sawall

I’ve been blazing through the Defenders TV series. I had previously seen Jessica Jones but had avoided the rest. In viewing order:

Daredevil S1: Overall I enjoyed this. Great dynamics between the main characters. Kingpin is really well done. I could have taken a bit less violence and maybe wish they had toned down some of the squelchyfoley work during said violence. I haven’t loved previous Daredevils but I really like this one, especially how they focus on the lawyer side of his life and his struggles with making both halves work out. 3.5/5

Jessica Jones S1: Really fantastic but trigger warnings all around. Deals with heavy mind control / rape / violence themes and the main character is an alcoholic dealing with all of this. Excellent but not fun by any means. The centerpiece is a great rivalry between Kyrsten Ritter David Tennant. Not as much of a sense of overlap with the MCU in general. 4/5

Daredevil S2: Still good but the core dynamics are broken up in this season. Elektra is great but off to one side in a lot of ways. There is a Punisher plotline I have pretty mixed feelings about - the plot arc and actor is good but I do not love how aggrandized he is by certain elements in American law enforcement. 3/5

Luke Cage S1: Loved this all around, it felt like a love letter to Harlem and African American culture in NYC. It’s a visual feast of venues and jam packed with great music. The themes around being a bulletproof black hero are great. 4.5/5

Iron Fist S1: Wow this was bad. The director seemed to want the main character to be three different things that didn’t match up with each other. The plot was full of weird holes and relies on main characters being stupid. Truly terrible martial choreography, which should be especially embarrassing after how good it is in Daredevil in particular. I may be a terrible audience for this because I really have seen people who have trained in kung fu since birth and the main actor can’t even vaguely fake it, and the costars are also generally not very good movers. I had to force myself to watch the last few episodes because I wanted the lore. 1.5/5

Defenders S1: This is a fairly believable story about how the main characters from all of the above come together and fight off a common enemy. There’s lots of great fan service and easter eggs that reward people who have watched everything but I’ll say that it isn’t absolutely necessary to have watched Iron Fist even though he’s central to the plot. Lots of fun and it felt like a satisfyingly big plotline. The main villain is played by Sigourney Weaver doing a fantastic job as always. 4/5

Punisher S1: skipped due to aforementioned misgivings

Jessica Jones S2: If you liked the angst in S1, it is back and here to stay in S2 with a family twist who isn’t nearly as interesting a foil as David Tenant. It’s great if you are looking for people turning their lives into train wrecks but this is totally missable if you aren’t up to the constant alcoholic angst. It’s good by dramatic standards, but no fun at all. It’s pretty unfortunate that the two main female heroes on this side of the MCU are a misanthropic alcoholic (JJ) and a literal psychopath (Elektra). 3/5

Luke Cage S2: I’m only halfway through this one but it seems to be pretty good so far. Luke is trying to figure his life balance while following his passion of being a hero but also trying to figure out how to deal with celebrity and pay the bills. Seems like interesting character deepening and advancement compared with JJ S2.


Other stuff:

Hawkeye S1 was solidly enjoyable and mostly low stakes. There was some fun cat and mouse and twists that I didn’t quite see coming. Some male idiot fanboys are complaining about how skilled Kate Bishop is, which is totally stupid given that her backstory completely justifies it at least as well as backstories of similarly skilled male heroes do. Great action sequences, amusing odd couple rapport, and good clean fun all around. A great lazy day watch for when you don’t want anything all that challenging. 3/5

Moon Knight is a weird blast so far! I have watched half of it and will have more to say later.

We managed to snag a decent airbnb for …. well, not cheap, but also not totally outrageous. Good luck with the house!!!

I’ve got one extra two-weekend ticket and two second-weekend tickets for Primavera that I’m about to sell back to the system. A couple friends fell through. If anyone’s reconsidering Primavera in light of recent reckless abandon in the face of COVID, I’d be happy to sell directly! Fenchurch and I will be there along with a couple other fun folk.

