schneefink

L and I are both out of practice when it comes to, uh, sailing the high seas, so when we wanted to watch Pride we walked over to the local library and borrowed the DVD. (The library has two entire #BookTok shelves btw.) Which turned out to be a great choice because we really enjoyed the DVD extra about the actual history. Finding out that there were actual LGSM members walking in the march at the end made it even better.

Such a good movie. Even before I watched it, a gif set of the ending (which of course I can't find again rn) was one of the few things on Tumblr to reliably get me teary-eyed. (The other one being the story of the RMS Carpathia.) Learning about the characters that were based on real people, and their fates, and then of course of the waves resulting from their actions, was a very good finish. (I was slightly embarrassed that I didn't remember where I knew Gethin's actor from until I read Andrew Scott in the end credits.)


I agreed to house&pet-sit a couple of times for friends that are leaving for a three week vacation next week, so on Monday I got the introduction to the house. I expected that I would most look forward to spending time in the garden and/or pool, and also take advantage of the fancy kitchen, maybe the Xbox Gamepass or Switch, but that's before I got the introduction to the VR glasses. Now I suspect I will spend a significant amount of time playing Beat Saber. You have lightsabers! And move to the music! Idk maybe the shine will wear off quick but I'm really looking forward to playing.

Catching up on reviews:

The Monday after it came out I went to watch A Minecraft Movie with six friends. I really wanted to watch it relatively early because I know I am bad at avoiding spoilers, and the plan mostly worked. I had a fun time! Was it a fantastic movie, eh, but was it entertaining, definitely, and it was a lot of fun to see so many Minecraft things as live action.

( Spoilers )

I also enjoyed Mumbo's video about his consulting work on the movie, with all of the unused ideas. And Scar and Grian interviewing the director during the Hermitcraft charity event (timestamp) and the director being so enthusiastic about Mumbo's work. Tall drink of water indeed.


Back in February I played Iron Diamond, a game that I saw recommended on r/metroidvania as "not very long, very good exploration, colorful, and cheap (especially on sale)," and all of that was true. The map and upgrades were great. The boss fights ranged from fun to too easy (to be fair I was playing on casual) to dumb (stupid yeti), the story was okay, the controls took me a while to get used to and I still didn't love them by the end, but overall I had a good time. The graphics weren't the best but that didn't really bother me.
I got to the end credits at 85% completion in 11.5 hours.


More Astalon: Tears of the Earth: ( Spoilers )

Three days of eight-hour-classes this weekend and it was not as exhausting as I feared, yay. In preparation for an exam in October that I found out I will have to take in February because I missed the sign-up deadline, oops.
For scheduling reasons this was the first of my classes that I could take in person instead of as a webinar and I much prefer that.


I finally watched Dumb Money on Friday. (It was also my first time going to the "cinema on the roof" above the main library and that was very nice, next year I need to check what other movies they are playing there.) It's about the GameStop short squeeze in 2021 and I was very curious about it. It would be a vast exaggeration to say that I "was there," but I did check the subreddit regularly when things got heated back then.

I enjoyed it, and I'm glad I watched it. So much about Wall Street sucks and it is full of assholes, no surprise, but that makes it nice to watch when they get a bloody nose, at least.
I didn't find it entirely satisfying but I think a lot of that were too high hopes and me overthinking.

( Details )

Watching this reminded me of watching "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room," the movie that played a big role in me staying interested in accounting many years ago. (That is one of those movies I'm not sure I want to rewatch because it might not be as good as I remember it being, but otoh it might be very motivating when I need to start studying IFRS.) I do like a good business ~documentary.

I didn't think I was doing too badly at semi-regularly posting on DW, but looking at my notes document there's so much I wanted to post but didn't; for example I'm so behind on reviews. These are from months ago, so for the books I partially just copied my Goodreads reviews that I always try to write soon after finishing.

