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Messages - Plugabugz

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26
General Chat / Re: The COVID-19 Virus is Coming For Us All Thread
« on: April 16, 2021, 05:52:54 AM »
Sounds like Pfizer is supposed to need a 3rd booster in less than 12 months, and potentially this becomes a yearly vaccine.

Plugabugz, I hope you don't experience any of the ill side0-effects from the Astra (was it blood clots?)



The stats suggest that it is 7 people in 1 million that is getting clots and, IIRC, they all had existing issues. Those numbers are not worth worrying over. People are out there doing riskier things than that.

I had none of those side effects aside from a headache and tinglyness. For comparison i felt a lot worse in December 2019 when this woman sneezed on me.

27
General Chat / Re: The COVID-19 Virus is Coming For Us All Thread
« on: April 15, 2021, 07:17:52 PM »
I got my first dose, the Astrazeneca one, in February. Aside from some tingly skin for one evening i've been fine ever since. I have to wait 10-11 weeks before the second dose, with the opinion that getting more people partially covered is better than smaller numbers of people fully covered.

We're finally starting to come out of a 7 month lockdown (it doesnt officially end until mid-June) so im happy to be able to do things again like watch movies.

28
I just realised that Wandavision contradicts Agents of Shield S4. They really dont pay attention to the Marvel Television produced shows no matter how much they say they do.

29
The lack of consequences - and Monica saying "i'd have done the same too!" - did begin to frustrate me after i let the episode sink in.

31
Movies & TV / Re: Rate the last TV show you've seen
« on: January 13, 2021, 11:02:21 AM »
The Expanse - This show has pulled off something that Person of Interest was the last show to achieve: get me invested in these characters and their stories. The characters in Season 5 are directly referring to specific stories and events thats happened through the series (notably 1, 2 and 4), characters are asking about their histories and everyone has distinct motivations that is both compatible and sometimes incompatible with those they consider allies. The show takes a serious, more frank look at scifi rapid acceleration and deceleration hurts, lack of gravity kills, characters wear seat belts in space, characters born in space almost never go to land because their bodies cannot handle it and then mines stories out of that.

Then there's some unconventional characters - Amos Burton is one of the most "simply complex" characters on TV. Everything is literal and direct he even says in one episode "if you're gonna kill me then kill me, you have a clean shot to the back of my head", and comes off as one-note until you understand why - and then the context changes everything he says even in retrospect. It's such a balancing act that makes the most potentially dull character very human.

Where Game of Thrones fell over was that the series outpaced the books. The Expanse never will because the series ends (season 6) before the books finish, and the writers are in involved with scripts and production.

If you haven't started this series you absolutely should.

32
How for AT&T to mess up the launch of Wonder Woman:

1 - Advertise on TV "Wonder Woman 1984 in cinemas now!"
2 - Pay no attention that half the UK (at the time, all of southeastern England, all of Wales and Scotland) was in Tier 4 which closed cinemas so there was no way to watch it.
3 - Release it on HBO Max which is US only, then spend all of 2020 about "an international release for HBO Max", instead of using Amazon or Netflix to handle the rest.

I still have my movie pass but Cineworld has been closed up shop entirely until at least April 2021, so there's no way for me to watch it without paying extra for a rental.

Well done AT&T.

33
General Chat / Re: Who here is into Hip-Hop/Rap?
« on: November 25, 2020, 10:17:19 AM »
So i finally did listen to May The Lord Watch. I quite enjoyed it. But the surprise for 2020 is Lyric Jones' Closer Than They Appear. It's easily my favourite album of 2020.

It's ludicrously short at 22 minutes long for an album, but the album flows together so beautifully that you dont even realise its finished. Phonte is the exec producer and it kinda shows due to how well the tracks flow together.

It takes everything that made Little Brother good and distilled it down even further. Amazing.

34
Movies & TV / Re: Rate the last TV show you've seen
« on: November 19, 2020, 01:36:42 PM »

    • Hughie, Frenchie, and Mother's Milk should be hella-dead. Stormfront just decides to casually toss them aside instead of murder-death-killing them immediately.


    Plot Armour is more powerful than anything the other supes have.

    35
    Movies & TV / Re: Rate the last TV show you've seen
    « on: November 18, 2020, 02:09:27 PM »
    The Boys S2 - Someone said somewhere that whenever the boys gets directly into confrontation with any supes, or Starlight against any of the other supes, they have just four options, always using at least one:

    1 - Run (which they use as much as possible)
    2- Another supe turns up and interferes
    3 - Kimiko supports enough to achieve something else
    4 - Blackmail

    4 was used extensively through the season, once directly with Butcher and Noir, and Starlight used it repeatedly through the season. 3 was used when Kimiko's side stories tied back to the main plot. 2 was used almost every single time including the battle in the final episode.


