(Dragon:)
DAN ABNETT is the super-secret screenwriter for the upcoming Ultramarines movie. No shame here--my brain just totally JIZZED IN MY FAN-PANTS. Gonna take more than soap and water to get that stain out.

I kinda object to the way he's talking about it as the "first real 40K movie," I guess because 70 minutes doesn't seem like nearly enough time to tell a deep, complicated story. Particularly when you know upfront that it's a bunch of 40K guys with access to top-quality CGI, so 30-40 of those minutes will probably be spent on an Insane Grim Darkness There Is Only War battlefield where cities will be levelled by Titans and hundreds of people get dead every second. I mean, come on. Even Godly Dan gets mired in battle spam from time to time.

.......They'd better get James Swallow for Blood Angels: Brother Rafen's Springtime Frolic Dante & Mephiston's Bogus Crusade, is all I'm sayin'. And Reynolds' Word Bearers totally need their own weekly primetime kids' show. Come on, GW, don't stop the fangasm train now! ;)

(PS: Also, thrill your human species pride with this photo of a right-minded Imperial citizen. That's love of the Emperor for ya. <3)

--Dragon.

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( And this is just Riss venting. Riss is full of assorted rages at the moment. Involves some frustrated swearing, and nothing especially insightful or coherent. )

In brief, I may not be dead (yet) and I may not be flunking out of school (yet), but still...fuck my life. That is all. :P

--Riss.
(PS: HUGS FOR EVERYONE. My suppressed rivers of the milk of human kindness overflow upon all of you.)

Yes, we got around to uploading the pics of our ROTC Halloween Run costume, complete (in some cases) with ghetto Photoshopped text and stuff. :B Sadly, most people in the battalion didn't know who Naked Snake was, although some of them understood after Solid Snake was mentioned. This was weird to me, but I can't help their lack of gamer culture. (I suspect that they probably get out too much, and could stand for some good, healthy lazing around in front of the TV with a few video games.)

Also, although we couldn't find a rubber snake for simulated eating, we did find a nifty portable sound system for the iPod. It looks and acts like a hard case, but the outside is actually a flat speaker. It fits nicely in the thigh pocket of our fatigue pants and the volume goes high enough for a perfect personal soundtrack effect. For all your snake-eating needs, shop Radio Shack!! :D

( On to the goods~ )

I don't know if I've mentioned this before, but for a few years now it's been our habit to bake Christmas cookies while wearing a holstered handgun. In the past, this has involved a shoulder holster and a Glock 23 with a Hello Kitty cell phone charm hanging from its lanyard hole. (We have a Snowman Kitty that is quite festive~ :B) However, I recently got ahold of a Kimber Pro Raptor II which has been the best .45ACP paperweight ever thanks to my lack of ammo money and, since Naked Snake uses a more conventional 1911 pistol in MGS3, I think it would be nifty to costume up again during Thanksgiving break and bake counter-terrorism cookies for the good of the American people. ;B I'm thinking that I could roll rumballs while inside the box, even. If we pull it off, there will probably be more photos. ^_^

--Riss& (peanut gallery all over).

Just got back from the semester's three-day ROTC field party. I was the acting platoon leader, and I had also sprained my wrist and somehow damaged a nerve in my arm a week before and was therefore forced to act like more of a gimp than I ever should have. (The doctor will not be hearing about how much I abused my limb out there. It is getting better, at least, although I am also taking tons of Advil and may just be incapable of feeling any pain. :P)

I managed to fuck up my job by accident, so I am still getting over the self-directed Failure Rage. On Monday, my mood was so rock-bottom that I decided I was too "sick" to go to class and spent the day hiding from life in my apartment.

If only I hadn't been in leadership...because otherwise, I did surprisingly good at almost everything else. Five of eight points on day land nav (absolute minimum, but I think I know what I screwed up), four of five on night land nav, didn't fall out on the 6-mile road march, overall "satisfactory" grade on the group problem-solving lane... My arm kept me off most of the obstacle course, and I sucked at the paintball lanes because the damn masks kept fogging up so bad that I couldn't even see to advance. *sigh* When I am queen in charge, somebody's gonna get tasked with smearing a film of toothpaste over the insides of those things.

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FYI: Ocean Eyes by Owl City (the MP3 version) is on sale at Amazon for only $5. It was playing over the speakers at B&N and we copied down some lyrics to look up later.

