Just thought I'd let y'all know that there's a virus email out there claiming to be from UPS (I know some of the people on my f-list are small business owners, and wanted to warn them.

Also, how cool is it that the people at my job check Snopes before fwding a virus warning?

OK, LJ, I have a bone to pick with you.  Why didn't anyone ever recommend SLINGS AND ARROWS to me?

(Before I go on, SLINGS AND ARROWS was a short-season Canadian TV show (originally airing on Movie Central and the Movie Network.)  It's about the fictional New Burbage Shakespeare Festival, and it stars Paul Gross, Stephen Ouimette, and Martha Burns.  The first season - the only one I've seen so far - is about a disastrous staging of HAMLET.)

I am absolutely, completely, 100% in love with this show. 

I sort of feel like I've just learned a new word, and now I hear it everywhere.  A couple of weeks ago, my editor sent me notes on THERE'S THE RUB (set in an imaginary theater in Minneapolis, starring people you've never heard of before, creating a disastrous staging of ROMEO AND JULIET.)  At the top of the notes, she said, "I can tell you must have loved SLINGS AND ARROWS."  (I'd never heard of it at that point.)

Then, two weeks ago, I went to dinner with our long-time usher friends, after a fantastic production of JULIUS CAESAR at the Shakespeare Theater.  One of our dinner guests, a professional actress from Pennsylvania, said, "It must have been just like SLINGS AND ARROWS, as they worked out the details of running Caesar with ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA."

So, I finally talked to Netflix.

And now I'm a convert.

If you have a theater bone in your body, watch SLINGS AND ARROWS.

Mindy, back to editing RUB, and waiting for Season 2 to arrive...

• 12:11 @ghbrett how does one ctrl-opt-cmd-8 on iPhone? #
• 12:11 @ghbrett oh hee! #

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• 00:37 @Ssb try turning off push for mail and change it all to fetch. I was having those issues too and I changed a few things to fix. #

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• 08:58 the endless in and out with boxes has turned me to a sleepwalker
• 15:04 "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means..."

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I don't remember when I started making jewelry.

I think it was when I was in high school sometime. I must have gotten glass beads somewhere and started playing with them. I am almost certain the first real stone beads I got were malachite, which was my favorite at the time, and which I still wear regularly.

I slowly worked my way up, material-wise. I'd get some crystal or silver, and figure out how to work with it, and then get more. For a while, I worked almost entirely with swarovski crystal with hematite worked in. It is very easy to make something pretty with crystal and silver.

I started weaving beads, and making multi-strand necklaces and bracelets. I finally started using chain only a few years ago, when I got good at wrapped loops. That's also when I started using dangles more. My necklaces got less 1-dimensional.

Now I am playing with pendants. It is kind of fun. I am starting to make things that I would wear even if I hadn't made them! Here is the piece I made last night:



I do not why I felt the urge to talk about this today, but there you go!

I kept trying to post yesterday, and mishap kept eating it.

On the whole, maybe that's a good thing. I was in a terrible mood yesterday, and the post likely wouldn't have been very entertaining.

Let me start off by saying that I've only ever seen one episode of Babylon 5, ever. I didn't much care for it, but my dear husband is always quick to assure me that the series didn't really get good until season 3ish. (The episode I saw was actually Season 1 Episode 1.) My husband is also a B5 nut, which I had no clue about until a year or two ago when he decided it would be a good idea to introduce me to it. As you may have guessed, that didn't go well. I wasn't quite willing to sit through a season of suck to get to the good stuff, and he insisted that the way continuity works in B5 it was all very important. More recently, he has gotten it into his head that he really wants to watch Crusade with me and that watching Babylon 5: A Call to Arms will familiarize me with B5 and provide a good jumping off point for the series. Ok, I'll give it a shot.

Before I get into the nitty gritty of this review, let me also point out that this movie was made for TV and came out in 1999. I wasn't aware of this going in, or I might not have had as much trouble stifling my laughter at the first space sequence. But, honestly, even for 1999 the special effects are baaaaaaad. Matt claims that B5 was always stifled by budget constraints, that they didn't have a 'Star Trek' level budge to work with. Well, I can certainly believe that this was a low budget flick. The space sequences looked very much like what they probably were... plastic models shot on blue screen with effects added later. Even the internal sets were very plastic-looking, I was half expecting to see some random extra bump into one and knock it over in the background. Heck, Galaxy Quest (also released in 1999) had better sets/effects and it was a parody of the genre. Granted, I'm sure it had a much bigger budget as a theatrical release.

