2minsforslashing | Member Posts

dine

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dine

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dine

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dine

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lannamichaels

Free Bird (Lynyrd Skynyrd) has now joined Breakfast In America (Supertramp) in the storied annals of: *actually pays attention to the lyrics for the first time* this song's about WHAT?

"Lanna, what did you think Free Bird was about?"

IDK, SOMEONE WHO LIKES TRAVELING!

dine

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dine

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dine

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lannamichaels

-the book does not take place in a specific year but it takes place on specific days of the week corresponding to days of the month: November 15th is explicitly a Saturday.

The book was published in 1978. November 15th was not a Saturday in 1978. In previous fics, I've just set it in 1978 anyway, because who cares. And I did that here but it's bothering me that, especially when I need to reference things on a specific date, the day/week doesn't match up.

So I opened Excel to find what year(s) in the 1970s had a date/weekday correspondance. And it's only 1975.

The moon phases don't match up to 1975 but the moon phases are not something that is going to bother me; me specifically having the start of the game happen in the middle of the week instead of Sunday, that bothers me.

And still I dithered because I'd made myself a reference table with the heirs's birth years based on their ages in canon and then how old they'd be in 2007, when the fic is set, and I'd used that throughout the fic, and if I changed it to 1975, I'd have to change all of that. aldkfa;ldkfja;lkdjsfalks

But I'm going to do it anyway, and not only because I was like "okay wait, when you change everything and actually save the excel file this time instead of just copying the table with | into scrivener, make sure you have Crow's birthyear right because her birthday is Nov 15, so her age given in her bio will not be the year she turns during canon" and it turns out I'd had it wrong in the reference table anyway.

So now I need to change every single year that is mentioned at any point in the fic but at least it won't bother me anymore, the day of the week problems.

THEY UPDATED THE BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOK

All right. So. Rosalie, Flora Baumbach's daughter. She is referred to as a "Mongoloid" child in the book. She is referred to as that in both physical copies of the book I have.

But also I got the ebook out from the library to have on my phone too while doing this because why the hell not, and! it turns out! that the line that was originally "She had a retarded daughter, Rosalie, a Mongoloid child", now it just says "She had a disabled child, Rosalie"! (I give them only half a point in cutting "retarded" since they keep "retarded" in the discussion between Theo and Mrs. Baumbach about Chris)

Now, yes, I am fine with them removing both those terms BUT BUT BUT now since they just went with "disabled", now you have to rely on context clues and physical description of Rosalie to know that she had Down's!

It's an incredibly minor characterization detail, but I think it's a VERY IMPORTANT minor characterization detail in how Mrs. Baumbach relates to 1) Chris, and 2) Turtle, that Rosalie had Down's. And now it's "idek, figure it out from the clues we'll pepper in". JUST SAY SHE HAD DOWN'S SYNDROME. IT'S IMPORTANT.

And great, from a canon review/consistency stage, now I have to worry what else was changed in the book. (I haven't spotted any other changes but I did spot a typo: Sam Westing is called "Sara Westing" at one point. THAT WOULD BE A VERY DIFFERENT BOOK. DON'T GET ME WRONG, I WOULD READ THAT BOOK. BUT THAT IS NOT THIS BOOK.)

It was not until this day (or, uh, yesterday? Two days ago? Some point in recent history) that I realized that... maybe Flora Baumbach is Jewish? Jake Wexler is textually. But... was I supposed to get the impression that Flora Baumbauch, nee Miller, is Jewish? Because the character never did that for me at any point at any time in the decades I have been rereading this book, but some of her various backstory details... uh, is she Jewish and I just never noticed?

Also Denton Deere seems to have massively changed medical specialties during the book but you know what, that's unimportant.

I appreciate that the book tells me that Turtle did not change her name upon marriage. I had to make an executive decision that Alice is just Deere, she is not hyphenated, even though she'd be in peak generational and peak socio-economical to be Wexler-Deere. But I made it just Deere for narrative reasons.

Why do I keep stumbling into fandoms where I have to make decisions about the last name of canonical children of the characters. Why.

