That with which I fill the empty days
Jan. 22nd, 2015 09:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alias_sqbrCam has been away for the last week and a bit which has meant I needed LOTS OF DISTRACTION. (And he is still away, so I shall distract myself by writing this post)
Books:
Deep Deception: An adequately written scifi f/f romance thriller. None of the various aspects blew me away but they all worked pretty well, and it was a fun read. The world building didn't work for me in parts, and it felt like there was some weird racial subtext I wasn't quite getting, but I liked the characters and was satisfied in the end. And given that this is the only scifi f/f romance novel I've ever encountered (though it's apparently third in a series!) that's good enough for me :)
Strong Poison by Dorothy L Sayers: a reread inspired by all the Yuletide fic. Having trouble keeping up my momentum, but she is such a good writer.
One Good Earl Deserves a Lover by Sarah MacLean: bookish inexperienced girl decides she wants a self hating rake with a Dark Past and a Good Heart to teach her how sex works before she gets married. He resists out of decency, eventually they fall in love, the end. Light and largely inoffensive and enjoyable once you tune out the formulaic and clunky writing. My longer review.
TV:
Agent Carter: Pretty great! Peggy is stuck being treated like a secretary after the war but she is a hypercompetent baddass agent anyway. Light and fun and thrilling, if cheesy and not gloriously written. The show treats "normal" women sympathetically, and she has a very femslashy waitress friend. Lots of digs about sexism, TOTALLY IGNORES race. Has a disabled character who...so far isn't evil??
Selfie: ahhh and now it is done. Ended on an optimistic but not entirely satisfying note, they didn't do too badly given they were cancelled unexpectedly. Was overall a fun if flawed show.
Brooklyn 99: continues fun!
You Are Beautiful: A nun crossdresses as her pop idol twin brother and eventually falls in love with a bandmate. I was reccomended this as a K Drama without annoying last minute romantic separation, unfortunately 2 episodes in it has too much embarasment squick for me and since it's subtitled I can't look away from the screen. Kind of ok, otherwise, I may get back to it but may not.
Penny Dreadful: I have enjoyed this every time I've I watched it but have to be in the mood for violent and cheerfully sexy cheesy Victorian supernatural melodrama. A bit like The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Apparently has canon gay later!
Movies:
Much Ado About Nothing (Joss Whedon version): I didn't find it funny or convincing, it all felt very stagey and overdone. It was an ok way to fill in the time.
Games:
Hexcells: A better minesweeper with none of the guessing and multiple lives. Also, hexagonal and quite pretty! There are three game in this series, Hexcells is the first and quite easy, Hexcells Plus is similar but with harder puzzles, Hexcells Infinite is about the same difficulty as Plus but also has a (pretty easy) random puzzle generator with a billion puzzles, they're not as elegant as the hand made ones but fill in the time well enough now I've done the main set.
Puzzle Agent: Like Twin Peaks if instead of death there was puzzles and the FBI agent was from the Puzzle Solving Division. Cute and quirky with some major puzzle design flaws and jarringly cheap animation. One of the flaws is that there seems to be no real punishment for multiple failures, which is good because sometimes you really do just have to take a guess. The ending has a really blatant hook for a sequel I haven't played yet. I enjoyed it overall.
The Wolf Among Us: I got maybe 5 minutes in before I had to get into a fight with a thuggish man who beat his wife and it was all too self consciously noir and grimdark and scary for me so I noped out. I didn't like the Fables comics and was hoping I would somehow like this but nope.
Never Alone: A charming, beautiful puzzle platformer where you play as a little Inuit girl navigating an icy landscape with her amazingly adorable fox friend. Has some educational videos about Inuit life you can unlock as you go, I can't speak as to their quality because trying to watch one crashed the game. And I can't speak to the plot because I hate puzzle platformers, the fact I got 24 minutes in before giving up (and enjoyed most of the experience!) is a pretty big compliment to the game.
The Talos Principle: an apparently entertaining puzzle game I WOULD play but that would overwrite Cam's save. Who doesn't allow for multiple saves in this day and age?
...and of course Dragon Age Inquisition :)
Books:
Deep Deception: An adequately written scifi f/f romance thriller. None of the various aspects blew me away but they all worked pretty well, and it was a fun read. The world building didn't work for me in parts, and it felt like there was some weird racial subtext I wasn't quite getting, but I liked the characters and was satisfied in the end. And given that this is the only scifi f/f romance novel I've ever encountered (though it's apparently third in a series!) that's good enough for me :)
Strong Poison by Dorothy L Sayers: a reread inspired by all the Yuletide fic. Having trouble keeping up my momentum, but she is such a good writer.
One Good Earl Deserves a Lover by Sarah MacLean: bookish inexperienced girl decides she wants a self hating rake with a Dark Past and a Good Heart to teach her how sex works before she gets married. He resists out of decency, eventually they fall in love, the end. Light and largely inoffensive and enjoyable once you tune out the formulaic and clunky writing. My longer review.
TV:
Agent Carter: Pretty great! Peggy is stuck being treated like a secretary after the war but she is a hypercompetent baddass agent anyway. Light and fun and thrilling, if cheesy and not gloriously written. The show treats "normal" women sympathetically, and she has a very femslashy waitress friend. Lots of digs about sexism, TOTALLY IGNORES race. Has a disabled character who...so far isn't evil??
