aghst

Arezzo - Kind of uninspiring properties thought the views from the last one were great. In fact, that is one part of Tuscany which seems more worth seeing than I would have thought.

Yasmin gets dumped on by her colleagues and superiors at the office and she gets bullied by her mother at home, where she lives in some basement with an extra room she can let out to Harper, solving her housing problems. But she’s got Richard wrapped around her little finger — though if she’s having sex with her bf yet thinks to send that photographic tease, she’s fooling herself? So far were suppose to get that it’s cutthroat and the probationary newbies are all trying to survive RIF — last hurdle before permanent hire. But all the probationary employees are in different departments so they’re not really competing with each other? Seems like for the most part they get along, party with each other, not trying to get ahead of each other. But Gus doesn’t care, he confronts Sara, daring her to fire him. Eric is a bit of a prick, confronting a major client. But compared to some of the other bosses he’s cool and Harper should feel lucky?

One of the featurettes said they built up Cittagazze rather than shoot abroad, as in Italy since the name is very Italian. So even though It seems the Magesterium should not be any threat to the witches. Then again the one being held captive wasn’t turning into dust and whooshing past the grasp of the soldiers like Queen Skadi. Frankly Mrs. Coulter shouldn’t be this scary to other adults, unless she too has some secret powers. From the previews for the rest of the season Someone noted that the in the books,

Lorraine has a show on HGTV called My Big Italian Adventure, about her renovating a home in a small town in Sicily that she bought for 1 Euro. As they were finishing up the renovations, the contractors showed how the walls of the home would be filled with cement to fill in the gaps or spaces between the rocks, to strengthen it. Lorraine says that sounds like how in America they fill women's faces up.

If she paid at all, it wouldn't be that much investment for her. She could probably sell it and even make money. Unless HGTV was lying about those costs.

Grace had to ask daddy to bail cheating hubby out. But that apartment has to be worth $7-8 million at least, with that terrace with that view. Unless it’s a studio and only has like 800 square feet or something. I know Jon said they couldn’t use it but why not? Couldn’t it be used as collateral and they borrow against it? He lost his job a few months ago but a top oncologist in Manhattan won’t find another job? But daddy won’t refuse Grace and he’s presumably going to leave a lot of money to her and the kid, so maybe an advance on the inheritance.

My DVR shows 2 episodes this Thursday, 11/19/20. It also recorded a short sneak peek. Looks like they filmed shortly after Angelina’s wedding so before the pandemic lockdowns but there are scenes of them joking about the pandemic. Now they says they rented out a resort and will have the extended family there together? So they filmed during the pandemic. Right now there are a lot of new infections attributed to social gatherings in homes — they’re even advising people not to have extended family gatherings for Thanksgiving. But leave it to MTV to have big family gathering during a pandemic, just to be able to air new seasons of their shows. They’re bringing a new season of the Challenge soon too, filmed apparently in September and October.

I think the scene of the appliances arriving was a little contrived. The delivery people probably knew what they were doing but Lorraine and Monica over acted. It looked like an Italian brand plate on those appliances. It’s nice but I wonder how much she time she truly plans to spend in Sambuca. Would be much easier to stay in more glamorous places in Sicily, such as Taormina or Cefalu or Siracusa, with a lot of nice amenities around. Renovation seems to have taken about six months and in the first episode they showed around a 150k budget, including 45k Euros for the adjoining house. Town probably hopes the other 1 euro homes have similar budgets, so the local workers can be busy for awhile. In a few years, it’d be interesting to see how effective these cheap homes with renovation strings attached did for revitalizing these small towns. They’re not too close to attractions so would people live there or even be able to rent out as vacation homes?

Well finished it. So many great characters, including even the villains. You understand why they did what they did. And when revenge comes, it's simple and personal but still very devastating. They don't have these ornate revenge plots, just a bit of tradecraft and a simple type of attack. The creator and the show runner is leaving after 5 seasons, the last of which ran this summer and fall. So a new person is taking over but sounds like the cast are still on board. Lot of suspense for relatively mundane things like losing a tail by changing clothes and dumping a phone and using a burner phone.

I don't think asking directions of strangers, whether you communicate effectively with them or not, is an interesting interaction. No more interesting than asking someone the time. Sometimes they establish a kind of rapport with taxi drivers and maybe they work with the taxi driver to navigate. That may be okay. But it doesn't add a lot to the show to have racers pester bystanders for directions. Many are willing because they see them filming but is there much cultural or entertainment value added there?

