WickedCestus

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Everything posted by WickedCestus

  1. I was disappointed in this episode. It felt like it was just dragging it's feet. I'm okay with the show being slowly paced, and I like weird drawn-out scenes basically as a rule, but not much of what happened in this episode hit with me at all. The opening one-two punch of murder and domestic abuse put me off, and the Janey-E and Dougie stuff was amusing in the first scene but went on way too long. The final scene with Cole just standing still and being delivered two slight pieces of exposition was just so empty. As for stuff I liked, I thought Jacoby's rant was hilarious, and Jim Belushi was absolutely brilliant in his scenes. I actually liked the casino scenes on their own; much like the weird cops from last episode, I appreciate them as amusing scenes but don't enjoy their place in the show. That is, it feels more and more like these characters are just going to get their one important episode, and then be brought back in tiny, underwhelming clips for the rest of the season. I guess my frustration is less with the actual content, but the way it's presented. I like the characters in this show, and I want to see more of most of them, but when they're fed to you in tiny chunks every other week, it's hard to feel involved in their stories. There's just so much going on that a lot of it gets lost and muddled in my head, and I never feel like any progress is actually being made. Maybe that's the grandest trick of this season: it feels like nothing is happening, and yet you're constantly being provided with new information and connections. I agree with what @anderbubble said, when we don't have to wait another week for new things to happen, this episode won't feel so bad. But as it is, my major highlight is Laura's weird ghost appearing to Gordon Cole. To me, that felt like this episode's True Twin Peaks Momentâ„¢.
  2. That's kind of how a lot of Twin Peaks mysteries seem to be solved for the viewer, with a sudden jab right to the face. Especially the reveal of Leland in S2.
  3. I liked this episode. It feels like the first half of the season was presenting all these disparate elements, then a weird thing happened (last episode), and now the second half will be the different storylines all combining in relatively concrete ways. There are a few things that still feel unrelated (Shelly's Daughter, Roy, Richard Horne (all stuff in Twin Peaks)). This episode, through small moments, filled in gaps that had for the most part already been filled in with our minds, but it was nice to hear some confirmation on Dougie's background, BadCoop's relationship w/ office guy and Ike / also Diane, the principal's relationship with the Lodge lore, etc. Also it seems like Jerry's foot is speaking to him in the voice of The Arm? I like the idea @Gailbraithe presented about Jerry getting tied into the Jack Rabbit Palace stuff. That's just too good. For me, the dopey cops were a highlight of the episode. Those guys just made me laugh, especially the way the Sargent emoted when he burst into the room. I enjoy that there's still room for that kind of nonsense sometimes. Although Lucy and Andy are still bad. I don't know how they are so bad. It's terrible to see.
  4. Good find! The detail that the other figures were all afraid of the Giant is interesting; I don't think we have ever seen him explicitly interact with The Arm or Mike or anyone else.
  5. Is It Wrong To Eat Meat?

    Thanks for the recs everyone! I will definitely have to try avocado, although I'm worried it might be a bit expensive where I am. I think I just need to get comfortable with the idea of using more ingredients, instead of relying on one big, significant filler element that meat sandwiches are based around.
  6. anime

