The Aviary

Hi, hello, I guess I haven't posted here in several months! Due to a combination of a) being very boring generally and b) inertia. One feels that one has to come up with something interesting when there's been a long gap, and then one feels that nothing is quite interesting enough. But that is silly and I would like to get back to posting, so here I am.

Things:

- I have been on vacation and home alone for the past week (now I am back at work), and have done a lot of sewing. I have completed my first button-down shirt! It is a little wonky in places and the fit is not perfect, but I'm quite pleased with it. Especially since the prospect of making my own button-downs was a huge part of why I started sewing my own clothes in the first place. (Button-downs for made for dudes do not fit me right; button-downs made for ladies almost never button all the way up which I very much want them to do; nearly all of them have breast pockets which I do not want. The only solution is to make my own.) I learned a lot from making this shirt, have already started on a second one, and have fabric for a third.

- I'm doing a concentrated Lovecraft reread for the first time in...maybe 15-20 years? Not everything he wrote - I don't ever need to read "The Horror of Red Hook" again, for example - but the major stuff/my favorites/stuff I somehow haven't read before but sounds interesting. I am reading by theme, not chronologically, and doing some movie pairings as well. Currently, I am in the middle of The Case of Charles Dexter Ward and enjoying myself immensely. Also, having it as a project is good, as I often lose any sort of attention span for reading in the summer, but this appears to be holding my focus for now. (Having the house to myself also means I'm free to read aloud if I want to. "The Thing on the Doorstep" is already fun, but it's even moreso if you read it out loud.)

- We have been having a heat wave - I hate it so much. The temperature is finally dropping off somewhat today, which is a major relief. The house is air conditioned, thank goodness, but my bedroom still gets very warm at night and it's interfering with my sleep. But since it's getting cooler now, hopefully I will be able to sleep properly tonight, and also I can do some sewing on the back porch this evening.

I have been on vacation this past weekend, which has been great. I have done nothing but knit (all my Christmas knitting is now finished!) and play the Arkham Horror card game. Every time I spend serious time with this game I am torn between wishing I had some sort of dedicated game space, so that it would be more convenient to play more frequently, and being glad that I don't, so that I don't spend all my money on it.

I played through the end of the Dunwich Legacy campaign this weekend, which was great. (I did realize halfway through the finale session that I'd accidentally been cheating really egregiously throughout that module. Cheating in solo games is only important insofar as it impacts my own enjoyment, so I just kept going, but I do feel it puts an asterisk on the end of the campaign.) I'm not actually good at the game - I find deckbuilding kind of mystifying so my strategy is always "oh hey, that card looks cool!" - but the game kindly provides several levels of difficulty, so I just play on easy mode and it works out. I immediately want to play the campaign again and make other choices this time. I also want to buy the Path to Carcosa campaign but I am trying to restrain myself.

Because I was playing a Dunwich-based game, I relistened to the Dark Adventure Radio Theater production of The Dunwich Horror while knitting yesterday. And now I'm going to have to revisit my whole DART collection and have feelings about fishpeople again. The Lovecraft Film festival is next week, so at least my timing is pretty good.

Things:

- It is so dark outside today. I'm sure this is unpleasant for many people, but I am finding it so comfortable and soothing. The grey times are properly here! Hooray!

- Way back in the summer, I had hoped/planned to be attending the HPLFF in Portland this weekend, and so I requested some time off. I made the decision not to travel - spending a whole 3-day weekend in a movie theater no longer seems like a great idea - but I still have the time off, starting tomorrow and ending next Wednesday. So, I had a week-long vacation and now I will be having Vacation, part 2. My plan is to finish my current sweater and do some larger cleaning projects I've been putting off.

- The festival did offer a streaming option, so I am going to watch at least some of the films at home, but they aren't streaming them till next weekend.

- My tiny solo rpg has picked up some steam this week, so I've been actively playing it a lot. ( Cut for rambling rpg discussion. )

- I just checked out My Heart is a Chainsaw from the library today - it'll be October tomorrow, so it's time to start shifting towards more concentrated horror reading. I'm planning to go through the as-yet-unread horror on my bookshelves and try to read at least some of them.

Going through my bookshelves, I am discovering just how many times I have purchased redundant Lovecraft stories.

One expects to pay for say, "Call of Cthulhu" or "Shadow Over Innsmouth" more than once in the course of buying various collections, but I resent the fact that I have paid money for "The Horror at Red Hook" or "The Outsider" more than once.

