Back from Japan!
Oct. 13th, 2023 09:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
got_quietEventually when I'm done doing all the catchup work I have left for myself I'll unpack and take some pictures of the little souvenirs I bought or something but for now I'm to tired to do basically anything. I don't even know how I'm typing right now honestly.
The trip was a lot of fun. I went with a group of friends and for everyone but myself it was their first time in the country, so it was fun to see how they reacted to everything, what surprised them or what they thought was stupid. The biggest takeaway seemed to be that food was cheap as fuck and high quality at the same time, and that some of the rules around rules following was over the top and silly.
I got to use a lot of my Japanese and felt both pretty confident that I was getting along ok and pretty frustrated that I was clearly misunderstanding a lot and struggling to communicate with anything that was too complicated. I really got to hunker down and study, but... after I take my 1000th nap of this week.
Since I didn't sleep much on the plane either way I ended up watching a few movies, but nothing that really made an impression. I saw the new Puss and Boots movie and that was the best of the batch out of all of them I think. Very nice animation, a zippy plot, and generally fun scenes from beginning to end. I saw the Jumanji sequel too and it was awful. I think I was juked by all the people saying that it was better than it had any right to be, because it was maybe not F tier but was definitely a D-. Every problem got solved by someone woodenly saying something like, "I believe in you, you can do it!" It was awful. Jack Black was fun as a a teen girl but he was literally the only good part of the entire show.
I think I ended up quitting on a movie too and don't even remember what it was... shows how much of an impact it made on me. What the fuck was it...
And I saw Guardians of the Galaxy 3. Clearly there is some massive plot gap between 2 and 3. I think maybe it's the last Thor movie? I've stopped giving a fuck about the MCU since endgame so I'm completely out of the loop now and not particularly interested in catching up. Even though I don't know what that massive floating skull is that everyone seems to have colonized the movie still made sense at least, and maybe it was a little bit blunt with its sentimentality but it's a Marvel film, I'm not looking for subtle. The movie was overall a fun adventure, and I think of all the casts in all the fractured and maybe not so fractured Marvel properties out there now the Guardians are probably the strongest at this point. Thor as a franchise is basically dead to me but even when I was enjoying it all the side characters outside of that nordic Professor and the goth chick were complete non-entities, whereas the guardians are all interesting in their own unique ways. I also have no idea how Gamora came back but found her new asshole self to be interesting, and I guess resetting her relationship with Peter is one way of getting to run that plot all over again.
The fandomgiftbox boxes got opened while I was in Japan, so I haven't had a chance to reply to my gifts quite yet. I'm hoping I'll be able to really sit down and read my presents closely this weekend, after work, but I'm super excited that I got an Arthur/Cobb fic and a Widdershins fic that seems to emphasize the husbandness of Whyborne and Griffin, so seems like my gifter tailored their fic to my gushing about their marriage on my journal.
Friday Five
1. Are you superstitious? No, pretty much not at all. The only thing that could maybe be interpreted as a superstition is actually more a manifestation of anxiety or something, believing that when bad things happen I've brought it on myself somehow every time. But I don't believe in pretty much any entity or system that isn't provable or testable.
2. Which superstitions do you believe in and act on? I don't believe in any superstitions, but I kind of like some traditions that are tied to superstitions? Like not gifting knives, and I have a medallion of St. Christopher in my car. But I have it because my mother gave it to me and it makes me think of her love, not because I think it's doing anything.
3. What superstition does someone close to you believe in and act on? I have friends who believe in ghosts, and some who are very intense about astrology. Live and let live.
4. Do you take any extra precautions on Friday the 13th? Nope.
5. Do you secretly judge superstitious people? I guess sometimes against my better self I can get judgemental. When I was younger I was seeking answers and hit Wicca and Catholicism and so on and I would like a lot of superstition or religious stuff to be true, but I just can't believe in it. I do still find a lot of superstition and religion to be interesting, and I like talking to people about what they believe. I have very little tolerance for people who try to insist to me that something is true when they can't prove it though, so I only really get judgemental when someone is trying to argue.
no subject
Date: 2023-10-14 03:00 pm (UTC)I only watched the first Jumanji with Jack Black and The Rock (the 1994 one was a childhood fave and that reboot is, in my view, okay).