stuff about stuff
9 Nov 2013 22:08![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
domarzione* Captain America: the Winter Soldier stuff: there was a cam video clip -- apparently since deleted -- of the extended trailer (that's running before the 3D version of Thor: the Dark World, I believe), which in turn is actually just the footage shown in Hall H back in July during SDCC. It has the full version of the elevator fight scene, which is gloriously brutal, a shot of Sharon Carter (sadly looking more Porn Star Lawyer than badass field agent, but we can hope that's misleading), and the original reveal of The Winter Soldier, which is him picking up the shield out of the ashes -- probably of the crashed Helicarrier -- with his metal hand and then a pan up for a full body and face shot. (here's a gifset from Tumblr of that) I like the idea of eyeblack as a sort of crude homage to the domino mask, which would have been pointless and dopey-looking IRL. It's disturbing and it makes the Winter Soldier look a lot more of a menace.
* I'll probably post the next chapter of Revenant here tomorrow; it's already up at AO3, since that's where most of the readers are. I've been noticing a pretty massive word count discrepancy between my document and what AO3 has; through seven chapters, Evernote says it's 40,611 words, but AO3 is only ringing up 34,778. That's a big difference, enough to initially worry me that I had deleted text or was missing a chapter on AO3, but I'm not. I can't explain it, either. I double-checked and my document word count is correct. Ah, well. Nobody is coming to that story for its brevity, so it's not like it's a bait-and-switch.
* It's very rare that I get really pissed off at a book. If it's bad, I stop reading it. But I just finished Henning Markell's last Wallander mystery, The Troubled Man, and I am pissed off. The novel is a farewell tour, the last Kurt Wallander story in chronological order, and Mankell spends the entire book utterly destroying the world he's built before turning on his own protagonist. Past recurring characters show up to be vilified or killed or both, the policework that Wallander has spent his life dedicated to is hardly present, and then Wallander himself is sent spinning further out of control before being sucked into the vortex of Alzheimer's disease, the end of the book almost literally turning into a black hole because he's the narrator. I was so appalled. I read this one out of order -- I got it out of NYPL's ebook collection -- and now I'm seriously debating whether I want to go back and read the ones I've skipped because I'm just that pissed off. I already know I don't want to read the Linda Wallander book; I have never liked Linda and she's self-absorbed and shrewish and horrible in The Troubled Man.
I know Scandinavian mysteries are brutal and nihilistic as hell; I usually don't read them because they are too sadistic for me. I don't mind a dark story, but they tend to be written more for the torture porn and less for the mystery. But the nihilism in Wallander has always been a little more existential; there's more going on than lovingly detailed descriptions of rape and murder while the dysfunctional protagonist wades through the muck of their miserable life to solve the case through no luck of their own. Not that Kurt Wallander isn't largely dysfunctional and has to wade through his self-made misery to solve the case, just that he doesn't need hip-waders to do it and he's still thought things through.
* I'll probably post the next chapter of Revenant here tomorrow; it's already up at AO3, since that's where most of the readers are. I've been noticing a pretty massive word count discrepancy between my document and what AO3 has; through seven chapters, Evernote says it's 40,611 words, but AO3 is only ringing up 34,778. That's a big difference, enough to initially worry me that I had deleted text or was missing a chapter on AO3, but I'm not. I can't explain it, either. I double-checked and my document word count is correct. Ah, well. Nobody is coming to that story for its brevity, so it's not like it's a bait-and-switch.
* It's very rare that I get really pissed off at a book. If it's bad, I stop reading it. But I just finished Henning Markell's last Wallander mystery, The Troubled Man, and I am pissed off. The novel is a farewell tour, the last Kurt Wallander story in chronological order, and Mankell spends the entire book utterly destroying the world he's built before turning on his own protagonist. Past recurring characters show up to be vilified or killed or both, the policework that Wallander has spent his life dedicated to is hardly present, and then Wallander himself is sent spinning further out of control before being sucked into the vortex of Alzheimer's disease, the end of the book almost literally turning into a black hole because he's the narrator. I was so appalled. I read this one out of order -- I got it out of NYPL's ebook collection -- and now I'm seriously debating whether I want to go back and read the ones I've skipped because I'm just that pissed off. I already know I don't want to read the Linda Wallander book; I have never liked Linda and she's self-absorbed and shrewish and horrible in The Troubled Man.
I know Scandinavian mysteries are brutal and nihilistic as hell; I usually don't read them because they are too sadistic for me. I don't mind a dark story, but they tend to be written more for the torture porn and less for the mystery. But the nihilism in Wallander has always been a little more existential; there's more going on than lovingly detailed descriptions of rape and murder while the dysfunctional protagonist wades through the muck of their miserable life to solve the case through no luck of their own. Not that Kurt Wallander isn't largely dysfunctional and has to wade through his self-made misery to solve the case, just that he doesn't need hip-waders to do it and he's still thought things through.
