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media round-up: january & february
Trying a different format for the round-ups this year, so it's a little more of a log vs various disjointed reflections!
Read
1. James Herriot Collection Pt 1
2. Circe, Madeline Miller
3. The World Beneath: The Life and Times of Unknown Sea Creatures & Coral Reefs, Dr Richard Smith
4. Ice Station, Matthew Reilly
5. Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell
6. Mossflower, Brian Jacques
James is a familiar friend, and one I feel a new closeness to as a fellow urban dweller come uncertainly creeping around the perplexing field of rural agriculture. I'll always have him to thank for not needing to ask my clients what 'bottle tit' meant.
I wish I liked Circe more, I really do. It had a strong start, an engaging writing style, and I loved the brutal, unromantic rendering of the Greek gods' divinity from the inside of their world. But it sure is a choice to write about a series of events from the perspective of a person who isn't actually present for most of them, and I found Circe's chronicles of exile started to drag as more and more time was spent on delivering familiar fables third-hand. Also, for a book I've often seen praised for its feminist take, I sure could have used a few more women Circe actually got on with.
It is a pledge I have made weakly before, but this year I'm making a determined attempt to insert non-fiction and different genres into my reading material! It's happening, dang it! The World Beneath was a gentle opener, being more about the gorgeous, colourful photos than the text - but I did read it all! Dr Smith is an enthusiastic diver with a not especially thrilling habit of waxing at length about taxonomy; I still learned snippets of new information about the mysteries of the deep, plus an appreciation for many species I'd never heard of. Pygmy seahorses are his particular fascination, and the narration of their miniature dramas was one of the highlights.
Can you believe Nineteen Eighty-Four was a new read for me? I knew approximately how it ended, plus the general cultural familiarity with concepts like Big Brother and Room 101, but it was interesting digging into the actual text at long last. Grim, pointed, perpetually meaningful. Boy do a lot of people wilfully misread this one.
Ice Station and Mossflower were both re-reads of old favourites. Mossflower stood up surprisingly well! Ice Station did not. I can't quite make myself eject my Reillys from the shelves just yet, but I suspect they are well on their way to becoming relics of a less discerning teenagerhood.
Watched
1. Centaurworld (s1)
2. The Lost Daughter
3. The Wire (s1-3)
Rewatches: Chicken Run, Balto, Ferngully, Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron
Centaurworld was... colourful? And undeniably catchy on a musical level. It relies on a style of humour that's kind of a miss for me, though. Over the Garden Wall and Infinity Train balance the serious and the quirky in a way that works for me; Centaurworld, not so much.
The Lost Daughter was very slow and very tense in a quiet, surreal way yet never quite had its lit fuse reach narrative dynamite. Props for tackling some harsh realities, I suppose, and the main actor did an incredible job.
I have been enjoying The Wire enormously, which is surprisingly less grimdark than I expected. Clever and natural scripting brings the huge and varied cast to life, walking us through dozens of perspectives and exploring challenging topics and philosophies with compassionate nuance. It's still a pretty hard watch sometimes. By the end of season 3's standard bittersweet ending I got the message: you can't change the system, you just have to do what you can to find the small wins in spite of it. Realistic, maybe, but also defeatist in a way that can rankle these days. As far as blorbos go, Lester, Omar, and to my embarrassment Prez are currently at the top of the list. Still fond of Kima, but season 3 strained that fondness some. Apparently I can tolerate various forms of misbehaviour but infidelity ain't one.
Had myself a bit of a non-Disney animation spree. Chicken Run is still the GOAT.
Played
1. Mass Effect: Legendary Edition (2-3)
2. Oxenfree (replay)
Returning to Mass Effect was a little bit bittersweet as well! On the one hand, I was relieved that the upgrade mostly kept things in fine shape, though a few people had bad makeovers (RIP Kelly 'stung by bees' Chambers). It was nice to interact again with friendly faces, visit beloved settings, and actually enjoy the combat LMFAO. (I played a Vanguard for the first time and had an absolute blast.) Mass Effect has always been a shameless space opera and at its best it is a loving, gorgeously cinematic adventure full of friendship, community, and sexy robot spacesquids.
At its worst the gross masculinity can be so in your face it's actually unpleasant. Joker grows steadily more inclined to make frat boy jokes. Donnelly's lines are nothing but sexual commentary on his crew members. EDI's treatment in the third game is agonising, no one will get off Miranda's case for existing the way they designed her, no, making Kasumi inclined to make creepy comments about the men is not an endearing balancing of the stakes- Aaaaaa! Aaaaaaa! In some ways it almost left me glad Andromeda flopped - the series is a cultural icon but also a time capsule, and you can't easily unpick these elements of it when they're so deeply embedded in the worldbuilding. It might be best to just leave it as it is, and move onward and upward.
Aside from all that, I was ruefully amused to find my journey through Mass Effect 3 was pretty much identical to the first time I played it. The initial third is some of my favourite gaming in the whole trilogy, concluding in the wild excellence that is the Tuchanka mission; then it starts to get disjointed and less logical as it scrambles towards an ending that feels like it has big question marks left scribbled all over it. There were moving moments in spite of the rush all the same, and Jennifer Hale will forever be a champion for work as Shepard.
