Holy crap, now I'm excited. O_O

1. I'm getting so lazy about staying caught up with LJ, but now it seems whenever I finally go through my f-list on this journal it's been really slow anyway. It's like a whole bunch of people have suddenly de-friended me without me noticing/gone on a spirit walk/dropped off the face of the earth. :/

2. Chike and I had planned to go see the new Transformers together, which to be honest I was mostly looking forward to because I wanted to see the Last Airbender trailer, hehe. But after hearing how God-awful it is we decided to do Up instead. Probably one of the best decisions of my life. I didn't quite cry like I heard practically everyone did, but I got pretty close. And speaking of Avatar, between that and Pixar movies it's starting to seem like a lot of the best creative minds out there are being used for children's/family entertainment these days.

3. Ever since I finished watching all of Heroes lately, I have never felt so indecisively torn between fandoms before in my life. I want to write epic Kirk & Spock buddy fic. I also want to write pseudo-darkfic about Peter, Claire, and Sylar all living to be like six hundred years old and being some of the only ones still alive after the apocalypse. Usually when I'm into something I get so into it I don't really have the attention to spare for anything else for the time being, but I'm totally confused right now. LOL.

I'm also busy reading through all the nominations for the sortofbeautiful Jacob/Bella fic awards to properly and fairly familiarize myself with everything before voting (though I'm not going to vote in the "Best Jacob Characterization" category since I'm nominated in it :P), and it's making me remember Oh yeah, there's also those five or so works-in-progress in this fandom I haven't worked on in forever... FML.

4. Besides embarking on my epic mission of cleaning/re-organizating/decorating my room, I'm having a properly uneventful and unoccupied summer. Nerd and Jordon have been hanging out at his parents' really big and nice house while they're in Hawaii, and Kitty and Layla and I have been going over to swim. The other day we ate watermelon in the pool and then made cookies and enjoyed them with girly Smirnoff drinks while watching Miyazaki anime with a classic rock radio station as the soundtrack because we couldn't figure out how to make the audio from the DVD player work. And at other times I've been mixing myself Shirley Temples and sitting out in my back yard reading Star Trek novels. Unemployment and uselessness FTW!

5. Seeing this old commercial just made me kind of sad for some reason. Everybody still alive and being so cute.

Also, this is a very good catch:

1. I'm so freaking tired of not being able to sleep at normal times. It doesn't matter how long I've been going without sleep, body is still like "But we are used to shutting off at 5:00 AM because you're crazy and it's 1:00 AM! What is this? Just go waste some more time laughing at the crack in st_xi_kink." And right now there are people here to repair my parents' shower or something and Casey is freaking out and won't stop barking and whining so there's not going to be any napping. So much for this day.

2. I've officially started watching Heroes when I never thought I would just because a certain GQ motherfucker is in it. Send me to shallow fangirl hell.



3. "George R. R. Martin is not your bitch": Neil Gaiman blogs about fan entitlement. This is why I love this man.

4. Layla and I are in agreement that this alien in the "cantina scene" of The Search For Spock is secretly Al Pacino.

Probably pretty obvious to anyone who knows me well at all, haha.



I kind of feel like my loyalty should be to my childhood and good old Obi-Wan, but what can I say? I guess bleak and depressing with characters who all make you hate them at some point is my thing.

1. Last Saturday was supposed to be when we went to my brother's house in Carbondale for Julie's graduation party, but they cancelled it because of bad weather. How stinky. Layla hasn't even seen their house there yet.

2. Haven't been doing much in the past week besides unpacking all my stuff I had at school and starting a huge cleaning and reorganizing in my room because I know if I don't take care of this before starting a job it'll never get done. I can't believe how much clothes I finally got rid of that I don't need anymore. And I can't believe how many pairs of pants I still have when none of them even fit quite right because buying pants sucks.

3. I was going to write an entire review gushing about how great Star Trek is now that I've seen it three times and also downloaded it, but everybody has pretty much already heard a really positive opinion of it from everywhere.

Instead I'm going to gush about how Avatar: The Last Airbender randomly took over my life recently. Yeah, that...Nickelodeon show. I heard about it all because it's gained such a big following of fans outside of its intended age group because it's really well written. As far as children's cartoons that happen to be really enjoyable for anyone go, I can say with complete seriousness that I think it's even better than Batman the Animated Series. The animators worked with a martial arts consultant to make the fight scenes authentically capture the movements of real martial arts styles, and the action sequences are really elegant to watch. Especially when helped by the pretty good music, which there's a petition to get released on a soundtrack. I seriously love every single character, some of which are surprisingly complicated Snape or Baltar types who are unlikable but not evil. And there are a lot of obvious homages to Hayao Miyazaki's animations which is of course extra fun for me.



It's being made into a series of three live-action movies by M. Night Shyamalan, which I believe is not a bad thing. He's a bad writer but not a bad director, so ever since he expressed interest in doing a Harry Potter film a long time ago I've wondered how he would do handling an adaptation of something.

