Saturday Morning Brain Drain [5/12/20]

A place to let it all out.

5/12/20 Elliecoo 66
Image via Deadline.com

What I watched: Season Two of the Netflix adaption of the Virgin River book series. I hesitated to add these two trailers, because the smoosh together all the angst and omit the humor and the intrigue (snark, drug dealers, teenage lust, and more).

Although I found myself telling the characters to use their words, and Keitel (who likes the show) often told them to “stop being a dumb ass”, the plot moves along at a good pace. So far, the two seasons have combined plot lines from several books, but they do a good job of bring the words to the screen.

Fun note: Tim Matheson, who was Eric “Otter” Stratton in 1978’s Animal House, plays Doc in Virgin River, and also directed four of the twenty episodes in seasons one and two. I thought “whoa, he got old” – and then realized how old I was in 1978/am now and shut right up.

Should you watch this? Sure – the characters are engaging, and it is a sweet, simple show.

What I read: I’d already read the twenty-book Virgin River series, and just in time to cross-promote the Netflix show, author Robyn Carr offers us book 21, Return to Virgin River. At this point they are formulaic, but I like the formula…sweet, upstanding characters overcome personal tragedy/struggles, find true love, and live happily ever after. This latest book has puppies, kittens, and rescued animals, totally my jam.

Should you read this? You could do worse – and by this 12,000th 12th month of 2020, we all could use some happily ever after.

What I listened to this week: Virgin River has a darn good song list, here a few from this season:

Hoozier, Movement (soooo romantic)

Ocha La Rocha, Tomorrow Is Coming

So, dearest, amazing DeadSplinterites, what is up with you? Are you doing okay? Did you have a fun recently? What have you watched, read, or listened to? Please tell us about your world!

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

66 Comments

  1. Watched:  A Christmas Story.  I love that fucking movie.  Mrs. Butcher fucking hates it.  I watch it anyway.
     
    Read:  Let’s Colonize Titan on Scientific American.  I like well-considered proposals like this one because it’s not just assuming that we will develop the ability to fold space or use transporters.  The thing that makes this idea actually make sense is the fact that Titan has a thick atmosphere which would protect people from cosmic radiation–something that the Moon or even Mars cannot do.  Interesting read.
     
    Listened:  Been spending some time with my Deadsplinter playlist this week.




     
     

  2. im stuck in a loop…i try to read brain drain but notice i have notifications up top…so i go ooo notifications must go see and click on those
    then the notifications page tells me i have no new notifications
    so i try to read brain drain again
    but i notice i have notifications up top…so i click on those
    and the notifications page tells me i have no notifications…
    so…. i go back to brain drain… and notice i have …ive been at this for a while now
    anyhoo… im re reading world war z (mostly coz i actually forgot what all it was about and partially coz i keep thinking it was written by mel brooks and expecting it to be funny)
    the only thing ive watched this week was romeros dawn of the dead
    its still a good movie (and the 2 songs that are its entire soundtrack are masterfully picked)
    and listening….well..im mostly having a paul simon day

      • Both of these issues mentioned usually happen when someone stars a comment then the person who wrote the comment uses the 15 minute edit/delete feature…at least until the cache clears.

        other than that, I am working on the site right now that will speed it up significantly but for the next few days, it might be slower than usual and strange things such as these may occur in the meantime.

        As Ellie said, feel free to let me know via pm.

  3. I saw Get Duked on Amazon. It’s dumb funny.
     
    Four misfit Scottish high school boys are sent on a supposedly character building trek through the Highlands and encounter weird elderly Scots and confused cops along the way.
     
    Bad rap, tons of cursing, drugs…. I don’t want to oversell it but it has the good sense to go less than 90 minutes so it tells its jokes and doesn’t overstay its welcome.

  4. Watched: Staged. Stars! They get bored during pandemics just like us! If you can stomach the whole woe is me-ness of two rich white men, this show provides a hilarious non-break from pandemic life. A zeitgeist of the early days of Covid (…am I using that part of my name right? ;P). Filmed mostly in zoom calls, Tennant and Sheen’s ad libbed banter is adorably “British” (yes yes I know Scottish and Welsh).

    During my weekly grocery run, I listen to Xmas music on a radio station dedicated to only that and hosted by Delilah.
    StilI reading the same book from 2 weeks ago. I dont have much free time with the littles running around needing to be clothed, fed, and above all else entertained.

  5. I watched HBO/SHO for 3 hours last night and I don’t remember any of it, thanks to the Canadian Whiskey Sour I drank. Then I stayed up reading Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain, I’m on this kick of rereading books I’ve read before, this one is much better the second time around. 

    • For real esp. the way I make them since I can’t be bothered to measure.
      just in case you need the recipe:
      To a cocktail shaker add:
      juice of 1 lemon
      equal part maple syrup [eyeball measurement]
      double that of rye whiskey
      ice
      shake it
      drink it
      It’s potent so you want to drink it slow but delicious so you don’t.
       

        • What is your bourbon of choice?
          There are some fantastic bourbons available but Jim Beam always has a place in my house, just can’t beat the price. Esp for cocktails.
          Straight up I like Michter’s.

          • …out of curisoity, which of theirs do you mean?

            …I’ve always been fond of the scotch but have been trying to get along with whiskey-with-an-e the last few years & feel like I’m beginning to get a sense for one or two I like but I’ve yet to figure out the rye end of the spectrum & I’ve heard good things about michter’s where the rye is concerned…but haven’t figured out what the distinction is between their bourbon & the stuff they call american whiskey on the label?

          • @Sedevilc, I am deeply in love with BSB 103. @SplinterRIP recommended it, and he was so very right. It is a 103-proof brown sugar bourbon with a touch of cinnamon. Good enough to drink straight and chilled, excellent as a mixer. I have to special order it here in Pennsylvania via the state store system, but I  get it for $15 less a bottle then the maker sells  it on their website…

  7. Oof, my traps/rhomboids are sore as hell today/yesterday.  Back when I used to occasionally go to the gym, it would typically take me ~24-48 hours for a muscle group to feel sore.  So, I’m trying to figure out what I did Wednesday/Thursday, and I can’t remember anything out of the ordinary.  Oh well, it will just mean they will be slightly stronger after this… It’s one of the things I kinda like about my new job, there is enough physical activity and heavy things to move around that I occasionally find myself with sore arms/shoulders.  anyways…
    watched:  Latey it’s been Letterkenny, Helstrom, and Preacher.  Letterkenny is pretty amusing, and while it’s not perfect, I feel it’s fairly progressive.   I don’t remember anything about the comics version of Helstrom, but thought the show was fairly decent so far.  Just finished the first season last week or so.  Started watching Preacher, I didn’t realize they had more than the pilot on Hulu.  So far I like it, and the casting seems to be pretty well done.  Almost done with the currently available Letterkenny episodes, so I’m going to have to find another ~20 min comedy series to watch.  I like to keep a ~40-60min “serious” series and a ~20 min comedy series active simultaneously, depending on how much free time I want to spend watching stuff. Probably try Rick and Morty or Broad City next, but also considering It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, and Futurama (I missed a few of the later seasons), and am open to suggestions.
    Reading, recently finished Machine by Elizabeth Bear.  Pretty decent, but I like most of her stuff.  Just started Dead Lies Dreaming by Charles Stross.  Latest in his Laundry Files series, but I think it’s all new characters/protags in this one.  Next will be the first book in the Rivers of London series.

      • @Elliecoo (did I do that right?(no, I did not…)) – good to hear.
        somewhat ironically, my reading rate has greatly slowed down with the new job and COVID.  I used to do a fair amount of reading on public transit and in bars.  with my new job, I’ve been doing a partial bike commute, so my time on public transit is way down, and with COVID, reading and drinking in a bar isn’t an option anymore.  Instead of reading at home, I just fuck around on the internet…

        https://deadsplinter.com/members/elliecoo/

          • …it can be hard to tell when you’re in the edit window because the link/highlight only shows up after the comment posts…I’m guessing that would be the explanation?

        • …thanks for the heads up about the charles stross/laundry book

          …been a while but I enjoyed those so I’ll have to check that out

          …also enjoyed the checquy series that daniel o’malley wrote which starts with “the rook”…& was kind of sorry to learn that the TV adaptation they did won’t be getting a second season as I thought they’d done a pretty good job

          • I enjoyed those two as well, and got to see him at an author signing a few years back, was fairly amusing.  I believe he also said he planned to keep writing books in that series, so hopefully there are more coming out in the future.
            I vaguely remember hearing about a television adaptation, but don’t know much else about it, is it available through Hulu, Netflix, or Amazon Prime Video?  Those are mostly what I alternate through for streaming.

