npub12mew...mn64 2 weeks ago

Watching this long-since forgotten animated series, "Meatballs & Spaghetti". Yet another in a long, tiring line of "Scooby Doo" clones from the 70s and 80s. You know the formula: a band of teenagers with a sentient pet (usually a dog), a laugh track, and zaaaany adventures! Think "Jose & The Pussycats", "Jabberjaw", "Speed Buggy", etc. What's different here: it's produced by Marvel, as opposed to the usual suspect: Hanna-Barbera. Ron Masak plays the lead character, "Meatballs", and I swear to god he could have been a direct stand-in for Alan Reed as the original Fred Flintstone. It's uncanny. He was also the original voice of the Vlasic pickles bird (the one modeled on Groucho Marx). The show, itself, seems rather unremarkable. But at least it doesn't have nearly as many of the cliche Hanna-Barbera tropes.

npub12mew...mn64 2 weeks ago

Oh, yeah, this is totally normal.

npub12mew...mn64 2 weeks ago

#Pluribus manages to stay satisfying even if I did call a couple of the surprises in this episode. The episode opens with an eerie blue glow emerging behind a partially open door. It's creepy, and makes the imagination go wild... until you realize it's just the light from Carol's torch. When we saw Carol's terrified reaction in 1x05, everyone called that it was 'people', and yeah, it was. But I also felt that, despite this shocking revelation, there would be a perfectly logical, if horrifying reasoning around it: it's a nutritional resource. And sure enough, that's exactly what it is. But then we go on to also find out a large chunk of remaining humanity is going to starve to death. Humanity simply can't sustain billions of lives under the existing model. Based on these things, I feel more than ever that, aside from the inciting event which was obviously some sci-fi shit, everything following is just a mundane, natural progression flowing from the new status quo. While I don't currently subscribe to idea that this is a slow moving backdoor alien invasion ('mental malware'), nothing here precludes that idea. The inciting event is, after all, cosmic in origin. Six episodes in and I'm still invested. It's pace is an asset to me; it's not break neck, but with one exception, each episode has pushed the story along with just enough revelation to keep it interesting. I still have no idea where things are going to land, though. And that's exciting in itself.