cleolinda | Hello, peoples of the internet

I am a little tired right now.

@cleolinda: I did not sleep at all last night. Just lay there hoping Bad Cat was making That Rustling Sound.

@SuperCricket: @cleolinda and that's how Cleolinda found out she had a heffalump infestation.

Speaking of Twitter: please do not contact me there if you currently are or are pretending to be on hard drugs. Thank you.

@NASA_Hubble: Helium walks into a bar. Bartender says "We don't take kindly to Noble Gasses here." Helium doesn't react.

You know, as Mark gets ever further into Harry Potter, I began to wonder why I never did Order of the Phoenix in Fifteen Minutes. What the hell was going on at the time? So I went back and checked some dates.

Goblet of Fire came out in November 2005. I remember this because we had a cold midnight showing (yay scarves!) instead of a hot summer one.

For whatever reason, I didn't get around to doing that one until... April 2007? Damn. I think I was still taking classes through 2006 (I never finished my MFA), and of course spent the first half of 2005 taking classes and writing the Fifteen Minutes book. So I was monumentally exhausted when GOF came out, it looks like, and once I missed it, it was hard to get the momentum back. Eventually I did, but it took a while.

Order of the Phoenix then came out in... 2007. Okay, this is starting to make sense. July 2007, to be precise--which is, as you notice, quite logically after April 2007. I bet I was trying to catch up on GOF so I could then do OOTP when it was fresh. But I let that one slip by, too.

I sat here and thought about it and tried to remember what my deal was, and--this is so, so stupid, and I don't want to discourage anyone from giving their honest opinion, but--a couple of people got upset about a line (of mine, not the movie's) to the effect of (MARK, SERIOUSLY, DON'T READ THIS) Harry saying to Sirius, "Remind me why I'm going to be so upset when you bite it?" As in, HOW DARE I be so--flippant? dismissive? snarky? something--about a beloved fictional character and his impending death. A death they found out about when Order of the Phoenix was published four years before they were sitting there reading the GOF parody and were still grieving. I guess I'd thought the mourning period was over, but there you are. So here I am, a month or two after people getting upset, faced with the movie in which Sirius actually dies, and while I'm not sure what was actually going on in my life at that point, I distinctly remember thinking, "Knowing how ornery people are about this, still, four years later, I really do not want to deal with trying to make this funny right now."

The correct response, of course, would have been <---HATERS TO THE LEFT, but I hadn't finished my degree in bitchcraft at the time, either.

But people asked why I never wrote that one up, and as far as I can remember, that's why: because I have a desperate need to make everyone happy all of the time.

Speaking of which: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Behind the Scenes Photos.

Completely Similar Directors Darren Aronofsky and David Slade Vying for Wolverine 2. ...what? David Slade came out of Eclipse with his cred intact, as far as I'm concerned, so not only could you do worse than class up a big-budget X-Men movie, you could not do worse than the first Wolverine. It's kind of a win-win situation. But... Aronofsky? Really? I mean... that is... what? I know I'm like the only person who liked The Fountain (in which Hugh Jackman was fantastic, by the way. CONNECTIONS), but... what? Am I going to be traumatized by this? Was that Black Swan trailer his Mutant Natalie Portman tryout? I don't even know.

Related: PREVIEW: Archie's 'Twilight' Parody, Part 2! Sigh.

Better: Jackson Rathbone: New TV gig.