dragojustine: (Land war in asia)
[livejournal.com profile] miriad, thank you SO MUCH for this! It was cute and adorable and fun, and all his little asides were just brilliant and hilarious. (Also, I feel quite bad for the guy's wife and kid)
dragojustine: (Science fiction)
I seem to have lost my attention span for novels. I haven't been able to keep my mind on anything longer than a novella in a month. I really hope this is temporary.

Science Fiction: The Best of the Year 2006 ) Fictions, Jorge Luis Borges )
dragojustine: (Ben Wade)
Random: Today, the cat stepped on the on/off switch to my power strip and I lost an amount of work that might be roughly estimated at "a whole lot."

Grr.

My life. Ask yourself, 'how much do I care?' )

So I have read and watched a ton of stuff recently, and I was just blown away by a lot of it.

The Road, Cormac McCarthy

Chalk another one up under 'things that make me sob in inappropriate places.' (I'm sorry, random man who had to sit next to a sobbing woman on an airplane!) )

I Am Legend

Wow. )

3:10 to Yuma

Oh holy god, the slashy vibe )
dragojustine: (Reading is sexy)
A Universal History of Iniquity, Jorge Luis Borges

Actually I read this as part of the big “Collected Fictions” omnibus, but I’m not going to get through that in one chunk so I figure let’s mention Borges as I finish the original collections.

Until now, I knew Borges only by reputation... )

In short, I’m going to adore Borges, but I can’t read too much of him at once.
dragojustine: (Christmas)
Only 13 more days till I go home for Christmas!

Successful days of writing: 12

I am DONE with my Christmas shopping!  *Victory dance*

I am missing home more than I thought I was. I just voluntarily downloaded the Mormon Tabernacle Choir's Christmas album. God, this is definitive proof that I miss my daddy.

If I reach for the Gladys Knight, please shoot me?

For somebody who is such an atheist, I sure do get weird about Christmas.  The entire year revolves around it, for me, and I start listening to religious music basically 24/7, which is... weird.  But I crave it, every year.  Every year I end up cursing the fact that secular music tends to be either incredibly trite or sappily over-sentimental.  Only religious music is really moving in the way I crave.  I just... feel odd, singing hymns.  I love Christmas, and I don't want to be any other way about it, but still. 

My knee nearly popped out again this morning, which means I need to start working out again NOW, OR ELSE because when my ligaments get weak enough that the knee starts popping out, I am in serious pain for a significant amount of time. Curses. I don't WANNA work out!

dragojustine: (Science fiction)
Successful days in the "write a little bit every day" post-Thanksgiving-sloth resolution: 3

Earth Abides, George R. Stewart

This book is stunning. It is brilliant and... I am having trouble processing it, to be honest. And when I have trouble processing what I read, I tend to write too much.

dragojustine: (Christmas)
Let's go with a list, shall we? [Poll #1094127][Poll #1094127]I have never done an LJ poll before, so let's hope that works.

5. I really want to get myself a snowy, frosty, crisp Christmas icon. But I am living in LA and there is going to be no frosty crisp Christmas for me and I'm really, really, irrationally sad about that. Will a frosty Christmas icon make it worse or better?

6. Water for Elephants, by Sara Gruen )
dragojustine: (made of awesome)
I had the most incredibly awesome time on Thursday with [personal profile] miriad  and Katie. It's... awesome. Yaay for local friends, and somebody to share my cheese obsessions, and good conversation, and YAAY. Seriously. Plus, I think we will hold an orphan Thanksgiving with [personal profile] miriad  and Katie and I and... maybe some other people she knows? Maybe at my place, maybe at those other people's? (if there are other people, it will need to be at their place, because mine is really only big enough for four comfortably). An orphan Thanksgiving sounds utterly awesome to me. There will be Guitar Hero 3, Apples to Apples (plus I'll bring some other games) and [personal profile] miriad  has promised really good pumpkin pie and I am just SO HAPPY about this whole thing 'cause I was so sure this Thanksgiving was going to suck for me.

*huggles [personal profile] miriad  a lot, for being awesome to the lonely out-of-towner*

Plus, the last two SPN episodes were awesome beyond all possible belief. You know, over hiatus I was SO convinced the third season was going to just lose all the magic, as they tried to make a leap to a whole new arc and a format with more recurring characters and ditch the bro-emo-togetherness-angst altogether and I was so sure I would end up saying "So long, SPN, and thanks for all the porn" but instead, the third season has (with the one striking dissapointment of The Magnificent Seven) been of uniformly higher quality than the second and the awesomeness only continues ramping up. Jared is doing so well with really good character development (I'm so proud of him!) and Jensen continues to be a god among actors and Sterling just kicked the ass of that last episode and Bela is actually a good character who stands on her own rather than existing for the purposes of the Winchesters. And, going back a week, Dean's "don't objectify me!" was perhaps the most perfect line spoken on TV EVER and makes me want to just pet him and say "Oh darling, that ship has sailed." The show is still Not Subtle but all the thematic anvils are utterly working for me, and our two bro-emo-togetherness moments in Fresh Blood just proved that Sera Gamble owns my heart and soul forever and ever.

