nehrlich

dr_tectonic @ 11:07 am: D-War
The night before last Jerry warned me that he was about to watch a terrible movie, and popped Dragon Wars: D-War into the DVD player. (Yes, that's really what it's called. Because apparently one title just wasn't enough and they needed two.)

Now, let's be clear: this is not a good movie. But on the other hand, neither it is an awful movie. It's certainly nowhere near as bad as his coworkers claimed. They all said that it was so bad none of them could get through more than a half-hour of it, and of course, my schweetie takes this as a challenge, because that's the kind of monkey he is, and because he enjoys laughing at bad movies.

So again, it wasn't good. But it was perfectly adequate, and it definitely had its moments. There was a lot of well-done CGI, and a few little bits that were seriously funny. It may be that you need the context of the previous 40 minutes to fully appreciate it, but one scene had us howling with laughter.

Fortunately, someone has put the whole damn movie up on YouTube in 10-minute increment, so I can share it with you. It's roughly the first two minutes of this video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1cCwvXYGt0Q

(Later on someone asks "What happened to [the black guy's character]?" and the main character answers "Oh, I'm sure he's fine.")

And unlike the truly hideously awful Dungeons and Dragons movie, D-War didn't bore me. It may have been stupid, but at least it wasn't dull. During the big fight between the dragons and the helicopters, did we get sentimental music and "oh, no, they're all dying" schmaltz? No we did not. We got fleeing pedestrians and exploding buses. Which is MUCH better.

In fact, I think my primary complaint was the lack of cursing. Far too many characters reacted with disbelief or indifference to El Snake-O Gigantico, rather than screaming "Holy f*ck! It's a giant f*cking snake! Sweet Zombie Jesus, RUN FOR IT!"...

dilbertdaily @ 12:00 am: Comic for July 19, 2008

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/DilbertDailyStrip/~3/18424/

http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2008-07-19/

ariiadne @ 10:40 pm: Day 169: Caribbean Kiss
Puerto Aventuras, recovering from the red eye flight before driving south south south the following day. We were both a lot less pale by the end of the week! (Well... *I* was a lot less pale. Colin mostly just got pinker.)

ultrafineflair @ 06:55 pm: 12 + 99 = 4

http://ultrafineflair.blogspot.com/2008/07/12-99-4.html

Or, Ambition + Temperature = Reality

I had grand plans to run home from work tonight, plans which were thwarted when, about 3 miles into my run, I realized that it was 99°F even along the waterfront, and that crossing the tourist-laden Brooklyn Bridge and running up fume-y Atlantic Avenue in that heat was really going to suck. So I cut my run short after 4 miles.

Fortunately I sweated enough to still feel hardcore.

Training update: I ran 10 miles last Saturday, a totally beautiful run starting and ending in Prospect Park, and across both the Manhattan and Brooklyn bridges. The weather that morning was perfect, and I felt great. Tuesday night I had another hill workout, which wasn't exactly *fun* but I (and my calves) survived.

ariiadne @ 03:53 pm: Day 167: Beringed
Given that it's been over a month and my left ring finger is still, to me, pretty much the most interesting place on my whole body means you'll see variations on this photo a lot in the next few weeks.

FUN FACT! The closest both Colin and I came to losing it at the ceremony was when we were actually ringing each others fingers.

ariiadne @ 03:51 pm: Day 166: MARRIED!!!
In the Squid Labs Alameda Control Tower, marriage license in hand. Exhausted, joyful, high on the intensity of it all, and more than a little overwhelmed by everything. We took this picture together right before fleeing the scene of the reception, of course, both fingers pushing the camera button at the same time.

ariiadne @ 03:49 pm: Day 165: Games Night Kiss
Friday was the first of the general wedding guest pre-wedding events (does that even make any sense?). Games night at Squid Labs SF featured huge quantities of pizza, at least a few instances of actual game playing, a lot of "find-the-people-on-your-list-of-people-to-meet" (connections FTW), and, of course, a few stolen moments of smoochin'. Oh yeah, and some epic rock band.

amrhein @ 07:37 pm: the thing about kissing girls, or: yeah what she said

http://www.elizabethamrhein.com/blog/?p=860

I had access to unfiltered television at Grama’s house.  I came across the “music” television channels, where I saw a smokin’ hot chic talk about how sensuous girls are.  Okay… I’m with you… So I stopped clicking and watched while she, she being Katy Perry, performed her “number one hit song”: I Kissed A Girl.

As I awaited the performance, I’m thinking: this is great!  A hit song about lesbianism!  Let’s go gay rights!  Finally this country’s pop music scene is opening up!

