Finally!

State of mind: braindrained
Current soundtrack: Black Jack - ROOTS (B'z)

So I finally glommed my aunt's copy of HP&DH/HP7/Source of Potterdammerung!!! and read it.
All right, I speed-read quite a fair bit of the clash-bang-boom thing at the end, because Mom wanted to head home. But come, spoilery art and Messenger titles and Metaquotes! I fear you no longer!

Ohright, thoughts. It was OK. I got choked up a bit at some points (not telling you where). Despaired at the death of *blip* by *blip* because it was so darn *blip* and then *blip* and *blip* died so suddenly after *blip*...I'm not overly troubled, but no wonder people got miffed. I happen to be very fond of the second and third last blips in there.

There's always time to read it in a leisurely fashion at some point in the future. :)









[spoiler]...Heeeeehehehehehehehehehe, Uncle Potter and his sons with DQNames.[/spoiler]

Music, mayhem, and, yes, manga dorkery.

State of mind:
Current soundtrack: Playlist name - series - song title (artist)

I like music. There's a neighbour across the street who has been regularly playing the piano for years, but I have yet to see his/her face. So, it didn't surprise me when I heard the sound of a guitar while eating brekkies this morning.

It was pretty loud, though, and so was the...singing?!

Look closely and you can glimpse a sneaker.

First thought: OMGyey busking person!
Second thought: Why's this person playing just beside my hedge, behind the protection of a car door?
Third thought: ...Gilasiao* dude strumming guitar outside house?

He went on strumming, anyway, and I'm still wondering if the gods are crazy on weekends.

--

So I mentioned I'd bear proof of my mild shopping addiction, and of course my dorkery, correct?

Now it's time to play 'Guess M.Y.'s favourite brand'.

I went to Body Shop looking for concealer (panda eyes) and perfume oil, and walked out with a blusher brush in tow. @_@ But that's not proof of dorkery, you say? You're right. It's not. But this is.↓↓↓

Ka―nashige―ni saku―hana ni―

Finally couldn't pass up the manhwa shop's Black Jack manga box set, branded as Most Advanced Caricature *choke*. It contains a whole truckload of macabre medical goodness, shrunken to four-pages-per-page and translated into Chinese.　I've been looking for BJ manga in the shops, but I can't find that all-important first issue, so I really can't start, can I? @_@ The Chinese translation is the best bet, considering any other translations out there would have been sourced from this one. (It's a hypothesis, but a pretty strong one.)

Oh yes, there's just one last thing. I can't read Chinese. :P

*gilasiao - 'Crazy-crazy'. Malay-Hokkien. Personal portmanteau.

Accio irony!

State of mind: exhausted
Current soundtrack: J-Pop-Rock - REDEMPTION (Gackt)

It's raining outside, a nice pleasant sound with a nice pleasant temperature to go with it. This is one of the best times to be curled up under thick blankets with a fluffy pillow, and drifting off to the sway of one's one thoughts.

I am not asleep. I have a stiff neck, but I have just finished sketching the last sketches...I hope...of the P.S.T.C. internship project and I am pondering the irony of how I, a child of Multimedia Design and Generation-Y and all that, am fervently wishing for a media blackout of about, ohhhh, shall we say two weeks, for the following reasons:

1. My aunt, who is the big Harry Potter fan, has hidden her copy of Deathly Hallows SOMEWHERE in my grandmother's house, and I haven't been able to find it.
2. She's not revealing its whereabouts 'til she finishes reading it.
3. My aunt reads v-e-r-y slowly - it'll probably take her three weeks to finish the book, which in the language of myself and the Internet is half of forever. (To give a sense of scale, I ploughed desperately through OOTP in two days, though without much enjoyment - and HBP took a long Sunday afternoon/evening.)

The annoying part is I don't want to be spoiled at all for this book. I don't want to know who dies when or where with the what by whom. I already felt cheated when someone blurted out Dark Zagi's true identity on the board that must not be named, and since then I have been doubly anal about fandom matters.

Which, of course, makes it perfectly natural for two spoilers to hit me between the eyes within 24 hours; once when I clicked on an LJ-cut to comment on how bleedin' fast someone was reading—I scrolled down, but the browser jumped and a big spoiler sprang at me, and once more when someone slipped an R.I.P. into their Messenger alias.

YEEAAAARGGGH!

Now is the time for the path of least resistance, and less Internet. But I swear if anyone comes up and blurts out anything...there will be carnage. @^@

I also promise you that I will be sneaky and furtive and put any long spluttering rants about the death of (insert name here) behind white blocks of span style.

In the next post: Pictures of what I just blew half my month's stipend on shopping for, and proof I am a complete DORKUS. (If you didn't know that already.)

*erk ork ark*...ACK!

State of mind: hopped-up
Current soundtrack: Animated!TF Movie theme on loop %3

After a long long absence from the theaters (the last silver screening I caught was 300 — yey manchest!), I decided I needed to go see Transformers, for my sanity. I used to love them robots back in the day. They also introduced me to the idea of death, for I clearly remember Ultra Magnus getting, um, stepped on by Megatron and wondering for years and years whyyyyy they filled his coffin with SPIDERS...Yeah, I don't get it either. (._.;) It was actually a whole mess of daisies. But it looks like this was something out of Headmasters, or so the Transformers Wiki tells me.

