wickedqueen.net

So all this past semester, everyone in my comm arts class (”Rhetoric and the Intarwebs”–okay, the official title was slightly different) kept raving about hulu.com, where you can stream all kinds of random television with the usual intermittent ads from Visa and shit. There’s some current stuff–The Daily Show, for instance–but also a lot of OLD stuff, like Knight Rider and McHale’s Navy. I kept telling myself that I was too busy to go near such a colossally perfect timesuck, but then it was summer, and I finished the IRB application for my research and I have no official job,* and so I started nosing around the site.

I have no recollection of how I first stumbled upon Cleopatra 2525. I have vague memories of having heard of it in the past, but I had assumed it was some kind of Ancient Egyptian steampunk deal. It is not. “Cleopatra” is the title character, a cryogenically frozen 21st century exotic dancer who awakens in the 26th century when Earth has been conquered by the machines and is taken in by two scantily clad resistance fighters, one of whom is played by Gina Torres, who I had no idea had come up quite THAT much in the world when she got on Firefly.

The show appears to have been produced in someone’s basement with costumes by the Frederick’s of Hollywood clearance grab bag.** It is mostly bare midriffs and laser blasts. As my friend Leanna commented, I cannot believe it is not still on the air, with millions of dollars’ worth of merchandise and some kind of theme park. Consider this theme song:

(Spoken)
Five hundred years into the future
She will enter a world where machines rule the Earth
Mankind has been driven underground
And Cleopatra is about to discover
There’s no place like home!

(Sung, with awesome drama)
In the year 2525
There are women with the will to survive
Fighting for a brand new day
Nothing’s gonna get in their way
In the year 2525
Three women keep hope alive
Joining forces to reclaim the Earth
Looking ahead to humankind’s rebirth!

Dude. Hot girls with lasers in the post-apocalypse. If this had been around when I was a kid, it might partially explain how I turned out this way.

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*I’m enrolled in three credits of “directed reading” in order to continue to live off the government. It’s not the solution I would have preferred, but it does free up my time to work on my dissertation proposal. Assuming I can stop watching hulu at some point.

**This is a real thing, or it used to be. You tell them your size, you get a random dress and pair of shoes. My dad got a Halloween costume out of it once.

Greatest video ever:*

I’ve been playing a lot of turn-by-email Scrabble lately via Scrabulous, which also has a Facebook app so you can play through the Facebook interface if you prefer (which I do, mainly because I check Facebook a lot).

And if you really don’t feel like working, Name 50 states in 10 minutes. I missed four, but I’m not going to give you an edge by telling you what they were.

Not the best video in the world, certainly lacking the broad appeal of the first, but if you like a) Highlander (and/or, you know, bad TV/movies) and b) the post-apocalypse,** you cannot help but be intrigued by this totally unauthorized mystery trailer for Highlander: The Source:

The voice-over totally sounds like they slowed some tape in an attempt to mimic Ian McKellan, doesn’t it?

Thanks to Keely and j00j for the video links.

I’m going to see the Simpsons movie tonight on Travis’s recommendation. Spider-Pig better not be the funniest part.

Oh, and as I was alerted by another friend, e.l.f. (Eyes Lips Face), a make-up line, has been bought out by Nordstrom’s and is clearing out their inventory. Virtually everything is $1. The website is a little wonky, but if you get a weird message box just hit “cancel” and hit whatever link you wanted again. Let me know if you want an “All Over Color Stick” in Pink Lemonade, as I accidentally ordered two.

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*I know I say that a lot, but this time it’s REALLY TRUE, srsly. And it doesn’t even make crude insinuations about anyone from Harry Potter.

**This could be wishful thinking on my part, but it sure LOOKS kind of post-apocalyptic.

Yesterday, even though I was tired** and the weather was so crappy that if it weren’t California in July I’d have thought it was going to rain, I finally rode my bike out to the Mountain View Kwik-E-Mart, which I’ve been meaning to see since the locations were announced.

I know, the lighting is bad. You let me down, California.

“Color booster” lets you make it pretty cartoon-ish, though.

I don’t really like Bart and Milhous on the front facade; it defeats the point of making a “real” Kwik-E-Mart, dammit.

They refused to do Duff Beer, so I bought a donut instead. $.85, or $8.50 for a dozen.

Carbs are important when you’re cycling.

Simpsons donuts go with my hair.

Sadly, I did not get a photo of any of the employees in their special Kwik-E-Mart shirts, because it was pretty busy and I didn’t want to bother them. Maybe I’ll go back before the movie opens–I don’t know how long they’re running the promotion.

