Please entertain me

[rachelmanija]

I got the covid booster yesterday. Slept on couch with chills and fever because I could plant myself next to a space heater.

Looks like I will also be spending today on the couch. Please entertain me. Recommend a nook or movie, discuss sorting systems in literature, ask fo advice, or whatever.

Comments

story recommendation

[brainwane]

An atmospheric story I liked about someone who gets in over his head while making a documentary.

ways to deal with the cell phone problem

[brainwane]

Sometimes people say that it's harder to write certain kinds of stories (in particular certain kinds of horror stories) set in the present day, because most people carry mobile phones with them which could be used to call for help, look up information, light dark places, etc., and so it's harder to set up a person as isolated and scared for the purposes of the story.

Have you ever run into this as a writer, or noticed particularly good or bad ways another storyteller is getting around this? What are your favorite ways to deal with it, or, what are ridiculous ways to deal with it?

Re: ways to deal with the cell phone problem

[rachelmanija]

I deal with this all the time. My two main solutions are to have the bad guys destroy the heroes' phones, or for them to be in a no-service area. My all-time favorite example of the first one is when I had a gargoyle turn the hero's cell phone to a stone carving of a cell phone.

In the category whatever - I think ^^

[estara]

Links to stuff I like a lot. The posts on unknown Japanese manga at this professional translators blog:
https://brainvsbook.wordpress.com/2021/11/19/kakeochi-girl-battan/
- this one is on a yuri manga with some warnings, but also a link to a different unproblematic work by the same mangaka - with gorgeous art examples

I made her a dreamwidth feed: https://brainvsbook-feed.dreamwidth.org/

There's a YT channel that reminds me a bit of your house-searching and moving updates with lots of diy added (it's also in a gorgeous bit of German landscape in Berlin) - well worth watching from the start, the guy has a nice calm voice and a dry sense of humour:
https://youtu.be/nF07wn5WyHo

Good luck with recovery - I'm hoping Germany gets its act together at some point and us teachers get offered a booster shot, too. My parents will get it next week, that's something at least.

Re: In the category whatever - I think ^^

[rachelmanija]

Thanks! Those look great.

I'm glad about your parents and hope you can get your booster soon.

Re: In the category whatever - I think ^^

[estara]

It looks like I may be in luck, as a co-worker had some connections to a doctor with vaccine doses to spare (since Germans are idiots with regards to getting vaccinated :P), I may get my booster shot on December 1st, which I fervently hope works out.

Re: In the category whatever - I think ^^

[rachelmanija]

Oh, I hope you can get it!

[minoanmiss]

What would you do when a marital spat between your roommates resulted in five quarts of yogurt that no one wants to eat, sitting around the fridge?

Also, what kind of short story excerpt might entertain you right now?

[kathmandu]

Is this plain yogurt or flavored?

[minoanmiss]

Plain. 3 regular, 2 Greek, afaict.

[slashmarks]

It won't use up 5 quarts (wow!) but I bake with yoghurt pretty often - there are bread and cake recipes that use yghurt, and I add a scoop when I'm making pancakes out of a box and adjust the liquid I add by feel. It makes them tangy and more filling. It might help you use up some of it in a way that does not also taste like yoghurt.

[minoanmiss]

I wonder if I can try that on the Kid of Limited Diet, who does like pancakes. Thank you :)

[rachelmanija]

I would bake with some of it. You can also mix plain yogurt with chopped garlic (I like Trader Joe's chopped in a glass container, which is slightly pickled) to make a sauce that is delicious with roasted or fried chickpeas.

[minoanmiss]

I'm going to make a yogurt cheesecake for thanksgiving, so that's one quart...

[rachelmanija]

Short stories - anything good, honestly! Fic in my fandoms, SF short stories.

[minoanmiss]

Here are two stories I wrote recently that might amuse you, both about magic.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/34486582

https://archiveofourown.org/works/34274254

[ellenmillion]

A link to this YouTube gave me much-needed otter entertainment. SO CUTE. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCDYyCQAk60CqabvkL5gU3Mw

I hope you feel better soon.

[rachelmanija]

AWWWWW.

[telophase]

I just read this fabulous short story told in text format.

Escape Pod 579: Texts from the Ghost War
While I realize driving that mech likely takes all of your limited resources, please take care not to step on the roses. what Don’t step on the roses. I don’t care if we’re under imminent attack.

[telophase]

NPR has announced their annual Comedy Wildlife Photography Award Winners.

Also there are the Natural Landscape Photography Awards results

[rachelmanija]

Ahh, beautiful.

[movingfinger]

A FOAF has recommended The Lion in the Box by Marguerite de Angeli, which I hadn't heard of before. Given your interest in older books, perhaps worth adding to your list of things to watch for?

[rachelmanija]

Thank you!

