Cimorene

I intend to watch the three released episodes of Heated Rivalry so I can know what everyone (my wife) is talking about, but I haven't got to it yet. I am obviously spoiled by Tumblr posts but I haven't watched the bits between the gifsets.

I rewatched Derry Girls over the last two weeks while attempting to knit this nephew sweater (made it to first sleeve cuff again, finally!). That show is so good, and it's so frustrating, because there's nothing more that's like it! All the main adult actors are also so good, but none of them have a long back catalogue of other comedy to watch! And of course the writer, Lisa McGee, needs time to write more things.

I have a long list of things I've been intending to watch and rewatch, but it feels like I don't have enough emotional bandwidth, or attention, or something, for starting new long things that are going to be dramatic.

So I've been watching a ton of non fiction instead:

➡️very old Folding Ideas and Hbomberguy videos

➡️Mentour Pilot's back catalog of aviation disaster explainers (previously I was familiar from watching over waxjism's shoulder)

➡️Defunctland episodes that aren't too Disney-focused (a mention on Tumblr reminded me and I've only seen a few before)

➡️KyleHatesHiking videos about true crime, accidents, and missing persons cases related to hiking and outdoor sports (recommended by my sister last week)

➡️BobbyBroccoli science scandal documentaries (there's a new movie on Nebula, but otherwise I've watched them all before)

Meanwhile Wax is filling our bird feeders (seed and tallow ball) sometimes multiple times a day and the bird traffic is constant. Sipuli will sit by the window watching them like tv. Tristana is happy to sit in a chair facing the woodstove and watch the fire like it's a tv, sometimes for hours.

(Not G)IP! After years and probably a hundred attempts to draw a version of my old default icon that I liked better than the original, last week I succeeded! I've wanted for a few years now to replace the vintage photo of Helen Kane that I've been using as a default since probably 2008ish?, but I would always get hung up at the last minute in a panic of identity crisis: how will anybody recognize me without a teal side-eyeing profile? (I have a constant urge to make my pixel Art Deco radio my default, but I just can't stand the strain of it being non-teal and not giving side-eye. But I wouldn't like it as much if I made it teal and gave it eyes!!!! It's a dilemma.)

Karar i arbeit. (This means "men at work" in a weird western Finland Swedish hick dialect and is the title of a song by Kaj, the Finland-Swedish band that Sweden are sending to Eurovision this year. And it's what waxjism has started saying anytime it is remotely relevant, I guess because it sounds funny to her.) The diggers are back this morning digging up the rest of the intersection next to our house. They dug up most of it in February and replaced some pipes, but then they've left it and most of the street below covered in compacted gravel since. The longer they leave it there, the likelier that our plumber will manage to get the digger guy to do the digging he needs to do to fix our pipe before they repave the road (not calling people back apparently applies also to contractors and not just to end customers! Great!), so I guess that's good. Possibly this development is bad, in fact (like what if they just keep going until they finish and then immediately start paving?). The cats like watching out the window though, and that's always cute.

At least a few flowers! All the maples are blossoming now, like little chartreuse pom-poms everywhere. Very cute. Possibly my favorite tree decoration. Lilies have been coming up, but nothing else but our daffodils is blooming yet, not even our tulips (there are some tulips open in town, in much sunnier spots, but our yard has a great deal of shade from tall trees around it).

