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I’m interested in this idea, but every time I’ve tried to just Sit Down And Write without an idea in my head for what to write about, I produce nothing but useless rumination. Can you say whether that’s something this book specifically addresses? I have found other ways to produce work I’m happy with, but not on any kind of regular basis.
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 9:27 AM on January 25, 2024

And the queerness is much less subtextual than I had expected it to be.

Right?? I’m honestly not sure how it makes sense any other way! That fraught walk they take in the garden where they’re both too afraid to say what they’re both feeling so they say nothing - maybe I’m just being homonormative but I can’t see a platonic reading of that scene that makes any sense.
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 5:03 PM on November 2, 2023

I’ve been rewatching Hannibal recently, and Anne and Mary are like the living genderswapped embodiment of the very silliest jokes people make about Will and Hannibal. Just three murder attempts before dinner followed by frantic making out in front of your mortified guests.

This season feels deliberately and explicitly designed to generate fanfic, maybe more than any show I’ve ever seen.
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 10:34 AM on October 14, 2023

You know, I love Lucius but I don’t find Pete all that interesting (and Lucius has more chemistry with Izzy anyway, sorrynotsorry).
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 10:30 AM on October 14, 2023

it's one of the central themes of the show - the mythos of legendary piracy vs the horrific actuality of what pirates *do*.

Exactly this! Last season I was actually delighted when they started delving into just how many fucked up things Edward has done, because although I love pirate media of all kinds, I don’t love when it becomes purely aesthetics divorced from the reality of what piracy in this era actually was. This show started out just making… [more]
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 9:45 AM on October 7, 2023

I love this book so much and I’m so mad I didn’t read it when I was 16. I’ve been meaning to go back through it and write down all the writers she mentions who I think sound like my cup of tea.
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 6:26 PM on October 5, 2023

I hadn’t heard of this at all until yesterday, but the name is so good that it immediately went on my watch list.
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 9:22 AM on July 22, 2023

I just started reading these books in March and am already on Murder Must Advertise. I’m obsessed. I had never even heard of these before a friend told me about them this year and they might be my favorite mystery series now? Certainly up there.

Re: Whose Body specifically, I was absolutely sure that the Nietzchean superman killer who felt his intelligence entitled him to kill had to be inspired by Leopold and Loeb… turns out they were caught in 1924, the year… [more]
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 1:31 AM on May 26, 2023

This was the first movie to make me cry in the theater as a kid. I will probably never rewatch it because I’m sure it’s not, uh, great, but it will always have a special place in my heart.
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 5:14 PM on May 18, 2023

I had never even heard of this before yesterday but I immediately sent the trailer to a bunch of friends. Can’t wait to watch, I love a show with a premise this convoluted and The Leftovers was delightful.
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 9:03 AM on April 21, 2023

Even benevolent gods are terrifying when you actually run into one. I mean, how do you oppose an entity that's always ten steps ahead of you?

This is giving me shades of an earlier era of sci-fi, like in one of the later I, Robot stories where a robot secretly becomes the President of the United States. There used to me more of a “advanced technology could save us all, but at what cost vibe”; nowadays it’s generally “advanced technology is a Big… [more]
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 9:35 AM on April 24, 2023

The billboard thing seems to me like an awfully weird example to use as evidence of lazy writing. It’s deliberate Looney Tunes logic. It’s not as if the writers engineered that scenario because they couldn’t think of something else.
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 10:22 AM on May 14, 2023

Ok but… where did the shoes come from?? I can’t believe this is the thing I’m hung up on but, why are there thousands of pairs of shoes in the basement if the shoe company had no knowledge of this whole plan? Who manufactured them?
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 10:27 PM on May 6, 2023

I wonder if this isn't the first step to him beginning to fully understand and master the game, versus his reliance on his ability to motivate others to do it in his place.

