Followers

31.12.10

Troll 2

Truly one of the worst bad movies of all time, in my opinion. 2 out of 10 stars on IMDB already tells you this is going to be a winner. Everything from the main character getting up onto the table and peeing on the food at a family dinner to the corn love scene (as in a sex scene involving corn, and no, I'm not joking), to the fact that while this movie is called 'Troll,' there are in fact no trolls in the movie, but goblins, makes this movie so laughably terrible that it has become a cult classic. I saw it in live action along with the movie about a year ago, and it was just so ridiculously bad that I couldn't help but laugh, though seeing it without the acting and the rest of the audience would not, I'm sure, have been near as much fun. My parents were kind enough to get it for me for Christmas, and oh, how they have rued that decision ever since. Being in some state of intoxication while watching is highly recommended.

Here's the timeless sex scene, in case you're interested:

Nilbog backwards is Goblin? Oh my Goooooooood

22.12.10

Poll: Best Superhero

Best Superhero


Who do you think it is? Obviously I'm a little biased towards the DC universe, but I've tried to include some Marvel characters as well. If you vote other, comment who it is, and why you think anyone could possibly beat Batman!

20.12.10

Total Lunar Eclipse Tonight

For the first time since February of 2008, there will be a total lunar eclipse visible in North and South America starting tonight around midnight EST, with the best viewing time being around 1:30 a.m. (A lunar eclipse occurs when the earth moves between the sun and the moon, and they line up perfectly so that the shadow of the Earth completely obscures the moon; it can only happen when there is a full moon). Fun fact: this eclipse also occurs on the Winter Solstice, and it's the first time these two events have coincided in over 350 years.
Good excuse to smoke some weed, listen to Pink Floyd and ponder life? I think so!

19.12.10

Humble Indie Bundle

Games included are Braid, Cortex Command, Machinarium,
Osmos, and Revenge of the Titans.
Being the poor university student that I am, I try to find discounts wherever I can; that's why, when I heard that the Humble Indie Bundle is currently available for the second year running, I jumped right on it. In this bundle, there are 5 awesome indie games (normally an $85 value), but for a limited time you can choose what you want to pay for them. The cool thing is, you can also choose how much of the money you want to go to the developers, how much should go to charity, etc. They're available on any OS, and you can install and reinstall them on any computer you want to once you've bought them (they give you a permanent download link); it's a great deal for some really cool games, and at the same time you're helping to support charity. Check it out at here!

17.12.10

New Tron Legacy Soundtrack

The new soundtrack is amazing. The soundtrack for the original Tron was actually composed and performed by Wendy Carlos, who, if you don't know anything about her, also did the soundtracks for A Clockwork Orange and the Shining, among others - Daft Punk had a lot to live up to. They certainly took their sweet time making it, but the result is undoubtedly worth it. It sounds somewhat like an electronic version of the Batman soundtrack, and it fits seamlessly with the movie, really enhancing the video game-like atmosphere. Admittedly, some of the tracks do get somewhat repetitive, but overall I would say it's a definite success (it stood out for me more than the movie, which wasn't bad in itself). Also look out for Daft Punk themselves in the movie, where they have a cameo appearance as DJs at the 'End of the Line' nightclub.

16.12.10

The Wand Ownership Problem

If you're a devoted Potter fan like me, you will probably be aware of the wand ownership problem. If you're not, here is a quick overview (spoiler alert if you haven't finished the series): throughout most of the 7th book, Voldemort is searching for a wand that will be able to overpower Harry's, because their wands will not fight each other (although this is not, as he suspected, because of the twin cores, but because the part of soul that is in Harry that Voldemort is unaware of refuses to fight with any soul that still remains in Voldemort's body). He eventually takes the elder wand (a wand which is supposedly unbeatable that will win in any duel, though that raises other issues, like the fact that Dumbledore beat Grindelwald in a duel to get the wand in the first place), but he finds that it doesn't work as well as he had thought that it would; since Snape killed Dumbledore, Voldemort believes that the 'true' ownership of the wand would have passed to him, and so he kills him. If you look carefully at everything that happens on top of the Astronomy Tower however, it is clear that Malfoy disarms Dumbledore using Expelliarmus before Snape comes up and kills him, meaning that the true ownership of the elder wand passed to Malfoy, and later to Harry when he disarmed Malfoy.

Looking at this sequence of events, we should conclude that 1. The Expelliarmus spell is enough to transfer ownership of a wand, and 2. It doesn't seem to matter when the actual disarming happens, or if the wand that is taken is the wand in question; the ownership of ALL wands owned by the disarmed person will be transferred. We know this because Malfoy disarms Dumbledore near the end of the 6th book, just before the beginning of the summer, and it is over 6 months later (sometime after Christmas) that Harry disarms Malfoy, transferring the ownership of the elder wand to him (when the elder wand itself is, in fact, hundreds of miles away in Dumbledore's tomb; Harry takes only Malfoy's original wand, but this disarming apparently transfers the ownership of all wands that he himself has disarmed). However, if this is true, this also means that half of the people in Dumbledore's Army do not have true ownership of their wands, since Expelliarmus is the very first spell that Harry ever teaches them in the 5th book, and they then split into pairs and practice disarming. It has already been shown that just the use of the spell Expelliarmus is enough to transfer ownership, so it follows logically that every time a member of the DA practiced the spell, they either took ownership of their partner's wand, or they took ownership of their partner's wand and they took back ownership of their own.

JK Rowling has addressed this issue by saying something like 'It was just practice, they didn't really mean it, so their wands didn't actually transfer ownership' which is, in my opinion, a rather weak defence. It is a very long, complicated, inter-related series, so a few mistakes are expected, and JKR has made surprisingly few, but this is a big one. Even if she can explain away the practice sessions as 'not really meaning it', there are numerous other examples of disarmings, the most notable being in the third book when both Harry and Hermione, at the same time, cast Expelliarmus at Snape while in the Shrieking Shack; there is no way that you can say that they didn't mean it, or that it was only practice, which means that Severus Snape's wand never reached its full potential after that moment, because its true allegiances lay with Harry and Hermione.

I am Batgirl.

Exams are almost over, so I figured I would start a blog on the things I love most - namely, Harry Potter, comic books, video games, and other such fine things. I am 18 years old and live in Canada; I have purple hair and a lip ring, more because I became bored with blonde and bland than a true streak of rebelliousness. I am currently attending the University of Waterloo for my undergrad in Honours Science, which basically means I have no idea what I want to do with my life, so I'm taking a little bit of everything until I happen to figure that out. Maybe I never will, but in the meantime I'm going to enjoy my time to the best that I can.