Down in the Hole: The Wire dive

Got season 1 and 2 of The Wire at Home Depot. Been hearing for years about how this is the Best TV Evar, and yeah, looks good so far. I loved The Shield, so I'm down with the gritty. This Wire is more of a slow burn, but I can be patient. They say it's like a novel, I like the sound of that.

Donnie Darko and Sunshine

Found Donnie Darko and Sunshine at the Home Depot near Robinsons. Good selection there, they had The Wire season 2 but I wanted to start right from season 1. I'll come back for more sometime.

Donnie Darko was okay, but Sunshine was more engaging for me, in part because Sunshine is the closest I'll ever get to watching Peter Watts's extraordinary novel Blindsight in movie form.

I crashed my bike a while back, nasty wipeout, faceplant. The knee was the worst, still twinges sometimes. And it's made me a bit gun-shy on the bike. Speed-shy? I'm more cautious, I brake a lot, hold back on the downhill speed runs. Yeah, sometimes I imagine crashing again. Just need to get acclimatized I guess, and some mental discipline to not let imagination get in the way.

Trying to read The Best of Philippine Speculative Fiction.

Lostenfreude

lostenfreude: amusement and pity towards those who feel ripped off by the Lost ending.

i stopped watching Lost after the first season, but there was no escaping the buzz towards the end of the series. read about the finale on the rss feeds, so it was purgatory/afterlife, the fans called that years ago.

i've noticed that Lost apologists go something like, "well, it was about the characters, it wasn't really about the mysteries." hell with that. i watched season one and that was the hook: the plane crash, the polar bear, etc. and some people who liked the ending say they'd still watch the series again. but what if you didn't drink the kool-aid back when the series premiered? can the Lost faithful get new fans to sit through six (!) seasons of this shaggy dog? i don't think so. the tantalizing mirage of The Ending was the major driving force. now the jig is up.

i liked Alias more, at least it wasn't so pretentious. the outlandish and inexhaustible series of rambaldi artifacts, the rumblings about prophecy and destiny, no one took it seriously, so we could all just roll with it.

i'll never watch lost again, but if i did, i can easily imagine that whenever locke/the Others/etc. acted mysterious and knowing, it would be insufferably annoying. game's over, the emperor is naked. they just made it up as they went along, there was never any master plan unfolding piece by piece.