laceblade

I now have at least a month of HBO NOW, so that I can watch the Pod Save America midterm election specials.

I am wondering whether people have recommendations for other HBO TV shows. nicasiosilang has already demanded that I watch Young Pope, in which the Pope is 1) American, and 2) played by Jude Law. SOOOOOO THAT'S HAPPENING. But I will entertain more suggestions to make the most of this month.

Orphan Black - Thanks to a friend, I've been able to burn through the first season. I still need to watch the third & fourth episodes for the currently airing season. WOW THIS IS AMAZING, I forgive everyone in Glee fandom for constantly reblogging gifs of Tatiana Maslany on tumblr. She is amazing.
BUT ALSO PAUL IS AMAZING. AND HOT. LIKE, REALLY HOT. AND HIS TORTURED, PROTECTIVE HEADBUTTS WHILE TIED TO A CHAIR. idk if I'll ever get over it.
Paul & Mrs. S. might be my faves.

Star Wars: The Clone Wars (animated series) - This became available streaming on Netflix, and I've found it's a great way to spend 20 minutes. There are lots of great female Jedi, Padme's gr9, & I love Anakin's padawan, Ahsoka. Overall it's sort of lighthearted/cheesy like the original trilogy, while also going through some pretty dark shit. Also the underlying Dark Feelings of knowing everyone's going to be murdered by the end of the war is pretty sad, & gives the show an interesting tone.
I'm feeling the itch to get back to the Star Wars novels from the expanded universe, but while I focus on reading WisCon-related things, this is a good way to scratch that itch. Might kill someone the next time I hear, "I have a bad feeling about this," BUT OVERALL it's a good ride.

Harvest Moon: Tale of Two Towns - I bought this game used, for the DS. Basically, you farm, help out your neighbors, forage for materials in the woods, & try to cook things. I think as you go on, you can court & marry people, & also have children.
This game is different than under Harvest Moons (as I understand it) in that there are two towns you can live in. No matter which you live in, you can visit the other, though. One is a Western European town which focuses on animal husbandry. The other is a Japanese town in which you can farm vegetables. They're separated by a mountain, & also by some stupid argument about whose food tastes better. Pretty sure my character's role is to bridge the gap between the two, by winning cooking contests & also eventually repairing the tunnel connecting the two (which goes through the mountain).
This is a pleasant way to spend time. I'm thinking about using my DS/PSP more, as they feel like less commitment than booting up the PS2/something else hooked up to the TV.

Speaking of video games, I'll take input: I have never played a Pokemon game, & I think it would be neat to try.
I have platforms to play the following systems: PSP (not Vita), DS (not 3DS), Gameboy Advance, PS, PS2, Wii, GameCube.
& actually, Pokemon aside, I will take any/all recommendations you have for the PSP and the DS. Since their next generation has come out, they've stopped selling games for those systems in Game Stop/Best Buy, & I'd like to know what I should keep my eye out for in the used shops.

If you have a response to this post, please leave it at this post over in ebooks, thanks. That way all of the comments will be in one place!

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I have a question about long-ish fanfics that are works in progress.

Let's say that I'm reading a 200,000+ word fic, which isn't yet complete. I download it to my e-reader, and read it on that.
Then, the author updates the fic with a new chapter.

Is there a way to add this chapter to the existing e-book?
Or is the only way to get it to re-download the entire fic?

If I do re-download the entire fic, does anybody know of an easy way to breeze past those first 55 chapters of 200,000+ words, or am I better off just reading the new chapters on my laptop?

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Side notes, in case they are useful, although I think the question is applicable to any site/management tool/e-reader:
Using a Kobo Touch, downloading fic from the AO3.org, managing fic with Calibre.

One of my resolutions after visiting Japan for the second time in 2012 was to grow more plants. In Japan, lots of houses/apartments don't have yards, but people still had potted flowers/vegetables/herbs all over the place, and they were beautiful & I loved walking past them.

