...is at least 70% romantic comedy. XD David Yates (the director) has excellent comic timing!

Overall impressions:

1. Hermione is still the hottest thing on screen. Ginny really can't compete, poor thing.
2. Rupert Grint is actually a really good actor! I hadn't realized because the scriptwriter never gives Ron enough to do.
3. Dan Radcliff is still the weakest link, HANDS DOWN, but he was fun to watch in the good-luck-potions-make-Harry-feel-invincible scenes (and obviously had fun performing them, too).
4. Jim Broadbent WAS PERFECT as Professor Slugworth, whoever made that casting call deserves a medal.

( more )

In conclusion this movie totally deserves the high score it got at Rotten Tomatoes.

Back from Europe and moved into the apartment! Suppose I'll just repost from twitter again, to save time:

( Less quirky than France trip tweets, mostly because I was half responsible for planning on this trip. Reserving trains and buses, and getting to the airport on time, these things are enjoyable in their own way but not so much fun to read about )

I realize that some of these tweets are kind of... mysterious... but there are some things I'd rather not write down where my parents might read about them, XD. But some other highlights were:

( more )

Hmmm, I suppose that's everything. My brother has pictures up to Belfast on his facebook - same last name, and first name is Alex, for those of you who know me over there.

Long time no post, huh? I've been doing some paralegal-ish things for my father, eating out in NYC more nights than not and catching the midnight train home or not coming home at all. Or in other words, spending too much money, a trend that is going to continue until July - have plans to meet my brother in Europe! The flight leaves, um, tomorrow. Here's the itinerary:

June 13 (AM): London
June 17 (AM): Rome
June 21 (AM): Belfast (via London Stampstead airport - currently contemplating changing the flight from Rome to London to June 20 (AM) for band-obsession-related reasons, but that's another story)
June 22 (PM): Dublin
June 25 (AM): Newcastle

And my flight back to NJ leaves on Sunday, June 28th. This is short notice, but anyone lives in or around the aforementioned cities and wants to meet up, just drop a line.

As for the REAL reason I haven't been around much... I'm seeing someone. ^_____^ One of Aki's friends. It's sort of funny, of the three people at dinner I'd never met before, J and R became friends, A tried to pick me up, and I picked R up. Either Aki has very good taste in friends, or we all really needed to expand our social circles. :p

(Okay so that's a lie, I didn't actually pick R up. What ACTUALLY happened was, I took a hint for the first time in my life. Body language reading skills, level up!)

[There was some analysis-of-appeal type stuff on R here, but on reflection, probably better to keep the details to myself or at least not share them with the whole wide web. But yeah: R's a girl. *g*]

I'd never been to a music festival before, wasn't sure what to expect, but Bamboozle was totally worth the price! Saw:

( These bands )

Korean BBQ in NYC tonight, followed by karaoke late into the night. absenceofmind is ♥

As of yesterday! Harumi, I didn't forget about you. Just didn't have computer access most of the time. Look for an email by noon tomorrow, Japan time.

Suppose I'll repost from twitter, just to have a halfway readable record. I borrowed my brother's BlackBerry for most of these.

( In order, removed some @ replies )

Looks like this weekend is going to be a grrrrrrreat time - music festival at the Meadowlands and absenceofmind flying in from the west coast! Plus dinner on Sunday with, like, nine people. All hail summertea queen of planning.

I have one. Thank you, Tari~

No invites to hand out, but drop a line if you're interested. The site opens to the public April 30th, but those without invite codes will have to pay. (Same as early days on LJ, though I wasn't around for that.) The moderators are also randomly giving out invite codes to people who sign up with OpenID, I'm told, so that is another thing to try.

Dreamwidth is a non-profit social networking site based on LJ code and fronted by synecdochic (denise on DW). She and a few other people have been working on the code since Strikethrough 07, trying to give LJers a viable place to move to in case our corporate overlords (once SixApart, now SUP) become too unbearable.

The appeal of DW is that you can leave without really leaving, since DW allows crossposting and - in theory - the use of authenticated feeds. (Meaning the ability to read your LJ friendslist remotely. Though I'll believe that when I see it.) I'm a little bit torn, actually, since I know from experience that I am BAD at juggling multiple site identities. Will have to choose one or the other and don't have it in me to leave behind certain people and places here. Currently adopting a "wait and see" approach. I do think that LJ will shut down eventually, but that day may not come tomorrow, or even in the next few years.

Here's some other Why Dreamwidth stuff. As much as I don't really want to leave LJ, I am psyched to try DW out, partly because I hate seeing ads on my LJ (and don't want to pay SUP to make them go away), partly because I've never been in on the ground floor of a "new" networking scene before and am looking forward to having input into the design/coding/policy-making process, partly because it's new and exciting, and partly because I'm suffering from (a real or imagined sense of) overshare on this journal and on some level wouldn't mind starting over.

