Food yesterday: 1 vitamin water (defense flavour), 1 small bag of potato chips, 3 fruit roll-ups, 9 minitacos with salsa, 1 piece of coconut ice, 11 gluten-free turkey basil meatballs with marinara sauce, 1 mini cheese, chocolate covered pomegranate jelly candy, 1 glass of apple-raspberry juice. Super, super boring I know. It's been a rough week.
Patty avoided getting seated on a jury yesterday and come home with a bazillion ridiculous stories about how completely incompetent humans are. I look forward to her telling me tonight that she's also not on a jury but that more wacky things happened.
Tomorrow night we are going to see The Creditors at BAM.
Saturday is Patty's Birthday/Volcano Escape picnic in the park. If you're in NYC and should have been previously informed of this, let me know or go check her journal for details. Be there.
This one is a little too bizarre: There are these events called KinkforAll that are basically these sex-positive gatherings where anyone can lead a class on anything -- from, say, safe BDSM practices to cross dressing. Some sex-negative people have apparently gotten it into their heads that KinkforAll events promote human trafficking and abuse. Aside from this being not true, taking attention away from the real problems of human trafficking where they do occur, it means that the guy who organizes the events, maymay (who you may know of from Male Submission Art) is getting a lot of shit he doesn't need. Ugh. Wtf. Department of not cool.
Angel: Everyone just got fired. Everything Wesley does is AWESOME. Angel left those fucking lawyers to die! (Die die die, lawyers!) That whole ep was filled with writing choices I would have made, which was FANTASTIC. But man, that voiceover thing on the next episode was awful. An episode-long bad voiceover just so Angel could utter than one great line about war? *sigh*. Also Dru and Darla are so doing it.
American TV vs. British TV is really interesting. Our commercials force our shows into an entirely different structure and rhythm, in a way that most episodes of most shows here function well, but are rarely exceptional. British TV has a lot more episodes of things that are just shit or flop around too much, but the lack of constraint also produces some much more compelling, and real-feeling, results (which may explain both why parts of Children of Earth don't quite work, and why everyone who had to lay on their kitchen floor and sob afterwards was like "I knew it was going to be bad, but I didn't know it was going to be that bad").
After Ellen, like After Elton, tends to be very white and young and gender normative. Mainstream LGBT representation has a long way to go.
When it comes to "vampires doing it", as the song says "Anything Goes".
I've always believed that Vampires (especially modern attractive ones since Bella Lugossi - but not counting the Mormon ones as far as I'm aware) are Omnisexual and have a hierarchy of age and lineage that doesn't work in the way human hierarchies work.
It made all the choices I generally think TV doesn't have the balls to make. And it made me uncomfortable, and I was loving it, and the pacing and timing of everything was EXCELLENT. People go on and on about how Joss Whedon shows define "how to write TV" and I haven't felt that until this episode (I have felt that his stuff is great as "how to conceptualize TV," but, like Russell T. Davies, not always great in the details and execution).
Right after the episode where Angel fired everyone, I had to do a linguistics assignment where one of the tasks was to identify as many synonyms of 'fired' as possible. I thought of that episode and giggled a lot while I was writing it. :D
For all the years, all the times, I had wished the good guys would let the bad guys stew in the mess they made, I have to admit I was stunned when Angel locked those doors. "My god, he actually did it," was my only thought.
Re: US vs. UK TV - Though I want to support the idea of British TV on these shores, I can never watch BBC America without getting squirmy and/or angry due to the way things are cut. Even in "uncut" presentations, they still have to squeeze in ad breaks. I completely understand *why* they have to do it (I teach media studies for a living, so I grok how commercial media works), but it still feels like square pegs and round holes to me. Thank the gods for DVD and BitTorrent.
That said, I was pretty amused by UK viewers' freak-out over the Graham Norton overlay at the end of Doctor Who last Saturday. My reaction: that's it? That's what freaked you out? Come over here, and watch any hour of TV at any time; THEN you'll see how much crap flies and floats over US TV shows ALL THE TIME.
I think, to be fair, that's exactly why it freaked people out - it's not that UK viewers don't know that's the norm on US TV or have never seen an overlay before in their lives, it's that people do know that, and actively don't want it to become the norm here.
Just searched Twitter to see if anyone else is boosting the signal re: Buddhist temple in Maryland, and someone's put out an alert that this may be a scam?
