in which our heroine tries to find something to watch during summer hiatus

Stray thoughts on pilots: Warehouse 13

There are Buddhas, and it’s Washington D.C., so this is a museum, or some post-apocalyptic version of the future where the Chinese took over and then rediscovered religion.  There’s a pretty brunette woman who has big, awkward eyes and wordlessly identifies with a misfit of a middle schooler, so she’s probably smart and socially awkward in spite of her obvious beauty.

There’s a man of mystery sleeping with a blonde woman who doesn’t know what he does for a living.  I bet he gets along really well with serious brunette girl.

A lab tech got blood on an ancient artifact. I’m sure this will work out well for everyone.

Back to the blonde, she makes a snide comment about the Secret Service to a man who won’t tell her what he does for a living, which in T.V. land is akin to bitching about the hard-ass boss that no one has ever seen to the conspicuously laid back dude who for some reason is allowed to lounge around the office with impunity.

Oh look, playboy and brunette don’t get along!  Called it!

Brunette’s name is Micah, or something phonetically similar.  One of the many biblical boys’ names that sounds like a girl’s name, Cf. Elisha.

Male ethnic nameless Secret Service agent, you’re dead. 
Yep.  Dead.

Playboy plays it fast, and plays it loose, and in the end is gonna get burned.  Either that or Sterling Archer is going to blow his cover.

Are inner thigh holsters really a thing?

Supernatural things are happening!

Roommate: “Well, his life is ruined; he might as well have been shot [by brunette].”
Me: “Yes, well, at least [brunette] won’t have to fill out endless paperwork.”

Mystery black woman, burly Asian guy, and Playboy.  This scene is so ethnically diverse!    Aw, Playboy has no human attachments.  Poor good-looking, highly skilled white man.

Brunette: “What am I doing here?”
Roommate: “What is she doing there?”
Me: “She has to balance out his seat-of-the-pants, fly-by-night attitude with her bookish adherence to rules and protocols, which is how she succeeded in a man’s world in the first place.  Also, sexual tension.”

Jane Espenson!

Brunette is an entitled brat.  I hate her.  She probably went to Choate.  She has a Choate neck.

Playboy asks the only intelligent question of the entire scene: “What am I supposed to do here?”

Brunette is dismissive of small-town America.  Her new name is Choate Neck.  She’s also insensitive to her partner’s alcoholism!

Playboy went to Dartmouth.  His new name is Dartmouth!

Oh, Choate Neck has daddy issues.  Shocker.

My inner hipster wants, nay, demands a old-timey typewriter computer keyboard.

Choate Neck is dismissive of domestic violence.  Hate.  Her.

Choate Neck is also terrible at interacting with suspects, or, you know, human beings of any kind in any situation at all, ever.

Defense attorney deflects question with snark, and Choate Neck takes exception: “That was a serious question!”  Oh, so now you wanna take things seriously?!

If I worked alone in a warehouse with a zip line, I would do that all day long.

Choate Neck’s dead lebensborn lover calls her “Bunny,” and if that doesn’t scream “Choate!” I don’t know what does.

WTF is a “Renaissance blowout?”
OK, it’s apparently a bonfire party surrounded by classical columns and a few people dressed in community-theater grade Renaissance garb.


Well, that was acceptable.  I'll probably watch that again.

in transit

Today in statements at once empirically dubious, logically unsound, and morally reprehensible: "Your laptop's not gonna break, lady?  Okay?  'Cause if yours breaks, mine breaks, and mine's A LOT more expensive than yours." -- guy who dropped a laptop on my head trying to shove it into the overhead bin.  He didn't say this to me, mind you.  He didn't say anything to me.  Because he is an asshole.

at the speed of light

In a time long ago, before the internet was a thing that recorded all the other things, ever (I know, because I tried unsuccessfully to google it...unsuccessfully...to GOOGLE IT), some stand-up comedian had a bit that went something like this: "First we had a magazine called Life, and that was pretty broad. Then we had a magazine called People, which was not about all of life, just the People. Then came a magazine called Us. Not them; just us. Pretty soon, there's gonna be a magazine called ME!!!!!!" Today, I think I have that magazine; it's called Facebook.

In other internet news, here is a real conversation:
mikaydee: "wtf is Kingdoms of Amalur? I thought it was a Facebook game."
RM: "I still have no idea."
***
48 hours and one Penny Arcade news post later
***
mikaydee: "So, we have to get Kingdoms of Amalur, right?"
RM: "Oh, absolutely."

