So, something went weird with one of my drivers, and I had to factory-reset my computer.

I've lost everything, including the sonnets, which is a major loss. Even moreso than the mass of music that disappeared, and it's more upsetting than that I'll have to redownload my power rangers and sentai and the other series I was in the middle of.

Plus, I've lost all my bookmarks, so. Recommend sites?

ETA: YESSSSS I HAVE MY SONNETS. My laptop isn't actually networked to the printer in the house, so I emailed them to m'self to open on the computer connected to the printer and didn't delete the email. :D

Okay, you know how I frequently flail in my rewatches of Power Rangers about how underneath all he cheese there can be some legitimate value to the show?

The current season is flat-out AMAZING. Just... Holy shit episode 11.

So, um.

I just submitted the last assignment of my undergrad career.

Cue slow-burn freakout OHGOD.

So, it's only happened two seasons in a row (Lost Galaxy and Lightspeed Rescue) so it's not a pattern yet, but still, Power Rangers, you're weird.

What the hell causes you to decide that a good early sign that the mentor figure in a militaristic/outright military operation has been brainwashed is that he doesn't give proper attention to the morning report?

And did you get the same guy to play the brushed-off peon? Wait, strike the incredulity from that question, because if you did that's kind of awesome, but I don't remember which LG episode that was, and I'm not about to hunt for it.

Also: that's in response to a LR episode a few back, because I just finished the season, actually. It's not a bad season, but it's not the best. It's certainly got more going for it than the first couple, almost exclusively episodically-based seasons of Power Rangers, and it doesn't suffer from the mood whiplash of Turbo, or the relative directionlessness of Zeo and LG (Though to be fair, it's more that LG kept changing direction more than that it lacked it). The final four-episode arc is actually very tightly done, and holy crap is Queen Banshira FUCKED UP.

Too bad Vypra can't act to save her life.

Visit to Oxford was awesometiems! :D I got to see everyone I wanted to but Shannon, but we phoned a lot, and Thomas'll get her Wii zapper back to her, so that's okay.

I also got a lot of cool background noise from places to use when I put together my sonnets, although I wasn't able to get anyone to record any lines, since we were all too busy being otherwise engaged. I may wind up soliciting files of people recording lines from my flist, though. IT COULD BE A GLOBAL EFFORT OMG.

Anyway, I had a nice diversion (and a very nice lunch today - Wild Bistro makes an awesome bento) and am ready to face daily life again. Woo.

So when I was getting ready to head up to Kofenya to finish editing my sonnets before I record friends reading bits of them so that I'll not have unusable recordings of old versions of the sonnets, I notice the sky is overcast, so I decide I'll head past my car which, as I no longer have a Miami parking pass, is located a good ten minutes away, but on the way to Kofenya.

Had I not been distracted by the totally awesome and engaging posts at the one feminist blog that I had still open in tabs (but don't now and OHGOD I'M NOT SURE I BOOKMARKED THE PLACE SHIT) when I went to shut Brian down, I'd not have still been five minutes from my car when the rain and hail started.

And that, children, is why Feminism is evil. D:

Man, did I screw myself when I made two of the thrice-reused lines of the fifteenth sonnet require rhymes with "truth".

THERE ARE NO USEFUL RHYMES WITH TRUTH. I mean, I could have kept pairing the same two words, since the fifteenth sonnet did have a decent rhyme pair there, but I don't think I'd be graded well using the same rhyme pair FIVE TIMES. It'd be like rhyming a word with itself. It's just not done.

I'm going to wait until I have the final version of the project done before I post the sonnets here, BTW. I'll want to include the recording along with them.

I decided I was going to write a crown of sonnets for my final project in my one class. Thank god I was smart enough to start with the fifteenth (which, for those of you who don't know crowns of sonnets, is the one made up of the first lines of the previous fourteen, which are also the last lines of the ones before them - if you took out the fifteenth, they'd thread through each other in an unending loop).

