It Is The Summer Of My Smile

It's my wife's birthday, everybody! Hooray! She's spending it feeling like a truck hit her! What a great present to give her, right? It's the gift that keeps on giving! Actually, through a great stroke of luck she's been feeling pretty good this morning, hopefully it will last to her birthday dinner (waffles). The presents I actually got her was the set of all four original .Hack games for the ps2 (we managed to find them cheap-ish on ebay) and a file at the only dedicated comic book store in town set aside for the My Little Pony comics as they come in. Both Jess and her sister really love the show, her sister especially since she grew up with the original, retained her obsession with horses into adulthood, and needed a show for her and her little kids to watch that was fun and not patronising. You might say the show was a perfect storm of awesomeness for her, especially when you consider that she's very talented when it comes to crafts and now she makes plushies for extra money. She even got paid $200 to make a celestia! Here's her DA: http://thuvia.deviantart.com/ As you've probably guessed by now, She's the one that made my Vinyl Scratch plushie. I'm technically a brony, but I'm not an obsessive one. I watch each episode when it comes out and I love the humour and art style, but I don't own every piece of merchandise that has ever existed. We do own a lot of mini figures, though.

Lots of work to do today! I'll be finishing my style frames (sort of a storyboard for an ad) today, as well as finally recording some new episodes of Nancy Drew. Once the frames are done I'll be asking you guys' opinion on them which will also count towards my grade, so watch out for that later. Once more into the breach!

Movie of the day: The Raid. Technically this indonesian martial arts film's english title is "The Raid: Redemption", but I don't agree with that as it makes it sound like a sequel and the 'redemption' is more of a b-story to the main focus. What is that focus? Punching, dear boy. This movie is the Sound Of Music of punching movies: It does everything it needs to do well. It's ludicrously fast paced with insanely clever set pieces and camera techniques I'm shocked haven't been used before. The camera is kinetic and rough, but here's the thing. It stays still and pulls back when there's a fight scene so you can see every single move. Novel, right? I have only two problems with this movie. For one thing, the subtitles were done by a guy with Tourette's, it seems. Are there really words in the indonesian language that directly translate to swear words? This is a pet peeve of mine, especially in anime when the subbers hear the character talking strongly and loudly and decide, "let's throw some f-bombs in there!" That's more subjective, though. The other thing I couldn't get over, though, was that the main character is a zen master of the nightstick. He demolishes an entire floor of knife-wielding punks with one. So WHY doesn't he ever pick it back up after said fight? he just steps over it! I don't know, that just really bugged me. Otherwise, gritty martial arts at it's best.

Song of the day: The Rain Song by Led Zeppelin. I don't need to tell you how awesome and influential Led Zep was, but I can tell you my favourite of their songs. I learned a few things from this number: one, that when a good band releases a song called "The ____ Song" It's usually pretty good (see also Immigration song, Pyramid Song, The Campire Song Song), and that when rock bands do big and orchestral, they do it good. One of the best mellow songs out there.