MONARCH: LEGACY OF MONSTERS, s1 (2023)

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A rare feat: a show that managed to bore me (in spite of having an excellent cast and characters that I, for the most part, enjoyed having in my life) for at least half of the far-too-long episode count and then excite me for a second season over the last few episodes, especially the last few seconds of episode ten (again: it didn't need to be that long; I forgot most of the first half of the show). But hey, Godzilla! And I love Godzilla – though my favorite part was seeing the mad Swede from HELL ON WHEELS as a straightlaced American general. Heyerdahl forever.

links/2024w06

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Experimenting with returning links to being their own weekly post (or perhaps twice-weekly, on Weds and Sat?), a hodgepodge of trailers and quotes and more. Plus it’s easier to update these at the last minute than it is trying to update the newsletter before it sends (and K said she enjoys clicking through them so there). Anyhow…

And if a prosthetic need not mimic the limb it is replacing, then perhaps prosthetics could be more than just replacements? Ms Clode is an expert in the design of robotic prostheses controlled by artificial tendons. She is keen to explore the possibility of augmenting existing bodies with new capabilities, making prosthetics “a technology that could be of use to everybody, not just amputees”. To that end she has designed the “Third Thumb”, a small and robust prosthetic digit that does exactly what it says on the tin. Controlled, like Ms Knox’s vine-arm, by pressure sensors in a pair of shoes, the thumb can be used to replace a missing one. But it can also be added to an intact hand on the opposite side from its existing, biological thumb.

GREEN MARS (Kim Stanley Robinson, 1993)

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Much as I adored RED I was simultaneously underwhelmed and over- here: Robinson's unparalleled worldbuilding is, as ever, on full display, but the sense of discovery that made RED so irresistible was lacking, both in characters and in reading (due in part, of course, to us, character and reader, having been on Robinson's Mars for decades; a general dulling of wonder is, unfailingly, human – though I'm not sure that employing a retread of the structure of RED was the best choice). Good as it was to reunite with Maya, Coyote, Hiroko, and, most of all Sax, it felt like we didn't have much to talk about this time. Perhaps BLUE will provide a rekindling of the spark.

inputs

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Didn't plan on spending much of this first morning chunk re-doing my reading page into a full-on log of each year's inputs (movies, books, comics, games), but here I am. Blame Cassavetes: SHADOWS was so brilliant I wanted to write more about it than SixWords – but in a different format from my previous postscripts; in other words, needed to separate the words from the log. Think I've found the best way to do it: yearly list which moves to archive (which is just reading until next year) at the start of the next. SHADOWS thing coming in a bit.

not a sim

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Among the many things I appreciate about GHOSTS OF TSUSHIMA is that, while it's a spectacularly-rendered open world that thrusts you into a pulp history version of the 1274 Mongol invasion of Tsushima, it's not a spectacularly-rendered open world that thrusts you into a RED DEAD 2 pulp history version (much as I adore RDR2) of the 1274 Mongol invasion of Tsushima that forces you to eat the right amount of carbs and protein and what have you or wear the right outfit in the right weather conditions or feed your horse the right amount of apples and oats to live to slay another Mongol hoard. Nice just to ride with the wind from stand-off to stand-off to heartbreak to heartbreak accompanied by Nobu’s clop-clops and Ilan Eshkeri and Shigeru Umebayashi’s incredible score.