kiffie

Been trying to post this since Friday. It finally worked. Yay!

So. The movie. Saw it. Surprisingly, it did not suck. Even more surprisingly, it was... actually, pretty damn good. :D

Non-spoilery thoughts:

Despite being PG-13, there's a lot of death. A lot of it. It's mostly Star Trek death (shoot-fall-down and vaporization type things), but there is one very nasty death scene that even made me hork a little. I have done necropsies and this made me queasy. If you dislike blood and/or violent deaths, go with someone who's seen the movie before, and they can tell you when to close your eyes.

Unlike a lot of other films, this one was long enough to actually feel like a real movie. There were quiet moments, silly moments, and action-y moments and none stepped on the others' toes. The pacing, too, was mostly good -- it built slowly, but when it was going, it was going.

The acting is good all-around. Typically, in action movies, men are the leads and women are added in just for eye-candy and can't act a whit. (A damn shame, because there are some great actresses out there who I'd love to see in action films.) I LOVED the female lead, and if there was a way to just get an entire movie about her and Cap being buddycop, I'd be fine with that.

The film ties in quite neatly with Thor and Iron Man. If you haven't seen those, watch them first. One of the major plot points of the film relies on the audience being in the know. Not that the movie would be unwatchable if you haven't seen them, but really, it will only help you. If you have seen them, you'll be playing "spot the reference" through the entire film. Everything is so nicely tied together.

And, as with all of the other Marvel films, be on the lookout for Stan Lee and STAY 'TIL THE END. :D

( SPOILERS from here on out. And, boy, are they long. )

A secret posted on fandomsecrets, as well as ed's own recent nostalgia kick with Bruce Coville, made me think of a book from my childhood that I loved-- love --very much:

James Gurney's Dinotopia.

I'd been into dinosaurs since I could walk. One of my mom's favorite "stupid kid tricks" when I had just learned to move on my own was sitting me in front of a mess of toy dinosaurs and having me name each one. And not just triceratops and T-rex -- I had brachiosaurus and anklyosaurus and pleisiosaur down. One of my favorite toys was a black-and-purple plastic triceratops. My mom scribbled my name on the bottom so I could take it to preschool with me, supposedly without fear of another kid nicking it. They did, anyway, but at least I had a good comeback to, "Is your name on it?"

Anyway, some time after the first Dinotopia book came out, the whole "feathered dinosaurs" thing came into vogue, mostly driven, at that point, by Archeopteryx (even though that particular critter is now considered a proto-bird, not a dinosaur). Dinotopia kept with the accepted-- and, in my opinion, more visually-appealing --version of non-feathered dinos. Really, most people still draw dinosaurs as giant lizards. After all, T-rex is hardly scary when you imagine a great big chicken. Lizards, though? Lizards are scary. They're pretty much the exact opposite of us warm, fuzzy mammals. And what makes for a better monster?

But then I got to thinking.

If, in a few million years' time, someone found a chicken skeleton, would they imagine this or this? Why did we end up with the latter, when iguanadon and megalosaurus (semi- and fully bipedal, respectively) were the first skeletons on display?

Science is very strange.

From a design standpoint, I love the smooth and slick raptors, the clunky armored tank anklyosaurs, and the graceful gnarled tree trunk sauropods. They hit all of the right notes for a great creature. But the scientist in me looks back at those books-- and man, I love those books! --and screams "WRONG WRONG WRONG!"

...

I should be doing homework.

It sucks, being part of a small subset of an already small fandom and WANTING NEW MATERIAL

DAMNIT

WHERE IS THE BOB/WINIFRED?!

WHERE?!

I may just have to go ahead and do that badly-drawn comic strip wherein we meet Awesome!Evil!Hrothbert, Sorceress!Winifred, and the long-suffering wardens sent to hunt them down.

