Things, possibly even three of them
Movies: To conclude our merry traipsing through the Aliens franchise, obviously we also needed to rewatch Alien: Resurrection. This took on a whole additional layer of analysis when the opening credits flashed up "Written by Joss Whedon", and I inhaled my dinner. (No, I hadn't known that before. I'm not a Whedonite, remember?) So now, not only were we watching an Aliens iteration, but we were also watching the rough draft of the crew of Serenity.
On the Aliens side, I find the addition of the predatory alien aspect to Ripley really interesting, and I feel like I would've liked this a whole lot more if it had been more of an exploration of what that means, who she is now, how she's changed. I mean, she even asks it herself at one point, but I feel like the movie brushes it aside in favour of action and her making nonsensical choices that she then regrets (which is not actually a synonym for realistic character complexity).
On the actual aliens side, the movie followed the franchise continuity in having the species develop in ways that make no sense and are in fact internally inconsistent. (By which I mean: when the aliens are in the cell, they gut one in order to acid-bleed through the floor, but later on, an alien spits acid at a guy. No wonder the one that got gutted was kicking up such a stink. "Guys!" he was saying, "we can just drool our way out of this!" But I guess they never really liked him anyway. Aliens are just bastards like that.)
On the Serenity-rough-draft front, we had a lot of fun playing "Pin the eventual Firefly character on the cast". It's nowhere near a one-to-one, except in the case of Ron Perlman's obvious Jayne-v1-ness, which makes it interesting to compare how Joss shuffled and redealt the traits. Wincott's captain (sidebar: oh Michael Wincott, talk about severely fuckable) gets the sexy-relations-with-the-pilot aspect but his second-in-comment is just as awesome as Zoe. We had a lot of fun with "Ripley is River and Winona Ryder is Simon" discussions, but Ryder is also Kaylee, except for the ways in which Dominique Pinon is Kaylee.
Anyway, that didn't save the final third of the movie from being just as stupid and tedious as I remember from the first viewing.
Games: I started playing DC Universe, just to have some pixels to smash while I waited for the Carmageddon reboot goodies to drop, but I'm giving up on it. Never mind the ridiculous physique options, or the way half the gaming console and commands are neither explained nor in any intuitive way available, or the extreme disorientation of the movement/fighting/camera-angle system. It is sort of amusing to be able to run straight up a building, but I'm baffled by the fact I apparently can't jump (which is extra-frustrating when a mob's dropped a quest item just above my head). Never mind all of that. Playing it causes me actual physical pain. My left hand - flailing all over the keyboard for arrow keys, number keys, random letters of the "press x to fulfil a plot point" variety - cramps up into some serious ouch after twenty minutes of play, which is just the crowning glory on the completely bizarre keyboard usage of the game. I mean, I'm nowhere near a power gamer, but I've played a fair few, and I can just come up with no way that a person with only two hands can sensibly play this game. Even if I had one of those expensive mouses with the number buttons on the side, I would still have to go, "WHERE'S THE FUCKING E KEY?!" in the middle of battle. Whoooo. Yeah, nah.
Television: We have finished the second series of Game of Thrones. Let me note that the condensed timeline of the television series improves Daenerys's storyline immensely for me, but she still irritates the bejesus out of me in this section of the story. She seems to spend all her time being shouty, arrogant, wilful and, in short, a total Targaryen, and then she is proven right, and I get all annoyed the same way I get annoyed when parents reinforce their children's bratty behaviour with praise or validation just to get them to shut up.
I mean, a good example would be the whole going into the tower to get her dragons back. "What about my magic?!" she says, and Mr Dee goes, "Oh, so the plan is to set the tower on fire and then you can walk through it and get the dragons?" Because that is all the magic she has manifested thus far. The ability to withstand fire. She has no basis for claiming or relying upon any other sort of power, and in that light to go swanning in having made NO plans and with NO support is the worst sort of selfish stupidity. That she is then validated by getting a scenario in which she is luckily able to win really annoys me. It's the sort of cheap fantasy trick that I dislike about my beloved genre, and given Martin's gleeful, skilful shanking of so much of the rest of the trappings of cheap fantasy, his adherence to that one is particularly bothersome.
Anyway, Sansa's 374 times less irritating on television, possibly because we get very little from her close POV, so her continued clinging to fairytales is not as evident. Margaery Tyrell is even more awesome on screen than in the book (possibly I am just fond of Natalie Dormer's smirky face). But on the flipside, Rob's matrimonial brainfart is somehow even more annoying this way. I loved the rework of Arya's adventures in Harrenhal to include Tywin, that was solid gold, and I'm so glad they eventually showed Jaqen's face trick, because Mr Dee was going to explode if they didn't. (He was literally bouncing on the couch going, "DO THE FACE THING!")
