Recent-ish Media

I saw Spiderman: Into the Spider-Verse in a theater. Its been a really long time since I saw a movie in a theater and it was super nice. R and I made a date of it and had lunch out before the movie. Its very meta which I thought was fun. I mostly liked the animation but sometimes I thought it was bit distracting. Its got all these old school comic book dots which took me a bit to adjust to.

I also got Your Name, a recent anime movie, out of the library and watched it last week. It is extremely pretty, both the small rural town and Tokyo are look amazing. I was worried for a bit that the movie might set up a contrast but making Tokyo ugly and I'm glad it didn't. There's quite a bit of Shintoism in here that I enjoyed but don't really feel like I can comment on. There where some bits where I felt like the male character had more agency than the female character, but there was also some interesting commentary on gender socialization. (And now I'm having complex thoughts about my tolerance of ambiguity it media presentation of straight vs queer relationships ... I need to think about it more and possibly get some more examples to ponder.)

I made my self a list of longer stuff to read for Hugo nominations and I've been working my way through it. Its not a super long list. Rather than list everything I might I want read I mostly just listed the things that I think I might really love, and all of the stuff I actually own that is eligible that I haven't read yet since I tend to only buy things that I think I'll really love anyways. I'm going to talk about some highlights form the list below.

Sing for the Coming of the Longest Night by Katherine Fabian and Iona Datt Sharma was indeed wonderful. There's scene with a queer not very observant found family celebrating Shabbat that was amazing. It really touched on what Jewish rituals mean to me. The rest of the novella was lovely too --so many found family feels.

I reread the 1st two graphic novels in The Nameless City by Faith Erin Hicks so I could read The Divided Earth the third and final book. I liked the ending. Plus Rat and Kai's friendship is so great. I had not read this since before I watched Avatar: The Last Airbender but this time through I really noticed the influence.

I've started reading In the Vanishers’ Palace finally and I really like the worldbuilding so far and think the character are interesting but I'm not sure about the promised romance.

On the other hand I've made very little progress on finishing up my 2018 short fiction reading which is disappointing. I think once I finish the longer works I own I'm going to focus more on the short fiction side of Hugo reading - my TBR bookmark folder is pretty big.

Also if anyone else is going to FOGcon programming sign ups are now open!