fluttering_muse

Work is not off to a good start this week ;-;

The crying face is an exaggeration, of course, but they really slammed me out of the gate. I barely got around to getting some of the stuff sorted. I didn't remember to count the cases but there were at least a hundred. And I had around thirty cases to finish from last week before I could even get to those. My total for the day was eighty, which, if you're following along at home, means I'll be going into a lot tomorrow too.

Ugh.

At least having work to go into makes the day move faster. I just hope things calm down enough as the week goes on that I can get caught up. No matter the pace of the day, I hate having to leave cases.

Welp.

I did indeed write down a to-do list before I went to bed last night. Aaand I accomplished very little of it :/ Idk why, since I didn't stay up any longer than it took to write the aforementioned list but I didn't sleep as well as I hoped. Or, well, I at least didn't wake up very well. Tried to get up off of several of my alarms and every time it felt like I was interrupting an REM cycle, Idk.

Got some crochet done as hoped, which is good, and I tried to call the post office but never got through, which is not. That was pretty much my day, so I REALLY let myself down. Here's hoping for a better tomorrow.

The weekend fast approaches and I am so ready to meet it.

I have some crochet projects I want to wrap up and some I want simply to make progress on. I think that'll be my primary goal for the weekend. Secondary goal will be to get my yarn stash reorganized to make higher priority projects more easily accessible.

"Haven't you done that before?"

Yes, shut up. It needs refreshing.

Speaking of yarn, it hit me that I haven't received some yarn I ordered last month. I double-checked and it shipped on the fourteenth. This is not a problem I've had before. And because I'm not used to having such problems, I did not purchase tracking. Ugh. Gonna try reaching out to the post office first, just in case I missed a failure-to-deliver slip. If they don't have my package, I'll contact the seller.

I love when I make a plan and then forget about it. Always fun, never frustrating.

Anyway.

You may remember that, earlier this year, I signed up for Fannish 50. If you don't remember, that is totally understandable because I have yet to make a single post. But that changes as of this post!

I waffled a little but I have indeed decided to go with my initial idea for a theme-- fifty Transformers relationships I'd like to see more canon and fan content for. I also waffled a lot on how and where to start-- hence the procrastination-- but I've decided to get what I consider the lower priority posts out of the way first.

So! Let's go ahead and dip our toes into the shallow end.

( Read more... )

Kind of a slow start to the week but there's nothing wrong with that. Got a bit of crochet done and messaged a couple people on Facebook Marketplace about furniture pieces.

I'm considering getting Travis's new tank at retail just to assure myself of his safety but I think that's probably just me being nervous over nothing. I mean, it's a terrarium. Chill out, me. There were some promising listings on Marketplace but nothing within my budget before next payday. Here's hoping they don't sell before then-- or at least that I can find something just as good or even better if they do.

What I'm really worried about finding is a proper piece to put his tank on. I'd like an entertainment cabinet of some kind, for the storage space, but I haven't seen a lot in the right dimensions. Might pop around to the local thrift shops if Marketplace doesn't cough up what I need. Push comes to shove, I can always get a wire shelving rack similar to the one he's on now and just shove some cube shelves under it. There are always cube shelves on Marketplace.

Aaand I think this is the last I'll say about my room until I get what I need to finish, to keep from boring you all too much with these nothing updates, lol. I feel like I've made that promise before but I mean it this time!

Well, I was definitely wrong about getting all the plants done, lol. For as pumped as I was, I just could not focus. I'll probably still finish the two smaller pieces tomorrow but not the bigger two.

The lack of focus extended to my reorganization efforts but I've got a lot more done on that front. I have to keep reminding myself of that because I'm currently in the middle of that "dark before dawn" period of rearranging where everything is everywhere and it looks awful, lol. I got the furniture moved, I got the under-bed storage situation situated. The main issue now is getting everything squared so I can put it all up on my closet shelves tomorrow. Found more Goodwill stuff and some to-be-sold stuff I'd put up and forgotten about, which will just have to be put aside for now. Made some slight recalculations re: new storage furniture pieces I want, mostly to do with where I want to put it, which obviously affects how I want things arranged now. Little things like that have set me back more than they should've, due to the aforementioned lack of focus.

I know I can get done tomorrow but I'm no longer so certain about actually managing it. Trying to be kind to myself on that front but it's so frustrating... I'm not giving up, though!! I'm so close, I can feel it. I think I need to just shove aside the "deal with it later" items, whether it's donations or stuff to be sold or things that I don't have the storage pieces for yet, and refuse to think about any of it until I finish figuring out the things I plan to actually live with. I think that's a not insignificant part of what's tripping me up, when I actually can manage to pay attention to what's in front of me. Gonna bank on that, anyway, and see if putting it all out of sight helps.

Final stretch! Just gotta bring it home.

Saw 40 Acres tonight! Considering the title and the main cast being a Black and Indigenous blended family headed by former soldiers, I was expecting a more direct political critique. It ended up being pretty subtle, though. Still trying to decide how I feel about its approach, tbh. The racial and community politics are very much there-- there are a couple direct references to the way the government has treated BIPOC people and the family explicitly engages with Black Marxist theory as part of their educational curriculum. But I felt like more could've been explored, especially as regards community and how the parents' approach might've been shaped by their military experience. Then again, the racial makeup of the cast is a conversation in itself, so maybe the creative team wanted to let the setup speak its own piece so the story could focus elsewhere.

The movie is a dystopian thriller set after a fungal plague has wiped out most animal life on Earth. Food is scarce and good farmland is the hottest commodity. The matriarch of the Freemans took her family isolationist during the fallout, surrounding their farm with an electric fence, and has raised her children to survive and to kill. The plot kicks off with word through the Network that other homesteads have been attacked and is driven by the oldest son's growing desire for human contact outside his family.

All the actors put in great performances and the family dynamics feel genuine and lived in. Everyone has their own voice and you really get the sense that this family is a community unto itself. I found the juxtaposition of the horror inherent to the way they've been raised with the sweeter and the simply more mundane moments they share to be highly effective for making the premise believable.

There's a good sense of not only the family's isolation but of their vulnerability throughout the movie. It's there in the characters' behavior, of course, but also in the way their land is set up and what we see of the way they live. There's a visceral sense of the rising threat through the comm chatter we overhear-- probably my favorite little touch in the movie. And the cinematography and sound design really bring it all home. There are some incredible shots and sequences in this movie, especially once we get into the thick of the action. The fight scenes straddle the line between gritty and typical action movie nonsense and they ride that line well.

I didn't find anything terribly special about the story itself. Though it definitely beats its own drum, its beats are familiar to the genre. The story plays out basically how you'd expect it to once everything is set up. This was hardly a disappointment for me, personally, since it let the performances and the action alike shine and left ample space to consider those subtle politics dynamics and to ponder over what little we learn about the backstory of this world.

So, yeah, would recommend!