I am too tired to properly provide context. I trust you can figure most of this out. If not, check Twitter for details. 🙂
I don’t know why some of them are sideways, either.
Month: March 2016
GUEST POST: The X-Files Revival: The Very Disappointing and the Good
I’m running guest posts while I’m in Chicago at C2E2. I’ll probably be posting anyway, but just in case– heck, as this one is posting, I’m still in town. My friend Natacha Guyot gets the first one.
To say I was looking forward to the new season of the X-Files, my all-time favorite TV show, would be an understatement. I had high hopes for it, as for the most part I enjoyed all seasons and movies, though the most recent one didn’t live up to my expectations.
I liked the first and last episodes of this tenth season most. The four in the middle, I am still wondering why they made them for the most part. I have nothing against the return of the monster of the week approach, but those “middle” episodes didn’t do it for me.
10.02 ‘Founder’s mutation’ and 10.04 ‘Home Again’ were the closest to old school monster of the week kind, but I found them slightly disappointing and visually gore for the sake of it. Now there were similar aspects in older episodes, but not to this point. When I went to see Deadpool, I felt that it was less gory than the new X-Files, which was weird.
10.03 ‘Mulder and Scully Meet the Were Monster’ was beyond disappointing and atrocious to watch. I generally don’t care for “funny” or parodic episodes, but this one tops every other episode of that kind I had to put up with. It felt like wasted time from start to finish. I didn’t find it smart or witty, but simply horrible and poor writing.
10.05 ‘Babylon’ wasn’t much better and the overall case didn’t feel X-Files-ish at all. The doppelgangers new agents seemed very forced as well (though these two eventually grew up on me in the season finale). While these agents being somewhat similar to Mulder and Scully in dynamic, the trait was too forced, and hindered their introduction and early development. As for the whole section of what I dub “Mulder goes Californication style”, I just shook my head. If I wanted to watch Californication, I’d watch it, not X-Files.
10.01 ‘My Struggle’ and 10.06 ‘My Struggle II’ were my favorite and the season finale actually reconciled me with the newest episodes, as I watched it quite reluctantly at first. They did a great job approaching the mythology of the show that has been developed since day one. It also ended with a cliffhanger that makes me hope we get another season (or movie) because I want more answers! It is sad though that they wasted so much episode time in between those episodes, as the finale would have benefited from being a two part instead of a single one.
All the returning actors did a great job (as well as some of the new additions) and I am grateful we got to see Skinner and Reyes again but more screen time for both would have been great. Duchovny and Anderson showed that they can still do an amazing job as Mulder and Scully, though I wish they had had more scenes together. While it made sense to have them do their own thing in most of the finale (as it happened before in earlier seasons), other episodes could have had them interact more, regardless of the status of their personal relationship.
I like how Mulder’s and Scully’s son was brought up in several moments of the narrative and I am curious to see what they may do about him in a next season, as he should prove pivotal. I loved seeing Scully use her medical abilities a lot again, though one element peeved me. I was surprised to see her faith be of so little importance as she loses her mother in 10.04 ‘Home Again’. I understand it is extremely hard for her, but the writers seemed to mostly “forget” about this intricate part of the character, which annoyed me.
Overall, this season has been disappointing, in terms of number of episodes I have like. Yet, I still am hoping for more X-Files and am crossing fingers that the writers get it together and go back to what makes the show fascinating to me.
***
Natacha Guyot is a French author, scholar and public speaker. She works on Science Fiction, Transmedia, Gender Studies, Children Media and Fan Studies. She is a feminist, a fangirl, a bookworm, a vidder, a gamer and a cat lover.
Her released titles include A Galaxy of Possibilities: Representation and Storytelling in Star Wars (New Revised Edition), and Clairvoyance Chronicles – Volume One.
How to be an Asshole Without Even Really Trying
…okay, I know I said I wouldn’t be around much today, but I want to write this down before I forget about it and it won’t take long.
