swatkat

I go away for one month and my favourite shady tea place shuts down.

Granted, this was going to happen sooner or later -- for years we'd wondered how they even managed to keep the place running, given the number of customers they usually managed (a few) and the property rent in a location such as theirs (astronomical). I suspect some of it involved bribery, since there's no way the manager actually owed that wad of bills I saw him pass on to that policeman one fine afternoon. There might be a moral to this story, but right now I will only lament the loss of its moth-eaten sofas and non-functioning air-conditioning and the lovely glass windows I spent hours sitting by, reading, preparing lecture notes, watching highschoolers throng the shady pub across the street, out of uniform (I've witnessed at least a couple of fights in the past few months alone, while daintily sipping on my tea). And also their tea, which, while somewhat overpriced, was undoubtedly good and the only place in the vicinity where they brewed tea instead of handing you an (also overpriced) cup of hot water with a tea bag in it.

Sigh.

+

I managed to catch Brave last week. 'Managed', because it ran for a week in the theatres amidst appallingly poor publicity and show timings. It's as though they didn't want kids to watch it during their summer vacations.

Even more appalling, however, are the reviews I've been reading ever since: ( this does not spoil the major plot point, but there are emotional spoilers in here as well discussions of certain scenes )

It's off the theatres now, but I will buy my mother the DVD the moment it's out because I know she will enjoy it. And I hope someone more articulate than I will write a comparative analysis of mothers/daughters/power in this movie, and the two Snow White movies that came out this year.

I like that ff.net has a bazillion epic Azula redemption stories.* I love a good redemption arc. I like it when a narrative takes a character who has done horrible things/is a horrible person apart, piece by piece, and then makes them something far more than anyone ever thought they were capable of. It's a narrative kink. And I'm even willing to trawl through reams of badfic to fulfill that need because hello, narrative kink! But ugh, I hate it when well-written stories - stories I have invested sixteen chapters in - end up with things I like the least, causing me to backbutton: Marty Stu OCs, ~past sexual abuse and healing penises**, not to mention a botched Ursa-Azula reunion. And it was going so well! It had the right build up! It had one of the best Character is Accidentally Heroic/Jaded Character Receives Benediction moments ever. *wails*

I get that sexual abuse/healing penis is a standard h/c trope that many readers are fond of, but I wish it wasn't such a cliched shortcut to ~explain away a character's shortcomings. That's just lazy writing (see also: Korra fandom's FIXATION with miscarriage/infertility in Lin's backstory. BEING SINGLE/CHILDLESS IS NOT A TRAGEDY).

And while we're complaining: Tahno is not Zuko. Tahno/Korra is not Zuko/Katara. Please stop.

* It's an interesting phenomenon, sort of like how Buffy fandom had a bazillion epic Faith redemption stories, a lot of them action-y stuff written by fanboys.

** I don't always mind healing penis/vagina. But not an OC and healing penis.

Oh GOD, LJ, what have you done to the 'simple' comment page what?

Is it just me, or is LJ down? FB is working, but is ridiculously slow.

Writing is hard.

Argh, nothing like discovering in the middle of an already troublesome section that you've given Character X three hands, or Character Y two heads (or something like that). Argh.

Organizing is *hard*.

I don't know why I always get talked into these things. There all these people with a bunch of nifty ideas and pretty words, *luring* you in. And then there's the dirty work, the Getting Things Done part where you have to run about, talk to fifty people and manage *all* their temper tantrums while *also* managing your own temper.

Frak. My laptop's CD-burner finally gave up. I knew this would happen, and I've been dithering with the repairs, and today it refuses to burn a single thing.

Tomorrow, I talk to the Lenovo dealers. But meanwhile, because I absolutely refuse to use pen drives (sorry, too many bad experiences with *other* people's pen drives), I have to type up an entire frakking fic all over again. And I have to do it today, because it's for the hmd_rareathon and the date of submission is the 11th. Which is today. *headdesk*