The Breslau Files

So I'm in Wroclaw, doing my festival gig. It's way more hardcore than I remembered. On the first day, we left work at 4:30a.m. And it wasn't the happy go lucky kind of "oh my look at the time" 4:30. It was gnaw your arm off get me outta here 4:30.

And then the same thing happened on the next day.

Now we're down to leaving around midnight, so I feel almost relaxed.

I'm eating tons of really unhealthy food and quite possibly already gained a couple kilos. Perhaps in response to that, my jaw stopped working today. It's happened to me once already, and last time mild anti-inflammation medicine worked, so I went to the doctor and told him just that. And he prescribed me Ketonal, which from what I understand is something akin to a horse tranquilizer. Anyway, I popped one and suddenly I was able to chew again, so I'm not complaining.

The work itself is kind of a pain, but the company is good. My co-translator was a very good bet. She is probably the most effortlessly cool person I know, has a good sense of humor, and appears to be completely unphasable, which comes in handy when dealing with the assorted freaks and geeks of ENH. Case in point - tonight, festival club:

bdq, walking up to her at the bar: Hello. I just wanted to look into your eyes.
dorota, meeting his gaze levelly, after a beat: And now, good bye.

There's humor, but it's of the unquotable, highly hermetic variety - either related to the sometimes absurd nature of our work, or springing from exhausted brainfarts. The current expression du jour is "shut down the reactors!", inserted whenever we have absolutely no idea what the person in the movie we're translating is saying (it's an actual quote from one of the translations, which inexplicably appeared on the screen instead of "I have a headache" or something equally unrelated).

I took it easy with alcohol tonight on account of the horse tranquilizer, so I had a rather Sober and Unkissed evening, but that was more than made up for by the unusually flirty Consort to the Beast, and the server goblin, who has taken to - literally - humping the wall. Something's gotta give soon, and I just hope I'm not anywhere near when it happens.

Oh, also: met (well, got better acquainted with, really) two new, potentially stellar people. So there's that.

Quickie

I already wrote about Pajiba vs. io9, but I forgot to mention that while io9's True Blood recaps are absolutely hilarious, Pajiba's are... just terrible. Bloated, boring, and utterly devoid of wit. (Yet their Entourage coverage is inspired. Go figure.)

Anyway, I loved the last episode so much that I even checked out the Pajiba recap, and sure enough - the things I liked about it most were the exact same things that got panned in the first paragraph. And the entire episode was written off as a disaster.

Meanwhile, I thought it was absolutely hilarious. Anna Paquin's delivery killed, I watched her crying scene at least 3 times... (actually, you can watch it here, in the io9 recap, and read the whole damn thing while you're at it. "Miley Cyrus, is that you?") I now firmly believe that all the flak she gets for playing Sookie is completely undeserved, it's not her fault her character's unlikable, and whenever they let her fly, she soars. I'm so happy that her Bill Compton's "Sookeh!" impression was just a first taste, and I hope they keep giving her comic material.

The new werewolf guy is a very nice addition, and I'll be completely on board once 1) I get over how cartoonish his body is and 2) he stops reminding me of Felicity's Scott Foley gone the way of the steroid.

The deranged new vampire guy is pure win, and he was Alvaro de la Quadra, the Spanish ambassador in Elizabeth, so obviously he was meant to rock (the laughable post-orgasmic void line from the previous ep notwithstanding). His car conversation with Tara was golden.

"It's skinny!" Even background characters got good material!

And they played that beautiful Massive Attack song in the strip club scene.

Ok, to play us out: a short interview with Sookie and the new werewolf guy.

I'm getting over the body as we speak, but at some angles, Noel Crane still rears his wholesome head.

Otherwise we'd go crazy

The festival is almost upon us, and it has imbued everyone involved with a seething hatred for Jean-Luc Godard. I get to translate a metric ton of his brain sewage into English, so I've developed a bit of an immunity, but still, sometimes the pain pushes through. To wit:

So, we asked to be told only about this, not about us, not about you – about something between us and you, you, who are we, we, who are you, we, who came from you. We placed “us” among “us”. We’re among us. Television is a family matter. Dad – day and mom- night. Dad – before and mom – after.

And then 20 more hours of that. Fun!

