![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tropicsbearThis was the Permian, an obscure era of geological history where the planet was ruled by giant, bone-chilling beasts that ran with a characteristic waddle and sometimes snacked on sharks. During this living nightmare, there were occasionally more carnivores around than there were prey for them to eat on land.
tropicsbearSince it's already Christmas season in the Philippines (and has been since 1 September), please enjoy this amazing bagpipe mashup cover:
tropicsbear
(I bought this 100% because of the pretty hardcover with the shiny foil. The picture doesn't do it justice.)
It took almost three years for me to finish this 💀 In my defense, I kept putting down and ignoring this for long stretches of time whenever I was in the middle of a story that I didn't vibe with. I'm not gonna rate the collection as a whole because I think it makes more sense to rate per story ... but I'm also too lazy to rate per story.
I'll settle for listing my favorites in no particular order:
Problem that I didn't anticipate with this book: How absolutely unengaging I would find some of the older stories. Those were usually the ones I needed to drag myself through because the completionist in me wasn't bored enough to skip anything. I don't know if it's because the style of prose just doesn't jive with what I'm used to or if it's something else. The worst ones (in terms of keeping my attention) were "The Steam Man of the Prairies" by Edward S. Ellis, and "Frank Reade Jr. & His New Steam Man" and "Frank Reade Jr. & His New Steam Horse" by Luis Philip Senarens.
(It also didn't help that they were very racist towards the characters of color. I thought it was weird that they had a foreword and a publisher's note for the collection but neither one included any warnings about it, like the Warner Bros. one for their old cartoons.)
I have a couple more collection type books in my to-read pile to go through, but I think after those I'm done with collections.
blueshiftofdeathWatched this with ebaths last week, and it was very entertaining. I was expecting more of a cash grab, but I felt a lot of love and thought had been put into the movie. Great animation with some stand out moments, great soundtrack, laughs throughout (important!!), an overall effective message, and very pleasantly female-centric on top of it all! I enjoyed myself and have been returning to the soundtrack since finishing.
That being said, it's not so impressive that I would normally be writing a post about it, but there were several elements that kept me thinking about it. Mostly in terms of what they didn't do. The core message (basically "self-acceptance and the ability to confide in others are important parts of life") is very effective, but it seems like it was supposed to be part of something more complex that got cut. Some parts of the movie really left me scratching my head..... personally I'm OK with this since I see it as a purely "for fun and entertainment" movie rather than something with deep literary value, but still. I have Thoughts... here they come!
( cut for spoilers )
![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