*flails a little in sheer joy*

Seriously, no media- book, movie, TV, nothing- has given me this much sheer JOY in my entire life. Hell, I'm counting the great loves like Tolkien and Wolfe and the fun ones like Harry Potter and Indiana Jones and everything. I've never gotten as much joy from anything as from SPN.

dragojustine: (Reading is sexy)
Fannish randomness: I porned at [personal profile] wendy  's Porny Sentence-a-thon. Actually, I porned twice and I'm really quite happy with the results, despite my run-on-iness and predilection for parenthesis.

Yes, I am totally adoring the post-con J2 cuteness floating about the flist right now. I am so jealous, and so dead of cute! Here is a con-report of Samantha Ferris' panel. That woman WINS. Seriously. I am stunned at how bluntly she discussed the new girls this season, but it was completely beyond the pale the way she was bluntly booted off for young T&A and I totally back her there. As much as I am willing to like both Ruby and Bela in concept (and possibly Bela in execution), I dislike the casting of both on simple "You replaced the most awesome woman in the universe for THEM?" grounds. It is a crying shame that we will probably get a short season this year and so won't see Ellen come back (of course I support the writers, but I can still be sad), but I can only hope that means she comes back in a big way next season.

This cracks me up, and is completely why I'm so paranoid about Dustin reading my computer over my shoulder. Heh.

The Blind Assassin, Margaret Atwood

I adore Atwood. Frankly, I do not think any book has hit so many of my bullet-proof narrative kinks in one go since Absalom, Absalom, so I am in heaven here. Nested narratives! Unreliable narrators! Family secrets! Complete defiance of genre!
Spoilery )

Oh god I love this book.
dragojustine: (Damaging my calm)
So the official answer is no, C will not be visiting me over Thanksgiving. Mom spun this whole thing about how she couldn't stand to lose both of her kids on the same Thanksgiving, but I'll be home for Christmas and the real reason is that she's punishing me for living with Dustin. Because I'm going to be some sort of horrible bad influence on my pristine sister or she's just generally upset or god knows but I'm pissed because dammit, I wanted to see C and I wanted to see her without mom and dad around all the time and I wanted someone to visit me here. And I've lived with Dustin for over a year now and even though mom and dad have been better about it than I honestly would have predicted (in fact it's been really really good between us since I moved out, which makes me think I should have moved out about a year earlier, because one fewer years of arguing about inanities like phone calls after 10pm and church attendance would have helped everybody's blood pressure), and even though I know they have every right to feel uncomfortable about it and I can't change that it just pisses me off that they're finding stupid petty little ways to try to punish me for it.

*gasps for breath*

And I just... really really really wanted to see her for Thanksgiving and I wanted to spend Thanksgiving here, not up in Seattle, because I just... want this to feel like home too and I just want these things to not be an issue and I just... need to have a good cry now.

Plus, Dustin's afraid he's going to be fired and even though there are plenty of jobs here for him, that combined with my own apparent inability to get work combined with the realization of how incredibly unstable and un-long-term-suited this whole damn thing we have going is and what do I want with my life really and why am I stuck in these temporary situations that don't even make me happy in the short term and ANGST.

Well, that felt good. I guess while I'm here I should report on my required reading. Are You Dumb Enough to be Rich? G William Barnett II )

ETA: So C and dad are visiting on the 8th for several days, and they have offered to buy my ticket home for Thanksgiving. They always do this, pull my anger out from under me with awkward peace offerings that don't fix the underlying thing but make it impossible to be pissy and just leave you... sad. But it's sweet, it really is. And I have a job interview for tomorrow, too.
dragojustine: (Smug face)
In the last two days, I have
- Written up two resumes from scratch
- Applied at three temp companies
- Advertised for tutoring
- Put out traps to kill all the ants in my apartment
- Done my laundry and cleaned the kitchen
- Set up my now-working desktop and caught up on all my record-keeping from the last three months
- Finished a book and started another
- Gone grocery shopping and made really good Mexican food
- Ran several errands
- Gone swing dancing
and STILL had time to watch massive amounts of TV, read fic, play BioShock and Portal, pass some more songs on Guitar Hero, go shopping, have a fun board-game party night, and sleep.

I win at life. Take that, Unproductive-Funk-I-Have-Been-In!

On the downside, I have just inputted "(my current address), WA, 90094" into three different online forms. Why is it so easy to mentally change my address and zip code, but IMPOSSIBLE to enter "CA"?

Also, I have promised several people pictures of various things, and there are more people who I wanted to give pictures but haven't yet.

So, first is the Turkey trip gallery. Mom and Constance, you have seen most but not all of these.

Then comes the apartment gallery.

Enjoy!

The Penelopiad, Margaret Atwood )
dragojustine: (Book stack)
Random:  The maintenance guys finally fixed our dryer.  There was a bird's nest the size of a soccer ball in the vent.  Now I can do laundry.  Score! 

