It's just an ordinary day - Recent Entries

Today's hero of the revolution is kathrynt, who last night brought me not one, not two, but three DVDs of craptastic movie goodness. Which means, ladies and gentlemen, that the Movie Suckoff Marathon is about to commence.

But I need suitable challengers for this Triumvirate of Suck, and this is where you come in! Please to submit your suggestions for which movies should go up against these contenders:

Phantom Force, a Sci-Fi Pictures Original from 2004

Decoys 2: Alien Seduction, not a Sci-Fi Pictures Original, but it did air on the USA channel, which is almost as bad

And last, but certainly not least, as this one features the redoubtable Summer Glau:

Mammoth, a Sci-Fi Pictures Original from 2006

ETA 4:56pm: Please to note: anything I have already seen is automatically disqualified. This includes the vast majority of MST3K episodes, as well as anything of Ed Wood's. Ideal contenders: big-budget theatrical releases, preferably as grandiose, overblown, and badly acted as possible. Previous contenders have included Battlefield Earth, The Day After Tomorrow, and On Deadly Ground; if you can come up with something to match those, that's exactly what I'm looking for. ;) Extra bonus points if the movies in question match up with the three above in general theme or monster type!

I was just waiting for this: the fine folks at GreatBigSea.com have overhauled the site again in honor of the forthcoming Fortune's Favor. It is gorgeous. Very nice figures of Fortune herself here and there all over the place, and plus, there seems to be some new stuff to look at as well--there's a new journal that's apparently going to be all about Séan's dog.

Best of all though is that they have a page up now for the album, including a complete track list, though I don't see cover art up yet or any lyrics. The liner notes however are HY-LARIOUS and remind me yet again exactly why I love my B'ys:

We honestly can't remember who played each track on each song. Somebody played the strumstick on "Banks of Newfoundland". We suspect it was Bob, but we can't find it to dust for prints. Hawksley and Kris played the drums, but Alan swears some his can be found on "Oh Yeah". Sean figures he played guitar on several tracks but couldn't, for the life of him, discern which ones. Hawksley insists that Sean played banjo on "Heart of Stone". Sean insists he does not know how. There are no bag pipes in the studio, but there are some on "Heart of Stone". We suspect Bob is responsible. Alan is a terrible piano player, yet he may very well have played the piano on "Walk on the Moon". Murray has a vague recollection that Kris hit one of the bouzoukis like a hammered dulcimer on "England". There is a cheap Casio keyboard part on "Long Lost Love" that no one will own up to. It would be impossible to count the number of passersby that sang the gang vocal on "Oh Yeah". We do know for certain that the lovely gal you hear sweetly singing in "Dance Dance" and "Hard Case" is Jeen O’Brien. She's an awesome writer and singer.

Looking forward to this album more and more. And to the TOUR that should be coming shortly thereafter!

sutures1 forwarded me this in email. It is HY-LARIOUS (and worksafe). Two words are all you need to know: Improv Everywhere.

Go. Laugh!

First up: someone does a LOLCutter on elfquest, and lo, it is the Win.

Second: the 2008 Hugo nominations are out! I haven't actually read any of the contenders for Best Novel this year, though I am eying the Scalzi and the Stross, to be sure. And I must also admit that I looked at the blurb on Rollback in the store, and the concept sounded interesting. I may well indeed have to check out the reviews going around on these books.

However, I'd like to call your all's attention to the delightful list of contenders for Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form:

Battlestar Galactica "Razor" Written by Michael Taylor Directed by Félix Enríquez Alcalá and Wayne Rose (Sci Fi Channel) (televised version, not DVD)

Doctor Who "Blink" Written by Stephen Moffat Directed by Hettie Macdonald (BBC)

Doctor Who "Human Nature" / "Family of Blood" Written by Paul Cornell Directed by Charles Palmer (BBC)

Star Trek New Voyages "World Enough and Time" Written by Michael Reaves & Marc Scott Zicree Directed by Marc Scott Zicree (Cawley Entertainment Co. and The Magic Time Co.)

Torchwood "Captain Jack Harkness" Written by Catherine Tregenna Directed by Ashley Way (BBC Wales)

I am particularly delighted by the Doctor Who squareoff, and am hopeful that paulcornell2 will score the win despite the excellent competition from Mr. Moffat--just because a) Mr. Cornell is awesome, and b) as I gushed before, David Tennant's performance in that two-parter was incredible.

However, I am genuinely unsure whether either of these will pull ahead of the competition!

And last but not least, Juno says no on Faerie Blood, but this was another favorable rejection, purely a "not to my taste" thing. I can deal with that. Now I'll just have to figure out where else I have left to send this one while I'm querying Lament of the Dove; DAW's most likely. We'll see.

