What I Watched: Father Brown, season 13. Here is the blurb from the BBC:
Mark Williams is back as Father Brown, the crime busting clergyman based on the classic character created by GK Chesterton. The 13th series also sees the return of fan favourite cast members Tom Chambers as Inspector Sullivan, Claudie Blakley as the new Mrs Isabel Sullivan, Ruby-May Martinwood as Brenda and John Burton as Sergeant Goodfellow. Also returning are Nancy Carroll as Lady Felicia, John Light as Hercule Flambeau, Lex Shrapnel as Father Lazarus, Roger May as Canon Fox and Kieran Hodgson as Father Lindsey.
Following the jubilant wedding celebrations at the end of series 12, the new Mr and Mrs Sullivan settle into married life and a new home, with Isabel thrilled to be welcomed into the Policeman’s Wives Society. Meanwhile, Brenda goes on a journey of self-empowerment as she covers the role of Parish Secretary and learns to drive with the help of Sergeant Goodfellow. Father Brown is tasked by Flambeau to visit Father Lazarus in prison, resulting in a deadly game of cat and mouse which ruffles the feathers of Canon Fox. With his consecration now looming, Bishop-Elect Fox plans to enact his revenge upon Father Brown, leaving Kembleford changed forever. And in a Father Brown first – the group take a trip to the seaside!
Father Brown, which first aired on BBC Daytime in 2013, is the UK’s number 1 Daytime drama of the last decade and a global success with 140 episodes made (including those just filmed).
What I Read: Tonic Shop at the Edge of the World 2: A Cozy LitRPG by Max Vale. Here is the Amazon blurb:
One Alchemist. One Dream. One Seriously Ridiculous Shop Location, What The Hell. Mason Curacao is settling in nicely to his shop at The Edge of the World, and with the seasons changing, there’s even more odd and unbelievable things to explore about his new town. But the trials and tribulations of the folks who settle in such a strange place aren’t for the faint of heart. Deathly rivalries and dangerous magics abound here, and there are some things only an alchemist can do to try and keep the peace. Or at least even the odds. Luckily, Mason has never met a quest he couldn’t complete. Even if the botanicals bite, the brews burst into flames, or the locals lurk a liiiiittle too close for comfort, he’s a damned professional first and foremost. And he’ll do all he can for the good of those who call this wild, unruly, and enchanting place home.
What I Listened To: Lauren Auder – Mantra, bored, Boko Yout – All My Life, and Midlake – The Old and the Young:
Thank you for playing Brain Drain! How are you, Darling DeadSplinterites? What’s going on, dearest ones? Please do share with us!
Babylon 5’s on Prime so I started (re-re-re watching that.)
I saw “No Time To Die.” It made me cry a little (not as bad as Dead Poets Society, Godzilla Minus One and Toy Story 4.) It flips a lot of scripts on the Bond mythology. In some ways it give a sendoff that most Bond actors never get (even Connery unless you think remaking Thunderball with Mr Bean was a great idea… it wasn’t.)
Bond (despite the movie mythology) is an extremely flawed man who would be someone a nation needs in time of crisis and keeps away in peacetime (as intended by Ian Flemming.) Strangely, Goldeneye was one of the few Bond films that touches on the PTSD that guy must have suffered as well as how a man of that time would have coped (copious amounts of booze, cigarettes and women) before it went to full on cartoon again in the later Brosnan films. It is probably why Goldeneye is my favorite Brosnan Bond.
Eventually no matter how tough you are, you can/will crack under pressure, guilt and discipline. The Craig films showed the price Bond paid to be Bond.
The novel “You Only Live Twice” showed the finality of what happens (being the last novel Flemming wrote) and not what happens when the publisher decides to continue the series with other writers. Bond was not the same guy (not surprising as Flemming wasn’t the same guy either since he was the Bond Espy and suffering problems from alcoholism, dealing with PTSD, being ill and a host of personal problems including affairs.) A lot of the ending of No Time To Die came from that novel.
I have not watched Babylon 5. I acknowledge this as a personal failing.
Seriously, man, get your act together here. You’re embarassing yourself with this oversight.
…it’s…basically all jeff bezos’ fault
…hmm…litRPG, you say?
