Media Consumption Weekday

[firecat]

Media Consumption for February 1–7

My annual-or-so stab at doing a meme adjacent to Reading Wednesday. Maybe I can keep it up this year.

Listening

• Heavy Weather_from P.G. Wodehouse Volume 2, The Blandings Collection. I’ve dabbled at reading Wodehouse before but this is the first time I’ve tried to go through one of his series in order. My gushing reaction: This guy is quite simply a PERFECT comedic English writer.
  
  Some of the plot points and jokes are predictable (probably in part because so many writers have imitated them). The attitudes are of their time (sexist, racist, ableist — some of these are set up for criticism and some are not).
  
  But OMG the language. The pacing. The stories are satisfyingly twisty. And there are feelings, but no one suffers TOO much for too long. The way he satirizes class is really good.
  
  The collection is narrated by Stephen Fry. I’ve listened to other works he’s narrated and I find his narration spotty. For example I have his Sherlock Holmes audio collection, and the narration is OK, but he doesn’t put his back into it. However, he is THE PERFECT narrator for Wodehouse. In a forward he mentions falling in love with the stories at a young age, so that’s probably part of it.
  
  
• Victoria: An Intimate Biography by Stanley Weintraub. Originally published 1987; foreword to this edition dated 1996. Narrated by Donada Peters, who has a prim, old-school English accent. She’s been around for decades and I like her narration but it probably isn’t to everyone’s taste. The audiobook is 29 hours long. Described thus on Goodreads: “A major biography of Queen Victoria--the first complete life of her in over twenty years--and the first to be written by an American.” It has mixed reviews. One reviewer says it’s not all that “intimate” and they have a point, but it relies a lot on her diaries and letters, so I’m not sure how a biography of Victoria could be more intimate without a lot more speculation. I’m about 3/4ths of the way through and I’m learning a lot because I haven’t studied her before, but the biographer is very critical of her and overall I get the impression he sees her as a spoiled child. I don’t know to what extent other historians see her that way. But it kind of annoys me. I want to go to him and say “OK, you try.”
  
  
• Microbe TV (https://www.microbe.tv) bills itself as “science shows for everyone.” This is the home of the podcast This Week in Virology (TWiV), founded and hosted by Vincent Racaniello. I took his virology MOOC (online course) in the early teens when MOOCs were the new hot thing. The site got a lot of attention during the first couple of years of the pandemic and that’s why it’s been able to expand. It now hosts eleven shows and I’ve been trying them out one or two at a time. I have listened to one devoted to Covid research, and also TWiV and its companions This Week in Parasitism and This Week in Microbiology. Those are mostly hour long shows with panels of several scientists, most of whom seem to be regulars. They discuss recent research in the field in a way I can follow (layperson with some knowledge of biological sciences). They talk about their careers and share off-topic links they find interesting. And they chatter a lot about all sorts of things. On one recent show, for example, they were speculating about AI, and they mostly knew even less than I did. (I know a tiny bit.)
  
  It might sound kind of chaotic but it really works for me. I get that “these are my people” feeling when I listen, because they’re not claiming expertise in anything but their particular fields and yet they’re smart and curious and share a lot of my values (humanist/agnostic, liberal/progressive). It makes me feel less alone in this crazy world and it also makes me occasionally wistful that I didn’t go into science as a career.

Reading

• The Silmarillion by JRR Tolkien. I have loved The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings since childhood but somehow never got around to this, so I’m trying to remedy that. I’ve only just started. I’m finding it enjoyable to read out loud to myself.
  
  
• Fool Moon (Dresden Files #2) by Jim Butcher. The first time I tried to read The Dresden Files I bounced, mainly because of the sexism, but my tastes have changed to where that doesn’t necessarily annoy me so much that I can’t read a story that has any. A lot of people I know like the series, and I watched the one-season TV series and liked that, so I decided to try again. I listened to the first three but realized I wasn’t doing a good job of keeping track of the characters. So I’m reading it now and making a list of characters as I go along.

Watching

• Grand Sumo Highlights. In Japan there’s a two-week sumo tournament every two months and I keep up with it with one of my sweeties, via watching the 30-minute summary of the day’s matches. I originally got interested in sumo because hey, all-but-naked fat men stomping and bashing into each other! For a bear-attracted guy, what’s not to like? But I am now interested in the nuances of the sport as well. I feel uncomfortable sometimes because there are abuses in the sport and it’s very hard on the athletes’ bodies. But I’m still watching. I need to see fat men being athletic and participating in a sport considered very masculine while having body shapes that are stereotyped as soft and feminine.
  
  
• iZombie. Horror/urban fantasy/police procedural show that ran for five seasons. I’m watching one ep per week with a small group of friends who, during lockdown, began watching Netflix shows together while chatting virtually. We’re still doing it four years later! We are in season 4 now. The show is kind of silly. The premise is that zombie-ism exists and can be transmitted by a scratch, a bite, or sex. The zombies aren’t the “shuffle around moaning” kinds as long as they can eat human brains. The protagonist gets hers by working at the morgue. As a bonus or sometimes a curse, eating someone’s brain gives her their personality and occasional flashes of their memories. She uses this to help the police solve murders.
  
  
• Heartstopper. Romantic comedy about a gay teen boy and his mostly-queer friends and his boyfriend. At first glance it seems like a show aimed at teens. And maybe teens do like it. But it’s also a show aimed at queer grandparents who want their teen grandkids to have it easier than they did. There are crises and drama, but nothing terribly stressful (which to my mind is a welcome change from the many many queer-coming-of-age shows where the young person has to deal with bullying from the community and nightmare parents).
  
  
• Evil. It’s hard for me to find an elevator pitch for this show. I guess I’ll go with the reasons I enjoy it: Christine Lahti, Michael Emerson, and Andrea Martin having illegal amounts of fun with their badass characters, and Mike Colter looking smoking hot and acting angstily earnest. Most of the rest of the main/recurring characters are really good too. The stories address weird happenings and weird people and whether the weirdness is magical/supernatural/religious in origin or practical/psychological, but that is a big oversimplification. It’s impressive that they have managed to keep do this for multiple seasons usually without settling the question.
  
  
• All Rise. Legal drama, ensemble cast led by a character who’s a newly appointed judge with an agenda of improving criminal justice. Most of the drama is soap-opera-ish but so far it feels fairly realistic and everything ties back into the characters’ legal work. Gives me that satisfying “there is fairness in this corner of the world” feeling.

Comments

[greghousesgf]

I've noticed a LOT of American remakes of foreign movies are disappointing and even seem to miss the point of the originals.

[firecat]

It’s true. Some are OK but it’s not the way to bet