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Feb. 12th, 2013 09:29 pm1. I'm still getting annoying pharmaceutical marketing spam on my lj - now one daily, so am trying to do cross-posting from DW again to see if this makes a difference.
2. Eh, someone, I ganked it from![[profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
frenchani but I have no idea if she invented it, has come up with a 30 day book meme to equal the 30 day tv meme. I think I like the tv meme better, I'm less indecisive about television than I am books. Books? I read a lot. Can't remember half of it. And can't choose which one I loved or which was most memorable, and it tends to depend on my mood. Also my memory of books is wonky - I remember the Great Gatsby which I read over 30 years ago, but I can't remember the book I read two months ago. In short, I've read more books and far more widely than tv shows.
So with the caveat that I'm agnostic about my opinions and while most likely change my mind next week...here goes nothing:
Day 01 – The best book you read last year
The Fault in Our Stars by John Green - it is also the only one I remember clearly at the moment. All the others are becoming one big blur in my memory banks. The Fault in Our Stars should not work. It's essentially a romance between two teenagers with terminal cancer, except at the same time, it's not quite. The writer, though, had a story in his heart to tell that he'd attempted to tell one way, didn't work, years passed, he wrote other things, then he came back to it another way - through a point of view not his own. He'd been a chaplain in a children's cancer ward before becoming a writer. He tried to write about his experiences - it did not work. Understandably. Rule number 1 - don't write about yourself or from your point of view. Years later, he meets NerdFighter - a nerdy/geeky girl and a few other nerdy geeky cancer kids, and the story takes off in his head. Hazel Grace is born. And she's amazingly insightful.
If you've ever been a fan of a book or movie. Ever written meta. Scanned spoiler boards. Obsessively hunted down news for the next chapter, sequel, or thread in a story that appears to have abruptly ended or been cancelled - this novel was made for you. Because the two kids go on a quest of sorts to find the writer of a book they adore, their favorite book in the world - to get the writer to tell them what happened to the characters at the end of that book. What happened next.
Which in a way, if you think about it...is a nice metaphor about life - we all want to know what happens next to the characters we've met in our own stories...but life being life, doesn't always decide to tell us.
At any rate it's a book that I might forget one month, but seems to jump back into my mind the next.
( the rest of the days, which aren't done yet, and just so you know...it's highly unlikely I'll be able to answer day 30 in this lifetime. )
3.Day 04 - Your favorite show ever
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
(Angel the series - sort of necessary to watch with it, just to give it texture.)
Not even those horrible comic books could kill my love of this wonderful series. I want to tell people not to read the comics. Just watch the TV show. Skip the comics, skip the movie. Only watch Buffy and Angel...because if you watch both...that gives it texture.
A television series that I did not expect to love, and only watched to well see Anthony Stewart Head. I actually went in with very low expectations and a bit of a grudge, since VR5 was cancelled the year before and Buffy replaced it, and I liked Darryl Hannah and Michael Easten better than bitchy Sarah Michelle Gellar. But...over time...the writing, acting, comic timing, and tongue firmly in cheek sardonic wit won me over. Then over time...it got better. Not only did it get better, it broke rules, took bizarre risks, and played with the medium. This is possibly the only series outside of MASH that I've watched all the way through more than five times, and I watched MASH multiple times in order to write a media essay for a college course. Buffy I watched multiple times for personal pleasure. I wrote essays on it. Fanfic. I hadn't written anything close to fanfic since I was 17. I discovered a fandom and became an active member of it - which I'd never done. This show spoke to me on an intellectual and emotional and gut level.
Proof of how you can be rewarded by sticking with something, committing to it. It started out as breezy fun and became something you could teach a college course on.
Yes, I see its flaws. It is far from perfect. There are television shows that I'm fully willing to admit are better written, produced, and well acted. Breaking Bad comes to mind. But I will never re-watch those shows 20 times until the DVDS and VHS are broken. I won't write meta or fanfic on them. They don't touch my heart in the same way. In an odd way, Buffy's flaws are what endeared it to me. It broke boundaries regarding gender dynamics and roles, it played with how people view gender roles, how we view death, god, and destiny. On the surface - it was a typical heroes journey and below that a tale about surviving high school, yaddah, yaddah, yaddah...but peel back that layer, you get a critique on gender in pop culture, on sexual politics and power plays, and
growing up in a wonky and unpredictable universe where the good guys don't always wear white hats.
It may be the only series that addressed the emotional pain of 9/11 in a way that made sense to me.
The rage, and the post-traumatic stress...the sense of falling. And it is the only series that ever got across what it means or feels like to have someone close to you die.
( Read more... )
4. Watching the State of the Union Address or half-watching. Not a huge fan of these things. Less talking, more doing. Never been a fan of grand-standing and marketing and speechifying. I don't think I quite understand it...I'm the sort who likes to do things quietly behind the scenes, where they get mysteriously done and no one knows I did.
