Sakura of DOOM

First, I am sure everyone has heard about this by now, but just in case you haven't or have but didn't check it out yet: Hamilton Original Cast Recording Spotify playlist (or if Spotify doesn't work for you, YouTube). I've been dying to see or listen to this musical since I heard about it a few weeks ago, and now that the soundtrack is out, I can at least listen to it. Lin-Manuel Miranda's mix of hip hop and Broadway and other pastiches (the BritPop!) is amazing, and it reminded me of the excitement of listening to Rent for the first time in the 90s after only having heard Andrew Lloyd Webber and Les Mis. The recitative bits sounds a little like Rent to me, but other than that, Hamilton is entirely its own thing. Also, Thomas Jefferson sports natural hair and purple velvet.

I also saw East Side Sushi over the weekend, a cute indie film about a Latina woman who gets a job in a sushi restaurant and decides to become a sushi chef. The plot is pretty much what you would expect—opposition from her more traditional father, racism and sexism from the Japanese owner, a competition where she Proves Herself—and it sometimes felt a little clunky, but it's extremely charming and features Mexican-Japanese fusion food. It's also filmed in Oakland by a local director, so I got a ton of enjoyment out of seeing familiar places on screen as well.

And I (FINALLY) played through Hatoful Boyfriend, aka the pigeon dating sim, thanks to bluerabbit. Although to be accurate, it's more a piece of post-apocalyptic science fiction masquerading as a pigeon dating sim, which was not what I was expecting. Also, you date pigeons (and other birds). If this interests you and you're generally not into video games, I'd give this a try. It's a visual novel, so there's not that much game play involved aside from making some decisions about who to talk to and etc., and it's worth it to go through all the storylines.

I also mean to rec N.K. Jemisin's The Fifth Season and Zen Cho's Sorceror to the Crown, but I am still holding out hope that I will write actual entries on them.

Hi I have dragons! Anyway, any other Flight Rising players? I am there as oyceter.

Wreck-It Ralph

Really loved this. Love all the gender stuff and how quietly and matter-of-factly the movie codes gaming as a gender-neutral or sometimes leaning-toward-female thing, LOVE Jane Lynch's character, adored the Sarah Silverman character, and was very impressed by how Dreamworks managed to make a pop-culture-inspired movie that feels so much bigger than just a string of pop-culture jokes. Also had thoughts about Ralph kinda sorta representing male gamer privilege when he's so medal focused. CB didn't quite think so, though. What do people think?

Professor Layton and the Eternal Diva

So weird to not be solving puzzles by myself for the whole movie! Alas, the series continues to have saintly, largely inactive girls and women, though at least this one features Emmy for a bit. There are also a lot of Laputa influences. Mostly it makes me want to play the newest Layton, which I have discovered is now out but only available for the 3DS. ARGH. Want to play but don't want to buy a 3DS just to play a single game!

The Hobbit

I've never been a fan of the book (read it once in sixth grade, never mustered up enough interest to ever finish a reread), so mostly I had fun with the movie. Was happy just to be back in cinematic Middle Earth, especially once the Shire theme started to play. Mostly the movie is notable in that a) now I can at least remember one or two of the dwarves' names (me watching FotR Moria scene: "Who the heck is Balin?"), b) Thranduil's doofy-looking "I am not emotional" expression, c) the hunger-inducing first scenes in Bilbo's house, and d) RABBIT SLED.

Fellowship of the Ring rewatch

Wow, I can't believe it's been ten years. The special effects hold up amazingly well, I'm guessing because they did a lot of things with stunt doubles and forced perspective and miniatures. And though I'm now largely uninterested in mainly-male medieval Europe-ish quest epic fantasies, this one has so much nostalgia attached, both for the books and for the movies, that I don't care and I love it anyway. I was also extremely amused that the very first shot after the Fellowship is formed is a long shot of the Fellowship traversing a mountain range, silhouetted against the sky. Also, the end Boromir + Frodo scene is filmed disturbingly like a rape scene.

I only have one residential floor left, and then I am finally done with Tiny Tower!

... now I have to figure out what to do during the commute.

I have also signed up for QZone (me!), one of the biggest social networking sites in China. I have done this despite being able to read much less simplified Chinese than I thought because Sims has launched on it and I am a sad, sad addict who wants to see if there are any different clothes/furniture/hair/missions/whatever.

