Day 6: The Idiot Box

In my last post, I mentioned fandoms. This got me thinking about favorite TV shows, and I don't think I've really ever touched base on my actual favorites. Here's a short list with short reasons why I've enjoyed the given series.

Gilmore Girls

That's right, I said it. I own every season and think the writing on this show is fantastic. The quips from Lorelei and Rory are phenomenal and every single character is interesting to some degree. Except Taylor. Bastard.

The Wife: Also a fan of the show. Hell, even her mother borrows my sets.

Supernatural

A TV show that creates its own monster-based dogma loosely based off of folktales and such? Yeah, sure, it's been done. But Supernatural was the first to do it right and I absolutely love the cast on this show. Dean and Sam (who is played by the actor who plays Dean in Gilmore Girls...) can be serious or depressed or intense, but they're at there best when they're being funny. As the seasons go on, the show is definitely losing its appeal. And the lack of really interesting baddies has dragged them down, but I am about a season and a half behind, so maybe I've missed something. Either way, the first handful of seasons are gold.

The Wife: I think the relationship between the brothers really drew her in as well -- we watch this show together. It's entirely possible that the actors, Jared Padalecki and Jensen Ackles, have something to do with it, though...

You know, these guys.

Firefly

I don't think I need to write much here. It was short and bittersweet and the best damn sci-fi (and sometimes even Western) show to ever grace the television screen. In my arbitrary opinion, of course. Nothing has really come close.

The Wife: While she doesn't fully agree with my level of sadness, she does understand it and she'll watch the series with me when I re-watch it every couple months.

Mobile Suit Gundam

There are many different Gundam series, and I've enjoyed several. Giant robots with lasers and shit? Yes please. The original holds a special place in my heart, and in any game where I can change armor color, I invariably make a character dressed all in red and name him "Char."

The Wife: ANIMATED giant robots with lasers and shit? Absolutely not.

The Red Comet

Sherlock

Some of the best writing in any TV show I've ever seen. The episodes are long (1hr 45mins) and the seasons short (3 episodes), but even my least favorite episodes (Season 1, Episode 2 and Season 2, Episode 2) are still awesome in many ways. The character of Sherlock is incredibly well done. Most eccentric characters lack any appropriate character growth. They either get weirder or normalized. Sherlock's changes are minimal, graceful, and generally quietly done. Also, and this isn't something I normally care about, but the cinematography is spot on. Love the camera angles and the different styles they'll work into a given episode.

The Wife: Possibly loves the show as much, if not more, as I do. With the lengths of the episodes, this is surprising -- usually she tends to fall asleep when we watch longer things later at not. Not so much when Sherlock is on.

One of the best episodes, and I don't even like music.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer

It's taken a while, and I still have a season and a half left, but I eventually did fall in love with this show. Again, this is mostly do to a solid cast and witty writing. Also, I can't get the songs from the episode, "Once More, With Feeling" out of my head. I don't always like Joss Whedon's TV shows, but Buffy has been well and truly great, and I'm actually excited by the thought of going back and watching the first few seasons with my updated perspective.

The Wife: She never really got into when I started, but that's mostly because I watched the first few seasons pretty quickly. I'll try again when I go for the re-watch.

Always Sunny in Philadelphia

This is a strange one for me, because I don't generally enjoy outright comedy. Always Sunny may be dark humor, but it is, at heart, a comedy. That being said, the characters are all a kind of quirky I enjoy and the show has something I respect above all else: a sense of memory. You will still see references to season one even after half a dozen seasons, and it doesn't feel tacked on. If you'd never seen previous episodes, it wouldn't be glaring, but it adds to the humor. Apparently the gang always uses the same cassette tape when they have to record something (which isn't too often). When they eventually play any videos, you always catch a brief snippet of something that happened in one of the previous episodes. And then there's Kitten Mittens. Or that one episode where they actually repeated a previous episode, and it was STILL hilarious.

The Wife: Another show we watch together and equally enjoy.



Well, I'll end this list here, but one suggestion -- find a show you can watch with your significant other. Even if you're both dead silent during, it is a nice experience. And it'll make for interesting talk or references later. I'm often told by my wife to, "Shut up, bird."

Characters in Movies/TV Shows

Annnnnnd we're coming in after midnight again. What else is new?

This is the final post of Character Week, and I'm ending it with some of my favorites from movies and TV.

Last post, I struggled to fill the spots with appropriate characters. This week, I'm struggling to cut my list down to five! Due to the mass amount of characters I love, I'm going to add a focus on variety for this list.

Yada yada yada, only the last spot as any significance, yada yada yada.

Here we go!

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Tristan Thorn

(Stardust)
I tried, for the most part, to keep characters from film-based movies off this list. The film Stardust, however, is different enough that I don't feel bad including it (that, and this is my blog, so bite me). Also, it's one of the very few movies that I enjoy more than the written story.

Tristan starts out as a boy who thinks he is in love. We follow him on his journey when he grows into a man that knows he is in love. This journey just happens to take him to the mystical land of Stormhold, where all sorts of magical crap happens.

I like Tristan because his transformation from shop boy to swashbuckler was done so well and, despite the universe it is set in, feels plausible. He has his whiny moments and his badass moments and the latter far outweighs the former. He's a character you love to love, and his history, while not the biggest twist, is still fun to see revealed.

Shop boy...

...Swashbuckler.

Donnie Darko

(Donnie Darko)

I did say disturbed, right?

