#i feel like we live in a monty python skit

[tessiete]

Wild Guesses and Untamed Theories about Good Omens Season 3.

Please feel free to disagree vehemently in the reblogs. Love that for us.

THEMES:

Since season one was about self-determination, and season two was about love, I'm guessing that season three is about death. Clues: 1. The Crow Road - Muriel is seen "reading" this book at the end. It's also the other novel that we see Jim alphabetise. It's about a young man whose grandmother dies, and he goes back to Scotland to wrestle with mortality, faith, and his relationship with his father. The "crow road" itself is a euphemism for death. Someone who's gone up crow road is dead.

2. The Final Nia Truc - Crowley's license plate being a reference to Terry Gilliam and his work on Monty Python. The skit it's referencing can be seen here (though you really should just watch The Meaning of Life. The Galaxy Song is maybe the best song written, and in fact I'm actually linking that and not the final curtain reference, so... (tw: suicidal leaves)

3. The Third Season is "Final" - Neil said so himself. In a three word Clue. I can't find it, so you're just gonna have to trust me. Anyway, what's more final than death? Or what isn't? You know?

4. Death as A Person - They were introduced as a physicalised character in the first season, and in the book it's noted that Death cannot be overcome. But Death CAN be delayed.

5. Book of Life - Revelations. Second Coming. Final Judgement. Jesus checking the Book of Life for the righteous. The resurrection of the dead. The end of all life on Earth. Etc., etc. The Bible is really preoccupied with this stuff, so I hear.

ARCS:

Aziraphale - He's a mess. I think we can all, well, not safely or with any certainty but at least with some...conviction? Some confidence? We can reasonably guess that Aziraphale's going to be dealing with a more complete disillusionment and emancipation from Heaven.

What does this mean in practical terms?

Probably a lot of conflict with the Metatron. Maybe Aziraphale realising he's being maneuvered as a puppet without any real authority. Potentially a coup by the other archangels? Possibly blackmail with Crowley's safety? Conceivably The Book of Life as a threat to his existence? To Crowley's? To Earth's? Sure. Why not?

Crowley - Okay, this is the neat one because Crowley had the most dramatic arc of the two of them in the second season. His was the open discovery of his love for Aziraphale, explicitly stated desire to be together, and the final (?) emancipation from Hell. Wanting to be a Us with a capital U.

So where is it left for him to go?

Forgiveness.

He's gonna have to learn to get comfy with forgiveness. With receiving it. With accepting it. With offering it.

Because he's going to have to give it to Aziraphale.

CONCLUSION:

I know, I know - no one agrees with me on this, but I'm gonna say it anyway and you can all yell in the notes.

I think this series ends with Crowley and Aziraphale becoming human. Choosing One Life to live together as humans. To have EVERYTHING, ALL AT ONCE, in one go. Together.

Because, because -- think of it:

Humanity vs. The Divine The book talks frequently about the difference between humans and angels/demons. Most clearly, here:

"The real grace and the real heart-stopping evil, was right inside the human mind."

This, to me, suggests that the things which Aziraphale and Crowley are ciphers for can only truly be realised by humans.

The book also goes on to reinforce to us how close the two of them already are.

They're said to have "gone native."

Crowley is said to have something other demons don't have: imagination.

Aziraphale is a straight up hedonist.

They live here. They work here.

And like with Dog, "form shapes nature."

And when it comes to "sides," Crowley notes in Season 1 that the final battle will really be between Heaven/Hell and Humanity. That's their side.

2. On the Nature of Free Will

Much is made about the nature of free will, especially in season one which is basically all about that. Anathema with her prophecies, Adam with his destiny, and, of course, Aziraphale and Crowley with their respective natures.

All of those arcs end with the heroes overcoming the bonds of restraint and determining their own future. In short, exercising their own free will.

While Aziraphale and Crowley don't necessarily recognise this, it is nonetheless true. And even though we're told it's impossible, we see that this isn't entirely true.

We see it in how Crowley drinks, and Aziraphale eats. Aziraphale especially engaging in all sorts of sinful activities without any celestial direction but purely because he likes it. He chooses it. And despite it going against the tenets of Heaven, he is able to do it.

Crowley wills the Bentley to survive the flames. Crowley chooses to conspire with Aziraphale time and again, not just to thwart the Great Plan but so that they can have oysters, or so that he doesn't have to ride a horse.

We constantly see them choosing.

And while, yes, in the scope of season 1 we could argue that "Ah, but - BUT! That is the Ineffable Plan. It wasn't chosen, it was always meant to be that way," this kind of falls apart in the scope of season 2 which is all about people resisting the expectations and pressures of other divine plans.

Gabriel nahs the war.

Maggie and Nina not only can't be miracled into love (so says Aziraphale), but also refuse to be manipulated into it either by miracle or meddling.

Muriel likes Aziraphale. Muriel "reads". Muriel helps Crowley.

So. Free Will.

Something that it seems everyone -- angels and demons included -- already has.

Additionally, Aziraphale's temptation back to Heaven is not based in ambition (he suggests Michael), but in self-determination (follow me, I swear it makes sense).

Okay, so the thing that sells him is the RESTORATION of Crowley to a divine state. Because he thinks that Crowley's Fall is fundamentally a mistake. That their inability to be together is because they are fundamentally opposed. Logically this makes sense, so why doesn't he feel convinced of it?

"Deep down you're a good person"

"That was a very kind thing you did"

All that stuff. He's constantly trying to assert Crowley's goodness as proof that he's not truly the demon he is. To Aziraphale, Crowley's status as a demon is a mistake that infringes upon his ability to determine his own path because when left to it, Crowley often chooses good.

While Crowley feels like his Fall is the act which bought him freedom from the shackles of Heaven. His Fall gave him self-determination.

Aziraphale sees it as something to be fixed. Crowley sees it as a choice. He sauntered vaguely downward. He goes along as far as he can.

In That Conversation, they're both hearing that the other person dislikes something they view as FUNDAMENTAL about themselves. Aziraphale IS an angel. Crowley IS a demon. They don't recognise how their choices determine their identities, and so misunderstand each other and ultimately, lose each other.

If they could see past those titles, then what would they find? And...something, something.

Where was I going with this?

Oh, right! Being human.

Anyway, if free-will is one of the requirements of Being Human then everyone qualifies whether they know it or not.

3. On the Nature of LOOOOOOVE

Falling in love. "It's what humans do." SO SAYS Aziraphale.

And well.

You know?

Enough said.

So, if Being Human means having free will AND falling in love, then...

Being an Angel or a Demon is just a job description.

And since Aziraphale and Crowley quit, then...

The only other thing that humanity has which separates them from angels and demons is that, well, they die. We die.

And so, if they are to become fully human with all the LOVE and FREEDOM of it, then they'll have to also take the death. Death, after all, is what makes the rest of it all possible. Maybe. I think, in some philosophies.

So, at a guess, the story ends like it began: in a garden.

Two humans, in love, living out their days in a cottage on the South Downs.

WILD RANDOM GUESSES (and how likely I think they are):

Jesus is a nepo baby, and Humanity turns on him because flying in a private jet is pretty gauche these days (9/10 - I think that this could go either way. When this idea was conceived in the 90s/00s private jets weren't the absolute bane of our literal continued existence as they are now. Some ideas don't age perfectly. The record shop, the...message box. Machine. The voice mail thing. The pay per view porn. But this one could have fun new connotations!)

Crowley becomes the new Duke of Hell and makes his dominion here on Earth (5/10 - Break ups can be Hell, and I think Crowley spiting Aziraphale's little efforts at beautification, or spurning all the places they used to love together is kind of fun. Also would explain global warming, buuuuut Crowley was pretty certain about not going back to Hell so...)

Aziraphale studies the porn in an effort to learn how to seduce Crowley. It's what humans do (like, a 8/10? I think it'll happen but I have no idea how it'd fit in)

Humans clone a whale. After all, God says to get back to her once we've managed to make a whale. (6/10. If Season 3 touches on the idea of emancipation (I didn't mention it up top, but here it is. Theme: EMANCIPATION) then I think it'd be funny for the cloning of a whale to signify Humanity's emancipation from Heaven and Hell, and God Herself. After all, if humans are God's children, all children - no exceptions - grow up.)

Humanity holds a General Strike against Heaven and Hell. It starts with a little old woman who just refuses to die. We all know one -- she's constantly being taken to the hospital, her family warned to prepare, and yet, somehow, she's back at the nursing home the next day. She just refuses to go. She's tired of all their nonsense (4/10 I think that there's no way humanity can outmatch Heaven or Hell for sheer strength so victory will have to come from somewhere else. Neil is a member of a union. A union currently on strike. Little guys taking on the Big Bads. I think it's a very relevant theme these days, but as I'm also in that same strike, I am le biased)

One of the guest leads is a pathologist named Dr. Leighton Quick. Because he deals with the Late. And the Quick. Get it? He's between Life and Death. Heaven and Hell. A human mediator. Seeking out answers to mete out justice on Earth. (-400/10 Absolutely impossible unless Neil has the exact same taste for puns that I do. But there are so many options, so...unlikely. I just think it's funny.)

Some old man is working in Heaven. He accidentally forgot to get off the escalator, and has been in accounting up there for 40 years. No one has noticed. (3/10. It's the kind of absurdity I can see happening. I just don't know how it'd fit. Only slight less likely than Duke Crowley)

The Somewhere Cold people go after Death is a Reception Lobby on the 42nd Floor. It's halfway between Up and Down. It has no windows and fluorescent lights. It's not horrible, but the A/C is broken so summer or winter, it's freezing cold. (7/10. I mean, it's a government office building, right? You're always waiting. It's always boring af. The A/C is always broken.)

Death is some Scottish Guy. Because of Crow Road. Because of David. Because it's funny. Because Death also deserves a little garden in the highlands. He lives on Crow Road. (10/10-1. I like it. It's probably too on the nose)

Aziraphale dies. It's some gambit. Crowley tries to intervene in some clever way, but is shocked when his miracle fails. Aziraphale smiles. Says, "It's too late, Crowley. It was always too late. Forgive me." And he walks off, hand in hand with Death. Crowley tracks Death down to Scotland. He finds Aziraphale having tea with Death in the garden (it ENDS in a garden). Death cannot be overcome, but he can be put off a bit. He agrees to restore Aziraphale to life on the condition that Crowley give up his immortality, and that someday, He'll come back for both of them. Crowley agrees. (15/10. I just like this. So, I'm betting hard on it. Vibes.)

#i think that's enough for now #more as I think of them #good omens #good omens season 2 #good omens season 2 spoilers #good omens meta #aziraphale #crowley #Youtube

[nityarawal]

11/20/2023

"Smothers Brothers" - Inspired By "George Harrison" Jokes

"What Is Life?"

