| NaNoWriMo Winner! |
[30 Nov 2009|03:02pm] |
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 Whee! I did it! 50K words in November. I didn't think I even had a shot since I started on the 5th and had quite a few days I couldn't write. But I managed it. Mind you, it's nowhere near done and the writing is pretty much abysmal at the moment due to the speed of it, but I have stuff on paper. It'll come together in editing. I hope. Yay!
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| Buy It. Read It. Seriously. |
[19 Apr 2009|11:14am] |
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http://www.lifesthatway.com/
This is the first book in a long, long time that I pulled an all nighter to read. I went to bed at 1 am with the intention of flipping a few pages and going to sleep. At 4 am I forced myself to set it down, turn off the light, and try to sleep. At 4:30 am I conceded defeat to the pull of the book and picked it up again. At 7 am I finished it and marveled at it and slept a few hours on it. I got up to tend to my dogs, and before going back to sleep I needed to post this.
Jim Beaver is someone I admire. Yes he's an actor. Yes he's in one of my favorite television shows. That isn't why I admire him. He's also a former Marine. He's also a playwright. He's also a biographer. He's also a single dad, and a very wise human being. This is this Renaissance Man's memoir about the year encompassing the discovery that his wife, Cecily, had cancer, two months after their two year old daughter, Maddie, was diagnosed with autism, and everything that transpired for 12 months from that point. It is a compilation of nightly emails he authored to friends and family during that year, which were then forwarded to further and further ripples until they were reaching about 4000 people. And reading them is both a privilege, and a remarkable journey.
If you have ever lost a loved one. Read it. If you have yet to, read it. Just read it. Please. You will be a better human being for having done so.
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| My Bloody Valentine 3D Review (No Spoilers) |
[19 Jan 2009|11:48am] |
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I love Jensen Ackles. I own Devour, ok? Now that I've established my undying devotion to the lead actor, it should tell you how honest I'm being here. MBV 3D was not a horrible movie. It had moments. There were some frights which worked well (such as the grocery store chase scene), but for the most part I wasn't very scared during the film. It was lighter on suspense and higher on blood and guts. I don't mind blood and guts, so that wasn't an issue for me, but this is NOT a movie for the weak of stomach or anyone who has trouble watching people be injured. At the same time this didn't have the squick factor of Hostel or any of the Saw movies. The violence was clearly movie violence, and most of the murders happened too quickly and to characters you know too briefly to have much of an emotional effect. The acting was decent, especially when compared to other recent horror movie remakes, but all of the actors with the exception of Betsy Rue seemed to struggle with the material. I don't think this was their fault, or even the dialogue's fault. I think the issue was the staging required for the 3D to work properly. Most of the shots were distance shots, with very few close ups or angles and lighting that most directors use as a tool to intensify emotional investment. A such, the leads had to exaggerate their expressions and tones and a lot of the acting came across as forced because of it. The 3D, while amazingly advanced from the days of Jaws 3D and the like, still tends to be distracting and kind of eye strainy at times. Also, while it gave phenomenal depth and clarity to the set at times, it gets muddled when there is any kind of swift movement. Thus the slow, sustained, and clearly set up shots to make things poke out or come flying at the audience. These shots really put a speedbump in the flow of the movie, and took me out of any potential suspense more than once. Overall, it was better than I expected, but I don't feel it was worth the $11.50 a ticket I had to pay. I also want to see it again in 2D, to see if it is easier to invest myself in the characters without the distraction of effects, but I am worried that it might fall flatter without the distraction. I think it's worth seeing to appreciate the advances in 3D, and for the laughs and few scares. However, the best part of the movie (and this is coming from a woman) is the 4 minutes of full frontally nude Betsy Rue's attitude and total comfort with herself in her major scene. That scene, although it focused on a fully nude beautiful woman, was still done tastefully and she was the one character I ended up feeling for.
