Saturday Morning Brain Drain [23/4/22]

23/4/22 bryanlsplinter 33

Creature Feature Edition

Okay, I’m in here pinch hitting for Ellie, and so we are gonna have a science fiction Brain Drain. So without further ado …

What I read: The Kaiju Preservation Society, by John Scalzi. I can’t really say Scalzi is one of my favorite authors, but I like his blog and his basic attitude toward life in general, so I’ve read a few of his books. I was intrigued by Kaiju because, let’s face it, who doesn’t love kaiju? I mean, not Tokyo, of course, but the rest of us? Hell, yeah. It’s a very lightweight book, by Scalzi’s own admission. He wrote it during the pandemic because he couldn’t really focus on the novel he started to write. Scalzi is big on plot and character but light on description. The kaiju aren’t ever really described particularly well. I did like his world-building — it’s an interesting take on how kaiju could appear on earth and then subsequently vanish. But it’s fun.

What I watched: Ghosts. Okay, I’m crazy about Rose McIver, and have been since I, Zombie. Ghosts is adapted from a British sitcom, and it’s about a freelance journalist who develops the ability to see ghosts, and decides to turn her ancestral home (which is full of ghosts) into a bed and breakfast. The ghosts all hail from different eras and while the whole thing really shouldn’t work, it really does. Rotten Tomatoes backs me on this. My wife cajoled me into watching it and now I’m totally hooked.

Another thing I’m recommending: Resident Alien. This show on the SyFy Network is loosely based on a comic book series, which is very good, but it’s only loosely based, which I love. I like to see other interpretations of stories, particularly comic books. Slavishly recreating the original is all well and good, I suppose, but I mean, I read that already. So if you want to throw a different take at me, I’m okay with that, as long as it’s good. And it is. The comic by Peter Hogan and Steve Parkhouse features a benevolent alien stranded on earth who has to fit in. Using his advanced knowledge, he assumes the identity of a doctor and is ultimately “drafted” to provide medical services for a small town, and starts making friends. He comes across a few mysteries that he solves, so it’s a bit like E.T. meets House. The TV show, on the other hand, also features a stranded alien, but Alan Tudyk’s alien is clumsily malevolent. He’s stranded after his mission to destroy Earth runs into problems and he initially tries to fulfill his orders, until he starts learning about people and making friends. Tudyk is a scream, and his inept and snarky alien is completely different from the kindly doctor in the comics.

So that’s my Saturday creature feature, friends. How about you? What have you got?

avataravataravataravataravataravataravataravataravataravataravataravataravataravataravatar

33 Comments

  3. I watched Death on the Nile and for all the decadence it was lackluster. I haven’t read the book but it felt off from the other Poirot movies and series that I’ve watched. The theme was ❤️ which was cringe inducing and 🤮. About a quarter of the way in, I realized that the main dude was Armie Hammer. IRL He’s an alleged sexual assaulter with deep enough pockets to silence his alleged victims. I haven’t been feeling up to watching anything lately and I’m bitter that I wasted my precious viewing time on that movie. I wish I watched The Batman or Spider-Man movie instead.

    I have been reading some lovely books that Elliecoo recommended. The Invisible Library series and Modern Magick. I’m preferring the latter because of the their faster pace and more lovable characters also puppies with mini unicorn horns and a penchant for sniffing out treasure!

    • Oh, I love the Invisible Library series!

      I tried to find the Modern Magick books, but can only get the first one. Currently can’t afford to buy the rest of the series for Kindle and none of my library apps have them :/

      I did like her Wyrde series, though, and I hope there will be more of those books at some point!

      • It’s unfortunate that her works haven’t been picked up by libraries. I don’t know how librarians choose which books to buy. Maybe you could recommend it to your library (mine has that option). Leaving detailed positive reviews probably helps boost her works too. She sells the Modern Magick collection of books 1-3 for 1$ on Amazon. But she also publishes them by chapter for freefree.

  4. I tried to watch Ghosts but couldn’t get into it.  It just seemed too much like a British ripoff of Beetlejuice but not as funny.  I only watched the first couple of episodes though so probably need to give it more time?

  5. …still clocking in for picard & moon knight…& still hoping they finish out their seasons without making me feel like my misgivings about an aspect or two of each are well-founded

    …also clocked that there’s a part 2 for an anime thing that’s a spin off of the extremely daft pacific rim (it’s called pacific rim: the black) on netflix which is enjoyably bonkers

    …& on a side-note…stumbled across something called “hard cell”…which is a short series set in a women’s prison in which catherine tate plays multiple parts…not least of which being the warden…which definitely made me laugh but also threatens to be more than the sum of its parts…pun mostly unintended?

    …& pretty much blazed through the latest of the rivers of london books after ellie made me notice there was one I’d not read…so feeling a bit like I should have tried to draw it out longer so I wouldn’t have run out already?

  6. On the Kaiju/sci fi front, a while back I read Kraken by China Mieville. A dead giant squid leads a museum employee into a bizarre underworld in London. Huge fun.

    I saw Hawkeye and my expectations were appropriately low. It’s low stakes on purpose and I was surprised that I enjoyed it as much as I did, and a lot had to do with Jeremy Renner being better than I remembered in anything else I’ve seen.

  7. I’m watching Station Eleven. I almost always prefer the book to the movie/show but I really like the changes they made. The relationship between Jeevan and Kirsten is beautiful and tender and adds a lot to the story. I can’t imagine watching this though if you lost anyone due to Covid as so many people have. I’m on my library wait list for Emily St. John Mandel’s new book Sea of Tranquility. I’ll report back when I finally get a chance to read it.

    Listening to localish (they split their time between here and Nashville) power pop band The Dreaded Laramie.
    Tell Me

     

  9. Watched: United Airlines fuck up my flight plans today because they couldn’t be bothered to maintain their planes.

    Read: a text message from United telling me they’d rescheduled my flight for 12 fucking hours later. I said fuck that and stood in line for 1.5 hours to get to a human to give me a somewhat less fucked up option.
    Listened: to the sound of my internal screams. I had to get shuttled to another airport an hour away and land in a different city which means I had to get a relative to agree to pick me up and drive me two hours to my actual destination because all the rental cars are sold out. Waiting for another 1.5 hours until I can board and hoping this plane actually pulls away from the gate. Fuck United. I will never fly this shitty airline ever again.

  10. Many MANY thanks to @bryanlsplinter for the Brain Drain. April is hell month at work, my hard drive failed dead on Thursday, and I  am still dealing with the clunky restore files and transfer to a new machine with Crashplan. I still do not know what data will appear, but there are 11 gigs of it so maybe okay?

    Enough whining, wishing you all a happy weekend.

  11. I love Resident Alien. I was unsure about Ghosts, but will give it a try now based on all of your lovely recs. I still don’t understand how y’all read as fast as you do.

  12. Scalzi is an excellent author.  His Old Man’s War series is one of the better ones around and highly recommended. Especially as it doesn’t go off the rails like a number of other series like David Webber’s Honor Harrington for example.

    I’m usually a completist when it comes to books and shows, but it takes a terrible kind of awful to make me stop cold and a series I quite enjoyed.  Like Honor.

     

     

Leave a Reply