Cleolinda everywhere

1) Bella Swan: vampiring better than you since *checks watch* 2008. This is the same teaser that ran in front of The Hunger Games, so you may have already seen it (stop poaching Katniss's deer, BELLA). ( Read more... )

2) Meanwhile, shit got real: The Hunger Games' box office crushes the Twilight movies. All of them.

3) I seem to have hit a hypomanic upswing; mine, as I've explained before, are pretty mild. The only thing someone would really notice from the outside is that I'm a bit more upbeat, enthusiastic, and talkative--but when a movie I've really been looking forward to comes out, that doesn't seem out of place. (Honestly, I've started wondering--as I've said before--if you can trigger manic moods. If nothing else, I think it suddenly being SUMMER IN THE MIDDLE OF MARCH gave me an overdose of natural light, and that may have caused it as well. As I recall, my most pronounced upswings are almost always in the spring and summer.) Otherwise, I'm outwardly calm, but as I've gotten older, I've been edging further and further into mild mania, and the happy creative bursts have been "evolving" into something less comfortable. The upside at the lower hypomanic end is that I feel happy and creative (verging on hypergraphic); at the high, verging-on-manic end, I feel overcaffeinated, impatient, and irritable, I have all these ideas but I can't concentrate or focus, I have a hard time sleeping, and I don't want to eat. I have a sample of BPAL's Safari blend, and a dab on the back of each hand (so I can smell it while I'm typing) seems to have centered me a bit. Once I was able to actually focus, I got 1600 words written in a couple of hours last night (there's your hypergraphia), but it took me all day to be able to concentrate that long.

On the other hand, you get wackadoo flights of fancy like the mandatory Panem TV schedule, and like this:

@cleolinda: WHY IS THIS STILL HAPPENING RT @NikkiFinke: Hugh Dancy To Star In NBC Series ‘Hannibal’

@cleolinda: Look, save some time. Modern-day Sherlock Holmes hunts Hannibal Lecter. In a dystopia. With a vampire. An alien vampire.

@cleolinda: The alien vampire is on the run from a beauty pageant to the death. Also, Sherlock is a werewolf. His brother is a steampunk faerie.

@writingfreak88: No alien ninja turtles?

( Read more... )

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Just a short bit, because I liked the question: I always related a lot to Jo March as a kid, since I was a writer too. So many people identify with Elizabeth Bennet--probably because she's just that well-written a character--but more specifically, I always identified with Elinor Dashwood (my sister is very much a Marianne); I tend to choke a lot of things down. And Jane Eyre and Sara Louise in Jacob Have I Loved appealed to me a lot for that sense of outsider-ness, of not fitting in.

(As a side note, I try to find something I can identify with, or at least understand, in every single character I write. It's a useful way to prevent cardboard villains, for example. You know, what beliefs do they hold, or habits do they have, or what do they really want, and can I identify with wanting that, even if I don't want it for myself?)

Early linkspam so I can go take some pictures for something I'm a bit behind on posting. Cough.

Re: the previous post: Okay, you know me. I love me some Tonners. That is not a factory fresh "original" Tonner Jacob. Now that I've gotten a good look at it, you can't convince me that it is. I know for a fact that the other two are repaints, because I know what the originals look like. That is just not a Tonner paint job, and you cannot tell me otherwise. ETA: Aha! Solved.

The new Made of Fail podcast is up, for real this time.

( More 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... )

Back that way: Iorek finally gets his skyfoil (with pictures!); the Faramirs read Twilight; Valentine's plans are made.

I'm behind on the Snack Deathmatch! Today: Apple pie vs. peach pie.

I am behind on so, so much, actually. Particularly the linkspam. And discussing the bush fires (which we will get to in greater length this weekend. Again: The Red Cross). I spent much of the day sneezing, strangely. And I'm an hour late on getting dinner because I passed out napwise from five to seven. So I'm not feeling so much with the good right now, I guess.

( Linkspam )

I forgot to mention this earlier, but since a few people asked--you actually can get the Movies in Fifteen Minutes book in paperback off Amazon UK for a lot less than the hardback, which seems to mostly be in the hands of the Asshat Resellers now (God bless us, every one). What's £5.99 these days--$8.48? And you can get it used for £2.99 (even from a business perspective, I'm more concerned with people reading the book than whatever slim royalties I might lose from secondhand sales). Whereas the hardback now seems to only sell used from £31 and up. So, in conclusion: if you want to get the book cheap, the paperback has a different cover and a slightly different title, but it's the same thing.