    @Gormongous Yes! The idea of members of opposing factions meeting in non-battle situations is a concept that is explored in almost every Gundam series* to an extent, and is often handled much more complexly than the typical "reluctantly teaming up with my enemy to survive" or "two kids who don't understand why there's a war" tropes, although there are usually elements of those too. This is one of the things I love most about the show, and is tied to the moral ambiguity I referred to earlier. Both sides do bad things and good things, and have good and bad characters, without it feeling like the show is artificially creating a false equivalency. It's packed with grey areas that allow you as a viewer to decide who is worse, because at some point, it does feel like you have to pick a side, because the state of the world is clearly not right in a way that, perhaps, and this is a core theme of the show, can only be solved by these conflicts. I think War In The Pocket hits the nail maybe too closely on the head. *Spoiler for War In The Pocket* It works well as a stand-alone story, but it loses something if divorced from the grander Gundam narrative, I think, and is less subtle in its treatment. I still think it's a great OVA, but does misrepresent, maybe, what makes the series truly special. A lot of the stories within Gundam are reinforced by the meta-narrative, and also by the fact that concepts are repeated over and over in a way that, at least to me, feels like more of an intentional choice than trope-y laziness (although it might sometimes be that too (as evidenced by the myriad clones of Char Aznable in the alternate universe shows (most of which I haven't seen though and can't comment on))). Also, Gundam names are always ridiculous and hilarious in a way I can truly get behind. The main character in Victory is called "Usso" (similar to the Japanese word for "lie"), which makes me constantly think the characters are yelling "no way!" when they refer to him. *I'm not really sure how to differentiate between referring to individual TV series or OVAs and the Gundam series as a whole, so I use "series" to refer to individual series, and "the show" to refer to the grander story. I don't like the word "franchise" because I think it doesn't convey the idea that this is a meta-narrative, and not just a bunch of things thrown together by a brand.
  7. anime

    I have not seen Turn A, so it's possibly weirder than what I've seen before, but I too have been surprised by the tone of the series. There is a ton of interesting concepts going on, with each series seeming to fall on a different place on the spectrum between the major political factions. There are series that are skewed toward one side or the other, and then there are others that seem totally caught in the middle, which means the viewer has to constantly re-contextualize how they feel about these conflicts. It just feels like the show, while fun, is absolutely serious in its treatment of war. It's never far outside of your mind that real people are dying during these events. Also, I don't know how much Turn A gets into this, but 0079 and Zeta get into strange psychological territory that introduces some cool dream-like imagery which I absolutely did not expect. I always thought of Gundam as just a bunch of mechs, but it treads a weird balance between mech battles (that are totally cool) and political/interpersonal drama that, while sometimes hokey, often hits me harder than I expect.
  8. [RELEASED] EVADER

    Also I just beat the #1 high score by 6000 points. Good luck everyone!
  9. [RELEASED] EVADER

    Hi! I'm still playing the game and enjoying it a lot. I have noticed something that I'm not sure is a bug or not. Whenever you destroy a snake enemy from tail-to-head instead of head-to-tail, the next wave seems to spawn a second or two later than usual. This has happened to me quite a few times to the point that I think it might have something to do with the scripting relating to this enemy type. Am I crazy? Has anyone noticed this too? @zerofiftyone do you see any reason why this would be? Thanks again for the cool game!
  10. Is It Wrong To Eat Meat?

    I stopped eating meat a little while ago. I was one of those kids/teens/young adults who would never eat vegetables and everyone would joke was a "meat-atarian" or whatever. I've been thinking about not eating meat for a long time, but I always thought it would be too difficult for someone like me, so I kept putting it off. Eventually, I started enjoying meat less and less, because I felt like my principles and my actions were totally at odds. So I stopped. And it hasn't been as difficult as I imagined. I don't like being called a vegetarian necessarily, because I don't like being described based on a food group that I often eat but still don't actually like that much. I'd rather be called a "pasta guy" or a "significant rice eater", or I guess, a "non meat-eater", which would make the most sense. Although, I agree that the binary between "meat-eater" and "vegetarian" is silly. I think some people react so strongly to the idea of vegetarianism that it stops them from considering the benefits of simply eating slightly less meat, even if they don't cut it out altogether. We all live with contradictions; everyone just draws their lines at different points. There's a ton of space between "eating all meat" and "not eating any meat" that I think gets lost in the way we talk about these things. On a more practical note, since there seem to be some long-term vegetarians in this thread: one thing I'm having a hard time replacing is deli meat for sandwiches. I've found some vegan salami that I think is OK/fine, but I'm curious what else you guys use to fill your quick sandwiches for lunch?
  11. anime