Dear horror film makers,

Look, I get it, but you have got to stop making cosmic horror movies and including characters named "Howard Phillips".

A thought I had this morning:

So. My mother's people are part of the Portuguese diaspora, specifically that part that settled in New Bedford around the beginning of the 20th century. Which means that my family is part of the influx of 'swarthy and degenerate foreigners' who scared HP Lovecraft so much.

And therefore...

I probably really am a Deep One and anticipate growing gills any day now.

So, we've been doing a lot of rearranging in the library over the past few weeks, and a lot of book-weeding as a result. Today, a coworker and I were discarding a bunch of weeded books, and she remarked that a lot of our books on the history of Antarctica were going. I mentioned that maybe we might get some new ones and she said something about the history of Antarctica not having changed a whole lot recently.

It was only at the last possible moment that I remembered that said coworker a) has actually been to Antarctica several times and knows actual things about its actual history and b) is not at all a geek. And thus, she is pretty much exactly the wrong audience for jokes about shoggoths and sinister penguins.

Which is a shame, as opportunities for jokes about shoggoths and sinister penguins really don't come up all that often.

So, I was having breakfast and I thought to myself that it would be fun to spend the evening after work playing Arkham Horror, since there's no one else in the house to be annoyed by my game taking up the whole of the kitchen table for several hours. Then I thought that I should go ahead and set it up this morning, so I won't have to do that after work, because the game takes a goodly amount of time to set up and I had a new expansion I wanted to incorporate.

It took me half an hour to lay the game out on the table with all the pieces. I swear to god, setting up Arkham Horror is in itself some sort of arcane act of summoning. I'm pretty sure if you did it exactly right, you could actually use the board to contact an Elder God.

And then I guess I didn't post for a week. Huh.

Things about this past week:

- Since the Kingston community center had a car in the wall and the library was closed, the staff of Kingston had been working at the Little Boston library. Which...has a very different library culture than I'm used to. It's a lovely building and the staff are great but it's much less busy than Kingston and everyone is so quiet. Which, yes, I guess you want in a library but neither of the ones where I normally work are quite that quiet. We had all the Kingston holds there and had told Kingston patrons they could come in and pick them up and you could always tell when a Kingston person walked in the door because they were significantly louder than everyone else. 8)

( - There was a somewhat dreadful incident toward the beginning of the week. The Kingston phones were redirecting to Little Boston and one of the staff there got a call from a Kingston patron. The patron was informed that Kingston was closed but that Little Boston was still open and that the patron's holds would be there. The patron then told the staff person that she would never ever go to the Little Boston library because "the area there is just way too creepy". We have no actual proof that the patron was referring to the fact that the Little Boston library is on tribal land but, y'know, the area really isn't creepy and the library is actually in a really beautiful setting. So. I know it's not in any way my fault that some of our patrons are jerks but I kept wanting to apologize to the Little Boston staff anyway for bringing them there.)

- The Kingston staff won an award! For being awesome under the continuous burden of our building falling apart. We had to go to the board of trustees meeting to get our award and they read something our manager had written about all the stuff we've had to put up with in the last six months (not the car - she submitted it before the car happened) and it was hilarious watching the board's faces as the list of crazy got read. Some of it, I had completely forgotten ("Oh yeah, our furnace totally stopped working this winter!"), which goes to show that anything can become normal if you put up with it for long enough. We each got a certificate and $50 (which I will likely be spending on Game of Thrones dvds).

- We did reopen the Kingston library on Thursday. Hooray! Little Boston is lovely and Kingston is falling apart but it's still nice to be home.

- So, I did start making a quilt, did I mention that? It is a rag quilt, and is all blues and greys and greens, and I am really enjoying all the hand sewing. It's a nice occasional alternative to knitting, though it's not as portable and I have to look at it more to make sure I'm actually sewing along the right lines. I'm about a fifth of the way done with it and I'm very pleased so far.

- Next week is the HPL Film Festival! I am totally excited about my trip. They are showing The Stone Tape, which I love, and which will be totally fun to watch with a group of people instead of just by myself. The only problem is that there's so much being shown this year that I can't possibly schedule it so that I can see everything. My tentative schedule right now has me missing nearly all of the shorts, alas. And Beyond Re-Animator, but, well...I have that and also it is pretty skippable in general. But except for that and The Stone Tape everything else is new to me. Hurrah!

