Avengers Review -- Somethingth Post

First off, I can't remember how many posts there actually are. I think I skipped a bunch of numbers, but I can't be asked to go back and fix everything.
Know what else I can't be asked to do?
Homework. Yeah, it's finals. Yeah, I have four things due for one class and an exam in another tomorrow. No, I don't want to work on those.
So, here's what will hopefully be a largely spoiler-free review of The Avengers, the new superhero movie by marvel that all the kids are talking about.
Yeah, I went to the midnight premier even though I had an exam the next day. I've been waiting for this movie since the first Ironman whenever it came out (I was in high school then; I'm very nearly a senior in university now); I'm not going to let a little thing like an exam in my hardest class stop me from seeing this the day it comes out.

The trailers had been indicating that all these extremely strong, movie-carrying characters were going to be working together but still having issues and experiencing internal conflict due to their extremely strong personalities. This was encouraging. You don't get to be a superhero without being independent, strong, and forceful (unless you're that pansy, Spiderman), and superhero-type personalities don't mix well. Luckily, Nick Fury was a super-strong personality as well as being the purported leader of the gang, so no one was fighting over who got to call the shots, just who was, you know, right about stuff like who had the right to beat the shit out of Loki.
Who was played really well, by the way. I have a soft spot for non-satanic "bad guys" in mythology because they just tend to be misunderstood over time and disney. Hades didn't torment anybody, he just made sure everyone followed the rules of the underworld (which included the paradise-like afterlife and wasn't just a sort of greek hell). Zeus was a dick, though. Loki wasn't evil, just mischievous (well portrayed in Thor, I thought) in a way that sometimes came into conflict with everyone else.
The film really dug into the basic nature of humanity in the conflict between Loki and everyone else, making it interesting to watch from a philosophical viewpoint (one of my classes is dealing with some of the actual statements made in the film). It also dug into Tony Stark's hidden depths, since he mostly just developed compassion while still being a rich egotist in his other two movies.
While Bruce Banner was not played by the same guy as in The Incredible Hulk (2008-ish; I was in high school but it was after the first Ironman), this new guy did a great job of portraying Bruce Banner and the Hulk.
I was pleased by the tension between Captain America and Tony Stark. I was hoping for some, since Steve Rogers had pretty much been BFFs with Howard Stark, who Tony only barely came to forgive (for kind of being a terrible dad) in Ironman 2. There's a scene where Tony and Steve get into an argument and leave muttering angrily; Tony comments that if this is really the guy that his dad wouldn't shut up about, maybe they should have left him on ice. Still, they get over it because of a HUGE FUCKING PLOT TWIST OMG!
I won't tell you what it was, but Joss Whedon is a sneaky bastard who kills off his main characters and can't even be blamed for it by the end of the movie because it works out so perfectly.
Damn you, Joss Whedon. You kill people off and I can't even hate you for it.
We are all Joss Whedon's bitches, is what I'm saying here.
Another thing that impressed me was how there was no love story. All the others, including both Ironmans, The Incredible Hulk, Thor, and Captain America, have had love stories that are sort of central to how the movie runs, how the main characters roll, and how the probable sequels might be set up. The only love story in The Avengers is between Tony Stark and Pepper Potts, and it's really just a few scenes showing that they're in a committed relationship and that Tony really loves her a lot. Thor's lady, Jane Foster (Natalie Portman, if you've forgotten her name as thoroughly as I had), gets shuffled out of harm's way without us ever seeing her. He better have dropped by, because if I saw that my demigod man had saved the human race from devastation without even saying hello even when I'd been looking for him relentlessly after his einstein-rosen bridge had been smashed, well...
Well, I'd take him back, but he'd better be sorry.
Presumably, Captain America's lady is dead or very, very old with grandchildren. Not a lot of WWII veterans hanging around nowadays. My grandparents are in their 80s, and they were children during the war. She wasn't even mentioned, which I thought was a bummer.
Bruce Banner's love interest from The Incredible Hulk (Liv Tyler, of all people) wasn't brought up at all either. She really wouldn't have fit and the whole thing was a bit odd in the first place.
Basically, there was enough personal growth and team growth that they didn't need love stories to drive the action. The action was driving itself well enough.
A new story that popped up was Hawkeye and the Black Widow. There were romantic undertones, but you mostly get the impression that the Black Widow cares more for Hawkeye than she does for anyone else in the whole world because she owes him. I would watch a movie about those two, even if they didn't end up together. They could be best friends forever and I would be okay with that.
Also, Robin from How I Met Your Mother is a SHIELD agent.

Overall, the film is a great blend of action and plot, with great explosions and these fish things from outer space. I also suspect the Red Skull (Hugo Weaving's character in Captain America, you know, the guy with the creepy-ass red head who gets tesseracted out into space?) is involved.
There are slow spots at the beginning, but once it gets going, it's awesome. There's a lot of humour on both sides (neither side gets to have all the jokes) even in really serious situations. However, there are serious situations that are not appropriate for humour, and these were not made funny in the movie.
Stay to the end of the credits. Not only is the music pretty good, the final scene is hilarious. No, it doesn't set up a sequel, but it does reference a humourous moment from a serious situation and it's pretty hilarious. No, I won't tell you what it is.

Yay, so that's a review and I really do need to do homework.
Summary: Go see it. If you're too broke, pirate it as soon as you can and try to ignore the weird non-western alphabet subtitles. It's worth it.

Veganism -- Seventieth Post

I believe I posted a recipe for vegan apple pumpkin bread made out of random stuff I have in my kitchen, which at the time did not include butter or eggs.
It turns out that I'm quite fond of vegan recipes. This is probably because I frequently run out of eggs and butter (my housemates use some of my eggs, it's a long walk to a store that has cheap groceries, I have no budgeting skills, I made a chocolate torte that takes three eggs and half a stick of butter when I only had three eggs and a stick of butter left, and my baking cravings are unpredictable). Vegan egg substitutions are cheap, and it's fun to try recipes that don't have any cholesterol (yay, shitty heart issues!). I also stick with vegan milks because it's too hard to keep regular milk fresh and around with how little I use it on a day to day basis (mostly, a glug or so in my tea every morning when I can be bothered to wake up in time for tea, since I don't eat cereal hardly ever). I'm thinking I might try some vegan cheese just to see if it's quesadilla-worthy, even though it's probably more expensive.
Today, after a weekend of homework, I NEEDED to bake oatmeal cookies. Unfortunately, as I mentioned before, I used most of my butter and all my eggs in a chocolate torte that is, quite frankly, pretty damn good for a first try and without a machine to beat my egg whites into stiff peaks.
So, I started hunting for vegan cookie recipes. Eggs I could handle, but the butter... I don't have any coconut oil on hand. I need some, but I am currently without.
I found one recipe that seemed pretty legit, although it didn't include oats, and figured I could just add in oats.
It worked okay until I added too many oats and dried the whole thing out. I also used brown sugar instead of raw sugar. I added 1/3 of a cornstarch egg (1 tbsp water, 1 tsp cornstarch) to moisten it up, and the result was a slightly dry but surprisingly soft and delicious cookie.
I did end up adding about two tablespoons of soy milk to the second batch, but they came out cakey. Another tablespoon of cornstarch egg would have been a worthy addition. Ground up nuts and applesauce might have been good as well.
I hope to make a review of milks for my own purposes at some point, but I need to try rice milk first. So far, almond milk is way too thin for use in tea but fine for everything else, and soy milk is great in tea; maybe a little thick.

Which reminds me, there was something else I was going to post a review on... I forget. Oh, the oriental hy-top stir fry mix is all beans and pretty much nothing else. Don't get that again.