iron men

(One of these days I'll get back to books. I'm currently about halfway through Anathem, which is sort of like the thinky bits of the Steerswoman books set in the New Sun universe, and is also nine hundred pages, so it'll be a bit.)

uilos and I watched Iron Man on Tuesday night, and were pretty underwhelmed. (It's been a very long time since I saw someone hack into a computer by using the simple command "Access secret files.") Evil bald Jeff Bridges was pretty awesome. Other than that. . . it snapped my disbelief suspenders at the point where the bad guy sees Stark testing some sort of flexible leg armor and neither kills him immediately nor demands to know what the hell he's doing, and I never really recovered. I don't require those hours of my life back, but I'm pretty sure I could have come up with a better use for them.

I mention this because I saw Iron Man 2 last night with nixve and am now of the opinion that the first one was a cinematic masterpiece. Yow. I can't recall ever seeing a movie quite that relentlessly mediocre. Explosions and robot fights and pseudoscience that was an order of magnitude worse than in the previous film ("Congratulations! You've just discovered a new element! I've analyzed it and it can serve as a replacement power source!") and just very very little to recommend it. You'd think it's hard to go wrong with giant flying robots beating each other up but Iron Man 2 manages it.

I'd like to think that a movie like this lives or dies on the strength of its supporting cast. . . but Samuel L. Jackson was a great Nick Fury, and Sam Rockwell did an amazing job as the slimy and barely-competent industrialist Justin Hammer, and I'm tempted to nominate Garry Shandling for the Senate because he would fit right in at any hearing, and even they couldn't make it worth watching. And evil bald Jeff Bridges has been replaced by evil scruffy Mickey Rourke ("so, just Mickey Rourke"), and Don Cheadle is utterly wasted as Stark's sidekick, and Scarlett Johansson exists solely to traipse through hallways beating up security guards for a scene.

As a two-hour trailer for The Avengers. . . it makes me not want to see any more superhero movies.

i could use a vacation, i think

One of my favorite paintings, explicated: from rbandrews, who notes, "It just makes more sense as a triptych."

Interview with Danny Trejo: You know Danny Trejo, he plays the mean-looking Mexican in like a zillion movies. Here he talks about a bunch of them.

Shambling Mound: "To the tune of 'Ramblin' Man' by the Allman Brothers." The archives are pretty good too.

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I dunno, everything's been rather slow and dull lately. Biding time until I run off to the beach for a week of gaming. Work has been crazy with trying to ship an iPhone version of the software, and a server infrastructure that can deliver reports to same, in an exceedingly compressed timeframe. Writing, eh, somewhat, I've started a couple of things that may or not ever come to actual endings.

Running is easier when it's less humid. The temperature was fine this morning, it's just that inhaling nontrivial quantities of water along with oxygen causes my lungs to get cranky and stop wanting to work. Plus not being able to sweat efficiently leads to overheating, which as we all know leads to slower movement (not to mention erratic targeting and potential internal damage). So, ick. And it only gets worse from here.

Perhaps a week at the beach will revitalize me. I can hope.