Oh look, a bird.

Posted by: Wonderduck at 09:29 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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So just before the Duck U Bookstore closed for the day, I got a phone call from The Librarian.  As it'd been a month or so since we last saw each other, she was like "hey, dinner," and I was all like "hey, cool, where," and she was like "sushi," and I did the whole "ace nifty" thing and hung up and got the store closed and, like, boogied out to go meet her.

I'd like to apologize for that sentence.

I showed up a couple of minutes late, as I am old and slow, but as it turns out it didn't matter.  The place of sushi was as crowded as I've ever seen it... on a Tuesday, no less.  It took nearly a half-hour for us to be waited upon, another half-hour for the food to be delivered.  But when it arrived... oh, when it arrived...

Posted by: Wonderduck at 09:11 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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As terrifying as it is to think about, Duck U's midterms ended this past Tuesday.  The rest of the week was this odd beastie called "Fall Break."  Similar to Spring Break in that the Duck U fledgelings got a few days off from school, but completely dissimilar in that the weather is cold and ishy.  Anyway, on the Friday of Fall Break, the Duck U offices are closed... and when that happens, the Duck U Bookstore is closed as well!

Which meant that I only worked for a few hours today, after a meeting with the Duckford Visitor Bureau of course.  I was home by 4pm, and after some breakfast (no, I didn't mis-type; what else do you call the first meal of the day?) decided to take a nap.  Just a couple of wonderful, wonderful hours of blissful slumber, unconscious to the cares of the world, refreshing both the mind and the body.  Afterwards, I'd sit down and finally close out the first Evangelion movie writeup.  It's a good plan, let's go with it!  On three... one, two, three, sleep!

Four hours later, the plan had been crumpled up and thrown into a trashcan.  I can only assume I needed the sleep, but geehorseyfat, that sort of thing does play hob with the whole blogging thing.  Maybe tomorrow night... after working the football game, then dinner with Ph.Duck.

Hey, it could happen.

Posted by: Wonderduck at 10:43 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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After having missed the movie Pacific Rim in the theatres this summer, I vowed that I would purchase a copy of it as soon as it became available.  This, I did not do.  In actuality, I pre-ordered the film in a Blu-Ray / DVD package close to three weeks ago.  When it was delivered this morning, I was very much like a duck in a rye bread store.  Sure, I couldn't actually DO anything with it until I got home, but it was here and that was all that mattered.

I came home, made some dinner, fired up the DVD player, and sat down to watch.  Now, understand something.  When it comes to watching movies at home alone, I tend to pause the film a few times... run to the bathroom, get something to drink, y'know, that sort of thing.  Not tonight.  Tonight, I didn't even notice the time passing.  From moment one to the post-credit scene, I was locked into the film.

Pacific Rim gave me everything I hoped for from this particular movie: giant robots punching giant monsters in the face.  Repeatedly.  In clever ways.  There are going to be two types of people who see flick: those who hate it, and those that realize that it's the best movie ever.

Let me stay that again, in a stylized way that makes it look like I'm shouting each word, then pausing dramatically afterwards or something:

BEST.

MOVIE.

EVER.


Now that I've gotten that out of the way... for an anime fan, Pacific Rim is probably the closest we'll ever get to a live-action Evangelion (giant robots punching giant angels monsters in the face), but without the whiny hero and with more Rinko Kikuchi.

Look, the film is full of cliches.  I got that, but here's the thing: you don't care.  It resonates with the kid in you and makes it jump up and down like it's full of chocolate and mountain dew. 

Watch it.  Love it.  Thank me later.  If I didn't have to go to work in the morning, I'd watch it again.

Posted by: Wonderduck at 10:22 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
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1 Saw it in the theaters, it was awesome.  Of course everyone was a scenery-chewing cliche.  But that's how it should be!  The point is that they did it so amazingly well.

Also, Rinko Kikuchi should be the new spokesmodel for the Dreamliner... covered in carbon fiber and smokin' hot.

(Yeah, I used that before.)

Posted by: Mauser at October 16, 2013 05:50 AM (TJ7ih)

2 Saw it in the theater opening weekend, loved it to pieces. They did so much right and not enough wrong to be bothered about. Stacker's "One, don't touch me... two, don't ever touch me..." bit is brilliant. The... courtship, for lack of a better term... is another well-done thing. (As one Tumblr commentor puts it, "Please Daddy can I kick his ass he just asked for it please oh please oh please?!?") Keeping angst to the minimum requirements, yet another.

If anything its main flaw is that there wasn't enough of all the good things, but that would've made it twice as long a movie. (More of the other Jaeger teams! More giant robot punch! More more more!)

Posted by: GreyDuck at October 16, 2013 11:31 AM (3m7pZ)

3 I give the movie 5 SDF-1s!  (And wholly endorse the Duck's review of it. )

Posted by: Dreamshadow at October 17, 2013 10:07 AM (T5fuR)

4 I really enjoyed it too.  
Though I admit to wanting to pull my hair out at the ending...  Nuclear reactors don't explode (well, not as nuclear explosions).  That's always bothered me in movie.  Nuclear reactor != nuclear bomb.

Posted by: DrHeinous at October 22, 2013 10:04 AM (/Y+Yb)

5 By the way, Honest Trailers did one for Pacific Rim that sums it up nicely.

Posted by: Mauser at October 24, 2013 01:46 AM (TJ7ih)

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So the only problem I had with my new computer, Nori, was that the keyboard that came with her was absolutely terrible.  Oh, don't get me wrong, it worked fine, and the wirelessness of it was a pleasant experience... but it was a chicklet.  That is, the keyboard is of chicklet-style, little square keys, like a laptop's keyboard except slightly less pleasurable to use.  You're expecting something comfortable to type upon when you have a desktop computer, after all.  However, all my keyboards still had PS/2 connectors, and Nori only had USB... so I had to use the terribad keyboard for a while.

Until today.

Not only is it a full size, full key keyboard with keys that actually CLICK! when you press down on them, but the Logitech G105 has LED backlighting as well!  It's lovely, particularly when you look at it through the viewfinder of my camera and it looks like the LEDs look like they're pulsing right-to-left due to what I assume is a weird frequency thingy between the LEDs and my camera. 

I happily packed away the wireless keyboard and laughed when it gave a quiet *beep* when it was taken out of range of the computer.  I'm a cruel duck.

Posted by: Wonderduck at 08:18 PM | Comments (7) | Add Comment
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On the whole, this has been a really bad week.  I might even be able to tell y'all about it sometime.  As a trade, here's Rio Tachibana in her sugar glider outfit.

Why do I like such a stupid, stupid show?

Posted by: Wonderduck at 10:59 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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News came out today that Tom Clancy had passed away at the age of 66.  He was probably best known for "inventing" the Techno-Thriller genre of writing in books such as The Hunt For Red October, Red Storm Rising, The Sum of All Fears, and many, many more.  He was also a part-owner of the Baltimore Orioles baseball team.  The books in the so-called "Ryanverse", based on the adventures of Jack Ryan, all hit #1 on the bestseller lists, and here at The Pond, he has a couple of shelves all to himself in the library.  It's safe to say that once his books began to be ghostwritten, their quality dropped, but until that point he was clearly one of the giants of the literary world.  I remember when the book Rainbow Six came out... I was running a Waldenbooks here in Duckford, and I bought the first copy out of the box.  I then took it home and put it in a difficult-to-reach location for three weeks, just so I wouldn't read it.  See, I was about to take a week's vacation, and I wanted it to be my vacation read...

I just looked back at the release history of his books...arguably, he hasn't released a good book since 2002's Red Rabbit or 2003's Teeth of the Tiger.  I don't think it matters, though.  Even if you stop right there and include his non-fiction titles (mostly co-authored with "researcher" John Gresham), he has an enviable back catalog to say the least.  Not too shabby for an insurance salesman who sold his first title to a history press for $5000...

I'll have to put him up there with Heinlein on the short list of my favorite authors.  Now, where is my copy of Red Storm Rising anyway...?

Posted by: Wonderduck at 08:36 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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