Or rather Batman's sock.

While Christine is apparently the dude from Thunderbirds and Dr Bashir is the Persian (no really - that last one is true)

And already 10000X more amusing than Webber's planned Phantom Of The Opera sequel

... but this more than makes up for it! XD

This is hilarious! John Hodgman (AKA the "I'm a PC" guy) giving a speech at the 2009 Radio and TV Correspondents' Dinner at the White House. And Obama totally plays along.

If you've got 14 minutes to kill (or put it on while you do something else) it's WELL worth it.




And jetsan_supreme you'd be so proud - I got the last three questions right ;)

As more and more people on my FL brave the wilds and venture out to see Transformers 2 some of them are coming back and saying they liked it. Or, that at least they didn't have a problem with it because all they wanted to do was see stuff blow up (and yes, stuff most definitely blows up)

And actually, despite all my ranting and raving I am 100% fine with other people liking the movie. I have very specific reasons for hating it and I realize that not everyone shares these. But people are continually making two arguments that bug the crap out of me (especially coming from people who, if they don't consider themselves outright geeks I know at least have geekish tendencies), which is why I've made 3 posts on this already.

So please, please, PLEASE, I'm begging, for the love of all things Geeky DO NOT use the reasoning "Of course Transformer 2 is bad - it's a movie based on TOYS" because quite frankly that argument is a load of crap.

The guy in that review I linked to said it best. He said:

"I've seen shitty movies made about the life of Christ and I've seen great movies made about funny books involving a rich guy who dresses up like a [flying] rodent and beats up bank robbers because he misses his mommy."

His point being that the source material should not automatically mean that the movie is either good or bad. How the movie is made should determine whether it's good or bad.

So if you like Transformers 2 because of the giant robot stomping action or because there were lots of big explosions - that's fine. If you did like the humour - again also fine. If you thought it was fun and not one of the worst movies ever made I'm OK with that. Really. I mean it. Because these are reasons. But don't try and hint (or outright say) that NOT liking it is pointless based simply on the source material or else you might as well hand in your Geek Card right now.

A lot of "normal" people would say that discussing, reading, writing, drawing, costuming, going to conventions, or otherwise doing any extensive thinking (for good or bad) over anything to do with any sort of fictional character (whether based on toys, cartoons, comics, tv shows, movies, or books) is silly and a waste of time, period. But we know that's not true.

And from this point forth if you ever catch me saying "But of course it's bad - it's based on _____" you have my permission to smack me upside the head.

PS. Given the qualifer that I did like the first movie, substituting "it's a Michael Bay film" in for "it's a movie about toys" and therefore I can't complain it's bad is also silly (no, wookiemart I don't mean you - you gave me a very nice "I told you so" ;) ). That basically amounts to "You must like (or loathe) all films in a director's body of work equally because they were all made by the same person." So if you LOVED the original Star Wars you have to LOVE Episode 1, 2, and 3 the exact same amount because all four were directed by George Lucas. Or, having loved Spider-Man and Spider-Man 2, I have no right to want to chase Sam Raimi down with a soggy spleen as payback for Spidey 3.

In the wake of the horrible travesty that was Transformers 2 I've been trying to figure out where I went wrong. How did I get suckered into believing this movie could be anything other than 2 and a half hours of Baysplosions.

And I have come to the conclusion that it is all Steven Spielberg's fault.

(But before that, for those of you lucky enough to have still not seen this piece of garbage, yet are fighting your overwhelming curiosity - or just are looking for LOLs - the Nostalgia Critic summarizes the entire movie in under 5 minutes. Be warned it is full of SPOILERS for you masochistic folks who still insist on seeing, or are being dragged to see, the actual movie)

So, I had me a wee think about just what tipped the scales for me the first time from "adequately exciting summer flick based on an 80's cartoon I liked but was never crazy about" to "Cool! Awesome! Must Add To List Of Personal Fandoms NOW" and it pretty much comes down to Bumblebee. I love that Bee's a playful, funny character without being a stupid one (occasional juvenile actions can be attributed to his youth, not his intelligence level). I love the friendship that develops between Bee and Sam (Bee and Mikaela too). Bee and the kids become the heart of that movie and the main thing that counteracts the Baysplosions.

And the reason Bee's in the first movie, in fact the reason the first movie got made at all is because of Steven Spielberg. According to the Transformers DVD it was Spielberg who really decided that Transformers needed to be a live action movie, and Spielberg that decided that the main relationship/theme of the first film should be "a boy and his car" (because Bumblebee was his favorite character from the days when he used to watch the cartoon with his son).