  8. I started watching the Mandalorian because I got free Disney+ with my new internet service. I’ve never really been into Star Wars but this seems like it stands alone. Plus, baby Yoda (I know it’s not Yoda). 

    I also watched Godmothered, which is super cute.

    • …haven’t watched season 2 yet (kind of been saving it to binge on a better screen than I’ve had access to of late) but the mandalorian has generally struck me as one of the better star wars things to have come up in recent years so I’m hoping that holds true through the second season

      …they seem to have hit on a good tone for the show overall & it has some nice touches…not to mention apparently a serious budget to get it all looking the way it does…it’s pretty cinematic for a tv show…& yeah…baby yoda is fairly awsome, too

      • …I heard somewhere that eventually they give “baby yoda” a name in season 2…but I’m with you on the confusing nomenclature

        …yoda was a name…so it’s more of an infant of yoda’s race…which I don’t know ever had a name…& it acts like a baby in a lot of ways but is apparently decades old…which I have questions about that I’m not sure will ever get answered…like from an evolution perspective how does it make sense (even for a species that lives a long time) for the juvenile stage of their life to last for decades before they can speak or seem able to look after themselves?

        …basically you may not have used enough question marks, there

        • The Child has a name, yes. You learn it in Season Two. The members of Yoda’s race have very long lifespans — I think Yoda was about 900 years old when he died. The Child has been around for decades but is still a baby. 

          • …I get that part…it just seems not to entirely make sense to me (even if you might live the best part of a millennia) that it would take decades to acquire speech?

            …it just seems like that wouldn’t bode well for the survival of the species in general…sure maybe you need to be into your second century before you can have children of your own or something (though even that doesn’t seem altogether like something evolution would encourage) but to need caring for like an infant for the better part of the first one seems at odds with my vague understanding of how that stuff works, I guess

            …I don’t know…maybe as a species they communicate telepathically or something & yoda was unusual for speaking at all…which might explain his unique approach to grammar & syntax…but I’m mostly just thinking aloud?

            …& although the name-recognition thing makes sense for why we all referred to it as baby yoda it also doesn’t really make sense when I think about it

            …the “it’s a trap” guy was a mon calamari so we wouldn’t call an infant that looked like that a baby ackbar (well, maybe the cool kids would) if it wasn’t that character as a kid…they’d be a baby mon calamari, right?

  9. I think I’m going to reread A Christmas Carol this week. It’s something I do every few years during the Christmas season.

    I watched American Murder: The Family Next Door because true crime doesn’t take a holiday dammit! It was as depressing as you’d expect. 

    I’m listening to Oscar Lang

     

     

  10. I’ve been watching lots of Christmas movies. So far this week I’ve watched How The Grinch Stole Christmas (original cartoon, there is no acceptable other version), White Christmas, and The Muppet Christmas Carol.
    I listened to/watched the 25th anniversary concert of Les Miserables on PBS. Stayed up til 1am for that, since I stumbled on it so late.
    I’ve started reading The Princess Bride. Inconceivable!
     

    • …the muppet christmas carol is also great…& you just reminded me that I think I remember enjoying bill murray in scrooged

      …but really I just wanted to ask if you have a preference between the film & the book when it comes to the princess bride…I remember really liking some of the stuff in the book about the not-good-parts that have been “cut” here & there…things like [there were pages & pages of detail about someone packing that was all supposed to be a complicated satire about court society & would have been here but it was boring so I cut it out] (not a direct quote but roughly an example I remember) which I rather enjoyed…but the film is hard to beat?

  11. Still meandering my way through Star Trek Voyager. Started watching Sabrina, the Teenage Witch. Re-started Stargate SG1 because Other-Husband pointed out that he’s never actually watched it all the way through. I’ve been working on finishing a crochet project which involves lots of counting, so I’m mostly going for background noise, anyway.
     
