A public service announcement followed me home the other day
I keep thinking, "this time I am going to write a long-ass entry about crazy BBM AU's, and then segue it into other crazy AU's for other fandoms that might be fun to write." And then I write about something totally different because it seems either time sensitive, or I just feel too lazy to write a real entry. Also I realized I have yet to brag about my hat! Or should I say, hats.
If the pictures don't show up at first, boomspeed and I are fighting again.
Back in the fall, flidgetjerome, (with whom I will someday die alongside pantsless, in a curious incident involving absinthe, three goats, a truckload of plantains, and seventeen bags of doll eyes) was a wonderful friend and sent me a Penny Arcade Merch/Fleshreaper hat. I have never had this many comments on a hat in my life. I wear it everywhere, with the appropriate side turned out to signal my mood (and sometimes the opposite side turned out if I am trying to take my enemies by surprise.)
Here we have Merch:
And this is the Fleshreaper:
I do love me some hats. And since I'm pulling a bunch of pictures from my phone and camera, here's the last time I visited the aquarium at the Academy of Sciences in San Francisco. I love the Academy of Sciences; they have a ton of cool stuff to look at, and I get a kick out of watching my Tiny Cousins tear-ass around while touching everything they can. Any place that allows me to both make faces at sharks and have butterflies land on my head is fine in my books.
And then we have Arlington cemetery, where I end up about once a month or so, and that's also interesting, but in an entirely different way. We took the Czechs out there to see the sights, and to put flowers at my grandparents' section of the Columbarium. After two weeks of warm weather, all the snow is finally melting away, but we saw it in December when the first snowstorm hit, and again in February after that snowstorm. (Both times, the Tomb of the Unknown was spick and span.)
Arlington is both sad and lovely in the snow; it covers the fields where they're digging up space for more graves in a softening effect, but it throws all the lines of stones into sharp relief. They stand out like rows of teeth biting through the crust of the snow; most of them fall in straight lines, but the older graves run jagged with their size and shape disparity.
Driving back from Arlington along the river and the woods is also like a battlefield; all the roads are littered with broken limbs and split tree trunks from the ice and snow of last month. It makes me think of last fall, when I drove through wine country for the first time. There was this one area where the trees were small but obviously alive; the thing that struck me about them was how wracked they looked, almost flat to the ground, twisted and bent so that they looked like bodies locked in agony. (If I am getting too purple-prosey, please forgive me; I understand first-time viewing of wine country does that to a lot of people.)
The difference between those trees and the trees damaged by the ice storms are that the wine country trees looked a lot more alive, but the same general wrackedness remained the same. It feels as though you're looking at Dante's Woods of the Suicides.
Since we got into a sort of war and death rumination at the end there, I suppose I should mention my reaction to The Pacific last night. Nonspoilery version: I liked it!
I saw the first installment of The Pacific last night, and enjoyed it, though it somehow seemed to go both too fast and too slow at the beginning. I suppose we're going to figure out who half these characters are eventually, and initial establishments are important, but I'll be more interested in seeing how they develop, and I think they'll do fine with that. I don't have much of a sense of them as people, but at one hour in and with nine to go, I guess I can't be too demanding.
I am vaguely wondering if they're going to try to bring in love story/interest angles. I think the reading aloud of letters can sometimes work wonderfully well (and it was touching, that they were reading all their letters to each other to cheer themselves up) but it can also get lazy and/or unrealistically portrayed at times. I like love stories. I like war stories. In most films, I tend to get distracted if they try to combine them on the same level, but that's my personal preference and the way I like to focus. (Of course, in films you generally only have two hours and a bit to tell your story, and that can hinder things.)
Rather than get ducked into a long entry about what aspects I like most in war films and shows and mini-series, my favorite part was the very end, beginning with the scene featuring the Japanese soldier in the river, and forward. Nothing new to the revelation: humans do horrible things to each other, and yet we often find a sense of humor in the oddest places. The gift of a hand grenade, all the men singing "Happy Bithrday to you" and "How fucked are you now?"-sad and hilarious. I rather like it when films manage to double-sucker punch me. (And as Generation Kill taught me, nothing brings me in faster than a whole bunch of guys singing.)
So far, it has not consumed my interest the way Generation Kill did, but I look forward to the next bit.
Three links!
All-black penguin discovered. If this one mates with an albino penguin, do you get a regular black and white penguin?
Fueled by filial piety. Two adult sons tour nation with mother in homemade carriage. Let us be specific, this is the nation of CHINA. They are pulling their mother in a cart all over freakin' CHINA. Wow. Now I feel like I really have to step up my game for Mothers' Day.
Same-sex crush parody of Taylor Swift's "You Belong With Me" video. Made by the University of Rochester Yellowjackets a capella group, and rather well done! I mean, her music still annoys me, and the song itself is still uncomfortably stalkerish, but video-wise, I find I can tolerate a weedy guy in emo glasses slightly better than a blonde girl in a virginal white dress, so there you go. It manages to make the Madonna-Whore complex a little less glaringly obvious.
