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Thank you for loving her.
I finished up Poker Face (US: Peacock, CA: Citytv+, UK: Sky/Now, AU: Stan) and Murderbot (Apple TV+) this week.
Poker Face is simply the best time I've had watching TV in recent memory. It's currently two seasons in and consistently has me smiling and laughing. It's not "premium TV" in the way that a Breaking Bad or Severance is; instead, it's very much a throwback to '70s murder mysteries and especially Columbo. While there is some serialization, it's mostly episodic in nature. If you like Rian Johnson's Knives Out trilogy, Columbo, Natasha Lyonne in general, or even the 1970s Incredible Hulk TV series, you should have a good time with it.
The basic concept is that Natasha Lyonne's Charlie Cale is a drifter with the innate ability to detect lies. Broadly she is reading people's involuntary physiological responses to being deceptive, but as Cale says when asked how her ability works, "I'm not exactly sure, but that's not really the point." She travels the country, getting tangled up with a different set of guest stars, one of whom inevitably gets murdered. The structure of Poker Face is such that the week's guest stars get a ton of screen time, which means they're able to cast big in every episode. There's at least a couple of heavy-hitters turning up in every mystery, which often skew toward the comical end of the murder spectrum.
I'm always impressed that they're consistently able to write murder mysteries for a character who has the X-Men mutant superpower of being a perfect lie detector, which in theory should break the entire genre. The perp-of-the-week doesn't just walk into a scene and say "I did not commit any murders recently" and set off Cale's ability. Rather, she catches them in some small innocuous lie that leads her to spiral into figuring out why they would lie about something so outwardly meaningless.
Lyonne is great in it, as are the handful of recurring cast we get besides her, but most of all, getting a star-studded miniature murder-mystery film once a week has just been fantastic. I don't necessarily want to give the impression that these are Knives Out-quality movies, but I don't really want to give the impression that they're not, either. It's kind of damning the show with faint praise to say that it is relentlessly so much fun while not really offering the kind of deep meditation on human nature that is the hallmark of "premium TV", but I can't fault a show where I am consistently having a great time.
No season 3 pick-up yet. I imagine the show is pretty expensive given the names attached, but as far as I know it's Peacock's biggest hit by far, so hopefully they see the benefit of having a show people seem to care about.
Murderbot was also pretty fun. It's a relatively straight retelling of the first book in Martha Wells's The Murderbot Diaries, All Systems Red. Alexander Skarsgård plays a very autistically-coded security android who is deeply uncomfortable with social interaction and self-soothes with futuristic sci-fi soap opera TV. It's a pretty different take on the "android learns how to be human" trope, because his behavior is already very human at the outset. For anybody worried, he doesn't adapt by masking or curing his autism-coded behavior. People do remark on his awkwardness, but it's mostly just accepted as part of his nature.
My one problem with the show is that to me it felt like one long movie cut into 22-minute episodes. The plot of each episode felt unsatisfying on its own. There just weren't enough plot elements introduced and resolved in any individual episode to tell a meaningful story within that episode. I don't have this problem with any other heavily serialized shows, as even then they usually have the standard three-act play structure where some specific event is the focus of the episode. I don't know what it was about Murderbot, but many of the episodes just felt like they were built to serve only the season-long arc.
Obviously, this comes from the fact that the original book is one book, not 10 episodes of television, and the show basically just splits the book into segments of roughly equal length. Now that the series (which released weekly) is complete, I'm thinking about rewatching from the beginning without having to deal with the arbitrary delay to get the next section of one overall story, because I did enjoy basically everything else about it. Generally, I like the slower pace of weekly episode releases, I just don't think that format suited this show at all; it should have gone up all at once as a binge show.
Murderbot has been picked up for a second season and I'm 100% going to continue watching. Maybe I'll wait for the full season to be out before watching, though.
I loved this show! Watched it a month ago or so. Another reference point I'd give is an underwater version of Firefly or Farscape: a rag-tag team of misfits with hearts of gold on the run in a ship that's not quite qualified for what they're up against. For more Farscape-ism, it was shot in Australia and the cast are mostly from there and pretending not to be.
The production was kind of a mess: the show was ordered by Disney+ but dropped again before it became available to stream, so where it's available to watch in any given country is a crapshoot. AMC+ in the US and Canada, Amazon Prime Video in the UK, Stan in Australia. Given the awkward production history, I suspect it will remain a single-season show (hello again, Firefly).
For people who don't like a series that ends abruptly, I'll give some very generic "vibe" spoilers: I thought it was a perfectly satisfying ending, especially given the show is a prequel to the original novel, so we know or can find out where the story is going. There are absolutely some plot threads left untied which would be followed up in a hypothetical season 2, but personally I didn't leave the series frustrated by them.
It's only a 10-episode show, so it's a very easy watch. I'd love it if they got the opportunity to make more, but I had a ton of fun either way.
In fairness, space is as far away from the subway as anybody's ever been.
I feel a thousand years old. People are mixing up George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and the TV series Avatar.
In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Earth has been split into three large superstates: Oceania, Eastasia and Eurasia. These three states are in perpetual war with one another, with Oceania's alliances frequently shifting so that the current enemy and ally could change at any given moment and history is rewritten to affirm that the enemy and ally had always been in their present alignment.