4. I just found out there's now a Season 2 soundtrack for Mad Men out as well as a whole album of original score from the show. I've been hoping for a long time I'd be able to get my hands on the arrangement of Rimsky-Korsakov's "Song of India" that was used in an episode, and they did put it on the score CD. Now it really sucks that I shouldn't be buying anything right now. :(

5. Most awkward and creepy yet hilarious interview I've ever seen...Who let this guy near them?




Basic gist of the conversation in the car after I saw ST with Kitty, Layla, and Marita...

Kitty: I really enjoyed it, but the science geek in me is just going "What the fuck? Black holes and time travel and what?"
Me: I guess it's just the red matter that makes time travel possible?
Marita: Yeah, that's it. We know nothing about what red matter is, therefore everything is taken care of.
Me: The real question is who the hell has seen a canyon that big in Iowa.
Kitty: ...Good point.
Layla: They blew it up?
Me: The next movie will be another prequel about what happened to make the huge canyon.
Marita: It'll just be called Where the Fuck Did That Canyon Come From?
Me: Star Trek 12: Where the Fuck Did Canon Go and Where Did That Canyon Come From?

Told Mom and Dad the plan when they were over here to have lunch with Layla and me last weekend. They were disapproving but not mad, pretty much like I expected, and they expect me to not be such a pain as long as I'm still living at the house. Dad was like "We need to come up with an agreement. Containing...you know...agreements."

So it's my last night in the Blo and I'm a little sad. Ashley and I are spending it watching Lars and the Real Girl because we both love Ryan Gosling and have pretty much been talking about watching it since our first week as roommates, and trying to finish up all the junk food we still have stocked up here. She made me promise I'll call her whenever I visit Bloomington so we can get together. Gonna miss her. :'(

First plans for my first summer that won't be summer vacation: hang out with Chris as soon as possible because A) I never see him anymore and B) I need to ask him about this job he and his mom were both doing for a while reading books for a publishing company that sounds too good to be true. And we're visiting Aaron and Julie in a couple weeks for Julie's graduation party, which I'm pretty excited about.

Hm...Tonight I should probably start packing some of my crap, too. Haha.

1. I freaked out more watching this than the latest Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince trailer.

Why must it take so long for soundtracks to come out? SEASON 4 TWO-DISC SET, I WANT YOU INSIDE MY COMPUTER. NOW.

2. New Moon promo pic of the wolf pack minus Jake.



Holy freaking photoshop Batman. First thing I thought when I saw this was Oh my God, Sam Uley looks like Joseph Adama! and somehow that seems kind of appropriate. LOL.

Apparently they'll be using images of the actors' eyes to animate the eyes of their wolf forms so that they'll actually kind of look like the characters. I approve.



3. Speaking of Jodama, my thoughts on the Caprica pilot.

1. Been forever since I posted, as usual. What be the haps? I hope everybody had a good Easter/Passover/first half of April/whatever.

2. I watched the pilot for Caprica a few days ago because it's leaked, which I'm feeling rather guiltless about because I don't have much interest in buying a DVD to see just the first episode of a show that's not even quite movie-length even if it might help the show's chances. I'll use the $18.00 on the soundtrack instead. Anyway, I loved it and I can't wait until it's officially released and everybody's seen it because I'm withholding all my specific comments until then. Though Shep and I had to squee together about it online for about twenty minutes since we both know nobody else who's seen it, haha.

3. Also, Layla keeps bothering me to start watching Kings so I'm downloading the first episode now. La-di-da...

4. The other day I was filling out a survey for fanfiction writers to help someone with a thesis they're writing about us crazy bitches and had to select "Did not graduate from college" instead of "Attending college and intending to graduate." Felt weird. LOL. It's probably going to take forever to get used to not having a bunch of due dates for assignments to be thinking about, but I'm finally starting to feel completely guiltless about it and I mean...this is awesome. Yeah...Check back with me in a couple months when I actually know what it's like to be independent and poor.

5. Speaking of fanfic, I know I'm not the only ff.net user who's noticed this dramatic drop-off in people's tendency to bother reviewing ever since they've started sending alerts to authors when someone adds a story of theirs to favorites. This is not a substitute for a review. :( Let me hear from you, don't you think? People do look at review pages to determine whether something's worth reading, and I don't get paid for the hour of my life it takes up to write every 600 words or so. If you actually enjoy reading something, the least you can do is leave ten words of feedback or something. Geeeez.

6. It's freaking raining again, I'm freaking bored. Unoccupied. I don't get to say that often. But I can't drive my car because I need to get a tire fixed so I'm kind of stranded in my little dorm room all the time lately, especially when it's this crappy outside. Guess it's King time...

