kiev4am

I'm just throwing this out here for anyone to see because it's so awesome: Retronaut. If you like abandoned buildings, old photographs, weird memorabilia, vintage or retro, history's junkpiles, haunting or poignant figments of the past of any kind, this is the site for you. Just don't come crying to me when you find it's done a TVTropes on you and sucked up your whole afternoon, that's all :)

I love that my Google homepage is asking me to buy stuff from the Android Market. The fact that this conjures up a mashup of Chiba City in Neuromancer, the street vendor bits in 'Blade Runner' and the troll market in 'Hellboy 2' - rather than some boring website selling phone apps - makes me happy. And a big nerd, obviously.

Well, not really, but obligatory Oz reference for high winds blah blah. So we already had the Big Bad Storm Force Winds last week, with schools & colleges closing and me running about in the garden like Auntie Em putting everything not nailed down into the shed and bracing for impact. And it was pretty bad, with anecdotes of people getting hit by flying wheelie bins and video of wind turbines blowing up from the strain. Now it's doing it again with no apparent warnings; the whole house is creaking and wheezing, wind is whistling through the back door keyhole and banging the kitchen vent, and we seem to be surrounded by broken-down, flapping plank fences in imminent danger of acting like unhinged ceiling-fan blades. It's the sound of chaos, of random wild things flying out of nowhere to hit you, and I'm starting to understand why cats go crazy in this kind of weather. It's like a drunken tirade, scaling down and then gathering energy for one more rant. Being harangued by nature.

ETA - now the wind's playfully rolling the garden bench around. Nope, not going out anywhere today.

Random thoughts:

1. That was a way better film than I was expecting it to be. Mainly because of Michael Fassbender, who carried his own 'totally different movie' field with him into every scene, and then stole that scene.

2. Early 60s decor and fashion, fun. X-kids hanging out and showing off, fun. Evil Kevin Bacon, hell yeah fun.

3. Killing the black man and having the black woman defect to the bad guys in the same scene, less fun. Even for Hollywood that's pretty special. Two infinitely editable, non-essential plot points that do nothing but gratuitously alienate people and make it a lesser film. So much for the 60s civil rights allegory. And it's Darwin. Evolve to survive != die, ffs.

4. The good guys want Mystique to change her body or hide it forever and the future bad guy doesn't. Yeah, I like the future bad guy right now.

5. Oh, so that's where all the Erik/Xavier fic is coming from. I most definitely get it.

6. I want someone to take the scale, style, fun and actorishness of this film, throw away the crap from #3 and #4, and make X-Factor Investigations, The Movie. They can do that silly acronym thing and call it XFI if they want to. Get PAD on the script. It would be awesome.

I've been trying to get it together to write a proper entry about films and stuff, and then another one about writing, because I'm aware my shiny new LJ with its shiny new good intentions has gone a bit quiet already. But I still don't have those entries finished and I'm getting stupidly, regressively hung up on writing issues so here, randomly, is my current desktop picture. It's been my desktop picture for a while now, because I really struggle to find something to look at so regularly that makes me feel as instinctively happy as this does, for no intelligent reason. I mostly think it's the joyous pitch at which it shouts COMICS! in your face; but it also seems to work as a visual antidote to dithering, colourlessness and nerves when I sit at the laptop. Sliding Albion, in the house.

( Big noisy pretty comic page )