Taunt mode: ENGAGE!!
So, did anyone get hit with Conficker? I got into a paranoid snit yesterday about it and promptly spent three hours scanning my system with every Conficker removal tool that I could get my hands on, made sure my Webroot security suite was all up to date, backed up stuff relentlessly, scanned with Malwarebytes Anti-Malware (I've become very fond of Malwarebytes) and vowed that next time I'm buying a Mac because I'm tired of hassling with the latest malware du jour. I did see that Microsoft has offered a $250,000 reward for a tip that leads to the identification and arrest of the people responsible for Conficker, which makes me want to become a PI specializing in computer forensics. (I also read that some of the systems for the British Navy got infected with Conficker, which makes me wonder exactly what British sailors are doing with their time online.)
It wasn't until I read the tenth comment in this entry that I realized that LJ had thoroughly punked us for April Fool's. This is so...the opposite of Duchamp because I could see LJ actually pulling a boneheaded move to mandatory cutting of any LJ entry on one's flist that is over 140 characters. Well played, LJ. Well played.
In Random Science Experiments news: I've started to take theanine because some research has shown that it's a co-factor for good sleep and helpful for people suffering from insomnia and anxiety. Normally my dreams are very, very surreal (pineapples hacking at the Source Wall with golf clubs and all of that), but since I've started the theanine, the theanine's true persona has emerged, and that persona is clearly a dastardly melange of Luis Buñuel and George Miller.
My subconscious is thus now at the whims of early Surrealism married to Mad Max, and my subconscious, being a consummate performer, has risen to the challenge: last Saturday night I dreamt that I was in this post-apocalyptic Road Warriors-esque scenario, where San Francisco had devolved into a wasteland of extreme poverty and total infrastructure collapse, with homeless people everywhere struggling to survive. You could tell that it was Milleresque Post-Apocalyptic Urban Environment #1792, because everyone had dirt and grime smudged artfully on their faces and hair that was dreading out. At one point I looked out my kitchen window to see a woman and her two daughters setting up camp to sleep in the little patch of dirt that serves as a yard for the apartment building across the street. A group of motley and menacing men emerged from the building to menace her, and I ran outside and proceeded to try to turn into...Moon Knight.
Yes, really.
I even screamed "KHOOOOONSHU!!" and everything, just like Marc Spector does when he decides to brush up on his impromptu plastic surgery skills and remove someone's face.
I didn't get the mandatory moody precipitation and backlighting that Marc gets, though, in almost each and every panel that he's in, so my metamorphosis into Moon Knight wasn't that successful (apparently Khonshu is a fickle deity), so then the dream shifted and I was suddenly talking to Gavin Newsom (!!!) and he was handing me heirloom tomatoes outside this huge...massive...hangar thing he was having built, and then we were driving along a vertiginous scaffolding thing in a go-cart (piloted by my brother's girlfriend...yeah, not sure why), and given that I'm afraid of heights, when we rounded a corner at breakneck speed and came to a stop, I looked down at the weird Op Art pattern painted on the floor of the hangar and suddenly had one of those shifts of perspective where I realized how HIGH up we were, and I promptly fell down in terror.
Thanks, theanine!
Oh my god, YOU GUYS. Circumstances were such that I happened to catch Dancing With the Stars last night, which is my secret guilty pleasure, and this season is absolutely incredible. The couple with the highest scores thus far is Gilles Marini (also known as That Really Hot and Nude French Guy from the Sex and the City film) and Cheryl Burke (she's the professional ballroom dancer, he's the celeb who is paired with her). I adore Cheryl because of those hips on her. She wrecks the house when she dances.
So they did a tango on last night's episode and proceeded to get a perfect score from all three judges. I thought Carrie Ann Inaba was going to pull an Eartha Kitt and climb over the judges' desk, grab Marini, and make off with him after the dance was done. It was scorchingly hot. My face was close to melting off whilst watching them - it was THAT GOOD.
