Also also, no new episodes 'til January?! NOOOOOOOOOO!!!!! Well, at least it gives me time to make all my deadlines without distraction!

In sum: great episode. Thank you once again, Supernatural, for ripping my heart out of my chest and stomping it into a squishy goo.

I love you when you are meta. "It's not jumping the shark if you don't come back down!" Exactly!

Also, you made me love Sammy for the first time since ... ever. Well done, show!

Love and kisses,
Me

P.S.

Yesterday while I worked I was watching Terminator 3 again, and at the end there's this (the good stuff starts at 3:00):


When John says, "I am," and Kate takes his hand, I just die, it makes me cry every time, the whole ending of the movie is awesome.  This is probably further proof that I am a.) not normal and b.) an enormous softie, but this movie does it right.  It's all running jumping (climbing trees?) blowing stuff up (the chase through the city is unintentionally hi-larious--or maybe not unintentionally), with the romance between the two leads being little more than an afterthought, and yet it works.  Is it the high strings of aching sorrow and destiny fulfilled on the soundtrack?  Is it having the weight of three whole movies (+ the show if you feel like retconning that in) behind this moment?  I don't know, but it is just exactly the sort of thing I can't get enough of.

Nice retcon, guys!

(Erm, I realize thumbs-up Dean makes it seem like I'm being ironic, but I'm really not!  Tonight's episode was coooooool!  Sam n Dean better turn their not-very-considerable intellects towards the problem of thwarting their "destiny," though, and be quick about it.)

I love this show!  (Even though their theology makes no sense.)

Unlike pariahsdream I thought I would have a hard time answering this prompt: romance is not my favorite thing in any movie, and for years I told people that Tim Burton's The Legend of Sleepy Hollow was my favorite romantic movie in the world. (It was even true for a while! Jane Austen and age have mellowed me, so I can enjoy movies that are more explicitly romance-centric, so long as they don't star Meg Ryan or Tom Hanks.  Possession was pretty good!)  But then immediately popped into my head this sequence from The Village: (The good stuff starts around 2:30, but The moment is at about 3:23)



It just kills me, I tear up every time I watch it.  That right there, with no words and no explanations, symbolizes their relationship, their love, the reason they work.  She trusts him to come for her, and he does.  The violin and the slo-mo don't hurt, either.

I don't like a lot of talking in my romance, or a lot of swooning and pining.  Twilight is bearable as a book because one can read it fairly quickly; on film all those yearning glances, full of passion, take forever (and also look like the actors are suffering upset tummies).  Most of the time, I'd rather the characters carry on with the business of what the film is really about (hunting down ancient mummies, smuggling stolen goods from planet to planet, seeking fantastic treasures by following clues left by ancestors of the Knights Templar, battling undead pirates, or VR agents of sentient machines, or killer robots from the future, or what-have-you) and leave the romance almost entirely unspoken.

The kiss towards the end of National Treasure is pretty good too.  And I think we can all agree that Pirates of the Caribbean 3 had the best wedding sequence in any movie, ever.

Oh and then of course there's this:


I could talk about the awesomeness of Labyrinth for ever and ever, but I won't.  I can't count how many times I've watched the movie (several times a year since I was twelve?), but that moment around 2:02 where he steps forward and takes her into the dance still gives me shivers.  Now there's a weird romance.  He wants her, and courts her through cruelty; she's too young and naive to understand what he's about.  The whole romantic subplot is not something I understood the first time I saw the movie (when I was, like, twelve), but now I can't get enough of it, and David Bowie's Jareth is still the form of dark sexy bad guy, for me.  (Note that Sarah ultimately rejects him, however, turning her back on the fantasy world he offers and choosing to become an adult in reality.  MAN, that movie is just all kinds of awesome!)

Runners Up include: Belle's "I love you" at the end of the Disney Beauty and the Beast; Mal and Inara's conversation at the end of Serenity; and the final charge at the end of The Last Samurai.  What do you mean that's not romantic?  :D

What about you guys?  *iz curious*

Hey everybody,

I don't suppose anyone can ID the fonts in this picture?  I used them pre-computer crash, and now the client needs to know what they are.  I have no idea!



If you recognize either of them, please let me know!

ETA: "Wonderland" font is Vintage.  Still trying to figure out that crazy script for "Alice", though.  I thought it was The King and Queen, but it isn't.

ETA II: VICTORY!  The other font is OLHO DE BOI, which has a teeny preview in Photoshop, which is why I couldn't figure it out.  Whew!

So, we bought a house.

And, we moved all our stuff in.

Also, we have a fridge.  But no stove, and no hot water.

Also also, I thought one of the cats escaped when the guys brought the fridge, panicked, and then burst into tears when she was found amidst a stack of boxes.

Am exhausted, will write more later.  But!  We have a house!

SPLAT.

