Bingewatching

It turns out that having some random TV episode or movie streaming on my Cellular Telephone off to one side of my desk at work helps me focus, and/or keeps me from wandering off to get yet more food that I don’t need. So I have been watching lots of things in a “not really paying attention” sort of way, on the Net Flix. A few movies, but mostly many consecutive episodes of various old TV series.

Let us write things about some of them!

Warehouse 13: This was fun, and I’ve watched every episode that NetFlix streams. Which includes only Seasons 1-3, darn them. I could like pay Amazon money to see some more, but that would be silly.

Numb3rs: This felt kind of fun at first, but eventually the horrible scientific / mathematical gaffes got to be too much to take. Now I just watch a single episode now and then, when I’ve OD’d on everything else obvious. Pretty much every episode involves Our Hero making a mathematical model of some very complex real-world phenomenon (generally a crime), and using that model to figure out Who Done It, or How Many Shooters There Are, or Where The Killer Will Strike Next. And in every case it’s utterly implausible if you actually understand anything about how modeling works, how rough and approximate it is at best, and how many unknown input parameters are always floating around.

Bones: This is superficially better, because not being a forensic anthropologist I don’t realize that all the cool-looking science is crap (I have heard third or fourth hand that in fact it is, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised). But over time the soap-opera stuff starts to pall, and the basic moral-majority premise, that the rational atheist polyamorous Bones will not be truly happy until she is an irrational religious believer in the Magic of Love and monogamy like Booth, palls even more.

Lie To Me: Fun premise here, where the protagonists have the scientific ability to tell whether people are lying, what they are feeling, and so on, from the microexpressions on their faces, and their body language. I’ve watched a bunch of these (and when watching something else afterward I’m always wondering why the characters are so clueless about what the bad guys are thinking and all). But recently they’ve been mostly about how angry the main good guy is about everything, and how much trouble their company is in for various reasons, and so on, which seems unnecessary.

Sliders: Premise sounded good, but is apparently targeted pretty narrowly at High School Kids or something.

CSI / Law & Order : NY / SVU / LA / Criminal Intent: So far these all sort of mush together as decent Police Procedurals with high production values, but everyone is always frowning glumly and darkly alluding to grim back-stories from off-camera or last season or something and being generally depressing. So I don’t watch these alot.

Star Trek: TNG: Eh. I should be all fannish about these I guess, but the science and general plotlines are so often so bogus, just clumsy artificial set-pieces for some particular character interaction or whatever. Will have to try various Star Trek things again sometime, there must be something there?

The X-Files: So classic, how could this not be great!? But somehow it feels incredibly dated. “There is a vague hint that there might be an alien spaceship around, CUE SCARY MUSIC!!!” Really, guyz; a vague suggestion of alien spaceships, even ones that maybe sometimes steal people, maybe, just isn’t all by itself all that scary.

Witches of East End: Completely silly-looking premise: there is this group of magical people (“witches”) who came to the mortal world from the magical realm of Asgard (seriously?); the mother is immortal, and she is cursed so that she keeps having these same two daughters over and over, who keep dying young, and then some time later she bears them again (kind of novel!). Her sister can change into a cat and has nine lives, and has also been here for a very long time. This time around, the mother tried to keep the truth about their history and powers from the daughters, hoping this would keep them from dying, but now they know. They have all made lots of enemies over the centuries, who keep bothering them. One of the daughters is engaged to this guy, but keeps having dreams about hot sex with his mysterious ne’er-do-well brother. That sort of thing. And lots of knives for some reason. It’s great because it doesn’t even nod in the direction of reality or sense, so I can watch it without wincing.

Buffy, Dollhouse, and Firefly: Nope! These, I want to pay attention to when I watch. :)

Suggestions for other things that might be good to have playing in the background while writing C++ are more than welcome…

Sunday, January 15th, 2012

Having said that the longer I stay away from WoW the less I miss it, I have now naturally started playing it again. :) I picked up a (human male) Warlock that I’d rolled up a long time ago, who was sitting at like level 28 or something being bored in Westfall, and looked to see what they’d done to Warlocks lately, and started leveling him, and now he’s like level 83 I think, doing Cataclysm quests and instances and stuff.

