jack

So, yes, that was ever so well done! I don't have much more to say, really. I mean, gosh, what a difficult adaption, but they did it very well.

Some people pointed out they had rather more voiceover than you might expect, which I think is true, but it didn't seem unreasonably much -- I can see you might have adapted it more, but since the adaption they did do I thought worked ever so well, I'm not sure I want to second guess what could have been different.

Crowly and Aziraphale were so so lovely.

I'm really glad I watched it with people too, I think that helped the experience.

Welcome to your unscheduled rant. I've been watching a bit of Aaron Sorkin's sportsnight. Mostly it's pretty good, Sorkin's strengths of emotional heart, endearing and slightly klutzy characters, witty banter and optimistic dedication are prominently on display. West Wing was about a more serious topic, but on the other hand, West Wing was sharply constrained by not departing too far from reality. And I hear newsroom was well written but tried to be more serious and was even more pompous.

But there's one vile plotline in the first series, which sadly came on almost exactly the one or two episodes I happened to watch when Liv was in the room to see. Sorry about that.

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OK, right, yes, that episode where the fairly significant turn from the previous episode is amplified a lot. Many feelings.

Spoilers (this may still be interesting if you haven't watched the show at all, but probably don't read if you're mid-way through the first season)

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I've bashed my head on this before but not got a specific answer. Now I read through it in some more detail.

Summary

In West Wing episode 1, Josh insults some evangelical christian leaders. In a meeting trying to resolve this, the following happens.

* One of them proposes a radio address (presumably by the president) on a topic important to them, including public morals, school prayer or pornography. Apparently meaning "people in school should not have access to condoms", "people in school should be forced to perform christian prayer" and "we don't quite know what we want you to do but we're very upset about pornography".

* There is a muddle of people speaking at once, and he cuts in again, saying, "I'd like to discuss why we hear so much talk about the First Amendment coming out of this building, but no talk at all about the First Commandment."

* He says, "The First Commandment says 'Honor thy Father'."

* Toby breaks in, and says that's wrong, that's the third commandment. He is very long-suffering.

* He says, what is the first then?

* The president enters the room and quotes: "I am the Lord your God. Thou shalt worship no other God before me."

Analysis

I'm fairly sure the intended impression is, talk show guy spoke without thinking and screwed up something basic, Toby and the president correct him.

But firstly, the first commandment seems SO basic, it's hard to see how he could get it wrong. Whether or not he's a good Christian overall, quoting the commandments, especially the first one, seems like the sort of thing he'd do all the time.

Secondly, when I first heard it, I assumed this was "honor your father and mother", but now I wonder if it's supposed to be honoring *God* thy father. Although that doesn't quite fit any of the specific sentences either.

I'm not sure if the commandment he was quoting was supposed to be directly related to the previous discussion or not. Either of the possibilities doesn't seem directly relevant to the school stuff, but it's possible it is in a way that's only familiar if you know the usual arguments people make.

Several people point out that all the people involved have *different* traditional commandment numbering. Toby is Jewish. The christian leaders are protestant. And the president is catholic. I assume in America the protestant version is widely known and often considered canonical? I spent some time on wikipedia checking the different traditions for how to break up the commandments into ten.

But that doesn't seem to fit much better. The president could be quoting the protestant version (or possibly a slightly abbreviated catholic version?)

There's no way to make "honor thy father and mother" into 1 or 3, it's 5 for both protestants and jews (and 4 for catholics).

It could instead be "have no other god" or "don't take God's name in vain" but that doesn't quite fit, either the numbers or the quote.

My best guess is that someone wrote an exchange that worked, probably based on the traditional protestant numbering[1]. And then it got edited for various reasons, and ended up in a version which sounded good but didn't actually make sense.

The best alternate explanation is (a) Christian leader guy genuinely didn't know what the first commandment was (or forgot in the heat of the moment) (b) Toby was trolling by deliberately making something up, knowing no-one could call him on it as he had a different numbering anyway (c) the president (an intellectual catholic) knew the confusion of the numbering, but quoted a first commandment that would be expected to protestants and wasn't exactly wrong by his own tradition.

But to me that seems too complicated, if all that was supposed to be there, there'd be more indication. The mistake would have been one where it's more clear how he came to make a mistake. Toby would have sounded different if he was blowing smoke than if he was correcting people. There'd be some acknowledgement that SOMEONE would have known the first commandment, that this isn't exactly an obscure piece of theological trivia the president researched.

[1] West Wing does much better at research than most shows, but they seem to research a particular topic, it still seems like minor things not the main theme of an episode get overlooked sometimes.

Transcript: http://www.westwingtranscripts.com/search.php?flag=getTranscript&id=1

A Dangerous Energy, by John Whitbourne

Recommended via cjwatson iirc. An alternate history where magic exists, but is subsumed into a practical/academic discipline by the catholic church, from which England never successfully split. I think it's set now, but the politics and technology feel a way before that?

I love stories about the study of thaumaturgy. The main character grows up into quite a sociopathic man, but the journey of his researches, his friends, his sins is very interesting.

Lamentably, stories about the nature of the soul/magic/afterlife are doomed to be disappointing in the end when it is not ultimately revealed; this does better than most.

We are all completely beside ourselves, by Karen Joy Fowler

See woodpijn's brief review here: http://woodpijn.livejournal.com/104297.html

The protagonist is now at university, but lost touch with her sister and her brother when she was about five, and isn't sure which of her memories of what happened are accurate. But it's not deliberate abuse, nor deliberately false memories, it all arose quite naturally out of what actually happened.

