Tabbyclaw

Do we have anything other than speculation to support that theory, though? It's certainly my headcanon, and there's the line in The Trial Of Audrey Parker about Nathan not having listened to his dad since he was six years old, but as far as I can tell we're still just inferring it as a likely scenario.

Or maybe uselessness is less a cover and more a good trait to have in a mole. They might just be too dumb to realize that they shouldn't be sharing the information they are, and even if there's a lot of dross to sift through when you get info from those two there might be some gems getting passed along. And any indicator that they're accidental informants is likely to get written off as part of their general stupidity.

I'm not sure Max could have not known. We don't know when he went to jail the first time, but we know he was out at such a time as to be a suspect in the Colorado Kid murder when Nathan was seven, and it would have been easy to track down his wife/girlfriend and discover that she'd taken up with Garland.

I feel similarly about older outdated special effects versus newer outdated special effects. When there's a jump cut and the actor playing the vampire has been replaced by a rubber bat on a string, it's cheesy but there's a sort of silent pact with the audience where the filmmakers represent the story as best they can and we agree to recognize their intentions and pretend not to see the string. But in later works, where they're using every animatronic and CGI creature and clever camera trick they can find to make everything look perfectly realistic, there's not the same agreement. You tried to make this look real and you failed, and we can do better now so you don't get a pass for it.

Forget Nina; I went through Maes Hughes twice.

I'm a big believer in the idea that there is no shame in liking something that harms nobody (said the 31-year-old woman, looking up from the Princess Celestia toy she was busily crocheting), and thus I don't have any songs or shows or hobbies that I really consider "guilty pleasures." I roll my windows down and sing along to Call Me Maybe and Never Gonna Give You Up (although for the latter I vastly prefer the version someone made that's a mashup with The Hand That Feeds). I still listen to Linkin Park and Evanescence. I own seven Rush albums, which apparently is something I shouldn't ever admit to. I have no shame. I do, however, have a whole subcategory of songs that I love with a fierce joy even while parts of my own brain are going, "Really? We like this? Really?" I'll admit that some of the Rush stuff is in that category. So is Coldplay's Every Teardrop Is A Waterfall, which is less "Really? We like this?" and more "Really? This makes us cry?" And right at the top of that list right now is The Phoenix by Fall Out Boy. A little voice in the back of my head keeps telling me that it's a ridiculous song and the lyrics are the dorkiest thing ever, but the rest of me is singing along too loudly to hear it.

Smash was much like the musical its characters were trying to create: Some really good songs, but nothing stringing them together. Anyone remember New Amsterdam? 300-year-old man blessed/cursed to live without ageing or dying until he finds his soulmate becomes a police detective, convinces everyone that he's some kind of supergenius because he's spent several lifetimes just learning everything he possibly can. And one of his hobbies is making furniture that convinces even the best appraisers that it's antique because it bears all the hallmarks of this one really impressive old-world craftsman who was, you know, him. Interesting premise, really beautiful show, and the three main characters (John Amsterdam, his lady cop partner who suspects Shenanigans, and his best friend who is a very old man who is actually his son) were just ridiculously, unexpectedly likeable. And then they brought in the love interest, and the B-plot of the entire season -- they only got the one -- was John trying to find and connect with this unappealing, inconsistently-written woman he was briefly convinced was his soulmate. The show withered and died because it was expending all its effort trying to make us care about the one plot thread that absolutely nobody cared about and ignoring all the interesting bits.

I'd prefer to watch everything live, and I do when that's an option, but if it's an older show that I'm just now finding I am a binge addict. TV episodes are like potato chips, and marathons are an excuse to get some serious knitting done. I watched the first two seasons of Haven twice (once discovering it for myself, once grabbing my equally-bingey best friend and telling him he totally had to watch this show; he was gonna love it and it was gonna be our new thing we watch together) in about a month, and I think all of Brooklyn Nine-Nine took me a couple days. My most recent mega-binge was Fullmetal Alchemist. Both of them. In about... you know what, let's just leave it at "far less time than it should take someone to watch two entire series; I am unemployed and have no social life stop looking at me like that." (For the record, I do not recommend doing this. At least take a break in between the two.) Right now I'm binge-watching Psych, which I watched weekly when it was new but gave up on early in the third season. I decided I should give it another chance now that it's over, and I don't know if it's the bingeing or just the knowledge that it has an endpoint but I'm finding myself more forgiving of it. All the elements that made me walk away from it the first time are still present, and are getting worse (Shawn is the most obnoxious manchild in the history of television, virtually all the female criminals are motivated by either wanting a man or being rejected by one, the writers are too busy cramming in pop culture references to actually give half of the episodes plots), but this time around I'm more willing to shrug and say, "Whatever. I'm watching for Lassiter and Jules' partnership, and occasionally Gus and/or Henry." And with shows I don't have previous experience with, I think bingeing makes me more likely to fall even harder for something I probably would have liked, but not as obsessively. I am absolutely sure I'd have adored Haven had I come across it when it first started -- there are times when I look at the show and go, "You wrote that bit just for me, didn't you?" -- but if I'd had the slow burn of waiting a week between episodes I don't know if I'd have been already making a list of the fanfics I wanted to write for it by about the fifth episode. Same with Fullmetal Alchemist; I probably would have quite liked it at the pace of a sane person, but I also probably would not have told a friend I was at risk for exploding into a glittery cloud of feelings regarding Riza Hawkeye once I finished it/them. (I was at least aware even as I said it that it was a weird thing to say.)

