What I Watched: The third and final season of Ted Lasso. OMG so fun to watch, so corny, so heartwarming, so much Roy Kent (never enough Roy Kent). The red string episode was eight-year-old boy humor at its best.
However, season three was panned almost everywhere. Boo hiss and ba humbug say I! Here is the nasty review from The Guardian:
Rubbish jokes, inept plotting, a weak script … should we go on? This messy, boring, endurance test of a show got way bigger than it ever deserved – thank goodness its final episode is here.
You can read the entire dissing here.
A short conversation between the actors who play Roy Kent and Jaimie Tartt
What I Read: the six-book Sam Quinn series, beginning with The Slaughtered Lamb Bookstore and Barby Seana Kelly. These are related to her Sea Wicche spin off series. Both series are ongoing, book six of Sam Quinn (releasing October 2023) and book two of Sea Wicche (releasing in April 2024) are preordered. If you like Tilly Wallace, Hailey Edwards, or Heather Raconteur you will probably like these books. Trigger warning re the Sam Quinn series: one of the premises is her struggle to move forward after a viscous assault and rape – I focused on her resilience as opposed to her trauma, but you may feel differently. Here’s the blurb from book one of the Sam Quinn series:
Welcome to The Slaughtered Lamb Bookstore and Bar. I’m Sam Quinn, the werewolf book nerd in charge. I run my business by one simple rule: Everyone needs a good book and a stiff drink, be they vampire, wicche, demon, or fae. No wolves, though. Ever. I have my reasons.
I serve the supernatural community of San Francisco. We’ve been having some problems lately. Okay, I’m the one with the problems. The broken body of a female werewolf washed up on my doorstep. What makes sweat pool at the base of my spine, though, is realizing the scars she bears are identical to the ones I conceal. After hiding for years, I’ve been found.
A protection I’ve been relying on is gone. While my wolf traits are strengthening steadily, the loss also left my mind vulnerable to attack. Someone is ensnaring me in horrifying visions intended to kill. Clive, the sexy vampire Master of the City, has figured out how to pull me out, designating himself by personal bodyguard. He’s grumpy about it, but that kiss is telling a different story. A change is taking place. It has to. The bookish bartender must become the fledgling badass.
I’m a survivor. I’ll fight fang and claw to protect myself and the ones I love. And let’s face it, they have it coming.
What I Listened To: new music from my favorite artist, Dekker – Hero Myth; Unsocial Media – Death Sport (sounds a tad New Orderish); and Gloria – The Snuts (super adorable video).
Thank you for playing Brain Drain! How are you, dearest ones? Darling DeadSplinterites, what is up with you? Please do share with us!
Watched: Weird – The Weird Al Yankovic Story. This movie was very much as I would expect from Weird Al. Funny, stupid, absurd, and very watchable. My favorite running gag in the film was how Eat It is “an original song and not a parody of another artist in any way.”
Listened: Eric Gales put out a new album last year called Crown.
You Don’t Know the Blues is really a genre classic.
How was Daniel Radcliffe? I’m guessing the idea of casting him worked, but I’m curious how it went.
I like the fact that he’s had a post Harry Potter career of not worrying at all about his career.
I saw Daniel Radcliffe on Broadway (along with John Larroquette, from “Night Court”) in “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying,” and he was amazing. I’ve never seen a “Harry Potter” movie so I didn’t know what to expect, but he delivered.
This is my favorite number from it. Footage of the performance I actually saw apparently doesn’t exist, ironclad copyright/no cell or video policies no doubt.
I know that this must come across as extremely sexist and will rile up the #MeToo scolds and prompt those childish “trigger warnings” but it’s a light-hearted satire of the “Mad Men”-era culture that people were living through at the time. That’s what it was meant to be, in 1967, and that’s what it should be received as, in 2023.
…I saw him a while back in the cripple of inishmaan…a bit like I saw dominic west in a non-quixote bit of cervantes a bit longer ago than that…seemed like a chunk of the audience had come for the chance to be in the same room as a face from the screen…but they were both excellent…helped by decent material but they gave great performances
I love post HP Daniel Radcliffe! The indie movies he chooses to be in are the best. Have you seen Swiss Army Man. He’s literally a decomposing corpse throughout the whole movie.
He nailed it. Al played a soulless record executive, so I’m sure Daniel had plenty of time with him to get the feel of playing the “character” of Weird Al.
I saw an interview with Daniel and he was fanboying about Al. Making the movie was a dream come true for him.
Having five days off, I spent a lot of time finishing movies that I couldn’t finish in one sitting.
