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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   Edited 1yr ago   2738 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for January 6, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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What TV shows did you enjoy this year? Thinking about starting watching a new one with friends and figured I would solicit opinions.

So far this year I've watched Severance, Andor, and House of the Dragon; the former two I very much enjoyed and the latter I thought was mediocre.

I enjoyed Zeta Gundam a lot more than my abortive attempts at watching 0079 (in which I was filtered by the ugly animation) and ZZ (in which I was filtered by the goofy early episodes).

Were you watching the TV series or the movies of 0079? The movies cleaned things up a bit, though I would still recommend the TV series even with its very rough animation simply because the movies cut out so much. (There's also always the Gundam: The Origin manga series, but it makes so many changes that I can understand if one would be weirded out by the aesthetical shifts.)

I would also beg you to stick with ZZ, it does get better later on.

Were you watching the TV series or the movies of 0079?

The episodes. It's been my experience that episodes in Gundam series already feel very rushed, so I can't imagine how disjointed the compilation movies must be.

I would also beg you to stick with ZZ, it does get better later on.

Yes, I've seen the same said on /m/ about a zillion times. I probably will get around to trying again at some point.

It's been my experience that episodes in Gundam series already feel very rushed, so I can't imagine how disjointed the compilation movies must be.

I suppose they will move very fast for you; the movies really streamline and compress the overall storyline, but a lot of that is, again, cutting out stuff (some of it is forgettable stuff like Cucuruz Doan's Island or the salt episode; some of it is better stuff like more episodes with Ramba Ral or M'Quve's attempt to use a nuke against the Feds). They still have a proper cinematic flow, IMO.

We Own This City: if you like the Wire, you’ll really like this show. A detailed, gritty dive into Baltimore police corruption.

The Rehearsal: A comedy by Nathan Fielder. I never really watched his previous show, Nathan For You, but this dude is incredibly funny. This is an odd, odd surreal style comedy series on HBO. The closest comparison I can make is Borat, but it’s such a strange show it’s hard to describe.

Survivor: Forced to watch this by my girlfriend. I’ve never seen the show before and I’ll say that it’s ok. I wouldn’t watch if I had the choice.

I watched the Amazon Rings of Power. It’s worth a drinking game. Rules are easily found.

Finished Better Call Saul,, it absolutely pays off in the end. The episode where legendary comedienne Carol Burnett and hilarious comedian Bob Odenkirk play off each other is masterpiece television, but not in the way you might think.

Andor was the best Star Wars material I've seen since ESB, and had the interesting property of feeling quite edgily radical in its politics without actually being about specific contemporary controversies.

That’s because it’s about organizing an underground against realistic fascism, not an Internet tankie’s trite anti-corporate slogans. The stakes are far taller when you’re not a Skywalker and the universe doesn’t want you to win.

There was one downside to me. Gizmodo’s io9 fansite had an impossibly short-sighted article about how the final episode almost dropped an F-bomb, and they wish it had, but they had to be content with the several “Shit!” swears dropped throughout the show.

Really? This is a galaxy far, far away. They use kilometers because the meta-conceit is that the Skywalker Saga was translated from Galactic Basic recorded in the ancient Journal of the Whills to English for our benefit. Short Germanic words for bodily functions have no expletive heft in that context, they just sound wrong and shred my suspension of disbelief.

Wookiepedia has a whole article about The Galaxy’s various swear words. There are enough coarse expletive obscenities listed there that they could easily have picked ones which sound worst to American ears, had the lower-class characters use them throughout the series, and have that character use it at the climax. It worked for frakking Battlestar Galactica and for Firefly too, gorrammit.

After not watching much tv with my husband for a while for one reason or another, we started putting more on after the birth of our baby. It made the late nights surprisingly cozy.

Yellowjackets - rides a mystery box line where I think the writers might know what’s inside their box, but I’m not terribly sure. Most mystery box shows kinda turn me off. I saw the OG Lost. Please don’t put a polar bear on your island just for the mystery when it doesn’t relate to any other mystery. I didn’t feel like Yellowjackets made that mistake. Good, creepy fun. I’m down for the next season.

