"We're never gonna get any time away"

http://cuteoverload.com/2009/12/16/ehhhhn/

http://cuteoverload.com/?p=36710

♠ I made a community called whatthejeff. I don't know what I am going to put in there - at the moment I am just reposting stuff from my gaming journal before I finally delete the hell out of it (although I will let you know when that happens). You can friend it if you like, but you can't join.

If you want to hear my brain farting, that is the place to go.

Also I'm considering a post for that that isn't gaming related and I don't want to post it in here because...well, I don't, and it's my whimsy, right? And my freaking comm. Don't be put off by what it says on the user info, btw, because I intend to change that to something nicer when I have more of an idea what it's for).

That was longer than I intended.

♠ Eddie Izzard's birthday is two days before mine. Which also makes it the same day as James Spader's. I like it when (famous) people have birthdays near mine.

♠ I am considering watching the Xmas special of Lark Rise to Candleford. I hate costume dramas - even the lure of Philip Glenister could not get me to watch this, so why now? Because Tim Curry will be in it and, as we all know, Tim Curry is pure, condensed awesome.

♠ I have done two days of work so far. I am so. very. tired. But it is interesting, and I think it will be a good job, to be honest.

♠ YAY NEW WALLANDER! (That actually happened on Saturday, but I am still all capslocky glee about it because that's the reaction I have to it all the freaking time).

♠ Been reading some stuff and slowly but surely it is all clicking into place why I was so freaking unhappy last year at college (I mean, I'm better now, but I'm not fantastic. So to speak). I wish I could talk about it, really, but it's quite hard for me to do that at the moment. I know I don't have to, but I feel like I am lying by not talking about some stuff. Right now I want it to all go away, but I know that isn't going to happen (and frankly, I'm in the state I'm in now because of hoping shit would all go away).

So. Sorry for the mood whiplash :s

♠ Okami is still fun despite a) fucking frustrating digging mini-game, b) even more fucking frustrating fishing mini-game (honestly, I could reach through the TV screen and happily smack Issun about every time he says "Didn't you see the fish, Ammy?" YES YES I FUCKING DID. IT'S NOT MY FAULT THE GAME IS STUPIDLY PRECISE ABOUT HOW YOU SLASH IT TO LAND IT) and c) scary as all fuck ship. If you've played the game, you know what I'm talking about. Seriously. There's this hand thing. It picks you up and pulls you into the water. IT COMES FROM NOWHERE. There will be nightmares about that, I can see it (because seriously, it's like someone was in my brain. I used to hate those stories/urban myths about the giant who snatched you through your bedroom window for that precise reason).

♠ Um. That's your lot.

Thank you twilight_zone for the wonderful holiday card! So completely unexpected and very awesome, yo.

Thank you to lady_ezri for the card and the chocolate! Hello Panda went over real big with the Wers' Schuldig Contingent. Probably has to do with their Hello Kitty fetish, yo. The chocolate was divvied up between the two systems. Good think the Wers like dark chocolate!

Thank you to nekojita for the tea! We could completely smell it upon opening the envelope. It is awesome, yo. I think between you and a couple other friends, we are set with nummy tea until at least April! Also, Kadaj has laid claim to the solid chocolate snowman.

Thank you all!

http://cuteoverload.com/2009/12/16/holiday-cookies-are-almost-done/

http://cuteoverload.com/?p=36705

I am so glad I’m no longer living on my own any more.

 

Yesterday afternoon I went to the library to pick up some books for my grandmother and I must have left the lights on afterwards.  When I went to start the car this morning it was dead. 

 

If this had happened to me in Chicago I would have been shit out of luck (as they say).  I don’t know what I would have done, probably had to spend a couple $100 getting someone to come from a garage to jump start the car because most of my co-workers bike and most of the other people I know worked out of town and/or were clueless about starting a car.  As it was, I was able to call my father and he was able to get the car working again.  Really, this is one of those things that I know would have been a horrible situation if I was on my own (thinking of January 2008 when it was really cold and I couldn’t start my car… what a nightmare).

