the girly who shall end all girls

• tried deep water exercise at Queen Anne on Saturday. instructor was terribad. a regular confirmed that they were a sub, so fingers crossed for a better time next week
• Photos app is feeding me memories of this time last year, and I've realized that I'm going to get hit with a bunch of one-year milestones re: mimerki now and in the next few months and that sucks
• still enjoying Poker Face. just saw the episode that Judith Light won an Emmy for; the casting on the show is top notch. so is the makeup that nails ordinary lower class people. the wig they have on Natasha Lyonne (at least I hope it's a wig, her hair is so gross) stirs up memories of high school and my couple hitches in manufacturing

we've been watching House of the Dragon on Sundays. i stopped reading GRRM after A Dance with Dragons wasn't already written as promised in the back matter of A Feast for Crows and likewise stopped watching A Game of Thrones after it got past what I had read.* not having read the source material (or any Targaryen lore other than a couple Dunk and Egg stories), i'm able to really lean back and enjoy the show since i know nothing about these people or what happens next.

anyone else here watching? i feel like it's starting to hit its stride now.

( spoilers through and mostly about episode 4, and a sex scene )




*someday maybe he'll finish the books and i'll read them all end-to-end, but i think he's going to die first.

**plus his missing eyebrows really work with that weird white-blond hair.

there has been much watching of things:
The Eternals was fine. really pretty, avoided a lot of Marvel movie tropes, but had the problem of bland leads surrounded by an interesting and fun supporting cast. it was much funnier than I had been led to believe and had some lovely character work. did you miss anything if you skipped it? an awesome black gay superhero! other than that, the mid and post credits introducing some stuff that will probably still send you to google (unless you were lucky enough to be sitting beside mimerki).

Peacemaker is delighting me. three episodes have dropped so far; if you like Archer you should give this a try - reprehensible people with sad lives do dirty off-books work for the US government. little bit superhero, little bit workplace comedy, lots of tits and gore. James Gunn wrote all of it and directed most of it, so that will also probably tell you what you need to know. due to this being contemporary "real" world, there are a lot of Tarantino-esque quotable exchanges about mundane or pop culture stuff which is also my jam. and holy shit the period metal soundtrack: Gunn's Spotify playlist and the (unskippable to me) opening credits dance number.

The Matrix Resurrections was better than i expected. nothing earth-shaking because they did that in 1999. was it necessary? nah, none of the sequels were. it's very very meta, which i would say is the only way that you could do the thing at all. Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss have grown into much better actors and still have excellent chemistry. a lot of pixels have been spilled on the trans narratives in the Matrix films, i like this piece: The Matrix Resurrections is a trans love story.

The Witcher season two watch is complete, and now we've looped back to season one and are enjoying it much more on the rewatch with all the context. season two has one overarching story and leans hard into Ciri and Geralt's found family narrative. if you thought season one was just okay, or you bounced off but still feel like this is something you ought to like, try watching this 15-min recap of season one in chronological order then jump into season 2.

The Book of Boba Fett is in progress. it's fine. it's one of those shows that goes back and forth between the past and the present and so far the past story is more interesting than the present (even though i love Ming-Na Wen and want her to have all the fun jobs). i appreciate that the show low-key has a bunch of disabled folks, the leads are POC, and the one white dude in the cast who has appeared more than once is a receptionist.

what are you currently consuming?
Edwardian Farm, where they've just made buttermilk biscuits and act like that's some weird local Devonshire thing. one of the things i find remarkable is the extent of international trade - they mention that no one is growing wheat anymore because wheat from the US is so cheap, and that folks are eating more lamb and mutton because of imports of cheap frozen meat from AUSTRALIA and NEW ZEALAND. okay, the Suez Canal had been operating for ~50 years at that point, but isn't it wild to think that people who didn't have a toilet in their house were eating meat from the other side of the world that cost less than the local stuff?