Visual issues aside, the movie did actually have a semi-decent plot. Big bad aliens got their hands on some big bad tech and are using it to nuke whole planets, with Earth in their sights. It's up to Sheridan (zomg when did Bruce Boxleitner get so old?) to save the planet again, hopefully this time without taking over their government. Apparently they didn't appreciate it last time. (?) Armed with nothing but a cryptic message from a mysterious technomancer, a couple of quirky next-generation battle cruisers and crow's feet deep enough to have been carved by the Colorado he must unravel the mystery and save the day.

I guess you could say that this film has it all... bad sets, bad acting, bad special effects (seriously, I remember thinking that what they really needed to solve the final space battle was a giant badminton racket with all the shuttlecock-looking spaceships drifting across the screen) and even some really bad wardrobe choices (parkas in spaaaaace). I would say that the second half was a bit better than the first, and while it may not have ended with triumph (sort of the opposite with a lot of lives sacrificed in vain) it did end with hope and seems to have set the stage for Crusade pretty well. I'm sure that B5 fans would have enjoyed it more than I did as a neophyte. I found it to be a little bit confusing but once the ball got rolling I was able to follow it well enough. I wouldn't really recommend it unless you have at least a passing interest in B5. If you want a good laugh, rent Galaxy Quest... at least it's intentionally comical.

Final score: 2 out of 5 paws.

It's a sort of duh for anyone with connections to NOLA, but in case you weren't aware the mis-management and damaging effects of Hurricane Katrina continue to this day.

(as a side note, the preservation nation blog does post stories with good outcomes, and it makes for an interesting read).

• 08:25 8:30 and already at half battery. Hm. #
• 12:40 12:39 and 20% battery. Something is chewing it up! #
• 15:24 @geoffreylong omgwtfbbq!! #

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We went to the fair tonight to check out how we had done in our entries. My stollen placed 3rd!! WOO! I'm pretty excited getting 3rd for my first competition and to see how it did against so many others in the category. All of those in the "fruit and nut bread" category I entered this into were quick breads, such as banana nut bread. Mine was the only yeasted bread so I was pleased by placing with a recipe so different from the typical entries. I think I know the reasons it might not have placed higher, so I have ideas to improve for next year.   I still have one more entry to put in this Friday. Its a slightly different recipe of my Stollen that will have toasted pecans in it instead of almonds.  Below is a pic of my winning bread.




Also congrats to  goldenmaia who placed so well in her entries too. She entered 2 poems, one placed 2nd and the other 3rd, and for the pet costumes she sewed and entered. The wedding dress she made placed 1st! and the tux with the golden star buttons and red, white, and blue bow tie placed 2nd. 

man I love so I survived a japanese game show. that is all.

       As a comm major, I've had classes for over three years now on how to give a speech. None of the advice I've ever gotten, the principles I've studied or the theories they indoctrinate us with was as good as reading this article.

K.

This made me think of rainbowbinky right away:

Bioware is working on KotOR MMO

I just finished Jade Empire and have to say that Bioware games just have the tightest, most compelling storylines that I have played in RPGs. I have no idea if they can translate that to an MMO setting, but if they can, it's probably going to be awesome.

I was a little bit wary of this movie. Excited, but wary. After Batman Begins and what I had seen of Heath Ledger's Joker in previews, not to mention amazing reviews from everyone I know who saw it before I did, my expectations were pretty high. I was worried they were too high, that the film would fall short.

Apparently, I had nothing to worry about.

Don't avoid this movie thinking that it's all hype. Don't wait for DVD. If you haven't seen it and you saw/enjoyed Batman Begins, stop what you're doing and go see it now. You can finish reading this when you get back (and thank me for my insistence).

I've read a few reviews of this film that critiqued the Director pretty harshly for some technical aspects of his filmmaking. While I'm sure they have valid points, as a layman nothing really jumped out at me to spoil my enjoyment of the film. But I also didn't go to examine lighting, sequence editing or costuming in detail (though I certainly had the opportunity, sitting in the 2nd row), I went to be entertained and I was not disappointed.

The only complaint I have about the movie is its pacing. It is very long (IMDB clocks it at 152 minutes) and there were numerous points where I thought it was drawing to a close but it just. Kept. Going. That's not to say that the content was not engaging. The story was certainly interesting, and I think that the plot threads that came to fruition later in the film were valuable to the whole. Part of me wonders if my buddy Frank might have been on to something about the Director possibly stuffing all the Heath Ledger footage possible into the movie, thus expanding The Joker's screen-time in the first 3/4 and basically 'bloating' the movie by making the first 3/4 all about his antics and the last 1/4 just getting around to telling the rest of the story.