Though as we learn from this metafilter thread, YOU REMAIN YOU NO MATTER WHERE YOU ARE. XD; So I am trying not to make "new start!" my primary motivating factor. Or at least not as a magical fix for any (perceived) excesses in the conduct of my (online) social life.

Definitely not going to make any moves in one direction or the other for a while, at any rate. For one thing, I will be in on vacation in France! My flight leaves tomorrow. :)

Via summertea:

Amazon.com removes sales rankings from print books tagged GLBT. Also books with BDSM themes and (explicit) heterosexual erotica.

This matters not just because it distorts figures to make already marginalized groups look even smaller, but because unranked books won't show up on front-page search results.

List of affected books.

Affected works of classic literature include: Tipping the Velvet, Maurice, The Well of Loneliness, The Charioteer.

Affected works of nonfiction include: The Dictionary of Homophobia, Who's Who in Gay and Lesbian History, Unfriendly Fire: How the Gay Ban Undermines the Military and Weakens America.

Affected self-help books include: My Husband is Gay, The Way Out, Hello Cruel World: 101 Alternatives to Suicide for Teens, Freaks and Other Outlaws.

Though really it shouldn't matter whether a book is classic or not, nonfiction or not, explicit or not, A SUICIDE PREVENTION MANUAL or not. Suppression is suppression; manipulating sales data for political reasons is manipulating sales data for political reasons.

( three scenarios )

EDIT: ALTERNATE THEORY: trolls are responsible.

EDIT2: Statement from Amazon.

Updated post @ saiunkoku with links to translations of the novels:

http://community.livejournal.com/saiunkoku/265940.html

Next update should be in May, when the fourth gaiden comes out. I want to thank this blogger for her work since she isn't a member of the community, but as Charmian reminded me, LJ is BANNED in mainland China, so she wouldn't be able to see what I was thanking her for. ^^; Previously considered adding the links to my website (or WP blog) but was lazy and couldn't be bothered. Maybe I will do that now. Html-izing is tedious but it seems a shame for E-fandom to be almost totally cut off from C-fandom.

Orrrrr I could just (continue to) be lazy, and wait for someone else to add links to the wiki. ^^;

Note to self: DEMAND BACKPAY before applying for unemployment in two weeks. =_= Yeah, that's right, I'm out of a job. All it really means is that I now have a hard-and-fast reason to step up the job hunt, which I'd kind of let slide. In any other economic climate this would be a blessing in disguise. No, really. ^^ Decided not to do the low self esteem thing anymore so I am trying to convince myself that I am a blameless victim of the recession economy - they are eliminating my position - although the truth is that I haven't exactly been a model employee, either. More work, less procrastination...

Ah well, that's all in the past! Today I went to the Borders in Upper Saddle River and bought:

1. Peter Doherty - Grace/Wastelands
2. Graham Parsons - Grievous Angel
3. Yuki Urushibara - Mushishi vol. 6
4. Matsuri Hino - Vampire Knight vol. 6
5. Fuyumi Ono - The Twelve Kingdoms: The Vast Spread of the Seas

Flist fail! Why did no one tell me this was out?

Post on last weekend's mini-vacation at the other livejournal. Includes a review of Glasvegas, who weren't really worth coming back into town for, but at least now I know that. *g*

Finished a book on the train from Boston to NY - The Myth of the Paperless Office by Abigail J. Sellen (an anthropologist specializing office cultures - very cool!) and Richard H. R. Harper (an economist). This was groundbreaking when it came out...in 2003, which is probably why it was only $3 at MIT bookstore. ^^; Interestingly many things the authors claim paper does better have since been implemented electronically - like this desktop application which tries to imitate physical workspaces, or this site which supports annotation of webpages. Reminded that close reading is best accomplished with lots of highlighting and notetaking, I signed up for an account there. We'll see if this will help me to read online material less superficially.

Also finished Pattern Recognition. Hadn't realized that all of William Gibson's books are set in the same universe. See what petronia meant about a single narrator being hard to work with - I don't think everything that happened while the protagonist was in Tokyo was in-character. Wonder if more knowledge of systema - the Russian maritial art practiced by the KGB - would make the least interesting of the three protagonists in Spook Country more interesting. Speaking of Spook Country, diigo's web-annotating function really reminded me of the "geospatial" digital art in that book: an invisible world that intersects with ours in ways that only the properly-equipped are able to detect. Pattern Recognition also has that alternate-world thing going on, only this time the world is marketing. The protagonist, a coolhunter who is the daughter of a security expert, resists being drawn any world she won't be able to discuss over dinner. (I know how she feels.) She's investigating the source of a cult movie on the web. I really liked the footagehead angle, it felt familiar. XD; Lots of people in fandom who also have day jobs!

Biiiiig post on blip.fm and music fandom coming up. In fact it is so long that I've decided to put some reviews of bands here first:

The Whigs at Bowery Ballroom March 7: ( Read more... )

Mark Olson and Gary Louris CD came in the mail. Thoughts after listening to the whole thing: ( Read more... )