What are you watching?

Best Selling RPGs - Available Now @ DriveThruRPG.com
Like many of you, I also recently watched the second season of Umbrella Academy. I tend to watch TV with the subtitles on, and one thing I appreciated was that the when a song came on in UA, the subtitles would specifically identify the title and artist, rather than just saying "song plays" or "rock song plays," like some subtitles. I did enjoy this season, but preferred the prior season.
 
According to the several hearing tests I've had in the past few years, my hearing is perfect; however, I have respiratory allergies that often make my head stuffy and affect my hearing. Hence, subtitles, especially for shows with rapid-fire dialogue and/or characters with accents that are difficult for my American ears to parse.
 
Watched The Color Out of Space on Netflix last night.

It is directed by the cult horror director Richard Stanley and of course is based on one of the best short stories by Lovecraft.

Stanley modernizes the setting and characters and adds a few more characters and details to make it feature length (Lovecraft's farmers were pretty sketchy) but keeps the central sense of mystery and amps up the psychedelic strangeness the story hints at. Great score by Colin Stetson.

Nic Cage continues his comeback of sorts with another pychedelic horror film (Mandy is the other), he brings a jittery oddness to his role with touches of humour without sliding into camp. Recommended for fans of the original story and horror in general.

 
Got some VOD credits from my cable company so we're using them up by watching The Last Starfighter, Knives Out, Todd Haynes' Dark Waters and revisiting the original Australian feature of The Animal Kingdom.

The Last Starfighter is so cheery and naive it is kinda amazing. The iconography/contrast of the trailer park and the spaceship are what I remember best from seeing it as a kid and it remains the strongest element of the film.


Fun fact: the CGI for The Last Starfighter was rendered on a Cray X-MP, which gets a mention in the final credits. The vector units in an X-MP were good for about 400 MFLOPS. Contrast this with a modern card - an NVIDIA RTX2080 - which has a peak throughput closer to 4 trillion FLOPS, 7 orders of magnitude faster. A big visual effects company like Weta or ILM might have a rendering farm with 1,000 or more computers - many billions of times the compute power used on The Last Starfighter.
 
Put me down as another 'watches with the subtitles' person, at least for some things.

So, thanks to the local public library, which has just opened its doors again this week, my wife and I have watched season 1 of A Discovery of Witches. It's based on a series of novels by Deborah Harkness, a historian who specializes in the intersection of science and magic in 16th-17th century England. I've not read the All Souls trilogy, as it is known, though I have read some of her articles and her monograph on John Dee, which I'd recommend.

The show kept our interest and my wife especially appreciated its PG (at most) level of violence and sex. Some of the performances were pretty good and the show features some fairly strong actors. The male lead is Matthew Goode, whom we recognized from Downton Abbey and The Good Wife, and Alex Kingston, Sorcha Cusack, and Lindsay Duncan all have supporting roles. Unfortunately, the actress playing the protagonist, Teresa Palmer, is a good deal less convincing. I didn't recognize her name, but checking her filmography I guess I saw her in The Sorceror's Apprentice. Based on the interviews that accompanied the series, she normally speaks with a strong Australian accent, so I wonder if part of the problem was that she was not that comfortable playing a Yank. That would help explain why her delivery sometimes seemed strained or flat. It also made me wonder why they did not just cast an American.

I was also a bit surprised that more of Harkness' background and expertise did not seem to come through in the show. It is set in Oxford, concerns academics, and features a magical manuscript with some references to alchemy. But given Harkness' knowledge of the weird phantasmagoria you find in Dee's angel conversations and of alchemy, I expected more references to Early Modern occulta. Instead, the magical world of the series seems to owe more to Anne Rice or even White Wolf's World of Darkness than to John Dee or alchemy. So there are magical creatures (witches, vampires, and daemons) but they have in effect a 'masquerade' to hide their existence from humans; vampires 'sire' others (did Rice invent that terminology?) and older vampires are menacing aristocrats that play power games. There is some suitably creepy stuff with Gerbert d'Aurillac, though, and an interesting take on his 'brazen head' from legend.

My guess is that Harkness put more of her specialisms into the book but that these got excised for time reasons or because the series makers weren't interested in them--or thought their audience would not be. And I guess season 2 (and book 2 of the trilogy) move back to Elizabethan times, at least in part. Anyway, I'm interested enough that I've put the first novel at the top of my pleasure reading list.
 
In Canada.
Ah. I checked and it's not available here (yet?).

We decided to watch an episode of Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, after finding out we have no idea by which episode we stopped watching Walking Dead. Quite fun so far.
 
Stewart Copeland is well known among drummers to play traditional grip. I've seen drummers use both the index and the middle finger technique. If Copeland started the index finger technique, that's interesting.

Simply switching to matched grip, which really makes more sense for a horizontally placed snare drum, would also allow for more powerful left-hand strokes, but I guess he prefers playing traditional grip because that's what he was taught.

