So I made a bunch of gifs from the latest episode of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, and I was going to upload them to Tumblr tonight so everybody could rejoice in pony wonder. It was going to be magical. Magical, I tell you.
Unfortunately, it turns out my internet hates ponies. I can tell, because it has decided to become the slowest piece of shit that has ever been slow. Seriously. It's slower than the first Star Trek movie. Yeah. That bad.
But because I am apparently a masochist and enjoy nothing more than tearing my hair out while trying to get useless pictures onto the internet, here are a couple of pony gifs. Fuck you, computer, I'm doing it anyway. That's right, I don't care if you are being slow and stupid. Suck on THESE.
I should learn how to do Princess Leia hair buns. I'm pretty sure I've got enough hair for it. Especially if I can get my hands on some of those hair bun donuts.
It'll have to be a pretty big donut, though. What the hell Chrome, why is donuts correct but not donut? Either they're both ridiculous or they're both fine, make up your friggin' mind already. Whatever, I like the doughnut spelling better anyway.
Pumpkin Scissors is one of my favourite animes of all time. Granted, I'm not into anime as I used to be, so I don't watch as much of it any more. So maybe there are better series out now that should also be loved by me? Feel free to suggest any, I'm trying to get back into watching the stuff.
But Pumpkin Scissors is amazing, for super serious. It avoids a lot of those irritating flaws that made me mostly stop watching anime in the first place. Not all of them, mind, the series is subject to some irritating filler and that obligatory "lovable" super-creepy womanizer. But on the other hand, FUCK YES ALICE MALVIN OMFG
One of these days I'll have to write a proper blog post on how fantastically amazing she is. And the series in general. I haven't watched the series in full in a year or two though, so I'll watch it again to re-familiarize myself with it before I start publicly fangirling.
The reason I bring it up now, though, is because I'm still making gifs! Except I got bored of Pirates after that weekend, so I've been trying to think of what other movies or shows I could make gifs out of. And, of course, Pumpkin Scissors! Duh! Why did it not occur to me sooner.
The show desperately needs more love, and there is a depressing dearth of PS fics, gifs, and fanart online. One of those things I can help with!
Well okay technically speaking all of those things I can "help" with. But gifs are the thing I choose to help with, on account of my being a lazy bastard. I've learned my lesson on how terrible Blogspot is with photodumps, so now I'm posting the gifs I made of Pumpkin Scissors on my Tumblr, which will hopefully co-operate. Look here, here, and here. I only did gifs of the first episode, but I might do more of later in the series later if I don't get distracted. Won't post them here, though. To Tumblr! Mostly because hey, I can actually use tumblr now, that's new. I've had an account there for a while but ignored it because I had no idea what to post lol.
I'm gonna be honest, Love Never Dies is a guilty pleasure of mine. It's a little embarrassing to admit that I love it as much as I do. I mean, objectively, I get why a lot of people dislike it. It's certainly not equal to Phantom of the Opera. The story is exceedingly silly, the music isn't as good, and honestly PotO didn't need a sequel. In fact, there's a reasonable argument that the sequel actually detracts from the fantasticulosity of the original. Well, not really original, the actual original Phantom of the Opera is Gaston Leroux. Which if you've never read it is still pretty good! Not least because of how often the Phantom calls people "a great booby." Hahaha, boobies. Classic.
Not what he meant, but still. Boobies. Heh.
But still, LND. I just can't help but love it! I know it's got pretty glaring flaws, but it's got enough good bits to make it genuinely enjoyable despite them. For example, the music being not-as-good as in Phantom doesn't mean the music's actually that bad. That's the problem with comparing decent things to awesome things, the decent starts looking crappy because of how awesome the awesome thing is. And the silly story....well, it's very silly. But I've read sillier fanfic that I still enjoyed. And that's basically what LND is, live-action musical fanfic that just so happens to involve the original(ish) creator. After all, it is partially based on Phantom of Manhattan, which is in fact published fanfic. When I went to the movie theatre to see the screening of the Sydney production of Love Never Dies, I didn't go in thinking "At last! The long awaited second half of the Phantom's story!" I went in thinking "This is going to be amazingly ridiculous and I am going to love it for that."