[procrastinate]After I finish eli's arts, anyway...[/procrastinate]

I've just come into some considerable (for me) money, but I'm a bit at a loss on how to spend it. I might get a bit more come Christmas, but really, it's practically burning a hole in my pocket as it is. I've had some wants (and needs) for a while, and it's like someone just offered me everything on a platter. 8D

Things I Need:
-New windshield for Voodoo
-A new stove
-Jeeves' muffler and pipes installed (he's still wearing his drainpipe cast)

Things I Want:
-The Scarlet Pimpernel: German Highlights Album
-The Scarlet Pimpernel Songbook
-USB Owl -- I would name him "Hollis." :3
-A frock coat
-A skull for Bob
-A record player that works, damnit B|

So, as you can see, the choices are making me crazy. Obviously, the things I need are fairly big and expensive and would mean putting the money I have now into savings until later, but the other stuff I could just get now, if I so chose. We've been needing a new stove for a while, but it's been put aside in favor of other things -- the washer broke, the fridge died entirely, etc.

I'll probably still have this money in a few months, all because I have no idea what to do with it. *sigh*

If you can't tell how your car is running by listening to it, you shouldn't be driving.

Point - you don't NEED a tachometer. Your engine? It makes sounds. These sounds correspond to a tach readout. Learn them.

So, peoples! Stop telling me I need a tach in Voodoo. Or an oil pressure gauge. Or any other fancy-shmacy spinning thing that gives me something ELSE to read when I'm driving. Would they be nice to have? Sure. So would airbags and heated seats.

re: GQ's article on leather jackets, to be found here:

http://men.style.com/gq/features/landing?id=content_7212

While I generally agree with the points outlined, I also find it insanely hard to take any advice given by a magazine that seems to think that elastic fabric at the waist of a biker jacket is a good thing*. It does not make me think, "Oh, how sexy." It instead makes me wonder what sort of sissy wimp needs the soft, cushy support of fabric on a LEATHER JACKET.

And another, though less pressing nitpick: Brown bomber jackets CAN look good. You just have to get one that's actually cut correctly and possibly made before 1980. (._.)/

*Note -- elasticized leather is okay.

Peoples!

I have seen this far too often on forums and the like.

When you are talking about an automobile model, it's capitalized. Even the nicknames are capitalized. Why? Because they're still proper nouns. Even if it's not the official title, it's still a title.

So, if you're referring to a Volkswagen sedan? Yes, it's "Bug", not "bug" and "Beetle", not "beetle". Neither are the 'real' names for the car (excluding the Super Beetle), but they're common usage enough to be treated as such.

On a similar note, if you're talking about a Dub and you mention the hood of the automobile, I'm gonna be looking toward the tail-end of the car. The trunk is in the front. No, really. Front = trunk. Rear = hood. Or "decklid" if you want to be proper. (Unless you're talking about a Type-3, then both the front and rear compartments are 'trunks'.)

Hood means there's an engine underneath. Trunk means you can put stuff inside of it. So if you say you've popped the hood of your Bug and are loading your groceries on in? I'm probably gonna reach for my fire extinguisher and/or camera, because that's gonna be beautiful when you hit the ignition.

I'm gonna try to sum up all that's happened. It will probably be hilarious.

From the beginning:

As most of you know, Voodoo had been shuddering for a while. I didn't know what it was, but it wasn't affecting driving, so I let it be. One night, when me and random_redshirt were coming back from a movie, it got bad. Real bad. So bad, I wasn't sure we'd get home. But next morning, everything was fine, like it never happened.

I made an appointment with Broadstreet and took her in.

The place was swamped and the mechie couldn't do much that day, but he said that he could keep her overnight, drive her around when it was cold out and see if the bucking, shuddering motion came back. I made some mention about the gas pedal "pulsating", as this had been happening, was annoying, and I figured that if she was already in the shop for one thing, I might as well get that fixed, too. I hadn't really seen any connection between the two things. Mechie, however, immedietly made a face-- you all know it, because it's the one that car owners know means "expensive work ahead" and other mechies know as "formation of several ulcers ahead" --and went to find his jack.