Oceania was at war with Eastasia: Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia. A large part of the political literature of five years was now completely obsolete. Reports and records of all kinds, newspapers, books, pamphlets, films, sound-tracks, photographs—all had to be rectified at lightning speed. Although no directive was ever issued, it was known that the chiefs of the Department intended that within one week no reference to the war with Eurasia, or the alliance with Eastasia, should remain in existence anywhere.
"There is no war in Ba Sing Se" is the Avatar line, while "Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia" is generally the line that gets quoted from Ninteen Eighty-Four in similar contexts.
These seem like arbitrary rules. Most random accidents don't reliably kill people and are also painful. You're comparing a tiny subset of random accidents to all intentional suicide methods as if they are or should be somehow similar.
♫ I still dream of QAnon ♫
(To the tune of Kate Bush's "Cloudbusting".)
Sorry if I'm misreading, but I wonder if you're mixing up Steve Bannon (71) and Barron Trump (19). The Tweet says "Bannon" and is probably meant to imply the former. Steve Bannon is probably too old to have ever been victimized by Jeffrey Epstein; they are/were the same age.
Sorry to go all Godwin's law, but astrology can and has been used as a tool of oppression. Nazi Germany had a state-sponsored astrologer, Karl Ernst Krafft, appointed by Deputy Führer Rudolf Hess and Chief Propagandist Joseph Goebbels. Krafft was employed to write astrological propaganda that justified anti-semitism on the basis of celestial events. He was also tasked with using astrological observations to predict threats to the Führer Adolf Hitler and offer military advice.
Ultimately, it's not the stars and Moon that do the oppression, just whoever is in charge of divining their meaning, which is also pretty much how religious oppression works.
Mildly amusing: watching the "previously on Doctor Who" I could tell pretty much when I tuned out of the previous episode. At some point, I switched to scrolling through my phone while listening to the episode. It was really only the final scene with the electricity effects, which is decent considering how much I didn't like the last one.
Farting aside, the comedy is improved here. "I think you'll find the Prime Minister is an alien in disguise ... That's never gonna work, is it?" Elsewhere, the good to bad ratio is just a lot better than the first half. Jackie always adds some heart and Harriet Jones gets to do more than hide in closets and grimace about farts. She's a likeable character whose solid introduction sadly wasn't really capitalized on given future timeline changes. The Doctor's memory of her ("Elected for three successive terms. The architect of Britain's Golden Age.") is much better than what he ends up doing to her Prime Ministership.
We get some additional mentions of how young Rose is, which always kind of throws me. Billie Piper of 2005 is already into her second career and has been a public figure for seven years. Her music career started when she was just 15 and ended at 18, so even though she's already been retired for five years, she's still only 23. Still, she's not entirely believable as a 19-year-old, which is probably for the best given she ends up with a significantly older man.
The absolutely-no-budget alien explosion is very fun: the cutaway and throwing blobs of practical guts around feels like something out of Red Dwarf. It looks as obviously cheap as it is and that makes it timeless, because it looked like that from day 1. Contrast that with the CGI which must have looked a lot less pokey to viewers 20 years ago.
I'm not even really trying to scold folks who pirate, I do it too, I just don't bother to grandstand about it. BFD I'm pirating 30 year old video games. Y'all think if I bought a 200 dollar used one on Ebay the original studio sees a dime of it? C'mon now.
Right here is where you're essentially in agreement with the meme. You recognize that walking into a used game store and shoplifting their copy of the game is objectively worse than downloading an additional copy of the game, where you haven't harmed somebody else to get yours.
I don't think the argument is that "Piracy is completely and entirely victimless in all cases," but that it's a false equivalency to equate piracy with theft. They're not the same thing, is all.
Certainly, but I don't know how to tie those back to a Batman '66 reference.
It's true, I've seen Jeff Goldblum do it.
9:39 "Please understand that social media is not a place to get news and information."
Now I don't know what to think about this video I just watched on social media.
The Penguin is the #30 show you must see before you die? Holy recency bias, Batman!
Neat, thanks for explaining!
You should read her words rather than just the intro to the article quoted in the OP.
'I made that choice. And now I'm watching my dad suffer because of it,' she responded.
She has admitted it. That's not a free pass to make bad decisions, but most of the quotes in the article are about her trying to change and do better.
'I'm learning everything I unlearned,' she said. 'And I'm going to fight for people who don't have a voice.'
'The guilt I carry is heavy, but I won't stay silent anymore,' she added.
'We all make choices,' she said. 'But we can make better ones next.'
I definitely have conflicted feelings about this: it's like when some former white supremacist changes their mind, gets the swastika tattoos removed and speaks out in support of anti-racism. They don't deserve a medal for saying "Whoops, I fucked up" after fucking up extremely hard, but is telling them to fuck off serving the greater good, or just giving us an opportunity to feel superior?
The "stone" with the words in it has a suspiciously uniform appearance. I wonder whether it might be concrete and the letters pressed into it while wet, in which case basically none of it is true.
Orphan Black: Do the characters get any easier to like after season 1? (spoilers)
I AM THE PARK!