Arctic Light

.... so we went and saw Days of Future Past today, and I mulled about it for awhile, and then I read a review that was linked on Tumblr (SPOILERS OBVIOUSLY), which caused me to have slightly ranty thoughts, which are under the cut because of spoilers. (I did actually enjoy the movie, but many of my thoughts on it are ranty ones.)

( X-Men: Days of Future Past )

... okay. This is a White Collar-related rant I've been sitting on forever, and I'm not sure why I've suddenly hit the point when I can't contain it anymore, but ... RANT AHOY!

( Complaining about character favoritism in fandom -- contains spoilers for White Collar through 5x03 )

I haven't posted anything yet about Tuesday's episode of White Collar because, well first of all, I had a houseful of guests and was only able to get minutes to myself here and there during the week, but second, the episode was ...um. There were things I liked about it, but there were also things that bothered me, and when eventually I put my finger on why it bothered me, my squee collapsed like a punctured balloon.

If you're still on a squee-wave and don't feel like encountering negativity about the show, this post is not recommended.

( Major squee-harshing under the cut! (Also, emo complaining about trivial TV-related angst. *g*) )

ETA: Upon rereading, wowwwww, this is even more emo than it felt like when I was writing it. XD I think it is safe to assume that this post is at least partly the result of me being kind of lonely and unhappy at the moment (er, not in a clinically depressed kind of way, just in a MY FRIENDS ARE ALL GONE AND I'M ALONE, WAHHH kind of way), so don't feel like you have to read or comment or anything. I will probably be more cheerful later.

ETA2: Decided to lock comments, because I am in a whiny emo mood and discussing this particular topic in comments is apparently making me even MORE emo and whiny, so in the interests of not encouraging that side of myself, I think I will go make a MORE CHEERFUL post about something else. Sorry if I cut you off in mid-comment, but please respect my desire to stop discussing this by not trying to subvert the comment-lock (e.g. by PMing me, or leaving your response to this entry via comments on other entries). When I feel like discussing it again, I'll enable comments again.

Okay, seriously, LJ, WHAT. Spoiler-span code seems to have stopped working. I've tried it in two different browsers and in two different journals, and I'm pretty sure it's not me.

On top of that, people have already complained about what has been done to comment display in LJ's "light" style (and apparently for some people in the default style as well; it doesn't do it for me, but it does for some, possibly depending on your prefs) -- the gray separator bars have become much shorter, so that the icons overlap the line below. It's not only fugly, but makes the comments harder to read.

And on top of THAT, I noticed the last couple of days that the "expand" button in threaded comments doesn't reliably work anymore. Sometimes it does. Sometimes it just makes the whole comment thread disappear and the only way to get it back is by reloading the page. (The first time it happened, I thought I'd done something wrong. But it just kept happening.)

Is this happening to anyone else, or is it just me?

Awww, you know you missed these ... :D

So the book in question is "Pigs Don't Fly" by Mary Brown. It looked like a fun, lighthearted fantasy, and mostly, it was. I had plausibility issues with a lot of it -- I think the book's attempt to combine serious themes with a plot made up mostly of jokes and random encounters didn't work very well. But there's a huge thread of DO NOT WANT running through it, which has to do with the heroine's weight issues.

One of the things that made me pick up the book was that it was noted in the cover copy or Amazon description or somewhere that the heroine is overweight, which is vanishingly rare in fantasy. I wasn't expecting the book to handle it in a stellar fashion, but really don't think it would be possible for the author to be more blindingly awful about it than she was ...

( Spoilers for the book and fat-person-hating language within )