doitninetimes

I'm procrastinating going to bed, even though going to bed late is going to undo all the great napping I did this afternoon, but whatever.

I did want to talk about this summer's movies, and how I've actually seen a surprising number of them, despite working my ass off on field work for 4 months. I saw:

- Star Trek: INTO DARKNESSSSSSS
Actually pretty entertaining, for the most part. I think my favorite was the scene(s) from the trailer, which were BEAUTIFUL and hysterical.

- Gatsby
Really really lovely, but ... maybe a little too true to the atmosphere of the books? Also, Leo hitting on Carey Mulligan was TOTES CREEPY. Also, Toby Maguire's face just bothers me to infinity. But Carey was ultra-charming as Daisy, and I though did a wonderful job of bringing an often unsympathetic character who is basically there to be a manic pixie girl for Gatsby. inmyriadbits and I also spent a lot of time talking about how really homoerotic the relationship between Nick Carroway and Gatsby was in this adaptation, although nearly entirely one-sided? It was interesting. Despite having a ton of stuff to say about it (apparently), I didn't come away from it loving it as much as I wanted to.

- Pacific Rim
ROBOTS. PUNCHING. SEA MONSTERS. Also, The Mary Sue had some really great stuff to say about gender roles, but all I can say is that as a person who generally is willing to suspend disbelief as high and long as necessary and never really notices the quality of acting, the dude who played Raleigh (sp?) was SO TERRIBLE. Like. I just couldn't find anything he did to be terribly compelling. The closest he came was when he confronted SPOILER about SPOILER. But otherwise, I loved the cheesyness of it. I loved the world-building, and I am super stoked to read a million Jaeger-pilot AU's in ALL THE FANDOMS!

- Elysium (TOMORROW)

Somehow, I thought there was another, but I'm probably thinking of Much Ado About Nothing with Clark Gregg, which I think I've missed on the big screen, tragically.

There are a bunch of other movies I would love to see, but free time is scarce a lot of the time. ONE DAY. Until then, I'm just going to mainline episodes of Dog Whisper on Hulu.

As a whole, I find the concept of the TED talks a bit ridiculous/patronizing/so 1.0, but on an individual basis, they do end up quite interesting, at least in the moment I'm watching them.

( Education, group learning, fandom collective action, creativity and inspiration! You know you want to read it )

Tenuously related to the above, I want to briefly pimp ItunesU/Open Courseware/etc. While a lot of the most popular stuff is geared toward computer education, there are a TON of college classes FREE over a very wide array of subjects (including languages), and they are kind of fun and useful. In my dreamiest of dreams, there would be a fandom com dedicated to 'taking' classes together, because I am a gigantic nerd like that. I'm currently watching an intro computer science course from Stanford (Programming Methodology, if anyone cares), and the prof is very engaging, if nothing else.

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And on a slightly administrative note, I wrote a brief and completely incomplete overview of using RSS readers to substitute for the old Delicious Network page. If that is a thing any of you want to do and you have any questions or run into problems, I cannot promise to be able to answer them at all, but I will do my best to help!

In personal news, I'm going to start 'volunteering' at my theoretical job either Friday or Monday (and I have to spend the intervening time giving myself a pep talks about having a concrete money conversation no matter how much I don't want to) and build up some serious off-record vacation time. I will use this vacation time to take off some extra time over the holidays and most importantly, most of the SXSW week. *\o/*