#since limited life i foolishly decided to watch everyone's episodes

[zenithofstories]

i didn't do a post last week cause i didn't have many thoughts; it was a pretty chill session. people got frustrated about the food situation and they set up bases *shrugs*

But this week...

snail week was fucking crazy

-first of all; Etho and Tango's predictions that the session would have seven deaths and end with three people on yellow—lolololoollolololol. three people on red and who knows how many deaths total. Jimmy died four times in the first like ten minutes 😭😭😅 also, how many individual times did Skizz turn red? three? in one session? hilarious

-the snails put them all in such peril that for the most part, they forgot who their allies and enemies were and just talked to everyone and anyone, sharing info. Tango and Joel, Tango and Skizz (admittedly after Skizz killed Tango), Skizz and Scar, Grian and Jimmy (Jimmy just straight up warned Grian that his snail was coming mid argument), Tango and Joel and Gem, Bdubs complimenting Skizz for his kill on Tango. And everyone just mourning everyone who died, even if they should have been rejoicing. They all just forgot they were playing a death game

-Martyn, Mumbo, Jimmy and Scott recognised the 'theory' or 'thought experiment' (meme lol). (i'm pretty sure Lizzie recognised it too, she just didn't want to say it so explicitly) Now we know who our meme lords are 🤣 (plus Grian chose the wildcard 😂) (the complete contrast to Etho who just let it walk right up to him lol) (and Jimmy who let it walk right up to him and then recognised it 😭😅)

-Pearl has an interesting habit of dying early each session and discovering wildcard mechanics in the process, helping her team to survive. I firmly believe that Jimmy still has the canary curse, but Pearl appears to be the wildcard canary

-we got this season's (first??) Tango Rage™ and it was because Scar burnt down his base lol. fork found in kitchen

-a whole lotta shitty assassination attempts lolololol. Skizz vs Impulse and Big B with the cobwebs without any snails close by, Jimmy trying to blow up a light green (illegal) and putting Skizz on red (very illegal), Ren vs Impulse (which was admittedly successful but only just, and didn't follow the plan), Skizz chasing Lizzie down, Bdubs trying desperately to convince Gem and Joel to sacrifice themselves to their snails so they would know their names, Jimmy trying to set Scott's snail on fire, Jimmy with all his tnt minecarts, probably more i've forgotten

-also a few pretty good ones, to be fair. Impulse distracting Etho from the creeper, Skizz vs Tango, Skizz chasing Scar into an underwater ravine, Scar and Jimmy drowning Bdubs' snail in a hole so he had to get close to free it,

-everyone just loved their snails lol. a bunch of people said they would miss their snails, and called them cute. Tango was overjoyed that his said 'yahoo' and stated it could kill him any time lol. (admittedly a few {Ren, Bdubs} called theirs freaks)

-i really love this series. i love when people are obviously having fun, and I love the sound of laughter. This series is honestly one of the most fun things on the internet. Joel's giggle especially is fantastic

-Lizzie: "i better not walk off a cliff in f5 mode. rookie mistake" 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣 I can't tell if that was shade for Scar's first death or just a coincidence 🤣🤣

-so many snail cams 😂

-Skizz had better get credited for Scar drowning; it didn't register automatically and i desperately hope that they don't forget to give him a life for that. he totally killed Scar

-Grian, Mumbo and Lizze with absolute mega amounts of courage (or stupidity) and going underground. like just incredibly dangerous adventures to go where they have so little options for escape. massive respect for all three of them. also Martyn and Etho going to the nether to be fair

-the plot to turn snails invisible was so devious, and i'm so glad it worked, but pretty sad it happened to be Scar's. Ren should still get the credit for it though

-we ended the session with three people on red: Skizz, Scar and Tango, and four people on yellow: Ren, Jimmy, Pearl and Mumbo. i desperately desperately hope that no one gets eliminated next week. four episodes would be a devastatingly short season.

