conciliatory

https://www.merriam-webster.com/word-of-the-day/conciliatory-2025-11-06

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for November 6, 2025 is:

conciliatory • \kun-SILL-yuh-tor-ee\ • adjective

Something described as conciliatory is intended to reduce hostility or to gain favor or goodwill.

// As the customer’s voice rose, the manager adopted a soothing, conciliatory tone and promised that the situation would be remedied.

See the entry >

Examples:

“When I was younger, and my father found me in bed after my mother had said or done something to send me there, he would sit for a moment by my feet and tell me, in an awkward, conciliatory way, that it wasn’t my mother’s fault. She was sad, and worried, and she had been sad and worried for a long time, so I had to try harder to be a good, thoughtful child.” — Farah Ali, The River, The Town: A Novel, 2025

Did you know?

If you are conciliatory toward someone, you’re trying to win that person over to your side, usually by making them less angry. The verb conciliate was borrowed into English in the mid-16th century and descends from the Latin verb conciliare, meaning “to assemble, unite, or win over.” Conciliare, in turn, comes from the noun concilium, meaning “assembly” or “council.” Conciliatory, which appeared in English a bit later in the 16th century, also traces back to conciliare, and is used especially to describe things like tones, gestures, and approaches intended to turn someone’s frown upside down. Another word that has conciliare as a root is reconcile, the earliest meaning of which is “to restore to friendship or harmony.”

https://www.merriam-webster.com/word-of-the-day/conciliatory-2025-11-06

Entry tags:

Wednesday is happy with the election results...

1. Woo-hoo! Democrats won across the board. (In NYC - they won everything but Staten Island Borough President, because you know...Staten Island? And Texas. But it is Staten Island and Texas...)

New York City hits 2 million votes for first time since 1969. Biggest turnout for a Mayoral election ever.

( Read more... )

Miki Sherrel won the Governor's Race in New Jersey - becoming the first female Democrat Governor of the State.

Oh, and NBC has an interactive map showing how each neighborhood in NYC voted for the Mayoral race. It's kind of fun, and shows that elections are complicated.

2. Work wore me out. That and lack of sleep - I couldn't get comfortable, and I kept waking up. Didn't fall asleep until Midnight, and woke up at 3 am and 5:26 am. Something beeped outside and woke me up at 3. Took a while to get back to sleep. Then something woke me at 5:26, and I never got back to sleep.

Very busy. Kind of inundated? They decided to get together and unload all their work on myself and Breaking Bad at the same time. Don't procrastinate folks? It just makes more work for everybody. But my good deed was installing two printers on my computer and Breaking Bad's. Just in time for the new folks to move in - in two weeks. Maybe they'll bring a printer that is in closer proximity. Albeit not too close proximity.

Commute wasn't easy either - but went smoother than expected. I miss hopping on the G taking it to 4/9th Streets, and running down the steps.
Now? Going down steps hurts, so I take the F, run up, then down steps, and wait on a tiny platform with a ton of folks for the R. Oh well, it's 35 minutes either way.

But overall? Happy to be back at work. I enjoy what I do for the most part - it's a lot of analysis, editing, problem solving, and figuring things out.

3. Cooler - in the 40s-low 60s. Typical Autumn weather in NY. A-typical is 60s-80s, typical is 40s,50s, and low 60s.

Time change is still messing with me though - by the time my body gets accustomed to it - they'll change it again, right around my birthday.
Whose bright idea was it to do the Time Warp?

4. Buffy/Angel re-watch.

I'm enjoying Angel more now than I did the first go-around. Buffy, I always enjoy. It occurred to me today that the writers fell in love with a specific plot twist - which they employed in S2. Which is the good guy turns bad or switches sides. They also did the bad guy switches sides to help the heroine - but they enjoy the good guy turns bad a lot more.
( Read more... )

[I'm mainly just writing about this at this point to please myself at this point. Hopefully it entertains others too. But alas, as in most things, there's really no way of knowing for sure. I'm thinking I probably wrote it to please myself back in the day as well. Although a bit better, and more targeted.]

Entry tags:

Lake Lewisia #1326

The blender promised it could blend anything, but the instruction manual showed him only mundane suggestions for smoothies and milkshakes and, in what it considered a really exotic expansion, pureed soups. Thinking he would either succeed or rely upon the warranty, he tried blending up flowers and crystals and books. He spent the summer sipping on shakes that tasted of sunlight and escapism, then he started eyeing the growing pumpkins and Halloween decorations hungrily.