"What have you done with my Nazi, George?!"

solarbird and spazzkat informed me this morning, you see, that the little figure of a German soldier that comes with the LEGO Indy set mamishka gave me has vanished. So has one of the little LEGO crates that came with the set. Indy and Professor Jones Sr. are accounted for, as are both motorcycles, the flag, and the little gatehouse thingie.

But of poor Heinrich, alas, there is no sign! All I found upon searching the media room were his tiny LEGO goggles.

I expect that from this can be derived the moral that if one is a LEGO German soldier trying to mess with the LEGO Jones boys, one can expect to be apprehended by a giant cat.

Spotted tonight over on JournalFen: Eddie Izzard US Tour this summer!

Local folks, please to note the Seattle date for July! Who's up for an outing? Tickets are on sale NOW!

Snurched off of the Fandom Lounge community over on JournalFen, I bring you tw_babiez. As the JF poster asserted, this is indeed better than the actual program. ;>

I realized to my chagrin that I completely skipped three of my character icons when I built my list. As a result, rather than re-order the entire list to account for those I left out, I bring you this special bonus matchup!

Harry Dresden (The Dresden Files, TV edition) / James Bond (Daniel Craig edition) / Martha Jones (Doctor Who)

007 liked his cases simple: find target, eliminate target, God save the Queen and the sanctity of Britain. Why the bloody hell M assigned him to a stakeout of robe-wearing Druid cultists in Stonehenge he could not begin to fathom--and about what the hell an American detective was doing there, also staking out the cultists, he could not begin to give a damn. On any other case, in any other country, he might almost have liked him; the man did have a certain refreshing honesty about him. But in Britain, he was out of his jurisdiction and far out of his league, and James wasn't about to let Dresden waltz off with his mission. Or the feisty, dusky beauty who'd pulled him out of the ruin that the cult leader had made of his latest Aston Martin, and then patched him back together with skilled and efficient hands.

He didn't know what strange new tech the cult had armed themselved with, that they'd flung his car a hundred feet into a ravine without any trace of an explosive device. Or for that matter, why Dresden seemed to know more than he was telling about their activities...

Or why lovely, clever young Martha, confronted with the danger at hand, did not seem the slightest bit surprised.

Snurching this one from cadhla, because it's hysterical:

Make a list of all the characters in your icons. (Although you may have more than one icon of a single character, they only go on the list once.) Alphabetize it. Take the first two people on the list; that's your first pairing. Second two people; second pairing. Etc. Then write your reaction to each pairing (or a snippet of a hypothetical fic featuring each pairing).

( I think I just broke my brain... )

And now, from the same fine artist who brought you Doctor's Girls and omg DOCTORZ , we have Doctor's Boys. I love it. I love it so. :D

Someone has also apparently generated icons! Look for the extra special bonus "Young One" icon in that post.

ETA 9:01am: solarbird gave me this link, too, which made me laugh and laugh and laugh.

I found this little gem by George Eliot while wandering around LJ land a morning or two ago. It's an essay called "Silly Novels by Lady Novelists", and its primary virtue is Eliot's snark on the 1800's version of the Mary Sue. Mary Sues really haven't changed much since then--just in their implementation. ;) Get a load of it:

The heroine is usually an heiress, probably a peeress in her own right, with perhaps a vicious baronet, an amiable duke, and an irresistible younger son of a marquis as lovers in the foreground, a clergyman and a poet sighing for her in the middle distance, and a crowd of undefined adorers dimly indicated beyond. Her eyes and her wit are both dazzling; her nose and her morals are alike free from any tendency to irregularity; she has a superb contralto and a superb intellect; she is perfectly well-dressed and perfectly religious; she dances like a sylph, and reads the Bible in the original tongues. Or it may be that the heroine is not an heiress -- that rank and wealth are the only things in which she is deficient; but she infallibly gets into high society, she has the triumph of refusing many matches and securing the best, and she wears some family jewels or other as a sort of crown of righteousness at the end. Rakish men either bite their lips in impotent confusion at her repartees, or are touched to penitence by her reproofs, which, on appropriate occasions, rise to a lofty strain of rhetoric; indeed, there is a general propensity in her to make speeches, and to rhapsodize at some length when she retires to her bedroom. In her recorded conversations she is amazingly eloquent, and in her unrecorded conversations, amazingly witty. She is under stood to have a depth of insight that looks through and through the shallow theories of philosophers, and her superior instincts are a sort of dial by which men have only to set their clocks and watches, and all will go well.

I feel an urge to go read some old Barbara Michaels coming on. Mwah.

