Saturday Morning Brain Drain [15/8/20]

15/8/20 Elliecoo 31

What I watched: Keitel and I watched season two of the Umbrella Academy, which comes from the comic books written by Gerard Way and illustrated by Gabriel Bá.  I most like the parts that included Klaus Hargreeves (Number Four) who plays a marvelous early 1960’s hippie, cult leader, and addict. Keep in mind that the show makes cults and addiction, and even massive occurrences of violence and death, look like campy fun – so if you prefer these issues treated seriously, this is not your show. Should you watch it? Probably, if you have nothing else going on?  I think that this show calls for a fun, fruity summer drink – try a Mai Tai.

What I read: The Night Witch (Wilde Justice Book 6) by Jenn Stark. I really like this series, it is centered around a ruling council of magical “connected” based on the tarot, who rule from hidden mansions above Las Vegas casinos. Books 0-3 are free as a boxed set on Amazon, not sure for how long, but the price is right to give it a try!

What I listened to: There is a fancy perfume line called D.S. and Durga. One of their shticks is to make Spotify playlists based on the feelings evoked by their fragrances. I’m listening to their Amber Teutonic playlist (which I think matches their rich fragrance Amber Kiso.) Here are some highlights:

Halluzination Guillotine · Amon Düül II (a German art commune that made psychedelic rock beginning in 1969) :

Für immer – NEU! (a German band from 1971-1975):

And from the Durga Concrete After Lightening playlist, Jesus and Mary Chain – Happy When It Rains (My favorite Scottish band):

Them Crooked Vultures – New Fang (music by a “supergroup”, which I usually eschew, but this a fine song):

So, all of you delightful, debonair, and darling DeadSplintertarians, how was your week? Whatcha doing? What did you watch, read, listen to, or do? Please let us know how you are…. Everybody okay? Are you ready for Cousin Matthew’s classy triffle recipe at 2PM ET today? The kids behaving? What’s up with you?!

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About Elliecoo 536 Articles
Four dogs, one partner. The dogs win.

31 Comments

  1. I love Umbrella Academy, and I’m about halfway through season 2. I also loved the comic it’s based on. Another really good binge is Watchmen — the series from HBO.

    Other things I’ve caught up on lately include Picard (very good) which led me to Star Trek Discovery. I didn’t watch Discovery when it first came out and now I feel stupid for not doing that.

    Watched the series finale of Agents of Shield. This show sagged a LOT in the middle, but the last season was really fun, with a nice Agent Carter tie-in. You kinda need to just roll with a lot of it — lots of timey-wimey stuff, as The Doctor would say.

    • …I found Picard overall to be better than I thought it was going to be, although some of the pacing was arguably a little off

      …discovery had an uphill struggle that felt at least partly self-imposed by the desire to peg it to the prequel column…& at least one reveal that wasn’t as concealed as they seemed to think…but overall the criticism it drew became sort of comical to me?

      …if you enjoy the umbrella academy (& watchmen, which I’d agree was fantastic) you might like Doom Patrol…it’s arguably an acquired taste but it’s very much in the atypical superhero slot & if I’m honest I quite enjoy it where I felt like legion was a little too self-involved?

      • Way ahead of you on Doom Patrol. I’m a big comic reader — have been for … well, let’s just say decades. So anything comic based will at least get a trial from me. The Boys is another that I enjoy — I actually think the series is better than the comic it’s based on.

        • …the boys as a comic had some aspects that were a bit “meta” that maybe work better on the page in the ways that they send up the medium itself…but I’d agree there are a few ways the show might be better

  2. I tried watching Absentia in Prime Video. Someone told me it was good, and I now I seriously question their taste. It’s derivative, badly written and poorly acted. Skip this one.

    I’m still reading Deacon King Kong, it’s very good, I’ve just been busy.

    Listening to Girl In Red

    I like a good trifle so I am looking forward to FYCE. But I’m going to my daughter’s , it’s her birthday. So I probably won’t get to comment on it until this evening.

  3. Watched: The Night Manager. A mini-series based on a John Le Carre book. Mostly I watched it because I like Tom Hiddleston. It’s good, not great.

    Read: Finishing up The Spirituality of Imperfection with my book group. The most recent chapter was on Forgiveness, which I wish I had read decades earlier. The parts that really struck me were:

    1. Forgiveness itself isn’t something that can be willed, but is something that takes place over time, provided that the person doing the forgiving isn’t consciously “trying to forgive” the whole time. I found that was true in the case of my ex. After I stopped trying to actively forgive her for what she did, it took a few years before I realized one day that at some point I had forgiven her–but I just couldn’t pinpoint when.

    2. Forgiving and forgetting is bullshit. To forgive and forget is to throw away dearly bought experience. One is best served by forgiving and NOT forgetting.

    Listened: I’m going to cheat a bit and mention the most recent episode of Freakonomics Radio: Is Economic Growth the Wrong Goal? It’s something I’ve thought was true for years, but have never heard anyone actually present it in a serious way before.

    Is Economic Growth the Wrong Goal? (Ep. 429)

    • …I don’t know how well it meshes with their argument but I’ve certainly come across the suggestion more than once that there’s a step or two missing in the logic that dictates that there must & shall always be growth…& particularly in the case of a business

      …it certainly seems as though a viable business that makes a profit ought to still be valuable in its own right even if that profit margin fluctuates a bit while the amount of business it does remains broadly static…but I’ve heard more than one described as “dying” from the moment it wasn’t “thriving” & that always seemed like a misapprehension to me?

      • When I still worked in the for-profit corporate world I would have this argument with my bosses all the time, everywhere from the direct managers to the VPs. “Expecting growth every year–particularly growth of x% per year, is neither sustainable nor practical. It’s perfectly acceptable for us to not hit those growth goals in some years provided that we’re still profitable. Just because we didn’t hit our growth target this year doesn’t mean we’re all going to be on he street. Behaving otherwise is killing morale, and THAT for damned sure is going to hurt our ability to grow.”

        They would invariably spew some business seminar pablum that everyone has heard for years, but never actually took the time to think about in a critical manner–because then they’d probably recognize that it is bullshit and we can’t have that. I would ask them to demonstrate for me how this one year of not growing is the death knell for the company, and then they’d get pissed off and tell me to just get back to work.

    • We really liked the Night Manager, and Tom Hiddleston. Plus the scenery was pretty to look at. The quotes you mention speak to the importance of letting go of bitterness. Also, time and distance are great healers. My mother was a troubled person, addicted, and “fired” from three separate psychiatrists because she was using the appointments to feed her narcissistic and sociopathic mental illnesses. Eleven years after her death I have let it go, try to understand what caused her traumas, and can forgive.

    • Even classical economics says that externalities are supposed to be priced in — if you cut down a bunch of trees, you can’t count that as a $1 million gain to the economy for the lumber because you’ve just wiped out $1 million worth of trees, plus the costs of air and water pollution, etc.

      Except economics is so politicized on the right that they refuse to believe in any elements of classical economics. Externalities don’t exist. Benefits to workers from a straightforward national health plan, or to kids for arts education, are vapor as far as they’re concerned.

    • I would recommend it to pretty much anyone. The only caveat I have to offer is that it can get pretty dense in certain chapters. So, when that happens I know I can focus on the anecdotes that are scattered throughout the book which do a good job of getting the message through. The authors are Ernest Kurtz and Katherine Ketchum.

  6. …the jesus & mary chain stuff is pretty great but at some point my brain got used to it being “only happy when it rains” which is…well…garbage

    …but the vocalist is scottish?

  7. For years and years, summer vacations with the kids meant lying in hotel rooms with SpongeBob playing (we never got cable). I never really paid attention, but now that Trump has ruined summer vacations, I have watched the first season on streaming.

    What a blast. I always kind of liked the bits and pieces I’d seen, but the show is on a level with the old Looney Tunes in terms of humor and creativity and characters (not the same level of animation). I should have paid more attention.

  8. im not currently reading or watching anything… sooo…i guess ill just pass on one the missus keeps bothering me about wich i will start watching later….lol


    (i mean…zombies and swordfights…thats pretty up my alley…tho..it does take me forever to get through a series…cant binge like i used to without beer…i get bored)
    and on that note…listening

    (tbh..ill get used to it…but goddamn do i suck at doing nothing much sober)

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