Abhimanyu

Has there been any mainstream coverage of it? I saw a piece on the BBC news channel - but they literally cut mid sentence to David Cameron and - not kidding- Barbara Winsor (!) wearing poppies outside number 10. It was as if they'd lost interest in the story half way through.

Just an aside to respond to this: GamerGate coverage has definitely gone pretty mainstream of late. There was a big Sarkeesian-centric article in the New York Times and she even went on The Colbert Report to talk about it. MSNBC and CNN have broadcast segments interviewing both Quinn and Sarkeesian. Pretty much every online publication you care to name will have run at least one related op-ed. It's just a matter of time before The Simpsons incorporates a GG gag and there's a porn parody of the whole movement.

But yeah, carry on, I'm still not sick of people piling creative abuse on GG gumps. I LOL'd at 'lesser basement-dwelling beings' earlier in the thread.

I honestly cannot wrap my head around just how Evil with a capital E Monsanto is. I am dumbfounded by the fact that companies like this are allowed to operate, billions of dollars in lobbying/bribe money or no.

After the seance and final shot of ep2 and Rory Kinnear acting (with capital A) up a storm in episode 3, I am entirely sold on Penny Dreadful. One. Hundred. Percent.

it makes me wish they had the budgets to do seasons like network shows get--26 episodes a season. just imagine.

The 24 episode season length is one of the big reasons that network dramas are so slack and padded out. 12-14 episode seasons are perfect. Pretty much every TV drama I genuinely admire is of the shorter duration.

Thanks, Lou!

Also enjoying True Detective.

 

I rather resent being put into the position of having to be impressed by Mr. McConoughey?

He's a very good actor. Always has been. He'd just been putting in a decade of shit romcoms to make all the money while he's young and pretty. But the last few years, he's been doing amazing work. Dallas Buyer's Club is probably his *least* interesting work of the last few years. Mud, Killer Joe, The Wolf of Wall Street, The Lincoln Lawyer, Bernie, The Paperboy...he's been great in all of these.

TRUE DETECTIVE is the fucking bomb. Somehow manages to be absolutely nightmarish (quite literally - I've had shitty sleep after each of the last 3 episodes), hilarious and - occasionally - faintly ridiculous at the same time. McConnaughey is god. And I can't fathom why anyone would criticize the show for Cohle's monologues - they're the best part!

Not feeling this season of BANSHEE as much. It feels muted, like they're trying to take themselves a little more seriously than last season. The moping to violence ratio hasn't skewed to the good side. That first season was wall to wall batshit fun. This season...not quite as much.

Absolutely gutting.

Justified and Banshee back this week...on the down side, the portable HD I hook up to my TV for watching downloading stuff is currently full.

Preaching to the choir on all counts! Including the full HD. Can't bring myself to delete old seasons of Boardwalk Empire, Mad Men and Justified.

There's also HBO's new show True Detective which is getting some of the best advance reviews I've read in years.

I heartily second Ade's recommendation for Only Lovers Left Alive. Currently rivaling The Act of Killing, Before Midnight and (a little behind those others) 12 Years A Slave as my favourite of 2013.

Some great horror so far this year - VHS 2, A Field in England, Byzantium (boy, was that amazing), Cheap Thrills, We Are What We are and many others I am definitely forgetting.

I think I read a review of that recently. Hey, what happened with the cholesterol thing, any better results come back from the second round of tests?.

Haven't been back yet. Due back for the second blood test in two weeks.

Reading Mary Russell's The Sparrow and quite enjoying it. What if the Jesuits were the first to send a manned mission to meet and greet alien life?? A propulsive and (thankfully) non-preachy read with some very well-drawn and sympathetic characters.

Blergh, you guys are right about this season of Dexter getting worse and worse as it moves along. The only reason I'm watching it is because I put seven years into the damn show and might as well see how it ends. So very irrational of me. And bizarrely, it doesn't feel like a final season at all. It doesn't seem like it's building to a damn thing.

Oh boy. I'm at that melancholy point in life where nearly everything takes me back. Chalk it up to my enormous extended family - basically the people I grew up around - all dying off one by one in the last few years. Every time I return to India for a visit, the various houses I used to do the rounds of, all of which used to be filled with activity, are now like tombs.

Well on that joyful note: as with everyone else, music is key. Different kinds of music = nostalgia for different phase in my life. When I hear 80s music (ie. all the time), it's nostalgia for pretty much my entire childhood - kid to teens. Despite being too young to remember much of the 80s, I spent my whole childhood listening to that stuff. Springsteen, U2 and the Police are particularly good at evoking nostalgia. Then there's the shitty shitty 90s pop and the 'hard rock' (as we called almost everything that wasn't Real McCoy or the Spice Girls back then) that was all the rage in India when I was in my early teens and on through high school.

Movies and TV shows also do it for me. There are some movies I used to watch on practically a weekly basis over the first 18 years of my life - Robocop, the Terminator movies, Pulp Fiction, Masters of the Universe (don't laugh), the Chris Reeve Superman films, Flash Gordon, Die Hard, Predator. Mostly genre films from the 80s. The X-Files, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, NYPD Blue, Street Hawk, Automan, Knight Rider, Highlander: The Series - all the 80s and 90s US network dramas were big in India when cable TV finally hit and every kid suddenly found himself immersed in the glorious world of pop culture.