Amazingly ridiculous.
I already knew the general plot beforehand, because Internet. Spoilers: Raoul had become a drunken gambling loser who lost all his money, he and Christine and their son Gustav go to America to make money singing, and Erik the Phantom hires Christine through deceit and trickery to sing at his carnival because he has a carnival now. Surprise! Turns out Christine had an affair ten years ago right before getting married to Raoul, tracking down the Phantom for a sexy night of sexy sex (a moonless night btw, because dude's ugly remember? hot ladies can't sex ugly dudes if the light's on!) and then the Phantom ditches her because somehow he didn't realize she loved him? So Gustav is actually the Phantom's son, to the surprise of nobody watching because it wasn't exactly subtle before the big reveal. You mean the ten year old child who's uncommonly gifted with music is actually the son of the genius musician Christine knew ten years ago? Never! So Erik the Phantom and Christine have their happy ending where Raoul fucks off and they get to be all sweetly in love because nobody actually remembers all the evil stuff the Phantom did in the first movie, may the shippers rejoice, but then Meg accidentally kills Christine when she kidnaps Gustav and tries to commit suicide. By the way Meg is a crazy person now and has fallen in love with the Phantom, despite all her excellent don't-be-in-love-with-an-evil-opera-ghost advice to Christine in the original. So yeah, very silly. But fun-silly, in a way that works! No, it doesn't all make sense when you look at it next to PotO. But it's like, it could make sense in a fanfic-universe, because that's how fanfic works. It takes canon and sort of bends it just enough that, say, Christine could leave Raoul right before the wedding because she's realized that she truly loves the Phantom despite, you know, everything. The same way that so many people find Harry Potter and Draco Malfoy slash fic to be adorable and possibly realistic. Or Draco and Hermione, if you aren't a slash fan. Doesn't make much sense, isn't everybody's cup of tea, doesn't really work with canon at all. But still fun, and still almost possible with the right bending. The right fanficcy universe-bending, I mean, not sex-type bending. Or element bending, that's a different series.
Of course, it's only fun-silly in a way that works in my personal opinion, because the show does have a lot of legitimate haters. LND does kind of ruin the plot of PotO a teeny bit, what with the Phantom suddenly not being crazy and evil any more and Christine apparently developing amnesia after running away from the evil scary man who tried to kill her childhood sweetheart, did kill several un-hot people over the course of the musical, and tried to imprison her and force her to become his unwilling wife, and also, possibly his worst crime, destroying the beautiful and historic Paris Opera House. But it's a silly musical with decent though not PotO-amazing music, pretty incredible effects, and fanfic-like shipping. No, it's not equal to Phantom of the Opera, but if you were expecting it to be then you are also very silly. Nobody expects a sequel to live up to the original. Have you never seen any of those direct-to-video Disney sequels?
So I watched the four Pirates of the Caribbean movies over the weekend. I'd seen the first two and the last one -- well, the last one for the moment, I hear a fifth is in the making. I don't mind. Some people online think all of them past the first one are awful, but they're not that bad. None of the follow-ups turn out as well as the first one, but they're all fairly endearing. Though I developed a sudden love of Davey Jones over the weekend and have always had an undying devotion to mermaids, particularly creepy/evil mermaids, so I may be somewhat biased.
SO GOOD
Anyway, my sudden love of Davey Jones and his betentacled face (though not so much his bescrotumed back-of-head) started from him doing that one thing in Dead Man's Chest, where he's talking to Jack the first time and goes, "Price? (plupt)" and I replayed that scene like a dozen times because it looked just so hilarious. I realized that I desperately needed a gif of that scene, just looping for eternity.
I looked all over Tumblr for ages (ok fine it was for like five minutes but on the internet that's a really long time ok) and couldn't find it, so I decided I'd look up a tutorial or something online and find out how to make my own gifs.
