Kapellmeister Bonno reacts only
I honestly meant to do this on Sunday, but I woke up and found myself obsessed with a. Pokémon and b. Python, so I spent most of the day playing Shining Pearl and indexing lists instead. Then I wrote some form of it on Monday evening, but it was taking so long that I then had to put it aside until Tuesday because I (annoyingly) seem to have a lot of things to say about various instances of media I have Consumed 🍽 recently. It wasn’t meant to be like this.
1. Fic writing
- Posted a few more chapters of the longboi; up to chapter 30 by the end of July. Auron is starting to have a Bad Time (I probably said this last month … but … it’s a worse time now??). Braska is starting to kiss him (contributing to said Bad Time, but also in some ways making it a Good Time). And, as always, Jecht is also there.
2. Films
- Éloge du chiac partie 2 (2009) – I actually watched the original as well, but it’s much shorter so it doesn’t count as a film. My thoughts: languages are so cool waaa.
- 乱 (1985) – King Lear but samurai, excellent.
- Amadeus (1984) – the rare rewatch, at the cinema because they’ve just done it a 4k remaster. @adt called it “a perfect film”; I don’t know if I would be so unequivocal but it definitely merits at least a “sublime”. We discussed various big- and smaller-brain thoughts about it afterwards and here are a few of them:
- My favourite scene: the part where the emperor plays Salieri’s march and then Mozart improvises variations on it and they all talk passive-aggressively about whether his opera will be in German or Italian.
- Most yaoiesque moment: weak, sweaty Mozart asks Salieri to stay with him while he sleeps (and then Constanze finds Salieri asleep in their son’s bed and is like wtf, haha).
- The soundtrack is great, because it’s Mozart, and mostly his choral and orchestral works instead of his boring piano sonatas (which are nonetheless much more interesting than most solo piano music of the period). It was just really great hearing good music coming out of cinema speakers instead of dull and derivative modern film soundtracks.
- It does a really good job of showing how significant religion was at the time, not just in terms of society but actually, and more centrally, how it affected one’s beliefs about why the course of one’s life was going in a particular way – but at the same time without being heavy-handed about it. People’s conception of why it be like it do must have been so radically different back then.
- Leopold Mozart looked and acted just like a conductor of our acquaintance. I never whisper comments during films but I was moved to do so twice on this occasion, once for the sake of a stupid pun involving “ducats”, the other time to be like “that there Leopold Mozart is the spit of XXX”.
- The details of life in eighteenth-century Vienna are so meticulous – like random animals walking through the streets. I would have liked to see more of the exciting wider European historical context than just a couple of Clever references to the emperor’s “sister Antoinette”, but then I want to hear about France at all possible times, so maybe I’m biased. The earlier scenes show more elaborate wigs and these start to be less prominent in the later scenes, which is a nice acknowledgement of how the changing social context affected fashion, but I want more, I guess.
- Constanze really is a strong female character; she gets what she wants and it’s great.
- I like the ambiguity around how responsible Salieri really was for Mozart’s death (within the context of the story, I mean): Mozart dies of Unspecified Illness, but Salieri is clearly pushing him to overwork and has been manipulating him for a while. I think there’s a nice moral ambiguity there, especially concerning the focalising character, who I think audiences are kind of primed to see as morally good and trustworthy. Do we root for Salieri, as a much more ordinary man than Mozart (but one who lives in luxury and is extremely petty)? I saw some account of the film on some website that said it’s implied that Salieri poisons Mozart, but we didn’t think that was implied at all – it would have made things much less subtle.
- Just want to express my appreciation for Mozart being a short king, which apparently was true IRL even if nothing else about this film is at all based on fact.
3. Gaming
- I am of course playing the French game: it’s supposedly heavily inspired by FFX and it’s French, so it was a given. Also this is the first time I’ve been able to play a “J”RPG in the original language hur hur hur. But oddly enough, playing it in French actually makes it seem less French; it would be more remarkable to have characters called things like Gustave and Maëlle in English, but in French it’s just like … well, they’re French names, and this is in French, so why wouldn’t they be?
- I haven’t got massively into it yet; the story is starting to be intriguing, the combat is … quite good although It’s Not Really Turn-Based Is It, You Liars. I’ve entered one of my periodic Pokémon phases so I’ve been tending to prioritise that instead recently.
