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Was shockingly (for me) busy this last week and over the weekend, ( Read more... )
Ronnie Spector's concert a week from this past Sunday was totally worth it. ( Read more... )
But Ronnie! Man, she's like, what, 71? And still rocking. And still big pipes! She was totally on-key, all the time, not one false note, and had to hold the mic away from her mouth sometimes because her voice, it is just that big! ( Read more... )
I was all, Bah, humbug! about xmas before the concert. My boss and a couple of coworkers have been forcing us to listen to the all Christmas station since after Halloween, which is way too soon imho. But after all Ronnie's Christmas tunes -- and the old Ronettes hits -- I finally surrendered. ( shopped and actually minorly decorated my apartment for xmas, first time in... years, I think )
So then every night after that last week I caught up on stuff I needed to do ( Read more... )
My nephew's concert this past Friday was great, even the regular chorus kids. Sounds of Sweetness' acapella rendition of "Counting Stars" was A-MAZE-ING. There's one kid, not a regular member, I think he's on the (autism) spectrum, who often joins them just to do percussion sounds -- he's like a human beat box. Man, he was great; it would not have been what it was, without him. He really brings it. ( assorted other comments on SoS and the recital and family bullshit )
With all the family and most of the work and personal stuff done, I settled in for a weekend of hopefully no migraines (wish came true=yayyay!!) and catching up on stuff I hadn't watched. grey had mentioned Gracepoint a while back ( Read more... )
I had managed to miss both Gracepoint eps of the last two weeks, so I caught up on those this weekend. Really was not expecting the twist of who really did it. As they were leading up to it, I started moaning, "No, no, NO!", finally yelling at the TV, I was so shocked. I won't give it away, and I haven't seen Broadchurch, so no idea if this is how it went on Broadchurch. But I would say this was one of the more successful rug-pulled-out-from-under-you plot twists I've seen the last few years.
I watched the premiere of S6 of Vampire Diaries when it occurred -- and was horribly disappointed. ( why I wasn't enthused to begin with )
So, this weekend, I thought I'd try to catch up. omg, I couldn't. I watched like the first ten minutes of 3 different eps in a row and was like, No, honey, we're done. ( how you know you're done with a show )
On to Archer Vice. I started watching Archer in S2, and it was the most hilarious, inapprops, non-stop cracked out show I'd ever seen, yet with all this insane wit, great dialogue and snappy comebacks, a great ensemble cast, and so many bizarre homages and nods to old and new war movies, scifi, and spy stories and 1970s pop culture ( how geeky am I about Archer? )
That being said... S5 of Archer, from last January to March, when it became Archer Vice... I was on the fence about it. Sure, the show is cracked out to begin with, but I kind of felt it, too, went off the rails last season. It took me until 5x5 to really get into all the new insanity of the 5th season. ( why I kept watching anyway, unlike with VD )
But then, Archer has always been a combination of low-brow and high-brow. And knowing a Archer S6 is coming in January, I decided to rewatch last season. So when I binge-re-watched S5/Archer Vice this past weekend, I was less on the fence and much more omg, take that US intelligence and foreign policy! because the continuing season-long backstory arc is totally seditious -- and if government and military authorities expected Adam Reed to just nicely kill off the fictional ISIS just to politely accommodate them, well, I bet they sure regret that now.
The season long arc leads up to a basic indictment of US "intelligence," not to mention portraying the huge mistakes of American foreign policy wrt all the South American banana republics and dictators we constantly set up so they would be under our control. And, as cracked out as Archer Vice was -- and I do still have problems with Pam's cocaine-related slimdown -- it's actually not as cracked out as American foreign policy. So. There's that.
But, I almost forgot: Elementary.
For all us non-football fans who are fans of Elementary, the Elementary ep of 2 Thursdays ago was tragically unavailable because the Chicago Bears were playing ( Read more... )
Comments on this season so far: I am disappointed that the whole Mycroft thing has seemingly disappeared without a trace. (Rather like Irene/Moriarty, right? Ugh.). I mean, what? ( mini-rant about the comings and goings of characters who only ever broke up the Holmes/Watson dyad or served as season-long story arc devices ) And, so far, while there have been individual eps that have been clever, I have just not recovered from the whole handwavy "Sherlock moved back to London when Watson moved out and abandoned the consultancy with NYPD/Captain Gregson, leaving that to Watson alone; now all of a sudden he's back in NY, but with a new female sidekick, er, protege, who herself is... a victim of a horrific crime and the anti-Moriarty! ta-da, here's Kitty!"