-Joel's shock at all the deaths was pretty funny lol

-Joel and Lizzie organised a meet-cute for their snails?? omfg!

-the snails are voiced by Oli (theOrionSound)? 😂 lololololololoolol

-i hope y'all have seen @rusty-courage's in a Nutshell this week; it's the cutest thing i have ever seen and perfectly encapsulates the vibes of the session

-hilarious how much Bdubs regrets the 'tuff guys' bit

-Martyn referring to Joel's 'forty-second obsidian' 🤣🤣🤣

-the family-friendly insults are great 😂 'jerk' is always fun, and Pearl's 'stinky butt' is hilarious

-the G's racing their snails up bam mountain was pretty funny

-Pearl saying 'i can see your sparkles, sir' and Ren not being able to help laughing. my beloveds

-Poor Jimmy is so determined to win, or at least break the canary curse, and he was so disappointed when he died so many times. he almost rage quit when the second creeper blew him up 😭

so i've just finished watching all the first episodes, so i wanted to give my thoughts on the first Wild Life session:

-so much fun i love it so much. i'm so glad they're all still having fun and continuing the series, and that Mumbo and Lizzie came back, despite dying early in Secret Life (i was a tiny bit worried they might get a bit dejected and pass on this one). also thrilled Ren is able to play this time; he's a blast

-there is a lot of mistrust going around which is very curious to me. most of it stems from previous seasons and has no bearing on what was happening at the time. Pearl straight up telling Cleo she expected her to betray her; Mumbo and Skizz not trusting Martyn, and then Grian; and then not trusting that Martyn just wanted to use their enchanter; the huge immediate aggression towards Scar when he came out of the mountain into Grian, Skizz and Mumbo's base; Mumbo not trusting Skizz (his teammate!) when he asked for someone to pass him a diamond; Scott, Cleo, Pearl and Impulse assuming Joel stole their cows, probably more i'm forgetting. it's definitely obvious to me that these people have learnt how the games work and learnt from the pain (as we do). i'm very curious to see if the general server mistrust grows, and the impact it has on everyone and the people

-i love JImmy, Big B, Lizzie and Ren forming a dnd party and Ren (in true bardic fashion) has a guitar within reach and is willing to break into song at the first campsite (this honestly might be my favourite moment from all the life series at the moment. the guitar within reach, Ren's beautiful voice, how much the others thought it was great. fantastic vibes all around)

-i really want Scar and Martyn to team up. they are both instantly mistrusted, to the point that both of them (in their first episodes, no less) expressed that if people are going to treat them like a villain, then they may as well act like it. if the two of them team up to take revenge on everyone being mean to them in a new series i think they would be a force to be reckoned with

-Skizz and Mumbo is a fantastic team-up. both very genuine people who are so funny together

-i hope they get the lag fixed, or that it was just from the size-changing mod and they don't have to deal with it for the rest of the series

-Gem and Joel's partnership - in the early days Gem is going to be a fantastic counterbalance for Joel; help keep him calmer and curb his wild ideas. But once Gem gives in to her own urges... oh boy

-does Big B know that he can go caving with people? cause he seemed to be under the impression that he had to get geared out before he could make friends and it would suck if he ended up alone all the time because it hasn't occurred to him that he can go caving with people right at the start

-double life thought: i know most people count Pearl as the winner, but did Scott technically win as well? cause they were the last pair alive, and died in the same tick. it probably doesn't matter at all, but i wonder about it sometimes (especially in how it would affect Martyn's lore but that's not canon)

-i don't think Jimmy has broken the canary curse. i subscribe to the theory that cause Lizzie died in the End, the Watchers weren't able to perceive it and then he was the first to die in the Overworld (i'm not counting Real Life as canon; it happened and i enjoyed it but it wasn't a full series and they were deliberately playing it silly as an april fool's joke. very glad that Cleo won though. hope they get a full series win as well)

