Tag: television

Some Black Mirror shit coming to life here

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

A little while ago, my gym brought in these three new stationary bikes.  Expresso bikes.  They do that every now and then; bring in some new cardio equipment, presumably to try and get people to actually work on their cardio instead of doing the age-old practice of bogarting elliptical machines for 30 minutes and calling it an adequate workout.

At first glance, they don’t look like anything special, they look like some fairly standard, nondescript exercise bicycles – except that they have a screen affixed to the front of them.  Obviously, with the constantly advancing rise of the digital world we live in, it’s no shocker to see screens ending up on bicycles, when there are already screens attached to various other bicycles, treadmills and elliptical machines; distraction is the key to long cardio sessions, and if screens can provide some distractions, then maybe some fat sweaty Atlantic City sweat hogs might actually lose some weight.

But it’s not television that these screens broadcast; users have the option on what they want to have broadcast between different settings of paths, some interactive studio training, or interactive games that can be played while bicycling, utilizing your own cycling as the controller.

Honestly, I’m intrigued by these Expresso bikes, and if I weren’t always in the mindset that running is really the only acceptable form of cardio, I’d be willing to give these a try.  Frankly, I’m under the belief that gamification is an effective way of teaching and training, and if making an exercise bike more fun by adding games or creating competition is going to be what it takes for some people to get up and exercise, I think it’s pretty cool.

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Not sure how to feel about RE:Netflix

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Back in 2002, I really, really enjoyed the first Resident Evil film, starring Milla Jovovich.  What I really liked about it was that it was almost an entirely independent story that took place inside the RE world, with unique characters, and only featured tertiary concepts and adversaries from the game itself.

And then with each successive sequel, the franchise began shoe-horning more and more actual RE characters into a storyline that wasn’t really intended to have them be a part of in the first place, and the series as a whole began to get really ridiculous, disjointed and have Swiss cheese sized plot holes, not to mention the casting of all the actual characters seemed so very inappropriately bad in most cases. 

Needless to say, my enthusiasm for the series dwindled with every sequel, and by the time The Final Chapter came about, I didn’t even see it in a theater, and watched a pirated copy of it on the internet for free, and still wanted my money back afterwards.  It was the movie-watching epitome of a mercy kill, and the only real good thing about it was the fact that I could have closure to the movie franchise, and wouldn’t have to watch this any later in the future.

That being said, when I found out about how Netflix wants to release a live-action Resident Evil series, my blood kind of goes cold, and I’m left with this crippling feeling of not knowing how to feel.

In one hand, I’m still scarred from just how poorly the movie franchise (de-)escalated into this abominable avalanche of bullshit, and I never want anyone in existence to ever try to act out the story of one of my favorite video game franchises in history.

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Thoughts on 90 Day Fiancé season 6

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I knew 2019 was off to a great start when we discovered that the TLC Go app had opened their doors to our cable provider, thus allowing us to access to watch TLC programming, completely on demand.  That being said, I don’t often have to worry about not having something to watch at any given point with the vast majority of TLC’s library now available to me with the push of a few buttons.

Obviously, shows like My 600 Lb. Life are among the marquee shows that I favor the most, and classics like Extreme Cheapskates and Extreme Couponing inexplicably didn’t get renewed for anything beyond two seasons.  But if I had to pick one show that stood out above all others as my go-to for TLC programming, it is and has always been, 90 Day Fiancé.

I’m not ashamed to say it, but I’ve literally watched every season of 9DF.  The irony is that I’ve really liked a lot of shows in my time, but eventually everything falls to the wayside for whatever reason(s).  Archer, The Walking Dead, and American Horror Story come to mind as shows that I’ve at times gotten lukewarm with and allowed them to slide over to the back burner.  But not 9DF.  Nah dog, I’ve literally seen every single episode (of at least the core series), and I’m fairly certain I can name every single person who’s been on the show if shown a picture.

So I just recently finished season 6, and I was thinking that I was playing some major catchup; little did I realize that I basically caught up to season’s actual air dates, and probably wrapped up the main episodes right as the season was winding down with its typical tell-all episodes at the end.

Needless to say, there have been some real trainwrecks throughout the series, but I think season 6 really outdid themselves at finding some truly tv-worthy couples this time around.  I mean, every previous season always had one kind of anchor couple, or layup couple, as in the one couple that anyone could tell was the stable one, vanilla one, bland one, or rather the couple that everyone knew was going to be fine, even after the cameras stopped rolling.  Usually, they were the one where one or both of the couple were religious, and it was pulling teeth trying to get any sort of drama or entertainment value out of them.

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Hi praise for Hi Score Girl

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I really wanted to say that it was surreal to be binging on an anime again, as if it were the year 2000, but that wouldn’t be that accurate.  Within the last year alone, I watched stuff like the last two seasons of Initial D, and I watched through Kakegurui on Netflix, so I have in fact watched some anime beyond 2000.  Regardless, over the last week, I binged through an anime series, and as if I were 16 years old again, I’m looking forward to when Netflix gets the reigns to the rest of it.

I’m going to assume it’s either Castlevania (which I guess would have classified as anime) or all the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers episodes I’d been watching over the last few months that prompted Hi Score Girl to populate in my recommendations on Netflix, but I guess I have to admit that Netflix does kind of know me, because the preview got my attention enough to where I’d fast track and actually watch it, as opposed to putting it into my list and then never actually watching it until like a year later.

