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!

Forget TinyURL.  Have DickensURL instead!  It turns your boring links into quotations from Charles Dickens!

I tried this LJ address and got, "Professionally he declines and falls, and as a friend he drops into poetry."  Here's the link! http://dickensurl.com/a163/Professionally_he_declines_and_falls_and_as_a_friend_he_drops_into_poetry

What I Want to Do Today: Lounge on the couch, eating Doritos and alternately watching Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles and reading Georgette Heyer novels.

What I Need to Do Today: Stick to the diet-y thing, draw 6 more comic book pages by tomorrow night.

Bah!

Oh well.  I don't have a couch, anyway.

Can we, seriously, get time to slow down just a tad?  Seriously?  Where's a time machine when you need one?

( Busy month means short list )
Happy May, everyone!  Hope it's a good month!

Okay, so, here's how the line of thinking went:

Me (walking up the stairs, musing): Somebody said, if you can turn the sound off and still understand it, it's animation.  If you can turn the picture off and still understand it, it's radio.  Hmmm, audio dramas would be good to listen to while I'm drawing; no pesky picture to distract me from what I'm doing.  I wonder if there are any good audio dramas out there on teh intarwebz. ... You know, I know lots of talented people.  We should make our own audio dramas!  Mwee-hee-hee!

So this is the new totally exciting thing that I don't have time for!  I feel like somebody in one of those old musicals: "Hey, my grandpa's got an old barn, and here are some nifty costumes ... let's put on a show!"

Like so many of my new totally exciting ideas, it will probably come to naught.  But!  You heard it here first!

Meme from sarahmaclean. Whee!

1. What author do you own the most books by?
Patrick O’Brian. (That’s if we’re just counting “my” books; if we count my husband’s too, then Stephen King wins, with Dan Simmons coming in a close third.)

2. What book do you own the most copies of?
Bein’ as I only own one copy of each book….

3. What fictional character are you secretly in love with?
I have a list, somewhere around here, with a number of most excellent gentlemen on it. Most of them are English Magicians. :D

4. What book have you read more than any other?
I have a bunch of books I like to reread. Robin McKinley’s Deerskin is, oddly enough, one of my favourite comfort books, as is Patricia McKillip’s The Changeling Sea (my copy of which, I just realized, is missing!). More recent additions to that list are Connie Willis’s To Say Nothing of the Dog, and The Enchanted Chocolate Pot by Patricia Wrede and Caroline Stevermer. Oh! And Venetia by Georgette Heyer.

5. What was your favorite book when you were ten years old?
Hank the Cowdog, I think. Or Bunnicula.

6. What is the worst book you’ve read in the past year?
Ahab’s Wife. Words cannot describe how I loathe, abhor, revile, despise and abominate that wretched thing. It might be the worst book I’ve read, ever.

7. What is the best book you’ve read in the past year?
Oooh, uh. Possibly Ender’s Shadow, by Orson Scott Card. There are others, I’m sure, but I’d have to look at my list.

8. If you could tell everyone you tagged to read one book, what would it be?
Oh dear. Just one book? An almost impossible task!

9. What is the most difficult book you’ve ever read?
The most … difficult? I’ll have to think about that.

10. Do you prefer the French or the Russians?
The Russians, please.

11. Shakespeare, Milton or Chaucer?
Well, since we all know that “Malt does more than Milton can to justify God’s ways to man”, and I can’t read Middle English, I’ll have to go with Mr Shakes.

12. Austen or Eliot?
Austen, of course.

13. What is the biggest or most embarrassing gap in your reading?
I’ll have to think about that, too.

Having thought about it, I can't think of what it might be.  I don't read modern novels (*shudder*), because if I want to read about clinically depressed lesbians dying of cancer in a flat in New York, I can bloody well read the newspaper.  But that's not something to be ashamed of, I feel.

14. What is your favorite novel?
Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, by Susanna Clarke.

15. Plays?
Well, I did say "Shakespeare" up above.

16. Poem?
I really honestly thought I hated poetry (all that noodling around with imagery—just get to the point already!), but my husband taught me that it’s not all bad. I like Dylan Thomas a great deal, if we’re talking Serious Poetry, but I really love rhyming nonsense verse the best.  How pleasant to know Mr Lear!

17. Essay?
Sure.

18. Non Fiction
Nautical history FTW! I’m in the middle of reading The Line Upon A Wind, which is a vast huge comprehensive tome of a book, about the use of sail in the Napoleonic Wars. (When I say “middle” I actually mean “beginning” … it’s a huuuuuge book!)

19. Graphic Novel?
For sure.

20. Science Fiction?
I’ve only lately started reading more s.f. I like characters, not technology, so I am feeling my way along. Orson Scott Card is a genius.

22. Fantasy?
I have FFS—Fantasy Fatigue Syndrome. If the book summary starts, “Young Alec, growing up on his uncle’s farm in the Kingdom of MadeUpNameicus, never knew he was special, until the old man…” I will be putting it down immediately. Similarly, if it begins, “The ancient Kingdom of Randomium is threatened by dark forces…” my eyes cross and I have to go away. That said, I like fun, unusual fantasy, fantasy that blends different genres (like The Enchanted Chocolate Pot! It’s a Regency and a fantasy!), and really well-written character-driven books. Lois McMaster Bujold’s The Curse of Chalion, for instance, is a brilliant fantasy novel!

23. Who is your favorite writer?
Patrick O’Brian. No contest.

24. What are you reading right now?
Fireshaper’s Doom by Tom Deitz, Catch-22, The Imitation of Christ, and the above-mentioned nautical history. What? I like to have options!

25. Favorite Genre:
Adventure, especially nautical adventure!