Cleolinda everywhere

I feel really crappy, probably because the weather's been hideous for several days now, but it's sunny now, so here's an early linkspam so I can go recharge my epidermal solar panels.

(Re: Yesterday's Secret Life: There are a ton of awesome reader-made icons sprinkled through the comments; The Littlest Hat is courtesy of MaggieCat; and TLE is not technically napping [sparklepires don't sleep, if you will recall], so he has actually stopped for a Q-tip snack break, if you look closely. Also: Let's have a big hand for Squeakers the Cat-Toy Stunt Mouse.)

( Linkspam )

Oh my God, I am so behind on everything and I pulled a leg muscle moving boxes yesterday so I took some Aleve and a nap late this afternoon and I woke up feeling loopy and tireder and I kind of arrgh. So I have a number of things to get to, but I think I'm going to mention them tomorrow so they don't get lost in the shuffle.

(Happy clouds. Peaceful, happy clouds.)

And happy birthday to sweetdragon (Dayna at Made of Fail)!

Linkspam: ( Read more... )

Followups from previous posts:

Re: writerly anxieties: I now have a row of mini Post-Its stuck across the shelf over my desk, and they read (from left to right):

This is fun.

This is entertainment.

This is not brain surgery.

Nobody dies.

Re: green eyes: Have also been window-shopping at the Sephora site, browsing the "for green eyes" shadow palettes. I'm sure my eyes are still kind of bluish, and they've always had that Mary Sue ring of brown around the pupils, but I don't need a lot of excuses to hang out on the Sephora site, so. (When I was playing with some Hard Candy shadows I got on deep discount, I noticed that reddish, tawny or peach colors really made my eyes pop, no matter what color we decide to call them. So now I've been cruising various brands for those colors. I hate to say it, but one of the colors I'm most interested in is called... "Roach." Thanks, Urban Decay. At least "Last Call" doesn't make me want to throw up, as names go.

Oh, you know what else blew my mind? I was reading last month's Vanity Fair, the one with Amy Adams on the cover, and in the article I discovered that

1) She was the lead in that craptastic TV show Manchester Prep that got repackaged as Cruel Intentions 2 ;

2) AMY ADAMS IS NOT A NATURAL REDHEAD.

What? WHAT? What else fundamental to my system of beliefs is really a lie? And I don't know where she got the red from but it's really good, too. Damn.

Re: Pushing Daisies: reports of its death may be exaggerated. So if you do want to see it stay on the air, now is the time to work on saving it.

Re: Twilight: So... what does media training involve? life_on_queen says: "Uh, the media training I went to was pretty much - wear navy blue or black when you want to be taken seriously, tan or beige means 'love me, touch me.'" Permit me to note here that media-training-resistant Robert Pattinson is usually wearing black--and, in the books, Edward Cullen is ALWAYS wearing beige. (Poor confused, sex-starved, mixed-signaled Bella. "Your mouth says no, but your beige says UNF.")

Jumping randomly to something else: the best Metaquotes ever. If you don't get the punchline, you may want to take a detour over here.

(Something equally random and fabulous: one thing I love about the latest version of Firefox is that you can go up to the address bar and type in, say, "wikipedia the aristocrats," and it will take you to exactly that page. [Okay, technically it takes you a disambiguation page in this case, but it works with single-article topics.] And you can do it with "imdb [movie title]," "sephora [cosmetic brand]," all kinds of things. This has made my life so much easier, let me tell you. And for anyone who wants to argue the authorship of POTO/15M with me, type in "phantom of the opera in fifteen minutes" and see which web page Firefox takes you to IMMEDIATELY.)

In conclusion, also randomly: This made me laugh way too hard. Like, I kind of snarfled Mountain Dew all over myself. (I have a strange sense of humor, what can I say.)