Turns out that this "band" is actually one guy who started singing and jamming on his computer during long stretches of insomnia, which is something that I can respect. (I also suspect that everyone probably knows this already, since the guy is popular enough to rate airtime at major bookstores. ^^;;)

( The lyrics are also satisfyingly bizarre. Really, if you're going to sing stuff that makes no sense, do it to the hilt. )

I'm liking the repeating water/ice and flight imagery.

Also, I wish I could have learned the band and album names while I was at B&N, but unfortunately it seems like walking into the CD/DVD section of the store while dressed like an average kid and wearing a messenger bag (even if it's a Dai-Gurren Dan bag, which can only be worn by people of Great Justice) is the equivalent of having a giant Hi, I've Come To Shoplift Your Shit sign floating over your head. I got upfront hostility from the old guy manning the counter, and while I was messing with a listening station I got two walk-bys from the same uniformed security guy and one from a female employee before the old guy stationed himself almost right next to me and started idly puttering around with the merchandise for no obvious reason. Wow, I was not aware that I looked like a soulless criminal. Clearly these people don't want my money. Yet another reason to shift my WH40K crack-buying habit to Borders, I suppose. Since I already buy my manga from a small comic shop chain, this'll eliminate almost every reason I have to bother going into a B&N store.

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I don't think I mentioned the Halloween ROTC run--the mission was successful, though I was never able to find a rubber snake in time. Our mom got some pretty good photos of us as Chubby Hermaphrodite Naked Snake + Cardboard Box, and some other good photos of various parts of the battalion in costume. I'll get some of those on Photobucket at some point so that the Internet can leer at our pseudomanly hotness. :B FAKE STUBBLE FTW.

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I think a big reason why I might be feeling especially miserable is because I know that NaNoWriMo is going on right now, and I am actually amazed at how desperately I wish I could participate. Last year I did three months of Novel In 90 during the fall semester, and although it was pretty damn hard, I was still glad that I did it. Writing is the most satisfying kind of work that I can do, hands down. I am utterly the slave bitch of my creative urge. Even if it sometimes feels like the time-management equivalent of crawling through a minefield covered with broken glass and large puddles of lemon juice, I end up so stupidhappy on the other side that I'll still declare undying love and beg for more of the same. *sigh* It's been months and months since I've put words on paper or in the laptop...gods, I feel like the longer I go without writing, the more I feel like something that's been dead and rotting for about the same stretch of time. I keep trying to tell myself that I don't need it to stay sane, because some part of me keeps thinking that I really shouldn't, but...fuck, I think I might need it to stay sane. Dammit. X(

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Also, it looks like I may have screwed up our iTunes library, to the point of losing some of our files. Now I have to go through the many joys of recovering a chunk of that shit from the iPod itself...FUCK. At least I didn't lose it all, I guess.

--Riss.

(BT:) Well, so I understand that randomly posting lyrics is typical behavior for online journallers. What's on my mind at the moment?

( How calming it is to know that, somewhere, there is a light that will never go out. )

(BT:) There is a great flood of thoughts triggered by these lyrics, but describing it would weaken it. Things frozen into a shape are fragile. Let me keep this molten. (In part, though, I'm remembering things from the past and people that I once knew.)

(Riss:) Have a listen. I feel a little creeped by how cheery this sounds in places. Also, WTF music video?? o_O;;

(BT:) Yes, love for the music video as well. The target has been acquired. I'll be wanting more of this sound.

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(Riss:) Today we went out to get Naked Snake's box for the Halloween costume. We ended up in a UPS store, and after fretting over the sizes of available boxes, we talked to a clerk who quickly caught on to the plan as soon as we mentioned a costume and Metal Gear Solid. He was quite a packaging professional, estimating that Snake's box in the game was likely a 32" cube; unfortunately, the biggest size he had was a 25.75" cube, but he graciously allowed us to try it on before buying. ^_^ This box is retardedly huge. It almost didn't fit into the trunk of the car. Although full-body concealment may be a bit of a squeeze (looks like we can curl up nicely under it, but our legs will definitely stick out while running), it doesn't matter much because we'll be jogging, not sneaking. Looks like the clerk gave us a discount too. :D

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( And now for some stupid Army videos that Riss found on YouTube. UN-ACCEPTABLE!!11! )

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(Dragon:) What post could possibly be complete without--you guessed it--WH40K bullshit?

(Dragon:) The latest news: Nick Kyme's Salamander and Abnett's first Gaunt's Ghosts omnibus, The Founding. Salamander was actually not bad. RITE MOAR, NICK.

