(no subject)
Sep. 5th, 2015 12:13 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gwydion* I used nearly all the spoons today on errands. Before I left, I found the missing paperwork. Yay! Which changed the route of my errands as I suddenly needed to use the copier at the library. Apparently I was remembering fees from before voter suppression changed the fee structure, and things are an order of magnitude less expensive for a new birth certificate than I thought. Unfortunately, fixing my shoes is way more expensive than last time I took them. At this point I'm thinking the shoes knocked out a doctor bill anyway, so I might as well try for the birth certificate (Name and gender both need changing, and I've misplaced the old one anyway in a move. I need a passport too, living so close to the border, but I don't have that kind of money). I've picked more BPALs to cull, but I need the spoons to set up an auction. Assuming that goes well, things will work out doctor bill wise. I am paying the folks who kindly didn't send me to collections last month first. After that, we'll see how it goes with the other copays. Anyway, today was exhausting and productive.
* I got a lot of ugly looks when I was out and about today. I think the thing people don't understand when they see someone like me gimping about at speed with a grocery cart is what that costs. They do not see that I picked that particularly day to do a major errand like grocery shopping because I'm well above average mobile for me. If I'm not up to walking, you don't see me because I'm home, hiding rather than risk a bad fall. They don't see that I'm moving as quickly as I reasonably can because each extra second I'm upright is incredibly painful. Able bodied folks, remember the littler Mermaid, that each step is like walking on knives? My feet do that, though generally I try not to leave the apartment when that is going on. The thing is though? My hips are doing that. Pain radiates out from the joints all the way down to the backs of my knees and up the spine to just below my shoulder blades, with special stabby punctuation in the spots where the spinal damage is particularly bad. then there's the bar of pain across my shoulders and the fire that always burns in my neck. That knee to shoulder blades thing? That's not too bad when I'm sitting down, but if I'm standing or the Gods help me walking? Constant agony that gets worse the longer I do it, until I start losing control of my legs. Sometimes, when it is bad enough, I lose power below a certain particularly damaged spot on my lower spine and it's like someone cut a marionette's strings.
My goal is to get my errands done and get home before I drop like a rag doll. So yes, I toss my crutch in the grocery cart and I tool around pretty well, increasingly impatient at loose children, and the indecisive, and people who are blocking the aisles with their conversations, because those minutes may mean nothing to you, but they are literal physical torture to me and you are burning my damned spoons with your long boring conversation or lack of parenting skills. I NEED those spoons. I NEED that pain resistance you are using up on your refusal to park your cart out of the way while you natter on about cocktail peanuts. Because this stuff in the cart? I'm going to have to put it away and somehow feed myself before I can afford to lie down.
Yes, I know I don't look that disabled, Lady. You didn't see me yesterday when I was so stiff and in so much pain I was having trouble making it to the bathroom and back and I nearly fell on the cats trying to feed them. you aren't going to see me two hours from now when I'm seeing how long I can hold my water because I'm having trouble gathering energy and pain resistance to go half the length of my apartment and back.
* Black Sails Rewatch XI:
1. Let's take a moment to look at the first thing that happens in the episode. it's a flashback to London, in which they are talking about the problem of keeping an honest man honest so far from home. "Put a man on an island, give him power over other men, and it won’t be long before he realizes that the limit of that power are nowhere to be seen. and no man, given that kind of influence will remain honest for very long.— Lt. James McGraw to Lord Thomas Hamilton in Black Sails XI. I love the irony of that, the way that quote so beautifully applies to James himself when he becomes Flint, the way he rolls over limits and kills friends to get what he wants. Take James away from London and give him power over men with very few limits and see what that looks like. In the second scene we see one of the men chafing against Flint's attempt at absolute power. I think it pretty much applies to Eleanor and Vane and possibly Max.
2. The meetings between Vane and Low are fascinating, the two of them playing poker. Ned feigning weakness to feel out Vane and lull him. Vane feigning weakness to feel out Ned and lull him. this is another chance to see how good Charles is at captaining. his open is him sparring with the men, the victory to show he's still up to it, the self deprecating joke to keep the crew liking him. Politics. The way he plays ned shows long term planning and a sold knowledge of men. He beats him at his own game.
