Star Crossed Musing

Seriously. A ton of them. The house I'm staying out is out in the woods and there are a lot of ponds and rivers and inlets in the area. The front of the house is quiet, but man, out by the back windows, it's a chorus of basso profundo frogs in fine voice, making with the joyful froggie sounds in earnest. The odd thing, to me, was that when I first heard it, I was suprised and had to think of what it was. I honestly couldn't place it for a sec, and then when I did, I was both happy and sad. Happy to be hearing it again, and sad because at my house, there are no frog sounds from the woods and wetland. The forest floor is silent. Down in the bottom of our yard, you see, it is not anything one would recognize as a pond. There used to be something more pond like on the other side of our property line, on land owned by a church, but they went to a lot of trouble to drain it -- of course, they didn't level it, so it came back, which makes me wonder just what the point w...

So back in the day, I ran a Dresden Files RPG game. It was the first game I'd GMed in quite some time and I was really nervous, but it came out well, I think. You can read the write-ups here, if you want.  It ran for 13 sessions and wrapped the first "season" pretty well. (I like to use the TV show metaphor for planning games -- it helps me get a handle on character arcs and such.) That was before my MA exams -- god, back in 2010. But now, here in 2014, most of those players are still in the weekly group, and they're still wanting to play in the next installment of this game. Plus I've got two new people, both of whom are excited. With everyone on board, let slip the corgis of adventure! Ahem. Anyway, so some background: This group has chosen Baltimore as its city, though not the Baltimore writeup in the core book. This Baltimore's problems include it being a last stand of the Black Court, having demons in the driver's seat, and there there's m...

I did not finish all my movie reviews, and it's now the night before Oscars, and I have made (in preparation for our Oscar dinner bash) cider syrup, candied black sesame seed "stars" and Guinness chocolate cake -- as well as cleaning a ton of the things. There are still things to clean, mind you, but with the help of a terribly good friend and a remarkably good-natured stepdaughter, great progress was made. So. The last of the Oscar movies that I've seen: Movie: The Wolf of Wall Street (Martin Scorsese, 2013) Oscar nominations: Best Picture, Best Actor (Leonardo DiCaprio), Best Supporting Actor (Jonah Hill), Best Director (Martin Scorsese), Best Adapted Screenplay (5 nominations total). This is based on the biography of Jordan Belfort, who is really just an odious human being who got rich through have absolutely no sense of ethics or responsibility to himself or others. He's done his time in prison and now we have his book, which is about all the things...

Movie: Philomena (Stephen Frears, 2013) Oscar Nominations: Best Picture, Best Actress (Dame Judi Dench), Original Score, Adapted Screenplay So, Philomena . An Irish girl named Philomena Lee (Judi Dench) gets pregnant as a teenager and her parents take her to one of the Magdalen laundries, where she has her baby and works off her indentured servitude. The nuns then adopt her little boy out without telling her. It's not until she's grown old and married and her children are grown that she ever reveals anything about the birth of her son, and starts her search for him in earnest, backed by Martin Sixsmith (Steve Coogan), a reporter in search of a story to redeem his career. That the laundries were awful is really not in doubt. The Irish government came out in 2001 and finally admitted that they were a cultural abuse perpetrated on the women of Ireland by the Catholic Church and the government, who turned a blind eye to anything that happened there. That's not in the m...

Movie: Her (Spike Jonze, 2013) Oscar Nominations: Best Picture, Original Score, Original Song ("The Moon Song"), Production Design, Original Screenplay (5 nominations total) Her is a really intriguing film by Spike Jonze, who has done a number of intriguing films. The plot summary is that there's a guy who writes "handwritten" letters as part of a service for people he's never met. He has broken up with his wife (or rather, she broke up with him) and has been putting off signing his divorce papers. He's lonely and all the spark has gone out of his life -- he misses his wife, or at least he misses someone, and he can't seem to find anything on his own worth living for. About this time, an "intelligent" operating system is released. He upgrades his computer accordingly, and thus Samantha enters his life -- the name the AI gives herself. Oddly, the two fall in love with one another, with Theodore (played by Joaquin Phoenix) realizing tha...

It should be noted that, for reasons I could speculate have to do with my existence as a high functioning person with ASD but for which I have no proof, I have to work really hard at not getting overwhelmed with my emotional responses. I am either on, in which case I'm overly plugged into everything going on, or I'm off, in which case I'm uncomfortably objective but able to handle stuff. This means I don't have an emotional buffer in movies. When all my sensory input is coming at me from the screen, I can very easily lose control of my emotional reaction, having feelings all out of proportion to what's going on -- or at least out of proportion to the reactions of those around me. I'm also super sensitive to low-frequency sounds, which can effectively induce panic attacks and headaches in me if I have prolonged exposure*. I effectively can't communicate under those circumstances, other than to get up and leave, which I do if necessary. I can't stim enou...

The pic is from my yard last year, but it looks about the same this year (except more snow) so it works. Winter in Ohio, people! I am bad at time management. I'm not as bad as I used to be (and for those who know me and are good at it, there's your shot of horror for the day) but I'm still like an old car with a sticky transmission -- it goes, but never smoothly. That said, this year I am forced to get my shit together as never before -- because in October, I take my qualifying exams. Now, for those not initiated into the funhouse that is grad school, qualifying exams are the exams you take to prove you know enough about your speciality to be something of a subject expert -- certainly enough to teach it. Unlike comprehensive exams, which demand that you know everything about everything in your field, qualifying exams only demand that you know most things about the areas you're in which you are specializing. You set the reading list, you do all the research, and yo...