-i'm glad that Tango and Skizz (deliberately) didn't team together, but i kinda wish Tango had ended up in a different group. him, Etho and Bdubs are fun, don't get me wrong, but a whole lot of the fun of the series is seeing people interact and work with people they don't usually. Tango and Jimmy was a top tier pairing in Double Life, and Tango is hilarious. i would love to see him branch out more and work with some more people

-there is more than just the wild card. Grian said he wasn't going to explain it, and i didn't notice anything else happening (but i'm also not expecting it to be much until they get to the late game). i think that there will be a wild card that affects the players, and then also something that affects the world? we'll see, i guess

-now that everyone who has played is playing (i'm pretty sure? if i've forgotten someone i'm gonna be sad) who is gonna sub in if needed?

-i love Mumbo's "that was sub-one intelligence mate" when they all fell 🤣

-i'm not sure what the purpose of including the creakings or whatever they're called? nevermind i just looked it up and they're going to be in the game at some point. weird. i'm not sure how i feel about creakings coming to minecraft though

-very glad they've got six lives this time. it will both allow them to not worry so much about mistakes and accidents (as evidenced by Pearl) and encourage them to take risks, which will be fantastic

[ohjohnno]

Outrageous Fortune Reviewcap: S1E01 (”Slings And Arrows”)

The first time I watched this show, it was more as an exercise in trying to learn New Zealand slang for a writing project than anything else. It didn’t really prove useful - the characters I was researching for were upper-middle class kiwis, as opposed to the bogans depicted here - but nonetheless, the first time I watched the first episode I was too focused on my project to pay too much attention to the actual quality. Only upon rewatching did I realise that this show was great right from the get-go.

The show, for those who don’t know, centers on what is sometimes called a “crime family”. But this isn’t a Corleone or Gambino style family; this is more like what you could call a blue-collar crime family, with the main breadwinner just happening to earn most of his income through crime (in this case, mostly burglaries). They aren’t a particularly violent menace, but they are nonetheless a perpetual thorn in the side of the police, from whom they get constant and generally perfectly justified visits.

It has flaws, yes. They’re especially apparent during the first season, and they never completely go away. But it’s the cast of characters that makes this show tick, and for the most part, they’re all compelling right from the get-go. It’s a fascinating bunch of introductions - let’s take ‘em one by one. 

We have Cheryl West, introduced initially as your typical mama bear. She’s fiercely protective of her children, even as she remains very firm with them; she’s less firm with her husband, Wolfgang West, the only person in the whole episode she allows to lie to her face without challenge. (”Do you know where Van was last night?”, she asks; “no,” says an unconvincing Wolf, but she lets it pass without further comment). She claims that she loves all her children equally, and I believe her, but she’s particularly kind with Jethro West, the only one of her children who’s done everything with his life that she wanted him to. He’s on his way to being a big-shot lawyer at this stage in the show, and he seems nice; the first glimpse we get of any darkness below the surface is the revelation that he made up some Maori heritage to get hired. (Spoiler alert: this plot point gets quietly dropped pretty quickly, since, y’know, it doesn’t make any sense. One of them early flaws I mentioned.)

Cheryl is less kind to Jethro’s identical twin Van West, but that’s really only because he deserves it. Van is quickly established as The Stupid West, and accordingly provides most of the episode’s laughs, but it’s a little deeper than that; he is, specifically, the Stupid Man West, his stupidity really being almost entirely rooted in his crude, half-formed machismo and his desire to prove himself to his father. It’s clearly unhealthy - Van, and his good friend Munter (who will become more important later in the show), are clearly lacking the mental chops required for a life of crime, and Van especially is an absolutely horrible liar, which is maybe the worst possible trait a career criminal could ever have. Wolf, for his part, is very fond of him; he’s less fond of Jethro, with whom he shares only curt words (by familial standards, anyway) when he’s awaiting his court date. 

