All the tropical flowers in the greenhouses at the Botanic Gardens are currently in bloom. I’ve never caught them in bloom before, and had a fairly wonderful time going through and taking pictures in the warm serenity of the greenhouses. Of course, this is one of like two pictures that I actually know what I was taking a picture *of*, and mostly I didn’t think to take pictures of the accompanying labels, either (primarily because it’s never really clear to me which label belongs with which set of plants unless…
Author: mizkit
Picoreview: American Hustle
Picoreview: American Hustle: better than I expected, even given all its glowing reviews. Much of that is because I was expecting to hate all the characters but instead found myself enjoying them all to a fair degree. Brad Cooper plays an FBI agent who’s not as smart as he thinks he is; an almost unrecognizeable Christian Bale plays a con artist who *is* as smart–at least about cons—as he thinks he is. I was basically expecting everybody to be about as sympathetic as the characters in August: Osage County, but…
Recent Reads: The School for Manners
My reading lately has not been going so well. I’m bouncing off a lot of well-reviewed books hard, and I’m retreating to fun and easy reads. I’ve said before that I enjoy reading MC Beaton’s books because they take me about 70 minutes and therefore allow me to feel like I’m reading a lot, even if in wordcount I’m not really. I’d been reading Agatha Raisin and Hamish McBeth, but I picked up one of her Regencies lately and it was great fun, so I’ve recently blown through the whole…
Picoreview: August: Osage County
Picoreview: August: Osage County is a story about a wildly dysfunctional family, with an absolutely dreadful matriarch played by Meryl Streep and–primarily, although really not at all singularly–her personal war with her oldest daughter, played by Julia Roberts. The real skill of the performances is that although many of the characters are just awful people, they’re all *understandable*. At moments they’re all even sympathetic, which, given how dreadful most of them are, is pretty impressive. There are possibly no mis-steps with the casting (I don’t personally like Dermot Mulroney or…
Reader Questions: Doing it all
Thirzah asks keeping kick-ass real? Why is it ok to have a hero/ine shoot people in fiction, when we’re opposed to guns & violence in real life? Well, I write about a god-fighting shaman, so I’m not sure how *real* I keep kick-ass, but… :) I think it’s all right for us to explore violence in fiction precisely because we don’t in real life. It’s a way for us to imagine and experience things we actually really hope we don’t encounter in real life. A lot of fiction is about…