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sarea
I have a major project due at work, so obviously to distract myself from it, I need to make an LJ post. :P It's actually why I haven't posted any ASOIAF topics lately, even though a few are percolating in my brain. The ones I want to talk about next require some research, and it can be a bear sometimes to find supporting quotes and what not.
Some random updates on the State of Me:
* My eye doc wants me to ditch my hard contacts and get with the times, as they're becoming "obsolete." I've just never minded having them -- they don't feel like anything in my eyes, so soft contacts are not more comfortable for me -- and I've had them for years. The biggest pain about them is that finding contact solution is a lot tougher than for soft, and more costly as well. I wore some soft contacts as a trial run for two weeks... and ended up ordering new hard lenses. Apparently soft contacts have come a long way in terms of letting air through, but hard (gas permeable) lenses have always been better for that, so that your eyes feel less tired at the end of the day. I didn't much notice a difference in that regard.
What I didn't like about the soft contacts:
1) They're HUGE. I have small eyes, so I have to peel back my lids like crazy in order to fit them on.
2) They're more challenging to stick to my eyeballs -- whereas with my hard lenses, I just have to touch them to my eye and they adhere, with soft I have to jiggle this way and that, and even then sometimes when I take my finger away, the contact is still on my finger and not on my eye. I spend way more time trying to get them on.
3) I have mild astigmatism, which is why I don't like wearing glasses, and I never realized that my hard contacts "hold" my eye in such a way that it clears it up (well, I knew that I preferred wearing them to glasses because I could see better, but never really understood the reason why). Soft contacts don't do that, so often things at a distance would appear blurry/double, even though I could "see" it fine.
4) You have to avoid using water on soft contacts due to bacterial concerns, which means you have to have solution with you everywhere in case something gets in your eye, and when you clean you have to always use solution to clean and rinse. That's not the case with hard contacts; water is safe to use for an interim clean, and for a nightly clean, you rinse the cleaner off with water.
The pain about contacts is cleaning them, but the most common type of soft contacts are the 2-week disposable ones, which you have to clean daily anyway. Also that and the daily disposables create a lot of trash, which I'd like to avoid.
* I'm nearly done with a YA book called Thoughtless, by S.C. Stephens. It has amazing reviews on Amazon (4.3 stars with over 1,200 reviews), so I was really looking forward to reading it, even though it deals with a true love triangle, which I normally despise. I think it was self published, so didn't have a proper editor (at least, I hope not). It reads like fanfic, which obviously isn't necessarily bad, as there's really good fanfic out there, but it reads like mediocre fanfic. The protagonists are in their early 20s, so it's more mature than your typical YA lit, which I was actually looking forward to. Unfortunately, the heroine -- if she can be called such -- is TSTL, and has the emotional maturity of a pre-teen girl. I tried to get past the love triangle thing, wherein she's seriously torn between the two guys (since that was the premise of the story and I chose to read it knowing that full well), but she just seemed extremely fickle and selfish (which is partly why I hate true love triangles to begin with). She kept wavering back and forth, and it just made me hate her. I liked one of the guys, but his perfectness was just kind of over the top. Anyway, I can't rec it. If you see it and are interested in reading it, go in with your eyes open about what to expect.
* I went canoeing this weekend with J. Ohmygod at how much my arms hurt afterward. I didn't even do much, but I don't exercise, like, ever, so it was terrible. I mean, the canoeing at the time was awesome. We rented a canoe through the UW, the day was unbelievably perfect, and being on the water was fabulous. Every time I drive over the 90 or 520 and see people out on Lake Washington with their boats and kayaks and what not, I'm always like, how do you even do those things?? Now I know! But afterwards, when I was going to bed that night -- OMG. It wasn't a nice kind of ache in my muscles; it was REALLY, REALLY PAINFUL, to the point where I had trouble sleeping. :( (But we did go and get pedicures after, and that's always fun.)