I don’t know about this… it seems to me like this entire season is setting up Ted going home. He misses his kid, he misses America. It’s come up in some way or other in pretty much every episode. I’m assuming we’re gonna see Ted go home to coach American football again, possibly… [more]
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 9:55 AM on April 24, 2023

I need to read this for an upcoming book club, but I have to admit, I don’t read much contemporary litfic and when I saw the description was basically “a murder podcaster confronts her childhood trauma and takes on [list of social issues that have been trending on Twitter recently]” I was shall we say not very excited to check it out.
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 7:29 AM on March 26, 2023

Ok I don’t REALLY think this will happen but I honestly feel like there’s a 5% chance of Ted/Trent endgame here. Maybe it’s just that Trent is a chronic smolderer.
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 6:47 PM on March 22, 2023

The snow globe scene says that the CFO doesn’t stay anywhere very long - either because she gets replaced or because the businesses get shut down.

Huh… now I’m wondering if the VC firm has some ulterior motive for funding Keeley’s company, say as a tax shelter or something, and they have no real intention of making it a viable long-term business. And the CFO has seen this process a million times before and is numb to it, and the arc will be her and… [more]
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 7:33 PM on March 23, 2023

My big problem with this episode: what the hell is up with Keely’s office environment?? Excepting her own office, I mean. I know a lot of people who work at PR firms, and that is NOT the vibe they have. That looked and felt like the office of a refrigerator coolant manufacturer or something. Sure, that venture capital company sent her the CFO, but presumably she hired the rest of them, right? So why do they all have a vibe like they just came from a funeral for a distant aunt?
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 8:50 AM on March 16, 2023

I’m curious about the commercial/legal wranglings that might be involved in setting up West Ham as the big rival for S3. Because unlike AFC Richmond, West Ham is a real club, with real lawyers, and presumably they have to agree to being used in this way? What were those conversations like?

I don’t know a thing about football but with the number of actual TV pundits who’ve appeared as themselves in this show, plus the fact that Apple TV has apparently… [more]
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 9:33 AM on July 9, 2022

Did a rewatch and just occurred to me - if the character sticks around, Edwin Akufo could wind up being the one to to spill to the media about Sam and Rebecca.
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 5:39 AM on March 10, 2023

So mad I can’t even get the ebook yet. Seriously considering preordering it and then pirating it. She was one of my favorite Taskmaster contestants ever.
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 9:34 AM on February 25, 2023

I love this movie. Watched it with my dad and the last line made me audibly gasp, it’s just perfect.
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 6:53 PM on January 31, 2023

Riruro, that’s exactly what my dad said! He was a huge cowboy movie guy (born in 49 so it was basically required) and he always said John Wayne was too obsessed with his own image as a flawless hero. Hated his True Grit passionately. But this movie kinda goes out of its way to mess with that image and what it means.
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 4:40 PM on February 2, 2023

There was a moment or two when I suspected they had ALL been told to watch the wrong movie and each thought they were the only one. Totally wish they’d done that now.
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 8:37 AM on November 25, 2022

Three things I specifically love in TV shows are vampires, gay shit, and toxic codependency. So this should have been a slam dunk… and I’m sad to say I mostly hated this.

With the exception of all the scenes with Louis’ family, which I thought were very well written and acted, this whole episode was an exercise in setting up and then COMPLETELY SKIPPING almost every emotional beat I was interested in. Seriously, you’re going to use a sentence of voiceover narration to… [more]
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 3:52 AM on October 11, 2022

I’ve recently gotten into horror movies after many years of ambivalence (probably because I came up in the Saw era and that kind of gore isn’t for me). I think I loved this, and I’m definitely FASCINATED by it. I was texting some friends while watching it, to whom I usually liveblog horror movies, but for this one all I could say was “I cannot describe this at all and I NEED you guys to watch it with me, you might hate it but I need to see someone else react to this.” And if they hadn’t been… [more]
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 9:44 AM on October 5, 2022

Having read the book before, I’m totally getting a different experience from the emails, because - holy crap, Jonathon is trapped in that castle for a LONG TIME! I remembered this as “the first part of the book,” and if you’d asked me offhand I’d have said the whole section took MAYBE two weeks.