3. Watching the Anne/Max sex scene, I kept thinking of "This Film is Not yet rated" and the way that the MPAA consistently sensors women's pleasure as obscene, their cutting down of the woman's orgasm from oral sex in "Boys Don't Cry." This sex scene wasn't nearly as long, but it didn't seem male gazey to me, despite brief glimpses of Max's, and the camera spent most of the time on Anne's face. Given how much the MPAA wants to stop us seeing women coming, and the extreme contrast with the way, say, GoT films sex scenes, this struck me as kind of beautiful, a little insert that is all about Anne's pleasure. It also shows exactly why Max thinks she can separate Anne from Jack and why Jack believes he can't compete sexually, so it serves a plot and character purpose. I think this is important, because Anne does most of her talking without words, just generally as a character. Anne is mostly about showing and not telling, on actions instead of words. Character wise, she's unlikely to say what she is feeling, but her taking Max's hand and pulling it closer afterwards speaks powerfully, the same way the curl of Charles Vane's fingers around Eleanor's speaks for him.
4. I kind of love that Anne and Charles are often coded the same way, all small gestures and non-verbal expressions to express emotions neither of them are able to speak of. They have very similar childhood's I think, and are both terrified of showing any vulnerability or breaking out of the traditional masculine presentation that they wear as mask and cloak.
5. The Eleanor/Miranda scene is fascinating, the women fencing with words. Like Hornigold, I've always felt Miranda is an under-rated character, in her case overlooked because she uses the conventional trappings of womanhood as a curtain behind which she does what she pleases. It is easier for a modern audience to love Eleanor because she is so modern and Anne, because her butchness makes her easier to identify with. Miranda is a little like Marquise de Merteuil, she has studied to learn how she ought to appear and what she can get away with. Which turns out to be rather a lot. She is a force to be reckoned with, but because she wears the stereotypical period appropriate femininity as camouflage, people routinely underestimate her, including Eleanor, who's open rebellion to the same social expectations blinds her a little when it comes to camouflage like Miranda's, much as it does the average modern American viewer. It's a sort of slight of hand: she wears a dress, and putters about her garden, and reads books. We see the trappings and have the time miss how intelligent, insightful, and most of all furious she is.
6. It is interesting that the Miranda/Eleanor negotiation is so quickly followed by the Max/Vane negotiation. (There is a brief internecine bit with Flint and Silver discovering Hornigold displaced, Silver's line, "The Fuck happened here?" cutting straight to the answer: a shot of Charles Vane). Like Miranda, Max is coded with a more traditional femininity, in this case, the seductress. She is hard as nails in that negotiation: the soft voice, the lovely dress (seriously, I love that dress), the classically feminine presentation are the same sort of camouflage Miranda wears, also cloaking a formidable intellect, a strong set of goals, and a great deal of fury. Watch her try to throw him off balance with the invocation of Eleanor and their shared experience of being spurned and betrayed by her. Watch her get exactly what she wants out of that negotiation as far as her maneuvers with Anne and Jack, which also not coincidentally greatly strengthens her position in the brothel that forms her power base. Charles name and reputation are incredibly powerful on that island and now she visibly has his weight behind her, as well as the black mark being lifted on her partners, which she can now use as a lever to get what she wants there long term. Seriously, look how fast she's learned strategy this season. She's gone from short term survival tactics only, going for immediate gain, to long term strategic planning that we were still waiting to finish playing out at the end of season, and she did it without the likes of Flint or Vane guiding and teaching her, which is something Billy, Eleanor, and Silver all have. She is teaching herself. Each time she gets burned, she comes back cleverer.
7. I think Flint confronting Eleanor is a sort of bookend, paralleling the Eleanor/Miranda confrontation, a sort of triptych with the Max/Vane negotiation in the center. You can see the liking and affection between them, despite the anger and disappointment. They dream the same big dream; they are ambitious; they do terrible things in what they believe is a good cause. No wonder they understand each other so well, Charles and Miranda lying between them.
8. And now we come to the ambiguous flashbacks, the one with the kiss in the carriage, much thought about and debated. I still am not sure what to think. Is his flirting in the carriage performative, or real? Is the kiss? Is she testing him for herself or her husband or both? Is she wanting him for a smoke screen or a lover or both? I think she knows of her husband's interest in James, I am suspecting she's trying to figure out James interest: Thomas, Miranda, or both, careful of the danger to her husband and any man he loves, but I don't know for sure. I suspect given Miranda's arc we'll never know for sure now.
9. Hornigold's advice to Silver is good, but Hornigold hasn't got the true measure of Silver and why he's more dangerous than Flint.