2. Eh, someone, I ganked it from
frenchani but I have no idea if she invented it, has come up with a 30 day book meme to equal the 30 day tv meme. I think I like the tv meme better, I'm less indecisive about television than I am books. Books? I read a lot. Can't remember half of it. And can't choose which one I loved or which was most memorable, and it tends to depend on my mood. Also my memory of books is wonky - I remember the Great Gatsby which I read over 30 years ago, but I can't remember the book I read two months ago. In short, I've read more books and far more widely than tv shows. So with the caveat that I'm agnostic about my opinions and while most likely change my mind next week...here goes nothing:
Day 01 – The best book you read last year
The Fault in Our Stars by John Green - it is also the only one I remember clearly at the moment. All the others are becoming one big blur in my memory banks. The Fault in Our Stars should not work. It's essentially a romance between two teenagers with terminal cancer, except at the same time, it's not quite. The writer, though, had a story in his heart to tell that he'd attempted to tell one way, didn't work, years passed, he wrote other things, then he came back to it another way - through a point of view not his own. He'd been a chaplain in a children's cancer ward before becoming a writer. He tried to write about his experiences - it did not work. Understandably. Rule number 1 - don't write about yourself or from your point of view. Years later, he meets NerdFighter - a nerdy/geeky girl and a few other nerdy geeky cancer kids, and the story takes off in his head. Hazel Grace is born. And she's amazingly insightful.
If you've ever been a fan of a book or movie. Ever written meta. Scanned spoiler boards. Obsessively hunted down news for the next chapter, sequel, or thread in a story that appears to have abruptly ended or been cancelled - this novel was made for you. Because the two kids go on a quest of sorts to find the writer of a book they adore, their favorite book in the world - to get the writer to tell them what happened to the characters at the end of that book. What happened next.
Which in a way, if you think about it...is a nice metaphor about life - we all want to know what happens next to the characters we've met in our own stories...but life being life, doesn't always decide to tell us.
At any rate it's a book that I might forget one month, but seems to jump back into my mind the next.
( the rest of the days, which aren't done yet, and just so you know...it's highly unlikely I'll be able to answer day 30 in this lifetime. )
3.Day 04 - Your favorite show ever
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
(Angel the series - sort of necessary to watch with it, just to give it texture.)
Not even those horrible comic books could kill my love of this wonderful series. I want to tell people not to read the comics. Just watch the TV show. Skip the comics, skip the movie. Only watch Buffy and Angel...because if you watch both...that gives it texture.
A television series that I did not expect to love, and only watched to well see Anthony Stewart Head. I actually went in with very low expectations and a bit of a grudge, since VR5 was cancelled the year before and Buffy replaced it, and I liked Darryl Hannah and Michael Easten better than bitchy Sarah Michelle Gellar. But...over time...the writing, acting, comic timing, and tongue firmly in cheek sardonic wit won me over. Then over time...it got better. Not only did it get better, it broke rules, took bizarre risks, and played with the medium. This is possibly the only series outside of MASH that I've watched all the way through more than five times, and I watched MASH multiple times in order to write a media essay for a college course. Buffy I watched multiple times for personal pleasure. I wrote essays on it. Fanfic. I hadn't written anything close to fanfic since I was 17. I discovered a fandom and became an active member of it - which I'd never done. This show spoke to me on an intellectual and emotional and gut level.
Proof of how you can be rewarded by sticking with something, committing to it. It started out as breezy fun and became something you could teach a college course on.
Yes, I see its flaws. It is far from perfect. There are television shows that I'm fully willing to admit are better written, produced, and well acted. Breaking Bad comes to mind. But I will never re-watch those shows 20 times until the DVDS and VHS are broken. I won't write meta or fanfic on them. They don't touch my heart in the same way. In an odd way, Buffy's flaws are what endeared it to me. It broke boundaries regarding gender dynamics and roles, it played with how people view gender roles, how we view death, god, and destiny. On the surface - it was a typical heroes journey and below that a tale about surviving high school, yaddah, yaddah, yaddah...but peel back that layer, you get a critique on gender in pop culture, on sexual politics and power plays, and
growing up in a wonky and unpredictable universe where the good guys don't always wear white hats.
It may be the only series that addressed the emotional pain of 9/11 in a way that made sense to me.
The rage, and the post-traumatic stress...the sense of falling. And it is the only series that ever got across what it means or feels like to have someone close to you die.
( Read more... )
4. Watching the State of the Union Address or half-watching. Not a huge fan of these things. Less talking, more doing. Never been a fan of grand-standing and marketing and speechifying. I don't think I quite understand it...I'm the sort who likes to do things quietly behind the scenes, where they get mysteriously done and no one knows I did.