January facies duos capra 01/02/20
8I have yet to receive just received! my goat badge and accompanying scepter, but and so will continue on with these as I find the time. Yesterday’s topic of how one deals with January evolved into a (still-ongoing) discussion of biblical calendar keeping, so this will be a little more focused, I hope.
TL:DR Summary
- January dark, we still have a DVR
- Here’s all the crap on it.
- What do you plan to watch/read in the dark hours ahead?
January has a lot of in-house time, because it’s dark and wet and cold outside and the roads often freeze up and the mountain lions are hungry, so taking a cue from the squirrels and mice, we stash stuff on the DVR during the course of the year for viewing during these dark times. As I’vebitched aboutexplained before, our rural internet here at the ranch can be inconsistent, so getting the current cool streaming thing doesn’t work very reliably here.
So we rely on the DirecTV DVR for most of the content – I fell into some fortunate marketing niche by having the phones on AT&T so we get free (for now) HBO. Aside from the single-episode recordings we do (news programs, John Oliver, AXIOS, etc.), here’s what we’ve accumulated:
Recent and not-so-recent full season episodes of:
His Dark Materials (8), Bob’s Burgers (15), Supergirl (10), The Detour (42!), American Swamp (4), Happy! (19), Veep (8), Con Man (6), Sharp Objects (6), Top of the Lake: China Girl (3), Mars (7), The Righteous Gemstones (8, because John Goodman!), Ken Burns’ Country Music and The Vietnam War documentaries, Chernobyl (5), Mars (7)
Futurama – Episodes 9-16 of Season 6, the two “movies” that are split up into 4 episodes each because I’ve never seen them in proper sequence
Movies we haven’t seen yet:
Finding Dory, Bohemian Rhapsody, A Star is Born (the Lady Gaga one), Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, Blade Runner 2049, Dunkirk
Movies we’ve seen but would like to watch again:
Elf (for Christmas!), Die Hard (also for Christmas!) Apollo 13, The Fugitive, The Princess Bride (just because), Unforgiven, The Man Who Came to Dinner
And various one-offs to watch:
Ice on Fire, Mars: Making the New Earth, the last episode of last season’s The Magicians and Westworld, to watch before new ones begin.
In addition we’ve been streaming our way through back episodes of The Expanse before watching the new ones, and reading the original book series by two-headed author James S. A. Corey (thank you @DennisG2014 for recommending them!)
So what’s on your DVR/Stream list/Book Shelf to catch up on? If none of that floats your boat, it’s also National Science Fiction Day, National Buffet Day, and WORLD Introvert Day, so comment on those if you wish …
- 4 comments, 7 replies
- Comment
I Love Lucy reruns.
@therealjrn and Twilight Zones - SyFy had their usual marathon over New Years. Great for picking out those favorites …
Great Performances Vienna Philharmonic New Year’s Concert with Andris Nelsons.
Link
I miss Julie Andrews, but Hugh Bonneville is passable as a successor.
@mike808 Those are great - I missed this year’s but PBS has it online:
https://www.pbs.org/video/from-vienna-the-new-years-celebration-2020-fmggau/
@stolicat The summer concerts are also excellent.
My favorite part is always the finale, The Radetsky March.
One year, maybe 5-8 years ago, was simply exhuberant with joy, and the conductor, the audience, and the orchestra were all having a blast. I was hooked ever since.
Yay! Another Expanse convert!
IMO, the books are way better, but that’s not to say the TV show is bad.
I’m on my 2nd attempt to watch the series Mars. I don’t know why, but it just doesn’t hold my interest.
We do seem to have similar tastes, though, lots of the stuff you listed is also stuff I watch or intend to watch.
I really enjoyed Ken Burns Country Music Doc; IIRC, it’s something like 16 hours, but it’s the kind of thing you could watch in little bits - there are ‘chapters’ within the episodes.
I’ve enjoyed a few streaming titles recently - last week I signed up for a free 7 day Disney trial just so I could watch The Mandalorian and I loved it.
It’s the best Star Wars material I’ve seen since the original trilogy.
