seryn

I've found something even more embarrassing to admit that I watch than Glee.
( why glee is embarrassing )
( I watch American Ninja Warrior, you can laugh at me now. )
( long bit about cool cartoons )

So I'd rather be watching cartoons that debate the nature of who is a real person and whether you can be friends with a clone and talks about how to channel duly-earned anger so you don't get the people around you killed. But it's incredibly difficult to do so even though that's precisely what Young Justice is pretty much all about.

Instead I'm watching American Ninja Warrior. ( Read more... )

I've been watching Monk too. But eh. It's hard to identify with the characters on the show even though it's set in California. For whatever reason they're all culturally really alien to me. I'm sort of wondering if they filmed it in New York because it's got that "We're not Californians." vibe. The most irritating thing about the show though is the song... I didn't start watching until a few months ago, after the series was over and the whole thing is on Netflix streaming. It's REALLY hard to fast forward through bits of a show like the theme intro.

What the freaking hell happened to Netflix? I had to check the calendar to see if this was a prank.

They've decided to spin off the DVD service within the next month. AND the announcement says that there won't be any interchange for queue and ratings. It'd be like starting over with the new company. If I'm going to start over, why wouldn't I start over with someone else?

It makes me not want to have their streaming anymore either. Because, hello, quite bitchy to spring that kind of thing on customers.

I'm also appalled that they didn't have a mechanism to opt-out at the end of the billing cycle, but in advance. The explanation seems to say that if you don't cancel your DVD subscription, they're going to give your credit card information to a new company but without setting up your queue or ratings or anything else. I believe that's something that should be illegal.

Which is why I'm completely skeeved about keeping their streaming content.

Amazon does have some streaming content included in Prime, but not nearly enough.

One of the things that surprises me is how much I am enjoying Doctor Who now. When I started, I had to be dragged kicking and screaming.
( Read more... )

I've been watching MacGyver from the Netflix streaming. I'd almost forgotten why I thought the show was awesome. I especially like the prologue stories before the main story starts. Those are tight.

Funny post on being way older than everyone around you: Life as an old fart This was locked, sorry.

Still watching the Mythbusters streaming stuff, but even though I'm in season 1 still, it's being taken over by the trio of "can we make this more lame?" I really dislike them. Not because they're not smart... we've seen evidence that Grant's really great at electronics (though we're not at Grant season yet) and Tory has this subtle vibe around explosives and guns that makes you think he had experience. No idea what Kari was good at. But they don't play to those strengths, ever. No one on their team thinks anything through. It's sort of the anti-science whenever they're on board.

Strangely, Simon IM'd and told me I was cool. He was indicating a comparison with some other thing, but I didn't take it that way. I said, "Oh. I will get a sweater."

Simon has me watching the new Doctor Who show. It's available streaming from Netflix, well, sort of available in that it's like years behind what the BBC is actually showing. It's BBC, BBC-America, SyFy, Netflix. And it seems to take an extra year at each locus. I don't like Doctor Who. This incarnation seems vaguely tolerable in that if I didn't already have preconceptions causing there to be dislike to overcome before I even watched one, I might enjoy it. But I find that it's too scary. I loathe time travel. And I hate incompetence. The very first episode I saw, the Doctor seemed like he had a clue. The Tardis ended up where/when it was supposed to be, the people who were assigned various tasks, although idiotic, were aptly suited for those tasks. Normally, in the Doctor Who episodes I've seen, filmed back when they used actual film and the world wasn't all the way in color yet, The Doctor is a fuckwitted moron and the people who travel with him are cretins. So this is a tremendous improvement. (To clarify, I'm watching the bow-tie current doctor, not the one who was on Weakest Link and sang his themesong (which is instrumental). I watched a couple of those and had this tremendous desire to hurt myself to make it stop.)

There's a restaurant here that puts giant homemade egg noodles in tom yum soup. It's fantastic and I'm kind of wondering why more places don't do that instead of those nasty looking mushrooms. I really hate those. Not just because I hate mushrooms, which I do, but these always look like small penises. And it makes me wonder why anyone thought they might be worth eating.

I watched a Good Eats recently where Alton Brown cooked with ramen noodles. I have had issues with him for a while now, but is there anyone who doesn't see that as a shark-jumping moment?

My home is not arranged correctly. It seems like I should be able to fold and put away clothes while watching TV, but we don't like having electronics in the bedroom (so there's no TV and no computer in there, there's an alarm clock but that's it.) Then I'm wondering why we have clothes in the bedroom. I don't change clothes after sleeping, I change clothes after bathing. So it seems like a small room that has no closets and just room for the bed and a couple hooks for robes would be ideal. There would be a room for clothing storage elsewhere. Preferably adjacent to the viewing room. It just doesn't make sense that sleeping and dressing are conflated. It's probably leftover from when we were children and bedrooms were where we kept our personal stuff. It's probably also leftover from when people had families. My whole apartment is my space for my stuff. Simon uses the whole apartment as his space for his stuff too. So why does this have to be like that. I will have to think on it. It might make a difference in terms of what I'd like in an apartment.

