So I saw Avengers over the weekend. Relax, I didn’t think it was crap. There will be no ripping apart of the movie today, folks. It has jumped to my number two spot on good superhero movies, just behind Iron Man. Why, you may ask? I got two words for you: Joss Whedon. Yeah, the guy who was asked ‘why do you write strong female characters?’ and his famous response was ‘Because you’re still asking [...]

Now, as we all know, being a woman on the Internet with an opinion is a dangerous thing. Woe betide the female who decides to voice their feelings on a particular nerdy subject without making it clear that they love said nerdy subject very much. See, of course, the shitstorm that Jennifer Hepler endured for having an opinion on games. The year is 2012, and this idiocy still hasn’t ended. Allow me to post these [...]

So I went to the Vancouver Fan Expo, and it was ridiculous and awesome and everything that truly warms my heart about North American geek conventions. I got the chance to say hello to Marina Sirtis, and I watched my better half almost tear up when he met Stuart and Kathryn Immonen and got chatting about Mike Wieringo. Part of what I really love about this kind of con is that geek culture tends to [...]

Chapter 5: OMG BLOOOOOOD! Are you scared yet?! ARE YOU?! So Bella talks to the jerk a bit more, and he just comes out and tells her that he’s a jerk and she shouldn’t be friends with him, WHICH OF COURSE SHE DOES NOT LISTEN TO because of him being perfect. (Take a drink!) Once again, I want to make it clear that at least two or three normal, nice guys are vying for her [...]

Chapter 3: Still not convinced Bella isn’t a space alien. I’m three pages into the third chapter. This is so unbearably hard to read. She’s talked to Edward once – ONCE, and it was a normal conversation between teenagers, as far as I can see – and she’s calling it ‘brainless babbling’. I fear that accepting her description as is leaves no suitable phrase for describing everything else in this book. This one conversation is [...]

Yes, this may call my sanity into question, but I’ve decided to review Twilight chapter by chapter. My initial impression: at nine pages in, Bella already comes off as an insufferable teenage angst machine. Pray for my soul, friends; I may not make it to the end with my sanity intact. Chapter 1: I’ve finished the first chapter …and I have never been more confused. What the hell is so bad about Forks that Bella [...]

Being in the web design business, and being connected to a number of freelancers and entrepreneurs, I get quite a few interesting articles in my email inbox most days. Sometimes I go read them, if I have the time, but this gem showed up this morning and the title alone made me go and look, if only so I could confirm my suspicion that it would be… less than the highest quality material. I swear [...]

Presented without comment.

I haven’t really been homesick since getting to Vancouver. Today, though – today is St. Patrick’s Day, when everyone pretends to be Irish. The actual Irish don’t much notice, apart from having another excuse to have a party, really. It’s a kitschy, stupid holiday that I never really thought much of. It came as something of a surprise, then, when I was chatting to a friend and suddenly got… okay, emotional. I cried a bit. [...]

Once upon a time, I went to the cinema to enjoy the latest huge, crazy disaster movie. Having a degree in geology makes big disaster flicks somewhat hit and miss for me, but I thoroughly enjoyed stuff like Dante’s Peak and I figured that Hollywood at least deserved a chance to impress me. See, science is genuinely pants-wettingly scary, when you get down to it. Earthquakes are terrifying. Volcanoes are terrifying. All the stuff that [...]