we're stalled in season 4 of Babylon 5 because it is challenging and farm show is not.

what did you recently finish?
Secrets of the Castle, like the farm shows but with more stone cutting and français.

what will you consume next?
i'm addicted to the historic farm shows and their spin-offs, so i expect we'll be on to Wartime Farm or maybe take a detour to Victorian Pharmacy.
i also need to watch a lot of trailers because online-only SIFF is starting April 8.

thinking more about the new All Creatures Great and Small; they chose to bring in Herriot's Scottish accent, but turned the Yorkshire waaaay down. or at least for as much as i was willing to watch. my memory is that part of the humor in the early stories was in Herriot's culture shock, transitioning from city life to rural life and his inability to understand the English spoken by his clients. the 1978 show certainly plays this for laughs from the first episode.

i found a quote from the actor who played Herriot in the original series; they told him he wasn't to sound Scottish (even though the character is from Glasgow) because it would make him less relatable (gross). but apparently it was fine to lay the Yorkshire on thick. which could be interpreted as othering the Yorkshire folks.

as an American i don't know all the implications. today we wouldn't do a bit like the jive talk scene in Airplane (which isn't actual AAVE and i don't know if that makes it better or worse). but Hot Fuzz seems to get away with the idea of the city dude not understanding the older locals. so is it considered offensive to make jokes about regional speech being incomprehensible to the POV character? is that why it doesn't seem to be a part of the new show?

Just finished:
Barbarians (Barbaren) on Netflix. this is a German show in German and classical Latin, where i got the story i wanted out of the first few minutes of Gladiator - those nasty Romans deserve to have their asses kicked in the woods. C says the military history and costuming of the Romans is good, i say the human drama is soapy and fun, six episodes and no filler. CW for suicide, gore, and attempted rape. ends in a (reasonably) happy-for-now place with a solid setup for season 2.

Weekly watches:
Feeling pretty meh about the GBBO final coming up. this season has been edited to create extra "drama" that has resulted in one of the contestants looking like a fuckup that keeps managing to just be not-last, like showcasing every spill on her workstation and her basically calling herself stupid. i know she's been a star baker so that's not the full story. i blame Love Productions/Channel4 for creating a narrative that has resulted in making her a target for abuse on social media.*

After a wobbly start, The Mandalorian has mostly righted the ship.

Tried and failed:
Seis Manos, a "Netflix anime" set in Mexico. it's trying for a pulp 70s kung-fu film meets grindhouse vibe but it just kind of grossed me out and was giving this white girl racist vibes. kudos for subverting a trope - someone looks like they're going to be the series protagonist, but they were just a way to introduce us to the actual leads. i think anyway, we were only able to give it two episodes.

The palate cleanser:
The Repair Shop is delightful - Brits bring in family heirlooms for restoration and a charming specialist in a thatched-roof barn restores them and then we get to see the owners beaming and crying and sharing said heirloom with family members. i'd like slightly more restoration nerdery and slightly less sweet families (really we could keep the families and just make it longer) but it literally helped us be able to sleep well after the disturbing stuff in Seis Manos. the various restoration experts are delightful and it just has them and a narrator, no tv host. excited to have three seasons to get us through the rest of the year.

The tried and true:
tonight i discovered that Key and Peele is on HBO Max. it's so nice to watch without commercials. the Obama jokes are bittersweet these days, but tonight I said, "bitch" had me laughing so hard i had a coughing fit.



* yes, it's the fat one and there's definitely fatphobia involved. but i felt the same way (and still see similar comments from other fans) about Ruby Tandoh back in the day, and she is slim and conventionally attractive.

tonight is our third night of curfew.
i spent the afternoon coding on Saturday and would have had no idea anything had happened if my phone hadn't gone off, because i am very careful about what news i get. i am sick with worry and fear whenever i turn my mind to the state of my country, and as a white person i feel only the tiniest fraction of the weight.

