윤

I’m certain I’ve never written about this place, since I only first stepped into our location this year. (There’s been some competition from the Panini Kabob Grill around the corner.) Last week I upped my “lines” of their 130K Scoville red sauce on my platter to six, and it cost me most of the following day.

Which got me thinking again about my three pillars of taste, and how the human flowchart will eventually force me to give them up, only one at a time, if I’m lucky. Jin compared them to Ultima’s Principles of Truth, Love and Courage (which of course combine to form the Eight Virtues, because they needed more than just three cities and dungeons) and gave me the idea for a comic where I’d meet their personifications, possibly represented by Geri Halliwell
, Gene Wilder and who else but that fucking nightmare from Star Trek. They’d have to emerge from within me, since I’ve already used the cosmic pantheon for my Lance Reddick one—I’ve really got to get to work to drop them all someday like a Netflix season.

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.

2023 brought with it news that the new series from the husband-and-wife team who brought us Dark wouldn’t be renewed (which corporate cost-cutting has ironically made a considerable concern despite all the competition for content), and while the first season hadn’t convinced everyone that it would be something just as special, I did enjoy my late-night viewings on the old couch, overcoming my hesitation about the period setting, appreciating the confluence of languages where before there was only Deutsch, and certainly relishing the dream-like transitions between realities through the crawlspaces.As exquisitely as they crafted the imagery, this was a quality production, the way I like my WTF, because the creators got a chance with their vision and ambition. Shame, I was relieved more than anything those two threw us for a loop on their maiden voyage and I was expecting no less than another from them, especially after pulling the ending straight out of the shitty US remake of Life on Mars… Wait a minute, Ashes to Ashes ended with “Heroes”, and so did Regular Show?

In retrospect it may not amount to much, but there was at least some progress from the Killing Eve remake where the queers were relegated to supporting characters then letting them be the leads, if only “coded” as such and surrounded by the most extreme examples of the opposite sex.

Took an early nap while the boy reveled with the Minions, maybe in the hope that my subconscious would pervert them to my liking, but all I got were short BLM-looking guys who could travel, in trios, along the surface of a golden vase and survive being bombed but were otherwise cold and impersonal.

So the long-awaited adaptation arrives with a DC logo but none of the familiar characters in the original run, Mister Miracle, Etrigan, Wesley Dodds Sandman; Constantine they keep, and make her an impeccably dressed scoundrel as only the girl of my dreams could play? It worked on Doom Patrol and Titans (at least until Batman actually showed up), but that was when both were on the Universe.

I looked through the doorway and saw a young person’s bare arm suspended unnaturally high above the room, undulating slightly and the fingers wiggling to show that someone unseen was behind it. Suddenly I was attacked by a dozen gray fists, but I fought them back, defiant and insistent that they weren’t getting to me, even as the image of my aggressor in the back changed shape and color.

In quite the change of setting to an anime convention, my friend and I (I think it was Frank Hsu, because he was tall, thin and decked out in motorcycling leathers) were admiring the life-sized mechs on display, and when we learned we could actually climb inside one for photos, queued up thinking that we were first in line. Turned out it already stretched around the display and the others were full-on cosplaying as sentai pilots, so the Shoei or Arai helmet and riding gear looked philistine in comparison. Nearing the end of our wait, a woman with a baby approached and we let her cut ahead of us, but she then tried chaining in a fat relative who waddled up and we objected vehemently. I don’t remember taking any pictures because the very next thing, my buddy looked more like that fucker Steve Bannon and was thanking me; such an abrupt edit in my timeline frightened me that Alzheimer’s had struck and this was how my perception would continue, jumping from one moment to another, unaware of what happened between them.

It’s how I reconcile Severance and Navillera. (Although the former will probably be revealed to be mad science like Dr. Brain, the Trojan Horse implant that has to be “macrodata’d” to override memory or willpower conflicts.) Bread-winning aside, what good are we to our loved ones if we don’t know who they are anymore? What good are we to ourselves?

