Five Things Make a Post
Jul. 27th, 2014 01:40 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pedanther1. How is it only today that I learn that Groot, the large tree-like alien in the new Marvel movie, Guardians of the Galaxy, is played, or at least voiced, by the same actor who voiced the title character in The Iron Giant? This is important information!
2. I've finished playing through the storyline in Lego Marvel Super Heroes, which leaves the part of the game that involves wandering around Manhattan finding all the side quests: foiling bank robberies, helping citizens in distress, and so on. The "helping citizens in distress" bits range from appropriately superheroic to things like finding lost pets and helping little old ladies cross the road. (Also, for some reason, at least two people having trouble getting a taxi to stop for them, the correct solution to which is apparently to steal a taxi and drive them to their destination oneself. Super heroic.)
[edit: I belatedly realise that you're probably supposed to use one of the passenger vehicles you get as a reward for other side quests. But finding the nearest taxi and stealing it is usually easier than remembering where your own vehicles are parked, anyway.]
One amusing aspect is that, because the sidequests don't take into account which character one happens to be playing at the moment -- the free play portion of the game lets you switch at will between any of the available characters, including villains, and to an extent encourages spending a little time as each of them to learn their capabilities -- the juxtapositions can sometimes be rather incongruous. My two favourite examples from my own playing are the time a little old lady calmly requested assistance from Spider-Man's nightmarish evil counterpart Venom, and the time the X-Men casually asked Magneto to help them repel an attack by his own League of Evil Mutants.
3. It took me a while to get around to seeing the second How to Train Your Dragon movie; maybe I should have left it a bit longer, because a few days after I saw it I found myself rewatching the first movie on TV. Oh well. I don't think anything was badly harmed by doing it that way around.
4. Since I mentioned that I have been unable to attend Toastmasters recently due to having something else on the same day, I have been to two Toastmasters meetings, though neither on my home club's usual day. One was at the new Gourmet club, which meets monthly over dinner; I enjoyed that, and intend to go again next month. The second was this weekend; there were a couple of higher-level officials in town to do club officer training for the three local clubs, so we had a combined meeting and potluck dinner with people attending from all three clubs. I ran Table Topics for the meeting, or as I announced it, Iron Chef Table Topics, in which each speaker is given a mystery ingredient and immediately has to spend two minutes talking about what meal they're going to prepare with that ingredient.
5. I've mentioned before that I enjoy cryptic crossword puzzles because a good cryptic clue can be satisfying in the same way as a really bad pun, and that sometimes I'll be stuck on a clue for a long time and then one day pick it up again and immediately see the answer. This one is a case in point:
Resort city is half a mile, pal, from Paris (5)
2. I've finished playing through the storyline in Lego Marvel Super Heroes, which leaves the part of the game that involves wandering around Manhattan finding all the side quests: foiling bank robberies, helping citizens in distress, and so on. The "helping citizens in distress" bits range from appropriately superheroic to things like finding lost pets and helping little old ladies cross the road. (Also, for some reason, at least two people having trouble getting a taxi to stop for them, the correct solution to which is apparently to steal a taxi and drive them to their destination oneself. Super heroic.)
[edit: I belatedly realise that you're probably supposed to use one of the passenger vehicles you get as a reward for other side quests. But finding the nearest taxi and stealing it is usually easier than remembering where your own vehicles are parked, anyway.]
One amusing aspect is that, because the sidequests don't take into account which character one happens to be playing at the moment -- the free play portion of the game lets you switch at will between any of the available characters, including villains, and to an extent encourages spending a little time as each of them to learn their capabilities -- the juxtapositions can sometimes be rather incongruous. My two favourite examples from my own playing are the time a little old lady calmly requested assistance from Spider-Man's nightmarish evil counterpart Venom, and the time the X-Men casually asked Magneto to help them repel an attack by his own League of Evil Mutants.
3. It took me a while to get around to seeing the second How to Train Your Dragon movie; maybe I should have left it a bit longer, because a few days after I saw it I found myself rewatching the first movie on TV. Oh well. I don't think anything was badly harmed by doing it that way around.
4. Since I mentioned that I have been unable to attend Toastmasters recently due to having something else on the same day, I have been to two Toastmasters meetings, though neither on my home club's usual day. One was at the new Gourmet club, which meets monthly over dinner; I enjoyed that, and intend to go again next month. The second was this weekend; there were a couple of higher-level officials in town to do club officer training for the three local clubs, so we had a combined meeting and potluck dinner with people attending from all three clubs. I ran Table Topics for the meeting, or as I announced it, Iron Chef Table Topics, in which each speaker is given a mystery ingredient and immediately has to spend two minutes talking about what meal they're going to prepare with that ingredient.
5. I've mentioned before that I enjoy cryptic crossword puzzles because a good cryptic clue can be satisfying in the same way as a really bad pun, and that sometimes I'll be stuck on a clue for a long time and then one day pick it up again and immediately see the answer. This one is a case in point:
Resort city is half a mile, pal, from Paris (5)
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no subject
Date: 2014-07-26 07:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-07-27 09:50 am (UTC)Sounds quite likely though really?
Good luck with the cryptic clue, that's not the way my brain works!
no subject
Date: 2014-07-30 08:50 am (UTC)Mu reaction was that the definition is either "from Paris" or "resort city", with the latter being more likely; however, I can't get anything out of taking half the letters from "mile" (mi? le?) or taking 'pal' from 'Paris' -- and five letters really doesn't leave much scope for complicated cryptic constructions. There seems to be too much clue for the available amount of answer!
'Pal' is obviously significant as there's no reason for it to be in there. But I can't think of any equivalently short synonyms. Nor are any city names concealed within the letters (epalf, alfro, lepal).
no subject
Date: 2014-07-30 10:04 am (UTC)