With that said, I must echo sentiments from around the world... Heath Ledger's Joker is amazing. Sadistic, demented, cunning, an agent of chaos indeed. I have to imagine that playing a character like that--and so well--has to fuck with your head a little bit. I can only hope that it didn't have anything to do with the problems he was reportedly having before his death... such would make his performance more tragic than triumphant.

Of course, his wasn't the only stellar performance in the film. I've always enjoyed Michael Caine's Alfred and Christian Bale's Bruce Wayne/Batman performances are top notch. I loved the scenes where he plays up his playboy/wastrel reputation, it's such a great smokescreen for what lies beneath the surface. As for the 'Batman voice', it was both good and almost painful to listen to. I hope he didn't damage any vocal cords, because he's won his way into my 'all time favorite actors' list over the last few years.

In conclusion, as you might have guessed, I would recommend this movie to anyone who would possibly have any interest. Despite the problems I had with its pacing, it is a very entertaining ride full of thrills and chills with a dash of romance, conflict and tragedy. Just don't take a big drink into the theater with you, and you'll be fine.

Final score: 4.75 out of 5 paws. (Yes, it does take a lot to get 5 paws out of me.)

Well, it's, um, almost the end of July, and I haven't included "bookshelf" updates about what I've read for this entire year.  Recently, I haven't included the updates because I am just too intimidated by the stack of read books on top of the bookshelf closest to my desk.  (Also, those stacked books are an effective barrier to keep Acrobat Kitty from leaping the chasm to the bookshelves on the perpendicular wall...)  At the risk of causing grievous bodily harm to Acrobat Kitty, here's the beginning of my reading from this year:

• HAL SPACEJOCK, by Simon Haynes.  Simon is one of the SFNovelists, and he kindly sent me this copy of HAL, his first comic SF novel, all the way from Australia.  I am not a fan of most comic novels, and I'm not even a big reader of SF (I'm mostly a fantasy girl...)  I truly enjoyed this novel, though, mostly for the wry voice of Clunk (a robot) and the absolute un-flap-ability of the titular character.  Simon has made this volume available as a free download so that other USian readers can enjoy his work, and his fourth HAL novel is now being carried by Powell's, online, without horrendous postage-from-Australian charges.
• THE DEATH OF FAITH, by Donna Leon.  A mystery-writing friend recommended Donna Leon to me last year, and then I suddenly saw Leon's name everywhere, in bookstores, on the subway, etc.  Her novels aren't amazing mysteries, in the sense of whodunnit, but they're marvelous drawings of Venetian life.  I adore the matter-of-fact way that Guido Brunetti navigates the world around him, balancing corruption and faith with a shrug and a glass of fine wine.
• SKIN FOLK, by Nalo Hopkinson.  I'm not a big short-story reader, but I've had this collection sitting around for - alas, literally - years.  I was captivated by the different voices in the stories, some of which worked better for me than others.  One recurring theme - the magic that penetrates our lives - resonated for me; the stories simultaneously felt "fantastic" and utterly mundane, as the people in them embraced the magic in their daily lives. 
  
