the message in the bottle is the booze

I ... uh ...

If you haven't watched this, I highly recommend it. Not because it's good, but because it's hilarious. I especially recommend watching it while live chatting with a friend who shares a love for terrible but bonkers TV.

The tone of the entire series, episode to episode, scene to scene, is non-stop DRUMS! CHOIR! PRIMAL SCREAM!

I watched it expecting something like Castlevania because it's done by the same animation studio, but it has absolutely no subtlety or self-restraint. Castlevania could be entertainingly extra too, but it also had things like characterization and storytelling. They both have a penchant for "edginess" but Castlevania's edgy moments are more earned.

I think it could have been an actual good show if it was longer. There was simply no time at all to make us care about the characters and their conflicts. As it was, it was just crammed full of:

(a) exposition

(b) more exposition

(c) seriously is the exposition over

(d) tragic backstories (told though more exposition)

(e) the female gaze

(f) tropes turned up to 11

( In case you don't want to be spoiled for the, uh, plot, I'm putting my favorite moments behind a cut. They're not super-spoilery, because I'm keeping details vague, but I dunno you. )

I actually hope there will be fanfiction for this series. The thing is, we know almost nothing about most of the characters. We see very, very little of their lives and their relationships outside of the (very compressed) events in the series. There's a lot of room for for fun.

P.S. Hermes looks like a penis.

Netflix's Blown Away was a lot more interesting than I thought it would be. It has a lot of the same things I like about The Great British Bake-Off: People with an interesting skill I don't have trying to win a competition without a lot of manufactured drama or fancy production.

Glassblowing is fun to watch!

( I didn't like one of the competitors much though... no spoilers about who wins. )

Wow, watching Mystery Diagnosis is a good way to make yourself mad.

Last night I watched an episode where a woman's husband told her that she was making it up. He related this himself, with no shame.

Today I'm watching an episode where a woman is in so much pain that she wants to die and can't take care of her family. Doctors dismiss her repeatedly after telling her it's just "stress" or a "woman thing."

Her eight-year-old daughter has to make dinner and clean the house, because "otherwise there would be no dinner." Is she a single mother? No! She apparently has a useless husband who "doesn't understand." They divorce - she twists herself in knots trying not to place blame - and ends up with the kids.

I used to love this show, since I find medical mysteries fascinating. This time around, though, it's interesting to pay attention to what's not being said. No one accuses doctors or partners of sexism.

There are also some episodes where it's clear that diagnosis and treatment took so long because the person couldn't afford medical care. When they do their final wrap-up, they never say that, though.

I haven't watched Chernobyl, but it has been fun to read about.

One of the things that makes the Chernobyl disaster so fascinating to me is the contrast between the horror of the disaster itself and the mundane. For example, it seems impossible that Chernobyl was still a functioning power plant until 2000, with many of its same staff. Meanwhile, not far away, lies an eldritch horror of the nuclear age - that is, of course, the Elephant's Foot.

r/Askhistorians has had some interesting threads about the show, including:

HBO's Chernobyl: "... We seal off the city. No one leaves. And cut the phone lines. Contain the spread of misinformation. That is how you keep the people from undermining the fruits of their own labor." Is this an accurate representation of the USSR's politicians' attitudes toward their people?

How accurate is the Chernobyl miniseries on HBO to the actual events ? Was the negligence of Human life by the Soviet State and it’s members this bad ? Was the higher-ups of the Plant as depicted in the show ?

But, back to the show. This post on Bored Panda is an interesting side-by-side comparison of shots from the show with actual footage and photographs.

Notice anything? I sure did. It looks like the show has been struck by the same disease that has desaturated most of the dramatic TV shows that are produced these days. It is such a boring choice artistically. That's how you know that it's a disaster, I suppose. The sun cannot possibly be shining; it must be gloomy and gray so that we know something is wrong.
But actually, the horror of this disaster is in large part that it was an invisible horror. Making it visible is easier than building fear through other means, but it lessens it.

