Last night, I finished watching the whole series for The Big Bang Theory. 12 seasons in total. I really enjoyed it the whole way through.
My wife had never seen it, and we were looking for a show to watch together. It became our go to show during dinner a couple nights a week.
I’m adding the show to my mental list of great tv, that includes the likes of Seinfeld.
I don’t think I’ll end up watching Young Sheldon. I watched the first episode about a month ago, and while it was good, it’s not my style. I love sitcoms with laugh tracks. I’ve never been a fan of The Office, in comparison. But turn on Seinfeld and I’m sold. Young Sheldon seems more like a single camera drama/comedy show.
Who knows – I might watch it someday. But for now, I’m going to keep The Big Bang Theory in my mind.
Troubled by the violence stalking the town, Atmost and I retreated to Wendy’s home to pour over all the evidence we could find about these terrible murders. There in the dark of night, a gruesome and eldrich horror boiled up from the ground beneath our feet, threatening our very sanity. Courageously, we investigated, learning what we could. But before long and painfully aware of our own weakness, we were forced to flee, barely escaping with our lives.
Now, trembling outside Wendy’s home, lucky to have escaped with our skins, and fearful of the ravenous ghouls kept inside by nothing more than a chair wedged under a door handle, we regroup and await to learn what Lita Chantler has to tell us about these vile goings on we have barely survived…
After finally beating the character creation boss (this involved much rinsing, much repeating), I settled in and played a max-Intel, max-Cool Netrunner: so hacks as weapons with stealth. I also played non-lethal except in the few instances where that wasn’t an option.
Quests in the game give credit toward three quest categories:
related to side-jobs and gigs and tracks your effort to become a legend in Night City.
tracks your progress getting to know Jonny and helping him reconnect with his past.
tracks progress toward finding a way to remove the biochip that’s killing you and Jonny both.
I cleared all side-jobs and gigs before doing much work on the 3rd category. (On second play through I realized I hadn’t been clearing the NCPD gigs. Live and learn.) When I got to it, the quests in that category went quickly, and I was soon meeting with the daughter of Arasaka to launch the final quest sequence. When I was finally done with everything, I felt spent. The story worked for me and wound up being unexpectedly emotional. (I mean, I’m writing this….)
Me and Jonny
The game starts with a job gone wrong that puts Jonny—a rock star slash rebel slash apparent terrorist—inside my head as a data construct. Everyone thought he died decades ago setting off a bomb in Arasaka Corp’s headquarters, but he was actually captured and his psyche was removed from his body and translated into a data construct on a chip. That chip wound up stuck in my head and is slowly killing me. The upside is that it also means Jonny’s there, offering advice and sometimes later in the game, taking the driver’s seat for a few quests related to the second category. The quest journal text is actually Jonny’s commentary on the quest, although I didn’t realize this at first. Early on, when he first awoke and before he realized he was a construct, he tried to kill me. Good times.
Oh and for the record, Jonny’s attack on Arasaka Tower was his attempt to save his girlfriend, Alt, who had been kidnapped. He was also trying to destroy the Soulkiller, the secret Arasaka software that can kill people while converting them into data constructs that can be stored in the corporation’s vaults.
Here Jonny is waiting for me at the entrance to one of Maelstrom’s clubs early on in the quests for the second category:
Here is Kerry, Jonny’s best friend from when he was alive, and who has a not at all secret crush on Jonny:
Here’s Jonny looking at a portrait of Kerry, who has become a reclusive musical genius during his absence.
It’s all trashy, but good trashy lol
My take on the endings I played through in another post.
That moment when you’re traveling and looking at old things and it’s starting to feel like another world completely disconnected from your own, and then unexpectedly, you walk up the narrow circular stairway in the stone building from the middle-ages that’s become a hotel and discover the Scarlet Witch painted on your room door…
Room doorKitchen door
…and everything snaps back into place and becomes better.
Pierce Brosnan playing an aging New Orleans hit man dealing with young trouble-makers, a set-up that sounds like a rehash of movies we’ve already seen. But turns out this isn’t a rehash of REDS or Taken or The Expendables. Charlie isn’t a superhero. He’s old, cautious, a bit scared that he’s outmatched. He also cares for the people he works with. His feelings aren’t just a tribal “you hurt mine, so now I’m going to kill you” excuse for getting an action movie going. He’s friends with these people and has reasons to do what he’s doing. When Inara from Firefly shows up as a potential romantic interest, I groaned, expecting a different but equally familiar cliché, but again, this relationship didn’t quite play out how I was expecting.
Basically, I’m saying this is a good movie, … and I haven’t even mentioned the best part yet: it’s run time. This film gets everything done and does it well in a little over an hour and a half. There’re no wasted moments. There’s also no showy, hard-edged efficiency either. It’s just a good, well-contained story, concisely told. And the whole thing looks great. Turns out the director, Phillip Noyce made Patriot Games, Clear and Present Danger, and The Quiet American, three films I really love. Surprise surprise.
I took the leap and started watching the final season of The Bad Batch before all the episodes are available, and I might write a bit about it as I watch. So far I’ve seen the first four episodes.
Is it worth admitting here that the first two seasons were rough? I didn’t like that the Batch took over the first section of the final season of The Clone Wars and that colored my first impressions of the show. I liked the initial bounty hunter angle but that was sherlocked by The Mandalorian. The whole “Band of Brothers with a kid” angle that replaced it never really gelled for me, and so right up through the middle of the second season, I wasn’t sure I understood what the show was about. I also found the Batch itself, a bit lopsided: Hunter was dour, Tech did everything, Echo who should have been their clone-astromech (which would have been very cool) didn’t do anything, and the Crosshair side-plot always felt like a completely separate story.
But there were also so many great episodes and sequences: the destruction of Kamino, the pod race, every single episode involving Rex or other clones. Plus I liked Wrecker … a lot. By the end of the second season, I’d been won over, was on-board and hoping for more.
Now we’ve got one, and it’s the final one, and that’s maybe too bad, because this season (the art I mean) looks great, and the stakes seem clearer and more focused. I know what I’m rooting for. Plus Asajj! So my hopes are sky high for what’s coming over the next couple months…and that makes me nervous… o.o