Got to spend some time with The Girl. We watched Up since I managed to score the DVD of it yesterday. It still made me cry. And the new little short about Dug also made me cry. Both in a good way.

I don't know what it is about movies geared towards children and making me cry.

I'm actually tipping at a bit of fanfic. It's an idea that's been kicking around my head for a while so I thought I'd try and do something with it. Let's just say it's Dr. Light's revenge for getting fridged and/or made into a bit of an ass in a lot of my fanfics. XD And that Blues takes after him far more than he'd like to admit.

It's gotten chilly again. I hope this means fall's here to stay finally. I hate it when the temps see-saw like they do a lot of the time. I usually end up getting sick when it happens and I have too much crap to do to get sick right now.

Continuing also to watch the 2003 Astro Boy. And.. well.. This is their character model for Dr. Tenma:


(image ganked from Wikipedia, for the curious)

As you can see, he has a rather unfortunate resemblance to a chicken. And since I've taken a bit of an instant dislike to him as a person, at least on-screen, well... there's been a lot of clucking involved. Especially since in a lot of his dramatic scenes he's backlit in profile so he really looks like a chicken.

And since I am dead tired this is hilarious. So I shall leave you with that.

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Entry originally posted at http://teh-kittykat.dreamwidth.org/32149.html

comments and counting...

I can say that I am definitely liking the 2003 Astro Boy series. Picked it up on Sunday when I was out with The Girl as a bit of a YAY CLASS IS OVER present to myself. It doesn't come in subtitles, but the voice-acting is about regular American cartoon normal, which means it's not Oscar-winning but the actors didn't phone in their lines in one take like some anime dubs. They picked a really weird one for Dr. Tenma... he reminds me a little of a phone sex operator. XD I've noticed some of the romanizations of the names are different, and the 2003 series lacks some of the really depressing moments of the 1980's version.

Miso has been dubbed adorable by one of The Girl's coworkers.

I am envious of the NaNo participants, but realistically there's no way I can participate this year with moving and packing to do on top of my usual insane workload. I might still get off my butt and write something, though. It's been an age since I actually sat down and wrote stories, and doing a little comment flashfic for glitterbats makes me want to do something cool again. Maybe when this all-day headache goes away.

I'm having fun being a paladin. I'm going to spec her holy and take healing for a spin, since I enjoy being DPS and tanking definitely drives me up a wall. I haven't healed in years, though, and my last healie character was a shadow-specced priest, so this will be interesting. Moose even quit Demon Soul in disgust and rolled on my server on Alliance side and is considering bringing his badass prot warrior over and faction-changing to play with the rest of us gaiz. Hey, his tank will have a healer if I can settle down and play for a while.

I think I can add Astro Boy to my official list of fandoms (TM).

We did end up seeing the latest movie incarnation last night. It was actually a nice round of fun. I do agree with the other criticisms that Donald Sutherland's performance fell pretty flat, in that adult-trying-too-hard-to-be-relevant-to-kids sort of way, but the other guys were pretty fine, even if that made Dr. Elefun outrageously British. (And I'm sorry, he'll always been Ochanimizu-hakase to me.) When I heard some of the voice acting crit I went in expecting something along the lines of the Escaflowne dub, though, so my expectations might have been lowered.

In all, it did a competent job of following what I have managed to figure out is the basic Astro Boy sort of mythology. (My only other reference is the 1980's Astro Boy, though. I'm actually considering getting the 2003 animated series now too.) It did have an overlay of pretty stock Hollywood Kid Movie Hero's Journey Plot in there, but it still managed to capture that undertone of alienation and trying to fit in that runs through the anime. Parts are, in fact, about as dark as the series itself got, which is kind of a feat in a US kid's movie. (Though between this and Where the Wild Thing Are I'm kind of seeing a revival of unflinching storytelling reminiscent of the kid's movies of the 1980's-1990's before everything suddenly got sanitized.) Heck, they even managed to do the entire backstory on screen which if you know Astro Boy's origin story might raise your eyebrows.