X-posted from my dA journal, because: hey, actual content!  Books are always a good subject!

A LIT MEME FOR ALL THE BOOK NERDS:

( long meme is loooooooong )</div>Looking back over what I've written, I see it could be taken as a paen to Scott Lynch as much as anything--but yes, guys, he really is that good!  Also I find it interesting that most of my favorite authors are women, but most of my favorite books are written by men.  I don't know that it's indicative of anything, but it's interesting if you like meaningless statistics!

We're getting ready to move out of our current ramshackle apartment, and I don't know what we've accumulated more of in the last two years: books, or dust!  *waves featherduster*

My husband is the chef in our household; it's not that I can't cook, it's just that when I go into the kitchen either flour goes everywhere or things catch on fire--sometimes both! When I was living in Japan, we'd talk on the phone every Saturday morning (his Friday night), usually when he was cooking his supper. He'd say things like, "Oh, yeah, I'm just making something simple: braised beef tips with roasted asparagus and a simple rice pilaf," or what-have-you. "... I had ramen," I would invariably reply. If the household cookery were up to me we'd be eating ramen every night, except for when we had spaghetti or mac-n-cheese.

I do have culinary skills, however! Besides my mean ramen-making abilities, I have the power of bachelor cooking! You know, where you look through the cabinets and find a grand total of three ingredients, none of which seem to go together, and through some magical alchemy turn them into food. (I also make really great scrambled eggs.)

Yesterday was Friday, which means no meat. I had a can of tuna, some leftover rice, and an apple. Yeah, Apple Tuna Fried Rice!

Folks, it was delicious! So much so that I totally recommend it as food, not just crazy bachelor-cooking!

Here's what I did:

1. Heat sesame oil in a skillet (any oil would work, but sesame adds a nice flavor, which other oils might not)
2. Fry up the tuna, so it's hot through and a little seared
3. Add the rice; same business
4. Add cut-up apple bits; ditto (I used a granny smith, which gave a nice sharp, tart contrast to the tuna and sauce both in taste and texture)
5. Smother with sauce: I used miso paste, a ton of soy sauce, and a healthy dollop of rooster sauce, because pain is good.
6. Fry everything a bit longer just to make sure it all comes together
7. Devour

NOM NOM NOM. Bachelor cooking FTW!

How about you guys? Any awesome ad hoc cooking experiences you'd like to share?

 

So today is my anniversary!  Eight years ago this evening, my husband and I were married.  I had a bunch of thoughts in my head, about marriage in general and marriage to him in particular, but they all went away as soon as I sat down to write, so I'll just say: I'm the luckiest girl in the world.  Still.  :D

(P.S.  I know this song is a couple years old, but I just got the album and cannot stop listening to it.  And is it just me or is John Rzeznik starting to look like a cleft-chinned David Bowie?)

So we just finished watching the final episode of the Sarah Connor Chronicles.  I want to go right back to the beginning and watch it all over again; it was like a novel that you just can't put down, one that you know you're going to be coming back to again and again.

And now I can't decide: is it better to torture myself by speculating fruitlessly about what might have happened in the future (as it were, haha) if the show hadn't been cancelled, or to torture myself by reading interviews with cast and crew about the same?

(There needs to be Supernatural/TSCC crossover fic!  Dean hits on Cameron, and then she punches him through a wall!  Sam and John compete for the title of most emo main character!  John Winchester and Sarah compete for the title of worst parenting skills!  It will be epic!)

So ... I realized I really haven't posted anything since May, and now it is October! The end of May, but still, that's a pretty long while. Long story short, internet time was eating into productivity time, so I basically blocked myself from access to time-waste-y sites except on Sundays. Did it work? Welllll ... I'm not much more disciplined about being productive than I ever was, but at least I've been wasting my time reading books and, er, reading more books, instead of idly browsing dA or playing Robin Hood on Facebook.

( here's what i've been up to )

And how is everyone else doing these days?

I don't play strategy games as a rule, but boy howdy this looks sweet:

www.totalwar.com/

*waves*

*gets crushed by pile of projects*

Seriously, I realize I haven't posted in ... a while.  Where does the time go?  I have a "How I Spent My (Husband's) Summer Vacation" post written, which I will post up ... eventually.  Behold the awesome power of vagueness.  But now, it is time for sleep.

How is everybody?

I love my birthday.  I am not going to lie.  Even though I'm now (or will be tomorrow) 31 years old (Gasp! O, the humanity!), with all the attendant what-have-I-done-with-my-life (plenty, thanks, if nothing you win awards for ... yet!  bwa ha ha!) angsting, I still love it.  I hope when I am 91 years old I will continue to love it.  Of course, when I'm 91 I hope to be one of those black-clad cane-wielding autocratic grand dames, you know, like Lady Catherine, only not crazy and mean like she is ... which actually I think will probably make the whole birthday thing more enjoyable, at least for me.