So! I accompanied my fellow fangirl Lynn to the theater. We came, er, a bit late, and had to squeeze past a lot of people to get to our seats. I then realised we were...rather close to the screen. But no matter! Movie! Hilarity! Big shiny robots!

Transformers: The Movie

The Not-so-rabid Fangirl Review

To summarise the story very very quickly, the uber 1337 powderfull Cybertronian Allspark plummets to Earth. Powderfull indeed, as not only is it able to Create Life, the right person touches it and it neatly compresses into a cube about, oh, a tenth-maybe-twentieth of its original size. Megatron pursues, but gets frozen in the Artic (n00b!). 19th century Witwicky finds Megatron, gives him a bad touch and gets the map to the Allspark printed onto his eyeglasses - many years later, Autobots and Decepticons show up to find the map to the Allspark, then the Allspark itself, and finally there's a big crash-boom-bang-through-buildings kind of fight, and the Autobots decide to make Earth their second home.

Now, I didn't want to watch the movie at first. I mean, I saw what they'd done to the designs first. Where was the sleekness? Where was the simplicity? Where was the Inherent Cheese?! And I'm talking about the Autobot designs here! And then I saw the really ah beng flames they'd painted on OP. But I did end up here, partly because it looked like the treatment was going to end up something like the 2004 ULTRAMAN movie - a modern reimagining of an old concept. If you compared Ultraman to The Next and then the robot redesigns, sure, it made sense.

...'mma going to kill that pimptastic Michael Bay. At least ULTRAMAN's got a three-minute time limit excuse hidden in the fandom's core consciousness. Transformers doesn't have enough Transformers. Not enough for my liking or Lynn's, anyway.

When I saw this, I squeed. Out loud. In a packed cinema. Thankfully nobody shushed me. *dies*

I mean, it was a pretty movie. It was full of crashes and booms and bangs, and every time the Autobots convoy rolled out, it sent shivers up and down and diagonally through my spine. There was a lot of pop culture references, like the insignia and the leaking lubricant. (I thought leaking lubricant meant to blather on? Or am I thinking of Kup from the other movie?) And it was full of human drama. Which meant there weren't enough Transformers.

There were also a few other problems I would like to address here:

How am I NOT supposed to love a woobie face like this? @_@

• Um, Mikaela. Just a little, in the beginning. After that she rocks socks in box...es. Because really, doesn't this kinda look like that Sideshow Mary Jane figure that has/d feminists up in arms? All right, it's fanservice, we get it. Cheez. Some of your audience happens to be female, you know. -_-;


• One has to sit through about half the movie before any Autobots finally appear. Hi, can we please have our protagonists nice and up front?


• The Autobots learned their English...over the Internet. Er. I'm just kind of glad nobody burst out in a string of 'all your base are belong to us' or 'zomg' or even 'is it can be cheezburger tiem nao pleez?' They seem to have picked up...rather a lot of slangy language, but thank god they didn't pick up Memeglish or Macroese. ^^;


• What did they do to Optimus Prime?! He's PRIME fercryin'! He's witty, but not snarky, grumpy or impatient; nor, for that matter, does he say things like 'My bad.'


• Snarktimus Prime also needs to keep that mouth-mask thing on. Mostly because it looks like his lips are pasted onto his chin. x_x Umf, do not want!


• The head of Sector 7? Needs to be given a goooood kick in the pants. He only useful for five minutes, and pretty much a turd for the rest of the movie.


• Did we really need to have Bumblebee's...lubricator outlet...there? I mean it was funny and all, but the term 'golden showers' never seemed so appropriate before.


• Those parties who decided to rope Bumblebee like a beef steer, tie him down and freeze him? OMAIGOD DAI. YU DAI NAO IN FAIYAR THXBI.


• [kindoflargespoiler]Did they HAVE to kill of Jazz? I mean, G1 Jazz roxxor the soxxor in the boxxor! He was one of my favourites along with Bumblebee and Ultra Magnus, and you SNAPPED HIM IN BLIMMIN' TWO![/kindoflargespoiler]


• Bumblebee's unusual British accent. British? Not that I have anything against the Commonwealth, but...nice, proper, mature British? I thought Bumblebee was supposed to be small and nippy and quick and young. D:


• Please do not perform petting or making out on top of Transformers, people. Even if they're in car form. Specially if they're in car form. Special-specially if the OTHERS are kind of parked around. Teehee voyeur TFs


• Not enough Transformers already, confound it.

In conclusion, while it was an adequate movie, humourous and awe-inspiring in good amounts. the focus might have been a smidge misplaced. Because I honestly and whole-heartedly tell you, there just weren't enough Transformers. For me, anyway. It's worth a tub of popcorn for the boom-bang visuals and the unintentional LOLmoments. Seeing 5 TFs trying to conceal themselves in a suburban yard is like watching Iron Giant in quintiplicate.

Oh, here. To show I'm not ENTIRELY humourless, have a Burger King commercial with Prime in it.

ETA: VGCats has summed up my feelings about the situation, and much better than I could. Hooray Intart00bz!