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shadowkat1. Rumor has it that they are moving Revenge to Sunday nights next year. My response?
Noooo!!! Frigging hell, how many tv shows that I love do you have to put on Sunday? I can't watch all of them! It's hard enough as it is!
Currently we have : OUAT, Good Wife, Mad Men, Masterpiece, Game of Thrones, Girls, and Walking Dead. I do NOT need another favorite show on this night. Wed was perfect for Revenge, I don't like any of the other shows on Wed's - it is a sitcom/reality show/procedural grave yard.
Spread the wealth!!! Have a bit of compassion to those of us who prefer serials. Don't put them all on the same night! Stupid HBO, AMC and PBS put all their best and original series on Sunday nights. But at least HBO and AMC rerun. PBS not so much. Dammit. The reason I'm not watch The Killing - is I can't watch EVERYTHING!
2. Big Bang Theory is entertaining me.
Sheldon: Is this what male belly-aching about girlfriends is about? I complain, you complain, but no one offers any real solutions?
Leonard: Pretty much.
Sheldon: No wonder the women are winning.
LOL! Except unfortunately this is not gender specific, we do the same thing. I love Big Bang because it really depicts how difficult human relationships are. And the characters feel so real - very few sitcoms depict real characters, which is my problem with sitcoms.
I don't believe them. Friends and HIMYM have pretty people in posh apartments, I'm sorry no. Or okay, yes, but ugh, I hate these people in my neighborhood, I don't want to watch them on tv. Go AWAY! Admittedly I liked Friends in the 1990s and 2000, but this was before my neighborhood got gentrified and when I was the same age as the characters. Or slightly younger. (Yes, I'm the same age as Courtney Cox, Jennifer Aniston, Matthew Perry, etc...)
3. Mad Men - I don't like the episodes that focus on Betty Draper/whatever her new last name is. I can't stand that character - she is so whiny. Whiny characters grate on my nerves. I know, I'm probably in the minority on this. But the episode before that which focused on Meghan and Pete Campbell, was interesting. I particularly identified with this conversation between Roger and Don:
Don: Meghan wants to pursue her dreams. She's good at advertising. But she dreams of being an actress...who am I to stop her? I don't want her becoming like Betty.
Roger: See...I never really saw a career as being something you dreamed of wanting to do or loved to do. My Dad ordered me to do it. So I did it. There wasn't really a choice.
Don: I grew up in the 30's...my dream was indoor plumbing.
Then this week's episode...the conversation between Meghan and her friend...
Friend: It's easy for you. You can do whatever you want. You don't need this job.
Meghan: You don't think I wouldn't kill for that audition? For any part? Even for a crappy show like this? I'd die for that part.
Friend: Yes, I get that. I'm sorry. I'm really stressed. But you see - I need the money so bad. You have your rich husband, you aren't worrying where your next meal is coming from, you aren't waiting tables to make ends meet.
Meghan was even able to quit her cushy job as an advertising copywriter.
Virgina Woolfe: In order to be a writer, one most need money and a room of one's own.
People see this as a feminist statement. I see it as a classist one. It is hard to write if you have to work really hard for a living. 5 days a week. 8 hours a day. Exhausted when you come home. Stealing time to write. After doing nothing but writing business emails and memos and letters all day long.
And then online, I saw a post that made me realize something...our luck is so much more than skin color, ethnicity or gender related...it's deeper and more complicated than that.
It's who our parents are, what our education was, who our friends are, our connections,
our lovers, our ability to have children, the opportunities and choices placed in our path.
I think sometimes everyone is dealt a hand of cards, with good and bad cards, we can't choose the hand - that's dealer's choice, but like any good poker player we can choose how to play that hand.
I struggle with my own choices. Hampered by the cards I've been dealt and aided, that too.
I do not know what I want. In that way, I'm more like Betty Draper than Meghan, which may explain why I can't stand the character. I want to be a writer - but I don't at the same time. I don't want the fame, fortune, the tinkering with my work, I don't want the criticism or the constant changing and altering of every sentence to fit what may or may not be in some editor's head. I want to be a writer and an artist on my terms not the world's. I look at all the jobs in the world and I see clearly the ups and downs of all of them...and I feel a bit like Buffy on Career Day. I've fallen into my own career, I did not choose it exactly and half the time I wish I could change it, but to what?