Midnight Mass - gets a little monologue-y, but I can only think of two that were just egregious. Thankfully, watching with subtitles on while trying to put a newborn to sleep got me through those bad moments. The rest of the show is quite good.

Guillermo del Toro's Cabinet of Curiosities - some of the episodes are pretty fun. Others are fine to catch while wrangling said newborn at 2am.

X-Files, Angel, Supernatural, and Star Trek: TNG rewatches. TNG was great hospital bed fodder as one of the only things on tv at 3am.

Marvel’s Moon Knight wasn’t too bad. I think it might fall under “guilty pleasure” since it has a lot of things I like but is clearly flawed like a typical middling Marvel entry.

Aw, man, Midnight Mass was great. It really depressed me that they gave the final monologue to the

"we're all stardust, so death is just returning to nature"

viewpoint. Out of all possible attitudes towards death, especially all the attitudes shared throughout the show, that's the only one that really strikes me as intensely meaningless. Not only that, but they give it to

the person who had previously described her unborn baby's trip to heaven--implying that essentially her faith was just copium against the harsh reality of death.

It seems like her point was basically that we all started out as atoms, and sentience is a useful illusion, so death is meaningless anyways. Well, that's certainly one way to look at it, but that really implies that you should have no values at all. e.g. if you truly believe that we're all just atoms anyways, then it's an utterly nihilistic perspective, and things like rape, torture, just about any bad thing you can think of, don't actually matter because it's just atoms moving around in configurations. If this is the case, why bother with something like killing the vampire? Well, because you actually do still care, and you're not truly convinced that it's all just atoms.

Great show though.

Yes! That was the worst for me. Borderline offensive on a personal level, since I can most identify with that character as a Christian woman who just gave birth. Honestly, she took her baby disappearing incredibly well. I think it would have been fitting to have one of the characters go through losing their faith because of what happened to the island, but I don't buy her losing it. Her initial monologue on heaven served as a foil to Riley's views. And if she didn't lose her faith then, I don't know that she should have after everything else. The monologue itself was ok, though I stopped paying attention once I got the gist. Being stardust is a beautiful thought, but as you point out there are darker implications.

The second worst was the sheriff's backstory.|| Terribly inappropriate moment for that. ||You just found out the island town, including your son, is being turned into vampires, and you think that's the right time to explain what brought you there? I don't even remember the point of it, if there was one.

To even this out, I did love the monologue for Monsignor Pruitt's story. Though, that may be cheating since you also see it happen and aren't just watching someone talk. And when you do, it's a very interesting shot of Father Paul in the confessional.

Stargate SG-1. I started from the first season on Netflix and enjoyed it immensely until season...9? I think. There were some big changes going into season 9 and it just didn't stick with me.

Fantastic show until then, though.

Depending on what you liked about it, the SG-A and SG-U spin-offs were quite enjoyable as well. I didn't like SG-A as much as it really leaned into the silliness of the series a bit too much for me. On the other hand, I think SG-U died because it tried to be too serious for much of the fan base.

The big changes made a lot of people drop it, but the final season is worth it, plus the two finale movies wrap it all up pretty cleanly.

Over the course of a decade, they went from killing worm parasites using minor superpowers to masquerade as gods, to depowering and killing actual metaphysical miracle-working gods (ascended humans, in this case) whose ethics they disagree with, while using acquired interstellar tech to uplift the US Air Force to a galactic superpower.

Babylon Berlin was fun. U.S. Netflix has the first-three seasons. Season four has finished in Germany, and is supposed to be out on U.S. Netflix sometime this year.

Fleabag. First time I properly laughed at a female comedian

I watched the first episode and found it a little bleak. Does it get lighter as the series goes on?

They lean less on constantly breaking the fourth wall after the first episode but the humour doesn’t get more slapstick

Fleabag is so great. My favorite show of the past decade, I think.

I enjoyed Andor once it got going--I enjoyed Mandalorian, but did not much care for Boba Fett or Obi-Wan, so I guess I remain cautiously Jedi-curious. I watched Moon Knight and promptly forgot about it.

