Standing On Boxes

More movie catchup. This time… Some Marvel superhero movies to catch up on (5) before going to see the new one - The Avengers . Might take a few days. Not exactly sure of the order to watch them in… Iron Man I, Iron Man II, Incredible Hulk, Thor, Captain America

• Iron Man (I) – the Origin Story – though with a modern twist. (I’m pretty sure the original origin story for Iron Man took place in Vietnam, though it’s been a very long time since I read it. The new one? Afghanistan? Or someplace similar in the Middle East.) Stick around past the end credits for a teaser to a future movie in the series.
• High points (in this order):
• Gwyneth Paltrow as Pepper Potts
• The Suit
•  Robert Downey, Jr. as Tony Stark
• Meh…
• The Villain (of course, we wouldn’t want the villain to be too evil for an origin story… the Hero wouldn’t survive.)
• The government (First hints at S.H.I.E.L.D. – stay for the extra after the credits for a cameo)
• Tony/Pepper (Not sure what the point of that was… Sure, in the comic they have a complicated relationship…)
• Iron Man II – Tony meets his first post-Origin villain (Someone who builds his own Suit.). And finds out the perils of everyone knowing who Iron Man is (I could have sworn it was a secret in the comics) (He never could stay on script… the government should have known better.) (Once again, stick around for a teaser for a future movie (Thor))
• High Points
• Pepper Potts (again)
• Scarlett Johansson  as Natasha Romanov (aka The Black Widow) - She had the only non-Suit action scene in the movie
• The Suit-case
• The Tech!
• Mickie Rourke as a version of Ivan Vanko (maybe)
• Meh…
• Tony drunk at his birthday party in The Suit
• Tony vs The Government
• Tony’s competition (Hammer)

Digging through my pile of unwatched DVDs. So many to watch. I could go years without buying anything new.

First-up… Summer Wars.

Verdict? Excellent movie. Even if it wasn’t a Studio Ghibli film (So it wasn’t translated by Disney) I can see why it won awards when it came out back in 2009.

Quick synopsis – Girl asks boy (math nerd) to go with her to her grandmother’s 90th birthday party, neglecting to tell him she’d told everyone he was her boyfriend. Oops. We then have some AI taking over some international VR social networking site (for which the boy gets blamed) and the rest of the movie is the fight to defeat the AI by the girls family + boy. The Wiki says it’s a romance… but just barely. It’s more about family.

Next up? Tales From Earthsea

This IS a Studio Ghibli film, directed by Goro Miyazaki. (See the wiki entry for the film for Ursula Le Guin‘s reaction to the film, which uses ideas and characters from her Earthsea stories.)

Quick synopsis – Heck if I know. But it had dragons, and magic and Ged (though he’s never called that) and Tenar and an evil wizard. So it wasn’t too bad. But not one of the best Studio Ghibli films I’ve seen.

One of the extras on the DVD is an interactive map that contains quick video blurbs about many Studio Ghibli films and trivia/info. And some games.

Two writing events are headed our way…

The 2012 International Day Of Femslash is on July 14th, just 3 months (and 1 week) from now.

NaNoWriMo? 6 months and a bit.

And ideas? I’ve got plenty:

For IDF 2012 – I’m thinking another episode in my Class of 99 series, but centered around Joyce. And that’s all I plan to reveal for now – it might change.

For NaNoWriMo 2012 – I’m thinking alien invasion. Not an original idea but I think I have a unique twist on it. We’ll see.

Randomness.

Instead of writing today, I read two books. Rocket Girls and its sequel Rocket Girls: Last Planet by Housuke Nojiri. (Note: Excluding tax, the Kindle edition is cheaper than the iBookstore ebook, and both are half the price of the paper edition. I actually bought the first book from Borders before they closed and that cost even more but it was an impulse buy – that took me a year to get around to reading. )

It’s about a girl who goes looking for her father in the Solomon islands and ends up falling into a job as an astronaut. The second book covers her further adventures along with several other girl astronauts.