Dropping out of college playlist.
music I've been listening to instead of studying for finals...heh

hanne hukkelberg. berlin.
the who. magic bus.
the dandy warhols. all the money or the simple life honey.
louis armstrong. la vie en rose.
massive attack. man next door.
sons and daughters. blood.
the beatles. lady madonna ("love" version).
led zeppelin. black mountain side.
moby. flower.
the cult. she sells sanctuary.
soul coughing. screenwriter's blues.
bobby darin. splish splash.
the crystal method. trickshot.
spoon. back to the life.
sufjan stevens. the dress looks nice on you.
cat power featuring steve shelley. the sleepwalker.
the the. this is the day.
the yeah yeah yeahs. gold lion (acoustic version).
[zip]

...Apparently it's actually a really funny parody.

I think I need to read this.

Stupidly cold weather in April, thou art an intolerable offense and I spit on thee. Three times.

Last weekend Layla and I came home for one night the day before the party and randomly decided we should finally see Watchmen. Sans Shep, because he "doesn't like super heroes," though I tried to tell him based on what I've heard about Watchmen that that's kind of a hilariously ironic reason to not want to see this movie. But then both theatres in our town only had two showings of it all day, and not one late enough. WTF. I was sad.

So instead we just rented Once Upon a Time In the West, which I ended up just watching by myself later and enjoyed immensely. Before that we hung out at Shep's, where Jason once again showed up most likely in hopes of seeing me, and that's beginning to become just slightly awkward. We watched the pilot of Dead Like Me, which seems like an awesome show, though with all the other shows I plan to get to I don't think I'm ready to commit to it anytime soon. My fears I had when I first heard about DLM about many elements of it being too similar to a book I want to write called The Carrier (which is more of a ridiculous knee-jerk reaction than something influenced at all by me getting ahead of myself with concerns about how publishable it would be) were confirmed even more than I feared. D:

Recently I also finally watched the Director's Cut of Dark City which Layla got me for Christmas. As far as I could tell there isn't really that much additional material, which is fine with me because I don't have to feel all conflicted about which version is the "real" one. LOL. I'm just surprised now because I'd seen comments like "The characters are much more developed and fleshed-out in the director's cut," though I kind of cocked an eyebrow at that in the first place because the whole point of the story is that the characters are living with superficial, forced identities and are too confused to show much depth. It's worth seeing, but people seem to be blowing the differences out of proportion.

I felt so crappy last night I thought I was actually becoming seriously ill, which pretty much never happens to me. I still have a sore throat but felt functional in the morning, which is good because I otherwise would have had to go get a doctor's note in order to make up my Geology test and doctor's notes are the most dumbass concept ever. There are a great many incapacitating conditions that are no more detectable by a professional than anyone else. Especially if you get migraines. Or you're female. Ahem.

Oh wait...except I'm planning to drop out of school so none of this matters. Except I figure I might as well get my money's worth and finish the classes. And it's really hard to let go of the notion that's been pounded in my head all my life that any of this matters in the grand scheme of my entire hopefully long life, so it still feels secure and comforting to go through the daily ritual of School. Basically.

Just when I thought I couldn't love her any more.

I don't understand what I'm missing because I'm not all in love with Andrew Bird's music like so many people are. Ashley has asked me about three times if I like Andrew Bird and I'm just like "...Yeah" with not much enthusiasm. Haha.

Yeah, I get it, he plays a whole bunch of different crazy instruments and is clearly talented and it's cute. And I do like a lot of his songs enough. But listening to an entire album of him seems like it would be intensely boring after a while.


...Yep.

Chocolate and soda pop.

Two of many reasons why I've come to sort of support the death penalty. Heheh.

The other day I bought a short black wig because at the house of my Bloomington bitches they're going to have a "drag party" this Saturday. "The only rule is you have to look fabulous." This is sure to produce some hilarious pictures.

Over the past many weeks it became a ritual for a bunch of Shep's friends to join us at his house to watch BSG every Friday, so I've become a lot more acquainted with this guy named Jason who apparently asked Shep after the first time he met me if I was single. Even though the show's over Layla and I had originally planned to be over there at the usual time last Friday to do a drinking game watching the miniseries or something but then didn't, and apparently Jason came over again hoping he'd see me and was disappointed. Now I feel kinda bad even though I have no reason to. LOL. I don't think I've done anything to give him the wrong idea, but I'm sure I haven't been very discouraging either because I just like hanging out with him.

Now that it's time to move on with my life after BSG, I'm hoping to start checking off a bunch of the movies on my "SEE THIS ALREADY" list. Probably starting with some Sergio Leone Westerns because it's gotten to a point that it's absolutely ridiculous I still have never seen any of them. I love the music from them so much I almost feel like they're bound to not be able to live up to how good the scores suggest they must be...Which is a stupid way of thinking anyway because there are tons of great scores for lackluster movies or mediocre scores for great movies.

My Comedy of Manners class is the funnest thing ever because 80% of the time we have students teaching the class as an assignment and as a result we don't do anything serious. The other day we were assigned to write "Fuck my life" entries in the POVs of characters from Excellent Women. Before then we had to rewrite scenes from the book with the main character replaced with a Disney princess and this resulted in two groups performing rewritten Disney songs. College is hardcore at IWU.

And there's this. Hm.