---

LL#1326

Fuck I'm old.

So I'm doomscrolling, as one does, and this Dead Poets Society clip comes up. DPS came out when I was a freshman in college. A group of us from the dorm went to see the movie, which is why I remember it.

I am not good at actors or at faces but I watched this loop a few times because the one guy looks really familiar for some reason. And he SOUNDS very familiar.

And it came to me. The guy, the one cheering up Todd, that's the guy who does House's friend Wilson in the TV show House MD. He's a lot younger, but that's the guy.

Fuck I'm old.

Entry tags:

2026,
volunteers

Call for Volunteers 2026

It’s coming up at that time of the year again and we wanted to let you know that the Fandom Snowflake Challenge will be happening again in January. We are very excited about hosting another round! To make the upcoming round as awesome as it can possibly be we are looking for volunteers to help us out! Here are the details on what the requirements and expectations of volunteer mods are for you to consider.

Requirements and Expectation of Volunteer Mods

General Volunteer Requirements:

All volunteers will have the opportunity to help us mold the challenges by helping come up with what challenges we offer and when we offer them.

Volunteers must be willing to interact with a lot of people who have different interests and levels than you and some of them, you might be the only interaction they receive. You must be able to offer support and encouragement or alert other mods to the need.

We have 4 levels of involvement that can fit most people's availability.

1) Poster and First Comment Responder

2) Comment Responder

3) Other Site Organizer

4) Graphics

Poster: We have 19 posts scheduled (15 challenges, one introduction, one meet the mods, one wrap up post and the friending meme.) You can sign up for only one if you'd like, or more if you're able.

Responsibility of Poster: create the post using the template provided. Seek feedback if you'd like. Post into the community, and then notify us in the mod community so we all know it's there. Then you are the first responder to that post. You don't have to answer every comment or read every post after. But you'll be the one getting the notifications as the challenge progresses so you'll have the sole responsibility of cheering on the stragglers.

Second Responder, Third and (hopefully) Fourth Responder Responsibilities:

✔️Help poster respond to comments on the community post (we get an average of 150 participants per challenge)

✔️Take turns commenting on each post of our participants.

✔️Communicate with other volunteers throughout the month.

Other Site Organizers Requirements:

We need volunteers familiar with other fandom spaces that aren't Dreamwidth if we want to have a presence in these spaces. This will require adapt each Dreamwidth post to making a post on your site, which may include fixing links, removing or altering HTML, sharing a small quote and linking to the Dreamwidth post, tagging appropriately, and/or removing or altering images to your site's specifications. You should be prepared to post the above 19 posts listed under Dreamwidth Poster and you should also be prepared to make additional posts as needed on your site to share any applicable graphics, share your site specific tags, or otherwise interact with your site participants.

Depending on your site, you may need to keep track of a tag, reply to comments on your post, keep track of reblogs, keep track of direct messages, or otherwise monitor your site for participant entries. You need to interact with participant entries in some way, such as commenting, reblogging, Liking, or whatever is possible on your site. Ideally, each site should have an additional volunteer (or volunteers) to help with posting and commenting on your site which might involve creating site specific templates, communicating outside of the Dreamwidth mods community, and other mod duties (like answering asks, checking an inbox, or maintaining a community.

Graphics:

We'd love to have someone with graphic abilities to help us create some banners and icons. Only requirement other than making awesome pretties is to supply the coding needed to post it.

It really is a lot of fun, made more so by the inclusion to as many people from as many fandoms and spaces as possible.

Metric Tip

https://xkcd.com/3164/

https://xkcd.com/3164/

Entry tags:

Things Completed

nacramamo has ended and for the time being so has my jewelry making. I made more than I posted about, although there was a lot of that, too. Just a reminder that

everykindofcraft remains open for everyday work in progress, completed or stalled.

2) Finished a few shows, such as Perry Mason on HBO. I can see why it was cancelled. It was ambitious and fairly well written, and I thought the character backstories made sense. However, it liked to roll around in the noir aspects rather too much, which I think affected the pacing in S1. I prefer S2. I also think you could watch S2 on its own. ( Read more... )

3) Finished both seasons of House of the Dragon. Am looking forward to S3. I can see why Game of Thrones would have drawn people in. I love a complicated political story with various competing interests, which is what this is. Add in the important female protagonists and it's interesting to follow the zigs and zags.