A great link on Top 10 Jewish Comic Characters.

Sadly does not include Kate Kane aka smokin' hot lesbian Batwoman. Still, a very good post.

http://www.engrish.com/2009/12/you-may-say-im-a-dreamer/

http://www.engrish.com/?p=9387

Photo courtesy of Sharja Khan.
Found in Namso, Tibet.

Yeah, so it is 1 am and I am still awake...probably won't get to bed until 3 anyway.

The meme:

Please copy the topics below, erase my answers and put yours in their place, and then post it in your journal! Please elaborate on the questions that would benefit from elaboration. One-Word-Answers seldom help anyone out.

So, I have noticed that there are a lot of "empty" journals on our list here. So many people going to new and shiny services and just leaving an empty husk of themselves here.

Housekeeping is being done. It's not that we really care about the number of people that show up on our flist count - it's that it is quite depressing frankly when people just leave you for somewhere else. Makes the internet feel like one big pile of discarded friends, you know.

This leaves me to clean out the list. Any journals that have not been posted in since May 2009, I am assuming you are gone and therefore, I drop the Ban Hammer. No worries if you are fairly regular posters or you comment to us every so often - you are safe. But if you are unsure, drop me a comment and I will tell you if you are still with us or not, which you probably are. ^^

The dead journals just have to go...

I just wanted to declare that Dragon Age Origins has eaten my soul.

And Alister is excellent fun to get into bed.

That is all.

• 05:39 @paper_hand RE: No Doubt's "Just A Girl"; I felt the same way after I came out. ^_^
• 05:54 @paper_hand Definitely! It also describes the limitations we face as women, too, which makes for harsh lessons IRL.
• 12:51 @BT Wait, you're covering “The Ghost in You”?!? *swoon* I LOVE that song! Are YOU singing on it, just out of curiosity?
• 12:52 Marilyn Manson still rocks... he's just not as glittery-glam-style as he used to be! \m/
• 20:12 Hopes that Brian Setzer feels better. bit.ly/7tcthz

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Tuesday
1. My mommy's birthday!
2. Anniversary of several good things
3. French silk ice cream and cookie dough ice cream at dinner
4. Garlic bread and orange chicken for dinner
5. Got a microwave for free!
6. Several packages in the mail! Aww!
7. My luggage not weighing anywhere near 50lbs
8. A good meeting with a prof

But I laughed at the irony of it all.

See, we just found out that Peter Falk, star of one of our favorite childhood series "Columbo", was diagnosed with Alzheimers.

This is only funny when you consider his character in the TV show and the fact that the character badgered the suspects with questions that he had "forgotten" to ask them earlier.

I realize that Alzheimers is not a laughing matter and I am sorry if I offend anyone. I know shouldn't be laughing and I am totally notsorry. But the damn universe is just killing me with it's ironic sense of humor.

http://www.journalfen.net/community/fandom_wank/1232846.html

I totally don't care that you've prevented me from my fourth successful entry in Hogwarts Elite, AGAIN, that I'm going to tell you it's really just a social experiment.

(Read more ...)

http://cuteoverload.com/2009/12/15/this-just-in-ive-got-a-lovely-bunch-of-coconuts/

http://cuteoverload.com/?p=36658

The lights on my grandparents' front porch.

http://www.journalfen.net/community/fandom_wank/1232629.html

It all starts with what people are already calling LJ Genderfail: the newest beta version of LJ added a mandatory "gender" field to the sign-up process and eliminated the "unspecified" option (LJ quickly responded that the mandatoryness and binaryness of the new question were an accidental bug, and that the code was not going to go live. Of course, not everyone believes them about the "unintentional" part).

(Read more ...)