And it was also Steven Spielberg's severe lapse of judgement that somehow decided that Michael Bay would be the perfect person to direct it. I can only assume that it was Spielberg's producing that kept things from getting out of hand on the first film and his lack of paying attention that allowed the second to turn into a bloated mess severely lacking in said "boy and his car"-ness (because kazahaya and I have both decided that many of the problems with the second film would have been fixed by actually letting Bee, you know, do stuff).

Hence the "shame on you Steven Spielberg, you tricked me".

And though I certainly don't agree with everything this guy from The Escapist says (because obviously I DID like the first film) he also makes several valid points and a good counter argument to the extremely irritating "it's a summer movie based on robot toys - what do you expect?" apparent justification for the movie sucking.

My take - If the lazy, stereotyped, confused, half-assed writing in TF2 can be entirely justified by "it's a summer blockbuster" then we should be giving $200 million dollars, a full film crew, and free reign to every film student with a half-baked idea for an action flick no matter how bad.

And I'm all over the "why are the robots the C string characters in their own damn movie?" point as well. In the first movie it makes a certain amount of sense - almost all sf/superhero movies take a while to get going as they set the scene/pour out the exposition but this is the second film - there's NO reason for the robots to have such minor roles. I don't think all the human characters should be eliminated but the emphasis should be on the Transformers not the humans.

And after all that - I still want Michael Bay's head on a platter. Like that last reviewer said "I just don't feel like I've seen a bad movie ... I feel like I've been defeated by some malevolent force"




But don't worry Bee - I still love you

I really, really do. That was beyond stupid.

the4thhokage was right - Transformers 2 is far less of an extended car commercial than Transformers and it's because the Autobots are barely in the damn thing!

Seriously it was all Decepticons Vs Humans. The Autobots got even fewer lines than they did in the first movie - except for the two pieces of utterly insulting stupidity they dared to call the Twins (who looked like mechanical versions of Gizmo and talked like the worst black rapper stereotypes you can possibly get away with in a PG film). THEY never shut up.

And What The HELL was with the constantly farting robots?!? And all the testicle jokes?

And they're ROBOTS, not Aliens - all the slime and goop is not necessary. In fact, take that tongue and go stick it in Spider-Man 3 where it belongs!

The ONLY good thing to come out of this is the fact I no longer have to feel dirty about liking the first film despite the fact you are a pompous ass. Because obviously all the things I liked in the first movie were a complete fluke, you jerk.

DAMMIT that was worse than Spider-Man 3 and X-Men 3 COMBINED XP





EDIT: lelola pointed this review (http://bexless.livejournal.com/789078.html) out to viewpoints a few days ago and I didn't read it because I was trying not to read ANY reviews or info going into the movie. My plan was to just go in and sit down, and enjoy the giant robots. Sadly I have to concur that the reviewer got it exactly right.
So not only is the movie DUMB it's SEXIST and RACIST and just generally all around ignorant. XP

Oh and only Michael Bay could manage to make Obama come off as a xenophobic jerk in comparison to George W Bush :P

Wow - it's been a LONG time since I used oil paints. Like 15 years at least. When I was young I did a lot of drawings with oil pastels because well, that's what my parents got me the year I asked for "art supplies" for my birthday.

When I decided I wanted to move on to actual paint I got a set of oil paints. Why? Because my favorite painting show was Bob Ross' Joy of Painting and he used oils. And fan brushes. You couldn't make a "happy little tree" without a fan brush ;)

After a couple attempts though I eventually gave up with the oil paints. I did a couple really neat landscapes I was happy with but I hated having to clean everything up with paint thinner and the paintings took FOREVER to dry. Like, not over night, not by the next night - like one to two weeks. As a 13 year old I was just not that patient. I switched to acrylic and never looked back.

Now though, I'm loving how long the oils take to dry. It's perfect for the experimental mood I'm in. I can go at everything at a leisurely pace - if something's not working I leave it, go do something else, then come back later and try again. Yesterday I tried a "painting" that was all basic 3D shapes like a cube, cylinder, sphere, and a "donut" (I think it's called a torus), got frustrated with my attempts at blending, so left it till today. And now I've managed to fix it (or at least part of it - I know I didn't get a couple things right but it's a 1st attempt - and I can always paint over it and try again later).

Tomorrow I'm going to try an actual still life. I spent all night sketching teacups, but it's late so I'll hold off applying the paint till tomorrow.

I've just discovered Teletoon is in the middle of a MASSIVE G1 Transformers marathon.

Apparently it started at 9am and it's going till 9 tommorow morning.

All right! Transformers all night!

Oh I love the library. All these documentaries for me to get my hands on.

Right now I'm working my way through Canada: A People's History. It was a series produced by CBC and Radio-Canada about 3 years ago and it's excellent. I think there's 13 volumes starting with the First Nations people crossing the land bridge into North America and it's supposed to go all the way up to the year 2000.