4) For those with pets, the same things are happening surrounding vet care, supplies and even services as with a lot of other industries – buyouts, stripping services to the bone, and reduction of care. "As with human health care, billionaire consolidators aim to extract big coin on veterinary services, pushing expensive tests and pricey interventions, instituting aggressive billing and collection, and focusing on cost-cutting on the service side, including squeezing wages from employees....These vulture investors typically collect management fees on all transactions, strip out profitable assets (including real estate), call the shots in terms of major decision-making in the practice, and charge fees for monitoring them, even as some of the companies they acquire spiral into bankruptcy. “It’s like setting the fire, being paid to put out the fire, and collecting the insurance on the fire all at the same time."

5) The issue of news avoidance or indifference isn't a new one, but what I found interesting in this was the breakdown of who actually sought out news or made it part of their routine:

MSNBC viewers: 72% active
CNN viewers: 71%
Seniors (65+): 69%
Daily Twitter users: 69%
Strong Democrats: 67%
White college grads: 67%
Fox News viewers: 66%
White collar workers: 66%
MAGA Republicans: 64%

Given this is a recent study I find this to be relatively unsurprising, as it leans towards politically engaged and even fanatical ideologues, who are the only people I can imagine being able to tolerate most of the news these days. Seniors are also unsurprising as they have traditionally been the biggest news consumers, partly due to time, but also because they have the most time to be politically engaged and are the most reliable voting bloc.

This also leads to a logical reversal in more passive news consumers: ( Read more... )

Poll #33802 Kudos Footer-548

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5 (100.0%)

reading and watching

I read thirteen books in October! (And DNFed two.) And three already in November.

Geoff and I are considering going to the Channel Islands on our next trip, so I read The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society for research, like you do. It did a good job of really making me feel the location and community, and although for the most part it hit all the expected beats -- city girl ends up in small tight-knit rural community, you will be shocked to learn that she finds love and meaning there! -- it had some unexpectedly hard-hitting moments as well, and certainly didn't make me any less interested in going to Guernsey! Although I plan to bring my lover with me rather than finding one there, thanks anyway.

My local book group read This Is How You Lose the Time War, which took me a while to get into, because significant aspects of the worldbuilding aren't explained, you're just dropped into them; but I absolutely think that was the right way to write it, and once I found my feet I really liked it.

I DNFed The Summer Is Ended and We Are Not Saved, because I thought I was in the mood for a horror novel but within fifty or so pages something so horrible happened that I was donezo, nope, nope nope nope, close file. It did seem to be well written, though; I expect it's a good book but it was way too much for me. So instead I read something called Fake Dating the Prince, which is exactly what it sounds like plus also gay, and it was delightful. The horror novel I read that was just my speed was Meddling Kids, which starts from the premise of "What if Scooby Doo but also Cthulhu?" and was a romp. But also horror. But also a romp. (The frontispiece is a reproduction of a 1977 local newspaper article about the protagonists' last case as teenagers: "Teen Sleuths Unmask Sleepy Lake Monster," and the town is Blyton Hills and the article is written by Nancy Hardy and the photo is credited to J. March and I'm not sure the author could have name-checked more teen classic lit if he'd tried for a week. I knew I was in good hands from that moment.)

In the category of fan writers gone pro, I really liked Freya Marske's Cinder House and loved Emily Tesh's The Incandescent. In the category of fan genres gone pro, not sure about the writers, I've been reading a bunch of hockey romance; I picked up a couple of Rachel Reid's one-shots and then got tired of waiting for a library copy of her Game Changers books (one of which is soon to be a Crave miniseries!) and bought an omnibus of the first three when it went on sale. I've read the first one and am about to start the second, on which the miniseries will be based. I heard somewhere that Reid commented somewhere that a PG-13 adaptation of the book would have to be, like, twelve minutes long, because there's so much sex in the book? Anyway I look forward to reading it 👀.

As for watching, I watched The Long Walk with

dorinda; I remembered being quite moved by the novel decades ago, but I hadn't even realized there was a movie until a couple of weeks ago! It was well made and wrenching and I'm glad I saw it but wow I am not making a general recommendation. Another friend and I watched the movie of What We Do in the Shadows; I enjoyed it and was surprised when I mentioned it to Geoff and he said he thought it was terrible! But my friend wants to go on to watch the TV show together. I'm not sure I'm up for that much casual killing of humans as light entertainment? (Despite the fact that she and I just finished watching Interview with the Vampire together. At least there it's not played for laughs as much.)

