let me hear your voice tonight (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
alexseanchai) wrote2013-01-22 09:18 am
alexseanchai) wrote2013-01-22 09:18 am
Entry tags:
meme from oursin
I know very little about some of the people on my friends list. Some people I know relatively well. But here's a thought: why not take this opportunity to tell me a little something about yourself. Any old thing at all. Just so the next time I see your name I can say: "Ah, there's Parker ...she likes money and cereal." I'd love it if everyone who's friended me did this. (Yes, even you people who I know really well.) Then post this in your own journal [only if you feel inclined]. In return, ask me anything you'd like to know about me and I'll give you an answer*.
*Providing it's answerable/suitable for public posting.
*Providing it's answerable/suitable for public posting.
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I used to read all. the. time. There was a time during 7th & 8th grade where I had no friends at school, so I spent all my free time reading and finished on average a novel a day. Now it's considerably less. *g* Mostly I read fic, but I kind of miss reading actual books, too, so I'm trying to read books more. Right now I'm in the middle of The Hobbit and have started rereading the Dragonlance Chronicles (fantasy epic of my nostalgic, 8th grade heart!)
What's on your reading/to-read list right now?
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Got a bookmark in Seanan McGuire's Ashes of Honor, another in her Discount Armageddon, bag also contains Jim C Hines's The Mermaid's Madness and the Leverage tie-in The Con Job. Checked out from the library I have Tanya Huff's The Silvered, a book of Irish music and lyrics, C E Murphy's Demon Hunts (haven't read the rest of the series, I just wanna personally verify that Sam and Dean Winchester have a cameo in this one), Bart D Ehrman's Forged (about authorship of various books in the Bible), Madre: Perilous Journeys with a Spanish Noun (apparently 'madre' has unpleasant connotations that neither 'padre' nor 'mama' have), Discount Armageddon, Margaret Ronald's Spiral Hunt, and Death by Supermarket: the Fattening, Dumbing-Down, and Poisoning of America (which I expect will be fatphobic in the extreme but educational nonetheless).
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Ooooooh all of those sound like interesting reads! I may have to track down a copy of Ehrman's Forged and Madre, and naturally one day I will catch up with all of Tanya Huff's oeuvre. :P
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Do you have a favorite non-electronic game?
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And ooh, Tanya Huff! I love that she wrote about the ghost of Ivan Reznikoff, my alma mater's campus ghost. And also her Smoke & ____ series makes me very happy, too. It was pretty much all the prior knowledge I had about Vancouver, before moving here for work.
And also, I have a HORRIBLE memory. Case in point- did we become LJ friends through the Tanya Huff fandom??
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I doubt it. I've never been fannish about Huff.
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Without spoilers, reasons I love (early) Dexter:
I adore Dexter's opening credits, which is really unusual for me; they're not as awesome now, since I've seen them umpty-billion times, but at first the recontextualization of quotidian tasks into violence was a really interesting re-framing.
I remain incredibly happy at the narrative arc of S1, the way everything comes together and is interwoven throughout; it might be one of the tightest span of 12 episodes I've seen - it moves at an incredibly pace, but everything in it builds on itself.
I really love the characterizations, although I don't necessarily like the characters. For a male-centric show about someone who's cop-adjacent, there are surprisingly vibrant women characters. They're all a mess in various ways (as is every other character on the show), but their messiness is a function of who they are instead of their gender (although their gender impacts who they are, like LaGuerta climbing the ranks in the police force and Deb's sister and daddy issues and Rita's relationship with domestic violence). I don't like the later seasons as much - by stretching out the central conceit as long as they have, way too many people have to be way too stupid way too often, but it really, really worked for me early on.
I like that people actually sweat in the show. They're in Miami; of course they're going to sweat. But how often do you actually see that on tv? It's ridiculous, but it's something tiny that made me happy. (I can't speak to any of the rest of the verisimilitude, particularly cultural, unfortunately.)
I wish they had let the show end gracefully instead of spooling it out, but, well, I still think the early seasons are awesome, and S1 remains one of my favorite seasons of anything.
I tend to get fannish about things for a few reasons. One of them is other people around me or whom I read being fannish; sometimes I do follow the group and draw from that kind of synergy. Also, there tends to be some sort of character that I peg to and favor: Daniel Jackson, Sam Winchester, Severus Snape, I'm looking at you. Also, there's often some sort of supernatural/scifi/fantasy element, for that is my happy place. For fannish creativity, I tend to have questions or something I want to answer; someone who's not me would probably not notice, but i tend to read heavily different characters and pairings than I write heavily.
With a show like Dexter (see also: Rome (highly recommended, btw, if you like period pieces at all); late-season Leverage; The Wire [with the caveat I stopped watching in S4 because I didn't find that story-arc engaging]), I like the show itself, but I don't feel the need to push it or ask questions or flail or read around the show. Part of it is probably the lack of scifi/fantasy elements that have always just flat worked for my in my leisure reading. Part of it is that I'm getting what I want from the show itself for whatever reason; I'm not... curious/engaged/whatever at a point of seeking or creating extra-textual material, I'm simply engaged at the point of the text. Like, these things are all really well-done*, and that's sufficient for my happiness with them.
*I don't know if I would say Leverage was always really well done - there's a lot in there that strains credulity, some v. strained plots/cons, and I pretend a lot of S3 doesn't exist. But, by late Leverage the actors were so identified with their roles to me that the space for my fannishness is eclipsed by that, if that makes any sense. The plots and pacing don't hit my sweet spot, but the acting/characters were really strong. (I ignore Nate, so take that as you will.)
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hello, hello -- I love to cook, just get into the kitchen and mess around and see what happens. And I tend to read cookbooks like other people read novels... not so much for actual recipes, but just to see how the author pairs things off and what happens when different things get put together.
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What's the best place you've ever traveled to?
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Haven't traveled really. Used to do a lot of being driven cross-country, but that was always going from home to relatives and back, though occasionally relatives would be found at Seven Springs Ski Resort in Pennsylvania instead of their homes in other parts of Pennsylvania or in New Jersey. (Always did Seven Springs in the summer. Haven't been there in a few years, not since the time I flipped my sled on the Alpine Slide, which is concrete, and took half the skin off my leg. Spent most of the rest of the trip sat in a chair in our rented condo wearing T-shirt and panties, surfing on Dad's laptop.) Acadia and Shenandoah National Parks are gorgeous; they're also the only ones I remember ever being to. I opted out of the family trip west, which had Yellowstone and I don't remember what else, because they were camping every night, I loathe camping, and I was plenty old enough to stay home.
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What's your current favourite book or series? (Other than Harry Potter.)
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