I was even happy since it did manage to feature one of my two favorite characters after all-- Daddy Mustache got about a zillion minor cameos (they decided to translate him as Mustacio-- or however you spell that). Uran wasn't in it, but I didn't expect her to be as she was a later addition to the anime's cast, at least in the 80's Astro Boy.

It is sad, though, that of most of the stuff out right now or that I want to see in the near future, more of it is PG-G level than not. (Though I totes want to see Avatar now.)

Guess what time it is?



( Con Report: Otakon 2009! )

Otakon 2010 will be July 30-August 1. We are considering where to book hotel, though we probably won't decide for a bit since we all entered a raffle the Sheraton was having for a free weekend stay. lostangelssong and I are going to do Braska and Jecht from FFX again, which was our very first cosplay together. Though we're going to re-tool our costumes. I'll have to see if I can dig out the old pictures for comparison when we finally get the new stuff together.

I'm gettin' all into Otakon mode over here. Gettin' my squee on as I start to finish up my last few chores and count the hours and stuff until tomorrow. Still gotta pack, but that's about it.

I've also been getting all WAI WAI OTAKU over the last couple weeks like I always do, especially since not much has been going on here aside from bad shit and catsquee.

So I've gotten to get through seeing Princess Princess, which I picked up for stupid cheap at Best Buy a while ago since it's by the same person who does Hana Kimi and who is pretty much known for basically getting all genderqueer with their stuff. It's pretty cute, lots of crossdressing, a little bit of ambiguous gay, and a couple of pseudo-lesbian kiss scenes (one is actually a gay kiss done to get an overbearing wanna-be girlfriend away and the other one is het between one of the princesses and his girlfriend.. that whole episode was a few shades of awesome). Totally unrealistic, especially with as homophobic and transphobic high school guys tend to be, but it was cute and fluffy eye-candy. As long as you don't expect a deeply complicated plot you're A-OK.

The Girl and I also ended up watching Afro Samurai on Tuesday after I managed to make my fast-talk roll to get her up to my place on her other day off. It's a little miniseries (five episodes) that's basically lots of that very traditional "dueling samurai" action set in Japadelphia.. well, wherever you get a lot of rather bleak Japanese-style scenery intermixed with inner-city style slang and accents and gratuitous use of cell phones. It reminded me a lot of Ninja Scroll, which I saw while I was in high school, since it's violence, buckets of blood, a main character who barely talks, dead girlfriends, boobs, and an ending that ties up very little. In other words, typical very guy shounen anime. It's only dubbed in English, sorta like Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust was only done in English, and it definitely follows the American tradition of never having more than ten consecutive seconds of silence between characters. Not bad if you like shounen, but be prepared for constant babbling from the annoying ninja guy. (Most of Afro's lines are telling the ninja guy to shut up, actually. And both are voiced by Samuel L. Jackson, who also produced. Now we know what his Gary Stu fantasy was!)

Just to top it off, I spent a good chunk of the week re-reading Memoirs of a Geisha, which I'd read in high school. It's a very good book and well-researched, and you can almost believe that it is someone else's translated memoir. I remember when it was first out and very popular, I was talking to a friend of mine and she didn't like the ending, that things shouldn't have worked out like they did. I tend to disagree, especially now since I've been in a few spots where things just happen to come together in just such a manner. I'm not going to go into details just because the whole book kind of revolves around it, but if you've read it, I would look forward to discussion. XD (I have the movie on me, but I haven't watched it yet. I wonder how it compares to the book.)

I also splurged and got myself a new DS game, since I haven't gotten one since Gardening Mama. Picked up Final Fantasy: Echoes of Time. I then proceeded to spend most of the afternoon today playing it. I'm stuck somewhere in the library with this spellcasting puzzle you have to work out. My timing is awful on it and the battery light was going red, so I shut it down and I'll restart from save and try it again tomorrow. Lord knows we will have time to kill tomorrow night. But it's an extremely fun game (I'm actually tempted to re-start just to re-arrange my party more to my liking.) and quite cute. The controls and interface are a lot like Kingdom Hearts and Star Ocean where you control one character at a time, battling is real-time like KH with your other party members on an AI, but you can switch main characters at will like in Star Ocean when you want to change the lead. The non-main party members are pretty retarded about the jumping puzzles and generally clumsy, but they're not too stupid when fighting starts (thank Bob). Just make sure to keep your main healed and watch the health bars of the other characters, because they're not so great at the whole support magic thing.

