Monday, May 27, 2013

NOT THE BEES

I should not be awake right now.  I only went to sleep like, three hours ago.  But there's this goddamn bee somewhere in my room, and I swear to god, it is the loudest fucking bee in history.  I can sleep through like four alarms, but this bee woke me up.  All I want to do is curl up and go back to sleep, but no, I can't, because this freaking bee just won't shut up.  I can't sleep while it's buzzing around, but I can't find it to get rid of it.  I think I hear it buzzing against paper or something?  It might have fallen behind one of my sagging wall posters.  Fucking bees.  I just want to go back to sleep.

Also, I'm blogging about bees, of course I'm going to use this video.


Saturday, May 25, 2013

Star Trek: Into Darkness

Guess what movie I saw the other night!  And will now blog about in an unstructured and random and not-even-a-little-bit-thought-out way!


As you may have guessed from the title of the post and the spectacular gif, it was the new Star Trek!  It was...good, I guess?  No, it wasn't nearly as good as the first one, but I still had fun watching it.  I think part of the problem is it felt somehow smaller than the first one, which is rarely a good thing with a sequel.  Though still, fun to watch.  I admit I did laugh my ass off when they pulled that Wrath Of Khan flip-ending thing.  That was pretty goofy, it felt almost like a parody (that scene was supposed to be funny, right?).  Also I didn't entirely get the point of making Kirk no longer captain for all of...what, ten minutes?  Seemed like pointless drama.  The death of Pike was pretty rad, though, and I really liked Spock mind-melding with him to experience his death.  I gotta wonder how that could have fucked him up, though, because for serious that is some traumatizing shit.  There will be good fanfic to read, I am sure.

I'm sure the entire internet has already lost its collective shitstack over this, but what was the deal with making Khan white?  The character was like, Indian or something, wasn't he?  And a Sikh, if I'm remembering right, it's been a while since I've seen the original series.  How the hell did they get away with casting Sherlock Holmes instead of somebody who looked the part?  Yeah, Sherlock did a good job in the acting department, I guess, but it seems kind of shitty to replace a dark-skinned character with a super-pale-skinned character for no reason, especially when it makes absolutely no sense; even if you wanted to use the argument that this is an alternate reality, it's only alternate from Kirk's birth or so, it wouldn't have any effect on the people who were frozen hundreds of years ago and only just got thawed out.  I guess maybe the movie was trying to avoid the possibly unfortunate implication of having the villain be a dark-skinned person.  That sort of makes sense, but you'd think that in interest of not looking like they're whitewashing the series they'd make one of the good-guy characters a minority, to make up for the switch.  Like, the new girl could have been Indian or something.  Speaking of her, what was with the random stripping scene?  And while we're on tiny little nitpicks, why didn't Spock ever give away the conn?  He constantly runs out of the bridge while he's acting captain person.  I am not entirely sure on the rules here, but shouldn't he hand off the conn to the next highest-ranked person in the room before dashing off?

I know that me going on about all these little flaws makes it sound like it was a terrible movie, but I did have fun watching it.  Not nearly as much fun as I had watching the first movie, though.  I'd say it's probably about equal to the newest Die Hard film, or one of the Hugo episodes of Bob's Burgers.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to track down some original-series Star Trek to watch.  It's been far too long.  Also eventually I have to start buying TNG dvds, because that seems to be the only way I can watch some shows.  Drama-ish shows especially, I am far too easily distracted to have internet tabs in the other window when there's a slow or quiet scene.  Next Gen was a good show but I couldn't even get halfway into the second season while trying to watch it on my computer.

Tuesday, May 21, 2013

FUCK YEAH KITES

I went on a kite-flying picnic thhe other day!  It was awesome.  I skipped work and went downtown on the bus with a bottle of pepsi and a box of cookies and two dollar-store kites, and met Tom near some park-like thing.  He brought his fantastic sandwiches and some mangoes and a hot chocolate from Coffee Matters, perfect picnic things.  His sandwiches are really amazing lunchfoods.  He gets a fresh baguette or ciabatta bread or something, and some nice cheese to slice onto it, and some nice thick slices of pepperseed salami and sandwiches it up.  It's really simple, but amazingly yum.  I should have taken a photo to post, but they are so good I couldn't stop eating to grab a camera.  Or rather my iPod, since I've lost my charger and made my camera into an expensive paperweight.  I gotta find that thing.  Or get a new one.  Where the hell do you go for a new camera battery charger?