I downloaded Freemake Video Converter because I was pretty sure I didn't have a program on my computer to cut videos with. I played around with it for a while and figured out how to do it easily, since the program is nicely simple and straightforward. So when I had a few video clips to gif-ify, I went online looking for a tutorial on how to make it go from video to animated gif.
I found one tutorial that was supposed to be on how to make an animated gif with Windows Movie Maker. I checked my computer and went, "Oh! I have that! I didn't need to download the Freemake one at all!" and read on. The first part was all about cutting the video -- it looked a little more complicated than it was on Freemake, so I figured it was still worth downloading. "Okay," I thought. "So the first half of this is all about cutting the videos to size, right. But I've already done that...let's skip to the end and see how to make the gif in Movie Maker, not just cut the video." Turns out, you can't make gifs in Movie Maker, despite the tutorial being "make gifs in Movie Maker." Well that was annoying. The last step was, "oh by the way you can't actually do this in this program, surprise! But here's a link to a completely different program to download that will do it." Kind of annoying but hey, whatever. So I download the program, Movie to Animated Gif. It was crap. I tried to use it a couple of times and it kept crashing. Thanks a lot, useless tutorial.
So I looked at an online program or two, but all of them put their website's logo on the gif. One of them offered to remove the logo if you paid money. No thank you, website. I'll just find some software to download after all. I ended up getting Free Video to GIF Converter 2.0 and it was pretty good. Again, a very simple easy-to-use program and the GIFs I made work fine for the most part, but sometimes they seemed to delete the last frame or two which made a few GIFs not as complete-looking as I wanted. But still, I am delighted! LOOK AT ALL MY PRETTIES!!! Warning, a ton of GIFs. Also, um, spoilers for Pirates, I guess?
I'd hide these under a cut, but I have no idea how to do that and am too lazy to look it up, so I guess you'll just have to deal with a dozen GIFs loading and possibly spoiling you for these films that came out a couple of years ago. Sorry about that.
Edit: Looked up lj-style cuts for blogger, found some halfway promising ones, they turned out to be useless. I'll just cut a bunch of gifs and post them on my tumblr or something later, I guess. And make the ones posted here a little smaller. Maybe that will help a bit.
Shopping for jeans sucks. It's almost impossible to go to the store and find a couple of pairs of jeans that look good, they're not that shitty ultra-low-waist straight/skinny leg style, that fit well and have decent pockets. I'm sure you know how I feel about pockets.
But I love my jeans anyway. Possibly because of that! There's just something about going through racks of jeans until you find the Perfect Pair. I get all happy inside when I look in the dressing-room mirror at jeans that look as awesome as they feel. I love a good pair of jeans. I can get very emotional when it comes to pants, you see.
And because I love my jeans so much and it's so hard to find a good pair, I'm loathe to throw a pair out. Even when I've worn them to threads and there are giant holes in them, I think about how comfy they are and how long it took to find them, and I just can't throw them away. I will wear jeans until I have no other choice to go buy new jeans to replace them, and then I keep both the new and the old jeans. It's probably a bad habit, because I have like a billion pairs of jeans that are so ragged and worn to bits that I can't wear them unless I decide to become a very odd stripper and I still don't get rid of them. Maybe I need help or something, who knows?
I sure as hell don't.
But there's this one pair. This one pair of jeans that I am just so emotional about oh my denim god. Anybody here read The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants? I haven't. But I saw the movie! Or I saw like half the movie. Bits and pieces of the movie. Okay I saw the beginning of it shut up and let me finish. I have magic pants.
They aren't magic in that they fit whoever tries them on like those weird Sisterhood pants. Fuck right the hell off, I'm not letting anybody else wear these! These are mine, get your own magic pants! Don't you dare come near my jeans, Bruce Banner.
