Been awhile since I've posted and here's why:
My close friends and family already know this, but if you're neither of these (no offense) I'll explain.
I got issues. Anxiety. Depression. These can form a potent chemical cocktail in my wee brain that gives me problems. It was especially bad about ten years ago, but I had mostly gotten past it. But this last year they became acute. I had some family issues, and the anxiety bloomed from that and the depression came next.
ANYway. Boo hoo, my life is
so hard. I spent the last many months sorting out my shit and the more frivolous stuff (like writing this here bloggy blog) was placed on the back burner.
So here I am, writing for the first time in like totes forever but I find I have nothing to say. Scratch that. I have so much going on in my aging, balding dome that I don't know where to start. Without further ado, I give you my semi-annual clearing out of my mental junk drawer!
Last week I had the flu. Nasty stomach flu. Thus the headline. I was so sick at work one day, I came home and had a good cry over how sick I was. I was snotty and barfy and I hated being sick and I hated winter and I hated that
All About That Bass song.
So today I feel fine. I'm reading a book that I may never finish (more on this in a later post) and I thought I might write something. Yay?
I watched Broadchurch. Is binge watching a TV series one of the coolest byproducts of technology ever? I sure think so. Anyway, sometimes I had to watch this show with the subtitles on because my hearing is crap and the accents just plain left me befuddled. Really good though! B+ good. It was almost an A kind of thing, but there were a few story threads that didn't quite nail it. Nothing wrong, but not quite a classic. Olivia Coleman was awesome and Doctor Who was surly. A well done murder mystery that shakes up the small town. Yep, B+.
So a week or two ago Comixology had a sale on the entire run of The Boys, a hyper-violent, extra sweary take on super heroes written by a guy who doesn't much like super heroes, Garth Ennis. I bought this series for myself for Christmas and read them while feverish which took their offensiveness to new heights.
The Boys are (from ten o'clock and counter clockwise) Billy Butcher, Wee Hughie, The Female, Mother's Milk, and The Frenchman. They are in league to defeat super heroes run amok and it's a fun and mean spirited (if not overlong) ride. Ennis delights in showing people at their worst and if that's what you're looking for in his books, these won't disappoint. Debauchery runs rampant, people are varying degrees of awful, and heinous situations abound. I give it a B-.
So there's a short-ish anime called Kite. It's about a girl, Sawa, whose parents have been killed and her subsequently become and sex slave and assassin run by her father's former cop partner. Dark stuff to be sure. Some really nice animation but the story needed to be fleshed out some for my tastes. C+, and that may be slightly generous.
I just read online that there are two versions of this. The forty-five minute version (which I saw) that had all the sex scenes cut out, and the sixty minute version that has, well, fifteen minutes of sex scenes left in. Do with this information what you will.
So then I find out that there's a live action version that came out just last year! Maybe they flesh the story out! So I add it to my Netflix queue and I when it shows up, I give it a watch. Like a sucker, I was optimistic. And like an sucker optimist, I was disappointed. It's not good at all. The parts where they had to flesh out the stories were pretty stupid. There's some nice visuals and all, but overall it's mostly crap. D+.
Related: It's kind of sad to see Sam Jackson in the Michael Caine phase of his career. It seems as if he'll be in anything whether it's good or shite. It's a bummer to see.
Oh, and there's a sequel called Kite Liberator that is a sequel, I guess? I watched the first maybe twenty minutes and it made no sense at all and it was aggressively bad so I turned it off. D-.
The farther this goes, the worse it gets. Avoid! Avoid!
Here's something that I found interesting. Steven Soderbergh (movie director, don'tcha know) has a list of every movie/TV show/book/play/short story he watched/read in 2014.
Here's a link for you if you want to see it. It made me want to keep a list of my own, but you know, that takes effort and stuff. I was inclined to forget it. Then I read Patton Oswalt's
Silver Screen Fiend and in his book he has a list of every movie he watched during a four year span where he was unhealthily watching waaay too many movies. So this has brought me back to the idea of doing it myself. I will, from this day forward, list all the movies and books (and maybe somehow list TV shows) that I watch and/or read this year. I'm curious to see how it turns out. Stay tuned, more on this later.
Okay that's enough for today. More soon. Stay awesome, you filthy animals.
