Okay -- blogging services. About them, I know nothing. The only thing I know is LJ.

But, my bosses want me to look into being able to set up a blog for us. (I'm deeply dubious about the idea, but that's another story.)

I figured it couldn't hurt to ask folks on my flist if there are particular blog services they would recommend, as I am trying to sift through what information I can find.

One specific question, in case anyone knows the answer: it kind of sounds to me like my boss would *like* for multiple people to be able to be registered as moderators (or whatever) of the blog, so that multiple people could post, reply, and moderate others' replies. Is there a particular service in which this is possible?

What they want is to be able to set up a blog that would be an online departmental presence for us, and where they could post on occasion on subjects related to us (yes, I'm being cagey here; I don't want to lock this post, but I don't want to be super open about where I work; I think a lot of you know the answer, anyway), and where people could ask questions or participate in discussions on our subject.

I'm not above talking to them about the possible advantages of doing what they want as an LJ community, but I have a feeling that may be a little more wild-and-wooly than they would like. I think they want something with a few more barriers, a bit more professional and less casual, if you know what I mean.

(What do *I* think about this? *I* think that it's not a good idea. I think that *I* do not want to become a moderator of a blog where anyone on the internet can drop by and post questions like "please tell me all about Zeus for this paper I'm writing", and we'd feel obligated to answer it in some way. I think that my boss doesn't quite realize how much work keeping up with it and moderating it would become, even if there were several of us able to do the moderation. I think it sounds like a lovely idea in theory, but a headache in practice. I think all four of my most immediate bosses are WAY too busy to actually deal with this -- I think they're reacting to the "sexy" idea of "blogging" without realizing how much time and work bloggers put into maintaining their blog presence. But... that's just me. I have been tasked with "looking into it", so I'm trying to come up with answers, including which service to recommend, and whether we can do some of the things they're pipe-dreaming about.)

I know, I'm hell at updating. But, as you can tell from my writing this, I came through the surgery fine. (Except for the nerve block not working to actually block the pain, and except for the Percocet making me ill.) Massive, massive thanks to elishavah, and also to veejane, for all the help they've been giving me. I apologize for not being good about replying to comments, I really appreciate everyone's well wishes.

Yesterday was the 11th day after the surgery, so I went in for my postop checkup. Everything looks good! The cast finally came off (and this had been the most annoying cast, yet). I now have a very small plastic brace that goes on with Velcro straps, which I can take off to shower (!!!!!!) and to do my exercises. The incision is big, but healing well; the skin is already pretty much closed over. The whole arm and hand is a bit achey, and feels vulnerable because it isn't so well protected. The bone won't actually be healed for another four weeks, but because the plate is holding it together, I can start on rehabilitating everything.

The weirdest part is that I am supposed to now be doing all kinds of exercises to get a hand and the wrist back in shape, and it's very strange to have nothing at all on the arm, and to be trying to tell it to do things, and it's not be able to do them. I know that will come in time, as I work on it.

Below the cut, my x-rays, so you can see the plate and all the screws.

( Pictures this way! )

So! When I last updated, it was to announce in a brief way that I had broken my right wrist in a fall on the ice. It's been a while, so it's a good time for another update.

I've been coping, even though it is a gigantic pain in the ass. Many thanks to people like emilytheslayer, lynxreign, elishavah, and especially veejane, for various bits of assistance that have made the last four weeks get-throughable. Everyone at the office has been very nice; it helps that we are in a somewhat slow period. (Although, our annual symposium took place a couple of weekends ago, and that wasn't what you would want to call "slow". But I was able to line up a lot of minions and delegate to them, so we survived it.)

The office bought me a copy of MacSpeech Dictate, the Mac version of Dragon Naturally Speaking, which I have been able to install both at work and at home. This allows me to keep up with some of my e-mailing, rather than having to do all my typing one-handed. Unfortunately, it doesn't really work for me for writing fiction, and needless to say, what the right hand out of commission I can't do any artwork, which is driving me nuts. Still, thank goodness for small favors. (I am however getting really tired of having to speak everything out loud, including punctuation.)

Below, an example of how the cats have been "helping":





(i.e., Morgan has decided that the pillow that I use to prop up my arm when I'm sitting in my chair is her new favorite place to lay, and I have to shove her over when I actually want to use it for the purpose that I intended it for. Also, yes, I had undecorated the tree prior to the fall, but had not taken it down and put it away; now, it is up for the duration, and I don't see the point of having it sit there without putting the lights on.)