What made it that much harder is that I'm alternating speakers throughout the previous fourteen, so I wrote the fifteenth as a two-voiced poem. So some of the lines in the fifteenth are one speaker, some the other, some both, and all have to work as something either speaker would say, since they'll be the first line in one speaker's sonnet and the last in the other's.

It took me over an hour to write fourteen lines.

BUT!

I wrote two of the earlier ones in significantly less than an hour, so I should have my "rough first draft" ready to hand in tomorrow, even though when I asked what a "rough first draft" for a crown of sonnets would be, my professor decided that ONLY THE COMPLETED SONNETS WOULD COUNT SALKDGJ.

So, to justify having the project already done like two weeks early, I'm going to record them being read and hopefully get some music banged out to go with.

WHY DO I DO THIS HRRRRRG.

Okay, so. During my Native American Lit class this evening, one of my classmates' presentation was on how he's following the Red Path and becoming Lakota. My elderly, not-a-drop-of-Lakota-let-alone-any-other-nation-blood-in-him classmate.

There is something indescribably uncomfortable* about that, though I can't fault him for having investigated Lakota culture, or for having participated whole-heartedly in ceremonies, and so on. If the Lakota have no problem teaching him, and he really wants to learn for the learning's sake, and participate for the participation's sake, that's great. What bothers me, I think, is that researching Shintoism and taking it on wholeheartedly as your belief system doesn't make you Japanese, nor does converting to Islam make you Arabic, and so on. Yes, Lakota spirituality is incredibly much tied into their culture as a whole, but at the same time it isn't their culture as a whole, and... I don't know. There's just something kind of ugly about it.

Then I come home, and sitting in the middle of the kitchen table is a postcard inviting my little brother to Living Stations of the Cross on Good Friday which... a bit excessive, but whatever. What's Catholicism if not gaudy religion? Then I actually read the thing. It says, I shit you not, "All are welcome to join in and commemorate the suffering and death of Our Lord Jesus."

Commemorate. Suffering and death.

THAT CANNOT BE WHAT THEY MEAN. WHAT.

Why can't the world be normal every now and then?

*This word was initially "wrong," but on rereading, that is not the word I meant to put there holy crap.

Sometime this summer, I'm going to take the train up to New York, see the Hair revival, and then train it back home. It'd be a three day trip, and looking at Amtrak, the second-cheapest option would give a two-hour stay in DC between trains (barring delays, which, as I understand, are a fact of life on Amtrak since the rail lines belong to the shipping companies) so I could see my brother and sister-in-law, maybe.

Or, if I can get more time off work, I might train up to DC, visit for a bit, then go to New York, see Hair, and come home.

Either way - I'm looking forward to a train ride, Hair is an amazing show, and Amtrak is a bit cheaper and far less stressful, I'm sure, than airlines. Plus I can walk around while travelling without feeling like a total jerkass.

(If anyone really wants to, maybe we could make a trip of this, but I understand if it's just me.)

I've had the sequel to Sideline Secrets on my hard drive for a while, 'cause the first one was one of those awful movies with just enough unintentionally awesome moments (like anything involving the Awesome Topless Chick) to be worth it, but I didn't get around to watching it until just now.

One, there's a hell of a lot more cock in this one.

Two, IT'S FUCKING HILARIOUS. Like, it's objectively a better-made movie. There's only a couple lines of badly-looped dialogue, it doesn't run twice as long as it needs to, and even though most of it fails, the director does at least make some attempts at symbolism.

However: it's about an hour of disjointed scenes with the barest of patchwork plot actually moving things along. The movie expects you to accept that because we keep following the same characters that something is going on, but that's not true at all. For fuck's sake, what looks to be the main plot turns out to be dropped entirely as it's just the trigger for what turns out, in he last ten minutes at most, to be what's actually happening.

It comes out of fucking NOWHERE and it's AWESOMELY BAD. Depending on who comes up to Sandusky this summer it might be group viewing.

