(no subject)
Mar. 27th, 2015 08:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chocolatepotDid the Friday evening shift, so I get tomorrow off, and a three day weekend! Yay! I did not get a lot done, boo, because JeanMarie asked me to slow down giving her things to put away. (The majority of the backlog is archival.) While I spent a decent amount of time futzing around on the internet, I also investigated grants to get necessary PastPerfect updates (they only have it on one computer, it's madness) and worked on writing for a "mini-grant".
Around 7:30 I decided to go look at the dress room because why not? Pulled up the 1840s dress I thought might be a costume, and I'm about 99% sure it's not. It's just in fantastic condition. Wool, slightly crepey, printed with chiné pink flower-blobs on an apple-green background. Fan front, belled sleeves. Just gorgeous.
Last night I made a loaf of ricotta whole wheat olive oil bread with this recipe, plus some sunflower and flax seeds thrown in while I was kneading. It has a bit of a funny taste to it, but it's so nice and soft compared to my last whole wheat loaf (which didn't even really rise). I also let the dough sit a while before I started kneading, which I've read lets the whole wheat flour absorb more water.
I finished Raising Steam today when I popped home for a short break around three. I've been holding off writing about it until I finished. It feels awful to have such a low opinion of it - I mean, I started reading it on the day Pterry died - but it was so aggressively dull. (I'm assuming Pratchett dictated the book, but some people have suggested it was ghostwritten.)
There was no tension at all, every problem was solved after about a page. When there was supposed to be tension, I didn't buy it: the grags, despite being a heavy-handed Al-Qaeda parallel, didn't seem capable of doing anything more than an occasional throat-slitting; Vetinari's always been very interested in keeping Moist motivated, but after two books there's no teeth in it anymore. There were villains, Reacher Gilt the stage pirate and Cosmo with his dead finger! Nobody was really opposing Moist. And Vetinari's reasoning was "I want a more comfortable seat" instead of "the city needs this"? (I wondered if Vetinari's inability to solve the crossword and desire for comfort were maybe based in Pratchett's own issues, perhaps, but IDK.)
I only vaguely remember Unseen Academicals at this point, but it seems weird how goblins were suddenly introduced one or two books ago and yet they're universally loathed but then suddenly a triumph of anti-racism. Really, the anti-racism themes were so much better with the dwarves and trolls (although the troll accents seemed a ton more like 1920s-style racist dialogue than before - did my perceptions change ofrthe writing?), and it was so much more complex ... if you've essentially "solved" your fantasy racism analogue to the point where you have to introduce a new species in order to investigate racism some more, you've really oversimplified racism.
He worked a lot of past characters in, right, but I would have liked to see the witches and Carrot, not to mention Susan. Overall it felt like he was mainly concerned with pulling Discworld into the modern era, which is part of why he didn't include the characters I wanted - the witches and Susan and pure fantasy, and Carrot's archetype parody really only works with fantasy, and while Going Postal and Making Money included more fantasy than this the series has been trending toward science and progress for a while now. Calling back to Reaper Man kind of felt like an apology to the way he treated advancement in the first half of the series, as something wrong forcing its way into the universe, which I did like. The apology, I mean. Not that it needed to happen, but it was a nice way to acknowledge. That said, while I went into it seeing it as the end product of the change in the books since The Truth, a shift in philosophy promoting hope that humans can keep advancing science, an uncharitable interpretation from Amazon makes a pretty good point: 'technology and industry is amazing and brings unproblematic prosperity and social advances to all, and the only people who raise issues with its cultural and social impacts are insane religious fanatics'.
The female characters were disturbingly not there, which especially made the lack of witches or Susan stand out. Adora Belle had none of the spikiness that makes Moist call her Spike and was essentially a mannequin with a tag marked "WIFE" on it; Angua, Sally, and Cheery get looks in, Sybil and Lady Margolotta have cameos, and that's about it. Technically Iron Girder was a she and the Low King outed herself (which I was not into, it was way too ham-fisted to fit with the earlier books involving dwarf gender relations - and the way it resulted, in the end, with Aaron standing next to her to protect his lover and unborn child was just ...), but neither of those really counts.
Also, petty thing, but the repeated "loggysticks" was nonsensical. That kind of joke was funny with the "inn-sewer-ants" and "echo-gnomics", but there's no reason for them to be unfamiliar with "logistics".
Why does it have an average of four stars? The five star reviews seem to be real ones. My only thought is that there are a lot of loyal/pitying people there.