I have nothing personal against Kitty and she seems like a character with great potential. (But I really have a problem with her backstory of being a rape/torture/abduction victim, and how that's going to 'serve' the Holmes/Watson stories... I mean, why? Why must she be damaged from jump?)
And given the way the preceding two stand-ins for this type of character were treated (Irene/Moriarty in S1; Mycroft in S2, and, to a lesser extent, Marcus), I do not have high hopes for Kitty's development as a character and not just a season-long-story-arc-plot-device. And I do have a problem with the introduction of yet another person to get between Sherlock and Watson. Why? Wherefore? The Holmes/Watson partnership was working so nicely in S1 and the early part of S2... why, why, WHY must writers fix what isn't broken?
All of that being said... I do appreciate the fact that Watson now has a place of her own and a new beau... and, canonically speaking (relating to the original Conan Doyle stories), it is correct that Watson moves out from Holmes' place. In the original Conan Doyle stories, of course, he got married, but mixed it up with Sherlock regularly after (presumably) married life got boring.
But, just as I had a problem with Marcus' Sherlock-caused injury being used as a plot device last season, I have a problem with Kitty being introduced. ( was there ever such a character in Conan Doyle's original stories? don't think so; also, why must Elementary be dumbed down? why must everyone be assumed to be so stupid that we won't figure it out? )
Oh, I forgot to mention this in the title of my post: How To Get Away With Murder. I really, really hate the Grey's Anatomy-ish setup with all the twentynothings who are supposed to be the eye candy pulling in younger viewers, and I really, really love Viola Davis and don't understand why she can't have a The Good Wife-ish role without a bunch of dumb young eye candy taking the story away from her character. ( my other issues with HTGAWM )
I have tried to watch Sleepy Hollow and Agents of Shield this season, and to catch up on their last seasons. I have failed. ( oh, just take a guess. )
All of this makes me yearn for the third season of Hannibal. Hannibal walks a very fine line between totally cracked out (let's face it: all those insanely fucked up murders Will gets called in to profile have never actually occurred -- at least, not before those episodes were broadcast) and yet Taking Itself Very Seriously.
Hannibal is thoroughly creepy, absorbing, and hypnotic. This is largely because of all the leads, all of whom are amazing actors in their own rights, but especially on this show. ( other reasons I can't not watch Hannibal )
The slash -- and everything else -- is so there in Hannibal (and polymorphous, too). And yet it is so well written -- and so horrifyingly dark and seductive and twisted and almost odious in where it's going -- that I can't quite make myself read or search for much Hannibal fic or slashfic.
I can't decide if it is a good thing or a bad thing when you fear that a show is so well written that it's highly unlikely the vast majority of the fanfic will meet that same standard, as the bar has almost been set too high.
I was thinking about this the other day, as I am still (grrr, still) struggling through a DS fic ( sigh, this is why I don't write that much anymore, aside from the RSIs )
Anyway, while thinking about DS, and rewatching some eps to try to get back into the groove so I can finish this fic, I realized that, while I loved DS and thought it was a well-written if family-oriented show -- and yet very slashy -- with a well-developed sense of whimsy, it was by no means perfect.
So, sometimes, in many different but equally enthralling permutations, it seems like DS fanfic (especially, but not exclusively, the slashfic) is the better 'verse -- better than the canonical suffers. Sometimes much better. ( how strange and wonderful, and is it just because the fanfic is 'the HBO version' of the show? I think not )
Whether that's accurate or not, the bottom line is the fanfic 'verse for DS has taken on a life of its own, one which is far more in-depth and more complex, as are the characters, than the original show and characters were... and I really love that that happened.
Can that only happen with a show where there are certain restrictions and parameters?
Which reminds me... it'll be, like, six more months before we get the next Penny Dreadful! Sigh.
But then, there is the new season of Lost Girl... I haven't seen the first 2 eps yet. But I can't go into that, I have to go to bed, and ( yes, it's cracky, but it's also tongue-in-cheek )
Crap. I really must go to bed. Gotta be at work by 8:30! At least it's not 6:30 like it used to be.