Makin' my way through Lost Galaxy (which is even more the villains' season than In Space was, wow), and... they just took an episode to rip off Alien. Like, a lot. Only one thing happened that was at all relevant to the season arc, and there was maybe two minutes tops of morphed ranger footage. And until the rangers showed up, there was no sign that people were going to make it out of this alive - and in fact, the crew of the ship sending the distress signal clearly hadn't. There were on-screen corpses in Power Rangers. Alien corpses, who had died before the episode, but corpses nonetheless. Huh.

Just got back from seeing it. Most of the way through, I was all set to make an extensive post of my impressions of it and the changes they made (and how some of them actually work very well, including the change of Veidt's exact MO), and then the very very last parts of Antarctica happened, and I really can't be assed anymore because they totally missed what Veidt's failure actually was (though that certainly helped explain the random parallels they kept drawing between him and Hitler).

Stole these from Ashley, but if you want to gimme five things or guys for KFM too, I guess you can.

Comment to this post and I will give you 5 subjects/things I associate you with. Then post this in your LJ and elaborate on the subjects given.

Five things from Ashley:

1. Power Rangers

I'm in the middle of an epic rewatch of Power Rangers, though I think everyone here already knows that. If I stop with what I actually watched when it aired, I'm over halfway, but I'm kind of morbidly curious about the Disney seasons, given how fandom reacts to them. I'll probably wind up wondering what the hell their problem with it is, because I actually enjoyed Turbo and thought Trouble by the Slice was actually done about as well as it could be, given the sentai footage included the Rangers getting baked inna giant pizza oven.

I find the show is generally better than one gives it credit for, and good for cracky entertainment that isn't quite like anything else. Also: up until about In Space, all the Rangers were totally doin' all the other Rangers offscreen. I mean, there were pairings that tended to each other most of he time, but you can't tell me that being a Zordon-era Ranger didn't mean epic orgies. Except for Justin, but do you think it's coincidence that after his first two adventures as a Ranger, all of a sudden Zordon returns to Eltar?

2. 90's music

WTFFFFF, why do you associate this with me? So I listen to Ace of Base in the car, but that's like ALL of the '90s music I have, and it got replaced with Sharon Lois and Bram before I was booted back to Sandusky and could tune into CBC 2 again.

3. The Orphanage

Er, I lived there. It was nice for a while, until Erick decided that no, I didn't really need any warning that he'd be living at any point when I might have had a chance of finding a replacement roomate, and now I'm living in my parents' house, paying off this semester's rent on an apartment I haven't lived in and won't live in for any of the semester.

Also, it had Pokemon on the walls and an epic unreadable sign.

4. Late night video game shenanigans.

OMG ANTI-FORM SORA AGAIN AAAAAAAA. FUCK YOU DEMYX.

And Balthier is hot, yes.

5. Newspapers.

I DON'T EVEN KNOW. I haven't read one for reals since like last spring and it makes me sad, because I'd have to pay to get the Times and USA TODAY out here (and USA TODAY is totally not worth paying) and the local paper is EPIC SUCK OMG.

Kill Fuck Marry

(If you don't know how this game works you fail.)

From Ashley: Tommy, Jason and Billy.

I'd kill Tommy, no question. He's not terribly bright, not terribly attractive, and besides that I don't think I'd be able to get his attention, not being a pink ranger.

Billy, would be marry, as long as it's pre-Zeo Billy. David Yost wasn't able to hide his frustration with production staff and some of his costars during Zeo, and as a result Billy kind of stopped actually being a character.

Also: I would have Kimberly come by sometime to help train him in sometimes being the Femme!Billy that happened when they switched brains early in the first season, because holy shit that was hot, but there's no way I could live with him permanently being that either.

So, Jason gets to be a one-time fuck, which seems right, anyway. He was cute and inoffensive but not much more, and I wouldn't want to keep him away from Zach, anyway.