(Riss:) Yes, it has a surprising number of Space Marines with legit mental disorders, so maybe Kyme is hoping to take a toned-down page out of Ian Watson's playbook. We have people crippled by the effects of grief (including survivor's guilt), masochism, sadism, and what looks like sociopathy. Chapter Commander's lesson learned: make sure the company chaplains are not soulless assholes so that the men will actually, like, come to them for help with their personal problems instead of letting their insanity fester. On the up side, this book also includes a Marine who might be competing with Storm of Iron's Captain Eshara for the "Most Goshdarn Decent to Civilians" award.

(Riss:) Kyme's writing style is a little wonky, but then again, I think most of the editors at Black Library are there just to take up office space. :P

(Riss:) And we're still wading through the Abnett. I'm reading it because it was recommended by another fan, but frankly...I'm glad that we read Abnett's later work first. This book contains the first novels that the man ever wrote, and while they're not horrible, they're rather on the beige side for WH40K. Say it with us--

(R&D:) BATTLE SPAM BATTLE SPAM BATTLE SPAM BATTLE SPAM

(R&D:) It's great that they go places and kill people! Can has character development plz?

(Riss:) Salamander had a little of the same problem, but that can be chalked up to way that 40K novels are expected to be at least 60% play-by-play bloodshed.

(R&D:) Still planning to get Titanicus when it comes out in softcover. Still planning, for no sensible reason, to write a parody of it called So I Herd U Leik Imperaterz. Still secretly longing to leap back into the RAGING WRITER-FORGE that is NaNoWriMo...but no time for it, damn it all. *sigh*

Now that we've made a tiny dent in the remixes that we downloaded, we thought that maybe we should pass on a few that caught our attention. Again, we're not aware of any other way to get these things (especially in the US) except by download, so...send lots of love and good wishes over to Japan? Links are good for seven days only, and the order in which they're listed is a vague best-to-worst ranking. Any "(...)" indicate something that this sad white otaku kid can't read for one reason or another. :B

(Riss:) For the record, I'm still working out the original OSTs, so I generally don't know which song is being remixed or even which game it's from. Clueless n00b is clueless, but good music is still good. ^_^;;;

( Cut for people who are squicked by gratuitous filesharing. )

Probably this should be representative enough--if anything else particularly excellent pops out of the playlist, then there may be followups to this post. ^^ Also, I tried to keep those links straight, but give us a heads-up if I mislinked something.

For now, we should probably go do something to get that speedcore out of our brain so we can actually go to sleep. x_x

...some fool decided to make a Space Marine movie real life documentary. Judging from the, uh, elaborate trailer on the website, I'm guessing one or all of the following happened:

1) The media team assigned to get live combat footage of the Ultramarines in action survived 8.75 seconds before the last guy went down in a spray of manburger. The producers had to throw together a placeholder until they can figure out how to keep the crew alive long enough to at least get an interview.
2) The 41st Millennium is so grim and so dark that, no matter how they try, the movie always comes out looking like 70 minutes of jet-black screen. They added text just so people would know that something INSANELY EXCITING is going on. If you could see what's actually happening in this trailer, it's possible that the raw awesome would make you instantly piss blood and die.
3) THIS FILE HAS BEEN SEALED FOR YOUR PROTECTION BY ORDER OF THE HOLY INQUISITION.
4) The producers are idiots who think that animated text will cause fanboys worldwide to decide that this project is guaranteed badass.
5) The quality of GW's fanboys is such that all they need to see is animated text in order to decide that a project is guaranteed badass.
6) Possibly I am a bit too cynical, and all it takes to get me cranked up is animated text designed to get a rise out of GW fanboys.

I would have linked to this before, if only there had been something to link to. Probably I would have let it go completely unmentioned, but this particular post had enough comment flavor to be worth spreading around. adeptusastartes is a cool comm in the sense that it feels like a bunch of dudes bullshitting at each other in a fannish fashion, as opposed to some of the more hardcore-gamer lairs where people only post intelligently about battle reports, rules lawyering, and army-pimping. Thus, comments in this comm tend to be much more fun. vurumai takes my cake with this suggested improvement:

Or you could put the cast of Twilight in powerarmor and make a Blood Angel movie.
And then let Michael Bay direct it so I can go ahead and paint the walls with my brains.

FUCK YES. This needs to happen yesterday, but only if the world's foremost Blood Angel fanfic writer can work on the script. Seriously, if you give this project to somebody who can actually write well, you're missing the point by kilometers. Kilometers, I say.

