Protecting squee since 2002

Episode 1.2 of V was an improvement from the pilot. It got me, and even Mr. Logovo, interested in seeing it next week. This time they didn't rush through the story and it is varying enough from the original miniseries that I want to see what happens next. I like the characters played by Elizabeth Mitchell and Morris Chestnut, so I have a hook right there to get invested with the show. The only thing missing is a real villain to hiss at, but Morena Baccarin is not it right now. Maybe ( 1.02 spoiler. )We'll see!

In a new effort to start dressing like a grown up (I've attempted this many times before, but I have jeans+tshirt enablers all around me) I managed to hurt my left foot by wearing heels. They weren't even that tall! *sigh*

My mom gave me this humongous bag for my birthday. I think she supports my efforts to stop dressing like a 14 year old boy. However, having no experience with huge leather handbags, I'm surprised by how heavy the thing is, what with the leather and the zippers and the heavy canvas material that makes up the lining. Do people normally walk around carrying these things and not get tired? It's like the heels thing, right? I'm just never going to get it. The bag is pretty though! I just can't put that much stuff into it's hugeness, otherwise I'll throw my back out or something.

V.- I found the pilot last night for the V reboot disappointing. It has potential and some characters I liked, but the script was very, very clunky. I'll give it a shot next week, see if it improves any.

Leverage.- I should learn to use DVR now that we got our new box, maybe see the show "live" for once. The first season was my happy place for a few days, as we zipped through the episodes. @nd season has been sometimes *meh*, but I so love Parker and Hardison. OK, and Eliot too.

I haven't seen a single episode of White Collar yet, which makes me a rare specimen in my flist. I will though! I just need to -um- figure out when it's on. This is why people use DVR, yes? I'm so used to downloading stuff, so now that I'm actually seeing my new(ish) shows with Mr. Logovo it means messing with an actual TV.

Last thing. Burn Notice? My husband likes it, I haven't been crazy about it, had seen some S2 episodes with him, but before my trip to Mexico I saw the pilot and a handful of S1 episodes. Wow, it feels like the same thing that happened to Burn Notice happened to Leverage in S2. Sort of losing some of it's kick, which means you (well, more like I) stay because a love of the characters, and sort of stick with it even if the writing is not as fresh. Lesson to self: Don't jump into a show in S2. Always go back.

60 Minutes tried to explain BitTorrent to the masses tonight. Oh 60 Minutes, you never fail in delivering the hottest new thing, about 4 yrs too late.

Fantastic new Supernatural vid by Killa.

Little Lion Man.

I don't get sniffly at vids, most times they don't get to me that way, but there are exceptions. My experience went from admiring the vid and choice of song to kind of trying not to get too teary eyed. But the good kind of tears.

Went to Hulu to see SGU and got bored and stopped after about 15 minutes. I think I'll wait a few episodes before I try that again, see what the flist reviews say. I kind of had a bad feeling about the main nerdy character. Like I've seen this guy so many times, the nerd loser who saves the day, that I started to figure out how they decided to write this character. I managed to get creeped out, because of all of the crap I heard before the show even premiered. I was imagining the writers either projecting or presenting this guy as the audience stand in and - ew.

I got my hands on Merlin 2.03 and that was so, so adorable! Oh, the Merlin and Arthur stuff was perfect. I needed more Gwen though. Can we get more Gwen and Morgana at the same time, plz?

I've consumed Leverage in huge amounts, now at S2, episode 5 I think. Ready now for some fic. I'm sure I saw some on the Yuletide site. Anyone care to rec their favorite story? I'd love me some Hardison/Parkinson/Eliot in any and all combinations or pairings. From friendshippy gen to threesome hotness, don't care, I just love them :D

Just had another wondeful lunch at the hole-in-the-wall place that serves the best guisados and Mexican homecooking in town, Super Cocina. Inexpensive too! Give me more of that green chile pork thing that I can't remember now what it was called! Yum!

Do no, do not if you can help it, read/listen to a translated version of Bolaño's 2666. I'm reading it in Spanish and have the audiobook in English, which I was listening to and from work. Mistake! When I got to part four and all the characters are Mexican, the English translation was missing a lot of the flavor. As I said, duh! How could this have been such a surprise? I think about translations and dubbing and language all the time. I guess I was just hoping this time it would be different, and I was excited to have had been able to download audible's file for only about 7 dollars and get completely into the novel even as I was driving.

I think part one of 2666, the one about The Critics, works in English sort of OK, but the closer I got in the narrative to the town of Santa Teresa, the more I realized I had to dump the audiobook. Hrrmp!