And season 10 of Shetland premieres in the UK today! I'm really looking forward to that. Also, looking further ahead, the Call the Midwife Christmas special and new season -- and I was absolutely thrilled to hear that they've announced a prequel series! The main show is getting awkwardly close to modern times, and I would love to see younger versions of the characters before and during the war.

Whee!

ETA: Oh, Rachel Reid. I'm not qualified to reality-check your hockey writing -- and let's be real, it's not like I'm reading you for the hockey -- but when you tell me that Montreal is an hour's drive from Ottawa? I have questions.

Chien 51

The French movie Chien 51 was excellent. In a dystopic Paris divided by class, an AI helps solve crime, but can it be trusted?

It stars my beloved Adèle Exarchopoulos, whose characters I always headcanon as sapphic (nothing official here).

hello!

What I go by: Ren (they/them)

Bit About Me: Nonbinary, bisexual, old (okay, over 40), parent, writer, admin worker and disabled, living in Wales.

Where else I can be found online: so many places lol

What I post about: Art, writing, fanfic, mostly my life in general - my kids, my health, my hobbies

Hobbies & Interests: I like to write, to draw, archery, colouring, gaming (I have a swtich and a PS5), fanfiction. This is one of the few places, as well as pillowfort, where my fandom side and my actual life intersect.

Fandoms/characters/ships if fannish: I like Stargate, Star Trek, Rizzoli & Isles, Dr Who, Castle, NCIS, Bones, MCU, Dragon Age. I dabble a lot and hope around a lot - I mostly write in whatever I'm watching at the time. I prefer femslash, I dislike m/m.

Other things I want you to know about me: I have two kids, both girls, one is a cancer survivor and had a liver transplant. I've been married for 13 years to my American wife.

What I'm looking for in friends/blogs to follow: Anyone who still loves Stargate as much as me, but anyone who's into the same stuff as me, or happens to be a geeky parent.

utahraptor! i know this will only hurt me after I'm dead, and yet somehow, I think it's hurting me

http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=4399


archive - contact - sexy exciting merchandise - search - about

don't worry, everyone i know in real life: i only wrote down good things about you and then put 'em all in an envelope labelled "OPEN ONLY IN THE EVENT OF LETTERS NEEDED TO SLOWLY PAN AND ZOOM ACROSS IN A DOCUMENTARY FILM WHILE AN ACTOR DRAMATICALLY READS OUT THEIR CONTENTS"

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November 5th, 2025

November 5th, 2025: MAN I was sick all weekend in a way I hadn't been since I was a kid! Just spending the whole day in bed feeling awful. Bodies, like teeth: BARELY WORTH IT??

Anyway I'm better now but I wanted to note that I lost the weekend to being sick and it sucked. Attention future generations reading this: please cure being sick. Thank you very much in advance.

– Ryan

http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=4399

Entry tags:

books

Reading Wednesday

Any day that starts with Cheney dying and ends with Mandami getting elected as New York mayor, even with the forces of both wings of the Party allied against him, is a pretty good day.

But onto the books.

Just finished: Nothing.

Currently reading: Katabasis by R.F. Kuang. Okay "academia is hell" is a cheap premise but 1) it's true, and 2) she does it splendidly, and I am devouring this book. It's so good. I love Alice. She's awful and such a fuckup and makes the wrong decision at every turn and I'm here for it. As I'm reading I just want to screenshot every page and text it to my academic friends.

I'm about 3/4 through and if Kuang lands the ending, this is going to be one of the best things I've read this year.

Joy!

I know these US elections are a tiny blip on the radar compared to what else is happening in US politics, but it's SO NICE to have the first good political news for a YEAR!

*happy happy*

Entry tags:

Let's Get Literate! Books I Wish I Could Read for the First Time

As we end the year, I'm resisting the capitalistic urge to have my favorites list out in December for Content Reasons. Those of us dedicated to the ways of book blogging know that personal lists are best out in January because there's always a chance a book picked up in the dead space between holidays and the new year hits different. I will link to best of lists in Intergalactic Mixtape (because I am weak, and I love them), but that's it. I will not create my own!

To distract myself, while I was redoing my bookshelves, I made a list of books where I thought, "Wow, I would love to be able to read that again for the first time."

