verushka70

Aw, thanks for the gentle hugs. (hugs back)

I tried watching PoI, and I watched some of the first season, but I couldn't get into it. I honestly didn't make that much of an effort though. I think it suffered from overhyping and that drives me nuts. After a certain point of hearing it so many times, every time someone says "You've got to watch x show!" I become incrementally LESS inclined to watch x, like someone's trying to make me do the video equivalent of eat my vegetables. What I recall of the episodes I did see was a vaguely queasy sense that gross violations of personal privacy were justified in a post-9/11 world... that plus the idea of the heroes of the show being responsible for the surveillance of ordinary citizens just didn't sit right with me. But mostly it was hype -- I'm extremely hype-averse. Something could fall into my favorite genres, have my favorite actors, be well written, superbly acted, fantastically directed, etc. -- but if it's over-hyped to the point of saturating print, web, TV, etc., I'm just dead set against it. Hype is part of the reason why I kind of avoid broadcast TV even though I have it, and I stopped reading most magazines years ago because I realized they were 90% advertising and then product placement bullshit anyway. Now I only buy them while on vacation, for trashy reading.

Alas, that's what happened with GoT, too: over-hyping -- and I never read the books, either, so I didn't have that as a reason to overcome my anti-hype reaction. Now I'm so far behind in Game of Thrones, it's too daunting to try to catch up. :\ I'll get to it eventually... but in the meantime I have the comfort food to catch up on or re-watch.

btw... what did you think of Magic Mike XXL? I haven't watched it yet but it's available on demand for the rest of the summer, so I was planning to. I really liked the first MM because, despite the inherently cheesy aspects, (1) it was Soderberg, so (2) it actually had other shit going on besides the luridly appealing surface (eye candy)(not that the eye candy was a problem for me; it certainly wasn't)* -- and I liked how the story threads kind of subverted what the movie appeared to be about and the way it was promoted, heh.

Anyways. My latest new effort in TV watching is Mr. Robot S1. My ex recced it to me via text message... said it was right up my alley, was surprised I wasn't already watching it, but I don't get USA Network or any basic cable -- just local broadcast channels and HBO as part of my high speed Internet service. But Mr. Robot is available via Amazon Prime, which I do have, so I started watching it. I don't think I can recall ever seeing such a nihilistic, oddball, antisocial, fucked up TV show protagonist that you actually sympathize with. Mr. Robot passes my cursory ex-IT/technogeeky tests (I do have more than a passing acquaitance with Linux, though I'm hardly an expert) wrt hacking as portrayed on the show... and of course I love all the anti-corporate/revolutionary shit. But it's more the personal dissociation, identity confusion, the clear psych issues, the desolate loneliness of the protagonist, and his insanely fucked up attempts to occasionally breach that, that I got sucked into. It is falling somewhere between addictively-want-to-see-the-next-ep and comfort food for me, I guess.

And for new/old comfort food, I'll be watching all 9 eps of the only season of Wolf Lake because, werewolves... and the hot and ethnically vague Lou Diamond Phillips of 15 years ago. (Not that he isn't still hot on Longmire; he is.) Though I didn't watch it at the time it was originally broadcast. 9 eps I can handle, even if there's no resolution to the characters and season-long arc, if they had time to build one before the show was canceled...


*though my ex, who was my bf at the time, started to tease me about watching it and I was like, stfu, how many hundreds of pornos have you illegally ripped from the video store? is it over 1,000 yet? which shut him up. But then when I told him it was Soderberg he was like, Oh, okay, and then he shut up and watched it... and pronounced it "not bad," later, like I'd asked for his opinion about it &/or it mattered, lol
:)