The actual garden beds are the last on my list unfortunately. Maybe next year I'll grow some food. Right now I am just trying to resurrect the lawn and get the flower beds cleaned up so I can get some nice things put in.
Marley is a sweet cat, very loving and affectionate. Despite her size though, she is a huge lover of the greater Outside region of the world, and stands ever vigilant.
This long memorial day weekend I watched two interesting movies. On their own I probably would not have decided to write about them but together it was an interesting juxtaposition of filmography methods and storytelling conventions.
Primer
This movie won the 2004 Sundance jury prize for dramas, but I'm having a hard time understanding how, within the confines of a single linear viewing one could feel confident enough to vote for this movie in a competition.
The premise of Primer is that there are four individuals that work together in their off-hours as a sort of garage based design and patent development team. They personify that bygone era when unique inventions (such as computers) were dreamt and created inside a garage by a few smart, driven individuals.
The story that ensues was difficult to follow. The storytelling is divergent and disjointed, but it is on purpose, and every choice the produces made in the presentation was very intentional. The best recommendation concerning this file would be to watch it with a lot of attention to detail, otherwise you'll miss too much and half way through need to either start over, or stop watching.
Oh, they made it on a budget of only $7,000.
Pan's Labyrinth
This movie was billed as a fairy tale for adults, but in all honesty the only reason it is for adults is because of the Quentin Tarantino-esque approach towards violence in this film.
It is fitting and I don't find the violence itself to be out of place in this film considering that traditional fairy tales were often full of violence, blood, and other unsavory things before Disney white-washed them for use as cartoons. I do however take offense as the pointlessness of some of it.
The complaint about violence for violence's sake aside, I enjoyed this movie quite a bit from an aesthetic stand point. The camera work was excellent and a majority of the movie was so well framed that I found myself almost insulted when there was a shot that did not just captivate me with how it was setup.
I would compliment the set design as well but now in this day and age, it is too hard to tell what is computer generated and what is actual lighting and hardware work. A good combination of the two was used here and meshed very well producing a very rich mosaic background for the story that unfolds.
Overall I give this movie a very high ranking and will note it as one of my favorites, inspite of the gratuitousness of the Captain's violent nature. Rather than being a fairy tale for adults, if they had made the violence on the part of the Captain more purposeful, I would have called this a true fairy tale.
Movies aside, Marley has recovered from her abscesses beautifully and craves to return to the outdoors like a fish craves water. I am continuing to deny her this luxury as I do not trust her to make good choices about staying out of fights quite yet. I believe she agrees with me because she often escapes through an open crack of the door, but readily returns to me when called.
The weather is starting to get nice again and I can't wait to go hiking again. Honor's last trip with me out into the Willamette National Forest was a short one and in retrospect, probably not good for him since his knees were likely already damaged at that point.
I will probably exclude him from some of my day hikes early this season to prevent him from causing any unnecessary stress on his newly repaired knees. It will be difficult though to leave him behind.
As it is though, he seems to be doing pretty well and holds up well for a 30 minute walk around the neighborhood. I'm thinking we may try something a little longer and take a trip up to the Disc Golf course this weekend.
Hopefully this summer Honor and I can relax on the banks of a mountain stream, relaxing and enjoying some of that good old fashioned back country air.
I decided to take a look at an anime series I heard about a year or two ago called Utawarerumono. I've been watching it using the the Netflix Play Instant feature, which means I am watching in it with the English dubs.
I was always (and still am) a huge advocate of original language playback. The biggest reason is because language helps contain culture and even if you don't understand the spoke word, it helps declinate the division between the listener's culture and the source of the material.
Anime uses a lot of cliche animations as well to go with character reactions that are very Japanese in origin, and the attempt to accommodate that in English ends up feeling clumsy.
That said, on the topic of Utawarerumono, I'm finding it to be mildly uninteresting. I appreciate the first two episodes but everything since has left me feeling uncaring and unmotivated to watch more.
I realize that when I watch anime, it tends to be for the material that is designed to investigate human emotion, relation, and the condition of living. I enjoy this primarily because it is interesting to compare the methods that different cultures will use to investigate these topics, as well as the conclusions that they draw, or in the case of Japan, the questions they find worthy of consideration.
Utawarerumono has very little of this and now, half way through the series they are just now hinting at something I feel should have been a major plot point to the main character: He has no recollection of his past.
I'm considering finding a plot synopsis for the series and skip watching the rest of the series.
And now for the mandatory Honor picture!
It has been a long night. I read once that you should never spend more than an hour at a time lying in bed trying to sleep, something about that making the process of getting to sleep more difficult.
Ultimately though it is 2:11 AM and I am still awake.
Honor keeps coming out to check on me. He slowly pads up to me, out here at the computer and slightly nudges my leg. Next, a small sigh and he collapses to the floor at my feet. A few minutes later he gets up and returns to the bedroom.
Comforting as it is, it makes me feel a little guilty. Though I'm in the stress zone now that work approaches in only six hours.
Because I messed up the URL for the image yesterday, and because I haven't written anything to edit entries and I'm too lazy to go in and do an SQL replace query at the moment, I'm going to add a new image here of my best friend.
Fetch time yet?