윤

It’s been a trip, living long enough to see a gay Black Doctor. (No doubt Disney will try to make it Harry Potter rather than allow It’s a Sin.)
I fear, however, no shot at outlasting evil cunts like Sunak and Braverman who want to ship migrants off to the actor’s home country of Rwanda.

No one’s gonna remember this nameless filler for those times in the week when AMC couldn’t air The Walking Dead, but every few years I feel like an underachieving nobody hung up on the past I return to watch all the ones whose lives it shared for its 20-episode run. Cut short? Maybe, nobody cares. The whole show was a big fat zugzwang. I suppose Mrs. Davis attempted something of the sort, but freeyow, was that cast good-looking, their characters too Harry Potter for my idea of Pynchon, and conspiracies nowadays might want to keep a lower profile. Setting it in nearby shitty Long Beach helped, too.

Wasn’t going to let go without a look back at some of my remaining memories from the series, those weird aliens with bowler hats, the kid in the mirror world saying he doesn’t have a reflection to break (which I really could’ve sworn wasn’t from the Black-and-White season), and the awesome way they’d abruptly lead into the next episode after an almost disappointing lack of epilogue at the end. Lesson I should’ve learned was that you’re never lost when you’ve got each other? And apparently some of the From showrunners worked on Lost, but I stick by what I recently said that whatever it is they’ve put together so far and dangle for as long as their budget lasts reminds me less of it and more of Land of the Lost.

I’m still reeling from the events of last weekend, but carry on as I always have with the imaginary solace that American safety net GoFundMe is amassing for William Cho a Bruce Wayne-sized estate to make something of a legacy. It was actually the night before that I sat for this recent release, was mildly entertained by its refreshingly tongue-in-cheek approach to the genre, only to spot right away what has understandably got to be my favorite cameo ever, despite it being no strange a feature in all these nostalgic sequels and remakes.

I forgot, I really did like seeing some of the 60’s cast members in the one-off Lost in Space movie—starring Gary Oldham? (And Heather Graham, who is always welcome to segue into my subconscious.) The show came up, right on cue, when I was reminded of Dr. Smith’s “oh, the pain” catchphrase upon turning over another year and expecting little else to convince me not to make it my own. Learning that Jonathan Harris was 54 during his act (and milked it for 3 decades) doesn’t help.

I preferred how the characters in the original served their purpose and didn’t reappear, much less intermingle as archetypes, but despite these and other changes, how can I disparage Ishiguro’s reliable eloquence:

I wonder, Mr. Wakeling, if I may now turn to matters you may consider more personal. I have no wish to belittle our playground, but I put it to you that it was, all the same, a small thing. And that it will, before long, go the way of most small things. It may fall into disrepair, or be superseded by some grander scheme. To speak plainly, we cannot assume to have erected a lasting monument. Should there come days when it becomes no longer clear to you to what end you are directing your daily efforts, when the sheer grind of it all threatens to reduce you to the kind of state in which I so long existed, I urge you then to recall our little playground and the modest satisfaction that became our due upon its completion.

I had to see for myself, and it’s not as bad as the “haters” made it out, but fuck it’s disappointing there weren’t better ideas to develop. Like the Scooby gang all grown up and working in the same boring office. Or fighting off a zombie apocalypse (which I think has been done in comics). Certainly a next generation of them, so the diversity wouldn’t seem so forced again. The New Adventures of Mighty Mouse had “ethnically-mixed friends” 35 years ago!
Holy coincidences, Bat-Bat, lucky as I was with a seed because I of course forgot about my DVD, only to be floored by the reunion episode with the Mighty Heroes!

In the furor over the 1899 cancellation a Reddit poster suggested a much cheaper and renewed Epix series From, which I binged in but a day or two and might have something more to say about (I honestly don’t, other than to hope this incarnation of Lost delivers at least one “[The] Constant”—what’s with these four-letter titles; Evil, too), for an opportune upload on Nyaa led me back to Netflix and overlooked drama 방법 from a few years ago. Brilliant villianess and some nice ideas like the gathering of shamans from around the world like Street Fighter, one of them being a manga artist like Lovecraft’s Pickman, though the best part was undoubtedly the craziest zombie chase scene, ever, in the follow-up film. If only Inspector Koo‘s 12 episodes could’ve received such treatment! …The thought got me started on a rewatch, and with that in mind, there certainly is enough material seeded for a similar short sequel, one that pits the team against a challenging enough one-off opponent but in the process, of course, must solve the mystery behind her husband’s suicide, which K was right, involved 산타씨, but maybe not as she described. “Santa’s Secret” could be the subtitle.

I’m sometimes glad to be proven wrong—what am I saying, as a pessimist, I count on it—the mulefa and war with the angels weren’t unfilmable; I was only unable to predict that budgets for such spectacle would eventually be approved for the small screen. Not like me, too, to quote the books (“There’s plenty of folk as’d like to have a lion as a dæmon and they end up with a poodle”) and fail to make the connection to “Seen and Not Seen” from Remain in Light.

I’m also reminded how I found the series in the first place, from a co-worker whose church-arranged husband strung her along for just long enough to finance his business and obtain a green card. The spinster’s faith is surely unshaken: “L’absurde naît de cette confrontation entre l’appel humain et le silence déraisonnable du monde.” Albert Camus, Le mythe de Sisyphe

Chang Cheh (and I Kuang) had a whole Hung Sikuan-verse long before Marvel, I remember at least another one where Fu Sheng had to tunnel to rescue him from a dungeon, and in this Executioners prequel, the character, filled in by a Chen Kuantai-lookalike, gets in on some Lu Feng skewering with Kuo Chui, Lo Meng and Chiang Sheng. Sun Chien wasted his time being an expert of walking on posts, while Brass Head/Mr. Chu from Crippled Avengers wielded a lollipop-shaped hammer, all of which is visible in the final freeze frame above.

There was a suspicious car traveling up the street, I think maybe because the driver wasn’t immediately visible, so somehow I was able to hop in the back and confront the occupants. “This isn’t possible,” I accused, “You must be from the future!” The two or three men admitted as much, as our vehicle converted to a boat and took off on the open seas. (I was reminded of The Last Starfighter, which we watched the other night. It wasn’t really that good, was it, apart from the premise, which I’d rather have seen again on a 12-minute episode of Regular Show.) We entered a purple gash in the air, and the sky went from sunny to dark as we docked. They warned me that in their time, non-Whites were gone, purged, didn’t press for an explanation, and that I’d stick out. The city was a bland shade of brown and eerily empty of inhabitants, like an early videogame. The boy, still a four-footer, tried befriending one of the local Village of the Damned children but heeding our host’s advice, I told him to let go of her hand.

Thought-provoking foray into race relations aside, another of my familiar themes in dreams is the long journey on foot alone, often across unimaginable distances and non-navigable terrain, which may or may not be a corollary of transportation woes, though fortunately I spare myself the actual experience and only reflect upon it before or afterward. This morning I traced my trip from somewhere in northern New England to upstate New York by way of Canada and the “Madison” River, probably mistaken for the Hudson. Is there some challenge I’m bracing for, and am I burdening myself unnecessarily by taking the more difficult approach, like how I prefer to use a manual screwdriver instead of the cordless drill?