So, as those of you who read (lj)faithinfire will already know, yesterday I was formally diagnosed with depression. This is a good thing, arguably, as it gives me some framework for handling the overwhelming sense of "oh shit, universe falling to pieces" that I've been suffering for the last few weeks and assuming was somehow entirely my own fault.

So while I was at home feeling sorry for myself and very small indeed, koilungfish went out and came home with lookingforsigns, and they brought me presents! ♥♥♥ There were cookies! And Seiber bought me pizza! And... and, and, and...

There were also a whole five booster packs from the Pirates CSG that Seiber and me have been fangirling over lately! Including one from the "Fire & Steel" expansion that has the gorgeous Switchblade and Scorpion miniatures, which have tiny moving parts! Blades that turn on miniature plastic cogs! Now, Seiber had been lucky enough to get a Switchblade ship, HMS Salient, in our very first packs of boosters and I'd been profoundly jealous. But...

As I tore open the Fire & Steel pack, I saw the glint of silver. My eyes widened. Silver-stamped cards! Black super-rare corner tags! All of them! And...

...three entire cards that went to make up a great, pale, hideous monster of a ship. Grey and black and dust white, the pallid shade of old skin and the rotten muted red of dead, stripped meat. And dazzling, silver, twin scythelike blades...

A super-rare, Cursed-fleet Switchblade. Oh. My. GODS.

Her name is Skin Flayer and she is gorgeous. I cannot believe that a random booster pack my friends grabbed for me as a "please cheer up!" present could manage to be the single most coveted set in the whole expansion - witness the bit of paper that fell out after the Skin Flayer (not to mention the Silver Coffin, the Soul Mark treasure card, and Tabitha McWarren, the Cursed pirate girl who joined the crews of the damned when she threw herself from a clifftop for the sake of a dead pirate lover): a note that read "Congratulations! You just dug up the most sought-after treasure chest in the Pirates of the Cursed Seas Fire and Steel pocketmodel game! It contains every super-rare game piece in the set!"

I mean, how extraordinary is that, in those particular circumstances? I think something out there loves me at least as much as my friends do. ♥♥♥

Laters,
Rath

*IS TEN THOUSAND TIMES DED*

Oh my... I cannot articulate how much I love this, mostly because I am laughing too hard. But seriously, this has just given me an entire year's worth of joy in the space of five minutes.

Okay, everyone knows The Wind Beneath My Wings, right? Here's Michael Ball's version, which I happen to like, for reference (excuse the Xena, but this was the only version of it I could find on Youtube). Classic, slow, sentimental, much loved song you can play at weddings, funerals and your Dad's sixtieth birthday bash. You know the one.

Now, here are my beloved, beloved boys Sonata Arctica (YES, the Finnish metal band, for those of you sitting at the back) doing their version of this pop classic. I... am INCOHERENT, seriously. Oh, my BOYS. This is simultaneously utterly and soaringly gorgeous and the funniest thing I have heard ALL DECADE. ~♥~♥~♥~♥~♥~♥~♥~♥~♥~♥~♥~♥~♥~♥~

Dear power metal scene, and Sonata Arctica in particular, I love you very, very much. Please do not ever, ever change, and in particular please do not ever develop ANY sense of how you look to people whose senses of the ridiculous have developed beyond the embryonic. Please keep doing wonderful, ludicrous, utterly unselfconscious things like this for ever and ever, because the world could more easily spare a million scoffers than it could spare one band THIS AWESOME. ^_^

...I would totally dance to this if it ever got played in a club. And if they play it live next time I see them, I bet I cry. ^_^

Laters,
Rath

Yesterday was a definite day of downswing. Mood, luck, Stuff, all rock bottom. Today? Is less than halfway through and already feels like that moment on the way up to the top on a swing, when your insides go over with the force of the lift and the iron frame around you shudders and lurches as your weight and momentum tug on its anchoring, and the wind and sun hit you in the face and it's all too exhilarating to be frightening even if it does feel like you're about to fall off. Today, so far, is good.

And this news article on measuring quantum effects without them realising that you're looking is just the icing on the possibly-existent cake. Apparently, if you can manage to observe reality without changing it, you discover that it is EVEN WEIRDER THAN YOU THOUGHT. Somewhere in the back of the universe, I can hear laughter. ^_^

In other more local news, it's so good to be awake and alive and not half dead with exhaustion for a change. ^_^ I even have a story blocked out in my head, which is great as I've been utterly useless at getting anything into pennable form lately. And today there will be pub food, and useful work, and friends, and also Judgement Day pay-per-view over at Mark's... yep, stuff is good. Life++.

Laters,
The Navigator

PS Also, new best thing ever: Body Shop's brazil nut body butter. I have no idea how it goes from smelling of warm and creamy and, well, brazil nuts in the jar, to smelling like WKD-Iron-Brew-over-hot-charcoal[1] on me, but the fact that it does is frankly just fantastic. Win!

[1] You will learn strange things from pouring alcoholic libations over a disposable barbeque. You may also discover the most unimaginably wonderful caramelised-sugar smell in the world, seriously... ^_^

I have NEVER needed this icon more, I swear...

So I was round at the corner shop just down from the office, getting some drinks, and happened to check the biscuit rack. I discovered not only Garibaldi biscuits (which I haven't had in years!) but... Wagon Wheels!

