What Show are you currently watching?

ANDOR, third time through, entire rewatch.....certain scenes have been rewatched 30+ times.....cannot get enough of this masterpiece....

 

Just 2 episodes in so far, but looks good. Weird and good.

 

Superman & Lois, the CW puts out allot of trash, so I didn't watch this when it was initially released. A good friend of mine asked me if I was watching it, I said, no with no intentions of watching it at all; oh jeez... LOL, I wish he would have told me that it was really good! ( James Gunn's DC slate encouraged me to give it a go) I think its the best CW series I've ever watched thus far. Binged 15 episodes in one day and I hate binging. I finished season 2 yesterday. Does anyone know if there'll be a season 3? Best Superman series since Smallville. This is of course coming from, an avid comic book connoisseur, so it might not be your cup of tea.

If you are a comic book connoisseur, I suggest you purchase the collected trade paperback of Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow, written by Tom King, yes that Tom King ( comic book fans disliked his version of Batman, so much so, there was a campaign to remove him during his run on the title) and drawn by one of the best artist working today. This Supergirl story was surprisingly good that the head of Warner Bros, James Gunn is turning it into a major motion picture... Its great that the head of Warner Bros., actually reads the good stuff. ( I was never a fan of Supergirl; however, I follow the illustrator Bilquis Evely, I'm a fan of her work, so when I heard she was the artist of the aforementioned book, I purchased it, her art style is similar to some of the great early 19th century illustrators, notedly Gibson Girl artist Charles Dana Gibson).




I believe Warner Bros has finally found their Kevin Feige, President of Marvel studios.

Season 3: March 14

 

Fun stuff. RJ has found his groove with the Murder Mystery thing.

 

Just finished
Rise of Empires: Ottoman Mehmed vs. Vlad

 

Just finished The English.

It’s a Western/post-Western in outward appearance, but really if is a masterful to-the-11th drama, wrapped in a revenge story, wrapped in a road movie, wrapped in a quirky character-driven tragedy, cleverly expressed through weird vignettes and informative flashbacks, and slowly unfolding arcs. In short, it is a very small-scale grand epic, and the acting is some of the strongest I’ve seen in this lifetime.

Make sure you watch The English. Absolutely marvelous… Possibly the best thing ever.

 

By all means, please continue to enjoy the show.

That said, the portrayal of autism actually had me stop watching it. I'm autistic. Technically classed as, "High functioning", but I prefer the term, "Highly adapted" as that's what it feels more like.

To be true, there were some scenes which felt relatable, but on the whole it was irritating to me to see autism relegated to yet another Rain Man savant show.
Yes, it is likely that if someone is autistic they will see things from a different perspective than neurotypicals and that can lead to interesting problem solving and creative choices coming about from a given autistic if they are so inclined.

But here's the thing. Every time autism is represented, it's always represented at considerable disfunction. Gross level disfunction. An inability to do basic tasks, or an obsessiveness over an exact way (OCD) without any tolerance to abide.

There's never presented The Dude meets Peter Parker (but not Spider-Man) of autism. That is, there's never given an autistic who's learned how to abide in the world and just wants to do what they love to do, work hard, and is generally amiable - if not slightly goofy, but not exaggeratingly so.

But they exist. Loads of them exist. More than most realize by a long shot. There's as many adult autistics in the population as there are adults with dementia (I'm not comparing the brains as being alike here - only population... people are well aware of the presence of dementia as a normal part of the population, but everyone thinks autistics are relegated to the extreme oddity end of the population).

Let me put that a different way. There's a bit over 5 million autistic adults in America. That's half of the Game of Thrones viewing audience size, for perspective.

Now, I don't know about anyone else, but I don't see 5 million severely inhibited savant autistics sweeping through society.
A ton of adults (currently, anyway) never knew they were autistic until mid to late adulthood (due to previous incapability of diagnosis in past decades).
All they knew was they had a hard time existentially (at the very least) and had to push through because there's no free lunch.
So, there's a whole host of highly adapted autistics whom almost no one would pin as autistic until it was said because they've done such a bang up job bending and adapting through Pavlovian experiences.

On the flip side, not everyone has had even a remotely capable experience. They may be presentationally social in most ways folks consider normal, perhaps a bit of a geek, but so what - however, they may never move out from the poverty belt due to failing to maintain control over money, taxes, rent, punctuality at work, etc... to say nothing of an endless listlessness of failed relationships that can often be found in this demographic.

Obviously the latter has a ton of emotional baggage weighing them down, but what most don't realize is the former does as well. They've punched through life by white knuckling it. Feeling wrong and barely keeping it together off and on, even when they're keeping it together. Depression is a high comorbidity in this demographic because they've never been properly identified until much later in life.

For some, like myself, that depression evaporated upon diagnosis because it suddenly made everything click into place and recontextualized the playing field. Others, however, are not that lucky and continue to be drug down by depression.

