A Weekend in Review
Sep. 7th, 2020 04:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hilsI honestly don't know where the weekend has gone. Well, I suppose they do say time flies when you're having fun.
Friday I squeezed in an episode of Kingdom ahead of the weekly Newcastle Zoom call. More on Kingdom later. The Zoom call itself was pretty chill. We just chatted, mostly about Star Wars for reasons that escape me now. I bowed out early because there was hockey to watch.
So, a brief overview on the NHL playoffs. Teams who finish at the top of the league play each other in a series of rounds. Whoever wins the series goes on to the next one and whoever loses is eliminated until there are two teams left and whoever wins that series wins the Stanley Cup. Each series is a best of 7 games. At one point the Avalanche were 3-1 down in the second series and they somehow managed to drag it to 3-3 which meant the 7th game was the deciding game. That's the game that happened on Friday.
As I've mentioned before I've struggled to get invested in hockey since the season was suspended due to COVID. I've enjoyed the few games I've managed to watch but it hasn't occupied my every waking moment like it did before. I just didn't have the headspace for it and everything else that's been going on.
But I tuned in and it was a good game! With everything on the line both teams gave it everything they had. Every time one team scored, the other equalised within a few minutes. Eventually it went to overtime and the Avs lost, but I didn't have it in me to be too mad or disappointed. They did their best, and now they get to go back home to their families having been living in a bubble since the beginning of August.
I have no idea when the next season is going to start or how it's going to work so I guess we'll cross that bridge when we get there.
Saturday I had my weekly Stardew Valley session with Emma, and then after dinner it was time to stream ALL THE THINGS. I watched another episode of Kingdom, then two episodes of Lost Tomb with![[twitter.com profile]](https://p2.dreamwidth.org/e0caa790ec10/-/twitter.com/favicon.ico)
madamoisellebon followed by three episodes of My Strange Friend with the Twitter group chat gang.
My Strange Friend is definitely a show that needs to be watched in a group, ideally with alcohol to hand if you are someone who drinks. It is utterly incoherent. We had to go back and see if we'd somehow missed something at the end of the last episode we watched last week but nope there's just an inexplicable jump between one episode and the next. Someone joked that maybe they only had Yibo for a few days of filming so they just built the show around the footage they had. It actually wouldn't surprise me if that was the case.
Still, the fact that show is bad doesn't make watching it any less fun. We all laughed a lot and I can't think of a better way to spend a Saturday night.
Sunday was spent watching even more of ALL THE TV. Watched the latest translated episode of Street Dance of China with the Australians followed by a spinoff they do where the four captains and the producers sit around and eat food and chat. So that was nearly 4 hours of TV, and the thing is it goes so fast! It doesn't feel like a long show at all. After that I watched the last episode of season 1 of Kingdom and I need to yell about this now because HOLY SHIT
So I know I was laughing about how all the summaries carefully avoid mentioning that this is a zombie show but actually it's genius and I have made a point of not mentioning that when talking to anyone about it. Because half the joy of the first season is watching the buildup, and the audience realisation of what's happening at the same time as the characters is amazing.
Two things make this the best zombie show I have ever seen. The first is the setting. I think just about every other zombie show or movie has been set in the modern day. And with that comes certain expectations. You say zombie to anyone now and they have a reasonable idea of what you're talking about. Setting it in the 16th century means no one has any preconceptions of what a zombie is. All they know is that a mysterious plague is causing the dead to come back to life and eat people.
The second is the lore. This show (and I believe it's based on a comic which presumably is the same) does something totally new with zombies in that they're only active at night and during the day they go back to being corpses. Brilliant idea! It adds some extra tension in that the characters get a reprieve each day to plan their next move before the zombies wake up again. Except the last episode threw in a twist that it wasn't sunlight that made the zombies sleep during the day it was the warm temperature. Now that it's winter they don't sleep at all! I can't wait to see what happens with that in the second season.
And then what makes this whole thing wonderful is that the zombies are only part of the story. There's a whole political drama going on in the background where the prince and his father's young wife are vying for the throne. Argh, it's just so good I'm so glad I watched it!
So basically what I have learned is Korea does the best zombie stuff because Train to Busan is also the best zombie movie I've ever seen. Well, maybe tied with Shaun of the Dead but they are very different types of zombie movie.
I also finished Lost Tomb withmadamoisellebon and we started Lost Tomb 2. I don't really have a huge amount to say about it tbh but here's some general thoughts under the cut.
I think basically what I have learned about this whole franchise is that it just isn't as good whenever the Iron Triangle separates and even moreso when they separate and aren't in a tomb.
Lost Tomb 1 was really fun until they got out of the tomb and then it stopped making any sense and ended on a cliffhanger, which I thought would lead nicely into Lost Tomb 2 but it kind of didn't.
We've only watched two episodes of Lost Tomb 2 and the Iron Triangle is in a tomb so it should at least be entertaining for a while.
