From YouTube, a video of my favorite guys (The Seattle Knights), and my favorite sport.
The guy in black and green at about .25 is my favorite. He gave me the tip off one of the lances when it shattered…. One of these days I’m going to join their group and learn how to do this myself. Geez, but it looks like fun!!!
Also, in the evening after faire, I’m going to a steampunk concert, starring Abney Park. Does life get better than this?
I’m sick, so while I have a rambling essay on writing and the book I’m currently writing, I’m entirely too tired to type it up. I’ve had this thing for a week now, and this morning I thought: “Hey, I feel pretty energetic! I’m going to go out to the studio and sew!” Heh. I managed to sew for maybe half an hour before I was exhausted. My brother thinks we have the swine flu. He might be right. Heaven knows I’ve never had anything that doesn’t actually make me feelall that bad knock me out of business so badly and for so long. And it’s interesting that I got sick in summer, because I never, ever get sick in summer. Good thing I’ve still got two weeks to get my energy back before the Renfaire!!!
And on to the cool stuff….
I meant to post this earlier on my “All about Harry Potter” blog, but it slipped my mind, so here it is now. Wizard rock! Yea! How can you not love it just for the sheer dorky awesomeness (even when it’s bad) – and these guys are actually pretty good. I present to you the Ministry of Magic’s “Snape vs Snape”.
I adore Snape. He’s just plain written of awesome.
And “Simon’s Cat” has a new episode out! I don’t know who puts these out, but he sure has a handle on what makes cats tick.
Who doesn’t like penguins?
And here’s my latest music discovery. Amaranth, by Nightwish. Love the visuals – they put stories in my head.
I love it when the “expert” looks at me like I’m this mixed-up confused wrong person, and then I get to make them eat crow.
I went to the eye doctor yesterday to get more contacts. I’d been reading on the internet about these contacts called Acuvue Moist. They’re dailies, which are the only kind I will wear, because I refuse to mess with solution and cleaning. Plus, since I only wear them for special events like my Renaissance Faires, they aren’t pricey for me. These Moist ones sound awesome, because they’re made mostly of water, and don’t dry your eyes out at all. Renfaires tend to be somewhat dusty affairs, so with my old contacts I was definitely feeling some discomfort by the end of a long day.
So I tell my doctor I want to get these Moist contacts, and she says they don’t exist. She says she reads everything the contact companies send to her, and she hasn’t heard one word about anything called “Moist”. She’s looking at me like I’m totally confused. I don’t say anything more, I just let her get on with the exam, but I’m thinking I’ll just get the updated prescription from her, then order the new contacts myself off one of the discount internet sites. Then I ask to try on some color-change contacts, so she leaves me along with a bunch of different colors to play with. She leaves me along for so long that I get bored and start going through all her colored advertisements on the table. Guess what one of the advertisements was for? Yep.
She comes back, and I point out the add for Acuvue Moist contacts. She’s pretty flustered and leaves to ask the other employee if they have any of those in stock. She comes back in about a minute with some free samples of Moist contacts for me to take home and try out. 🙂 Moral of the story? Never, ever trust your doctor to know anything. They aren’t infalible, and they absolutely make mistakes. Do your own research!
I received good news though: my eyesight has improved by three powers! That means my plan of wearing my glasses as little as possible is working. You see, the eye is just a muscle, and when you stop exercising it enough, you get either near or far-sighted. I’m near-sighted, because nearly everything I like to do involves close up work (sewing, reading, writing). I didn’t exercise that far-away vision, and so I began to lose it. There are programs of exercises you can do to regain 20/20 vision, but I’m honestly too lazy to do them. I just don’t wear my glasses at home, and I bought glasses that are high enough off my cheeks that I can look under the lenses when I’m reading at work, so that I’m not straining my eyes by looking through a prescription when I don’t need it. Wearing your glasses all the time (if you don’t need to) is a guaranteed way of making your eyes worse over time.
And the colored contacts? Meh. The ones dark enough to turn my brown eyes blue slid around and put a blue haze over some of my vision. It’s annoying. They do have some that just add some “sparkle” to your normal color, but I wasn’t impressed enough to shell out the money. One called “Moonlight” was pretty cool. They gave my eyes a subtle silvery look, like wolf’s eyes. And since it’s just an enhancer, not a complete chance-of-color, you don’t get the annoying vision haze if they slide a bit. One weird thing, is that the trial lenses they give you to play with have the word “demo” or “test” written on about 1/3 of the lense. It’s beyond weird to see writing on your eye!!!
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is coming out July 15th. Since I am pretty much a geek (and fortunate enough to have a few sufficiently geek-like friends) I’m going to the midnight premiere in costume. I’m a little nervous, though. The films have been iffy for me; I loved the first two (Sorceror’s Stone & Chamber of Secrets), despised the third (Prisoner of Azkaban), thought the fourth (Goblet of Fire) was okay, and the fifth (Order of the Phoenix) was redeemed only by the presence of Fred & George. Since my favorite books are Prisoner of Azkaban, Order of the Phoenix, and Half-Blood Prince, you can maybe see my concern. They like to screw up the films that correspond to my favorite books.
I’m also concerned by certain film posters that have been made.
White doves? Really? And that’s the smallest part of my outrage.
I won’t even comment on that one. If you can’t see how wrong it is, you probably haven’t read the books.
But lest I scare you away entirely from the theater, I did find some good posters.
