“She danced like one of those things they put outside of carwashes, the tubes with faces and arms attached to a fan. She had no mystery, no allure, no skill, no art, and her lunatic visage was so off-putting you were heartened by a sudden new-found certainty: an entire culture had realized that keeping your tongue extended like a basset hound with heat stroke was unbecoming, and unlikely to be repeated except as a sarcastic reference in Instagram selfies.”
— James Lileks reviews Miley CyrusCalifornia weather
Today’s weather conditions…
Sadly, the smoke from the Napa/Sonoma fires does not smell like wine, at least not at this distance.
What's J Watching?
The answer is “not much, really”. I bounced hard off of The Orville (which one of my friends actually thinks is great, proving that he’s taken one too many shots to the head (“Hi, Rory!”)), and there really doesn’t seem to be anything else on cable that sounds even vaguely interesting.
- Restaurant To Another World
- For the most part, nothing really happens in this well-drawn, slow-paced series about why a little hole-in-the-wall Tokyo restaurant really shuts down one day a week. Relationships between the owner/chef and his fantasy-world customers develop slowly, and it looks like there are even a few honest-to-gosh spoilers coming, but for the most part it just drifts along with diner-of-the-week stories and some rare mild fan-service. Next up: the restaurant gets a clothing-challenged second waitress.
- Legends Of Tomorrow, season 2
- Finally catching up on this show, and wondering why I bothered. I already knew most of what happens, the writers have a pretty shaky grasp of the historical eras the team visits, the main villain was more interesting when played by the other actor, Nate is dull even with powers, Vixen’s WWII-era attitudes appear only when convenient to the plot, etc, etc. I think I’m pretty much done with the Flarrowverse.
- Magi?Poka
- Mauser reminded me this existed and I never watched it. Short, fun, mostly stand-alone episodes, with cute character designs familiar to anyone who’s seen Hand Maid May et al. It’s a pleasant diversion.
Coming Soon
- Kino’s Journey
- The only new anime series that I have any interest in right now.
- Alice & Zoroku
- I really liked the first few episodes, but got sidetracked and haven’t gotten back to it yet. Definitely one worth finishing.
- Preacher
- Sometime I’ll get around to marathoning the first season, and quite possibly the second. What little I’ve seen of it has been a decent reimagining of the comic, but I just haven’t been in the mood for it yet.
Good enough...
(via)
A nice example of the common use of the 吾唯足知 expression. There used to be a shop in SF Japantown who sold these basins, but not in such a nice stone.
Dubious capsule toys
Honestly, I’m not sure I’d want to put 5 bucks into this machine. エロ過ぎる = ero-sugiru = “too sexy”.
(via)
Now, if it dispensed pokemon balls containing horny monster girls… oh, wait, that’s an anime plot.
Apropos of nothing...
“You’ve got no alternative Seymour old boy
though it means you’ll be broke again and unemployed
it’s the only solution it can’t be avoided
THE VEGETABLE MUST BE DESTROYED.”
R.I.P. Hugo Awards
(nonsensical, counterfactual, hate-filled) Eulogy via bongbong:
This year’s Hugo Award winners have been announced, and the prizes overwhelmingly went to brilliant women like NK Jemisin and Seanan McGuire, to the eminent satisfaction of all those who saw the right-wing, misogynist, racist campaign to make science fiction inhospitable to brown people and women, took countermeasures, and for two years in a row, demonstrated the field’s inclusiveness and commitment to quality, rather than pandering to reactionary panic over the prospect of a future that breaks with the shameful past.
The Orville: meh
A couple weeks back, Brickmuppet mentioned the new Trek-ish series The Orville, “tentatively optimistic” after watching the first two episodes.
I was… less enthusiastic, and the only thing I really liked was seeing Adrianne Palicki out of uniform. Still, not every SF show can hit the ground running like SG-1, so I set my DVR to record it, which it promptly failed to do.
Fortunately, Hulu has it, so I was able to watch episode 3. Well, about half of it, until the stupid was too thick to scrape off the screen. There was one honest-to-gosh funny line out of the captain’s mouth, but I’ve already forgotten what it was about.
Fundamentally, the problem was that I had no investment in the setup (I hesitate to call it a “plot”) or the characters, and it was written like a bad ABC Afterschool Special.
Bortus was introduced as a member of a single-gender species, but this episode changes that to “all-male species capable of sexual reproduction without the help of females, who are quite rare but play no part in reproduction since they’re given sex-change operations at birth, because females are smaller and weaker, exactly like humans.” (which raises the question of how precisely they’re “female” to begin with…)
So, first they created a species that’s Not Like Us (which has all sorts of story potential), and then immediately made them Exactly Like Us But Gendercidal (which is a Women’s Studies dissertation). I stopped watching when Kelly tried to make her case in court based on applying a universal concept of “female” across species in a way that doesn’t even make sense for Earth, much less an SFnal universe.
Also, Alara Kitan is a terrible character, mostly because the concept is so poorly thought out that Halston Sage could be a terrific actress and still end up buried to her neck in manure. They might as well have named her One Trick Pony.
So, it’s not good SF, and it’s not good comedy. I don’t see any reason to watch the rest of the season.