2021’s Dune… well, I am looking forward to the sequel. Thanks to CGI and decent direction their vision Arrakis is closer to what I imagined. The David Lynch version is still okay, but this one way better done and acted. At the time I snickered when I saw Jose Ferrer as the Prahdash Emperor because I mostly knew him as the pompous blowhard father of Stephanie Vanderkellen from the sitcom Newhart. Now I realize that he was a pretty good/distinguished dramatic actor, but I only saw the tail end of his long career.
Saw Arnold Miniseries on Netflix. No major unknown revelations for me. I find it amusing (in a grim way) that the same assholes who wanted to elect foreign born Ahnold as Preznit were the same assholes who demanded a long form birth certificate for Barack Obama. Gee, I wonder why?
Read Jack Campbell’s latest installment of the Lost Fleet, Implacable. It’s not about space battles anymore. More diplomacy as humanity is realizing they’re not alone and their neighbors have better stuff than they do. After 15 or so books the series is still fun for me and I enjoy it as Space Opera unlike the Honor Harrington series of novels which became more bombastic and infodumping with each new book and author David Weber’s space battles seem too sadistic or one sided.
Read an obscure war novel called Chieftains (recommended by another internet friend.) It is on Kobo or Kindle. Written in the late 70s, it is about the British fighting WW3 in the early 80s. I dunno what it is about the Brits and grim, but it works. Also reminded me of the criticism (at the time, mid 80s) of Tom Clancy’s Red Storm Rising to be too sanitary and minus the grim reality of warfare. Spent too much time focusing on the weapons and not the sods who actually have to fight in/with them (which is true.)
Hope that your restful five days were enjoyable!
Yes they were enjoyable except for the times I had to deal with my parents home issues. Since my dad’s mind went mushy, I have been dealing with their stuff more and more. Unfortunately, my mom is very stubborn and won’t get hearing aids which makes talking to her on the phone difficult.
Hugs and appreciation for your kindness to your parents. I am enough older than you ( and my parents were older when I was born) that I have walked in your current shoes.
I also just watched Dune and enjoyed it. I also came to realize that the overall difficulty I have in following all the plot points is probably due to Herbert’s writing than David Lynch’s directing, because I had the same problem keeping up with this version. But, that being said, I’m still looking forward to part 2.
I finished Succession, and I admit to fast forwarding over sections of it.
I felt like it kept going back over the same ground too much, and didn’t give a good reason why. I think part of the problem is the setup about the succession was obvious from the beginning, which made too much of the later parts of the show hard to sustain.
The older I get the less I am willing to sit through superfluous scenes. #team fast forward.
…so…am at least an installment of what’s-his-face being jack ryan with bunk from the wire as jim greer…but it’s a lot of what citadel isn’t
…secret invasion served up more of the same but there was a nice dressing down that went against fury this time for a change of pace…& a possible return of the fridging idiot ball that seems like they can’t have cast that lady to be done with her already
…&…a couple of strays from off the beaten path…at least a little
…triangle of sadness…which I can see not appealing to a lot of folks but had some nice work in one way or another & not a bad shot at a not-so-unfamiliar examinations of the usefulness of the whip hand
…& an anime/manga thing called DawnFall: Black Rock Shooter that I stumbled over through the disney app but is…decidedly not disney…solid post-apocalyptic rise against the machines dystopian stuff though…allowing for the usual “must we, really?” caveats that come with that whole genre/culture
…that’s about all that’s available off the top of my head this morning, anyway?
Triangle of Sadness was only given two stars by the Guardian, my usual go-to for movie and television reviews. But I have disagreed with them lately. I think it looks like a good watch.
…some bits don’t land as well as they maybe could have…& it’s not exactly feel-good rousing fare…but it’s pretty good, I thought…woody harrelson isn’t really the focus of the thing but he’s kinda great?
I still don’t understant the plot of Secret Invasion.
Like yes, I understand the plot in the sense of ooohh secret plot to take over the world.
But I don’t understand the secrecy given the power the skrulls already have. There doesn’t need to be some crazy big secret plan. Just assassinate a few world leaders while impersonating their enemies and us idiot humans would do the rest of the work for them.
…this…so much this
…maybe they swing it so in retrospect it seems like they did a better job…but…it’s mis-firing on several cylinders as far as I can make out?
Also I rewatched Captain America: The Winter Soldier last week on my treadmill and now I’m like you fucking expect me to believe Nick Fury had a cabal of secret superspies in place since the late 90s…. and he still didn’t know SHIELD was actually being run by HYDRA????
