Standing On Boxes

So, I’m not shutting down this blog for SOPA protest day, obviously. Looking at the traffic stats for this site, I don’t think I have a lot of influence to peddle. But if you’re curious about SOPA, click the little SOPA link in the upper right corner (assuming it shows up. Which it doesn’t on my iPad.)

A quick note –

Okay, so I write fan fiction. If SOPA/PIPA is ever enacted/becomes law (remotely possible that it or something like it will in the next few years), someone who doesn’t like that could get my blog/fic site shut down. Fan fiction is one of those copyright grey areas.

But online piracy? If you’ve been on the internet long enough (2 decades in my case) it’s impossible to not have downloaded something iffy. But Piracy – Not a huge fan. But the kill the messenger (aka internet) SOPA approach is not the answer. And it’s a slippery slope downhill to censorship from there. To say nothing of the emasculation of “due process” it would enshrine into our justice system, just so Hollywood (the so called Liberal Media Elite aka MPAA) can make MORE money.

What I am surprised at, is that the Republicans aren’t using this “Attack on our basic freedoms” by the MPAA and RIAA as a campaign point. Of course, that might be why the POTUS and Co. have come out against SOPA. They don’t want the “enemy” to go there first.

Well… pardon me for having a cynical moment.

Somehow I missed seeing the ball drop in Times Square, even though I was actually watching the channel at the appropriate moment. All those ads for Disney were a bit distracting. Maybe there wasn’t a ball this year?

Where was Dick Clark? Are we sure that was really him? And was that shot of Jenny McCarthy kissing a cop really necessary.

Oh well… only 11 and a half months to the End of the World. Or 10 if you’re a Republican in the US?

Do drunk people actually watch tv ads at midnight on New Years Eve?

Ah… Yahoo finally updated MySQL to 5.1. Which means I just updated WordPress to the latest and Greatest version. Hopefully there won’t be too many problems.

Huh. Seems a little faster.

Apparently, Jesus was Jewish! I wonder if the Pope knows this? Or Pat Robertson? Or Fox News?

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You got the Food Techs Drunk!

- Watching “Food Detectives” — they’re testing hangover cures.

Bubblegum Crisis Tokyo 2040? Really?

Ever wonder why the Knights Sabre are all women? It’s all in the subtext. Sylia apparently likes to surround herself with women (though Nene must be just barely not jailbait.) Or maybe Sylia’s hard-suit design just works better with women?

I wonder what a slayer could do in one?

And how many episodes constitutes a marathon? All of them (24) ? Or just a DVD or 2 (4 episodes/DVD) ?

Long past midnight at this point. Only 2 episodes (of 26) to go. Could have been shorter. At least 2 episodes worth of boring exposition.

The ending never made much sense. So I think I’ll watch something a bit different as an antidote.

Najica: Blitz Tactics – A spy whose cover is a perfumer (designs perfume). Her signature is a rose left at the scene. Only twelve episodes. And lots of fan service (Yes, one of THOSE animes), though it would still be a decent spy story without that – more or less. Not something to watch if such things as fan service upset you. I’m sure I’ve commented on it before. Her first mission? Dressed in an extremely short skirt, she fights off a couple dozen maids also dressed in extremely short skirts to rescue some girl (who then follows her around like a puppy, also dressed in a short skirt, for the next 11 episodes.)

Okay, only made it thru 3 episodes of Najica before the fan service got too annoying. Now what?

Had the sudden urge to watch the old MGM movie Wizard of Oz. Had to find it first, and then had to hook up my Blu-Ray player, which required a software update first… and phew… 30 minutes later I’m watching Dorothy singing about teen-angst in a 30′s Hollywood kind of way.

Has anyone noticed that Dorothy lives on a farm with her aunt and uncle and 3 farm hands and a large number of hogs, and Toto too! So, not exactly a Depression era hard scrabble existence.

Of course, we’ve all noticed by now the foreshadowing with the farm hands, and Professor Marvel, right?

It was all a dream.

Poor Almira Gulch. She looks like she could use a friend. Thanks to Wicked we’re all aware of the UST between the Wicked Witch and Glinda but that doesn’t help poor Almira though I might have seen Dorothy/Almira femslash used to explain why she was so mean to Dorothy. ( Farmgirl + spinster teacher? Serious recipe for disaster.)

Ah… trivia. Margaret Hamilton (Gulch and the Wicked Witch) was the voice of Auntie Em in that mid 70′s Oz movie ( Journey to Oz) with Liza Minnelli as Dorothy (and a boat load of Hollywood has-beens as other characters.). She was also Morticia’s mother in The Addams Family. Have to wonder how she made a living on character parts – the Wiki says she refused to join a studio.