Anyway, I'm in more or less constant contact with my boss/server goblin, who uploads* the movies I then distribute among our translators. Whenever she's about to leave her house, she asks if I need something uploaded before she goes. It's a sort of ritual. At one point, when I copy-and-pasted my order from our Big Spreadsheet, she went "Pfff! How about a challenge for a change?" So when I sent her my next order, I snuck in Inception, in full Big Spreadsheet regalia (director, running time, language, etc). This became a sort of running joke, until last night I got another yousendit package with a file called Inception. Inside it was this:

You've guessed it. That's Jean-Luc Godard.

Sometimes it's worth it.

* through a series of trial yousendit accounts, so I've already received files from: Buffy Summers, Amber Benson, Sookie Stackhouse, James Marsters...

Mosaic

As I grew up, I discovered that I loved to wear women's clothing as a way to express my sexuality and myself, even though I was quite evidently straight (...) My later girlfriends usually found it a huge turn on and we'd always have fun trading clothes, amongst other things (...) The story I always tell people is I was about ten years old, swimming at my grandmother's house. My cousin and I were in front of a mirror, he had a buzz cut hairdo, and I had a little kid mullet. All of a sudden, he bursts out laughing and pointing at me and the bit of wet hair that was kind of curled around my neck and says,"HA HA, you look like a girl! You look like a girl!" I did look like a girl. I had very soft features for a boy and with my hair a bit longer, it wasn't a hard sell. But his teasing didn't make me feel bad. I thought I looked kind of... cool. I was intrigued by my androgyny and felt almost empowered by it. So I grew up thinking that since I certainly wasn't born to look like some gruff, muscled out Dude-Guy, I might as well work with what the good lord gave me, which happened to be a good, sassy pout and a sweet ass. So, off I went.

Godspeed.

Charting out and analyzing all the different permutations has never been my thing, but something about this quote fascinated me. Well, not something, it's not nearly as vague as that: straight guys acknowledging they have a sassy (sassy! I died and went to heaven) pout and a sweet ass fascinate me. That's such an... abundant, multi-pronged space. Every time I stumble upon someone of this ilk, I feel slightly better about the world at large.

Oh, and here's the author:

Airbending

I already love M. Night Shyamalan's Avatar: The Last Airbender, just for inspiring critics from pajiba and io9 to reach new heights of enlightened hilarity. Here are some choice bits:

And yet, there is no life. It feels half-speed like a dry run of the production. In fact, Shyamalan went out of his way to suck any and all life out of the original material, like a Twihard horking feathers as she chews through her Cullenpillow.

Aang’s animal companions are practically an afterthought. Given personality in the series, here they were a burden on the budget. Momo, the lemur-bat, is akin to the monkeys from the Indiana Jones series. In the movie, we seem him occasionally flying around in the background. There might be one scene where we actually get shots of him rifling through a closet. He looks cool, which is more than I can say for dear Appa, the flying six-legged furry bison. Appa was my favorite part of the series. Here, it’s like Snuffleupagus washed up on the island Where the Wild Things Are and got gang raped repeatedly, until one of the offspring developed the ability to fly and escape.

- Pajiba

All the story beats from the show's first season are still present, but Shyamalan manages to make them appear totally arbitrary. Stuff happens, and then more stuff happens, and what does it mean? We never know, because it's time for more stuff to happen. You start out laughing at how random and mindless everything in this movie is, but about an hour into it, you realize that the movie is actually laughing at you, for watching it in the first place. And it's laughing louder than you are, because it's got Dolby surround-sound and you're choking on your suspension of disbelief.

And then there's Shaun Toub, who stands out for the opposite reason: He's an honest-to-shit actual actor, and he looks as out of place as a zebra that's wandered into an alpaca farm. You can actually watch the realization dawn over Toub's face that nobody else is doing any acting in this film, but he soldiers on, dedicated to his craft in spite of everything. Toub, who's playing the uncle of Dev Patel's tormented Prince Zuko, is the real tragic hero of this movie, as you watch him struggle to cling to his dignity as everyone around him drowns in narrative sewage.

- io9

Both are worth a read, though lately I've found myself favoring the io9 stuff. Pajiba is great at these thorough, profanity- and vitriol-laced critical behemoths, whereas io9 is more of a breezy zinger acrobat. And with all the Godard bullcrap sloshing around my brain, I'm currently in the market for something lighter.

Also, they have a real knack for killer lead-ins. My favorite one of late is this: "Taiwan's NMA News creates computer-animated depictions of current events that drive a flaming dune buggy into the uncanny valley. NMA's 3D take on the Leno-Conan tiff was amusing, but their version of the Al Gore sex scandal allegations is transcendental..."

I giggled like a lunatic, and that was before Janek reminded me what the uncanny valley actually was.