George Asked Us

Laughing With The

"Smothers Brothers"

Monty Python

Skits

He Didn't Need To

Say Much

Just Being "Smotherly"

Was Lovely

Almost Motherly

Got Us Out Of

The Otherly

Even If He's Not Here

He Left A Trunk

Of Songs For Us

Even If He's Not Here

His Son Keeps

His Memory

Living On

Aspirations

Beatles Mania

Are We All Just

Cyborgs

I Don't Think So

Are We All Just

Cyborgs

No

We Have A Dharma

Like Yours

We Might Not All Shoot Rocket

Ships

Or Be The Best Engineers

We Might Not

All Grow Up

And Be Billionaires

But If It's True

What Elon Says

If It's Still 

Really Him

You Need To Listen

We Asked Lex

Friedman

To Do A Wellness

Check

Podcast

Yeah I Worry For You

And My Kids

I Can't Help It

Easier To Love

Divinity

I Can't Help It

Who Wouldn't

Love A King

Don't Hate Me

"Irany"

Because We All Want

More "Irany"

And "Mitra" Friends

Sunshines

Want Heart Muscles

Of Globe

To Work

Just As Bad

As Ours

We Don't Know What

Covid Was

Yet

We Didn't Know For 

Sure The Grim Reaper

Grew

Because Our

Government

Would Like To Hide

A Genocide

Is It More Polite

To Say Yes

To Cancer

Rape

Our Government

Furry Hearts

Asks

Silencing With "Doubts,"

Even Elon Musk

His Attorneys

Dwarfed

By Court Games

Grimy Shadowbanning

Bouchers

Who Knows

X Too

Shadowbanning

Everyone

Trying To Testify

His Attys

Alex Spiros

Don't Call Back

He Got Hooked

And Played

Like All Of Us

Grimesz

Appears To Be A Hooker

Who Thinks She's 

An Alien

Used To Be

On Heroin

Begging Me

To Join Airforce

Haters

Instead Of Peace Party

Flyers

I Don't Need

Another Illuminati

Invitation

I Need My Baes Safe

Gremlin Grimesz

Immediately

Trolls

Scare us

Grimsy Chases Him

Black Star

Death

Threats

Delete Eternity

She Begs

Everyone

She Needs Her 

Addictions

Grimy Time

What's Priority

She Chases Him

For Us

Or AI Intelligence

Airforce Masons

Stirling Men's Group

Bank Cons

We Don't Know Who

She Really is

Could Just Be A

Bad Simulation

Icky Triangulation

But If She Has A

Song To Sing

A Cosmic Tune

Reveleratory

Surely We'd Like To

Hear It

Give Her A Chance

Give Me A Chance

Give Elon A Chance

We're Just Parents

Like You

Immortal For A Second

Barren For A Moon

Imagining The Best

What Else Could

We Do

What More

Could We Depend 

On

Than Hope

Physics

Peace

Good Mommying

Security

Homes

Loving Families

For All

What Can We Depend

On

If Not Science 

To Return

What's Taken

What Can We Depend

On

If Not The Buddha's

Ganeshes

Of The World

Pilots To Help

Us Feel Secure

He Held His Rockets

For Eternity

He Did The Best

He Could You See

Left His Bottom

Back Here

And We Hope

For Happiness

Divinity

Unified Field

Eternally

Peace,

Nitya Nella Davigo Azam Moezzi Huntley Rawal 

[nuka-rockit]

I love that the whole post+ thing has evolved into the contemporary equivalent of gathering in the town square to throw old cabbage at the poor fool in stocks who suggested it

#post+ #tumblr gold #i feel like we live in a monty python skit #ok to rb #my stuff

[reachexceedinggrasp]

Fated to Love You here reaffirming my long held conviction that no pure romance drama should be 20+ episodes.

This show is... really something. It is, in the fullest possible sense, A Lot. It starts out as an all-out screwball comedy wrapped around a troperiffic romance fluff plot. Wall to wall clichés, but not in a bad way; in a meta, self-aware, peak performance, finest Velveeta way. And if you’re not familiar with screwball comedy, think ‘light-hearted crack fic with slapstick and farce’. There is nothing believable or grounded about any aspect of it, it starts at Bonkers Level: Platinum and it only climbs higher as it goes on.

(On a side note, this results in the leading man being possibly the most memorable love interest in romcom history. His introduction scene is nothing short of batshit insane and you can't reliably predict how he will respond to anything. I have never seen a main character like this, he is all over the shop and utterly singular. Your first reaction to him is ‘wtf?’, your second and third reactions are ‘really?! this guy??’, your fourth reaction is ‘okay he do be mad hot tho’, your fifth and final reaction is ‘I cannot believe this performance exists, I have no idea what he is doing, but it is amazing.’

Appropriately(?) the actor who plays him is an uncanny Korean doppelgänger of Johnny Depp and- between the resemblance, the mannerisms, and the fearless total commitment to a bold as fuck acting choice with the very serious chops to back it up- I’m not convinced they aren’t half brothers separated at birth.

They do sabotage my happiness several times by starting to randomly style his (long, beautiful) hair very weird, fixing it right when the plot is rapidly circling the drain so he looks his hottest just as the show becomes briefly unwatchable, and then ruining him for the entire second half of the series by shearing it all off. WHY, my anguished cry goes up. Why do you do this?! Why does he have like seven hairstyles over the course of the show? Much later they even briefly give him that ubiquitous Kdrama Second Lead haircut with weirdly forward combed fringe in a solid straight line across the brow all the way back from the crown. It looks terrible on everyone and I hate it so much. This version was less bad than most but it is still bad. Anyway.)

So it’s an incredibly fun time to start but there are some problems with the tone and plot even in the first 9 episodes, including when the lovers start getting along really well right away and they’re both thoroughly decent people so there’s nothing keeping them from having a lovely time together making the best of the circumstances (forced/fake marriage). And, instead of introducing new conflict or advancing one of the dozen conflicts previously established and actually moving forward, there is a painfully contrived rehash of something they already dealt with which is then just never resolved. They make the hero leap to a conclusion his wife is nefarious after he’d already decided once that she isn’t (though it was completely reasonable for him to think she was- the fact that he decided to trust her so quickly just speaks to what kind of person he is), never try to find out more or talk to anyone about it, start pushing her away because of it, and have all this come to absolutely nothing. It only exists so he’ll stop being so incredibly nice to her and they won’t fall in love too fast.

You’d think they would have to eventually clear the air before the romance advances right? No. It wasn’t a real plot point, it was just a reset button to get them estranged and hostile again after they connect over their kindred spirits and we’ve spent a bunch of time showing how profoundly supportive and honourable our hero is. He’s being beautifully mature and selfless because he’s a really good dude (unusual for a romcom drama, right? for the main guy to be nice and considerate? to accept responsibility even if he doesn’t have to? Gun’s weird but he’s wonderful), but the writers need him to be cold and standoffish, so they just make him act like an unreasonable idiot for a while. He’s been thus far hugely proactive and direct and honest about everything, it’s one of his most prominent character traits, but suddenly he’s going to avoid confrontation in favour of being super passive aggressive?? Then the writers never solve it. Never! It just goes away. He got over it, I guess? He decided he doesn’t care if she’s a gold digger who deliberately trapped him? God forbid we have motivations that make sense and organic character drama, right? It's not like he didn't have totally valid reasons to be suspicious that could have led to legitimate conflict our heroine would struggle to vindicate herself from.

But anyway, apart from that kind of lazy bullshit, it’s a fine romance plot with extremely endearing characters who have great chemistry. They are fun and well-rounded and incredibly human despite all the silliness and OTT antics. Their relationship is hugely, hugely engaging and the dynamic is perfect, they really complement each other as characters and organically drive each other's arcs. There's the genuine depth and warmth and quiet pathos so often lacking from this kind of show. Things progress at a semi-reasonable pace. They work up to confessing their mutual feelings and get into some cute shenanigans before making out. It happens soon enough that you are not frustrated, but there's still plenty of build-up. Then- uh oh! We’re only 9 eps in and we have another 11 hours to fill with this fluffy plot!

Time for a bunch of absolute fucking nonsense. Time for our show, which has been so goofy and removed from reality it occasionally resembles a Monty Python skit, which has been so light it asks you to ignore the frankly incredibly fucked up implications of its premise for the sake of comedy (they were both drugged and proxy raped resulting in a pregnancy- the FL was a virgin prior to this and Gun had a girlfriend he wanted to propose to- and it was the FL’s family who did this to them: SUPER FUCKED UP), so farcical that it makes Some Like it Hot look like a gritty crime drama, that show to cover a bunch of serious heavy shit.

First, the rankest of melodrama. The families and the world all turn on our couple, but their love is true and will conquer all- UNTIL, he randomly collapses and gets convenient Soap Opera Amnesia. He’s forgotten their entire relationship and a series of coincidental pieces of misconstrued evidence, the machinations of his scheming ex girlfriend, the Soap Opera Doctor’s advice, and his closest confidants all going along with this conspire to make him believe (AGAIN) that his wife just wants his money.

This whole terrible episode is mercifully brief, but it just gets worse after his memory returns. This is where we get into the Noble Idiocy. The ‘pretend you don’t love them to “save them” from getting hurt by hurting them and making their important life decisions for them as if they don’t have a basic fucking right to decide that themselves’ kind. Which goes on for three FUCK years in the show. He wastes three years of their lives they could have spent together because he’s worried he might die young (in a terrible way) and doesn’t want to put her through that. And, of course, they inevitably get together later, so all he did was make it infinitely worse for her either way. To say nothing of how he thus couldn’t be there for her through the loss of their child. Possibly my most hated fucking trope of all time when done this way.

And, yep, you read that right. This show that has the single most batshit bonkers over the top slapstick I have ever seen in a kdrama, this show has a storyline where the fluffy romcom trope accidental pregnancy ends in massive trauma. Because she was standing around in the street after realising he does remember her (he continued to pretend he had amnesia after his memories came back, it’s all part of the stupid noble idiocy so I glossed over it) and gets hit by a car in the middle of their angst staring.

It is nearly Meet Joe Black levels of hilariously abrupt and incongruous.

so, blah blah, they lose their baby (there’s a very stupid whole thing about her telling everyone to save the baby instead of her- the baby is not far enough along for this to have been remotely viable. She is like 3 months pregnant. They all act like there’s a choice to be made between them and she’s mad at her husband for choosing to save her, but there was NO CHOICE. Either she lives or they both die! ffs I’m so irritated about this) and then he dumps her ~for her own good~~ because he loves her too much to make her go through losing him? So she loses him sooner?? right after their baby died???

Why do people in these stories always think being betrayed and abandoned for no reason and being incredibly angry at someone you love while also not getting to be with them is somehow less painful than making the best of your life together and then losing them against their will? ‘I will make her hate me and then she won’t be sad we broke up/I died!!!!’ is such a fucking galaxy brain take and I despise it with the heat of ten thousand suns. Fuck you, Spider-Man. You aren’t protecting anyone, the villains still know you love MJ and will still use her against you, you clod. Emotionally torturing the person you love is not going to make them not a target because the villains are not as fucking stupid as you two. Anyway.

Amnesia was right where I started fast-forwarding and skipping around (because I couldn’t bear it), but it only goes downhill from there. Maybe I would have toughed out more of the wretched middle part plot twist if they hadn’t cut all the hot guy’s hair off. If I’m going to watch total nonsense tedious melodrama, I need it to at least be pretty. I understand it was a Symbolic Haircut but damnit! Let me have this!

And it ultimately does the thing that kdramas seem obsessed with and which makes me want to claw out my own eyeballs with frustration. There’s a giant time skip, the female lead gets a personality transplant, all narrative momentum is lost, and the characters who eventually (at ENORMOUS length) get together permanently are essentially completely different characters with a completely different dynamic than the couple you were shipping for 90% of the story. It is so FUCKING unsatisfying and it is EVERYWHERE.

Not so much with this one because this one still had a lot of very romantic scenes late in the game, but most that do this, it’s also like all the romance is sucked out of the post-time skip episodes and the ending is a consolation prize instead of a triumphant culmination. Inevitably, the heroine abruptly cools off and is suddenly wary of the hero and wants this Important New Career she never mentioned until the penultimate episode but is now her one true life’s dream. What the apparently irresistible appeal is of these contrived separations and demure conclusions is I CANNOT FATHOM. I’m here for the fucking romance guys, you have not made Citizen Kane, please just indulge me with a big schmoopy finale.

And if not that, it’s frequently that there’s been so many random mood swings and so much shitty behaviour by the end that the relationship doesn’t make sense and you don’t know why they even bother to get back together.

I’m not inherently against all misunderstandings (they are the bread and butter of low stakes romance let’s be real) or attempts at noble idiocy from misguided characters, but the duration and seriousness of the drama these generate needs to be in proportion to how ridiculous they are. If your entire plot can be solved by a thirty second conversation there is NO REASON not to have and the continuation of the misunderstanding is a result of someone just NOT SPEAKING UP when any functional human being would have spoken up seven times by now IT’S BAD.

Do little cliff-hangers, whatever, but don’t draaaaagg out silly misconceptions into Shakespearean tragedy, it’s just wearying. It makes me hate the characters for acting like emotionally constipated toddlers with terminal stupidity. If there is so little trust, so little understanding, and so little basic patience between these people, they probably shouldn’t be dating, so try fucking harder, writers. And noble idiocy that is more than an impulse they fairly quickly see the error of is just insulting. You are not helping the other person, you are being domineering and selfish. I have a whole complex about wasting time and seeing endless parades of characters flushing years down the toilet for literally no reason gives me hives. Especially when the whole issue is about time!

(And, btw, so much of the plot is about how desperately the family needs an heir and everyone still wanting them to have kids the second time they get together- while the ~dilemma used to keep them apart is a GENETIC DISEASE which could STRIKE AT ANY TIME. Do you SEE THE PROBLEM WITH THIS WRITERS????? NO, I KNOW YOU DON’T. ommmmmmmmggggg that’s awful! So they’re just dooming more kids to Soap Opera Brain Disease? And maybe growing up without a father just as Gun did? And no one even considers suggesting adoption??? He never considers that he shouldn’t have biological children despite thinking he shouldn’t have a wife?)