I do not know really what I want so much as what I do not want. I can't figure out the goals to get what I think I want...because that seems to change. I wish life was as easy and clear-cut as it is in all those self-help books.
4. I just finished a very disturbing contemporary romance novel (that I'm half convinced although I cannot prove it was once upon a time a Spuffy fanfic). The story is about a 19 year old girl who leaves Wichita, Kansas with her best friend for a school that I'm guessing is about two days away by car. So possibly in Eastern Oklahoma. She's fleeing her drunkard Mom and her down-on-his luck Dad, a former top poker player, drunk and gambler. She wants a new life away from that world. Apparently as a teen she was a top poker player. Named "Lucky Thirteen". Her father's luck ran out, and she won all the games. Her best friend, America, gets involved with a pseudo-bad boy who runs with a tough crowd. His roommate Travis "Mad Dog" Maddox smokes, rides a bike, drinks, whores, and fights for money - in an underground fight club. Travis has slept with pretty much everyone and is a womanizer. Until he spies Abby, the heroine at one of his fights. He pursues her. Calls her pigeon (an annoying nickname that grated on my nerves throughout the book and reminded me of Lady and the Tramp - Pidge). Finally at one of his fights, he bets her that if he can win without getting hit once, she has to stay in his apartment a month (she's already stayed with him for two weeks because her dorm showers were out of hot water, sleeping next to him in his bed no less), if he wins - he is celibate for a month. He wins. He's celibate, they stay together. The last night they are together, they have sex. All the while, she's dating this other guy, a nice guy pre-med student, who is a frat brother of Travis'. The story doesn't make a lot of sense in places and is poorly executed. The author is too invested in making Abby's backstory a surprise..which admittedly was what was keeping me interested, my curiousity about who in the hell Abby was and what her issues were. So if that hadn't been kept a secret, I would never have finished the book. The sex scenes are rudimentary, the dialogue is boilerplate, and the plot is down-right disturbing. By the end of the book - I was rooting for the heroine to leave the hero for good and hook up with the pre-med student. The hero wasn't going to change, was violent, and I feared if she stuck with him - she'd end up dead or in prison. Instead she marries him in Vegas and get's Mrs. Maddox tattooed across her stomach - which ugh, really bothered me.
This is the problem with contemporary romance novels they are scary. Although...oddly comforting to single women. You think, well, at least I don't have that to come home to.
Thank you, God.
Historicals oddly aren't. Maybe it's the difference in time periods?
Will state there's no rape in this book, well outside of an attempted rape but it is written so poorly that I couldn't quite figure out what it was. An it's not by the hero.
This isn't a bodice ripper, nor is it erotica - there is very little sex in this book.
And it's nothing like 50 Shades. Which explains why 50 Shades did so well.
Part of the reason, The Avengers, 50 Shades, Twilight (okay maybe not Twilight) and Harry Potter have taken off like gangbusters is they are in genres that don't have a lot of good reads. HP was in Young Adult fantasy with Wizards, prior to Potter...you basically had a lot of Tolkien and CS Lewis rip-offs (I know I tried to read them), Potter was a fresh take on an old idea. 50 Shades same deal - if you've read any erotica or contemporary romance - you know whereof I speak - this stuff isn't very good. It's horrifically bad, actually. Some of it is downright frightening. 50 Shades...was a fresh take on an old idea.
Same deal with The Avengers - no one has been able to pull off an ensemble super-hero flick. Oh they keep trying and keep failing. Even tv shows. It's hard to do, apparently.
X-Men flicks were possibly the closest we got to one. But those didn't have big-name talent, except for Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellan...Hugh Jackman was an unknown at the time and Anna Pacquin...okay, maybe. Granted X-Men First Class may qualify, but it's not as good as The Avengers. Nor does it involve five heroes who got separate back-story individual movies. Doing this sort of thing is lot harder than it looks. People don't get that. You've had to have seen a lot of super-hero movies and tv shows to understand how hard it is.
There's a benefit to reading and watching a lot of crappy things and a lot of amazing things, you appreciate the good stuff a bit more.