Ronnie Spector's concert a week from this past Sunday was totally worth it. ( Read more... )
But Ronnie! Man, she's like, what, 71? And still rocking. And still big pipes! She was totally on-key, all the time, not one false note, and had to hold the mic away from her mouth sometimes because her voice, it is just that big! ( Read more... )
I was all, Bah, humbug! about xmas before the concert. My boss and a couple of coworkers have been forcing us to listen to the all Christmas station since after Halloween, which is way too soon imho. But after all Ronnie's Christmas tunes -- and the old Ronettes hits -- I finally surrendered. ( shopped and actually minorly decorated my apartment for xmas, first time in... years, I think )
So then every night after that last week I caught up on stuff I needed to do ( Read more... )
My nephew's concert this past Friday was great, even the regular chorus kids. Sounds of Sweetness' acapella rendition of "Counting Stars" was A-MAZE-ING. There's one kid, not a regular member, I think he's on the (autism) spectrum, who often joins them just to do percussion sounds -- he's like a human beat box. Man, he was great; it would not have been what it was, without him. He really brings it. ( assorted other comments on SoS and the recital and family bullshit )
With all the family and most of the work and personal stuff done, I settled in for a weekend of hopefully no migraines (wish came true=yayyay!!) and catching up on stuff I hadn't watched. grey had mentioned Gracepoint a while back ( Read more... )
I had managed to miss both Gracepoint eps of the last two weeks, so I caught up on those this weekend. Really was not expecting the twist of who really did it. As they were leading up to it, I started moaning, "No, no, NO!", finally yelling at the TV, I was so shocked. I won't give it away, and I haven't seen Broadchurch, so no idea if this is how it went on Broadchurch. But I would say this was one of the more successful rug-pulled-out-from-under-you plot twists I've seen the last few years.
I watched the premiere of S6 of Vampire Diaries when it occurred -- and was horribly disappointed. ( why I wasn't enthused to begin with )
So, this weekend, I thought I'd try to catch up. omg, I couldn't. I watched like the first ten minutes of 3 different eps in a row and was like, No, honey, we're done. ( how you know you're done with a show )
On to Archer Vice. I started watching Archer in S2, and it was the most hilarious, inapprops, non-stop cracked out show I'd ever seen, yet with all this insane wit, great dialogue and snappy comebacks, a great ensemble cast, and so many bizarre homages and nods to old and new war movies, scifi, and spy stories and 1970s pop culture ( how geeky am I about Archer? )
That being said... S5 of Archer, from last January to March, when it became Archer Vice... I was on the fence about it. Sure, the show is cracked out to begin with, but I kind of felt it, too, went off the rails last season. It took me until 5x5 to really get into all the new insanity of the 5th season. ( why I kept watching anyway, unlike with VD )
But then, Archer has always been a combination of low-brow and high-brow. And knowing a Archer S6 is coming in January, I decided to rewatch last season. So when I binge-re-watched S5/Archer Vice this past weekend, I was less on the fence and much more omg, take that US intelligence and foreign policy! because the continuing season-long backstory arc is totally seditious -- and if government and military authorities expected Adam Reed to just nicely kill off the fictional ISIS just to politely accommodate them, well, I bet they sure regret that now.
The season long arc leads up to a basic indictment of US "intelligence," not to mention portraying the huge mistakes of American foreign policy wrt all the South American banana republics and dictators we constantly set up so they would be under our control. And, as cracked out as Archer Vice was -- and I do still have problems with Pam's cocaine-related slimdown -- it's actually not as cracked out as American foreign policy. So. There's that.
But, I almost forgot: Elementary.
For all us non-football fans who are fans of Elementary, the Elementary ep of 2 Thursdays ago was tragically unavailable because the Chicago Bears were playing ( Read more... )
Comments on this season so far: I am disappointed that the whole Mycroft thing has seemingly disappeared without a trace. (Rather like Irene/Moriarty, right? Ugh.). I mean, what? ( mini-rant about the comings and goings of characters who only ever broke up the Holmes/Watson dyad or served as season-long story arc devices ) And, so far, while there have been individual eps that have been clever, I have just not recovered from the whole handwavy "Sherlock moved back to London when Watson moved out and abandoned the consultancy with NYPD/Captain Gregson, leaving that to Watson alone; now all of a sudden he's back in NY, but with a new female sidekick, er, protege, who herself is... a victim of a horrific crime and the anti-Moriarty! ta-da, here's Kitty!"