Unless we find out a bunch of skrulls now were actually working for HYDRA, I’m just like you can’t retcon the plots of their other movies that way?
…they’re used to being able to get away with that on the page but I couldn’t agree more…& the source material for the winter soldier is one of my top marvel picks from the last…ooh…fair while, possibly…so I wanted to like that one, if you know what I mean?
What I’ve been reading:
Nothing you’d want to lay your hands on, believe me, but I have been reading responses and likes/stars to my comments. They’re flooding in. I have 76 unread ones so far, and I’ve probably gone through that many since I rose and shone at 5 am.
Thank you all for taking the time to tolerate my Deadsplinter rants and I hope I have provided humor and insight. And probably outrage, occasionally, so you might want to slap a “trigger warning” on me, just in case.
Trigger warnings. I once came across a stash of World War II-era newspapers. Because of the paper shortage this particular outlet only produced a four-page broadsheet daily. The front page was war news, victories and retreats. The second page was devoted to the known local-area war dead as reported by the War Department. Sometimes that went on to the third page. The rest was devoted to Help Wanted ads in the munitions factories and the shipyards, and to sports.
Do you think they had trigger warnings? Mothers reading about their sons dying in some hellhole in northern France or some godforsaken island in the Pacific? Of course not. People were adults. I read a quote recently that said “Grief is the price we pay for love.” It’s true. I can’t imagine what I would do if BH predeceased me. I’d be very wealthy, but I’d be so shocked and helpless. Maybe I should grow up and act like an adult.
Cousin M, you and I grew up in similar times, without trigger warnings. Sometimes I feel like trigger warnings are a kindness and sometimes I feel like they are coddling. Regardless, they are common today and I think their use shows respect for others, who expect or appreciate them. I’m not going to judge on this subject.
I will tell you one thing. When I was in college I had a boyfriend but we kept our relationship secret. A local theater company did a production of “Bent.” I don’t know if you know what this was. It’s…German gay people rounded up and sent to a death camp. I didn’t know this when we bought our tickets and saw it. Had it had “trigger warnings” I think I would have avoided it. But it didn’t, and it was so disturbing I still remember it 40+ years later. And I’m glad I went. It’s not fun to see your fictional forebears enduring the “Hitlerzeit.” It’s one of the reasons I strove to stop taking German as a side minor to my major and actually enroll in a German university and live there (and slightly over-extend my welcome.)
And they’re slapping “trigger warnings” on the fucking “Sound of Music.” Watch footage or see photos of the liberation of Buchenwald and Auschwitz. Grow up. Stop crying. The world is a nasty, awful place. Its depths of depravity need to be fully explored so that we can truly understand ourselves.
im considerably younger both of yous and grew up without trigger warnings….and for the most part think they are bullshit
if you dont like it…theres an off switch
i may also be amongst the last generations of boys dont cry…for what thats worth
not sure whats more fucked up….trigger warnings or me
Personally, I think the trigger warnings are. If you are old enough to be literate and you read something that disturbs or offends you, put it down (or I guess nowadays, log off) and find some other way to amuse yourself. Freedom of speech is one of the foundational principles of this country. Not all countries, not even the western secular industrialized ones, but in this country it still is. So people and institutions are taking an extra-judicial route to curtail this, and it must be resisted.
im actually siding with you
you can say/write what you want
i dont have to listen tho
Exactly. When I used to read print newspapers they always had pretty extensive sports sections. Those I would put aside and conserve to pick up my dog(s)’ shit. Some of the pieces and coverage were controversial in a way, I can’t remember how, but who cares, I just didn’t read any of it. I used their wise words to scrape dog shit off Manhattan sidewalks. So, thanks for that. Now we have to buy biodegradable mini-somewhat plastic bags.
@MatthewCrawley
“Back in WW2” or also known as “The good old days”. JFC. You are starting to sound like…
God, don’t I know it.
…the simpsons are a national treasure
That’s completely opposite of how it worked, though. Newspaper reporting during WWII was fantastically sanitized, far more than today. The reason there were only names in the paper is that they did their best to bury any kind of personal stories. Even Bill Mauldin’s completely anonymized and relatively innocuous cartoons of GIs on the front were highly controversial, to the point where Patton wanted him in prison.
You’re complaining about a system which lets the show go on with a preliminary warning, and doing so by elevating a world gone by which simply shut the story down.
The intense pressure toward silence and the complicity of newspapers added to the isolation and PTSD of returning vets. Family histories are full of stories of people knowing nothing about what actually happened to their older relatives, and how they lacked any kind of on ramp to start to talk.
