Bowlegged by saddle rash?
it’s an action pose, my ass shingles have not recurred
Seinfeld is on Netflix now, I thought it would be interesting to watch it as like a weird mid 90s time capsule
In the first episode Jerry picks someone up at the airport and meets her in the terminal and answers multiple phone calls on his landline, then the beginning of the second ep is a bit about how women love to write checks, and the first scene is in a video rental store
If it was like a contemporary period piece set in the nineties it would feel too on the nose
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Isn’t it great?
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Women do love writing checks! It’s funny because it’s true!
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Honestly though my wife really derives a lot of satisfaction from balancing her check book
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The Last of Us TV show is shooting in downtown Edmonton, can’t believe the stupidest thing about living in la followed me up here. Hope it doesn’t fuck up traffic too much
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For a game that clearly took place in the Pacific Northwest to head into Edmonton when Vancouver is right there…
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there are apparently a bunch of rusted out cars with massachusetts plates on them so i guess john lastofus is a masshole now
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first of all his name is Joel Miller and second, after a prologue in texas the game begins in the boston fedra quarantine zone
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traveling from boston to vancouver feels like shit though, they got that part right
(why do I remember the ending being more like norcal?)
the 2nd game ends in santa barbara
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i always thought the world would end in santa barbara
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I watched the first episode of shockingly popular Korean Netflix anticapitalist horror series Squid Game, and I thought it was pretty good.
Standout scene: A man in a suit approaches a beat-up, horribly indebted gambling addict in a train station and makes him an offer: Play this simple childhood dexterity game with me. Whenever you win a round, I give you 10,000 won (~$9). Whenever I win a round, you give me 10,000. If you lose, and you can’t pay me, I can just slap your face and call it even.
So these guys play the game and the indebted man keeps losing over and over. He gets slapped about twenty times. Finally, he wins a round. In his excitement, and with a spirit of jocular comeuppance, he reaches out to slap the suited man. The suited man grips his arm to prevent the slap and slips the bills into his hand instead. It’s a hard reminder that they were never equals in this game. The indebted man seems deflated for a moment but that quickly gives way to joy and relief at this small but crucial windfall.
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Yeah I’m in episode two of that and “enjoying” it.
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I’m three eps into Foundation and like… it’s pretty solid, I’d say. Great premise, great visuals, great acting, a lot of cool ideas. Lee Pace and Jared Harris are of course the standouts.
It’s not really a particularly great TV show, though, due largely to the fact that, I’m guessing, it’s following the structure of a book. There are big, frequent time jumps, and spurs of drama, all which remove any recognizable character after an episode or two. So as a result, you can’t get invested in any character, really. If this was a book, I wouldn’t mind it so much, but since this is a TV show, carried by the actors and not the writing, I dunno. Not really working on a dramatic level.
I’m told it has already derived so far from the books as to be unrecognizable, but, I never read them so, I don’t care too much about that. There’s a lot of ways this show could have gone with the initial premise, but it’s ended up on a sort of backwater planet sans any sort of interesting scenery, so you’re really just clinging to that political drama for the meat here.
Squid Game is definitely a much more interesting and carefully-considered puzzlebox than Saw or whatever, they really work with the implications of the titular game’s structure and all the ways it could fray around the edges. It also yes ambiently anticapitalist although one of the heroes is a Good Cop With Nothing Left To Lose (sigh). A good time all around I’d say, but it really lives on its personal character dramas, I don’t think it’s saying anything profound on a social or political level.
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I’ve seen some stuff on twitter from South Koreans talking about how Squid Game has very specific and targeted critiques of their political/economic order and it’s pretty interesting.
Makes me wish I knew more about Korean politics!
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someday I will breach the walls of this prison and gain access to reality’s debug room, and I’m going to disable everyone’s access to digital color correction
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Squid Game’s politics are good because it never once makes the ultra-rich seem like anything besides abject sociopaths who are objectively wrong about humanity.
Spoilers after having finished the show: I love that the main antagonist of the show reveals that the game was created because rich people were bored and nostalgic. It’s not any deeper than that, its just the inevitable result of rich people ennui. Billionaires torture the poor for kicks and then blame the poor for being desperate enough to do ugly things in order to survive.
The best part is how the rich are completely ignorant of the many ways that the game is unfair. They talk about everyone having an equal chance but ignore the contexts these people came from and how those would affect their chances in these games.
The games themselves also seem to highlight the many failings of capitalism, mainly due to the overwhelming influence of chance on whether any given person succeeds or loses. (the dalgona game was a great illustration of that. The shapes were picked arbitrarily by most of the characters, and those who had the misfortune to choose umbrellas had to work harder than anyone else to survive)
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