The Ancestor’s Tale,
Richard Dawkins

The Ancestor’s Tale combines a unique and catching premise with mini-lessons in everything from carbon dating to ribosome function. Dawkins is an absolutely incredible popularizer of Evolution and biological science. He can write accessibly and engagingly about complex subjects and make you think even about things you understand pretty well in radically new ways. It sure is a pity that Dawkins seems to feel that this qualifies him to say a damn thing about religion or politics, isn’t it?

So I've seen this "unread books" meme floating around everywhere, most recently from [personal profile] musesfool, and it's just the sort of listy booky thing I love.
dragojustine: (Sam smiles)

I know This Much is True, Wally Lamb

 

I am so glad I picked this up.  The story of the twin brother of the paranoid schizophrenic trying to heal his own anger issues while somehow saving his brother sounds exactly like the kind of Oprah’s Book Club thing I would avoid, but it is beautiful.  It ends up all wound up with issues of race in ways I didn’t expect, and it also ends up all wound up in family histories and lies and secrets, which hit me hard.  It reminds me ever so vaguely of the things I like best about Faulker, in fact.  In any case, it is exactly as sad as you knew it would be- because while Dominic, our narrator, is still capable of healing and creating a life for himself, there is no salvation for Thomas.  Some bits might tend toward the overwrought, but I really found this beautiful.

dragojustine: (Brain missing)

Catcher in the Rye, J D Salinger

 

Well, that was pretty much exactly what I expected it to be, wasn’t it?  Glad I finally got around to it.  The bit of me that loves unreliable narrators had a blast, at least.

dragojustine: (Book stack)

Antipodes, short stories by David Malouf (the Australian guy).

 

These shorts remind me of nothing so much as the Dubliners.  They are small, self-contained, sparse and brightly polished, centering on moments of epiphany (So pretty much exactly the Dubliners).  I sometimes think that they are a little too overwrought for the depth of the epiphany they are actually dealing with, and some of them are a little too concerned with being deep and obscure, I think.  But thought provoking and at times beautiful. 

dragojustine: (Science fiction)
Singularity Sky, Charles Stross

 

The writing here is thoroughly mediocre.  The premise is perfectly good SF.  A technological singularity, when humankind simply cannot assimilate the rate of change in their culture (especially when brought on my nano-technology style stuff) is a perfectly respectable premise.  The slightly surreal, dadaish feel of the later chapters is a bit of a high.  Mostly I just adore his juxtaposition of Leninist revolutionaries, trying to bring about a change that is absolutely small beans, really, and completely unable to wrap their heads around the thing that they are part of now.  Cute little book.

dragojustine: (made of awesome)

Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco

 

This is something else.  Is it a murder mystery?  Historical fiction?  An apocalypse allegory?  A theology musing?  A semiotics treatise?  Damned if I know.  Maybe one day I’ll be smart enough to understand this book; in the meantime, I’m just in awe.  Eco plays with metatextuality in his, what, four different framing narratives.  William of Baskerville is an amalgam of Occam and Holmes, and works beautifully as such.  He is the mouthpiece for fascinating speculation on knowledge, what we can know, how to interpret signs, whether truth can be found.  I have no words for the awesomeness of this book. 

dragojustine: (Bad book review)

Dancers at the Edge of Time (#1, An Alien Heat), Michael Moorcock

 

This is one of the all-time pioneers of the Dying Earth far-future genre, which I have adored in some of its later manifestations (Songs of Distant Earth, stuff in Hyperion, etc).  Our naïve childlike narrator is okay, and the actual time travel hijinks are relatively entertaining, but it’s a short book that reads more like a thought experiment than a developed novel of substance, and far future humanity is too foreign to be sympathetic or understandable without far better development, without letting us into their society and heads far better than he does. 

dragojustine: (Book stack)

Fragile Things, Neil Gaiman


Neil Gaiman may be following in the Neil Stephenson path of “got too famous and now his editors are afraid of him.”  Fragile Things has some incredible, vibrant, creepy, ingenious, imaginative stories that only Neil Gaiman could have written.  The Lovecraftian ones are especially welcome, as Gaimon writes Lovecraft-style oblique horror a lot better than Lovecraft ever did.  The Sherlock Holmes/Lovecraft crossover (yes, I’m serious) is exactly the sort of crazy crossover done perfectly that one expects from really good fanfic.  I love those moments when published sci-fi authors reveal themselves to be just big fanboys like us, you know?  Anyway, that’s some of them.  But there are also a LOT of stories in this collection that read like a draft (or worse yet, just a sketch of an idea) that he found in a shoebox in his attic, old stories he couldn’t publish then, but he can NOW, because now he’s famous and no editor will tell him to dump them.  I don’t know, maybe that’s partly my bias against poetry talking, but even aside from the poetry there were stories in here that just shouldn’t have seen the light of day.  I know Gaiman is capable of much tighter and more polished work than a lot of them, and I just wished this collection had a little more discipline. 

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