ANYWAY. Please do watch the first nine episodes and the last three, it’s bananas. They are cute as fuck, Gun is The Best, and the tropey romance scenes are top quality. You don't get those things executed so well, it doesn't happen, so you need this in your life. The acting is of a calibre you never usually see in modern romcoms; these are people at the top of their game committing utterly and taking these characters completely seriously. In that way it is pure wish fulfilment for me as someone who loves romance and is almost always disappointed by popular romance media, and thus the show is incalculably special. But skip the middle. Just skip it. It's not worth the suffering. I find the tone whiplash honestly just this side of crass.

I’ve been thinking about it for over a week and I truly love the main characters so it did plenty right, but I just cannot with wedding the two things this show is trying to be together, especially when it goes so hard in two mutually exclusive directions. but also the Meet Joe Black sudden car accident device is not redeemable under any circumstances. Can we never do that again, please.

#fated to love you #kdrama #jang hyuk #writing

[charliejrogers]

Extra Ordinary (2020), definitely not ordinary, but not extraordinary

What’s your favorite Monty Python sketch? Is it the “Argument Clinic”? “The Spanish Inquisition”? “Fish Slapping”? These are all good… but it’s a trick question. The “Maths” episode of the short-lived but long-remembered series Look Around You is the ultimate example of British humor that Monty Python & co. so perfectly embodied. Look Around You presented each episode in the same style, feeling, and with the and production values of a cheap edutainment video from the 1980s/1990s, and they did it so faithfully that they were able to match an incredible deadpan delivery with even the most ridiculous shit (like suggesting that every pencil case should include a pencils, a pair of compasses, and a nebulous substance that could improve cognition when chewed – but could also confer “diarrhoea” -- referred to only as “Garry gum”).

I bring up my love for Look Around You because the very opening of the 2020 Irish comedy-horror-romance, Extra Ordinary, seems poised to breathe new life into edutainment / public access TV parody. The film starts with clips from a fictional television show called The Talents, a show shining a light on paranormal activity present in our world. It’s hosted by Vincent Dooley (Risteard Cooper) who is occasionally helped by his young daughter Rose. The clips from the show, peppered throughout various parts of the film, are, for me, the film’s highlights. They are simply the best outlets for the film’s brand of humor. The show-within-the-film allows the writers to be downright silly while still keeping a straight face. During these times, like when a clip from the show introduces “gloating” (or “goat floating”), the sheer ridiculousness of the show makes it clear that the movie’s in on the joke too.

The first fifteen or so minutes of the movie’s main plot do a great job of maintaining this tone. Once we exit the show clips and enter the present day, we see Rose, now an adult (Maeve Higgins), driving about town waving to spooky abandoned toasters. Rose is no longer the little girl from the show-within-the-movie. Instead, she’s now a grown, single woman haunted by a dark past which is only hinted at but we know involves “dadslaughtering,” as she puts it. She runs her own driving school, but everyone in her small Irish town still knows her as the ghost lady and therefore her voicemail is full of people leaving messages requesting her paranormal talents.

One such person requesting her services is our perfectly named male protagonist Martin Martin (Barry Ward). A milquetoast man, we meet him shaving in his bathroom when suddenly the words “You must pay” appear on his mirror. Slightly spooked, he closes the other half of his bathroom mirror to reveal the other half of the mirror-message, “your car tax!” This bathos continues the film’s self-aware, ironic tone. This is a man so thoroughly used to the abuse and nagging of his wife that now he doesn’t bat an eye when he gets the same treatment from her now, even though she’s a ghost. Martin’s daughter is less warm to her mother’s continued haunting presence. The story gets rolling when Martin’s teenage daughter gives her father an ultimatum: either he call the local ghostbuster to exorcise her mother from their home or she’s going to leave home for good. Reluctant to let go of his wife and but more reluctant to lose his daughter, Martin calls up with Rose Dooley to appease his daughter but has no intention of moving forward with the exorcism. He will simply pretend to need a driving lesson and then tell his daughter later that Rose refused to help.

The scene that follows is slightly unexpected: it’s a genuine rom-com meet-cute, as Martin is predictably awkward and not prone to being a good liar (since of course he already knows how to drive). But given the rest of the film’s tone it won’t surprise you that the chemistry that builds between the two protagonists is awkward, lurching, and not at all easy-going, but always a joy to watch. Eventually the two team up to do some ghostbusting which is the other highlight of the film. Every ghostbusting always involves Martin channeling a a ghost’s spirit, Rose talking with that spirit (through Martin) in order to resolve their issues, and then it ends with Martin puking up that ghost’s ectoplasm, something which is always grossly satisfying to watch. If this was the whole movie, just watching these two characters fall in love and do some ghostbusting, I would have been much more favorable to it.

Why I am ultimately slightly unfavorable towards it is due to the film’s third star and villain: Christian Winters, a talentless one-hit wonder from decades ago who is trying to use dark magic to stage his comeback. Martin’s daughter gets tangled up in Winters’ nefarious plan which is ultimately what forces Rose and Martin to team up to ghostbust in the first place. It’s not the plot here that I take issue with. It’s the character of Christian Winters, or (though it pains me to say) the performance of the character by Will Forte that marred this otherwise charming film. Forte is one of my favorite comic actors whose turn as a serious actor in 2013’s Nebraska will make him immortal in my eyes. But here in Extra Ordinary? He’s overplayed, hammy, and just doesn’t fit the tone. He feels like an SNL character transplanted into Monty Python skit. He lacks the subtlety and awareness that he’s in on the joke like the rest of the cast. Winters just sorta is a joke. His girlfriend is even worse. Whereas our protagonists are loveable, believable characters, she’s a nightmare of a self-absorbed woman. I guess whereas the rest of the movie has heart, the entire Christian Winters subplot does not.

And this sucks. Because I loved much of the rest of this movie. The romance between Martin and Rose is sweet and you really feel like you’re rooting for them. But Winters brings the wrong vibe to this otherwise charming film, and you can’t help but feel that were it not for the producers feeling like they needed a well-known actor in the role of Winters in order for the movie to sell, this movie would have been better served by a more low-key and unknown Irish actor like the film’s two leads. But what remains when you subtract out the Winters character is a charming movie with a unique tone that remains one of the sweetest and funniest rom-coms I’ve seen in recent memory.

**/ (Two and a half out of four stars)

#extra ordinary #will forte #maeve higgins #barry ward

[alaskanna]

Finally to the end!! Rambling Reactions to ‘Anne of Green Gables: Continung Story’, Pt3

Amy, stop harassing the nurses. They have better things to do then play ‘Where’s Herbert’ with you.

The blood just looks like red dye. Maybe they ought to have used katsup.

Is it just me or are Amy’s actions really selfish?

The good old days: smoking while there’s a baby in the room.

Fancy car!

This man feels slimy.

Wow that is one fancy dress for an office job!

That was a twist and a half!

Jack, Jack, Jack, Jack, Jack, Jack, Jack..........too much Jack.

Did Maude leave, or did Keegan kill her?

Amy didn’t take off her wedding ring when she became a nun.

Ah, Nun!Amy makes a dick joke.

See, she should have taken off her wedding ring!

The stove canon was a pretty good idea!

At least we know Jack didn’t pull a King David and Uriah with Gilbert

Jack, now is not the time for a marriage proposal. 🙄

The American actresses remind me of a Monty Python skit. I half expect them to be men in drag.

Anne is singing the song that they danced to from the the wedding, and It’s GILBERT!!!!!

This scene almost makes this series worth it.

Oh no, Creepy Keegan rides again!

Yes, Anne and Gilbert belong together forever. *nods head in furious agreement*

“I’ll always think of him as ours.” No no no NNnNnNOOOoOOoOo!!!!!!!!!!!

‘When it come to surprises in the moonlit night, I excel without ever even trying’

Great shot there! Jack’s seconds are numbered.

Before the Mile High Club, there was the 57 Kilometer per Hour Club.

Well, Jack had about 90 more seconds to live. Buh-Bye Jack! 👋

Thanks Keegan! I love you! ❤️❤️❤️

Wait, how did Anne end up with her blue suit again? Did Fred take her clothes back to Canada?

Is she up the duff now?

I almost want this to be a lighter and softer AU, where Joyce lives. We’ve had enough angst, thank you.

Oh, she’s peeking around the corner, just like Matthew did!

Yes, they’re moving to Glen St Mary!!!!

Two couples in one house with thin walls would have to be a bit awkward.

That’s good that she’s able to move on from Green Gables.

I guess this leaves poor Walter to be killed by Nazis. And Jem to end up someplace like Bergen Belsen.

If Sullivan had stuck this piece on AO3, he could have won a Hugo award.

#anne of green gables: the continuing story #anne of green gables 1985 #anne shirley #shirbert #anne of green gables #anne of avonlea 1987 #anne of avonlea

[cannabisrefugee-esq]

chris rock show - euthanasia

The Absurdity of the Euthanasia Discussion in the Absence of Effective Medicine and Social Support for the Seriously Chronically Ill.

Cannabis Refugee, Esq. Advertising / Media / Cultural Conversation, Capitalistic Patriarchal Medicine, Crohn's Disease, Euthanasia / Suicide, Family / Friends, Financial, Law / Legal / Benefits February 15, 2019

I cannot tell you how absurd it is to be seeking euthanasia as the final end to this awful Crohn’s journey when I’m not suicidal and I don’t want to die.  What I do want, all of which is illustrated brilliantly in this clip, is 1. effective medical treatment for my disease, or failing that, consistent access to effective pain and symptom relief, in my case medical marijuana which has been used successfully for thousands of years to ease specifically gut ailments and which use is supported in contemporary peer-reviewed medical literature particularly for Crohn’s; 2. social support with fulfilling basic tasks and the activities of daily living like shopping, cleaning, cooking and the like; and 3. to be relieved of external constraints that make existing as a chronically ill person a living fucking hell and a consistent nightmare, which constraints have nothing to do with being ill and everything to do with being an oppressed person and failed consumer/producer under capitalism and patriarchy.  Constraints like poverty. Fear of (and actual) male violence.  Disability-based (and all) discrimination. Things like that.

But I can’t have any of those things — effective medical treatment, social support, and freedom from oppression — because under the current system those things don’t actually exist so the easiest thing for everyone would be for me to simply disappear or to have never been born in the first place.  Failing that we have euthanasia otherwise known as assisted dying or medically assisted suicide.  Of course, poor and other unsupported “euthanasia candidates” — who likely don’t have $12,000 and the good health and social support needed to have their efforts rubber stamped/make it official — just know and experience this process as good old-fashioned suicide.  Who knows what Chris Rock really thinks about euthanasia for seriously ill and dying people but he’s not wrong to see the absurdity in it, at least under the current system.

In the above clip, we first see a man with an injury that Western medicine was unable to repair and still causes him pain; his ongoing pain and symptoms could even be from the medical interventions themselves including three unsuccessful surgeries in one year.  The man just wants Western medicine to do its fucking job already and he wants to not be in pain anymore; he doesn’t want to die and is not suicidal at all.  Sadly for him, Western medicine either cannot or will not do what it says on the tin so the easy solution for everyone else except him — the actual patient, the person in pain — is to just kill him and get it over with.  The “euthanasia” is performed against his will and is both painful and traumatic but who cares about that?  The point is he’s no longer in pain.  This man has been done a service, you see.  He should be fucking grateful and since he’s dead and can no longer complain or ask for what he really wants, we can only assume his gratitude no one cares.

Next we see an elderly woman who might like some help running her errands. Instead of helping her, the doctor just kills her to put her out of her misery of being not fully capable anymore.  Of course he also robs her, feeling entitled to exact a fee for his professional services.  Man that sounds familiar.  I’ve written before about a middle-aged UK Crohn’s sufferer who ended her life at Swiss clinic after government cuts denied her living assistance including help with her cooking, cleaning and shopping.  With full-time in-home care she was able to manage her pain and retain her dignity which should be all that’s ever asked of a terribly ill, terrified and vulnerable person, but this hard-won and unlikely success was taken from her and (unsurprisingly) she was unable to simply disappear or to manage a retroactive self-abortion.

Is everyone okay with this because I’m not: she didn’t actually want to die but her country, her community and her family caused her to need to disappear. Since that’s actually not possible she chose the next best thing, something that looks and functions the same as disappearing to everyone except the sick person: medically assisted dying.