Children of Memory – Adrian Tchaikovsky (Children of Time #3): The first of my summer vacation books – it was so great to have plenty of time to read books while relaxing on the beach!
Every new book in this series is looking at a new kind of different intelligence/sentience/sapience and it's fascinating. ( barely any spoilers )A book I enjoyed more with my head than my gut if that makes sense.

The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi - Shannon Chakraborty: This was the kind of book that I enjoyed a lot while I was reading it and looked forward to finding out what would happen next, but (until the last 10% or so) when I put it down I felt no immediate need to pick it up again, so it took me a while to finish. I liked the characters, and I enjoyed the plot: I especially liked that it kept surprising me, not with major plot twists but with more frequent developments that I did not expect (I also didn't try to guess but still) and that kept things interesting.

Witch King – Martha Wells: I really loved the beginning of this, I was especially impressed with just how quickly the book drew me in. I really liked the characters and the worldbuilding, and I also enjoyed the main plot. ( other things worked less well for me ) Overall I still enjoyed the book a lot though.

A Day of Fallen Night – Samantha Shannon (The Roots of Chaos #0): I enjoyed this, but I think I would have enjoyed it a lot more if I had read or reread "The Priory of the Orange Tree" more recently. Multiple times things were set up or mentioned that I'm fairly certain got their pay-off in the previous book, but since I didn't remember that very well it just felt like the pay-off was missing, or at least not completely satisfying probably because the author didn't want to retread the same ground. (And I didn't like the book enough to go reread "Priory of the Orange Tree" right after.) I liked the characters and I enjoyed the queer relationships in particular.

Lords of Uncreation – Adrian Tchaikovsky (The Final Architecture #3): I enjoyed the first two books of the trilogy but I loved this one, pretty much the whole way through. From early on there were many interesting turns I was not expecting and yet that made perfect sense, and that also goes for the epic ending. My favorite was ( maybe a vague spoiler idk ) I was so excited when I figured out what was happening.
I really appreciated how the "superpower" of so many characters was basically stubbornness paired with "that's my secret, assholes, I'm always scared."
I enjoyed this book so much I requested it for Yuletide and got a great gift for it.
(That said, as often happens with books I remember loving a lot, a few months later I become suspicious if it was really that good or if I was just in the perfect mood for it. If I reread it at one point if usually turns out to be a mix of both.)

Encanto (2021): I was hesitant to watch this because of the "high expectations" problem. And We Don't Talk About Bruno indeed did not meet these expectations, but I liked the colors and I really liked Surface Pressure (I have listened to that many times by now and really want to try singing it at karaoke even though I think it's really hard to do well but I think it'd be fun) and I enjoyed the story – at least as long as I didn't think about it very much. ( Spoilers are talking about Bruno )

Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime: Flying a space ship and rescuing bunnies! I don't even remember why we started playing this – I think we were doing a board game evening but one person was late and we were at A&D's place who happen to have a large screen and four controllers. I've never played a four player in-person co-op before, it was so much fun. In hindsight this game might be best to play with three players, I heard it's very stressful with two but it was much easier than expected with four of us.
I really want to play co-op like that again, maybe even try out some classics like Mario Party? Maybe!

One Piece (live-action): I had heard good things and saw promising screenshots but I was still not quite sure what to expect. I was surprised how much I enjoyed it! The casting was great. ( some spoilers )

I'm still low on batteries, despite the recent vacation days though that helped, and therefore haven't been posting or commenting much, but here are some of the things I've done in the past few weeks:

- I went to see the D&D movie for the second time, this time with my TTRPG group, and I enjoyed it just as much the second time. We watched it in German because on that day it wasn't available in English anymore but fortunately German synchronizations are generally excellent, there were only a few instances where the translation seemed slightly awkward.