There's some really stressful stuff going on here this week. Not about me. And I can't really talk about it. So I'm mostly trying to keep going since an engine stall from this height could be crash-inducing.

re: Mentalist:
I find myself hoping that Theresa is Red John's inside man in the CBI. I really hate her. It won't be her, of course. They've spent too much show time building her up.

re: Body of Proof. I watched all of the third ep and they didn't have her bleating on and on about her lost lamb. But the whole plot was centered on how as a neurosurgeon she didn't care about people and now that she's got a less demanding job, she can nurture and connect with people. I'm thinking this is going in the bin, but I might watch one more.

re: House (I'm a week behind on these.) I liked Masters a lot more in this episode than I ever have in the past. Having her converse with her roommate really helped make her an actual character instead of a characterization. ( spoiler )

re: Mythbusters. Yeah. Everyone I knew at one point watched this show and I finally started just so I wasn't left out. But hardly any of those people are left in my life now and I'm still watching. Some of the stuff Adam and Jamie do is way cool. I don't really like the trio of Tory, Grant, and Keri. Part of that is the way they push themselves into caricature. Part of it is that they often seem to do things backwards in order to get the visual effect... like when they destroyed 4 full size cars to test stuff they knew was bogus and any small scale test would have negated the need. When they do extreme stuff just so it's worth filming, but the actual science wasn't that interesting, it bothers me. I know we didn't see all the experiments Adam and Jamie were doing with the masks because they showed a clip with Jamie's dog on Colbert which wasn't in the episode. Instead we got to watch Kari screeching about some random shit they were blowing up. Maybe they should make it a half-hour show and ditch the trio. Maybe Kari is preggo again and they'll bring back the smart girl who subbed.

Netflix is streaming MacGyver now. That's from more than 20 years ago. Knight Rider is from almost 30 years ago. And I find that even though these shows were about people who are 20-something, that those 20-somethings are not as completely fuckwitted as the current crop of TV's 20-somethings.

I am withdrawing my recommendation for Being Human. The concept behind the show is that monsters who want to be human have to work harder at it--- but what I was looking for was that they seemed like regular people aside from the monstrosity aspects that they struggled to control.

If this is what regular people are like, then I'm really not interested. I remember being 20 and 25 and not being able to find somewhere nice to live and a job I could stand and everything I needed to have the kind of life I'd left before college when I lived with my established parents... but I didn't have sex with my co-workers at work, I didn't go out to "have fun" by killing people, and I was able to have a life outside the search for a lifemate.

Whenever I see young 20s people on TV now, they act like 18 year olds did... you know, just first having their adult responsibilities and kind of flailing to make it work. They often make ridiculously stupid choices that don't make any sense to anyone who isn't caught up in the heat of the moment.

( spoiler example )

I can't enjoy watching shows like that.

When I saw one of Kevin Smith's Q&A shows, where he said he didn't really like Zack and Miri as characters. As he watched the movie, he personally kept thinking they should get jobs instead of finding a scheme to make money. Because the thought modes you have as a 40 year old person who has a family and a home are completely different than the ones people who are just starting out have.

What bothers me most is that I was an extremely responsible person even at 14-15 years old. So I, honestly, would never act like most of the 20-something characters on television now. I keep thinking, "Grow the hell up before you get someone killed." And that's exactly the crux point why I'm disappointed in Being Human.

I would have liked it if they did more of the really good documentaries.

Circus was added to Netflix streaming and I thoroughly enjoyed rewatching it. I would like to have seen the 2010 season as well (the show was 2009's).

There was a documentary about Cirque du Soleil too and that was also awesome and I would have liked to see more years of that too.

I'm not completely sure these don't count as "reality tv" because there are a lot of these video diary type moments and such, but it's still about being in the circus. It's not artificial and manufactured. These people were in the Big Apple Circus even if there wasn't a video crew following them around. Survivor and Amazing Race and all the clones of those... the people in them would not be there without the show.

What's the difference between a documentary and reality tv? I think it's exactly in whether the people are there because of the filming or if the filming is an added layer. Madonna's video of her concert tour--- not the concert themselves, but the whole back stage and traveling and the ongoing weirdness of caravanning around the world--- that wasn't reality tv with it's implied sleaziness.

Both the Cirque du Soleil and Big Apple Circus documentaries were great advertising vehicles in that they promoted a show I would never have otherwise considered viable for my entertainment into my conscious investigation. I looked into whether I could see the Big Apple Circus (can't it's on the wrong side of the country, always). I wouldn't have even thought of them otherwise.