That is an example of the original splint. It was succeeded by a hard cast, which is what I'm wearing now. I have a compression fracture of the distal radius, and from the start, the surgeon told me that he was worried it might "fall apart", rather than "get sticky" and start to heal. Well, nearly 4 weeks later, the latest round of x-rays taken today has shown that it decided to fall apart. Or to be more accurate, it collapsed in on itself. The ends of the bone to connect up with the wrist are not quite in the right alignment, which could be a bad thing going forward. So today, I found out that I will be having surgery on Friday to put in a plate to correct this.

The bright side is that this will not set me back to the beginning in terms of recovery. It will add a few weeks, but it won't (or, it shouldn't) add six more weeks. I'm annoyed, because the arm has just been getting to the point where it is starting to hurt a little less, like its, you know, healing; and now after Friday it's going to hurt all over again while I recover from the surgery, and I have no good idea of how long that's going to take.

In summation: FEH.

I leave you with a cute picture of Emily (all 4 feet!):

Short version: fell on ice this morning. Broke wrist. Right, of course. Already irked with one-handed typing. :P

Updates later. Apologies in advance if I'm slow replying to anything.

So, this is kind of random and meandering, but I wanted to note it down...

A while back I was lamenting the fact that I couldn't find Frankie Laine songs for sale on iTunes. Laine was a popular singer of the 40s/50s, and when I was small, we inherited my grandmother's cabinet Victrola and a collection of 78s and other antique records of amusing thickness and sometimes amusing colors. (The Victrola itself was painted an unfortunate shade of pea green, and it remained that color until my brother took it and stripped it down to its original oak, and he's had it ever since.) Anyway, my point: from the time when I was very small, I can remember playing Frankie Laine records on that Victrola, and I had my favorites, and I was thinking, you know, I'd like to have copies of those songs that I haven't heard in like 30+ years.

So I guess between the last time I wondered this, and this past Xmas when I was chatting about it with my brother, iTunes *did* in fact get a whole bunch of Frankie Laine songs, so I went in there and bought the Essential Handful that I really wanted ("The Cry of the Wild Goose", "Mule Train", "The Kid's Last Fight", "Rawhide"), and then a couple more that I recognized but hadn't realized Laine had done.

Which brings me to the point of this post, which is: "Rose, Rose I love you" (1951) is an INCREDIBLY CATCHY song, and I have it earwormed now, and... it makes me want to punch the lyricist in the face.

Why? Because it's a song about a white sailor guy (probably Navy, during WWII) singing about how he's fallen in love with this Malaysian woman (a rickshaw operator, no less), and it's breaking his heart because now he has to get back on his boat and sail away and never see her again. And his paens to her beauty and grace and style are lovely and all, but -- DUDE. First: exoticism LIEK WOAH. Second: does it really never occur to you, in 1951, that you could not be an asshole, and marry the lady? I realize that interracial marriages faced issues in that time period, but also, it's not like they didn't happen. Move to Hawai'i. Stay in Malaysia. Settle in California, which had repealed anti-miscegenation laws in 1948. SOMETHING, if you love her that much! Geez!

Looking up info on the song, to find out when it was recorded, I then came across some further fascinating facts about it. The song itself was originally a Chinese pop hit, from 1940. With a bit more digging, I managed to find a page that the original lyrics in Mandarin, with a translation of them, and also with the lyrics of the actual Frankie Laine hit.

As you can see, the original song is pretty much a straight-up love song. The love is not without its ups and downs (as the "rose" metaphor is obviously chosen for the fact that roses are lovely, but roses also have thorns), but it's *not* a song about "I love you, my exotic Oriental beauty, but my ship's leaving port and I gotta go". Apparently, we have a British guy to thank for the new English lyrics (although that page doesn't actually mention that he did the lyrics; the page about the song does).

Still, damned catchy.

Also, in conclusion: "The Kid's Last Fight" is just as weirdly inappropriately bouncy as I originally thought it was, given that the story of the song (remember when songs told long, involved stories?) is about a 19th century boxer who just has to win this fight so he can get the money and buy him and his girl the bungalow of their dreams, and how he does win the fight, and then he keels over dead. The end. Even when I was, like, 5, and loved the song because it was bouncy, I had some inkling of the fact that maybe it shouldn't be quite so bouncy when it was about, y'know, DEATH.