- Talking of dull and derivative soundtracks … I’m repeatedly reminded of why everyone seemed to think the (dull and derivative) FF16 OST was so great when this is what modern VGM is like. So boringgggg. I found one interview with the composer where he talks about being inspired by other video game soundtracks, and I’m almost certainly being harsh here because this is like the one interview that exists, but the fact that he didn’t mention being inspired by anything that wasn’t a video game soundtrack didn’t fill me with hope tbh.
- Yeah so I’m in a Pokémon phase right now, probably because of the forthcoming Aardman series? Hearing an old British man briefly talk about Pokémon in the Direct seemed more culturally significant than I would ever have anticipated.
- In Shining Pearl the national dex is almost complete (thanks pokémon home) but I haven’t actually beaten the league yet … got through the Elite Four with reasonable success at the weekend, but then Cynthia thrashed me, as is well within her rights.
4. Home
- The bank had a scheme to introduce the young techbros to Culture by giving out free National Trust day tickets … the most reasonable National Trust house to get to by public transport was still a 45-minute train journey + 30-minute bus journey + 1-hour walk away, but there’s nothing we love more than an unreasonably logistically complex day out. It was a nice adventure even if I spent the whole house tour regretting not saying anything when the guide asked if anyone could play the piano and wanted to have a go on the delicious-looking Steinway in the drawing room. I shall have to return wearing a disguise.
- Went to the parade part of Pride instead of the going to da club part for the first time! It made me uncharacteristically emotional. There were so many good LGBT dogs. There was however a lack of representation among NI-based companies that weren’t specifically LGBT-focused, apart from the universities: UK-wide supermarkets had a significant presence, for example, but none of the NI/Ireland ones were there, sigh.
5. Music
- Despite all my talking shit about video game soundtracks, I recommend this video game soundtrack!
- A much less contemporary recommendation because I was thinking about it the other day for some reason: Tri Yann’s version of La jument de Michao. I think there is something very revealing about the fact that this version uses electric guitars et cetera while the one by Nolwenn Leroy (the top result on youtube rip) has like, panpipes or whatever (not sure whether it’s actually panpipes, but I’m also not particularly keen on listening to find out).
- Bought the SOP:FFO soundtrack (of “I’m here to kill Chaos” fame) although I have yet to catalogue and listen to it. I mostly got it for the Sad version of Servants of the mountain, longfic vibes.
6. Reading
- Bought some Final Fantasy manga while I was in Brussels.
- Bought a collection of Voltaire short stories, surprisingly not while I was in Brussels.
- Read The names by Florence Knapp: I devoured this in an afternoon. I didn’t find the “Julian” narrative particularly compelling, but there were certain passages in the others that really stayed with me, such as the part where the abusive husband gaslights his wife into thinking she’s losing her mental faculties, then takes her to view a care home saying he’s looking for somewhere for a relative, and then drives her back to their house and says, “There, isn’t it nice to be home?” Yikes!!
- I looked at some Goodreads reviews afterwards because I wanted to prolong the feeling of … inhabiting this novel?? … and found that multiple people were just not willing to engage with the text at all (which translates to “one star” in our quantified world, Thanks Capitalism) because it has depictions of domestic abuse and sexual assault. Which made me think: if you avoid difficult topics like these in safe fictional environments, isn’t it going to be harder when you’re inevitably confronted with problematic stuff IRL? Isn’t the point of fiction to allow us to step into people’s shoes and develop our systems of morality and empathy while knowing that what we’re experiencing isn’t real? And these days we’ve all stopped reading novels and just watch TikTok videos or whatever instead … great. Relevant tumblr post that I saw the other day.
- Read Minority rule by Ash Ssarkar: a leftist (and UK-based) critique of identity politics was sorely needed, so this was a good read. As someone who is always thinking about how to be woke while simultaneously acknowledging that people have different opinions and ideological purity is impossible, it was useful to see these issues articulated, although I was surprised to see that Sarkar doesn’t seem to put much stock in the “lived experience”, which is something I find useful for understanding why the notion of “absolute truth” peddled by the technofeudalist ruling class [I haven’t actually read Varoufakis’ book, I’m just trying to be cool, sorreeee] is not practicable. This is probably something I need to give more thought to, not least so I can describe it in less elliptical terms.
- Read Green dot by Madeleine Gray because I like fictional age gaps; moderately enjoyable. I masochistically looked at the Goodreads reviews, having not learnt my lesson at all, and discovered various people who on this occasion refused to enjoy the book because the protagonist wasn’t a likable person … but like, the entire point of the first chapter is to establish this. Are people taking against books because they have flawed protagonists now? Is this ideological purity bullshit again?
