silver

There are no library books at home right now. This makes me so uncomfortable for some reason. (I visited family for two weeks so I returned my books.) Even if often library books just languish on my shelf, and I've got an entire internet's worth of original fiction and fic, ebooks available immediately from the library, and everything--old habits die hard, I guess.

I have to go to the library. It's not too cold, just snowy.

Agatha H and the Airship City, by Phil and Kaja Foglio--DNF.

This book is terrible.

It is unbelievably clunkily written. Paragraphs that don't have any connection follow each other. There are entire paragraphs are made up of sentences which are very short and simple, which make the whole thing sound choppy. There are multiple italics and CAPSLOCKED WORDS AND PHRASES on nearly every page. No one acts like a human, all the Jäger machines have their accents written out phonetically (possibly German caricature?), and the whole thing tries to be clever and arch and falls so badly short. And honestly, it's the last that really gets my goat.

( So I had some issues with this book. )

Having now written all of that out, I think the authors were trying to go for humour. But there's nothing for the humour to go on top of. Nothing to build on top of, so instead I'm left wondering what's going on and why I should care, and finding the humour illogical instead.

In conclusion, I hope that their webcomic is leagues better than their writing, because this book is just plain awful. Girl Genius won a Hugo? Why do so many steampunk novels insist on being arch? It reminds me of Gail Carriger's Parasol Protectorate, which was uneven and whose main female character practically screamed I'm not one of those girls! Thank you, I'll pass.

I'm going to admit this upfront: this is a rant disguised as a book review. By this I mean that this is me getting my music-student rage on. Among general reader rage, too. I fully admit to getting frustrated at around the first 1/3rd of the book because of logic, world-building, and characterization inconsistencies on top of bad, bad treatment of music, but sticking it out purely for the catharsis of writing a review. I finally finished it today. While it took me about a month-and-a-half to read the book (where normally a book this size is 2 hours, max) partly because of real life, it wasalso because I could not get through five or ten pages without being brought up short by some inconsistency or problem.

So. Wanna hear about Interface Masque?

The paragraphs under the first cut do not contain spoilers. The rage review contains spoilers. If I were you, though, I wouldn't read the book. Not worth it. In fact, I have so many issues with this book that I'm not even addressing the RANDOM ALIENS IN THE NET bits, because I have piled quite enough objections in this review, but please be assured that they are ??? and are like a red herring that doesn't actually help with anything. They're just there and never resolved properly.

Interface Masque, Shariann Lewitt. 350 pages. Science fiction - cyberpunk?

( The reviewer bits )

( The music-student (and general reader) rage bits )

I see this all the time in Support requests.

Please, if you have information that you think is sensitive, do not share it publicly on the internet. On LiveJournal and Dreamwidth, you have the option to flock or to make the entry private. Flock isn't perfect, but at least third-party search engines can't index it - they don't know it exists, period.

Do not put private, sensitive, or embarrassing information about yourself online, connected to your real name, unless you are fine with everyone around you knowing. There are people who, in high school, put all sorts of information out, and now are scrambling to delete it so that potential employers don't find it. Write it down offline. Privatize. Flock. Lock to custom friends groups.

Please do take precautions. In most cases as there are no TOS violations, LiveJournal support can't do a thing to delete your embarrassing entries if you forget your password/username. Most search engines won't delete the cache unless you delete it first from LiveJournal. There is nothing we can do.

Someone posts to fandomsecrets about Disney Specifically, that the song Kiss the Girl isn't sexist.

In this scene Ariel is consenting silently, as she's been rendered mute, but holy cow those lyrics are creepy.


In the context of the WHOLE ENTIRE MOVIE, they're acceptable, as her whole intent is to get Eric to kiss her.

The premise is troubling: girl wants to transform into another species (approximately) altogether, leave behind everything she's known, all her family, makes a deal with what she considers evil, just to win the boy. Courageous, yes. The fact that the boy doesn't do anything, doesn't need to do anything? And she has to give up her whole world to do be with him?

If we lived in a world where we don't have a history of one gender with greater privilege over another (HINT: misogyny is the word) this movie would be fine. The problem is we don't live in that world.

But to those people who are arguing that this has no real life repercussions? (raaaaaage: Sexism does not manifest itself with blatant slurs or outright assault alone. It's obviously more subtle than you can pick up.) The people who don't want to admit that Disney is sexist? (I'll be back; I just need to check to make sure this is the same universe I woke up in. You are so oblivious I can't believe you're serious.)

I have news for you.

One single movie about a woman who has marriage as the culmination of her dreams is fine. A hundred movies saying that is okay. It's not an unreasonable dream, and we are not all the same and do not agree on dreams. But when nearly every Disney movie (qualified because I have not watched them all) does end that way, there is a big problem. Belle, who is a heroine I love (the admiration for Page's voice is helpful) dreams of something bigger, better, and ends up marrying. Cinderella wants to escape her life of drudgery - she marries, and it's all a magic dream; it's nothing she's really done. Snow White is rescued by someone riding by at random; for Sleeping Beauty, ditto. Meg gets married; Mulan gets married. As examples build up, you cannot claim that this is only one girl's dream, and not the silent expectation in society, women and men alike.

I do not believe the Disney producers intended to be sexist. *Intent is magical! But the fact that even The Princess and the Frog, a movie released in 2009, has the girl predictably happily-married only shows that nothing has really changed. The message underneath it all is: for a happy ending, you need to be married.

One Disney movie like this = not a problem. All Disney movies with the subtle implications about how one can live a good life = a very, very big problem, and I am sorry that you cannot see this.

*Thank you also for the side helping of ablism.

I feel like I've stepped in a timewarp or something.

( TMI! )

And in my mind all day was the poem (the last lines have a tendency to stick):

THE WATCH
Frances Cornford (1886-1960)

I wakened on my hot, hard bed,
Upon the pillow lay my head;
Beneath the pillow I could hear
My little watch was ticking clear.
I thought the throbbing of it went
Like my continual discontent;
I thought it said in every tick:
I am so sick, so sick, so sick;
O death, come quick, come quick, come quick,
Come quick, come quick, come quick, come quick.