Also in video games, I have finally unlocked all the eternal modes for Katamari Damacy, beaten a few records, and made a new comet. Then I uploaded the data to my We &hearts' Katamari game just because.

Tomorrow we're all meeting up and heading into the city so we can check into the hotel and do badge pick-up. And get dinner somewhere, and kill time overnight deciding what to do and video games. squee!

Sink Cat has a name now. It's Miso. He needed a Japanese name after his ninja antics last night, but I didn't want anything stupid sounding or pretentious. There were actual ninja antics involved-- I will probably upload them later since I made sure to take a couple embarrassing pictures of them.

He is going to the vet for his wellness checkup in about an hour. Wish me luck, gaiz.

In other news, I've finally gotten around to reading some of my backlog of manga. The Ace Attorney manga, which is a compilation and NOT the serial manga released in Japan only, is really adorable and the second volume was nothing but stories revolving around Miles Edgeworth. (The picture from the icon is from that volume of the manga, actually, but the bear in question wasn't driving.) XD I'm also finally starting in on xxxHoLic, of which I bought the first three volumes at Otakon last year after watching a few episodes of the anime. It's got lots of CLAMP adorableness with a dash of Petshop of Horrors style occult-ness. The first Petshop series, too, since there's some death and destruction involved.

Both books are Del Ray manga, and they're a pretty new company to the block, but I think I really love their translations. They make a point to simply transliterate the Japanese honorifics rather than omit them or try an imperfect translation, with a little note at the beginning explaining to people what the different honorifics mean. It really helps to preserve the tenor of the different conversations and makes it real damn easy to keep track of character relationships. They also have note sections at the end of each manga explaining some of the different cultural references and in-jokes, sort of like they do for the Excel Saga anime, and explaining what got changed and why when they localized a few of the jokes to something an American would understand better. There's a great respect for the source material in the translations, and with the extra notes you can even learn a bit about Japanese culture and pop culture that you wouldn't have known before. :D

That's my shameless plug, anyway. Tokyopop is all right and so is Shounen Jump. Dark Horse actually puts out a few manga titles as well, but they are hella slow. (They're currently the ones releasing Hellsing at the rate of about a book a year! D:)

I borrowed Dai-Guard from my brother when I went home last, and I finally got around to starting a watch of it today. It's a little bit of EVA and a little bit of Power Rangers and a little bit of Shinesmen. I'm only finished with the first five episodes and it's a 26-episode series, so I'm imagining it does get a bit more serious as time goes on and the plot starts to thicken, but it's a good one. Giant robots FTW.

Otakon is in two weeks! I still need to style the new wig I bought, but I'm trying to wait until it's a bit less humid to mess with it. I think the cut of this wig will give me better spikes, and I've read some of the advice from Petting Zoo Wigs' forums that I also shouldn't have to worry about the wig trying to escape my head this year, either. Just needs two bobby pins my ass!

So we all know that Kirk/Spock is one of the old skool OTPs, and even if you're not into slash you can't deny that fact that there is some EPIC BROMANCE going on. (Heck, we suspect there's totally a BROT3 going on there with McCoy.)

I have also developed a bad habit for ontd_startrek. And I found video of an EPIC RL BROMANCE going on between William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy.

Much squee ensued.

( Video evidence under the cut. )

Also, I loved this fanvid enough to go hunt up the song. ♥ And you must watch it, so it is uncut.

Don't Stop Believing (Star Trek XI, Kirk and Spock) from arefadedaway on Vimeo.

Confession time: I'm a second-generation Trekkie. (Trekker.. whatever. Gimmie mah little ships!) My mother's been a fan since the original Star Trek aired in the 60's, so naturally I grew up with ST:TNG and all her Trek stuff. (My uncle is also a Trekkie, totally in love with Spock, and I try to scout shiny things for him. One of these days I'll hash out stuff about my family, but today is about fandom.)

