i called up my friend leroy on the phone
Sep. 24th, 2022 06:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jazzfishThe doctor went remarkably well: as predicted in and out in about ten minutes, with a new sleep-study referral for a CPAP which will hopefully suffice, and also referrals for chest x-rays and bloodwork. Will get those taken care of next week.
Got the bike out again yesterday. Rode around Queensborough, a small neighbourhood that's almost like a tiny city, technically part of New West but across a bridge and on the same island as Richmond. Also went well; Q'boro is pretty flat, and without constant uphill and without smoke in the air I felt much less like my lungs were about to give out.
I may try the ride along the skytrain line again tomorrow; will see how I'm feeling. There's a dessert place out by Metrotown that I don't think I'll get to tomorrow but is a good thing to have as a goal in general.
Reread Gideon and Harrow in preparation for Nonathe Ninth, with which I was less impressed. To quote Douglas Adams, "I think this is getting needlessly messianic." As with Harrow the pacing is really not working for me: half a book of buildup that I don't much care about and cramming in all the action / interesting stuff in the last third or so is not my speed. I'm still on board for Alecto the Ninth whenever that comes out, though. And I may like Nona better on first reread; that certainly happened with Harrow.
And today I watched Margin Call a movie... okay, The Big Short is a movie about the 2008 financial meltdown, Margin Call is set during it. Specifically it's set during about twenty-four hours, at an unnamed big financial firm, when they discover that their mortgage instruments are a house of cards about to collapse and what are they going to do about it? The characters are all varying degrees of amoral which makes it really interesting to watch as they try desperately to work out how they're going to get through this. And the movie does a lot with nighttime office scenes, shadows and glass and harsh fluorescent tubes, and with a sharp script that only occasionally shows the distaste the writer must feel for the banksters. I liked it more than I expected to, I think.
Tonight I see how cookies do in the toaster oven.
I'm doing alright, I suppose. No lonelier than usual.
Got the bike out again yesterday. Rode around Queensborough, a small neighbourhood that's almost like a tiny city, technically part of New West but across a bridge and on the same island as Richmond. Also went well; Q'boro is pretty flat, and without constant uphill and without smoke in the air I felt much less like my lungs were about to give out.
I may try the ride along the skytrain line again tomorrow; will see how I'm feeling. There's a dessert place out by Metrotown that I don't think I'll get to tomorrow but is a good thing to have as a goal in general.
Reread Gideon and Harrow in preparation for Nona
And today I watched Margin Call a movie... okay, The Big Short is a movie about the 2008 financial meltdown, Margin Call is set during it. Specifically it's set during about twenty-four hours, at an unnamed big financial firm, when they discover that their mortgage instruments are a house of cards about to collapse and what are they going to do about it? The characters are all varying degrees of amoral which makes it really interesting to watch as they try desperately to work out how they're going to get through this. And the movie does a lot with nighttime office scenes, shadows and glass and harsh fluorescent tubes, and with a sharp script that only occasionally shows the distaste the writer must feel for the banksters. I liked it more than I expected to, I think.
Tonight I see how cookies do in the toaster oven.
I'm doing alright, I suppose. No lonelier than usual.
no subject
Date: 2022-09-25 09:47 pm (UTC)I really need to give Gideon the Ninth a try sometime... some of my friends are so enthusiastic about it. Everyone seems to feel it all hits better on a reread, though. Hmmm.
no subject
Date: 2022-09-27 04:51 am (UTC)Gideon's the best of them. Harrow spends its front half being Too Clever For Its Own Good (this improves on reread where you can admire how clever it is). And Nona, well, to me Nona reads like "if i want to write two hundred pages about middle-school war-zone-gang politics from the POV of a literal child before getting to any actual plot then by god i will do that and if you complain you'll get another hundred pages of that after the first ten of plot". Plus the whole Space Jesus thing gets annoyingly literalized in Nona.
Honestly I'm put in mind of Jo Walton's dictum about Dune: paraphrased, the first one was good, and each subsequent was half as good as the previous, and she stopped when they became homeopathically good. But Gideon is, wholly and without reservation, Really Good.
(Gideon is also better on reread, true. I'm fine with books being better on reread! I just insist on a baseline level of 'good' on first read. Gideon met that bar trivially, Harrow was occasionally skirting the edges, and Nona likewise but from the wrong side.)