Trigger warnings are an on ramp to presenting difficult stories. The alternative which we’re getting from the right is straight out book bans and censorship. And for reasons I don’t understand, you keep presenting the two as the same thing.
Former Deadspin editor Megan Greenwell recently wrote a great article about her search for more information on her grandfather who served in WW2, and the enormous fire in 1973 that wiped out millions of service personnel records.
https://www.wired.com/story/the-night-17-million-precious-military-records-went-up-in-smoke/
Those records were the last hope for millions of people to finally know something more than just a date of death. And as Greenwell puts it, when she found out the only thing remaining of her Grandfather’s files was a final pay record “If you’re me, a woman yearning to understand the story of her dead grandfather’s life, it’s a tiny bit heartbreaking.”
I genuinely hope you think this through, because you’re going down a pretty rocky path to a dead end with this take, and there’s a different way to go if you stop and think.
…there’s a whole archive & supporting staff at the imperial war museum in the UK who help people try to sift the records to figure out the path of relatives through the military service of that period…it’s not obvious when touring the exhibits but it’s kind of amazing & there’s a lot of stuff that goes beyond the news of the day or the dispatches it was culled from & includes a trove of first hand voice recordings & private journals/correspondence
…it’s sort of amazing…maybe more than their “trench experience”…which if they haven’t retired it was much more likely to be on the school trip itinerary
[…more an aside than a reply…again…I’m worried I may be getting into another bad habit]
Here I will disagree, my friend. As a late-in-life baby all my male relatives, both sides, served in either WWII or Korea. Same with my older siblings’ male in-laws. We used to hold epic family reunions and the men would convene and chat about their fond wartime memories. But when I, or anyone else, approached, with a burger hot off the grill or a disgusting low-grade bottle of domestic beer, they would clam up and want to talk about the doings in New York.
I imagine it must have been very traumatic, but at least when they came home they were rightfully treated as saviors of Western civilization. Those poor drafted Vietnam vets that were treated (by a very small but very vocal draft-exempt group of the citizenry) as war criminals. No wonder so many of them have so many mental health issues.
…my family has had a fair showing in previous generations where military service is concerned but my grandfather…who at one point trained commandos…almost never talked about his
…one day when I was in the middle of the bit of university where I got academic credit for reading comic books I showed him maus & talked about it a bit…to say he wasn’t a comic book guy would be an understatement of heroic proportions even by british standards
…I heard more of that stuff in one sitting than the rest of my life combined
…funny how that works, in my experience
The hill you are willing to die on the last few days about how much you hate trigger warnings really makes you look like a callous prick.
I find it really interesting how the answer that keeps coming back is “oh just don’t watch it then” which is just something anybody who doesn’t like trigger warnings could do i.e. just choose not to read the trigger warning.
I know, and I should keep this to myself, but I’ve just become very sensitive (ironically. Sensitivity readers) to it all of a sudden. My biggest fear is that after I’m gone a lot of the best works of literature will have been so bowdlerized that people will wonder why anyone bothered to read them in the first place, because they can’t get their hands on the originals. Othello is another huge target. That’s being rewritten. What’s the point? In Shakespeare’s day it was exotic enough to portray a “Moor.” Let alone a powerful one. But oh no, Shakespeare, a dead while male, was engaging in gross racial profiling and committed a literary atrocity. Are these people nuts? And they’re tenured professors at accredited universities?
Thank God we never had children. I think I would have had to home-school them.
…not all rewrites are things I’d be in a hurry to resist…I mean…I still bear a grudge over the burning of the library at alexandria…so I’m not blind to what you’re saying
…but…I also saw a fabulous hip-hop musical re-write of othello…performed at the globe theatre itself
…so I’m down to live in a world where I get to pick both
I once saw an all-Black performance of Shakespeare’s Henry V. It was startling at first, because of course the real Henry V wasn’t Black, and there were no Black people at the Battle of Agincourt, but after five minutes you enter that magical world where “you don’t see color” and there you are, “once more unto the breach.” And because I went to high school when I did and there were standards I actually studied Henry V AND I had seen it performed by more traditional actors (white men, whose ancestors might have been with Henry V at the Battle of Agincourt) but this all-Black performance was also outstanding. It can be done. Why, I don’t know, but I’m glad I got to experience it.