I might see Cirque du Soleil sometime. The tickets are really expensive and really hard to get for the traveling show. But I really had figured they were a "child-required" show since they've named themselves a circus and the documentary changed my impression of their show a lot.

I washed a scarf today. Yay me. It's still drying. The joys of bulky-weight wool yarn during the winter. After a day, I needed to move the scarf to a dry towel.

Today I read a book. The new Diana Wynne Jones one. It was decent for a kids' book. Could have been a lot better if the same story had been rewritten for people who can use multisyllabic words. Reading the book was a lot like being a kid because stuff seems to happen randomly, but as an adult I realized that it hadn't been really random, but the events were based upon subtext that was vastly over my head at the time. This book had a lot of that, but it's narrated, not a first-person story. So I'm wondering where modern authors get their stock of butt-stupid narrators who have no clues whatsoever. It's like Dr. Watson from the Sherlock Holmes mythos, only the narrator here doesn't have any interest in explaining things to the reader. I was annoyed.

I also watched last week's House. I really dislike the new girl. I hate the House-Cuddy relationship, though I do believe that House pined after her and no one else would really suit his preferences. The episode was the slave ship one. Interesting that Bones does a slave thing and House does a slave thing in the same week? More like cheap of Fox to reuse the sets. I didn't think this episode had good medicine in it, and I thought everyone was OoC. I realize canonical episodes cannot, by definition, be OoC, but this was. This episode was so bad that I'm glad we recorded the Chuck instead and I'm about ready to drop Chuck entirely from my viewing menu.

This week's NCIS was the second of the two-parter and I cannot figure out what happened. The first part was tolerable, at about the same level as most of the NCIS episodes lately have been. The second half was random, bizarre, and pathetic. It was full of flashbacks and inside jokes and had Ziva being smarter than the average bear. I guess when your team is up 21-zip, you can send in the JV and let the other team score on you a bit since you're going to win anyway and that way your good team is rested for next week?

pre-script: Tomatoes from the farmers market really make a sandwich delicious.

Hulu has video clips for each of the major networks pitching new shows for this season. I've had trouble finding new shows ever since we got TiVo because the TV wasn't just on while I was in the kitchen getting drinks. Plus we fast forward through ads just like we did with the VCR, but for years I haven't watched anything live. It means I can skip ahead when they recap what's already happened on cooking shows (one can watch a Rachel Ray show in about 60 seconds after removing all the recap, all the "here's how to chop an onion" which they show EVERY time, watching her carry stuff, watching while the camera zooms in on her giggling, and zipping through the rest in the low-level fast forward and the idiotic part where she dishes up even though no one is going to actually eat it and regular people cooking for one serve out of the pot. I save a lot of time and got to watch even more TV because of the TiVo. But it seemed like there was never anything on.

I found the show Life 3 episodes before it was canceled. I started watching Castle after season 1. I didn't start watching Criminal Minds until the middle of season 2 (and that's really hard to catch up on because they didn't put out the first season DVD until season 3 had started). We completely missed Blood Ties--- though admittedly it didn't take long for that to drift into the prejudicial attitude, I sometimes think that if I'd been watching it from the beginning, then my posts about the show would have affected the directions the writers took indirectly.

I haven't managed to watch the previews for the new seasons yet. It looks like there's a buttload of reality programming upcoming and even more stupid shitty sitcoms. But if there's a diamond in that rough, at least I was looking for it.

I finished the fourth "season" of Doc Martin last night. Really dislike the whole British 8 shows per season thing. Honestly, the TV people should own up. They only do one "season" per year anyway, they might as well call them that... but then people might expect something closer to 50 episodes. No reason a timeslot couldn't share with another 22 episodes per year show. And British shows could get 6 whole seasons of shows sharing a slot.

I did enjoy this, but less than the previous years'. Previously Martin would do what he felt was the right thing regardless of what was popular or acceptable. These episodes had Martin ignoring the pregnant Louisa which is clearly not the right thing to do and he knows better. I did like it when Martin walks out on the bitch queen Edith, because that was the right thing to do. I also liked Pauline's role in the end and how she handled him.

Supposedly there will be a fifth season, but they won't even start filming it until next year.

It's so weird to watch British shows when they do that. It takes about 2 years for them to air here, and usually the moderately popular shows seem to need the money from American stations showing the shows before they can decide whether to make more seasons. Then they need to re-option the actors and schedule everything else, which takes about 2 years before they even start the filming. Then it will take about 2 years before they're showing it in America again. So, not only are British seasons only about a third of the length of American programs' seasons, they only come out every five years. That's about 60 minutes per year on average.

Making the Harry Potter movies in England with only British actors must have been completely miraculous. They must have used every set and every camera and every film actor in the whole country to get 8 3-hour movies in 12 years. Maybe that's why there's such a delay, they don't have any crews for working on anything else.