youth's a stuff, 'twil not endure
Sep. 5th, 2024 12:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kindkitSo, I turned 55 on Monday. Like all multiple-of-5 birthdays, this one is inspiring thought. Aging, mortality, all of that extremely fun stuff. And I can no longer set it aside with "someday." Someday is now, or in the next few years, at least. (I do not have a family history of people living long lives in good health. Maybe I'll be different. Maybe not.)
It's interesting how much "What do I want the rest of my life to look like?" is a different question at 55 than even at 45. And how very much I don't feel any closer to an answer.
Anyway, I took a 4-day weekend for my birthday, which has been nice although far from long enough. I haven't done much--that was kind of the goal--but I did see an actual movie in the actual cinema for the first time since before Covid started. (It was Deadpool and Wolverine, which was slightly better than it deserved to be. I'm the wrong kind of nerd to be the ideal audience for it, and I'm pretty over the whole "mass-produced corporate entertainment product ironically poking fun at mass-produced corporate entertainment products" thing, but I still mostly enjoyed it.)
Other activities:
Reading: I'm still having trouble finding anything I really like. I keep shying away from books that are obviously going to be serious or challenging, and then resenting the books I read because they're unserious and unchallenging.
I ended up re/reading Guy Gavriel Kay's Fionavar Tapestry series, having read the first book years ago and then skimmed the other two. It's painfully derivative of Tolkien and boy does it show its age. And boy is the third book unnecessarily loooooooong. And oh boy howdy, Kay got SO CLOSE to seeing how the whole "eternal tragedy of Arthur and Guinevere and Lancelot" thing is wholly dependent on patriarchal forms of monogamy, and therefore wholly avoidable, without ever quite seeming to notice that or confront it. (I'm really not someone who thinks "this could be solved by a throuple" about most romantic conflicts, but occasionally it's extremely obvious.) But despite the books' many problems, I guess I enjoyed the story enough to finish it. The kicker is, Kay's writing is in many ways exactly the kind of thing I love, but he also stumbles into certain very predictable problems in characterization and narrative (almost never writes women well, almost never writes queer people well/at all, nevertheless keeps making romantic/sexual conflicts important to his stories, can't see the narrative pathways he's foreclosed, and is kind of annoyingly conventional and tropey as a result). I don't think it's a coincidence that the best book of his that I've read (there are quite a few that I haven't) is The Lions of Al-Rassan, where he manages to write a couple of women characters with agency outside their relationships with men, and is slightly better about queer characters than usual.
I've also recently finished Vivian Shaw's Greta Helsing series, which is about a doctor who specializes in treating supernatural patients--vampires, ghouls, werewolves, and so on. Cool premise that Shaw doesn't do enough with, and the books' underlying worldview is extremely Christian in some unexamined ways. They're okay as popcorn books but that's about it.
I'm currently reading R. J. Barker's Gods of the Wyrdwood, but I'm not far enough along to see if it's going to be interesting or not. It's a bit bogged down in unclear worldbuilding--it honorably avoids infodumps, but at about 1/3 of the way in, doesn't seem to have found a way to clarify who the hell all these groups/people are and how they relate to one another.
Listening: Modes of Thought In Anterran Literature, by Wolf at the Door studios (with Alex Kemp as writer, showrunner, and main performer, though you have to dig deep to find cast information), which I saw recommended on Twitter. This is an audio drama consisting largely of lectures for a Classics course of the same title at Harbridge University. Anterra is an ancient civilization, dating back to approx 78,000 BCE (and no, there's not an extra zero in there), whose ruins were discovered on the seafloor after a Chinese submarine accident seven years ago.
I've listened to all the aired episodes--about 30--and I still don't know if I like it. The stuff that's actually about Anterra is interesting, and I really like the idea of an audio drama structured as a class, but the focus has increasingly shifted over towards X-Files style conspiracy stuff that doesn't interest me as much. Plus, the academic angle is just plausible enough, with a lot of actual real-world archaeological references, that my skepticism engages, and I want to know things like how the Anterran language (an unknown language, much too old to be closely related to any known ancient language, in an unknown and apparently logographic script) could possibly have been deciphered at all, let alone so quickly. And why this seemingly undergraduate introductory class has so many graduate students in it. And why the lecture topics are so random.
Randomness is the main problem, really. The show seems to be winging it, without a clear direction or a planned endpoint. Plot elements get dropped in and forgotten while new ones take over. At this point, new episodes aren't even being numbered, so I have no idea how close we are to the end, or if there is a planned ending, or what.
At the same time, I don't not recommend it? It's trying something pretty unusual, and I can respect that. It might be worth trying a few episodes to see what you think.