* Had brunch withcorianderstem to celebrate her recent birthday! We went to Tilikum Place Café, which I'd never been to before, but really liked it. I had their special eggs benedict of the day (salmon), A. had the caprese sandwich, and we split a peach-with-sage-sugar Dutch baby. It was all very good. Best of all though were their condiments: a house-made ketchup, and a habanero hot sauce from Belize called Maria Sharp's. It was so good! I had to buy a bottle from them right then and there (our server said that they get theirs direct from Belize, because it's impossible to find locally), though now I'm investigating getting it in bulk. >.>
* I've been on a Parminder Nagra kick lately. I saw her in the latest season of Psych, which made me want to rewatch Bend It Like Beckham (which is a nearly perfect movie, except for Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, who I don't find attractive at all, and also just looks way too evil for a tame hero role like that imho), which then led me to watching the short-lived Alcatraz series (which is OK).
* Speaking of JRM, I meant to talk about the City of Bones movie, which I saw with the DG gals a couple weekends ago, but it's now been so long I don't know if I remember all the details. Bottom line: The critics were right to pan it, and the fans are right to find it reasonably enjoyable.
- I really wanted Jamie Campbell-Bower to win me over as Jace, since Jace is one of my favorite YA heroes ever. He did not do that. He was okay in some scenes, but for the most part he just kind of creeped me out with his weird looks. Why, why, WHY did they have to do this to Jace?!
- Magnus was easily the hottest guy in the movie, followed closely by Robert Sheehan as Simon. I didn't start totally shipping Clary/Simon or anything, but certainly had they decided to do a total rewrite of the story with this cast, I could have totally gone there.
- I don't know if this was entirely the screenwriter's fault or if the studios got their meddlesome little hands on it, but there was just really bad/lazy writing. SO many things happened that made no sense or didn't need to happen at all, the way they did it. Case in point: I understand that with movies, you have to consolidate certain events due to timing and pacing issues. So it's fine that they went out of order with regard to when Clary actually goes to Madame Dorothea's. What's NOT fine is that it made NO SENSE for her to barge into Madame Dorothea's demanding answers, when we are given ZERO REASON to believe that Dorothea would know anything -- or why Clary would assume she would!
- They cut Raphael out of the movie, as well as Simon turning into a rat, so wtf was the point of the vampires? I mean, if you know what's going to happen in the later books, there's a point, but for this movie there was no point at all. It was just a thing they did because they wanted to do it.
- What was with the random portal in Hodge's office? The way it worked made no sense whatsoever. Clary was warned against using it because she had to absolutely know where she was going to go or else she would be lost in limbo, yet you could pull "pieces" of the portal out? What? When Clary uses it to get to Luke's, she just falls onto the street, with no portal visible anywhere around her, yet Valentine was somehow able to, what, suspend himself somewhere so that there could be the cheap scare of him reaching back through? RIDICULOUS.
- And what was with Hodge's sudden 180? We barely even saw him in the movie at all, so NO ONE CARED that he was actually betraying the kids. And then to "feel bad" and help them again -- so stupid. That was such a movie convention and unnecessary. Granted his future role in the books is easily cuttable, but it was incredibly lame.
- Could they have cast a worse guy as Luke? He didn't fit Luke at all!! He was waaaaaaaaaay too soft and effeminate, tbh. Luke is supposed to be really rough around the edges, being a werewolf and all. It was not believable AT ALL that this actor could be a werewolf, much less one that leads a pack. They didn't get into it in the movie, but the way he was able to get a pack in the books was by defeating their alpha. This Luke couldn't defeat a hamster.
- The way they treated the brother/sister reveal was possibly the worst thing of all. They revealed to the audience through Valentine and Hodge's conversation that Jace and Clary aren't really brother/sister, which I guess they had to do in order to make the masses freak out less about that plot point, but now that angst completely pointless and meaningless. One of the most attractive things about the ship in the books is that Clary and Jace want each other so much that watching them struggle with this knowledge, then ultimately be like, fuck it, I don't care (Jace), is really, really compelling and good. The way they did it in the movie, they might as well have not done it at all.
- Overuse of the "angelica" symbol. This wasn't something that was in the books, but I actually liked the use of it in the movie in order to quickly and believably establish Clary's supernatural background. But then it got used over... and over... and over, to the point where it was just NOT necessary. Not EVERYTHING had to turn into that symbol, particularly once Clary learns the truth. Ugh.
- The actress who played Isabelle was fine, but she was not ethereally beautiful the way Isabelle is supposed to be. She was far more "athletic," which would be fine if this weren't a world in which magic exists. It would have been all right for her to look less believably kickass, because part of her abilities come from runes/magic.
- Alec was just as disappointing as I'd assumed from seeing his photos when he was first cast.
- Lily Collins as Clary was pretty good. She's almost a little too pretty, but ultimately fine.
Some random updates on the State of Me:
* My eye doc wants me to ditch my hard contacts and get with the times, as they're becoming "obsolete." I've just never minded having them -- they don't feel like anything in my eyes, so soft contacts are not more comfortable for me -- and I've had them for years. The biggest pain about them is that finding contact solution is a lot tougher than for soft, and more costly as well. I wore some soft contacts as a trial run for two weeks... and ended up ordering new hard lenses. Apparently soft contacts have come a long way in terms of letting air through, but hard (gas permeable) lenses have always been better for that, so that your eyes feel less tired at the end of the day. I didn't much notice a difference in that regard.
What I didn't like about the soft contacts:
1) They're HUGE. I have small eyes, so I have to peel back my lids like crazy in order to fit them on.
2) They're more challenging to stick to my eyeballs -- whereas with my hard lenses, I just have to touch them to my eye and they adhere, with soft I have to jiggle this way and that, and even then sometimes when I take my finger away, the contact is still on my finger and not on my eye. I spend way more time trying to get them on.
3) I have mild astigmatism, which is why I don't like wearing glasses, and I never realized that my hard contacts "hold" my eye in such a way that it clears it up (well, I knew that I preferred wearing them to glasses because I could see better, but never really understood the reason why). Soft contacts don't do that, so often things at a distance would appear blurry/double, even though I could "see" it fine.
4) You have to avoid using water on soft contacts due to bacterial concerns, which means you have to have solution with you everywhere in case something gets in your eye, and when you clean you have to always use solution to clean and rinse. That's not the case with hard contacts; water is safe to use for an interim clean, and for a nightly clean, you rinse the cleaner off with water.
The pain about contacts is cleaning them, but the most common type of soft contacts are the 2-week disposable ones, which you have to clean daily anyway. Also that and the daily disposables create a lot of trash, which I'd like to avoid.
* I'm nearly done with a YA book called Thoughtless, by S.C. Stephens. It has amazing reviews on Amazon (4.3 stars with over 1,200 reviews), so I was really looking forward to reading it, even though it deals with a true love triangle, which I normally despise. I think it was self published, so didn't have a proper editor (at least, I hope not). It reads like fanfic, which obviously isn't necessarily bad, as there's really good fanfic out there, but it reads like mediocre fanfic. The protagonists are in their early 20s, so it's more mature than your typical YA lit, which I was actually looking forward to. Unfortunately, the heroine -- if she can be called such -- is TSTL, and has the emotional maturity of a pre-teen girl. I tried to get past the love triangle thing, wherein she's seriously torn between the two guys (since that was the premise of the story and I chose to read it knowing that full well), but she just seemed extremely fickle and selfish (which is partly why I hate true love triangles to begin with). She kept wavering back and forth, and it just made me hate her. I liked one of the guys, but his perfectness was just kind of over the top. Anyway, I can't rec it. If you see it and are interested in reading it, go in with your eyes open about what to expect.
* I went canoeing this weekend with J. Ohmygod at how much my arms hurt afterward. I didn't even do much, but I don't exercise, like, ever, so it was terrible. I mean, the canoeing at the time was awesome. We rented a canoe through the UW, the day was unbelievably perfect, and being on the water was fabulous. Every time I drive over the 90 or 520 and see people out on Lake Washington with their boats and kayaks and what not, I'm always like, how do you even do those things?? Now I know! But afterwards, when I was going to bed that night -- OMG. It wasn't a nice kind of ache in my muscles; it was REALLY, REALLY PAINFUL, to the point where I had trouble sleeping. :( (But we did go and get pedicures after, and that's always fun.)
* Had brunch with
corianderstem to celebrate her recent birthday! We went to Tilikum Place Café, which I'd never been to before, but really liked it. I had their special eggs benedict of the day (salmon), A. had the caprese sandwich, and we split a peach-with-sage-sugar Dutch baby. It was all very good. Best of all though were their condiments: a house-made ketchup, and a habanero hot sauce from Belize called Maria Sharp's. It was so good! I had to buy a bottle from them right then and there (our server said that they get theirs direct from Belize, because it's impossible to find locally), though now I'm investigating getting it in bulk. >.>* I've been on a Parminder Nagra kick lately. I saw her in the latest season of Psych, which made me want to rewatch Bend It Like Beckham (which is a nearly perfect movie, except for Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, who I don't find attractive at all, and also just looks way too evil for a tame hero role like that imho), which then led me to watching the short-lived Alcatraz series (which is OK).
* Speaking of JRM, I meant to talk about the City of Bones movie, which I saw with the DG gals a couple weekends ago, but it's now been so long I don't know if I remember all the details. Bottom line: The critics were right to pan it, and the fans are right to find it reasonably enjoyable.
- I really wanted Jamie Campbell-Bower to win me over as Jace, since Jace is one of my favorite YA heroes ever. He did not do that. He was okay in some scenes, but for the most part he just kind of creeped me out with his weird looks. Why, why, WHY did they have to do this to Jace?!
- Magnus was easily the hottest guy in the movie, followed closely by Robert Sheehan as Simon. I didn't start totally shipping Clary/Simon or anything, but certainly had they decided to do a total rewrite of the story with this cast, I could have totally gone there.
- I don't know if this was entirely the screenwriter's fault or if the studios got their meddlesome little hands on it, but there was just really bad/lazy writing. SO many things happened that made no sense or didn't need to happen at all, the way they did it. Case in point: I understand that with movies, you have to consolidate certain events due to timing and pacing issues. So it's fine that they went out of order with regard to when Clary actually goes to Madame Dorothea's. What's NOT fine is that it made NO SENSE for her to barge into Madame Dorothea's demanding answers, when we are given ZERO REASON to believe that Dorothea would know anything -- or why Clary would assume she would!
- They cut Raphael out of the movie, as well as Simon turning into a rat, so wtf was the point of the vampires? I mean, if you know what's going to happen in the later books, there's a point, but for this movie there was no point at all. It was just a thing they did because they wanted to do it.
- What was with the random portal in Hodge's office? The way it worked made no sense whatsoever. Clary was warned against using it because she had to absolutely know where she was going to go or else she would be lost in limbo, yet you could pull "pieces" of the portal out? What? When Clary uses it to get to Luke's, she just falls onto the street, with no portal visible anywhere around her, yet Valentine was somehow able to, what, suspend himself somewhere so that there could be the cheap scare of him reaching back through? RIDICULOUS.
- And what was with Hodge's sudden 180? We barely even saw him in the movie at all, so NO ONE CARED that he was actually betraying the kids. And then to "feel bad" and help them again -- so stupid. That was such a movie convention and unnecessary. Granted his future role in the books is easily cuttable, but it was incredibly lame.
- Could they have cast a worse guy as Luke? He didn't fit Luke at all!! He was waaaaaaaaaay too soft and effeminate, tbh. Luke is supposed to be really rough around the edges, being a werewolf and all. It was not believable AT ALL that this actor could be a werewolf, much less one that leads a pack. They didn't get into it in the movie, but the way he was able to get a pack in the books was by defeating their alpha. This Luke couldn't defeat a hamster.
- The way they treated the brother/sister reveal was possibly the worst thing of all. They revealed to the audience through Valentine and Hodge's conversation that Jace and Clary aren't really brother/sister, which I guess they had to do in order to make the masses freak out less about that plot point, but now that angst completely pointless and meaningless. One of the most attractive things about the ship in the books is that Clary and Jace want each other so much that watching them struggle with this knowledge, then ultimately be like, fuck it, I don't care (Jace), is really, really compelling and good. The way they did it in the movie, they might as well have not done it at all.
- Overuse of the "angelica" symbol. This wasn't something that was in the books, but I actually liked the use of it in the movie in order to quickly and believably establish Clary's supernatural background. But then it got used over... and over... and over, to the point where it was just NOT necessary. Not EVERYTHING had to turn into that symbol, particularly once Clary learns the truth. Ugh.
- The actress who played Isabelle was fine, but she was not ethereally beautiful the way Isabelle is supposed to be. She was far more "athletic," which would be fine if this weren't a world in which magic exists. It would have been all right for her to look less believably kickass, because part of her abilities come from runes/magic.
- Alec was just as disappointing as I'd assumed from seeing his photos when he was first cast.
- Lily Collins as Clary was pretty good. She's almost a little too pretty, but ultimately fine.
