Viridian5's House of "...What?"

Having seen Lazarus to the end, I like it better now. I would've been happier if it didn't wait to explore who these characters are until the final episodes. It hits better on the second watch, knowing them now, and you pick up seeds it came back to later.

Some parts of it and the conclusion still make no real sense though.

Toonami's marathon of the original Japanese today makes me regret seeing the dub first, because so many characters have so much more personality and often sass in the Japanese voice acting, like the AI helicopter in the clubbing episode, Popcorn Wizard in general, or Axel saying, "O. ne. gai?" with such attitude. I like the characters better in the sub! I especially like Axel better.

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I worried that all the hype might contaminate my view of Sinners when I saw it, and I was correct. I had issues with the pacing and tone shifts, and the major action sequence was sometimes an incoherent mess for me. Sometimes I was bored. ( spoilers ) But it's cinematic, some of the scenes are really great, and the music is lit. I probably would've enjoyed it a lot more if I saw it in a dark theater on a big screen with the speakers up instead of on my TV at home.

But I fully support less corporate, more original passion projects with different points of view and something to say.

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I watched Thunderbolts* via several reactions on YouTube and mostly enjoyed it. Something character-driven where it doesn't feel like CGI has eliminated all feeling of weight? Yay! Having so much done practically makes a big difference for me in the action scenes. The emphasis on mental health gave a nice angle, and it being a sympathetic view is much appreciated considering how Thor was treated as a joke in Endgame. The humor felt more appropriately used, instead of destroying or undercutting a lot of emotional moments like in many Marvel projects in recent years.

I like Bob, and Lewis Pullman does a great job, though I do side-eye Marvel for his presentation. The oversized and soft clothing, the floppy hair, his angsty, tragic white boyness.... It suggests Marvel is aware of certain things.... I'm amused that some fic posits that Bob's body had to have been reworked in many ways, since his drug abuse should suggest that ( spoilers ) I'm curious to see how Sentry is deployed in the future given all the risks using him invites and how OP he is.

It was nice seeing Bucky getting a heroic, hopeful-sounding musical accompaniment as he rides up on the motorcycle. The Winter Soldier theme was very, very cool, but it was a horror story.

The movie seems to find the idea of Congressman Barnes as ludicrous as I do.

I didn't like the 14-month time skip at the end. It glosses over a lot. And why does Bucky look awful in it?

I'm very tired of Marvel movies having characters get thrown around several times in ways that should seriously injure or kill them, even the super soldiers, but they're always fine afterward.

I've seen some things online that say that ( spoilers ), and I agree. ( spoilers )

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Checking out the recent volume of translated My Hero Academia has me back on that, and some recent developments in it make me feel like the author has course-corrected on or justified some things I had problems with previously. It's nice to get out of the section where the art was so busy I sometimes had no idea what was going on.

A problem with getting back into MHA is seeing some online fans convinced that Bakugo Katsuki never did anything really that wrong, and the ways he's improved are enough to negate all the bad stuff in his past and how he continues to be a bit of an a-hole. They're like, "God, a character bullies another child for several years, including burning him at times, and tells him to jump off a roof and kill himself, and you haters will never get past that? He apologized! (Once.)" Correct, I won't. Some of them still wish he was the protagonist.

Like I'm not thrilled by online fans convinced that the MCU's John Walker never did anything really that wrong.

Watching My Hero Academia AMVs on YouTube have given me a greater appreciation for Deku's evolved fighting style, specifically the kicks, which he started using and developing after the ability he was given was too powerful for his body so he kept tearing up and breaking bones in his hands and arms and needed to shift some of it to a different part of his body as he trained. (Deku continues to learn and adjust over the seasons, but the kicks started it.)

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I've also followed the Murderbot TV show through reactions on YouTube and enjoyed it. Having David Dastmalchian in it certainly helps. That season finale was really something, and I'm glad it's getting a second season. The PresAux team didn't make much of an impression on me in the books, aside from Mensah.