I watched most of DS9 and Voyager, too, though after TNG ended the networks started playing syndication roulette with Trek and I started branching into other scifi fandoms. (Hello Bab5 and EFC and SG1! Along with Space: Above and Beyond and Alien Nation even though those two were short-lived.)

Thing is, Star Trek: The Next Generation was my baby as far as Trek series went. I grew up with it right into my high school years. TOS wasn't on the air, so aside from sneaking bits and pieces from my uncle's tapes and my mother's huuuuuuge collection of tie-in novels I didn't really get much exposure to it outside the movies. (Though I loved the movies I saw. Star Trek IV and Star Trek VI are both long favorites of mine, and Star Trek V is just an awesome crackfest even if it is MST3K horrible.) I ended up missing a good chunk of the action in the ur-fandom that is TOS fandom. (Totally unironically enough, it was Earth: Final Conflict that ended up being my first major fandom. I was constantly on The Commonality and wrote twee fics including some wild Mary Sue action and it was beautiful. So a Roddenberry series was still my gateway drug. XD)

Flash forward to now and the Trek reboot.

I have discovered a completely insane addiction to Trek slash pr0n. (Uhura is hot. And she totally pwns her boys. End of story. :D) This should not be surprising, but ZOMG LOL. And thus I am tempted to seek out the old skool Trek slash to go with my new skool addiction.

It's like a circle of porn, man. And now I gotta find me some TOS episodes on the cheap. B|

Graduate class has been slain!

Grades will be out sometime next week.

I am relieved.

I may or may not be seeing Star Trek again on Wednesday, depending on how long I'm working and whether or not lostangelssong decides she wants to drive out there or not. I think I might be up to it after all.

katimus_prime is also the best sugardaddy in the universe. :D

I made pulled pork on Sunday in my crock pot. It's adapted from this recipe at Not Exactly Bento, only I did it the lazy way using the dried bottled minced garlic instead of fresh and frozen onion/pepper mix instead of the onions. (OK, so I didn't feel like attempting to mince garlic and the onions I had sitting in the bottom of the fridge turned out bad...) I actually think maybe adding a shot of hot sauce to the mix might be interesting. I'll probably experiment with the recipe a bit and post my own version later.

I still have a couple pounds of it laying around, so getting a break on Wednesday will be a relief.

PS: The icon really IS Spock and a badass muscle car. (Well, on DW anyway. Sorry IJ.)

Today was a good day. We got lunch at work. :D

My brother and I have worked out our Mother's Day thing. It was going to be a surprise, but we eventually had to spill since our father pointed out that we'd have to be all NO :| otherwise.

Saturday we're going to see Star Trek and then get some dinner.

From everything I've heard, it's going to be freaking awesome and that the storyline will be left open for more movies.

And then after work, The Girl (lostangelssong.. yup, she finally got her DW account set up) came up and we ate Five Guys. She managed to lure me out of the house despite low social tokens because we went to Best Buy and got THIS. There were terrible amounts of fansquee. As in, actual literal squeeing on the way home again to eat delicious burgers and watch old scifi. Even the Obligatory Cat's usual "I can haz cheezburger?" routine was not a hindrance to the squee.

I can't wait until season 2 is released. Then I'll have 'em all.

On the other hand, I realized I have a disturbing lack of Trek and EFC icons. This must be remedied.

Tonight has been gratifyingly boring. I made tacos. The boring ground beef kind this time since I had it sitting there and I needed to use it up. And doing my bento-ish lunches means I get to have taco salad tomorrow. XD I think I'm going to take a break from tacos after this, considering that's been a theme of the last few weeks. Pork chops actually sound pretty good right now...

Tromping up and down the stairs at work again was no fun. I get two more days if it this week and then I should be done for a while. I also get to do bills for the month this weekend. Yay!

I dug out my Phoenix Wright costume and tried it on. I think I want to get a new Oxford just because the one I have managed to pick up some weird little black stains on the shoulders and I don't like how it's practically see-through anyway (it's white and for girls, which pretty much covers the why part). The good news is that everything works as well as it did in 2007. The bad news is that I obviously forgot what meager tie-tying skills I had before and thus I'm going to be stuck practicing for a while. Or getting myself a cheater tie.