The “don’t vote, both parties are bad” crew are now on to the “how did Democrats allow this to happen on their watch‽‽!!?” narrative now.

One thing Congress CAN do is pass a federal law universally granting abortion rights. There’s no federal law because it’s generally been considered political suicide to get into the subject, which has led to States being in charge of this. There’s quite a bit of popular support in the country for abortion to be legal, but a largely symbolic Senate vote just failed miserably. It only “failed miserably” because anytying in the Senate pretty much needs a 60/100 vote to pass now due to the bizarre filibuster rules. Welcome to… Democracy?

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/ma...ights-bill-vote

Everything Everywhere All At Once is a fantastic A24 entry. You will probably have all heard the buzz about this buy now and it’s definitely worth seeing. Big screen isn’t strictly necessary but it’s one of the first post-COVID films I’ve seen where I’d nudge people to strongly consider it. Without getting too spoilery, the central science-fiction element is a technology that allows people to consciousness-hop between alternate universe versions of themselves, which includes Matrix style skill sharing. It’s by the same directors as Swiss Army Man and has a similar tone in places - there’s a heart-tugging emotional story as the centerpiece with utterly absurd action happening all around it. As a special bonus, if you think Michelle Yeoh’s husband is familiar and you are unable to place him, he is totally the guy who played Data in Goonies and also Indiana Jones’ Short Round, who hasn’t done much of anything since the 80s. 4.5/5

Bodies, Bodies, Bodies: I got to see this at the SXSW film festival and I believe it’s set to come out in the middle of the summer. It’s a black comedy/horror film about a bunch of mostly rich college kids playing a guess-the-killer game (think Werewolf or Mafia) in a remote mansion, and people start really getting killed right when a hurricane hits and the lights go out. Accusations fly, paranoia runs wild, and past grievances are aired. This could have been awful but the writing is really fantastic and hilarious in places, especially when woke language is reframed into expressing authentic suspicions that one’s friends may be psychotic murders. I’m surprised there hasn’t been much buzz about this yet, I really loved it. 4/5

I’ve been playing a lot of The Battle of Polytopia lately. If you have a hankering for Civ but want it to take less than an hour, check it out. It feels like an extremely well-designed and balanced Civ on a small map that takes you up to the middle ages on the tech tree. The phone app is a little small for my old eyes, which was where I was introduced to it by playing pass and play with my friend’s teenager who was getting a bit impatient with my squinting. It plays great on the tablet and the PC. The art style is blocky polygons with some character, with a lot of unique assets per tribe. It’s a TBS that rewards highly optimized build orders and rushes that reminds me a bit of Starcraft. You can play in a mode where you’re trying to optimize your score in 30 turns, or you can play a domination mode. The DLC is pretty interesting too, it brings in alien races that have unique powers that change things up a lot if you’re bored with the regular gameplay.

My long plays during the pandemic were Animal Crossing for about a year and then Stardew Valley. I eventually subverted all of my Animal Crossing into real world gardening, which I will put together a post about sometime elsewhere.

Another recent favorite is Baba is You, which is a really fantastic sliding tile puzzler where you have to move objects and word fragments around to create rule sets that give you win conditions. Brogue continues to be an ongoing favorite, I’ll play it two or three days a week during breaks from work.

Feel free to move this to another section, none of this seems worth its own topic!

There’s more Tayne footage!

https://www.reddit.com/r/Tayne/comments/ufr..._tayne_content/

I resonate a lot with Al’s post.

My TL;DR: I went to SXSW and started out being pretty safe in the context of going to talks in the convention center where there was lots of masking/distancing and everyone was guaranteed to be vaccinated. In the evenings I started to go to live outdoor shows while mostly masked and distanced and eventually ended up making a couple of questionable choices involving indoor venues, alcohol, and unmasking. I managed to not get COVID in the process, but two of my close friends did end up with it. We suspect they got it at an EDM thing that was open to the public that they attended when I went to go see Suzanne Vega in a vaxed/masked/distanced crowd in a church. Alternately I may have beensaved by the boatloads of extra Vitamin D, L-Lysine, Vitamin C, and Zinc that I was taking during the event.