Knitting for Niblings (they grow up so fast): The triplets I used to help bottle feed when they were born are turning eighteen this month and one of them is working this summer at a bar here in town, so has sought permission to crash at our place in the event he misses the late bus. They are basically adults!!!! Full-sized people!!! I mean he's been taller than me for a couple of years already, but still. Also this means I guess it's time to make them Adulthood Sweaters, but they're all the same age. (We made their older sister a nice sweater for her 18th birthday under the theory that she was now for the first time unlikely to outgrow it quickly.) (We did make her a sweater when she was a small child once but we never managed to make sweaters for the triplets because of this three-at-once issue. Not that they minded: it would be hard to find better-connected small children and they were always drowning in so many presents and party guests that they wouldn't notice our presence or absence.) So I'm thinking we will give them cards explaining that we will make them each the sweaters of their choosing now, but one after the other (Wax has tentatively agreed to this but she's probably forgotten by now because the discussion was a couple of weeks ago). It's summer anyway, so it's not like anybody will be in a rush for a sweater. And with any luck they will choose things that are easier to make than the long allover-cable mohair-and-merino cardigan Wax made for their sister. And I guess we need some kind of smaller symbolic present to go with the cards, but baking is out because their birthday party always features more sugary desserts than can be eaten. But also my shoulder still hurts (slightly, intermittently) and I still haven't called the doctor (or done the other stuff on that list from ten days ago. It was too scary and I froze up and didn't know where to start! Maybe I can start now, idk). So I couldn't start knitting right away anyway.

Fandom drama update, secondhand: I also forgot to mention that the two-week hiatus in Wax's fandom (911) ended and last week the new episode went up! And, as she and I expected, ( 911 spoilers... lol... ).

Reading Old Stuff: I made another attempt to read Le Morte d'Arthur and didn't get very far yet. The narrative voice is just incredibly dull! I did read the introductions to the Standard Ebooks edition with great interest, and obtained this list of sources which I hadn't heard before: "the great bulk of the work has been traced chapter by chapter to the "Merlin" of Robert de Boron and his successors (Bks. I-IV), the English metrical romance La Morte Arthur of the Thornton manuscript (Bk. V), the French romances of Tristan (Bks. VIII-X) and of Launcelot (Bks. VI, XI-XIX), and lastly to the English prose Morte Arthur of Harley MS. 2252 (Bks. XVIII, XX, XXI)." Having read Robert de Boron's "Merlin", the beginning of Le Morte d'Arthur is recognizable and also startlingly less interesting and fun to read. I looked up the English metrical and prose "Morte"s mentioned here and concluded that they didn't sound very fun either, although perhaps I will try them soon. Also started William Morris's translation of Grettis saga, and contrary to Morris's transports about characterization and poetry in the introduction, so far it is just wading through a lot of run-on sentences of geneology and short summaries of who attacked/burned and looted someone's house, just like the other Icelandic sagas I've attempted to read in the past. Amazing to think this in any way could represent a story designed to be told orally to a live audience who were supposed to not be falling asleep or getting up and leaving.

I'm still watching old movies mostly in order to do my knitting, at a rate of about one finished for each five or six started.

It's a lot easier for me to ignore a certain quantity of misogyny, racism, classism, etc in old movies, if it doesn't go much beyond the standard of the time, than it is in contemporary film. (The DNF rate shows that it only goes so far though.) In contemporary stuff, even nasty things that are completely genre standard will drive me away, like copaganda which has made me pretty much intolerant of any portrayals of them in contemporary tv, even from outside America where it's not quite as bad.

I'm finding it very refreshing seeing women with short hair absolutely everywhere in all these early-mid 20th c. films. Finland has the highest rate of short haired women out and about of any place I've ever encountered, but it's still much lower in my experience than the worlds of 1920s-60s film and tv. And I get a bit aggravated seeing the long hair everywhere on TV, where the Central Casting Style Nexus radiates stupidly identical, implausibly labor-intensive styling, right down to the same diameter of curling iron, out from shitty network tv into the rest of the film world, even affecting prestige tv and characters who textually can't be spending any time heat styling at all. (The long hair I see irl is not aggravating, because it's their own hair, but sometimes it is puzzling - Why? How? Do you think it's on purpose? - or mildly tragic - Oh no it needs moisture! Which is probably easier than they realize! Just switch shampoo and conditioner!)

Old films are generally worse than modern non-prestige film for makeup being worn all the time and by all women characters, but this is also easier for me to excuse. I always remember the picture size and quality they were designed for was generally so much lower that who knows what you'd've seen?