( Read more... )

Since my massive reading slump in 2020, I've become a lot kinder to myself when it comes to re-reading. It's nice to spend time with familiar characters and worlds. I'm trying really hard to be gentle with my brain, which is overtaxed by the Horrors. An election year seems like the perfect time for a reread spree. It's very likely all of these books, and their companion/sequel novels, will be on my December TBR/2026 reading list.

Current Mood: thoughtful

Entry tags:

Hey, good news!

Watch on YouTube

And Cuomo was a gracious loser, congratulating Mamdani and telling people off who were booing! I had forgotten what that looked like.

And then youtube suggested this, and it's wonderful:

Josh Johnson Gives Impromptu Speech About AI and Algorithms during set in Rochester, NY

Watch on YouTube

ETA: Oh and Josh Johnson also has a whole bit about this election:

Watch on YouTube

lout

https://www.merriam-webster.com/word-of-the-day/lout-2025-11-05

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for November 5, 2025 is:

lout • \LOUT\ • noun

A lout is an awkward brutish person.

// It was difficult for us to focus on the movie due to the noise coming from the group of louts seated in front of us.

See the entry >

Examples:

“Fortunately for Vince, Jake is about to sell their mother’s house, and the proceeds should cover his deep debts. As is often the case with ne’er-do-wells, however, Vince doesn’t make anything easy, and [actor Jason] Bateman casts him as an arrogant lout ... who’s always playing the angles to his own benefit, damn the damage he causes to everyone else.” — Nick Schager, The Daily Beast, 18 Sept. 2025

Did you know?

Lout belongs to a large group of words that we use to indicate a particular sort of offensive and insensitive person, that group also including such terms as boor, oaf, jerk, and churl. English speakers have used lout in this way since the mid-1500s. Well before the 12th century, however, lout functioned as a verb with the meaning “to bow in respect.” No one is quite sure how—or even if—the verb sense developed into a noun meaning “an awkward brutish person.” The noun could have been coined independently, but if its source was the verb, perhaps the awkward posture of one bowing down led over the centuries to the idea that the bowing person was base and awkward as well.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/word-of-the-day/lout-2025-11-05

(no subject)

Saw this The Future of Storytelling on John Scalzi's blog "Whatever" - he posts other's writer's blurbs for their books or big ideas for their upcoming books, without any comment. Just lets them write a snyopsis or idea for their book and post it on his blog.

"A revolution in storytelling is taking place, and it is going to have profound implications in almost every field. It’s happening in the top-secret tech labs of Meta, Apple, and Google; in avant-garde performances at fringe theater festivals; in escape rooms housed in storefronts of suffering shopping malls; in cores of quantum supercomputers containing next-generation artificial intelligence; in the newest VR and AR headsets; and in centuries-old museums. It’s happening at festivals like SXSW, Cannes Lions, and Comic-Con; in restaurants and bars; in old garages and abandoned bowling alleys; in Hollywood studios and Madison Avenue advertising agencies; on university campuses and at nonprofit organizations. It’s happening in the middle of the desert in Nevada and on a palm-sized device that lives inside the pocket of nearly every person who will read my book The Future of Storytelling.

As the publisher of Melcher media and the founder of the Future of StoryTelling (FoST) Summit, I’ve been incredibly lucky to get invited into the studios, labs, offices, and academic corridors where the future of living stories is being invented. I have come to believe that if we can understand the mechanics and unleash their full power, living stories – a term I coined – have the potential to become more popular than Hollywood and gaming have ever been. Artists and storytellers have a new opportunity to serve their audiences by creating experiences in which the audience plays an active role.

Something beautiful happens when creators relinquish control of the narrative to their audience. The reason living stories are so powerful is that they engage not only our eyes and ears but our whole person. They gift us experiences that our brains and spinal cords are primed for, thanks to millions of years of evolution. You can feel your response to a living story in the hairs on the back of your neck, in the pit of your stomach, in the ache in your thighs as you move and choose, emote, and think through these experiences.

Just imagine: How different is it to read a book or see a movie about surviving a natural disaster than to believe in the moment that you did? How much more satisfying is it when you, not King Arthur, are able to pull the sword out of the stone? Stories have always provided us with a safe, instructive way to survive the world, as we observe characters making choices (often the wrong ones). With living stories, those characters are us, and we learn from the choices we make, and learn deeply, because we feel them throughout our own bodies. Living stories are a gateway to a more intense emotional life, to living more fully in the world."

