Cleolinda everywhere

Some very sad real-world news in the previous entry. Thus, I endeavor to bring you escapism and raptors.

( Read more... )

MORE DWARVES, YOU GUYS!

( Read more... )

I am waiting for a professional do you like me yes/no/maybe check one answer right now, and I am not doing a very good job of not driving my friends and family crazy with my Eeyore stoicism and nervous upset stomach. I have also broken out with strange rosacea-like blargh across my cheeks, because my body likes to think of new and interesting ways to rebel every time I intellectually compartmentalize anxiety and pretend it's not there, but this is still better than that GIGANTIC HEINOUS FEVER BLISTER I got on my lip when Mom went into surgery. (Anxiety I calmly refuse to acknowledge has, over the years, also chosen to express itself as dizzy spells, blood pressure spikes, severe fatigue, nausea, facial blemishes, and, on occasion, boils. I am hoping none of the other plagues of Egypt show up.)

Meanwhile! As I am waiting! We have many things to discuss.

My sister has a new cat, and his name is Jackson. (ETA: My sister does not have a new cat here.) ( picture )

There is a new Made of Fail episode up.

Also, a Help Pakistan fandom auction (I heard something to the effect that 20% of the country is underwater?).

Mark is now three chapters into Order of the Phoenix.

Stephen Fry is... on his way to Mobile, Alabama? I don't even know.

Entertainment linkspam! Man, it's nice when I can keep reasonably on top of this stuff and not spam you with a Wall o' Text. ( In which things get scary IRL )

I just saw this and I am so blown away by it that I up and ran to Semagic JUST TO POST A LIVEJOURNAL ENTRY FOR IT:

Paul W.S. Anderson Casts His 'Three Musketeers.' Okay, stand back. Are you ready for this? I don't think you're ready for this. Here we go:

Logan Lerman will play D'Artagnan, the young man who leaves home to join France's elite fighting force, and gets hooked up with the three titular musketeers. Porthos, Athos, and Aramis will be played by Ray Stevenson (one of my very favorites, and the perfect Porthos), Matthew MacFadyen, and Luke Evans, respectively.

It's the villains who will have film geeks really lining up, though. Everyone's favorite Nazi, Christoph Waltz, will be playing the dastardly Cardinal Richelieu, and Mads Mikkelsen will be playing Rochefort. Orlando Bloom has been offered the part of the Duke of Buckingham, but has not yet accepted. Of course, since this is an Anderson movie, Milla Jovovich has nabbed a part. She'll be playing Milady de Winter, whom Anderson describes as "a 17th century Bond girl." Er, I guess.

POW.

Meanwhile, I'm trying to catch up with Made of Fail, which has just come out with Episode Twenty-Nine: If you liked it, you should have put a Power Ring on it. I think this is the one with Lewis Lovhaug (aka Linkara) (again). I listened to about three different shows yesterday, so I'm not sure which came out when anymore. I believe I will be on the July episode; the next one will be Dayna having a meltdown over the Nightmare on Elm Street remake, IIRC, and then there's the June anniversary ep (which I might be on, albeit briefly? I don't know?). So there's that.

( More linkspam! )

So this Formspring thing keeps glitching and not letting people see older answers, which also means that people are asking duplicate questions because they can't see what I've already answered. And I am getting asked a lot. I've answered 200, and I've got something like 83 still hidden in the inbox. So what I'm going to do is copy-paste the answers into LJ entries--but always backdated to 3/8/10, so that they don't keep cluttering up your f-list after today. I'll tell you when I've put up a new one, but we'll use 3/8 as the archive day. And that way, people can comment on the questions/answers without having to create new "this isn't really a question" questions to do so. I'll also put them in order from the top down, the way you naturally read, instead of the newest on top the way Formspring does it.

I'm sure some people will see posting all of this as incredibly egotistic on my part, but y'all, I just answered two hundred questions. That shit is not going to waste. So!

( Who would win a vampire match-up, Eric from the Sookie Stackhouse books or Edward from Twilight? )


More in a bit.

Yes, there is a New Moon trailer. I have not watched it yet, but the general response I'm hearing is, "My God, there's a plot and the trailer actually looks kind of good." Ladies and gentlemen, a big round of applause for Chris Weitz.