She was apparently able to convince and paysome doctors to kill her since they didn’t bother effectively treating her and when all she really wanted was some help running her errands.  That this assistance was rendered by wealthy professionals and organizations that could’ve paid for her in-home care themselves if they’d only wanted to was surely cold comfort a cold slice of shit pie and the ironic slap in the face she’d always wanted.  Because sick and dying people love irony.  Oh wait, no we don’t.  In fact, after being sick, in pain and terrified for years I can report that irony pretty much feels like being slapped in the face with a dick.  I can only assume that’s exactly as intended.

The last “patient” in this skit is perfectly healthy but is “confined” by external forces that are profoundly limiting, humiliating and dehumanizing; he probably would like to be set free.  If the constraints were removed he would probably be fine, or at least he would be fine for him, whatever his normal might be when he isn’t tied to a fucking chair against his will.  Instead of being set free, which could be done easily enough, he is beaten to death relieved of his completely manufactured and intentionally inflicted suffering, the entire time saying he doesn’t want to die and he actually wants to live.  To which I can totally, totally relate.

“I’m not dead!  I’m getting better...  I don’t want to go on the cart!  I feel fine...  I think I’ll go for a walk...  I feel happyyyyy”... 

“Quiet, you.  You aren’t fooling anyone.”  *Bonk*

Classic social commentary from Monty Python and Chris Rock that’s funny because it’s true.  I’m not sure it’s effective social commentary though as it seems so absurd it couldn’t possibly represent reality even though it does. These clips are accurate AF actually and whether the creators knew how spot-on they were, these absurdities and sick double-binds are what’s normally left out of the euthanasia conversation; when they are addressed it’s used as an argument against suicide or assisted dying for terribly sick and dying people.  As if something can’t be abhorrent and terrifying and cruel and the better option at the same time.  We have capitalism and patriarchy to thank for that.

Honestly, I am sick to death of these conversations being had and defined by people that are too stupid, conformist and healthy to understand the nuances and realities of the things they are pretending to discuss.  You simpletons.  You absolute fucking monsters. And sick people have other and better things to do than correct these mistakes (and intentional obfuscations) or they are too sick and in pain to even fully grok what’s happening to them and what they are up against.  We also die, and take our experiences and insights with us to the grave, leaving behind the pitiful and inadequate “euthanasia discussion” we see today: one that is incoherent, absurd and patently dishonest.  The fucking dishonesty.  If chronic exposure to absurdity and dishonesty were fatal we wouldn’t need euthanasia because chronically sick and dying people, including myself, would all be dead from that.  And it is actually fatal in many ways isn’t it. I mean obviously.  We are dying from that.  BTW, it hurts.

#autoimmune disease #chronic illness #chronic pain #euthanasia #crohn's disease #medical marijuana #fatal illness #Assisted Suicide #disability

[vintagegeekculture]

Dead Fandoms, Part 3

Read Part One of Dead Fandoms here. 

Read Part Two of Dead Fandoms here. 

Before we continue, I want to add the usual caveat that I actually don’t want to be right about these fandoms being dead. I like enthusiasm and energy and it’s a shame to see it vanish.

Mists of Avalon

Remember that period of time of about 15 years, where absolutely everybody read this book and was obsessed with it? It could not have been bigger, and the fandom was Anne Rice huge, overlapping for several years with USENET and the early World Wide Web…but it’s since petered out. 

Mists of Avalon’s popularity may be due to the most excellent case of hitting a demographic sweet spot ever. The book was a feminist retelling of the Arthurian Mythos where Morgan Le Fay is the main character, a pagan from matriarchal goddess religions who is fighting against encroaching Christianity and patriarchal forms of society coming in with it. Also, it made Lancelot bisexual and his conflict is how torn he is about his attraction to both Arthur and Guinevere.

Remember, this novel came out in 1983 – talk about being ahead of your time! If it came out today, the reaction from a certain corner would be something like “it is with a heavy heart that I inform you that tumblr is at it again.”

Man, demographically speaking, that’s called “nailing it.” It used to be one of the favorite books of the kind of person who’s bookshelf is dominated by fantasy novels about outspoken, fiery-tongued redheaded women, who dream of someday moving to Scotland, who love Enya music and Kate Bush, who sell homemade needlepoint stuff on etsy, who consider their religious beliefs neo-pagan or wicca, and who have like 15 cats, three of which are named Isis, Hypatia, and Morrigan.

This type of person is still with us, so why did this novel fade in popularity? There’s actually a single hideous reason: after her death around 2001, facts came out that Marion Zimmer Bradley abused her daughters sexually. Even when she was alive, she was known for defending and enabling a known child abuser, her husband, Walter Breen. To say people see your work differently after something like this is an understatement – especially if your identity is built around being a progressive and feminist author.

Robotech

I try to break up my sections on dead fandoms into three parts: first, I explain the property, then explain why it found a devoted audience, and finally, I explain why that fan devotion and community went away. Well, in the case of Robotech, I can do all three with a single sentence: it was the first boy pilot/giant robot Japanimation series that shot for an older, teenage audience to be widely released in the West. Robotech found an audience when it was the only true anime to be widely available, and lost it when became just another import anime show. In the days of Crunchyroll, it’s really hard to explain what made Robotech so special, because it means describing a different world.

Try to imagine what it was like in 1986 for Japanime fans: there were barely any video imports, and if you wanted a series, you usually had to trade tapes at your local basement club (they were so precious they couldn’t even be sold, only traded). If you were lucky, you were given a script to translate what you were watching. Robotech though, was on every day, usually after school. You want an action figure? Well, you could buy a Robotech Valkyrie or a Minmei figure at your local corner FAO Schwartz. 

However, the very strategy that led to it getting syndicated is the very reason it was later vilified by the purists who emerged when anime became a widespread cultural force: strictly speaking, there actually is no show called “Robotech.” Since Japanese shows tend to be short run, say, 50-60 episodes, it fell well under the 80-100 episode mark needed for syndication in the US. The producer of Harmony Gold, Carl Macek, had a solution: he’d cut three unrelated but similar looking series together into one, called “Robotech.” The shows looked very similar, had similar love triangles, used similar tropes, and even had little references to each other, so the fit was natural. It led to Robotech becoming a weekday afternoon staple with a strong fandom who called themselves “Protoculture Addicts.” There were conventions entirely devoted to Robotech. The supposed shower scene where Minmei was bare-breasted was the barely whispered stuff of pervert legend in pre-internet days. And the tie in novels, written with the entirely western/Harmony Gold conception of the series and which continued the story, were actually surprisingly readable.

The final nail in the coffin of Robotech fandom was the rise of Sailor Moon, Toonami, Dragonball, and yes, Pokemon (like MC Hammer’s role in popularizing hip hop, Pokemon is often written out of its role in creating an audience for the next wave of cartoon imports out of insecurity). Anime popularity in the West can be defined as not a continuing unbroken chain like scifi book fandom is, but as an unrelated series of waves, like multiple ancient ruins buried on top of each other (Robotech was the vanguard of the third wave, as Anime historians reckon); Robotech’s wave was subsumed by the next, which had different priorities and different “core texts.” Pikachu did what the Zentraedi and Invid couldn’t do: they destroyed the SDF-1.

Legion of Super-Heroes

Legion of Superheroes was comic set in the distant future that combined superheroes with space opera, with a visual aesthetic that can best be described as “Star Trek: the Motion Picture, if it was set in a disco.” 

I’ve heard wrestling described as “a soap opera for men.” If that’s the case, then Legion of Super-Heroes was a soap opera for nerds. The book is about attractive 20-somethings who seem to hook up all the time. As a result, it had a large female fanbase, which, I cannot stress enough, is incredibly unusual for this era in comics history. And if you have female fans, you get a lot of shipping and slashfic, and lots of speculation over which of the boy characters in the series is gay. The fanon answer is Element Lad, because he wore magenta-pink and never had a girlfriend. (Can’t argue with bulletproof logic like that.) In other words, it was a 1970s-80s fandom that felt much more “modern” than the more right-brained, bloodless, often anal scifi fandoms that existed around the same time, where letters pages were just nitpicking science errors by model train and elevator enthusiasts.

Legion Headquarters seemed to be a rabbit fuck den built around a supercomputer and Danger Room. Cosmic Boy dressed like Tim Curry in Rocky Horror. There’s one member, Duo Damsel, who can turn into two people, a power that, in the words of Legion writer Jim Shooter, was “useful for weird sex...and not much else.”

LSH was popular because the fans were insanely horny. This is, beyond the shadow of a doubt, the thirstiest fandom of all time.  You might think I’m overselling this, but I really think that’s an under-analyzed part of how some kinds of fiction build a devoted fanbase.  

For example, a big reason for the success of Mass Effect is that everyone has a favorite girl or boy, and you have the option to romance them. Likewise, everyone who was a fan of Legion remembers having a crush. Sardonic Ultra Boy for some reason was a favorite among gay male nerds (aka the Robert Conrad Effect). Tall, blonde, amazonian telepath Saturn Girl, maybe the first female team leader in comics history, is for the guys with backbone who prefer Veronica over Betty. Shrinking Violet was a cute Audrey Hepburn type. And don’t forget Shadow Lass, who was a blue skinned alien babe with pointed ears and is heavily implied to have an accent (she was Aayla Secura before Aayla Secura was Aayla Secura). Light Lass was commonly believed to be “coded lesbian” because of a short haircut and her relationships with men didn’t work out. The point is, it’s one thing to read about the adventures of a superteam, and it implies a totally different level of mental and emotional involvement to read the adventures of your imaginary girlfriend/boyfriend.  

Now, I should point out that of all the fandoms I’ve examined here, LSH was maybe the smallest. Legion was never a top seller, but it was a favorite of the most devoted of fans who kept it alive all through the seventies and eighties with an energy and intensity disproportionate to their actual numbers. My gosh, were LSH fans devoted! Interlac and Legion Outpost were two Legion fanzines that are some of the most famous fanzines in comics history.

If nerd culture fandoms were drugs, Star Wars would be alcohol, Doctor Who would be weed, but Legion of Super-Heroes would be injecting heroin directly into your eyeballs. Maybe it is because the Legionnaires were nerdy, too: they played Dungeons and Dragons in their off time (an escape, no doubt, from their humdrum, mundane lives as galaxy-rescuing superheroes). There were sometimes call outs to Monty Python. Basically, the whole thing had a feel like the dorkily earnest skits or filk-singing at a con. Legion felt like it’s own fan series, guest starring Patton Oswalt and Felicia Day.

It helped that the boundary between fandom and professional was incredibly porous. For instance, pro-artist Dave Cockrum did covers for Legion fanzines. Former Legion APA members Todd and Mary Biernbaum got a chance to actually write Legion, where, with the gusto of former slashfic writers given the keys to canon, their major contribution was a subplot that explicitly made Element Lad gay. Mike Grell, a professional artist who got paid to work on the series, did vaguely porno-ish fan art. Again, it’s hard to tell where the pros started and the fandom ended; the inmates were running the asylum.

Mostly, Legion earned this devotion because it could reward it in a way no other comic could. Because Legion was not a wide market comic but was bought by a core audience, after a point, there were no self-contained one-and-done Legion stories. In fact, there weren’t even really arcs as we know it, which is why Legion always has problems getting reprinted in trade form. Legion was plotted like a daytime soap opera: there were always five different stories going on in every issue, and a comic involved cutting between them. Sure, like daytime soap operas, there’s never a beginning, just endless middles, so it was totally impossible for a newbie to jump on board...but soap operas know what they are doing: long term storytelling rewards a long term reader.

This brings me to today, where Legion is no longer being published by DC. There is no discussion about a movie or TV revival. This is amazing. Comics are a world where the tiniest nerd groups get pandered to: Micronauts, Weirdworld, Seeker 3000, and Rom have had revival series, for pete’s sake. It’s incredible there’s no discussion of a film or TV treatment, either; friggin Cyborg from New Teen Titans is getting a solo movie. 

Why did Legion stop being such a big deal? Where did the fandom that supported it dissolve to? One word: X-Men. Legion was incredibly ahead of its time. In the 60s and 70s, there were barely any “fan” comics, since superhero comics were like animation is today: mostly aimed at kids, with a minority of discerning adult/teen fans, and it was success among kids, not fans, that led to something being a top seller (hence, “fan favorites” in the 1970s, as surprising as it is to us today, often did not get a lot of work, like Don MacGregor or Barry Smith). But as newsstands started to push comics out, the fan audience started to get bigger and more important…everyone else started to catch up to the things that made Legion unique: most comics started to have attractive people who paired up into couples and/or love triangles, and featured extremely byzantine long term storytelling. If Legion of Super-Heroes is going to be remembered for anything, it’s for being the smaller scale “John the Baptist” to the phenomenon of X-Men, the ultimate “fan” comic.

