thistlechaser: (tree)
No TV + no game (MMO down 24 hour for maintenance) = zzz boring.

My one-week checkup on my toe was today. Got stitches out (OW OW OW), turns out it's infected yet again. Sigh. I'm on antibiotics once more, hopefully they'll do a good job of knocking it out without killing my stomach.

I'm mostly getting used to having no TV. Now and then I miss it, but I miss it in the way I miss grazing (mindlessly eating). It's just filler, nothing I really ever paid much attention to. I can watch live TV on various websites, like this one or this one, or there are the "official" sites, like cbs.com. Toss in Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, and I have quite a collection of entertainment.

Netflix has 12 seasons of NCIS, so I started in on that. Many eps are new to me, though some I've caught before. It amazes me how good the very first episode of the series is -- the characters, timing, writing, etc all seem just as good as the later eps. Often it takes some time for a show to get its feet under it.

Usually when I watch a show, I watch only it and nothing else, but this time I'm alternating NCIS and The Great British Bake Off (The Great British Baking Show in the US). Oddly the fifth UK season was shown as the first season in the US, and the fourth UK season was shown as our seconds. Now that I've seen all of the first season, I can kind of understand not starting there (it was quite the different show), but I think they could have started with the second season. (I'm halfway through the second season now.) The seasons are so short though! It's sad, I'm going to be out of them too soon.

I want to check out The Great British Sewing Bee next. ([livejournal.com profile] changeling72 said good things about it.) The first season doesn't seem to be around online, but I'm going to get the second while I'm thinking about it. (Edit: Found season one, woot!)

Money is stressing me out. I ran the numbers, and if I don't want my savings to go down, I have $100 per month to spend on all food, car gas, electric, medical, basically everything other than rent/Internet/phone. I spend more than $100/month on just medical stuff... My boss let me know that she's pushing hard for a promotion for me come December, but it's not fully in her hands, so... we'll see.
thistlechaser: (Moon)
It's no secret that I enjoy reality TV. Maybe a whole lot less than I used to, but I still watch the cooking shows and a couple others. So, when our US PBS station started showing The Great British Bake Off, I checked it out. I fell in love from the first episode.

Like so much of British TV, I love that they have just "normal" looking people on it. Wrinkles, a pimple, non-perfect hair... you don't find those things in American "reality" TV! And the judges are so good -- honest yet positive and encouraging. The contestants are just normal, everyday people, and that's so nice to see. I really wish our reality TV were more like that -- I'd watch a lot more of it if it were.

I started watching Farscape by accident. I was poking through Netflix looking for something to watch, and I remembered there was an old scifi show I meant to check out. I couldn't remember the name, so when I saw Farscape I thought that was it. (Later I realized I had been actually looking for Blake's 7.) It took only one episode to hook me... well for the writing to hook me. The issue was the characters. Or rather, the puppet characters. It took me almost the whole first season to stop seeing them as puppets or as actors with foam crap stuck to their faces.

Side note: People who complain about shows like Star Trek making their aliens basically human with some added little feature? Like Bajorans are human with a "crinkle-cut french fry stuck to their nose"? You all can suck it. I'd rather have the less distracting "basically human" alien than some obviously foam, clearly fake creature.

I do cut Farscape a lot of slack though, as it's 15 years old now. (I wonder if people watching at the time bought the aliens as realistic?) As much as the puppets don't work for me, the writing is AMAZING. For a show full of foam puppets, it's so dark! The characters keep killing people (and torturing them!) which seems so out of place.

Please no spoilers: I'm nearing the end of the first season of Farscape and probably mid-season in Great British Bake Off.

Profile

thistlechaser: (Default)
thistlechaser

September 2023

S M T W T F S
      12
34567 89
1011 12131415 16
17 181920212223
24252627282930

Syndicate

RSS Atom

Most Popular Tags

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Page generated Apr. 23rd, 2025 09:32 am
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios