Saturday Morning Brain Drain [21/3/20]

21/3/20 Elliecoo 76
A place to let it all out.

What I watched: I took a sabbatical from television for about ten years, so I missed many TV pop culture references. Then Keitel and I acquired adjoining sofas for the den and learned to negotiate the frequency of channel changes. Since December, we have zoomed through all 14 seasons of Supernatural. We dumped cable TV (so expensive where we live) and will need to figure out how to get the upcoming season 15 – we are willing to pay for it.

What I read: My reading tastes lean toward the chocolate covered cherry end of the food pyramid. Not necessarily good for you, but delicious. There is a small publishing house in North Carolina called Falstaff Books, run by John G. Hartness, a fun author in his own right. I just finished Pluck & Cover, a novel about a Zombie Cosmetologist. Need I say more?

What I listened to: Westerman, I Think I’ll Stay. He has a new album, ‘Your Hero Is Not Dead’, out 5th June on Play It Again Sam / Partisan Records.

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About Elliecoo 566 Articles
Four dogs, one partner. The dogs win.

76 Comments

  1. …so, as what might politely be described as “a bit of a geek” I’ve been watching the new “Picard” show on amazon

    …& (cautiously) thinking it doesn’t suck…if you like that sort of thing…which I guess I do…that said I haven’t been over to the AVClub or i09 to find out how many people are busy arguing about whether it’s better or worse than Discovery or The Orville

    …call it self-isolating?

    • The gist is that a bunch of the Star Trek fans don’t like that it spoils Gene’s utopian view of the Federation and Starfleet ideals, as though the Federation and Starfleet haven’t been spoiled literally dozens of time across basically every series that’s not called Voyager, which was literally designed to be as inoffensive as possible.

      It’s like a low key The Last Jedi thing where people are mostly upset that it’s not just Picard being TNG Picard and instead deconstructs who Jean Luc is as a character.

        • …oddly enough to some people the idea of humanity being all sweetness & light & enlightened scientific explorers seemed a mite unrealistic to one or two people…so at some point they instituted a dark & sinister hidden cabal kind of deal called Section 31
          [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_31_(Star_Trek)]
          …personally I think Special Circumstances in the Iain M Banks novels about a society called “The Culture” is a more satisfying take on that sort of thing but you don’t have to have a goatee & be from a mirror universe to be a crazy amoral puppetmaster in a Federation context…although I think they’re spinning off a Section 31 show from Discovery with Michelle Yeoh as the lead…no goatee…but from a mirror universe so she can be kind of an unhinged amoral sociopath…who “gets shit done”?

      • …those people may have parts of their soul missing…how is not great to hear these characters speak like actual people…they don’t have to be constantly swearing but I swear some of the interactions with previous crew have been handled much more adroitly than I expected

        …think they had some clunky bits trying to fold the sword-wielding monk with no social filter into the mix but even that’s starting to work out for them…so I stand by my cautious optimism…& by the sounds of it my decision to not get into it over on kinja?

    • OMG – so I am such a silly! I read that TV show name phonetically as pi card and thought it was maybe about cool mathematicians. (Hangs head in shame.) I really like Star Trek in all versions. One of my earliest memories is sitting on my Father’s lap watching the original Star Trek whilst he compared ship operations with those of the destroyers he served on in WWII and Korea. Thanks for the suggestion!

  2. Do you have a smart TV or Fire Stick? If you do add the Cyber Flix app. It has everything you could possibly want to watch. You only have to wait until the day after a show originally airs. And it’s free, at least for now. Or you could buy an android box for your TV. That’s what we did. I find it a little cumbersome to use but worth the savings.

    I like British TV, shows like Doc Martin. We’re currently watching The Durrells in Corfu. It’s light, quiet, sweet, and has lots of animals.

    I’m rereading Anna Karenina. It was the March selection for my classics book club, canceled now but I hate not finishing a book once I’ve started.

    Not listening to anything in particular, following whatever rabbit hole DUAN leads me down.

  3. one of the last books i read might be up your alley
    the girl who could move shit with her mind by jackson ford
    its about a girl who can move shit with her mind………(and murder and stuff…)
    ill just go with what the back of the book says…
    its like xmen if they were all sick of eachothers shit

    • …maybe check out (if you haven’t already) “Soon I Shall Be Invincible”

      “Doctor Impossible—evil genius, diabolical scientist, wannabe world dominator—languishes in a federal detention facility. He’s lost his freedom, his girlfriend, and his hidden island fortress.

      Over the years he’s tried to take over the world in every way imaginable: doomsday devices of all varieties (nuclear, thermonuclear, nanotechnological) and mass mind control. He’s traveled backwards in time to change history, forward in time to escape it. He’s commanded robot armies, insect armies, and dinosaur armies. Fungus army. Army of fish. Of rodents. Alien invasions. All failures. But not this time. This time it’s going to be different…”

        • …I have thus far only a passing familiarity with the ninja-themed lego stuff but from the little I’ve seen it’s probably not far off

          …iirc I read it before the lego batman movie was a thing so it seemed like a pretty fresh take on that sort of thing at the time…it isn’t exactly the same deal but a lot of how the lego animation stuff runs a sort of two-tier system for the jokes so that the adults don’t lose their minds over repeat viewings maps pretty well as an analogy

          …it could sound like a lazy exercise in reversing tropes by reversing the PoV but I thought it did a better job of it than that to the point of being actually funny…ymmv & all that sort of thing

  4. Should have put my Fred Rogers movie comment in here instead.

    I was in the middle of Big Game by Mark Leibovich. Kind of entertaining, but not the best thing I’ve read by a long shot. However, before that book I read The Bastard Brigade by Sam Kean, which is an excellent account of nuclear espionage during WWII. Trust me, it’s very readable.

