Pandemic and TV
Mar. 14th, 2020 04:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
avreliaWell, the schools are closed. as of March 16th. It's probably the right decision, but it still freaks me out. Self-isolating while being alone is one thing, self-isolating with husband and kids is totally different. I don’t anticipate a load of free time – just more cooking, cleaning, teaching kids myself and playing with them and stuff.. and all the while being stressed about uncertainty. Fun times!
Won't be able to take kids to playdates, playgrounds, libraries, anywhere. Sitting together in a small apartment for the foreseeable future is not going to be fun. I mean, there are still parks and mountains, and we are fine, and have internet and food and whatnot.
I don't want the panic to eat me up, but it really is affecting. One moment I think we are overdoing it, the next moment I am sure we are not doing enough. I read the new info, but it doesn't help. bouncing back on my fatalism. I didn’t buy toilet paper, and feel rather smug about it. Until our usual stock runs out, I guess.
And it’s raining. Thanks, California. Just in time for crappy mood.
Meanwhile, in Stuff I Watched news.
Altered Carbon, season 2
Altered Carbon is sci-fi series that are well-made, visually gorgeous, and have some ideas, and I have next to nothing to say about them. Everyone says how the first season (that closely follows the book by Richard Morgan) is much better, and I disagree. I found that I mostly forgot about it. It’s another bleak and dreadful future full of horrible violence against women and not only women, of course, but young beautiful women look much cuter dead and broken. I liked it, I liked the characters, and was happy to see faces new to me and familiar – as Dichen Lachman as the sister of main character, or Adam Busch in a small role. And I wanted more – so I was looking forward to the next season, and here it is, and I liked quite a lot. And the lack of graphic sexual violence didn’t make it boring or tame, it made it better, allowing to focus not on naked bodies, but on ways we still can be horrible to each other.
On to the plot (with minor spoilers)
The main feature of the series universe is that human conscience can be recorded on a special device (stalk) and backed up on remote servers, and uploaded into a different body (sleeve), etc. And it resulted in many ways the rich can control the world, and the poor can get screwed. Our Main character is Takeshi Kovacs. In the first season he was in the body of Joel Kinnaman, in the second one he looks like Antony Mackie, but the original – Will Yun Lee is the best.
In the second season Tak is looking for the woman he loved and long thought to be dead – Quellcrist Falconer. He is being helped by his friend AI who looks like Edgar Allan Poe and runs a virtual hotel. And occasionally by Trepp, the bounty hunter, played by Simone Missick. Quellcrist was that ideal person living in flashbacks and memories during the first season, but now she is out of the fridge (literally) and has her own agenda. And not quite her own, too. So, that got so much more interesting.
Ragnarok (Netflix)
6-episode long Norwegian series about a small town in Norway, secretly rules by a family of ice giants. And then a woman with two teenage sons returns to this town (which she left after the death of her husband) and her eldest son Magne becomes Thor, with all associated superpowers. Her youngest, Laurets, is Loki, but doesn’t know it yet. But one simply cannot be more Loki than he is. There are also a large assortment of teenagers who don’t (yet?) associate with any Norse gods, parents of those teenagers, strange chain-smoking old lady who utters cryptic stuff, one-eyed old man who does nothing, ravens flying everywhere, and the problems with ecology due to a plant owned by the family of ice giants. The whole story is not very deep, but entertaining. So far, anyway. Made me to want to read again on actual Norse Mythology, because I realized how skewered I am by MCU canon.
Won't be able to take kids to playdates, playgrounds, libraries, anywhere. Sitting together in a small apartment for the foreseeable future is not going to be fun. I mean, there are still parks and mountains, and we are fine, and have internet and food and whatnot.
I don't want the panic to eat me up, but it really is affecting. One moment I think we are overdoing it, the next moment I am sure we are not doing enough. I read the new info, but it doesn't help. bouncing back on my fatalism. I didn’t buy toilet paper, and feel rather smug about it. Until our usual stock runs out, I guess.
And it’s raining. Thanks, California. Just in time for crappy mood.
Meanwhile, in Stuff I Watched news.
Altered Carbon, season 2
Altered Carbon is sci-fi series that are well-made, visually gorgeous, and have some ideas, and I have next to nothing to say about them. Everyone says how the first season (that closely follows the book by Richard Morgan) is much better, and I disagree. I found that I mostly forgot about it. It’s another bleak and dreadful future full of horrible violence against women and not only women, of course, but young beautiful women look much cuter dead and broken. I liked it, I liked the characters, and was happy to see faces new to me and familiar – as Dichen Lachman as the sister of main character, or Adam Busch in a small role. And I wanted more – so I was looking forward to the next season, and here it is, and I liked quite a lot. And the lack of graphic sexual violence didn’t make it boring or tame, it made it better, allowing to focus not on naked bodies, but on ways we still can be horrible to each other.
On to the plot (with minor spoilers)
The main feature of the series universe is that human conscience can be recorded on a special device (stalk) and backed up on remote servers, and uploaded into a different body (sleeve), etc. And it resulted in many ways the rich can control the world, and the poor can get screwed. Our Main character is Takeshi Kovacs. In the first season he was in the body of Joel Kinnaman, in the second one he looks like Antony Mackie, but the original – Will Yun Lee is the best.
In the second season Tak is looking for the woman he loved and long thought to be dead – Quellcrist Falconer. He is being helped by his friend AI who looks like Edgar Allan Poe and runs a virtual hotel. And occasionally by Trepp, the bounty hunter, played by Simone Missick. Quellcrist was that ideal person living in flashbacks and memories during the first season, but now she is out of the fridge (literally) and has her own agenda. And not quite her own, too. So, that got so much more interesting.
Ragnarok (Netflix)
6-episode long Norwegian series about a small town in Norway, secretly rules by a family of ice giants. And then a woman with two teenage sons returns to this town (which she left after the death of her husband) and her eldest son Magne becomes Thor, with all associated superpowers. Her youngest, Laurets, is Loki, but doesn’t know it yet. But one simply cannot be more Loki than he is. There are also a large assortment of teenagers who don’t (yet?) associate with any Norse gods, parents of those teenagers, strange chain-smoking old lady who utters cryptic stuff, one-eyed old man who does nothing, ravens flying everywhere, and the problems with ecology due to a plant owned by the family of ice giants. The whole story is not very deep, but entertaining. So far, anyway. Made me to want to read again on actual Norse Mythology, because I realized how skewered I am by MCU canon.
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