I wonder, is he still forced to make small talk with his captor, or has that pretense been largely abandoned at this point? How is he filling his days? Still trying to escape, or… [more]
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 4:22 PM on May 31, 2022

Yes, one of the first letters between them explained this.
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 11:15 AM on July 27, 2022

I can’t disagree, but we are now just about at the point where shit starts happening again! June and July, not much really happens because Jonathon has brain fever and Dracula’s on a boat and nothing much plot-relevant really goes down. I read the book a while ago and I’m pretty sure it’s about to pick up the pace quite a bit.
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 5:55 PM on August 15, 2022

Yes! And like, ok, up to a certain point it made some sense that he was holding information back because if someone told ME “I suspect this mysterious medical problem is caused by a supernatural monster” I would definitely not be like “ok makes sense.” There’s even that entry of Seward’s where he’s like “is Van Helsing uhhh crazy because I, a certified doctor of craziness, am having some serious misgivings.” But after the first time they leave her alone and she’s immediately re-exsanguinated,… [more]
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 11:52 AM on September 26, 2022

I also can’t remember from reading the book years ago whether Van Helsing already knew for a fact that vampires existed, or whether he was just familiar with the lore and open-minded enough to consider that it might be true when he saw Lucy’s symptoms.
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 11:56 AM on September 26, 2022

Unrelated, definitely certain things on reread are hitting harder, and one of them is hearing Jonathon’s voice again after so many months! This pace really has made me feel more for all of these characters, but particularly Jonathon and Lucy because you experience the slow creeping horror the same way they do.
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 11:58 AM on September 26, 2022

From the director of Miss March (which I watched because of its awful reviews and wound up enjoying).

Ha, I was wondering why Alamo showed the trailer for that before the movie!

This was great fun, I’d seen the trailer but deliberately didn’t look up anything else and I was thrilled when pretty much everything in it had already happened by like a third of the way in.
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 7:24 PM on September 25, 2022

I’m sure it was creative editing but I loved the various shots of side-eye after Dawn said with a chipper voice “oh I was a project manager for Boris Johnson!” Wonder where this filming schedule fell with respect to his rolling scandal train?

A million kudos to Syabira for making something with matcha that Paul didn’t talk shit about. Definitely was an early contender for my favorite even before the technical.

When Sandro was revealed to be not… [more]
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 10:47 AM on September 17, 2022

Now I want to append “Meanwhile, an alien parasite crashes to Earth in a meteor” to every IMDB movie synopsis ever. Against the backdrop of the Civil War, the manipulative daughter of a Georgia plantation owner conducts a turbulent romance with a roguish profiteer. Meanwhile, an alien parasite crashes to Earth in a meteor. A young F.B.I. cadet must receive the help of an incarcerated and manipulative cannibal killer to help catch another serial killer, a madman who skins his victims. Meanwhile,… [more]
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 4:13 PM on September 6, 2022

Oh, for sure! But the GM is never supposed to tell you what to roll. "Give me a..." is not a phrase you should hear in a PbtA game. It's always, always supposed to be player-driven; Apocalypse World came out of a very particular game design philosophy in the early 2000s. It's why the players direct what the outcomes will be from a move. Even the GM has moves that they're supposed to use, specific actions based off of setting triggers.

Right… [more]
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 9:20 AM on September 5, 2022

I just watched this last night because I found out that André Øvredal directed an upcoming movie that's just that chapter of Dracula where he kills a bunch of guys on a ship, something I have always wished existed but figured would be impossible to make work.

Having seen this movie, I am now totally confident in his ability to pull off a Nautical Dracula movie.
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 7:29 PM on August 12, 2022

Re: why couldn’t Hilly just refuse to read the words? Well, imagine spending every single moment of the rest of your life in that room, with brief intervals of walking to and from the elevator. Forever. Never eating, sleeping, drinking, speaking to or seeing another person, for years and years and years, watching your hands grow gradually older and more wrinkled and realizing you’re going to die and almost every moment you can remember of your life is just sitting in that room.… [more]
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 6:34 PM on June 7, 2022

I’m five episodes in, watching along with some friends who are big Black Sails fans, and, well. This show sure doesn’t seem to be trending any less gay than that show. You love to see it.

