I finished Boston Legal while home with a migraine last night, so now it's time for me to talk about it at excruciating length. Spoilers, I guess, if you've been meaning to watch that for the past twelve years and somehow still haven't gotten around to it.
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I've spiraled down into the part of the Netflix queue where it's all "that one thing someone told me to watch that one time," which I added to the list to make them stop bugging me about it. Why didn't anybody tell me that Boston Legal was this completely bonkers? It caught my attention because I've been watching through Star Trek trying to work out how the costumes are put together (with haste and a kind of mad genius, out of the cheapest fabrics available), and I vaguely remembered that Shatner was (is?) still a jobbing actor. I didn't watch it when it was on actual TV; the promos made it look like a straight-up legal drama, and one can only mainline so many Law & Order clones. This thing is brilliant . It has a reality-defying lunacy one rarely finds outside of manga. It contains the trope-naming character for Bunny Ears Lawyer, in fact, an archetype that I had assumed came from something Japanese, because that's the sort of thing they do. Al...
[Addendum to the earlier note--] Firstly, I would like to say, God bless the obsessive stans of the world. They save me from having to track down each and every individual goddamned piece of media one by one when I go on a tare. There is no project so obscure that they cannot give me enough information to find some chunk of it somewhere on the internet. I can't honestly recommend Exit 57 for entertainment value (it's recognizably in Colbert/Dinello/Sedaris' style, but, uh, they got better) but if you ever wanted to know how they worked their way up to Strangers With Candy , that'll definitely tell you. The down side to this is that their laser focus sometimes gets a little too narrow. The hive mind tends to assume that anyone who's found their way down the rabbit hole already knows what's going on, or that nobody ever needs a reason for the "smexy", and they can edit things down to just the "good bits". This is aggravating if you're actu...
A friend of mine was tolerating my drunken fangirling last weekend, patiently agreeing that yes, it is the cutest thing ever when Stephen Colbert turns around to hit on his off-camera wife every time he fucks up a line in his monologue. And yeah, I keep watching that because he's being comfortingly sane/angry right now, but also because it feels like representation, in a weird sort of way. Colbert is, in many respects, what a lot of people would think of as the quintessential American: A straight, white, Christian man, married with kids, on a lifelong career path that has earned him substantial material wealth. Left to his own devices, he dresses like the dadliest dad who ever dadded. He's expressed some ambivalence about the knowledge that at least some of his media clout comes from this. On the one hand, he is perhaps not the best person to speak to the lived experience of institutional disadvantage; on the other, there are a lot of straight white Christian men in America who...
Life continues. Kind of. I have a place to go as of this end of this month, although I still have no idea how the fuck to move my stuff during Plague Times. I don't own that much, but I also don't have a car. I am tempted to not bother moving the mattress, but I am very much afraid that if I don't I will literally never manage to own a comfortable bed ever again. Being someone who discombobulates joints on a regular basis, not being in extra pain every time I wake up is kind of important for my quality of life. I could eventually figure out how to replace the futon I use as a topper, but a futon alone is not enough padding -- I've learned the hard way that I can very much feel the hard floor or the hard pipes of a futon frame through one of those things, and it is Not Good for my sleep. Massachusetts is, as of this writing, continuing with their re-opening plan. We've hit the phase where the dance studio has been cleared for operation, with appropriate procedures. ...
Stephen Colbert is really mad. It is not easy to push him into being mean. He generally stands for things like 'read more books' and 'get along with each other'. Somewhere in the multiverse, there is a reality where Colbert is a Jesuit scholar. Somewhere else is a timeline where he's the television personality who accidentally won his bid for President. I for one would like to apply for a transfer, right now. Colbert has a reputation. I've started to wonder if people who interview him are contractually obligated to describe him as 'the nicest man on Earth' because they all basically do. When he accidentally acquired an internet army at his old show, he put them to work alternately getting random shit named after him and organizing thousands, if not millions, of dollars for various charitable causes. After testifying before Congress on behalf of immigrant workers, he was asked why he would do that, and stammered before quoting Matthew ('the least of...
It is allergy season. The weather is warm again, and that means all the local plant life is spawning. I would think it was much prettier if it didn't also make my nose stuff up constantly. I've spent most of the week trying to fight back one of those headaches that makes you feel like you have too many teeth, and your eyeballs have routed your heartbeat through a powerful subwoofer. I cope with this by overmedicating as much as I dare -- you can actually take three of the 325 mg aspirin tablets at a time, FYI -- and by distracting myself. Right now I am also distracting Moggie by throwing detectives at her. I used to work overnight at an answering service. It was boring as hell. Nobody called after the bars closed at about two. They had the computers locked down and I can only carry so many books, so I spent most of my time in the break room, where the cable TV was, conducting a survey of all the kinds of fascinating nonsense stations started throwing on at four in the mor...
