redfiona99

And now the last in this wave of X-Men-related posts - a ranking of the X-Men films.

First a caveat, I still haven't seen Logan. When it was released, L banned me because he was more than slight (and justifiably) concerned that I would cry so hard I would desiccate (full story here - https://fulltimesportsfan.wordpress.com/2017/03/04/logan-which-im-banned-from-watching/). Unfortunately, due to content and language, when it's shown on TV it tends to be after 9 pm, which is when Mum calls so I haven't had the chance to watch it since. One of these days I will set aside an afternoon to watch it, but I haven't managed that yet.

With that understood, ( 10 to 1 Countdown below )

So some of the train companies still do the thing of naming their trains. Sometimes they have really cool names, like one of the West Coast travelling to the South West trains was named for Jason Leonard.

Sometimes they're done as part of a promotion for something, which I suspect is how this train got its name.

However it happened, I ended up on a Virgin pendelino called "X-Men: Days of Future Past". I may have squeed. I definitely took a picture. Sorry for the poor quality, I was literally running for the train (Euston's way of doing things has many issues).

( Large picture of train below )

Because I am also a hopeless member of the Twitterati I also tweeted, much to the amusement of whoever was manning the Virgin Trains twitter account. I like to give them some variety in their twitter feed :)

As you might have gathered from the last X-Men post, all I needed to be satisfied with Days of Future Past was time travel and Bishop. It went beyond that :D

Beneath lies gratuitous exclamation marks and high pitched squeaking, complete with run on sentences and bracket abuse. And also one giant spoiler for Watchmen.

( There was one thing I disliked )

( I liked everything else )

tl; dr I enjoyed it and it was good and I nearly shouted at the screen several times.

( The 5 Things That Made Me Happiest )

Mostly because I discovered I kept mentioning their take on Days of Future Past in my write up, so I've moved that stuff here. No spoilers for the film, but lots of spoilers for a show that went off the air last century.

Like a lot of people my age, my first exposure to the Days of Future Past concept was the old X-Men cartoon. To this day, I still love it's take on time-travel and it's consequences.

( Spoilers for the show below )

No spoilers for Days of Future Past because this all happened before I went to see it.

So P is the other comics geek in the lab and has just returned from Mexico. One of her friends is a psychologist and they were talking about personality tests (the ones where you're supposed to identify your personality traits and analyse why you feel that way) and how abstract they were, particularly for people with no psychology training.

So P has put her own spin on one of the tests. Her version goes, "choose the X-Man you are most like and why, the X-Man you find most attractive and why and the X-Man you most dislike and why." The whys being the most important thing of course.

( The X-Man I am most like )

( The X-Man I find most attractive )

( The X-Man I dislike the most )

A great deal of stuff will be said some time in the future, but for the moment, mostly squee, some reservations, a lot of things were I want the spin-off comic (or fanfic, I will accept either). lilacsigil's post on it covers most of what I want to say more coherently than I can.

They abound, everywhere, in this post.

As does intermittent squeeing.

Also, some tumblrites might have seen even less coherent versions of this but this is longer, and slightly more considered.

So the thing that really set off this weekend's squeeing was ( this picture )

Also, while I've not been looking for casting news, I occasionally hear it. Now I'm quite deliberately not double-checking anything because I want to go into the film minimally spoiled (I'm a comics reader, I've see the cartoon, I have a base level of pre-spoiled) so I heard that Adrian Holmes has been cast. Now even if he's not Bishop (brief pause for Bishop-squee) (a second pause for Bishop-squee) (a further pause for Bishop and Gambit-squee which is not going to happen in this film but I don't care because squee), the man deserves to be in something big since he spent time acting with/at/around Steven Segal in the second season of True Justice which may, in parts, be the worst thing ever committed to television.

I've also just heard about Aaron Taylor-Johnson as Quicksilver. I approve. As long as they dye his hair silver. Some details are important.

Part of this approval is because I like his acting.

The other part is that he does look quite like both of the actors playing his Dad.

Of course, I have no idea how they’re going to do Quicksilver with his Dad being with a different studio, because, and this is me being a terrible comics fan, the only thing I remember about Quicksilver’s character and motivation are “I hate my mutant Dad” and “I love my sister”. According to angstbunny Fox and Paramount have an agreement, which basically boils down to Fox will not mention that Magneto's children are in the Avengers and Paramount will not mention who Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch's Dad is. I'm assuming the "or else" is attack lawyers. It does strike me as being horrible childish.