Wrong.  It is a shiny punk-pop number that has an infectious beat and Perry’s strained vocals make you want to be that girl she is kissing.  But once beyond the pop appeal- this is a revolting song about the drunk-girl-on-drunk-girl-to-impress-the-boys-at-a-party thing that seems to be ubiquitous in sororities across the country.  This isn’t a song about same sex attraction and love.  This is another exploitation of women’s complex sexuality.  She sings about cherry chapstick and boyfriends and how “it don’t mean I’m in love [just because I kissed a chic.]“  There is nothing but more of the crap you find in 99% of pop music: selling sex to men and selling girls on selling sex to men.

I really liked what Marissa Moss had to say about it over at the Huffington Post.

lilamp @ 12:32 pm: um, what?
Woman charged in unborn baby's death

[An Alabama] woman has been arrested after she was accused of killing her unborn child by cutting the umbilical cord, authorities said Monday. ...
"She said her water broke sometime Friday morning and then she started experiencing pain and bleeding and was taken to Helen Keller Hospital," Tyler said.
He said medical personnel at Keller Hospital, during the course of the baby's delivery, discovered the umbilical cord had been "severed while still inside the mother's uterus."

is it even possible to intentionally sever the umbilical cord yourself? how would you do that without causing other injury? i mean, it's not like you can just pry open the cervix and stick some scissors up there...

lilamp @ 11:32 am: thoughts of a meme
subtly_modded posted the following meme:
"If there are one or more people on your friends list who make your world a better place just because they exist, and who you would not have met (in real life or not) without the Internet, then post this same sentence in your journal."

at first i thought, of course, there must be lots! but then i started thinking about it, and i wasn't so sure. i realized that almost all of the people i know, i actually met in person and would have met without the internet. what the internet _has_ been incredibly useful for is helping me get to know people better than i would have otherwise, and creating a sense of community. and there are definitely quite a few people that i would only have met in passing and never really gotten to know at all without the internet, so i'm going to say that counts. however, there is at least one person i can think of on my friends list whom i would not have met without lj, so there you go. :)

indexed_feed @ 07:37 am: Hanging out with your peers.

http://indexed.blogspot.com/2008/07/hanging-out-with-your-peers.html

wondermark @ 12:35 am: #426; In which a Tree gets the Talk

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/wondermark/~3/338832917/426-in-which-tree-gets-talk.html

I like this Flickr set of iconic photographs recreated in LEGO.

dilbertdaily @ 12:00 am: Comic for July 18, 2008

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/DilbertDailyStrip/~3/17430/

http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2008-07-18/

xkcd_rss @ 04:00 am: Impostor

http://xkcd.com/451/

dr_tectonic @ 10:01 pm: Hellboy II
We went and saw Hellboy II with Sarah & her brother & Bryree last night. I enjoyed it, but I don't think it was nearly as good as the first one.

The visuals were gorgeous, the effects were well-done and quite spectacular, and I really liked the action scenes, particularly a lot of the fight choreography. But I think the script was kind of lacking. It felt very disjointed or schizophrenic, with a lot of tonal whiplash and sudden changes in character. The acting was good, given the lines they had to deliver, but there were a number of spots where I thought "oh, did you really have to go there? Come on."

By the end of it, I figured that probably the script had gone through several revisions with various people sent in by the studio to add in a lot of standard Hollywood junk and that whoever worked on the script just didn't really get what made the first movie so good, which is very strange because I think it was Guillermo del Toro who wrote the screenplay for both movies. So I don't know what happened.

But as I said, it was very, very pretty, so I wasn't unhappy that I spent my time and money on it. I was just disappointed that it wasn't as good as it could easily have been.

dr_tectonic @ 09:59 pm: Losing My Luddite Cred
Gadzooks! I appear to have purchased a mobile telephonic communications apparatus. Thus, I shall be empowered to remain in auditory contact with friends, family members, and like-minded compatriots whilst travelling at home and abroad.

One again, I hardly know what to do with myself.

ozyandmillierss @ 12:00 am: Ozy and Millie - Jul 17, 2008

http://www.ozyandmillie.org/d/20080717.html

Ozy and Millie comic for Thursday, July 17, 2008

oots_gitp @ 03:20 am: 576: Construction Workers

http://www.GiantITP.com/comics/oots0576.html

http://www.GiantITP.com/comics/oots0576.html

amrhein @ 02:06 am: retirees go to work for Frontier Airlines

http://www.elizabethamrhein.com/blog/?p=858

Five of the six flight attendants on my fights yesterday were decidedly “older.”

ariiadne @ 05:12 pm: Day 164: Post-Rehearsal Dinner
This is immediately after our "rehearsal" dinner at a local Chinese restaurant, where our families collided for the first time. It was a little unbalanced, as Team Liotta numbered 3 people (myself, my mom, and my dad), while Team Bulthaup had 8 (Colin, his sister, his brother, his half brother, his mom, his grandma, his dad, and his dad's wife). And one of his brothers and his wife were missing. Despite the unbalanced ratios, everyone managed to get along splendidly as we scarfed down a ludicrous number of courses of tasty Chinese food.