- It has been a while (too long) since we managed to find a date for a cat TTRPG session and then last time I had to cancel because I had no voice, but the time before that when two people were on vacation we instead played the boardgame "Flamecraft" (in the fancy deluxe edition with shiny metal coins etc.) where you play in a town full of both humans and dragons and it is possibly the cutest game I have ever played. I enjoyed the game and afterwards I looked at all the cards we hadn't used to admire the art. (And the puns.)

- I watched "Across the Spider-Verse" and I enjoyed it. Haven't finished writing up my notes, maybe later. (Looking at my many post drafts: yeah that is a definite maybe.)

- I went to see a theater play for the first time in years: "Noises Off," a comedy about plays, at the Burgtheater. I wouldn't have gone if I hadn't gotten gift tickets for my birthday months ago but I'm glad I did. I'd already seen it once but that was about fifteen years ago so I remembered little except that it was very funny, and it was. I went with two friends and, after the third friend cancelled, with my mom, which was nice, and she was especially happy because she is always very excited to meet my friends. My mom and I are going to see another play this week and I look forward to it.

- It is finally warm enough to swim in the river near my parents' place again, that was nice.

- For the first time in several years (because I usually forget) I went to the Pride parade, it was great. My friend F had great body paint on and she offered that next year she'll paint me too, that'll be fun.

- We had a company outing to Bratislava via boat, that was nice, even though it was very hot. I last visited Bratislava about a dozen years ago, even though it's so close. My favorite find was this statue of Hans Christian Andersen with a snail.

- I finally have a summer hair cut! Definitely not too soon.

- the GM of my cat TTRPG group had his 30th birthday party and some others of our group organized an actual quest for him, that was so much fun. He got to pick two guests as his party members (one of them was me) and then a mysterious figure in a bar told him he had to go on a quest to save ice dragon babies. Along the way a "mage" as well as three "gnomes" in a blanket trench coat demanded that he solve logic puzzles (we failed at two out of three) and at the end he had to destroy a piñata of a dragon raised by an evil necromancer, while wearing a dragon onesie for stealth reasons.

- D and I recently talked about computer games and he invited me over to try out playing on his PS5 since I haven't played anything on a console since… ever, I think? At least a very long time. It's definitely a different feeling than playing on my laptop. I played a few hours of "Horizon Forbidden West," the first main quest, and had a great time. It's a gorgeous game, definitely requires a big screen. The monsters look very cool too, and there were enough of them that I very much appreciated the red grass and the sneak attack ability. It took me a while to get used to the controls, I usually only play 2D games so I had to get used to using one stick for movement and the other for perspective, but eventually I improved.

I went running today, even though it was very cold and it took twenty minutes for my hands to stop freezing because I forgot gloves, and I almost fell twice because even though I took a different route than normal some places were still icy. But I still went, not for very long but it counts. The only reasons why I didn't hate every minute were because a) the feeling of spite and accomplishment, and b) the sun. When I'm out in full sunshine for the first time in a while I always feel very plant-like.

On Friday after work I went to LB's apartment to finally watch Prince of Egypt, which we'd been talking about for a while now. "Deliver Us" is such a good song&scene, goosebumps.
Today he came to our place for dinner and to watch Glass Onion. It was fun, and I was glad that I managed to avoid spoilers enough to still be surprised a few times. It was the first movie I saw that was set during COVID times and I really liked how that was shown especially in the beginning. Some of my favorite parts were

spoilers

everyone arriving with different kinds of masks, Blanc immediately solving the planned murder mystery, and his long speech at the end in which during the speech which was only meant to stall he realizes what was actually going on and is mad about it because of the stupidity. I also liked him emphasizing that he is not Batman and at the end saying he could only uncover the truth but not deliver consequences - but then he did encourage Helen to ensure consequences on her own. (Sadly I could not forget the likely future that Helen will almost definitely go to jail for it.)

Afterwards we got LB to watch the Potato Wars series xD He's had to put up with me talking about Minecraft for months now so it was high time to show him what got me into it. First I told him that the first one isn't that long and then he enjoyed it enough that he didn't complain at all when the playlist continued, success.