Watching: Nothing at the moment. But a new season of Taskmaster UK is starting in a couple of weeks!
It's interesting how much "What do I want the rest of my life to look like?" is a different question at 55 than even at 45. And how very much I don't feel any closer to an answer.
Anyway, I took a 4-day weekend for my birthday, which has been nice although far from long enough. I haven't done much--that was kind of the goal--but I did see an actual movie in the actual cinema for the first time since before Covid started. (It was Deadpool and Wolverine, which was slightly better than it deserved to be. I'm the wrong kind of nerd to be the ideal audience for it, and I'm pretty over the whole "mass-produced corporate entertainment product ironically poking fun at mass-produced corporate entertainment products" thing, but I still mostly enjoyed it.)
Other activities:
Reading: I'm still having trouble finding anything I really like. I keep shying away from books that are obviously going to be serious or challenging, and then resenting the books I read because they're unserious and unchallenging.
I ended up re/reading Guy Gavriel Kay's Fionavar Tapestry series, having read the first book years ago and then skimmed the other two. It's painfully derivative of Tolkien and boy does it show its age. And boy is the third book unnecessarily loooooooong. And oh boy howdy, Kay got SO CLOSE to seeing how the whole "eternal tragedy of Arthur and Guinevere and Lancelot" thing is wholly dependent on patriarchal forms of monogamy, and therefore wholly avoidable, without ever quite seeming to notice that or confront it. (I'm really not someone who thinks "this could be solved by a throuple" about most romantic conflicts, but occasionally it's extremely obvious.) But despite the books' many problems, I guess I enjoyed the story enough to finish it. The kicker is, Kay's writing is in many ways exactly the kind of thing I love, but he also stumbles into certain very predictable problems in characterization and narrative (almost never writes women well, almost never writes queer people well/at all, nevertheless keeps making romantic/sexual conflicts important to his stories, can't see the narrative pathways he's foreclosed, and is kind of annoyingly conventional and tropey as a result). I don't think it's a coincidence that the best book of his that I've read (there are quite a few that I haven't) is The Lions of Al-Rassan, where he manages to write a couple of women characters with agency outside their relationships with men, and is slightly better about queer characters than usual.
I've also recently finished Vivian Shaw's Greta Helsing series, which is about a doctor who specializes in treating supernatural patients--vampires, ghouls, werewolves, and so on. Cool premise that Shaw doesn't do enough with, and the books' underlying worldview is extremely Christian in some unexamined ways. They're okay as popcorn books but that's about it.
I'm currently reading R. J. Barker's Gods of the Wyrdwood, but I'm not far enough along to see if it's going to be interesting or not. It's a bit bogged down in unclear worldbuilding--it honorably avoids infodumps, but at about 1/3 of the way in, doesn't seem to have found a way to clarify who the hell all these groups/people are and how they relate to one another.
Listening: Modes of Thought In Anterran Literature, by Wolf at the Door studios (with Alex Kemp as writer, showrunner, and main performer, though you have to dig deep to find cast information), which I saw recommended on Twitter. This is an audio drama consisting largely of lectures for a Classics course of the same title at Harbridge University. Anterra is an ancient civilization, dating back to approx 78,000 BCE (and no, there's not an extra zero in there), whose ruins were discovered on the seafloor after a Chinese submarine accident seven years ago.
I've listened to all the aired episodes--about 30--and I still don't know if I like it. The stuff that's actually about Anterra is interesting, and I really like the idea of an audio drama structured as a class, but the focus has increasingly shifted over towards X-Files style conspiracy stuff that doesn't interest me as much. Plus, the academic angle is just plausible enough, with a lot of actual real-world archaeological references, that my skepticism engages, and I want to know things like how the Anterran language (an unknown language, much too old to be closely related to any known ancient language, in an unknown and apparently logographic script) could possibly have been deciphered at all, let alone so quickly. And why this seemingly undergraduate introductory class has so many graduate students in it. And why the lecture topics are so random.
Randomness is the main problem, really. The show seems to be winging it, without a clear direction or a planned endpoint. Plot elements get dropped in and forgotten while new ones take over. At this point, new episodes aren't even being numbered, so I have no idea how close we are to the end, or if there is a planned ending, or what.
At the same time, I don't not recommend it? It's trying something pretty unusual, and I can respect that. It might be worth trying a few episodes to see what you think.
Watching: Nothing at the moment. But a new season of Taskmaster UK is starting in a couple of weeks!
no subject
Date: 2024-09-09 01:09 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-09-09 01:50 am (UTC)[Edit] She also has transcripts there which are useful when people have accents I find hard to understand.
no subject
Date: 2024-09-09 10:21 am (UTC)