- There were various people who had left reviews for this who presumably have some amount of Goodreads clout as they mentioned having got the book as an ARC (tbf I don’t know how this stuff works at all, so maybe anyone can do so), but who wrote entirely in lowercase, sometimes just in a massive continuous paragraph, which made them quite hard to read. I would have thought people who regularly review books would be aware of the kinds of occasions where it’s useful to use standard writing conventions (yes, I eschew capital letters a lot myself, but only in shortform contexts).
- Read one book for work. A good one!
- Now reading The internet con by Cory Doctorow … I didn’t expect something by Mr “long thread” to be so dry? Not that it’s uninteresting, just more staid than I anticipated.
7. Recs
- Got around to transferring my Pixiv likes to my general bookmarks: lots of Rise Of The Ronin, a bit of Pokémon SV, a few Dions.
- Japanese in Anime & Manga looks like a useful resource although I don’t think my level is high enough to benefit from it much. That said, I recently experienced what is probably a very mundane realisation but felt like a huge breakthrough: learning kanji and relevant vocabulary together makes it much easier to learn the kanji readings. Enormous brain over here.
- This JavaScript tutorial is nicely designed and looks like it would actually be useful. As someone who tends to assign variables using
var
… I would probably benefit from this. - This computer science course also looks intriguing … maybe an ambitious project for once the fic is over …
8. Techbro
- Switched from Ubuntu to Debian.
- Redesigned the fic archive! My biggest triumph is using Beautiful Soup to extract the fic text from the exported HTML files and embed them in the fic pages instead of using iframes like an ancient HTML grandmother. There are a few more small things I need to implement, and I still need to check over the fic metadata to catch the inevitable things I missed.
- Finally posted my Citrus Con revue.
- Redesigned the siteroll to show descriptions of sites when hovering on buttons (thank u css selectors, my beloved). Someone at Citrus Con innocuously remarked that they didn’t find walls of buttons particularly useful when there is no indication of why the webmxter has actually included those sites, and that simple statement somehow rewired my brain. They’re right! I really think it’s important to consider why one is jumping on various web design bandwagons and I don’t think I’d done that on this occasion.
- Various edits/QOL improvements for the TCG SSG, where I am rapidly approaching my goal of almost complete automation.
- A few Emacs things i’ve discovered this month:
- site-wide initialisation files that are distribution-specific; I was running a certain operation in batch mode (the script for generating these very pages) and found that it was taking even longer in Debian because it was loading some ispell dictionary every time … turned that shit off, obviously, because I refuse to use spellcheckers.
M-x delete-file
literally deletes files and I need to stop going into the terminal to runrm
when I don’t need to.C-x 8 RET
lets you insert Unicode characters by their names?! with tab-completion? Amazing ★- TempEl looks like it could be interesting, although is there any need to switch from YASnippet?
M-x capitalize-region
also exists and seeing as the only title case I recognise is the one where literally every word starts with a capital letter, this will actually be useful for me.
9. Work
- Trying to get writing done before September … also resits … people apparently take leave at this time of year ha.
10. Upcoming
- Orchestra rehearsals will restart this month and we’re playing the New World symphony … yawn. Last time we did a concert under this conductor we played Shostakovich … what happened?!
- Probably going to go and see the local youth orchestra playing the same Shostakovich plus Pictures from an exhibition (sadly not the ELP version, but Ravel is good too, I guess). Probably going to resent the fact that the youths get to play good music while we have to do the New World Symphony (which, tbf, is really good to listen to, it’s just so boring to play).
- Also “come and play Tchaikovsky 6” coming up! This seems unduly ambitious.
- We have some vouchers for the local food and drink ecosystem in our possession (a birthday present from my father), so @adt has identified a posh restaurant in the middle of nowhere for us to have an unnecessarily complex time visiting.
- Kind of want to try my hand at non-static methods of site generation … I’ve got my eye on Flask even though syntax like
app = Flask(_name_)
and then@app.route()
is completely alien to me. My kind of Python is just iterating through lists looking for strings and then building new lists and writing them to an HTML file. Having said that, I did write the lineif varone[0][0][:-2] == vartwo[0][”name”][:-2]:
at the weekend, which is ridiculous.
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