Very science fiction YA feel to it. Sort of Heinlein-ish if you got rid of the rugged individualist, boy and his dog themes. So, basically, a Heinlein YA science fiction book (Podykane of Mars, Rocket Ship Galileo, etc.) if Heinlein were Japanese. Sort of.

The books are from 1995, and 1996 respectively. Took 15 years for an English translation to make to this side of the planet. Supposedly there’s an anime series based on the two books, which are very popular in Japan.

I thought they were very good in translation, even if they would be G rated, mostly. And it’s nice to have something to read that wasn’t full of vampires, werewolves, and assorted other supernatural creatures.

March, that is. It’s almost over. And very unproductive fic-wise. Maybe 500 words of output. That’s after a 2 month period where I was averaging 500 words/day for that drabble vignette series (posted elsewhere). Which followed Nanowrimo where I wrote 50K+ words in month.

Here’s hoping April+ goes much better.

It’s that time of year again… new iPad! Time to move!

It’s been an adventure so far. In some ways, simpler than when I moved from an original iPad to the iPad 2 last spring. In other ways? Trickier.

Going from Gen 1 to Gen 2? I used the ‘Restore from Backup’ method. In some ways this worked fine but a number of apps had issues afterward that I spent a week cleaning up afterward. This time? Starting from scratch.

I should note up front that I haven’t moved from MobileMe to iCloud yet (Not time to panic yet. I still have a couple months!). I’m using iTunes on my MacBook as the intermediary tunnel between the iPads.

I’m on my third iPad (and 2nd iPhone and used to have an iPod Touch) so I have a lot of apps collected over the last 3+ years (all the iWork and iLife apps, etc.). But some I use more than others making the migration difficulty level a bit higher.

Pages

If I had iCloud, some things would hopefully be easier — primarily moving all of my Pages documents from one to the other. That is a clunky, manual process. 1. Copy to iTunes. 2. Copy out of iTunes. 3. Copy to new iPad. 4. Re-arrange documents into folders. Very headache inducing. Especially considering how many documents I have in Pages.

OmniOutliner, OmniGraffle, Notability

Some apps were easier. OmniOutliner and Notability? Simple copy out, copy back in (though tedious because I have so many Pages documents). OmniGraffle? Not so simple. Exporting from the iPad was easy. Importing back in? Not so much. It wouldn’t recognize the documents and stencils until I reinstalled the Mac version of OmniGraffle (which I don’t normally use so I had to grab the eval copy from their website). It’s possible that OmniOutliner would do the same thing but since I have a legal copy of that I didn’t notice.

OmniGraffle was also one of the apps that didn’t handle the ‘restore from backup’ move from 1 to 2 very well. Fortunately, I only had a couple documents. to move that time.

GoodReader

This one was a mess going from 1 to 2. Most of the documents did not restore from backup correctly.This time? I knew what I was doing. I was able to export all of my documents – multiple root level folders exported easily but I had to zip/compress them into a single zip file, import it and unzip because the import into app feature in iTunes doesn’t do folders (which is also part of the OmniGraffle problem – it thought the documents were folders until I reinstalled OmniGraffle.

eBook Readers

Stanza, and MegaReader were easy (I don’t do Kindle or Nook ebooks). iBooks? Had to go back and unselect a few since the default iTunes ebook behavior is to upload everything. eReader? For reading old Palm/Peanut Press/Fictionwise secure ebooks? That is going to be annoying. The app no longer allows you to download directly from your FictionWise bookshelf. I’m going to have to throw the ebooks on a web server, download them to the iPad and reauthorize them. Annoying but doable. (Stanza was one of the apps that had mangled documents when I moved from 1 to 2. This time I didn’t have much in it that I couldn’t get again.)

iTunes/Apps

Lots of Music/Lots of Apps. Unfortunately, another thing that would have been simpler with iCloud, I suspect. As soon as I plugged the new ‘pad into iTunes on my MacBook, I had to register it and it immediately started syncing music and apps. I had to quickly configure iTunes syncing (I don’t put ALL of my music or apps on my iOS devices) and resync several times before it settled down with only what I actually wanted.