Yeah, I'll do pretty much whatever those guys tell me.

in which our heroine finds herself writing about gender issues again

I saw Haywire yesterday, which is a fine movie. And I mean just that. It's fine. It promises to be 90 minutes of watcing a former American Gladiatrix beat up a bunch of really good-looking guys, and it delivers exactly that, plus it managed to actually make me kind of sad when one of those guys died. Pathos, amirite? The only thing that I didn't like about the movie was the guy sitting next to me, who, besides being a BTS (borderline two-seater) was also the kind of person who talks during movies. Not to another person. To the screen. He kept saying "Daaaaamn, this chick's insane!" over and over again, usually in response to her bashing some guy's (very pretty) face into a fixed object. Except, she wasn't insane. Everything she did was quite rational. It was skillful. It was, occasionally, clever. She wasn't insane. He just thought she was insane because she's a woman, and she's being extremely violent. Purposefully, rather than reactively violent. And women aren't supposed to be violent. Not even to save their own lives.

(hot guys)

gender bending over backwards, part deux

(1) An actual conversation about an actual person:
CB: This man is hysterical.
mikaydee: Like, funny hysterical, or driven insane by a uterus hysterical?
CB: Like totally sobbing.
mikaydee: Ah, so, both.

(2) Revelation:
"You're cute when you're angry" is a really just a thing that men say as an excuse to continue making me angry. Oh, am I pissing you off? Well, it makes you more attractive, so that makes it okay, right? No! Hells no! I'm cute when I'm angry? Am I also sexy when I'm crying? That is totally effed up.

in which our heroine confesses her sins

mikaydee: I often confuse Rose Byrne and Rose McGowan, and then I feel really bad.
RM: oh jesus
RM: taste just rolled over in its grave
mikaydee: In my defense, the context is almost always "What?! Rose McGowan would never be in this piece of--...oh wait, Rose McGowan would."

appropos of nothing

Apparently this is old news to some, but male stripping is somewhat unsettlingly aggressive. I went to a strip show last night for, I assure you, culturally appropriate reasons, and to be honest, it was kind of like being trapped in some strange woman's elaborate gang rape fantasy. That is very much not what I want to happen when I call the police, or the fire department, or the U.S. Navy. At one point I tried to be game and help out a friend who was getting (again I assure you) a culturally appropriate lap dance, and for my troubles I got a lap dance of my own "for helping her out." It honestly felt like I was being punished for doing something nice. Which is supposed to be hot? I guess?

in partial praise of neologisms

Suffixiate, verb: to smother an existing word or word root with suffixes, often "-ate," which add nothing to the word's meaning, but may make the speaker appear smarter or dumber, depending on who is listening, e.g. "conversate," "refudiate."

in which our heroine weighs in

The internet's schadenfreude reflex landed squarely on this girl today, and I can't say I disapprove. Of particular note is this little gem, which still exists in the Australian edition of Gizmodo, unaffected by the author's post hoc, face-saving edit:

"Also, for all you world famous nerds out there: Don’t go after two Gawker Media employees and not expect to have a post written about you. We live for this kind of stuff."

Are you kidding me?

On behalf of all the serious professional women out there, let me say this: gentleman, you absolutely can, you absolutely should go out on dates with women and not just assume that they are going to use you to their professional advantage. Women who do that are evil. Don't touch them; you don't know where they've been.

As I've said elsewhere, there's a word for women who go out on dates for professional, rather than personal reasons.

....

"Whore." The word is "whore."

in which our heroine wishes she were silicon-based

When people ask if some food is "organic," I usually tell them, "Well, it's not inorganic....", 'cause I'm a smart-ass like that. At the airport this week, though, I was listening an episode of This American Life, and I heard maybe the dumbest thing I've heard about organics ever. I don't know if the reporter was trying to seem balanced for the sake of professionalism or if she actually sympathized with the vaccine-o-phile parents in this story, but she actually said there's no such thing as an organic vaccine. No, lady. Just no. There's no such thing as an inorganic vaccine! You know what is organic, though? Whooping cough. Also, polio. Maybe give your kid some of that, instead. All natural, 100%, nature's best.

in which our heroine cuts herself with occam's razor

England is on fire, and no one can explain why. In the absence of any other explanation, I'm gonna look to historical precedent and just assume that Vikings are responsible.

rosencrantz and guildenstern are wizards

Thank MR for this one, since he introduced me to WTF D&D, with which I have been wasting a great deal of my employer's time lately. Hey, state labor law requires that I take at least one break during the day. It would be a dishonor to the memory of all those Pullman Strike people if I didn't goof off for a half-hour every day.

