Unsolicited Advice

A (fixable, yet annoying) bank snafu has just occurred in my life. None of you want to hear about my bank, so I am going to rave about an internet thing which is simultaneously unimportant to the fate of the cosmos, and absolutely vital to many people. It will be long and contain many digressions and footnotes and spoilers for comics you may not have read and potentially movies that are not out yet. You have been warned. I've been going through a lot of Captain America fanfic lately.  

As I mentioned yesterday, you will never convince me that Captain America: The Winter Soldier  is not the story of Steve Rogers going out to rescue the love of his life. Don't believe me? Go watch both of those movies again, while mentally swapping the roles of Peggy and Bucky. Peggy becomes the childhood friend and protector who watches over Steve until he kind of accidentally succeeds in enlisting and gets Vita-Ray'd by Dr Erskine. Bucky is the mysterious and awesome government agent who sweeps Steve off into the war effort and keeps an eye on him until he gets the chance to prove that he really is made for more than star-spangled dance numbers. Friend Peggy goes missing, gets rescued, has one-liners about his new size, snipes for him on missions; then gets peevish that suddenly Steve is spending all of his time with the cool kids, and she's been busted from beloved caretaker down to ensemble support. Agent Bucky finds Steve canoodling with the WACs and WAVES and Wrens ...

Seawall drew my attention to this a few days ago. Aside from the fact that this is one of the most unoriginal questions invented since "Hey, baby, what's your sign?", and the fact that she showed up to talk about a role she played and got asked about her ass instead, it's also boring journalism. I can tell you how she got into the catsuit; anyone with a shred of common sense knows there are only three answers she could possibly give to this question, should she roll her eyes and choose to humor the twit asking. Nothing. This is entirely possible, though rare. Some people are just shaped like that. One of the nice things about humans is that we come in a wide variety of forms. Some of them are bound to be shaped like Catwoman no matter what they do. Eats very little and moves constantly. This is how most people do it. Sometimes it's intentional, sometimes not. I never mean to, but I have such an irregular schedule that I forget to eat a lot of the time, and I...

My flatmate the cosmologist (who will henceforth be known as "David Goldberg", because when I asked him what he wanted his alias to be his first concern was that it project the correct air of 'nice Jewish boy from Jersey'  no I swear I cannot make this stuff up ) is a bit of an odd duck. Enumerating all of the reasons I say this would take a mid-length novel, but the pertinent one right now is that he loves costume parties, and particularly loves throwing them for his birthday. I actually showed up about twelve hours before the last one -- literally, my plane landed at 5am and I ended up napping on the sofa after being driven out from the airport by a cheerful madwoman named Jazmin, because at that point, between packing and freaking out and flying and time changes, I had been awake for something between two and three days. (If anyone is interested in the minutia of my life, I happened to have known said flatmate online before I moved out here, and when I called ahe...

For any of the Avengers fans curious about how the Stark + Banner bromance thing goes in the comic canon, I dug this here up for yas: Hulk vol 2 071 Hulk vol 2 072 Hulk vol 2 073 Hulk vol 2 074 It's pretty much just Stark and Banner for this short arc, with a few vaguely peripheral people of whom I have never heard before, and of whom no one probably ever heard again. A few notes, for context: Tony doesn't drink anymore. He dried himself out some years ago in the comics, because he noticed it was starting to interfere in his being a genius billionaire playboy philanthropist. This is basically the only way to get Tony to do anything. He has kept the rest of his world-famous collection of bad habits, on the basis that he is TONY motherfucking STARK and he can do whatever he wants. Bruce is on the run again, pretty much now and forever. He does typically show up when the Avengers assemble, but aside from that he spends most of his time being an itinerant supergenius an...

One of the very nicest things about the Kindle is that, when I am insomniac and dysphoric and bored and realize that the internet will rise up as one and slay me if I write one more freaking thing about the Incredible Hulk, is that it makes it very easy to at least pretend I'm fixing that. It handles PDFs natively, which means I can put the 400+ page Hebrew textbook on it and not dislocate my shoulder carrying it around. MIT and Harvard have also recently banded together (with a few other schools -- I think Stanford is in on this now, too) to publish a listing of free courses. You can't get an honest-to-God degree this way, but for a small fee you can get a load of certificates in whatever you manage to learn. It occurs to me that I may be able to use this as leverage to pry my way back into school, where I'm decidedly happier. And that if I can do so at one of the private institutions out here, there will be no faffing about with grants and loans -- if Harvard or MIT wa...

In which I apply way too much logic to the Hulk. Again. [small Avengers  spoiler. spoiler. spoiler spoiler spoily spoiler. this is getting monotonous, but i suppose it's better than being beaten by a rampaging mob of comic geeks.]

Finally got around to watching the Edward Norton Hulk  movie. And it is definitely that way around. It is not a Hulk film starring Edward Norton; it is an Ed Norton movie guest-starring the Hulk. I admit up front to not being a fan of his at all. His favorite themes in storytelling are pretty much the opposite of anything I find even remotely fun to watch or enlightening to ponder. They're generally good films for what they are, but what they are is not to my taste. Still, the compare and contrast between the character of Bruce Banner as written and played by Edward Norton and Bruce Banner as written by Joss Whedon and played by Mark Ruffalo is an interesting example of how far apart you can get with interpretations of comic book characters and still technically all be canon.

[[Edit: Hi, people from some kind of Iron Man message board. Poke around the blog to find other stuff on Avengers, Iron Man, and RDJ.]] When we went to see The Avengers  I was not expecting to be impressed by the Hulk. The green guy has not exactly had a good record on either the big or small screen. The Hulk's story is really just your basic werewolf tale, and it's far too easy to ham it up to the point of self-parody, making Banner nothing but a giant bucket of angst and the Hulk nothing but a really big blunt object. For some reason, the casting is also often terrible -- prior to the Norton version, their greatest success in the part was Lou Ferrigno. (Ferrigno is not actually a bad actor. YouTube has a few episodes of the infamous TV series, which happens to include one where a sudden infusion of plot-related unobtanium results in Ferrigno spending about an hour playing not-the-Hulk, and delivering lines other than "Rauuuuugh!" They manage to get tears out of ...

I went to go see The Avengers  on Friday night. If you had any interest in any of the preceding movies, GO SEE THE AVENGERS . Without spoiling anything, I will note that the ensemble cast was very well-balanced, and the script gave each hero at least one moment of unadulterated awesome that made the theater break into cheers. They kept the previous casting for everyone except Bruce Banner, and both the new nerdy dude and the CGI green guy are an improvement -- the new actor is charmingly understated as Banner and, via a new mo-cap technique, also provided a lot of the (decidedly not  understated) movement and expression for the Hulk, and the combination works very well. The Hulk still doesn't look 100% real, but even the real people in the movie don't look 100% real, so he fits in. Also, if you're seeing the US release, there's a new stinger at the end of the credits. Stick around for it. We didn't stop laughing for quite a while. I am here, however, to talk abo...