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dreaming of the season of mists
We are almost to the end of the 7th week of remote school! Next week is fall break, which we are all really looking forward to -- it will be so nice to sleep in and not have to monitor 2nd grade and do some relaxed reading. For the last two years we've gone to Portland as a family for this break, and my kids are sad we aren't going -- especially my daughter, since her birthday happens during this time and there's a lot of things we do to celebrate -- but she's making the best of it, as we all are, and we've talked about all the travelling we'll do together once the pandemic is over and we won't be risking ourselves or anyone else by going places. In the meanwhile there are some family movie plans (Return of the Jedi, Labyrinth, maybe The Princess Bride) and some Minecraft time together scheduled and a lot of special meals on the agenda, and possibly a beach trip if the air quality holds up.
I am still reading when I can, and watching The Untamed with my spouse during our regular Saturday date, and obsessing over Homestuck (which I do not think I mentioned here before, a little surprising since it is a large thing in my internal landscape!) and listening to music and trying to get enough sleep. We are starting to get fall fruit in our CSA box and I have eaten some apples and drunk some hard cider and plan to revel in autumn by ordering more hard cider and starting to think about braised dishes instead of salads. It is about to be hot here again, but we have had a few cool mornings that smell like fall, so as always I am crossing my fingers that the second period of heat will be short and dissolve into cool breezes and changing leaves and badly needed rain soon. (A few leaves have already changed, very very unusual for September here, but I saw orange and yellow at the top of the trees when I was driving by the lake yesterday.)
How are all of you?
I am still reading when I can, and watching The Untamed with my spouse during our regular Saturday date, and obsessing over Homestuck (which I do not think I mentioned here before, a little surprising since it is a large thing in my internal landscape!) and listening to music and trying to get enough sleep. We are starting to get fall fruit in our CSA box and I have eaten some apples and drunk some hard cider and plan to revel in autumn by ordering more hard cider and starting to think about braised dishes instead of salads. It is about to be hot here again, but we have had a few cool mornings that smell like fall, so as always I am crossing my fingers that the second period of heat will be short and dissolve into cool breezes and changing leaves and badly needed rain soon. (A few leaves have already changed, very very unusual for September here, but I saw orange and yellow at the top of the trees when I was driving by the lake yesterday.)
How are all of you?
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O.o I had not stopped to count, but it's the end of week 6 for our school district, which it totally does not feel like we've got a grading period down already, but we do... O.o (No fall break for us, though.)
Hope you guys are able to spend your school break in a nice way despite no traveling this year!
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I've been meaning to give Homestuck another try and see if I can get further this time, but it's a very intimidating canon! Are you reading it, or have you read it, or both, or neither?
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Actually, the more I think about it, the more I realise I have developed an entire array of tools/techniques for reading Homestuck! Along with the YouTube videos above I also use this great webpage (http://rafe.name/homestuck/) that has really good page-group summaries -- by which I mean if, say, pages 1-30 are all one set of actions, it groups those together and summarises it in a few sentences, with a set of links to each individual page on the right. When I was doing my reread I used that to skip over the really intense slogging in Acts 1 & 2, since rather than watching John interact with his environment for hundreds of pages trying to figure out how things work, I could just read some sentences about it and move on to the parts where people are talking to each other, which is what I'm actually interested in. (Eventually it did hit a pace where there was zero slogging for me, but it took a looooooong time.)
All that being said, I do love how twisty it is, and how the worldbuilding proceeds, and how there are many time-travel shenanigans and how non-linear the story is, and I don't mind the grim dark murdery bits (of which there are many) because for me it's all at a register of adolescent melodrama that means I *care* but I don't take it seriously as a reflection of life, if that makes any sense?
How far did you get when you tried it? I want to rec it to everyone, but the first 1000 pages of slog are understandably a very hard sell. But if you do decide to try it again I would love to hear!
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I think, as far as I can determine from that excellent guide you linked, that I got through Act 3 and then could not motivate myself to read the Intermission. Which confirms my sense that even though I felt like I'd read a ton, I'd still only scratched the surface! As far as I can remember, I enjoyed Acts 1 and 2 very well, but I often struggle with stories that make a dramatic move away from the characters and setting I've been enjoying, and I guess in this case the Intermission was too much for me. But there are characters on the other side of it that I'd really like to meet, so maybe I'll give it another shot?
It makes complete sense, and I love thinking about this kind of thing! It reminds me of how I feel about How to Get Away with Murder, which has some kind of triple-layered thing going on in my mind where I care about the characters and their relationships and feelings, but I largely don't take seriously all the murders (and various other crimes) they commit, but then I do take the show entirely seriously when it's commenting on systemic injustice. Emotional engagement with a story is so much more complex than a single linear spectrum!
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