What I Watched: Bosch: Legacy, on Amazon FreeVee, which has commercials. It ended on one heck of a cliff hanger, so I am happy that Amazon will bring it back for a second season.
First, the commercials…they repeat the same four or five commercials. While I do not care about the dry eye solution (do not use if you are allergic to it, rolls non-dry eyes), the Matthew Stafford commercial is cute. I did need it explained to me (QB traded after years with one team immediately wins Super Bowl), I am yours in cultural oblivion. And the Reeses commercial – well – they are on this week’s grocery list, Keitel food limitations be damned!
Now – on to the actual TV show. Did you like Bosch? If yes, then you will like Bosch Legacy. Here is the blurb: “Harry Bosch, retired homicide detective turned Private Investigator, fights to work cases without the authority his former job provided. Attorney Honey “Money” Chandler, having survived an attempted murder, struggles to maintain her faith in the justice system. And Maddie Bosch discovers the possibilities and challenges of being a rookie patrol cop on the streets of Los Angeles.”
There are cameos from Crate and Barrel and his old partner. The season-long Bosch story is classic rich bad guys, and the Maddie character is really growing on me. Plus, he has a new tech wizard friend played by Stephen Chang. (I need a new tech wizard friend.)
What I Read: I mentioned Tilly Wallace (Manners and Monsters) last week. Her second book in the new series, Tournament of Shadows, the story of the mother in M and M, just dropped with a third due in November. Here is the book two blurb for A Dangerous Ruse: “Her opponents have her cornered, unless Sera makes an unexpected move…Seraphina continues to pick at the secrets entangling her, when during a ball she spots a piece of enchanted jewellery eerily similar to the one she once wore. But before she can find out about the origins of the magical bracelet, its owner is murdered..” Remember this old line? Well, this author could write the phone book and I’d read it.
I’m up to book 17 out of 28 in Blake Banner’s Dead Cold Mysteries (complex mysteries, love partner banter), I think I’ve mentioned this before? And I breezed through Sepia Blue Demon, book five and the satisfying finale of the series by Orlando A. Sanchez.
What I Listened To: A good version of the classic Mad World by Ed Nash and Liz Lewis; Bad Love by Dehd; What Is It by Worries and Other Plants; and Schwarzes Karma by Bilderbuch.
Thank you for playing Brain Drain! How are you, darling DeadSplinterites? Please check and share with the crew!
Still watching The Boys. It has been a very bloody but entertaining season.
Listening to: new Viagra Boys
and for my sunny chill music, Sevana has the voice of an angel!
OMG us too re the boys. My gore-o-meter is set lower than that of many…
I watched Bosch Legacy as well. I do love me some Titus Welliver. I saw him on a plane once, he’s a small dude but very attractive in person.
Your comment triggered a random memory. I saw Halle Berry once at the airport and she is TINY! (If I could adjust font size, I would have made that last word half its size for proper emphasis)
I ran into Kristen Belle at MegaCon one year. Pretty much literally — she was exiting a door as I was entering. This was around the time of Veronica Mars, so she wasn’t super famous and I guess she was comfortable walking around with some friends. But she’s very little.
Also ran into Zachary Quinto once when Heroes had just started. Nice guy, posed for a picture with my buddy. Normal height, though. About 6′ 1″ or so.
James Marsden is also on the small side. They were filming X-Men in Montreal. At the time, I was bummed that I didn’t cross paths with Patrick Stewart or Hugh Jackman. Not that I would instigate an interaction with any famous person.
Hi @bryanlsplinter! Cool fame adjacency. I am only fame-adjacent to a contemporary classical composer ( Pulitzer and grammy winning, but still mostly unknown except in certain circles).
Ohhh a Titus in real life! @MegMegMcGee
I’m watching the Brokenwood Mysteries on Acorn. It’s a New Zealand based detective show. I like the main characters but their accents take a minute to get used to.
Oh, us too re Brokenwood, the country soundtrack is in your genre. We are going to binge this season once all the episodes have dropped. @MegMegMcGee.
Brokenwood sounds like our thing.
