Just My Imagination

How cute is this?

Okay, terrible picture taken with the laptop upside down over my desk, but I would have eaten them all in the time it would have taken to find my camera cable. :)

Conclusion: I messed up the rice but this little press worked perfectly anyway. It would be even better with proper sushi rice, in tiny little homemade bento boxes for school. Thanks much to my sister for the gift.

This is kind of meta, or something:
Using an online translator to find the french word for thesaurus so I could then go find synonyms for a french word.
I got a bit distracted by the "visualize semantic space" button on the results page.

Clicking it was not particularly enlightening:



In other news my room is finally organized and I have a kickass little basket for the front of my bike. Oh the things I get done when I'm procrastinating. :)

I went to see the movie again and have to amend my previous statements a little bit. I caught a lot more, including Joker bits that I kept my eyes open for this time around. There's still some level on which he's not quite believable to me. I'm not quite sure how to explain it but I think it's that I couldn't quite make sense of his madness. Where I realized he was brilliant was that his character in a bizarre way inspires sympathy at some moments. He describes himself as reasonable even though it's all insanity and cruelty. It's like the cat sweetly telling the mouse he's doing him a favor even as he eats him. Something about his sheepish "hi" to Harvey Dent in the hospital...he's play-acting but he means it.

The scene in the building with the SWAT team had gone totally over my head the first time...what happens is that the Joker succeeds in turning everything upside down. The captives are the bad guys, the shooters are the good guys, Batman has to fight the cops to keep them from killing who they're trying to save. Brilliant.

I started crying at the /exact/ same moment after seeing it the second time (as soon as Gordon's wife starts screaming...and then harder when I find out what Batman has to become). I think filmmakers have magical buttons, someone may have to enlighten me.

P. S. I was seriously pretty sad about the Rachel thing, fictional character though she may be. Know what made me feel much better? Youtube videos setting a sequence of dramatic shots of Bruce/Harvey/Rachel to very heart-wrenching music. Seriously, people. Reminds me of this (essentially the same thing for the movie version of The Fountainhead), which I'm still laughing about. Be sure not to miss the very end of the video!

No offense meant to any of the video creators, it looks like a daunting amount of work compiling those clips and making it all match the music. They mostly prompted me to laugh at myself for taking it a bit too seriously. :) ...although I still say Ayn Rand would be spinning in her grave at the music chosen for the Domenique one (Roark thinking a woman out of his league??)

I need a category for tiny electronic gadgets.
This is a micro-SD card reader. It is freaking cute and I want one.

It will go perfectly with my future tiny laptop.

Edit: Darn it! My future tiny laptop already has a card reader. I suppose that's a good thing. :)

Should I do the cluster challenge this year?

Dunno.

Gah.

Halloo. Haven't posted in a while but it seemed like a good idea tonight. I tried to start another blog on crafty stuff but I can't stay on topic to save my life so I'm lumping it all back together.

First: The Dark Knight, a review for the faint of heart.

Note: SPOILER ALERT and so forth. There is crafty stuff further down, skip to that if you don't want the movie ruined.

I did some review-reading and it seems as though everyone's favorite part was how amazing the Joker was. Sucks for me because I missed most of the scenes with him in it. :) See, I don't handle jump-out-at-you or gory bits in movies well at all. And by don't handle I mean I cover my eyes and sometimes ears when I think there might be one (but of course I love plot details so when it's safe to come out I bug whoever is watching next to me to explain what happened, fair warning not to watch movies with me). So that pencil thing...I did not find out nor do I want to know where it ended up, thank you kindly. And I wish I'd missed the part about his dad but it turns out to be quite difficult to block your ears properly when sitting in the front row at an imax movie (we got there a bit late). However, it was worth it to hear Heath Ledger's freaking amazing and classic "why so serious??"...amazing and indelible.
I'm still a little torn up about the whole Rachel/Harvey/Bruce subplot. I didn't lose hope until right at the end that they'd find her in some other warehouse, slightly peeved and hungry but otherwise unharmed. I was reminded gently that we did actually see the explosion and her in the same shot. Sniff.
I thought this over for a while and I decided it wasn't that she thought less of Bruce because he didn't stand up and take the fall rather than having Harvey do it. She realized she could never really have him, whereas Harvey was genuinely hers...to the point where he broke when he lost her. Poor Batman's pretty good at loving and taking care of people without asking anything in return ("you don't have to thank me") or being loved back (letting them chase him at the end). Though in the end Rachel showed she was human when she went back on her promise to him, and I'm not so sure he could be there for someone real, he'd internalized too much of his own legend.

Completely different topic: I found an awesome yarn store in Tempe! It's called Tempe Yarn and Fiber and it's super close to where I used to live. I was excited because I'm always looking for cool non-chain crafty stores here, I miss that like crazy about the Bay Area. I don't really knit, but I like looking at pretty yarn so I went and checked it out. They have a very nice selection (from a non-expert's point of view) and the ladies who worked there were super friendly. This made me feel rather bad that I hadn't planned on buying anything until I noticed their fleece section in the back. Omigoodness they have the most beautiful colors, and having been used to working with regular wool roving I was not prepared for how amazingly soft merino is. Soooooooooooooooft oh. <3 Plus...it's not that expensive! Most of it was $2.00 an ounce, and an ounce is a lot for someone who likes making teeny things. I picked out six colors and got a half-ounce each (got a lesson when I watched the lady pull off the right amount for me: tearing off bits is much much better than cutting them). I should post the colors but I'll post something I made with them for now. The hair is this incredible purple multicolor mixture with silk in it, it absolutely needed to be mermaid hair.

Behold a sea girl and her Merbie.














ALSO someone left cran-grape juice in my fridge and he is wonderful.