Also, if I could see Brother Rafen take off his bloodstained helmet and SPARKLE MENACINGLY in the sunlight while screaming, "THIS IS THE BODY OF A KILLER!!" I think I would die from the force of my lulz and pass smiling through the gates of Fanboy Hell.

I kind of wonder, though, if this is really going to happen. Way back when, maybe at Games Day 1994 or thereabouts, they had big-deal looping trailers (with more than animated text, no shit) about the OMG UPCOMING WH40K MOVIES, which I believe featured Space Marines and Inquisitors vs. Orks. The Ork dialogue was all subbed in English. XD XD There was even a little sidebar about the flicks in an issue of White Dwarf, where they showed a photo of an actor suited up in Space Marine armor. Back then, they didn't have all this newfangled CG nonsense you kids got nowadays--the props and gear looked like they were all cast resin and hand-detailed, with all the heraldic stuff sculpted in relief. Believe me, it looked fucking sweet at the time. Obviously, that project never went anywhere.

Our other thoughts (mine and Riss'):
- I think we're both expecting something like the FF7 movies, meaning that it'll be A Movie About Space Marines and not much else. People who are not already insane fandrones will probably not get hooked by this flick alone.
- Dudes, why Ultramarines? Are they not supposed to be the most generic Chapter, providing the vanilla foundation on which the quirks of all the other Chapters can be built? If the intended audience is fanboys anyway, why not pick something more exotic, like Space Wolves or Blood Angels? (BT: "Or a Free Legion? I think the Word Bearers are as close to vanilla as we get, maybe. Our vanilla is much more exciting than the Imperium's vanilla, you notice.")
- Riss suggested getting Billy Idol and Rutger Hauer to play a pair of Aging Badass battle brothers. I do think that if you clean these guys up a little--maybe with some dramatic facial scars--and make sure that they've had a few cups of coffee, they could probably get fired up enough to pull it off nicely. Particularly Rutger Hauer, who still seems to randomly lapse into an icy killer's glare when he's not doing anything else with his face. Billy Idol could even take a page out of Will Smith's style guide and write a kooky rap for choreographed dancin' Dark Angels stirring hard-rock anthem about Space Marines for the ending credits. <3

So, like, I should probably wrap up before I make an Internet record for Longest Post Focused on Content-Free Movie Trailers or something. Ultramarines: The Movie Docudrama--coming soon to an Ecclesiarchy Truth Distribution Center in a hive-city near you! :D

--Dragon (with some of those other guys).

(PS: When posting to our DW comm, I was able to use my Cyberfriends 5-Cock Derby icon, which is really the only one appropriate for a post like this. The shared LJ space is Not A Comm, so you poor bastards lose out. I still think we should convert that journal. [/editorial])

( Riss talking about the Bad Brain again. Good news, though, I think. )

--Riss.

(Riss:) Unless my teachers decide to spring a bunch of stuff that's not on the syllabi, I've just gotten over this semester's Hell Week. I'm glad that it was so early. At least half of my survival can be attributed to dumb luck and/or the grace of Heaven...although I haven't gotten the test scores back, so I guess there's still a chance of a crash-and-burn. But I'm not letting that thought stick to my brain. :B I'm also pretty badly sleep-deprived, so hopefully we'll make sense when we type. After this post, I'm probably going to flop over and sleep for 14 hours or so to to recover from the insanity.

( Also, I have begun to show evidence of being semi-hooah. Shokku~! )

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(Riss:) I've been gradually making us some more icons. Nice, functional icons that we should have had a while ago for use during intrasystem team-ups. Shuffling around the 15 slots on the shared LJ account has been a "hmm"-inducing experience. [S] didn't really care if he had more than one, so he gave up two spaces. The rest of us are too damn expressive. Sometimes I wonder if the only reason why our group's stabilized at four active members is because we can't have newbies cramping our style when they grab their share of icon real estate. c.c

(BT:) Also, if we were to get many more people standing in line for their promised icons, then the situation might become less of a queue and more of a revolutionary, flag-burning mob.

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(Riss:) Just today, we discovered an act of fan-blasphemy so perfect that it deserves public adoration. Prepare your fannish conscience, then step forward and behold the awful splendor that is "Crank Dat One-Winged Angel" by Valley of Walls.

(D:) The Internet taught me what to say at times like this! *ahem* WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS I DON'T EVEN

(BT:) Reader, I think you'll want the rest of the album too. It's such a charming blend of NC-17 rap music and oldschool game soundtracks, and it's available at no cost to you!