I gotta admit, I rock a suit. :D

Obligatory Cat was Not Impressed.

I spent a disproportionate amount of time tonight reading Widdershins. It's a wonderful totally OOC AU fic that manages to make the ending of Harry Potter so much better. I mean, I know most Harry Potter fans are like Star Wars fans and hate the series... but whatevs. And it's got pictures!

OK guys and gals... who's up for a roadtrip to Toronto?

I so want to check out Agent Sandoval's Espresso Bar. (No, seriously, AND all the reviews I've tracked down pin it as way better than Starbuck's.)

:D

It's not creepy or stalkerish AT ALL.

Blame fantasmabob

OMG THANK YOU GOD!

Apparently we'll see season two sometime soon as well. The whole series on legit DVD so I can enjoy it on my comfy couch instead of crowding around the computer screen? Can I get a HELL YEAH?

Today I dragged The Girl out to Fells Point and we wandered around for a couple hours. (It really was a couple-- we had some time left on the meter.) I found some pins and a magnet and took some pictures. The Girl  found an antique frog holding a teacup and managed to trip and fall. She's all right, just got a bit of a scrape. I got her gas and some water for dragging her out. It was a fun afternoon.

We saw a very tough-looking biker guy walking his pet python. He looked like a tough guy straight out of a biker movie but he was very sweet and happy to talk about his snake. He even let everyone pet it. The snake looked pretty content, too. I'm kind of sorry I didn't get a picture of them, but eh. I like the memory.

I've decided I want the summer to myself. Between pretty much losing the good application window to sickness and stress from the midwinter and perhaps still being a bit immature, I'm going to take a pass on the writing institute this summer. They hold it every summer, and the slightly less local location that it'll probably have next year isn't THAT far. I'll save the money I got back from taxes, maybe use it to pay for my fall coursework. Maybe I'll find something else to do in the summer that would be ultimately more uplifting than sitting in classrooms talking about stuff. Maybe I'll finally start writing that book I keep mumbling about doing every few months.

I've been reading books, too. I'm up to #20 so far this year. Picked up a bit more fiction this weekend, so I have a fantasy trilogy and something that Neil Gaiman said was awesome.

Saw Watchmen on Saturday. It was very good. Violent maybe on the level of 300 or a Tarantino movie, but very faithful to the book, even with the change in the ending. The change worked, which is the important thing. I think putting the squid in there would have meffed something up, truth be told. I'm sort of quietly in awe how they pulled off Dr. Manhattan-- there's a sort of quiet and confusedness about him that works. (And yes, gentlemen, the nudity is primarily Dr. Manhattan, sorry. No huge amounts of boobies for you. Though I'm surprised that they actually went all the way and had as much full-frontal on Dr. Manhattan as they did.) And Rorschach.. heavens. He made the whole movie, yes he did.

I'm also a lot more excited about Star Trek than I was before. I think it might actually live up to itself. It's coming out in May! Almost can't wait. Terminator: Salvation also looks like it will be cool. The Girl wants to see if only because Christian Bale will be playing John Connor. I want to see it because of that and because it's going to play with my favorite "what it means to be human" robot plotlines. I think that's also going to be a May movie.. this summer's going to be busy.

We already have a standing sort-of plan to rent Twilight out of one of the local Redbox rental things and watch it while getting skunked. Did it when The Passion was out on DVD and had a fun time. I'll probably post the results of that. XD

On a bit of a lark I went and re-read Dragonflight by Anne McCaffery. And as I was reading it I think I remembered all the reasons why I pretty much stopped reading her stuff.

And I mean aside from the gay from tent peg thing.

For one thing, the dragons don't have personalities. They're not characters, they're plot devices. And boring ones at that. It was something that always bothered me, but the early books especially just use the dragons as shiny flying buses. One of the few things Mercedes Lackey does right in her Valdemar books (another teenage love that makes me want to strangle it sometimes as an adult) was to give the Companions personalities, goals, and independent wants and even occasionally set them at odds with their people.