It was fun, we should do movie evenings like that more often. Unfortunately LB soon won't be here for a few months, we'll have to pick it up again afterwards.

Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, MCU: The first MCU movie I watched in a while. It was fun. I especially liked the first two fight scenes (while during the big climactic battle I was too exasperated with what people were not doing to fully enjoy it.) Having recently watched Castlevania I also could not help but compare Xu Wenwu to Dracula.

Critical Role campaign 3: I do enjoy CR, the new characters are very promising (especially Taliesin's and Marisha's, and Sam's is fun), but 4 hours a week is a lot. I'm glad they'll take one week a month off, I'm already behind (I've watched the first three episodes so far.) I'm not sure yet if I'll continue watching, or if I'll do what I did for the second half of campaign 2, namely read the summaries each week and then decide to watch the episode if something particularly cool or interesting happened.

Taskmaster series 12: DD and I really enjoyed series 1 to 10, and then for reasons we forgot didn't watch series 11. We recently caught up with series 12 and it's so much fun. Victoria might be one of my favorite contestants ever. Only one more episode to go.

Iron Widow by Xiran Jay Zhao: People in magical giant robots fight monsters! And the heroine wants to burn down the sexist system that leads to female pilots being sacrificed. ( Some imo minor spoilers )

Six Crimson Cranes by Elizabeth Lim: inspired by the fairy tale "The Six Swans" in an Asian fantasy setting. Unfortunately the main character left a bad first impression because coddled youngest child or not, a 16-year-old Imperial princess should know more about responsibilities and consequences than Shiori (and that reflects badly on her family too.) Maybe I just wasn't in the mood for YA? None of the plot twists were surprising, and I could only connect to the characters rarely. Overall, I don't regret reading it and it did have some enjoyable elements, but I'm not going to bother with any sequels.

So I'm a Spider, So What?, anime, up to episode 13: I thought this would be mostly silly fun, but, uh, the recent episodes took a much darker tun than I anticipated. Very cool plot twists, ( spoilers ) Without spoilers, I'd appreciate some vague info about how dark this gets.
The first dozen episodes also had surprisingly catchy songs and I'm disappointed those changed.

I watched "Detective Pikachu" yesterday, with LB and a friend who we used to play Pokémon with more than fifteen years ago. There was a lot of nostalgia :)
I didn't know what to expect from the movie, I just hoped it'd be entertaining and fun, and it was.

( Spoilers )


I was inspired to read up on the current state of Pokémon (the last game I knew well was Crystal, though iirc the last one I played a few times was Ruby.) Apparently there are Mega Evolutions now! Past me, whose self-insert had a team made out of fictional higher evolutions, feels smug. (I had the next evolutions of Pidgeot (Taubokhan), Rapidash (Pegana), Vaporeon (Aquilea) – these three I still knew off the top of my head – and Incognito (Icogg.) Yes the names were very creative.)
Actually I had two different Pokémon self-inserts, one of them a very successful Pokémon trainer and the other a near-feral child who grew up among wild Pokémon in the Viridian Forest. Well, technically three, as I just saw when I checked my old notes, but I'd completely forgotten about the third one and I don't think she ever got much of a story at all. I'd also forgotten that I made paper pokéballs for each of the original 151, and I drew and made A5 "cards" for each of the original 151. Some of the drawings even look nice! I'm glad I still have them.

I watched Captain Marvel yesterday and enjoyed it a lot :)( Thoughts with spoilers )

I voluntarily sought out spoilers for Infinity War and then decided to watch it, and was glad I did. ( Spoilers )

(Now I'm thinking about a MCU crossover D&D campaign. A few MCU characters are stranded in a D&D world and trying to find their way back, stealing powerful artifacts and annoying people in the process, and the party is hired to stop the thieves/something similar and only eventually will realize who these people are. Could be fun, and I've been wanting to try to DM again anyway, after our current campaign is over.)