I also once went to this very odd patriotic concert near me. I was one of the only white people in the audience. It was around the 4th of July. Crowd participation was expected. So we all sang along to the American patriotic standards. It was fun for me, because I am a patriotic American and knew all the words to all the songs, but I was kind of surprised that all my fellow audience members were so into it. If you read the tabloid or left-wing press you’re given the impression that they’re a seditious bunch with all kinds of grievances that will never be fully addressed, but everyone there seemed pretty happy. I actually “adopted” in a way a small boy and held his hand while we sang along to a couple of tunes. He didn’t know the words (I think he was like 3 or something) so I sang for both of us.
Good times.
…some of them are duds
…saw a taming of the shrew one time that spent most of its time patting itself on the back for having one character very much be presented as the artist formerly known as prince
…it was…not good…& how arch the industrially foppish routine tried to lean I to being made it so much worse that any virtues the rest of the cast might have wrung out of the production were fighting a losing battle from the off
I once saw a very strange alternative performance of
MacbethThe Scottish Play that was meant to be feminist so they had six different women in the role of Lady Macbeth, depending on what the lines were. They were meant to illustrate six different aspects of her personality, I guess. Plus there was interpretive dancing. It was…quite memorable, I’ll give it that. Luckily my ticket was free because I knew someone in the cast.Watching Titans season 2. I was never a huge DC comics guy so don’t know much about back stories of characters & how much liberty they are taking with them but it has been enjoyable.
Listening to Cindy Blackman Santana
Ooh! I’m out back in sun and heat painting flowers on the garage door. (Don’t ask.) I just came in for a bit to catch up here, and to avoid heat stroke. Anyway, the Cindy Santana is excellent music to paint by. *Scurries off to check into outdoor sound access.
i watched a thing!
the death race 4 beyond anarchy
it was terrible…but entertaining….soooo…pretty much what i signed up for
considerably more boobage than is really necessary tho…which along with the murder cars is about all these new death races have in common with the death race 2000 they are based on….well…and the dystopian society i guess
the death race 2050 is much closer to the source material and so hilariously bad its mst3k worthy……highly entertaining
aaaaand…listening too…uhh…its a lot….fuck ill just pick one
Thank you Farcy, for broadening my horizons.
lol always a pleasure
come to think of it..the main difference between the corman death races and the new ones
is that corman is really having a go at society as is…..the new ones are just fluff
entertaining fluff….tho i do miss statham
the corman ones are over the top and exagerated to the extreme……..but if you think about it really not far off reality
Death Race could have been an awesome franchise if they steered away from the blatant objectification of women. Even FF managed to stop leaning on flag girls.
agreed.
also it needs more Statham.
i mean…….
yeah
agreed.
i dont think ive ever seent a movie with him in it i didnt at least enjoy
Always.
I’m almost done reading The Three of Us by Ore Agbaje-Williams. It’s written in a hilariously poised bitchy tone. Google sums it up as:
I watched Nimona (Netflix) and loved it. I wish it existed when I was a kid. I would have idolized Nimona. There is one TW I don’t think was officially mentioned…
SPOILER ALERT continued under the trailer
… at one point bullying leads to an attempted suicide. It’s a pivotal scene which gave me whiplash. The rest of the movie is light weight in theme and messaging. In contrast that moment was heavy handed and unexpected.
“What if the two most important people in your life hated each other with a passion?”
Well that just sounds like a nightmare.
I actually lived it. When I was in college I had a boyfriend (I had several boyfriends. By the time I met Better Half I had had a lifetime’s worth of boyfriends, and I was only 22) who evolved into one of my best and closest friends. Better Half couldn’t stand him. He (the former boyfriend) thought this was kind of funny and had all kinds of “just between us” nicknames for Better Half, which now that I’m thinking of them makes me laugh to this day. He unfortunately died very young, 32, of AIDS, which he must have contracted after he broke up with me.
If I really want to depress myself I think about all the AIDS-related memorial services I’ve been to. In my 20s and early 30s, at the height of it. But I can usually push them away because I’m still here.
It’s Sharkfest on National Geographic so I’ve been watching a lot of tv about sharks.
WHICH IS AWESOME
Also I actually read a book that wasn’t rereading an old romance novel this week.
Nature’s Best Hope by Douglas Tallamy – it’s a very very good read and an easy read. Well, some of the subject matter is depressing as hell because it’s about how we’ve destroyed a lot of our native diversity. But the key point he’s making is basically the idea of “homegrown national parks” in that if enough people can plant native species in their yards and available spaces, we can support the necessary insects to support the bird population. I’m still thinking about it a few days after finishing, I think my NOT tomorrow is going to be about it.
But old romance novels have their purpose, eh? Did you see that author Julie Garwood passed away last month?
Oh, I hadn’t seen that! That’s a damn shame.