No, I have not been able to watch True Blood yet. IF YOU SPOIL ME, I WILL KICK YOUR ASS. Seriously, don't even discuss it in the comments. I don't even want to hear it--I'm having a hard enough time dodging spoilers on Twitter and in entertainment news headlines. And yes, I have read the books. But given that the Maryann storyline is a near-total invention and they're also mixing it up early with Sophie-Anne, all bets are kind of off at this point.

Yes, I heard about Kanye and whatever. I didn't watch the VMAs or True Blood or ANYTHING AT ALL because whatever, I don't care. It was a really bad... evening, day, whatever... yesterday. I busted out the decant of White Light again, let's put it that way. So I'm a bit tense, if not outright cranky.

The best linkspam I can manage is over at FriendFeed.

So. Furnace checkup today; all clear. We have a contract with Evans, so they checked that for free, and then two more guys followed on Furnace Guy's heels to diagnose our plumbing problems. We knew we had some toilets prone to stopping up, and you get six inches of standing water in my tub every time you take a shower (repeated applications of Liquid Plumr have gotten it down to only two. It does eventually drain out, though, so it's not, like, the SAME six inches of water). So I take them all over the house--

See, I know what y'all are going to say. Is there a jinx on the house, Indian burial ground, who did we piss off, etc. What you have to remember is, a cheap and shady developer built all the houses on this cul-de-sac about 22 years ago. I love this house to death--it's the first time I've had a decent closet of my own, not to mention a bathroom bigger than a shoebox--so don't blame the house. I love the house. I feel sorry for the house. It doesn't want to fall apart on us; it just had a really irresponsible builder (newspaper instead of insulation. For real). In addition to that, I don't know about anyone who lived here before us, but in the eight years that we've lived here, we've never had any plumbing maintenance done. So of course we're going to find a shitload of things wrong with it. (Keep in mind, we have tried to take care of these problems ourselves already.) This is not evil horrible bad luck; this is inevitable. Such problems, which add up to $1500, include:

The water pressure is too high--this is something of an emergency/priority. Some kind of valve has worn out, and the pressure is at 90 whatever instead of 60 whatever, which is why the toilets keep running, things are getting worn out, we have a weird spraying problem with the base of the kitchen faucet, etc.;

Weird spraying problem with the kitchen faucet and the right-side sink, which is a bit clogged;

Severe calcium/mineral buildups in the 20-year-old toilets, which may need to be replaced entirely--not a problem with the pipes, in other words;

My shower, obviously, which needs a good snaking (that's what she said), as well as my clogged/slow sink;

Probably a few other things--I saw the itemized list--but I am too tired to care what they are right now.

So we're having $800 worth of it done today--the high-pressure problem and my bathroom, since the "taking a shower in standing water" (which I have been doing for way too long) issue is the most pressing issue. The continued expenses (snarling flooded dishwasher, two cars with severe repair problems, all the outlets upstairs getting rewired) just don't even faze me anymore. My mother seemed to think the diagnosis would be worse, so at least there's no catastrophic shock there. I'm working as hard as I can on the Harry Potter e-book thing, although yesterday was bad and I didn't even get in the same room as the computer. And right now I'm having to stay available in case the plumbers need something (where is this or that; a minute ago they asked for a wire hanger) (insert your best Mommy Dearest impression here), so I don't really want to get down to work, get in the zone, and then have to be dragged out of it. But as for the rest of it, I'm pretty much beyond reaction at this point.

Meanwhile, I go see my psych for a quarterly med check tomorrow; she generally insists on a therapy-like hour of chat, so she can see for herself how I'm doing. Is she going to get an earful, let me tell you what.


ETA: Well, I just wrote a check for $921 (taxes added). Yow.

So tired. Did not sleep at all last night, between the rainstorm and the cramps (again: you needed to know this, I'm sure). Headache now. The kind of long day where nothing actually gets done. Did see my doctor for a medicine check; we're going to raise the Lamictal from 150 to 200 (but leave the other two meds alone). And that was the target dose she thought would be best in the end, so I guess we're finally going to work up to that; it was originally (or primarily?) an anti-seizure drug, so what it's supposed to do is help the bipolar cycle even out. I just know that increasing that particular drug too quickly in the past sent me into a deep tailspin, so I'm going to have to be on the lookout for that. The thing is, I went into a dark patch this spring anyway, so the worst case scenario is that I go into another one--one that I'm expecting and watching for--and the best is that I don't, and it helps regulate the mood cycling better.

