Have some high school photos of me!

I was sorting through a ream of family photos for a thing I'm doing. There are many "gems", of course, but here are just two for the moment. They are from my high school years, so about 10-ish years ago judging by the fashions I'm sporting.


Here I embody everything late-late '90s.



Pedal pushers: check

Strappy, clunky sandals: check

Ridiculously short t-shirt: check

Pastel 3/4 cardigan: check

Flippy "Rachel from 'Friends'" 'do: check

(Sadly, you can't see my expertly color-coordinated finger nails in this one.)




Why do I look like a drunk dumbass in this photo??

ENJOY.



Also at LJ.

Things Pissing Me Off Today: A List In No Particular Order

1. Why were you broken, gas pump credit card reader--WHYYYYYYYY??

2. 20 mins. to get from the highway off-ramp to Panera near the mall less than a mile away. SHENANIGANS!

3. AND THEN PANERA DOESN'T EVEN HAVE ANY SOURDOUGH LOAVES LEFT WHEN I GET THERE--WHATFUCKETH?!?!

4. All of the winter storms lately have come through during the morning commute. EXPLAIN, PLEASE.

AND NOW FOR A HAPPY-MAKING THING:





Have a nice night!



Also at LJ.

Things wot I learned from this week's "Boardwalk Empire":

#1 Apparently dousing your chooch with a Lysol mixture after sex constituted a birth control method in 1920. I'd like to know if that actually worked.

#2 Agent Van Alden, just when I can't think you could possibly get wound any tighter, you start in with the self-flagellation over your "impure thoughts"--literally. I feel sorry for your wife. And also Mrs. Schroeder's (jail bait-y) picture.

If you haven't started watching this show, why the eff not?! Also: you should start watching this show.




Also at LJ.

Knee-high by the 4th of July

My dad recently pointed out to my mother and me that, in the midst of our patio furniture--our rarely used patio furniture--there was what appeared to be a stalk of corn growing out of the seams of the two concrete slabs that comprise the patio. Wha-huh?! Why yes, that is a stalk of corn, and yes, it is growing up out of our patio. I knew the weed and general vegetation situation wasn't exactly, well, under control at all, but this is just too random not to share.



Also at LJ.

On the way home from work today, I listened to an interview on NPR with Casey Affleck about the new movie he stars in: The Killer Inside Me. It's about this, you know, serial killer and stuff. This is what my brain kept jumping to:



Thanks, TV!

Since my computer at work up and died on me on Monday, they reformatted the hard drive yesterday, which essentially puts the computer back to factory settings. This was all fine--not fun having to re-map the network drives I work off of and manually adding each and every stinkin' printer on the network to my directory, but whatevs--until I discovered that it had reverted to Internet Explorer 6. GAAAAAAHHH!! So effing slow and buggy and just heinous! Shoot me, 2004. Jeebus! Naturally, I didn't have administrator access to update it to the newest version that doesn't completely blow. I don't know how I lived for so long without tabbed browsing, I really don't.



Also at

Saturday, March 27, 2010

Movie: Shark Attack 3: Megaladon

So, Shark Attack 3: Megaladon

I threw it in my queue purely because of that scene that's up on YouTube, the one that they showed on Jonathan Ross that time and John Barrowman was straight up that he did it for the paycheck.

Real-time thoughts under the cut.

Right off the bat, they show the "salty seas captain" sub commander with a cigar in his mouth. Aren't there OSHA guidelines against that sort of thing?

Ooh, the first instance of poorly done ADR at 7:00 in. This is going to be fabulous.

9:00 I see how they stayed within budget here: lots of old stock footage. And not even good stuff either.

11:02 John goes diving for lobsters (instead of patrolling the coast like a good employee-naughty, naughty!) and instead of a net full of lobsters named Lunch and Dinner he comes back with a shark's tooth. It's like Jack and the Beanstalk but with less beans and more dangerous killer sharks!

14:00 The night watchman is a leacherous old man! No cliche unturned.

14:51 Stupid female lead! The first rule of computer safety is to not open e-mail attachments from people you don't know; do you WANT to get a computer virus?!

17:11 Next on the menu: sexy nude swimmers. Thanks, gratuitous nudity.

21:35 Blonde female lead has all the on-screen presence of the prop dead shark on the beach.

24:00 Super high-tech computer room straight out of 1987! AHAHAHHHAAAA, "Code monkeys". Even if it had no relation to the JoCo song, it still made me smile.

27:03 I'm watching this and thinking that rereading amand_r's TW/Jaws fic was infinitely more entertaining. I must soldier on.

28:10 First penis joke!

29:45 The music, it's like the "Jaws" theme but different enough to legally not be infringing.

33:34 Shoulda listened to the dog, random dude who is now chum. Now who is going to throw him the doggie frisbee??

35:30 News flash! People lie. Also: the sky is blue and the earth revolves around the sun.