Now I need to download some podfic, to listen to instead.

Via edgarspp, a special recipe book that I'm guessing (hoping) is a joke. Plz?

http://www.lulu.com/content/4956212

Before last night's SPN I saw a bit of something that I think was CSI. The bad guy had a blonde woman tied to a chair and it looked like she was getting small electric shocks, with the result of the camera being right *there* to capture the constant breast jiggling. It made me think "torture porn".

Except for following one show at a time (Smallville, then Numb3rs, then Supernatural) I will rarely watch network TV, because I get really, really bored. This torture porn thing? It was just weird to see and upsetting. It was just so obvious what they were offering their viewers, you know? Then again, I watch SPN, posterchild for a long list of problems.

Anyway, about SPN last night, ( except for the cringeworthiness of 'douchebag' being used about 10 times (wtf?), I liked it. )

I don't think of myself as a gadget person, but in our home I'm the one with all the little devices that must go with us on a trip and this time around I got a Kindle to pack up, instead of 2-3 books.

Have uploaded about 10 fics and will be uploading as many as I have to time to convert. Right now I'm taking files (txt and rtf) and having the free Amazon service convert them to readable Kindle files.

I have noticed that no one in my lj flist ever mentions ebooks, at all. This makes me wonder once again how gadget friendly I am, even if it took a year for me to be convinced that I wanted to get a Kindle.

Lovely.

Last night Tijuana had 600 people show up at it's better know mall, Plaza Rio, in search of emo kids to beat up. 40-50 police officers were there waiting for trouble to start and from what I've read in local papers, there was some scattered violence.

People were trying to get in the mall and police at first were letting people through, but at some point pushing, shoving and rocks being thrown ended up in a mob scene. I have no idea how bad it got, but I'm guessing it was not as bad as it could have gotten.



Thanks to BeamTv for the image and links.

I should have known the story had legs. It's been making the rounds for days in Spanish sites, but now it's crossed over to Metafilter.

What with kids bashing each other over how one group looks, talking with sakurita I can plainly see how it's an attractive story. Youth "gangs" have to be irresistible "news" items.

What I have yet to see is a news report in Spanish pointing out that the attacks are homophobic. At least that seems plain to me, since the attackers interviewed look extremely happy to share their disgust with young men who look "kind of like girls" and therefore need to be driven out of public spaces.



ETA: Aaaand the TIME page now has something up. That didn't take long. Yesterday on Metafilter and 16 hrs ago on the TIME website.

Mexico's Emo-Bashing Problem.

ETA2: Right out of a movie. Sorry this is in Spanish, but stay with it, because between the punks, the skaters, the emos and the riot police trying to keep people apart, another group comes in at the end, stepping out of the subway station and actually calming people down: Hare Krishnas!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJPeffMSzVA

A very modest harvest of potatoes today, from the ones Mr. Logovo planted in a wine barrel about 3 months ago. Turned out pretty good looking, but have yet to taste them. I'm waiting for him to finish cooking the omelet that will be our breakfast.

We're using parsley, spinach and the potatoes that we planted, so that is a nice treat.

The carrots and onions are coming up, but who knows how they might turn out. We already planted some tomatoes, and so we will begin the yearly battle against water rot and little creatures wanting to get to them before we do.

Worked some on the OTW translation, and as I have joked before with one of my fellow translators, it's a lot more fun to translate porn than legalese or the less formal language of the FAQ. However, this is easier. When working with other people, most of the times it's not difficult to come to some concensus on non-fiction, at least in my experience. For fic it gets stickier, because you're dealing with something that's going more for the gooey center of your fannish brain. Also, formal language is sort of universal.

OK, I'm tired. I don't think I'm making sense.

But I did have a social life today! Go me! Or I should say "we" had a social life today, since we went out for some hearty french food and a movie with friends.

God, it's been at least a couple of months since we've gone out for a movie. I think the last one was Atonement. Tonight it was The Band's Visit, a very good, sweet (not cloying though!) movie about a police band from Egypt getting lost during a trip to Israel. Most of the dialog is in English, so I get why it did not qualify for a Foreign Language nomination at the Oscars, but wow, I totally get how it got mentioned again and again as crowd pleaser, and the one that should have won.

The loneliness of the characters is very poignant, but never depressing. It's full of interesting characters and great performances by actors I don't recognize, which I always love. I was expecting it to be fun, maybe a little silly, but it was so much better than what I had hoped.

Oh my. I went and looked at my flist over at LJ, saw a couple of proud-spamming-against-the-strike posts and lost my zen! Dude!