10. I think Jack talking to Anne straight out about his fears of losing her and what Max;s agenda might be was clever. He tried the outside the box approach and it didn't work, so now he's trying *gasp* honesty, and it works. It gets her thinking and he needs that because ultimately, she has the power in their dynamic. He's utterly lost without her, and she's proved she's not lost without him.
11. "On this island, three things are known to be true, and number two is Jack Rackham's a crew killer." Wait, the hell are the other two?
12. "I think you’re someone who’s very good at managing how you're perceived, and perhaps getting what you want without anyone knowing how you did it. Or perhaps that it ever happened at all." — Miranda Hamilton describing Lt. James McGraw to himself. Wow, she really has his number.
13. "I didn't do it for you." It's not just what Charles says to Eleanor about Ned Low's head on a spike, but it was what Anne said to Max about rescuing her from Vane's crew. I love that both times that line is simultaneously truth and a lie. You can't tell be that's an accident.
14. Eleanor Guthrie: the rare woman who understands a bloody head on a spike means "I love you."
15. The face acting in the Jack/Anne/Max scene towards the end is gorgeous. There is a whole conversation spoken with hardly any lines. You have jack's short monologue at the beginning about his plans, then silence punctuated by one line each for Anne and Max. The rest is all facial expressions, a world of dialogue and characterization compressed into the visual.
16. Flint's hero monologue at the end: The Navy Man and the Pirate wrapped up in one body, one purpose, one voice. You can see the man he was still alive in the older, angrier, less principled man he has become, which I suppose is why so many flashbacks and those particular flashbacks are in this episode and the previous one. We need Lt. McGraw fresh in our minds when Flint threatens to "rain down fire" if Charles vane doesn't yield.
17. The structure of this episode is gorgeous: The Vane/Low Violence/Negotiation visual palindrome. The negotiation triptych. The way the Flashbacks twine with Flint's maneuvers throughout, culminating in that final speech. The confrontation punctuation. Short term vs. deep long term planning. The ways manipulation does and doesn't work. This Show!
* Ebay, One More time:
Lindworm 2012 (LE, DragonCon, Event Exclusive): (Company says: Smoky green leather smeared with crushed grasses and wild herbs). 3/4 Full. http://www.ebay.com/itm/301718133830?ssPageName=STRK:MESELX:IT&_trksid=p3984.m1555.l2649
* A list of LGBTQA Charities to donate money to instead of seeing the racist Stonewall Movie that decided to portray a black trans woman activist as a cis white man. http://awkward0w1.tumblr.com/post/126399233673
* Want Game of Thrones without the creepy? We desperately need new players. We are very inclusive. "Game of Bones MUSH:" gobmush.wikidot.com
* I got a lot of ugly looks when I was out and about today. I think the thing people don't understand when they see someone like me gimping about at speed with a grocery cart is what that costs. They do not see that I picked that particularly day to do a major errand like grocery shopping because I'm well above average mobile for me. If I'm not up to walking, you don't see me because I'm home, hiding rather than risk a bad fall. They don't see that I'm moving as quickly as I reasonably can because each extra second I'm upright is incredibly painful. Able bodied folks, remember the littler Mermaid, that each step is like walking on knives? My feet do that, though generally I try not to leave the apartment when that is going on. The thing is though? My hips are doing that. Pain radiates out from the joints all the way down to the backs of my knees and up the spine to just below my shoulder blades, with special stabby punctuation in the spots where the spinal damage is particularly bad. then there's the bar of pain across my shoulders and the fire that always burns in my neck. That knee to shoulder blades thing? That's not too bad when I'm sitting down, but if I'm standing or the Gods help me walking? Constant agony that gets worse the longer I do it, until I start losing control of my legs. Sometimes, when it is bad enough, I lose power below a certain particularly damaged spot on my lower spine and it's like someone cut a marionette's strings.
My goal is to get my errands done and get home before I drop like a rag doll. So yes, I toss my crutch in the grocery cart and I tool around pretty well, increasingly impatient at loose children, and the indecisive, and people who are blocking the aisles with their conversations, because those minutes may mean nothing to you, but they are literal physical torture to me and you are burning my damned spoons with your long boring conversation or lack of parenting skills. I NEED those spoons. I NEED that pain resistance you are using up on your refusal to park your cart out of the way while you natter on about cocktail peanuts. Because this stuff in the cart? I'm going to have to put it away and somehow feed myself before I can afford to lie down.
