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• My brief dreams of watching The Wire were shattered by HBO apparently being exclusive to the northern hemisphere, so back on the shelf it goes with Fringe and Mr Robot and other shows that somehow keep dancing just out of reach.
• Can't really complain about not having enough to watch, however, as a whiny complaint to my parents weeks ago ended up netting me their Amazon Prime log-in and - sigh - their Disney+ log-in. Whatever my grudges against the corporate monolith, I can't say I haven't enjoyed having access to a huge wad of my favourite media. The highlight so far has been catching up on the last of the unseen Pixars, Ratatouille and Coco: I watched the latter twice in a row and wept both times. The low has been having to bail out on Aladdin: King of Thieves when it turned out fuzzy memories of liking it as a child did not brace my adult self for the really bad caricature designs somehow getting even worse having already done some awkward squinting throughout the first movie. Clone Wars/Rebels is next on my list, I think!
• In the meantime I have, at very long last, been working my way through Community after it unexpectedly turned up on Netflix. I've had a fantastic time with it overall and have particularly enjoyed playing mental bingo every time I catch a line that I've seen pop up on some gifset, meme, or other source that cannot resist the incredible quotability of the show. It has its rough patches, mind - during the first season I was getting close to going to my knees begging for just one episode without a demeaning gay joke, good grief - but when it's at its peak and focusing more on spearing genres and tropes than minority groups, and setting the characters' quirks against absurd circumstances rather than each other? Amazing. Hilarious. A truly next-level sitcom. Unfortunately, I've just broached season 4 so I know my time is limited, and I'm going to miss it. It's been a good evening dinner-time show.
• I rented Birds of Prey for an evening and ended up really liking it! I might try and write a short review at some point, so I'll just say I thought it was great character capture for the most part and a lot of fun.
• Have also watched Frozen 2 and Ant-Man and the Wasp as part of some long-distance movie nights with my old housemate. Frozen 2 was cute and had a surprisingly apt moral message ("when everything is dark and difficult, all you can do is the next right thing") but did not make one goddamn iota of sense. Ant-Man II was about the same as Ant-Man I - that is to say, harmlessly mediocre - with the welcome addition of more women characters getting to do cool things.
• Ex-Housie has also locked me into a Friends trivia night next weekend. I may have to mainline the TV tropes page to prep, it's been a while and I can't say I remember that much anymore.
• Still plodding slowly through Mass Effect 1, and have also been replaying Pokémon White on the side for no particular reason? Unless Scolipede counts as a reason. It's a pretty good reason.
• I don't seem to have picked up a book in a while, but I have been reading a lot of fanfiction lately - old favourites and fandoms for the most part.
• Can't really complain about not having enough to watch, however, as a whiny complaint to my parents weeks ago ended up netting me their Amazon Prime log-in and - sigh - their Disney+ log-in. Whatever my grudges against the corporate monolith, I can't say I haven't enjoyed having access to a huge wad of my favourite media. The highlight so far has been catching up on the last of the unseen Pixars, Ratatouille and Coco: I watched the latter twice in a row and wept both times. The low has been having to bail out on Aladdin: King of Thieves when it turned out fuzzy memories of liking it as a child did not brace my adult self for the really bad caricature designs somehow getting even worse having already done some awkward squinting throughout the first movie. Clone Wars/Rebels is next on my list, I think!
• In the meantime I have, at very long last, been working my way through Community after it unexpectedly turned up on Netflix. I've had a fantastic time with it overall and have particularly enjoyed playing mental bingo every time I catch a line that I've seen pop up on some gifset, meme, or other source that cannot resist the incredible quotability of the show. It has its rough patches, mind - during the first season I was getting close to going to my knees begging for just one episode without a demeaning gay joke, good grief - but when it's at its peak and focusing more on spearing genres and tropes than minority groups, and setting the characters' quirks against absurd circumstances rather than each other? Amazing. Hilarious. A truly next-level sitcom. Unfortunately, I've just broached season 4 so I know my time is limited, and I'm going to miss it. It's been a good evening dinner-time show.
• I rented Birds of Prey for an evening and ended up really liking it! I might try and write a short review at some point, so I'll just say I thought it was great character capture for the most part and a lot of fun.
• Have also watched Frozen 2 and Ant-Man and the Wasp as part of some long-distance movie nights with my old housemate. Frozen 2 was cute and had a surprisingly apt moral message ("when everything is dark and difficult, all you can do is the next right thing") but did not make one goddamn iota of sense. Ant-Man II was about the same as Ant-Man I - that is to say, harmlessly mediocre - with the welcome addition of more women characters getting to do cool things.
• Ex-Housie has also locked me into a Friends trivia night next weekend. I may have to mainline the TV tropes page to prep, it's been a while and I can't say I remember that much anymore.
• Still plodding slowly through Mass Effect 1, and have also been replaying Pokémon White on the side for no particular reason? Unless Scolipede counts as a reason. It's a pretty good reason.
• I don't seem to have picked up a book in a while, but I have been reading a lot of fanfiction lately - old favourites and fandoms for the most part.
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I'm glad Community has treated you well overall! S1 can be rough going (the homophobic jokes almost drove me to quit a few times), but it's so good when it's on form. I stopped at the end of S3 and keep wondering if I should try to catch up one day.
How are you liking Mass Effect? I have a gigantic soft spot for ME1 and its relatively relaxed pacing, even if it is clunky in places.
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I made it a few episodes into Community's season 4 with an optimistically open mind but... the quality really does take a nosedive :( Might be better off googling around for the best episodes of those later seasons rather than wading through the entire swamp.
ME1 has some of the best moments of the series for sure. (The conversations with Sovereign and Vigil? PEAK sci-fi aesthetic.) ME2 is by far my favourite of the entire trilogy, though, and this replay is somewhat confirming I should just start future replays from that point hehe. I've played ME1 enough. I've done my time. I don't need to struggle through the ridiculous gunsight drifts anymore.
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I've never heard a good word about S4 that didn't come with plenty of qualifiers attached. :/ I'm certainly not in a rush, though I remember quite liking the one episode of S5 I did see (the second D&D one).
Those sorts of moments + nostalgia add up to make ME1 more memorable than the other two for me (along with the music - Vigil's theme will never not give me shivers), buuuut I agree it's the least fun to replay on a nitty-gritty level. In theory, I love the emphasis on space exploration; in practice, I can only put up with wrestling the Mako across identical sections of terrain for so long. (I also made my main!Shep an Infiltrator
for some godforsaken reasonbecause I had a specific character idea in mind, which means getting to enjoy sniper rifle scope drift for half the game. No, thank you.)no subject
That's been my experience too - most will argue there are still episodes worth watching, but I haven't found anyone yet who says the season as a whole has much merit. Heh. Comedy is hard enough to write without having to try and mimic someone else's sense of humour, I suppose.
I knew some of the big spoilers going into ME1, so to be fair it didn't get a chance to make its case to me properly - ME2 pinched all of the Intro To This Universe fanfare. I definitely think it has the strongest actual plot of the trilogy.
Oh god, the Mako. Every time I start this game I cheerfully decide THIS will be the time I check out ALL the planets, and two planets later decide actually nevermind.