Author: Frances K R

A quiet kind of strange

So, despite a lot of the movies I spend time going on about, I actually do watch and enjoy movies that are commonly recognized as “good”. A couple of nights ago, I was rewatching The Cooler, which I think was one of the first movies I saw with William H. Macy.

A brief summary of the starting premise: Bernie Lootz is a “cooler”, a guy whose luck is so bad that a casino keeps him around to ruin other people’s winning streaks, which he does by standing next to them. As the movie opens, he is planning to leave in just a few days. The rest of the movie is absolutely worth watching, but this is not the point I am currently discussing.

It’s absolutely clear that Bernie’s luck is a real force. And the way this is handled is weirdly fascinating to me. One person mocks the idea of having a cooler as old-fashioned, but there is never a Mulder/Scully moment about how This Is Too Silly To Be Believed. And on the flip side, there is never a huge deal made about it. Forget the commodification and classification of bad-luck joes you might expect in a garden-variety urban fantasy; you don’t even get the organized underground betting you find in Intacto. (A decent movie, but not quite as awesome. More interesting concept development; less brilliant acting and characterization.) His luck is simply there, affecting things as luck might; plain and clear and true as a well-cut suit.

I think this is magical realism. The Oxford Companion to English Lit (apparently) describes magic realism as often having

a strong narrative drive, in which the recognizably realistic merges with the unexpected and the inexplicable and in which elements of dreams, fairy story, or mythology combine with the everyday, often in a mosaic or kaleidoscopic pattern of refraction and recurrence.

That is a little weirder than The Cooler gets–I think luck is so plain that it doesn’t reach quite the heights of strange you can find in dreams or fairy tales–but the way the real events go through the story in sync with Bernie’s luck, that seems about right. Refraction and recurrence.

It’s interesting to me not (just) because of the subtlety or the low-key fantastical elements, but because of the lack of self-consciousness. I can think of several written stories that have those qualities, but it’s a combination that’s pretty rare in movies. Would like to see more of it.

London-bound.

I’m working my way through The Weird[1], and there are these lovely moments when I’m just browsing through it and I recognize something. (It’s way more fun, I think, to browse through the book than to look at the table of contents. I am better with snippets of text than with titles, many times.) Today I reread “The Summer People”, and deliberately held off on “The Man Who Sold Rope to the Gnoles”, because it is a cuddly sort of story that I will save for tonight, in case I am tired.

In other news, that is totally not actually news, I am going to Loncon 3. This is not a surprise; I have been saving for the trip since I heard about the bid, which was way back in May of 2010. It just seems a lot realler now that I’m in the calendar year that the convention will be occurring in. It will be my first WorldCon in five years, and I hope it is as much fun as the last one, and I will probably be flailing gently at practical details over the next couple of weeks.

(I realized that I own a ton of things I would love to have signed by people who are likely to be there, but the trouble is that those things are largely books. As a result, they weigh… well, not actually a ton, but I’m guessing quite a lot, and definitely more than I would like to carry. I am not fussed about this, because I have lots of time to figure out what I’m going to do.)
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[1] This book, combined with the collected Gormenghast in one volume, is why I’m only aiming to read eighty books this year.

Dusting electrons.

There! New header. (Thanks to Six Revisions for the image.)

Next thing to get sorted out for the year is an actual organization system for all my ebooks and PDFs. They are sort of scattered over two computers and upwards of six folders. (I have corralled my knitting patterns, though, which is a (very small) start.)

However, that can wait, at the very least, until after the Martian scientist(s), their robot creations (“the good! robot! usses!“), and Death himself have completed their introductions at the 1991 San Dimas Battle of the Bands.

(The Bill and Ted duology is probably, objectively, not the best pair of movies I could be watching over the last fourteen hours. I’m okay with that.)

The word for year is library.

Early this year, I read a post on Captain Awkward[1], and one of the things she mentioned–cited from the Blogess, actually–was the idea of 2013 as a library. A safe quiet space where you can get ready for something.

Maybe you spend the year recuperating from last year. Maybe you burn the Thanksgiving turkey and forget an important birthday. It’s okay. It happened in The Library. It was just practice for next year. Maybe it’s insanity, or maybe it’s just me, but somehow I think we all need a year in The Library. A year where it’s safe to make mistakes.

Probably the biggest thing for me was trying to actually commit to writing[2]. (Cat Rambo gives excellent classes, by the way, and I am not sure she self-promotes quite enough, and there’s a deal on her classes if you sign up before 2014. Just saying. I like the six-week course best.) I’ve gotten seven rejections so far and I think they’re getting easier to take, which is nice?

Other things this year: I tried to do Mary Robinette Kowal’s Month of Letters challenge, but that got interrupted by a pet health emergency. (Pet in question is fine, but leave us just say February got itself repurposed very hard.)

What else? Started staggering along to Zombies Run again after I’d stopped for longer than I’m happy with. Started reconnecting with someone I’d kind of lost touch with. Went to Farthing Party and CanCon (for the record, doing two cons in two weekends is not a great idea; that said, so glad I managed to get to a Farthing Party).

The house was cleared of about ten feet of bookshelf space and perhaps twenty-five bags-and-boxes of things that weren’t being used, or wouldn’t be used, or would be better used elsewhere, or just really needed to go. And I finished installing a cabinet. Admittedly in the bathroom we use least, but still, it’s installed.

I knit 0.76 of a mile of yarn into a sweater for my mother, and it worked. I mean, it fit and she liked it. I was terrified that I’d need to reknit half of it and the yarn store would be out of the dye lot, and…

Anyway, it worked.

And I cut my hair. Myself. (I haven’t dyed it again yet, but… maybe next year. The light of my life dug up an old picture, and I miss the purple.)