Noooo!!! Frigging hell, how many tv shows that I love do you have to put on Sunday? I can't watch all of them! It's hard enough as it is!
Currently we have : OUAT, Good Wife, Mad Men, Masterpiece, Game of Thrones, Girls, and Walking Dead. I do NOT need another favorite show on this night. Wed was perfect for Revenge, I don't like any of the other shows on Wed's - it is a sitcom/reality show/procedural grave yard.
Spread the wealth!!! Have a bit of compassion to those of us who prefer serials. Don't put them all on the same night! Stupid HBO, AMC and PBS put all their best and original series on Sunday nights. But at least HBO and AMC rerun. PBS not so much. Dammit. The reason I'm not watch The Killing - is I can't watch EVERYTHING!
2. Big Bang Theory is entertaining me.
Sheldon: Is this what male belly-aching about girlfriends is about? I complain, you complain, but no one offers any real solutions?
Leonard: Pretty much.
Sheldon: No wonder the women are winning.
LOL! Except unfortunately this is not gender specific, we do the same thing. I love Big Bang because it really depicts how difficult human relationships are. And the characters feel so real - very few sitcoms depict real characters, which is my problem with sitcoms.
I don't believe them. Friends and HIMYM have pretty people in posh apartments, I'm sorry no. Or okay, yes, but ugh, I hate these people in my neighborhood, I don't want to watch them on tv. Go AWAY! Admittedly I liked Friends in the 1990s and 2000, but this was before my neighborhood got gentrified and when I was the same age as the characters. Or slightly younger. (Yes, I'm the same age as Courtney Cox, Jennifer Aniston, Matthew Perry, etc...)
3. Mad Men - I don't like the episodes that focus on Betty Draper/whatever her new last name is. I can't stand that character - she is so whiny. Whiny characters grate on my nerves. I know, I'm probably in the minority on this. But the episode before that which focused on Meghan and Pete Campbell, was interesting. I particularly identified with this conversation between Roger and Don:
Don: Meghan wants to pursue her dreams. She's good at advertising. But she dreams of being an actress...who am I to stop her? I don't want her becoming like Betty.
Roger: See...I never really saw a career as being something you dreamed of wanting to do or loved to do. My Dad ordered me to do it. So I did it. There wasn't really a choice.
Don: I grew up in the 30's...my dream was indoor plumbing.
Then this week's episode...the conversation between Meghan and her friend...
Friend: It's easy for you. You can do whatever you want. You don't need this job.
Meghan: You don't think I wouldn't kill for that audition? For any part? Even for a crappy show like this? I'd die for that part.
Friend: Yes, I get that. I'm sorry. I'm really stressed. But you see - I need the money so bad. You have your rich husband, you aren't worrying where your next meal is coming from, you aren't waiting tables to make ends meet.
Meghan was even able to quit her cushy job as an advertising copywriter.
Virgina Woolfe: In order to be a writer, one most need money and a room of one's own.
People see this as a feminist statement. I see it as a classist one. It is hard to write if you have to work really hard for a living. 5 days a week. 8 hours a day. Exhausted when you come home. Stealing time to write. After doing nothing but writing business emails and memos and letters all day long.
And then online, I saw a post that made me realize something...our luck is so much more than skin color, ethnicity or gender related...it's deeper and more complicated than that.
It's who our parents are, what our education was, who our friends are, our connections,
our lovers, our ability to have children, the opportunities and choices placed in our path.
I think sometimes everyone is dealt a hand of cards, with good and bad cards, we can't choose the hand - that's dealer's choice, but like any good poker player we can choose how to play that hand.
I struggle with my own choices. Hampered by the cards I've been dealt and aided, that too.
I do not know what I want. In that way, I'm more like Betty Draper than Meghan, which may explain why I can't stand the character. I want to be a writer - but I don't at the same time. I don't want the fame, fortune, the tinkering with my work, I don't want the criticism or the constant changing and altering of every sentence to fit what may or may not be in some editor's head. I want to be a writer and an artist on my terms not the world's. I look at all the jobs in the world and I see clearly the ups and downs of all of them...and I feel a bit like Buffy on Career Day. I've fallen into my own career, I did not choose it exactly and half the time I wish I could change it, but to what?