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*Normally I prefer the spelling “doughnut,” but when it’s prefaced by “Official Simpsons Movie,” I figure it has to be of the “donut” variety.

**I have mystery insomnia this week, except I think it might not be so much “mystery” as “getting super stressed about where the hell I’m going to live in Madison.”

In The Know: Our Troops In Iraq (Source: The Onion)

Thanks to Dad for the link.

Multiverse, maker of a free MMO-creation platform, plans to announce Friday morning that it’s struck a deal with Fox Licensing to turn the show [Firefly] into an MMORPG in the fashion of Star Wars Galaxies or Eve Online.

Yes, that’s right: a Firefly MMOG. FUCKING AWESOME.

Space piracy, here I come. …Or possibly space: the oldest profession. It’s hard to decide.

Also, the whole Multiverse thing is pretty cool if you haven’t heard about it. It’s a platform for developers to make it a lot easier, faster, and cheaper to create MMOGs, while hopefully still allowing a fair amount of control over and variety between different game systems. Right now, virtual worlds are so expensive to create that the majority of people/companies just don’t have the resources. Multiverse would open doors for indie games, which like indie music, would really broaden the options available to consumers.

Vatican unveils necropolis

Is there such a thing as a Famous Necropoli of Europe package tour? Because that would be fucking awesome. New Orleans did a pretty good business in cemetery audio tours and you don’t even get to see any skeletons with those.

I guess you could take in a fair amount of interment-related scenery in Paris alone; they’ve got the Catacombs, plus the Pere-Lachaise cemetery for fans of Famous Dead Guys. But that’s not the same as being bussed to 15 necropoli in a week. I really think there’s a market for this, probably significantly overlapping Neil Gaiman’s fanbase.

I used to know the Japanese word for “air burial,” which is when they put your corpse on top of a mountain or something and let the birds pick you clean. Sadly, I have forgotten it. Would such a mountain qualify as a necropolis, if they left all the bones up there? Seems a little messy.

I do, however, still remember the Japanese word for “vampire.” I realized this over the weekend when I was watching the first season episode of Supernatural where they face off against a pack of vampires; the lead vampire had a hiragana tattoo that did not mean anything as far as I could tell. I have to admit, I sometimes struggle with even a few of the hiragana characters these days, as my writing was never very good and I’ve gotten extremely rusty. But at least I can still say “Help! Danger! Vampires!” You don’t find THAT in the phrasebooks.

When I was eight years old, I spent part of a summer in Tucson, alternating between my grandparents, who lived just outside the city in Sauhuarita, and my father, who was doing something with a lab at the University of Arizona.**

My clearest memory of this summer is of watching episodes of Star Trek: The Original Series on the old black and white TV in the back bedroom with the red batik bedspread and the ancient faded red corduroy chair. I loved Star Trek. Most of all, I loved Mr. Spock; he was my second non-animated crush, the first having been Michael Praed as Robin Hood in the BBC’s Robin of Sherwood.*** I spent many happy hours, perched on that red corduroy chair, imagining myself aboard the Enterprise in Mary Sue-like glory.

Some years later, I discovered slash fan fiction on the internets. This was initially through Highlander, but you don’t spend much time looking at slash without encountering ST:TOS. And then, yesterday, Daniel sends me this:

This is a slash vid set to “Closer” by Nine Inch Nails. As you should know, this means it is Not Safe For Work. It’s “Closer,” for fuck’s sake. And the arrangement of the video clips strongly suggests that Kirk and Spock are making turbulent man-love aboard the Starship Enterprise.

It was just too good not to share. My favorite part is the grainy, sepia-tone quality of the clips, which is what reminds me, more than anything else, of watching the show on that old black-and-white at my grandparents’ house. The more things change, and all.

On a related note, I used to have an “Amok Time” t-shirt that I got at the Salvation Army in Kirksville, Missouri. Like so many other awesome things I have owned, it has vanished without a trace. Lame. At least I still have my HighlandsBarbarian!Duncan McLeod nightshirt.

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*Pon farr

**Unless I made this up in my head. But I was right about John Lennon.

***The animated ones were Lion-O, leader of the Thundercats, and Optimus Prime, leader of the Transformers. What can I say, I have a lust for power. Although apparently it is not a sufficient aphrodisiac for William Shatner.