Definitely agree that Taika Waititi is really surprisingly good in this. So much said with just the eyes! I love Izzy as well, I skipped Chernobyl but now that I know he was in it I’m thinking I’ll go back and check it out.
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 8:57 PM on March 21, 2022

I’m five episodes in, watching along with some friends who are big Black Sails fans, and, well. This show sure doesn’t seem to be trending any less gay than that show. You love to see it.

Update, just watched episode six and lol just lol I can’t believe this is happening
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 6:57 PM on March 23, 2022

And now finished ep 8 and just, wow I know this show is not gonna be for everyone but my gay ass could not be more delighted by this incredible nonsense. Can’t wait for the rest.

Also whoever is responsible for that beard deserves an Emmy.
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 8:16 PM on March 23, 2022

So that part, I predicted. The fucking toe thing? THAT, I absolutely DID NOT PREDICT and it was amazing. That scene belonged in a show ten thousand times darker than this one.

Based on the reactions I'm seeing from the aforementioned Black Sails fans, this is a show that was 100% tailor made to be fandom bait, more than maybe anything I've ever seen before.
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 8:19 PM on March 24, 2022

Blackbeard's whole turn at the end was so dark! Especially compared to Stede's reconciliation with his wife, which was so sweet.

This show keeps getting described as a sitcom or a romcom, but boy oh boy was there NOTHING comedic about Blackbeard in the back end of that last episode. Which I totally love, to be clear - but what even do you call a 90% silly sweet show where one of your two romantic leads goes THERE in the finale?
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 10:25 AM on March 29, 2022

People on social media love the central ship so much and already I'm like, hi, did nobody mention Blackbeard ordered somebody to kill his dog? I'm stuck back on this thing, hello? When a man weeps and says "I'm not a good person," no matter how handsome he is -- especially if he's handsome -- that is a very bad sign! It's one of the oldest in the book!

Once you finish the season, it does become clear that they're not just ignoring those… [more]
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 6:58 PM on March 29, 2022

Why o why no renewal news… don’t hurt me HBO
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 9:13 AM on April 10, 2022

I think the show, which I basically loved, had a hard time figuring out if it was a comic book (where the violence is more expected and not so serious) or more of a dark comedy (where the violence matters and where people can turn bad and stay bad).

I thought the tone shifts were one of the best things about it! Why should this NEED to be consistent - why is that necessarily better? To me it felt like the varying ways violence was handled were… [more]
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 12:39 PM on April 17, 2022

Actually maybe another way of expressing this would be - for me there is something about this show that is SO aggressively unconcerned with reality that, whenever anything has actual realistic consequences, it hits harder than it would have in a narrative that took those things seriously from the beginning. The violence is the most obvious example of that. For example, the massacre in the dining room in episode one is filmed to be unseriously over-the-top, but the concurrent accidental face… [more]
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 2:03 PM on April 17, 2022

Google suggests that while marmalade does have vitamin C, it has a lot less than actual oranges. Good question though, this totally hadn’t occurred to me!
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 3:29 PM on April 26, 2022

Check out this two minute wonder which is scary and a complete story, even in the short runtime:

Floor 9.5 vimeo

Oh man, my friend showed me this and it fucked me RIGHT on up.
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 12:30 AM on April 22, 2022

1. I don’t know about you, but to this particular gay it felt pretty unequivocal that this was a case of weird gay man vs. weird gay man. I don’t think Peter was reenforcing heteronormativity, I think he’s going to go home to his Very Good Friend ‘The Professor’ and live happily ever after.

2. Phil’s harassment of Rose went far, far past the point of “obnoxious” for me. It felt clear that he intended to destroy her life and felt good about doing so. He wasn’t a… [more]
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 7:27 AM on March 6, 2022