Also I had to decide if Angela changed her name but at least that's not a load-bearing decision. She's an orthopedic surgeon. She's probably Dr. Wexler at work! But did she otherwise change it? Did she hyphenate? There's a good chance she hyphenated.

Dr. Deere is her husband, Dr. Wexler is her father... Angela, what did you do. (I have it as Dr. Deere right now and will likely keep it that way, on the theory that Grace pushed her hard to change her name and Angela went along with it.)

dine

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dine

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snickfic

A lot of meh here.

Crash (1996). A man and his wife get involved in the car crash fetish scene. I really don't think "erotic thriller" is adequate preparation for this movie, but then again I'm not sure what is. I recently saw this described as "a series of sex scenes separated by car crashes," and that's about right.

I liked:
- The completely normalized polyamory. This married couple get off on fucking other people and telling each other about it, good for them.
- That it was a lot gayer than I expected, especially for 1996. Both m/m and f/f scenes (even if the latter felt a bit out of nowhere).

I was disappointed by:
- James Spader. THIS is James Spader? This is the guy everyone is low-key obssessed with? This gormless Zach Gilford lookalike?
- How we open with the wife, but the husband gets all the development, and she just gets pulled along in his wake. She seems to enjoy it, but I wanted to see her take some initiative, too.
- Somehow I'd osmosed that there was like car-related body mod stuff, like Cronenberg's version of Tetsuo: The Iron Man. The one gal with the leg brace was not really sufficient for my tastes.

--

Predator: Badlands (2025). A Yautja runt goes on a quest to kill an unkillable monster to avenge(?) his brother's death at his father's hands, and ends up teaming up with a Weyland-Yutani synth (Elle Fanning) with no legs.

This is by the same guy who directed Prey, Dan Trachtenberg. The writing felt more obvious and more cobbled-together than that movie, probably because it was trying to do more. I got tired of people stating the same obvious story beat multiple times.

I think this is the first time the Yautja have been humanized to nearly this degree, right? I've only seen Prey and the AvP movies, so I may be missing some lore. I'm not sure what I needed from a race of big game hunters was daddy issues, but otoh murderous patriarchy does go hand in hand with the big game hunting, I guess. IDK, I wanted the Yautja in general and our specimen in particular to be weirder.

However, I eventually enjoyed Thia the synth, who has a kind of anti-Gamora/Nebula relationship with a fellow synth. It passed the Bechdel test, good job! And the movie had some fantastic deadly alien fauna. Just completely bonkers creatures that want to kill you in the most unlikely ways. A+.

--

Die My Love (2025). A woman (Jennifer Lawrence) moves with her husband (Robert Pattinson) to his rural family home, has a baby, and has a mental breakdown.

My impression of this movie from the trailer was that this was maybe about a couple's relationship slowly escalating to bonkers attempted murder. (Pattinson's presence definitely contributed to my impression of it being bonkers.) There was no baby in the trailer I saw, and if there had been I wouldn't have gone to see it. That said, I don't know that it was ABOUT motherhood or post-partum depression or about the marital relationship. Frankly, I cannot confidently say what it was about. The choice of first and last shots suggest it's about the house?

I can't say it's not bonkers, but more in terms of its storytelling choices than its content as such. The timeline is weird and confused, but not in an interesting way. We learn literally nothing about the main character's background until about the 80% mark. (She was orphaned at age 10? Might be good to mention that earlier??)

Some of what we see on screen probably isn't happening. The ending, where she walks naked into a forest fire, I feel almost certainly didn't happen. There's a recurring theme where she prowls around on the ground but also might be pretending to be a horse? Also there's a horse that just wanders around and which they hit with their car at one point? (To be fair, it's not the first movie this year where a thematically significant horse just wanders through now and then. Looking at you, On Swift Horses.)

To be honest, JLaw was the biggest draw of this movie for me, and I did get plenty of her. It's a JLaw showcase, and I also enjoyed Sissy Spacek in a supporting role. But overall, man. I ventured outside my usual genre, and I had regrets!

dine

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lannamichaels

Zevachim has been fun, in a very different way than anything in Nezikin was. There's absolutely no relevance whatsoever but that does have its own charms. It does mean, however, I don't have many notes.

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