***
we're watching Avatar: The Last Airbender for the first time and enjoying it a great deal. C and i have managed to be completely unspoiled so it's been a great pleasure both to watch and to speculate together about what will happen. we're just starting season 3.

when i wasn't coding this weekend (or watching AtLA) we took in some classic films on HBOMax. first Million Dollar Mermaid (water sequences super-cool, ended abruptly in a perplexing spot) then a couple Showa-era Godzilla movies. there's a surprising number of Criterion Collection restorations available on the service. i'm excited.

we didn't watch the Rankin-Bass The Hobbit, but we will because we are of a certain age and it is written on our hearts. (they also have Watership Down but we're not watching that. it's like Pan's Labyrinth - great work, want to support it, people should see it, i'm not watching that thing again because i don't like nightmares.)

what are you currently consuming?
Doctor Who, but i'm behind. i liked the first episode pretty well - i like the casting of spoiler and their use of the classic thing they use. but i still haven't watched the second episode or the third. i'm going to declare that i'm waiting to watch them with mimerki. that's it, that's totally it, right?

what did you recently finish?
Watchmen. it was pretty great. i loved the production style and the casting. it's unclear if there will be another season, but if there isn't i'm happy with where it ended. there was one effects choice that i was disappointed with, but the characterization of characters from the comic felt very right, as did the flavor of the world. it's fanfic, but it's a really well-written fic. i have no idea if it would make a lick of sense to someone who hadn't read the book or at least seen the (kind of okay) movie that has a different ending.

what will you consume next?
gotta get caught up on The Good Place, can't seem to stop rewatching Star Wars animation. i've seen Westworld season 1 and i really ought to watch season 2 before season 3 drops.

what are you currently consuming?
Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, Star Wars Rebels (rewatch)

CxG is in the endgame now, tying up loose threads and doing callbacks to previous songs and situations. it's excellent. i continue to be sad at my inability to find CxG fandom online.

one of my favorite hoodies is classic software swag, and i'm not feeling like representing My Corporate Masters right now. since it's dark grey i've decided to embellish it to resemble Sabine's armor. so i have to watch Rebels. for research. (i already have a convor patch for the left shoulder thanks to mimerki and it looks like the same artist does the matching Spectre 5 for the right.)

what did you recently finish?
Nirvana in Fire (okay, that wasn't recent but it was since the last time i wrote one of these.)

it was great. i know everyone says that, but seriously it's excellent. i did hit what i think was a cultural wall at the end, and didn't find the final episode to be fully satisfying. but it couldn't retroactively ruin how well it was acted and directed, how beautiful, how well-designed, how it was somehow subtle and melodramatic at the same time. A++ have already done some rewatching with an alternate translation and have been dipping in and out of the fan translation of the novel.


what will you consume next?
more of Rebels, and then there are so many things that i "ought to" watch. i thought being unemployed would lead to bingeing tv and it turns out not so much.

what are you currently consuming?
Crazy Ex-Girlfriend and Nirvana in Fire.

multiple folks in my circle have recommended NiF, and it is perfect no-multitasking television: it's subtitled, and everything is significant from gestures to microexpressions to choice of outfit. watching the early episodes has been greatly enhanced by the recaps on disgracetoscholars. what is especially for ironymaidens is that this dialog-heavy soap also has at least one martial arts action scene per episode.

what did you recently finish?
The Good Place is now done for the season, and i think it ended well enough; i'm looking forward to the next season and hope there is no effort to extend it further. this is a show that definitely deserves to have a solid endpoint.

what will you consume next?
MOAR NIF - there are 54 episodes (and a sequel) and i've only watched nine or ten.
i'll probably get back into watching The Orville now that the new season is airing. (i am never paying for a CBS-only service so that is my Star Trek until my hold comes up at the library for the Star Trek Disco DVDs. i'm number 366. at least there are 50 copies? by the time i get it in five months or so i'll have forgotten and be pleasantly surprised that past me requested it.)