Laylah Hunter

I went to see The Hobbit yesterday! and the vast assortment of trailers that preceded it, of course. Two of them caught my eye -- Warm Bodies looks charming even though I feel pandered to, and After Earth is one I'm definitely shelling out for. The story for AE looks pretty familiar, man-vs-hostile-wilderness, but the trailer framed it as a story whose central relationship is the father-son bond between two black men, and godDAMN does that need to make money.

A zillion years later, we got to the feature presentation! ( cutting everything in case of spoilers )

Overall: glad I saw it! And glad I saw it with subtext, who quite helpfully provided the perspective that the film version of a book you love is the filmmaker's fanon, their chance to enthuse about the things that matter most to them in the source text; you can consume it and groove on it even if you disagree with some of their conclusions.

The end. :3

In a month or two when the rent keeps happening and I'm not getting paid, I'm sure I'll be more sorry about unemployment. But right this minute, honestly, it feels like such a relief to have time, at last. I've wanted to have time for myself for years.

And I'm not even entirely fucking off with it! Yeah, there's some Skyrim in the evenings (my dunmer is almost to level 50, you guys! she stopped the civil war and now she's chasing down the betrayer of the thieves' guild!), but I'm also settling in to be my own project manager:



Also, I'm the kind of boss who lets my employees use the internet at work. Aw yis.

If you live in the US, please vote today.

...And more selfishly, if you live in Washington State, please vote to approve Ref. 74.

(The church up the street from my apartment has an electronic message sign that currently reads, "We affirm the dignity and the rights of all people. Marriage, however, should not be redefined." Gotta say, I like the first sentence a lot better than the second.)

Heading back east this weekend for the memorial service for my grandfather. (Condolences not really necessary; we were never close, as his relationship with my mother was difficult at best. But he was still her dad, and I want to be there for her.)

Loaded up my kindle and charged all the electronics last night (top of the reading heap: Santuario by G.B. Gordon, which I was looking forward to enough to preorder). I'm hoping I can make some good progress on both reading and writing fronts during the flights, which are ~5 hours in each direction. That should be enough off-the-internet-now-focus time to get some things done, I hope.

This morning: pack bags, snuggle the cats a little extra, have coffee and breakfast, clean cat box, depart on a bus-train-plane-rental car adventure that will, late this evening, land me at ilyat's house. It's my first time flying since the introduction of the backscatter/patdown circus, and I'm not looking forward to that at all. Blech. Still, at the end there will be good company and quite possibly homemade tacos. That's a reward worth adventuring for, isn't it?

Also yesterday my snake bit me. I am really hoping today will be the start of a shift in my general luck.

(I'm fine, and it was my fault; I reached into his tank at feeding time because I was worried about some shed skin caught at the corner of his mouth. He has a brain the size of a pea and tracks food largely by sensing temperature, so a moving warm thing is obviously for biting. I, on the other hand, have a brain that weighs more than he does and can process consequences. I should have known better.)

The weather has suddenly decided we're changing seasons, so perhaps it will be a good change in my personal universe.