Copeland is my main reason for enjoying The Police, not being a big fan of Sting's voice. I have to say though, while I love what Stewart played with The Police, his drumming does not look particularly graceful. He always appears kind of flailing, as it were, kind of overly enthusiastic. I think switching to matched grip would help. It's also healthier and you can play any genre or style using matched grip, you don't need traditional grip.

significant link: The Trouble With Traditional Grip | BANG! The Drum School

trad-v-match.jpg


I already elaborated some more on ways of holding your drumsticks in the what are you listening to? thread.

Carl Palmer has always played with the traditional grip and not only does he have more than enough power, but at the age of 70, his drum solos still steal the show every time. Check out this song he played with Asia at the High Voltage festival in 2010*. He beats that drum like it owes him money:



* This was the same festival where Emerson, Lake & Palmer played their last show together. Keith Emerson, Greg Lake and John Wetton (the singer/bassist in this video) have all passed away, unfortunately.
 
I spent some time on Tubi TV this week, and watched Disco Godfather and Hell Goes To Frogtown.
Once seen, both cannot be unseen
I am not proud of myself, heh heh :grin:



 
Last edited:
Disco Godfather is great but my favourite Dolemite is still Petey Wheatstraw.


For good or ill, that's coming up as a recommendation for me
So I might meander into that territory again to check it out, heh heh :shade:
:thumbsup:
 
Last edited:
Carl Palmer has always played with the traditional grip and not only does he have more than enough power, but at the age of 70, his drum solos still steal the show every time. Check out this song he played with Asia at the High Voltage festival in 2010*. He beats that drum like it owes him money
I never said it cannot be done, Stewart Copeland also proves that, as did many drummers before him. Still, much easier and ergonomically healthier to use matched grip. Traditional grip is like this left-over from a previous evolutionary stage that doesn't really serve a purpose anymore, unless you're playing a tilted marching snare drum.
 
Last edited:
Just finished season one of Year of the Rabbit. Very funny, and pretty solid period detail.
 
Just finished Curson, a pretty good Italian drama set in the Alps near the Austrian border. A nice mix of drama, family angst and supernatural. I enjoyed it.

Also, found how to download all my viewing on Netflix, which is useful.

Next up, The New Legends of Monkey Season 2.
 
Blood on Satan's Claw is so good, I was so impressed when I first saw it and wondered why it wasn't better know. Since the boom of interest in 'folk horror' though I think it is now getting wider recognition as a classic.
 
Blood on Satan's Claw is so good, I was so impressed when I first saw it and wondered why it wasn't better know. Since the boom of interest in 'folk horror' though I think it is now getting wider recognition as a classic.

TCM plays a number of these movies every October, along with many of the Hammer films. I DVRed Blood On Satan's Claw last year and it's brilliant.
 
Last edited:
Gotta love Raquel Welch's train-stopping technique.

I caught a few minutes of that on broadcast a week or two ago. I was ashamed that I didn't recognize Raquel Welch immediately--it took me a scene or two.

Over the weekend I watched "Twice Upon a Time," the last Capaldi special for Dr. Who. I thought David Bradley did a good job playing the first Doctor/William Hartnell, though I found the episode's harping on his male chauvinism somewhat overdone. Of course mores have changed since the 1960s--and if I recall the first Doctor was a bit of a fogey even then--but pointing it out cuts into the suspension of disbelief, by emphasizing that this is a TV series. If the Doctor was really an alien from Gallifrey, then there's no reason he would have Earth prejudices. I followed it up by "The Husbands of River Song," which probably would have worked better for me if I remembered all of the River Song episodes through the years. It was enjoyable nonetheless, and I liked the way that Hydroflax looked like a Warhammer 40K space marine.

I also saw last year's "Knives Out," which I found amusing and pleasingly campy, in part--especially Daniel Craig's soliloquies.
 
The Mrs had never heard of Mr Rogers so I rented Won't You Be My Neighbor? on a lark. I was expecting an expose of sorts and genuinely surprised to find that Mr Rogers was more or less the persona represented onscreen. I was surprised at the serious nostalgia feels rising from a dimly remembered early childhood. It was a good flick and reinforced my belief that it takes guts and conviction to be consistently kind.
 
The Mrs had never heard of Mr Rogers so I rented Won't You Be My Neighbor? on a lark. I was expecting an expose of sorts and genuinely surprised to find that Mr Rogers was more or less the persona represented onscreen. I was surprised at the serious nostalgia feels rising from a dimly remembered early childhood. It was a good flick and reinforced my belief that it takes guts and conviction to be consistently kind.
Yeah, Fred Rogers didn't have anything to expose. He was just cool.
 
Banner: The best cosmic horror & Cthulhu Mythos @ DriveThruRPG.com
Back
Top