And then there's the domestic abuse. You have F'lar always slapping Lessa around and shaking her when he's pissed with her, and there's this whole section in there where even he's starting to think he's been raping Lessa when they end up in bed together after the mating flight.. and yet she ends up falling in twu wuv with him and all that crap to the point of being just another empty-headed twit obsessed with taking care of "her men" and omg baybeeeez.

I can't even bring myself to bother caring about the new books. Todd isn't too bad, but there are only so many "omg plague will kill all of the dragons that we finally realized are actually horribly inbred!" plots you can stand, let alone the fact he's a little fond of his Mary Sues. (Though Dragon's Kin was actually good, especially since they finally actually did something with the watch-whers and it wasn't all pretty flying ponies all the time.)

Not to mention the portrayals of the gay characters (even Lackey does better on that score, and she's pretty bad herself) and the total lack of lesbians when the gay (because bisexuals don't exist)  male population seems to be heug leik xbox on Pern. And the fact that women are basically only there to be pretty and have sex and baybeeeez, even if they managed to start off their appearance in the series actually having personalities.

It kind of makes me almost wonder what it would be like to write something with something like the founding concept of the dragonriders (humans being sucked into these intense mental bonds with these dragons) and really take it seriously. Have the dragons be as fully intelligent as they're supposed to, complete with all their alien impulses. What would happen if you had a pair that really resented each other? What would it be like living with this sort of dependency on another being who you really aren't going to have too much in common with?

That and it would be totally awesome to see lesbian bronze riders. I mean, seriously. :D

Some days I think I need a wife.

No, seriously.

Taking care of yourself and your place isn't much in the grand scheme of things, but it's so much when you're trying to juggle work (and in my case class) and trying not to go insane from not having enough hours in the day.

That and I sometimes just think I get the occasional longing for someone else to pack me a lunch and tell me have a nice day. It might just be envy from watching too many bento communities. I often don't have time in the evening to do myself a really nice lunch unless I plan ahead for it at dinnertime (something I generally don't do) and at any rate it's just not the same sometimes doing for yourself.

Either that or I'm incredibly lazy.

And sleepy. And hoping I'm not coming down with anything. The snot problem hasn't gotten any worse than it was before, so I think I might have dodged that bullet at least.

By the way, class is going well as far as I've been able to figure. I'm going to have to move on getting the stuff together to apply to this invitational summer course thing-- I can earn another six grad credits from it towards my master's degree if I can finagle getting in and paying for it. (It'll be a good fifteen hundred bucks, tho, and I don't get paid two months out of the year. Though my tax refund will cover most of it.) Getting into the program means definitely no Otakon for me this year, though. The last day of the course-thing is the first day of Otakon weekend, and it's a pain enough trying to commute down there to miss an entire day of the programming to schoolwork. That's ok though, since I'm beginning to think I'm just outgrowing Otakon. Too much fanbrat, I guess, on top of the INSANE Otakon crowds.

I think I'd rather kick it old skool and go to a regular sci fi con instead. I THINK Shore Leave might be a Baltimore con.. hmmmmmmmmmmmmm.

Speaking of excellent scifi tv, I still don't have any of ST:TNG (new DVDs are about $70 a season! The used ones go for $50 if you're lucky!) but I managed to actually find a DVD collection of M.A.N.T.I.S. which was a favorite of mine way back in the day. (It was considered ground-breaking since it was the first show with a black superhero EVAR.. he was also disabled-- paralyzed from a gunshot wound-- but they don't play that angle up much in the promos even though it appears in the show itself a few times.) It includes the unaired pilot. Man was the final show different from the pilot episode they made. They had to make some pretty radical changes to the show that actually aired. Some of them were, I'm sure, because we just aren't ready for them as a culture (the original pilot was very black-- it featured almost exclusively African and African-American characters/actors and dealt with the sort of urban gang violence issues that tend to dominate shows featuring black characters) and because, yeah, some of the elements in the pilot really didn't work too well (like the dorky wearing your business suit over your cool exoskeleton bit and the mismatch between gritty urban drama and high-powered superhero story... MANTIS even in the original pilot was not a Daredevil or a Batman, where it would have worked). But OMG.. so 90's. Nostalgia!