Sometime last weekend I clued in to the fact that the big Cultural Appropriation Discussion of DOOM had come around on the ol' guitar again, but I was only catching the edges of it, and I thought, aw man. That again. Do I want to even know? No, I really don't.

And then I realized that, you know: easy for me to say. It's the usual exercise of privilege to be able to say "nah, don't feel like paying attention to the latest racism-in-fandom imbroglio". And thanks to the indefatigable rydra_wong, all the links were there. So I read. And read. And my jaw dropped on the floor. And I kept reading, and OH MY GOD.

I don't want to say a lot, because this is a thing where for me, listening is more important than talking. And Rydra has posted links to a lot of people saying very smart things; a lot of fans of color saying extraordinarily important things, and I shouldn't even attempt to co-opt their voices when it'd be better to go read them saying it.

But I did think of two things I wanted to say.

One is just to point to the lyrics of the They Might Be Giants song "Your Racist Friend". That song absolutely gobsmacked me when I first heard it in 1990. It's not just a song about racism being bad. It's about not being silent and tolerating others spewing racist crap in your hearing, and what it says about you if you do tolerate that. I believed it was a searingly brilliant song then, and I still believe it now.

The other: you know what phrase I really despise right now? "Throwing under the bus". It came up in the fallout of the CADD, very much in a "Your Racist Friend" context -- yeah, my friends might have said racist crap, but I'm not going to *throw them under the bus* by making a statement that condemns the crap (if not the person).

You know why I decided I really despise it? Because it embodies, to me, the last 8... no, maybe make that 16 or more years of American politics. The willful characterization of all criticism -- even necessary, deserved criticism; even LOVING criticism -- as the equivalent of "throwing under the bus", and NO. NO IT IS FUCKING NOT. But I guess that's how it looks to people who practice what they preach, by which I mean -- hate the sin AND hate the sinner, and don't try to tell me they don't.

I'm so fucking tired of that, macro level and micro level. I'm so fucking tired of the idea that it isn't "patriotic" to criticize things that my country does -- NO, it's the MOST PATRIOTIC thing I can do, dammit! I'm tired of the basic notion that if you love someone, you can never, ever criticize what they do, you can never tell them they're fucked up, you can never give a child anything but an A+ or a trophy. NO.

When I post the words, "I love you like a brother, but you're FULL OF SHIT" here, I know that there's a bunch of people reading this journal who are going to nod along and suddenly have a whole bunch of very vivid memories associated with that, and the thing is, YES. Criticizing someone, telling them they're full of shit, telling them that what they just said is racist crap? Or, being gentle about it if you must -- but if you don't do it, who will? That is still being loving. That's being a friend. That is NOT "throwing people under the bus".

Because it's not about making yourself look good by condemning them. It's not about saving yourself by offering them up for sacrifice. That's not why you should do it. It's about YOU knowing what's right, and what's wrong, and about saying something when *even your friends* do something or say something toweringly, gobsmackingly wrong. Doing it *because* you love them, and because they might listen to you when they won't listen to strangers. The time to defend your friends no matter what, right or wrong, is when their lives, their well-being are truly in danger, NOT when the worst that's happening to them is that people are pointing out they're being kind of an asshole.

If you won't even point at something to say "that there is wrong", then how the hell can you ever work to FIX it?

I would say something sweeping and generic about cats and their walnut-sized brains, but rather than impugn the cats of others, I'll just impugn the brains of my OWN cat, which is much safer.

( Recipe for Winter Fun with Cats: )

Happy New Year, everybody! A grab-bag entry of recent-ish things...

First, to remind myself (because I can never really remember, any more, what I actually did on New Year's Eve in any given year): this year there was a snowstorm out there, and it was very cold. I had yummy food for dinner, and yummy wine courtesy of rednikki and mycranium. I watched the Disney movie "Enchanted", which I got from the library (to replace a unworking copy of "Madagascar") and which I'd been meaning to see. And it was a HOOT. Really. Disney taking the piss out of its own romantic-cartoons genre.