It’s been fun, I’ve been RPing him very lightly (it’s an RP server) as an Evil Necromancer type Warlock, enjoying going around drinking any souls that come to hand, consorting with demons, making diabolical (although in fact actually beneficial) alchemical potions, laughing maniacally at the Light-sucking fools RPing around the Stormwind Cathedral, and all like that.

But wow, WoW is easy these days. :)

Continuing to think how very very painful it must be to be an intelligent Republican these days, with all the anti-science and religious purity-tests and things that seem to dominate the party. Not that the Democrats are all that wonderful, but they are at least not so incredibly blatant.

Also in politics, fascinated to see the Administration coming out rather strongly against the whole SOPA/PIPA “let the music companies censor the Internet” thing. Brief speculation Twitter that maybe someone had just hacked whitehouse dot gov and put words into their mouths seems to have been unfounded!

Right now I am listening to some live music streaming in SL, with lil Dale standing at the back of the crowd swaying subtly while I do things in other windows.

Oh! Question for readers: there is an old movie, I think it is an old movie, although I’m pretty sure in color, and in this old movie there is an aspiring actress, and at one point the aspiring actress has this script that she’s going to use to audition with, and she goes over the scene with a friend or another aspiring actress or something, and it’s a relatively ordinary conflict between two people like yelling at each other, and then later in the movie she goes to actually audition the scene with some older and maybe famous and maybe slightly has-been (I’m not sure) actor, and the scene goes completely differently, still conflict between two people but this time extremely intense and passionately charged, with them snarling at each other with their lips like an inch apart, and although it’s the same words it’s amazingly different from the earlier runthrough.

So! Anyone know what movie that is? :) I have no idea. I’m pretty sure I didn’t just dream it though.

Drove the little boy up North into the colder and further-apart parts of New York, for an audition for the Music School of a College that he’s already been accepted to (we’re two and zero so far!). That was a fun little expedition; we got to stay in a Hotel because it was a bit of a drive, and the audition was in the morning, so we drove up the day before and drove back after.

We ate dinner at the Cracker Barrel next to the hotel. Cracker Barrel’s got quite a thing going there! There aren’t any very near us for some reason, but we’ve been to a few now. They’re all basically identical, they have big porches with rocking chairs and checkers sets (all for sale), and big stores inside selling all sorts of classic Old Fashioned Country stuff (did you know they still make Moon Pies and Cracker Jacks that come in cardboard boxes rather than metalized plastic bags?), and then big dining rooms with old-time ads and farm implements on the walls, and menus with lots of classic and high-calorie and not very expensive food.

(Humans were intended, I think, to eat the meals that they serve at Cracker Barrel, but only after having spent at least four hours in hard physical labor.)

I had the Chicken and Dumplin’s, the little boy had something with macaroni and cheese and shrimp, and we got the free corn muffins, and I had a Stewart’s Root Beer, and we both bought little candies in the store (malted milk balls for me, huge Smarties for him), and it all came out to just about twenty dollars.

There was snow on the sides of the road starting about halfway there, and on any cars coming from the north, but it didn’t snow on us at all. There was a detour on the way back, but we only got slightly lost. :)

Watched another episode of Buffy last night; I’m still somewhere in Season Three. Willow is extremely cute; I’m looking forward to the season where she becomes like a scary evil super-witch (although sad about the reason).

And now The Magnificent Seven is on the teevee, and I’m listening to CelticMaidenWarrior Lancaster doing a live set in SL (currently doing shoutouts to the people she recognizes in the crowd and anyone else obvious, and about to launch into “Lay Lady Lay”), and we’ve had our bagels, and I’m just sitting here relaxing. Maybe I will go make level 84 with that warlock…