- Today, I am going to make oatmeal bread and work on my quilt. That is an excellent plan.

More good things:

- Today, I got paid to play with Legos. (My manager has to bring some activity to a branch managers meeting and wants to do something with Legos. So she asked me to put together the design she's thinking of using, to make sure it's not too hard.) I haven't played with Legos in forever - they are still pretty cool. I'd rather be building spaceships than the beach house I was assigned to build, but it was still fun.

- OMG, you guys, there is new Dark Adventure Radio Theater! Okay, Call of Cthulhu isn't my favorite story ever, but it will still be fun. And there are more episodes in production, apparently, which is even more exciting! ::flails::

The other day, I was going through a drawer and found some geek-thing stickers that I bought a while ago with the obvious intention of eventually sticking them on things. One of them is a sticker of the Yellow Sign.

I took it out of the drawer and looked at it, trying to think where I wanted to put it, what would be appropriate to stick it on. And, as I thought about it, I realized that I couldn't think of anything I wanted to put it on. Not because I didn't like it, but because there's that little twinge of fear that it would end with, y'know, horror and death and possession by the Tattered King. It went back in the drawer.

So, two things. One, well done, Robert Chambers. And two, I may have wasted a dollar on a sticker I can never use but it might be worth it for that little frisson.

Things I learned today:

- People are going to keep making short films out Music of Eric Zaan (which I'm sure I misspelled) and I am never going to care.

- There is a sculpture of a giant mouse perching on a sleeping man at the Seattle Art Museum. It's pretty neat.

- Night of the Demon really would have been a better film if the demon had been kept off screen. It's still pretty good though.

- If someone ever gives you the opportunity to watch director's workprint of a movie you've never seen before or otherwise do not love, the correct answer is "No". And two hours is much too long to spend watching one. Seriously, that was like an endurance event.


In conclusion, I watched seven movies this weekend and five of them were fun. And I bought a new bento box and didn't permanently lose my kindle. In general, a positive experience, though I much prefer the Portland festival.

Update on the kindle: I called the SAM lost and found this morning and they did indeed find it. So when I go in for more movies today, I can just pick it up!

I am amazingly relieved.

So now I can talk about yesterday's movies, most of which I had seen before. Haunted Palace is always lovely, because Vincent Price is always lovely and because the movie is gorgeous - I still want the titular palace. And Mr Price's dressing gown. (One of the audience members did say irritatingly disparaging things after it ended, but he appears to be one of those guys who never grows out of the tendency to try to be the smartest and most jaded person in the room, so to hell with him.)

Re-Animator is a lot of fun in a room with lots of other people, and on a big screen. That one drew the biggest crowd yesterday - there were maybe 15 for Haunted Palace but 30 or 40 for Re-Animator. And in the row in front of me was a woman who had quite obviously never seen it before and seemed to be having a really great time, which was pleasant to watch. Total crowd-pleaser, everyone had fun. Man, but I love that stupid film.

The last movie of the night was Die Farbe, and there were only about 10 of us in the audience. This was the only one yesterday I hadn't seen and I'd heard some good things about it, so I was looking forward to it. Alas, I was greatly disappointed. It is, as the title indicates, a German adaptation of The Colour Out of Space and, oh dear gods but it's boring. It's black and white and trying so hard to be "artistic", with long lingering boring still shots of houses or trees or grotesque pears. There's a forgettable (and boring) framing narrative that never really pays off but the bulk of the film is a very straight retelling of the original story. It's not a bad adaptation, the actors do a fine job, and there are a couple of moments that start to capture some of the creepy wrongness of the original setting (there's a wonderful giant wasp at one point, for example) but the majority of the film is just so dull. It does do the one thing that I've sort of wanted in an adaptation of Colour Out of Space, which is to film in black-and-white except for the titular color, in order to properly represent the idea that this is a color that's not of this world, that's indescribable in human terms. Unfortunately, Die Farbe chooses to do this by making the color a neon pinkish-purple which is just so ridiculous that it doesn't work at all. (Me, I would try to keep it as close to black-and-white as possible. Maybe a dark blue or green or, yes, purple that's almost but not quite right. That would be effective, I think.) And that just makes me sad, because it's a good idea but done so badly and in such a boring movie. So disappointing.

Today is Dunwich Horror, which is awful but enjoyable, and Whisperer in Darkness, which I've seen clips from and have great hopes for.