I've made a few mentions of the Mapp and Lucia novels, social comedies from rural Britain by E.F. Benson published between 1920 and 1939. I finally finished reading the last one, so I took a peep at the 1985 tv show.

It's based on the last three books, published 1931-1939, and stars Geraldine McEwan and Prunella Scales (mother of Samuel West, whom we have long been fans of in this house, back to Hornblower (1999) - waxjism only, but I remember when she was in the fandom. She had moved on by the time I moved here, and hasn't rewatched the dvds since - and Cambridge Spies (2003), through to Poirot, where he is one of my favorite parts of the tour-de-force David Suchet Murder on the Orient Express, and Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell).

Anyway! Although the books take place in the 30s, the costumes of series 1 place it in the mid-1920s, which I think was a good move because they're absolutely stunning. I may have to try to get a DVD of it, just to get higher quality images, though I can't imagine finding DVDs that old from the UK will be easy. This is also right in my lifelong fannishly beloved period of history - 1920s-1930s that is -, and unlike a lot of latter-day productions set in the period, is of quite high historical quality (because the books were actually written at the time) and beautifully produced. I won't say there are no hair and makeup errors at all, and those areas generally are the worst offenders in costume productions; but they aren't nearly as bad in 1985 as they usually are nowadays. In fact, overall the hair and makeup is pretty stunningly good, comparable to the 1990s episodes of Poirot with David Suchet - and not nearly as glaringly 80s as some of the glaringly 90s moments in feminine hair and makeup in early Poirot.

Geraldine McEwan is a delight, as usual. I have seen Prunella Scales before in a few episodes of Midsomer Murders, the Beckinsale Emma, and the few eps of Fawlty Towers I watched before I gave up on it, but I've never really got to see her spread her wings like this before, and she is mesmerisingly and hilariously and chillingly evil! In that petty evil boss/ most evil fake-nice lady at church sort of way. I was dubious about Nigel Hawthorne when I glanced over the cast list, but after two and a half episodes I'm liking him a lot. I think they're all doing very good and very legitimate interpretations that nonetheless aren't what I was picturing as I read, and Georgie is perhaps the furthest from my imagining; but it's a bit like watching an Austen adaptation, I suppose. Not that E.F. Benson is on a level of genius with Austen, but there is a similarity. Sort of somewhere between Austen and P.G. Wodehouse - not as serious as the one, not as steadily and unrelentingly hilarious as the other.

Luckily for me, nobody cares about limited British channel 4 series from 1985, so even though you can't see them streaming anywhere and you can't get BBC iplayer or any of those British show things in Finland, even if you use a VPN to alter your location, you can still see them on YouTube. Just, you know, not in the greatest picture quality. Pinning hopes on the DVDs there.

1. Wax thought of a new way to Google the little connector that the tip of the wire broke off in when I accidentally broke the doorbell. And it worked! She found the right bit and we picked it up this afternoon at Tokmanni and she managed to get the doorbell functional and back on the wall.

2. They had the tiny miniature cousins of the giant monstera too, and she's been curious about them, so she got one. The other day we also bought two small Coleus scutellarioides, or painted nettles, which I've been coveting for a couple of years; we were planning to put them in the garden, but when Wax googled she found out they can't survive the winter outside here so they're really houseplants. People buy them in fall for planters around here and then just leave them to freeze to death as if they were annuals, something they actually do with a fair number of exotic perennials that are unsuited to our climate. As you can probably tell, I feel pretty judgy about the practice. Anyway, that's three new houseplants, and Wednesday, on Wax's next day off, we're going to the flower shop down the road from my job: the lady told me last week that she should have some more red and pink phalaenopsis orchids this week!

3. Finished season 2 of Good Omens at last, so I can stop worrying about accidentally seeing spoilers. Whew. I'm pretty happy with it. I can see why certain segments are in an uproar, though.

I saw a recent video about the sad state of the Looney Tunes (ie the lack of good new shorts starting in the 1990s) and from it I learned that there actually are some new Looney Tunes now that are not bad. Warner Brothers apparently commissioned a new series which is now in its third season and can be seen on HBO Max. I had been thinking that recently and I hadn't seen any Looney Tunes in decades, so I watched it this week while furiously knitting.

It actually is pretty good! Some of the shorts (each episode is 11 minutes) are classic quality. Some of them are comparatively boring, but that's the case with the old ones too. They're not all great. I suppose they're all pretty much in character, because I find all the Sylvester and Tweety ones just as tiresome as I ever did. I always disliked most of the Daffy Duck cartoons, but I think in retrospect, and after watching these, it's because he's so irritating, which is obviously how he's intended to be. It's more a question of what your taste in humor is, I mean.

I also noticed for the first time - or maybe it's a feature specifically of these new cartoons? - that the Daffy/Porky relationship is a bit kinky. In one of the new shorts they get married, so. There's that. But most of the time I just find him too mean to Porky and kind of want him to disappear completely. Cartoons where he gets the best of Elmer Fudd or fights with Bugs (and typically loses) are much more my speed. But of course, that genre of humor - where an annoying person torments an innocent and relatable straight man - is also a long-popular genre, and one that I don't like with any other characters either.

That's how I found out that HBO has old Looney Tunes too! I'm pretty annoyed that in this modern era the classics that used to be pretty democratically available because they were rerun on network tv constantly are paywalled by HBO, though. And HBO already bought Sesame Street and paywalled it as well, which is even worse. Anyway, I mostly wanted to see some particular classic shorts, but it isn't that easy to find specific ones. For example, I've watched "One Froggy Evening" several times on YouTube, but I can only find abridged copies of "Rabbit of Seville" there.

As I was turning on the Looney Tunes this morning to start some more knitting, I found myself thinking how peculiar this is compared with ... most of my past watching habits. I'm watching odder and odder things on streaming specifically as a result of the fact that it's more inconvenient to watch DVDs and many of the things I would otherwise rewatch are on DVDs and unavailable via streaming services. We've been knitting so much lately, though, it would probably be worthwhile to set up the DVD player downstairs again so that I could watch it while knitting and babysitting cats.

Because I have complained and marveled at the quality of the wigs on House of the Dragon - marveled at how bad they are, that is - I thought I'd provide a link to this post I just saw on Tumblr that explains it:

assessthatdress: aeronaudical: why did they ever even attempt to try and make another actor wear a white-blonde wig after orlando bloom in the lotr trilogy

Basically, the Tumblr post is talking about why Legolas's wig in LOTR looked better than any other white-blond wig you can name, and it's because the wigs in LOTR were, atypically, made using virgin northern european hair. The wigs in HOD, obviously, are not: they're probably made of bleached Asian hair, which is typically straight and stronger, and is hence sought after for expensive wigs because it can take dyes and treatments etc... but it's also much more available than northern european hair, I would imagine, although I don't know anything about the market, since global capitalism oppresses a big chunk of Asia in the so-called "global south".

I just couldn't believe that the wigs in HOD were synthetic, at least not on the primary characters, with this kind of budget. Also, I don't think they're bad enough for synthetics - they have some lace fronts that look quite good and there are some of them, at least in some styles, that manage to look more convincing, like Aemma's and Rhaenyra's when they're sweaty and unkempt, or the King's when he's old. This explains it. It's primarily the texture of the wigs on HOD that is wrong, but also the color depth, because it's much harder to achieve good artificial color when you have to start by bleaching. Even the texture of the hair, and the coarseness - because the strands are much thicker, it won't behave the same way in terms of split ends and flyaways.

Rings of Power and House of the Dragon finished their seasons a couple of weeks ago, and now Interview with the Vampire has finished as well. waxjism has started watching a couple more things since then, including that Guillermo del Toro thing where he does his Hitchcock impression in the introductions, but she's had headphones on for them, nothing we wanted to watch together. I've tried to suggest we watch the new season of What We Do in the Shadows a few times, but she said she's not in the mood for comedy. Even though it's one of my favorite shows (I guess tied with BBC Ghosts and now IWTV, because Derry Girls ended), I don't really mind that because being spoiled for comedies doesn't bother me and... well... I guess I like the content, but I don't really like watching things, the process. It takes a lot of energy and attention, or something, so from the outside when I haven't started watching something it looks like a lot of work.

Also I'm not over Interview with the Vampire. I had such a fun time watching it and have been enjoying all the content on Tumblr and I watched almost all the interviews I could find about it on YouTube as well. (I have needed to watch some things because I'm trying to finish knitting a sweater. Mostly YouTube, though, because I don't want the commitment of a whole episode with a beginning and end. Or anything serious.)

Wax is rereading the whole Vampire Chronicles now - she was a fan as a teenager. (I was always aware of their existence - because they were genre, after all - but never tempted to read them, and so far I haven't felt a strong impulse to read them now either.) She used to have most of the books, but she got rid of the lot of them one of the times we were downsizing our book collection a decade ago - "I had broken up with Anne Rice!" she says. So she bought ebooks of the whole bunch of them in a bundle, and then we spent... all of last weekend I guess, or was it the weekend before last?... figuring out how to get the ebooks through Calibre and out the other side without DRM so they can be read on her phone. This involved ordering a new power adapter for her mom's Window's laptop, resetting the laptop to factory settings, and then installing Calibre and some other stuff. Also some Google support requests, because when you buy an ebook from Google Play Books sometimes it just randomly decides you've downloaded it too many times and you have to have one of their support staff manually reset it somehow. That happened to several of my ebooks too, but luckily I don't need to reread them yet. (The support requests take at least a week each to go through. Mine took two.)

Anyway, since then she's been bombarding me with quotes and trivia from the books as she's reading them. I'm continuing to read Stranger Things fiction pretty much daily (just not to rec it, because I haven't found anything that was even bookmarkable, let alone reccable, in over a month) and also Gladys Mitchell's classic golden age Mrs Bradley detective novels.

There are some really good actors on Rings of Power working with incredibly inadequate writing! There's not much more to say about that because both facts are so glaringly true.

Byzantine-inspired costuming on Rings of Power and shockingly bad bras under costume gowns on Rings of Power and House of the Dragon
This week the writing got even more annoying, but I continued to admire the costumes. The Byzantine influence on Galadriel's and Elrond's and Celebrimbor's clothes was obvious. Also on the apprentice in Númenor who was sketching the dying king, although there were some INCREDIBLY stupid undergarments under her gown, which was filmy and draped from a round gathered neck and then belted around the ribcage, with her boobs sticking up like those of a (nippleless) molded plastic mannequin. Nothing but magic can do that, man. Or, like, modern smoothing and sculpting undergarments with injection-molded foam. You can't do it with cut and sewn or knitted fabric or with corsetry.

Breast support under the costumes is a big issue on House of the Dragon as well as Rings of Power, but the apprentice's filmy pre raphaelite dress is definitely the worst one I've seen so far. The likelihood that a costume team with the level of technical expertise and historical research I'm seeing on both of these shows are unaware of the effect that undergarments have on silhouette, or of what silhouettes should accompany these garments, is vanishingly small, so these choices are almost certainly about sexiness, and perhaps slightly also about the comfort of actresses, who are likely happier with modern undergarments in most cases. But that's no excuse, because it's inexcusable.

Terrible and good hair on House of the Dragon
The last episode of House of the Dragon made some cheap, eyeroll-inducing moves in the visual design - their attempts to indicate Alicent's purported religious obsession felt half-baked, which is probably appropriate because the script's attempts at showing that were just as bad. Alicent's costumes and particularly hair continued to look worse and worse, but the costumers and special effects and makeup outdid themselves with the king's dramatic aging and wasting illness. Paddy Considine's performance was flawless there too. It's pretty funny that some of his younger wigs that showed a full head of blond hair were so terrible, but now that he's old enough for his head to look like the Crypt Keeper's, the hair looks convincing and real.