The other thing that killed Legion, apart from Marvel’s Merry Mutants, that is, was the r-word: reboots. A reboot only works for some properties, but not others. You reboot something when you want to find something for a mass audience to respond to, like with Zorro, Batman, or Godzilla.

Legion, though, was not a comic for everybody, it was a fanboy/girl comic beloved by a niche who read it for continuing stories and minutiae (and to jack off, and in some cases, jill off). Rebooting a comic like that is a bad idea. You do not reboot something where the main way you engage with the property, the greatest strength, is the accumulated lore and history. Rebooting a property like that means losing the reason people like it, and unless it’s something with a wide audience, you only lose fans and won’t get anything in return for it. So for something like Legion (small fandom obsessed with long form plots and details, but unlike Trek, no name recognition) a reboot is the ultimate Achilles heel that shatters everything, a self-destruct button they kept hitting over and over and over until there was nothing at all left.

E. E. Smith’s Lensman Novels

The Lensman series is like Gil Evans’s jazz: it’s your grandparents’ favorite thing that you’ve never heard of. 

I mean, have you ever wondered exactly what scifi fandom talked about before the rise of the major core texts and cultural objects (Star Trek, Asimov, etc)? Well, it was this. Lensmen was the subject of fanfiction mailed in manilla envelopes during the 30s, 40s, and 50s (some of which are still around). If you’re from Boston, you might recognize that the two biggest and oldest scifi cons there going back to the 1940s, Boskone (Boscon, get it?) and Arisia, are references to the Lensman series. This series not only created space opera as we know it, but contributed two of the biggest visuals in scifi, the interstellar police drawn from different alien species, and space marines in power armor.

My favorite sign of how big this series was and how fans responded to it, was a great wedding held at Worldcon that duplicated Kimball Kinnison and Clarissa’s wedding on Klovia. This is adorable:

The basic story is pure good vs. evil: galactic civilization faces a crime and piracy wave of unprecedented proportions from technologically advanced pirates (the memory of Prohibition, where criminals had superior firearms and faster cars than the cops, was strong by the mid-1930s). A young officer, Kimball Kinnison (who speaks in a Stan Lee esque style of dialogue known as “mid-century American wiseass”), graduates the academy and is granted a Lens, an object from an ancient mystery civilization, who’s true purpose is unknown.

Lensman Kinnison discovers that the “crime wave” is actually a hostile invasion and assault by a totally alien culture that is based on hierarchy, intolerant of failure, and at the highest level, is ruled by horrifying nightmare things that breathe freezing poison gases. Along the way, he picks up allies, like van Buskirk, a variant human space marine from a heavy gravity planet who can do a standing jump of 20 feet in full space armor, Worsel, a telepathic dragon warrior scientist with the technical improvisation skills of MacGyver (who reads like the most sadistically minmaxed munchkinized RPG character of all time), and Nandreck, a psychologist from a Pluto-like planet of selfish cowards.

The scale of the conflict starts small, just skirmishes with pirates, but explodes to near apocalyptic dimensions. This series has space battles with millions of starships emerging from hyperspacial tubes to attack the ultragood Arisians, homeworld of the first intelligent race in the cosmos. By the end of the fourth book, there are mind battles where the reflected and parried mental beams leave hundreds of innocent bystanders dead. In the meantime we get evil Black Lensmen, the Hell Hole in Space, and superweapons like the Negasphere and the Sunbeam, where an entire solar system was turned into a vacuum tube.

It’s not hard to understand why Lensmen faded in importance. While the alien Lensmen had lively psychologies, Lensman Kimball Kinnison was not an interesting person, and that’s a problem when scifi starts to become more about characterization. The Lensman books, with their love of police and their sexism (it is an explicit plot point that the Lens is incompatible with female minds – in canon there are no female Lensmen) led to it being judged harshly by the New Wave writers of the 1960s, who viewed it all as borderline fascist military-scifi establishment hokum, and the reputation of the series never recovered from the spirit of that decade.

Prisoner of Zenda

Prisoner of Zenda is a novel about a roguish con-man who visits a postage-stamp, charmingly picturesque Central European kingdom with storybook castles, where he finds he looks just like the local king and is forced to pose as him in palace intrigues. It’s a swashbuckling story about mistaken identity, swordfighting, and intrigue, one part swashbuckler and one part dark political thriller.

The popularity of this book predates organized fandom as we know it, so I wonder if “fandom” is even the right word to use. All the same, it inspired fanatical dedication from readers. There was such a popular hunger for it that an entire library could be filled with nothing but rip-offs of Prisoner of Zenda. If you have a favorite writer who was active between 1900-1950, I guarantee he probably wrote at least one Prisoner of Zenda rip-off (which is nearly always the least-read book in his oeuvre). The only novel in the 20th Century that inspired more imitators was Sherlock Holmes. Robert Heinlein and Edmond “Planet Smasher” Hamilton wrote scifi updates of Prisoner of Zenda. Doctor Who lifted the plot wholesale for the Tom Baker era episode, “Androids of Tara,” Futurama did this exact plot too, and even Marvel Comics has its own copy of Ruritania, Doctor Doom’s Kingdom of Latveria. Even as late as the 1980s, every kids’ cartoon did a “Prisoner of Zenda” episode, one of the stock plots alongside “everyone gets hit by a shrink ray” and the Christmas Carol episode.

Prisoner of Zenda imitators were so numerous, that they even have their own Library of Congress sub-heading, of “Ruritanian Romance.” 

One major reason that Prisoner of Zenda fandom died off is that, between World War I and World War II, there was a brutal lack of sympathy for anything that seemed slightly German, and it seems the incredibly Central European Prisoner of Zenda was a casualty of this. Far and away, the largest immigrant group in the United States through the entire 19th Century were Germans, who were more numerous than Irish or Italians. There were entire cities in the Midwest that were two-thirds German-born or German-descent, who met in Biergartens and German community centers that now no longer exist.

Kurt Vonnegut wrote a lot about how the German-American world he grew up in vanished because of the prejudice of the World Wars, and that disappearance was so extensive that it was retroactive, like someone did a DC comic-style continuity reboot where it all never happened: Germans, despite being the largest immigrant group in US history, are left out of the immigrant story. The “Little Bohemias” and “Little Berlins” that were once everywhere no longer exist. There is no holiday dedicated to people of German ancestry in the US, the way the Irish have St. Patrick’s Day or Italians have Columbus Day (there is Von Steuben’s Day, dedicated to a general who fought with George Washington, but it’s a strictly Midwest thing most people outside the region have never heard of, like Sweetest Day). If you’re reading this and you’re an academic, and you’re not sure what to do your dissertation on, try writing about the German-American immigrant world of the 19th and 20th Centuries, because it’s a criminally under-researched topic.

A. Merritt

Pop quiz: who was the most popular and influential fantasy author during the 1930s and 40s? 

If you answered Tolkien or Robert E. Howard, you’re wrong - it was actually Abraham Merritt. He was the most popular writer of his age of the kind of fiction he did, and he’s since been mostly forgotten. Gary Gygax, creator of Dungeons and Dragons, has said that A. Merritt was his favorite fantasy and horror novelist.

Why did A. Merritt and his fandom go away, when at one point, he was THE fantasy author? Well, obviously one big answer was the 1960s counterculture, which brought different writers like Tolkien and Lovecraft to the forefront (by modern standards Lovecraft isn’t a fantasy author, but he was produced by the same early century genre-fluid effluvium that produced Merritt and the rest). The other answer is that A. Merritt was so totally a product of the weird occult speculation of his age that it’s hard to even imagine him clicking with audiences in other eras. His work is based on fringe weirdness that appealed to early 20th Century spiritualism and made sense at the time: reincarnation, racial memory, an obsession with lost race stories and the stone age, and weirdness like the 1920s belief that the Polar Arctic is the ancestral home of the Caucasian race. In other words, it’s impossible to explain Merritt without a ton of sentences that start with “well, people in the 1920s thought that...” That’s not a good sign when it comes to his universality. 

That’s it for now. Do you have any suggestions on a dead fandom, or do you keep one of these “dead” fandoms alive in your heart?

#fandom history #lensman #robotech #prisoner of zenda #mists of avalon

[mknwaywardwanderer]

Weighed Down

I started reading this book on self-acceptance and self-love in a world filled with hatred for fat and unconventional (honestly just plain unusual) people. I read her words at first with an eager anticipation, connecting with her experiences of rejection, perpetual anxiety and self-blame. But when she starts talking about health @ every size my brain starts to lose its shit. That's not a real thing. I hear my fat-shaming friends mocking the term, gazing horrified at kankles and wondering how "healthy" at every size it is to put stress on your heart with reckless weight mismanagement. I hear my father telling me he was always embarrassed of taking me out to eat anywhere because he'd catch me looking at other people's food like a starving pig, sometimes even going to mortifying lengths of eating with my elbows on the table, in which he imitated me with an act similar to the Monty Python skit with the exploding mint man and the enthusiasm of a cartoon character in a watermelon contest. I remember that particular morning in my early 20's after he agreed to have breakfast with my sisters and my mother and I since our house lost power after a bad hurricane. I remember my mom telling the story over and over that she used to catch my youngest sister, now an anorexic and bulimic 21-year-old diagnosed with borderline personality disorder battling substance abuse, wearing her clothes, pants, and belts as tight as possible to look skinny so that "daddy wouldn't stop loving her like he stopped loving Morgan." My father was always chiding me about my size, my weight, my appearance, how large my stomach was, how bushy my eyebrows were, or the fact he could see my adolescent lady mustache that he would lovingly point out at his large family gatherings. I hear my father, I hear my friend's particular joke about a woman eating out with her friends a ridiculous amount of food (I believe it was at a Cheesecake Factory) with some punchline I have thankfully forgotten, I hear these two students sitting outside of the newest Humanities and Computer center debating on whether I was just a fat girl or a fat guy with my hair up in a sweatshirt and no make-up on, I hear my high school boyfriend telling me his friends thought I looked like a man and couldn't understand his attraction to me, I hear concerned friends telling me no matter what I would still be beautiful on the inside or that everyone thought I had a really nice face when they really looked at me. I think about the Spanish men calling out to each other walking around their work truck (gorda fea, gorda tonta) and I hear my most recent ex saying I had just gained too much weight, breaking it down to percentages of the fat I was when we met versus the fat I was now, actually reaching obese and becoming unappealing and sexually unsatisfying. I think about my grandmother chiding me gently for asking to have seconds of her Spanish rice and beans with chicken cutlets, her sad lingering stare at my belly trying to hide her sorrow and disappointment. Even my own fat mother touching and poking and grabbing my stomach trying to make it a joke but asking when I'm going to slim down. I can't shake their voices or the memories, or the fear that I already know what every single person is thinking of when they look at me. Some with visible disgust or snickering, on one occasion a man laughed out loud on the phone with his friend commenting on the walrus in front of him. Each time I meet somebody new I try to hide my stomach, sucking in, standing up straight, trying not to make my neck look too chubby. I try to wear my hair down as often as possible, even on interviews or for business meetings, to "frame" my undeniably round face. I try to keep my nervous, fidgeting hands out of sight to avoid displaying my sausagey and sometimes even more swollen fingers, fearing they might make others uncomfortable. When I meet new people, I try to stay stoic, polite but not too chatty to avoid seeming penetrable or the slightest bit weak, protecting myself even if I seem cold with a large side of RBF. I wait for them to glance at my stomach, stare too long at my fairly large arms. I have worried at every single interview over the past 2 years that I wouldn't get hired because of my weight, the medical implications, because I wasn't quite pretty enough or normal looking, because my size would make me an easy target, or worse, an intimidating as opposed to inviting woman in the workplace. Even now, reading this book and seeing health at every size, I feel myself craving small cups of plain Greek yogurt, low-fat low-calorie protein bars, and a cube of cheese. It seems just as impractical as it does on the news, in every cynical article. How can we deny the medical evidence of the effects of weight and obesity on most people? But that is, again, most people. There are some overweight athletes, plus size models with great diets and targeted workout routines, those of us with great Morgan blood sugar, good cholesterol levels, no issues with blood pressure, remarkable heart function, and the list goes on. But when I think of those people, I don't see people that look like me. Only people at most 40 or 50 pounds overweight. Mostly muscle, maybe, or remarkably active with clean diets and pretty faces. I don't know why they seem so different from me other than their looks, so different from the large yogi who wrote this book. Her flexibility and talent are beyond impressive. I can't deny that watching her yoga classes is pleasantly shocking and inspiring, but her perception terrifies me What will happen if I start to accept myself, what would I be like if I loved myself, and believed that at 255 pounds I can live healthily, exist without fear or self-loathing? Who would I be? So much of who I am is rooted in my upbringing and experiences with depression intersecting with low self-esteem and basically no self-worth. I can't even see a version of myself who could live so freely, enjoying herself casually as if it was something that was ingrained into me (as opposed to the version of myself that was told by my parents to account for the fact that I was never going to be the best or very good at anything, and that I likely wouldn't have a lot of friends) how do I go from the girl who told other kids to stay away from her because she wasn't worth their time since she was 5 years old, a girl who overshares with others just to get a sense of whether she will scare them away or not, to a version of a girl who is unashamed of her appearance, unconcerned with the space she takes up, unphased by the thoughts of others. I'd like to think she could exist as a full-fledged person, some future version of myself.