Speaking of the aforementioned snowstorm: I went out very early yesterday, to feed elishavah's cat Tigger. It was already snowing, but given the forecast it sounded like it would be better to get it done earlier than later. By the time I got home, it was seriously putting it down out there. I came in the door, and of course, there was Emily, crying to be let out. "Yeah, yeah," I said. I picked up her harness, and the little fruitcake actually sat up on her hind legs and thrust her head through the loop, she was so eager to go out.

And then she found out what the outdoors was actually like:





I think the expression on her face in the first pic says it all, no? She did walk down the steps of her own volition, but she didn't really make it very far before she decided "Fuck this" and headed back up the steps to the door.

(Showing that she either does not learn, or else cannot keep a thought in her tiny little walnut-sized brain, today, she was crying at the back door again when I got in from Cat Sitting Errands. I ignored her this time.)

Also apropos to a post this time of year: my Fannish Year in Review.

In Kadanzer Weyr, my Pern fandom group: approx. 11,050 words of fic (spread over 4 fics). No art. (!!!) :( Yeah, I'm bad; I've got catching up to do there...

In RiverTwine Holt, my ElfQuest fandom group: approx. 11,375 words of fic (spread over 4 fics... okay, that's a bit eerie; I had no idea I had such parity between the two groups in terms of how much fic I was doing!). 52 pieces of art (most in color), including 77 individual figures. This included two pieces for the group's 2009 Calendar (I did February and July.)

Hmm. Basically, I wrote approximately the same amount of fic over this year as last year, give or take a story (still a total well under what I've done in years past). I actually did somewhat less art than I did in 2007. Good lord, what have I been *doing* this year? I guess, increased admin duties in the EQ group; that always sucks up time, it's true.

----------

Finally! One more piece of art I did this year was for EQ fandom -- every year, the EQ site's forum, Scroll of Colors, produces a fan-art calendar. It's juried. Artists submit pieces related to the year's theme, and then you don't find out if you made it in until the calendar is released.

Well, the calendar was released today. The theme is "The Magic of ElfQuest". My entry was chosen for January. :) It can be seen here: The 2009 ElfQuest Fan Art Calendar


That's all for 2008! Really, I am not sad to see it go. :P Here's to a MUCH BETTER 2009 for everybody!

Ganked from The Daily Coyote (itself a site that is deeply worth visiting daily, and catching up with its archive):

Hip-Hop Violin, by Paul Dateh and Inka One.

Violin renditions of GhostfaceKillah, TheRoots, Jurassic5, & more.

Just watch, okay?



I need an album of these guys, and I need it NOW.

ETA: According to Paul Dateh's website, an album from him is coming out on Jan. 27th. You can download some singles from his site.

(Coming up later: cat in the snow!)

Let me just repeat that:

ELECTRIC MINI!!!

http://blog.wired.com/cars/2008/10/all-electric-mi.html

From katie_m:

1. Stop talking about politics for a moment or two.
2. Post a reasonably-sized picture in your LJ, NOT under a cut tag, of something pleasant, such as an adorable kitten, or a fluffy white cloud, or a bottle of booze. Something that has NOTHING TO DO WITH POLITICS.
3. Include these instructions, and share the love.



Paragon Carousel, Nantasket Beach, Hull, MA - October 25, 2008

The center and inside horses go uppy-down, which is always awesome, and it really does go around at a respectable clip. Yay!

(At some point soon I will figure out how to upload a movie somewhere so I can post here 39 seconds worth of this carousel doing its thing.)

I was woken up out of a sound sleep at 1:22 am by my cellphone ringing. After the disorientation and the heart-pounding comes the lying-there period where I negotiate with myself about whether I'm going to actually get up to see who it was. I can tell from the beeps that the person didn't leave me a voicemail message. That's good, right? If it was someone who really wanted me, they'd leave me a voicemail. If it was someone who knows me really well and it was really, REALLY important, they'd call my landline. Right?

But it's an edgy feeling. You lie there and think about all of the bad news it could be; especially when your brain is kind of in that place already. What now?

Get up to look; don't recognize the number. Ugh. Go back to sleep.

Now here's the slightly unsettling part, although not for the reason you might think. This morning, I put the phone number into Google. And there she is: my wrong-number caller. Her name, her address. Click a link, and I'm looking at a satellite image of her HOUSE. (She's lucky; streetview hasn't quite gotten to her area yet.)

Now THAT is freaky.

(Yes, I then went and googled my own phone numbers. Nothing comes up for them. Good.)

