R.CAllen

I was weirded out that the anniversary of the JFK assassination was the day before Thanksgiving. I mean, that wasn’t ... that’s not how it was on Mad Men (‘07-’15)! American thanksgiving is (apparently?) the fourth Thursday in November. Ours is (also apparently!?) the second Monday in October. It’s a sequel to that Walter Matthau movie!? Well. You live. You learn. Anyway. Happy Thanksgiving!

I did see this and (as expected!) did not like it. I do my best to try and go into any of these things, these make’em’ups — TV, movies, books, comics, whatever — with open eyes and an open heart. I want to enjoy things. I want to have a good time. I guess maybe the problem here is mostly me, sure. Maybe no amount of psyching myself up to like something that I’ve already half-convinced myself beforehand is just not going to be up to snuff is going to work. Yeah. Okay. I’ve already lanced my boil re: this show, Netflix Scott Pilgrim, elsewhere on the Internet — I got a Discord account! I have officially joined the Internet circa the latter half of the ‘10s! — so I don’t really feel the need to go over again what I didn’t like about the show once more at length. But there is a little thing that I did like which is kind of a spoiler so...

I won't. These hostages also have relatives still being held in captivity. Eight other members of the family of the first pair released. The husbands of the second pair. I imagine I might say whatever my former captors told me to in that situation. I’ll help you. I found it. The claim seems to have been made by a Norwegian tabloid newspaper on November 8th tallying up the dead up until October 26th. I have no idea if their math is correct. It could very well be! If it were true I’d have expected to see the claim repeated by a lot more reputable outlets as well. While “five-year-olds represent the largest age group” isn’t exactly the same thing as “five year olds making up the largest number of fatalities” or even “that of the minors killed by the IDF the age most represented is 5 years old”, well, I understand why that mistake would be made! Okay! Perhaps it was just another inaccuracy. Another poor use of language.

I am not trying to deny or defend child killing. Do five year olds make up the largest number of fatalities? Are most of the hostages released?

just going through the list on Wikipedia and seeing what sticks out for me and hasn’t been mentioned yet; some of these are kind of edge cases but whatever: Detention (2011) The Final Girls (2015) Frequency (2000) Kate & Leopold (2001) A Kid in King Arthur’s Court (1995) Last Night in Soho (2021) Unidentified Flying Oddball (1979) – I always think of that movie as being called ‘A Spaceman In King Arthur’s Court’ ... I think that was maybe the title on the Betamax tape I watched it on when I was a kid? Wait they include Star Trek Generations (1994) as a time travel movie; yeah, it is! Same deal with Superman (1978)!

My answer is : yes! There are ninety eight (98) episodes of the show. I looked at the list of them on Wikipedia and asked myself a simple yes/no question for each one in turn. “Was that a good episode of Star Trek?” I came back with forty nine (49) yesses. Yeses. Yesi? In any case ... tie goes to the runner. It’s a good show! Is it worth it? Buddy, I don’t know. Spending any moment of your one beautiful life watching television? I don’t know. What else is there to do? That’s between you and your maker.

One of my main go to podcasts — what I listen to on walks, while doing laundry, that sort of thing — is a Mission Impossible fan podcast. Or at least it started out as a fan podcast but over time I gather the guys who make it slowly but surely insinuated themselves into the halls of power and now it’s apparently the official podcast. I know at some point they ended up on the Tom Cruise cake list, yeah. I’m well over a hundred episodes into it and it’s still just the early days of the pandemic. I think considering the pace that they put out new episodes outmatches the pace at which I listen to ‘em it’s entirely possible I may never catch up. I’m okay with that. Would happily listen to these guys interviewing Hollywood legends about Tom Cruise’s hair for the rest of my days. I think I’m on the record somewhere years ago as really liking these movies — pretty sure I started calling it the only good franchise sometime around Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol (2011) — and I still really like them. Haven’t changed my mind! I didn’t see the most recent one in theatres because a senior citizen may be brave enough to ride a motorcycle off a mountain but I’m not brave enough to breathe in other people’s air. I’m no Scientologist. My respiratory cilia weren’t made virus proof by eons spent in Xenu’s volcanic chambers! So it was a bit of a wait for me to see Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One (2023). What’s my verdict?

The new season is pretty good so far.

I feel pretty bad about the whole thing — and as we all know that’s what’s super duper important in the end; me and my feeeeeelings! they’re of world-historical consequence! they’re of unquestionable relevance! they truly matter! — and am deeply scared over what may happen in the future.

Happy birthday!

Before seeing this clip I’d already kind of soured on what I’d seen of it so far. I still do not really really like the animation style — somebody said it looks like the most expensive Newgrounds project; I think they’re kind of right — plus I don’t like that they didn’t adapt one of the better dumber jokes (“Wallace! Amazon.ca! What’s the website for that?”; wait, it seems that there isn’t a Netflix Dot Ca, it just redirects you to Netflix Dot Com, okay, I guess I understand why they made this particular choice) in this part of the movie/comic but I already kinda pre-decided to give it a shot maybe once it comes out.