Now, granted, a lot of these monsters logically could not exist. But it's magic, right? Wizards did it. This monster, though, is special, and by special, I mean enraging. It offends me not as a gamer, but as a sentient being. This monster ontologically could not exist, which is a little, you know, beyond. It has roughly human intelligence but no conception of death? WTF, indeed! How can you have self-awareness and not have a conception of death? If you understand that you exist, how does that not also imply the opposite possibility, that you don't necessarily have to exist? You exist, and unless you're YHWH (and if you're reading this and You're YHWH, well, I'm either incredibly flattered or utterly unsurprised), you know you haven't always existed, and so one day a little later maybe you won't exist, and BAM, conception of death, embedded in the conception of life. As far as basic concepts go, you don't get much more basic than that. It's as if you said "this monster is capable of learning to add, but not subtract." Eff you, monster. Eff you and your impossible thoughts. You don't understand death? Here, my +1 scimitar of intellectual fury will teach you....

stray thoughts on bad movies: transformers: dark of the moon edition

(1) If the Decepticons were planning decades in advance for the Autobots arrival on Earth, you'd think they could have avoided the first two movies.
(2) Why does Patrick Dempsey care if the Decepticons take prisoners or not?
(3) Did Optimus Prime just execute someone who was starting to beg for his life? I think he did.

in which our heroine engages in some peer review

I think one thing that separates sane people from insane people is that sane people actually expend some effort to make sure they are not insane; to sane people, being sane matters enough to work on it a little. Insane people couldn't give a shit. I know a woman who is pretty much universally agreed to be a little bit batty. Nevertheless, every time I have an interaction with her, I ask myself, "am I crazy?" I go over the situation one more time. Sometimes, I'll check with others, cross-referencing my sanity. I always come out on top. Today, she said something insane in front of a large group of people. There were two or three seconds of awkward silence before the stifled tittering began and someone tried to piece together some kind of response, and I know what was happening during that pause. People were checking to make sure they were not the crazy ones. And they were right. The crazy woman, however, did not question the awkward silence. She didn't question the befuddled response. She just stood there nodding like everything was normal. Because. She is. Insane.

the persistence of memory

I've been beaten down so long by the corporate bludgeon that is Starbucks that I've forgotten that angrier, eye-rolling-er me who used to ooze resentment all over their faux flagstones and insisted on saying "medium" instead of "grande," verily daring them to pretend they didn't speak my mysterious vulgar cant. NM brought the memories all back earlier this week when she threw up her hands in exasperation and declared "Calm is not a flavor! Refresh is not a flavor! Just tell me what the tea tastes like instead of telling me how to feel!" If she had been a tea, she would have been Rage.

I'd had a little Rage Tea(TM) today when I got to Starbucks for a much-needed post-conference-call sugar shock, and I was reminded of another thing that used to bother a more vibrant, more vital version of me: the Barista Who Thinks You Are Friends. She knows your name! (Well, she knows the Anglo-Frankish version of it.) She remembers that you work in the area! (Or has deduced this from the fact that you're wearing a suit and pumps.) Most of all, she remembers your drink. Except that she doesn't. She has perhaps mixed you up with another person of your gender and ethnicity, but you've never actually ordered that particular proportion of caffeine, sugar syrup, and milk fat that she is currently conjuring onto the side of the white paper cup. So you have to interrupt her tellingly efficient demonstration of intimacy (because really, all this treacle is meant to keep you moving as quickly as possible through the line and out the door before you realize that all this Old World bonhomie is essentially the carcass of a sheep draped grotesquely over the wolf who devoured it). You have to tell her that, in conscious betrayal of all you've been through together, you want to order something else. And for no good reason, you are embarrassed by this. They have tricked you into being ashamed of offering them money in exchange for the thing that you want.

The smartest thing I ever read about Starbucks comes from a Slate.com article by Jacob Weisberg: "The unappreciated business genius of Starbucks is not charging $4 for a latte but rather giving adults permission to drink milkshakes, on the pretext that they are merely tea or coffee." The baristas' drink-memorization gambit reinforces this notion, that an upside-down caramel macchiato with whip cream and chocolate sprinkles is just the way you take your coffee, in the same way that someone else might have it black with two sugars. Rather than a liquified candy snack (presaging a wider movement away from solid food), it is something that you can reasonably be expected to drink every morning and not tire of; it is a 300-calorie part of your routine, and therefore your identity. And changing that, suddenly and without warning, is a betrayal. It's a betrayal of yourself, and a betrayal of your friend, the barista.

aproposition

You don't have to be insane to take a shot at a politician. You just have to honestly believe in your heart what so many people keep saying on the news: that that person is essentially a Nazi who is going to kill your grandmother. This is where the unconscionable state of our political discourse has gotten us.

oxymoronic

So, because I'm only sporadically diligent about blogging, I've decided to become a fully integrated web personage and connect my Twitter feed to my Blogspot* and Facebook* Wall. Now, if I ever need to create a downloadable** version of my personality based on my digital footprint, a la CAPRICA, I will have an easier time of it.