Meanwhile, the Awesomeness Initiative is flagging somewhat, mostly because the cold weather is making me sluggish. One of my favorite things to do when it's cold--and the sheer amount of time I spend doing this is a major failing of mine--is curl up on the couch under a pile of blankets while the dogs argue over who gets to lie on my feet. As a means of jumpstarting my lazy ass, I've started asking myself what Barack Obama would do, and then I realized that's not going to work because he would just tell Rahm Emanuel to take care of it while he did something more presidential, like fix the economy with the power of his mind from his Fortress of Solitude. So then I started asking myself what Michelle Obama would do. Put on her Jimmy Choos and kick some ass, that's what Michelle Obama would do. I think this would look very good printed on a rubber bracelet, in fact.

(This is why I will never be a good role model. What would Cleolinda do? Curl up on her couch and... watch shitty movies on cable. POW!)

( Linkspam! )

Oh, wow--someone sent me a book, but I'm not sure who it's from? There wasn't any name or card or information with it. It's something I had really wanted to read for Black Ribbon research, though, so--thank you so much, whoever it's from!

By the way, if you were working the upstairs register at the Brookwood Mall Books-a-Million on Wednesday night, and you sold a copy of Dead Until Dark to two women, the older of which kept saying "SHE WRITES ABOUT THE SHOW" really loudly over and over again, and the younger of which looked like she kind of wanted to die... I need to apologize to you about that.

( You really don't need to go announcing that Twilight is terrible )

Also, I feel like I should say a bit more about The Gift of Fear, since several people raised this concern--( Read more... )

Linkspam!

helpvera was a complete success.

( Breaking news: Jacob recast leaked? )



ETA: Bettie Page passed away this evening.

Let's go ahead and get two days of linkspam out of the way, shall we? ( We need to cut a bitch on Roger Ebert's behalf )

You know, it's really productive to have a gigantic head/jawache from stress right when you need to work on something that would earn some money and thereby alleviate the source of the stress.

So... let's go to another happy jewelry place! I bring you--via elisa0984--georgianjewelry.com. (Favorite pieces: the man in the moon earrings; the moonstone double heart ring; the moonstone heart pendant; the scalloped piqué hoops; the pearl heart pendant; the French locket. But then, I think I'm a sucker for the sun/moon/stars motif in general. And also, moonstones.)

Linkspam! ( Twilight Tuesday, more petitions, Walt Disney's Sin City )

Sweeney Todd: Can't stop listening to soundtrack, plz send help. The extras on the second disc are fairly decent, by the way. No commentary, but--have you ever heard a Tim Burton commentary? Forget a Depp and Burton commentary--the one on Sleepy Hollow was Mumbletown all the way. But there's a few good bits on the costumes (which, if you've spent any time on this journal, you will know is the really important thing), plus some recording studio footage on the first disc, and a number of tangentially related featurettes (Did you know? Victorian London kind of sucked if you were poor! Sweeney Todd may or may not have been a real person! There's a theater in San Francisco that still does Grand Guignol plays today, and OH GOD WAS THAT AN EYEBALL AUGH WTF).

Speaking of eyeballs (~augh~) ( AUGH )

Anyway. Well, here's a dumb question: who would be interested in an annotated Movies in Fifteen Minutes? Just, in pencil, in the margins of one of the hardcovers--a one-of-a-kind handwritten thing. (It has to be in pencil, because I can't write in the margins of a book with pen. I just can't. It's sacrilege.) I could also print out all the existing online 15Ms, as a separate auction, and annotate them by hand? It's kind of weird to propose this, though, because it sounds like I'm completely full of myself to even suggest it, but it's one of those things--if you need money, and you think there's the slightest chance anyone would want something, you'll toss any idea out there no matter how ridiculous it sounds. Thoughts?

ETA: Yes, I know, bookplates. I have a large pile of self-addressed stamped envelopes to send those out in, to people who requested them an embarrassingly long time ago; I was just never able to get one that looked the way I wanted, and again, it's been such an embarrassingly long time that I may just need to swallow my aesthetic pride and do something much simpler. Point being, I don't want to charge people for signed bookplates. I just... I can't explain it, I just feel like I shouldn't take money for that. A signed book, you know, at least you're paying for the book itself as well. I don't know. So yes, I still need to do the bookplate thing, but that's an issue separate from needing to raise money to pay taxes.


( Linkspam )