I like this one. And because it’s really, really hard to read, I’ll quote you the statement at the top: “I am not afraid. I am with you.” Those words seriously makes me cry every time I read them in the book. If they’ve put them on a poster, that surely means they’ve left them in the film, right? They just better have them in the correct context!
Here’s a clip from the film that I just now found. Sigh. It’s a scene not in the book. I can understand having to cut scenes from the book for the sake of making all the plot fit in a movie, but is it really necessary to cut Rowling’s scenes so that the directer and screenwriters can invent their own scenes? No. Stuff like that is exactly why the Order of the Phoenix film wasn’t very good.
This is deeply cool. Not that the guitar was damaged, of course, but this group’s response to it. YouTube, the righter of wrongs.
“In the spring of 2008, Sons of Maxwell were traveling to Nebraska for a one-week tour and my Taylor guitar was witnessed being thrown by United Airlines baggage handlers in Chicago. I discovered later that the $3500 guitar was severely damaged. They didn’t deny the experience occurred but for nine months the various people I communicated with put the responsibility for dealing with the damage on everyone other than themselves and finally said they would do nothing to compensate me for my loss. So I promised the last person to finally say no to compensation (Ms. Irlweg) that I would write and produce three songs about my experience with United Airlines and make videos for each to be viewed online by anyone in the world. United: Song 1 is the first of those songs. United: Song 2 has been written and video production is underway. United: Song 3 is coming. I promise. “
And the response from United?
Glad they didn’t take the money to sit down and shut up, because I’m looking forward to video #2!
Are there any better words that could come out of author Brandon Sanderson’s mouth? Specifically, he’s done with his revision of his own book, “The Way of Kings”. And it’s going to be released next year!
This is pee-your-pants-with-excitement good. This is scare-your-dog-by-screaming-in-delight good. This is I’ve-run-out-of-ways-to-describe-it good.
Brandon says on his blog: “How did it turn out? Well, to be honest, it’s FANTASTIC. This is a monstrous, beastly, awesome epic of a book.”
I adore monstrous, beastly, awesome epics! And I don’t even have to know anything at all about the contents to know it will be fantastic. Brandon is just that sort of writer.
This particular book has been a long time coming. It was going to be published some time ago, but then Brandon pulled it back because he felt it hadn’t reached the required level of monstrous and beastly awesome-ness. It ended up with a no-cover, no listed information Amazon.com entry.
Well, Brandon’s fans took care of that! If you want to read some hilarious faux reviews (complete with a hilarious faux book cover) check out:
First off, just a update on the Black Phoenix Alchemy Labs perfume oil called “Somnus”. It’s supposed to help you sleep. I was skeptical, even after reading the rave reviews.
Okay, okay, so after a couple of weeks of testing, I’m forced to admit it does seem to work! I have this problem occasionally, where I either can’t get to sleep in a reasonable amount of time, or else I wake up in the night and can’t fall back to sleep. It’s not true insomnia; it’s my own fault. I get to thinking about a story I’m writing, or a costuming I’m sewing, and then I can’t turn my mind off. Gads, it’s annoying! So since I got the perfume oil, I’ve put it beside my bed, and waited for just those occasions. When I can’t stop thinking, I dab a little under my ears or on my pillow, and voila. I have just about enough time to think: “This is quite a lovely smell”, and then I wake up again in the morning, fully rested. I’m definitely getting a full bottle of this stuff.
Maybe as a possible side effect (and I hadn’t considered this until just now), I’ve twice dreamed really good story ideas in the last week. I don’t normally get much usable material out of dreams – except for little snippets and imagery. But these two ideas I’ve gotten are full-fledged, fabulous plots. With characters and everything. So yay for dreaming! I’d tell you what these ideas were, but then I’d never actually write them into a story.
Now for something really sad. I’ve been a tremendous fan of “The Shield” since the very first episode. There was always something truly original and wonderful about that show. In fact, I loved it so much that I purposely didn’t watch the last (and final) season as it aired on tv. I wanted to wait until I could get the dvds and have an advertisement-free marathon. Just to let myself get completely sucked into the story.
I just watched the final episode the day before yesterday. I was so shell-shocked by it that I sealed it up in its little red Netflix envelope, hardly knowing what to think of it. And then yesterday, I unsealed the envelope and watched it again. It’s a worthy ending, folks. Completely unlike certain other shows that won’t be mentioned.*cough*sopranos*cough*
Oh my gosh, Shane, what have you done to me? I wanted to hate you after you killed Lem, I truly, honestly did. I loved Lem. But I never could hate you. And even though I was pretty dang positive how you were going to go out, I hoped it wasn’t true, and now I’m all torn up inside grieving for a family that doesn’t even exist. That’s the power of a show like this. You care. You can’t help but care, no matter how flawed the characters were or what horrible things they did.
But what a tragic episode all around. I really honestly wanted Vic and Shane and Ronnie slip off into the sunset together, even though I knew that wasn’t going to happen. My guesses as to what was going to happen were pretty spot-on. I knew Shane would die, and how he would go, and I knew Vic would survive in his own private hell. I just wasn’t sure about Ronnie, so maybe that’s why it was the hardest of all to see him in handcuffs.
Here’s to the boys of The Shield. There will never be another show like it.
And now that I’m completely miserable, let’s have something fun.
You can’t miss Darth Vader doing “Thriller”.
And lastly, here’s Ron Paul’s reaction to being punked in Sasha Baron Cohen’s new film Bruno:
He’s such a classy guy (in stark contrast to the idiot that is Sasha Baron Cohen). And he wants to totally abolish the IRS and taxes. Yes.
Out of Eden 