This changes everything!
Wait, wait…nobody told me you could passively consume VR. I mean, just sit in the comfy chair and gawp as stuff flies or swims all around you! This…this is what I was born for.
I started with Attenborough’s First Life, an animated exploration of the very beginning of life on the planet (no, he did not conclude life was a mistake) and then just let it autoplay from there.
I got a couple of roller coasters, some horror experiences (including a VR section of King’s It), a couple of guys in wing suits gliding through a glacier, a hang glider who operates in my neck of the woods.
All the clips are five to ten minutes, so it’s either expensive to produce or they haven’t figured out how to charge extra for full-length features yet. I could do a lot of this.
Especially as it seems Uncle B and I have caught a lurgie.
March 21, 2022 — 7:27 pm
Comments: 7
Yep, we’re that desperate
We don’t watch a whole lot of TV, just an hour or so at the end of the day. When we’re stuck for something to watch, our go-to has been the Seventies British cop show The Sweeney which we have recorded. We’re coming to the end of that, so we’ve switched over to the late Seventies and Minder, which stars one of the guys from The Sweeney.
It’ll do. I’m not necessarily recommending it. In the States, when I had access to Hulu, I used to burn up stuff like Emergency! and Adam-12.
Not great theater, but these old programs are a perfect time capsule. What people wore, what buildings looked like. Attitudes. I remember some of it, I’d forgotten a lot of it. It makes me feel odd, having those old braincells tickled.
Seventies London isn’t part of my store of memories, of course, but that’s interesting, too. Dude ask for tuppence for the pay phone last night!
Uncle B records stuff ahead of time when it’s available on various online channels. Being something of a completionist, he was frustrated to find Season 2 Episode 2 was not available anywhere. So I headed to Wikipedia to find an episode guide.
Terry guards an antique shop owned by Alex, a friend of Arthur, after two men demand protection money. He isn’t keen on the job as he has to share a flat with Jim, a gay man, Alex’s partner. He soon discovers that the story of the protection racket is a fabrication, that Alex is also gay, and that his ex-wife Gloria set up the ‘accident’ that has put Alex in hospital.
Ah. Of course.
I’m guessing gay isn’t presented as an unalloyed virtue. The ep is available on YouTube. The sound is glitched on the very first scene in the bar, though, if you care to watch.
The internet being what it is, you won’t be surprised to learn that minder.org exists to break the show down into its constituent atoms.
New Dead Pool tomorrow. I won’t forget. Pinky swear!
February 3, 2022 — 7:56 pm
Comments: 13
Oh. That’s boring.
Saw this on my way to work today and was intrigued. Is this a dialogue between a die-hard feminist and a male? (My mother had the “if we can send one man to the moon, why not all of them?” bumpersticker). Or is it “men” as in “everyone” – but not today, thank you.
Googled it just now. They’re both Game of Thrones quotations.
Meh.
We missed that one. Uncle B hates fantasy. We started watching it, but he was like, “if there are dragons, I’m out.” And you probably know how worked out.
We’re between serieses at the moment. Netflix sucks. We gave up on Amazon originals. I’ve got some stuff recorded, but meh.
I got a boxed set of Utopia for a birthday gift, but I can’t face it. It’s really well done (which is why I asked for a copy) but deeply violent and nasty.
It’s about a “Russian flu” being bioengineered and deliberately released for…purposes.
Yes. Quite.
January 25, 2022 — 7:37 pm
Comments: 5
Mon dieu!
I woke up this morning with the French word “bouche d’incendie” going around and around in my head. As the fog cleared, I remembered it meant “mouth of fire” – which I thought was a strange and super profound thing to wake up thinking. Prophetic, even. But what could it mean?
I looked it up. It’s the French term for “fire hydrant.” French, am I right? I knew it because I had to draw site plans labelled in multiple languages when I worked for that engineering company.
My favorite expression to write was “casa de bombas” which is the Portuguese term for pump house. Sounds spicy.
We’re up to Season 7 of that French cop show Spiral that I briefly posted about before. Only one more season to go, and we have it recorded. It’s been fun. Dark, gory fun.
Watching it has made fragments of my Tennessee high school French float to the surface.
The French title is actually Engrenages which means “gears” – but also cycles, like cycles of violence. Which is a pretty good name for a copy show. But I guess Spiral, as in spiral out of control, is pretty good too.
Mucho recommendo.
October 26, 2021 — 5:48 pm
Comments: 6
‘Dire’ pun of some kind
Scientific American has run an article on dire wolves — which were real, apparently — in honor of the finale of Game of Thrones — in which work of fiction they feature, apparently.
I guess. We haven’t seen a single episode. We started to watch it, got to the dragons and Uncle B noped out hard.