I am a hoarder. This is partially by disposition and partially by circumstance–when you depend on the kindness of others for rides to the grocery store and whatnot, you tend to stock up as much as you can, particularly on things that you use a lot and know you will pretty much always need more of, eventually. Witness the 150 pounds of kitty litter currently stockpiled in my apartment.

However, the problem with being a hoarder is that most of this stuff gets stored kind of out of sight, and there you are at the grocery store thinking, Well, I’ve been baking a lot, I use a lot of unsweetened applesauce, I know there’s some in the fridge but it stores well… And then you get home and discover that you are ALREADY storing an extra giant jar of unsweetened applesauce in the cupboard. Now you have two. This also happens a lot with mustard, for some reason.

So really, what I need is not a shopping list but a NON-shopping list, recording all the things that I already have way too much of and should under no circumstances buy when stricken with a vague sense that, god forbid, I might be running out.

This list will also now have to include wine. Woodman’s gives a nice discount on many of their cheaper vintages if you purchase by the case… Shut up. I love the Yellow Tail shiraz/grenache blend. And it’s going to be a stressful summer, what with the social psych prelim in August.

I also bought sunscreen, because by god, it has been super warm for the past two days and even though I know, as a compulsive student of the weather report, that temperatures are going to drop like 20 degrees in the next couple of days, they will rise again, and I would really like to repeat last summer’s amazing feat of Not a Single Sunburn, Not Even a Little One.

I spent a long time in the sunscreen section, studying the billion available varieties as if I have any idea about anything having to do with the active ingredients of sunscreen. I finally just started popping them open and smearing dabs of them on myself, because the two qualities of sunscreen about which I DO have a real opinion are scent and viscosity.

I surmise from the frequent claims of “light feel” on the packaging that most people do not prize thick, viscous sunscreen; however, I have no confidence in a preparation whose presence cannot be felt ten minutes after application. I suspect those spray-on formulas are about as effective in the prevention of UV damage as prayer. I like a sunscreen that FEELS like a sunscreen, dammit. Fortunately, just as I was despairing of finding such a thing, I discovered my preferred brand, Ocean Potion, hidden behind a display of some other kind.

I got two tubes of it, plus some Hawaiian Tropic SPF60+, because I couldn’t resist. I know they say anything above 30 probably isn’t any more effective, but I am very, very fair. Hawaiian Tropic actually had some stuff marked SPF70, but it felt too thin and smelled too coconutty. I realize that an element of coconut is pretty much inevitable when it comes to sunscreen, but pure coconut makes me gag.

I do wonder why they can say something is SPF70 if it really isn’t any BETTER than SPF30, but I guess it still blocks more rays; you’ve just reached the point where blocking more rays provides negligible benefit. And of course none of us are actually putting on as much sunscreen as they use in laboratory tests. And obviously it works as a marketing device, especially once one company starts doing it: I am too fair-skinned to be taking chances, so if your brand doesn’t have at least SPF50, I will go with the brand that does.

The same principle probably applies to the Pepperidge Farm 15 grain multigrain bread I saw in the baked goods aisle. I frequently get Brownberry 12 grain. I like multigrain bread, and I like the thought of 12 whole grains. One can imagine that at some point I might be swayed at the thought of three additional grains, but I think Pepperidge Farm will have to make their bread bigger first. That’s the other thing we consumers like: big portions. Huge quantities of bread and sunscreen and Yellow Tail red wine.

Not to mention TV on DVD, the ultimate in media big portions. I don’t want to go into too much detail on my most recent failure of Amazon.com impulse control, but I will note that they are having another 50% off sale on select TV season sets. Including Firefly, which doesn’t seem to be on that list page, but which is currently available for $24.96.

Yesterday, I suddenly found myself totally enervated about five minutes before I was scheduled to tag along to the grocery store with my friend Nathan (at least I wasn’t suddenly starving). I couldn’t figure out why, until I remembered that I’d gotten about five hours of sleep a night for the prior two days.

Damn, I thought to myself, I’d better get to bed early tonight! Rest up!

Naturally, what happened instead is that I watched two episodes of The Young Riders on DVD* and got about six and a half hours of sleep before I had to get up for an eyebrow waxing appointment.**

So now I’m finishing off a big mug of chai and preparing to pop open a Coke Zero, because otherwise I will end up taking a nap and be totally fucked. And I have to transcribe. God.

For more adventures in not getting enough sleep, see my father’s recent experience chaperoning the high school Spanish club lock-in:

The Lock-In
More about the Lock-In

The second entry references my own seventh grade marathon Totally Sleep-Free Three Days, which ended, as I recall, as I was desperately trying to stay awake for an airing of The Young Riders.

