3 things: grocery stores and the closing thereof; lgbtfest and asexuality; Code Geass

[edenfalling]

1. I went grocery shopping this evening and discovered that Tops has decided to close the P&C location on Hancock St. (Tops is a grocery chain that recently bought most of the old P&C grocery chain; what they didn't claim, Price Chopper did.) Either they were not able to negotiate rents with the couple who own the site, or they decided the store was not profitable enough.

It will close in mid-April.

This is unfortunate, as that store was the only grocery store within walking distance of my apartment, and all other stores require a twenty-minute walk into town and then a fifteen or thirty-minute bus ride (in other words, forget buying dairy products; they will curdle) or a ten minute walk and a five minute bus ride to the ultra-discount Aldi, and I don't really like discount stores; they have such awful selection.

So it looks as though I will be joining the Ithaca car share program and doing all my shopping once a week down at Wegmans. *sigh* Damn it all to hell.

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2. In a fit of madness, I signed up (at least, I think I signed up) for this year's lgbtfest. I found a prompt that really spoke to me in a fandom I know. I think it may have originally been intended to be about a man dealing with subsidiary issues of being gay, but it can be read equally validly as a man dealing with asexuality, and upon considering said character (Astrin Ymris, from Patricia McKillip's Riddle Master trilogy), I suddenly cannot see him as anything but asexual and cannot figure out why I didn't realize that before.

And the fest is allowing prompts and stories about asexual issues this year, so my interpretation is allowable. Yay!

I have realized over the years that while I see some characters as asexual and tend to write most people as not especially interested in sex and/or romance unless said desires are notable character traits or sex is the point of a given story, I have never really written about asexuality as an issue. It will be interesting to try. It's something weirdly personal, in a way that other issues aren't usually for me. (Not even feminism, because for me, being female and therefore part of a community of women and girls has never been a question, whereas being asexual is something it took me time to realize and start working out what the implications meant for me on a practical and emotional level. And I still have not told my family in so many words, though I have danced very pointedly up and down the edges of the issue.)

Of course, from another point of view a ridiculous amount of stuff I write is already dealing with asexuality and/or aromanticism, since even when I am writing sex and romance, my treatment of said elements is awfully dry and glossed over, and I place more importance on friendship and familial relationships anyway. But still, the one time I previously tried writing a story specifically about asexuality, I was still not down with the whole implications of the thing (I had identified myself as asexual, but not really connected that to there being other asexual people) and therefore tried to justify a character's planned asexuality as nerve damage or some-such instead of just letting his orientation be natural and normal. That pathologizing of my own orientation is probably as much a reason I abandoned that story as my growing lack of interest in Harry Potter in general.

Anyway, hopefully I will be working on both my issues and this new story, and have something presentable done at the end of May.

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3. I've been overdosing on Code Geass fanfic the past few days. (You may have noticed over the years that I have a thing for mind games and antiheroes, though I rarely write them. I also have a thing for explorations of morality and ethics, which I do write about. Also, war stories are cool.) The upshot of this is that I have added the series to my Netflix queue and am morbidly curious about whether I'll enjoy it.

Comments

[ladyofshallnot.livejournal.com]

Hey, some people don't have Wegmans, and they live sad, horrible, empty lives.

They closed the P&C in the town next to mine, and now the nearest grocery store is a twenty minute drive with no public transportation to speak of. :/ But hey, the put in a Family Dollar!

[edenfalling]

In all honesty, the Ithaca Wegmans scares me. It's just too huge! ...But they do have a very nice selection of tea, and apparently they have very high employee satisfaction for a grocery chain, so I am sure I will get used to it.

I hate the way 95% of America is designed on the assumption that every owns a car. :-(

[ladyofshallnot.livejournal.com]

Have you ever been to the one in Pittsford? It's almost traumatizing.

Unfortunately, I hate driving more than I dislike the idea of living in a city, so I may be stuck with the inevitability.

[autumnia]

I think you'll like Code Geass, if you haven't seen it before. The whole situation (All hail Britannia vs Japan) made for an interesting series. It reminded me a bit of the Gundam Seed series with all the machinery involved. Lelouch, Kallen, Suzuku... they all have their own demons to battle, and they go about figuring where/who they should be differently. :-)

[not-croaker.livejournal.com]

I once described Code Geass to a Warsie fan as "Imagine if Grand Admiral Thrawn joined the Rebellion."

But yeah, it's more than just a Thirty Xanatos Pileup. Although it's fun to watch for that alone. I just wish we'd gotten the originally-planned Season 2.

[edenfalling]

Oooh! I always liked Thrawn. He was like the only sane man in the entire SW universe sometimes.

[edenfalling]

I have not seen Code Geass yet. (I have a terrible habit of reading fanfic for novels, shows, and movies that I have not seen/read and often never do go on to see/read. It's fun to figure out the bones of a series by seeing the changes people ring on it.) But what I have seen of people discussing it does sound like it's right up my ally, so long as it's carried out well. :-)

[vehrec.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure how Code Geass will pan out for you. I certainly know that every time I look into it I get driven away. If not by the themes, then by the CLAMP art or by the way it just drops all these plot threads when it jumps from one season to the next.

That, and it's most decidedly a filthy stinking mecha-scum infested show that should be purged with a face-full of shaped charge from the earth! I've got a tank as an icon for a reason, not a freaking Gundam. And in the timespace of about a year in universe, CG makes the jump from unrealistic 'real robot' show to hyper-unrealistic 'super-robots' flying around and spamming beams at one another. Blah. Not my style of military at all.

