I have, with no particular intent to do so, walked in the region of 65 miles since the beginning of the month. I am a little sore from all this walking, and would like a hot bath and a massage. *looks hopefully at the world*
I’ve been idly searching for the blank book in which I wrote half a dozen children’s book manuscripts. It wasn’t anywhere I thought it should be, but fortunately, in rescuing toy train parts a couple of days ago, I glanced into a box and there it was, safe and sound. This is a considerable relief. :)
Is anybody out there a master of Open Office? Because it seems to me that I should be able to take a Office file which has been formatted with stylesheets, and change the margins and page sizes in the Default and other necessary settings, and have the file reformat to the new page size. It does not, however, seem to actually work, and I can’t convince myself it’s not user failure. (Part of the reason I can’t convince myself of this is because I really don’t want to have to learn a real layout platform.)
Speaking of learning new platforms, I am dipping my toes into Scrivener. The only reason I’m doing this is I’ve got a large-scale project I’m eyeing, and Scrivener has these…post-it-notes…which keep a running tally of characters, places, whatever you like, really, at the side of the screen where it can be instantly and easily accessed. My impression thus far is it’s going to be *huge* amounts of time-consuming set-up, but given the size of the project, I think it’s going to be very useful.
Let’s see, that’s four things to make a post, so here, let me add one more, a picoreview behind the cut for exceedingly minor spoilers for Anna Karenina…
Picoreview: Anna Karenina: Having never read the book (I know, I know, and I should, because I’ve loved the Russian classics I *have* read), I went in unburdened by any particular expectations except that the costumes would be wonderful.
The costumes were wonderful. They were not, I think, wholly or perhaps even very, period, but the way the film was staged (and I use the word deliberately) makes it clear they weren’t going for huge authenticity, but rather for theatrics. And the staging was magnificent, really really wonderfully done. Jude Law was also magnificent, and heartbreaking, as Anna’s husband.
Sadly, there was absolutely no chemistry between Anna (Kiera Knightly) and Vronksy (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), which made the whole thing fall somewhat flat. One might go so far as to say it verged on boring, which is a terrible shame. I would have loved to see it with two actors whose chemistry and depth of emotion was as deep as Law’s, because wow, he was so very wonderful in the role. And the supporting cast was pretty much entirely fantastic as well, so it’s just a shame that Knightly and Taylor-Johnson had no chemistry at all.
Also, bewilderingly and horribly–you know the scene in the Knightly Pride & Prejudice, when Elizabeth and Darcy dance together for the first time, and the rest of the ballroom dancers fade away? It was a pretty and effective scene there, and I liked it a lot.
But they did it again. Seriously. There’s the ballroom and they did some other nice stuff and I was liking it and then something happened with the camera work or something and I thought, oh no, they’re not, they wouldn’t, they–did?!?!?! It’s the same director, and holy crap, I cannot believe he did that again. What the hell. Now I sort of want to see Atonement, also with Knightly and this director, to see if he did it in that movie too. Except I really don’t want to see Atonement, so maybe somebody can tell me…