• WHAT CAME BEFORE HE SHOT HER, by Elizabeth Geoerge.  I used to be an avowed George fan, but I swore off her several years ago, because her work became too wandering for me.  I broke my vow to read WITH NO ONE AS WITNESS (the book preceding this one) and was thoroughly grateful that I did - those characters came alive for me again.  Alas, this sequel, telling the story of some "small role but major impact" characters from WITNESS, was unremittingly grim.  The entire novel, I knew the dire fate of the main character (as related in WITNESS), and the book consisted largely of horrific circumstances designed to get the characters where I knew they'd be.  That, combined with a lot of the book being written in an urban patois unfamiliar to me, made this one a major challenge to finish.  Sigh.
• WICKED LOVELY, by Melissa Marr.  This "fairy tale" is hauntingly beautiful, with very real characters in a contemporary setting, recognizing the reality of magic in the world around them.  I was given this book with a strong recommendation to read it to advance my own writing; I enjoyed the storytelling all on its own, without any need for instruction.  (The sequel has just come out!)
• EYES OF CROW, by Jeri Smith-Ready.  I've known Jeri for quite some time, but (shame-facedly) had not read any of her books.  I loved the otherworldliness of this book; it reminded me in the best way of Zilpha Keatley Snyder's BELOW THE ROOT series, which I adored as a child.  The worldbuilding, however, and the magic that people get from their animal spirits, is uniquely Jeri's.  What can I say?  I'm a sucker for a reluctant heroine...
• SILENT IN THE GRAVE, by Deanna Raybourn.  My editor gave me this mystery, plucking it from the shelves in her office when I last visited.  I enjoy mysteries, but not so much the period pieces, so I wasn't overly eager to read Raybourn's debut novel.  My interest was piqued, though, when I saw that Maria Snyder had blurbed the book (while I ignore most blurbs, I don't ignore *friends*!)  I thoroughly enjoyed this book, particularly the believable iconoclasm of the heroine, who creates her own path, even as she conforms to her (Victorian) society's expectations.
• PARASITE REX, by Carl Zimmer.  This book languished on my to-be-read shelf for years, after Nancy Kress and I attended the author's lecture at the Smithsonian.  Scott Westerfeld used this book as the source for his wonderful interstitial chapters in PEEPS, so I finally dug out my copy.  I learned some interesting things, but I have to say that Scott's distillation (and the author's presentation, with slides!) was more entertaining than a lot of the gruesome details about how parasites rule the world.
• BLUE BLOODS, by Melissa de law Cruz.  Part of my reading project on YA vampire books.  The tone of this book didn't quite resonate with me (the school was just a little too outrageous - coed students stripping in the halls for their gym classes?) but the underlying mystery of the vampires, and who they are, and how they fit into American history, was superb.  I actually want to re-read a couple of history texts to figure out more about how these puzzle pieces could fit together.
• VAMPIRE ACADEMY, by Richelle Mead.  Another part of my reading project on YA vampire books.  I want to be Richelle Mead when I grow up (or, at least, to write her books.)  I loved the entire set-up for this novel, and the characters felt incredibly real to me.  The romance works well, the narrator was smart, but realistically not-quite-adult....  The most successful of all the YA vamp boks I've read.

OK, that's it for today - I'll get more of the shelf cleared off shortly!

Mindy, completing some housekeeping

On Threadless, I often don't want to buy the shirt in question. Just the guy wearing it. I wonder how one goes about doing that.

And does this make me a bad person?

Federal court overrules FCC fine, saying, "Sometimes a nipple is just a nipple." All that months of hooplah is hereby ruled overly-histronic and repudiated as hype and more fizzle than sizzle. Also, smoking is bad for you, nicotine is addictive, and the Gulf of Tonkin incident never happened.

       I'm thinking of starting to write a serialized story online. Something I'd do a couple of times a week, right now, probably more as school drops off and then back to a couple of times a week as it picks up again. I'm debating between running wordpress GPL on incubbus.com (and getting my favorite sysadmin ever to set it up for me, if i can contact him, hinthint), or finding an online place to host it for me. Wordpress.com might work, or I might just make a separate LJ account or even a community. I also want to be careful that it is separate from my offline life and not easily associated with me for professional reasons. Anybody have any ideas or suggestions? I'd really like to be able to have various pages about characters, history, timelines, details, as well as have a sequential format for posted stories so that people could jump to the most recent one, start in the beginning or pick up somewhere in the middle. Something that would automatically archive and list them for me, so I'm not writing a lot of HTML (and don't have to learn CSS), and can just focus on writing.

       I worry that I don't really have a lot of dedication, I tend to hop around and my interests have the lifespan of a housefly, leaping from one thing to the next without rhyme or reason. I am utterly passionate about the Holy Roman Empire one minute, and theoretical supra-light speed propulsion the next. Vikings war with exotic alien slave girls and obscure alchemical formula and global political theories and developments in human enhancement in my mind. I spend more time reading about religions that died a thousand years before I was born than I should while taking 18 credits and then the next week I'm reading about Russian mafia wars in the 1990s in Israel. Or Australia. Or Berlin.

K.

• 08:45 Feeling stupid. Not a shock. #
• 16:15 Impressive: teeny skinny 2-inch heels while at least 7 months pregnant. #
• 16:15 @magpie send me one! #

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Another first for me today. This year I decided to put some of baked goods to an "offical" test and entered my Stollen into the Sonoma County Fair. I'm rather nervous and figured most of the compliments I've received over the years are just nice comments by friends and family. Well tomorrow night we are headed to the fair to find out :)