There's a narrator but other than that all the segments and interviews come from actual letters and documents written by people at the time.

I just finished Volume 5 pt 1, which ended with Confederation. They even had a picture of the celebrations here in Kingston - and Market Square really doesn't look that different, with the exception of some trees and bleechers ;)

I'm actually really looking forward to the 20th century stuff. While I was working on the Dougie-head I watched a series all about the 1960's and another all about the 1980's. They were very interesting, but since both series were produced in the US, they obviously had an American focus.

And Canadian history classes in high school typically end right after World War II - I remember being taught little or nothing about what happened after.

Since Dad was also working on stuff in the workshop at the time he caught bits and pieces of the programs and would occasionally give commentary - like he remembers 1967 being a great year for Canada (what with us being 100 years old, and Expo '67 and so on). But the 60's series gave little mention to us.

But this People's History series is very cool. I'm learning so much about all the different groups of people that make up my ancestors.

Every time I finish a project I'm "lost" for awhile. I usually take a break (cause I usually exhaust myself trying to finish on time), deal with the loose ends (like sending photos and emails to everyone who wanted them), knock off a few other things I've been meaning to do, and generally be a little lazy.

But I can find it a bit hard to get going again, especially, like in this case, without another imminent deadline. Sometimes it takes a little wandering around to find something to entice my muse back from her vacation.

I tried a few things this time (starting on a new costume, picking up a half-finished project that hit a snag, started in on a sculpture I've been meaning to do for like a year and a half) but nothing was really grabbing me.

So I went to the library, as digging through the stacks there will often spark some sort of idea. This time I found a book on colour theory, which is something I know I need to work on. The title grabbed me in this case. The book was called Blue and Yellow DON'T Make Green. It explains, in a grade 8 science class sort of way, exactly what happens when we look at paint, and mix paint, and how this changes how you match colours with paint. Cute book and at the very least it got me to dig some oil paints out and start playing at mixing colours.

Really - for the past 4 days I've done nothing art-wise other than sit at my table and mix splotches of paint. Didn't do anything with them afterwards - just sat there and mixed them to see what happened. It was awesome XD

That may sound strange, but it was in fact very therapeutic. It was nice to just fool around without having a finished end project in mind. I got out my make-up palette put a little drop of each colour on a piece of paper and practiced mixing paint until it matched the make-up colours. Some were definitely easier than others (some of the duller fleshtones were a little crazy to match) but I did succeed in the end.

My success with the Dougie Doppelganger has given me confidence that my sculpting skills are doing pretty darn well at the moment. So I've decided I'm going to go back and work on my painting and drawing skills for the next little while. It's something I've wanted to do for a very long time as I've often felt that I've been lacking in certain artistic areas (like a solid understanding of colour theory). I often feel like I've just faked it up to this point -it's part of the reason I find sculpting easier than drawing - light and shadow get taken care of, in a way, automatically and if not you just hit them until they do.

I used to love to paint and I've forgotten how calming it can be. So I'm really looking forward to just "playing" for the time being. I don't care if the pictures turn out to be any good or not (that's what Dollar Store canvas boards are for). This is definitely a case where it's all about the journey - and the destination be damned.

Oh and I'm posting this from my new Dreamwidth account, which I've decided to make my new "art" journal. Yes, I technically could use the journal feature on my as-yet-empty deviantart page but since eleganceliberty was nice enough to give me an invite code, and I still intend to use my LJ for day to day stuff, I figured this gives me a nice purpose for this one. I haven't used my chibi_generator LJ for years mainly because, although I like the idea of having a separate costume/art journal LJ only lets you be logged into one journal at once - it simply got too annoying to jump back and forth. This way I CAN be logged into both the Dreamwidth and the LJ at the same time. And I like the idea of having a "blank slate" to start with.

In fact my Dreamwidth page design is all greys and whites right now. As I get more comfortable with my painting and drawing and photoshopping I'll be adding things.

So people with Dreamwidth accounts please poke me so I can add you to my friendslist (reading list, whatever they call it). If you don't have a Dreamwidth that's ok too - all my posts there are going to feed to my LJ anyways, so you're not missing anything.

When I was a little kid we had this game. We didn't really have a name for it other than Koala. Because it was played with a little toy koala - one of those cheap novelty items from the 70's where, if you squeeze his back, it opens his arms and then you can clip him to things.

I don't know how it started - Dad just took this toy koala one day and clipped it to the TV arial in the kitchen. And then I moved it to the cord of the kitchen blinds. Then my sister moved him somewhere else in the kitchen. Eventually it became this running gag where, if you found Koala attached to something, you had to move him - without anyone seeing you do it.

The game continued, on and off, until we moved into the city. Then poor Koala ended up in a box somewhere and we just didn't pick it up again.

