Cleolinda everywhere

Okay, things are about to get hellaciously (hella?) busy the next couple of weeks, sooooo let me lay it all out:

Yesterday was the #13HourDevour Hannibal marathon--I broke down and got the Amazon Prime free trial for other reasons, and it turned out to be a pretty good way to stream the show and watch along, although a lot of folks were using their DVDs as well. I kept meaning to walk away at some point and do non-computer stuff, but... I ended up sitting there through the whole thing. The whole thirteen hours. I mean, I was multi-tasking, but... thirteen hours. I am no longer afraid of the Oscars next Sunday. My fingers are ready.

The way I did it, though, didn't so much involve finging as a lot of gathering and organizing--I didn't necessarily livetweet that much myself, except towards the end. But I really wanted to put a Storify post pulling a lot of different things together, and I wanted it done before I called it a night, rather than let it take over today as well. So we ended up with three posts total (with single-page versions as well). A sample:

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As far as I can tell, it was wildly successful--various hashtags trended all day long, sometimes things that the producers didn't even come up with. Like, within minutes. The Hugh Dancy Q&A was in the second hour (see first post); various cast and crew wandered in throughout the whole day, with @NBCHannibal doing giveaways on the hour and at least one producer holding down the fort at any given time. I was just super interested in the whole process from a social-media perspective, because I don't think anyone's ever tried anything like this before, and it was fascinating to see it actually work. I'm sure it looks super obsessive on my part, but I just really enjoy experimenting with what you can do with this kind of thing.

I did set up a second Twitter account, though--@cleolindajones--to spare casual followers from massive livetweetage. So I'll probably be on that second account for the Oscars, Hannibal on Fridays, whenever I get to livetweet the second Game of Thrones book, Sleepy Hollow next year, and so on. Feel free to follow or unfollow that as necessary; I try to be vague anyway, but hopefully putting livetweets on a separate account will help people in different time zones and/or countries avoid spoilers until they want to see them.

So! I'm recording with the Matter of Taste guys again tomorrow night; we have the season 2 premiere on Friday (DOUBT NOT), the Oscars on Sunday night, and God knows when I'll have the first episode recap up considering all that plus the fact that the show's moved back a day and I don't have a "long weekend" time frame anymore. (Links to the season one recaps are worked into the marathon posts, but they're also listed here, if you want to revisit them fist.) Also I have another couple of writing deadlines, which is exciting, but clearly I'm going to have to bring my time-management A game to all this. Fortunately, spring is coming, which will help a lot.

ALSO I have started watching True Detective, which surprised me with the King in Yellow thing that none of y'all told me about, if you would like to discuss that here. I'm catching up on the latest episode sometime today, if/after I have been productive.

}:D



ETA: http://cleolinda.tumblr.com/post/77736157319/hannibal-watch-season-2s-brutal-opening-fight-scene

COME SCRAPE ME OFF THE FLOOR WHEN YOU'VE GOT A MOMENT

Another montage of actors explaining what movies mean to them. What a wonderful break for my fingers. I have three Tagalongs left; I'm pacing myself. ( Read more... )

"Front row, you know what I'm thinking? Why don't we chip in and buy the Dodgers?" ( Read more... )

I'm not even dignifying this Melissa McCarthy seducing Billy Crystal in a pink robe bit with one more second of my time. It's to introduce Ben Stiller and a statuesque Emma Stone, who has a massive red bow vampiring her neck, presenting Visual Effects. "This is my first time presenting an award!" she oozes, basking in the stage lights. She is about three hundred feet taller than Stiller. "We should have some banter! Where people laugh at you but you seem okay with it? We should have a song! I should pull someone up from the audience!" And then it goes from really funny to a gigantic train wreck. "Get up here Jonah! Let's dance!" Out in the audience, Hill makes a (scripted) CUT IT OUT gesture. Stiller, disapprovingly: "You don't want to be the presenter who tries too hard." "Oh," says Stone, turning on him, "you mean, like the guy who dressed up like Avatar? Or in a lime green unitard?" Okay, the whole thing was worth it for that statuesque BURN.

Visual Effects

    "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2"
    Tim Burke, David Vickery, Greg Butler and John Richardson
    "Hugo"
    Rob Legato, Joss Williams, Ben Grossmann and Alex Henning
    "Real Steel"
    Erik Nash, John Rosengrant, Dan Taylor and Swen Gillberg
    "Rise of the Planet of the Apes"
    Joe Letteri, Dan Lemmon, R. Christopher White and Daniel Barrett
    "Transformers: Dark of the Moon"
    Scott Farrar, Scott Benza, Matthew Butler and John Frazier

I'm so busy trying to type up the Emma Stone business that I only just realized that, since Hugo wins this, Andy Serkis and Planet of the Apes just got robbed.