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| Happy Birthday Seiraryu! |
[27 Nov 2008|10:35pm] |
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Friday, November 28th is ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) seiraryu 's birthday! Happy birthday my friend! Hope you have a wonderful, memorable one! *hugs*
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| Happy Halloween! |
[31 Oct 2008|02:00pm] |
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My favorite holiday! Whee! I decorated a few weeks ago, but yesterday I carved my pumpkin and decorated a cake for husband's office. I molded the candies myself on the cake (except for the candy corn. (Candy Corn -- Corn which tastes like candy. SON OF A BITCH! -- Lewis Black) See under the cut for pics.( Piccies! )
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| Brief Entry |
[08 Oct 2008|04:48pm] |
Hawai'i was amazing and I miss it terribly. Even the $6.00 gallons of milk can't dissuade me from one day wanting to live there. I'll post some pics once I go through the 4000 or so I took. My new Nikon D60 Digital SLR is awesome. So is striped marlin, ahi poke, and snorkeling in Shark's Cove. Birthday came and went. I was sick so all we did was go out for dinner nearby at Saltgrass Steakhouse instead of one of our usual uber fancy dinner spots. I couldn't see dropping the money on Fogo de Chao if I could barely taste anything. Got some gorgeous jewelry in Hawai'i as present from the hubby, and spent a buttload of amazon gift certs from the parents and sibs. cyriael got me some awesome Hawai'ian chocolate, a Koa wood bookmark with the breadfruit tree symbol, and a U of H colors friendship bracelet. Squee! It was so great meeting her and hanging out while we were there.
Also, Matsumoto Shaved Ice is the best thing ever. Went twice and bought t-shirts. It was that good. Shark's Cove Grill is a great place to get cheap, filling, delicious breakfast. The north shore shrimp trucks are AWESOME. Kua Loa ranch was also really cool, saw where they filmed parts of Lost, Jurassic Park, Godzilla, Pearl Harbor, Windtalkers, Mighty Joe Young, and other stuff. We didn't get to see all of the Polynesian Cultural Center and wish we had, but the luau and Horizons show were great. The Dole Plantation giant maze was fun, but go early or late to avoid the heat. The USS Missouri was really neat, and our tour guide was great. I enjoyed the catamaran ride (saw sea turtles, spinner dolphins, Diamond Head, and the lighthouse on it) but hubby got seasick.
I want to go back :( It really is a beautiful, tranquil, laid back place.
This thing below has been floating around on Xanga, had to post it because of DD. More later, still sick and kind of brain fried from that and cleaning for house guests who will be visiting us this weekend.
Your challenge is to write crossover fanfiction combining Around the World in 80 Days and Darkwing Duck. The story should use a tournament of some sort as a plot device! Generated by the Terrible Crossover Fanfiction Idea Generator |
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| Book Meme |
[25 Jun 2008|10:41am] |
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Stolen from dolimir_k The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they've printed. Well let's see. 1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicise those you intend to read (as in the book is bought and sitting on my shelf).
3) Underline the books you LOVE. Two were taken out of the list because they were repetitive. 1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4. Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6. The Bible
7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8. Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11. Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12. Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare
15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19. The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20. Middlemarch - George Eliot
21. Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22. The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23. Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25. The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33. Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34. Emma - Jane Austen
35. Persuasion - Jane Austen
36. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
37. Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
38. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
39. Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
40. Animal Farm - George Orwell
41. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
42. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
43. A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
44. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
45. Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
46. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
47. The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
48. Lord of the Flies - William Golding
49. Atonement - Ian McEwan
50. Life of Pi - Yann Martel
51. Dune - Frank Herbert
52. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
53. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
54. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
55. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
56. A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
57. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
58. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
59. Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
60. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
61. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
62. The Secret History - Donna Tartt
63. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
64. Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
65. On The Road - Jack Kerouac
66. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
67. Bridget Jones' Diary - Helen Fielding
68. Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
69. Moby Dick - Herman Melville
70. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
71. Dracula - Bram Stoker
72.The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
73. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
74. Ulysses - James Joyce
75. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
76. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
77. Germinal - Emile Zola
78. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
79. Possession - AS Byatt
80. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
81. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
82. The Color Purple - Alice Walker
83. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
84. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
85. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
86. Charlotte's Web - EB White
87. The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
88. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
89. The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
90. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
91. The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
92. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
93. Watership Down - Richard Adams
94. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
95. A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
96. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
97. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
98. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
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| Been a While |
[22 Apr 2008|12:02pm] |
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Been a while since I posted anything. Mostly because I've been stuck somewhere between being miserable from the worst allergies I've had in my life, and being either exhausted or splittingly headachy from the medication the doctor has prescribed to control them. I'm not sure which is worse really. I think the allergies were, followed closely by trying to benadryll them away and being so bloody out of it I barely knew my name from that. The headaches from the Flonase+Claritin+Tussionex are not fun, but a couple Excederin seems to combat them pretty well. The only thing is I /hate/ being drugged outside of an aspirin or ibuprofen once in a while. But I guess you do what you have to do. That and my husband gave me the ultimatum that either I go to the doctor for them, or I sleep on the couch due to keeping him up all night with the sniffling and coughing. Can't blame him, he gets up at 5:30 for work.
