About a year ago now, I put forth some arguments to the other admins on AF, stating my reasons for why I disliked the fanon consensus that Ginny Weasley’s first name was actually Virginia. Instead I preferred Ginevra, which, for various reasons, we then adopted as her first name on the game.

There was dissention over this decision from some of the other players, who had wholly bought in to the fanon — some so much as to believe it was actually stated in the books that her name was Virginia.

Which is why I was absolutely delighted to read this.

I feel so vindicated.

Ginevra, Ginevra, Ginevra. Ha!

I’m currently in the middle of about 8 different books. I hate it when this happens; it’s a result of a lack of focus on my part and makes it hard for me to pick a book to finish first.

It’s especially annoying right now because several of them are fairly long books and I’m not quite halfway through any of them. (This is mainly because anything else I’ve picked up was manga and I read those straight through without stopping.)

I’ve seen and read several things lately and haven’t written about them. Some of them I wanted to, so I’d best do it before it’s completely pointless.

Spoilers definitely abound, so if you care… don’t read.

Troy
Let’s work chronologically backwards. This was the last movie I saw at the theatre, and as I told E, the people who are frothing at the mouth about it were apparently confused as to what it was going to be. It is not an adaptation of the Iliad. It does not purport to be an adaptation of the Iliad. The title of the movie is not ‘Homer’s Iliad’ or any variant thereof. It is “Troy”, which says to me, here’s a movie that involves Troy in some fashion. And this expectation will not be disappointed. The story is massively simplified and updated — Priam has what, 100 children in the originating myths? They ruthlessly cut out all of the unimportant ones and several of the important ones (notably, Cassandra makes no appearance in this movie), paring the number down to the two you absolutely cannot do without: Paris and Hector. The gods, rather than being direct, physical participants, are not seen. This, I think, was a wise choice. It was more realistic to have them firmly off camera; people tend to read in to occurrences after the fact, when they can spin the results in the manner they wish. There were things which happened which were contrary to myth (for instance, the war took about 3 weeks rather than 10 years), there were things which happened according to myth (Odysseus came up with the horse), there were things that happened that were neither contradictory nor agreeing. The plot hung together reasonably well, and most everyone behaved pretty ICly, which is about all that I expect from any movie, let alone a literary adaptation.

Van Helsing
This was an interesting idea. Not being a fan of or very knowledgeable about monster movies in general, I cannot comment on how much of this was cribbed from classic movies of that genre. But the plot was weaker here than Troy. There were several points where I felt like avenues were not explored simply because the writers were too lazy to come up with the answer to the questions that had been raised. For instance, Dracula keeps going on about how he knows about Van Helsing’s past. He finally states that Van Helsing was the one who murdered him, and says a few more things which are neither explained nor really reacted to. Perhaps they’re just leaving it open for a sequel, but the script could have used some tightening. Overall though it wasn’t awful. Not as good as Troy; I won’t be buying the DVD; but I’ve seen worse.

Shrek 2
It was good. Cute and clever and with very few parts that annoyed me. Will it stand the test of time? Not at all. It’s too in-jokey and mired in current popular culture references. 50, even 20 years from now, I expect a lot of the jokes to be hard to understand. Like the first Shrek, it has not the staying power of a Disney classic. Pure fluff, it amuses and then is eminently forgettable.

Mean Girls
More fluff, but live action fluff this time. There were a few painful moments in this movie, but for an SNL associated picture it was nothing short of miraculous. (Amongst movies in general it was less so, but it was above average at least.) I don’t know if it’s DVD purchase worthy, but it might be. The script was reasonably clever, and though the end was pretty stupid, the middle part mostly makes up for it.

On to television…

The Friends finale annoyed me a bit. For something they clearly had all the time in the world to work on, there were several bits in the script that did not make any sense to me. First, the fact that the babies came home from the hospital approximately two hours after they were born. This does not strike me as realistic, especially in an adoption situation. And then there was the whole Rachel and Ross thing. I’ll be candid: I didn’t want them to get together at the end. They were over. The fact that they continued to dance around the issue seven or eight YEARS after they had broken up just emphasized their patheticness and inability to move on with their lives. In one sense they deserved each other, but in another it would have been far more cheerful an ending if it had shown them able to get over the past and make rational, reasonable decisions. But it didn’t. And why didn’t it? Someone suggested to me that it was because they needed to be together for the final scene — an OOC requirement artificially imposed on the plotline that caused it to twist. I’m inclined to believe this is the case, and it is unfortunate! Because without that restriction, more sense could have been had. Ross could have gone -with- Rachel instead of expecting the woman to give up -her- growth and dreams for a sad loser not willing to make the same sacrifice for her. (And that just made me sad. The show began with Rachel escaping from that box, and it ended with her leaping right back in.)

West Wing
More satisfying, but nonetheless upsetting! Poor Josh. My main comment here is the fact that I didn’t recognize Jason Isaacs right away. In fact, I didn’t realize it was him until I saw his name in the credits. I felt dumb. And it made me want to watch…

Peter Pan
Bought the DVD. Worth it. I’m glad they cut the original ending scene, but they shouldn’t have cut out the whole Mr. Darling flagellates himself bit.

Love Actually
Also got this DVD, and it was again worth it. Mostly I had just wanted to see the movie again, as it strikes me as one of those that I’ll be able to watch over and over again, but I was pleased to find that the DVD contains reams of deleted scenes, most of which are excellent.

…scares me.

I have this phobia about talking about things that are in progress or still undecided. So generally, if I have a long gap in posting, it means there’s something going on which I’m waiting for a resolution for before actually writing about it — something important enough that it seems like writing without mentioning it is silly.

Or else I’m just being lazy. It’s often hard to tell.

In this case, however, the gap between posts was because of the former reason. For the past two years I’ve been going to graduate school full time to finally finish my Masters degree. It was something I really wanted to do; something I told myself I would do, especially after I quit graduate school the first time, in the spring of 1999.

It came down to this semester and the required project credit. It was this that was the stumbling block last time — after a year in school, I still had no idea what to do for a project and felt disconnected from the professors, so I left. I knew that if I quit again, I probably wouldn’t ever manage to go back. But even though I nominally had a project worked out back at the start of the semester, I had an extremely difficult time motivating myself to actually work on it. I spent most of the semester fretting over it and staring listlessly at my computer screen getting nothing accomplished.

I never could really see myself done with the degree. I never had this mental block as an undergrad; I never felt any doubt that I would finish, and finish easily. So May rolled around (the last day of finals was May 14th) and the project was still virtually unstarted. If I was actually going to graduate this semester, this was a problem.

Somehow (with some help from Bob and J) the project was completed. I put together a presentation which I showed to my adviser on the 14th, at nearly the last minute. I sent her a paper (19 real pages, 59 with the code) so she could turn in the grade on the 17th, as was required for anyone graduating this semester. And then I got to worry about what the grade was. It had to be a B- or more to count so I could fulfill all the requirements for graduation.

The grades were finally online this morning, and I got an A. I’M DONE!!!

It’s such a relief to have that over with and confirmed over with. I’ve been in a state of paralysis waiting for the response; it felt weird to update my resume to include the degree, tempting fate to claim it before it was official that I was going to get it.

Now I need a job.

Holy crap. What have they done to poor blogger? This new interface is terrible! Yes, you have put fewer functions on each page, and thus the screen is less cluttered, but you have also hidden functions, forced people to click more times, and made it more difficult to check your previous posts. I think the negatives of the UI outweigh the so-called improvements.

Blah.

Er, so anyway, I have many things I need to post about, but this ridiculous new design has sapped what little strength I had left. So it’ll have to wait.

Assuming I can figure out what the fuck I’m supposed to click to save this post. What the hell is a ‘draft’?

Why don’t they just make diet coke taste better?

So frazzled am I. I haven’t been able to concentrate on much of anything for the past week or two, because all of my attention is concentrated on fretting over the state of my final project. This includes not being able to concentrate on working on the project, which does not help with the fretting, and so forth…

I’ve been playing a lot of solitaire.

Sigh.

If I could go to sleep and wake up on the 14th I would be very happy, but only if I could wake up with this damn thing FINISHED.