Today, I am full of French onion soup and accomplishment. Really full. I have a few screencaps to make (I want to link to visual evidence of some of this weirdness), but other than that, I'm putting the Van Helsing footnotes to bed. Exciting. Which means I get to plow on through the list chronologically and keep going until I hit another unfootnoted patch, and hopefully work through the entire set UNTIL THEY ARE DONE, OMG.

A weird little sidenote: I've been trying out different old BPAL favorites as room scents, and even though Fae is a pretty bubbly scent (bergamot, heliotrope and peach, I think?), I haven't been all that productive this week. Then I put out Siren (ginger, jasmine, vanilla and apricot), and suddenly I'm getting a lot more done. Could be a coincidence, I don't know.

OH OH OH I KNEW I WAS FORGETTING SOMETHING: Today's flashback is (the oddly prescient... kind of) MyScene Lindsay Lohan entry. I even went through and freshened up all the picture links (well, except for one, and I have no idea what it originally was).

Linkspam! ( The Hair touches down in Mexico, is assaulted with sombrero )

Lots of work done today! No whammies! no whammies! crashes! And yet, there is still more to do. And once again, I hunger. I hope there's some of that ravioli downstairs.

Let's get the pre-trailer bedazzlement Twi-spam out of the way so you can skip it if you want.

ETA: ~*THE TRAILER IS HERE*~

Widget, you suck.

(WHAT THE SHIT IS THIS, FOR REAL)

( I got an update on the Baby Renesmee situation; new pictures )

A few non-partisan stories about (American) voting: Massive voter roll purges being done in secret?; 5 Friends, a celeb-packed campaign to get people to register and vote; Vote for Change, where you can check your voter registration regardless of affiliation; Your Grievance For the Next Four Years: "Voter Fraud"; There's Nothing Some Fear More Than Citizens Exercising Their Constitutional Rights.

I'll tell you the truth, I'm to the point where I want to vomit if I so much as see the word election on a TV screen--I can't even find a channel that will report news on anything other than the election at this point, and it's been going on for more than a year now, and all they do is talk about the same superficial talking-head soundbite non-issues over and over again. And I make a point to rarely, if ever, mention politics here, because the parts of this journal that aren't personal are pop culture/entertainment blogging, and I like it that way. I like not having to moderate arguments and I like having a happy little quiet place where I don't have to hear about politics--not because I don't want to hear about politics ever, or because I don't want you to hear about them, but because I assume we're all getting our daily political FDA requirement elsewhere, at (the few?) blogs and websites and newspapers that actually know what they're talking about.

Anyway, my point is that I do care. I just don't want to care about it here, other than the occasional link or story that's about politics as it relates to entertainment, or politics as it relates to everyone regardless of party. Like voting. Because I do believe it's important, and you better believe that if someone tries to stop me from voting I will raise holy goddamn hell about it. And you should too.

More linkspam! ( Gambit and the Nuclear So & Sos )

Allegedly there is someone downstairs fixing the fridge (the wrong part came in last time), which sounds promising. But meanwhile! Famous people are out there being GAY and it is SO OUR BUSINESS, the media will have you know:

Clay Aiken: 'Yes, I'm Gay.' World: 'Yes, We Knew'; Clay Aiken is gay? Really? NO KIDDING (EPIC ONTD POST IS EPIC). And somewhere, the collective Claymate breakdown is in progress, I'm sure.

Lindsay Lohan FINALLY Confirms Relationship With Samantha Ronson. "Finally" kind of bugs me here--you know, because she so totally owes us an explanation of her life and needs to get right on that. But, you know. Apparently it's a good day to be gay, so good on them.

More linkspam! ( Movie musicals, Cookie Monster Slayer, Emmett takes candy from strangers )

Okay, I'm putting this above the cut, because it is one of the greatest things I have ever seen in my entire life, and given some of the things I have linkspammed, that is saying A LOT. Ladies and gentlemen, I bring you: THE BEST FANDOM SECRETS POST EVER. Turn off the internet, y'all. It's time to go home.

Meanwhile, we have more icons, for both "Growing Up Cullen" and the Midnight Sun recap, from incognito323.