I have nothing personal against Kitty and she seems like a character with great potential. (But I really have a problem with her backstory of being a rape/torture/abduction victim, and how that's going to 'serve' the Holmes/Watson stories... I mean, why? Why must she be damaged from jump?)
And given the way the preceding two stand-ins for this type of character were treated (Irene/Moriarty in S1; Mycroft in S2, and, to a lesser extent, Marcus), I do not have high hopes for Kitty's development as a character and not just a season-long-story-arc-plot-device. And I do have a problem with the introduction of yet another person to get between Sherlock and Watson. Why? Wherefore? The Holmes/Watson partnership was working so nicely in S1 and the early part of S2... why, why, WHY must writers fix what isn't broken?
All of that being said... I do appreciate the fact that Watson now has a place of her own and a new beau... and, canonically speaking (relating to the original Conan Doyle stories), it is correct that Watson moves out from Holmes' place. In the original Conan Doyle stories, of course, he got married, but mixed it up with Sherlock regularly after (presumably) married life got boring.
But, just as I had a problem with Marcus' Sherlock-caused injury being used as a plot device last season, I have a problem with Kitty being introduced. ( was there ever such a character in Conan Doyle's original stories? don't think so; also, why must Elementary be dumbed down? why must everyone be assumed to be so stupid that we won't figure it out? )
Oh, I forgot to mention this in the title of my post: How To Get Away With Murder. I really, really hate the Grey's Anatomy-ish setup with all the twentynothings who are supposed to be the eye candy pulling in younger viewers, and I really, really love Viola Davis and don't understand why she can't have a The Good Wife-ish role without a bunch of dumb young eye candy taking the story away from her character. ( my other issues with HTGAWM )
I have tried to watch Sleepy Hollow and Agents of Shield this season, and to catch up on their last seasons. I have failed. ( oh, just take a guess. )
All of this makes me yearn for the third season of Hannibal. Hannibal walks a very fine line between totally cracked out (let's face it: all those insanely fucked up murders Will gets called in to profile have never actually occurred -- at least, not before those episodes were broadcast) and yet Taking Itself Very Seriously.
Hannibal is thoroughly creepy, absorbing, and hypnotic. This is largely because of all the leads, all of whom are amazing actors in their own rights, but especially on this show. ( other reasons I can't not watch Hannibal )
The slash -- and everything else -- is so there in Hannibal (and polymorphous, too). And yet it is so well written -- and so horrifyingly dark and seductive and twisted and almost odious in where it's going -- that I can't quite make myself read or search for much Hannibal fic or slashfic.
I can't decide if it is a good thing or a bad thing when you fear that a show is so well written that it's highly unlikely the vast majority of the fanfic will meet that same standard, as the bar has almost been set too high.
I was thinking about this the other day, as I am still (grrr, still) struggling through a DS fic ( sigh, this is why I don't write that much anymore, aside from the RSIs )
Anyway, while thinking about DS, and rewatching some eps to try to get back into the groove so I can finish this fic, I realized that, while I loved DS and thought it was a well-written if family-oriented show -- and yet very slashy -- with a well-developed sense of whimsy, it was by no means perfect.
So, sometimes, in many different but equally enthralling permutations, it seems like DS fanfic (especially, but not exclusively, the slashfic) is the better 'verse -- better than the canonical suffers. Sometimes much better. ( how strange and wonderful, and is it just because the fanfic is 'the HBO version' of the show? I think not )
Whether that's accurate or not, the bottom line is the fanfic 'verse for DS has taken on a life of its own, one which is far more in-depth and more complex, as are the characters, than the original show and characters were... and I really love that that happened.
Can that only happen with a show where there are certain restrictions and parameters?
Which reminds me... it'll be, like, six more months before we get the next Penny Dreadful! Sigh.
But then, there is the new season of Lost Girl... I haven't seen the first 2 eps yet. But I can't go into that, I have to go to bed, and ( yes, it's cracky, but it's also tongue-in-cheek )
Crap. I really must go to bed. Gotta be at work by 8:30! At least it's not 6:30 like it used to be.
