In Their Names, Let's Drink To True Love, For a Toad and a Scorpion Fell

I have to issue several warnings about this post:

First of all, it's about a movie that some of you have probably never heard of. It's called The Devil's Carnival, and it was created/produced/directed/paid for/bled-sweated-and-cried-over by a couple of guys named Darren Lynn Bousman and Terrance Zdunich. They collaborated on another fantastic movie you've never heard of called Repo! The Genetic Opera.

For the long and short of it, The Devil's Carnival is exactly that; three sinners go to Hell, and each one is subjected to a performance in Hell's carnival that echoes the sins of their lives. The neat twist to all of this? Terrance and Darren used Aesop's Fables to illustrate the sins. They used three fables; The Dog and Her Reflection; The Scorpion and the Frog; and lastly, Jupiter and His Due. Today's words are about The Scorpion and the Frog.

Second of all, this will contain a few spoilers about the movie, or at least, a part of it. So if you're one of those folks who doesn't want to be spoiled about a movie (that is now out on DVD, by the way, and available through Amazon, Hot Topic, Netflix, Hulu, and The Devil's Carnival website) then you might want to find yourself another post to read.

Sweet, Sweet Sinus Relief

I am an avid sufferer of allergic rhinitis and (self-diagnosed) chronic sinusitis. All that boils down to? I'm congested, deep in my sinuses, pretty much year round. Some times are better than other times, I'll be honest, but there are days, like today, when I wake up dry-mouthed and stuffy because I've been so congested I'm breathing through my mouth and not my nose.

There are a lot of OTC meds I can (and do!) avail myself of, but I have to be careful what I use because I am prone to nosebleeds. Nice, big, heavy, Old Faithful-like gushers, if I'm lucky, that take an age and a half to stop and leave me with headaches afterwards.

So I tend towards suffering through it, or slathering on the Mentholatum or Vicks VapoRub. Although occasionally, I will find myself going homeopathic, and I'd like to share with the rest of you snufflies out there my "miracle cure."

Vinegar. Mixed pickling spice.

Stop Making Kristen Stewart A Martyr

Before we begin, I would like to offer a disclaimer:
I am a thirty-five, soon to be thirty-six, year old woman who despises the Twilight series and everything that it stands for. However, I have no personal anathema or particular hatred towards Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson, or anyone else involved in the whole shebang. In fact, I rather like some of the actors and actresses.

With that disclaimer out of the way, let me start this off by giving you the two links that started my tirade.

IndieWire: The Public Shaming of Kristen Stewart
Trampire: Why The Public Slut-Shaming Matters For Young Women from RKEC on Tumblr.

Go ahead and read, I'll wait here.

Reviews and Reports

You know, I sometimes wonder why I don't write reviews.

And then I re-read some of the reviews I've written in the past, and I realize why I don't. I suck at it. It's not for lack of trying; God knows I've tried. But I just don't have the right voice for it.

I've tried to write reviews for Flash Gordon as well as for Supernatural, and while I think my Supernatural reviews might not suck, they're also not gold standard.

Back to School (Again)

As it might surprise you to know, I dropped out of college after a car accident. I broke my ankle, and there was no way I could navigate the stairs and carry my backpack with my leg in a cast up to my thigh (don't ask me why it was so high, when the broken bone was way down on the other end of the leg), and so I withdrew from all my classes and pretty much dropped out.

Ten Ways To Survive A Horror Movie

As you may or may not know, I love horror movies. I love watching them, I love getting scared by them, I love crying over them, everything. So, while I'm by no means a connoisseur nor an expert, I have come up with a list of survival tips. Just a few things that'll help you out if you ever get caught up in a horror movie.

Rockin' Robin: Tweet Tweet!

Twitter is becoming a bad, bad habit for me. Of the 35 42 people I follow, maybe five--MAYBE--I speak to on a regular basis. The rest?

Celebrity twitters.

My most recent addition? Meat Loaf. That's right. Meat's on Twitter. @RealMeatLoaf, if you want to follow him, too.

What other celebs do I follow?

Shun Society, Be A Screenwriter!

Anyone who isn't one of my two best friends who gets the title reference will get cookies. And I'm nearly certain I mean the kind of cookies where I will bake them and put them in a bag and mail them to you.

But it's getting near that time of year again. No, it's not November, so it's not Nanowrimo (that's National Novel Writing Month for those of you in the not-know), but it is six days away from April, and that means Script Frenzy.

Script Frenzy is Nanowrimo's sister event, and it's exactly what it sounds like. Nanowrimo gives you a month to write a 50,000 word novel. Script Frenzy gives you a month to write a 100 page script.

What kind of script, tv, movie, radio, play, is all up to you. Script Frenzy provides you with a list of helpful tools, formatting guidelines, free websites (my personal favorite is Zhura) that'll help you format your script, and forums so you can connect with your fellow scriptwriters and seek out support and mental health assistance as well as moral support.

www.scriptfrenzy.org is the website, so look for me there! I'll keep you all updated on the script as it goes along.

Virtually Organized

If you could take a look around my house, especially my bedroom, you'd realize something about me.

I'm a Clutterer. I'm also a Pack Rat. Those two things together generally mean that it's kind of hard for me to remember what color the carpet in my bedroom is (thank God I've got the same kind of carpet in the rest of the house.)

But then, if you'd take a look at my computer's hard drive? You wouldn't believe that it belonged to the same person. All of my files, on my external and my internal drives, are organized.

The One Who...

You ever have a moment where you wonder where a certain person is now? Maybe it's someone you went to high school or college with, or someone you worked with once upon a time and now they've moved?

I've got a few of those people I'd like to find. Just because I wonder. I wonder what their lives are like now, if they achieved the things for themselves that they wanted to achieve, or if they went down a completely different road. Are they happy or miserable? And, selfishly, I wonder if they remember me at all, much less as fondly as I remember them.