Pheromones

I've been thinking about pheromones the last few days. 

Women In Superhero Movies (Video)

Today I just felt like bitching about Hollywood. 

Ant-Man

My mom, my sister, and I went to see Ant-Man today. I'm sure you will all be surprised to hear this, but I loved it! (perhaps I'm not the most objective when it comes to Marvel movies, because I think I say that about all of them but, seriously, this movies was really great.) We ended up being the only three people in the whole theater, which I though was really sad. I mean, I know it's already been out for a while, and we did go to the 3:30 showing, but still, why aren't you going to see this movie, people? Here are the reasons why you should go watch it-

1- Marvel has a rather incredible knack for taking things that should be ridiculous and making them super fucking cool. I mean seriously, anything called "Ant-Man" should be totally stupid right? Wrong!
2- As always, Paul Rudd was fantastic. Also, he obviously put a good bit of effort into getting into superhero-worthy shape.
3- Scott Lang is a really cool and interesting character.
4- Scott's daughter is fucking adorable. For example, at one point he gives her the creepiest looking toy rabbit I have ever seen. To which she replies "He's so ugly! I love him!"
5- We get another badass female character, Hope.
6-  I really liked the ants and the fact that they were, at least to some extent, given distinct personalities. I thought this was great, since a lot of people never think twice about killing ants. According to Evangeline Lilly "You could take all of us out of the movie, and it would still be really kick ass if you had the ants. They’re really the best part of the movie."
7- The big fight scene at the end was both intense and totally hilarious. Giant Thomas the tank engine flying through the air anyone?
8- Falcon has a (somewhat small, but still) part, which made me happy because I loved him in the Winter Soldier.
9- Scott has a circle professional criminal friends, who I found quite endearing. ( I don't know, I have a thing for likable criminals).
10- The post credit scene was weird and confusing (in a good way) and left you with an overwhelming need to see Civil War!

Pretty much my response to the post-credit scene^

Ⓥ Vegan Superheroes

Today, I found some seriously cool vegans that I wanted to tell everyone about. I started out looking for Tim Shieff's Facebook page (the link is actually to his YouTube page, because he has some great videos you should all check out). He is an amazing athlete who often speaks out about veganism and animal rights issues.

Anyway, when I found it, I started scrolling through his feed and found a link to a page run by a friend of his who is a vegan stunt man. It's called We See You, and it's full of beautiful images of farmed animals. The goal of the page is to change the way people perceive these animals.

From there, Facebook recommended that I check out Casey Michaels' page. She is another vegan stunt person and apparently she was actually Scarlet Johansson's stunt double in Age of Ultron. So yeah, the real Black Widow? the one who pulled off all of those amazing moves? Vegan! She was also Hit Girl's double on Kickass 2. Plus, she makes a point to proclaim her veganism on her page by calling herself a "vegan stunt performer."

I am always happy to find any public figures who are vegan, especially when they are as open about why they are vegan, as these people are. I am particularly excited though to find people who also manage to prove that veganism can be an asset to the individual as well as to animals and the planet. These people do things that the average person can't even imagine being able to do, and they do them while maintaining a compassionate lifestyle. These are true superheroes, in every sense of the word! They have skills and abilities far beyond those of regular people and they dedicate themselves to protecting the innocent. What could be more heroic than that?  

Pretty sure that's actually Casey.

Riveting Update

I just thought I would let you guys know that I got all of my blueberries dried. It didn't work quite as well as I had hoped, but I suppose they aren't too bad. The first batch came out more like freeze-dried than dehydrated. I wanted them to be like raisins, but instead they were more like a combination of gravel and dried leaves. Of course, I ate them anyway, but it was kind of unpleasant. I dripped some water on them, to add some of the moisture back, and that seems to have worked pretty well. Now if they just don't mold or anything I'll be good to go.

This is what I was going for......not so much what I got.

To make up for the really boring post, here is the trailer they just released for Suicide Squad. If you haven't seen it yet, it's ridiculously creepy/disturbing/amazing! 