Set design on Rings of Power
The sets around Celebrimbor's workshop are elaborate and probably looked fantastic in the illustrations and renderings they made before they were constructed, but the execution isn't all there. The set is clearly built in large part, because it has physical presence to interact with. Unfortunately, it also has less than perfect finishes that make it look not-quite-real in the other way: rather than looking like the colors don't match up to the ambient lighting or whatever because they weren't photographed with a camera, which is how CGI can fail, you have colors and surfaces that ARE reflecting light from the proper sources but not in the way they should. Which is to say, it's kind of like a theatrical set - it looks good from a distance, but in HD you can see that some of the stone things aren't stone (probably styrofoam and other plastics) and some of the metal things aren't metal, or aren't the correct metal, because they're painted. Most damningly, there's a semi-close, like, 3/4 shot of Celebrimbor standing in front of an archway that should be elaborately carved stone and you can see a horribly obvious horizontal seam in the "stone" behind him with the edges of the pieces failing to match up - and not in the way that actual seams in stonework do in reality. They probably could've fixed that shot in post, with enough time and attention, but... they didn't!

Ultimately, it all looks cheaper - because it all looks more hasty and careless - than the comparable parts of the LOTR trilogy, which is funny, because again: BILLION dollars.

And on another subject about Rings of Power's visual design: Halbeard and Elendil both look like they're working from a café in Portland. They definitely are both using modern haircare products. The styling there completely fails. Obviously, I have a low opinion of the hair design here in general, and I remain annoyed by Elrond's and Celebrimbor's fluffy 90s college professor hair. Galadriel's always looks great, but she's pretty alone there. Oh, the dwarves have good hair and wigs in general, I guess, although Disa's also comes with a half-caveat about modern haircare products. SIDENOTE: It's very funny to me that a big chunk of Tolkien dwarf names are just straight up Scandinavian names, not even with one or two letters swapped out like Tolkien seemed to do with a lot of his language construction. There's a Disa I've met who volunteers in my chapter of the Red Cross; it's not even archaic.

We watched another John Grisham film from the 1990s today. Sometime in 2021 we watched the one with Susan Sarandon and Tommy Lee Jones, which was also directed by Joel Schumacher, and today Wax said "He was making these around the same time he was making those Batman movies." Which is a funny observation.

It's a well-established truth that the Grisham movies in the 90s spawned a whole wave of Legal Thriller imitators, many of them actually bad although most of the Grisham films are good, in tv as well as movies I suppose. But movies more so. This genre has pretty much disappeared now.

Wax points out that they wouldn't exist now anyway, because of the oft-cited disappearance of the midbudget movie. They had been succeeded already by then with, I guess, espionage thrillers and terrorism thrillers. At least mostly. Thrillers tend to be streaming now, and rarely film length, although miniseries length would probably have been better for a lot of legal thrillers too, for that matter. But today's thriller miniseries seem to be espionage, terrorism, "politics", and of course, just plain crime and cops stuff but with ~suspense~ rather than the more classic piecing-together-clues formula common to early CSI and NCIS sort of cop shows. (Eugh.)

My dissatisfaction with contemporary mystery and crime genre offerings and ambivalence about law enforcement on film aside, though, I think this range of offerings is still a bit inferior. Partly this is because the espionage-suspense subgenre, in the intermediate (not-A-lister-like-Le-Carré) level, is plagued by mystery box writing, lazy stereotypes, loose ends and nonsense politics that don't match up, and usually also plagued by attempting not to have bad actors represent any actual ethnic groups, countries, or realistic terrorist interests. Except for muslims, of course, which are represented with shocking inaccuracy and racism in these genres (crime, espionage, "political"/"terrorism") and hardly anywhere else in media. I've talked about this issue in the context of the Mission Impossible movies before, which presumably got tired of bad actors within the US and UK intelligence services (the only remotely realistic premises they've ever used, tbh) and needed some more variety in villains but couldn't think of anything but implausible terrorists without coherent plans, ideologies, motivations, or goals, or even visible ethnicity. But that's a rant I've made before. Multiple times.