A nice feature at SXSW was free on site testing - I took a PCR every other morning and got results back within a few hours. I didn’t see a huge number of people doing it but I like that as being a feature at gatherings because at least I can feel like I am checking myself responsibly and can quickly remove myself from being part of the problem. After I found out my friends got it I started doing rapid NAAT tests at Walgreens every day because my allergies were totally blowing up my sinuses and I was glad and felt lucky to learn that I continued to never test positive.

My best friend here also managed to not get COVID at SXSW, but her husband was one of the friends who did get it. As soon as they found out they did all the right things with quarantining, but she ended up getting it anyways. On top of that, her mother had passed away right after SXSW and her entire family was coming into town for a memorial at a church. She found out a couple days before the service was planned that she also had COVID and they ended up needing to move the ceremony into the back yard because a couple of the family members were intractable about the timing of the service due to nonrefundable plane tickets, lots of emotional sensitivities around the death, etc. So that’s how I ended up officiating a memorial service during a pandemic with less than 24 hours notice.

One of the saddest parts about the memorial was that the parents couldn’t comfort their two kids who are still testing negative. My friends had to sit in the back and Heather got to give surrogate parental hugs to them up front. This is luckily for me the closest I’ve been to witnesses how much COVID can impact “normal” proceedings, and it can be heartbreaking even with everybody in more or less good health.

Everybody I know who got COVID is more or less fine. They are all triple vaxed and had what felt like a bad cold and then a scary loss of some aspects of their taste which seems to be coming back. One of my friends typically dislikes sweets and suddenly found herself enjoying them. Another of my friends has anosmia so we joked that maybe once she was over COVID she’d suddenly get a sense of smell. Her taste is reportedly off but no luck on smelling things, yet.

Last week I finally saw Spider-Man: No-Way Home, as my first in person theater experience since 2020. I enjoyed it thoroughly and agree with the comment that it’s great as a movie in itself. It is hard to say much of anything without spoilers but I’ll say that it’s worth it, and familiarity with the franchise will lead to even more audience payoff. At some points the film flips the script on how you expect the plot of a superhero film to go, but does so in a way that continues to have entertaining action and character bits.

I’m a bit frustrated with Sony’s stewardship of Spider-Man. This iteration of the character ties right in to the MCU but they’ve been making all kinds of weird limiting choices about streaming and rental capabilities. Apparently it will be streaming on Starz at some point and there won’t be any other way to see it online for a while. This seems ridiculous with Dr. Strange coming out soon (before Spider-Man will be streaming, AFAIK), and some of the events in Spider-Man have potential implications for the unfolding story. I am hoping that Disney will just buy back the rights or something. I have a Disney+ subscription and this seems like a really strange gap in their offering.

It’s bizarre to watch the various “trucker” protests. Here in the U.S. most of the reporting is about the one happening in Canada, I had no idea something similar was happening in New Zealand. Despite being an extreme fringe minority they managed to really screw up traffic in Ottawa. Counter-protestors have been infiltrating their chat rooms and sending them to the wrong place and exposing them.

My favorite one today was the My Pillow guy trying to send the truckers pillows like it’s the Berlin airlift: https://www.thedailybeast.com/mypillow-guy-...ker-vax-protest

Anti-Vietnam war was an important strain as well. Most of these filmmakers are fairly liberal/progressive, AFAIK, but it seems like the anti-war and anti-oppressive sentiments end up resonating with more conservative types as well. That’s not to say there isn’t a strain of conservatism and libertarianism amongst artists in the science fiction and action categories - in college I saw Ray Bradbury speak and I was shocked by how libertarian he was. From my political perspective that’s throwing out the baby with the bathwater. I am all for government having checks and balances, I am not for having no government at all as being the fix for problems that government can have.