    Based on the recommendation of several people who I think are cool, I fell down a Gundam hole for the last few months. I've finished 0079, Zeta Gundam, Char's Counterattack, 08th MS Team, War In The Pocket, The Origin, and Unicorn. I also dipped my feet into Stardust Memory and Thunderbolt before deciding they definitely weren't my thing. I'm currently watching Victory Gundam and honestly, it feels like I'm literally never going to stop watching Gundam. I don't read the synopsis for any of the series, so I go into each one completely blind and spend the first few episodes just getting my bearings on where and when it takes place. I'm always thinking, "The next one can't be quite as good", but other than the aforementioned two, I've been absolutely in love with all of them, and I think I've now reached the point that literally just seeing a Gundam will make me love the show, just because of the association in my mind. I keep trying to start other shows I really want to watch, but I always immediately find myself wanting to watch Gundam again. I'm hoping that once I finish all of the shows in the Universal Century, I will be able to take a break and slow down, but who knows. I don't even recognize myself when I look in the mirror anymore.
  12. I'll admit that I was being flippant and reductive, especially in my use of the word "badness". You both make good points. I was concerned that making her character into some sort of vessel for cosmic good and evil would retcon some of her agency, but when I think about it more, Fire Walk With Me actually fits into this concept well, because it gives weight and importance to the actual choices that Laura makes, even if she is dealing entirely with things that have been thrust upon her. My hope always with this kind of stuff is that the grand mythos is in service of the characters, and not the other way around. To my mind, Lynch has proven that he is capable of this; as for Frost, I am never quite sure.
  13. As soon as BadCoop was shot, I got really excited, expecting this to mean the return of Real Coop. I expected a cut to Dougie, a long drawn-out scene with him, before he suddenly snaps back into being Real Coop and we would all jump out of chairs and cheer and everyone would be happy forever. Then, I thought, OK, let's be realistic, it'll probably cut to Gordon and Albert first, or cover some mundane stuff in Twin Peaks, just to let us stew in our excitement for a bit. And then, uh, well, whatever happened happened! There were like three or four moments where I thought it would end and cut back to something relevant. I checked how long was left in the episode at about 49 minutes, and went, huh, well, I guess that's just that. I didn't dislike the episode; I think it's cool, but I'm not especially crazy about it either. I absolutely did not see it as the lore dump that everyone else did, since I guess I'm not well-versed enough in the lore. A lot of what seemed to be introduced about Bob and Laura does not excite me much; I expected Dale to be in the bubble instead of Laura, because he is way more of an antithesis to Bob than Laura is. Are we just supposed to ignore that Laura is complex? Is all her badness supposed to come from Bob? That just seems a bit too simple to me. Also, was the guy who introduced NIN the singer from the Red Room in the finale? It kinda reminded me of him.
  14. [RELEASED] EVADER