I found this post up on the OKP today, from a person who'd just gone to her very first GBS show--and who, in the middle of using her digital camera to take a video snippet of the B'ys doing "Donkey Riding", had Alan swipe her camera and keep filming during the song! The look on Séan's face as he's looking over at Alan out of the corner of his eye, singing all the while, is great. What a way for a GBS concert newbie to have her first show start off!

Quoted from the MurkMUSH, wherein our heroine begins by lamenting that she came into work today without her trusty handheld computing companion and proceeds straight into discussing the Evil Alternate Universe versions of Great Big Sea...

( Read more... )

My beloved solarbird made up a song last night. It goes like this:

I'm tired of this class
I'm tired of this class
I'm tired of this class
I'm tired of this class

My brain is made of spam
My brain is made of spam
My brain is made of spam
My brain is made of spam

There is also a dance. It involves stomping.

Since it needed doing, today I burned my recently purchased Casino Royale soundtrack down to disc, along with the single "You Know My Name" (which I had to buy separately, but hey, it wasn't hard to find in the iTunes store), down to CD. I mention this partly just as a general PSA that if you purchase music online, it's always best to burn backup CD copies in case your computer is smashed by a meteor or something.
But mostly I mention it because I also figured out how to get iTunes to print me a CD insert, using the album artwork. It took me a little finagling with playlists, but I got it to print! It would have printed in full color, too, if I'd bothered to go downstairs and turn on the color printer. The black-and-white album art I printed off was fine, though, and certainly enough to let me slip that into the jewel case along with the burned discs. At some point I'll now have to print off album artwork for the other things I've bought off of iTunes as well, now that I know how to do that.

Does anyone know if it's possible to make iTunes print off the part of the artwork that would go on the spine and back of the jewel case? That'd be even cooler, if I could make it do that. Then the jewel case would look almost like I bought it in a store.

In other news, it is well worth mentioning that according to CNN.com, 'truthiness' is the word of the year. Stephen Colbert is amusingly proud.

And I have been noting the rumblings going around about how Flanvention down in CA was cancelled this weekend. I'm very sympathetic to all the pissed-off Browncoats who had this as well as their hard-earned money yanked out from under them. I did also note the one silver lining, though, of several Firefly and Serenity cast members showing up at the hotel where the thing was supposed to have been held, and partying at the bar with the fans. That is so very cool of the lot of them.

I am one week shy of Faerie Blood being in Baen's e-slush queue for three months. By all estimates this should mean that I have another six months to go. Hopefully by the time I get an answer one way or another, I'll have Queen of Souls and Lament of the Dove out there too!

I have still not yet watched last week's BSG, or last night's for that matter. The writing has kept me from last week's episode, and last night's was postponed in favor of playing with the shiny new Wii that has joined our household. Hopefully we shall catch up on both episodes tonight!

Monday through Friday miles: 17.1
Miles out of Hobbiton: 1597.5
Miles out of Rauros Falls: 288.5
Miles to Isengard: 195.5

kathrynt IMed me today to say that she and llachglin missed our entire household, and would it be okay if they came over to visit us this afternoon, avec bebe? I promptly assured her that we'd be delighted to see them, and so they came over today with little Lilian, and we all hung out in our living room enjoying the Tiny Baby Show. There was actual conversation aside from said Tiny Baby, but still, it never ceases to amuse me that you can take a room full of grownups, put a Tiny Baby among them, and each and every one of them will watch the Tiny Baby's every move, going "ooooooooo baby".

Also, I must give props to Kathryn's father secondhand, as on the way out just now, Kathryn told us how her father decided that the unit he uses to measure beauty is the helen. Which therefore means that a millihelen launches one ship, a microhelen launches a train, and a nanohelen launches a truck. We opined that a femtohelen launches a scooter. Away from you.

It's good to live among geeks. ^_^

Rather behind on posting anything interesting for the past few days, but then, I haven't had anything terribly interesting to post about, so that's all good. The last few days have been busy at work, and I have found that while none of the various things I do at work are particularly difficult or challenging, there's a good deal of it to do, and so I'm happy to be kept reasonably busy. I was also pleased to be informed along with a coworker that we were "amazing" by our boss, so go us. ^_^

I trust most of you all on my Friends list have seen the Star Trek Inspirational Posters site by now. My favorites are definitely this one and this one, but I have to just make sure whether sarekofvulcan has seen this one, 'cause Garrett, it totally reminded me of you. ;)

Housemate risu has recently ascended a Ranger in Nethack, which has totally gotten me back onto a Nethack kick. For giggles and grins, I tried playing a Tourist character named Zim (with of course a dog named Gir), and remarked to my beloved solarbird that it was very odd wandering around a Nethack game with a character named Zim. She said, "I didn't know Nethack had an Idiot class!" I said, "It does, it's called Tourist!"

