• Daily Life

    Picoreview: Season 10 Supernatural

    Picoreview: Season 10 Supernatural: Honestly, I suspect I enjoyed this a great deal more after a 6 year hiatus than I would have if I’d continued watching it at the time. I’m watching the THEN/NOW recaps because it’s been years, and they’re generally helpful, and I spent all of April doing a more or less daily picoreview of the episode I watched on Twitter, so I’m just gonna drop that behind the cut for … the hell of it. :)

  • Daily Life

    Supernatural Fitness Regime

    I’ve sort of started getting into a schedule. Most of March was a complete wash, to exactly nobody’s surprise, but I’ve been working on a book since the end of March, and early in April I started (*shudder*) exercising. We’ve got an exercise bike in the shed, and–

    –see, so, like, 6 years ago I’d given up on Supernatural, but then I was CONVINCED it was gonna wrap up with season 10 and I wanted to watch the end of the series with everybody else, right? So I started catching up, but just as I finished watching s9, they announced s11 and I threw the towel in. And of course when they announced s15 was gonna be the last, I had a moment of “Oh, too bad I won’t be caught up,” because I’d still like to, y’know, like, Be There At The End Of The Road, right?

    Only know what’s happened now?

    Like everything else, production on Supernatural has been shut down…with 2 episodes left to film. And I thought, “Well, if I start watching RIGHT NOW, I might be able to catch up and STILL BE THERE FOR THE END WITH EVERYBODY ELSE AFTER ALL.”

    So on the 6th I started with s10, an episode a day while I use the exercise bike. I’m up to 60 minutes now, which is 1.5 episodes, so at the end of this first week I’ve watched 8 episodes, which…I’m pretty pleased about, actually. It’s proving to be entertaining enough to get me out to the bike so I can find out what happens, anyway.

    Ultimately I hope to be watching 2 episodes a day, because my ambition right now is to get through the seasons available on Amazon Prime by my birthday, and that’s, uh, well, I had like 92 episodes and 55 days to watch them in. So. Yeah.

    Anyway, the whole thing is like, this is both a very concrete goal (catch up before the last 2 episodes are aired) & a very nebulous one (because WHO KNOWS when they’ll film them, much less have them aired!), so…yeah, it’s like a thing. Of some kind.

    And now, at the end of April, I’ve cycled 19 of the past 25 days, which is…pretty good, actually, isn’t it? I’ve just finished s10, having earned 2 non-exercise-bike episodes by cycling on a REAL bike, so I’m got to sit around like an actual lump and eat cookies and finish season 10 tonight. And I was VERY BRAVE and didn’t start s11 despite the cliffhanger, ’cause I HAVEN’T EARNED IT.

    Which leaves me with 3 seasons to go by my birthday, EXCEPT s14 dropped on Amazon a couple days ago so now I have FOUR seasons to go by my birthday, which is 100% Not Happening. I’d have to watch a season a week, which would be…oh. hrm. well. hrm.

    Ok, I’d been thinking THREE HOURS A DAY, NO WAY, but they’re 42 minute episodes so it’s actually just a smidge over 2 hours a day, which is UNLIKELY, but not IMPOSSIBLE. I mean, it might render me dead and unable to do anything else, but it wouldn’t be IMPOSSIBLE.

    (I do not realistically expect to get through 4 seasons in 1 month. )

    Anyway, this is the most consistently I’ve exercised in years. Granted, it’s a very, very low-key workout, bc the settings on the bike are something like the equivalent of
    1=peddling on a flat surface
    2=peddling up kilimanjaro
    5=peddling thru granite

    so i’m using 1.

    But it makes me sweat &unlike a real bike, I’m peddling almost constantly bc there are no downhills to coast on. I have A Dream that eventually I’ll set it on Kilimanjaro instead of flat surface, but I thought I’d try to get to where I could get thru 2 episodes without dying, first.

    (tbh, i could 100% do 2 eps without dying right now, as i’m not dying at 1.5 episodes. i’d probably even remain conscious the rest of the day. But that extra 20 minutes seems like A Lot, somehow. It’d probably seem like less if I was getting to the bike a little earlier, say, AT 7 instead of getting out of bed around 7. But…bird by bird, right? Right.)

  • Daily Life

    Picoreview: Spinning Out

    Picoreview: Spinning Out: ugh.

    Ted suggested the new Netflix Spinning Out, which looked like a reverse Cutting Edge, with a young woman skater coming back after an injury to join a playboy pairs skater.

    Readers, it is *not* like Cutting Edge. It’s a drama with no humor to alleviate the bitchy unhappy characters.

    I watched all the way through the first episode for the express purpose of trying to make Netflix not suggest I finish watching it. It didn’t work, which is too bad, because if I’d known it wouldn’t, I could’ve stopped watching 10 minutes in. Poor Ted was in the other side of the room, periodically offering up apologies just from LISTENING to it.

    It may be well acted. I couldn’t really tell, because I disliked every single character so much that I couldn’t tell if it was the actors or the writing. I suspect it’s the writing. I think the lead woman could be quite charming & the playboy pairs skater clearly can be. But ugh.

    OH! I just found out the lead woman was The Girl in the Maze Runner movie, so yeah, she can be appealing (although I still want to know how a group of boys apparently raised with no women or female figures AT ALL even knew the word for ‘girl’, but I digress). And wait, no, there was a single character I liked. The playboy pairs skater’s coach was good. But I didn’t like anybody else.

    And I don’t think they should have cast a 27 year old who looks like she’s about 27, as the daughter of 41 year old January Jones, because even though the story acknowledges that Mom got pregnant young, I’m pretty sure they didn’t mean AT AGE FOURTEEN. God, I hope not, anyway.

    Anyway, IDK. Maybe if you don’t turn it on expecting something Cutting-Edgeish it’s fine, but it was clear within the first few minutes (after the interminably long credits, I mean) that it wasn’t, and I felt I was able to adjust my expectations accordingly, but I still found it *miserable*, rather than dramatically intriguing and compelling to watch.

%d bloggers like this: