Snaffled from Abhasana.

The only reason I got this answer is because I’ve recently become obsessed with an old piece of ramshackle industrial Victorian architecture in Kirkcaldy. In true Grand Designs spirit, I keep dreaming about how I could transform this delapidated building into a luxurious penthouse studio apartment, but, crucially, without altering the skeletal ironwork and brickwork appearance of the outside. I mean, it would be majorly, massively cool to have a modern apartment hidden inside the remains of a broken factory warehouse some 7 storeys tall. The top floor is literally broken glass and iron girders. It’s just fabulous.

You scored as Industrial/Rivet-Head. You’re a rivet-head. You like industrial music, warehouses, and you are a minion of the machines. Industrial/Rivet-Head 63% Cyber-goth 63% Old-school Goth 42% Perky Goff 42% Ethereal Goth 42% Death Rocker 33% Romantic Goth 33% Anything-Goes Goth 33% Fantasy Goth 33% Understanding Outsider 29% Confused Outsider 4%

What subcategory of Goth best fits you?
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Just so, you know, you don’t get a surprise when you get to work tomorrow, and because you don’t check your work addy when you’re at home but you might check LJ; and because it’s Memorial Day in the US so you won’t be at work today you’ll be at the beach or having a barbie or something; and because if I don’t do this you might just hit speakerphone and then your fellow IT monkeys might wonder what freakish thing is happening in your life:

You have voicemail. Slightly sozzled, squeaky Fife Scots voicemail. And the automatic message on your phone sounds just like the ones we have at work so I imagine it’s one of these swanky Cisco Systems ones. With a speakerphone.

You probably don’t want to use the speakerphone. I believe, in my slightly inebriated state, I lapsed into what the BBFC describes, bizarrely, as ‘language’.

I was riding into town yesterday to pick up the Sunday papers, as our village shop has closed.

By the way: hi to the C+ man I met in Sainsbury’s car park. Didn’t catch your user name, but I was dead jealous of you riding across Canada like that.

I got to thinking about the fact that I haven’t done a kit review in absolutely ages. And I don’t have time to do the full waxing lyrical thing now.

So, in true good list/bad list stylee, here are my goods and bads from the past 18 months or so, in no particular order:

Goods:

• Il Pompino. What a bike
• Timbuk2 El Ocho. I know I bought it 4 years ago but it’s still in my top three.
• 2006 Camelback MULE. Major improvement.
• On-One clothing. Cheap, robust, sexy. Nice.
• Selle Italia Lady Gel Flow. Still close to a benevolent cloud after a couple of hundred miles.
• Torq energy bars. Yummy, not too dry, taste great with tea or coffee.
• Carradice Trax. It’s a good bit of kit – just wish it would fit a bit more neatly on the Pompino with the full mudguards.
• Continental GP4000 in 700x25c. Very impressive. Grippy when they need to be, still skid when I want them to, hard wearing. All I could want in a tyre.
• Lumicycle Li-Ion battery. That rocks.
• Oakley Mag M Frames. Sexy, indestructible, cooler than a polar bear on ice and no longer available so there’ll be no copycat kit queens stealing my ideas (right, Munky?)
• EAI alloy sprockets from Will at Hub Jub. A thing of beauty is a joy forever.

Bads:

• Cat Eye Opticubes. What went wrong, guys? Other than the little watertight 3 LED ones, this is a great idea executed in the worst possible fashion.
• Conti Ultra Gatorksins. Unless you weigh 3 times as much as I do or you enjoy sliding over manhole covers like a seal over oiled rubber.
• Panaracer Paselas. Stay back! Keep them away from me! The product of Satan’s bowels after a particularly nasty chicken vindaloo.
• On One bottom brackets. They break and they give you a dodgy chainline. Seriously, Brant, love you to pieces and the bike is my best friend ever, but that chainline solution is just jive, man.
• Lusso cycle clothing. Maybe I’m not Italian and do come from good Viking stock, but that doesn’t mean I have the waist to hips ratio of Mrs Santa Claus.
• Tyre Flies. I mean, really. Why have second best when you can get the much cooler Tyre Flares?
• Time ATAC Carbon XS. Not because they’re bad, but because they’re no better than standard ATACs and yet cost twice as much. And do more damage if they catch you on the shin.

Typically, there are a couple of things I’ve left out of my good list (e.g. the Specialized Fortress gloves) and I’m struggling to make up the numbers in my bad list because I usually put a lot of thought into my kit purchases and try not to buy on a whim. I tend to remember the things I expected to be good and found to be bad more than things that I just picked up and that turned out to be rubbish. In my mind, the latter is my fault for not speccing them out properly first.

I’m going to put in some spoiler space. Fundamentally, unless you are enough of a Marvel geek to be able to get the Age of Apocalypse team bonus in X-Men Legends II without going to a cheat site — even if you did have to go to your copy of the TPB to do it — then I’m not going to ruin anything for you. If you know that Wolverine lost his hand in AofA, and are frantic with worry about how the retconning is going to affect Cable and Deadpool Vol 6, I suggest you look away now.

Still reading?

Are you sure you want to go this far?

Absolutely sure?

Well, you’ve had fair warning.

OK.

So let me just start by saying that, while you might not think it, I’m a fan of the first two films in the franchise. I liked the first one and I loved the second. I have two copies — bought them singly then had to have the box set. The X-Men films are on my top ten list of things to do to cheer myself up; along with Alien³, the alternate version. So I’m not against the films on principle. I was so excited about this one and looking forward to it so much that we bought tickets for the opening night.

People who know my reaction to crowded cinemas will understand that this means it was a Very Big Deal and I was Super-Hyped.

The cinema was sold out. Even so it started off well enough. Jean Grey’s first line got a laugh from the assembled mass of students, which was fair enough if a bit irritating. I was expecting the fastball special to be a dodgy because Thudthwacker had said it was from a clip he’d seen. (For what it’s worth, Joe, if you’re reading, there is a reason why the Sentinel was piss-poor, so fret not about that.) Logan got his pithy one-liners and Shadowcat was there and it was all looking quite promising.

Sadly that opening sequence is the best part of the film. The rest of it was… weak. If you think you’ll enjoy a couple of hours of playing X-Men bingo (that’s the Grant Morrison storyline; there’s the Joss Whedon; oh that’s how they’re going to play the stuck in a lifepod at the bottom of the sea thing; he was only ever seen in the Evolution animation) then make a list of your favourite X-Men clichés and take it with you. It might make it more fun.

The performances were lazy, I thought. A lot of people were anticipating Kelsey Grammar making a good Beast, and maybe he would have done had he been given opportunity. But he wasn’t and was shite. Even the lovely Hugh seemed to be choking against some leash of directorial restriction. The only person who seemed to manage was Halle Berry, and that was because she never tried to do very much with her character in the first place.

Nothing was made of Archangel’s homosexuality, but then I guess it was a 12A. It was most definitely a more childish rendition than the previous two. It didn’t make even a ham-fisted attempt of dealing with the big issues. Here they are, using the “mutant cure” plotline familiar to all Marvel fans, and yet, at that crucial point when they had to choose a course of action that would define them as X-Men and there was an opportunity to look at the issues underpinning the very reason for the series’ existence, they ignore it. They ignore its implications. The X-Men do exactly what anyone else would do and therefore become just another bunch of guys in suits with mutant abilities. They walk right over the shreds of Xavier’s dream and don’t even seem to notice.

I was hoping that the success of Batman Begins would have indicated that the global audience is ready for and desiring of a return to adult superhero movies. I should not have been so naïve.

What we got was Jean Grey wandering around as an evil Willow, but without the black eyes and the witty dialogue. We had Logan suddenly turning into the biggest team player of the lot, with his internal rage and samurai spirit devolved into that of a star-crossed lover with a crush on his mentor. We had Mystique rendered 2D, shallow and pointless — literally — by halfway through the film. Rogue was simply there as icing sugar. She had hardly anything to do with anything. Vinnie Jones was given nothing to do in an appalling bodysuit (and frankly, when it comes down to it, once X-Men is dumbed down so much that Juggernaut is just another mutant because otherwise it’s too complicated, all hope of a reasonable rendition is lost).

The entire cast seemed to be sleepwalking. And I had an even bigger problem: one can reasonably expect, even if the plot gets wishy-washy and the actors get bored, that the special effects will improve as a franchise goes on. I couldn’t work out where the special effects budget had gone. Mystique looked like a girl painted blue with bits of rubber doily stuck to her. In fact, I think my granny had a pink swimming cap that they must have dyed blue and used to cover Ms Romijn’s breasts.

It felt like bad fanfic. Really bad fanfic. It was just the same old clichéd plot lines being recycled, but not even done well. If you’re going to do the Grant Morrison Planet X ending, use his dialogue: it was a singularity of characterisation that encapsulated everything you ever needed to know about the relationship between Wolverine and Jean Grey. Don’t just say: “Do anguish, Hugh old boy, there’s a dear.” It doesn’t wash.

I wasn’t expecting perfection but, given that they’d made a decent hash of two of the things already, I was expecting better than this. A lot better.

All they had to do was bring in a mass of Sentinels, get Nick Fury involved, and maybe give it a hint of reference to current global politics. Hell. They could have had Apocalypse stand in for Osama Bin Laden, even, as trite as that might have been. It would have been better than this, which seemed to shy away from anything remotely resembling an awareness of current world issues.

