Catchy Name Needed

I realized when I was driving home from work tonight (I get off at 11;30) that November was ending right then and that made it Holidailies time. I had signed up and I did remember that it was coming, but still December 1st snuck up on me as it always does. I could wait til tomorrow to write an entry but I'd rather get ahead. It's 4 in the morning so this may not be too drawn-out, though.

I've switched venues since last year but my old archives are here and it's not as if Livejournal has actually gone anywhere, anyway - here's the old place, for the record. Since a lot of links and stuff didn't transfer I'm probably going to be sneaking looks at it myself.

Not too much has changed with me in the last year. There's a paragraph or two about Harvey if you scroll down click over to my recent entries, so I'm not going to repeat that. (Short version: we didn't get flooded. We were really lucky.) I'm getting older and I have an irregular heartbeat, it turns out, and I need to lose weight, of course, and I've been procrastinating about having a sleep study for months, but I'm generally alright. (I had actually lost 5 pounds or so before Harvey, and then we sat around the apartment and I played Portal Knights and ate for a solid week because we were flooded in, so that put paid to that.)

(movie talk below that I'll try to keep unspoilery)

Oh, let's see, I should probably talk about movies before I forget again. I last updated in October, and if we went to see anything later in October I can't remember what it was, but I made up for that by seeing four movies in November. Well, three movies, actually, because I dragged Rob to see Thor: Ragnarok again last Sunday. So there was that, twice, by which you can guess that I liked it a lot. But then practically everybody did. We also went to see two movies that weren't so generally liked, and that was Murder on the Orient Express and Justice League. And honestly I liked both of them just fine. I'm kind of at a loss for why nobody (relatively speaking) went to see Justice League - it's better than freaking Batman v. Superman and everybody went to see that one anyway. And hey, it had Wonder Woman in it! I mean, it's certainly not a great movie, but it's not completely terrible, either.

Murder on the Orient Express had a better Rotten Tomatoes rating than Justice League, but not spectacularly so. And it is a better movie than Justice League, definitely, but not really a great one, either, even though it has lovely production values and a terrific cast. Now I had read the book and seen the old movie, long ago, but I couldn't really remember whodunnit (and I'm not going to say) but I looked it up on Wikipedia to see if it was the one I was thinking about, and it was. (I read a bunch of Agatha Christie at some point long ago, so I can't remember which plot is Death on the Nile and which is Ten Little Indians, etc. I think I would have remembered which one this was really quickly even if I hadn't looked it up.) In any case, I thought they kind of telegraphed the answer in this new version, and that's probably its big weakness. Now I'd like to see the old one again and see if they manage to do any better.

(Do you think there's any chance that Ten Little Indians will ever get remade? What would they call it? - And yes, I know what the original title was. Although I didn't know about that until well after I'd read it - no internet, after all! It does have a good plot, but I suppose the basics of it have been stolen a hundred times by other movies and TV shows by now, anyway.) (And honestly, I remember the part about people getting picked off one by one, but I don't remember whodunnit there, either. Or who the characters were other than Poirot, even. Although I'm sure it would start coming back to me if I started reading it again.)

I had a new icon yesterday and I have another one today. I saved a few more so you may see some more new ones, eventually. I go poking around in my icons every December, because I have so many I don't even know what all I have. They're kind of a record of my years at Livejournal, really - baseball, Buffy (TONS of Buffy), Harry Potter, m15m, WoW. Kingdom of Loathing - that last one goes back a while, especially. I've deleted a few over the years - usually the ones that I most rarely used, anyway - but there are still lots of old ones there. (I saw "NaBloPoMo 2007" for one, and I doubt that that's the oldest one still here, either.) The first one I remember having as my default was one of the m15m Harry Potter ones - I think it was Snape saying "sit down and shut up." Actually if you look at my userpics page, they seem to have the current default first and after that they appear to be chronological, so if I'm correct about that, the Snape one IS actually the oldest, or the oldest that's still there, at least.

Anyway, I don't see anything Marvel in my existing icons. I suppose it's been so long since I was really a regular poster here that it was mostly before Marvel became a big thing. But I have been doing movie posts all year and if you paid attention to that you might have noticed that the bulk of the movies I've seen this year were superhero movies - a few DC but even more Marvel. There's a post somewhere in there that talks about what I read as a kid (Wonder Woman) and didn't read (anything Marvel, really). (Here's that entry.) I got gradually more into the Marvel movies as they came out, and then - as I mentioned in that entry - I started playing the Marvel Heroes 2016 game this year and that really got me even more into it because I'm gradually figuring out big chunks of backstory. Anyway, I figured it was time I had a Marvel icon and so I went and poked around again and Natasha here was the first one I found that I really liked. (I can't make a habit of spending time looking for icons, though, I have enough time-sucking hobbies already without adding more.)

If I'd found a good Daredevil or Jessica Jones one first, though, you might be seeing that instead. (I did eventually find a couple of them but half of them were Luke/Jessica and I'm not into it far enough yet to be invested in those two as a couple.) We just re-started Netflix a month or so ago after a LONG hiatus - like, a couple of years - and the main reason we re-started it was for the Marvel stuff (and Stranger Things for Rob, but we haven't gotten around to that yet). We finally got through season 1 of Daredevil last night and we watched enough of Jessica Jones after that to determine that we did in fact want to watch it. I was pretty sure I would, but I wasn't sure about Rob - then once we got really rolling I realized that this is right the heck up Rob's alley. It's practically a horror movie, or at least it's creepy-as-hell suspense. Anyway, we're only two episodes in and we haven't even really seen David Tennant's face yet, but we're pretty into it. We're both off tomorrow so hopefully we can get at least one ot two more in.

(Have I ever mentioned that my mom thought when we first started dating that Rob was some kind of serial killer or something? Because he liked horror movies and stuff about Charles Manson. Heck, practically every guy my age likes that stuff. My mom had some weird ideas sometimes.)

I hear Daredevil season 2 is not as good as season 1, which is disappointing because I really, really loved season 1. We may watch season 2 eventually but I figured it'd be nice to see if we could catch up with at least Jessica Jones & maybe Luke Cage too before any more Defenders stuff comes out.

Hmm, Holidailies has about 15 more participants than the last time I looked, a couple of days ago. I guess people are gradually figuring out that it's there again, maybe?

Also the formatting of the "post" page looks different in LJ today. It also has a "switch to old version" option but I don't think I mind the new one, so far, so I'll stick with it until it starts annoying me.

Related to that, there has been some discussion among my Twitter friends lately to the effect of "Why is anybody still using Livejournal?" Which, y'know, I have a certain amount of sympathy for, since I actually haven't been using Livejournal much, lately. But when it comes to Holidailies, it still seems like the place to be, in my mind, somehow! I still like reading my LJ friends page when I actually remember to do it, anyway - and that sort of becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, in a sense, because if I read my friends page, then I might remember to post, and if people are posting, I'm more likely to remember. (Somebody else said, "I miss the old days when everybody was on LJ," and I agree with that completely.)