Okay, everyone, stop what you're doing and WATCH THIS:



Called "Next!", this came out in 1989, directed by Barry Purves and made by Aardman Animations -- the same guys who did "Creature Comforts" and "Wallace & Gromit", etc. But this is a very different style and mood from those pieces. This isn't funny -- it's just sublime.

I got this in the early 90s on a VHS tape of various Aardman shorts, and have always loved it. The last time I looked for it on YouTube, it wasn't there -- I'm so glad that it is now.

I won't post the list of the order of the plays, in case folks want to play along and figure them out. :)

Am still running a bit behind in my posting -- these pics are from, respectively, a walk around Monson, NH (a nature reserve encompassing an abandoned colonial town) a few weeks ago with jenlev, elishavah, and katie_m; and the same place approx. 6 months earlier, during a snowshoeing outting. I thought the comparison was fun. :)



This is the entry path/road, with the reconstructed Gould House (the only building on the site) in the distance.

( More below the cut... )

Yeah, so I meant to post these awhile ago. Then I just remembered about them, and figured what the heck, I'll post them as an antidote to my craptastic day...



This poor-man's-panorama dates back to August 10, actually. I drove out to Wachusett Reservoir, which I had discovered a while ago by accident. It has a really big stone dam and you can walk around it and up and down, and I was out running errands, and it was a nice day (although you can see the scattering of clouds thinking -- for the umpteenth time this summer -- about becoming thunderstorms) and I wanted to walk around a bit, but not in the woods where there are mosquitoes. So I drove out there... where I discovered that the entire dam area is under construction, and you can't park near it or walk near it at all right now. Crud.

So as I was driving back, there was this little turn-out, and I pulled in there to take these pictures, because it was so pretty.

( Individual shots below the cut. )

Also:



To go with my very pretty, girly bike, some very girly panniers! Not the girliest ever (because this particular design also came in pink, so), but pretty close.

I got them because while I really like the basket, I was having problems with things jouncing out of it while going over bumps. The basket is more suited to leisurely rides, rather than commuting. These are capacious, and waterproof! (They are made by a company in the Netherlands called Basil. You can find them on the web by searching for "basil panniers". They make a number of other designs, but they are kind of hard to get in the U.S. I got these by ordering them online from a store in Canada, actually.)

Sadly, it looks like my biking commuting may be over for the season. For one thing, I don't have quite as much wiggle-room about when I get in in the morning, since the term is now starting. For another, I discovered last week the drawback to my lovely ride along the Charles River Bikeway -- if you actually do it at dusk (which is, of course, coming earlier and earlier these days), along some stretches what you get is a constant face-ful of gnats. That was a whole lot of no fun, let me tell you. (BUG GUTS ON MY GLASSES AAAIIIGGGH!)

Last night, I watched the entire Olympics opening ceremony. I didn't mean to, but at 7:36pm I decided I'd regret it if I didn't at least record it, and then I got sucked in. At 9:15pm, after some of the MOST JAW-DROPPING performances and spectacle I've ever seen, holy crap, raqs called to find out if I was watching. She had just started watching near the beginning (but she missed the drummers! :( ). So I backed up on my DVR and we watched together, up through maybe halfway through the parade of nations.

Then she wimped out to go, like, SLEEP, and junk. I sat there and watched all of the rest of the parade and the torch lighting.

Let me tell you, that was a HELL of a show. China, and the show's artistic director, can be damned proud of itself. Athens had a lot of spectacle. This was... more beautiful, better coordinated and performed. It was all really classy-looking, too. I didn't look at any of it and think, "well, that's a bit tacky".

Without going into spoilers, the torch-lighting was very cool, too. And very "wow".

Raqs and I were discussing briefly how it might compare to what is, for us, the best modern Olympics opening ceremony: Barcelona in 1992. But the thing is, I don't remember any of Barcelona's opening, EXCEPT for two things. I remember the performance of the Ode to Joy portion of Beethoven's Ninth (... why not? even if he isn't particularly associated with Barcelona), by a quartet of operatic singers as well as orchestra. And I remember the torch-lighting as the COOLEST thing I had ever seen.

So before I went to bed, I checked to see if that is on YouTube. OF COURSE IT IS. It was great to get to watch it again after 16 years. Here it is:



Most torch-lightings for Olympics seem to be staged in a fairly "can't go wrong" kind of way -- you know, someone significant actually touches the torch to the cauldron, or they light a big fuse, essentially, that takes the fire to the cauldron.

