mithen

Ooh, this is a fun one. My happy-dance memories cross several genres; the hardest part here is not repeating several songs from the "loud" set. There's a whole bunch of pop/rocks songs that get my feet tapping, and a handful of country songs, and a bunch of Irish ceilidh tunes (most of which I don't have names for), because I taught intermediate ceilidh dancing at the Starry Plough for a few years.

Intermediate is the easy level for teachers. Didn't have to teach the basics; didn't have to provide challenges for the experts. Intermediate works on refinement, expanding figure knowledge, and learning new dances.

Hal an Tow | Strip the Willow | Maid Behind the Bar | Sellinger's Round | The Congress of Vienna | Walking on Sunshine | Blue Suede Shoes | Twist & Shout | Baby Got Back | 65 Love Affair | Jose Cuervo | It's a Cowboy Lovin' Night | Relax | Blister in the Sun

( But really, there's only one that always pulls me onto the floor )

Meme list

Current Mood: melancholy

navaan

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sharpest_asp

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navaan

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elf

Ok, we're back to lists. Not that I have a lot of options here; I don't listen to a bunch of loud music, and most of the songs I like aren't loud. But there are a few. I'm including songs that I don't think need to be loud all the way through, but have a section that I prefer to be at top volume so I can scream along with it and not year my own voice.

Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go | Ballroom Blitz | Shut Up and Dance | It's the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine) | Cum On Feel The Noize | We're Not Gonna Take It | I Wanna Be Sedated | Immigrant Song | Fat Bottomed Girls

...okay, maybe I do have a lot of options. Not as many as some of the others, but I'm not running out.

( I have no idea what show or movie this was made from, but it's awesome )

Meme list

me_ya_ri

I think I might be coming down with a cold. My nose feels all weird. I'm sneezing all the time. I feel all muzzy-headed, too. And hungry and tired and bleh. I don't want a cold! I'm supposed to go camping next week and camping with a cold would be miserable. :(

Despite the bleh I might be catching, I got 3400 words written on the second of my 3 novels in 3 months challenge. I'm up just shy of 30K which is the minimum for 'novel' for this challenge. I think I've got another 20K or so to go, maybe less. I'm really not sure. Sinead's discovered what the Delbhana were up to but she still has no freaking clue what's up with the blankets or why they were so important. But she's got the two most important people in the mystery cornered and restrained so they're going to get questioned until Sinead's happy with their answers.

Tomorrow.

Got my steps today. The hubby wanted to go walking after work so we did even though I felt mungy. probably will help me fight the cold off but still ugh.

I got this week's short story into basic format, wrote the cover blurb and created the cover. I found exactly the right image for it so it was easy. Still need to put it into ebook and POD format. Tomorrow I hope. And I need to do some pre-work for next week's collection. I want to issue the first Gods Above and Below collection next week so getting started at it would be good. Won't have much time over the 4th for that what with visiting my mom and going camping.

*dies*

Goals for tomorrow include writing, not catching a cold (crosses fingers), exercises, preparing for doing two audits this week on Thursday and Friday (uuuuuuuugh!) and making pot roast for dinner. Though that's easy. Thank goodness for slow cookers!

Off to bath and bed for me--goodnight everyone!

Current Mood: sick, maybe?

muccamukk

One of the things I liked about Martha Wells' Murderbot Diaries series is that the title character is some sort of android/human clone hybrid and has neither a sexuality nor a gender. The books are written in first person, but all the outside characters refer to the Murderbot as "it," and frankly it's fine with that. Wells mentioned on a recent AMA: "I feel the core of the character is that while Murderbot is obviously a person, it isn't human and doesn't want to be human, so while other characters might give it pronouns, it's not going to want to pick any for itself."

I know at least one person who found the use of "it" over "they" for non-gendered pronouns uncomfortable, while Nenya liked it for reminding the reader of the profoundly non human nature of the SecUnit. Reading reviews, I noticed that people used a variety of approaches to deal with Murderbot's gender, and I did a quick tally of them.

214 Reviews on Goodreads as of this writing

137 of them don't use pronouns for Murderbot (a few seemed to be deliberately avoiding doing so, but mostly these reviews just said something like "Good book, will read the next one.")

5 of them are in a language I don't speak (I'm taking a Murderbot approach to this, and half-assing my research)

44 (61%) of them used "it"

12 (17%) of them used "he"

8 (11%) of them used "they"

8 (11%) of them used "she" (Ann Leckie's got them trained!)

Speaking of Leckie, she has recced this series as well. I feel like Murderbot and Breq could have a profitable conversation, really.

bradygirl_12

Happy Birthday,

DM_Wyatt!

May your day

Be SUPER!!!

:)

Current Mood: awake
Current Location: Home
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navaan

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elf

Well, here we go, a topic where I don't have a whole playlist to throw around, and if I did, I wouldn't want to. I don't have a lot of people I want to forget in my life; the people I've known who were entirely negative, I want to remember whatever made me despise them so I can avoid it in the future.