And I absolutely loved it.  Without question, Hi Score Girl is a love letter to old school video games and video game culture, and all too often, I felt rushed back to my own childhood watching the daily gaming mania and obsession with video games of Haruo Yaguchi.  I was super into Street Fighter II, and I poured hours upon hours into the game, and at differing points of my life, thought I was the best player in the world, until I went to the arcade and occasionally got my ass handed to me by players better than I was.  I can’t say I was as maniacal about improvement and wanting to be the best, but I’m still attuned enough to gaming culture to completely understand and relate to some degree.

Intertwined through all the gaming nostalgia is a sweet and fairly innocent love story between children growing up, and the trials and tribulations that come with different classes in school and society, the expectations of a family name, and the innate need and want to simply live our own lives.

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Tidying Up with Marie Kondo is the whitest show ever

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Prior to her show on Netflix, I’d heard of Marie Kondo.  Her book about tidying up and minimalism sparked a little bit of a firestorm from the literary world, citing inspiration to people to basically purge all the unnecessary shit they’ve hoarded over their lives, but from a holistic, Japanese approach; and if there’s one thing white people love, it’s exotic lines of thinking from the wise and progressive Orient.

Now, I use the phrase white and white people ironically, if that’s not obvious; the actual color of the people is widely irrelevant, as the mentality to rely on books and television to serve as inspiration to seek out enlightenment and happiness is a pretty white people thing, regardless of what color a person actually is.

And Netflix has clearly gone through the effort to make sure that the spectrum of people that Marie Kondo helps in her series Tidying Up with Marie Kondo, checks all the boxes of diversity, from the aforementioned whiteys, a black family, a gay couple, some ambiguously possibly Asian people, Hispanics, and then more white people in each respective episode.

I used to think that the shows on HGTV of a bunch of white people looking for real estate in South American countries were the whitest shows on television, but that was before I watched Tidying Up.  The HGTV shows are all about affluent rich white people, to which doesn’t actually apply to all white people; but the people all featured on Tidying Up are peak white people (again, regardless of actual race), in the sense that they’re all fairly upper-middle class households with the very relatable scenarios of just having way too much shit, and feeling overwhelmed and stressed out about, clutter.

They’re not worrying about jobs, income inequality, bills, or whether or not their next meal is guaranteed.  They’re worrying about the fact that they’ve accumulated a lot of material shit in their homes, and it’s stressing them out.

Peak white people problems.

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Netflix’s greatest accomplishment

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They made Iron Fist cool.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not one of those nerds who automatically assume Iron Fist to be the worst show out of the Netflix Marvel Comics Universe solely because it’s about Iron Fist, one of the lamest heroes in the history of Marvel Comics.  Frankly, I thought season one wasn’t terrible, and I maintain my unpopular stance that it was stronger than either season of Jessica Jones. 

In the grand spectrum of the Netflix MCU, both are still at the bottom of the barrel in comparison to Daredevil, Luke Cage and the Punisher, but we all know that they all had to exist and be created in order for there to even be a The Defenders in the first place.  But if you ask me, Iron Fist stands above Jessica Jones, and it’s not really that much of a contest.

But I just finished season 2 of Iron Fist, and my general reaction isn’t one of relief that I ground through it and that I’m up-to-date on Netflix MCU programming (like I did after Jessica Jones S2), but one of a general satisfaction, and reason to be optimistic that the series could continue in a positive direction in the upcoming season(s) that I genuinely hope come to existence someday.

Frankly, unending kudos go to Netflix, the writers and the showrunners for taking such a weak property and molding and shaping a halfway decent program out of it.  It was undoubtedly better than the first season, and the performances from the crew were all pretty decent in their capacities.  I can’t say that I really followed the comics at all, but from what I understand the season has been a somewhat fair portrayal of source materials while seeming fresh enough to adapt to live performances.

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I love stories like this

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Long story short: former Cosby Show actor photographed working at Trader Joe’s, photos submitted to celebrity gossip sites in an attempt to ridicule actor; instead, criticism and the general rage of the internet get turned onto woman who took pictures

I really do enjoy stories like this one.  It gives me hope for humanity that even the vast populous of the wasteland internet are operating with a general respect for those who work period, versus those who try to throw stones from afar.

I just love the thought that some nobody chick whom it says something about her that she was able to recognize Geoffrey Owens in the first place given the fact that his episodes of the Cosby Show were back in like 1992, thought she could get a little bit of internet cred by breaking photos of a television actor from the 90s working an ordinary job, but then it blows up in her face when the wrath of the internet simply asks, what’s wrong with a guy trying to earn an honest living?

The fact that there are people out there whose lives are basically dedicated to trying to find interesting content to try and break the internet with is sad enough, and feeds into the inherent need to be first that so many people fall prey to, and its stories like this that make me smugly satisfied from afar that people really should be a little more careful with the content they try to produce and think for two seconds of the potential outcomes of breaking it.  I’m fairly certain this broad didn’t imagine the vast majority of the viewing world would turn heel on her beyond the worthless props and credit she was going to get for making this reveal.

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