38:15 I have to hand it to the "writers", they do know how to explain the existence of a prehistoric killer shark in short order. Less than 3 sentences of dialog.

41:39 John Barrowman is a good looking man, no doubt, but he suffered greatly from the Dippity Do abuse so common to dudes of the late '90s/early '00s.

44:25 Barrowman gives it a good go, but no one, absolutely no one, can give a "shee-iiit!" like Clay Davis on "The Wire".

47:17 Heehee. Victim #8 or 15 or whatever dies because blonde female lead (BFL) has butter fingers/sweaty palms. *sad trombone music*

52:47 All the main cast is now on the boat headed toward open waters, their date with Danger looms.

54:31 I love in these movies that there's always some kind of stupid-ass sinister business reason why the killer sharks/bears/yetis star attacking people. Here, it's Apex Communications (or something, I didn't pay enough attention nor care to rewind) laying down cheap fiber optic cables that attract the killer shark because of the seeping electrical energy into the ocean or whatever. I suppose a few dead naked swimmers is a small price to pay for transoceanic fiber optic cables that will provide me with high-speed Internet access to all the German leather fetish porn I could ever want.

1:01:39 It is amazing, and by that I mean baffling, that there is absolutely no accurate size reference for this megaladon. In one scene it is small enough to fit mostly inside the galley of a boat, but in the very next scene it swallows a dude in a speedboat in a single chomping gulp.

1:06:05 Ooooh, okay. So the one was a "baby" killer shark but the other one was it's mother. And now Mommy is Pissed. Off. It's a quest for justice now! Angry killer-shark justice.

1:08:01 Teehee, the "grizzled knowledgeable old man" token character said "abso-fucking-lutely!"

1:09:44 The Line!!!! The whole reason probably anyone knows about this movie. Took them long enough. And then the next scene is pretty much poorly shot softcore porn with a distinct lack of John Barrowman eating anyone's pussy.

1:11:15 A boat full of rich fat cats makes for good shark bait.

1:13:55 Barrowman made more sexual noises maneuvering the explosives into position than he did during the previous sex scene. He has more chemistry with the joystick in the sub--insert joystick joke here--than with his female co-star.

1:20:14 The movie is plodding toward the action climax because everyone and their brother is lobbing explosives at the shark and the wised old man character is suiting up for a suicide mission to save everyone.

1:22:56 Yes, there's a giant killer shark with a taste for humans, so let's all jump in the water! And get into flimsy inflatable life rafts, because then we will all be safe.

1:24:20 I think they blew through their entire budget with two of the most spectacularly shitty CGI-ed shots of the shark eating first, a single dude, and then a raft full of people. It was a major letdown. Like the rest of this. And my whole life.

1:27:50 "Torpedoes away, motherfucker!!!" The second "best" line from the movie. Also uttered by the esteemed Mr. John Barrowman.

1:30:12 He lived! And they all lived happily ever after...or did they?!

So I rented this because I love me some John Barrowman and the clips on YouTube were hilariously bad, plus they brought it up on Jonathan Ross and whatnot. And all I can say it that was an hour and a half of my life I will never get back. Ever.


Also at LJ.

TV: Doctor Who, or: Shut Up, Internet, or: The LJ Cut Is Your Friend

Spoilers under the cut for Doctor Who: The End of Time, Part 2.

It's rare that I get angry about Internet spoilers for the TV shows I watch (and care enough about to steer myself away from spoilers). But there I was doing a search for something in my RSS feed this afternoon and what do I see in the list of results but a TW fic using spoilers from The End of Time part 2. The part about The Doctor giving Jack the note with the guy's name on it in the bar right before the end of the episode. GAH! Less than a few hours until I watched it on BBC America (all legal and everything--that's the last time I do that!) and I get spoiled about a character appearance toward the very end of the episode! Granted, it's all very minor in the scheme of things, but still. I was soooo good at avoiding, as much as I could, anything that was spoiler-ific about the last David Tennant DW episodes, and only to get tripped up right before it aired for me. Wah wah. I know.

AND THEN! To top it off, I was looking up something about Martha Jones while beta reading a fic for someone when what do I see on the DW wiki? Martha and Mickey?! Wuzzah? Not that I was like, invested to a great degree in Martha's relationship-y stuff, but talk about out of nowhere. ALSO: SPOILED AGAIN. Both of these are the most annoying kind of spoilers too, the kind that, when you read them, you know they were meant to be little mini surprises in the episode for first-time viewing and now knowing them negates that tiny little thrill of seeing the characters pop up and you spend the whole time wondering when so-an-so is going to make an appearance and blah blah blah.



Aside from that, I quite enjoyed these final David Tennant episodes. He was fantastic. And good old Wilf!! What's not to love there. I know there will be much kvetching about this and that and RTD "ruining" something or other and all that other fan wankery and BS. But I thought it was great, and I'd put that out into the swirling morass of opinions.




Also on LJ