[gwyn]

I just saw The French Dispatch the other night and loved it, even though my Wes Anderson twee-tolerance-o-meter usually tends toward the low part of the dial. But I adored The Grand Budapest Hotel, so since my friend was rhapsodizing about the new one, I wanted to give it a go. It's the first time I've seen what it's like to work in a magazine office handled right--I usually end up losing my shit about how wildly, madly inaccurate working on publications is in film, but since this is a paean to the old New Yorker (and a bit Paris Review), they seem to have actually done the work. I just loved it; it felt like to quirky magazines what Spotlight was to newspaper reporting and made my editorial office heart beat louder. I'm not sure if it's on any channels where it can be rented, but I would recommend it.

Do you like Gothic Regency lesbian romances? Rose Lerner's The Wife in the Attic has some wonderfully chilling stuff in it as well as a complicated romance.

[rachelmanija]

Do you like Gothic Regency lesbian romances?

OH HELL YES.

Thanks for the other rec too. Wes Anderson also sometimes hits my twee-o-meter, but that sounds fun.

*

[minoanmiss]

*makes a note*

[mildred_of_midgard]

Since you like memoirs, The Girl with Seven Names: A North Korea Defector's Story remains one of my all-time favorites. If you like, I can gift you a copy. :) Get well soon!

[rachelmanija]

Yes please!

[mildred_of_midgard]

Kindle or hard copy?

[rachelmanija]

Kindle please!

[mildred_of_midgard]

Sent! I may have let my book-buying habit get carried away with me and also sent you Far North, that survival novel we talked about. ;) I hope at least one of them is to your liking.

[sholio]

Oh hey! *booster shot solidarity fistbump*

It looks like this one is doing what my second shot did, where I feel perfectly normal for brief windows of time and then get absolutely punched in the brain by fatigue of the "walking up the stairs means I need a 4-hour nap* variety. Well, that and unpredictable thermoregulation issues. BODIES!!

[rachelmanija]

Me too. Well - better than covid!

[sartorias]

I will send you an e copy of Fledglings if you like? It's vitamin free trope fun.

[marjorie1170]

Great you got the booster, bummer on the chills and fever.

I have FINALLY been reading again, though it's still erratic, in terms of what will catch my attention. Really not genre much. That said, I was taken by Sharon Kay Penman's _Here Be Dragons_, a 1985-published book, focused on Welsh history (1200s). What the Welsh would think, I do not know. For me, it was a throwback to the books I read in my youth—without being ambushed by weirdo, atrocious prejudices (namely Susan Howatch and Taylor Caldwell).

I also thoroughly enjoyed, as a budding birder myself, Julia Zarankin's memoir, _Field Notes from an Unintentional Birder_. Birding is important but so is her family history as she was born in the then-Soviet Union and her grandparents were refuseniks. It's also about finding her footing as her life doesn't turn out quite as she expected.

I sometimes wonder if I'm the only one who finds the Bourne movies comfort-watches. They've reappeared on Netflix. Amnesia plus a hyper-competent protagonist—I guess that does it for me.

Feel better soon!

[rachelmanija]

Thank you!

The first Bourne movie is a great comfort-watch but the sequels have too much shakycam for me - it makes me motion sick. Very annoying.

[mildred_of_midgard]

I sometimes wonder if I'm the only one who finds the Bourne movies comfort-watches.

Not so! I comfort-watch all 5 Bourne movies.

[skygiants]

Congrats on being boost! I hope the side effects let up soon. If you have not read it, here's one of my all-time favorite novellas, Kim Newman's Coppola's Dracula, which is about the making of Coppola's Dracula in a world where Dracula is real, and Coppola is doing it as his big psychological-historical epic instead of Apocalypse Now, from the POV of the on-set vampire consultant.

[rachelmanija]

Thank you, that looks AMAZING and I never heard of it.

[scioscribe]

If you want stylized '70s New York punk grime, I just watched The Warriors, the Walter Hill movie, on Netflix. It will take you to magical alternate world where gangs dress as mimes. (I mean, it's also fairly dark and contains rape threats and lots of violence, but also it's thrilling and probably kind of ideal to watch through a feverish sheen.)

[rachelmanija]

That sounds amazing, thank you.

[sholio]

This chipmunk video is one of the cutest things I've ever seen:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VR43cu5Vvsw

Also, if you haven't seen this one already, please enjoy this desk weasel:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2CTVqt2wxU

[rachelmanija]

AWWWW. I want a desk weasel! Look how tiny he is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdRXuyBOyow

[sholio]

I'll take 12.

[mount_oregano]

2021 Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards: A shocked monkey, joyful birds and more : The Picture Show : NPR

https://www.npr.org/sections/pictureshow/2021/11/18/1056851585/comedy-wildlife-photography-award-winners-2021

[rachelmanija]

Thank you, those definitely brightened my day. I think my favorites were the bug-eyed otter pup, the bug-eyed fish, and the graceful and majestic eagle.

[oracne]

Crusoe the Dachshund? https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCz35G-z-ZB5rTma2yka7G8A

[vass]

Congrats on your booster shot!

You might like Margaret Killjoy's novellas. She writes fantasy about anarchist crust punks, with a clear-eyed, personal-experience-based view of how communities of people living according to their ideals can still get really fucked up.

How would you sort your pets, and/or the characters they're named after?