…having battered my way through the carl-adjacent dungeon crawling until I ran out of re-ups with indecent haste…&…uh…not like literally-I-never-even-got-up-for-a-drink or anything…but…might have sort of one-shot-ed the murderbot one that was new to me yesterday
…which…I like those & this might not be even really a critique much less a fair one of that…in terms of which pieces that moves where relative to all the other ones I just about remember where we left on the board they all got laid out on previously…I…might not have expected to run out where it did…since it sort of…& this is kind of an occupational hazard of the narrated-by-your-friendly-neighborhood-murderbot framing…but it sort of felt like I’d just got back up to speed on the preamble…& then I ran into the back cover like an unexpected brick wall to the teeth out of nowhere while having some momentum going for you that suddenly isn’t?
…& maybe I’m just having a particuarly acute aversion to sleeping hours or something…but…leaving aside the weird distractive properties of “dandelion” in which “angels” that shoot ghosts with magic guns that cast them out of their mortal ken…&…err…my dearest assassin…which…for a thai flick about assassin cliques in a world where the rarest bloodtype is some sort of miracle panacea…is…sorta sweet
…man on fire…the one that was denzel as a movie…as a show…turns out it’s the guy who was real good playing off ben kingsley in the sort of meta one about actors & superheroes…&…it…stays on the rails & does what it says on the tin but sort of dialled up & expanded & transposed to different timeframe so the characters make sense…but…not just that one guy…the performances are by & large pretty great & it’s…pretty good?
…as these things go…& there are enough of them that “above average” might actually be more than faint praise…also…let’s see now…*checks notes*
…vivy…another not-so-odd-if-you-remember-it’s-anime one called vivy with a maybe time-looped singing android that might doom/save humanity &/or the timeline
…swapped…fun & suitably heartwarming family type animated movie with mythic beasties
…apex…ummm…ok…so…about this one…eggsy’s…not the good guy…there’s a lot of “but if that’s what this has all been about what would you have done if it went the other way any of the times you know this could have ended scenes ago…that doesn’t make sense…like…at all?”…but there always is when the big scary thing is unhinged & mostly you give it a pass because you aren’t taking it as seriously as it takes itself…but
…if you just pulled a combination of free solo & an attempt to troll tom cruise as hard as the insurance will let you with charlize &…I dunno how much greenscreen or CGI or whatever but I can’t suspend enough disbelief to credit that the insurance to hang her out there for real is in anyone’s budget…so…maybe I shouldn’t get narked about choices made to set the shot…but…if by some miracle I make that climb…I’m dragging my broken ass the extra three feet or so it takes to not have my ankles dangling lower than my knees to remind me what a slope feels like before I feel “safe” to decide I’ve made it “far enough to relax”…I dunno…it’s…fine…just…whichever way my grain goes is apparently not with that?
I watched a documentary called Thirst Trap about this twentysomething guy in the pandemic who basically built an entire social media career doing dumb thirst trap videos what had older white women obsessed with him. Sending him money, making fan groups that had infighting and whatnot, etc etc.
No sense of boundaries, really all sorts of what the fuckery happening.
Basically him just being an online sugar baby but also posting his location etc so they just sent gifts and whatever he wanted.
ALSO
The fundamental thing that is gross about it all is the lack of criticism and side-eye going to these sexually obsessed women. There are moments where the documentary sort of lets the viewer sit with how offputting it is, but if the genders were flipped it would be front and center how exploitative it is.
…so…one of the ways I’ve been lucky in life is that I got to go to the carribean…more than once…I…didn’t get to be the people I’d spend at least some of one of those times struggling not to day dream about murdering in their sleep after swimming out with the traditional knife in my teeth to do the proper throat-slitting boat-stealing pirate routine so *I* could get to go island hopping in the wooden-decked multi-mast-ed ocean-going home of my dream-dreams where I’m not a homicidal fugitive & can actually enjoy it…but…I…there are kind of two extremes to that part of the world when it comes to the bits “the importance of elsewhere” is about?