And wave their loads and loads of guns around with no concept of firearm safety, don't forget that bit. And wear black leather and get tattoos. The planning process for Dauntless appears to have begun and ended with asking a group of eight-year-old boys what makes someone tough.

Slogged through the first one, got the second from the library for completion's sake (I had somehow gotten it into my head that there were only going to be two), quickly realized that A) it was not the last book, and B) I could not remember how the first had ended and didn't actually care. I think the first warning that these were not going to be good books was that the names of the factions aren't all the same part of speech.

...How are cutting gum out of your hair, resigning yourself to the arguing of your kids, and taking the last seat on the bus "being true to yourself"?

They got my attention with Karen Gillan. They got my "I will watch this if it's nothing but them reading German banking law for a half hour every week" with the combination of Karen Gillan and John Cho.

I can't think of a more perfect person to star in a version where it's about making Eliza appealing on the inside rather than the outside. Not because I think there's anything wrong with Karen Gillan's inside (she comes across to me as "maybe not the brightest, but quite sweet"), but because I cannot think of a single celebrity who doesn't have a more appealing outside already. She is literally the only actress who has ever made me jealous because I know I'll never be that pretty.

Ending the season with our first discovery that, whatever flaws this show may have, it does killer finales. My first experience with the show came in the form of a full-series binge between seasons two and three, and even stopping here just because I'd said I was only going to watch to the end of the season that day was torture. My sympathies to all the first-run fans who had to wait through the entire hiatus. This one's such a "Where do I even start" episode. Audrey is still reeling from last episode's revelation when Duke hits her up for help with Tattoo Guy. Except it turns out that Tattoo Guy could be one of any number of people, and this particular guy isn't him. But he is Nathan's biological father. And now Nathan's father and his dad are both dead. And just when everyone is starting to maybe get a handle on all of that insanity, here comes someone else claiming to be Audrey. I'd say "It's a good thing one of them owns a bar," but when do they have time to drink it all away? And is there actually enough alcohol in the world? Trivia: Someone leaked Emily Rose a copy of the script before she was supposed to have it, and the writers couldn't understand why she was so freaked out about it. It hadn't ocurred to them that "Here's a new character who is apparently your character" sounds a lot like "You're being replaced and we haven't gotten around to telling you yet."

I'm fairly certain that when they say things like that, they're talking about being aware of your form, not necessarily getting into a "totally in the moment" headspace. Just paying enough attention that you can go, "Wait, I should be feeling this movement in that muscle; do I have my hips in the right place? No; I need to hold them like this. Okay, now I'm feeling it." I had a (too-)brief stint of physical therapy last year, and one of the therapists was quick to point out my tendency to drift out of certain positions and the need for me to recognize that I was doing it and correct myself or I wouldn't actually target the areas that needed the help.

Nah. They're gonna wait until they're 50 and then adopt a set of creepy adult twins from Romania, remember?

Lashes can be inadequate for reasons other than there not being enough of them. If you have a lot of eyelashes but they're still individually thinner and wispier than you'd like, they're still inadequate.

I don't know how to feel about this show. I just know that when the pilot airs I will be there with bells on.

Stupid question for the class: You know those gorgeous Nova Scotia forests they wander through in every other episode? What kind of trees are those?

Amazon, please explain to me how "apparently tailored for ease of use by people with tenuous grips on reality" is a selling point for your Fire TV.

Same here. I've spent the past week or so binge-watching Let's Plays of the Fatal Frame games. And not sleeping very well.

Approaching the end of the first season. I'll probably end up watching "Spiral" tomorrow (or, more likely, later tonight). This episode has always been kind of a non-entity for me. The A-plot is just a vehicle to get us to the reveal, which I think was less "reveal" and more "confirmation of what we all saw coming," and despite the B-plot being a beautiful source of banter it's pretty flimsy. That said, there are certainly things to like about it. For one thing, I find myself unexpectedly fond of Tracy, who was the heart of the episode despite not actually being the Troubled person of the week. As it does so often, the show found an actress who just fit the part perfectly and made her weariness and worry for her family feel real. And of course, this is the episode with The Story About the Tacks. I've always had some sympathy for Nathan's attitude towards Duke, but this is one of the times when I really identified with him about it. I totally get that feeling of this one thing being a microcosm of everything that someone's done to you, and how hard it gets your back up when they don't recognize how significant it was. Although given how quickly and vividly Duke remembered the incident, he may be more aware of that than he'd like to let on. I really liked the way they wrote his eventual apology, having it happen unsolicited and at a moment when he no longer needed Nathan's goodwill.

Last week we had "If you don't help us I'll tell everyone about your severe manic depression and you'll lose your job" and this week we had "this poor brilliant man's bipolar disorder wrecked his life." Yes, writers, we are all terribly proud that you've learned about a new mental illness. Are you done throwing it in? I don't like the "Sherlock is always right about Mycroft being a lying liar who lies" thing they had going. But I like Mycroft's martyring himself for Sherlock even less.

Try "Sunday Bloody Sunday." It's got a good, aggressive energy to it, but when I tried to put it on my walking playlist I found that it was slowing me down.

Moviesnob: