Driving lessons update

[cimorene]

Last time I updated about my learning to drive stick/standard shift I posted this, you may remember:

Total cost:

Application fee: 25€
Driving lessons: 875€
ADHD tax: 152€

Incorrect. That was my total cost thus far, but I forgot the fees for the theory test and the driving test! I have now reserved a time for the theory test on August 14.

Theory test fee: 40€
Driving test fee (not booked yet): 99€

Total: 1191€

I'll have to take the bus to Turku to take it at the nearest Ajovarma office. (Ajovarma is the company that has a contract with the Ministry of Traffic for the administration of all the various licenses associated with driving as well as mandatory vehicle inspections, which are required every 3 years at first, and every year once the vehicle is 10 years old). (You don't have to have it inspected by them - lots of places can do those - I think they just do registration paperwork and that kind of thing? So you don't have to go all the way to Turku to get your car inspected, only to get your licence. And when I say "all the way to Turku", it's 25 minutes by car or about 40 minutes by bus.)

I have been studying the badly-translated textbook that came with my driving class (and also the good Swedish translation and occasionally the Finnish original, for clarity) and going through the test practice questions. I passed the first full practice test I took yesterday, but at about 70%, so I'm trying to make it so I know the answers to all the questions.

Friday I had a second lesson with the driving simulator, and it was much better than the first one. It was fun actually! But I completely failed to manage to start the car on a hill again (I failed to do this in my first simulator lesson like 8 times in a row and the teacher, after coaching me through the steps and explaining it, just gave up and reset the lesson lol) and had to reset it. Now I've read in the textbook I realize it's because the hill in the simulator was too steep for the instructions he gave me the first time (on a gentle slope you only need the brake, but on a steep hill you need the parking brake as well - terrifying).

BONUS OFF-TOPIC FUN FACTS: READING AND BANNING

1. After we watched the season finale of the Murderbot show, and I discussed it extensively with both my sister (who is extremely ALL CHANGE IS BAD CHANGE) and waxjism (who is not, but was annoyed because the show felt too YA for her, although she didn't HATE it), I reread the books. I had reread All Systems Red before the show; last week I reread it again, then all the others, and then I read the newest short story, Rapport: Friendship, Solidarity, Communion, Empathy (about ART and its crew). And after that for days I just wanted MORE and didn't want to read anything else, but the next novel isn't out yet; I reread Artificial Condition again and started Network Effect again, and skimmed through the tags on AO3 and Tumblr to see what people are saying... but it wasn't really satisfying. When I'm interested in a ship that is non-sexual in nature, I rarely find what I want from fandom, and that's what happened again (though there is some gen friendship fic and some queerplatonic fic on AO3). I can't begrudge people their desire to sexualize nonsexual relationships, because I've definitely thought that was fun before. I wrote Finding Nemo slash (and I stand by that). But when you don't want to read that, and I don't, your odds are simply worse, because there's less of it.
   
   Unlike my sister, I didn't hate the show, but I was even more annoyed by what Wax called "YA" writing choices than she was. I'm not sure if she can stand to watch it with me when the next season comes out, because I find it very hard to shut up when I'm annoyed at tv. I am happy with the casting and have no problem with the acting - all the things that I disliked are what I consider objectively bad adaptation and writing choices. But it was still fun and watchable when considered as its own work in isolation from the books! Just weirdly and unnecessarily YA in tone.



2. For fans of banning/blocking, the action, you'll be pleased that I banned someone from my design blog designobjectory last week! I like all ages and periods of decorative arts, but my blog contains a lot of my special interests - midcentury modern, Bauhaus, Art Deco and Art Nouveau, and Swedish and Finnish design (mostly 20th c). Somebody reblogged one of my MANY posts of Finnish midcentury light fixtures by Finnish lighting titan Lisa Johansson Pape (one of the many times I've posted a variant of her 44 cm. diameter metal pendant lamp shade, which is still in production by Innolux)... anyway, somebody reblogged it with a comment sort of like "This is the ONE Scandinavian modern thing I like lol. I hate light birch furniture!" My blog is extremely heavy on light wood because of my strong interest in Swedish and Finnish 20th century design! So I blocked them. First I asked Wax if that was too unreasonable and she laughed a lot and said that it's never unreasonable to block people on your own blog. Maybe a little weird though. I mean, probably. But it's so thrilling and satisfying to block someone.



3. Ever since DW made it so you can type @ + username to create the little username embed (waxjism), I have completely switched to it and whenever I want to use the version that links to another site I forget what the code is and end up having to google it. I mean, to search the DW faqs. This is the third time it's happened. That's because it's user name, with a space between. I always forget that.

Comments

[princessofgeeks]

Good luck with your driving test!!! I learned to drive initially with a standard transmission and I had a 1983 Toyota Corolla for years that was a standard. I'm a little nostalgic for them, honestly.

Also I would love to hear more about your Murderbot thoughts too.

I enjoyed the show very much but of course it's not the book! I thought it was a hard book to adapt because so much of the book hinges on the character voice and inner monologue. I too am not looking for erotic stories in this canon although I have no objection to them, and I have found a few that I loved but I haven't been organized about reccing them or anything. There was a terrific genfic about Three that someone rec'd that I have read several times but of course right now I don't remember the author or the name or anything. *facepalm*

[cimorene]

I do still think it would be better if almost all cars were automatic transmissions and I shouldn't have to learn this, but here we are. It's getting easier so I'm not catastrophizing about never getting it anymore.

I found the show sort of painful to watch. My main problem could be summed up as "making all the characters much stupider, including Murderbot and Dr Mensah albeit at least those two to a lesser extent", but it's really the same thing as what Wax means by saying it's like YA - there's apparently a school or trend in screenwriting that minimizes opportunity for sympathetic characters or sometimes for any characters to be too competent, skilfull, intelligent, quick to solve problems etc because of a belief that the audience has to SEE them learn the lesson or solve the issue onscreen, and that requires that the audience first clearly observe them NOT have the correct answer first. This has an idea behind it that isn't inherently bad, but there's a tendency in YA writing especially for all the story beats to be sequences of characters failing at something so that we can see them struggle or discuss before they 'figure it out'. It's a big problem for characterization when this pattern overrides considerations like the character's canonical history and specialized knowledge. It's also a problem, at least for me and Wax, when everybody is constantly having teachable moments and doing the next thing to turning to the camera and explaining what we all learned from today's episode: it feels like you're watching a middle-grade cartoon. This pattern is acceptable in My Little Pony, it's pushing my tolerance severely in a sitcom aimed at adults (Ghosts US remake, I'm looking at you), and it's firmly in "egregious" territory for a show like Murderbot. As a result of these changes made evidently in pursuit of onscreen growth and development and teachable moments, everybody in the colonist group, including Dr Mensah, is overall not really competent, and even Murderbot itself is dumbed down further than is really believable. Pin-Lee's role canonically requires her to be a lawyer who is so scarily competent that she intimidates corporations in spite of being a hippy without money and power behind her, but instead of seeing her thoughtful, analytical, having made a few observations herself, and able to hack, we see her foolish, slow to get the point, and showing expertise in nothing memorable except video games. And this is completely unnecessary even if they intended to use character questions to provide opportunities to verbally explain more of the things that become clear from context in the book, because you only need one character who's very clueless or at most two for that.

[princessofgeeks]

This is a true criticism and I agree with you.

They did make the team a lot more goofy than in the books.

The whole story in the books is full of competence porn and I loved that about it.

I don't read enough YA to notice that trend so thank you for that comparison!

Yeah, they changed the character of Pin Lee ALOT, and adding so much more comedy to the show caused a lot of changes that had me eyerolling.

I did enjoy the show, though. It makes me wonder what people who watched the show first will make of the books when or if they read the books.

[cimorene]

I really liked like... the other half of the show... or half-liked it? But the instances of this problem are so frequent that in practice the whole watching experience is mostly not that enjoyable for me. But like I said, I think the acting is good. And in terms of the characters, I love MB and Dr Mensah and Gurathin's casting. I like Bharadwaj more cautiously. I think Arada is really good and potentially close to her canon self (but dumber), and Ratthi (show Ratthi) is dumber than he needs to be but is likable and works well for the show more or less. I even liked the actress doing Pin-Lee; I don't think she could've done anything that I'd've liked any better, given the script. I mostly like the visual design, with a few caveats, and the photo direction/editing.

But I also feel like they leaned too hard on comedy, which might be the second overarching problem beyond the YA-writing-bug. The books ARE very funny and they were probably looking for a way to make the show feel as funny as they do when they couldn't translate the tone of the narration directly - that adaptation issue you mentioned in the first comment above. I think this KIND OF worked, because they added a lot of little silly sitcom laughs, humor completely unrelated to the original humor and also completely unrelated to the canon story and characters. IDK, it feels like that kind of "off topic" humor is just like fixing with sugar when the problem is that your fruit dessert didn't have enough fruit in it. Possibly this tactic but just less of it would've worked better for me, though. My sister thought it came off as slapstick and it really put her off - she said it made the whole show come across as "unserious" to the extent that people would fail to understand how evil the Corporate Rim was because the tone is too exaggerated.

[princessofgeeks]

The tone really did shift drastically within episodes and certainly the whole arc of Gurathin was very serious and a huge contrast to the comedic parts.

I was able to roll with it but I totally see how others would not like it.

Show!Arada may be able to morph into something more like book!Arada as they go on, but we didn't really see much of her compared to how she appeared in the later books so I am reserving judgment there.

I agree that Pin Lee was very different in the show than the books. We will just have to see how they do if they get enough seasons to bring them back. I liked the character of Pin Lee in the show but they were nothing like the Pin Lee of the books, honestly. I didn't think they were trying to meld the characters of Pin Lee and Overse but once they changed Pin Lee enough to be Arada's spouse the whole presentation of that character became so different that I just thought of show!Pin Lee as someone new.

I didn't have a strong feeling of Bharadwaj's character from the books except she clearly had more of a psychology background than the way the show presented her, and I liked the show's presentation of her.

If they go on with the second book this PresAux team won't even be in it at all.

I could do a whole post about Mensah. Show!Mensa is pretty different from book!Mensah and my inner Mensah but I thought what the show did with her worked.

[cimorene]

That's basically what I thought about Mensah, except for a few points where I thought they made her slightly too impulsive/foolish/unprepared/slow. You can overlook that in light of a good performance, and the performance helped. But it was slightly over the line into definitely bad choice (the writing) at several points, for me. I liked the interpretation of her overall though and thought her character mostly worked well overall.

[princessofgeeks]

also forgot to say my kid who lives with me noped out of the show because they left out Overse, who is his favorite character, and also he saw immediately they were playing the team for comedy and he hated that. He LOVED the books and uses them for comfort rereads.

[cimorene]

I remember you posting about that at the beginning, lol. I had it in mind as I was rereading this time. I bet as time goes on they are gonna try to give most of Overse's role to Pin-Lee but the bad choices in S1 already made Pin-Lee much LESS similar to Overse than she was before (oops). But it's diverged so wildly maybe it's overly optimistic to imagine they will consider characterization at all when giving lines to people!

[vass]

That's extremely fucked re the cost of getting your license.

Re Dreamwidth's version for linking to another site, you can add .sitename on the end of @ username. So @ vass .ao3 is vass.

[cimorene]

Oh cool! I completely missed that when I first learned it. teaandmisanthropy ?

[vass]

Yes! I don't think they'd implemented that part when they first brought out the @ thing. Whether or not it works depends on if they've added that site to the list that Dreamwidth's codebase recognises, so sometimes you'll still see ones that don't work.