Inglourious Basterds comes out on DVD today. Here's the review I've been fussing about with since August when I saw it in the theater--

Back in July I watched the film The Boy In the Striped Pajamas about the young son of a Nazi official who befriends a boy his own age interned at the concentration camp his father is in charge of. Reading over reviews of this movie, I found a recurrent complaint—that the Nazi’s were basically British. That is British actors, speaking English accented English. Not long after, looking up reviews of Tom Cruise’s Valkyrie I ran across similar criticism—that German characters were being played by English and American actors speaking in their native accents.

Reading these reviews I remember wondering what level of authenticity would be satisfactory. Was it enough to give German characters German accents? Realistically shouldn’t they speak German with subtitles? Wouldn’t that alienate English speaking audiences?

In its way, Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds came along and resolved these questions. Set in Nazi occupied France during the second World War, Inglourious Basterds not only portrays the different languages that are in play (German, French, English and some Italian) but shows them being wielded like Uma Thurman’s samurai sword in Kill Bill.

In many ways, Inglourious Basterds is not so much an action film as a linguistic film. Critics have called it talky, but that’s sort of the point. It’s about words, about language. The verbal interplay of the characters is as meticulously choreographed as the epic kung fu ballets of Kill Bill.

Yet ironically, the masters of the word in Inglourious Basterds are the Nazis. Christoph Waltz is absolutely stunning as Col. Hans Landa aka “The Jew Hunter”. Speaking German, French, English and Italian he dances verbal circles around all the other characters, from a French dairy farmer harboring Jews to the American commandos of the title.

Nearly as clever as Landa is Major Dieter Hellstrom (August Diehl), the Nazi officer who chances upon the covert meeting being held between German actress Bridget von Hammersmark (Diane Kruger), British film critic/spy Archie Hicox (Michael Fassbender) and the two German speaking Basterds. Although Hicox is fluent in German, Hellstrom detects something amiss with his accent and ultimately reveals him by catching him in a minute faux paus. In the meantime, Hellstrom does a bang-up job playing a twenty questions sort of guessing game. He’s quite something. Did I mention he gets his testicles blown off? And Landa, for all his smarts gets a swastika rather brutally craved into his forehead.

I think that one of the points of Inglourious Basterds, is to cut through the cerebral and linguistic mind games of the Nazis with raw bravado and brutality. Tarantino sums this up nicely with a shot of a Nazi officer’s head being lined up against a baseball bat. Swing batter swing and suddenly the supposed superiority of the Uber men isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. This seems to be what Tarantino wants to do, but I’m not quite sure that it works. The Basterds don’t seem at all heroic, just vicious. They seem to wallow in mayhem for its own sake, enjoying every minute of it. They’re a juvenile fantasy, stupid, brutal and largely incompetent when required to do anything more than bust heads. If the film had just been about them, I wouldn’t have liked it at all. Luckily the film is not so much about the Basterds as it is about a storyline that runs on a collision course with that of the title characters.

So the Basterds have the balls, the Nazi’s have the brains, but the heart and guts of Tarantino’s film belong to a young Jewish woman named Shosanna (Melanie Laurent). The last surviving member of her family (they are in hiding and discovered by Landa) Shosanna reinvents herself as the proprietor of a Paris cinema and becomes involved with Marcel, a black Frenchman.

Shosanna is a woman warrior willing to sacrifice herself for vengeance and to end the war. An amazing, blazing character. Marcel is right beside her, stoic and supporting. They are both the heart of the film, personifications of Tarantino’s love and devotion to women and blacks. Without them there is no film.

That’s the problem with Inglourious Basterds, 90% of it is bravado and theatrics and show. Only a small portion of it seems to be about what it’s about. It’s a fierce, radical film with entirely too much clever padding. As much as I love the scene in the basement bar and Christoph Waltz and his milk and cream and Dieter Hellstrom and King Kong it’s clever, it’s padding. It’s my baby Tarantino being boy rather than a man and cutting to the chase which is Shosanna and film and fire.

http://cuteoverload.com/2009/12/15/a-kitten-named-taunt-o/

http://cuteoverload.com/?p=36609