The Crackpot Book Club: Jingo

I've been tearing through the work of Terry Pratchett for the last few months. I've become a huge fan bordering on disciple. He's so charming and so understated. He waits for you to get lulled into a false sense of high fantasy satire then BAM. He dumps a bucket of ice cold humanity all over your head and you love him for it.

America has had a rough week and I think I have just the thing. A proverbial mug of calming tea with a bitter aftertaste. I'm only a few hundred pages into Jingo (city watch) and from that title you can guess where it's going. It's about being good police in a time where citizens are taking up arms for selfish, deluded, causes. It stares racism down and laughs in it's face the way only the English can. So polite... yet so brutal. It's helping me through a difficult time in the American south and I'm going to shut up now and let it speak for itself:

It was so much easier to blame it on Them. It was bleakly depressing to think that They were Us. If it was Them, then nothing was anyone's fault. If it was Us, what did that make Me? After all, I'm one of Us. I must be. I've certainly never thought of myself as one of Them. No one ever thinks of themselves as one of Them. We're always one of Us. It's Them that do the bad things.

-Terry Pratchett

C&C episode 84: Our EMOTIONS!!!

 

An Emotional Episode.

 

The table is being set for the return of Hannibal.

American Gods was... ok. Splitting the book into 2 seasons was a bad idea mostly because there was barely enough material for the first. That and the last half of the book is the weakest. It's just not Gaiman's best work at the end of the day. I got the sense that he doesn't think much about American culture even though he tried REALLY hard to appreciate it. All the American gods are pale intimations of their international betters and all the new gods are essentially villainous. I mean, you don't see technical boy boosting AIDs research through crowd sourcing, do you? Anansi was the sh*t, though. It was like Orlando Jones was waiting his entire career for that speech.

So thank christ the talks for Hannibal's resurrection are moving forward. This was Fuller's most inspired work by far and it deserves another chance at an ending. Hopefully we'll get some closure for Bedelia at the very least.

Conversations couldn't start until 2 years after the final airing of season 3. @neoprod has started those conversations. This takes time.

— Bryan Fuller (@BryanFuller) August 9, 2017

Cinematography of Preacher Vol. 2

 
Back by popular demand: season 2 episode 8. You keep the Hitchcock homages coming and I'll do my part, Preacher.

So I gave Warframe a shot...

Sometimes the randomizer hits gold. So help me if I'm tacky, when in Rome.

...it is not for everyone. It's free to play for a reason, if I had dropped more than $20 on it I'd be pretty bummed. But it is absolutely free and it is interesting enough for me to spend a weekend with. It's destiny on speed. You walk faster than most games sprint, the aiming is flawless, and the jumping/light platforming is smooth as silk. Though enemies are bland turtle people that look and sound like sh*tier versions of Andromeda's already underwhelming rock jerks.

This here bag? She's mixed, but did I mention the roguish class has Max Payne's strafe jump but with a jet pack? You can just glide around corners going 60 mph and reasonably pull off head shots. I'm already having more fun than I did with Destiny. People rag on that game's storytelling but Warframe makes it look like Doctor, f**king, Zhivago.

But it's free. Sooooo free. $5-$20 for new costumes and weapon skins, so the ethical kind of free. But it really makes you appreciate games like Borderlands who put so much more effort into WHAT you're shooting even though Warframe makes it more fun to actually do that. Shooting, that is.

Thrones was pretty good tonight!

And it gives me an excuse to bug everyone with a cruelly forgotten Queen song:

Yeah! How you like me now?!

I'm sorry Beddy, but the headboard connectors were drilled in at an angle and... you just frustrate me sometimes.