Most of the game is the same, except you can't post to your feed to request things a la Facebook, so everything is based on in-game requests. Most of the assets are the same as well, except for maybe 5-10 new items in hair, clothes, furniture, respectively. On the other hand, the new hair and new clothes are SO MUCH CUTER. And Bella has been replaced by a much more anime-looking character called Rongrong.

( Screencaps )

And OMG so many big things happening in Glitch! (Me!) ( Read more... )

Since I have become terrible at posting, a random update:

( Games )

( Reading )

( Personal )

(Starting to xpost to LJ again)

I have read approximately 1.8 books in the past five months or so. Okay, probably more, but that's how it feels. I mostly blame CB, particularly for siccing Sims Social on me, but here's a gaming report if anyone is interested.

Please note that I am extremely idiosyncratic re: what I can play. Ex. I dislike first-person 3D perspectives, 3D navigating in general, fighting, stress, anything that depends on too much physical coordination/real world physics, and I get fixated and bored by odd things. So I am not sure how useful any of these will be...

( Professor Layton, Glitch, random stuff, and Facebook )

And I realized this is actually getting kind of long (! now I feel guilty spending so much time on non-reading things!), so interactive fiction gets its own post.

( Stuff CB plays that I watch )

Sigh. Went out to find presents for the family today, and the thing I wanted to get my mom was $70 at Bed Bath and Beyond! Maybe I will look at Sears tomorrow. Couldn't find anything cute for my sister either, or anything happy for me at Express (I have a gift certificate to use, yay).

All in all, an unsatisfying experience. I wonder if I've just lost previous enjoyment of shopping, or if it's just that I'm not really in the mood lately. Also, shopping with the boy is not exactly the most fun thing around. Nothing wrong with the boy, but he definitely does not actively shop, unlike going out with my mom or my sister or friends. So it's kind of like me shopping by myself with someone to walk around with.

Well, shopping can wait for home as well. As can my haircut, which I quite desperately need now.

I've found I've been playing a lot of video games lately (this year), if I can use "play" to mean watching the boy play and offering hints and telling him where to go. I tried my hand at Final Fantasy X, but even though it requires no real hand-eye coordination, I still can't figure out easy things, like this button means select and this one means back. I blame this all on Timmy -- he had this interesting sounding game at his house last year, Eternal Darkness, with an insanity effect that was really cool, and me and Sarah got sucked into watching and we made the boy play it, hee. It's mostly action-adventure, with a good deal of evil-creature-killing, but with enough puzzle solving and the insanity effect to keep onlookers amuzed. Then that was that, and I figured it was a fluke.

Then the boy got Zelda: Wind Waker, which basically sucked his entire room, Sarah included -- three different games were being played at the same time (me and the boy, Todd and Sarah, Jared), everyone didn't want to be spoiled for their own game, we'd be rushing back to the room to grab the Game Cube first. Kind of funny. Anyhow, Zelda was an awesome game. I can't play them worth anything, because I can't even make Link walk in a straight line, much less do anything half as complicated as killing evil creatures on screen, but they've got a whole bunch of puzzles that I am good at. Well, maybe not giantly, but I did figure out some things no one else could ;). And then the boy and I played through Prince of Persia recently, and we're now in the middle of Beyond Good and Evil, which is really fun.

It's kind of weird because I always used to roll my eyes at the boy's gaming habits. And I still kind of do when he plays obsessively -- he plays lots of games that I'm not interested at all. Last year it was Halo and Generals, right now it's Project Gotham Racing 2 on XBox Live, and soon Halo 2 will come out (yikes!). But I kind of get it now... it's totally different from books and movies because you can make the little person walk around and do things, like take pictures of different animals or whatnot. It's also more frustrating in some ways, because I always want to do more things than the game will let me, but I'm kind of figuring that living with the game's rules is another game in itself. I like the puzzle games with a little adventure (Myst drove me nuts as a kid), but pretty much everything else bores me, especially shoot 'em ups and stuff like the Sims and Civilization. I generally don't like racing games unless they're like Mario Kart Double Dash, in which I get to sit in the back of the cart and throw stuff at other people while the boy does the actual driving. But good adventure games are like giant puzzles or trivia games, which are just up my alley.