I got through one episode of that, and thank god it hasn't a massive online fandom like some other shows, because the race wank would be epic, since the characters are, by nature, stuck in rather 1930's British mindsets, generally, even though the show isn't. This is a roundabout way of saying I just saw the Chinatown episode.

Anyway, I got through one episode, and then caved and started Lost Galaxy. First off, I never realized I had totally missed the first episode, so yeah. Second, and this is going to be amusing to only a few specific people who sat through a certain packaged-with-Eva-for-no-reason DVD I have, in the second episode, THE YELLOW RANGER RAN UP A TREE. Sadly, she did not burst up out of the piles of leaves on the ground first, but you can't have everything.

Also: Bulk and Prof. Phenominous forgetting Skull when boarding Terra Venture? NOT COOL SHOW. NOT COOL. NO COOKIES FOR YOU NOW. Even if Leo and Kai are crazy hot. Okay, only Kai is crazy hot, but Leo's normal-hot still. BUT STILL. WAY TO SHIT ON SKULL. HE WAS IN THE EPISODE, WHY DID YOU DO THAT SHOW?

So, when Power Rangers in Space first aired, I wound up becoming busier during the time they ran first airings than I had been before for whatever reason, and I missed most of the end-arc of the season. When Lost Galaxy started, I was able to gather that there'd been some kind of end to the first six years of the series, but I didn't really see much of it.

I just did. Holy shit, that was good. Like, Space was the throwaway season after Turbo tanked, and the last stretch of it was clearly everyone in production putting all they could into it to give the series the sendoff it deserved, and it's just good. There's still some crackishness here and there, and some of the acting could be better, but oh man.

And Bulk and Skull get to be Big Damn Heroes after six years of never quite having enough moments otherwise to be generally seen as anything but butt monkeys.

The only fault I can see, really, is that there was absolutely no reason Ecliptor couldn't have been purified by the Zordon wave if Lord Fucking Zedd could. Bullshit. And he didn't get to take out Darkonda (though I certainly can't say Darkonda's end wasn't unsatisfying or in any way inauthentic I just wanted his hijacking the weapon and using it on Dark Spectre to have been Xanatos'd by Ecliptor. It's easy enough to wank that, I guess, but Astronema's cluelessness to that happening is tougher to reconcile. Still, mentally cut fiveish seconds of the episode, and BAM! Badass Ecliptor through and through.

(Ecliptor, by the way, quickly rose the ranks to my favorite PR villain ever - visually, too.)

I think I'll take a season of Poirot before I move on to Lost Galaxy.

...Or Greatest Drink Ever?

So, still working my way through Power Rangers. I'm somewhere between a third and half done with In Space; Darkonda just had his first couple of episodes (well, where we know he's there, anyway). Knowing what's coming, even if not in specifics since it's been so long since I last watched anything from this season, makes the interplay between the villains incredibly fascinating. "You can't tell on me or I'll squeal on you" plays different when what would be squealed about is known this time around.

Honestly, the villains are far more interesting in this season, because they've been getting most of the arc scenes so far. And there's a hell of an arc this season, considering that among everything else it does, it concludes six years of ongoing storyline because Turbo's ratings were low enough they thought it was likely to be the last season. (Ironically, the freedom that "eh, it's probably over" gave them allowed them to craft a significantly better show than we'd been getting, and you can see how not-over Power Rangers is, as it's still airing over ten years later.)

I'm looking forward to the later part of the season especially; for whatever reason, I missed a whole lot toward the end (Including the actual finale - I think I might be more upset about that now than then, considering the reputation those episodes have in the fandom.)

ETA: OHMAN THE NEXT EPISODE HAD SO MUCH ARC STUFF BUT REALLY IT'S AWESOME BECAUSE THERE'S A SWORDFIGHT. IN A SALOON. ON AN ALIEN PLANET. SO AWESOME.