I don't know? I think I read stories for different reasons than this individual does? I don't want to live them? I want to escape inside another point of view? I'm not really interested in turning the story into my own, I'm interested in seeing and understanding their story?

I feel something is lost by living the story virtually, or in a role-playing sphere?

I don't know. I've never been a fan of improv or role-playing games. And I don't tend to like interactive theater - I like the fourth wall firmly in place. I tend to get annoyed when it is removed? If that makes sense?

Entry tags:

Tuesday Voted on Saturday and went to the doctor instead..

1. On a brisk sunny Tuesday morning, with a crystal blue sky - I lugged myself off to the doctor. It's about twenty-twenty five minutes. Train is fifteen. Walk is about ten to fifteen, depending on how fast I go? Ten blocks.

The knee wasn't bothering me though, sciatic, yes, knee no. I'd been using a hip compression, and wandering about at home. Also I can sit with my legs elevated at home. This was leading me to believe that - it was indeed sciatic nerve and back/hip related, not knee related.

Got the X-ray. Waited about thirty-five minutes to see the doctor. And after the assistants took my vitals. A wet-behind the ears kid came in.
I stared at the kid. Okay, granted the doctors are getting younger - but this is ridiculous. I have Doogie Howser.

Kid: Hi I'm Lucas, I'm the student intern working with the Doctor.
Me (oh thank god.): Oh...right.

His job was to ask me what was going on. I was kind embarrassed because after killing me for weeks on end, the knee decided not to hurt today. When the Doctor eventually came in - he wasn't a kid at least (thinking mid-thirties) - he quipped, yeah it's like taking your car to the mechanic and all of a sudden it stops having mechanical difficulties.

The Knee Orthopedist thankfully found nothing wrong with my knees, outside of mild arthritis. (I was relieved. Mother was relieved - after I told her.) This is the second time I checked the knees out this year. So clearly this is a hip alignment/sciatic nerve issue. The knees just have mild osteoarthritis. Additional proof - the hip compression sleeves that I've been using this weekend, which I bought on Amazon, have actually helped. My knees weren't bothering me that much today. Of course I only went to the x-ray/doctor's office, then shopping after. Less steps, more walking, than I do going to and from work. The commute has more steps, less walking.

Apparently the knee doctor sees approximately eighty patients a day (explains a lot) while the pain management doctors only see ten, which is why it is almost impossible to get an appointment with the pain management. He didn't recommend muscle relaxants either - last resort and all the do is knock you out (or screw with digestion). PT is the best bet - and I've scheduled that.

Afterwards - I bought stuff. ( Read more... )

2. Voted on Saturday. I will be happy when the election is however, the ads are annoying. So is the discourse.
( Read more... )

We won't know the results until tomorrow - I think - or late tonight, since the polls close in NY at 9pm. Over 300,000 voted early. It's the highest turnout for early voting in the State's history.

3. Still rewatching Buffy and Angel.

* There's two very subversive character arcs in these series, actually more than two. But Spike and Cordelia, which are in some respects similar characters - are at the top of the list. ( Read more... )

The other takeaways from Buffy - is Buffy and Riley don't really work. They become bland fast. There's not enough conflict. It's kind of like Buffy S3 with Angel take 2? But from another angle? ( Read more... )

Overall - the episodes are still good, even if the central plot is flawed?
Oh, learned recently that Robin Sachs who played Ethan Rayne died several years back. He was a good friend of Juliet Landau's, apparently.

Almost forgot? S4 Buffy makes it clear to me that the writers watched Doctor Who, the Prisoner, and various British sci-fi shows. Buffy almost states - when she runs into the secret underground facility underneath Riley's frat house - that it's bigger on the inside than on the outside.

And..I realized that biggest problem with the whole Initiative storyline, is that they kind of combined Reptile Boy with Some Assembly Required - not the best episodes of the series? ( Read more... )

***

On Twitter, someone asks to name a better show than Buffy. And people named Charmed. Charmed??? I found Charmed unwatchable at times. I tried. But it took campy to a whole new level. Also I felt the writing was horrible.

