This is just to say:

byob_kenobi has suffered a monitor failure, so is offline and will be for a while. She doesn't know how long, but she wanted me to let y'all know what was up. She's been able to access AIM but not Yahoo Messenger via phone, so those of you who keep in touch via AIM should be able to find her that way.

(no subject)

In the year 2005 I resolve to: Drink more beer. Get your resolution here

...yes. Yes I do.


Yesterday, iuliamentis and I had our annual Christmas break Movie Day, where we hit the movie theater and pack three movies into a single day (three seems to be the limit; we occasionally talk about attempting a four-movie year, but nothing ever comes of it.)

This year's movies were Ocean's 12, Sideways, and Closer. I'd like to say something coherent about them, but I'm not feeling very coherent right now, so:

Ocean's 12: My god the pretty. If what you wanted after Ocean's 11 was more of the guys hanging out, bickering, and being the prettiest gang of thieves you ever laid eyes on, and thought the only thing missing was a hot arch-rival and Terry Benedict deciding to play Bond villain... this is the movie for you. ( Little Spoilerish Thing )

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After Ocean's 12 we had some time to kill; I think we mostly just sat on a couch in the lobby waiting for the Dippin' Dots machine to be refilled and talking about how attractive Brad Pitt is until it was time to go sit in the theater for...

Sideways: I've been trying to work out what personality flaw makes me unable to like this movie. Possibly it's that I'm shallow; despite perfectly slashy main characters, I wasn't able to really enjoy it as much as I had, say, Ocean's 12 an hour before. Possibly it just suffered by comparison to the flash-bang-overwhelmingly-pretty experience of Ocean's 12. I like movies with some flash-bang to them. Capers and hijinks and gunfire and stuff blowing up are all big cinematic pluses in my book. In Sideways, there were none of those things. What there were were people talking. People I didn't like, talking. Mostly, they talked about wine, although occasionally they strayed onto the topic of how sad their lives were. Iulia and I walked out about ten minutes after Sandra Oh's character appeared, when it became obvious that a) she wasn't going to singlehandedly make the movie entertaining and b) Thomas Haden Church's character probably wasn't going to fuck Paul Giamatti's character just to make him stop whining. So if either of those things happened in the last hour of the movie, um. Don't tell me. I'm happier not knowing.

Our early exit from Sideways gave us an hour to kill in the lobby before Closer started, which we spent crammed together on a couch discussing boykissing and gay porn. Fairly loudly. Because that's what we do, apparently. It put us in a pretty good frame of mind for...

Closer: OMFG. Movie opens with Jude Law in glasses and Natalie Portman being just gorgeous. And everyone is likable, um, to start with, and the dialogue is snappy and sparkling and everything you'd expect of a film adapted from the stage, and you're sort of cruising along and then ( Mildly spoilerish )

So in short, wow. Go see that movie.

Yuletide reveal!

My two yuletide stories, Two Heroes, written for wayfairer, and Hunde, written for _aerye_, are now also up at my site. I was totally overwhelmed by the response to these stories, so thank y'all who liked them and commented and recced very, very kindly.

Also, Susan, I know Tom doesn't smoke, but I thought you might not mind. ;)

And now that I know who you are, I'd like to say thanks again and by name to Parhelion, my Yuletide santa, for writing the absolutely lovely story The Councils of Despair. I love it to pieces!

Hockey AU update

150,013 words. 333 pages. 27 1/2 scenes to go.

I had, incidentally, thought that the story was going to be 150,000 words long, and had hoped to finish it at the end of the calendar year, so I guess that would have worked out fine if I'd been right about the length. Ah, well. Back to the salt mines.