(Riss:) I cannot stop the hysterical giggling over this one song. Watch me crank dat S.O.L.D.I.E.R. boy, den Supa-man dat HOOOOOOOOE.

(D:) YUUUUAH!

(Riss:) By this point, I think the raw stupid is killing brain cells that I could really use for better things, but...yeah. ^_^; Or wait, I meant yuuuuuah.

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(Riss:) Speaking of other stupid things that I might not have done had my better judgment been working at the time, just today I finished categorizing and untangling a shit ton of music that I got from the Net. I mentioned the Touhou remixes, which I picked up while looking for the actual OSTs. I now have 2347 Touhou songs. What the fricking fuck am I going to do with that many?? That's seven straight days of music, and I really only use my Pod when I'm walking around on campus. T_T

( We Are a Sad Music-Hoarding Creep, con'd. )

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( In which the Ark displays concern over the plot depth of certain WH40K novels. )

(Riss:) Anyway, after reading too much bad fanfiction in dead-tree form, we need to know if there are any other decent authors out there that I might have missed. That new Salamander book has me curious, for instance. People we've liked in the past: Dan Abnett, Gav Thorpe, Simon Spurrier, Ian Watson (fuck yeah Space Marine), and Anthony Reynolds' lovable Word Bearer scamps. I'm officially pissed at Graham McNeill for killing Cpt. Forrix so ingloriously, but I can be convinced to cease hostilities. Goto and Counter are out. Any suggestions?

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(BT:) While we're discussing media trades and 40K, I could dearly use some help. Does anyone know of a source for D-Rok's Oblivion album? It will end up in digital form regardless, so a physical copy isn't strictly necessary. This is a must-have item and we've had zero hits on our searches thus far. Much preemptive love to anyone who can assist.

(Riss:) And with that, I think we should probably sleep.

It's dangerous to go outside. People play music out there. ;_;

The most recent incident: a trip to the dentist's office. They were playing pop Muzak, like every other properly-equipped white-collar front office. I heard a song in the stream that I was sure I'd heard before--I remembered hearing it years ago, so I figured it was pretty old. The melody was familiar, even though I couldn't make out the lyrics beyond a scrap here and there about things being yellow.

"What is this?" asked BT, who'd never heard it before and was more curious than I was.

"Dunno," I said, but I memorized a line or so and, later on, we did some Google-fu and discovered that it was the appropriately-named "Yellow" by Coldplay.

I read the lyrics and felt kind of floored by how nonsensical they were. From the soulful, passionate way they were sung, I guess I expected some kind of profound message, or at least a story. "Popstar clergyperson, explain this shit to me, if you've got such a great handle on it," I demanded. "Why do people insist on making songs about nothing comprehensible?"

He deflated my initial annoyance by pointing out how many nonsensical singers are surprisingly good, some other examples being Cocteau Twins and Yoko Kanno/Gabriela Robin. I'm not really sure if those count, though, since both of them admit that they like the sound of the human voice but want to use it as just another instrument. The lyrics are abstract because the only important thing is the shape of the sound.

I tried to consider "Yellow" very thoughtfully, thinking of how poets can use symbolism to refer to complex ideas or events in simple ways that only people who know the subject will understand. I ended up with a morbid little story of a beloved dying of some horrible liver disease ("you were all yellow" = jaundice?), with the song sung by a lover who traveled far to see the person and did everything he could, only to have the beloved die in the end. But the singer didn't want to dwell on the person's miserable end and instead sang about how wonderful they were while they were alive, and about other beautiful things that were also yellow, so that the death was blended into the good life before it and the good world around it. "Your skin and bones / turn into something beautiful" made me think of a grave out in a sunny field, where flowers would grow thick because of the body underground.

BT is not saying that I'm wrong, but I don't think that he thinks of this as the right approach either. "Why does everything have to have a definite meaning for you?" he seems to be saying. (He isn't saying anything more on the subject. Mostly he just smiles at me in an enigmatic "you are completely missing the point and overworking yourself in that silly way that you do" fashion.) He spoke before about how pop music talks to people about the things that they value and the ways that they should or do feel...if a song sings about nothing intelligible, then is it basically the same as nonvocal music, where it expresses a pure emotion through sound alone? Or maybe I just need to stick to my pretentious sung poetry. -_-;;

A love song for someone who died of liver failure is pretty creative, though. I might stick with that meaning in this case. :)

--Riss.