Donnie is a disturbed young man. He's on medication (when he feels like it), but it doesn't stop his friend Frank, the giant bunny-thing, from visiting him. Donnie does what Frank says and ends up causing a lot of well-deserved ruckus in his small town. Frank being a product of time travel or a damaged psyche is debatable but, whatever the truth, makes for a very interesting dynamic in Donnie's development.

Donnie feels like that slightly odd friend you know. When we see him interact with other characters, we see a good guy that doesn't always know how to express himself, or at least express himself appropriately.

He decides to try and unravel the mystery Frank presents him with while making or building on connections with friends, and it is a rare movie that has a hazy plot even at the end but, due to the character, is still worthwhile.

This is one of my favorite movies, and I've watched it many times. I never get tired of the character of Donnie.

Rory Gilmore

(Gilmore Girls)
Rory was a character I pretty much wanted to be growing up. She was smart, polite, and driven. She was also female, but that's not part of it.

Rory is on this list because I connected with her having an unusual family dynamic and being in a generally different head space than the rest of her family, yet still maintaining strong relationships. She also interacts
with a host of different characters that were all interesting and dynamic, and all of which made Rory more interesting and more dynamic by being around.

Best mother/daughter relationship ever?

Also, Rory is a reader. I don't read quite as much as I used to, but that was a big connection I made to the character when watching the show as a younger person. This is now one of the few shows I own physical copies of every season, and it is completely worth it.

Nicholas D. Wolfwood

(Trigun)
I've spoken about Trigun before, so I won't go too long into this.

I love Wolfwood because he is a walking, talking, contradiction. He's a good guy on a bad guy's mission, he's an immoral priest, he seems to hate everyone yet runs an orphanage, he loves Milly but stays aloof, and respects Vash yet disagrees with him most of all.

Physically, Wolfwood fills the "badass" role for me. Dark glasses, a preacher's suit, and a giant cross that is really an armory/weapon, finished off with a crushed up, lit cigarette.

I'm half tempted to make Trigun my first mange read, simply because it deals with the character so much differently than the anime. That being said, the only flaw with the anime is that it takes so long for Wolfwood to be introduced.

Agent Dale Cooper

(Twin peaks)
Like Trigun, I've spoken about Twin Peaks before.

Agent Cooper is, in a word, eccentric. In three words, he's really friggin' eccentric. He mixes intuition, mysticism, and a youthful optimism that really should be fitting on an FBI agent, but it works. When his dreams say something, even garbled nonsense, he listens. And then tells Diane via recorder.

The first season of Twin Peaks introduced us to Agent Cooper and his unusual ways, and it is a masterpiece. The second season becomes mired in a convoluted series of plot twists and shunts that really killed the series. That being said, even the second season is worth watching, if only so you can spend more time with Agent Dale Cooper and the sleepy town of Twin Peaks.

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As a member of many fandoms, including Supernatural, Sherlock, Doctor Who and more, NOT including any characters from those shows feels wrong. In all of those series, however, there are too many awesome characters to settle on just one. I think I'll work on a fandom series soon enough, so stay tuned for that.

Other than that, who are some of your favorite characters in movies and television? Let me know in the comments!

The "Catalog"

I know I'm a bit behind on my pull list posts, I've been unable to grab my pull list in a while. Maybe next weekend, maybe not.

For now, here are some screen shots of my comic catalog! Yes, it's just a series of folders for now, but I'm ok with it.

The Catalog! I feel like reading...

Venom! But none of that awesomely-terrible '90s junk, I want something new...

This is the folder for the current Venom title being released, different from the other series of the same name due to Flash being joined with the symbiote, hence the folder's title of "(Flash)".

With liberal use of the back button, I can get the the previous sections. No series of folders goes further than three levels (at the moment -- Spider-Man is pretty convoluted, though).

(I may eventually post (bigger) screenshot of all the folders somewhere, but that's for a later date!)


Every issue has been sorted by series and, if needed, sub-series. From there, every issue has been named and numbered. There are some additional changes I need to make with this, but I'm happy with it for now.

The main thing left for me to do is to copy items that fall under different sections, and I'm interested in creating a series of folders that lists where each item is in my boxes (or on my wall). The multiple section items would be items from the TPB section and some of the sets come from overarching series (IE, Secret Wars is a set unto itself, but Maximum Carnage isn't). Crossovers are still give and take as well.

Other than that, it will just be up to me to keep up on taking/uploading pictures.

Question for anyone who reads this: for your issues that are worth more money or are potentially collectors items, how do you store them? Some of mine will be on my wall, but I'm not sure if I should just leave the others in the boxes or move 'em somewhere special.

... AND I just found out about http://www.collectorz.com/comic/, which looks exactly like what I would have loved a month ago, before I started all this. Maybe I'll look into it, but I don't feel like paying for it at the moment.



Other updates:
Finished the second season of Doctor Who with the wife, so I'll need to post about that soon.
I've been neglecting my "Suggested Reading" series, I think I'm going to make it a weekly item. The next time I post it, that will determine what day you can expect the series.
I started to watch Breaking Bad this week and have already finished season 1 (I didn't realize it until three episodes into the 2nd season). The show is amazing and I think I'll do a season by season review of it.
Speaking of TV shows, there are several series that I've really enjoyed and could use some spotlight on here. Specifically, I'm thinking of other shows I've seen every episode of: Gilmore Girls, Supernatural, Lost, etc...

That's all for now! If you happen to know anyone who might be interested in the BS I'm posting, send 'em over! I'd love to get some discussions going in the comment section on here, and more followers would always be good!