I have a Wizard of Oz movie poster calendar for 2011. The Witch isn’t on any of them surprisingly. Hmmm… not sure if Billy Burke ( Glinda ) is either.

(Ah… more spelunking in the trivia. Billie Burke was 18 years older than Margaret Hamilton, making her 55 when she played Glinda. (Have to wonder what she thought when someone else played her in a movie about her deceased husband Florenz Ziegfeld in ’37.) Hadn’t realized she was that old. Both of them lived into their mid 80′s.)

Sitting in traffic, on the way home from work tonight, a thought suddenly occurred to me. I drive a car in a very festive, seasonal color ( jump to my Flickr account if you need an example ).

In fact, one might say it’s decidedly Christmassy.

And, shouldn’t it be decorated to more celebrate the season?

But what, exactly, is considered appropriate holiday car decoration?

Ribbons?

Bows?

Reindeer?

In a non-gaudy fashion?

To the Research-mobile!

Ugh. Can’t sleep. 2 hours past my normal lights-out. Too much caffeine does it again. But really, it wasn’t that much. I had just my normal cup of decaf first thing in the morning and then… a cup of something non-decaf (We have one of those Kurig coffee machines at work. Pop a little plastic container in the machine, insert cup, press button — instant “real” coffee.) which must have had 10x the amount of caffeine normal coffee has, judging by how I feel right now.

I was tempted to blame the excitement of finishing NaNoWriMo but… let’s just blame a larger than normal caffeine dose.

Did it! Down to the wire, with less than an hour to go, 50,241 words!

Yeah!

Haven’t decided if or when I’ll post the entire, rough-draftish story. It’s complete plot wise but could do with some spiffing up/filling out in places. I might wait until I turn it into a crossover fic. Definitely will decide before the end of December what to do with it.

Two days to go on NaNoWriMo and I’m at 80% of completion. Things aren’t looking good. Did approximately half the writing I needed over the Thanksgiving break than I needed to get there.

We’ll see how close I can get. I’m not ready to throw in the towel yet!

As of now, I’m back on track with NaNoWriMo. Almost halfway. Spent the day catching up. Unfortunately, I have’t gotten more than a few words ahead and I’ll be luckY to break even for the rest of the month. We’ll see what happens.

[Update]
Managed to churn out almost another days worth by midnight. But still not enough to get ahead.
 

But, I am ahead of where I finished the last time I attempted NaNoWriMo.

As far as the story itself goes… the story continues to meander off into elf-land, in an unexpected way. There’s even some subtext between the main character and the main elf, but that’ll disappear in the fanfic rewrite after Nano. Maybe. I find the character interaction interesting to write, which means its a major contributor to forward progress, but I have a hard enough time writing action scenes. I have no plans to venture beyond subtext here.

If you aren’t a spammer, or similar bot of that ilk, and you’ve commented on a post here in the last year or so (since 8/1/2010 apparently) and it hasn’t appeared… sorry but I haven’t seen it. The comment spam catcher I use hasn’t let a comment through since then. And since I can’t see the comment spam it has deleted, I don’t actually know if it is broken or doing it’s job. And I don’t really want to open myself up to spam by turning it off.

Still moving forward with NaNoWriMo.

But I’ve fallen behind, by 3,000 words!, from where I should be. Actually, it’s even worse because I needed to be a few days ahead, not behind. Hopefully I’ll catch up this weekend.

Oddly enough, my main character has been kidnapped by elves. Not something I’d plotted out but I think a rescue is in order.

Okay. So I haven’t watched the last couple season 3 episodes of Glee. The whole diva vs. diva thing between Rachel and Mercedes was a huge turn off. (And apparently pointless if overviews of the West Side Story episode are to be believed.)

But, out of curiosity, I decided to buy a couple songs from the Glee version of “West Side Story”.

Okay but the usual Glee vibe. On the other hand, I did what I usually do, which is to buy the originals ( Well, from the movie, since that is the version I’m familiar with).

Verdict? Movie vs Glee? Movie. But not embarrassingly better.The Glee gang did fine for a tv production. The “ethnic” wording ( accents? Dialect? ) in “America” is cringeworthy whether Rita Moreno or Santana (Naya Rivera ) sing it. Of course we’re talking about a 1950′s view of Hispanic kids in a gang. I’m sure if it had been set several decades earlier with Irish or Italian characters it would have been also cringeworthy.