Mal: "Ain't all buttons and charts, little albatross. Know what the first rule of flying is? Well I s'pose you do, since you already know what I'm 'bout to say."

River: "I do. But I like to hear you say it."

Mal: "Love. Can know all the math in the 'verse but take a boat in the air that you don't love? She'll shake you off just as sure as a turn in the worlds. Love keeps her in the air when she oughtta fall down...tell you she's hurtin' 'fore she keens...makes her a home."

--Serenity



And lookit what avictoriangirl made!!!!!

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According to my uber-boss, assuming the world doesn't end by September 1 (yes those were his exact words), I AM TENURED!

I went into this movie with ludicrously high expectations that were exceeded.

Let me reiterate this.

**I** went into a **JOSS WHEDON** **COMIC BOOK** movie and it was **BETTER** than **I** thought it would be.

There's your Moment of Zen.

~

In all seriousness, it was like a "how to" for writing. Economical, each character gets to shine. It's like Star Trek Reboot upped by several notches because Whedon is so familiar with the source material and knows exactly how to handle large ensembles without being repetitive. Compare with JJ Abrams who put most of the tension on two characters, relegated the woman to love interest, and kept reusing the same moves over and over. (Oh look, here's Kirk being choked. Oh here he's being choked again. Now he's hanging from a cliff. Oh look now he's hanging off a drill. REPEAT.) There's some telegraphing to make sure you know where things come from because a lot is going on. The writing is also unbelievably snap-crackle-pop.

Cannot wait to go again! I'm doing a review for SFRA so when I'm done with the draft I'll post it here on f-lock.

Okay, so last week we were uninstalling our Printing Arts exhibit. Typically what we do is we take photos of our exhibits and layouts so if we ever want to reconstruct them again later we can do so with (relative) ease. Well, Todd was taking the photos as Glynnis and I helped take away the items and put them away. We were trying to be very careful about staying out of the photo-range (helpfully, we thought), but of course, Todd took this as a dare to try to get pictures of us.



Me and Glynnis's elbow. Note the general prairie dog-iness.



Just laughing; you can see Glynnis's side as she maintains the Wile E. Coyote method of hiding behind the pillar.

Hours of moving heavy cases made up for with the kookiness of all.

(I still say I want the TED talk Tony Stark would give. Todd maintains this is disrespectful to real brilliant people to want to hear about a pretend brilliant person, but I maintain it's not my fault that I tend to prefer pretend people to real people, period.)

I just got back from this movie and OH MY GOD STILL IN NERD ECSTASY. Full disclosure: I've been waiting for this film since 2009, and it's Whedon & Goddard with Acker and Kranz, and so my expetcations were ridiculously high to begin with, BUT DEAR GODS, THE AMAZING!!!!!

The short review is: I think that The Avengers will be my favorite film of the year but Cabin will be my favorite of the decade if not longer. It is mad, brilliant, subversive as hell, hilarious, heartbreaking, and completely wonderful.

The long review: ( Read more... )

Famous Authors on Fan Fiction

Strangely they all asked authors who were opposed to it.

Discuss!

Hey, remember when I could finish stuff? Yeah, me neither. The side effect of the end of the semester is me being even MORE ADD. Like, tonight, after finishing my paleography homework, I meant to read Tennyson but wrote some fic instead.

So, here's a bitlet of an Avengers WIP tentatively called Friends, Lovers, or Nothing, because it wasn't meant to be a real fic, and YET. Stuff would happen. Like all my other WIPS...maybe summer, yeah?

So. Snippet below.

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His keynote was amazing and I teared up more than once. He started off talking about when he was a little boy and he saw soldiers with guns and bayonets arrive at his family's house and take them to a vacated racetrack, where the family of five lived in a single stall for three months before being moved to Arkansas for over three years. At the end of that time, they were given $20 and a train ticket to go where they would.

He talked about coming out to his family and how when his mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer's his husband took care of her. She couldn't always remember her other children but she remembered Brad to the end.

He spoke about living as a gay man in the fifties and sixties and about all his activism and how Star Trek has inspired so many people to work to make the future a better place for us all.