Yes, I know I don't look that disabled, Lady. You didn't see me yesterday when I was so stiff and in so much pain I was having trouble making it to the bathroom and back and I nearly fell on the cats trying to feed them. you aren't going to see me two hours from now when I'm seeing how long I can hold my water because I'm having trouble gathering energy and pain resistance to go half the length of my apartment and back.
* Black Sails Rewatch XI:
1. Let's take a moment to look at the first thing that happens in the episode. it's a flashback to London, in which they are talking about the problem of keeping an honest man honest so far from home. "Put a man on an island, give him power over other men, and it won’t be long before he realizes that the limit of that power are nowhere to be seen. and no man, given that kind of influence will remain honest for very long.— Lt. James McGraw to Lord Thomas Hamilton in Black Sails XI. I love the irony of that, the way that quote so beautifully applies to James himself when he becomes Flint, the way he rolls over limits and kills friends to get what he wants. Take James away from London and give him power over men with very few limits and see what that looks like. In the second scene we see one of the men chafing against Flint's attempt at absolute power. I think it pretty much applies to Eleanor and Vane and possibly Max.
2. The meetings between Vane and Low are fascinating, the two of them playing poker. Ned feigning weakness to feel out Vane and lull him. Vane feigning weakness to feel out Ned and lull him. this is another chance to see how good Charles is at captaining. his open is him sparring with the men, the victory to show he's still up to it, the self deprecating joke to keep the crew liking him. Politics. The way he plays ned shows long term planning and a sold knowledge of men. He beats him at his own game.
3. Watching the Anne/Max sex scene, I kept thinking of "This Film is Not yet rated" and the way that the MPAA consistently sensors women's pleasure as obscene, their cutting down of the woman's orgasm from oral sex in "Boys Don't Cry." This sex scene wasn't nearly as long, but it didn't seem male gazey to me, despite brief glimpses of Max's, and the camera spent most of the time on Anne's face. Given how much the MPAA wants to stop us seeing women coming, and the extreme contrast with the way, say, GoT films sex scenes, this struck me as kind of beautiful, a little insert that is all about Anne's pleasure. It also shows exactly why Max thinks she can separate Anne from Jack and why Jack believes he can't compete sexually, so it serves a plot and character purpose. I think this is important, because Anne does most of her talking without words, just generally as a character. Anne is mostly about showing and not telling, on actions instead of words. Character wise, she's unlikely to say what she is feeling, but her taking Max's hand and pulling it closer afterwards speaks powerfully, the same way the curl of Charles Vane's fingers around Eleanor's speaks for him.
4. I kind of love that Anne and Charles are often coded the same way, all small gestures and non-verbal expressions to express emotions neither of them are able to speak of. They have very similar childhood's I think, and are both terrified of showing any vulnerability or breaking out of the traditional masculine presentation that they wear as mask and cloak.
5. The Eleanor/Miranda scene is fascinating, the women fencing with words. Like Hornigold, I've always felt Miranda is an under-rated character, in her case overlooked because she uses the conventional trappings of womanhood as a curtain behind which she does what she pleases. It is easier for a modern audience to love Eleanor because she is so modern and Anne, because her butchness makes her easier to identify with. Miranda is a little like Marquise de Merteuil, she has studied to learn how she ought to appear and what she can get away with. Which turns out to be rather a lot. She is a force to be reckoned with, but because she wears the stereotypical period appropriate femininity as camouflage, people routinely underestimate her, including Eleanor, who's open rebellion to the same social expectations blinds her a little when it comes to camouflage like Miranda's, much as it does the average modern American viewer. It's a sort of slight of hand: she wears a dress, and putters about her garden, and reads books. We see the trappings and have the time miss how intelligent, insightful, and most of all furious she is.
6. It is interesting that the Miranda/Eleanor negotiation is so quickly followed by the Max/Vane negotiation. (There is a brief internecine bit with Flint and Silver discovering Hornigold displaced, Silver's line, "The Fuck happened here?" cutting straight to the answer: a shot of Charles Vane). Like Miranda, Max is coded with a more traditional femininity, in this case, the seductress. She is hard as nails in that negotiation: the soft voice, the lovely dress (seriously, I love that dress), the classically feminine presentation are the same sort of camouflage Miranda wears, also cloaking a formidable intellect, a strong set of goals, and a great deal of fury. Watch her try to throw him off balance with the invocation of Eleanor and their shared experience of being spurned and betrayed by her. Watch her get exactly what she wants out of that negotiation as far as her maneuvers with Anne and Jack, which also not coincidentally greatly strengthens her position in the brothel that forms her power base. Charles name and reputation are incredibly powerful on that island and now she visibly has his weight behind her, as well as the black mark being lifted on her partners, which she can now use as a lever to get what she wants there long term. Seriously, look how fast she's learned strategy this season. She's gone from short term survival tactics only, going for immediate gain, to long term strategic planning that we were still waiting to finish playing out at the end of season, and she did it without the likes of Flint or Vane guiding and teaching her, which is something Billy, Eleanor, and Silver all have. She is teaching herself. Each time she gets burned, she comes back cleverer.