Anyway.  Nummy picnic on a park bench!  I forget which park, but there were lots of pretty trees around and nice flowers everywhere and a bajillion ants and everybody who walked by had an adorable dog and I just wanted to feed each and every one, but I didn't want to share the sandwiches so I didn't.  We fed the ants some mango, though, because it's really hard to keep a grip on a mango when you're cutting it on your lap without a board or a table or anything.  Mangoes are yum.  I didn't know I liked them until Tom showed them to me.   I should eat mangoes more often.

After the picnic we had to find a new park, because Tom had not realized there were quite this many trees until we came here with kites.  So we started walking!  We wandered the mean streets of St John's until we could find a suitably kite-friendly patch of land.  We would have walked for hours if necessary, though I would have complained ever step of the way.  But we didn't need to walk for hours, we just had to walk for ten minutes or so until we got to The Rooms.  The Rooms, along with all its fantastic displays inside which I will talk about another day because we went there and I took pictures of the giant squid and it's fantastic but it's not the point of this post, also has a very large grassy front lawn with no powerlines overhead and hardly any trees at all.  Perfect for kite flying!

Like I said, we got our kites from the dollar store.  I picked a lovely large parrot-shaped kite and Tom got a traditionally diamond-shaped kite with fighter plane jet things all over it.  Before we went out we agreed that Tom's kite would probably fly better, because after all kites are traditionally diamonds, right?  It must be the best kite-shape if that's what they're all like.  And while we were putting our new kites together on the lawn of The Rooms, it certainly seemed that way.  Tom's kite was much easier to put together than mine, the clip thingy on mine was bent so I had to pretty much break my kite and put it back together to make it work.  But once our kites had been assembled, it turns out that my parrot (whom I decided to name Percival) was a natural flyer, and his wings caught the breeze easily and took him delightfully high up.  Alas, Tom's kite must have been afraid of heights.  It wouldn't go more than five or ten feet off the ground and only flew in dizzying loops before crashing to the ground again.  But it was still lots of fun!  I flew my kite for ages while little children running around turned green in envy, and Tom flew his kite in loop after loop after loop until his string clip broke and his line became hopelessly tangled.  Then, because I was very nice, I let him fly Percy!


He proved to be a much more skilled kite-pilot with a working kite.  While he showed off his skills, I went to his goofy kite and tried to untangle it to see if I could fly it, because to tell you the truth those loopy-loops looked kinda fun.  So I only had half an eye on Tom and Percy, and when I looked away, tragedy struck!

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO PERCY COME BACK

It was inevitable, really.  Percy crashed into the ground, as kites are wont to do now and then, and his poor cheap dollar-store string-holder broke, so he got free.  Being the excellent flyer that he is, the wind caught him easily and he flew away, loose into downtown St. John's.  I hope he did not land on anyone's car windshields.  That's why I don't have any close-up pictures of Percy, by the way.  I was gonna take some after getting tired of flying him so I could show the world how pretty he was, but you can't take pictures of a kite that isn't there.  Sorry, my fellow kite-fanatics.  You will just have to take my word for it, and also maybe the far-away pictures where Tom is flying him.

But the loss of Percy wasn't the end of the world!  Birds are meant to fly free, after all, and with no more working kites Tom and I went to get some Chinese noodles, because we were right next to one of my favourite Chinese restaurants (Mea Mei Wok Eatery!) and noodles are delicious, and then we went to....THE GEO CENTRE.  Fuck yeah!  I love that place.  I haven't been since I was a little kid!  And it's just as rad as I remember.  There was the Titanic room and the rock wall with the spray bottles and there was a room about oil and stuff and all kinds of geology!  Awesome geology!  The Canada guide from Lonely Planet described the Geo Centre as an interesting way to learn about stuffy boring geology, but fuck that book because geology is always amazing.  

And then the next day we went back to The Rooms!  But I'll save that for another blog post because hey, if I tell everything all at once what am I gonna blog about then, huh?

Friday, May 10, 2013

Skype, Why You Gotta Dick

Skype is nice and all, but sometimes it is sweaty dicks.  Listen, Skype, when a name pops up in the corner of the screen because someone's signed in or said something to me, I'm gonna click on it so I can talk to them.  So maybe you should start putting the text in the conversation-window instead of the search-bar, ok?  I've opened the chat I want to find.  I don't need to search for it.  Come on, it's like you're deliberately trying to be useless.  Be cool.