So, y'know, pretty much anything from the 80s or 90s :P

I agree with Christian - Trillium #1 was fucking great. That combined with somewhat familiar but very strong work from Snyder on The Wake as well as a promising first issue of Collider gives me some hope re: Vertigo's future.

Maybe I don't understand the cos-play world, but I don't get the whole professional model dressed up in a costume made by a professional. It comes off disingenuous. Are most of these people actual fans? Are they hired by a company? Are they doing it as a sort of audition for more work? Again, I don't know that world.

But I like it better when "normal" people make their own costumes.

I'm pretty sure they're almost all fans who make their own costumes. The pictures that circulate are those of the most hardcore of the hardcore hobbyists.

Mark, you seen it yet? Opinions?

This article articulates what bothers me about the whole destruction porn aspect of all these blockbuster movies. It's the PG 13 rating. On one hand they want to make serious movies about serious topics including terrorism and apocalypse but on the other hand they want to make it OK for kids to go. So they enter this weird grey zone where they depict city-wide massacres but aren't allowed to show the physical or emotional fallout of such violence. As the writer says, it's OK for them to show the death of thousands of people but only if it happens mostly off-screen. Classic have your cake and eat it too. It just leaves you hollow. It doesn't have the pop kick of genuinely 'comic book' style violence (a la the Donner Superman movies) but neither does it have the sobering effect of more visceral depictions of violence. Just leaves one feeling hollow and vaguely dissatisfied. These are generalizations, of course, but I've found that they hold true for me through most of the blockbuster films of the last decade or half decade.

I'm not saying superhero movies need to be gory and horrific but I do think that if they choose to go with the PG-13, they need to tailor their stories accordingly, the way Donner (and Singer) did. You can't have movies about globally scaled terrorism and cataclysm and then proceed to sterilize the whole damn shebang.

http://blogs.indiewi...s-pg-13-problem

 

I'd put most of the blame on the script.

 

This is the crux of the matter right here. We've come to the point where the screenplay is pretty much the most irrelevant, dashed-off, shoddy, thoroughly compromised and cooked up by committee aspect of most big budget films. It needs to be one of the strongest elements in every film - the foundational one, if anything.

If the action stuff is anything like the standard CGI-heavy, thoroughly anonymous apocalypse that is now a feature of pretty much every single summer movie then Balthy's review isn't very encouraging. I was hoping for mood (as opposed to portent), inspired visuals and/or character to make the film for me. I am utterly sick of 'action' as defined by summer blockbusters - bland, bloodless, generally incoherent PG-13 destruction without an iota of emotional fallout. There's only so many explosions and epic punches shrugged off by godlike beings/robots/etc that I can take without it getting mind-numbingly rote and only so many times I can see London/NY/Paris get razed without the spectacle becoming completely meaningless.

Cranky in my old age.

Thanks, Avaunt. And yeah, I'm cutting down drastically on the sodium intake and upping the potassium intake. We'll see what that achieves. There aren't really any other lifestyle changes I can make. Thing is though I never really eat chips and processed foods anyway. And you're certainly correct about the inevitabilities of aging but I still maintain that getting a high blood pressure reading at my age is a serious bummer. Just the fact that I'm going to have to be ridiculously careful about what I eat for the rest of my life is a little depressing. Also not happy about the fact that if this is true, I might have to tone down (or possibly even eliminate) a couple physical activities I really enjoy - lifting weights and boxing. Not to mention those lifelong health risks.

But, sigh, yes...positive thinking. It just came as such a shock is all.

High blood pressure. Turns out I may have it :(

Went for a regular physical today and the pressure measured out at 150/90 which is well into the hypertensive range. I work out regularly, don't smoke and am bang in the middle of the correct body mass range for my height. This leaves dietary causes and - primarily, according to the doctor - genetic causes. Both my parents have high blood pressure and, apparently, when the genetic risk is that high, all the healthy living in the world cannot keep you from having the same problems.

So the advice is to radically alter the diet - reducing sodium dramatically along with bad fats - and return in 3 months for new measurement. If it hasn't improved from the dietary changes, I get to go on lifelong meds and be at high risk for heart disease/stroke/diabetes. It takes at least 2 measurements of high blood pressure for the diagnosis to be definite (a single measurement could read high due to stress, exhaustion etc) so I won't be 'officially' diagnosed as hypertensive unless the reading in 3 months is high too, but it definitely doesn't look good.

Bit depressed about this. I didn't think I'd be having these conversations at 30. So much for regular exercise and perfect body weight keeping you healthy. Fuck.

Indeed - I was listening to that just this morning, having transferred it to one of those newfangled Eye Pod things. Thanks, Ade! Quality compilation, much as I'd expected.

Could we get the playlist?

I don't know why I got such an instant image of Arabian nights style, I suppose it was a bit stereotyping of me really.

 

I just like that sort of thing, Sir Walter Scott, Tale of Genji, etc.

Well, given the book's title, you can't exactly be faulted for thinking of the Arabian Nights. The style isn't flowery or anything but the story and characters are strongly evocative of Middle Eastern mythology as well as the popular worldwide conception of said mythology (which isn't quite the same thing, of course). Carey's clearly done his research or has - at least - managed to fool me into thinking he has. It also has that 'nature of stories/myth' meta feel that Carey and Gaiman often return to (the latter to a fault). It's done very well here.

I liked the style just fine. Carey's usual well-paced and eminently readable approach.