Billy Crystal: "You know, this is the year we say goodbye to Harry Potter. They made more than 7.7 BILLION dollars, and only paid 14% in taxes last year." Please welcome non sequitur-winning Melissa Leo!

Actor in a Supporting Role

    Kenneth Branagh in "My Week with Marilyn"
    Jonah Hill in "Moneyball"
    Nick Nolte in "Warrior"
    Christopher Plummer in "Beginners"
    Max von Sydow in "Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close"

And the Oscar goes to Christopher Plummer! Please bring some class up into this joint. Viola Davis leads a standing ovation (seriously, she JUMPS to her feet). Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie's lipstick are slightly less beneficent this time around. "You're only two years older than me, darling. Where have you been all my life?" he says to his Oscar. "I have a confession to make. When I first emerged from my mother's womb, I was already rehearsing my acceptance speech. Fortunately for you, I have forgotten it." He also thanks his fellow nominees, particularly "dear Max, I am so proud to be in your company." Wait, I just realized that he is wearing a black velvet suit. I need to hit post now.

"That win for Octavia Spencer is what the Oscars is all about," says Crystal, who is not at this moment wearing blackface, and then makes a joke about how he wanted to hug the first black person he saw after he saw The Help and was in an area where there were no black people.

RT @SmartBitches: "That moment with Octavia was what the Oscars is all about." Good thing you rushed her offstage so you could come on and make racist jokes.

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"Welcome back to the Your Name Here Theater," because Kodak is going bankrupt, lol. "Let's go to the movies!" IT'S A MONTAGE! GOTTA HAVE A MONTAGE! ( Read more... )

In theory, I will, in fact, be doing an Oscar liveblog in the grand old tradition. I have been having some health problems, though, and since we're talking about blood pressure spikes and dizzy spells, it's a little harder to just shrug it off. Less seriously, I'm mostly in panic mode because we've got a Billy Crystal song/montage/whatever it is he does coming up, and those are hell to recap in progress. ("I can't understand what he's singing! Now he's interacting with footage of a movie I have not seen! Drag, really? OH GOD WHAT IS HE DOING WITH THAT HORSE?!") Anyway. I will do my best.



@fuggirls: PLEASE, Hollywood, stop enabling Sacha Baron Cohen. "The Dictator" looks SO TERRIBLE. OMG. -H #oscars

@StessRingold: @fuggirls @cleolinda Did you see him "accidentally" spill Kim Jong-Il's ashes on Ryan Seacrest? Yeah. Please just stop, you are not funny.

@particle_p: I don't know, ashing Seacrest raises my opinion of Baron Cohen.

@cleolinda: I will say, the bit at the end of the Dictator trailer where he starts shooting the other runners made my mother laugh.

@fuggirls: A Fug National is at the Oscars and apparently E!'s security team is PISSED about the SBC stunt. - J


Oh dear.

I have a ton of catching up to do, but I slipped into a research/rewrite/productivity rabbit hole and didn't want to come out for a few days. So, here is several days' worth of linkspam, although I tried to stick to the essentials: ( Read more... )


I cut several news items for time (space?), but I'll see if I can't work them into the next spam, assuming one happens in a timely fashion.

Okay, more housekeeping.

The new layout: For those of you just joining us, the goal was to make the layout, particularly the comment posting boxes, more accessible to anyone with visual impairment. I threw "November Day" up here just to have something clean and legible for the Oscar liveblog, but... now I actually like it. I went through every single other layout LJ offers, tested more than a dozen of them full-size, and kept coming back to this one. In fact, I don't even think I want to go back to Component now; it looks cluttered and small in comparison. Problem: This layout does not have an option to change any of the colors. So we're staying with it in teal for this week, and then foresthouse and I are going to work on the CSS code over the weekend and shift all the hex codes to purple hues. I had a few people who said they liked the teal better (if it weren't an issue of persona, I'd actually be perfectly happy with it myself), but I also had people who were touchingly distraught at my non-purple existence. So we'll at least see what it looks like changed, live, so we can tweak it. Here's what a screencap of the current layout looks like with the hue shifted in Photoshop and lightened/desaturated a bit, both a warm purple and a cool purple:

( POLL TIME )


On the upside, my parents are both down for the count with a third iteration of Death Blarg, but somehow, I have managed to dodge it this time. I am hoping that better health and weather will lead to an improved awesomosity forecast.

That said, we had a freak hailstorm yesterday:



A quick linkspam: ( Read more... )

And now... the games begin.

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