    I listened to what I always listen to. It’s hard for me to find new music that I actually like, even though I have an extensive library. Since I left the music business, most of the time I just have to stumble on something, like when Colin James appeared in my Pandora feed one day.

    • And added that to my list to read! “The Bastard Brigade: The True Story of the Renegade Scientists and Spies Who Sabotaged the Nazi Atomic Bomb” – including a baseball player, a Kennedy, and the Curies – good stuff, thank you. Although this is of greater nutritional value than the chocolate covered cherries I typically read – it sounds good.

  6. I also have been without a tv for over a decade or so…
    But I live alone, and just use my laptop. I used to use Hulu back when they had a free version, and then I stopped watching much of anything. I would hit up the public library for DVDs, and sometimes use their streaming service.

    Then I used Netflix for a couple years, and they have a lot of the shows, but they don’t get them until like a year after they originally air or something. I got caught up on most things I was interested in, and canceled it, and switched to Amazon.

    I really don’t like Amazon’s setup, their search function is borked all to hell, and either littered with really low grade crap, or it’s stuffed full of stuff you would have to pay extra for. I did really like The Expanse and The Boys, though. I was watching Doctor Who until it just disappeared from the Amazon library. Lucky for me, it happened about a week before my renewal date, so I canceled that.

    And then I got a new job, and got really busy, and didn’t really have time to watch anything.

    And, now with this pandemic thing, I’m thinking of starting one of the streaming services again. Maybe Hulu? I think they have a couple shows I was interested in. But I should finish the stack of DVDs I got from the public library right before they closed, and see what I can find on the Library’s streaming services first…

    • …there’s a part of me that feels like streaming services are a great illustration of something but I’m not sure what exactly you’d call it

      …when there were only a couple it began to look like you could subscribe to one or maybe two & you’d be set…maybe like you say not for the first airing but you could afford to pay to eventually catch up with pretty much all the properties you might care to & satellite/cable started to look like a rip off

      …but then everyone & his dog decided that their little slice of that content was worth the same kind of fees all on its own & now to keep up with everything you used to be able to would take perhaps a half-dozen or more hits & you’re looking at doubling up on that cable/broadband provider bill with all of those on top

      …which leaves me asking, if the customer is always right…who is that guy & why has he got to be such a dick about this stuff…we all know what people actually want is to be able to find all the shit they want through the service with the interface they prefer so why can’t these (extremely wealthy) companies get their shit together & agree to show each other’s stuff & make sure everyone gets their cut

      …then they could compete on things like fixing that borked search function which would actually improve their customers’ experience & stop trying to buy the pot like a rich but shitty poker player

      • Streaming has gotten to the point where it is essentially not that different, or even less expensive, than cable–especially when people have to maintain 4-5 subscriptions due to all of the licensing turf wars. What will likely happen in the relatively near future is the inevitable consolidation of big fish eating little fish, until Disney owns literally everything.

  8. Altered Carbon is back as well, and going strong. Better Call Saul is fucking killing it imo. Harley Quin is fun, but it’s on the DCU app. Expanse just had another season, and it’s way better than Battlestar Galactica imo.

      • …dunno if they count as anime in the strict sense but there’s a kind of anime thing with the voices of David Tennant, Maisie Williams & Michael B Jordan called gen:LOCK that I enjoyed…& AfroSamurai…so…sure…whaddya got for us?

        • Couldn’t get into Gen:lock, though I tried. RWBY is ok and made by Roosterteeth as well. Are we talking about in the vein of Afrosamurai? Because then I highly recommend Dororo.


          IMO, it’s kinda been overshadowed by Demon Slayer which I have not gotten to yet (my backlog is huge).

          Megalobox is another great one, if you want a boxing anime (there’s a lot of boxing animes).

          • …not sure gen:LOCK was exactly breaking new ground but it was certainly not bad…& had the decency to at least make narrative sense?

            …will check out dororo…which reminds me…read it before I knew it could be watched but blade of the immortal & rurouni kenshin weren’t bad, either…although the vagabond manga about musashi miyamoto I enjoyed more, I think…haven’t read all of it, though

    • …working backwards…agreed, fingers crossed as it keeps going…it really is, but kite man, really…that girl could do better…been kinda saving better call saul until I could rattle through the season with less waiting…& that’s good to know because when I remember reading those the first one was the best by a considerable margin?

    • Oh and as far as comic books goes, I’m currently reading the Earth-X omnibus. It’s like if Marvel did their version of Kingdom Come (including artwork by Alex Ross, natch) and just expanded it out to cover almost everything in the MCU and try to come up with an explanation for how it all works. I don’t like everything about it, it’s very grim at times and stupid at others, but it’s a really wild and interesting story, and long as hell.

      https://www.amazon.com/Earth-X-Trilogy-Omnibus-Alpha/dp/1302913174

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