That's going to become more and more a quaint relic, even in Europe. Electric car adoption is high over there. They get these tiny cars, smaller than Minis, which will have say 150 km range on a single charge and they cost under 20,000 Euros before incentives. Chinese manufacturers are also going to try to sell cheap electric cars there and also in the US. One year they drove hybrid cars and they were encouraged to drive conservatively so that the meter showing the fuel efficiency would rise. IT was a sponsored thing with Ford so they had to do it. But Europe is looking to ban gas and diesel cars by no later than 2040 and it may be sooner. Diesel cars are cursed after the emissions scandal. Some cities like Paris and London want to band them sooner because of the pollution. London is offering incentives like electric cars don't have to pay a congestion charge and get some free parking and charging. So maybe in a couple of years they will be driving electric on TAR and manual transmission won't matter.

In a foreign country they've never visited, with signage in a foreign language? It's one thing to figure out metro stations in Paris or even London where they place names are in English. But learning where certain streets, districts or attractions are, going in cold? OK the racers typically ask directions from willing locals. How is that necessarily a better thing than using actual navigation tools?

Not a millennial. I’ve driven in Europe with paper maps. Also Garmins with Euro maps. Now have been getting unlocked iPhones and iPads so I can get local data SIM cards and use Google Maps. I can create custom maps with bookmarked destinations and then open them up on my phone. It’s not about paper map skills. It’s about navigating much more efficiently time-wise. The sisters got eliminated in this leg because they couldn’t navigate Paris. I’ve been to the city many times but never drove it, always Metro, some bus, some taxi. If I had to drive using paper map I’d figure it out but might have to pull over once or twice. It shouldn’t have taken them that long. But did their difficulties finding that location make this episode more watchable? I preferred that the blonds survived rather than the sisters, because they were enjoying the experience thinking they’d lost. But I’d rather that the last two teams be much closer and the team survived because they performed better on the tasks, which were all more interesting than the navigation parts of the race.

I mean they're running the same playbook as previous seasons. - Austen is going to be competing with Pringle or so they make it appear, just like he supposedly competed with Shep for Chelsea. - Craig starts out each season, with good personal habits and business going really well. Then as the season goes on, you see he's sleeping in and kind of blowing off doing any work on a given day. You know, what's her name complained about that a few seasons ago. - Shep is always going to have this question about whether he will be the eternal bachelor or will commit to a good woman of substance or whatever and right now, he made it official. Whoop de doo! - Kathryn may be coming into a good place in her dealings with her baby daddy and then boom! I guess they caught a great break because Thomas is gonna Thomas. Leva is for now screen time worthy. But she said in Persian culture you cook for your friends or guests as a gesture of friendship. Oh you mean like every other culture on earth? Except maybe cannibals, who don't cook for you, because you may be the main fare! I'm hoping the pandemic and the emoji will bring something different, not necessarily better but different, to the show. Will they keep going to trendy restaurants and bars to film scenes? It's such a staple of the show and you don't associate South Carolina with lockdowns so do the cast just Zoom with each other the rest of the season or do the producers try to force them together?

HDM: My Daemon the app. Answer some questions and the app will show your your daemon. And display him/her in augmented reality.

Thanks, that's very interesting timeline. Iceland has had its share of increasing new cases too recently so I guess they got it done just under the wire.

So while we're working when the next season will air after the one currently on the air, MTV announced that season 36 of The Challenge is coming back in early December. Season 35 aired from 4/1/20 to 7/22/20, 17 episodes in all including a Reunion episode. So it would be about 8 months between the premier of seasons 35 and 36. That show had been on that kind of tempo 7-8 months between "seasons" the last couple of years. Season 36 was filmed in Iceland. They don't say when it was filmed but it like was after March/April when much of the world locked down non-essential travel -- i.e. tourism. Iceland had been talking about reopening for tourism to all starting in early summer, because they'd fared well with the pandemic during the spring. Not sure if they went ahead with it. Maybe MTV capitalized on this country's willingness to have foreign visitors. Obviously TAR needs more than one country to allow them in. Even then, there may not have been enough flights between countries for TAR to get the racers between countries. Airlines were cutting their flight schedules way back. Some other TV productions planned to shoot and go into production starting in late summer. That was when the spread of the virus was relatively low in many countries. In fact there was talk that Netflix would have an advantage because they had rights to shows filmed in places like Europe and South Korea, which at the time were doing better with preventing new infections. TAR's best chance might have been early summer when Europe was doing relatively well. But they were barring Americans and pretty much all of Asia is also banning Americans from entry.

