Trying to not question too much what my brain is doing in its regeneration process from burnout. Yesterday, after finishing a great ARC and a Critical Role episode I found myself scrolling through old and even ancient story files, and pulling them down off the shelf, metaphorically, to leaf through.

I doubt I've actually hit a different stage of mental development, but there's definitely something cyclical happening with this. And it's always interesting to discover yourself at a fresh remove from older writing, and seeing new patterns/flaws in them.

I think I'm reorienting myself to myself as a writer, and learning a few things I didn't notice before about who that is, too.

It's weird to be setting up a new stage of life with new freedoms after a lot of restrictions, cramps on time. It's weirder to be trying to settle into what feels like a really attractive rhythm while the world continues to crack apart. While I wait to hear if my mom's cancer is being impeded by the treatments or if it's moving as fast as ever. (Do I need to keep an eye out for cheap flights? Or do I need to keep an eye out for places my parents could move into to be nearer to everyone? Do I need to just chill?)

And still today I got to write in a pretty sunroom while it rained about kids making art. So that was pretty great.

This is a rant that has been coming on for a while, because I've been binging on Lord of the Rings movie stuff after long abstinence, because my brother sent the family the Lego game for Christmas, and you know how it is with that little taste of an old addiction...

Anyway. Viewing it in a sort of post-LotR-dominant world is a little bittersweet.

Here's the thing: fans have gotten so jaded about it.

Yes, everyone has a right to gripe about the things left out. Whether there were inferiorities.
(For goodness sake, *I've* discovered that I've outgrown this vision of Faramir, and Strider's so hot I'm reluctant to leave that part of the movie behind...)
But fandom loves too well to hate a thing because it became popular with the mainstream, having gone outside the original fans (which is rot, my mother was in high school when these books were having their first revival of popularity, these fanchildren can get over it)

And it's so rank of privilege, in a way.

This movie was my Star Wars. I grew up watching movies with the toolset to create fantasy worlds from it's pioneering, but Lord of the Rings was the kind of awestruck experience that I think the first generation of Star Wars viewers felt in the theatre. There was an art to it, a skill to the mastery of new and old techniques, used to a whole other level. Suddenly, even what you could do with writing had to level up accordingly.

It was a masterpiece. John Howe and Alan Lee helped create a thematic realization of their whole bodies of work in fandom. Weta Workshop pushed the envelope for skill and artistry in both digital and physical design. Whole ranks of artists labored, some of them just to put together masses of chainmail, for years, that would hang right and be structured correctly.

And so maybe Peter Jackson has jumped the Phantom Menace shark with the Hobbit. My teen brothers love it, because it's the sprawling epic fantasy they are looking for, though the reason I love the Hobbit best of all books is because of the quiet threads of British humor and Bilbo's delightfully domestic outlook on these events of great moment. The man is an artist, like anyone, and can you imagine living with that over your head, as probably the greatest achievement of your life or at least the most notable? Who wouldn't go into a bit of sequel madness?

(And let's not even try to figure out how much studio politics must have gone into this incarnation, as well. Jackson got to produce LotR without any forces of expectations of a knowing public, and very little oversight from powers that be. That has no doubt changed a LOT.)

And you know what? I am SO SICK of feeling defensive because I fell in love with this movie, and gave it a piece of my heart I am never getting back.

Lord of the Rings was amazing.

So maybe Orlando Bloom, not so much.

And ten years from now, there'll be a more artsy rendition in which all the characters are less archetypical and more artsy, and I won't like it as well, but I'll give it a fair chance. But it'll be because PJ made it possible.

And no doubt some coming-of-age filmmaker who imprinted on that masterpiece will be doing something spectacular with innovations we can't even imagine.

Having to Google your own friend's recipe, because you never wrote it down?
Embarrassing.

Having that recipe be called Naamah's Ginger Sluts and totally the number 1 result?

PRICELESS


needing to create a co-op to find where they've relocated the molasses to in the store, only to find my mother texted me back with the location after I asked 12 people: totally my style.

it has been so long since I was really *in* LiveJournal that I am struck by nostalgia for another time just coming here.

However. I was looking at Sirens' page (rhinemouse is luring me to it)and they had a newsletter on their community on LJ, and I have been meaning to come and post photos of my adventure to Boston and my brother's wedding for those who know him and may still be here, or those who may be curious despite not knowing.