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I'm not used to having so much new stuff to watch and think about over a summer.

I still don't have Netflix and thus can't watch the Blue Eye Samurai series but I've picked up enough online to be able to enjoy the full-episode special edition of the episode 6, "All Evil Dreams & Angry Words," they posted to YouTube.

I Dont Know How But They Found Me has a new song, "What Love?", with a music video out on YouTube... for an album, Gloom Division, that won't come out until February. Though for now you can buy just this one song as an MP3 on Amazon.com. What are they doing? If they intend to make their fans buy song after song individually until the album comes out--and then also buy the album, step 3: Profit?--I'm not going along with it. Just another way Dallon Weekes is trying my patience.

Though at least the music video is nearly a music video, as opposed to Depeche Mode's "music video" for "My Favorite Stranger," which is just one of their wives lightly disguised as male while taking a walk in black and white.

Last year I was really enjoying the Dimension 20 Misfits and Magic roleplaying game clips that came up on YouTube. Today I found a very well done animatic of one of my favorite scenes from it. You can see the original table reading for it within this clip, which is titled "Evan Ruins a Kid's Whole Career."

Misfits and Magic is a somewhat satirical play on the Harry Potter universe--with them roasting some of J.K. Rowling's writing and life decisions--and the players are all great but my favorite character is the superlative Brennan Lee Mulligan's Evan Kelmp, who is something like Tom Riddle if he had a conscience and the story really played out how being the foretold Dark One can suck since dark things keep following you and destroying your life and ability to have good people stay in it. But also funny, because this is D20 and because Evan Kelmp is starting to find friendship and support in the small group of American newbies who joined the school at the same time he did and his life before them was so horrible it turns around into being humorous at times.

This animatic depicts part of an in-game wizard tournament, with Evan facing off with an opponent from another school and this opponent really regretting it.



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I've been dealing with some anxiety and depression lately, and I'm not sure why since things don't noticeably suck that much more than usual. (Though I've been suffering some particularly bad headaches.)

Haven't been getting any writing done as a result, among other things. Part of that might be from how fandom on the internet seems to quiet down a lot during the summer, leaving me feeling more isolated. Another is the whole thing about writing in old fandoms where I don't feel like there's anyone really excited about getting to see what I'd put out.

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As ever, I am watching the skies, here from my third-floor apartment's balcony.





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Birthday gift cards have enabled me to buy some music, so I picked up some of Bo Burnham's new songs and Gary Numan's Savage (Songs from a Broken World), the last of which I've especially been listening to a lot and is a whole mood. "When the World Comes Apart" strikes me as a rather Farfarello song.

It used to be a thing where Marvel excelled at live action movies while DC ruled in animation, but seeing the Batman animated films aired on Toonami as a tie-in to DC FanDome 2021 on the last two Saturday night/Sunday mornings have seriously made me question this since they mostly really bored me.

Batman Ninja, in which Batman, his villains, his current and former Robins, and Alfred are sent back in time in Japan, didn't bore me and the art was pretty but the plot is ridiculous. That has to be the point, because just when you think it's reached the height of ridiculous it throws in something even more ridiculous, but I couldn't enjoy it. I'm sure there are viewers who would enjoy this but....

Under the Red Hood is just okay and had moments that dragged for me. Batman: The Long Halloween parts 1 and 2 bored me, when its barely competent Batman didn't annoy me. Plus, Jensen Ackles' voice is too easily recognizable for... another character to work as Batman for me, though I could deal with him as Jason in Under the Red Hood.

It didn't play this year for FanDome, but I hated The Killing Joke too, mostly but not exclusively over how it portrayed Barbara Gordon. So maybe I'm just not enjoying the contemporary stuff DC is putting out.

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It's weird hearing White Town's "Your Woman" every time Dua Lipa's "Love Again" plays on the radio. Thing is, "Your Woman" isn't about a happy, successful relationship, while "Love Again" is giddy over new love, so I keep feeling that Dua Lipa's love isn't going to end happily. With some artists, I can trust that something they're sampling is a deliberate comment. This situation is probably like those people on social media who post the "what women want in men" part of "Lower Your Expectations" as a straightforward, straight-faced thing, when the name and point of the song is about lowering your expectations.