I do not know really what I want so much as what I do not want. I can't figure out the goals to get what I think I want...because that seems to change. I wish life was as easy and clear-cut as it is in all those self-help books.
4. I just finished a very disturbing contemporary romance novel (that I'm half convinced although I cannot prove it was once upon a time a Spuffy fanfic). The story is about a 19 year old girl who leaves Wichita, Kansas with her best friend for a school that I'm guessing is about two days away by car. So possibly in Eastern Oklahoma. She's fleeing her drunkard Mom and her down-on-his luck Dad, a former top poker player, drunk and gambler. She wants a new life away from that world. Apparently as a teen she was a top poker player. Named "Lucky Thirteen". Her father's luck ran out, and she won all the games. Her best friend, America, gets involved with a pseudo-bad boy who runs with a tough crowd. His roommate Travis "Mad Dog" Maddox smokes, rides a bike, drinks, whores, and fights for money - in an underground fight club. Travis has slept with pretty much everyone and is a womanizer. Until he spies Abby, the heroine at one of his fights. He pursues her. Calls her pigeon (an annoying nickname that grated on my nerves throughout the book and reminded me of Lady and the Tramp - Pidge). Finally at one of his fights, he bets her that if he can win without getting hit once, she has to stay in his apartment a month (she's already stayed with him for two weeks because her dorm showers were out of hot water, sleeping next to him in his bed no less), if he wins - he is celibate for a month. He wins. He's celibate, they stay together. The last night they are together, they have sex. All the while, she's dating this other guy, a nice guy pre-med student, who is a frat brother of Travis'. The story doesn't make a lot of sense in places and is poorly executed. The author is too invested in making Abby's backstory a surprise..which admittedly was what was keeping me interested, my curiousity about who in the hell Abby was and what her issues were. So if that hadn't been kept a secret, I would never have finished the book. The sex scenes are rudimentary, the dialogue is boilerplate, and the plot is down-right disturbing. By the end of the book - I was rooting for the heroine to leave the hero for good and hook up with the pre-med student. The hero wasn't going to change, was violent, and I feared if she stuck with him - she'd end up dead or in prison. Instead she marries him in Vegas and get's Mrs. Maddox tattooed across her stomach - which ugh, really bothered me.
This is the problem with contemporary romance novels they are scary. Although...oddly comforting to single women. You think, well, at least I don't have that to come home to.
Thank you, God.
Historicals oddly aren't. Maybe it's the difference in time periods?
Will state there's no rape in this book, well outside of an attempted rape but it is written so poorly that I couldn't quite figure out what it was. An it's not by the hero.
This isn't a bodice ripper, nor is it erotica - there is very little sex in this book.
And it's nothing like 50 Shades. Which explains why 50 Shades did so well.
Part of the reason, The Avengers, 50 Shades, Twilight (okay maybe not Twilight) and Harry Potter have taken off like gangbusters is they are in genres that don't have a lot of good reads. HP was in Young Adult fantasy with Wizards, prior to Potter...you basically had a lot of Tolkien and CS Lewis rip-offs (I know I tried to read them), Potter was a fresh take on an old idea. 50 Shades same deal - if you've read any erotica or contemporary romance - you know whereof I speak - this stuff isn't very good. It's horrifically bad, actually. Some of it is downright frightening. 50 Shades...was a fresh take on an old idea.
Same deal with The Avengers - no one has been able to pull off an ensemble super-hero flick. Oh they keep trying and keep failing. Even tv shows. It's hard to do, apparently.
X-Men flicks were possibly the closest we got to one. But those didn't have big-name talent, except for Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellan...Hugh Jackman was an unknown at the time and Anna Pacquin...okay, maybe. Granted X-Men First Class may qualify, but it's not as good as The Avengers. Nor does it involve five heroes who got separate back-story individual movies. Doing this sort of thing is lot harder than it looks. People don't get that. You've had to have seen a lot of super-hero movies and tv shows to understand how hard it is.
There's a benefit to reading and watching a lot of crappy things and a lot of amazing things, you appreciate the good stuff a bit more.
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Date: 2012-05-21 07:46 am (UTC)Nods.
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Date: 2012-05-22 11:08 am (UTC)