On my list of things to do today was an eye doctor appointment to get fitted with contact lenses so that I can see while I’m swimming. I’ve worn contacts before; I tend to flip back and forth between contacts and glasses every couple of years or so. I left with a pair of sample contacts in my prescription and, after thinking about it for a bit, decided to go for a swim.
Why did I think about it? Because the thought you don’t have a replacement pair, so if you lose a lens in the damn pool you’re going to feel pretty stupid rolled through my head, and I almost decided to give my eyes a couple of days to get re-used to the lenses before swimming.
But I didn’t!
As I was swimming, getting reasonably close to my number of goal laps for the day, I noticed a youngish black kid standing rather nervously at the shallow end of the pool. There was one open lane and one person in each of the other three, and he was being kind of weirdly fidgety about getting in. I stood down at the shallow end and gasped for air for a minute or two, waiting to see if he wanted to share my lane, and then swam down to the far end.
As I got down to the far end and turned around, he climbed into the pool, using the ladder, in my lane.
And right about there, at that exact second, I adjusted my goggles and knocked a lens out of place. It wasn’t out of my eye, but it was seriously not in position any longer, and it wasn’t comfortable at all. I fiddled with it for a second, realized my chlorine-soaked hands weren’t doing me any good, and bailed. From the deep end.
Leaving my towel and flip-flops at the other end.
And, as it was starting to hurt, didn’t quite run– the floor’s too slippery for that– but made for the men’s locker room at as high a rate of speed as being half-blind and in bare feet could allow.
It took two or three minutes in the bathroom, maybe, to get the lens back in place, at which point I thought fuck it, I was pretty close to the number of laps I was going to do anyway, and I think I’ve pushed my luck enough. I went back into the pool area, grabbed my flip-flops and my towel, and went off to the hot tub. Meanwhile, this kid’s swimming– not in my lane, notably, but sharing the one next to where I was.
It wasn’t until I was in the shower a few minutes after that that I realized that, as far as he could tell, the fat white guy had practically jumped out of the pool and fled as soon as the black teenager had gotten in. Fled so quickly, in fact, that I’d forgotten to take my shit with me and had had to go back and get it.
So, yeah, that could have gone better.
(Note that I’m fully aware that I am not the center of this kid’s universe and that he probably barely even noticed I was there. But if he did? Shit. It ain’t like I can track him down and apologize. “Hey, that thing I did, that you might not have even noticed and looked really racist if you did? Contact lens. I swear. Wanna go share the pool so I can prove it?”)
Come see me at #C2E2!
I’m leaving tomorrow morning for the Chicago Comic & Entertainment Expo, at McCormick Place, where I’ll be doing my best to make at least a moderate amount of money in booth 228! The hours for the sales floor are long– 10 to 7 on Friday and Saturday, and I think 10 to 5 on Sunday– so there’s plenty of time to go do whatever else people do at huge conventions and still come see me!
I expect to spend today rushing around like a maniac getting 10,000 last-minute things done, so it’s going to be quiet around here. I have guest posters lined up for the next five days, but y’all know me; the chances that I won’t be posting at least something while I’m at the con are slim.
See you in Chicago!
It’s Big Mega Hoopty-Doopty Tuesday!
More primaries today! Let’s wantonly speculate! I’m not getting paid for this, so it doesn’t matter if I’m right!
- The Republican race is what it is. I hear Kasich might come in first in Ohio, with Rubio winning in fourth. Whatever. That race is their problem; I’m not worrying about it right now.
- Now, obviously, I’m basing just about all of this on the polls, and the polls shit the bed last week in rather spectacular fashion in Michigan. It will be very interesting to see if they’re useful today or not. I suspect part of the problem (PART!) with Michigan was Democrats who thought the election was in the bag for Hillary crossing party lines to vote against Trump. I’m fully aware that anecdotes are not data, but my own aunt did precisely that, voting for Kasich; I’m sure she was not the only one. There was also probably a real late surge in people either switching to vote for Bernie or committing late. One way or another, I don’t expect the first effect to be as strong this time around so I’m suspecting the polls to reflect reality a bit more closely. But we’ll see.