*Apparently Blogspot's spell-check doesn't recognize the word "Blogspot," which, ya know, it coined. Similarly, Facebook's spell-check doesn't recognize the word "Facebook."

**This is really a silly way to recreate someone's personality. Think of all the web applications you share, or all the things you've purchased online for other people. If someone tried to do this to me based on my Amazon and Netflix accounts, they might very well end up with a marathon-running homosexual man who really, really likes children's art supplies.

momentum momentous

I do not understand E3's insistence that I flail about while playing video games, when what I actually want is to be able to play video games while lying utterly prostrate, surrounded by down pillows and sleeping puppies.

At some point, the dominant narrative coming out of E3 became something like "normal people are going to love this new motion sensor crap; hardcore gamers are just being haters because they are fat slobs who disdain movement and sweating."

The thing is, I already do lots of flailing and sweating...at the gym. When I come home from the gym, I want to shoot Nazi zombies in the face while splayed upon the couch in a digitally-induced stupor. If Sony, Nintendo, or Microsoft could design a discrete, spill-proof bedpan and a robot to feed me grapes during loading screens, now that would seriously improve my gaming experience. And it's not as though home video game exercise is going to replace real exercise, which requires sufficient space and/or equipment, and more importantly, movements that have little if anything to do with video game actions. It's not as if I can get a Kinect and then suddenly cancel my gym membership. Gaming is a certain kind of experience and exercise is a certain kind of experience, and while combining them can be fun in certain, limited situations (Wii tennis) it will usually be a dilution of both. They already sell televisions welded to exercise equipment, and it certainly hasn't revolutionized how most people watch TV. I'm doubtful, too, that it has resulted in more people exercising.

In short, if a first-person shooter ever tries to make me actually run to shoot something, I will punch it in the face, pick up a Tom Clancy novel, and crawl into bed.

stray thoughts on bad movies: The A Team

Two in one month!

1. In one early scene, a character makes a huge deal about Fate and how Fate brought these two people together and how you can't ignore Fate,...and then Fate is NEVER MENTIONED AGAIN, because the writers apparently couldn't come up with a better way to explain how two people meet at the beginning of a story.

2. B.A. Baracus isn't just a magical black man; he has a magical black van that materializes in the desert when the white guys need rescuing, and then is promptly destroyed for a cheap emotional beat as soon as they no longer need it.

3. In two separate scenes, fake dramatic tension is created by the characters' inexplicable refusal to simply move laterally out of harm's way. Nothing is preventing them from moving laterally except the movie's need for them to almost die so that we will have a reason in Hell to care about what happens to them.

4. Movies like these (dubbed "radtarded" by AS) often find me rooting for the villain because, due to poor plotting, he is usually the smartest person on screen. His victories come from considerable effort on his part and not from things magically occurring to his benefit. Heroes are much more likely to get undeservedly lucky because the movie needs them to succeed, but no one could be bothered to figure out why exactly they would.

5. This movie had eleven writers.

stray thoughts on bad movies: Sex and the City 2

1. Opening lines of narration: "Once upon a time, there was an island, some Dutch, some Indians, and some beads." This is an unpromising, albeit accurate, preview of the movie's ear for global politics and race relations.

2. The Prestons' Great Recession Horror Story is to have moved from the palatial penthouse suite into a more modestly mansion-like apartment twelve floors down. The camera shots are designed to show us the thrifty narrowness of their fifty bajillion damask-draped rooms. Not for the last time, I find myself thinking this is sort of what Versailles looked like, before the pitchforks and beheadings. Of course, they still keep Carrie's old apartment, which essentially functions as her (second) giant walk-in closet. Like ya do.

3. This is a movie about Americans traveling in the Middle East, and not once does a single person utter the word "war." Apparently the “New Middle East” is actually an alternate dimension lacking in shoulder-mounted, surface-to-air, anti-aircraft missile launchers, IEDs, and armed conflict in general.

4. Speaking of explosives, every time we see shots of those four white cars driving in caravan through the desert, I hope that one of them will blow up and this will turn into an entirely different kind of movie. Maybe the kidnappers will send Big a ridiculous beplumed shoe or atrocious hat as proof of life.

5. Remind me when I’m married to occasionally cheat on my husband, so that he’ll buy me jewelry intended to serve as a kind of gaudy choke chain for reminding me that I’m married.