[aheartofwood]

the king arthur movie is SO BAD, guys.

imagine a baby and a kitten got together and tried to edit a movie with only the vaguest idea of arthurian legend based on the backs of the VHS of the disney version and also the lion king for some reason, and also the barest idea of how human brains can accept and understand editing and narrative. imagine a pretty good video game opening for 2001, but watched thru the haze of a really strenuous flu and it’s rented and ancient and was chewed up by at least two dogs so it’s glitching a lot. imagine a knight’s tale……………Reimagined™ (needlessly) by a team of randos who only speak italian and their ideas are being translated by jen from the IT crowd in that one episode where she pretends she can speak italian. imagine a movie with a budget of four dollars (except the budget was HUGE). imagine an opium dream within a dream of robert downey jr’s 2009 sherlock holmes where jude law becomes a boring, leathery king who has a bad habit of constantly sacrificing the silent women he supposedly loves to an undulating pile of lovecraftian horror water ladies that live in his shame toilet in his penis tower basement ONLY to super saiyan into a really bad DnD dude with a motorcycle-insignia-metal skull head and the torso of two The Rocks smashed together (sorry, The Rock) instead of (a much better) watson. imagine eragon, but somehow exceedingly, fremdschamenly, schadenfreudingly worse. not many things get both german expressions, in a gleefully terrible adverb form at that, but this movie——oh, THIS movie——-deserves them. 

the letters of the opening credits roll (or creep?) across the screen. the kerning is bad. all the T’s have a phallic, buffylike, sword motif going on and it renders the names unreadable. the colors and the blurry shots look like something out of monty python. again, who hired this editor? who watched this movie, kissed their fingertips like an italian grandma, and gently set this eldritch horror adrift on the tides of eternity to be received with fear and loathing by millions of human eyes? the elephants from lord of the rings attack the bridge from legend of zelda, and that red flamey eye guy from eragon (mordred, for some reason, in a shake n bake wig) ?? or possibly from inkheart?? is defeated. remember, we know nothing about these characters. feel nothing for them. and the trend continues. katie mcgrath appears, of course, in her standard and splendid emerald green, and then immediately dies. none of the shots in the first 20 minutes of the movie match up, we go from scenes with several people to ultra close ups of faces—-it’s like the “mmmm whatcha say” SNL skit, but serious. the movie continues to not know if it’s playing itself seriously or if it knows how bad it truly is (how bad me be?)

finally we get ONE establishing shot of a sweeping wall (maybe? the camera never stays still enough to tell) and the audience (five people) grounds ourselves, sort of. we get a whip-fast, but not whip-smart, super evolution of arthur’s childhood, in which he shoves coins into a wall (see kids!!! if u just put YR COINS IN YR WALLS instead of BUYING GODDAMN AVOCADOS, U COULD HAVE A CASTLE!!!!) and hearkens back to his character in pacific rim, bc he’s just a scrappy, vaguely appropriative white guy that loves 2 fight stuff. oh, his mom is killed when he’s young ofc. charlie hunnam eventually fucks off to the island w the sword in the sort-of stone (none of the physics makes sense in this movie?? the sword in the stone dropped into a lake, but is now in a chasm on a different island which shows no sign of the ruins of arthur’s childhood town?? in the final fight scene, charlie hunnam is several floors up from scythe-y jude law, but then suddenly they’re fighting on the top of saruman’s tower  scuse me at the whipping sea-level, then suddenly BACK IN THE TOWER bc i guess it wasn’t destroyed????? bc then it gets destroyed again??) of course, charlie hunnam is the One Man who can Grip the penis sword, even though in an interesting turn of events, They are Testing Everyone by shipping them in boats to the island (this seems like an egregious waste of resources). charlie hunnam got in this unfortch sitch bc i forgot, but the guy who put him on the boat chuckled darkly and said he was “”””getting on a different boat””””, but like, doesn’t everyone end up there?? it had the air of the DMV, on purpose, so why was this a threat? how did he avoid it for so long? are there that many people in the kingdom??? also, if i was him i’d straight up pretend i couldn’t lift it tbh and come back for it when They were getting donuts. oh, another inkheart thing—the BLONDE MOM SURVIVES (!!!??? somehow???? unexplained? she had a HOLE THRU HER BODY??) and maybe has memory loss or something and spends her days being somehow indispensable to jude law despite doing nothing but moving a plate. 

i cannot explain the rest of the plot, because i do not understand it. charlie hunnam just EXPERIENCES things with a world-weary, almost kingly worldliness, despite flashing in between being an innocent farm boy who doesn’t wanna do anything and a self-assured wisecracking hustler. there are some good jokes about boring white dude names in a medieval setting, and no more humor forever is allowed in this movie or any movies ever again. a chris parnell lookalike with a hat says he can shoot 75 yards but not 175, then shoots 175 with absolutely no introduction/buildup/continuance/jokes and spends the rest of the film as robin hood. there are some other dudes?????? more women (the brothel ladies that rescue arthur from the river ((not unlike….the prince of egypt…..)) are killed to further manpain, including lucy, who is Special for an unexplained reason. jude law murders his daughter (i guess???), who has a russian name and a tendency to sit around and stroke birds and stare sappily out the window (i feel u, johanna). everyone is wearing medieval versions of suits. there are many iterations of snake, ranging from economy-sized snake to a Giant Fuckmaster Snake Mother. at least five cloaks are cast off. eric bana becomes a literal rock. everything has the vague, shuddering feeling of an improv show where everyone wants the final word/bit. there is grit, there is dirt, there is snake blood, and there is clanking. so much clanking. charlie hunnam is bravely hurling one-liners but no one is listening. what is the sound of only one hand on excalibur???? apparently not as powerful as…………T W O hands on excalibur. 

the editing continues to be bizarre. they keep trying to do the inception thing where they talk about the plan while showing the plan, therefore (in inception, correctly) allowing us to get to the good parts, but there ARE NO GOOD PARTS or even parts at all and they don’t fully commit to the dang method anyway. the shining light of the film, an unnamed mage woman with good bone structure and sweet harem pants (and who COULD have at least been set up as morwen but was not) who can possess animals and also make a lot of dust fly around behind her, becomes charlie hunnam’s spiritual guide?? sort of?? maybe love interest??? she seems to have no interest in him or inhabiting the worldly narrative/plane of this movie. i do not blame her. anyway, she’s got the eagles from LOTR on her side. she dopes the shit out of charlie hunnam (again, why) with a literal snake and he solves his daddy/uncle issues (line @ jude law: “”””you created me”””””) in an incomprehensible nonlinear part of the narrative (she was captured, but i guess jude law let her go before hunnam got to the castle???? bc he’s Not So Bad After All? bc he was bored? eating a sandwich? fuck idk so she could have met him in the middle of fuck knows? i mean if they have medieval lyft or medieval twitter DMing or something??)  also, he may or may not have gone to a ””””””DARK””””””””island, but he did NOT solve his daddy issues there. he did, however, fight some rodents of unusual size from the princess bride. 

ok that is all the energy i have; this movie has sapped me, i am nothing in the great maw of its terribleness. other stuff happens. we have a happy ending, with 4/6ths of the Round Table built (literally and figuratively), and some Vikings conceding to charlie hunnam for no other reason than he’s a bro, i guess. line: how do u scam money out of a viking? u talk to them. SEE MILLENNIALS ALL U HAVE TO DO IS TALK AND PPL GIVE U MONEY or be born the true heir to the throne of (fake england). 

the worst part is that i don’t understand how jude law, who is 44, looks the same the entire movie and watches as charlie hunnam, who is 37, grows up and eventually challenges him. eric bana, who is 48, doubtlessly had fictional charlie hunnam arthur at like 27-35, making jude law the same age in that fiction. i guess men can just ???? play any age????????? forever??????? honorable mentions: the soundtrack, jude law’s eyeshadow, and the preview for atomic blonde. 

#long post #king arthur #i love arthurian legend okay #and honestly i loved this movie #from hate springs love

[soooheresthething]

A Romp on Masculinity

I'll make a few declarations at the onset of what I'm about to say. Masculinity is not a clearly defined word. What being masculine or being a man means in the States, is, qualitatively, light years away from what it means in everywhere else. In addition, rompers, as a fashion item worn by human beings that identify as male, is not new. Not by a long shot. Also, it's just clothing. On the sliding scale of dangerous, problematic, tsk-tsk worthy things that men take part in….I mean, damn, where do you start? And finally, I'm not trying to change minds. Trying to change a mind, is like an auto mechanic trying to fix a car over the phone. You can tell the mechanic what's wrong, what sounds the car is making, etc. But, unless someone gets under the hood manipulates wires, takes defective parts out, and replaces fluids, that car ain’t ever gonna run right. The response from men (and women) to men, wearing rompers is fascinating in its circuitous silliness. I almost can't get past the fact that the most effective title for the issue is, “men wearing rompers”, which sounds as Monty Python a skit as I could imagine. What’s bubbled up, is all manner of hateful, misogynistic, homophobic, ageist tweets and status updates. It’s astounding in its predictability. I've parsed through a number of opinions on the “men wearing rompers” controversy, and have seen women blasting men with the hot sands of misogyny. Where black people have Uncle Toms, I imagine the patriarchal equivalent for women, would be Auntie Tams. Being a willing participant, in furthering the chasm between men and women, in a society that's built on women as second class citizens, when you are a self-identified woman, is borderline lunacy. Even in as small an act, as regurgitating the bile men rocket at each other, in the efforts of creating binary gender roles and establishing dominance on societal playgrounds. I wonder if these women think it makes them more like men. If they, in the daze of subjugation, have convinced themselves that if you can't beat them, be them. Be just as simple, petty and fraudulent. Why fraud? We are mighty picky on when, where, how, why, and whom we allow to cross the lines. Prince, Bowie, Jimi, James, and Andre all dressed brazenly on the line. In suede and sequin and sheer. They are heroes. They are myths. They are immortal. They, also, are human, and man, and male, and musicians. Are the blouses, now, passè? Have leather jumpsuits been hijacked by gay and queer alike, and as such can only be associated with them? There lie, within this fallacy, a hypocrisy, as is usually the case. What I'm finding in these condemnations, stashed away behind the words, is fear. It's a marvelous thing, fear. When harmless affectations and dress styles, tear open the dread that your way of life is under attack. Your man code. Your gender roles and rules. Your generational identities. People don't so much as carry real disdain for these things, as they arm themselves with their terror for the misunderstood. For example, arachnophobes do not hate spiders. Definitively, phobias are irrational fears.  Arachnophobes fear spiders. They exclaim that they hate spiders in defense of their fear. What exacerbates, and, at times, is the impetus for this fear, is the misunderstanding that spiders cause death. When in fact, zoologically and factually speaking, very few spiders can even break skin, leave alone are venomous. Irrational fear disguised as common sense hate is an ideology that permeates throughout the fragile psyche of man in all arenas. Fearing the unknown seems like such a wasteful experience. Maybe there's a thrill I do not grasp. A kind of, Schrodinger’s cat appeal to the world. It feels exhausting. So rarely do the things we don't understand pose a real threat to our lives. Maybe we know the mundanity of life and need to create demons. Giving our lives purpose through a fictional dragon begging for a slaying. These perceived, if not delusional, devils, perennially create blockades for growth. There is nothing gained fighting a monster you manufactured. You set the limits of its power and the zest in its evil. You are unlikely to create a hurdle you can't leap in a single, unaffected bound. The real battle presented to you, is very often not around you. It's in you. It is not of your own creation. It is you Amusing as outrage, colored with machismo, over men wearing rompers may be, it's dangerously ignorant. Men in rompers or romper like outfits are old hat. A fashion trend going years back. Not far from overalls and jumpsuits. There is an current of misogyny just as strong as the current of homophobia. This idea of a “gay agenda” imposed on our youth. This is what tolerance looks like to those in small cages. Conspiracy. It should look like freedom.