When would they have filmed this? Did they cut a deal when Iceland was willing to allow tourists in over the summer? When they did the reunion it was during the pandemic right? So they must have been filming some of it then? I could understand if they filmed in fall and winter and we got it in spring. Total Madness season 35 premiered on 4/1/20 and they're able to film another season, edit it and get it back on the air in 8 months? That's a quick turnaround even if there wasn't a pandemic. Hmm, just checking but season 34 first aired in August 28, 2019, just 3 months after the end of season 33 on 5/22/19 -- S33 premiered on 2/6/19. So that's 6-7 months between seasons 33 and 34, with a season airing over a period of 4 months. And it was 8 months between seasons 34 and 35. So this would be 8 months, which is not that unusual. But it always seem like a year between seasons when MTV is obviously filming with maybe a couple of months breaks? Makes you think that the vets, especially those who make it to the final challenges, are starting up like a month or two after they film the end of the previous season, so not much time to train in between. And MTV is probably cranking out the episodes, not doing much in the way of polishing the episodes. Or maybe they finish editing and post production on one or two and then edit the rest of the episodes as the season is airing. In any event, interesting that Bananas is skipping this season. America's Got Talent newbies? Blech.

I know navigation is an essential part of the game, at least design several legs around how well teams navigate. But who in 2020 is poring over a paper map any more for driving directions? If they were allowed smart phones, it would be too easy and it would be about Google skills? Maybe, but it would reflect life and travel as they are now. Well they're allowed to ask bystanders and cab drivers to look stuff up on their phones. So they're kind of going half-way on the restrictions. Many times, the bystanders congregate to watch the filming so they're not really discouraging the racers from borrowing phones. It's just one step removed from them having their own phones handy. Otherwise, they ask bystanders for directions, which introduces randomness since one team might have better luck finding people who knows places well. Its only in the last 10 years or so but phones are indispensable now for traveling abroad. It's inconceivable, the idea of not taking a phone on a trip. You might have to find a wifi connection or know how to get SIM cards for local networks. Isn't that a skill showing how you navigate through a place?

Blonds had the best attitudes. By the time they did the pies they must have figured it was over and decided to enjoy themselves. Didn’t get too stressed when they got lost on the way to the carnival games. Maybe without pressure they enjoyed themselves. But not sure why they fell so far behind from the airport. Navigation could be a problem for them.

It's really one long continuous story about the main character. The cast changes a little, with departures which aren't really explained. One thing is striking to American viewers. The show films in locations Americans rarely see in a show or movie -- Algeria, Damascus, Turkey, Kurd regions, Moscow, etc. The war zones look convincing and they seem to use actual nationals of the countries being portrayed like Kurds, Syrians, etc. Several languages are spoken in addition to French -- English, Russian, Arab, etc. The French characters all speak English well and it makes sense that they'd communicate with Russians and Arabs in English as well as French.

Yeah Sarah is usually not that cross or snarky but this couple was being unrealistic. In fact she’s usually chipper, to a fault. But is she not American herself? Not very tolerant of newbies. They made the right choice though. $300 above their budget. You can spend that much easily per night in Amsterdam hotels.

Not much happened in the pilot. Harper, black girl with the whitest name ever, seems to be faking her way in to high finance. But even with faked transcripts, she’s still the black girl from a “shit uni” with the nose ring. She scores a big transaction after a big client feels her up. OK the client committed half a billion on a deal where she only makes money if the US and China clash militarily in the South China Sea? Nicole the client is that rich but insists on the firm wining and dining her? So did Nicole feel guilty, thus gave her the deal? The rich don’t have guilty consciences and in any event, she could have made the sexual harassment/assault go away. Because we’re suppose to conclude that Harper has a price, which is treating herself to a luxury suite and room service. Also how she acquired the fake transcript, is she suppose to be transactional? Soon as Harper scored the deal her mentor Eric let her know to get rid of the nose ring, which she did right then and there. For a moment, it appeared Harper was going to walk away from Pierson, as she looked at the wine spill stain left by Hari, the last night before he died in a Pierson bathroom stall. She held back on uploading the transcript — BTW, I’ve never had to produce my college transcript for a job but for things like grad school applications, I couldn’t deliver it myself. FInally Harper tapped upload on her phone after taking a selfie of her wolfing down probably a $35 hotel burger with the London skyline view from the Shangri-La Hotel at The Shard. Hari’s death seems to be meant as object lesson for these aspiring bankers, all trying to make the cut at RIF day — 6 months after being hired the day when half of these new hires will be let go. Harper already seems to have figured out what she wants.

BTW, the little girl in the opening credits is suppose to be young Grace? She’s being stimulated by a rich environment, beautiful plants, a snow gloves, blowing bubbles in what looks like a designer perfume ad. Did little Grace have a rich dream life. So the song and the sequence are suppose to be ironic given her current predicament? Suddenly the bubble has burst for her? She shouldn’t have any money problems but her perfect life is shattered now?

Exactly. It would probably be national or international news because the couple relatively high profile, cancer doctor and a therapist with rich clients. Plus the salacious details, the guy has an affair, gets the woman pregnant, is accused of killing her. Now the wife is getting him a high powered defense lawyer?