I will hug him and squeeze him!

Inbred into our psyches is this thing called "parental instinct". It's especially prominate in the females of our race, resulting in strange cries such as "OOOooooOOOOoooaw! Whadda cute bay-bee!" The older the female, the quicker they dissolve into a puddle of baby-talk and kissy faces. Admittedly, men do it too, but only when they think people aren't looking. Nature protects its young with a cuteness factor so high that it threatens to melt the human ability to think logically.

The parental instinct is a dangerous thing, because it's not always in the interest of self-preservation. This is something I know from personal experience with a very cute, but destructive fox-hound. Many a teenager who's volunteered to babysit has suddenly found themself cowering behind a barricade and praying that the parents come home soon.

Okay, so not all babysitting gigs are that truamatic and if you actually choose a pet more suited for your lifestyle then it's acutally a rewarding experience. (I just made the mistake of getting a dog that can run five hours day five days straight.) However, if you just want a cuteness fix, here are a few websites that can oblige:

• The well-known "I Can Has Cheezburger"
• A pet simulation game called SuperPoke! Pets--and you can post it to your Facebook or MySpace!
• A very celver wecomic called Catena
• And last of all, for those of your who don't believe in cuteness, I have this video.

X-men move over!

On the suggestion of some good friends of mine, I started watching the first season of Heroes while doing math homework. Before I say anything else, let me just say that it's not a show for little kids in any sense. Some of the problems that the main characters face are definitely for more mature audiences and there is a lot of blood.

One of the main reasons for the gore-factor is Sylar. He is a serial killer who appears to randomly target people and then cuts out their brains. He's sadistic, sneaky, and despicable. He's one of those characters you love to hate.

I was actually pretty surprised about how the character has developed--and I'm not even done with the first season! He starts out as a mysterious bogey-man, always shrouded in shadow so you never, ever see his face. His attacks are strange, random, and spine-chilling. But as the season progresses, you discover more and more about him and the pattern behind the seemingly random killings.

See, I'm a bit of a weirdo in the fact that I earnestly believe that a well-written villain is an integral part of any movie, book, or t.v. show. The better the villain, the better the conflict between good and evil. I believe that villains are usually the characters that receive the least planning and forethought in their development or receive too much at the expense of the other characters. Sylar, however, is just one of the many intricate characters on Heroes. I look forward to seeing how things play out further on in the series.

And everybody was Kung-fu fighting!

I have this habit of watching movies and playing video games only after every other single person has seen it and the hype is long over. I don't do it on purpose; it just seems to happen. Well, today I watched "Kung-Fu Panda".

On one hand, it's really sad when a kid's movie has one of the best villains I've seen in a while. On the other, I thoroughly enjoyed every minute of it. I cheered for chubby Po and wondered why the heck I hadn't watched it sooner.

Even my elder sister--L or L-kun, depending on how annoying I'm being--enjoyed it and she's very picky about her movie intake. We even tried to figure exactly how wiggling your pinky can make people go "FWOOOM!" I'm not a kung-fu fan and I'm more like Po than Tigeress or Snake, but I think that's why I enjoyed it so much. Doesn't just about everyone want to be a ninja when they grow up?

Of course, I read a lot of reviews bashing it for promoting obesity. I also read reviews saying it was crude, violent, and inappropriate for children. I'm not sure how these people came to these conclusions--maybe they accidentally walked into a different movie and reviewed that instead--but I, for one, was remarkably surprised at how clean it was. There wasn't a single instance of foul language and, aside from Po's butt landing on the bad guy's head during a fight, there wasn't any potty humor. Now, admittedly, there are lots of slow-motion, kung-fu fights, but they weren't violent. It was more like a Jackie Chan movie than anything else.

Whatever the reviewers say, though, I know I'm going to add Kung-Fu Panda to my list of movies I wouldn't mind seeing again.

Learning curve

Okay, so this is my first ever post on my very own blog. A little nervous here, but I'll get over it.

Inspiration Hurts is going to be my new center for diatribes, monologues, and other thoughts I probably should edit before posting. (I probably won't, though.) In it, I'll probably rant about what I don't like and gush about what I do like.