Even if you've an aversion to dancing, I advise you to watch last night's episode on the big screen via ABC's website (you can watch full episodes starting the day after they air) if you're set up for that, but here's their dance via YouTube:
Gilles Marini and Cheryl Burke dancing the tango - it starts at about 2:00 in:
Sadly, it's hard to see the details of the precision and grace that Marini and Burke have in a YouTube clip. But talk about eye f**king! I thought he was going to push her down to the floor and ravish her. Man, THAT is how you do a tango. He is of course gorgeous and oh so very French, but what makes him even more appealing is that afterwards you can see what a truly humble and low key guy he is.
CBR has an eight-page preview of the All-New Savage She-Hulk up along with an interview with Fred Van Lente. I'm relieved to see that it's only a miniseries, since (along with a whole bunch of other people in fandom) I'm still bitter about the She-Hulk book being cancelled by Marvel (what with it continuously outselling other titles that have not gotten the axe and all).
I was very skeptical and dismissive about this ALL-NEW AND TOTALLY NOT IMPROVED SAVAGE SHE-HULK because the She-Hulk in question isn't Jennifer Walters, it's Lyra, who is the alternate-future-dystopian daughter of Thundra and Hulk and whose existence is due to one of the absolute worst storylines Marvel has ever done, that being HULK: RAGING THUNDER (for some reason, that needs CAPSLOCK OF EMPHASIS).
But then I read the interview and while yes, it is a variation on the ever present theme of a male writer writing about the horrible dangers of misandry and future feminist utopias/dystopias (or feminist societies, hi, Shamazons Attack, I'm looking at you), it's Van Lente writing, and Van Lente can be incredibly good, so I decided to read the preview pages. (You all should have read Van Lente's M.O.D.O.K.'s 11 by now.)
And then I saw this, which is Not!Jen Walters going apeshit on a unit of A.R.M.O.R. operatives in midtown Manhattan:
"DEATH TO PHALLO-FASCISTS!" I SO need that on a babydoll t-shirt. There's also the fact that here we have a gammafied Amazon from the future who is using one A.R.M.O.R. flunky to smash a bunch of other A.R.M.O.R. flunkies so hard that their reinforced faceplates shatter, and I think we can agree that that is flat out awesome.
Followed by this:
"Shut off taunting mode." I admit, I cackled. So, um, yeah, I'll be giving this a read.
Finally:
LION PEDICURE.
...Macro brilliance.
It wasn't until I read the tenth comment in this entry that I realized that LJ had thoroughly punked us for April Fool's. This is so...the opposite of Duchamp because I could see LJ actually pulling a boneheaded move to mandatory cutting of any LJ entry on one's flist that is over 140 characters. Well played, LJ. Well played.
In Random Science Experiments news: I've started to take theanine because some research has shown that it's a co-factor for good sleep and helpful for people suffering from insomnia and anxiety. Normally my dreams are very, very surreal (pineapples hacking at the Source Wall with golf clubs and all of that), but since I've started the theanine, the theanine's true persona has emerged, and that persona is clearly a dastardly melange of Luis Buñuel and George Miller.
My subconscious is thus now at the whims of early Surrealism married to Mad Max, and my subconscious, being a consummate performer, has risen to the challenge: last Saturday night I dreamt that I was in this post-apocalyptic Road Warriors-esque scenario, where San Francisco had devolved into a wasteland of extreme poverty and total infrastructure collapse, with homeless people everywhere struggling to survive. You could tell that it was Milleresque Post-Apocalyptic Urban Environment #1792, because everyone had dirt and grime smudged artfully on their faces and hair that was dreading out. At one point I looked out my kitchen window to see a woman and her two daughters setting up camp to sleep in the little patch of dirt that serves as a yard for the apartment building across the street. A group of motley and menacing men emerged from the building to menace her, and I ran outside and proceeded to try to turn into...Moon Knight.
Yes, really.
I even screamed "KHOOOOONSHU!!" and everything, just like Marc Spector does when he decides to brush up on his impromptu plastic surgery skills and remove someone's face.