So I'm stuck trying to figure out... are there songs I associate with the racist sexist step-uncle in Arkansas? With the kids who harassed me for being terrible at sports? With the teacher who gave me detention for reading in class? (I wasn't reading what everyone else was, because I'd finished it.) With the evil ex?

Wait, yes! There's a song that I like very much, that is so tangled with the evil ex (it was on one of his mix tapes) that I can't listen to it without unpleasant memories. :( Which is as close as I get to "a song that reminds you of someone you'd rather forget," I think.

( This song is far too mellow for the associations I have with it. )

Meme list

sharpest_asp

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meicdon13

Animated Movies/Shorts

Big Hero 6 (8/10) → I am forever bitter about Tadashi. I thought Disney wouldn't be able to manipulate my feelings but I was wrong.

Moana (9/10) → The only thing I didn't like was that long-ass Shiny song. Lowkey wish it'd been traditionally animated but *shrug* what can you do.

Cartoons

Samurai Jack S05 (9/10) → ( Things I didn't like. Spoilers. )

That being said, I very much enjoyed S05 overall. I was worried about the ending—after making people wait so long for it, it felt like one of those things where nothing would be good enough. But the bittersweet final scene felt right, though I think the show would've benefited more from 2-3 more episodes because the final battle/s felt rushed.

me_ya_ri

And man, it was the quintessential summer day. I melted during the ceremony and I was wearing a dress. So did everyone else. Blah for summer heat waves!

After that we came back home and started laundry. Got all that done, during which I wrote 4000 words on the second novel of my 3 novels in 3 months challenge. I'm up to 26K and just starting Chapter 12. Sinead's finding more and more layers of Delbhana influence, all of which are hard to deal with given her PTSD.

But Renata, her guide, has her back so Sinead will make it through.

I most certainly did not get my steps today. Too hot for going outside. It's not even supposed to cool until 6am tomorrow morning. *groan*

Goals for tomorrow include survive the heat wave, write (I'd love to finish this novel before the 1st), exercises (if its not too hot), and steak for dinner.

Off to bath to soak my tired arms and bed for me--goodnight everyone!

Current Mood: sore

bradygirl_12

Something a little different. To give you the lowdown on The Steel Helmet, Ben Mankiewicz and TCM introduces the movie. A gritty movie with startling starkness, as the film was released only six months after the start of the war.

As the film opens, veteran Sergeant Zack is seen crawling away as the only survivor of his squad (executed by the North Koreans). The hole in his helmet is proof of his luck, though this World War II vet is suffering from PTSD (known then as battle fatigue). Trying to get back to his lines, Zack meets up with a Korean boy he dubs Short Round (the inspiration for the boy of the same name in Indiana Jones & The Temple Of Doom) and a patrol also trying to get back to American territory.

The film includes scenes of an unarmed North Korean prisoner being shot (which infuriated the U.S. military), and frank discussion of race relations back home (black and Japanese). While the modern civil rights movement wouldn't get its catalyst until Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on that Montgomery bus for another four years, the Army was struggling with integration as ordered by President Harry Truman. Neither scene is the focus of the film, but they are startling considering that the war was currently raging and race relations were just not addressed very often by Hollywood.

The Korean War produced its share of flag-waving films, but more often the movies were grim, gritty depictions of war. World War II films were often intended as recruitment films. It was only after the war that war's futility and waste were addressed. Gene Evans is stellar as Sergeant Zack.

This film is considered one of the best war films of all time.

Watch on YouTube

Current Mood: sad
Current Location: U.S.A.
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galacticjourney

by Gideon Marcus

I've been thundering against the new tack Editor Avram Davidson has taken The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction for several months now, so much so that I didn't even save what used to be my favorite magazine for last this month.

So imagine my pleasant surprise when, in synchronicity with the sun reaching its annual zenith, the July edition also returns to remembered heights. Of course, Davidson's editorial prefaces are still lousy, being at once too obvious in describing the contents of the proceeding story, and at the same time, obtuse beyond enjoyment. If there's anything on which I pin the exceeding quality of this issue, it's the unusual abundance of woman authors. It's been a long time, and their absence has been keenly marked (at least by me). For the most part, the fellas aren't too bad either. Take a look:

(see the rest at Galactic Journey!)

Current Mood: jubilant
Current Location: San Diego, CA

erinptah

Our story so far:

PEOTUS was shot and assassinated on election night. Olivia Pope is on the case! So far she has accused three (3) people of ordering the killing, and been explicitly proved wrong about two (2). Meanwhile, the Electoral College is left to decide between the horrible, self-serving, politically-soulless VPEOTUS or the horrible, self-serving, politically-soulless runner-up ticket.

Onward!