[valles-uf.livejournal.com]

This is probably rather over the line of me, but...

Welcome to the produce aisle! We have lettuce, fruits, and vegetables! Sorry, no meats here, try three aisle over.

[vehrec.livejournal.com]

:P

Yes, I am aware that it is a bit strange to complain about these things here, but I simply don't think it's right to have superior damage resistance when your armor, judging by mass and area it must cover, can't be much thicker than tinfoil. I'm the kind of person who takes a long hard look at Star Wars, and then gets out a graphing calculator to figure out how much power a Star Destroyer should have by scaling the Death Star's reactor.

[edenfalling]

I think mechas are inherently silly, but my general attitude is that they are a cross between a mcguffin and unacknowledged "magic" (and apparently Code Geass already involves a naturally occuring room temperature superconducting mineral or something like that?) so I am not expecting realism from them. In a show that's based on the existence of a literal Evil Eye, I think this is probably wise. :-)

I kind of like CLAMP's art style, actually, so that will not be an issue.

[vehrec.livejournal.com]

My general attitude towards mecha is that they can obviously only exist by cultural or authorial fiat. By which I mean, superconducting minerals aren't going to work any better in roller skates on the feet of your mechs than they are turning the treads of a tank. In a sane universe, there would be no inherent protective and offensive advantage to using a chassis that stands twice as tall and weighs a quarter as much as your typical AFV. And since the show started out with realistic militaries but then immediately jumps on the 'Mecha>>>>>everything else' bandwagon, I've got a special bone to pick with them.

Yeah well, the art doesn't do my mind much good when I realize that 2/3 of these characters, as a rule of thumb, is leg. I'm fairly certain people aren't built on those proportions. And what's left universally looks to me like it could use a couple sandwiches.

[edenfalling]

I think the general justification for mechas is, bluntly, "They look cool, so there." No other considerations need apply. *wry*

Ah, so you are looking for realism in art as well as in military concepts? Fair enough. I am mostly looking for clarity -- can I understand what is happening, can I consistently recognize characters as themselves and tell characters apart from each other, does the art tell the story rather than obscuring it, etc. After that aesthetic appeal does come into play, but I can appreciate a lot of things as attractive. (Also, I think some artwork styles are pretty and/or cool on a linework, design, and coloring level even though they may be awful when judged as a realistic depiction of whatever they're portraying. CLAMP is not that great at realism, but they are good at storytelling and their work is just pretty. YMMV, obviously!)

[vehrec.livejournal.com]

I think we'll need to agree to disagree on this point.

Clarity, I am willing to sacrifice on the alter of storytelling. I loved FLCL, despite the fact I didn't understand it. I am also willing to at times sacrifice realism, such as in the case of Gurren Lagann. The key difference being, Gurren Lagann did not make me EXPECT realism. For various reasons, I went into Code Geas expecting a semi-serious Alternate History. It is a genre that I have held to an unusually high, perhaps unrealistic standard of realism. I judged it according to my expectations of that genre, which it failed to measure up against. I'll admit, I probably judged it like that because the first encounter I had with it was with secondary materials and the background timeline, a thing riddled with names like Queen Elizabeth, Ceaser, and Napoleon. As a result, I formed ideas about the series that were unrealistic. Unfortunately, those ideas were about the only things that had drawn me in in the first place.

[tjalorak.livejournal.com]

Eh. Code Geass is sort of hit and miss. Some great plans but also some moments of searing stupidity.

[edenfalling]

Most stories are hit and miss. The question is which side the balance will fall on for me, since that's not a question anyone else can answer until I watch the show for myself. (There are some stories I am willing to forgive all kinds of idiocy because they're awesome in other ways. There are some stories I cannot forgive much of anything. And there's no accurate way of telling beforehand, annoyingly enough. *sour face*)

[willowgreen.livejournal.com]

Wah! That was *my* P&C when I lived on Yates St. I'm very sorry to hear it's closing. Any chance of saving it with a good old-fashioned Ithaca-style protest?

[edenfalling]

Alas, I am inclined to doubt it. :-( It seriously sucks, though, because there are a lot of people in Ithaca without cars, and this P&C was therefore the only accessible store for a lot of people in Northside and Fall Creek.

[uminohikari.livejournal.com]

Mmm, season one and two for CG can ping very differently actually. Just a heads up :D

[edenfalling]

Fair enough -- I will keep that in mind. :-)

[tealrose39.livejournal.com]

I like code geass. lelouch and light from death note kind of remind me of each other, though i'm happier with lelouch as a character, being not as totally amoral as light.

btw, if you have any good suggestions for cg fic, would you post it? actually, i'd be interested in any recs that you have in any fandom. good writers give good recs, that's my favorite way to find fics.

speaking of anti-heroes, morality, ect. ect. have you seen Dexter yet? the show with a serial killer as the protagonist? worth it.

[edenfalling]

I... you know, I have read at least a hundred fics since Sunday and have completely lost track of which ones were good. *headdesk* I may see about rounding up some links Saturday afternoon, though.

I have not seen Dexter the show, but I have read the first three books in Jeff Lindsay's series, which the show was based on. The first two are very good. The third goes off in a stupid direction, but is still interesting. I have not read the fourth.