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I first discovered them on YouTube but recently bought I Don't Know How But They Found Me's Razzmatazz as an album. Listening to it has revealed some bits that didn't stand out to me playing the songs on YouTube, like how it has a few more warping and industrial moments than I thought. It's a bit of a weird mindfuck for me, and I wonder if it does that to other people who were submerged in '80s music in the past too. This material isn't just cribbing from or an homage to '80s, it's sometimes... slanted. Not cynical or ironic about the aesthetic, just... something. It's hard to describe.

Given the metafiction about the band being either a band from 30 years ago who've only been discovered on old videos lately or a band actually lost in time, I wonder if, meta-wise, the warped sections in the music are something the band did itself originally or supposed to be the product of the deteriorating old media it's on.

I'm loving the album, by the way, even with the occasional brain twisting.

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The local oldies radio station was played at my old hell job 16-17 years ago so incessantly that I'd get flashes of depression and fear whenever I heard it playing or just certain '60s or '70s music after I quit it. But these days CBS FM is mostly living in the '80s and '90s. Friday it kicked off the end of the workweek with "(You Gotta) Fight For Your Right (To Party)" by the Beastie Boys, "Living on a Prayer" by Bon Jovi, and "Gonna Make You Sweat (Everybody Dance Now)" by C+C Music Factory, which is a massive improvement and a balm to my emotions, though I do have the occasional "Noooooo!" reaction of the music of my childhood and teens being considered oldies.

Man builds an entire village for mouse he saw in his garden. It looks a bit like Hobbiton.

This Bloomingdale's window series was amazing to see in person, with the light and colors popping out of the windows a bit. The leopards prowling in the back video screens in two windows kept distracting me though, with the movement I perceived at the corner of my eye making me think someone was coming up on me, setting off my "canny New Yorker" fight-or-flight instincts. At 3 a.m.

I also posted some photos I took before the serious rainstorms of two recent days. Like in this brief clip taken at St. John's Roman Catholic Cemetery, which doesn't look ominous at all.


You can see them all at my Flickr.

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This cool car is the only survivor of the sixteen red 1958 Plymouth Furies used during the filming and promotional tour of the 1983 horror movie Christine. I'd love to get behind the wheel of something like this and drive it a bit. No parallel parking though.

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Bo Burnham posted this on his account, so Netflix won't kill it. Here's "White Woman's Instagram," which is deeper and has more empathy than it first appears to. He set up and staged all these images on his own. And performed them.

Pearl River Mart had to move its flagship store again, due to another rent increase and problems from lockdown and rising anti-Asian bias affecting sales figures. They're now at 452 Broadway between Howard and Grand, returning to SoHo. I've long suggested Pearl River Mart as a fun and interesting place to visit during a trip in Manhattan.

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So, a while back, I noticed that wearing nail polish was making my hands and especially my fingertips hurt, something that got increasingly worse as last year went on. Although polish has been a part of my self-expression and decoration for decades--I can't wear rings for neurology reasons--I decided that maybe I just needed a detox. I took off my last coat of nail polish in the middle of December and didn't apply another. In March I tried a clearcoat from defy & Inspire, which is supposed to be free of all of the most toxic things nail polishes might have, on one nail on my right hand. The finger immediately got cold and soon the hand and arm to my elbow started to experience the deep ache I feel when I pet dogs or cats a bit and don't immediately wash my skin. It died down and went away after I removed the polish. A month later I tried Sally Hansen's Double Duty clear coat on one fingernail and experienced the same.

Crap.

I still wanted to decorate my nails though and thought maybe I could apply nail polish stickers, which surely wouldn't be nail polish directly on my nail surface and thus okay. Any brand that demanded I apply a base coat of nail polish beneath them I immediately eschewed. Color Street didn't have any designs I liked. I found some stuff from two brands on Amazon that looked good and had decent ratings. Today I applied one sheet from one of the brands, Torokom's "marble" nail art polish stickers.