Tuesday, May 7, 2013

Sick

I had a heck of a cold this weeked.  I'm still getting over it, so nobody shake my hand or anything for the next week.  I was blowing my nose pretty much every half-hour for about three or four days straight, including all through the night while I was trying to sleep.  I think on Saturday night I got maybe an hour of sleep in total over eight or nine hours tossing and turning in bed trying to breathe.

Which led to some interesting thinks.  Does anybody else get kind of loopy when they're sick and exhausted and trying to sleep?  At one point I was lying in bed willing my nose to clear (didn't work), and out of nowhere I suddenly became obsessed with this thought that popped into my head, "My nose is trying to turn me into Bears Griffin!"  I do not know what a Bears Griffin is.  I think I was trying to say Bear Grylls?  I don't know why though.  I don't know who this guy is.  I have vague ideas of him having a survivalist tv show that I've never seen, and a meme about drinking his own pee a lot.  I was neither trying to survive in the wilderness nor drinking my own pee.  They are both activities I would rather not do at all, thanks very much.  I have no idea why I started thinking about him, or why I was so convinced that my nose being stuffed up meant it was going to turn me into him.  It was a very confusing thought.

Friday, May 3, 2013

Sci Fi on the Rock

I went to Sci Fi On The Rock on Saturday!  And neglected to blog about it for pretty much an entire week, because I kind of suck at this.  Oh well.

It was kind of a blast!  Twenty dollars seemed a little steep for a day pass, but whatever.  There was some pretty cool merchandise; I got two fridge magnets, a Storm Trooper with a bow and a Pokeball.  The fridge magnets, I mean, that's what they were.  I also got a knit R2D2 cap and a tribble!  I named the tribble Nimoy and he is now wearing the R2D2 hat.  The tribble came from one of the workshops, a dramatic reading of the episode The Trouble With Tribbles from the original series Star Trek.  That was a blast.  I also went to the Second Most Dysfunctional Writing Panel, which was fun, but in hindsight I wish I'd gone to the Terrible Fanfiction panel instead.  I tried to go to the Steampunk Tea but there wasn't anywhere to sit, so we went to McDonalds instead.  Then I got absorbed into a group of strangers and we went to the movies and saw Jurassic Park.  There was one workshop I really wanted to go to, Build Your Own Airship, but it was on Friday and I had a dentist appointment so I couldn't attend.  Sadface :(

I also got buttons!  I got two Doctor Who buttons and a It's OK Pluto, I'm Not A Planet Either button. The Pluto button was actually free!  I couldn't find a dollar so the woman at the booth was like, "you know what, it's one button.  Here!"  I wish I could find her business card so I could tell everybody to buy things from them, but I seem to have lost it.  Alas.  If I ever find it I'll make a dedicated post specifically for that business, because it really was nice of them to give me the button.  I'd like to repay them with a little publicity in lieu of a dollar.

All in all, it was a good day.  I spent a bit more money than I meant to, because who can turn down tribbles and R2D2 hats, but it was a fun day all the same.  I only went on the one day, because twenty dollars a day?  Ouch.  It double-hurt, because when I checked the website before I went I saw the price and it said it was ten dollars for an adult ticket.  I didn't scroll down to notice the part where it said it was for Friday only and that Saturday and Sunday were both twenty dollars each.  It would have been nice if they'd removed the Friday price after Friday passed, but oh well.  Next year I might go on a Friday instead, or I'll just suck it up and buy the weekend pass for forty bucks.  I'll have to decide when next year comes around and I can see what awesome workshops are on the go then.

Thursday, May 2, 2013

Oh, Tumblr

I should really start paying more attention to tumblr, there's some funny and/or awesome shit there.  But then, it would be a lot of work to look for it, I think.  I'll just stay on the system I have where my friends who use Tumblr link me to the good stuff.  I might be the last to see it, but I'm ok with that.

In other news, I still miss Busty Girls comics.  I get why the author stopped at three hundred, because I'm assuming there are only so many comics you can make about the subject, but still.  It was a really fun little thing while it lasted.  I loved how the artist represented so many people and body types with such a simple cartoony style.  She had women of all colours, and of different religions (seriously, how often do you see brown women with headscarves represented in comics?  So cool!), she had women with scars and stretch marks and body fat.  The comic was just such a great space to feel included; there was always something or someone to relate to, even if you are less-busty than the women depicted, and it was always funny.  And just seeing so many body types depicted was a real breath of fresh air.  And it was a comic specifically about large-breasted women, and they never got sexualized or objectified!  How fantastic is that, right?  Dang, I miss that comic.  I wish I could find a new one just as good to lose myself in.