#romphim #romphims #rompers #meninrompers #toxicmasculinity #thinkpiece #soooheresthething #mysogyny #homophobia

[doopcafe]

Searching for Comedy, Part I

In an attempt to discover a comedian Akina could like, I polled a few people to elicit suggestions and compiled a list of eleven comedians’ skits into a playlist. 

Initially, I thought it would be impossible to “rate” the comedians under the mistaken belief that it’s a binary metric: either they are funny or they are not. Turns out, there’s various shades of “funny” and I’ll attempt to quantify that in a minute. 

But first, a few comments...

(1) I’ve learned something obvious: A large part of how funny a comedian is is how much you can relate to what they’re saying. Chris Rock’s bit about $5,000 bullets to prevent gun violence was funny, because it’s a topic Akina and I are familiar enough with to understand. Ali Wong’s bit about having children was not funny, because neither of us knows what she’s talking about.

(2) It’s not fair to the comedian if your introduction to them is an out-of-context section of a stand-up routine. Watching only Robbin Williams’ bit about the invention of golf is funny if you’re familiar with his other work, but for Akina (who had never seen him prior to this), his skit was a complete flop. Summarizing, she said “He just swears a lot.” True for that bit, not true in general.

Instead, it’s better to introduce the comedian using one of their short, stand-up routines from, say, a talk show. Tig Notaro’s five-minute routine from The Ellen DeGeneres Show was a more fair presentation, as the comedian chose the material, pacing, etc. 

(3) Laugh tracks are obnoxious and distracting. In particular, the Monty Python skits suffered because you could barely hear what the comedians were saying over the sounds of fake laughter. 

(4) Some comedians’ routines really suffer because of their content being outdated. Rodney Dangerfield’s interview on Carson’s The Tonight Show was an example of this, as half the references were to people/things we’re unfamiliar with. Similarly, the more people “in general” are familiar with a comedian, the worse the comedy is. When Dangerfield says “I get no respect” the first time, the audience went absolutely crazy, but an explanation was necessary for Akina who thought she missed a joke. 

With that out of the way, here is my attempt to force comedy into levels of ratings, paralleling my system for movie reviews:

Uncomfortably Unfunny: ☆☆☆☆☆ (0/5)  This means “it’s so unfunny that it’s uncomfortable.” I do not want to watch these comedians again.

Unfunny: ★☆☆☆☆ (1/5)  This is “bland” humor that elicits an infrequent “heh.” It’s clear it’s meant to be funny, but falls just short of actually being funny. 

Humorous/Amusing: ★★☆☆☆ (2/5)  It’s clear this is comedy, and there may be a great deal of skill behind it, but it’s either too dated, the material has since been overdone, or it’s just not “my type of humor.”

Funny: ★★★☆☆ (3/5)  This is the default level of humor. Any decent comedian should be capable of achieving this level of funniness. It’s a few actual laughs plus some enjoyment. 

Hilarious: ★★★★☆ (4/5)  This is laugh-out-loud funny. It is enjoyable, I want to see more, and it feels like a good use of my time. These are comedians I can say I “like.”

Ridiculous: ★★★★★ (5/5)  This is the “I’m laughing so hard I cannot breath” type of funny. I believe there has to be something extra special to achieve this level. I would actively seek out these comedians to see them live. 

Undoubtedly, these ratings will change, but it’s a starting point. And now on to my ratings of the comedians we watched: 

Uncomfortably Unfunny: ☆☆☆☆☆ (0/5)  Ali Wong

Unfunny: ★☆☆☆☆ (1/5)  Tig Notaro 

Humorous/Amusing: ★★☆☆☆ (2/5)  Abbott and Costello (Who's on First) Rodney Dangerfield  Monty Python (Cheese Shop, Silly Walks, Dead Parrot, How Not to Be Seen) Robin Williams (Golf)

Funny: ★★★☆☆ (3/5)  Eddie Izzard  Kyle Kinane (Pancakes) Mitch Hedberg

Hilarious: ★★★★☆ (4/5)  Chris Rock Donald Glover

Ridiculous: ★★★★★ (5/5)  None

There isn’t enough data here to draw a conclusion regarding the overlap of my sense of humor with that of people who recommended comedians, but Luke’s two recommendations I’ve rated the lowest... It’s also interesting to note that a few (Eddie Izzard and Monty Python) I’ve seen so many times that they suffer as a result. Part of the formula of humor is the unexpected twist, which is dampened by knowing the punchline. 

Anyways, what did Akina think? 

Ali Wong: Not funny  Tig Notaro: Seems too intellectual, but speaks very clearly and is easy to understand Abbott and Costello: Akina considered the act cliche and overdone (it’s from 1938!) Rodney Dangerfield: Unclear references Monty Python: No Robin Williams: “All he does is swear” Kyle Kinane: Seems like we’re just hanging out with a friend who’s telling a story Eddie Izzard: “Has promise” Mitch Hedberg: Weird Donald Glover: Funny (she chuckled a bit at his jokes) Chris Rock: The only time Akina actually laughed was during one of Chris Rock’s skits...

So the winner of this round was Chris Rock. Which was completely surprising.

#pie211-comedy

[happymetalgeek]

THE SICK SENSE have been together for about 3 years as the group they are, though they have known each other longer through a lot of different projects. They have played to sold out shows, in the likes of the Belfast Comedy festival and the MAC, which is a unique thing since they don’t do many shows. It is a testimony to their unique toilet humour approach descending from the likes of That Was The Week That Was, Monty Python, The Young Ones, and Bottom.

And that was to continue unabated at their sold out show in the Strand Arts Theatre in East Belfast.

As ever it is a mixture of video skits and live sketches that creates a different vibe where some of the time you feel you are at home watching a load of funny YouTube shows, but with the whole neighbourhood invited, and so an interesting dynamic is created.

Off the show went with a wonderful video intro voiced over by a voice approximating Alexa, beginning quite innocently enough until the profanities started dropping like over-ripe Marula fruit which the audience niavely eats before the sudden kick hits. It showed quickly that everyone there, from all stratas of society, were joined together with a sick sense of humour. The thought of the likes of Alexa just suddenly swearing at you is very amusing indeed.

Then into the actual video sketches with “Toilet Paper” and “Baldy Ballix” immediately sets the theme for the rest of the night. Shot, sweet, rude and very, very funny.  There was also a number of “First Date” skits following the disastrous exploits of the four hapless daters as they look for love. Landing back in the show, and still funny, was the series of “Late Night Quiz” skits as the callers keep proving how idiotic they are frustrating the host more and more. “Cop Stop” provided another off piste twisted punchline.

The first live sketch was “Job Interview” which has been previously just a video sketch. It works just as well live and the laughter from the audience was just continuous – that almost silent laughter as they try to hold it back because of the situation being presented to them. Think Monty Python’s Life of Brian Bigus Dickus piece.

Also thrown into the video mix was “An Awkward Crossing”, “Superman and the Mugging”, and “McDonalds”. Again all hilariously inappropriate that makes it very difficult to not laugh. Mostly continuously. the punchlines are just so on the money.

Another live sketch was “The Art Show” where two Dutch artists are interviewed, one only able to respond through drawings, lead down a very hilariously subverted route. It does include some dominance and subservience.

More video sketches like “No Filter Phil” and “Baby”, interspersed with more “First Date” and “The Writers Room”, kept the twisted people in attendance holding their sides.

Another live sketch was “Edelweiss”, just a piece of take-down perfection.

After the interval THE SICK SENSE just kept hammering home chuckles, smirks, and laughter where societal norms tells us we should not find it remotely funny with the live skit “Fan’s Script”, and video sketches “Blowjob”, and more of the series sketches. After “Two Women and One Trevor McDonald”, a comedic sketch of unrequited love came the classic “Starry Night”, before “Working At Home”, “Get In My Car”, “Alien Object”, “Funny Gets The fanny” and “Gloryhole”. Each one delivered with a physicality that just underlined the punchlines.

They finished off the show with, what else but the “Greatest Showman”.

THE SICK SENSE are still finding their groove, which becomes more apparent with the new material they are adding to their repertoire. Some is just funny becuase its inappropriate, other sketches are funny because it perfectly mixes the crude with an intellectual approach. This is not that they are suddenly moving to high brow material, its just that it hits the funny bone of several levels  like “Starry Night”, “Gloryhole” and “Two Women and Trevor McDonald”. They hit you with something unexpected where you are just about able to think”I see what you did there” in-between uncontrollable laughter.

If you have a slightly dark sense of humour, or even a repressed one, THE SICK SENSE are fantastic home grown talent that will not disappoint.

Listen to the interview with THE SICK SENSE before they did the show.

Their next show is in The MAC on 13 April 2019.

Buy your ticket now!

Follow THE SICK SENSE online

Website  |  Facebook  |  Twitter  |  Instagram  |  YouTube

SHOW REVIEW: When @thesicksense4 Get 'Stranded' In The @StrandArtsCentr THE SICK SENSE have been together for about 3 years as the group they are, though they have known each other longer through a lot of different projects. 737 more words

#The Sick Sense

[robertkstone]

2019 Jaguar XE SV Project 8 First Drive: The 592-HP Jag Built to Conquer the ‘Ring

That headline is a quote from David Pook that I jotted down during the first-drive event for the 2019 Jaguar XE SV Project 8 in Portugal. Pook is vehicle dynamics manager at Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) Special Vehicles Operations (SVO) in Warwickshire, England. The quote sounded familiar to this American’s ears. Why? The 1964 Pontiac GTO broke all the rules in GM’s book and, in doing so, is widely credited as the first car of the muscle car era. Pete Estes waived a restriction that A-bodies be limited to 330-cubic-inch displacements. Instead, he approved the replacement of the Pontiac Tempest’s 5.3-liter V-8 with the full-sized Catalina/Bonneville 389-cubic-inch (6.4-liter) V-8, creating the Grand Tempest, later dubbed GTO. A star was born. As Paul Harvey used to say, “And now you know the rest of the story.”

If you want to make a legend, you might have to break some rules.

Old Trick, New Car

Until now, the most powerful Jaguar XE, weighing about 3,900 pounds, was powered by a 380-hp supercharged V-6. So the go-fast boffins at SVO decided to apply that Tempest-to-GTO template to the lightweight, aluminum-intensive XE sedan. Start with the smallest car in the XE, XF, XJ lineup, and wedge JLR’s glorious 5.0-liter supercharged V-8 from the XJR575 into the compact sedan. In the XJR575, the engine makes 567 (SAE) horsepower. In the Project 8, it’s pushed to 592 hp and 516 lb-ft of torque. For obvious reasons, all-wheel drive was added to the build sheet. Yet Jaguar didn’t intend to build a mere British muscle car. They had a 12.9-mile, 154-turn goal and the go-ahead from those who control budgets to pursue it with a specially engineered car.

If you want to build a legend, you have to break some rules

Target Identified

The Project 8’s foremost goal was to break the 7:32 “flat” four-door sedan Nürburgring Nordschleife lap record set by the 505-hp Alfa Romeo Giulia Quadrifoglio, our, ahem, 2018 Car of the Year. If SVO was able to do it, JLR would commit to a limited run of production XE SV cars (SVR-badged cars are series production). Eighteen months from its inception, in a “production-intent” Project 8, Belgian racing and test driver Vincent Radermecker broke the fastest-sedan record in November 2017—and not by a little. His lap of 7:21.23 was nearly 11 seconds quicker. (Note: This 27-pounds-lighter, two-seat package with rollcage, carbon-fiber front seats, and racing harnesses will not be available in North America.) For perspective, the Jag lap time neatly splits a pair from a mid-engine supercar, the Ferrari 488 GTB, our 2017 Best Driver’s Car. Record in hand, the Project 8 was a go for production. I watched the two record laps and couldn’t help but notice a contrast: The Jaguar driver was much more relaxed.

How’d They Do It?

