shadowkat | (no subject)

1. Oh, I'm loving Bob Hearts Abishola -- the weak link up to this week had been Bob's family, but this week makes up for that. They were hilarious this week.

Co-worker: So I tried Bob Hearts Abishola. And I don't think it's going to last.
Me: Why? I love Bob Hearts Abishola.
Co-worker: It's too clever.
Me: That's why I like it. Although you're probably right, the shows I love usually get cancelled.
Co-worker: Yep. It's clever. The Neighborhood is good too.
ME: There's only three I like at the moment...The Connors, which is well written. And well-acted. Bob Hearts Abishola, ditto. And The Good Place.

Of the three - The Good Place is on it's last season. Although it doesn't make me laugh as loud as Bob Hearts Abishola, which has the cleverest social satire on race and gender politics on at the moment.

Best shows of the new season so far?

*Bob Hearts Abishola (only keeper in the sitcom category)

* Prodigal Son

* Stumptown

* Batwoman

Everything else is okay. I'm sticking with Nancy Drew and Emergence for now. But have pretty much given up on the rest.

You have to be picky. Too many television shows, too little time.

2. Crappy day. I wanted to smack people by the end of it.

Me (minding my own business and picking up something my boss ordered me to print off from the printer)
Co-worker: Oh, you couldn't hear me because you have head phones on. Is my stuff in there?
Me: Is this yours? (She nods. I hand it to her.) And yeah, the earphones keep my blood pressure down and blocks out the world.
Co-worker: It's not safe. You shouldn't wear them. That's what I tell my kids, when they block me out.
Me: No comment.
Co-worker: If an insane shooter came into the office you wouldn't hear them. And we'd all evacuate and you'd be shot.
ME: It doesn't block out that much. I can hear the fire alarm.
Co-worker: You couldn't hear me.
ME: Could you please keep these insane scenarios to yourself.
Co-worker: I like to think out all the worst case scenarios, so I'm safe.
ME: You are as bad as Claudia was -- you like drive my blood pressure up. (I so wanted to smack her. There are people at work that just have a sign on them that says "SMACK ME" in big red letters.)

I tell this to my mother.

Mother: You should have just said, "let them kill me, I don't care."
ME: No, I should have said what I was thinking which was -- shame they don't come in and shoot her. I'd like to shoot her. She drives my blood pressure up. Hence the ear phones -- so I can block people like her out.

So...mother turns to politics.

ME: I really wish people would stop speculating about who will an election in November 2020. OR saying Trump won't be impeached. No one knows. Anything can happen. You can't see all the variables. Stop it.
Mother: Everyone is terrified that Warren and Saunders will get the ticket and they'll lose their 401 K's and supplemental insurance.
Me: It's not even 2020 yet. What the hell? Either one could die before then, they are both over the age of 70, it's not like they are young and in top shape.
Mother: Saunder's plan would do away with all insurance.
ME: First of all, he can't just do that. It's not how it works. Second, the idiot is 78 and just had a heart-attack, he probably won't make it to November 2020.
Mother: I don't know, he's doing very well.. And people also think stock market will crash...
Me: It will not. That's not how it works. People are stupid greedy selfish assholes. Who only care about themselves.
Mother (laughs): This is true.

I meditated for twenty minutes and successfully reduced my blood pressure. Go me.
I'm getting quite good at this meditation thing.

3. Am tempted to get the audible version of Book of Dust -- I have the hardcover, which I need to read. Just haven't gotten around to it. The audible version is being read by Michael Sheen. But I'm horrible at listening to audible books or podcasts. I'm thinking this may be a genetic thing? My parents suck at it too.

4. Went back into the Ancestry.com - after my Uncle, whose into this stuff, posted that the DNA thing had updated again.

So?

41% Irish
35% English, Welsh, etc.
11% Germanic Europe
10% Sweden
3% Norway

Still not that interesting or surprising. The problem is that my mother's DNA isn't in the database and not a lot of her family is in there. So this is mostly my Dad's side. And Ancestry has major databases in Ireland.

Also Germany lost a lot of it's records during WWI and WWII, and Sweden/Norway didn't exactly keep much. Belgium and France had similar issues during WWII.

So, how accurate all of this is...

Uncle attempted to regale my parents with this information, which I found hilarious.
First off, my father can barely keep track of what day it is, and can't remember his address. And my mother has no interest. She really doesn't understand why anyone would be remotely curious. When her Aunt Mabel was doing it -- she thought it was nuts.

For the Europeans out there? This is a popular American past time -- to see which cool portion of Europe, Asia and Africa that you hail from. Mainly because Americans are sort of insecure about being well Americans.

4. Star Wars Trailer

Well, the trailer's great. But I will read all the reviews prior to forking up money to see it in a theater. I do not trust them. And I won't drag my poor decrepit mother to it at Christmas. I drug her to Last Jedi and she went to sleep during the first half of it, and this wasn't really that big a deal.

I think my parents lost interest after Return of the Jedi...which, alas, was the best of the films that followed Empire. Although I liked Force Awakens, it had potential. Shame all the cool subplots didn't pan out.

Also, it appears they dropped Finn/Rey, and Poe/Rey never took off. So can I have Poe/Finn?

And I appear to be the only fan who doesn't care about Kylo Ren. I don't. I'm ambivalent. I don't care if he lives or dies. I like the actor, the character? Meh.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I'm not sure if you're counting Rogue One, but I thought that was the best of the post Empire movies.

No, I wasn't counting Rogue One. It's sort of outside the series in a way? Similar to Solo, and the television shows. I'm only counting the prequels, the original three, and the ones under the Rey/Poe/Finn arc.