    Deep's story was a single isolated storythread that only connects back to the main story twice, and the second time it was purely for A-Train to get the info on Stormfront - then plot-wise abandoned him again. You could have cut him out entirely, or just made him recurring, and have A-Train run into him in the church and achieve the same result.

    I am aware a bit of what happens in the books,
    but since someone said that i said unsee that now and its kinda spoiled the season.

    36
    Movies & TV / Re: Rate the last movie you've seen
    « on: September 30, 2020, 01:41:04 PM »
    The Old Guard - A surprisingly decent Netflix movie with an interesting conceit. The only thing that stands out is the "location problem" when movies film in a major city.

    Towards the end of the film they park a car outside an office block in the City of London (the City of London is itself inside London, but only a square mile wide) and leave it and go upstairs. No other people, no other cars, no other traffic seen. When they leave no other traffic or people is seen until after they leave when all the extras suddenly pop out from around the sides.

    1 - That car would have had hundreds of parking tickets on it by the time they got back to the car.
    2 - Parking that car on a two lane road in the City would have caused a massive traffic jam going back miles (having seen a fight in the middle of the road last week, this is very likely)
    3 - It was clearly a workday if dozens of people appear in business clothing, meaning that, in pre-2020 at least, that street would have been packed and police would have been there before they got downstairs.

    It's the little things that throw me out.

    37
    Movies & TV / Re: Rate the last movie you've seen
    « on: August 29, 2020, 03:53:56 PM »
    The New Mutants - Well this ends the FoX-Men era with a complete whimper. The movie needed some extra time to polish up some things, and the editing is all over the place one scene very early into the movie sees Dani run into an invisible wall and wake up with blood under her nose, and the very next scene (with no time jump) its all gone.

    A common complaint over all these movies - Apocalypse especially - is they keep fighting murky CGI villains. And this continues here too. Sadly the movie hints at a few things for future movies that will never happen.

    It's best to assume the final X-Men movie is Logan.

    38
    Movies & TV / Re: Rate the last movie you've seen
    « on: August 28, 2020, 04:43:07 PM »
    Tenet - I am still completely unsure about what i just watched. A technical masterpiece, made by someone who knows exactly what they're doing (see: Birdman, 1917). But the story? I'm not sure yet, i'll watch it a second time over the weekend.

    If you watch Doctor Who, the character of River Song will have educated you completely as to how certain parts work

    But i can say with absolute certainty, Tenet will be confusing a LOT of people.

    39
    Movies & TV / Re: Rate the last TV show you've seen
    « on: August 14, 2020, 03:47:05 PM »
    And goodbye to AOS entirely. The show had many problems over the years - not being allowed by Marvel to use anything to do with the movies or even other comic characters, being ignored by the movies, budgetary issues (which the showrunners acknowledged after the final episode) - but the characters really grew into their positions and Chloe Bennet (Daisy) really matured into the role over the years.

    It got 7 seasons and ended on its own terms which is a lot better than most shows these days.

    40
    Movies & TV / Re: Rate the last TV show you've seen
    « on: July 28, 2020, 05:36:31 PM »
    Last weeks episode of Agents of Shield was fantastic. Quite possibly the best in the series.

    41
    AOS is the only show where i keep noticing them redressing the same sets.

    In the first episode the kitchen for the restaurant was the same set as communal area for the Lighthouse and initially the SHIELD base. In the most recent episode the research facility was the same set as the battle arena on the lighthouse (i think?). The corridors have been redressed repeatedly to be all sorts of places.

    It keeps the costs down, for sure, but i dont know how i keep noticing it with just AOS.

    42
    Agents of Shield is back if anyone still cares. Was enjoyable. Mac is really cheesing me off. Why did they make him Director again? Last season has been so long ago I had to rack my brain. Deak is cool, promoted from git. The suffering of Fritz Simmons continues unabated. Coulson is back to being cool. Premise for the season is intriguing.

    I'm glad its back, but they should really have dropped a "previously on" in the episode because after a year i've totally forgotten.

    I like Mac. He is a bit steadfast compared to Coulson but then he also looks like he'll wreck everyone else with not much effort. Sad the show is ending but glad it got to end.

    43
    Movies & TV / Re: Star Trek
    « on: May 20, 2020, 12:16:50 PM »
    I had thought about starting a thread on Discovery just to start bagging on it but I figured there wasn't much point as oohhboy's pretty much got that on lockdown. I suppose I'd sum it up as this. When watching Voyager, you could see how TV still struggled with incorporating early CGI. It got better by Enterprise's time. CGI was used sparingly so the shows had to rely more on keeping people entertained by the dialogue and ideas. Now the graphics have gotten to movie blockbuster quality and have taken over so that everything can be whiz-bang AMAZING action and the dialogue between characters has decreased in quality to move things all in a perfunctory manner while any deep issues or questions raised during the series are barely explored or are treated like that is a homage to past Trek series. Like the people behind are saying to the fans, remember in past shows how the crew would go to a foreign planet and get in a tricky situation? Look we did that quickly in an episode as well. We're still the same Trek as before because we paid that thing lip service. Sure, the old series would explore the issues or conundrums they faced on those missions but who's got time to think when we can show spaceships go BOOOM!? The effects have now taken over and it is a hollow shell of what the series was meant to be and the direction it had followed for decades through multiple series up until now.

