Movies: None

Television/Streaming: Watching the latest season of Taskmaster.

Buffy season 4:
"Living Conditions," where Buffy contends with her bad roommate; even without all the other stuff going on, Kathy was annoying as hell. I remember so many horror stories my college friends told me that lived on campus, and it made me grateful I was able to be a commuter student and not have to deal with that bullshit.

"The Harsh Light of Day," where Spike returns to Sunnydale, looking for their version of the Holy Grail, the Gem of Amara. Spike is quickly becoming a favorite character for me. I felt sorry for Buffy dealing with Parker; I clocked him as this sort of guy when she met him in a previous episode and was very much hoping I was wrong, but . . . Ugh, fuck you, Parker.

Angel, Season 1:
"Lonely Heart," with that creature that invades bodies. I didn't particularly care for that, haha.

"In the Dark," which picks up from the Buffy episode "Harsh Light of Day" and has Oz traveling to LA to give the Gem to Angel for safekeeping. And Spike shows up, too. Marcus was perfectly creepy; literally made my skin crawl.

Farscape, Season 4:
Only briefly mentioned in the last media post, but up to now we've watched the first six episodes of this season. Aeryn is back and that wig is not great, but I do find it interesting that she is wearing her hair long and loose again. I'm sure this has been talked about elsewhere, but when we first see her, she has her hair tied back, very regimented, as is probably Peacekeeper requirement. Over time, as she gets closer to the other and especially John, the hairstyle becomes a bit more relaxed. After clone John dies, and she comes back to Moya, her hair is pulled back again, in a kind of echo to her closed-off attitude towards this John.

Aeryn's description of how Peacekeeper embryos can kind of stick around in a stasis for several years was an interesting point. I hope those crazy kids, her and John, can get themselves together again.

Listening to: two albums from the Rolling Stone Top 500 list.

Number 483 is the Muddy Waters Anthology. This was at 38 on the original list.

Rolling Stone blurb:

Muddy Waters started out playing acoustic Delta blues in Mississippi, but when he moved to Chicago in 1943, he needed an electric guitar to be heard over the tumult of South Side clubs. The sound he developed was the foundation of Chicago blues — and rock & roll; the thick, bleeding tones of his slide work anticipated rock-guitar distortion by nearly two decades. The 50 cuts on these two CDs run from guitar-and-stand-up-bass duets to full-band romps — and they still just scratch the surface of Waters’ legacy.

I did enjoy what I heard of this anthology, but it's a lot of tracks and after a while, they started to blend together for me. I also don't think I found the whole album they're referencing here online to stream (I use NewPipe or YouTube to find the playlist and then listen that way if it's something I don't already own).

Number 482 is Bizarre Ride II the Pharcyde by the Pharcyde. This was not on the original list.

Rolling Stone blurb:

These high school friends from L.A. were a little like a West Coast answer to De La Soul and A Tribe Called Quest, offering their own spin on alternative hip-hop in the Nineties and showing there was something going on in Southern California beyond G-funk. They rapped about innocent topics, like having a crush on a teacher in “Passin’ Me By,” which was a small hit, but also about dating a cute girl who turns out “to be a John Doe” and run-ins with the cops (the Public Enemy-homage “Officer”). It all came out as bright and refreshing as sorbet.

This is another one where I listened to it, but can't tell you much about it at all. There were some good hip-hop beats and some of the songs were light-hearted. I would have to spin it again to recall, as it was a few weeks ago now that I listened to this album.

Playing: I finished the first Danganronpa game, Trigger Happy Havoc. If you are not familiar, this is a visual novel style game with some murder mystery elements and courtroom drama puzzles like the Phoenix Wright/Ace Attorney games.

I had no idea what the difficulty levels were going in, so I picked middle-of-the-road, which turned out to make the trial battles a little more frustrating for me, as they kept adding elements in to complicate matters. But I did it. It was an interesting story and even though you're probably not supposed to, I do like Monokuma as a character.

The soundtrack was really good, as well. As I have finished the game, I've unlocked school mode, which I guess is more like a dating sim, and I'm curious how that looks here.

Books: The Original by Nell Stevens. This is next month's book club pick and I did not really gel with it. The publishing blurb begins, "In a grand English country house in 1899, an aspiring art forger must unravel whether the man claiming to be her long-lost cousin is an impostor." This was an intriguing premise; there are some queer characters in here, as well. Then I started reading it, and well, it didn't quite live up to its expectations. The central mystery here is wrapped up so very quickly in the final pages of the book, after drawing it out and complicating it with so much other unnecessary stuff. There are a bunch of potential plot points sprinkled in here and then sometimes they are never picked up again. The art descriptions were interesting, but overall, it wasn't for me. I'm interested to see what others in the group have to say about it.

There Never Was a Once Upon a Time by Carmen Naranjo. This was on my list from a "read around the world" project I had started a long time ago. It took me ages to get the list for A-C done (and then never finished it), as I wanted to find books that were written by authors from that country, and of course, translated into English if it's not an English-speaking country. The books still come up on my TBR from time to time, so I still am working my way through them, I guess, although I probably forgot to tag some or write anything much about them since then. I also came up with that list over a decade ago, so maybe there are other choices since then. (Or someone else did the work for me, haha).

Anyway, Carmen Naranjo was my selection from Costa Rica. This was pretty short, a collection of short stories told from the perspective of children on topics like death and growing up. It was middle-of-the-road for me, but it was translated in the 1980s and I don't know if some of the disconnect is because of the translation or it's just the stories themselves.