My brother's bride Abby, himself, my cousin Tim, and the bride's sister, Julia:

Look at how cute they all are.

It was both a fairly traditional wedding, and a fairly low-key one. They shortened the service, though they had it at the Episcopal church in Abby's hometown. The old chapel building was lovely, and since it was just family and friends-as-close-as-family, the smallness was nice.


It was a nice little day, gorgeous weather, and most of my family was able to come out for it. This is the extended clan:


That is, mainly my mom's side of the family was all there.

Enough with the pictures you cannot relate to, though:


You see before you my first manicure. This photo nicely obscures how well I had destroyed in the four days before the wedding XD

Anyway.

It was good to go home and realize that I like my life here well enough to not want to flee up there. I think the boys are cuter, but the roads (now I get to drive on them) are horrifying.

It is only fair that I tell you all about my latest geeky fiber project, The Beekeeper's Quilt.

It is a knitted thing where you stuff little hexagons and sew them together in to a quilt whatever size you can endurance-knit up to.
So my kinda thing.
First one!

Especially in the element of "this could get as complicated as you want it to", because you can make patterns out of the hexis, you can make patterns on each hexi that then become themed...
I cracked, and decided to go for "Superman Logo in shades of blue" which has not really progressed much beyond this first rough sketch:


But lately I was rereading The Beekeeper's Apprentice (which I probably went and ordered at my cute little bookstore here in Claremore because I keep typing out "Beekeeper" "Beekeeper" and thinking SEXY SILVER FOX SHERLOCK

So. I am contemplating whether this Superman logo is more of a SuperHolmes logo?
I also found the most precious little chest to use as a project carry-case, I am in love

I watched Hero, as advised, by the way

and I've been meaning to write you a thanks, farrandy and timeripple, as well as a review

but it was just one of those *experiences*, ones that kind of eat your words and settle into your bones, and trying to turn it into blog-fodder seems petty
(though I did just post a photo of Donnie Yen on my Suitblog because I am at least that shrewd.)

So yes, it was pretty, though I did wonder what my experience of it would have been if I wasn't so aware, from the beginning, about the color. If I would have had the red, red calligraphy house be a revelation, instead of something I was kind of waiting on.



It told it's story in a way that shook me up, too. The sparsity of words, and yet the complexity of the nature of those words--that's something I could live toward achieving. I started to wonder about the veracity of what Nameless was saying fairly early, but I only had that sense of unease snap into a strength for the narrative when the king (who seemed so magnificent for such a small role, and then it wasn't a small role, was it?) says,

I have fought them, and seen them, and they are upstanding people. I don't buy this passions-tragedy you are telling me.

And that is when I sat back and fell into the story.

Though I tell you, that huge calligraphy scene pretty well could have been a mini-movie for me, and I would have had plenty to let my mind chatter and feed on...

So my dad's filled up a digital photo frame for my grandmother's room, including some, uh, real throwbacks.

"Bethany is so ageless," says mom, "I have to see what stuff is around her to tell when it is."

...

I can usually tell by what horrible thing I am doing to my bangs, but I can see her point.

Evidence:


I am about 14 in these.

Today was the last day of the Belvidere Christmas rush.

I feel myself going down like a tree. (At 9:30!)
I've enjoyed actually *having* holiday things to go to, having new friends from work and so-on, but I think I've been shortchanged on sleep, introvert time, and water like whoa for a while now.

Tomorrow I will probably be a little selfish, or maybe Monday I will, though the family's all home, and SPIN. Start a new knitting project just for me, now the sweater for my god-daughter is drying.
(It's not getting to her by Christmas. Which is fine, her parents aren't together anymore, and I'm pretty sure her birthday last month was a private war gift-off. It may be better as a follow-up to all the toys, at some remove.)

I got some poems sent out today.

I'm just feeling sick about Duotrope taking their public search away starting in January, which is NOT HELPFUL in psyching myself up to look for markets, but c'est la vie, dou shiyo mo nai yo, what can you do about such things?

I made this falling-star Calcifer yarn, and it pleases me:


Porthaven Marshes

It has bamboo streaks like the multicolored star-trails in the anime, which you can see better in some of the photos at the shop listing there. This photo is a bit rosy, it's  quite dark, really, except for the light parts...