Right. Transcription. Blergh.

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*Did anyone else watch The Young Riders? As the linked IMDB entry indicates, it ran three seasons from 1989 to 1992. I was introduced to it by a high school student babysitter who referred to it as “[her] cowboy show.” Ironically, the show ran longer than its subject (the Pony Express) did; the “cowboys” were probably cleaner and better looking than the real thing, too. Following in the wake of Young Guns (1988), it was clearly an attempt to ride the Wild West Wave and sell a whole stable of strapping young heartthrobs to impressionable young girls like myself (maybe not primarily that young). The writing is bad and the acting is ridiculous, but I still like it. I’m glad I preordered it months ago when I first heard it was coming out.

**I had already forgotten about and slept through a previous appointment last week. Keely told me that it was only $10 at Cha Cha, the little salon that’s only a block from my house, and since the cosmetology school is STILL not doing waxes, I decided I’d give it a try. I liked the girl who did it; I think I may go back there for my next haircut, just to give it a try. The staff is very counter-culture-looking in general, and thus not fazed by my hair the way the beauty school instructors (not so much the students) always are.

Guess from where I am writing this post?

C’mon, guess.

Okay, some of you have an advantage.

I am writing this post FROM BED. Which you probably wouldn’t have guessed if you didn’t know that I’d decided to spend the vast majority of my tax refund on a Dell Inspiron 6000 laptop. But I did. And now I am on the internet in bed.

I haven’t been able to access the internet from bed since 2002, when I still had my old laptop and my dorm room was tiny enough that the ethernet cable would stretch that far, because I certainly did not have wireless.* I actually went like eight months without internet in my HOME when I moved off-campus that May; I worked long shifts as a computer lab manager in the mostly deserted library, so it wasn’t a huge deal (this was also my only source of air conditioning). But man, when I finally got internet access again, it was like stumbling out of the desert. Not a deprivation I care to repeat.

Anyway, that laptop was rendered non-functional when I spilled cranberry juice on it in the spring of 2003, and shortly thereafter I got a desktop, which I still have, and just recently upgraded the graphics card on–I want to get a better power supply and possibly a flat screen monitor for it in the nearish future. Purchasing a second computer was a big step for me; it felt very extravagant, although certainly there are good solid practical reasons for a student to own a laptop.

Not so many good solid practical reasons to upgrade that laptop’s graphics from integrated to an ATI Radeon X300 card, but what if I am in an airport somewhere and need to play City of Heroes RIGHT THEN? What THEN? (Speaking of which, I can run City of Heroes on this machine, but it is bitching at me that my drivers are outdated and when I try to install ATI’s new driver set, it tells me that I need “basic video drivers” first. WTF, mate?) Anyway, this touches on something that several people have mentioned, when I sheepishly admitted that I was buying a laptop: namely, that as someone who has more than once publicly expressed impatience about how long it is taking for us to be able to jack our brains directly into the internet, I really OUGHT to have one.**

Which, okay, yes. I remember when I had my old laptop in Japan–I got the laptop because I was going to Japan, and could not even imagine leaving the country with no computing power–I used to take it to campus and hook up the ethernet in the common area at the base of the tower where I had all my Hosei classes, and I would sit there happily surfing the internet for hours, and I remember thinking, This computer is my HOME. No, really. I am that cyberpunk.

The laptop also has a DVD burner. Which means it has a DVD player, which means that I can watch trashy TV on DVD in bed, like I used to do when my TV was in my “bedroom” (it was an efficiency apartment, so there wasn’t really a separate room–just a kind of alcove in the back). Sometime at the end of this month or the beginning of the next, I will be receiving the first season of The Young Riders on DVD from Amazon, and sweet fancy Moses will there be trashy TV-watching in bed then.

I’ve already loaded my essential programs onto the machine: FireFox, Trillian, GoogleTalk, and City of Heroes. I’ve removed most of the extraneous crap that they load on for you. I’m sure little things will be occurring to me for weeks yet, and I really need to transfer some stuff over from my desktop: music, desktops, etc. But the process has begun. I am beginning the cyborg mindmeld with it already.

Oh, new laptop. You are my precious.

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*You could argue against my “having” wireless now, but let’s just say that there is wireless to be had.

**This is kind of like when I got my nose pierced, and almost nobody said anything for weeks, because it turned out that everyone just felt like I’d always HAD a nose piercing. Like, SPIRITUALLY, or something.