One equal temper of heroic hearts

I've now finished the second season of Friday Night Lights and I'm both eager to begin on the next and pleased I waited a while to come around to watching it - I wouldn't have enjoyed or appreciated it nearly as much if I'd tried it another time, not even all that long ago. It's something helpful and satisfying for where I am now, for so many reasons. The large scale news, the small scale news, the personal family concerns.

I keep watching it and looking at it, and I keep thinking that there's a wonderful sense of precise geography. It's true there's not much in the way of wildlife, and I can't feel the climate through my computer screen, and there's still a lot of one small corner of Texas to be seen. I've seen faceless image collections and gifsets pass through Tumblr, and I know there were faceless icon challenges back in the day, and watching this show makes me think there's probably enough footage for a faceless vid. Something with the fields and the clouds and the stadium lights, the oil wells and the horizon lines. Something with all the players on the fields and the massive crowds in the stands without any one person carrying the focus. I'm sure I've seen such vids around, maybe at a con's vidshow, but I can't remember anything specific, and it's not the most precise keyword to use to search.

I'm still going to think about it, though. And because I listened to the soundtrack recently, and because the song fits the human melodrama of the show as well, it'll probably be to Live That Way Forever for a good while.

My phone's inability to hold a decent charge is starting to grate on me. I don't use it for a whole lot of things or for many minutes throughout a given day, and based on the stats provided by said phone, the things that I use it for the most - the phone function itself for calls, the CitiBike app, and the home and lock screen - are fairly baffling that they're taking up the most energy. I can't claim to understand the details of the technology involved, but I can claim to be confused that using this phone as a phone is a major drain.

I'm not replacing it, though, not unless I can get the exact same model in the exact same color. I'm holding out until I've got no choice in the matter. Hopefully by then, technology's going to have advanced to the point I can replace the battery myself.

It's now been suggested to me that, like job applications, I cast a much wider net in terms of sending out novel queries and pitches. The logic's fairly sound, and I can't recall if there's any specific advice or industry information I've gotten to have me disregard it out of hand. I've heard that it's good to tailor queries to specific agents, but in terms of not sending out plenty of queries, I'm drawing a blank. So maybe there's something to it. To doing something, at least.

In the absence of going anywhere, whether to gigs or the movies or out with friends, it's as good a use of my time as any I can think of.

Picking up a new fandom used to mean picking up a new icon. It turns out I already had one. I'd thought it was nice looking and atmospheric with no knowledge whatsoever about the character in it, and to no one's surprise, I managed to pick out my favorite without even trying.

Going from MASH to Top Gun to Friday Night Lights is something where I could easily pull out a through-line beyond that it's a trio of ensemble casts working within and against the rigid structures they're living in, whether or not it's by choice. Something about maintaining a sense of self and self-worth both externally and internally, but I'm only about halfway through the first season. I know that it ends well, but not how it ends, or how it gets there, and I'm enjoying the process quite a bit.

There's no word for the feeling of watching something and being hit with the thought, "So that's where that icon comes from!" Sometimes it's reading and getting to a quote, sometimes it's a fraction of a moment caught up in a 100x100 square. But since the experience isn't unique, simply highly specific, I might a well just call it "fandom."