Also, they'd better also have the Scarlet Witch if they're going to have Quicksilver. I know she's game-breakingly powerful but one without the other, particularly if the one is the male twin, is a bit 0.o.

I will have intelligible Sherlock thoughts eventually ( that day is not today )

Sadly I fear those thoughts will come before my X-Men: First Class ones, which now take up 6 sides of A5, and I haven't even reached the stage where Xavier and Magneto meet. I can't help it, I have many, many thoughts about that film.

It should be helped by it arriving in the post any day now.

~~~~

Both the snooker and the tennis results are annoying me. I think I'm already down to just Neil Robertson in the Masters and Dolgopolov in the men's in Oz.

~~~~

TNA:

( Spoilers )

[Error: unknown template qotd]

Getting me to march is not difficult, I have marched, jangled money tins and campaigned for a fair few things (mostly Amnesty International stuff but a few other things when I've been roped in to do it). I think it's one of those things where once you start doing it, you keep doing it. However, I'd be pleased as punch if they stopped only having the major marches in London. I think the student protests had the right idea, one in London and smaller ones in the other major cities.

~~~~

On to happier things, I bring you a link to a fantastic piece of fan-art (http://pentapus.livejournal.com/295664.html). Charles and Raven, two days before Charles's viva. (My own request would more likely have been 'be something that keeps everyone else away', but then again, Charles Xavier is undoubtedly a better man than I.)

I am slightly too excited for X-Men: First Class. I mean, I was excited when I heard who they cast as Xavier and Magneto, but I have just seen Beast's SFX and I am very, very excited indeed. Especially because they seem to have remembered the mutant politics. You can't do the X-men justice without the mutant politics.

~~~~

Knitting: http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v11/redfiona99/img001.jpg A somewhat scaled down photo of my first quilt square as discussed previously. It's less lopsided in real life. Not included are the terribly written instructions, which have obviously been written by someone who knows how to knit without being checked by someone who doesn't know. The instructions for the design on top were absolutely unfollowable until I looked hard at the pictures and realised that they looked like a daisy stitch (have since been informed by Nan that the stitch is really called a chain stitch).

I shall see what next week's edition brings.

~~~~

Wrestling:

This week's 15 minutes of Smackdown saw me squeak over Drew McIntyre again. I can get behind evil with a heart of squish. And when I say that, if I were a cartoon, I'd get little red hearts for eyes every time he comes out.

Also, rather wierdly, I felt oddly protective of Cole when Booker T was yelling at him. Even while he's being evil, I want to yell 'stop picking on him, he's half your size.'

~~~~

Film Meme - Day 23 - Character You Relate To The Most

I am aware it says nothing good about me but hello, Geoffrey Plantagenet, count of Brittany from The Lion In Winter.

I felt it most strongly when I was a teenager (really, my horrible, suicidal teenage years, let us not do that again), but it's still there. I think it was that, almost uniquely in characters who feel alone and unloved in films, he doesn't act out by destroying himself, as normally happens, but by hurting everyone around him. Which makes far more sense (like I said, I am aware I do not come out of this looking good).

I think it was also the way he was, he'd channelled his hatred into being cleverer than everyone else, which was something I respected.

There was also the situation that he was in, where there were three people in his generation, all scrambling for the same thing, and the constant in-fighting and back-biting. My family, while fighting over less significant things than the crown of England and the Plantagenet lands, bears an uncanny resemblance to the dynamics in film, and trying to remember who'd told what lie to who and why took an awful lot of energy.

Even now, there's some of that fellow feeling still there, because you've got my eldest cousin, who is a far nicer person than anyone in the film, who fills in the roll of Richard, run away to escape the family, and then my boy cousin who, despite being older than me, often fills John's shoes to a T. And I'm just expected to be okay. Which I am normally, and now that I don't have raging hormones and school bullies to contend with I am relatively happy with life, but sometimes when I feel put upon, it's nice to have someone on screen who gets that, someone who responds the same way I do to the same kind of stimulus - the way you feel when you think that your feelings are being disregarded, not out of any extra malice, but because they're inconvenient to other people.

( The Other Days )