I didn't get the mandatory moody precipitation and backlighting that Marc gets, though, in almost each and every panel that he's in, so my metamorphosis into Moon Knight wasn't that successful (apparently Khonshu is a fickle deity), so then the dream shifted and I was suddenly talking to Gavin Newsom (!!!) and he was handing me heirloom tomatoes outside this huge...massive...hangar thing he was having built, and then we were driving along a vertiginous scaffolding thing in a go-cart (piloted by my brother's girlfriend...yeah, not sure why), and given that I'm afraid of heights, when we rounded a corner at breakneck speed and came to a stop, I looked down at the weird Op Art pattern painted on the floor of the hangar and suddenly had one of those shifts of perspective where I realized how HIGH up we were, and I promptly fell down in terror.
Thanks, theanine!
Oh my god, YOU GUYS. Circumstances were such that I happened to catch Dancing With the Stars last night, which is my secret guilty pleasure, and this season is absolutely incredible. The couple with the highest scores thus far is Gilles Marini (also known as That Really Hot and Nude French Guy from the Sex and the City film) and Cheryl Burke (she's the professional ballroom dancer, he's the celeb who is paired with her). I adore Cheryl because of those hips on her. She wrecks the house when she dances.
So they did a tango on last night's episode and proceeded to get a perfect score from all three judges. I thought Carrie Ann Inaba was going to pull an Eartha Kitt and climb over the judges' desk, grab Marini, and make off with him after the dance was done. It was scorchingly hot. My face was close to melting off whilst watching them - it was THAT GOOD.
Even if you've an aversion to dancing, I advise you to watch last night's episode on the big screen via ABC's website (you can watch full episodes starting the day after they air) if you're set up for that, but here's their dance via YouTube:
Gilles Marini and Cheryl Burke dancing the tango - it starts at about 2:00 in:
Click to viewSadly, it's hard to see the details of the precision and grace that Marini and Burke have in a YouTube clip. But talk about eye f**king! I thought he was going to push her down to the floor and ravish her. Man, THAT is how you do a tango. He is of course gorgeous and oh so very French, but what makes him even more appealing is that afterwards you can see what a truly humble and low key guy he is.
CBR has an eight-page preview of the All-New Savage She-Hulk up along with an interview with Fred Van Lente. I'm relieved to see that it's only a miniseries, since (along with a whole bunch of other people in fandom) I'm still bitter about the She-Hulk book being cancelled by Marvel (what with it continuously outselling other titles that have not gotten the axe and all).
I was very skeptical and dismissive about this ALL-NEW AND TOTALLY NOT IMPROVED SAVAGE SHE-HULK because the She-Hulk in question isn't Jennifer Walters, it's Lyra, who is the alternate-future-dystopian daughter of Thundra and Hulk and whose existence is due to one of the absolute worst storylines Marvel has ever done, that being HULK: RAGING THUNDER (for some reason, that needs CAPSLOCK OF EMPHASIS).
But then I read the interview and while yes, it is a variation on the ever present theme of a male writer writing about the horrible dangers of misandry and future feminist utopias/dystopias (or feminist societies, hi, Shamazons Attack, I'm looking at you), it's Van Lente writing, and Van Lente can be incredibly good, so I decided to read the preview pages. (You all should have read Van Lente's M.O.D.O.K.'s 11 by now.)
And then I saw this, which is Not!Jen Walters going apeshit on a unit of A.R.M.O.R. operatives in midtown Manhattan:
"DEATH TO PHALLO-FASCISTS!" I SO need that on a babydoll t-shirt. There's also the fact that here we have a gammafied Amazon from the future who is using one A.R.M.O.R. flunky to smash a bunch of other A.R.M.O.R. flunkies so hard that their reinforced faceplates shatter, and I think we can agree that that is flat out awesome.
Followed by this:
"Shut off taunting mode." I admit, I cackled. So, um, yeah, I'll be giving this a read.
Finally:
LION PEDICURE.
...Macro brilliance.