I think I need to upload more icons. That will restore my inner peace, I'm pretty sure.

Also, I must tell myself that next time someone says "This story made me cry!" and I follow the link, I'm actually in the mood for a cry. Which I definitely was not tonight, being way tired. I thinks it's called "This is Sparta", a SPN fic. Good, but now I'm all puffy-eyed and unhappy before bed.

Things will continue to be a bit on the hectic side for 3 weeks, and then a short trip to San Francisco. Decompress and spend time with friends in the Mission district.


ETA: Forgot to rec this other fic. Not the crying kind. Written by svmadelyn in the Terminator:The Sarah Connor Chronicles fandom. BTW, has everyone agreed to use the acronym SCC? Need to look that up.

She Moves, written from what is pretty much an outsider POV on the Connor family, the kid crushing on Cameron, Morris.

I didn't expect the mainly "Eggads! Make it STOP!" reaction to the vid "Deep Kick" (from the movie 15) would have the legs to still be a topic of conversation in fandom almost a week after it was shown in Escapade.

It was a weird vid show this year, shorter than usual, and even less happy than 2007, which has been described as dark. 2006 was excellent BTW, or at least that was my reaction, with funnier, happier vids shown. This year included "15" by absolutedestiny, and it's the most disturbing vid I've seen of the 3 vid shows I've attended.

I believe I'm not the right audience for this vid. My own tastes stretch into what I think of as "disturbing content LITE." I love Cronenberg, Lynch and Fincher, and if I'm in the right mood I'll watch something like "The Audition," but not "Irreversible." Just, no way.

I haven't seen the movie "15", but I'd seen the vid before the con. It was recced, maybe by slodwick or laurashapiro??? Someone in my flist. Oh, I can't remember now.

My reaction was sort of "meh" when I downloaded it, even if it was filled with beautiful, striking images. It has teenage boys inflicting a lot (or what seemed like a lot) of self harm and it's all sort of right in the face of the viewer. The vid itself is very long, or just felt long, around 5-6 minutes. My main thing, the reason I didn't keep it in my vid folder, is that I didn't feel connected to the characters. So, I didn't care that they were cutting/piercing/punching themselves, even if done in glorious saturated colors.

I watched it online and forgot about it, until I realized I was watching it again at the con, but this time with exactly the wrong crowd to sit through all that goriness. I kind of had an attack of nervous laughter, as there were shouts of "OMG! What IS THIS?!" and "Ewwwwwwww!!!". People were covering their eyes, waiting for it to be over.

So yeah, I just went through my flists and people are still talking about it. For good or ill I know I'll remember this vidder's LJ name for a while.


ETA: Whoa! I just watched 2 of his other vids that were new to me, Rodeohead and Revenge. I had seen the excellent (and from what I remember controversial) Gold Digger before, but Revenge in particular is amazing. Rodeohead was more like sweet nostalgia (yeah, even with that kind of editing), combining my love of Firefly and Radiohead and weirdness.

I got a lot of shared friends with amireal (not to mention my other account) but just a heads up that LJ will no longer offer Basic free accounts.

The way I read it, me and other people with accounts created by today are OK. At least I hope so since I'm going back to Basic next month.

New users will have a choice between Paid Accounts or accounts with advertisement.

More info over here at the no_ads_lj com. Thanks to isiscolo

The long and short of it will be no big news to anyone in my flist. The feeling at the con was that there will be no big move to other journaling services anytime in the near future.

The panel was "Livejournal: Should fans take their business elsewhere?" and of course people had no good alternative, one that could handle a mass migration. Journal Fen came up of course, but from the conversations I followed it seems that to a lot of people JF = F_W. It also still suffers from a bad reputation on the server robustness side of things. Me and a couple of other people kept saying how we haven't had problems with that issue for a long time, so I just hope some of that got through. I can't remember the last time I had any trouble with my JF account.

The issue of the old code and difficulties finding stuff in JF came up. I wasn't too clear on what they meant, since JF has changed the code, but the conversation moved on to comparisons between Insane Journal and Journal Fen. Most agreed that IJ will go the way of LJ sooner or later, even if Squicky right now is very accommodating. Personally, I don't see it as being paranoid to believe that $$$ will always have the final word on any of these issues.

Three_wishes thinks Twitter is a way to stay in touch, but I've given up on the service. The minutia of everyone's lunch grows boring, no matter how much I might love my fellow fans. Twitter offers no freakin filters, so I rarely look at it anymore. There is no point, fandomwise, for me to ever check it for updates.

I also had no idea that metafandom had an Insane Journal account. Corrected that now.