After finding Wheel of Time simply excruciating, I skipped both Rings and House of the Dragon and have yet to hear a compelling reason to binge them after the fact. I also skipped Sandman and I am currently skipping Willow, to my sorrow, for much the same reason.

Season 3 of The Boys surprised me a bit, and finally stopped apologizing for its departure from the comics. Guess I'm in for Season 4. I also watched Season 4 of Westworld, which was not terrible but was nothing particularly special, either. The dude from Breaking Bad did a good job playing a pointless character. I watched Season 5 of Rick and Morty which was neither the worst season, nor the best.

From Japan, I watched:

New:

  • Chainsaw Man: Beautifully-animated gore-fest

  • Spy X Family: Hilarious, plus you can enjoy it as not-so-subtle pro-natal propaganda

  • Lycoris Recoil: CGDCT genre mashup, plus you can enjoy it as not-so-subtle lesbian propaganda

  • Shokei Shoujo no Virgin Road: Moderately clever isekai deconstruction, plus you can enjoy it as blatantly overt lesbian propaganda

  • Isekai Ojisan: Exceptionally clever isekai deconstruction, and hilarious, too

  • Isekai Meikyuu de Harem wo: Unapologetically pornographic isekai deconstruction about a guy who just wants a wife, a house, and a job. Also, the wife is his slave. Maybe there will be more wives and/or slaves? The first one is literally a dog-person y'all, I'm honestly not sure how to talk about a show where the central message appears to be "work hard and grow a garden, but aspire to no further greatness, and you, too, can spend your evenings hot-tubbing with your submissive furry waifus."

  • Isekai Yakkyoku: Enjoyable isekai and the protagonist does real medical chemistry--sort of a Cells at Work or Dr. Stone meets Ascension of a Bookworm.

  • Cyberpunk: Edgerunners: It was recognizably cyberpunk!

  • Ya Boy Kongming!: I loved everything about this show

Continuing:

  • Ascension of a Bookworm: Probably the most endearing isekai out there, about a girl who just wants to read books (also: not-so-subtle pro-natal propaganda!)

  • My Hero Academia: Ameriboo superhero anime, wish it had more romance but this one is mandatory watching to keep my knowledge relevant to my students' interests

  • Overlord: I keep waiting for the MC to do something really overtly evil but I guess it's not that kind of show

  • Made in Abyss: Weird, boundary-pushing, occasionally graphic coming-of-age-but-also-metaphorically-aging-and-dying show, I don't know how this one got made actually, never mind imported

  • DanMachi: This dungeon crawler is not bad, but it's getting a bit tiresome I think

  • Mob Psycho: Weird coming-of-age kinda-battle-shonen-I-guess, but enjoyable

  • To Your Eternity: This one is conceptually interesting, it's about an immortal who can mimic its friends after they die, but the first season was a lot stronger I think

  • Rising of the Shield Hero: Season 2 was actually quite bad, which is a shame because Season 1 was quite compelling

I did not watch Attack on Titan because I have fallen hopelessly behind. I am also sorry to have not yet found time for Better Call Saul, or a bevy of others on a backlist that I doubt will ever be completed. The best things I watched this year were all movies. If you enjoy musicals at all, I highly recommend Netflix's recent adaptation of Tim Minchin's adaptation of Roald Dahl's Matilda.

Sandman was fine, speaking as someone who has never read the comics and also found WoT terrible. Willow never appealed to me, and I also skipped Dragon and Rings. It could have been better, and my biggest complaint is that the actor they cast as the vortex cannot act at all. She's stiff as a board for every excruciating minute she's on screen.

I'm sorry to hear Shield Hero was bad. I'd been looking forward to season 2 and I thoroughly enjoyed season 1 when I caught it years ago.

I did, however, watch all of Yu Yu Hakusho last year, and it is exactly as good as I remembered it being (very, if you don't mind fighting tournaments).

I'll have to check out Matilda.