That is what the X-Men are about, at the end of the day. Being the outsiders. The arbitrary labelling of “us” and “them”. The desire and need both to be with your own kind, to be tribal, and yet not to stand out in a crowd. To be both in and out at the same time. X-Men is all about shades of grey presented in a subtle disguise of good and evil. The presentation of ordinary, every-day problems in skintight lycra just to make a point.

There was plenty of opportunity in the storyline they used, and an occasional glimmer of hope that they might use it. Alas, no. Not even a sideways reference to current issues with genetic testing for congenital abnormalities.

Deeply disappointing. It gets its own new category: Couldabeen, Shouldabeen, Wasn’t.

Today I was introduced to Married to the Sea by my bro Gecko. Thanks Elf.

I really, really, really needed that.

Thanks to Estara for pointing me at Tek Tek for the new avatar you can see to the left. It’s not as good as the UGO one to the right, or my little Stortrooper, which is residing on the hard drive of my PC (yet to be reassembled since moving up here), but it is very cute. It reflects the more girly aspects of my nature that I have been playing with since I moved. Although I still had to choose male eyes because the female ones were all just too much.

She has manga hair, just as I do these days.

It’s not enough to cheer me up after the disappointment that was X3 last night, or the dawning understanding of just how much trouble it’s possible to get into when playing drinking games with Tricksters (although I swear I have no recollection of doing so, and I can’t believe I’d be so stupid as to agree in the first place, so I suspect they just decided to do this and that’s an excuse to make it seem like my fault).

Review of X3 to come, but I need coffee and I have some urgent work to attend to.

Snaffled from Ythy.

You scored as 3rd doctor. A man of science, a Gadget king, you can put up a good fight. You are just what the doctor ordered 10th Doctor 100% 4th Doctor 100% 3rd doctor 100% a Dalek 83% 8th Doctor 67% Davros 67% 1st Doctor 67% 5th Doctor 50% 2nd doctor 33% 7th Doctor 33% 9th Doctor 33% 6th doctor 33%

What Doctor Who character are You?
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This week the fitness planning has been like this:

• Sunday – bike ride with Frood
• Monday – rest day owing to a creamed knee caused by bunny-hopping on bike ride with Frood (otherwise it would be a running night)
• Tuesday – swimming because knee is better but probably shouldn’t run on it yet nevertheless (otherwise it would be a running night because I missed Monday’s run, otherwise a cycling night)
• Wednesday – running because going to see X3 Thursday night so won’t be able to do it then and need to get at least one run in before the weekend
• Thursday – swimming because going to see X3 and so has to be a lunchtime training session
• Friday – generally my one night off a week but I had Monday night off so I’ll probably go for a run because that doesn’t take as long as cycling and Frood’s bike is knacked.

As you can tell, I have a very methodical approach to planning my training.

A while back, with a view to ramping up the swimming part of my training, I got myself a pair of what Frood insists on calling ‘fish fingers’.

Owing to various factors, including being very busy and not being able to find the pool for a while, I had not got around to giving them a go. Today being a swim day (see above) I grabbed them from the drawer on the way out.

At the start of today’s session the guys were back and I had a serious chat with them, aided and abetted by Bob. We made it quite clear that I can’t go and play with them until I have got my minimum 30 lengths. So after that’s done, then I can come and play. They were very interested in my fish fingers, which they declared tasted nasty, to which I could only respond that they shouldn’t be trying to eat them.

Dear gods those things add a significant amount of work to swimming. I could really feel it in my triceps. The extra buoyancy makes it harder too, as does the fact that suddenly your hands are twice as big as they should be but you still have to drag them through the recovery section of your stroke.

Even so, when you’ve got that pair harassing you to get a move on so you can come play, it’s actually quite easy just to plough up and down the pool for your thirty lengths without stopping. I’m currently alternating 100m breastroke and 50m freestyle, and I’m planning gradually to increase the freestyle and decrease the breastroke.

Having said that, impatience on their part does lead to the occasional episode of:

BOFF!

gurgle cough choke splutter “What?”

“LOOK! TREASURE!”

Today’s “treasure” was an ancient elastic hair band (not even one of the fluffy ones) and a rusty hairpin.

Bless.

The score I get on this quiz depends on whether or not I ask Ben what he thinks…

Owing to a recent spate of folks emailing me with the whole “Yo Sis!” thing, I have decided that there is to be a Ravenfamily FAQ.

I’m still working on my personal one. I’ll probably have some entries in the two of them that are the same.

To this end I am inviting suggestions from regular readers and those who are familiar with our merry gang of deviants and freaks, having been forced to tolerate them for probably far too long.

Five minutes is too long for some people.

I’ll tackle that old cultural misappropriation bugbear there too. Again. For the umpteenth time. Although I can’t be arsed right now.

Email or comment, either is fine by me. LJ readers should note that syndicated entries are only held by LJ for 2 weeks.