It was a bit difficult, especially using my left hand to apply them to my right hand's nails. Some of them I should've streteched a bit more to fully fit my nails, and applying them to my nail surface somewhat awkwardly meant that there were some wrinkles here and there but the "marble" effect made that somewhat less obvious. This is how they turned out: ( photos )

I applied them to all of my nails and was happy. For about 20 minutes. Then the deep ache started in my hands and went all the way to my elbows, and I was incredulous because really?!? At least it took longer this way, but I still couldn't keep them on while they were doing this. I peeled them off and then did many swipes with a non-acetone polish remover to try to get the remaining stick'em goo off but then I had to stop that because the remover made my nails and fingers start to feel a burning sensation. I know it's the nail stickers because the ache started dying down after I took them off.

I guess I am now super sensitive; temporarily or permanently, who knows?

I'm keeping the remaining the sheets because they're pretty and maybe someday I'll be good to use them. (And they're a much appreciated birthday gift.) I'm not trying the other brand right now because this might happen with them too.

Oh, and my fingertips occasionally hurt sometimes even when I'm not wearing any polish for months because why not.

I hope I don't have a bad reaction when I next try to dye my hair because goddammit.

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My root canal on Friday will get its own entry later. It went worse than I expected though not for the reasons I thought it would.

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I actually found two bits from Inside that weren't smote off of YouTube.

Bo Burnham's own channel has a vid of his "Welcome to the Internet." (Some NSFW moments, and a few small trigger warnings.)


A Netflix official channel has "FaceTime with My Mom (Tonight)," which isn't my favorite from the show but it's amusing (and sad) and shows some of the ways he plays with aspect ratios for effect.

From telophase: Adorable pen crabs!


While I was listening to some music dine had links to as favorites on YouTube, I found a recommended video from Gary Numan released in 2017 that is musically and visually right in my wheelhouse. (Also, does this man age? This is that Gary Numan.)



I'm going to have to check out more songs from his Savage: Songs From A Broken World album and see what I think. (By the way, the girl in the "My Name Is Ruin" video is his daughter.)

On clear nights when I'm out walking I'd see many stars--something I didn't see much of years ago in Queens and wonder if the new LED bulb streetlights, which don't have the hazy, wide "bleed" of light in all directions of the old sodium bulbs, is the reason why I can now--and wonder if they belonged to anything I'd heard of. With that in mind, I recently downloaded the Skyview Lite app to my phone. It's been too cloudy recently to see any star clusters and I missed the Conjunction due to that, but last night I could see the orange-golden star that had been gradually moving across the sky for months that I thought might be Mars and the app confirmed it for me. I wish I had this when I saw a rose-colored star Thanksgiving night that I thought might be Venus.

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I picked up an Apple lightning to earpod jack piece for my iPhone SE for $10.88 at Micro Center, where I bought my laptop three(!!) years ago. The sound isn't amazing, though I don't know what "good" sound on the SE through AirPods is like either and I'm picky, but it definitely works. I may still splurge on AirPods at a later date but now I don't "need" to so immediately.

My Micro Center location is local (about 5 miles away), the price was better than the $20 I was seeing (before taxes, shipping and handling) online, and I didn't have to pay s & h or wait for it to arrive.

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YouTube recommendations found me these two interesting "behind the scenes" videos about Mad Max: Fury Road. In both, they talk about all the things and vehicles they created out of pieces of junk they recycled, thousands of things most audience members wouldn't even notice, as part of the visual worldbuilding. Some of the results are genuine works of art, and I hope at least some of them went to good homes and weren't just destroyed at the end. (I know a lot of the vehicles were destroyed during filming and that they couldn't just sell the monster hot rods they created because they're not street-legal and I heard someone who had bought something like it died in a crash in it so....)

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