kiev4am: (Default)
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 :)
kiev4am: (rictor)
Once in a while there's a film that makes me glad to be a geek. I finally saw 'Cowboys and Aliens' and loved it. I loved the way it was an absolutely straight-down-the-line western complete with a Man With No Name, scrubland, canyons, stray dogs, Biblical-named town, cowed townsfolk, wastrel rich boy shooting up the place, heartless cattle baron and a whole fistful of 'Searchers'-style empty-house, open-door-to-sepia-daylight shots. And then it had aliens, and it was still a completely straight-faced, dusty, deliberate western. With aliens. Oh, and a beautiful upside-down paddle steamer.

I liked Daniel Craig doing his best Lee Van Cleef and Keith Carradine doing his best Sam Elliott and I especially liked Harrison Ford getting to play his real age and be the evil-tempered old bastard of the piece. He barely cracked a smile, but he snarled and cragged and grouched and gnawed the scenery like a true Leone stalwart and generally looked like he was having enormous fun not being personable any more. I also sort-of appreciated the way the enigmatic, otherworldly beauty you so often find in washed-out backwater ghost towns (cough) really was otherworldly. It helped explain Olivia Wilde's eerie perfection and Keanu-like blankness.

It was an affectionate, daft, flashy mash-up of a film that meandered a bit towards the end, pulled every western trope out of the bag and closed with the classic 'Time Machine' gambit of blow-them-all-up-and-run-like-hell. But who cares. It had grizzled Harrison Ford, on a horse, shooting spaceships with a Colt - what more could you want?

Pfff.

Feb. 10th, 2012 06:44 pm
kiev4am: (tabby)
Han never shot first, says George Lucas.

OH COME ON.

Totally worth making a whole new tag for.
kiev4am: (tabby)
I love Peter David's X-Factor. I hate that its sales figures are always so dangerously low for such a critically acclaimed, beautifully constructed, thoughtful, fun comic. And yet right now I want to slap upside the head all the people on forums who are saying they'll definitely pick up the book now that Havok and Polaris are in it, as if the core cast, the characters David has done so much awesome development with and woven so many excellent stories around, are just an annoying add-on that they're tolerating. Part of me wants to say no, please, just stay with your big proper X-books and leave X-Factor out of your rabid following-characters-without-caring-who-writes-them thing; if you didn't appreciate this book before then it's wasted on you. But then, sales. Hmph.
kiev4am: (Default)
I want someone to create software that will cleverly take a script, drabble or ficlet and turn it magically into a piece of fanart. Honestly, I have so many dorky little ideas for fanart that amuse me, but I can't draw for crap. I'm almost tempted to try and teach myself to draw just to get these little scenes and gags out of my system, but the results would be so embarrassing; I'm pretty sure it's not something you can learn at my age unless you're already talented in that direction. Thwarted geekdom. Hmph.
kiev4am: (hee)
...is beautiful, loopy and intriguing, with a side of magnificent fanservice.

I'm Kiev, I know stuff. Spoilers. )

Tumblr'd

Dec. 2nd, 2011 12:44 pm
kiev4am: (Default)
I finally got myself a Tumblr login, just so I could maybe follow a couple more blogs than the handful I look at already, just one or two, you know. I've found specific blogs via Google, but never really browsed Tumblr itself.

One endless rabbit-hole of internet time suckage later...

OH GOD SO MANY BLOGS. Book design and Soviet cameras and modern architecture and lots and lots of comic stuff aaaaand that's an hour of my life every day I'll be giving to this shiny new blog aggregator, then. Awesome.
kiev4am: (Default)
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.
kiev4am: (underwood)
I shouldn't want this, it's far too geeky even for me and the wanky reactionary old git part of me deplores the increasing dilution of the 'proper notebooks for proper writers' boring black Moleskine aesthetic. And then I go eeeeeee, Star Wars Moleskine!

http://www.thepaperie.co.uk/brands/moleskine/star-wars-collection/moleskine-star-wars-limited-edition-pocket-ruled-notebook.html

I think I'd need more appropriate manglings of Star Wars quotations on mine, though.

"If there's a bright centre to literature, you're in the notebook that it's farthest from."

"Aren't you a little short for a novel?"

"I find your lack of plot disturbing."

And of course, "Sorry about the mess."
kiev4am: (Default)
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 )
kiev4am: (Default)
This is probably one of those things that everybody else discovered on Google years ago, but what the hell. This guy built a fully functioning steampunk laptop, and it is a thing of beauty. The steampunk aesthetic has hit the mainstream in the last couple of years, with the usual degrading effects (Look, it has a cogwheel! It must be steampunk!), but this laptop is the real deal, a work of incredible craftsmanship with the concept integrated into every detail. It's lovely.

Edit: Oh wow, he makes keyboards as well. Just look at some of these keyboards! I want that Art Deco one badly. Or the Aliens-style industrial one. Guh. I may have to create a 'gadget porn' tag just for this.

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May 2012

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