Quintus

Empire is the best but Star Wars is my favourite.

It looks it.

Friendship is magic.

Doesn't everyone? I'm guessing Bruce has a little tiddler or something.

Let's not get carried away. BTW, what's a size queen?

No Don no deal. bye

It can be, yeah. I'll go along with it.

Yeah, but you just chat shite in every other thread.

Ugh, in the Fifties any mention of the word "toxic" meant radioactive water. Bugger of Holko, you're boring. No, why don't you get on with your life instead?

Rubbish posting in which you act daft now, Thor?

1983, of the choices available.

😂

The Gondorlorian.

Plus Gondolin sounds too much like Gondor. I honestly can't imagine how, further down the line, like, ten years from now, the whole thing didn't culminate in the Downfall of Numenor.

Fall of Gondolin.

There was no way the rings weren't ever going to be the background of this.

Wait, they're only just beginning shooting the season proper? Fuuuuuuuuck. I thought the pandemic had merely paused the production mid shoot. I remember reading a piece in the news in APRIL with the actor playing Galadriel, and how she had resigned to being stuck in NZ - far longer than originally planned for, and how she was badly going to miss her folks at home because of it. But again, I had been thinking she had at least completed a good deal of her work on the season. Yet now it appears they haven't even started it yet. Poor girl.

Finished the Queen's Gambit. After quickly binging the main brunt of the series, we slowed down almost to a halt for the last couple: once you've seen five chess match montages you've sort of seen them all, and the novelty of the elegantly stimulative though decidedly one note underscore begins to wear off. Still, the score and the handsome filming works hard to make an otherwise boring game seem quite exciting and even a little glamorous, and I think that's actually the biggest most impressive accomplishment of this show. The actor who plays older Beth is obviously the other big main draw (not to play down the earlier scenes of the terrific younger Beth), and she is excellent in this major breakout role; but also, at least for me, a little bit too distracting. See, this girl is beyond strikingly beautiful to look at (doesn't this show's director know it), and in the end I just don't buy it - that a chess prodigy could ever be as impossibly gorgeous and glam as the character depicted in the Queen's Gambit. One could probably build a decent argument that says the whole thing is fantasy drivel based solely on that aspect, but it'd take a real misery guts to do that. It was Madonna who said Rita Hayworth gave good face, but in the later episodes Anya Taylor-Joy takes that concept to a level where every single shot of her could be a Vogue cover, and it actually begins to erode my immersion in the story a little. I've never had my suspension of disbelief broken by outright sheer beauty before, so this was a bizarre first, and I think this somewhat minor misgiving wouldn't have presented itself had they cast a more "convincing" face in the role. This is chess - where the absolute masters have the appearance of serial killers! People no doubt would consider this a strange criticism to make, but I've personally always had this meta problem with small-town America serials whereby the cast look like models. For eg, I couldn't get into The Leftovers for the same reason. With all that said, Anya Taylor-Joy does flex her considerable personal acting talents (including her beneficial aesthetic attributes) to great effect in this series, and she deserves the plaudits for going all in on the role. The climatic shot of her, staring mesmerisingly into the camera as she achieved the clarity she sought, the unrelenting swirl of the music reaching its crescendo, was a wonderful and legitimately cinematic moment. A satisfying end to the grand chess master storyline that would have Rocky Balboa punching the air. But then it carried on after that, the story of Beth's success doubling down, almost to the point of narrative betrayal, on its desire to leave audiences with a sugary sweet aftertaste in their mouths. All her problems apparently just washing away. It seemed a bit odd to abandon those mechanically high effort threads so casually. Ultimately, it was a bit off. Nevertheless, Queen's Gambit is a semi great Netflix effort, one that is very easy to recommend. Because the good parts are as good as anything in seen in TVs best.

I'll wait for Black Summer S2 instead.

I'm not going to get too hyped for this game; Rocksteady would have to be at the helm for that to happen.

Told ya Blade Runner would be along.

Ah, the quarterly Alien discussion. Blade Runner stuff to follow.

They say it's for censorship but I reckon it's for flattery!

Asian porn girls are incredibly gorgeous and impossibly shapely, but I can't bear to watch their stuff due to the horrible little peckers on the blokes.