YOU'VE ALREADY GOT MAGIC PANTS ANYWAY JERK
My jeans are magic in that they fit me so well it's almost eerie. I found them in Value Village for like five bucks, ages ago. In high school, so probably like four or five years ago. And I tried them on and it's like a chorus of angels was singing, though it might have been the radio. They were perfect! They made my ass look fantastic. They fit in the waist AND in the leg, which is just like astounding when you're as short as me. I've never found jeans that fit me in the leg before! And they made my ass look fantastic. They had this neat design on the right leg, sort of cut out of the jean all neat to show brown suede-like material sewn underneath, and instead of a zipper they had the same sort of suede material in a string, lacing up the front. And did I mention that they made my ass lookfantastic? When I die I want to be buried in these jeans, for super serial.
So I got these jeans secondhand and I've been wearing them for like four or five years now. Obviously, they're starting to get a little worn out. I noticed last year that the material's getting really thin and a small hole is starting to appear around the crotch-thigh area, where my upper thighs rub together when I walk. I was literally devastated when I realized that these jeans are not immortal, and I can't wear them for the rest of my life. Nooooooooooooooooo!!
Or can I?
Well, they probably won't last the rest of my life. Unless I die tomorrow in a freak trouser explosion or something. But I can make them last longer!
I decided I didn't want to give up on my favourite jeans. There had to be some way to fix them, right? I mean, I couldn't think of any way to successfully patch a crotch without ruining the look of my jeans, but maybe there's some sort of trick out there for it. So I started googling! TO THE SEARCHMOBILE
NOT EXACTLY WHAT I HAD IN MIND BUT OK
First thing I found was Denim Therapy. Apparently I send them my jeans and some money and they will fix my damaged pants. I put it on my list of things to Consider. Maybe to some people it would sound crazy to be willing to pay somebody what will probably end up being a fairly substantial amount of money to repair a five-dollar pair of jeans from a thrift store. In which case, what have you been reading up till now because it probably wasn't this blog post. YOU WILL NEVER UNDERSTAND MY DENIM LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOVE
But anyway. If I couldn't find any other options I would probably end up going for Denim Therapy, but I'd rather save that money and fix them myself if it turns out to be possible. Hey I said I'd be willing to pay someone to fix my jeans, not that I want to do it. Luckily for me, I kept searching and found a couple of answers!
The most common one is "make a patch." Usually of another layer of same-colour denim or a funky-looking patch of another colour, material, or pattern. That would probably work for the knee or something, if there was a hole there, but for my crotch? It sounds like it would end up being ugly and bulky and uncomfortable, since the jeans are fairly tight. I have a few pairs of jeans that I can rescue with this patch-method, but I doubt it would work for my magic jeans.
And then I found this. It is exactly, perfectly what I need to save my favourite pair of jeans from becoming totally unwearable. It's perfect! It's incredible, fantastic, amazing, it'sintastimazing! I had no idea that I could fix my jeans in such a clean, tidy-looking way! I'd settled for getting the hole in my jeans patched up in an awkward but serviceable way, so they look slightly less awesome but I can wear them again. It's like magic! I can save my magic pants with magic sewing! Thank you, Google! Now let's party. TURN THE MUSIC UP AND DANCE, MOFOS
Seriously though, snakes rock. They get a bad rap, what with all the squeaky-screamy people jumping on chairs going "eeeek!" when they see them. Or do they only do that for mice? I guess if somebody's timid enough to scream and jump up on a chair because of an itsy little cute mousy, they'd do it for a snake too. Geez, imagine how jumpy-screamy they'd be at a snake and a mouse!
But yeah, I've gotten off topic. I'm talking about how awesome snakes are, and how much I love them. They're just so cool! They're like the prettiest reptiles ever, I mean I'd like to see a gator or a bearded dragon look as fancy as this albino cobra.
But it's not just cool or pretty or exotic snakes I love. I like all of them! Just any snake anywhere makes me squeal with glee. Look at this little guy! Doesn't he look just so neat!?
I kind of desperately want a pet snake, haha. Or a pet hamster. Or a pet cat or dog or turtle or just about anything, really, I love animals. Unfortunately I am not in the position to own a pet just this minute, whine sob weep woe is me. A pet snake would be really cool, though.