Since it's a holiday in the US todaymadamoisellebon is going to watch some more of Lost Tomb 2 with me after dinner. Looking forward to it.
I still haven't touched my Untamed fic I really need to try get some editing done this week so I can get it to a beta and start writing one of the many Guardian ideas I've written down.
Friday I squeezed in an episode of Kingdom ahead of the weekly Newcastle Zoom call. More on Kingdom later. The Zoom call itself was pretty chill. We just chatted, mostly about Star Wars for reasons that escape me now. I bowed out early because there was hockey to watch.
So, a brief overview on the NHL playoffs. Teams who finish at the top of the league play each other in a series of rounds. Whoever wins the series goes on to the next one and whoever loses is eliminated until there are two teams left and whoever wins that series wins the Stanley Cup. Each series is a best of 7 games. At one point the Avalanche were 3-1 down in the second series and they somehow managed to drag it to 3-3 which meant the 7th game was the deciding game. That's the game that happened on Friday.
As I've mentioned before I've struggled to get invested in hockey since the season was suspended due to COVID. I've enjoyed the few games I've managed to watch but it hasn't occupied my every waking moment like it did before. I just didn't have the headspace for it and everything else that's been going on.
But I tuned in and it was a good game! With everything on the line both teams gave it everything they had. Every time one team scored, the other equalised within a few minutes. Eventually it went to overtime and the Avs lost, but I didn't have it in me to be too mad or disappointed. They did their best, and now they get to go back home to their families having been living in a bubble since the beginning of August.
I have no idea when the next season is going to start or how it's going to work so I guess we'll cross that bridge when we get there.
Saturday I had my weekly Stardew Valley session with Emma, and then after dinner it was time to stream ALL THE THINGS. I watched another episode of Kingdom, then two episodes of Lost Tomb with
My Strange Friend is definitely a show that needs to be watched in a group, ideally with alcohol to hand if you are someone who drinks. It is utterly incoherent. We had to go back and see if we'd somehow missed something at the end of the last episode we watched last week but nope there's just an inexplicable jump between one episode and the next. Someone joked that maybe they only had Yibo for a few days of filming so they just built the show around the footage they had. It actually wouldn't surprise me if that was the case.
Still, the fact that show is bad doesn't make watching it any less fun. We all laughed a lot and I can't think of a better way to spend a Saturday night.
Sunday was spent watching even more of ALL THE TV. Watched the latest translated episode of Street Dance of China with the Australians followed by a spinoff they do where the four captains and the producers sit around and eat food and chat. So that was nearly 4 hours of TV, and the thing is it goes so fast! It doesn't feel like a long show at all. After that I watched the last episode of season 1 of Kingdom and I need to yell about this now because HOLY SHIT
So I know I was laughing about how all the summaries carefully avoid mentioning that this is a zombie show but actually it's genius and I have made a point of not mentioning that when talking to anyone about it. Because half the joy of the first season is watching the buildup, and the audience realisation of what's happening at the same time as the characters is amazing.
Two things make this the best zombie show I have ever seen. The first is the setting. I think just about every other zombie show or movie has been set in the modern day. And with that comes certain expectations. You say zombie to anyone now and they have a reasonable idea of what you're talking about. Setting it in the 16th century means no one has any preconceptions of what a zombie is. All they know is that a mysterious plague is causing the dead to come back to life and eat people.
The second is the lore. This show (and I believe it's based on a comic which presumably is the same) does something totally new with zombies in that they're only active at night and during the day they go back to being corpses. Brilliant idea! It adds some extra tension in that the characters get a reprieve each day to plan their next move before the zombies wake up again. Except the last episode threw in a twist that it wasn't sunlight that made the zombies sleep during the day it was the warm temperature. Now that it's winter they don't sleep at all! I can't wait to see what happens with that in the second season.
And then what makes this whole thing wonderful is that the zombies are only part of the story. There's a whole political drama going on in the background where the prince and his father's young wife are vying for the throne. Argh, it's just so good I'm so glad I watched it!
So basically what I have learned is Korea does the best zombie stuff because Train to Busan is also the best zombie movie I've ever seen. Well, maybe tied with Shaun of the Dead but they are very different types of zombie movie.
I also finished Lost Tomb with
I think basically what I have learned about this whole franchise is that it just isn't as good whenever the Iron Triangle separates and even moreso when they separate and aren't in a tomb.
Lost Tomb 1 was really fun until they got out of the tomb and then it stopped making any sense and ended on a cliffhanger, which I thought would lead nicely into Lost Tomb 2 but it kind of didn't.
We've only watched two episodes of Lost Tomb 2 and the Iron Triangle is in a tomb so it should at least be entertaining for a while.
Since it's a holiday in the US today
I still haven't touched my Untamed fic I really need to try get some editing done this week so I can get it to a beta and start writing one of the many Guardian ideas I've written down.
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Date: 2020-09-07 06:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-09-08 03:39 pm (UTC)