I’m experiencing astounding cognitive dissonance here in Austin. Heather and I are staying pretty locked down as the numbers are extreme. I still go out now and then to pick up take out food or whatever and I see that a lot of the restaurants are packed to the gills with maskless diners. I’m seeing a lot more direct impacts leading to quarantine and staffing shortages. The bodyworker I regularly go to had to close up shops for a couple weeks, garbage collection service has become unpredictable, take out restaurants keep changing their hours or shutting down for days, and so on. My friends with kids keep never being sure if the schools will be open or not as it seems like they keep getting closed down when there are too many cases. Since I’ve seen how much better cities like Oakland seem to be handling this, it’s hard for me to not come to the conclusion that there is a critical mass of people in Austin who are REALLY bad at this and that future situations are not going to be better.

I thought this Stratfor podcast had some really good up to date analysis last week: https://open.spotify.com/episode/4ZBbyqr1mj...oTZyGNf-fSS6b-w
Stratfor is a group that provides open source intelligence analysis intended for a corporate audience to help execs with decision-making. I like to follow them because they give a almost completely depolicitized threat forecasting about regional conflicts and world events. This is what I gleaned at the top level:

• Omicron is 2-3x more contagious than Delta and, based on data, spreads at rate of chicken pox. It may be even more transmissible because we are failing to collect a lot of data due to home testing and testing shortages.
• Omicron is dominating almost all regions of US - most regions are 90% or more Omicron
• 2x Pfizer/Moderna = 33% efficacy against Omicron; add in the booster and you get = 75-80% efficacy
• Getting a booster means you are nearly 100% protected from hospitalization
• Omicron is infectious at under 5 micron doses which means a cloth mask is almost entirely ineffective. Thus, being unmasked and eating indoors is an extremely high risk situation.
• Omicron is “less severe” because it is less likely to spread to lungs and give patients severe pneumonia, we are still seeing a threat to the hospital capacity in the U.S. because there are so many cases.
• 1 in 10 people in England and NYC had COVID during the last couple of weeks of December.
• If you do catch Omicron, it will raises neutralizing antibodies against Omicron and Delta
• The CDC-recommended 5-day quarantine is a little short. Stratfor recommends organizations mandate at least a 7 day quarantine and thinks that the 5 day recommendation has more to do with managing staffing shortages.

I have some extended family members who are vaccine… let’s call it “averse”. I’ve had talks with them about this and a lot of their issue comes down to the fact that the weird fringe, grifters, and disinformation campaigns have led them to feel along the lines of “there’s a lot of information out there and I am not sure who to believe, so the safe/conservative/prudent move is to mask up, hide out, and don’t take the vaccine.” There’s been so many years of anti-government sentiment that they don’t really take what the government says at face value.

Somewhat tangentially and somewhat not, one of the people in question is really into action flicks from the 80s-00s where the federal government is often the bad guy or full of idiots that the smart rugged individualistic hero has to fight against in order to win. I’m not talking about conservative propaganda that beats you over the head, I’m talking about things like the FBI in Die Hard, the EPA in Ghostbusters, the CIA in the Bourne films, and the NSA which seems to have become a generic proxy for “evil government organization” in everything under the sun lately. I wonder sometimes what effect this has on the public’s trust in federal institutions. I mean, it could also be ACTUAL NEWS coming from events like the Snowden links, and watching how some federal regulators seem to love fracking, pesticides, and oil pipelines, but it got me thinking. I’m just asking questions here.

I continue to expect some sort of financial crisis this year and am again surprised that it didn’t happen. Property values are doing silly things but what I really expect now is that Tether and other “stablecoins” are going to get revealed for being shams, which will bottom out the Bitcoin and NFT markets, and make a bunch of banks and hedge funds really sad because they are way more extended into the cryptocurrency space than any of them want to admit at this point.