I got it from Sam, who is is usually pretty careful.
Can I say I know this is for real? No. Can I say that I'm inclined to trust one angry tweet from someone I don't know more than what I've been told by people who I do? No. Everyone needs to do their own research and make their own decisions.
I think that's one of those things that's inevitable, especially on the Internet. You also see that type of infighting in anything with lineages (fencing and martial arts get that way too). Without doing that research, I thought to myself something like that might pop up, and almost didn't post because of that. *shrug* What can you do?
Our commercials force our shows into an entirely different structure and rhythm
I once read an interview with David Lynch, back when Twin Peaks was on the air, where he talked about how weird it was to make something for television. He compared it to conducting a symphony and taking periodic breaks so the triangle player could stand up and perform jingles.
As for the Welsh mummy worshippers, somewhere a Torchwood writer is giggling. Also, now I'm wondering how often security has to firmly escort people away from the Temple of Dendur.
That Lynch paraphrasing was a great one. I'll have to remember it.
There are a slew of British sitcoms that I like, from "Yes, Prime Minister" to "As Time Goes By" to "The Vicor of ..." opps, I forgot how to spell it. Anyway, I think the loose plot allows the characters to feel more human, and the lack of commercials allows the tighter ones to build tension properly instead of having to build tension up to the commercial break, and then start over.
Maymay doesn't organize all the individual KFAs. He came up with the IDEA of the sexuality unconference model, based on BarCamp, but each KinkForAll is led by different folks. ;) That misperception/bit of misinformation has been one of the things that detractors have latched onto in their arguments (it's "his" project and "he" does it and "recruits" people and yada yada yada).
British TV has a lot more episodes of things that are just shit or flop around too much, but the lack of constraint also produces some much more compelling, and real-feeling, results
I would say that this is the case with Being Human too (although in that instance, I think the main flaw in the show is that there's not enough of it to explore all the issues they raise in full -- S2 was 8 episodes and it should have been 13). But yeah, Being Human does flop about a bit, but it also tears your guts out. I really can't wait until you watch that show; I'm looking forward to your reactions to it.
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nehmet.
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When it comes to "vampires doing it", as the song says "Anything Goes".
I've always believed that Vampires (especially modern attractive ones since Bella Lugossi - but not counting the Mormon ones as far as I'm aware) are Omnisexual and have a hierarchy of age and lineage that doesn't work in the way human hierarchies work.
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That episode is *excellent.* Angel shutting the wine cellar doors on the lawyer never ceases to thrill me. That, and "You're all fired."
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:-D
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That said, I was pretty amused by UK viewers' freak-out over the Graham Norton overlay at the end of Doctor Who last Saturday. My reaction: that's it? That's what freaked you out? Come over here, and watch any hour of TV at any time; THEN you'll see how much crap flies and floats over US TV shows ALL THE TIME.
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Can I say I know this is for real? No. Can I say that I'm inclined to trust one angry tweet from someone I don't know more than what I've been told by people who I do? No. Everyone needs to do their own research and make their own decisions.
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And yeah, Dru and Darla, definitely. Fanged four is pretty much canon, in all directions.
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I live near there. How did I not hear of this?! *scrambles to donate* Holy shit, I love that temple!
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I once read an interview with David Lynch, back when Twin Peaks was on the air, where he talked about how weird it was to make something for television. He compared it to conducting a symphony and taking periodic breaks so the triangle player could stand up and perform jingles.
As for the Welsh mummy worshippers, somewhere a Torchwood writer is giggling. Also, now I'm wondering how often security has to firmly escort people away from the Temple of Dendur.
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There are a slew of British sitcoms that I like, from "Yes, Prime Minister" to "As Time Goes By" to "The Vicor of ..." opps, I forgot how to spell it. Anyway, I think the loose plot allows the characters to feel more human, and the lack of commercials allows the tighter ones to build tension properly instead of having to build tension up to the commercial break, and then start over.
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I would say that this is the case with Being Human too (although in that instance, I think the main flaw in the show is that there's not enough of it to explore all the issues they raise in full -- S2 was 8 episodes and it should have been 13). But yeah, Being Human does flop about a bit, but it also tears your guts out. I really can't wait until you watch that show; I'm looking forward to your reactions to it.