melannen: Commander Valentine of Alpha Squad Seven, a red-haired female Nick Fury in space, smoking contemplatively (Default)
melannen ([personal profile] melannen) wrote2013-05-08 05:31 pm

Finally update!

Hi people! Long time, no post. short explanation: tag wrangling has eaten all my free online time. basically. (new wranglers are awesome! But they have, like, energy, and ideas, and questions, so there's stuff we've been putting of that's suddenly being worked on, and I've been spending a lot of time in wrangler chat now that it's constantly full of new wranglers with energy, and ideas, and questions. So there goes what remains of my online interaction energy.)

Anyway! TODAY I SAW IRON MAN III. (Because Interrobang Studios headquarters are holding their bi-annual 24-hour-geekery house party on Saturday and Sunday, so if I wanted to go unspoiled it had to be soon.)

Notes on previews:
1. Star Trek movie: Cumberbund did not impress me. Nor did all the grimy non-star trek looking action shots. :/ There was about half a second of a blonde in science blues who looked like Elizabeth Dehner though, so I perked up!

2. Do we really need a movie featuring Johnny Depp playing Jack Sparrow playing Tonto? (I'm willing to entertain the possibility that the answer is 'yes', but I'm currently doubtful.)

3. I do however really need Valjean!Wolverine. REALLY REALLY NEED, guys.

4. I don't think I'll be able to watch Thor II, at least not in the theaters. :/ When you dress Natalie Portman up like a space princess, she looks like Padme Amidala, and I get terrible flashbacks.

5. If I didn't already know the story of Gatsby and that it is all things Do Not Want, that movie might actually be one I'd like.

6. ...I don't think there were *any* movies in those previews that weren't sequels, remakes, adapations of books or comics, or sequels to remakes of adapations... (This is another reason we need a limited copyright term, guys: if they'll eventually lose control of their cash cows, they actually have motivation to create *new* stories and characters...)


1. That was awesome.
2. Need Tony/Rhodey/Pepper guys. ALL OF IT. I really hope this has inspired a bunch of Tony And His Non-Avengers-Friends fic, because they are all the best and they make the best team okay.
3. Speaking of creating your demons, I also need the fic where the boy's little sister becomes one of the world's top weapons designers OUT OF SELF DEFENSE SO SHE CAN SURVIVE HER CHILDHOOD and then comes after Tony for revenge. YOU DON'T GIVE A LITTLE BOY AN ENGINEERING LAB AND THEN NOT GIVE ONE TO HIS SISTER OKAY TONY. This kind of thing is why people keep trying to blow you up.
4. That was a lot of Tony-building-things-porn. I approve HIGHLY.
5. I probably would have enjoyed the post-credits scene if I hadn't spent it going "Is that who I think it is? I hope it's who I think it is. but his hairstyle is slightly different and in that lighting he kind of just looks like any-given-middle-aged-white-character-actor. I'm going to have to wait for somebody else to confirm it's him before I squee, it would be embarrassing if I got it wrong." (I admit it, I advocate diversity in casting not out of a desire for better representation but out of an inability to tell 'pretty' white people apart if they change their hairstyles.)
ETA 6. DOUBLE BECHDEL PASS. Involving four different women! (I choose to believe that at least three of them are still alive at the end of the movie okay.) ...our standards are so low.


Um. Okay. Hmm. Other things:

I have joined the beta of GrowStuff, [personal profile] skud's food gardening community website, where I am sort of live-blogging my annual doomed attempt at vegetable gardening, so if you'd like to observe me moaning as my plants slowly die over the course of the summer, that's there. (And you should also join the beta if you have an interest in awesome open-source projects and in growing things you can eat!)

Also if you remember that giant HOW TO TAG thing I posted awhile back, I keep staring at it and being scared of how much revising it needs, so in the meantime yesterday I posted five-simple-ways-to-improve-your-ao3-tags on Tumblr, which pulls out the bits of that which I most DESPERATELY wish more people would figure out. Spread it around? I am always surprised how many users don't know this stuff.

Um and also I got tired of doing wrangling the other day so just to prove I could actually make things, I coded a Random AO3 Work Generator. It's coded using my l33t web design skills c.1997 (FRAMES ARE AWESOME OKAY) and also it'll only find works that were posted before the last time I went in and manually updated the maximum works number1, and the error handling consists of 'if there's an error, press the button again' but it does to a pretty good job of getting you random AO3 works! Many of them poorly tagged and sadly un-kudos'd. :/ Also here's a fun game to play: press the 'random' button until you find a work you've already read. Then divide 800,000 by the number of times you had to press the button, and you get the approximate number of works on AO3 that you've read. (multiple trials improve accuracy, of course. My number hovers around 10,000...)

...and finally: [personal profile] luzula podficced One Warm Line (the fic where Ray Kowalski meets the Winter Lady), and I have listened to it ummmumble times since I got the notification. You should listen to it too! Luzula's voice actually works *really well* for the Maeve in my head, and she even handled the random Welsh and Inuktitut I threw in there. :D (though there's nothing as excruciating as the lingering typo in your fic that looks like a real word so the podficcer reads it as-is even though they were clearly confused by it...) (also did i really think I could get away with using "twisty passages" and "gently caress" in the same sentence? What is wrong with you, me?)

1 I thought it should be possible to go in and automatically get the number off the AO3 latest works page once in awhile, but apparently the internet is set up to not let javascript do this by itself? And if I'm going to mess with more-than-javascript I should just learn proper AO3 coding already...

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