- Also, keep in mind that the nature of polling guarantees that occasionally it’s gonna shit the bed. 99% chance of yes means 1% chance of no. That ain’t likely but it’s still gonna happen once in a while.
- That said, if I wasn’t looking at polls, I’d say Hillary was in for a sweep today. The Democrats vote in Illinois, Ohio, Florida, North Carolina, and Missouri, which are all underneath the currently 86.2% white threshold where Bernie does best– he’s only won two contests in states with fewer white people than Minnesota. Hillary has won eleven. Illinois is 77.7% white, Ohio 83.2%, Florida 78.1%, North Carolina 71.7%, and Missouri 83.7%. Further, Hillary is from Illinois, so I’d expect her to do quite well there.
- That said: right now it looks like Hillary is going to win Florida and North Carolina quite handily. Ohio and Illinois are both leaning toward her but are closer, and Missouri looks to be in tossup territory. Illinois surprises me. Best guess: most of the Dem votes in Illinois are going to come out of Chicago, obviously, and Chicago’s a pretty young town. Hillary tends to win young black millennials, but Chicago may prove to be the exception here. We’ll see.
- Every single poll aggregate shows motion in Bernie’s direction lately.
- Now, here’s the thing: CNN and the rest of the idiots will pay attention to the number of states won here, but this is all proportional. All of it. If Hillary rolls up big margins in FL and NC and it’s close, regardless of the winner, in the other states, that means Hillary wins. Bernie has a gap of about 220 delegates to close, and that’s without counting the superdelegates, who are still hugely in Hillary’s corner but will move if the momentum switches. If Bernie loses two states big and ties or wins slightly in the other three, he still ends the night farther behind. And we’re taking three big-delegate states off the map today. Looking ahead, I see no chance that Bernie wins New York, so that leaves him Pennsylvania, California and New Jersey as states where he could potentially try and run up big margins to catch up. The rest of the states don’t have the delegates to produce big swings in his way even if he wins them. I don’t see how it happens.
- But I am wrong all the time.
- I just don’t think this will be one of those times. The math really, really isn’t in his favor. But we’ll see how today goes.
Wheeeee!
Free life advice
Never join a gym on the same day you change your antidepressants. Because the bullshit from the med change will make you not want to/not able to go to the gym, and that will make everything worse.
Especially when the Monday after the med change/gym joinination is the goddamn Daylight Saving switch, and everyone in the universe wants to crawl back into bed regardless of what chemicals they’ve been putting in their bodies lately.
Hitting the reset button on everything once I get back from C2E2. Until then, I’m not worrying about it.
#REVIEW: 10 Cloverfield Lane
I do this a lot in movie reviews, which is kind of unfortunate, but it’s still frequently the case: just take my word for it, and go see this movie, and don’t ask any questions and especially don’t read anything about it beforehand. It’s creepy, well-directed, brilliantly acted (John Goodman deserves Oscar consideration) exciting and well-written; everything a good movie needs to be.
But I haven’t seen Cloverfield!
That’s okay. Although you should see Cloverfield. This isn’t a sequel; JJ Abrams called it a “spiritual sister,” or something like that, and while if you’re obsessive about details there are ways to link the two movies together it’s entirely unnecessary to have seen Cloverfield to enjoy 10 Cloverfield Lane.
You should still see both, though.
But I didn’t like Cloverfield!
Ah, shuddup.
There is no shakycam in this movie. And it’s not found footage. Does that help? Good.
Anyway: it will be interesting to eventually see this for a second time, because it really does help if you go in knowing as little as possible, and I’m not a hundred percent sure how well it’s going to hold up once I know everything that happens. Watching Goodman and the other actors is still gonna be pretty great, but losing the What’s Going On mystery will be unfortunate.
So, yeah. Two thumbs up. Go see it, just don’t read anything else about it first.
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