Read
1. James Herriot Collection Pt 1
2. Circe, Madeline Miller
3. The World Beneath: The Life and Times of Unknown Sea Creatures & Coral Reefs, Dr Richard Smith
4. Ice Station, Matthew Reilly
5. Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell
6. Mossflower, Brian Jacques
James is a familiar friend, and one I feel a new closeness to as a fellow urban dweller come uncertainly creeping around the perplexing field of rural agriculture. I'll always have him to thank for not needing to ask my clients what 'bottle tit' meant.
I wish I liked Circe more, I really do. It had a strong start, an engaging writing style, and I loved the brutal, unromantic rendering of the Greek gods' divinity from the inside of their world. But it sure is a choice to write about a series of events from the perspective of a person who isn't actually present for most of them, and I found Circe's chronicles of exile started to drag as more and more time was spent on delivering familiar fables third-hand. Also, for a book I've often seen praised for its feminist take, I sure could have used a few more women Circe actually got on with.
It is a pledge I have made weakly before, but this year I'm making a determined attempt to insert non-fiction and different genres into my reading material! It's happening, dang it! The World Beneath was a gentle opener, being more about the gorgeous, colourful photos than the text - but I did read it all! Dr Smith is an enthusiastic diver with a not especially thrilling habit of waxing at length about taxonomy; I still learned snippets of new information about the mysteries of the deep, plus an appreciation for many species I'd never heard of. Pygmy seahorses are his particular fascination, and the narration of their miniature dramas was one of the highlights.
Can you believe Nineteen Eighty-Four was a new read for me? I knew approximately how it ended, plus the general cultural familiarity with concepts like Big Brother and Room 101, but it was interesting digging into the actual text at long last. Grim, pointed, perpetually meaningful. Boy do a lot of people wilfully misread this one.
Ice Station and Mossflower were both re-reads of old favourites. Mossflower stood up surprisingly well! Ice Station did not. I can't quite make myself eject my Reillys from the shelves just yet, but I suspect they are well on their way to becoming relics of a less discerning teenagerhood.
Watched
1. Centaurworld (s1)
2. The Lost Daughter
3. The Wire (s1-3)
Rewatches: Chicken Run, Balto, Ferngully, Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron
Centaurworld was... colourful? And undeniably catchy on a musical level. It relies on a style of humour that's kind of a miss for me, though. Over the Garden Wall and Infinity Train balance the serious and the quirky in a way that works for me; Centaurworld, not so much.
The Lost Daughter was very slow and very tense in a quiet, surreal way yet never quite had its lit fuse reach narrative dynamite. Props for tackling some harsh realities, I suppose, and the main actor did an incredible job.
I have been enjoying The Wire enormously, which is surprisingly less grimdark than I expected. Clever and natural scripting brings the huge and varied cast to life, walking us through dozens of perspectives and exploring challenging topics and philosophies with compassionate nuance. It's still a pretty hard watch sometimes. By the end of season 3's standard bittersweet ending I got the message: you can't change the system, you just have to do what you can to find the small wins in spite of it. Realistic, maybe, but also defeatist in a way that can rankle these days. As far as blorbos go, Lester, Omar, and to my embarrassment Prez are currently at the top of the list. Still fond of Kima, but season 3 strained that fondness some. Apparently I can tolerate various forms of misbehaviour but infidelity ain't one.
Had myself a bit of a non-Disney animation spree. Chicken Run is still the GOAT.
Played
1. Mass Effect: Legendary Edition (2-3)
2. Oxenfree (replay)
Returning to Mass Effect was a little bit bittersweet as well! On the one hand, I was relieved that the upgrade mostly kept things in fine shape, though a few people had bad makeovers (RIP Kelly 'stung by bees' Chambers). It was nice to interact again with friendly faces, visit beloved settings, and actually enjoy the combat LMFAO. (I played a Vanguard for the first time and had an absolute blast.) Mass Effect has always been a shameless space opera and at its best it is a loving, gorgeously cinematic adventure full of friendship, community, and sexy robot spacesquids.
At its worst the gross masculinity can be so in your face it's actually unpleasant. Joker grows steadily more inclined to make frat boy jokes. Donnelly's lines are nothing but sexual commentary on his crew members. EDI's treatment in the third game is agonising, no one will get off Miranda's case for existing the way they designed her, no, making Kasumi inclined to make creepy comments about the men is not an endearing balancing of the stakes- Aaaaaa! Aaaaaaa! In some ways it almost left me glad Andromeda flopped - the series is a cultural icon but also a time capsule, and you can't easily unpick these elements of it when they're so deeply embedded in the worldbuilding. It might be best to just leave it as it is, and move onward and upward.
Aside from all that, I was ruefully amused to find my journey through Mass Effect 3 was pretty much identical to the first time I played it. The initial third is some of my favourite gaming in the whole trilogy, concluding in the wild excellence that is the Tuchanka mission; then it starts to get disjointed and less logical as it scrambles towards an ending that feels like it has big question marks left scribbled all over it. There were moving moments in spite of the rush all the same, and Jennifer Hale will forever be a champion for work as Shepard.
no subject
(no subject)
no subject
Yup. And what I love about the show is how it demonstrates this across institutions, both formal and informal (legal and not so much).
Prez gets such a nice arc! And of course Omar is <3.
Hm, Kima. I think the women in this show - the few that there were - suffered from being written by men. I seem to recall David Simon saying as much, but that might just be wishful thinking on my part.
(no subject)