Overlord: I keep waiting for the MC to do something really overtly evil but I guess it's not that kind of show

Uh...are we watching the same show? IIRC, he personally slaughtered tens of thousands of people. He had captured prisoners slowly raped and tortured to death. How much more overtly evil does he need to get?

Rising of the Shield Hero: Season 2 was actually quite bad, which is a shame because Season 1 was quite compelling

In what way? I actually enjoyed season 2 more than season 1.

IIRC, he personally slaughtered tens of thousands of people.

With the baby goats, right? In that big war? The morality of winning a battle is tricky, I guess.

He had captured prisoners slowly raped and tortured to death.

...really? That was not clear to me. I assumed he was feeding those people to carnivores who subsist on human flesh. The fact that humans aren't at the top of the food chain is unfortunate, but it's hard for me to perceive predators as overtly evil by that fact alone. I did catch some allusions to torture (albeit arguably justified, IIRC, as an enhanced interrogation technique) but I missed the rape entirely.

I haven't read the manga so it's possible I'm missing some details, but so far my impression of Momonga is that he feels mostly swept along by everyone else's natures and desires. He seems pretty sure that if his underlings rebelled as a group, they could defeat him, so he needs to maintain their loyalty simply to survive. He wants to build a peaceful, advanced civilization, but his underlings will only go along with that aspiration insofar as their natures are fulfilled. So he's conducting this massive utilitarian balancing act that keeps bringing him into inevitable conflict which he must win for the greater good. It reminds me of HPMoR:

Learn all that I have to teach you, Mr. Potter, and you will rule this country in time. Then you may tear down the prison that democracy made, if you find that Azkaban still offends your sensibilities. Like it or not, Mr. Potter, you have seen this day that your own will conflicts with the will of this country's populace, and that you do not bow your head and submit to their decision when that occurs. So to them, whether or not they know it, and whether or not you acknowledge it, you are their next Dark Lord.

In short, Momonga is only shown killing when there is good reason to kill, and he never personally eats or rapes or tortures anyone, while showing generosity, charity, and mercy at seemingly every opportunity. The show seems to hint that he no longer feels empathy for humans, as a result of his new physiology, but his actions often suggest otherwise. I do enjoy the show, but Momonga doesn't ever seem very evil to me. Which is fine, I just find it interesting how often I see others recommend the show as being about an evil overlord.

That said, maybe this says more about my own moral compass, comparatively, than it does about the show...

In what way? I actually enjoyed season 2 more than season 1.

The plot just seemed... random, I guess. Stuff happens but doesn't go anywhere. The Shield Hero was interesting when everyone hated him. Now it just seems to be a few irrelevant nobodies. Again--perhaps the source material would give me greater insight as to what is happening and why, but I'm not usually the kind of viewer who keeps a wiki open while watching a show.

With the baby goats, right? In that big war? The morality of winning a battle is tricky, I guess.

There's a difference between winning a battle and slaughtering a routed army. He could easily have won the battle with far fewer casualties, even with his additional goal of intimidation. He intentionally chose the slaughter.

...really?

It's been a while, so maybe I'm misremembering. I thought that was implied for at least some of the treasure seekers who "invaded" the tomb.

I do enjoy the show, but Momonga doesn't ever seem very evil to me. Which is fine, I just find it interesting how often I see others recommend the show as being about an evil overlord.

I thought this was the entire point of the show? Momonga is "evil" in the sense that he is responsible for some horrific outcomes, which he had the ability to both predict and avoid while still achieving his goals if he so desired. While the show portrays him sympathetically, it does not attempt to explicitly make him the "good guy", leaving it up to the audience to judge.

[Shield Hero season 2]

I thought season 1 was a bit too fast-paced, jumping from action sequence to action sequence without spending a lot of time building up the setting, so I found season 2's slower world-building more enjoyable. I'm also a bit biased in that one of my favorite characters got a lot more development in season 2, including a scene that resonated with me quite a bit (~13:20 in Episode 12).

The Bear. It's fantastic.

I forgot to mention that one, I really enjoyed it (though found myself perplexed at the ending)

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