Goddamnit, is Sebastian Stan famous enough now to be in things that don't suck? The interwebs say that The Bronze was picked up for a 600-screen deal, which means it'll undoubtedly be shown somewhere in Boston. I suppose I'll see then. Netflix Watch Instantly, it turns out, has Political Animals , a miniseries in which he plays one of the main roles, that of the fuck-up drug addled child of the star family. I expected to not particularly like it; I'm not keen on political dramas, and I figured there'd be a lot of shocking plot developments and hand wringing and probably at least one scene that consists entirely of two actors shouting at one another like they think volume is what wins you an Emmy. I've watched worse and less interesting things out of curiosity, though. I did get through Black Swan for Natalie Portman and Mila Kunis. I didn't think it was the epic cinematic tour de force that everyone else apparently thought it was, but it wasn't part...
Doctor Who: One
The First Doctor: William Hartnell First serial: 100,000 BC Last serial: The Tenth Planet Costume details: A gentleman's day wear from roughly the Victorian era, with an appropriate shoulder-length hairstyle. Frock coat with astrakhan collar and karakul hat, dark cloak, long scarf. Wears an ornate ring on one finger. Companions: Susan , Ian Chesterton , Barbara Wright , Vicki , Steven Taylor , Katarina , Dodo Chaplet , Polly , Ben Jackson At first glance, the First Doctor is egotistical and imperious. At second glance, he's egotistical, imperious, and also flubs his lines a lot. This is because the Doctor was not initially supposed to be the focus character of the show. Originally, the show that we know as Doctor Who was conceived of as less a science-fiction serial, and more of an edutainment program -- you will notice, if you watch the very early stories, that they're rather heavy on history, and comparatively light on stuntmen in giant rubber suits. The audien...
Collins is still piqued over the Destiel kerfuffle on Twitter. Gif'ed version with subtitles on tumblr, if you're on a thing that hates Flash. [Otherwise irrelevant note: "Миша" is how you spell Misha in Cyrillic. Just in case you ever need that.] He's past being pissed off, and has progressed into exasperated. He's been doing this for a few months now, sitting up there on a stage with a microphone and saying, "Well, this here is what I'm doing with this character," and apparently there are still people going, "No, you aren't!" He can't be doing that badly -- five kabillion people on tumblr have noticed, and getting a coherent argument out of that lot is like herding a load of schizophrenic tweaker cats. There are only so many ways you can debate with someone who keeps telling you what your own opinion is, and refuses to listen to what you actually say . On a psycholinguistic note, Collins specifically says ' wh...
Before I go on with any more of the SPN stuff, I should probably do the whole listing-of-ye-biases and meta-commentary thing. This is 145% opinion, speculation, and personal orneriness, and should not be taken as the basis of anything. I was sort of aware of Supernatural before I started watching it. I hang out on the internets, after all. I had been told that Dean/Cas was a thing, although I had no idea who the hell they were at the time and I'd heard much more about the infamous "Wincest" people -- that happens to hit one of my personal squick buttons, and I was told it was prevalent, so I read no fanfic before I started prodding Netflix for episodes. I watched the first couple of season 1, then skipped to season 4, since I'd been specifically asked about Misha Collins. I've been a fanficker for a long, long time. I write it (no, you can't see it), I read it (don't ask me for recs unless you want things that are slashy or interesting), and I study it...
Ohhhh, I almost missed a train wreck on the internet. Supernatural season nine started a few weeks ago. It's airing on Tuesdays now. I dunno who capped it, so I dunno in what time zone it was 11:35p when this happened, but sometime that evening, someone named Chad Kennedy tweeted this, evidently in a response to an @mention: I would love to link you to the original, but the account has since been closed, for reasons that will become abundantly clear in a moment. The fanbase, as you would expect, immediately exploded. Someone with an IQ asked the obvious question, which was 'does this dude actually have anything to do with the show?' This is as far as I got before I had to go out and do actual work for a while. I dunno who Guy Norman Bee is; the internet tells me he is indeed on the show. People who do have some idea evidently accept his word on Mr. Kennedy up there. This answer, to be honest, actually tweaked my antennae a bit -- he vouches for Kennedy's ...
So apparently Misha Collins has a really interesting idea of personal space . Moggie tripped over that one on YouTube a while back and ended up laughing so hard she forgot about air and started making the kinds of noises one might expect to get out of an emotionally-distressed pterodactyl. This is not particularly uncommon when he does panels, and most of the cast let him get away with it all . the . time . It is widely agreed to be charming and hilarious, and makes it well worth turning up to basically any event where they let him talk to other people. There's another one where someone asks him if he and Castiel have any character traits in common, and he decides to give her a demonstration of Cas' total obliviousness when it comes to interpersonal distance by getting within about a foot of her while waffling on. I don't think this is the only version of this you can find online, but nobody's got a particularly good vantage point on the other side of the auditorium,...