If the pictures don't show up at first, boomspeed and I are fighting again.
Back in the fall, flidgetjerome, (with whom I will someday die alongside pantsless, in a curious incident involving absinthe, three goats, a truckload of plantains, and seventeen bags of doll eyes) was a wonderful friend and sent me a Penny Arcade Merch/Fleshreaper hat. I have never had this many comments on a hat in my life. I wear it everywhere, with the appropriate side turned out to signal my mood (and sometimes the opposite side turned out if I am trying to take my enemies by surprise.)
Here we have Merch:
And this is the Fleshreaper:
I do love me some hats. And since I'm pulling a bunch of pictures from my phone and camera, here's the last time I visited the aquarium at the Academy of Sciences in San Francisco. I love the Academy of Sciences; they have a ton of cool stuff to look at, and I get a kick out of watching my Tiny Cousins tear-ass around while touching everything they can. Any place that allows me to both make faces at sharks and have butterflies land on my head is fine in my books.
And then we have Arlington cemetery, where I end up about once a month or so, and that's also interesting, but in an entirely different way. We took the Czechs out there to see the sights, and to put flowers at my grandparents' section of the Columbarium. After two weeks of warm weather, all the snow is finally melting away, but we saw it in December when the first snowstorm hit, and again in February after that snowstorm. (Both times, the Tomb of the Unknown was spick and span.)
Arlington is both sad and lovely in the snow; it covers the fields where they're digging up space for more graves in a softening effect, but it throws all the lines of stones into sharp relief. They stand out like rows of teeth biting through the crust of the snow; most of them fall in straight lines, but the older graves run jagged with their size and shape disparity.
Driving back from Arlington along the river and the woods is also like a battlefield; all the roads are littered with broken limbs and split tree trunks from the ice and snow of last month. It makes me think of last fall, when I drove through wine country for the first time. There was this one area where the trees were small but obviously alive; the thing that struck me about them was how wracked they looked, almost flat to the ground, twisted and bent so that they looked like bodies locked in agony. (If I am getting too purple-prosey, please forgive me; I understand first-time viewing of wine country does that to a lot of people.)
The difference between those trees and the trees damaged by the ice storms are that the wine country trees looked a lot more alive, but the same general wrackedness remained the same. It feels as though you're looking at Dante's Woods of the Suicides.
Since we got into a sort of war and death rumination at the end there, I suppose I should mention my reaction to The Pacific last night. Nonspoilery version: I liked it!
I saw the first installment of The Pacific last night, and enjoyed it, though it somehow seemed to go both too fast and too slow at the beginning. I suppose we're going to figure out who half these characters are eventually, and initial establishments are important, but I'll be more interested in seeing how they develop, and I think they'll do fine with that. I don't have much of a sense of them as people, but at one hour in and with nine to go, I guess I can't be too demanding.
I am vaguely wondering if they're going to try to bring in love story/interest angles. I think the reading aloud of letters can sometimes work wonderfully well (and it was touching, that they were reading all their letters to each other to cheer themselves up) but it can also get lazy and/or unrealistically portrayed at times. I like love stories. I like war stories. In most films, I tend to get distracted if they try to combine them on the same level, but that's my personal preference and the way I like to focus. (Of course, in films you generally only have two hours and a bit to tell your story, and that can hinder things.)
Rather than get ducked into a long entry about what aspects I like most in war films and shows and mini-series, my favorite part was the very end, beginning with the scene featuring the Japanese soldier in the river, and forward. Nothing new to the revelation: humans do horrible things to each other, and yet we often find a sense of humor in the oddest places. The gift of a hand grenade, all the men singing "Happy Bithrday to you" and "How fucked are you now?"-sad and hilarious. I rather like it when films manage to double-sucker punch me. (And as Generation Kill taught me, nothing brings me in faster than a whole bunch of guys singing.)
So far, it has not consumed my interest the way Generation Kill did, but I look forward to the next bit.
Three links!
All-black penguin discovered. If this one mates with an albino penguin, do you get a regular black and white penguin?
Fueled by filial piety. Two adult sons tour nation with mother in homemade carriage. Let us be specific, this is the nation of CHINA. They are pulling their mother in a cart all over freakin' CHINA. Wow. Now I feel like I really have to step up my game for Mothers' Day.
Same-sex crush parody of Taylor Swift's "You Belong With Me" video. Made by the University of Rochester Yellowjackets a capella group, and rather well done! I mean, her music still annoys me, and the song itself is still uncomfortably stalkerish, but video-wise, I find I can tolerate a weedy guy in emo glasses slightly better than a blonde girl in a virginal white dress, so there you go. It manages to make the Madonna-Whore complex a little less glaringly obvious.