    This is something i coined for Stargate Atlantis (more than 10 years ago?!) as "blow stuff up wowzy". The show would use this tactic almost like a setpiece in the Uncharted series, most notably accidentally blowing up an entire solar system, instead of the character growth underpinning things like SG1 did. It was still fun to watch but the wowzy was very much a well it went back to repeatedly.

    Compare to say, Doctor Who's Listen or Heaven Sent which was solely Capaldi's doctor (and Steven Moffat reminding that he is actually a good writer).

    Also, DS9's visuals and sets has aged far better than Voyager's did.

    44
    Movies & TV / Re: Star Trek
    « on: May 18, 2020, 09:37:39 AM »
    I haven't watched Picard yet, but Anson Mount was great as Pike. He came off as capable, warm and approachable.

    Curious to see how this turns out.

    Also, this just makes me sad for the Stargate franchise.

    45
    Movies & TV / Re: Rate the last TV show you've seen
    « on: May 05, 2020, 05:48:27 AM »
    Gangs of London - The director behind The Raid 1 and 2 made a TV series. That should be all i need to say to get BNM to watch it. It's incredibly brutal.

    So i binged the whole season. The show definitely didnt go as brutal as the first episode, but it was an interesting story with multiple different plots that often only brushed against each other.

    I had one issue with the final episode and a single point which the entire series hinges on Shaun works out that Elliot is a cop because the other undercover cop had zero security locks on his phone containing all the photos and evidence but aside from that it was quite a ride. The actor who plays Ed Dumani was fantastic, he had such stage presence about him (compared to other people who was just merely acting; this will make sense in the show) while coming off as calm and collected even while everyone else is going nuts.

    However, this show gets an 18 rating in the UK (the equivalent of a USA R rating?), and is equally graphic to match.

    46
    Movies & TV / Re: Rate the last TV show you've seen
    « on: April 29, 2020, 04:32:15 PM »
    I heard about this but never even seen a trailer. So I don't really know more than it either exist or is in the works. I'll probably look it up later now that you reminded me.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4CJ5p4XisHs

    It's a Cinemax co-production with Sky so it will appear on US TV soon enough.

    47
    Movies & TV / Re: Rate the last TV show you've seen
    « on: April 29, 2020, 09:32:08 AM »
    Got a weird one for one today. Just finished watching the 1st season of an Amazon Prime series called Homecoming. Julia Roberts plays a Counselor/Administrator of a new Dept. of Defense Project called "Homecoming" aimed at rehabilitating veterans returning from combat so they can be reintegrated into civilian life.

    The twist is that this is a conspiracy/mystery thriller taking place simultaneously at 2 points in time: the past, where we follow Roberts' character as she goes about her job...and the present, where mysteriously everything about the project has been covered up and everyone involved is oddly evasive and conspiratorial regarding how it all went down. The present storyline largely follows a Dept. of Defense pencil-pusher investigating a "complaint" into Homecoming that no one seems to want to talk about...

    Season 1 is...alright. As it's aiming for an atmosphere of paranoia, there's a lot of shots lingering on seemingly unimportant things for long periods of time. The odd performances & atmosphere almost reminds me of David Lynch's work, but there is a LOT of boring, "shot/reverse shot" camera work. I also feel like there's a lot of fat here that could have been trimmed because it feels like there's a fair amount of screen time spent on elements that either don't altogether matter or have long since been firmly established.

    Season 1 will apparently be self-contained from the upcoming Season 2, which will follow a new cast of characters.

    I quite enjoyed it for its oddness admittedly. It set a strange feeling which works quite well with the story.

    Gangs of London - The director behind The Raid 1 and 2 made a TV series. That should be all i need to say to get BNM to watch it. It's incredibly brutal.

    48
    Even before the virus I probably mentioned how the idea of theaters was becoming obsolescent in a modern world where its becoming common to have 75 inch TVs.

    Ok I just had a weird thought. Do they still sell tv by the inch in Europe?

    Yes they are. The metric measurement is usually mentioned on the box somewhere.

    49
    General Chat / Re: The COVID-19 Virus is Coming For Us All Thread
    « on: March 13, 2020, 06:50:14 AM »
    It's the same here too, but now there's signage up limiting everyone to 1 per person.

    Antibacterial wipes have all disappeared too which is concerning because i have to work with people's grubby laptops. Still lots of bleach though...

    50
    Movies & TV / Re: Rate the last TV show you've seen
    « on: February 20, 2020, 05:43:40 PM »
    Legends of Tomorrow: A headless Marie Antoinette with a flamethrower running around loose on the Waverider.

    Never change.

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