Ten minutes later and I'm sitting on a $350 work job. Voodoo's front trans mount was cracked and needed to be replaced. This involved pulling all the car's guts out her tail-end and sorting through everything. The job was long, laborous, and a pain in the ass to do (for both the mechie AND the car! *rimshot*). Almost all of that cost was just time spent getting everything out of the way.

The secretary drives me home and I wait.

A few days later, I get a call. Mechie has news. It's not just the front mount that's cracked. It's ALL of them. The front one was evedently cracked in the accident. The force of getting hit probably drove the front part of the trans into the mount, shattering it. And then the kicking motion that the cracked front mount allowed had damaged the other mounts, flattening, and eventually cracking, them into oblivion. The price of repair got upped to $750.

There was a good side and a bad side to this: The good - the insurance company had sent off a check to cover the cost of repair to the trans, which they estimated at about $2,500. Now, we figured we'd probably be held to pay any remainder back to them, but at least we knew we'd have our asses covered in case anything else was discovered. And now the bad - in pulling the engine and the trans out, mechie discovered three wondrous things: the clutch plate was cracked (from the bucking trans), the oil cooler was leaking (probably from the same), and Voodoo's previous owner had fitted her with some engine mods that had fucked with her internal workings enough to be a driving hazard. Yay.

By now, she'd been in the shop a while. The costs were racking up, I was getting annoyed at not having a car-- Archie is nice, but he's not motorized --and, on top of it all, it was raining and the bloody rear window LEAKS. I think I had the most hilarious panic attack EVER at 3am as I heard rain, realized what it meant, and then thought Voodoo, being at Broadstreet, was parked outside and would be flooded by morning. Blessedly, the mechie was smart and had parked her inside the garage next to that poor, bastard Ford Probe. So I figured, what the hell. She's in the shop already, I might as well get the window fixed. It WAS knocked out of joint in the accident, so the insurance won't mind if I include this on there as well. After all, I might not ever have the chance to get it fixed again.

Ugh. Smart one, Kiff.

The glass guy, who the mechies need to pull and place the window, showed up once in the last week. He came in to pull the window and was scheduled again to come on Wednesday to place it back in. He didn't show up. Okay, the mechie tells me, he'll be here Friday. He has to be. I wait by the phone. Nothing.

The mechie hadn't wanted to place the engine back in until the window had been set, as it's easier to move the car without the added weight and position it for window-related stuffs. But as the window guy was MIA, mechie went ahead and placed the engine back in, fired it up...

And was promptly treated to a gasoline shower.

The fuel pump, probably just as old as the engine, had taken some offence to being jostled around during the engine removal and disassembly and had more or less said, "Fuck it, I'm out." By this point, both the mechie and I had been well on our way to ulcers that may require hospitalization. This pretty much pushed it over the line.

After a brief (and rather hilariously strained) convo with the mechie over the phone, the grand total of damn near everything came out somewhere in the neighborhood of $1,500. That's not including any work that he'll have to do on the horn once he realizes that, in you replace the fuse that is MISSING FOR A VERY GOOD REASON, Voodoo doesn't stop screaming. On the one hand, I feel pity and a certain kinship in having both having experienced this bout of WTFery together. On the other... no. He knew what he was getting into.

That's pretty much where I am right now. Window guy should be here Monday, but there's no saying for sure. And the insurance company is probably gonna drop me after this. But at least Voodoo will be fixed. I hope. (._.)

Since you're already making feature-length movies that no one is gonna watch anyway...

Would it really be too much to ask that we get SOMETHING featuring the Invaders?

( Long rant behind the cut. And a little cussing. )


It's a good thing Marvel never reads my rants at them. As much as I want there to BE an Invaders cartoon, my luck it would end up being set in the modern day, with them fighting our current enemies. *sigh*