Also, there is no chocolate in the house. This vexes me. Thus, in this spirit of sleep-deprived vexation, I bring you a smattering of linkspam that might or might not provoke more discussion than usual, I don't know.

Headshots of the four main Airbender actors in costume. DO NOT SNIPE AT EACH OTHER IN THE COMMENTS OR I WILL PULL THIS JOURNAL OVER AND COME BACK THERE. I'VE DONE IT BEFORE, I'LL DO IT AGAIN.

Emma Watson on the scene I always think of as Voldemort Ships H/Hr: "I'm going to end up kissing both of [the boys] in the last film. Ugh, it's horrible." But! Emma Watson had the hots for Tom Felton.

Meanwhile: LA Times: Michael Gambon "Sees No Point in Reading" Harry Potter Books by JK Rowling. Maybe I'm crazy, but I love the Gambledore. I'm not saying he's Perfect Exact Book Dumbledore; I'm just saying I love him.

Danny Huston Takes the Crown in 'Robin Hood.' Aw, I love him! I feel kind of warm and fuzzy now.

A major deleted death scene from the director's cut DVD of Watchmen. ... a little less fuzzy now.

What Does Ryan Reynolds’ ‘Green Lantern’ Role Mean For ‘Deadpool’ Movie?

TCM's 'Summer Under the Stars' Posters are Phenomenal.

With ‘True Blood,’ HBO Revives Its Fortunes.

Kodi Smit-McPhee Might Be Oskar in the 'Let Me In' Remake.

'The Wolfman' Gets Down On All Fours: "Rumors of reshoots have been dogging the Wolf Man movie for months. Now we know the truth: instead of paying homage to the original film, the film-makers have reshot key scenes to put Benicio Del Toro on all fours. [...] And then he faces off a much fiercer CG-ed up werewolf. Yes that's right the crew that made a movie based on the Wolf Man now think the Wolfman is lame and did bounding reshoots, so the Wolf Man could be scarier and face off with a werewolf."

Everything Wrong with the Internet in One Gaming Banner Ad Campaign [Badvertising].

1) House rules: Don't fight on my journal. Don't. Disagree, discuss, that's great. But you will be civil and non-snippy to me and each other on my own journal. Take it somewhere else if you can't.

2) My stepfather decided to buzzcut the Angry Jasmine again. The jasmine then got so much angrier, in fact, that it disgorged a swarm of yellowjackets that stung him upside the head several times. I'm not even making this up.

3) Yesterday, I opened the front door to take Scout outside on his leash, and there's a dead bird toes up on the doorstep. A fairly large bird, too--you know, the size of a pigeon, rather than a sparrow. We have no idea what it was doing there, because it was under the little porch overhang fairly close to the door, so it couldn't have just fallen out of the sky or something.

( Linkspam )

Re: the SDCC exclusive Tonner Edward variant: I think my problem here isn't OMG IT'S A TWILIGHT DOLL I MUST HAVE IT; it's that I love incorporating stuff into the Secret Life stories. And "stuff" often gets expensive, although not always--some of the best bits have been small reader gifts (The Littlest Cowboy Hat, for example), or stuff I found around the house (the dessert fork for pitching the ponies' grass), or old toys from my closet (the ponies themselves). I mean, there are dolls I want for myself that I haven't bought because I couldn't justify the cost (even crazy-fantastic bargains) by thinking of a way to incorporate them--but I see something that makes me go HOLY SHIT I HAVE TO PUT THAT IN THE STORY and it's like my brain just shuts down. I mean, I saw Super Special Exclusive Legolas with Cloak on eBay and fought for that thing to the $40 death AND STILL GOT IT FOR HALF WHAT IT USUALLY GOES FOR, SUCKAAAAAS. It's kind of my equivalent of "SQUIRREL!"

But I am trying to talk myself down off the Gratuitous Edward Variant ledge because: Alice. I have to have Alice. I can't not have Alice. I have to bring Alice's awesome to The Shelf. I can't blow this kind of money on a character I already have in a slightly different shirt and afford an Alice. So there's that. I... I'll have to see a picture of the variant Edward, I guess. *hangs head*

Oh, by the way, we have a reader question about dolls--where to find good sites for accessories for 4" figures?

Oh, and my mother has found someone who wants to buy the plates. Not the mugs yet, though.

( Linkspam )

BREAKING: David Carradine Found Dead in Bangkok; David Carradine, Actor, Is Dead at 72.

Fantasy Author David Eddings Has Died.

( Read more... )