Now, since Wagon Wheels are practically cultural heritage if you were ever a kid in the UK, I grabbed some just for old times' sake (and also planning to introduce lookingforsigns to the concept). They're still being plugged on the strength of being basically the biggest damn biscuit known to man, but as I happened to glance at the back of the packet I noticed that they've acquired a new (to me) marketing slogan which goes:

"You've got to grin to get it in!"

I... really, WHAT? I CANNOT be the only person who reads that and thinks things that have NOTHING to do with chocolate marshmallow biscuits. Can I?

In fact, I am so convinced of this, that I am throwing this benighted gimmick out as a fic prompt to the writers on my friendslist. Any fandom, any genre, any characters of your choice, but I invite you all to, er, rise to the challenge of writing something based around that sentence (and, optionally, a packet of Wagon Wheels)...

Bring it on!

Laters,
Rath

Can I get an OH MY FUCKING GODS from all the Lovecraft fans and giant tentaclefishoggoths on my flist, please?

Link, for clickyphobes, is to an article about an expedition to the buried, ice-covered, and geologically-shouldn't-be-there Gamburtsevs, the "ghost peaks" of Antarctica. Umm... yep.

Incidentally At The Mountains of Madness was written years before the Gamburtsevs were even discovered (in the fifties, for the record), for anyone who's counting. Hang on to your hats, believers. O_O

Laters,
Rath

Just watched 3:10 to Yuma with (lj)oml404 and I honestly can't recommend it highly enough. It's a classic Western of the old school, beautifully shot, laden with character and that special kind of controlled emotion that the genre does so well. Short version of the premise: a crippled war veteran whose ranch is on the verge of repossession volunteers, in exchange for the money that can save his family, to help escort a captured outlaw to the "3:10 to Yuma", the prison train that will take him up to his execution, and the long and convoluted road there causes both men to reassess their own ideas of honour, courage and loyalty. Both Christian Bale as burned-out good guy Dan Evans and Russell Crowe as charismatic, blackhearted villain Ben Wade turn in magnificent performances, and the ending moved me to the brink of tears. I won't say more because it's one I'd honestly rather people saw than were spoilered for, but it's wonderful. See it!

We followed that up with Jet Li's Fearless, which while it doesn't grab me so hard as some of the Chinese epics I've seen is certainly pretty good. It doesn't quite have the emotional intensity of things like House of Flying Daggers or Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon - mostly, I suspect, because Jet Li's acting honestly isn't all that - but any great martial arts movie should stand or fall on its fight scenes, and in that regard Fearless delivers and how. (Although at a couple of moments I admit I was thinking "dude, this is actually just ancient and honourable Chinese version of the WWE, isn't it?")

And finally, while we're talking videology - Youtube blindsided me this morning with one of the more startling things I've ever found on it. This is an old bit of camcorder footage from a Mayhem rehearsal, back in 1990 when both Euronymous and Dead were still in the band. I clicked this with interest, having seen a snippet of the footage before, and for a moment I thought it was actually some kind of joke - because - oh, just click it and you'll see. The opening segment looks like one of those dream sequences from some feelgood family movie, or possibly a Timotei advert. Like it couldn't possibly have less to do with the lords of true necro Black Metal.

Except of course it isn't a joke, it's a real clip. Boys and girls, Per Yngve "Dead" Ohlin, singer for Mayhem and Morbid, suicide victim at the age of twentyone, legend of the Black Metal scene - and someone who got himself caught on camera, out of all the poses he could have been throwing, like that. Flowers in his hair, no less. Laughing in the sunshine and then ducking into the shade to join his friends and pick up the mic and sing his heart out like the world would never end. If someone had written that sequence into a Mayhem fanfic they'd have been crucified for OOC, and it's real. I love that.

(I know most of you won't know or care what this is about, or why it affects me so much - but for the two or three people who will, there you go. Inner Circle Kodak moment, just for you guys. *s*)

Laters,
The Navigator

PS - and for the one person who might want to know this, keep watching that Mayhem video if you've ever wanted a good look at Hellhammer's nipples. Seriously, I have no idea what was going on there. O_O

-N.

Are your enemies sneering at your setpiece superpowers? Are your evil plans getting you chased out of town every time swearing that you'd have got away with it if not for those damn kids? Are you so utterly losing your power to terrify, control and appal that even a bunch of dodgy internet types in V for Vendetta masks can raise the populace to laugh heartily at you?

Well... get some earplugs and then pay attention, because I think I've just found the ultimate weapon of mind destruction, courtesy of the video screens in Chili's and Koi doing five seconds' work on Youtube:

Ladies, gentlemen, strange androgynous things, and evil creatures one and all, I give you: The Power Of Seventies Disco Gone Horribly Wrong! (aka, the video for Sarah Brightman and Hot Gossip performing "I Lost My Heart to a Starship Trooper". I don't know which is harder to believe - that this exists, or that the singer was later mostly to be famous for being in Phantom of the Opera.)

And with that, goodnight, and I hope very much that all of you will be humming this and then hitting yourselves in the side of the head as much as I am for the rest of the week...

Laters,
Rath (with stylistic and compositional support from Dr Werner Wildstrom)