Assorted Apps

I’ve got a bunch of apps that let you redownload media (which, since you can’t export from them, makes sense) – ComiXology, Zinio, Sports Illustrated, etc. I’ll have to log back into these and redownload things I want to have available locally.

A bunch of other apps require a login even if nothing gets downloaded. Passwords / account info don’t seem to always move across backup restores so I was expecting that.

What Else?

Hmm… my iPad 2 has a DodoCase BookBack on it. It’s a tough material that sticks to the back, protecting it. I like it (though I’m not looking forward to removing it if I decide to sell the iPad 2) but they don’t seem to have one for the 3rd gen iPad. So, right now my new iPad is “wearing” a Belkin iPad 2 “Snap Shield” – it fits, just barely (the iPad 3 is slightly thicker than the 2. It should fit the slimmer WiFi only iPad 3 better than it does my WiFi+4G iPad 3. Hopefully it won’t pop off before they come out with a DodoCase BookBack for the 3. Or I find something else.

THe 3 is slightly heavier than the 2. With the Belkin Snap shield on it also feels more massive/substantial than the 2. Not sure I really like that. It feels like a 1.

Apple product announcement. And software purchases.

Actually, 2 hardware (iPad 3rd gen (now with spiffy 4G cellular goodness) and 3rd gen Apple TV (now with 1080P video)) and a bunch of software updates (almost every Apple iOS app was updated for the new iPad and for iOS 5.1, which was also updated.)

And a new iPhoto for iOS.

And, as usual, a new version of iTunes ( 10.6) to go with the new iOS.

What else? On the Mac App store – New version of iBook Author; new version of Xcode (now with less user install controlability!)

But no update to Aperture? Why Not

Hmm… in un-Apple news… bought a USENet news reader (Unison from Panic) to replace the slowly ossifying MT-Newswatcher I’ve been using for years. Good. But different. And not free.

And, there was a 50% off sale on Poser (all versions) so I finally ordered an upgrade – from Poser Pro to Poser Pro 2012. I’ve been putting off upgrading for a while but it seemed worth it at that price.

So… potentially expensive week…

So it begins… it’s “Robo Call Weekend” around here. Yes, I live in one of the “Super Tuesday” states. And someone just left a minute long robocall for Mitt ‘Flip-flop’ Romney on my phone.

I’m not very political and consider myself a moderate (socially liberal, fiscally conservative but NOT a libertarian – I think government has its uses.) but the Mayan apocalypse will happen before I vote for any of the misogynist, theocratic yahoos in the Republican party who make Ronald Reagan look liberal. (And I actually voted for Reagan! And Bush I. (But I got better .) So there!)

So, anyone else not watching the Oscar telecast this year?

And, are you feeling guilty for watching a show celebrate what a bunch of mostly old white guys think are the best movies (and related things) of 2011?

Me neither.

Yesterday’s episode of Glee ( 3×14 – “On My Way”) ended in a double cliffhanger – Will Rachel get married? What happened to Quinn?

Speculation/spoilers follow

Read More >>

Another 3 Day weekend almost over. It rained ALL day today and is supposed to freeze tonight. I never get much done on them. But I think I’ll try to do something worthy of a “Day Off” tomorrow. Maybe go see a movie (A Studio Ghibli film looks interesting), eat out for lunch, and then hit a few President’s Day sales (I seem to recall there used to be 2 President’s Day holidays in February when I was young… what happened to them?)

I’ve been focusing on an experimental double-drabble (200 words/each) series. The goal is to tell a story in 100 parts. 33 to go… trying to write at least 2 a day, so it should be finished this month and I’ll be back to my regularly scheduled writing.

( No, it isn’t posted here. Or anywhere I normally post. Or under any of my normal aliases. Not sure if I ever will put it here. I’m only mentioning it now so people don’t think I disappeared into the wilds of the internet. )

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.