I am further not going to lie, and admit straight-out that one of my favorite things about my birthday is ... presents!  (Don't get me wrong, I think the whole package is top-notch.  I mean, here you have a built-in reason for your friends and family and all your other loved ones to get together and have fun, so you can have all your favorite people gathered all in one place ... and it's just because you were born!  How cool is that?  Plus, birthday cake.  Or in my case, pie.  Because pie is more delicious than cake.  Sorry, cake-lovers; it's true.)

So my lovely friends and relations got me some bang-up top-notch super-keen presents this year: coffee from Harrod's! four kinds of tea! The Nutmeg of Consolation by Patrick O'Brian! (At last, my collection is complete!) Three kinds of gin ... and one of the kinds has ships on the bottle!  And the pinnacle of presents, right up there with the FFX Bahamut action figure and the scale model of HMS Victory ...  the Trafalgar tea-pot.

( Photos of Awesomeness within )

And how convenient that I also have tea!

Cheerio, everybody!  Happy Sunday!

It is a no-contest win for Firefly.  Somehow that little show managed to pack in everything I love in just the right balance ... adventure, explosions, hitting people in the face, awesome characters, peril, crime.  I love the steampunk blend of old west and new tech, I love that the crew is a passel of lovable rogues, I love the washed-out, sepia-toned, lived-in feel, the variety of stories, the cadence of the dialogue ... there is nothing about the show that is not to love.  If they were still on the air today, still telling stories about the characters and the ship, I would definitely not be sad.

(I loved the movie less than I loved the show, partly because it seemed like they backpedalled the character development a little, partly because the production design erred more towards blue, cold and space-y than amber, warm and western-y.)

A week ago, I would have said Battlestar Galactica came in second, but that was before we went and saw STAR TREK!  Loved the movie (explosions! adventure! hitting people in the face! ... you might be noticing a theme in the things I like by now), and it inspired us to start watching the classic series.  Which ... is awesome!  Yeah, it's old and the effects are cheesy (one of the alien creatures they discovered was a dog in a costume! A dog! In a costume!), but the stories are suspenseful, the characters great, and the acting pretty good.  (There was an episode written by Richard Matheson!  Richard "I am Legend" Matheson!  How cool is that?  It was a good episode, too.)  It's also pretty cool to see that the changes they made in the movie ... weren't actually all that far-fetched.  Uhura is pretty clearly trying to attach Mr Spock in the old series; that she managed to succeed in the movie is a big "here ya go!" to fans.

Besides, BSG is a thrilling story, but it's got a lot of that post-modern, "grittily realistic" thing going on (i.e., all the characters are jerks, and they spend a lot of time flailing about morality because no one has a moral compass, because no one actually believes in anything, fitting it into the "This Story Would Be Better if the Writers Weren't Atheists" category), which always bothers me.  (It also seems like it won't hold up to repeated watchings.  I tried to re-watch Season 3 recently, and was just bored and annoyed, so perhaps once the "must! know! what! happens! next!" is satisfied, the story's weaknesses are made plain?  It's a theory.)

And ... did I just really blather on for four paragraphs about Shows In Space?  Wow.  Okay, enough of me: what about you guys?

So I made some Star Trek icons, because graphic design is how I express my geeky love for things!


( (+ MOAR!) )

Having finished the hard laborious time-intensive soul-crushing first phase of a major, major project today (only two weeks behind schedule ... ouch!), tomorrow I am giving myself the day off.  Not just a day off ... a Reading Day!

I have Arabella, The Toll-Gate, and Bath Tangle by Georgette Heyer, and Sarah MacLean's The Season (just purchased, thanks to a birthday gift card from snitter_writer !) ... all of which delights await me after I finish the current book, The Seven Towers by Patricia Wrede (old-school Wrede, published in 1984!  Although, did you know that The Enchanted Chocolate Pot was originally published in 1988?  I had no idea until just today, when I happened to see the original cover for the book.  Wow!).

Reading day, hooray!  I certainly won't finish everything tomorrow, but I intend to make a good dent in the stack, and then back to work on Saturday.

Cheerio, my darlings!  Have a happy Friday!

OMG SQUEE!  This looks fantastic--I have to not think about how excited I am for this movie, or I won't be able to stand the 6-month wait still to go!

Watch the trailer here!

Also: Star Trek!  You know what I loved about it?  Everything!  You know what I loved more than that?  Spock.  And you know what I loved the most?  It was not a grim, bleak, horrible, nihilistic death movie--it was fun, it was exciting, and it was hopeful.  I love The Dark Knight to little bitty pieces, but watching a summer blockbuster that wasn't shot in unvarying shades of everything sucks was really refreshing.

I think we'll be seeing it in I-MAX this coming weekend!

Now!  I needs me some Sylar!Spock icons, stat!

Happy Monday, everyone!