7. I think Flint confronting Eleanor is a sort of bookend, paralleling the Eleanor/Miranda confrontation, a sort of triptych with the Max/Vane negotiation in the center. You can see the liking and affection between them, despite the anger and disappointment. They dream the same big dream; they are ambitious; they do terrible things in what they believe is a good cause. No wonder they understand each other so well, Charles and Miranda lying between them.
8. And now we come to the ambiguous flashbacks, the one with the kiss in the carriage, much thought about and debated. I still am not sure what to think. Is his flirting in the carriage performative, or real? Is the kiss? Is she testing him for herself or her husband or both? Is she wanting him for a smoke screen or a lover or both? I think she knows of her husband's interest in James, I am suspecting she's trying to figure out James interest: Thomas, Miranda, or both, careful of the danger to her husband and any man he loves, but I don't know for sure. I suspect given Miranda's arc we'll never know for sure now.
9. Hornigold's advice to Silver is good, but Hornigold hasn't got the true measure of Silver and why he's more dangerous than Flint.
10. I think Jack talking to Anne straight out about his fears of losing her and what Max;s agenda might be was clever. He tried the outside the box approach and it didn't work, so now he's trying *gasp* honesty, and it works. It gets her thinking and he needs that because ultimately, she has the power in their dynamic. He's utterly lost without her, and she's proved she's not lost without him.
11. "On this island, three things are known to be true, and number two is Jack Rackham's a crew killer." Wait, the hell are the other two?
12. "I think you’re someone who’s very good at managing how you're perceived, and perhaps getting what you want without anyone knowing how you did it. Or perhaps that it ever happened at all." — Miranda Hamilton describing Lt. James McGraw to himself. Wow, she really has his number.
13. "I didn't do it for you." It's not just what Charles says to Eleanor about Ned Low's head on a spike, but it was what Anne said to Max about rescuing her from Vane's crew. I love that both times that line is simultaneously truth and a lie. You can't tell be that's an accident.
14. Eleanor Guthrie: the rare woman who understands a bloody head on a spike means "I love you."
15. The face acting in the Jack/Anne/Max scene towards the end is gorgeous. There is a whole conversation spoken with hardly any lines. You have jack's short monologue at the beginning about his plans, then silence punctuated by one line each for Anne and Max. The rest is all facial expressions, a world of dialogue and characterization compressed into the visual.
16. Flint's hero monologue at the end: The Navy Man and the Pirate wrapped up in one body, one purpose, one voice. You can see the man he was still alive in the older, angrier, less principled man he has become, which I suppose is why so many flashbacks and those particular flashbacks are in this episode and the previous one. We need Lt. McGraw fresh in our minds when Flint threatens to "rain down fire" if Charles vane doesn't yield.
17. The structure of this episode is gorgeous: The Vane/Low Violence/Negotiation visual palindrome. The negotiation triptych. The way the Flashbacks twine with Flint's maneuvers throughout, culminating in that final speech. The confrontation punctuation. Short term vs. deep long term planning. The ways manipulation does and doesn't work. This Show!
* Ebay, One More time:
Lindworm 2012 (LE, DragonCon, Event Exclusive): (Company says: Smoky green leather smeared with crushed grasses and wild herbs). 3/4 Full. http://www.ebay.com/itm/301718133830?ssPageName=STRK:MESELX:IT&_trksid=p3984.m1555.l2649
* A list of LGBTQA Charities to donate money to instead of seeing the racist Stonewall Movie that decided to portray a black trans woman activist as a cis white man. http://awkward0w1.tumblr.com/post/126399233673
* Want Game of Thrones without the creepy? We desperately need new players. We are very inclusive. "Game of Bones MUSH:" gobmush.wikidot.com
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Date: 2015-09-06 01:34 am (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2015-09-07 03:14 am (UTC)