So Cool

A few days ago, I rented The Wolverine from Redbox and today I finally got around to watching it. It was good; I thoroughly enjoyed it. What I enjoyed more though was finding what I think is my new favorite, comic-based, character; Yukio. She is fucking fantastic! Everything about her is just so incredibly badass. First of all, she is an amazing fighter. She saves Logan's ass on multiple occasions. Second, her weapon of choice is a sword, which is definitely what I would choose. Third, she is super brave and not in that "I want to go with you, but then you have to drop what you're doing and come save me when I get in trouble." way that a lot of female characters in these kinds of movies are.

Fourth, she and I have practically the same sense of style. Those boots look just like mine. I had those same socks a few years ago and wore them util there was nothing left of them. I had my hair that color for years, and probably still would if mine didn't fade to obnoxious pink after about a week. I even lover her coat; assuming that's not real sheep, which I'm fairly certain it's not. 

P.S. At the beginning of this movie, Logan gets into a fight with a dumbass hunter who killed his bear friend. This automatically gets it a thumbs up from me. It was still really good after that too though. 

Now There's an Idea!

I just suddenly remembered that I totally forgot to write a post for today. It's not like I have anything exciting to talk about anyway, but I thought I should get something down here. So here's this. I've been on a serious superhero kick lately. I recently realized that I am just a natural born multitasker and that I have a hard time doing just one thing at a time, especially things that are time consuming and/or difficult. My mind gets bored or frustrated and I just end up giving up on whatever it was that I was trying to do. Well since, lately, I have been trying to teach myself how to do all of these new things, sculpting, drawing, making utility-belts, etc, I've been watching movies to keep my mind occupied whilst I struggle endlessly with the things I'm trying to make. For whatever reason I have been mostly interested in watching superhero movies. I already had some and I bought quite a few more from various discount movie bins. So far it has been working pretty well. I don't even notice that it takes me for-fucking-ever to make really small, unimportant, things. An unfortunate side-effect is that I keep finding myself thinking "Hey, you know what would be a lot more fun than making misshapen mugs? Being a fucking superhero!"

Today I watched Daredevil. I found it fairly enjoyable. Plus, I'm thinking that if you can get superpowers just by going blind.........that one seems kind of feasible for me. Just saying. 

Oath

Alright you guys, I swear, when the weather gets better ( I mean like spring better, not like slightly less snow better) I AM going to find something interesting to do with my time. I don't care if I have to take up drag racing, or grave robbing, or whatever, I will have something to tell you that you might actually give a shit about. As it is, the high point of my day was watching X-Men and making a set of Runes out of clay. I will get less boring eventually, I swear.

In Bad Taste

I think, for the most part, people tend to think that they have good taste. The average person looks at him or herself and thinks " Yeah, I like cool things." I'm fairly pleased with my taste in most things; my fashion sense, taste in music/movies/TV/etc. One thing that I believe I have very bad taste in though is humor. My sense of humor is god-awful. 90% of the things I think are hilariously funny, no one else thinks are the least bit amusing. Everything I laugh at is either dark, and morbid, and disturbing, and makes people look at me like I might be a serial killer; or is just completely, totally, utterly stupid.

^This. I have been laughing at this for three days. THREE DAYS! Every time I think about it, I can't help but laugh. This is a problem. 

What Are You Complaining about?

As I mentioned a couple of days ago, my dad and I have started watching Farscape. The basic idea of the show is that an astronaut gets sucked into a wormhole and ends up lost somewhere in the universe with no idea where he is in relation to Earth. He spends a large portion of his time just trying to figure out how to get back home. This concept seems to be a really common theme in the Sci/Fi and Fantasy genres. It seems like someone is always getting lost in some amazing place and then moping and whining about how much they want to go home. Just once I would like to see someone get lost in some distant and magical place and be like "Fuck yeah! I'm staying here! This is so much better than where I come from!" because that's what I would say, if I were in that situation.