I bought a bunch of plants when I came back in July, but most of them have since died.
At the moment I have a fading African violet, an almost!dead but then revived ivy (which looks more like a sickly baby tree at the moment), and a robust spider plant. I got the spider plant as a cutting from one of my friend's spider plants, so I take a lot of pride in that one. It's even spawned a baby spider plant, which I hope to break off and start in its own pot once it gets warmer outside!


What I want:
--I'm not so ambitious as to plan to grow all of my own vegetables herbs, or etc. It would be neat to eat things from my own garden, but it's not a necessity. The cost of growing/maintaining plants needn't be less than the money I save by eating food I've grown.
--"Useless" plants that are pleasing to the eye are fine with me, too.
--I'll ignore advice about tomato and pepper plants for now. At the moment, I can't eat them. If it turns out that I can later in the season, I'll buy plants that's already started.
--I would like to try growing some plants from seed. But I recognize that this can be especially frustrating for beginners, so I'm okay with buying some plants that are already started, too.
--Assume that my budget is fairly liberal, but I'm not going drop like, $50 on a single plant (is that possible??). Thus far, I think all plants that I own have cost me less than $5. If I can re-use common household items like food containers, I would like to. But I don't mind buying pots if I need more than the few hand-sized ones I've got.

Internet resources I'm planning to start toying with right now:
This post about using toilet rolls as seed starters.
This PDF of a seed-starting plan so I know when to start growing shit.

Specs of my growing environment:
Inside: I have a sliding door/window that floods my apartment with light. I keep my three plants on top of a bookshelf next to the top of the door/window. The floor in front of the door/window is bare. I don't have a shelf or anything to set plants on, at the moment.
When it's not freezing, I like to set the plants outside.

Outside: North-facing balcony, measuring at dimensions forthcoming [in August, I'll be moving to a different apartment, and the balcony dimensions may increase.]
--The balcony has a guard rail. The balcony also has three wide beams in its "ceiling," supporting the floor of the balcony above me. With effort & assistance, I could probably hang some stuff from these beams.
--Birds like to nest on top of the beams. There's still an empty bird's nest there from last summer.
--The bottom of the balcony has slotted wood planks. There are gaps between each wood slot, & a balcony down below mine. So I have to be careful not to spill dirt/etc. down below! I do live next to a bike path & fields, though, so I could easily plant stuff on a ground/etc.
--I live in Wisconsin, so we're still a ways away from being able to set plants outside. This past Friday, for example, we had a blizzard.

Starting questions:
I think that at the moment, most of what I'm looking for is really basic advice, like what types of plants are fun to grow; do you use fertilizer and what kind; is it good to start plants growing inside before I set them outside; advice for frequency of watering, etc. I will take any advice!

ETA: Also desperately seeking advice on how to know when to re-pot plants.

Having trouble figuring out how to "cure" in Dissidia 012 Final Fantasy (I haven't played the first one....I thought I could play the first one in this game!).

Further described in this post, if anyone can help me out!

I feel a little uncomfortable making a post asking for anything but advice, but I'm going to do it anyway!

For the first half of today, I can't eat anything. Then I get to wear an acid monitor (down my throat) and purposely eat foods that trigger my symptoms for 24 hours. So basically I get to force myself into feeling like I'm having a heart attack and like there's pooling nasties at the bottom of my throat.
On the up-side, it'll be my first time eating chocolate, spicy curry, Mountain Dew, and pizza in over a year.

THAT SAID.

I could use some cheer! Link me to your favorite cat macros, heinous .gifs, ytmnds, youtube clips, fanmixes, fanfiction recs, whatever. This lasts until mid-day tomorrow, and residual pain might last through Friday, so if you read this Thursday/Friday, still link to hilarity! [Fanfic recs can be "serious business," they need not be funny.]

