For all Mankind 5.01

Mar. 29th, 2026 01:25 pm
selenak: (Spacewalk - Foundation)
[personal profile] selenak
I finished s4 of For All Mankind with mixed feelings - you can read my review of the season 4 finale here, which goes into details as to why - but not so much that I wasn't curious about s5, which started on Friday.

Spoilers finally found out what happened to Oleg from The Americans )

Clever music marketing trick

Mar. 24th, 2026 10:11 pm
brithistorian: (Default)
[personal profile] brithistorian

K-pop group STAYC just released the longest K-pop album I've ever heard: 17 songs, 50 minutes. It's called Stay Alive. Based on the title, I thought it was a live album, which intrigued me: I'd never heard a K-pop live album, because the K-pop industry is run by people like A., who want the live version to sound exactly like the recorded version, so there's no point in releasing a live album.

Anyway, I started listening to Stay Alive. The first song makes it clear that it's not a live album. By the time I got to the third song, I noticed that all the songs were being sung in Japanese. So I checked track list: It's Japanese versions of all of their songs. Then it hit me: I checked the dates, and November of this year will be sixth anniversary of STAYC's debut. Depending on how far in advance of their debut they signed their contracts, they could already be in the sixth year of their seven-year contract. And suddenly the whole album makes sense: They're showing their label that they can sing all of their songs in Japanese, in hopes that the label will start promoting them in Japan and also renew their contract, so that the group can "stay alive"! (I hope it works — I really like STAYC, and I'd hate to see them disband.)

Paradise 2.06 + 2.07

Mar. 23rd, 2026 04:19 pm
selenak: (AnakinVader - tiedyedress)
[personal profile] selenak
In the former, Jane sees herself as Alice to Sinatra's Luther, while in the later, Sinatra is informed it all comes down to Vader and Luke.

Spoilers are saying hello to.... )

Fingers say what?

Mar. 21st, 2026 11:10 am
brithistorian: (Default)
[personal profile] brithistorian

I talk with my hands. This amuses A. to no end: She's the one who's part-Italian and yet I'm the one who can't talk without gesticulating. Whether I'm talking about sending an email (fingers typing on a keyboard), sending a fax (hands palm-down, fingertips guiding the paper into the machine), or chopping vegetables (left hand moving the knife up and down, right hand advancing the the vegetable toward it), I don't even think about it, but my hands accompany my words.

Yesterday, we got some small cucumbers and I was talking about using some of them to make oi muchim (a Korean cucumber salad with thinly sliced cucumbers in a gochugaru-seasoned dressing). I was talking about slicing the cucumbers, and she looked at my hands and asked "What's that?" I looked at my hands and saw that my right hand was flat, palm-up, while my left hand was palm-down, in a claw grip, moving back and forth over my right hand. And then it hit me: When I make oi muchim, I don't slice the cucumbers with a knife. I slice them with a mandoline. And without even thinking about it, my hands were doing to the correct motion for the action I would be doing.

I don't even notice that I'm doing this until she points it out, so I don't know if I could stop it if I tried.

(no subject)

Mar. 17th, 2026 05:28 pm
lycomingst: (Default)
[personal profile] lycomingst
Today was the first day I went to the store without wearing a jacket. The trees are agog with Spring. The ants have returned from wherever they were wintering.
selenak: (Time Lords by Crazy Celebrian)
[personal profile] selenak
Dark Winds, Season 3: continues to be both beautifully acted, thoughtfully and empathically written, and a visual feast. Also heartbreaking in the day it follows up on s2's conclusion for Joe Leaphorn and his wife Emma. Small spoilery remark. ) Also I was more grateful than ever that the show takes place in the 1970s and wasn't updated to the present because Bern's new job with border patrol would have felt very differently even before her subplot kicks in.

Young Sherlock: aka the one by Guy Ritchie which doesn't feel like a prequel to his Holmes movies and is the better for it. I mean, I didn't dislike his first Holmes movie, which was the only one I saw, but I wasn't crazy about it, either, and never felt the need to see it again. Also it was made at a time where all the various iterations of Sherlock Holmes seemed to lean into emphasizing his arrrogance. Now, this show is entertaining fluff with only the vaguest nods to when it's supposed to be set: female students galore in Oxford, 1870, for some reason a rich and high ranking visitor takes the carriage instead of the train to Oxford, while someone in the production team actually remembered the Paris Commune happened, they evidently forgot or ignored both the near starvation of the population part of that and that there was also the Franco-Prussian war going on, so everyone makes a trip to Paris for one episode with no armies in sight, but the Folies Bergeres being in business with dancing girls, etc., etc., etc. Not to mentiion something extremely plot spoilery ) But honestly, because the show doesn't pretend to be anything but fun fluff, I did not mind. What I do suspect is someone in the production team has watched at least some Smallville and thought, hm, that "Clark and Lex were bffs for a while when young before Lex went evil" premise is great, we should do that with Holmes and Moriarty". And proceeded to follow up on this idea. Young Sherlock, played by a member of the gifted Fiennes clan, and young James M, played by Mat (the second one) from Wheel of Time, have the necessary chemistry and homoerotic subtext, they hit it off famously, and at the same time the seeds for future supervillaindom in Moriarty are there. And the show does make it believable these are two young guys smarter than most others around them and on each other's level. Most importantly, though: this Sherlock Holmes is the first one in what feels like eons who is not introduced being a jerk to the people around him. (I love Elementary ! But while Elementary's Sherlock was never as extreme as Sherlock's Sherlock, he, too, started out being rude to his Watson and everyone else.) It might come with the much younger territory, but while he's cocky, he's not (yet?) abrasive, downright tender with his mother, and, lo and behold, civil to people who aren't awful to others in front of him. Otoh, it may also be that Guy Ritchie and his production team watched the last season of Sherlock and thought, hm, dysfunctional Holmes family drama, unexpected relations, we like it, we like it, but how about giving the women better parts? Spoilers were very entertained indeed by the result ) Oh, and absolutely no one gets raped or threatened with rape. Like I said, this fluffy show with a heavy emphasis on the bromance manages to do very well by its female characters. Anyway, whether nor not this gets another season - which it doesn't really need for the story it has told - I enjoyed myself.

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