What made Barcelona's choice so bad-ass was that element of uncertainty. Not that I think they WERE uncertain, because I don't think they would have done it if they hadn't had complete faith that that guy would make the shot. And yet -- it was a method that could be acted on by conditions far more, I tend to think, than the fuse method. (Not that that couldn't go wrong, too; I've never heard of it going wrong, though.) Just look at the WIND that's blowing the flame of the torch as the guy stands there before lighting the arrow. And yes, that's a big cauldron -- but you've still got to drop the shot in it, while compensating for that wind. Damn.

(Maybe what made it particularly impressive to us was that at the time we were still doing archery, and we shot the clout every year at Pennsic, so we had some idea of what it takes to shoot up and into something like that. Then -- do it in the dark; at a smallish target; in the wind; IN FRONT OF THE ENTIRE WORLD OMG.)

Some of these were taken on the ride in, and some were taken on the ride out, which is why the drastically different lighting conditions.



Abandoned railway bridge and below that a footbridge across the Charles to the Shaws Supermarket parking lot. For want of a better identifier, the dam is just "the Shaws dam". (A decade ago it would have been "the Ames dam". I should look it up and find out what it was originally called.)

( More below the cut... )

I know that I posted about the nice hybrid bike that I got off of Craigslist a little while ago -- the truth is, I resold it about a week and a half later. After riding to and from work a few times, I started to feel like maybe it wasn't quite the right size for me -- maybe it was a bit too small.

Or maybe that was a rationale for going to a bike store to pick up some supplies for the Craigslist bike, and meeting the Bike of My Dreams. (Really, they should market it like that.) I inquired about the price and thought about it a few days, and the salesman looked right at me and said, "I would want to put you on the 16" frame" (all he had at the time was the 14"). I ended up going back to the bike store on the Friday, and he had one with the 16" frame built, so I test-rode it. And it was AMAZING. So smooth and comfortable! And even though that was still in the period in which my tailbone was hurting like a mofo, it didn't really hurt that much to ride *that* bike.

So I bought it (it was even on sale!). I also bought a basket for it, because I was good and tired of riding to work with my bag slung over my shoulder. The next day, I put the Craigslist bike back on Craigslist, and it sold within a couple of hours for what I'd paid for it.

Here is my very spiffy new bike! It's a Trek 7000.



YES, it could be *more* girly. For example, instead of the green leaf decoration it has, those could be PINK. So there. Did I mention how incredibly comfortable it is?

Since then, I've been taking it a bit easy, working up to things. I got in the habit of riding it to work one day, then riding it home the next. Then I kind of lost last week to the CONSTANT THUNDERSTORMS OMG. Given the forecasts and being wimpy and afraid of being caught out in one of those, I just left the bike at home (I went to to the gym several nights instead, and biked 7 miles on the stationary bikes).

Today, I both biked *to* work, and then home again in the same day. w00t!

Speshul sekrit message for jenlev: camera this morning, but no blue herons at the dam. Because the dam looked like this, and the herons could not possibly have stood there even if they would have been able to see the fish, which they wouldn't:



This is the Watertown dam, along the Charles River Bikeway.

Finally, I leave you all with a pretty sunset. This was on Sunday, after thunderstorms moved through. I came out of the O'Neill tunnel, briefly, heading for the Prudential tunnel, and the sky was suddenly ON FIRE. Flecks of bright orange below a higher canopy of dark grey, stretching up farther than I could see. It was amazing. I had made it to the Allston/Brighton tolls before I realized that my camera was in my bag, and I might be able to snap a clear pic of it -- but you can see, the sunset is already rapidly fading by then, a deep pink, and extending much less overhead. Still: pretty.

Finished up. I might do some designs on the lower gussets, but only after I get some new pens...



( More pics below... )

Ganked from telepresence, who is over there also geekgasming over this. He has more to say about it over in his post, but, apparently, at Comic Con, Disney just put this on the end of its video presentation. There has been absolutely no word leaked of this. NONE. No fanfare, just, there it is.




eta: I just want to say that one of the things I love about watching stuff like this is getting to hear the audience/fan reaction as they figure out what they're watching. (After watching this one, I went and watched the ComicCon footage of the Iron Man presentation last year. Same thing.)