    Sidenote: I recently realized that I have literally watched the entire series of Stargate AT LEAST 500 times and that is not an exaggeration. When my boys were little they loved it, and we seriously watched it every day. My 3rd son was mostly non-verbal until he was nearly 5 and he would come up to me and sing the theme song to ask me to put it on. It once got put on with the French audio track and I didn’t even realize it because I had seen it so often I had it basically memorized! Anyway.
     
    First Sister by Linden A. Lewis was an awesome book. It’s a “space opera” (not sure why it’s described as such instead of just good old sci-fi, but whatever) set in the distant future after humans have settled Mars and other planets. It’s a little creepy and very well written, but it’s the first of a trilogy and the second book won’t be out til next summer!  
     
    I started reading Cooked by Michael Pollan, but, so far, I don’t like it as well as The Omnivore’s Dilemma. I’ll probably finish it, but… he’s firmly up on his soap box and I hope he steps off of it at some point. 

    • @HoneySmacks, thank you for the First Sister suggestion.  I do enjoy the scifi into fantasy as genres. You may want to check out Falstaff Press or Crimson Press for a plethora of good authors who write series.

  13. …been a bit slack on the reading this week…but I ended up rewatching RED (it’s a movie that was originally a comic book & the acronym stands for Retired: Extremely Dangerous) & although the sequel isn’t bad the first one is surprisingly great?

    …I say surprisingly because I half-expected it to have dated badly since much of the premise revolves around a dubious sounding deal whereby bruce willis’ character takes a shine to mary louise parker’s based on nothing more than a few phone calls before essentially blowing up her whole life in the process of meeting her for the first time…but somehow it still seemed to be funny in context…so either it hasn’t dated as badly as I’d feared…or I have?

    • That was a Warren Ellis one, right?  I liked a lot of his works, including his two novels, but then earlier this year, or maybe last year, I heard there were some credibly accusations of predatory behavior on his part, so that is disappointing.
      I did enjoy the movie though, hard not to like something featuring Helen Mirren with an automatic weapon…

      • …yeah, it was a warren ellis comic right enough…& it sucks to keep hearing that people who did stuff that seemed good turn out to have behaved badly so I’m with you on the disappointed thing, too

        • I have to figure out how I’m going to react to news like that.  I really like his work, and feel like it was pretty decent in terms of representation and such.
          Recently there was news of the owner of a popular Sci-Fi bookshop in San Francisco having credible allegations of predatory behavior made against them as well.  I’m a little more bothered by that, because that book shop held a lot of author signings that I attended.  At least with COVID, nothing is happening there anytime soon, so I’ve got a bit more time to sort things out and see what other people do…

          • …when it comes to things that were written/created many years ago I guess I’m quite comfortable seperating the art from the artist, so to speak…I don’t feel like my liking or otherwise finding their stuff to be valuable involves condoning any aspects of their personal character or dubious views they might have held/espoused

            …but when buying (or even just buying into) something created by someone who’s still around to benefit from that somewhat directly it feels like a different choice…I don’t think I have an answer exactly but I think I know what you mean about needing to figure out an appropriate response…I don’t think it’s necessarily as simple as the “cancel culture” approach seems to want to imply…but I also don’t think I’m okay with just taking the approach I do with the older stuff & I’m not sure what the middle ground looks like when it comes to that stuff

            …like with your bookshop example…it doesn’t seem like you’d want to continue to have your money going to the owner but the owner isn’t the only one your custom helps out…presumably there are employees…& there are the authors of the books you buy from there…& so on & so forth…so I don’t think you ought to feel bad about attending the signings & what have you

            …to suggest that by liking a thing we somehow tacitly condone the behavior of everyone that was a part of making that thing seems overly simplistic & excessively reductive to me even if I do obviously believe that behavior of that kind is unacceptable & ought not to be in an sense rewarded?

  14. I watched “Unbelievable” on Netflix . It came out last year but it deals with a serial r*pist and I was not in the headspace for that. But it’s really good and the two main female detectives are exactly who I had in mind when I was getting my BS in criminal justice. 
    Before that I watched “The Staircase.” Very interesting documentary about a guy accused of killing his wife. I mostly thought he didn’t do it and the prosecution just had a bucket full of red herrings, but there’s also a lot of stuff that makes you go “weeeeeelllllllll……..”

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