It was the second season of a Squid Game/Severance love child and I was one of the employee/contestants, waiting in a spacious modern lobby with all the others for our first assignment. There was an announcement and a rush of people to the elevators, who then returned with forms they were furiously completing, filling in shapes with their №2 pencils, presumably as part of the next series of tasks. What I immediately noticed, however, was that all of them were women and the four or five of us fellas still lounging on the couches didn’t seem too interested in participating. Instead, we went downstairs to a seat-less auditorium where in place of a stage was a towering window covered by a flexible lattice. I joined one of my colleagues trying to climb it to freedom, but a tsunami raged outside with such force that we were swung off by the rising water.
I actually enjoyed the series last month, despite my niggling issue with co-opted business terminology; wouldn’t “balancing” (as in work-life) have conveyed a more favorable impression of the fanciful procedure? But who am I to know the discarded ideas and ultimate plans of successful people. While the premise shouldn’t be too far beyond my experience to have come up with, maybe I’ve been preoccupied with mitigating the frustration of corporate bureaucracy and organizational dysfunction on a short-sighted personal level, after hours or no, rather than exploring how it might be done away with once and for all.

I had finished up a tour with the new company—new-ish because I seemed already to be familiar with the place and know many of the people there, maybe they were a local customer—and got to join former colleague Steven Xie as he was preparing for his entry exam. The administer was a gruff American who wasn’t capable of accommodating his applicant’s language and personality nor cared to, and told him he’d dock his score if he wouldn’t “shut the fuck up” and said a single thing while taking it. After hearing Steven repeat that abrasive instruction without the least bit of sarcasm, I stayed to help him refrain from outburst while he retrieved five small fish out of a tank with his choice of available tools, a shovel with a flexible scoop. His future department teammates gathered afterward to congratulate him, going so far as to wear T-shirts with Chinese characters on them, which I am sure made him feel as welcome as one might surrounded by smiling people adorned with halves of words. (One had five on his and claimed it spelled his name.) All employees were rounded up for a slideshow presentation and I took the opportunity to bring it up with the mostly-Asian Accounting girls, who nodded in embarrassment. The projector looked 8mm and the initial picture was tiny, then spread across a messy wall; my test was to save the movie to digital and insert some captions. After the screening, I was handed what appeared to be a VHS cassette and was confident in my ability to accomplish the task, even if I was no professional like in that recent Netflix casualty; would my old rig with a USB dongle and Microsoft Photos be enough?

What kept me watching this low-budget no-fanfare new series wasn’t so much the prospect of Lovecraftian horror (which no, doesn’t just mean the spooks are invincible), but my fascination with the main character’s video restoration work. Plus, Tarkovsky’s Solaris, which is Lovecraftian. I wish they went somewhere with that, beyond the use of found-footage simply to switch perspective, maybe that’s what they were getting at with playback of all the recordings recreating reality. Why not make that the “other world”—a realm run by a being not unlike the Doom Patrol “Telephone Avatar“—instead of yet another Nexus, or even the surface of a comet, since we now have a good idea what one looks like? Still waiting for the genre smörgåsbord to top John Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness, however.

Another recurring dream I have is coming across stashes of loose change, sometimes on the street, one coin becomes two and more, quarters are followed by larger mint I assume to be half dollars or greater, and there’s always a moment before fully waking when the reality that I can’t bring them with me hasn’t sunk in, that blissful state of delusion when somehow beautiful young women are alright with you and your wife is with them. And I don’t buy the notion that this foretells riches, unless I’m meant to understand that happiness comes in small denominations and is limited to approximately $23.50. This morning’s haul came at an arcade, where at the foot of unmanned retro games I would pick up a quarter or two, occasionally coming across coins smaller than the 10-cent one from Hong Kong I still keep in my wallet and some the size of coasters. I continued my collection upstairs but was stopped by a kid who looked like that pathetic James on Ricky Gervais’ After Life series, which is the case with all its characters, sure, but it’s still good for laughs at their expense. He explained the quarters were left as tips for the repairmen, so I felt obliged to make up for my transgression, but all I had was a single dollar bill and fives, stupid cashless post-COVID economy. It was then that it occurred to me they might have me on video pilfering all those machines, camera technology being ubiqitous nowadays.