We’ve been watching Old Man with Jeff Bridges and John Lithgow. For obvious reasons, I like movies that have old men kicking asses. The acting is very good and the story absorbing.
@LuigiVuoto I also like old men kicking ass, for obvious reasons…
I’ve been watching Chloe on Amazon. It’s about a woman, Becky, who is obsessed with a former friend from high school’s glamorous life. She follows Chloe’s Insta and lets her imagination fill in the context of each post until news breaks that Chloe has died by suicide. Becky is off in that Anna Sorokin way minus the terrible pseudo Russian-German accent. She maxes out her credit cards, remakes herself as Sasha and infiltrates Chloe’s wealthy friend group in order to figure out why she died by suicide. I’m near the end of the season mostly because I can’t look away. Becky/Sasha is insane but I’m rooting for her because she is so broken and yet so determined to figure out what happened. She’s no mastermind and it is stressful to watch her almost get caught at every corner. Definitely not a show for everyone. I’m surprised that I like it.
Oh, boy, stress watching. I have watched perfectly good shows which I can only take one episode at a time because they stress me out!
I finished Stranger Things and found myself fast forwarding more and more.
I’m on board with the basic idea that the characters have been through unbelievably awful stuff and it’s finally time to figure out what it’s done to them.
But the execution — woof. It really feels like they were trying to understand trauma in a simplistic 80s pop psych way, which is not only wildly unrealistic, it’s awful drama. Huge amounts of long slow elliptical talking that reinforces ideas about trauma, but very little showing how it plays out.
It feels in a weird way like an Ayn Rand book, not in the subjects, of course, but in the way there is an overwhelming focus on an organizing and motivating principle that leads characters to endlessly talk about it. And when they finally do something, it all feels incredibly staged.
And like Ayn Rand, some people seem absolutely engrossed by the volume of it all, but other people seem baffled by how it just goes on and on.
It wasn’t my favorite season of Stranger Things either. For me, some of it was that the polish has come off what was once a shiny new show. And the aging of the characters is not easy. But the Russian sub plot was (in my memory) reflective of a greater USSR fear than was the reality.
I don’t get why they didn’t change things up a whole lot more. Let the kids age, get new interests, come up with new monsters. At that age six months can flip everything around, but the show seems fossilized, which tends to be a sign the creators don’t really get why it worked in the first place.
These Reese’s Cups are going on my grocery list now too. I haven’t read or watched much of anything this week. I’ve been a total slug and played video games all damn day. Oh well. 🤷🏻♀️
What are you playing this weekend? We’re enjoying Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands. It’s a spin-off from the Borderlands series and is set up like D&D.
@HammerZeitgeist Keitel is playing SkyRim and I like the Secret Society and Design House.
I’m still playing Spiritfarer. I could technically finish the game but it has a lot of side quests you can do and it’s fun so. I did just buy a couple of games – Hades and Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion so I may stop Spiritfareer for now and start one of those. Tiny Tina looks fun, I might have to get that next.
OMG right? Then…horrors…the designated grocery shopper forget to get them. @Hannibal
Oh no! I get super pissy when that happens.
i havent really watched or read much of anything worth mentioning this week
its hard to find time to watch things with so much music coming out every minute
Hi @Farscythe! Good tunes are always worthwhile!
Watched Season 4 of Star Trek Discovery and like… too much about the ending didn’t make sense. Even by scifi show standards, I was like wow you did all that stuff and now you just go… help resettle refugees?
this calls for a fitting song!
I am so disappointed when you can tell that the writers just gave up.
I’ve been playing Unpacking. It’s a really chill game where you’re unpacking boxes and putting things where they go after moving. It’s cute and relaxing (not at all like the actual experience of moving), and you see the protagonist moving through different stages of life. I didn’t realize it was going to be a LGBTQ game but it was in the end, which was a nice surprise.
I finished it in like 3 plays, but I might go back and clean up/rearrange some previous levels. Playing it did inspire me to organize the hall closet, which has been a disaster zone for like a year and a half since we first moved in. Lil has been enjoying it too and I wonder if it’s inspiring any organizing impulses for him.
It sounds fun!