I finally sketched something after a serious dryspell of about 8 months, and when I went to scan it in to ink and paint in Photoshop, my scanner finally gave up the ghost. Which really sucks as it was the last legal sized scanner I've been able to find at a reasonable price. I ordered a letter sized Epson which was supposed to arrive yesterday, but still has not.
Also, got some bad news from home. On the street where I lived, all the families were very close. My neighbors were always "Aunt" and "Uncle" to me (Or "Grandma" and "Grandpa" if they were white haired) and I grew up with their kids being like siblings. My next-door neighbors, Frannie and Frank have 3 kids. Lisa and Michael were much older and I was never close to them, but Molly was a year younger than my little brother and became like a little sister to me. When her siblings moved to other states I became her surrogate big sister. I was her confirmation sponsor and she was a bridesmaid in my wedding. Around the time of my wedding she had her first kid with a canadian guy named Billy. I didn't like him much. Mostly because he got her into drugs and wasn't man enough to marry the mother of his daughter, yet was so controlling he wouldn't let her dance with her assigned groomsman at my wedding. But she loved him, so I tolerated him. They eventually had three kids together, though they never married. Well a few weeks back, Billy had an aneruism and ended up in the hospital in a coma. On April 16th, she had to pull the plug, and last night he passed away. It's times like these that it is so fucking HARD to be 1500 miles away from my family. I wish I could be there to comfort her and her children. She was there for me when my best friend of 20 years was killed in a car accident a few months after both of them were bridesmaids in my wedding. She was the one who mothered me after the wake and took me out for a drink to just let me babble at her about how much I loved Jenny and how I didn't know what to do without her in my life. How do I put into written words how much I am sorry for what she's going through? How can a stupid Hallmark card and a check possibly say what an actual hug would convey so much better? This sucks ass.
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| Music Meme |
[27 Jan 2008|10:38am] |
Stolen from seiraryu
Step 1: Put iTunes on random.
Step 2: Post the first line from the first 25 songs that play, no matter how embarrassing. (You can skip songs that are instrumental).
Step 3: Strike out the songs when someone guesses correctly.
Here's the songs:
My iTunes is a bit odd, I don't have many of my actual CDs ripped into it, so it's mostly things I bought online or had friends send to me.
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| Happy Birthday and a Get Well Soon |
[09 Jan 2008|04:10pm] |
Today is my husband's 35th birthday! Happy birthday, Paul! I made him a rubber ducky cake. His nickname is "bath man" after all. We're going to carnivore nirvana for his birthday tonight.
Also my dear pal seiraryu is down sick with bronchitis. Here's a get well to him and some virtual chicken soup. The internet is boring without him. :(
Thought for the day: Mocking or bullying other people on an internet roleplaying game is kind of assinine. It's like a wino picking on a hobo. At the end of the day, you're just as homeless as the other guy. Just cuz you get to get your drink on doesn't elevate you whatsoever. It just pokes holes in your own glass house.
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