What did you do this year? What’ll you do the next?
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[1] Lovely lady, very thoughtful, excellent advice, minimal Evil Bees.
[2] I had to work through a brief bout of “omigod I am admitting in public that I want to write things and care about whether I’m good at it!” to even type that. Oy, my issues.

Driveby cute, and reasons.

White-and-grey cat in a green-and-black hat. This is a hat that I knit

  • partly to stashbust,
  • partly to try out a pattern from Doomsday Knits, and
  • partly because a friend of mine collects hats for the kids at the school where she works. So.

The project is called “Rewoven Threads”

  • because Threads is really a pretty classic post-apocalyptic movie (and an incredibly bleak one, I will add),
  • because knitting a hat to give away to someone who needs it seems specifically to address some small reweaving of the broken threads of the aforementioned movie, and
  • because I needed to weave in fourteen ends.

The cat is in the picture because

  • I apparently have no sense of self-preservation.

(He is plotting my demise. Oh yes. Do not be fooled by the sad kitty-eyes.)

Tidying up.

Still over a week to go before 2014, but I have decided that now is a good time to formally note down a handful of things I have found online that I really like. (This will also enable me to close a few tabs in my browser. I am trying to get better about doing this. I have had tabs open for over a year.)

First, the artlog tag on EliseM’s LJ is often filled with lovely things. (I mention it first because the 3 Woman Sale is over tonight. January is looking to be chill and grey and unpleasant, and I am thinking something from that showing up in the mail is not the worst thing that could happen.  I am waffling particularly over a couple of the earrings.)

Second, Captain Awkward is an advice blog that is shockingly sensible, and very good on reminding people that you actually get to have boundaries, and that you can’t actually make other people feel things.

Written Kitten‘s cache is pretty amazing, since I have stuff still saved in there from… er… four months ago? I should copy that to a file and back it up properly. Also, you know, kittens.

TV Tropes is dangerously likely to be a timesink, but I think it’s nice to have tropes–these and others–layed out so explicitly and discussed. I felt kind of the same way about The Tough Guide To Fantasyland by Diana Wynne Jones.

Knitty.com‘s– oh, dammit, a new issue is up. Okay, not closing that tab. Anyway. Yes. Knitty’s an online ‘zine for knitters; free patterns, articles, how-tos, assorted usefulness, lovely pictures. The latest issue seems to have a lot of cables. I love cables.

Hmh. Remaining tabs (all, er, hundred-plus of them) appear to be falling into broad categories. May sort them out and come back later – for the moment, I think it’s time to go light a fire.

Adjustment period.

The cats went to the vet recently. They’re fine, but one of them especially has started gaining too much weight (a pound a year is fine for an adult human. For an adult cat, it’s something you want to nip in the bud), so there’s no more leaving food out for them to graze. They each get a measured amount.

In practical terms, this means that they don’t eat together anymore, and that the food dish for one is taken away and the food dish for the other is brought out.

In other words, there is food right there and yet one or the other of the poor poor things is not allowed to eat. Is restrained from eating. Is, as it were, brutally starved by a cold and unfeeling human who has clearly put food out for the express purpose of torturing them.

It is amazing how piteously hungry a thirteen-pound cat can sound as he looks soulfully up at you and quavers out a question mew. (His sister is more practical, and has taken the “If the humans wake up, I am fed. If I push things off the dresser, the humans wake up. Ergo…” approach. At two in the morning. Darling  little fluffbucket.)

On a lighter note, I feel I have survived the worst of the holiday crunch, so there’s that. Now if I can just get a few more hours sleep…

Just one of those things.

This is not a happy post.

I was spending a little time on the fire-hydrant stream of Twitter, as one does, some days. And someone shared a link to a five-minute game, and the post-mortem of same.

The game is called The Day The Laughter Stopped.

It is not a happy game. It is not an unrealistic game.

In the more detailed discussion from the game creator, they also link to an article by someone I wasn’t familiar with, who writes as Film Crit Hulk. (There are many Hulks online! They often talk in ALLCAPS and refer to themselves in the third person. E.g.: “HULK’S SAYS IT ALL THE TIME, BUT THE PROBLEM WITH PLAYING DEVIL’S ADVOCATE IS THAT YOU’RE ACTUALLY ADVOCATING THE DEVIL.” (The post-mortem also contains a link to http://convertcase.net/, where you can copy and paste the article in question and then change it out of ALLCAPS, if you are annoyed by the prospect of someone internet-shouting at you for the entire length of an article.)

Seriously. The holiday season is upon us. There is stress and hope for kindness and many things to get done and many people being rushed. It is okay to not read the rest of this. Trigger warning ahoy.

Security nagging.

Okay, does anyone actually have anything (either good or bad) to say about WP’s repeated suggestion that you/we/I enable two-step authentication? The backup code thing seems neat but fussy.

Closing in on Christmas, which is never a relaxing proposition. (I will grant exciting in a good way, on good years, but not relaxing.) Gift flail, card flail, and trying to figure out how many days between now and mid-January I can reasonably block off and declare to be mine and mine alone, for my peace of mind. It’s been a very busy week.

The guy who’s coming to install our new sink did call this morning to say he’d be late, but we haven’t heard from him since. I am hoping he either calls or shows up in the next ten minutes, but I’ve been hoping he’ll call in the next ten minutes for nearly an hour now, and it’s getting increasingly distracting. Lots of “but if I start X won’t I just get interrupted? Surely I will get interrupted soon, right?”

Sure it will get sorted out. Meantime… well, onwards.

(I have a holiday goal–possibly not specifically a Christmas goal, but definitely a “within the next three weeks” goal. It involves nice movies, possibly candy/popcorn, a fireplace, and the humans in the house not outnumbering the pets. I will keep this in mind as something to work towards, slowly and with grace.)