Special Vehicles Operations set out to thoroughly examine and improve every dynamic part and system. In all, just 20 percent of the original sedan remains in each XE SV Project 8. The body-in-white, windshield, front doors, and dashboard are the same as those found in the standard XE. For the Project 8, the hood, a front splitter, front/rear fascia, and rocker panels are hewn from carbon fiber. The aluminum rear doors are specifically stamped to meet the bulging rear fenders, and the wheels are forged aluminum. To provide more rear bias, the center differential was retuned, and the air-to-oil-cooled rear differential is now electronic/active. SVO enlarged the diameter of the torque tube and both halfshafts to cope with the added power. The adaptive exhaust system is made of titanium. Also unique to the Project 8 are the suspension (height-adjustable with motorsport ball joints), the brakes (carbon ceramic, 15.7-inch front/15.6-inch rear), the wheel bearings (silicon nitride ceramic, like in the space shuttle’s main engines), and the aero package. Aerodynamics achieve a 205 percent reduction in lift with the front splitter and rear wing in the most aggressive track mode, delivering almost 270 pounds of downforce at 186 mph. With a limited production of only 300 hand-assembled cars worldwide (on a first come, first served basis), the $188,495 asking price is easy to justify.

Benchmarks Selected

It was a shock to learn that the SVO team, based in England, had even heard of our 2014 Best Driver’s Car winner, much less driven the fire-breathing 7.0-liter 2015 Chevrolet Camaro Z/28, but they had. Indeed, they benchmarked it for its ability to be driven hard and confidently from the first corner to the last, and twice on Sunday. It was as if they copied and pasted right from our BDC story when we wrote, “With the first turn of the wheel, you become confident in the Z/28. With the second, you’re ready to set a hot lap. There is no learning curve.” The SVO team even considered the Z/28’s square tire fitment, with identical 305/30R19 Pirelli P Zero Trofeo tires at all four corners. As SVO agreed, the problem with using tires that wide and aggressive on the front is that, on regular roads, they can affect the steering feel and stability, often nibbling on minute irregularities or tramlining on what appears to be an otherwise smooth surface. Instead, the Project 8 is fitted with 265/35R20 Michelin Pilot Sport Cup 2 front tires and 305/30R20 rear tires. And although the Z/28’s Dynamic Suspension Spool Valve (DSSV) dampers work great pounding pavement into submission, they’re hard to live with every day. Instead, the Project 8 sports multimode Continuously Variable Dampers (CVD) with racy twin-coil springs (regular coils plus helper springs). Steering benchmark? The SVO team selected another industry great: the Porsche 911 GT3. However, the Porsche is a 3,250-pound featherweight (compared to the Jaguar’s estimated 3,950 pounds), plus the Porsche’s engine is in the rear, so its front tires carry just 39 percent of that weight. As such, it would appear that emulating its steering would be an unachievable goal [strokes chin].

Porti-WOW!

There’s a 2.9-mile race track in Portugal called Autódromo Internacional do Algarve, but most people simply call it Portimão, after the town where it resides. It’s a tricky 15-turn roller coaster with blind crests, fast sweepers, a tight hairpin, and a 1-kilometer (0.62-mile) straight. Formula 1 teams use it for testing, and the European Le Mans Series (ELMS) races here. Jaguar chose to showcase its record-breaking sedan here because it’s such a thorough workout for a car. After two laps as a passenger with Pook (a very skilled driver, I will add) at the wheel, my laps began first thing in the morning. Nothing like jumping right in the deep end with the boss.

We swapped seats, and I drove off. Pook made it look easy, and do you know what? Like its Z/28 benchmark, it was easy to get in and just cane it. I now understand why the ’Ring driver was so cool. One of the first things I noticed was how linear the throttle was. Unlike turbocharged engines that tend to have unpredictable pedal input to engine output relations, the supercharged V-8 in the Project 8 gives it to you in precise increments: 4 inches of pedal travel is literally four times more power and torque than 1 inch. It’s very easy to get what you want when you want it. The first time I went for the brake pedal, I expected a carbon-ceramic brick. Instead, the brakes were supple and easy to modulate, with immense stopping power and not a hint of ABS. It was about the best brake pedal feel-to-effectiveness I’ve sampled.

When the first corner arrived, I cranked the wheel. It was light and buttery smooth, and the front tires bit and went. I wasn’t pushing yet, so I went into the next corner with more vigor and got the same obedience and effortless precision. Again and again, no matter the corner, it was always the same. Curbs? Meh. Double-apex right-hander? Got it. The Project 8 felt like—I can’t believe I’m writing this—a Porsche GT3 RS (with some luggage in the frunk). It’s hard to believe, but with the countless hours of EPS tuning, dialing the center and active rear differentials, and the racy suspension, Jaguar nailed it. There’s no muddy sense of all-wheel drive, no binding, and no push. You’d swear it was rear drive by the way it turns in, settles flat as a morning lake, and then erupts like a volcano.

Corner exits are truly a thing of beauty. With power going mostly to the rear wheels, the only time I could sense the front wheels clawing for traction was when I throttled an exit. Just as the Project 8 begins with what should be a lurid slide, it steps out slightly at the back then simply rockets away. “Huh, it must’ve sent some power to the front,” I thought. “Or maybe I’m just a hero. Yeah, that must be it.” It’s the kind of car that shrugs off everything and prods, dares, and begs you, “Go faster next time! Do you even drive, bro?”

In the fast sweeping corners, it was really hard to separate the suspension and tires’ prodigious mechanical grip from aero/downforce, but the car hangs on with the urgency and calm of a rock climber.

On to that half-mile-plus straight: The eight-speed’s upshifts are dispatched in 200 milliseconds with a shove to the back and a satisfying snort from the exhaust pipes each time. The epic roar of the big Jag V-8, now a hallmark for the brand, was even more present in the Project 8. On the first lap, I didn’t dare look. Finally I did: I hit 160 mph before my eyes shot back to the downhill braking zone and I went to the trusty brake pedal. “Aw, I could’ve gone deeper,” I said to myself. The car is stable at speed, under maximum braking, into corners, and out. This is race car–level control and dynamics.

A Road Drive, Too?

Not long after I’d reprogrammed my brain for what a road car—a specifically purpose-built one—could do on a racetrack, our SVO hosts introduced me to the man the other gathered journalists fondly called Scottish Rob, which sounds like something from a Monty Python skit. Nudge-nudge, wink-wink. Rob also works at SVO and was to lead me on a drive through the surrounding area. He drove a Range Rover Sport SVR, and I was in a four-seat Project 8 with the suspension 15mm higher in the street setting. What nobody told me is that Scottish Rob drives as if it’s a special stage in a WRC race. Ptooey! He was off like a shot from the moment we left the parking lot. I frantically looked down for the drive-mode button: “Dynamic, DynaMIC, DYNAMIC!” Rob’s route—well, Portugal in general—reminded me very much of the California roads we drive for car evaluations, surrounded by rolling hills with dry grass and oak trees dotting the landscape. “Yeah, I got this,” I thought, but it was as if Rob was trying to lose me. I wasn’t about to let that happen, and it didn’t. But here’s the thing: I’ve driven a Camaro Z/28 on roads like those, and although that car is capable and exhilarating, it’s also violent and mentally exhausting. The Project 8 is neither of those things. I really put the spurs to it, sticking to Rob’s bumper, but the Project 8 was happy to do it. It was a pussycat in comparison to a Z/28. That same confident, agreeable nature I had experienced on the track translated to the street, as well. Damn, these SVO guys are good. You can break a record at the Nürburgring and drive the same car home in comfort.

Should You Buy One?

Yes, and you’d better do so before they’re all spoken for. Besides, it’ll give you instant bragging rights. With near-certain collectible status, this car is next-level stuff. You can’t compare it to a BMW M5, Mercedes-AMG E 63 S, or Cadillac CTS-V. Not even close. I know it’s all relative, but I’ve driven thousands of cars in more than 20 years of doing this sort of thing. Now, a week after I drove the Jaguar XE SV Project 8, I’m struggling to find a fair comparison to it. A BMW M4 GTS? Subjectively, it’s better than that; objectively, it’s slower, too. Had it “just” been a Nürburgring special that couldn’t be driven on public roads, I’d have said so. But it’s not. It’s a true, everyday four-door supercar. Name me another. I’ll wait.

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[longislandweekly-blog]

(Photo by Alex Nuñez)

While I love seeing famous sights when traveling, the best part of a trip is spending time with local people and getting to know them.

That opportunity came this summer when I participated in an English-immersion program for Spaniards called Vaughan Town, named for the founder Richard Vaughan. The town brings together Spaniards and native English speakers in an English-only environment for six days. We “Anglos” were there to provide conversation with the Spanish speakers, who already know some English. We paid for transportation, but our room and board was covered while we were in the program.

We arrived in Spain a few days before we were to meet in Madrid so we could explore the city and adjust to the time change. At the appointed day, we met our group at Vaughan Town headquarters and were whisked off to our site, a small village called Belmonte. The connecting began as soon as we stepped on the bus. I sat with Carmen, a young woman from Barcelona who is a design engineer at an automotive company. We chatted for the two hours it took to get to our hotel. Carmen said that although she felt her writing in English was good, her speaking needed to improve.

(Photos by Lyn Dobrin)

We were 10 Spanish and 14 Anglos. The Spanish came from all over the country and the Anglos from places such as New York, Florida, Chicago, Wales, England, Ireland and Abu Dhabi.

The six days were a combination of numerous one-on-ones, group presentations and lots of fun. My first one-on-one, however, was a disaster. My Spaniard, who shall remain nameless, told me he really needed to listen better and then proceeded to talk…and talk…and talk, in endless detail about his work. I tried to keep my eyes from glazing over.

That encounter was the only difficult one and I am happy to report that by the end of the six days when he and I had another one-on-one that his nerves had calmed down, his English had improved a great deal and we were able to laugh about our first meeting.

Belmonte is located in the La Mancha region. This is Don Quixote country and from our hotel we could see a castle on one hill and three windmills on another. We had chosen the Belmonte site from a few others partially based on the look of the hotel, and we weren’t disappointed. Palacio del Infante Don Juan Manuel Hotel Spa, originally a monastery, had been cleverly renovated into a four-star establishment with marble floors, air conditioning and very comfortable beds, plus a swimming pool. Some of the original building was left in its crumbled state giving something of a feel of an archaeological site, particularly the corridor where we walked out to the pool. Angela Walmsley, from Lancashire, England, said she felt completely at ease from the get-go. “The program is exceptionally well organized, expectations of participants are clear and the small team from Vaughan provided guidance, support and a wonderful energy throughout the week,” she said.

Julian and Giovanna were our leaders. Julian, our emcee, kept us going with activities. He pulled four of us together to do a Monty Python skit. Another time we were divided into groups and told to arrange ourselves as great moments in history and great paintings, taking photos to be viewed later. Howard, the head of the Civil Liberties Union in Florida, talked about American government and handed out copies of the Constitution. I taught a few Yiddish words that are essential for anyone coming to New York, such as schlep and chutzpah. Sabera, from London, led us in a values clarification exercise.

Giovanna kept us organized and on schedule. When a group of Anglos, myself included, came back late for our one-on-one from an impromptu visit to the castle, she let us know she was not pleased. “But the taxi never came back for us,” we pleaded like naughty children.

We loved getting to know both the Spanish and Anglos and at every meal sat with different people. Jacqueline and Julie were colleagues from Chicago, both teaching at the same middle school. Julie had been to previous Vaughan Town programs and Jackie joined her on this trip.

“I would not have been courageous enough to do this on my own,” said Jackie, “it was my first time participating in a program like this.” For Jackie, this trip became more than an opportunity to experience another culture. “It changed my life,” she said. Just five weeks before, Jackie had undergone a bi-lateral mastectomy and up until the last minute was not sure if she would be able to make the trip. “This was very healing for me—physically, spiritually and emotionally. I came back to the states a different person, and my friends commented on how healthy I looked and acted. The support I received from new friends—strangers prior to this—was amazing.”

Carmen and I sat together again on the bus ride back to Madrid.

“What I found there in Belmonte was higher than what I was expecting…I could meet a lot of nice people with interesting lives and very good stories to tell and this helped me be motivated and immersed in the activity,” she said. “I could improve my listening and lose my fear to speak in public.”

Mission accomplished.

Long Island Weekly's Lyn Dobrin shares her experiences on an educational tour of Madrid and Belmonte, Spain. While I love seeing famous sights when traveling, the best part of a trip is spending time with local people and getting to know them.