Holmes Minor

The weekend fast approaches and I am so ready to meet it.

I have some crochet projects I want to wrap up and some I want simply to make progress on. I think that'll be my primary goal for the weekend. Secondary goal will be to get my yarn stash reorganized to make higher priority projects more easily accessible.

"Haven't you done that before?"

Yes, shut up. It needs refreshing.

Speaking of yarn, it hit me that I haven't received some yarn I ordered last month. I double-checked and it shipped on the fourteenth. This is not a problem I've had before. And because I'm not used to having such problems, I did not purchase tracking. Ugh. Gonna try reaching out to the post office first, just in case I missed a failure-to-deliver slip. If they don't have my package, I'll contact the seller.

Okay, I've only given myself half a year to get all these posts out, so here's another one right fast. Once again, we're gonna be in the shallow end of the pool.

In fact, I don't think this one even needs a cut.

Twirl, a tiny, flighty and very conspicuously colored stealth bomber, was an Autobot-aligned minicon introduced in the 2003 tie-in comics for the Unicron Trilogy. She later made an appearance in FunPub's Beast Wars: Uprising fiction and was even later reimagined as a Decepticon for the Transformers Legends mobile game, which carried over to her non-speaking role in IDW2, where she's seen first as a customer of Swindle's and later amongst the crowds of 'cons.

Autobot Micromaster Windy is arguably even more obscure, appearing in much non-mainstream fiction and only getting a name-drop in ancillary media for Transformers Animated. Like Twirl, she's more interested in fooling around than fighting but is admired for her beautiful singing voice. She's something of an idol, even having fans amongst the Decepticon ranks.

... Yeah, that's it. They barely share continuity, never mind screen/panel time. I just like to imagine that, in some nebulously G1-ish continuity stream, Twirl is amongst Windy's Decepticon fans. It makes me smile and sometimes that's enough.

As with Trickdiamond and Andromeda, my personal contribution to these two amounts to one drabble written for Femslash February last year. That can, at your leisure, be found here.

(I promise these will get more interesting as I get into characters who actually know each other, lol.)

Saw 40 Acres tonight! Considering the title and the main cast being a Black and Indigenous blended family headed by former soldiers, I was expecting a more direct political critique. It ended up being pretty subtle, though. Still trying to decide how I feel about its approach, tbh. The racial and community politics are very much there-- there are a couple direct references to the way the government has treated BIPOC people and the family explicitly engages with Black Marxist theory as part of their educational curriculum. But I felt like more could've been explored, especially as regards community and how the parents' approach might've been shaped by their military experience. Then again, the racial makeup of the cast is a conversation in itself, so maybe the creative team wanted to let the setup speak its own piece so the story could focus elsewhere.

The movie is a dystopian thriller set after a fungal plague has wiped out most animal life on Earth. Food is scarce and good farmland is the hottest commodity. The matriarch of the Freemans took her family isolationist during the fallout, surrounding their farm with an electric fence, and has raised her children to survive and to kill. The plot kicks off with word through the Network that other homesteads have been attacked and is driven by the oldest son's growing desire for human contact outside his family.

All the actors put in great performances and the family dynamics feel genuine and lived in. Everyone has their own voice and you really get the sense that this family is a community unto itself. I found the juxtaposition of the horror inherent to the way they've been raised with the sweeter and the simply more mundane moments they share to be highly effective for making the premise believable.

There's a good sense of not only the family's isolation but of their vulnerability throughout the movie. It's there in the characters' behavior, of course, but also in the way their land is set up and what we see of the way they live. There's a visceral sense of the rising threat through the comm chatter we overhear-- probably my favorite little touch in the movie. And the cinematography and sound design really bring it all home. There are some incredible shots and sequences in this movie, especially once we get into the thick of the action. The fight scenes straddle the line between gritty and typical action movie nonsense and they ride that line well.

I didn't find anything terribly special about the story itself. Though it definitely beats its own drum, its beats are familiar to the genre. The story plays out basically how you'd expect it to once everything is set up. This was hardly a disappointment for me, personally, since it let the performances and the action alike shine and left ample space to consider those subtle politics dynamics and to ponder over what little we learn about the backstory of this world.

So, yeah, would recommend!