Quit you're bitching Crichton! Damn! 

Top Tens

So you know last night when I mentioned "real writing"? Well it turns out I was talking about writing lists.

Here are my top ten favorite things in various categories, not necessarily in any particular order.

Movies:
1-Bold Native
2-Year of the Dog
3-My first Mister
4-Across the Universe
5-The Matrix Trilogy
6-Garden State
7-The Breakfast Club
8-Zombieland
9-Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
10-Donnie Darko

Books:
1-The Dark Tower series
2-Farm Sanctuary
3- The Last Unicorn
4-The Shining
5-Looking for Alaska
6-The Folk of the Air
7-The Perks of Being a Wallflower
8-Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
9-Paper Towns
10-Vegan Freak

Musicians:
1-Bob Dylan
2-Bright Eyes
3-The Giving Tree Band
4-Dar Williams
5-The Beatles
6-Mumford and Sons
7-Rise Against
8-Shawn Mullins
9-Elliot Smith
10-Fleet Foxes

TV series:
1-Supernatural
2-Firefly
3-Being Human
4-Buffy
5-Doctor Who
6-Angel
7-Dollhouse
8-Torchwood
9-Sherlock
10-The Invisible Man. I haven't seen it in years, but it was the first show I ever fell in love with so it has to be on the list.

These may not, in fact, be my favorites. I will almost certainly post this and then instantly think of twenty things that should have been here, and be mad at myself for forgetting them. Oh well, these are still all very good things.

Top ten, get it? 

It's a Trap!

My dad and I had this interesting idea today. It probably won't ever come to anything, because we have a tendency to talk about doing things and never actually do them, but I think it would be a lot of fun if we did. The idea was to make some Youtube videos about escaping from various situations. This came about because we were channel surfing and came upon some movie where a guy gets caught in one of those traps where you step into a loop of rope and get hauled up into the air by your foot. Every movie that I have ever seen where someone gets caught in one of those, the person just hangs there and waits to pass out, or die, or be rescued. It seems to me that it would be possible to get out of one of those if you were able to use your core muscles to pull yourself up and get a hold of the rope, but no ever seems to do that. Of course the only way to know for sure is to try it, and that is why we came up with the whole video series idea. This one is obviously not the most practical one to start with, but we also talked about getting out of handcuffs, being tied to a chair, and I personally would really love to see if I could get out of a car trunk. This lack of motivation to escape things like this is something that has annoyed the shit out of me in a great many movies, TV shows, and books. I am constantly thinking "Why the fuck are you just sitting there? Why aren't you trying to get away?"

When I read this book was the first time I really remember thinking about this. For those who don't know the story; a couple is "playing a game" in which the wife is handcuffed to the bed when the husband suddenly dies of a heart attack and she is left with no way to get out of the handcuffs and ends up just laying there for several days (if I recall correctly). Here was my thought, how hard would it really be to just break the headboard? I guess there's only one way to find out......  

Happily Ever After

I was thinking today about the whole concept of "happy endings." I came to the conclusion that there is no such thing. When a story ends happily, what has really happened is that the writer has decided to stop writing at a point where things are going well. If he or she had continued writing long enough things wouldn't have inevitably gone downhill until no one was happy anymore. I guess that's why I tend to be fond of depressing endings; they are more honest. I prefer stories that end with some sort of purpose or meaning, but not with everyone being all joyful and feeling like everything is perfect. That shit never lasts. Even on the off chance that the perfection could last, the story will always end sad; because the end of something wonderful is always sad. Even the most improbably amazing love story ultimately ends when one of the people dies. That is never going to be happy. That's why people who write happy endings don't ever really write clear to the end; if they did, there would be no such things as a story with a happy ending.

1- I had intended to post this last night, but Hughesnet said nay. 

2- I really didn't intend for it to be so depressing but, since it turned out that way, I decided to run with it and use the Donnue Darko gif.