I don’t know. Stop trying? Doesn’t feel like the time, really. Looking at it from the outside and from a great distance I kind of think your career has never been on more of an upswing. I can’t turn around these days without seeing you retweeted on someone else’s Twitter — forgive me, I don’t have a Twitter account, I don’t know how it works, I don’t follow you, I don’t follow anyone, does the Twitter computer know I ‘know’ you? — like, I knew about your book coming out before seeing it in this thread because someone else retweeted your tweet about it. Someone else is always out there retweeting your tweets! Stop trying now? When you are so Twitter famous that even I see your Tweets? Seems like a bad idea to me. My advice is to wait for the strike to be over. Wait for the inevitable victory over the dumbest rich people ever AND THEN maybe consider stopping trying. At least go out on top! If you need to make money in the interim, well, I don’t know. Welding? If you want to, sure, but at this point you talking about going back to school to weld sounds like when Greg Behrendt was on his old podcast talking about going back to school so he could become a barber. I don’t know. How long does it take to do that? I guess it all depends on what’s practical. I don’t see how it’s, like, ‘stopping trying’ to pay the bills any way you can in whatever way you can. There’s that bit in Martin Short’s biography where he talks about dealing with the fact that his career wasn’t always going great and sometimes wasn’t going at all with just doing whatever he was allowed to do whenever he was allowed to do it and not saying no to stuff and just being happy to get the chance to work — if ‘they’ would let him do movies then he’d do movies, if ‘they’ would let him do TV then he’d do TV, if ‘they’ would let him be on stage he’d be on stage, if ‘they’ would let him do voice work for a direct-to-DVD animated sequel he’d do that, whatever came his way. I don’t know what is and isn’t practical but considering you must have a resumé substantially different from lots of people out there it shouldn’t be that difficult to stretch the truth and ... there was that Twitter thread giving advice on this subject. I don’t know. This is kind of what Kirk was going through in WoK and everything worked out great for him!!!!1!

Oh dear! I hope everyone sick feels better soon, of course!

Oh, wait. It was actually two things! Here’s the second half of it:

I don’t think I had any thoughts re: the Georgia stuff but the previous indictment uncorked something in me — I’ll see if I can find it and copy’n’paste it — okay, here it is:

Whoops. It is not hell yeah. It is hell no. I realize now I got this guy — spelled it wrong, too, it’s Admiral Nagawa — confused with Admiral Nogura from Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979) and he’s also in some of the books. Neither of these two appear to be the guy with Robert April in the final scene of the season premiere. That guy is Commodore Tafune.

I waited until the season was almost over to watch. Pretty good! Most of the episodes were really quite well done. Eight out of ten, really. I didn’t like the finale and I didn’t like the sixth episode. I feel like there’s only two or three complaints about the season as a whole that I didn’t otherwise address. COMPLAINT #1: James T. Kirk. James T. Kirk is always just showing up! Why!?!?1? I guess maybe it’s the thing with how, like, Worf would be in Star Trek: Insurrection (1998) and in Staᴙ Trek: Nemǝsis (2002). And apparently, although it’s left a little unclear onscreen, Worf goes on to be captain of the Enterprise-E until it meets some kind of disastrous end. What’s my point? My point is I guess it’s Star Trek tradition for captains of the Enterprise to just inexplicably be around for no reason because they were on the old show. James T. Kirk is not Spider-Man. Spider-Man can just show up as a guest star or do a cameo and it’s, like, whatever. He’s teaming up in someone else’s book. It’s fine. The whole narrative doesn’t necessarily revolve around him. Kirk is not like that. A story with Kirk in it becomes a story about Kirk. It doesn’t matter if he’s alternate universe Kirk. It’s still James T. Kirk. The people making this show seriously expect me to care about Lt. Noonien-Singh in stories about him and her interacting!? What!? Oh no! How will her broken heart heal when he dies in her arms, how will she deal with interacting with his canonical reality self, how can she keep the secret of their time travel shenanigans from him, how can she manage once it turns out he’s still seeing his steady off and on!!!? There’s like four episodes with Kirk in it this year! They won’t stop shoving this guy in front of my face! James T. Kirk doesn’t make sense as a character outside of his role as an intersecting apex of other points of view. He doesn’t work as a foil to his brother or opposite the granddaughter of a guy who will one day temporarily kill his best friend! He works when he’s talking to Spock or when he’s talking to Bones. When there’s a moral problem or a sci-fi make’em’up at play for him to be the one to solve! He can’t really be the second banana. There’s no life in the guy if he’s on his own. He says so, explicitly! COMPLAINT #2: Wait. I think I actually talked about this. I really don’t like the empty space in the struts, the pylons, the thingmabobs connecting the nacelles to the main body of the ship. Doesn’t look good to me. They need to put the ship through another refit next year and fix it so it looks normal. COMPLAINT #3: I was sure there was something else but I forgot what it was. Must not have been too important. I’ll file the grievance if I can ever recall it oh wait as I am typing these words I just remembered what it was. Twenty plus years of Star Trek prequels and still no Dax symbiont how come give us Dax during this time she is supposed to be a gymnast who boned Bones give us Dax give us Emony Dax or whomever it was during TOS times come on stop playing around with ENT references and give us Dax. ENT wouldn’t give us the Dax! I want Dax! Dax dax dax! The stuff with Trill people in the future on DSC wasn’t good enough! Daxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx!!!!!1!

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