I can’t wait for season 2 and I’ll be happy to pay to watch it (but I’ll wait until all the episodes are out and just pay for one month, because I’m a cheap skate).
The other series I really liked and am eagerly awaiting season 2 is Amazon’s The Boys.
It’s a very dark and violent superhero thing, so it won’t be for everyone.
I started reading the graphic novel and holy crap is it ‘graphic’.
Another Amazon show I liked is kind of a sleeper - Undone - haven’t heard anyone else talk about it, I saw it recommended on a TV blog about best shows of 2019 and it sounded interesting, so I watched it and now also can’t wait for season 2.
It’s a trippy, rotoscope animated story about time travel.
I know you said streaming isn’t a good option for you - sorry about that.
I am planning to do a free trial of HBO next, to watch Watchmen. It’s gotten good reviews, and I enjoyed the graphic novel. The Boys has similar themes, btw.
I think there were one or two other series I was interested in on HBO, too.
Probably not GoT, though; Not only will it take more than the free trial period to watch it, I figure if I’ve made it this far without seeing an episode, maybe I’m better off not watching it at all.
I’ve been meaning to post on the forum about some of the books I’ve been reading, but my dinner’s getting cold, so it’ll have to wait until some other time.
edit: Oh, and speaking of Christmas movies and coincidentally, Capra (Frank) - It’s a Wonderful Life is my favorite. I watch it every year, sometimes in chunks but often from start to finish, and it never gets old.
I like it more every time I watch it.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
@DennisG2014 We can use streaming services, but it works best to download the shows first to be able to watch without interruption so it’s more of a chore than it should be. But worth it if it’s good stuff and we can plan ahead. Luckily the iPad has gobs of memory so I can load up a lot of stuff ahead of time.
We got Disney+ and watched the Mandalorian as part of our pre-TROS viewing - it is awfully good. I’ll check out The Boys and Undone - I’d heard good things about them also.
We did Watchmen over the holiday and loved it. It probably would’ve helped to have some background on it beforehand but it got clearer after the third episode.
Heh! FINALLY got the Amazon Recast set up but just so’s to watch the ball drop on the Fire stick. I’d been planning to record some OTA (H&I stuff mostly) but it turned out the female of the species wanted to see The Dublin Murders and other Starz stuff, and between work and parental stuff things’ve been nutty enough for me to be more interested in crashing out than zoning out when free to choose.
I haven’t been particularly blown away by most of the Amazon streaming stuff (although I did like The Tick) - but I did try to start The Expanse and will give it another try - next week. It’s hard to find stuff we both like - I was surprised to like White Crow almost as much as she did. We did like Bohemian Rhapsody, but not enough to watch it again. Die Hard and Apollo 13 seemed to be on constant replay this past Christmas - once seems to’ve been more than enough for her. I’d like to see Blade Runner 2049 and Dunkirk, but I doubt she would. We keep getting about 2/3rds of the way through Men in Black: International before there’s a phone call - and I have to say, I’m not sure I really care enough about it to watch it to the end!
@aetris Try: Goliath, Hand of God, Mozart in the Jungle, The Boys, Everybody Loves Dick, Sneaky Pete, The Americans. And if you like procedural police dramas, there are seven seasons of The Closer to binge through.
@aetris Most Expanse watchers agree that you have to get past the first few episodes of world-building before it really hooks you.
I remember being pretty lost after watching the 1st season - a lot of characters, factions, plots, sub-plots and locations across the solar system to keep track of.
Then I read the books and it all gelled.
@aetris @DennisG2014 We have Amazon because of Prime, but mostly have stuck to the free stuff. I have issues with the quality of the pay-for movies - side by side comparison with the same content from iTunes and you see a marked difference in quality, both in compression artifacts and motion.
But I was glad to see them pick up The Expanse, which I had been following on SyFy for it’s first three seasons. As @DennisG2014 mentions above, it takes a little time to get into it but it picks up quickly toward the end of the first season. And yeah, the books are really great for defining the show’s universe.