My resolutions:
* buy some land in Washington State so that my hippie compound has a place to spin up
* figure out how to do strength exercises in a way that I enjoy without ever being able to go to a climbing gym again
* finish up some seemingly endless backyard landscaping projects

You reminded me about being asked to show proof of vaccination. It happens at a lot of show venues in Austin but no restaurants that I’ve been into (though I think it may be a thing at a couple). It was fairly common in many of the restaurants that I went to in California. There’s a California phone app that you can scan with a database of who’s been vaxxed. Nothing like that exists in Texas. I haven’t attempted to eat indoors in Washington so I am not sure what the typical story is here. I’ve heard conservative pundits comparing the practice to making Jews wear stars of David in Nazi Germany and now apparently some of them are trying to have “vaccination sit ins” like they are Rosa Parks or something.

Somewhat off topic, but I LOVE my Kindle Oasis for reading. My old eyes were starting to feel strain reading into the wee hours and the e-ink is definitely more gentle on them. The Oasis is a bit pricey but has some major ergonomic improvements and lets you use an amber light instead of white, which is also a lot nicer in the evening.

I picked up the final entry in the Expanse series a couple weeks ago and I think the writers really stuck the landing (and shockingly delivered it on time). The plotlines affect the entire galaxy but it still feels personal. It’s totally worth checking out the entire series, IMO. I also really enjoy the show and the changes they made to make it better fit the format.

For folks who haven’t read it, the series is three trilogies that ultimately are about humans being humans in all of their various permutations. This plays out with different political and technological backdrops. The first book is set mostly in the hard boiled detective and space opera genres, but the later books explore many facets of politics with plots that involve colonialism, mercantilism, terrorism, and authoritarianism. There is a roster of different point-of-view characters similar to Game of Thrones, but it never gets too unwieldy. The television show does streamline the number of characters a bit - if you’re familiar with it, then just be aware that the fantastic Drummer is actually several different characters stitched together.

Starting early December I road tripped then flew and saw all sorts of weird permutations of behavior:

Austin: Lots of the vibe was “back to normal” before Omicron started popping its head. Most people I know were starting to do indoor dining (masking on the way to and from tables). More adventurous folks were going into movie theaters and indoor shows. People who were doing consistent masking and isolation were much more rare. Staff at most retail and restaurants were masking, although there were no masks at some places. There are still a handful of places that are take out only (very frequently, places run by asian immigrants). There were no clear mandates so knowing what to expect of the staff when walking into anywhere was a crap shoot. I suspect it’s still like that there based on what I hear from friends.

West Texas: What pandemic? We stayed in a hotel and we were literally the only people we saw with masks anywhere. Several people were hanging out in the lobby unmasked. Pretty much everybody was unmasked in gas stations and fast food places.

Albuquerque, New Mexico: My first taste of sanity. The State has clear mask mandates so what we saw in service establishments was consistent - employees were masking, most people were masking when in line and on the way to things. I realized what a relief it was to know what to expect when walking indoors.

Prescott, Arizona: Back to “what pandemic?” Some major national chains like Starbucks had staff who were masking but pretty much everywhere else we were the only weirdos with masks again. Heather’s mother lives in a senior living apartment complex and she and her friend are pretty much the ONLY people who mask out of 200 in there, and they have had several people die of COVID over the last couple of years. Thankfully due to federal law the masking at the airport and on the plane was consistent.

Oakland CA: The most masky place I’ve been lately. I felt very safe here. I can’t think of a single place I went into that had staff members not wearing masks. I very rarely saw anyone not masking and it seemed more likely that it was absent minded than anything. In fact on the street sometimes I felt like *I* had become the asshole - I generally walk around outside without a mask unless it gets crowded because, well, it’s generally extremely safe based on my understanding of how transmission works. At one point a couple crossed the street to avoid me when they saw me coming up the hill without a mask on and I saw other people hold their masks to their face as I passed. It felt very safe everywhere we went.