(OKAY FIREFOX CAN STOP CRASHING ANY MOMENT NOW.)

Oh, re: JaHurricane: the J storm this year is Josephine, which makes me think of this Josephine. And the hurricane before Josephine? Ike. Looks like someone over at the World Meteorological Organization is a Lemony Snicket fan.

Linkspam! ( Kermit Bale, The Internet Is Here )

I still can't get over The Happening (here in Fifteen Minutes). It's the kind of movie that's soooo bad (HOW BAD WAS IT?) that you desperately want to make other people watch it so they can commiserate with you. Because they are not going to believe you if you just tell them how bad it was. I did make up a few things in the parody... but not enough. ( Spoilers )

Meanwhile: The Legendary Stan Winston Has Died after battling cancer for seven years. In Memoriam: Stan Winston:

Aliens earned Stan Winston his first Oscar. But the visual effects genius, who succumbed to multiple myeloma yesterday at the age of 62, hardly stopped at outer-space shenanigans. Though Winston majored in painting and sculpture in college, and went to Hollywood with dreams of making it as a actor, he found more work on the other side of the lens. In the early '80s, he set up his own studio and worked with James Cameron on the surprise box-office hit The Terminator (1984). The success of that film lead to a fruitful partnership between the two men — notably, Aliens and Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) — and he and Cameron went on to found the renowned F/X shop Digital Domain.

Over the course of his career, Winston earned four Oscars (including two for the makeup and visual effects in T2 and another for the groundbreaking dinosaurs of 1993's Jurassic Park) and multiple nominations — impressive in any category. His other work includes (but is hardly limited to) Predator (1987), Edward Scissorhands (1990), Batman Returns (1992), Interview with the Vampire (1994), Pearl Harbor (2001), Iron Man (2008), and several other films currently in production.

( More linkspam )

Not sure why I'm tense, either. I think it's a hormonal thing, because I've felt like I wanted to cry all day long, even though I was relatively cheerful otherwise. Mother's Day was fine--y'all know how close I am with my mom, so that's never stressful. After we had lunch at Panera (so that Sister Girl, who had to work this afternoon, could join us), we had dessert at my grandmother's, and everything was fine. I just want to scream, is all.

( Linkspam )

Okay, I'm hugely behind on the linkspam because I spent all of last week either 1) puppying, 2) hand-writing and editing 300 in Fifteen Minutes (now with many icons), or 3) sleeping for dear life. Moreover, I kind of don't care. I have a huge list of starred links on my Google Reader, and I'll probably cherry-pick the very best (and no longer hopelessly outdated) ones for this week. But really, I feel like I'm too dependent on linkspam these days anyway.

So: I saw two movies last week--300, obviously, and I pretty much started laughing when Marching Flute Guy showed up and didn't stop from there. If there had been any doubt, the Guitars of War pretty much sealed my fate. I totally want this on DVD and spent my week in the Comedy Mines listening to the soundtrack. I feel like the Fifteen Minutes turned out pretty well--it actually beats Van Helsing by about 100 words in terms of Shortest Parody Ever, although... well, if you've seen the movie, you'll understand how it's a pound of plot in a ten-pound sack. Still, I worked pretty hard at tightening it as much as possible, if only as practice for the second book (which I hope will have shorter parodies--but more of them), so 2300ish words is like beating the four-minute mile for me.

The other one I saw was The Namesake, which ( more; mild spoilers )

April 23, 2007 is International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day! Have you heard about this? One of the Grand Poobahs at the SFWA (Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America) has decided that, in his opinion, professional writer who posts his/her work online free of charge is a "webscab" (leading to the question, "Who's on strike, exactly?") and, moreover, a "pixel-stained technopeasant." Many technopeasants, myself included, claimed that title (rather gleefully) for our own. So papersky's idea is to have next Monday be, in essence, Give Your Work Away Free Day: ( Whee! )

( Crème de la linkspam )