Selfie: ahhh and now it is done. Ended on an optimistic but not entirely satisfying note, they didn't do too badly given they were cancelled unexpectedly. Was overall a fun if flawed show.
Brooklyn 99: continues fun!
You Are Beautiful: A nun crossdresses as her pop idol twin brother and eventually falls in love with a bandmate. I was reccomended this as a K Drama without annoying last minute romantic separation, unfortunately 2 episodes in it has too much embarasment squick for me and since it's subtitled I can't look away from the screen. Kind of ok, otherwise, I may get back to it but may not.
Penny Dreadful: I have enjoyed this every time I've I watched it but have to be in the mood for violent and cheerfully sexy cheesy Victorian supernatural melodrama. A bit like The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Apparently has canon gay later!
Movies:
Much Ado About Nothing (Joss Whedon version): I didn't find it funny or convincing, it all felt very stagey and overdone. It was an ok way to fill in the time.
Games:
Hexcells: A better minesweeper with none of the guessing and multiple lives. Also, hexagonal and quite pretty! There are three game in this series, Hexcells is the first and quite easy, Hexcells Plus is similar but with harder puzzles, Hexcells Infinite is about the same difficulty as Plus but also has a (pretty easy) random puzzle generator with a billion puzzles, they're not as elegant as the hand made ones but fill in the time well enough now I've done the main set.
Puzzle Agent: Like Twin Peaks if instead of death there was puzzles and the FBI agent was from the Puzzle Solving Division. Cute and quirky with some major puzzle design flaws and jarringly cheap animation. One of the flaws is that there seems to be no real punishment for multiple failures, which is good because sometimes you really do just have to take a guess. The ending has a really blatant hook for a sequel I haven't played yet. I enjoyed it overall.
The Wolf Among Us: I got maybe 5 minutes in before I had to get into a fight with a thuggish man who beat his wife and it was all too self consciously noir and grimdark and scary for me so I noped out. I didn't like the Fables comics and was hoping I would somehow like this but nope.
Never Alone: A charming, beautiful puzzle platformer where you play as a little Inuit girl navigating an icy landscape with her amazingly adorable fox friend. Has some educational videos about Inuit life you can unlock as you go, I can't speak as to their quality because trying to watch one crashed the game. And I can't speak to the plot because I hate puzzle platformers, the fact I got 24 minutes in before giving up (and enjoyed most of the experience!) is a pretty big compliment to the game.
The Talos Principle: an apparently entertaining puzzle game I WOULD play but that would overwrite Cam's save. Who doesn't allow for multiple saves in this day and age?
...and of course Dragon Age Inquisition :)
no subject
Date: 2015-01-23 02:10 am (UTC)...uh, define 'last minute romantic separation' though?
no subject
Date: 2015-01-23 02:53 am (UTC)Yeah, if you needed to nope out of The Wolf Among Us during that scene then yeah, it's good to have noped out of the whole series. It doesn't get any less grimdark and noir than that.
no subject
Date: 2015-01-24 12:11 pm (UTC)Sorry I just had to. I didn't know it was coming when I saw it and I was like 'did they just???? OMG!'
no subject
Date: 2015-01-26 06:25 am (UTC)I can't say it wasn't one of my motivations for giving the show a shot!
no subject
Date: 2015-01-26 06:58 am (UTC)yes, seriously! you'd think by now they'd know not to introduce a black guy only to have him killed off 5 minutes later. I'm still enjoying it a lot though--I love the campy, fun tone, Haylay Atwell's acting and the scenes between Peggy and Jarvis.
no subject
Date: 2015-01-26 07:03 am (UTC)nods
I was hoping that being in charge of the story would annoy me less than the comic, but it actually made it worse because I couldn't skim over annoying parts or ignore Bigby in favour of the female characters.
no subject
Date: 2015-01-26 07:05 am (UTC)Breaking up in the second last episode and not seeing each other for years, then having a rushed reconciliation in the last episode. I asked for recs for Kdramas that don't do that since it seems to be bizarrely universal. Have I been misled and You Are Beautiful does something similar?
no subject
Date: 2015-01-26 07:32 am (UTC)I need to catch up, only seen the first two episodes!
no subject
Date: 2015-01-26 10:13 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-01-26 01:40 pm (UTC)If you are into historical rom-com, I can rec Sungkyunkwan Scandal, which has a super cute crossdressing romance, a canon bisexual character, and the only timeskip at the end is between 'yay everything's going to be fine!' and 'look how AWESOMELY everything has worked out since we got together, God, I love my rocking crossdressing life!' But that is literally the only one I've seen that I can think of. (Well, aside from Capital Scandal, which is AMAZING but thwarts its rom-com happy ending in ... other ways ...)
no subject
Date: 2015-01-26 01:46 pm (UTC)I see! Thank you for telling me! Especially since I wasn't really enjoying You Are Beautiful and have always thought Sungkyunkwan Scandal looked interesting.
I guess this is what I get for trusting the advice of random strangers on an anon meme.
no subject
Date: 2015-01-29 05:30 am (UTC)Huh! I'd forgotten it was a miniseries. That is a weird thought. I'll miss it :(