There's an adult self-check attendant at a grocery store I frequent whom is on the spectrum. The result for them is that they're an over-sharer. They'll chat with you warmly as you self-check. That's it. Pleasant conversation. A bit too much conversation, because they don't spot queues well, but that's it.

No genius pouring out of them. Just a person. Like the rest of everyone with a slightly increased dial on the chatty attribute. That's all almost anyone will know about them in their life.

It would be a breath of fresh air to see an autistic character who simply struggled with what a ton of autistics actually struggle with. Self acceptance, depression, finding pride, keeping track of vital parts of adult life (all the money/schedule things), feeling "other", feeling like they should "do" something but not ever getting there (so many feel like they should be "smart", but don't see it evident - they haven't found the thing they truly enjoy that benefits them in business life), faking social exchanges because they like people - but don't actually have the emotional kicks from the same provocations that neurotypicals do, and extreme fatigue and tiredness from running double-time mentally every minute of every day.

In many respects, take any now cliche movie about being a guilt-ridden repressed same-sex person and replace it with an autistic person and you have a much more relatable story for so many autistics out there than this overly used trope of genius savant autistics.

So, it's a fine show for representing the concept of a savant, but I'm sort of tired of seeing yet another buff guy blowing up trucks with big machine guns as the only action flick option.

Cheers,
Jayson

 

There's such a broad range of autism I'm not surprised this is what we see depicted most of the time. My cousin has two autistic children. Only one can speak a little. The other can't control her body, but can sometimes communicate through pressing letters. It's heartbreaking, but it wouldn't make for good long form storytelling.

The problem is when autism is only depicted one way it creates myths about it. So I don't blame you for being irritated.

 

That's the thing, though. There's stories about that version of autism as well.

What there's not, everything I outlined above. All of those who can function, but struggle with all of the existential challenges of depression and fatigue that comes with pulling double-duty to tap dance in the neurotypical world. The white knucklers. There's a lot of them. There's 5 million adults and there's nowhere close to 5 million adult autistics who aren't "self sufficient" (at this point in time - again, because of failed diagnostic measures earlier). That would be a massive tax on the health care system and as such would be everywhere in the news. But no, it's not a thing right now because adults now who were kids from the 40's through the 80's (at least) really didn't get anything other than a boot up their butt and told to buckle up and move it.

It's easy to diagnose when there's inhibited motorskills and/or the person is nonverbal. Those have almost never been missed over the years. It's all of those, especially women, who don't have those externally blatant presentations and only have everything internalized who are a very large percent. Only about 40% fall into the "obvious" category - that's 60%ish who just got glossed over - 3ish million adults have heard, "You seem normal to me", or "You don't seem autistic" once they finally get diagnosed late in life.

That group is a completely ignored group in just about every respect. No one makes that character. And, trust me, there's tons you can do with the plights of the "high functioning" autistic.

Cheers,
Jayson

 

I completely agree with everything you wrote.

This is why I'm not against the show. It's doing a net good. And Park Eun-bin really put in a ton of work to accurately portray her character's autism amazingly well.
I just long for two things: "high functioning" characters and for autistics to also be allowed to be shown as bad guys. The latter sounds weird, but it's actually because I dislike that if you listen to lectures (TED, etc...), inevitably you'll run into two repeated reasons society should be more welcoming to autistics: 1) They're intelligent and gainful in ways "you" aren't and therefore beneficial to your business, and 2) They're honest and nice.

I'm not disagreeing with the sentiment, mind you. I honestly don't know the demographic answer to whether that's actually true or not. What I dislike is the implied (and likely unconscious) philosophical ramifications of those assertions as reasons society should be more open to autistics. It places conditions on acceptance. We should accept autistics as a society because they're intelligent and nice. So, therefore, if they weren't intelligent and uncannily nice, then we shouldn't? As soon as you replace "autism" with any given ethnicity, it becomes abundantly clear how warped of a proposition that is (even if well intentioned). So, the punk rock gen-x in me longs for the autistic character who has taken to hyperfocusing on human behavior (not a stretch, several have and become psychologists) and becomes one heck of a good con artist. Think Ocean's 11 with the "face" being an autistic con artist. Call it, "A Typical Job".

Anyway, I'm rambling. Point is, you are very right. Great show. I just can't get over myself and it's not the show's fault on that.

Cheers,
Jayson

 

Tulsa King I was surprised no has brought this one up yet. One SLY best performances

 

shows im busy with this month

Season 3 and 4 of NCIS on Netflix. wrapping it up with the last episode of Season 2.
Monster on Netflix
Babylon 5 slowly. Been a long time since ive seen some of it on TNT back then

 

In your opinion which is better Crunchyroll or Netflix? In terms of anime content. Trying down size all my streaming services.