Oh well.

Netflix keeps trying to get me to watch Bonding. So I did, for about ten minutes.

The premise is that a graduate student in New York who works as a dominatrix needs an assistant and hires her gay best friend. The gay best friend appears to be the primary viewpoint character - so it's set up a bit like other stories in which the mundane protagonist falls into an extraordinary world.

Only Harry Potter was much more convincing.

The show is bad.

The actress is entirely unconvincing - even in the trailer, she comes across as a young woman play-acting what she thinks a dominatrix is like instead of a ... dominatrix. You get the sense that she was cast by people who didn't know what they were looking for.

There's something about the way she's framed and styled as well. It just reads as dress-up, kind of like a model in an ad for a sex shop. She's not shot in a way that gives her power. And yeah, it's a comedy and not a porn, you're not watching to experience being dominated by her, but it just cuts out the believability.

I looked up the actress and apparently she's been in other things where her performance was good? So, I'm not sure what's going on here. I'm not sure how much is her performance, and how much is the writing, which is terrible.

(There is a truly awful scene where she's late for class. We get a minute or so of her in this "grad" class, which is written like an undergrad's conception of what a grad class is like.)

See my icon?

That's taken from a promotional picture for the sequel to Avatar: The Last Airbender, which has been given a go. The new avatar is a water tribe woman named Korra. From the interview I just linked:

The new “Avatar” is a woman. What inspired you to change the sex of the protagonist of the series?

Michael DiMartino: It’s not so much about changing because we had Avatar Kyoshi before Aang. We’d established that the Avatar can be male or female and we just thought let’s explore one of those more in depth, because Kyoshi was a popular character with a lot of fans and it seemed like a great opportunity to not retread what we’d done with Aang, who was a great hero, we all loved him, but we really wanted to try something different. And we have so many great female fans out there, who really responded to Katara in the first series, we thought we have the fan base who are really going to enjoy seeing the Avatar be a female.

Konietzko: Mike and I, we love those characters too, and we’ve encountered countless fans who are male who really like those characters too. We just don’t subscribe to the conventional wisdom that you can’t have an action series led by a female character. It’s kinda nonsense to us.

I plan to support this show with my real money if I'm given a chance.

So far the details are quite vague, but we know that Korra lives some sixty or seventy years after the original show is set, and is taught airbending by Aang and Katara's son. A large part of the show will take place in a city that is inspired by Shanghai and Hongkong in the 1920's and 30's. There will be tension between benders and non-benders.

I can't wait.

High-res version of the image in my icon. The creators say it won't entirely look like this, but look at the city. Awesome.

I'm working through my "easy reading" list, and am on Dead Until Dark, the first book in Sookie Stackhouse series. The premise is pretty basic: Sookie Stackhouse, small-town waitress with the special ability to hear others' thoughts, gets tangled up with vampires and other creatures in Yet Another Supernatural Romance.

In subject matter and general intent, it's very similar to the Anita Blake novels, but Sookie isn't quite as annoying as Anita (yet). She's uninteresting and shallow, but at least she doesn't make a lot of noise about how haaaaaard it is to be badass oh life is soooo haaaaaaaaaaard why are all these hot men wanting to sleeeeep with me god it suuuuucks ewwww gay people-

Anyway.

The first book matches up pretty closely to the first season of the HBO series, but there were some changes. My thoughts below the cut. Because you don't need to know.

( Read more... )I know that the books go on forever, and Sookie keeps racking up suitors--like Anita Blake, again, but I hope that I don't get irritated by that too soon. All in all, it was entertaining and much less objectionable than the Dresden Files book.

So, fellow watchers of Criminal Minds...



Who else immediately thought "OMG, it's Kirk and Spock"? And then thought, "that's so appropriate it hurts"? I was disappointed when they didn't put their hands on the glass.