(no subject)

Flyboys was awesome. It knows _exactly_ what it is and executes on it perfectly. It hits all the tropes one expects, but hits them well and not too obviously in most cases; it looks beautiful; it conveys the futility and brutality of WWI without being excessively gorey; the dogfights look _fantastic_; you care about the characters; the love story doesn't over-power it or drive it; you want more of several characters without, largely, being disatisfied by what you get. FANNISH PEOPLE: Go see it and write lots of slash. NOW. OMG. Also, there's a pet lion.

Also, my birthday has rocked so far, even if Kali did embarass me by more or less shouting "fisting" in a crowded train.

Also, new Descensus soonish.

(no subject)

Also, how tickled am I that I share a birthday with Minerva McGonagall?

ghost brides

And while I did not, in fact, make this icon for "news stories about death/afterlife," it seems to be getting a lot of use for that lately.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/05/world/asia/05china.html

But here in the parched canyons along the Yellow River known as the Loess Plateau, some parents with dead bachelor sons will go a step further. To ensure a son’s contentment in the afterlife, some grieving parents will search for a dead woman to be his bride and, once a corpse is obtained, bury the pair together as a married couple.

...

“For girls, it doesn’t matter about their minds, whether they are an idiot or not,” he said. “They are still wanted as brides.” Dead or alive, he added, as he peered at the river.

“There are girls who have drowned in the river down there,” he said. “When their bodies have washed up, their families could get a couple of thousand yuan for them.”

...

She added: “It’s superstition and religion. People live as couples. If they die, they should live as a couple, too.”

And that is why families too poor to afford a minghun bride also follow a similar custom in some villages: They make a figure of straw and bury it beside a dead son as the spouse he never had.

Marie Antoinette

I know it's largely been panned, but I saw a commercial for Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette last night and am more excited than I could possibly say about it. While I suspect it may well be like AI or Moulin Rouge is for many -- an excessively ambitious and iredemeably flawed film that provides some measure of reluctant interest -- I have a strong, fundamental suspicion that it's going to manage to say something or other really important to me, whether it's because I just like costume dramas or that such things speak to the same interests that provoke the existence of Descensus or what, I really have no idea.

But I'm madly excited for it.

Regency ball prep

I still need to:

- acquire and clock stockings
- address the matter of undergarments
- dry clean my purple cloak
- find (and dry clean) the shawls for the ball gowns so we can pretend they're day dresses
- finish finishing Kali's dress (scheduled for Monday)
- assemble hair stuff (including finding ribbons for mine)
- assemble jewelry stuff
- plan/pack gluten-free stuff
- clean/pack poker set (not for poker, mind you)

I _think_ that's all of it. If start eyeing this list now, it's more likely to all get done.

Swordspoint

I am rereading Swordspoint for Jaida's bookclub, as it's been many, many years (probably almost a decade) since I last read it. I had forgotten how overtly sexual it was, and wonder if I even picked up on all of the sexuality in my first read of it -- I recall rereading passages then because I was unsure it said what it seemed to. I had also fogotten how unbelievably stressful i find Alec and St Vier's relationship -- the lack of communication skills, the elephants on the able -- all done expertly of course, but these are characters that rouse a nervous ache in me. Of course, there's also a sense of familiarity to them that soothes me. Certainly the power dynamic between them is very weird and complex, something a lot of writers could learn from.