---

Episode 6 gives us campaign-era flashbacks of Olivia's dad reconnecting with an old girlfriend, who turns out to be a lure under the control of...someone.

Different flashback: Olivia asking her dad for advice on how to handle Mellie. Hey, remember when Olivia's dad orchestrated the murder of Mellie's son? (The grief put her for months into a near-suicidal depression.) I'm sure his advice will be great.

Olivia: "She's from California. Why don't they like her?" Dad: "I can't answer that." Ooh, ooh, pick me! Because Californians hate Republican policies, and she's a Republican!

They keep talking about "calling San Benito County" as if the voting within states is calculated the same as national voting, as if you're guaranteed a certain number of points (and no more) once you win a county. Even if Mellie got every vote in San Benito (pop. 58,000), that doesn't mean she couldn't fall behind once all the ballots are counted in San Mateo (765,000), or Contra Costa (11.13 million), or, I don't know, Los Angeles (10.2 million).

Dad Pope was behind the Vargas shooting! Although not on his own initiative, it was pushed by the Someones, who had the girlfriend hostage. And then they went to far in taunting Dad Pope about his compromising attachment to her, so he shot her in front of them. Good grief.

---

Episode 7 finds Olivia telling Huck to kill her father. For the second time. He helpfully reminds her that the first time didn't end well.

Huck confronts Dad on a subway platform, openly aiming a gun at him, and there's a lot of yelling, which echoes beautifully. For some reason there are zero other people on the platform, and nobody is concerned about metro security cameras capturing this shouted confession of killing Vargas.

Accusations of a mole in Olivia's company lead to Huck and Quinn aiming guns at each other's faces. What a team.

Investigation by Huck leads to him threatening his current girlfriend with a syringe of something nasty, all while going "this is hard for me, but you're making me do this!" Just in case you were starting to feel sympathetic toward him.

Olivia is back for the third time to accusing her dad of Vargas' murder, but she's passionately insisting that it was all his idea, based on the admittedly reasonable evidence that he murdered the girlfriend who was being used to manipulate him. Huck counters by passionately insisting that Dad Pope has changed because he was in love and now he's in pain and...listen, buddy, both him and you are still 100% willing to be violent-to-murderous the minute you feel threatened. You haven't changed, and people, especially women, should stay away from you.

(I would say "random civilian women," but this girlfriend turns out to have been planted to shoot a witness, which she gets away with because none of these geniuses thought to frisk her, and, wow, we are never going to get any case-of-the-week episodes this season, are we.)

---

The Someones got to Abby. That explains why she was pushing for Cyrus to get the death penalty ASAP, huh.

In flashback she asks Cyrus "how did you know Frankie was the one, how did you know he could go all the way?" We've seen this in The West Wing -- Josh asking Leo how he knew Bartlett was his guy, because Josh had found Santos and was starting to think Santos could be his guy. But Abby isn't thinking she's found a candidate -- she's thinking she could be the candidate.

Anyway, the Someones offered her $3 million with no paper trail and no explanation beyond "we like you and want to support your eventual candidacy." And she took it! What's next, Abby, sending the money to a the next Nigerian prince in your email?

---

So Huck's evil girlfriend shot the witness, and then shot him, but in a weird way that seemed designed to miss all vital organs. I figured she was deliberately not-killing him for some reason. (He was flat on the floor, she had lots of spare bullets, it's not like she could miss the heart and lungs.)

Then she sticks him in the trunk of a car and pushes it into a lake. Apparently she's just incompetent.

We get a nice hallucination-sequence where Huck is back in Pope HQ, with the mental images of his team members talking him through how to escape. And he does it! Not only did she not kill him, she didn't even shoot him hard enough for the blood loss to slow him down!

...setting aside that part of my disbelief, I do actually like the bit.

Hey, was anyone worried that there hadn't been enough graphic on-screen torture this season? Well, don't sweat it. Quinn's got you covered.

Olivia gets a pep-up talk about how she's a "miracle worker," from another of these people who hasn't seen the show. And sure enough, they find Huck -- by tracking the phone of the dead witness, which murder-girlfriend wasn't smart enough to chuck in a dumpster on her way to the body disposal! That's not you working a miracle, that's your opponent being a complete moron.

Gonna wrap up this post here, purely because my head hurts from hitting this desk so hard.

bradygirl_12

Good morning!

Today is the 67th anniversary of the start of the Korean War ("Isn't this where we came in?" "It's even Sunday morning!"). And it was a Sunday that it began, as the film's dialogue attests. .

One Minute To Zero stars Robert Mitchum and Ann Blyth in a film released in 1952, with a year to go in the Korean War. A mix of flag-waving and gritty realism, the movie is most noteworthy for actual combat scenes and a controversial scene involving Korean refugees. Howard Hughes, the owner of the studio (RKO), refused to delete the scene when requested by the U.S. Army.

Watch on YouTube

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