And it doesn't dwell only on the negative, she fills in her life experiences at various points, and it's really interesting to hear how she grew up.

I don't have a lot to add, there's an important twist a quarter of the way through, which didn't feel contrived, but I don't want to talk about in case people want to read it.

Justice League Unlimited

This animated series is a pretty good introduction to many of the DC heroes. Especially the 3rd episode where Superman, Batman, Wonderwoman and Green Lantern are turned into younger versions of themselves.

It kind of annoyed me by being 80% really good messages, but kind of annoying in the remainder. Message of "give peace a chance, don't fight for no reason" is good. Portraying anonymous eastern-european countries as prone to fighting for no reason until american heros help them, maybe problematic. Having multiple prominent female characters treated as equal, good. Having them all have lots of cleavage, maybe problematic. etc.

Hudson Hawk

A film with Bruce Willis as a once-famous cat burglar just getting out of jail, blackmailed into taking several Leonardo Da Vinci related heists. I once played a very good 8-bit platform game based on it, which captured the feel of catburgling quite well for the time. It was one of the first games I actually finished, which was really exciting.

A few bits are really fun, when they sing the same song to time themselves and keep themselves in sync as they go around different parts of the building. And the introduction of the gang with candy-bar codenames. But then it descends from heist movie into slapstick action movie and I mostly lose interest.

Steven Universe

One of the animated children's TV shows which lots and lots of people have been very excited by recently. The crystal gems are three gemstone-themed alien people who protect the earth from various monsters, aided by half-human half-gem Steven.

A lot of people praise the handling of emotional themes, eg. Greta Christina on episode 5: http://freethoughtblogs.com/greta/2015/12/10/steven-universe-episode-5-frybo/ on how one of Steven's friends disappoints his father. It's generally a good role model, having lots of examples of flawed people who are not all good or bad and easily-accessible examples of complicated emotional stuff.

The episodes mostly about some of the humans don't hit my emotions as hard as they do other people, but I also liked a lot else about it.

The gems are all aliens who, it seems, don't have two different sexes, but are all coded as "female" in the show, whatever their role in society. Which I think works very well, considering the number shows which have used "male" as if it were equivalent to "default, no marked gender".

Steven's emotional maturity and skill with his gem powers are shown growing really realistically. It's not always a straightforward "he learns how to do this, and then can do it henceforth", but there's a clear sequence of "he can't do this", "he can do this some of the time and is excited when it works", "he makes a lot of effort and isn't sure if he'll succeed", and finally "he does this fairly reliably". I think, if you watched episodes slightly out of order, it would still work nearly as well, but there's a definite benefit to watching the whole series mostly in order.

And in many ways, the "struggling to learn how to do it" is more realistic than having a "one episode where he learns it". It's very moving to watch Steven progress from automatically being left at home during missions, to being automatically included in the team.

The worldbuilding is great. The early episodes do a very good job of painting the general situation, the gems, raising Steven, protecting the world, etc. But as we slowly learn more, learning about the gems original homeworld, and where the monsters come from, and the history of Steven's mother, we learn a richer story that doesn't contradict what we learned. And it's all sufficiently consistent, it's possible to speculate and be correct, and things introduced in later episodes don't make nonsense of the earlier episodes where they weren't established yet.

I'd rather have MORE of that, but then, it's not aimed primarily at me.

After the dramatic changes in episode 22, I finally watched the next two (and having seen all of season 1 except the last episode). Now I have all the thoughts, which are major spoilers for the show, but aren't really about the show (so are hopefully ok to read if you don't think you'll watch it).

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I've decided in my personal canon, the last one-two episodes were actually the ending one-two seasons earlier, and it was a _fairly_ good ending, and then the producers said, no, wait we can do even better than that, let's film an alternate ending.

And then they retconned out that ending, and filmed most of the last one-two series, all except the last one-two episodes. And the characters had some of the same character development, but spread out over a longer time period. Ted got over Robin, really, and he and the mother lived happily ever after. Marshall and Lily became successful. Barney grew up and had a decent relationship with Robin. Robin travelled the world, and joined shield!

I saw the first episode of Three Musketeers. I liked it quite a bit. I was a bit bored by the plot, and thought Athos should have more gravitas than the other musketeers. But I very much liked the way it showed the setting, it seemed very much in keeping with the book, and I liked they made up an appropriate plausible story rather than trying to stick too closely to the original plot.

I actually find it more interesting when film adaptations add something interesting, rather than just reflecting the original. It's just that USUALLY the changes take away whatever was more unique or interesting about the original and make it more like a standard good-guy-bad-guy-gets-the-girl hollywood plot I've seen before. I liked that they kept d'Artangan's duel with the musketeers, and that he flirted with CB despite her being married, and that the Cardinal is trying to do the right thing by France even if he's manipulative and ruthless, which are often left out of adaptations. In fact, the duel almost makes MORE sense -- his dad's death gives d'Artangan a reason to immediately commit to fighting the musketeers other than bravado, which makes more sense to a modern audience. (I'm just annoyed the first episode had three people pretending to be the musketeers before you know what they really look like, it's too confusing).

And I like that it keeps the feel of real life-or-death stakes, but also the devil-may-care humour, of the duels, and of Aramis and Porthos bullying the cardinal's guard. And I quite liked Porthos. There was a minor fuss whether casting a mixed-race actor was inappropriate, and I may have felt unsure if it was a character who was more explicitly expected to be European, but it seems entirely in keeping with Porthos' character and Dumas' ancestry.