I hate Vimes now. After this, and Snuff, I'm not even sure I could reread a Watch book. IDK, maybe I will try to see if I hate him less in Guards! Guards! But what I really want to reread is a Susan book, several Witches books
Around 7:30 I decided to go look at the dress room because why not? Pulled up the 1840s dress I thought might be a costume, and I'm about 99% sure it's not. It's just in fantastic condition. Wool, slightly crepey, printed with chiné pink flower-blobs on an apple-green background. Fan front, belled sleeves. Just gorgeous.
Last night I made a loaf of ricotta whole wheat olive oil bread with this recipe, plus some sunflower and flax seeds thrown in while I was kneading. It has a bit of a funny taste to it, but it's so nice and soft compared to my last whole wheat loaf (which didn't even really rise). I also let the dough sit a while before I started kneading, which I've read lets the whole wheat flour absorb more water.
I finished Raising Steam today when I popped home for a short break around three. I've been holding off writing about it until I finished. It feels awful to have such a low opinion of it - I mean, I started reading it on the day Pterry died - but it was so aggressively dull. (I'm assuming Pratchett dictated the book, but some people have suggested it was ghostwritten.)
There was no tension at all, every problem was solved after about a page. When there was supposed to be tension, I didn't buy it: the grags, despite being a heavy-handed Al-Qaeda parallel, didn't seem capable of doing anything more than an occasional throat-slitting; Vetinari's always been very interested in keeping Moist motivated, but after two books there's no teeth in it anymore. There were villains, Reacher Gilt the stage pirate and Cosmo with his dead finger! Nobody was really opposing Moist. And Vetinari's reasoning was "I want a more comfortable seat" instead of "the city needs this"? (I wondered if Vetinari's inability to solve the crossword and desire for comfort were maybe based in Pratchett's own issues, perhaps, but IDK.)
I only vaguely remember Unseen Academicals at this point, but it seems weird how goblins were suddenly introduced one or two books ago and yet they're universally loathed but then suddenly a triumph of anti-racism. Really, the anti-racism themes were so much better with the dwarves and trolls (although the troll accents seemed a ton more like 1920s-style racist dialogue than before - did my perceptions change ofrthe writing?), and it was so much more complex ... if you've essentially "solved" your fantasy racism analogue to the point where you have to introduce a new species in order to investigate racism some more, you've really oversimplified racism.
He worked a lot of past characters in, right, but I would have liked to see the witches and Carrot, not to mention Susan. Overall it felt like he was mainly concerned with pulling Discworld into the modern era, which is part of why he didn't include the characters I wanted - the witches and Susan and pure fantasy, and Carrot's archetype parody really only works with fantasy, and while Going Postal and Making Money included more fantasy than this the series has been trending toward science and progress for a while now. Calling back to Reaper Man kind of felt like an apology to the way he treated advancement in the first half of the series, as something wrong forcing its way into the universe, which I did like. The apology, I mean. Not that it needed to happen, but it was a nice way to acknowledge. That said, while I went into it seeing it as the end product of the change in the books since The Truth, a shift in philosophy promoting hope that humans can keep advancing science, an uncharitable interpretation from Amazon makes a pretty good point: 'technology and industry is amazing and brings unproblematic prosperity and social advances to all, and the only people who raise issues with its cultural and social impacts are insane religious fanatics'.
The female characters were disturbingly not there, which especially made the lack of witches or Susan stand out. Adora Belle had none of the spikiness that makes Moist call her Spike and was essentially a mannequin with a tag marked "WIFE" on it; Angua, Sally, and Cheery get looks in, Sybil and Lady Margolotta have cameos, and that's about it. Technically Iron Girder was a she and the Low King outed herself (which I was not into, it was way too ham-fisted to fit with the earlier books involving dwarf gender relations - and the way it resulted, in the end, with Aaron standing next to her to protect his lover and unborn child was just ...), but neither of those really counts.
Also, petty thing, but the repeated "loggysticks" was nonsensical. That kind of joke was funny with the "inn-sewer-ants" and "echo-gnomics", but there's no reason for them to be unfamiliar with "logistics".
Why does it have an average of four stars? The five star reviews seem to be real ones. My only thought is that there are a lot of loyal/pitying people there.
I hate Vimes now. After this, and Snuff, I'm not even sure I could reread a Watch book. IDK, maybe I will try to see if I hate him less in Guards! Guards! But what I really want to reread is a Susan book, several Witches books