I totally need a Nethack icon now.

Looking forward to a quiet writing-type weekend--especially since next weekend, Dara, spazzkat and I will be preparing to head off to our Worldcon/Disneyland vacation down in L.A. Y'all consider this your advance warning of the Impending Anna Shortage. Any of y'all going to actually be at Worldcon too, sing out!

Last night, Paul and I stopped at Barnes and Noble, so I took the opportunity to blow my $30 rebate card from Cingular for my cell phone purchase. I wound up getting a couple of books--Dies the Fire by S.M. Sterling, since kieri had recommended it, and a new one called Webmage by Kelly McCullough, since it sounded like some fluffy fun and had a combo of magic and computer tech. And, for extra giggles, I picked up Vol. 1 of the Season One DVDs for Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea! Ah, cheesy Irwin Allen Sixties Skiffy, I (heart) you so.

Last but not least, I appear to have been tagged on two different memes, so what the hey, let's do this. I don't tag, but if you want to play, by all means jump in.

First up, from leian, the ( current favorite songs meme... )

And then, albeit days behind, from waterowl, the ( page 123 out of the nearest book meme... )

Wednesday lunch and evening miles: 2.4
Thursday miles: 3.0
Friday miles: 3.2
Miles out of Hobbiton: 1297.4
Miles out of Rivendell: 839.4
Miles out of Lothlórien: 377.4
Miles to Rauros Falls: 11.6

solarbird is going to beat me to Rauros Falls. Foo. This is what I get for her biking to and from class on a regular basis right now, while I'm just walking. She's going to beat me to Mount Doom, I'll just bet! Oh well, I'll just wander off to Isengard after that handsome scruffy Ranger and that pretty blond fellow with the pointy ears. Who wants to get to Mount Doom anyway? It's all splody and stuff.

Busy work day today, in no small part because I got hit with several projects all at once, including two that were dumped on my plate at the last minute with apologies for such short notice, but could I please oh please get them done by tomorrow? Meh.

In ongoing continued PernMUSH nostalgia, I threw out email to the players of Melora and Jorenan, two persons highly important to my former NC selves, and was delighted to hear back from them both. Yay! And in related general MUSH-y news, y'all should say hi to gilroycullen, kisanthe, and tavella!

Still waiting for word from Bantam.

And I just got spam mail with a sender name listed as "Bigmouth H. Shorts". Somewhere, some place, that clearly needs to show up in a short story. HAH!

ETA 2:39pm: And oh yes, I almost forgot to mention--during my QA work today I found mention of this, for which I have three words: RACING! WIENER! DOGS! Yip yip yip yip yip yip!

Also? On another thing I had to QA today, I saw reference to an unfortunate soul who had been saddled with the name "Gynger". GYNGER. *cringe* I would like to make a public appeal to all the potential mothers of daughters on my Friends list to never, ever name your child Gynger. She'll thank you.

Sunday miles: 2.3
Monday miles: 3.6
Tuesday miles: 3.0
Wednesday morning miles: 1.4
Miles out of Hobbiton: 1288.8
Miles out of Rivendell: 830.8
Miles out of Lothlórien: 368.8
Miles to Rauros Falls: 20.2

Shamelessly snurched from filkertom, I bring you this fabulous picture, which apparently comes from this message board thread.

That there is a thing of beauty. ;)

Word is going around the news sites today of amusing fossil discoveries in northern Australia of creatures being dubbed "killer kangaroos" and "demon ducks of doom". The MSNBC story is here, the BBC story here. Me, I have but one word to say regarding this scientific achievement, and that word is:

QUACK

Meanwhile, I bring you the story of a brown dress on the lam. That its owner, Alex Martin, had been doing a year-long thing wherein she wore that same dress every single day as a statement on consumerism is cool all by itself--but apparently when she had the party for her "undressing" at the end of the project, somebody swiped the dress! And is now sending her email and photos about it. That's hysterical. :D

And speaking of further amusing blogger stunts, for those of you who haven't seen this story yet, I further bring you the tale of a man who started with a paper clip and bartered his way to a house.

ETA 10:32am: Oh yes, I forgot to add this one: this year's winners of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest. I particularly like this one: It was a dreary Monday in September when Constable Lightspeed came across the rotting corpse that resembled one of those zombies from Michael Jackson's "Thriller," except that it was lying down and not performing the electric slide.

Monday miles: 3.4
Tuesday miles: 3.2
Miles out of Hobbiton: 1208.9
Miles out of Rivendell: 750.9
Miles out of Lothlórien: 288.9
Miles to Rauros Falls: 100.1