If you want a play-by-play, it'll be on the twitters - ribbonknight
I follow fewer people on Twitter than I do on Dreamwidth, sorry in advance.

I posed this question on Google+ and got no response. I have higher hopes for you, my Dreamwidth people!

DC Comics is relaunching its entire line (I think). Either way, a bunch of storylines are getting rebooted with Issue #1.

Since I live two blocks away from a comic book shop, I thought it would be neat to follow a mainstream comic series for once (I'll also be following Buffy Season 9, and probably the Angel/Faith series).



Are you going to be following any of the new DC series? Which one(s)?
For entrenched DC readers, do you have any recs for me?



From reading the preview issue, I was kind of interested in Super Girl. I've always liked Batman, but there are like eight Batman series, idk which one to pick (except to boycott the Oracle one, wtf magical wheelchair healing).

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I'm about to go Up North and be unconnected to the Internet, so I will respond to comments on Sunday or Monday.

Easter Vigil at any Abbey is pretty sweet. Not only was the homily superb (the abilities of a priest as a homilist will pretty much make/break him, in my esteem of him), BUT THERE WAS A GIANT TORCH TO LIGHT THE EASTER CANDLE. Seriously, that pole had to be 20 feet long, and there were GIANT FLAMES that made me fearful most especially when the dude tried to get the thing through the doorway. Easter Vigil: arguably the most bad-ass mass of the year (except for that one time at Pentecost when we purposely lit the baptismal font on fire).

On a more serious note, I really appreciated the homily. Easter is not just about butterflies and cute bunnies and candy. It means a lot because of the suffering that comes before it, because of the seriousness required by Lent. It's kind of the time of year to screw your head on straight, and then Easter comes and floods your heart with light, and you realize that Spring is here.

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A discussion on whether 'The Hunger Games' was cribbed from the Japanese novel/movie 'Battle Royale.' People have pointed out the similarities in general premise to me before, but the argument made here lays out a series of incredibly specific things that happen in both. An interesting read, even if it doesn't convince you.

The Onion's AV Club had a nice article about A Room of One's Own, on its 35th anniversary.

I think that fan-made crafts like these are really cool. In addition to creations focused on by the OTW (fanfiction, fanart, fanvids), I think that crafts are really neat, too. I've been collecting lots of paper cut-outs of various fandoms, along with a few extra Buffy comics. I'd like to make my own, even though I'm not totally skilled in the realm of craft-making.

With everyone lying about what's actually in the Health Care bill, I found this Washington Post link useful: Answer 4 questions and find out what the Health Care bill means for you.

Also, really liked this Buffy Season 8 vid. DO NOT CLICK UNLESS YOU'VE READ THE TWO MOST RECENT ISSUES OF S8. For serious.

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Help Out Your Fellow Fan!

--were_duck seeks recommendations for the WisCon Vid Show. Specifically, she'd like some AMV recs, as she's generally unfamiliar.

--meganbmoore seeks old school shoujo anime. Bonus if you can tell her how to get a hold of it, :D

--littlebutfierce both recommends and seeks more baseball anime.

Last night, I scored all of Robotech: Masters, for $7.95.

I blame general_jinjur for this impulse buy, although I think we'll all agree that that's a pretty good deal for a 23-episode series.

Anyway, my question is, do I need to watch Robotech: The Macross Saga before watching Robotech: The Robotech Masters? If I need to, it apparently won't be a big deal as it's up at YouTube.

Thanks in advance, Internet.

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In other news, I'm being pretty successful at getting everyone I know to watch/like Burn Notice. Look out, you might be next!

While I'm constantly reading new things and trying to watch new things from Netflix, I've fallen behind i some of my more beloved serials. I'd like to catch up in all of them, but I don't want to stress myself out by doing it all at once. So, I turn to LJ to answer the question for me.

[Poll #1415666]


EDIT: Now I would like to change "What" to "With which," but I can't edit LJ polls after posting them. And Grammer!Me was very sad, :(