Kitsap County, WA: I’ve been visiting family on the side of the Puget Sound opposite Seattle. There’s a State mask mandate and staff everywhere is wearing a mask. At the grocery store about 95% of customers are wearing masks. Most of the ones who aren’t seem a lot more defiant than the ones I ran across in Oakland - they know they are not masking and some of them look like they are waiting for the opportunity to get into a fight with whoever wants to challenge them on it. It generally feels really safe here and those folks are just outliers, but I do see them around.

Shang Chi is great in the effects and fighting department. There isn’t much substance but it’s a fun romp. I love Awkafina but her role felt a little weird - part of the time they seemed to be treating her as comic relief but they also tried to give her a serious edge as well.

Finally saw Black Widow and thought it was ok, but I bet that I will rapidly forget everything about it aside from the fact that I could have sworn part of it was filmed in the same apartment that was used in Killing Eve. I was wrong about that, but there was a decent sized thread over on the KillingEve sub so I wasn’t the only one to think it.

I’ve watched the first 3 episodes of Hawkeye, which is pretty fun so far. It’s nice to watch a Marvel story that’s lower stakes, although now that I’ve said that I’m sure he’ll uncover some world-ending conspiracy by the end.

I’m very excited to see the new Spider Man but am not setting foot in a U.S. theater anytime soon.

Ho ho ho.

I am up in Washington visiting my parents after swinging by to see fenchurch for a few days. Upon arrival I quarantined for three days, tested, and have taken a couple more tests since then. My mother’s immune compromised due to a medical treatment but my parents are both sensibly vaxed and boosted.

My extended family decided to do an in person Christmas this year and we all tested the morning of and then maintained distance, masked, and left windows open while inside. We ate in household pods, each of us at least a couple meters away from other pods. Based on what I’ve read about Omicron that isn’t 100% safe but I feel pretty good about how we managed things. I’m lucky that my entire family is on board with reality, most people I know have at least one or two family members here in America who are vax deniers or whatever which is making gatherings awkward to say the least.

It’s been unseasonably cold the last few days and we’re somewhat snowed in. There are major staffing shortages due to COVID and I think it’s extended to the people who plow the roads. We also aren’t entirely confident that our flights back will happen - there have been quite a few cancelations due to the same shortages. At least we are all safe and fed and have power, last year in Texas going a few days of sub-freezing temperatures meant a massive electrical meltdown.

Here’s a couple shots from the aforementioned goth quinceañera. I ended up dressing up a bit more than originally planned!

Heather and me:


Me and the quinceañera in her amazingly sparkly dress:

I may just need a Paul Rudd topic:
https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/qt8...ger_king_sauna/

tayne-adjacent amusement: https://youtu.be/UcjUov44PVM

My best friend here in Austin has a 16 year old daughter who missed her quinceañera last year. She requested that she have a GOTH quinceañera, so we’ll be having it on Halloween afternoon. Expecting to see all manner of frilly black tragic dresses. I’ll be going with a classic trenchcoat, jump boots, and who quite knows what else.

I keep meaning to get a Team Zissou costume together one of these years but I always think about it too late. I’ve got the hat but getting a decent shirt/jacket in the right is surprisingly challenging. I might go with Legion in his guru form but I bet nobody is going to recognize that.

Wow!!! Those hard Beat Saber levels are INTENSE.

Thanks, Cheers!


Weirdly, I had a more substantial reaction after my first dose, but it might have been partly because I got a lot of heat and sun exposure the same day. In the middle of the night I got chills and uncontrollable shivers that were moderately concerning. After collecting myself, I realized that what I was experiencing seemed pretty close to what I’ve experienced a couple times with extreme hypoglycemia, so I stuffed some carbs in my face and that seemed to settle me out. Second dose I got the typical arm soreness (which I didn’t get at all for my first dose) and felt a bit run down. Ibuprofen helped me there as well!