It's Blue Monday. I have spent half the day in bed, not doing anything useful. This is exactly the way to spend Blue Monday. I will probably have alcohol later, but I am doing an online class later today that involves math and I want to be sober for that.

Actual sentence I said to Ashley today: "Have fun with the karaoke and the toilet seats." (She's going to some party, plus mentioned that they'd had to replace all the toilet seats in the house.) Those do NOT go together, she said.

My plans involved watching a lecture on pattern grading and after that, presumably drinking Blue Monday style. I did not do the latter. The lecture was pretty much 45 minutes of throat clearing and not really discussing how one DOES it, which is a bummer because it's the only one I can watch live (the other two are during my workday because it's on NYC time). I'm having low expectations of the rest of it now, but it's free, so whatever.

During that, Dawn asked me if I'd seen Avatar yet. In all honesty I wasn't planning on seeing it at all because I'm way over the whole Avatar thing and no longer care, it's been so long, and I have zero motivation to get off my ass and go to a movie any more. I kinda wanted to say no, I don't want to go, but (a) I doubt she'd go alone/unaccompanied and I'm the only one in the friend group geek enough to go see that, (b) it's what I call a level 2 movie, i.e. "I don't care enough to get off my ass and go on my own, but I'm not opposed if someone else wants to watch it," (c) it's not like I had anything better to do. I also looked it up and it's about to go out of theaters after this week. So I bought tickets and brought my new portable HEPA filter, she drove over/got the snacks. I also knit in the dark through it...I had just blow-dried my project and the yarn still managed to roll out of the bag and I had to pull it all back TWICE. Sheesh. Project looks okay in daylight, but I may want to wash it again sometime anyway.

That said, the movie...was pretty good, actually? Probably doesn't need to be over 3 hours because there's a lot of scenery pr0n in between shots of battles, but it's very, very pretty in 3D. Jungle scenes are great, underwater/island scenes are great, random floating islands in the sky for no good reason, glow in the dark plants/sea/life freckles are cute.

Basically the plot is that somewhere between 15-20 years after the last movie, humans have decided to come back to Pandora, except they plan to trash the place and straight up colonize it and also kill their entire (equivalent of) whales population because they have anti-aging...stuff in them (the new "unobtanium!"). The villain in the last movie, Quaritch, has had his memories uploaded and installed into a Na'vi avatar body, so he's doing the exact same shenanigans except he finds his own dead body and crushes its skull, because ASSHOLE. Oh yeah, and we're also randomly told he knocked up someone on Pandora and the baby was left behind because you can't bring babies in cryo, so there's one teenage human (goes by "Spider") who is basically Na'vi Tarzan with snark. He's fun. Anyway, Jake and Neyteri had three kids and adopted a fourth, because if it wasn't weird enough to throw a random teen human into the mix, we're told that (now dead) Grace's Avatar body got pregnant SOMEHOW and produced a kid, Kiti, who seems to have some kind of psychic powers connected to the planet going on and you should probably reasonably presume this is a Virgin Mary situation, though that isn't confirmed. (I did get amused when the teen boys were razzing her that human Norm could be the father and she was all "I'd rather die!"

I find it very odd that Sigourney Weaver is playing both herself (as a ghost/video, more or less) and as her own teen alien daughter, but darned if she isn't like, the best one in the movie? Go figure? Jake is also rather charming as a pragmatic military dad. I note that Kate Winslet is in it as a pregnant sea colony leader, but you recognize her not a bit. Great character, though.

Anyway, the evil humans return and start blowing everything up, Jake leads a resistance, the kids run around and get caught by Quaritch--Spider gets caught, the rest get away--and Jake decides the best thing to do is leave the jungle and go hide out with a sea colony, hence the title. This is all recreationally fun and the main plot of that is his second son making friends with an injured outcast "whale" that had a run-in with the bastard humans. And then Quaritch and company go after the whales, and terrorize the sea colonies looking for Jake, and Resistance 2: Now With Whales, begins and it's all very fire-y on the ocean. I was a lot more into this than I figured I'd be after the first movie, so props to making the kid stuff interesting there.

I accidentally ended up with Dawn's glasses in my purse and forgot to give them back before she got home, told her I'd have to figure out how to get them to her later since I wasn't sure what my plans were Tuesday.

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