Then there’s Pascalle West, whom I’ve heard described as a “vacuous trollop” by certain online folks. I guess that isn’t entirely unfair, but it’s important to clarify what exactly is meant by that. In absolute terms, she is certainly smarter than Van, and she’s much more strong-willed and, in her own way, independent-minded. But she’s deeply naive, and her blustering confidence combines poorly with her total lack of any life experience. Her dream is to be a model, and she thinks she can use her sexuality to help her get there, Jenna Maroney style; the problem, as she discovers twice in this episode alone, is that this doesn’t really work. The handjob she gives to her photographer brings his price down only a little, and her attempt at charming the men at Work & Income leads only to them degrading her further. She’s trying to navigate a man’s world using the tools men have given her, and she’s only slowly learning that these tools were plague blankets, a false gift designed to keep her down.

And then, of course, we have my favorite of the bunch, and very possibly my favorite character in television history: Loretta West. It doesn’t take long to introduce the traits that most define her, and that will mostly continue to do so: she is intelligent, lazy, pretentious, nerdy, witty, and cruel. The cruelty is at a fairly basic baby stage at this point - mostly limited to probably-joking familial jabs and the occasional spot of ruthless blackmail - but it doesn’t take us long to discover that she’s found a way to secretly skip school for the past several months in order to focus on writing a movie script, that she views just about everyone else in the world as her intellectual inferior, and that she just loves to deliver witticisms.

                                     House of suffering and torment...

The others, at this stage, are mostly minor characters. Ted West will become more important very quickly, but for now he’s just the butt of a few softly ageist jokes; Loretta figures out that he probably burned his house down on purpose because he was lonely, and she seems to get on with him more than anyone else in the family does, but that’s the only real hint of depth we get here. Wayne Judd is firmly in antagonist mode here, serving us some lovely smug snake goodness as the righteous cop perpetually tormenting our family of lovable criminals. Eric Grady is a decidedly unlovable perverted cheapskate with a faintly sickening crush on Cheryl; he’s good because every laugh is at his expense, and so he shall remain. 

The episode does a great job of introducing all the main characters, but the central plot is really only driven by Cheryl, Wolf, and, alas, Van. Wolf, at this stage of the show, is very difficult not to despise; he loves his wife, but clearly doesn’t respect her nearly as much as he believes he does, and his utterly self-certain male chauvinism passes well beyond insufferable and ends up actively loathsome. Getting sentenced, early in the episode, to four years in prison for burglary does nothing to dent his absolute certainty in the correctness of his decision-making. A prison visit from Van ends with the latter trying, in perhaps the most foolishly and (fortunately) harmlessly incompetent way possible, to get involved in some sort of drug trade; when Cheryl presses him, he repeats what Wolf told him: that “with Dad inside, somebody’s got to make the decisions around here”. Cheryl’s long-suffering exasperation with unearned male arrogance is palpable.

But Cheryl is used to it. If anything, she’s too used to it, and her frosty confrontation with Wolf in a prison visit of her own is still far more charitable than he deserves. It does, however, lead to the most important early development in the show: Wolf’s hideously gentle insistence that she “doesn’t have the balls” for the sort of criminal work he expects from Van leads her to decide that the family is going to abandon the criminal lifestyle and embrace the straight & narrow. It’s a nice ideal, but it’s gonna turn out easier said than done. There’s far too many personality defects in among this cast of characters for anything to come easy.

Now, there is one notable flaw in this episode, and it heralds bad things to come: there’s a truly terrible racist joke about an old Asian woman who turns out to know Kung Fu, and it blossoms into the presence of an entire family of dumb stereotypes and silly lowest-common-denominator sex jokes (the Hongs) that’s gonna remain the worst part of the show for the duration of the season. It’s a shame, and the writers should really have known better, but I tend to just grin and bear it. They’ll be gone soon enough, after all, and they aren’t enough to get in the way of the generally excellent writing on display here. Plus - and this is one of only a few times I’ll mention it, ‘cos otherwise it’ll get repetitive - the acting from the main cast is universally incredible, to the point where I’m genuinely kind of angry that only Antony Starr has attained proper stardom. But no matter! We soldier on. To the second episode!