That's fair.

Although of the films I've seen since Empire, I'd rank it up there.
If not before Force Awakens, close behind it. It was among the better films in the Star Wars franchise.

Yeah, I thought TFA was good too. If you exclude Rogue One, I'd choose TFA as the best post-Empire movie.

Were you wearing noise-cancelling headphones, without music etc? If so, which were they? I bought some Sony ones today, but they don't seem to do anything at all.

Bose Quiet Comfort Series 35 II - noise cancelling headphones. I did have music. But you can do without music too.

https://www.amazon.com/Bose-QuietComfort-Wireless-Headphones-Cancelling/dp/B0756CYWWD

Got them on Amazon. You can also get them from Bose direct. Cubical mate has them and he rec'd them. They are amazing. Get me through the day and the commute.

I don't know much about Norway in terms of geneaology, but Swedish records are mostly pretty good at least as far back as the late 16th century, though they mostly consist of records of births and deaths and not much detail in between. From reformation up to a few decades ago, each parish priest was responsible for keeping records of the people in their parish, and they mostly took that pretty seriously. Far from all of it is digitised, though, so it usually involves a lot of reading actual physical documents and sharing them in various forums, so it's not usually searchable.

The main problem is that we mostly didn't do surnames until the late 19th century, so you have to do a lot of detective work to tell one Erik Andersson, son of Anders Eriksson from all the hundreds of other Erik Andersson, son of Anders Eriksson, son of Erik Andersson, son of...

The actual DNA records, though, are fairly spotty since not a lot of people have done that test so there's no real critical mass of Typical Genetic Swede™. My mom did it a while back and didn't really find out anything she didn't already know from proper geneaology - about 7/8 Swedish and 1/8 Forest Finn. Plus obviously, in large parts of Europe, if you go back a few hundred years the borders have often moved around so it becomes pointless to hang a modern-day nationality on your great great great great grandfather.

I don't really know how Ancestry does it. I do know that the family members who were the most invested are living in Ireland. So that's probably why that portion has been traced.

It's interesting that I have Scandinavian DNA (albeit not that much, 11%), but not too surprising -- at one point Norway/Finland and Sweden sent women to the Irish aisles apparently. (I read about it somewhere, can't remember where -- whether it's true or not? I don't know.) OTOH -- I can't seem to trace the DNA to a specific person, so who it is coming from and how they traced it, I have no idea.

I'm very skeptical of all of this. Because I agree -- while you can go back a certain period of time, after that point-- it's hard to know. The boundaries kept shifting. Pre-Roman times, a good portion of Europe was basically Gaul. Nationalities were rather fluid, and people were nomadic, they moved around a lot. Also, as stated above, I'm not entirely sure how they are determining ancestry, when they don't appear able to trace it to a specific ancestor from a specific region.

I know a whole lot of people who don't care about Kylo Ren. And some who absolutely loathe the character.

He's a decent enough villain. Not the best written, but no one in this trilogy is. Good actor, does his job as an evil-doer. *shrug* My desire for him to die onscreen is more about a not-so-secret desire to have his most annoying fans thwarted, to be honest.

My desire for him to die onscreen is more about a not-so-secret desire to have his most annoying fans thwarted, to be honest.

LOL!

I can totally understand that.

I don't loath Kylo Ren, I just don't care one way or the other. Nor do I really like the Rey/Kylo ship -- I prefer her with Poe or Finn or solo, to be honest.
I have a feeling she's going the solo route -- because that's so Abrhams.

If Rey/Kylo happens in IX, I doubt I'd ever watch it. But I figure it'll be more of what we got in TLJ: some ship-tease with nothing tangible, all in all. And yeah, I expect single Rey at the end of IX, even if Kylo Ren is alive in some form or another. Even if Finn and Poe are both single as well.

That's my prediction as well. I just don't see this going Rey/Kylo. Nor did I see that in TLJ. I don't see Rey trying to save Kylo again like Luke did Vader. Different dynamic.

I could be wrong. TLJ admittedly threw me. It didn't follow the thread established in FA at all, which was a bit jarring. Actually it seemed to drop the threads established in FA as if...oh, that's not all that interesting, I'm going off to do my own thing instead.

So, I'm curious to see how Abrams pulls it back to the threads established in FA, without dumping TLJ.

My guess is that no, there won't be any ships in Rise of Skywalker. Because the whole point of these films was to wrap up the storyline of Luke/Leia/Han and set up the new world franchise. Disney wants to end this arc but keep the world and franchise going in different directions.
To do that, it works better to leave things a bit more open-ended. Close off Han, Leia, Luke, but allow Rey, Finn and Poe to remain single entities that could potentially go off and do separate films.

Open-ended is what I expect as well, for all kinds of plot points and characters. This is why I think Kylo Ren won't die onscreen. To my slight disappointment.

TLJ admittedly threw me. It didn't follow the thread established in FA at all, which was a bit jarring. Actually it seemed to drop the threads established in FA as if...oh, that's not all that interesting, I'm going off to do my own thing instead.
Mmm, yup. I saw someone phrase it as "Rian Johnson didn't play the 'yes, and' game", referring to rules of good improv.

Open-ended is what I expect as well, for all kinds of plot points and characters. This is why I think Kylo Ren won't die onscreen. To my slight disappointment.

I'd agree with that. They'll probably have him die but not die -- or as you put it, fall off a cliff...into the mists. That leaves things open-ended.

I'm not sure what Rian Johnson was trying to do exactly -- except that he got caught up in presenting a specific message and changing the verse. Which is fine. But I wish he could have done it by following the story thread that had been set-up in TFA, instead of dropping it and doing his own thing.