Entry tags:

October TV shows

Somewhat belatedly, let me catch up on TV logging. I watched five shows this month (although I'm cheating a bit as I only finished the fifth this evening), which were the usual mishmash of genres and tones. The shows in question were:

Season 3 of Blue Lights, a BBC police procedural miniseries set in Belfast. Although the characters are a familiar mix of well-worn stereotypes (the idealistic rookie, the maternal type who cares too much, the one who's joined the police in spite of a backlash from her community, the world-weary old hand, the maverick), they're written with heart and humanity. The true pleasure in this series, however, lies its sense of place — it's deeply grounded in its Belfast setting, and does a great job of showing the various political and social currents buffetting the city, and the wider region. The real villain, though, is austerity, in a way that I don't think I've seen explored so bluntly on UK TV in contemporary times.

A Thousand Blows, a fabulous historical miniseries by Steven Knight (the creator of Peaky Blinders), set in the East End of London in Victorian times. Here we encounter a variety of deprived, traumatised, down-on-their luck characters, who converge both in a series of boxing matches (initially bare-knuckled affairs in the local pub, later more genteel competitions organised by the aristocracy in the West End), and in a heist plot. The characters are fantastic, the writing is as lurid and melodramatic as a penny dreadful, and in essence it's a great retread of two concepts that Knight explored well in Peaky Blinders: certain people who were made to feel vulnerable and afraid become singlemindedly relentless in pursuing an existence where they will never feel fear or vulnerability again, even if they have to burn down the world and destroy all their meaningful relationships in the process, and communities battered by poverty, exploitation and lack of opportunity who accept a certain degree of violence and exploitation done to them (e.g. by gangs offering their 'protection') as long as it's people they perceive as being from their own community doing the violence. This is familiar ground for Steven Knight, and he explores it to great effect here — and hopefully in subsequent seasons!

Film Club, a sweet little six-part BBC miniseries about two rather lost twentysomethings who started a rather intense film club (no phones during the viewing, full thematic fancy dress, elaborate snacks, etc) during their university years and are desperately trying to keep its magic going some years after their graduation, when the realities of professional adult life have begun to wear them down. One character has had some form of psychological breakdown and moved back into the family home with her mother and sister, and remains trapped there by agoraphobia, and the other character is on the verge of leaving for a new job in a new city, and worrying how it will affect their friendship. It's a sweet-natured love story, with teeth, and in spite of a somewhat cinematic sense of heightened reality, the depiction of quarter life crisis existential angst is grounded in a truth that resonates a bit too much.

The latest season of Only Murders in the Building, which I thought was a massive return to form. This time, our trio of true crime podcast sleuths investigate the death of their apartment complex's doorman, which inevitably uncovers sometime much bigger, managing to skewer local New York politics (prior to today's election), oligarchy, housing pressures, and more. My patience with this series had been wearing thin two seasons ago, and I felt it was fast approaching over-milked cash cow territory, so I'm delighted to have been proved wrong. Your patience for this latest outing will probably hinge on your tolerance for New York (and New Yorker fiction about New York) nonsense, which it continues to lampoon with affection.

Riot Women, Sally Wainwright's latest love letter to the north of England and the strong, complex women who live there — this time, our cast of characters are a multigenerational group of misfits who start an all-woman punk band, with songs about menopause, feeling invisible and underappreciated, and so on. All of them are dealing with struggles at once soap operatic and banal: family tensions, empty-nested loss of sense of purpose, sandwiched pressure between troubled adult children and elderly parents in nursing homes, or showing early signs of dementia. Women's invisible labour is front and centre, but also women's anger, turned inwards and outwards. As always with Wainwright, the characters feel painfully real, and she does an incredible job of capturing the stories of the types of older women working ceaselessly (and often without much acknowledgement) upholding messy, multigenerational family households, doing all the work that no one ever notices, but whose absence would certainly be noticed. It's an absolute masterpiece — with an incredible soundtrack. (And, since this is not always a given with ostensibly feminist British cultural figures, it was fantastic to have unambiguous confirmation that Sally Wainwright's feminism is most definitely trans-inclusive.)

I don't think there was a single dud in this collection of shows!

Sleep, Glorious Sleep!

For the first night in almost 2 weeks I got a block of 6 hours of sleep. YAY!

Went down for my first shift taking care of the horses at Winter Quarters. Thankfully it wasn't raining. All the horses were in very high spirits, dashing around bucking and rearing. Poor Firefly doesn't get to go out with the boys during the day. She would instantly become obese if left to graze all day. Instead she gets her portion of hay, in a barrel.

The wind is kicking up, it is threatening to really rain. Leaves are blowing off the oaks and fluttering down.
Here is a picture of the trees at the Main Gate swathed in yellow grapevines.