We are now moving onto Mad Men, of which we have watched one episode, and good lord, that's sort of confronting, isn't it? I don't mean Christina Hendricks' extreme hotness, I mean the in-your-face gender issues. Their punches, they are not pulling them.
On the Aliens side, I find the addition of the predatory alien aspect to Ripley really interesting, and I feel like I would've liked this a whole lot more if it had been more of an exploration of what that means, who she is now, how she's changed. I mean, she even asks it herself at one point, but I feel like the movie brushes it aside in favour of action and her making nonsensical choices that she then regrets (which is not actually a synonym for realistic character complexity).
On the actual aliens side, the movie followed the franchise continuity in having the species develop in ways that make no sense and are in fact internally inconsistent. (By which I mean: when the aliens are in the cell, they gut one in order to acid-bleed through the floor, but later on, an alien spits acid at a guy. No wonder the one that got gutted was kicking up such a stink. "Guys!" he was saying, "we can just drool our way out of this!" But I guess they never really liked him anyway. Aliens are just bastards like that.)
On the Serenity-rough-draft front, we had a lot of fun playing "Pin the eventual Firefly character on the cast". It's nowhere near a one-to-one, except in the case of Ron Perlman's obvious Jayne-v1-ness, which makes it interesting to compare how Joss shuffled and redealt the traits. Wincott's captain (sidebar: oh Michael Wincott, talk about severely fuckable) gets the sexy-relations-with-the-pilot aspect but his second-in-comment is just as awesome as Zoe. We had a lot of fun with "Ripley is River and Winona Ryder is Simon" discussions, but Ryder is also Kaylee, except for the ways in which Dominique Pinon is Kaylee.
Anyway, that didn't save the final third of the movie from being just as stupid and tedious as I remember from the first viewing.
Games: I started playing DC Universe, just to have some pixels to smash while I waited for the Carmageddon reboot goodies to drop, but I'm giving up on it. Never mind the ridiculous physique options, or the way half the gaming console and commands are neither explained nor in any intuitive way available, or the extreme disorientation of the movement/fighting/camera-angle system. It is sort of amusing to be able to run straight up a building, but I'm baffled by the fact I apparently can't jump (which is extra-frustrating when a mob's dropped a quest item just above my head). Never mind all of that. Playing it causes me actual physical pain. My left hand - flailing all over the keyboard for arrow keys, number keys, random letters of the "press x to fulfil a plot point" variety - cramps up into some serious ouch after twenty minutes of play, which is just the crowning glory on the completely bizarre keyboard usage of the game. I mean, I'm nowhere near a power gamer, but I've played a fair few, and I can just come up with no way that a person with only two hands can sensibly play this game. Even if I had one of those expensive mouses with the number buttons on the side, I would still have to go, "WHERE'S THE FUCKING E KEY?!" in the middle of battle. Whoooo. Yeah, nah.
Television: We have finished the second series of Game of Thrones. Let me note that the condensed timeline of the television series improves Daenerys's storyline immensely for me, but she still irritates the bejesus out of me in this section of the story. She seems to spend all her time being shouty, arrogant, wilful and, in short, a total Targaryen, and then she is proven right, and I get all annoyed the same way I get annoyed when parents reinforce their children's bratty behaviour with praise or validation just to get them to shut up.
I mean, a good example would be the whole going into the tower to get her dragons back. "What about my magic?!" she says, and Mr Dee goes, "Oh, so the plan is to set the tower on fire and then you can walk through it and get the dragons?" Because that is all the magic she has manifested thus far. The ability to withstand fire. She has no basis for claiming or relying upon any other sort of power, and in that light to go swanning in having made NO plans and with NO support is the worst sort of selfish stupidity. That she is then validated by getting a scenario in which she is luckily able to win really annoys me. It's the sort of cheap fantasy trick that I dislike about my beloved genre, and given Martin's gleeful, skilful shanking of so much of the rest of the trappings of cheap fantasy, his adherence to that one is particularly bothersome.
Anyway, Sansa's 374 times less irritating on television, possibly because we get very little from her close POV, so her continued clinging to fairytales is not as evident. Margaery Tyrell is even more awesome on screen than in the book (possibly I am just fond of Natalie Dormer's smirky face). But on the flipside, Rob's matrimonial brainfart is somehow even more annoying this way. I loved the rework of Arya's adventures in Harrenhal to include Tywin, that was solid gold, and I'm so glad they eventually showed Jaqen's face trick, because Mr Dee was going to explode if they didn't. (He was literally bouncing on the couch going, "DO THE FACE THING!")
We are now moving onto Mad Men, of which we have watched one episode, and good lord, that's sort of confronting, isn't it? I don't mean Christina Hendricks' extreme hotness, I mean the in-your-face gender issues. Their punches, they are not pulling them.