…like…there was a time when I went on my own to one bit…but stayed in a place where I had basically a hotel room in the hotel bit & neighbors I wound up talking to because…long story short…the sticker price of the ticket for the return leg of the last minute deal I booked was more than I paid for the whole thing & once I did that I pretty much as far as the bank was concerned didn’t have enough left to get off the island…&…apparently…in most places I’ve been from…I dunno…camden to california, I guess…with a bunch of europe thrown in…if I have “a look” it’s…somehow…”you probably want to buy drugs”…& they…didn’t look like that…but…did have infinity drink tokens at the bar that served the beach the other side of the pool…where I took the beer I paid for on my first night to watch the sunset I couldn’t take a picture of as good as @loveshaq would have…&…daft as it sounds…struggled to make it back to my room without more drugs than I’ve ever even been curious about taking
…but…on a different trip where I basically only hung out with the people I was there with because the whole thing was about inconceivably expensive indulgence of someone who had a birthday about in the middle of time we’d be there…which…as it goes…most of the people on were attending by grace of the parts of that they hadn’t had to pay for because the family that weren’t there that invited everyone else to be company for the birthday-have-r…took care of that…& the result…by quirk of circumstance…was pretty much all white girls that split about 50/50 across the bills-are-a-thing-I-worry-about line
…now…I was pretty young…& I didn’t know so much the time the minibus pulled into the lot in front of the club on the water’s edge in jamaica where I’d get to hear one of the best open mic nights I ever have…after we still went in when the guns went off while we were parking…but I got the message when the long island ice tea I picked because I didn’t know the name of any other cocktail I didn’t know I didn’t like…was delivered like they waved the coca cola at it but there wasn’t room…& once I ordered a coke on the side I just spent the whole night watering it down…apparently if you hit the bar in the company of only-white-chicks the assumption is you think you got game & there’s some natural hostility you gotta get past without taking offense
…so…I dunno how many years later or islands over…but the time I go not to open mic at the club but street-party-in-a-one-street-town where you have to be coming the right way or you have to walk round the wall of speakers because that’s wider than the part you drive on…with a different minibus…full of people I don’t know but some of them…white girls…of…from a similiar-ish age to what the other lot was the other time down to definitely-too-young-for-everybody-&-anybody-yes-of-course-that-means-you…& their parents…&…of all things a pair of lesbians from croyden…it turned out the thing that saved me the biggest ass-kicking I expect I’ll ever live to be that close to getting was having happened to have come across to the right one dude on the scene as someone who wasn’t faking that they dug the tunes way back before things got busy
…being the holiday fling can be a cut-throat scene if your trip has local rules that mean you aren’t on the default team-tourist…but…like who in that equation is taking what advantage of who…in my admittedly limited experience
…genuinely complicated nested sets of things in that balance
…still think the dutch dudes getting nearly-teens to sneak out from the sleeping parents to come party with them were worth everyone getting busted for the sneaking out part just to not let them get away with the whole “where I’m from it would be perfectly legal” line…&…like…that was someone else’s sister…so the trouble it got me in with *my* parents was on a slow fuse that wouldn’t trip until after the trip
…I…don’t know a lot of things…but…having found travelling alone to be…pretty great, actually…pretty much all the times I ever have…I at least think I know I probably wouldn’t feel that way about that if I was a different sort of…proposition?
…not all treacherous seas have reliable charts or forecasts available even in abstract metaphorical senses but pretending to be smoothly navigating them based on the curated online presentation thing…there’s…gotta be instinct involved…otherwise I don’t see how I know teenagers who actually have emotional attachments to people that aren’t the same sort they have for things…&…they do…at least the ones I get exposed to…but…you know…again with the luck?
…not trying to play more-withnail-than-I about the whole “even if it must be burglary”/”it’s you he wants” bit or anything…but…that’s flipped in a bunch of places…&…some of those places…there’s closets it could get you killed to come out of…which…in some seedy senses…is not entirely disconnected from a desire to curate a brand of “what it is to be a man” that taps pretty deep into the tourist economy without which the place might not really have one of those that ran to stuff like hospitals…or…police…or…wossname…one that isn’t pirates…political representation…ah…bollocks
…I had a real flight of fancies going there for a minute…how come politics always got to come along & ruin it for everybody…unless…ah…sorry…that…that might have been me
…note to self…agreeing with people is…harder than it looks sometimes
We’ve been watching some Nordic noir. I don’t remember the names any more because they all run together in my head, but there are lots of umlauts.
Also, I really like the Midlake band. I’m not sure why. This song plays in my head a lot. Again, I’m not sure why.
WATCHED
THIS party animal had to install a new sprinkler controller — a unit produced in this millennium, even — so:
LISTENED
Always music on here.
Catherine Wheel – Salt.
Reading a good book, but I won’t post about it until I’m done. 😊