Sword and sorcery. The man really hates it.
I don’t know how SA could possibly run an article on this animal without noting that it obviously had a baculum. How many canine species do?
April 29, 2019 — 9:11 pm
Comments: 13
Tinky-Winky says Bye Bye!
Simon Shelton Barnes died last night on the streets of Liverpool. Police say he collapsed and later died of hypothermia. He was 52.
I know this one: he was coming home from the pubs with a snootful, I’m guessing, slipped and fell on the pavement and froze to death. I’ve lost more ancestors that way…
Barnes was the second Tinky Winky. The first, Dave Thompson, left the show after he and the director disagreed on his character development. I shitteth thee not.
I’m a huge fan of the series. I have all their albums. Teletubby fever was just catching hold in Britain when I made my first trip here in 1997. I thought it was the weirdest effing thing I’d ever seen. Weirder even than the food.
I’m no fan of Falwell, but he totally spoke the truth about Tinky Winky being ‘the gay character’ (there was the gay one, the black one, the Asian one and the Chinese one, duh). I don’t know if the triangle on his head was a coincidence, but he always carried a red patent leather handbag and occasionally wore a tutu.
If he wasn’t supposed to be gay (“Oh my god, these are children…how can you monsters sexualize children?”) he was certainly supposed to normalize the gender bend. For children. Spare me the pearl clutching, BBC.
Simon Shelton Barnes, on the other hand, was apparently not gay.
Crank your headphones for Tinky Winky Jumps for Fun!
January 23, 2018 — 8:00 pm
Comments: 11
An environment minister who makes sense
Tee hee. Swedish TV channel accidentally slaps subtitles from a kids’ show onto a political debate.
Maybe. It’s an Imgur link, so I wouldn’t put my hand on my heart. Clickworthy, though.
And I ain’t doing nothing the big guys ain’t. Have you noticed how many mainstream news sites — particularly click-whorehouses like the Daily Mail — are scraping a big chunk of their content from social media? That you already saw hours ago?
Meanwhile, social media and legacy media are working together with governments to help ban ban ‘hate speech’. You know, “I don’t want to live next door to a Syrian” and like that.
Late at night…when all is still…if you listen very carefully…you can hear the bonds of civil society creak and groan.
January 20, 2016 — 11:00 pm
Comments: 6
Best Christmas special ever
The surprise BBC hit of the holiday season was two hours of a woman leading reindeer through the snow. In realtime. No dialogue, no music. The occasional caption. Boots crunching in snow.
We sat mesmerized through every minute of it, and we weren’t alone.
It was the latest installment of a phenomenon known as ‘slow tv’ popularized by the Norwegian Broadcast Company (though you could trace its lineage to Andy Warhol and the Sixties if you’d’a mind to; Wikipedia did). Their first effort was a seven hour train ride.
The reindeer lady is a Sami (the people we used to call Lapps), the natives of the far North. The route is an old postal route inland from the coast. Along the way, she meets up and parts company with another lady and some guys and they shake hands and mutter things in an unknown language. But mostly it’s just the backend of the reindeer. The reindeer have bells on.
And that’s it. That’s the whole thing.
You can watch the first two minutes of it here. Or you can just watch my header loop for two hours.
December 28, 2015 — 10:25 pm
Comments: 16
Oops! Lookit the time!
So I’ve totally figured out how to drive the Chromecast, which means (among other things), any video I can find on YouTube I can share with Onkle B on the big screen.
We’ve done Ninja Kitty, Cats are Assholes, Cats versus Cucumbers, badger cubs, stoaty fun, happy snow leopards, the One Of Us scene from Freaks, the entire Thanksgiving episode of WKRP in Cincinnati (funny, but not p’raps the gut-buster I remembered), the puMAman theme…and I’m wearing the bastard down at last!
What are some of your favorite ‘tubes? No need to post links, just enough of a description that they turn up on a search. If I make him sit through just a few more choice hits, I feel sure we can turn him ‘Murican.
Good weekend, all!
November 27, 2015 — 11:41 pm
Comments: 44
‘tsha!
Joel Hodgson has opened a kickstarter to get MST3K going again. They’re up to $227,898 of the minimum $2.2 million they hope to raise in a month. Five and a half million will fund a whole season. And
Finally, if we raise $1 BILLION – stay with me on this one – we’re going to adopt a real live teenage boy and “Truman Show” him into believing he is the Pumaman!
Bonus points if you know how to pronounce “Pumaman.”
Eh. I’ll kick in ten bucks. Don’t laugh; I have to work almost an hour down the history mine to make that.
November 10, 2015 — 6:36 pm
Comments: 4