So yeah. <3

~

My panel went okay. Ours was the first panel I had been to where all the panelists showed up and they all went long even when I passed them notes. Siiiiiiiigh. So we had very little time for q&a, but everything worked out. So now I can breathe a little easier and tomorrow hang out with rubynye and yeah. *G*

My hotel has "organic" water!

Can't.

Stop.

GIGGLING!

Just one of those things I do sometimes. So, a pagan and a Mormon exchanged each other's bibles the day after Easter.

Stay tuned!

This is the movie with Michael Fassbender and Viggo Mortensen as Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud. It probably should have been called "That Movie with Michael Fassbender and Viggo Mortensen as Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud." Keira Knightly is in it, and this should matter more as the centerpiece, but mostly she was distracting; her portrayal of hysteria involves doing a damn good impression of a lantern fish and all of her sexy scenes with Fassbender brought more crazy than hot. Like literally my thought was "I know this is supposed to be a kind of romancey thing, but doc, you are not only being STUPID here, you're being all kinds of WRONG, and not even in the FUN way!"

BTW, it turns out that judicious spankings from Michael Fassbender will enable you to get a graduate degree in psychology. I am contemplating changing majors now.

At any rate, the lack of chemistry between Fassbender and Knightley, or possibly just odd direction, makes the whole thing way more dry than it should have been. Somehow I magically think that if Fassbender could have shaved off the pencil 'stache and put on his rockin' outfit from James Eyre then the sexual repression would have magically worked. So.

Basically, this is my way of telling the internet I need Charles/Erik with kinky psychiatry twist. C'mon, people, do something for me.

(Bonus points if you see what I did there. ;))

Source

I'm just saying, only dogs can hear the sound I just made.

My life lately:


Source

Yeah so in writing class today we workshopped my revised 16th c. printerfic. Now at this point everyone in the class *knows* I TEACH printing/print history for a living. And YET, there were a bunch of comments like "Would this be happening then?" "Women couldn't do that back then!" "Were there black people in England back then?" (They got some polite historical footnotes verbally.)

Here's the killer to me though. Here's a line in the first paragraph: . I felt foolish in my boy’s garb, a half-wrought Cesario, with few pennies and less honor to my name than any Viola.

THREE OF NINE ENGLISH PHD STUDENTS DID NOT RECOGNIZE THE REFERENCE.

This...kinda makes it hard for me to want to take any of their other comments seriously.

Am I being pedantic? Snobbish? ...Something? Or do I have a legitimate reason to finish the box of chocolate jo-jos in the cupboard? (That last question, possibly not academic.)

SO HAI GUYS HOW ARE YOU?????

I went in with high expectations and they were met. I thought pretty much all the performances were nailed and the ones I was worried about--like Josh Hutcherson and Lenny Kravitz--were completely blown out of the water. I was always kind of iffy on Peeta but goddamned if I'm not on Team Peeta now, and I also may have a crush on Cinna. (Also possibly 'shipping Katniss/Cinna, which ew wtf self?)

Anyhow. SO PATHETICALLY BEHIND. Must make a paper happen in four days and finish an article by Saturday. WISH ME LUCK, 'KAY!

PS Check out this vid: http://cap-ironman.livejournal.com/810270.html That's what's called EDITING, folks. It also really makes me think of CW: The Confession, possibly because of the red washes. Still, lovely work!

(A Bad Idea for us: Watching Game of Thrones and taking a drink every time someone says "winter is coming." BAD, BAD IDEA!)

Took a couple days off so I could have a whole week of "vacation", which has largely been me just doing homework and research and stuff. (Also, watching Game of Thrones with Scott, cos that's hugely important too.)

I did go see John Carter though, twice, and enthusiastically recommend it on the basis of good writing, gorgeous effects, and James Purefoy.

I need to batten down the hatches though and get some more writing done. I really do have the attention span of a flea. I worked on three stories in bitlets today and really only got some progress made on one-- the Greek one, incidentally, which I wasn't even planning on working on, and yet.

so. How are you guys?

Stolen from rubynye:

Is there anything you've always wanted to ask me? About my life, my views of the universe, my writing, anything?