Well now we have a new "Koala" by the name of Doctor Octopus. XD

mriswith and eleryth gave me a Doc Ock Mighty Muggs(?)(Muggle? Something like that - it's a chibi Ock with bad teeth, whatever it is) for my birthday and somehow, instead of ending up downstairs in the Den Of Highly Concentrated Fandom on my Spider-Man shelf, he ended up on the tea shelf in the kitchen.

And then he was hiding behind my parents' wine on the counter...

And then in the breadbox...

And the fridge...

And even in the microwave at one point.

Man - he gets around ;)

- Brendan Fraser is a highly entertaining fellow. elizard100 and wookiemart were right - Journey To The Center Of The Earth is pretty cute. Very straightforward but cute - especially with a very small side order of evil plants! :)

- I would really like to see a cop/mystery show where it's the girl who is the quirky but charming genius and the guy who plays the competent and practical straightman. All these shows like Castle, the Mentalist, and we just finished watching Jeff Goldblum on Law & Order: Criminal Intent, have slightly odd-ball guy characters whose theories no one believes at first yet inevitably come up with the it's-so-crazy-it-just-might-work plan to catch the crook. And their female partner always does the same thing - rolls her eyes, goes "you can't do that, it's against the rules", and then finally has to admit that the guy had it right all along. For once I'd like to see that reversed.

Actually I CAN think of one show where the roles are reversed - Bones. But that's about the only one.

Many happy returns of the day to Sir hico!

... what a total and utterly FANTASTIC comic abe_kroenen is?

No?

It's a TOTAL and UTTERLY FANTASTIC comic! XD

If you have not read it, I promise you are in for a real treat. It was not in a million years what I was expecting when I first looked at it - which, in the interest of full disclosure, was an average fan-fic in webcomic mode. No, this was oh so much better!

It's really, really, too bad that because of copyright the girls can't get this published - because it's seriously that frickkin' good.

You'll laugh! You'll cry (from more laughter)! You'll cheer!

The lastest episode was utter and total EPIC WIN! But wait! If you've never read it before don't peek!

Instead, pull up a comfy chair, grab your beverage of choice, go back to the beginning and treat yourself to the whole thing.

It's completely and utterly worth it!

Despite the fact that he is a new dad, webmaster extraordinaire Parker, has given DelToroFilms.com a complete and utterly, totally ROCKIN', overhaul with many new features including a new blog by ... me! :)

He's had his own blog attached to the site for almost two years now and he wanted to add another one or two because he wanted more help with the site from some of the board regulars.

The only thing I figured I'd have the time or ability to do was a blog, and since the only thing I felt qualified to speak on with any authority was make-up/costume stuff so I volunteered/pitched the idea to Parker and he said "yes". Now because it's a blog I'll get to talk about other stuff occasionally but the main focus will be SFX.

I've actually had it up and ready to go since just after Easter (including the banner - I madez itz all by myself) but had to wait for the release of DTF.com vr 3.0. Which was today!

So ladies and gentleman I am happy to present Things In Jars: Creature Commentary From DelToroFilms.Com

Whee! I'm all excited! This should be fun! :)

It looks like it's going to be utterly adorable!

I set myself up an iGoogle page the other day, after seeing my cousins playing with one over Easter, and it has proven very handy. For those who haven't seen one, basically it's a private homepage Google lets you set up with little widgets that tell you at a glance if you've got mail, what the weather report in your area is, news headlines, favorite bookmarks, YouTube and Wikipedia search boxes, etc.

You can set different tabs too. So I've got the top one with my mail and bookmarks, one for tool widgets (like GoogleMaps, a currency converter, dictionary, and so on), one for game widgets, and one for "Of The Day" widgets. So the "Of The Day" tab has a feed to National Geographic's pic of the day, the Cute Overload pic of the day, - well you get the idea. One of these "Of The Day" widgets posts a "Inspirational Quote Of The Day" and if you click below the quote it takes you to an "Inspirational Tip Of The Day".

Today's was really neat. It likened pursuing any life goal to playing a giant game of snakes and ladders. Some days you roll a 6, some days you roll a 1. Some days you land on a ladder and get a boost and some days you land on a snake and take a slide backwards (or maybe I should say a "shoot" - I like snakes).

But the important thing, in any case, is to keep rolling the dice! Ladder or snake, if you stop rolling you end up stuck.

Yanked from glamourcorpse (because this totally needs to be pimped out)

Top Ten Reasons You REALLY Need To Watch FARSCAPE

With, like, direct quotes! And pictures! And just awesome Farscapy-goodness!

:D

... to cheer myself up I am simply going to look at the following picture, repeatedly.

I love you National Geographic

HAPPY BIRTHDAY nessun all the same! :D

A very easy day for bein' green! :D