    Hey I uh.. doubled my high score lol.
  15. [RELEASED] EVADER

    I'm obsessed with Geometry Wars, so I took one look at this game and said "I need to get the high-score". Played for about an hour, and I love it. It's a heck of a thing to get your mind around at first (and I had to turn off auto-switch), but once I got the hang of it, I was surprising myself with some of my maneuvers. Fantastic. (I only managed to get the #2 score tho, so I'm gonna have to keep trying...)
  16. I am hoping Galbraithe's supposition is more correct. The idea that BadCoop was any good at faking being Coop at the start doesn't hold much water for me, because from the one scene we see of him in the finale of season 2, he's already acting like a total BadCoop weirdo. On top of that, I just don't think sexual assault has to be the go-to reason for conflict between a man and a woman on TV, and like you mentioned, it doesn't explain her antagonism for rest of the FBI, unless they for whatever reason defended Coop, which is a situation that just doesn't fit anyone's character at all.
  17. Ohhh, I mis-remembered it as a second Coop walking past. I guess this scene can more simply just be explained by Jeffries' presence as a Lodge guy causing weird electronic interference, rather than my insane time-travelling-bad-coop theory.
  18. This is probably an odd time to bring this up, but I was just thinking about the scene in FWWM where Cooper sees the second Coop in the security camera footage. We've seen that the Lodge can facilitate time-travel to an extent, with Annie showing up in Laura's bed and Briggs' body appearing 25 years later without aging, so it seems possible that Evil Coop somehow appeared before the events of the original show and...did something? Maybe it has something to do with Phillip Jeffries, who enters the office soon after? Or with Coop's last meeting with Diane? I'm absolutely grasping randomly at straws here, but that scene, which seemed to be setting up plot points for the sequel movies that never got made, fits a little too well into everything that's going on right now, and it makes me curious if it's going to become relevant. (I hope I'm remembering the scene correctly and not completely making this all up lol) The audience only knows that Laura saw Leland as Bob because it was explicitly shown in FWWM. Basically everything that happens in FWWM is unknown to the police, other than what is indirectly hinted at by Laura's death and Leland's semi-confession, so yeah, it's totally weird that Hawk would immediately understand this evidence on those terms. Let's just chalk this up to Hawk's amazing spiritual intuition, shall we?
  19. Just for clarification, you guys mention that Hawk and Chad were in the women's restroom, but I'm pretty sure Hawk says to Chad, "use the women's washroom", implying that they're in the men's. That makes me think it has something to do with Gerard...but who knows...
  20. At the very least, it means that this character likes The King And I.
  21. The King And I. I haven't seen it though so I don't know what it could mean.
  22. Disconnected thoughts: It's striking to me how differently murder is treated in The Return as opposed to the original series. The first 1.5 seasons explores the impact of a person's death exclusively after the events of the murder, whereas in The Return, murder constantly feels like an endpoint to character's stories. The principal's wife, the couple in the box room, Darya, this random office worker - all their stories basically end as soon as they are dead, with only a scene at most to explore the aftermath. I don't know if I feel like the show earned anything from it, but it definitely feels like this episode addressed a few of the complaints regarding the treatment of women that were raised last episode, with Janey-E being a lot more assertive, and Any Explanation At All for Truman's wife being the way she is. However, it then proceeds to depict the gruesome murder of a young woman, again. I didn't like the murder scene, just because, well, I don't like murder scenes, but the drill guy's dejection upon realizing his weapon was bent felt incredibly Lynchian. The way the scenes leading up to the hit-and-run gradually came together was incredibly well done. What a scene. The Diane reveal is perfect. I love it. The Hawk's Heritage moment was also exactly the kind of thing I was hoping for. The Dougie portions were so tense; it felt like at any moment he was about to snap back. I wonder if it will be a sudden moment, or if it will be a long drawn-out scene. So far, Dougie is gradually becoming more and more put together, as his single words are becoming sentence fragments, and his gait becoming slightly quicker.
  23. Disregarding all the lore stuff, the glimpses we get this episode really makes me wonder what Dougie Jones was like pre-Coopifying. When he returns home, his wife carries on as if she's having a normal conversation, even though he is just staring off into space and only answering in two-word sentences. And in the morning, the way she prepares his clothes and makes his food and everything (even labeling his coffee cup (although that could just be a little joke, I guess)) suggests to me that perhaps Dougie has some sort of mental health issue that his wife is already aware of. It makes me think that Dougie was never really all there. I mean, even in his conversations with Jade and the one-armed man, he seems a bit gormless. If this isn't the case, then his wife's reaction is just completely nonsensical. Although, much like the chocolate bunnies, that possibility can never be fully discounted.
  24. Oh that is so good! I didn't realize just how bad I wanted the music back!
  25. The horse appears in the original series when Maddie dies, and also in Fire Walk With Me when Leland/Bob enters Laura's window. I always assumed it was (at least, on one level) an effect of the drugs that Sarah Palmer is given by Leland, because it was always shown from her point of view. I can not explain why it is now in the red room/black lodge.