"Hangry" and "horngry" are different things and I learned this the hard way

Easily my favorite sci-fi show at the moment, FIRE COUNTRY is a dystopian drama set in an alternate timeline wherein America utilises slave labor to battle hazardous wildfires caused by a climate catastrophe brought about by the same insatiable capitalist expansionism that the inmates are charged with protecting, even at the cost of their lives.  Where do they get their ideas from?

The show brilliantly mixes satire of life under authoritarian rule with a knowing pastiche of soap operatic conventions akin to that seen in the original Starship Troopers, a comparison I think holds up even better when you see how both works show people to be treated as little more than disposable frontline soldiers in ultimately-unsustainable imperial enterprises.  Were one to walk blind into a room showing an episode of Fire Country, they could be forgiven for thinking it really was a television show with the depth of a puddle that goes beyond the expected conservatism at the heart of American copaganda and instead displays an outright contempt for a proletariat that is constantly reminded that it should be grateful to be allowed to die in service to a middle class that offers nothing more than a display of "claps and cheers" for a job well done rather than any material compensation for life-threatening and life-saving labor - a particularly brilliant joke early in the first episode establishes that the slaves are paid "two dollars an hour", so that within the fictional universe, it can never be claimed that these are actual slaves - but to assume Fire Country was harmful corpo-fascist propaganda would be a disservice to the talented and insightful satirists who have concocted such a wonderful critique of the moral vacuum at the heart of a slave economy.  What an age of television we've lived to see!

You want that instant gratification of a knife attack

I done did see Avengers Endgame and Captain Marvel, in that order, and ah geez I sure wish the first big Marvel female superhero flick was a lot better than it was, but I didn't really like the character and the story was a weird mish-mash of tropes from 1980s cinema, only set in the 1990s and with a dreadful soundtrack.  The action scenes are also really flat, too, and some of the superpowered stuff later in the movie just seems nonsensical or perfunctory, like the aliens that fire enough missiles at a planet to raze its surface, but they fire them at the one spot rather than all over the planet at different places.
Avengers Endgame was much better, but I can't really tell you why as it's a movie about time travel and featuring evil doubles and zero new ideas.  I've got this sense that I should be feeling shortchanged by it, but it's the capstone on a decade-long run of good-to-great movies that have seen the superhero genre revitalised into a cultural juggernaut, so you know, I had a generous disposition towards it going in and it failed to annoy me even though I'm pretty sure its "nothing matters" approach to time travel is the height of laziness, not least because after establishing at length that nothing matters, it introduces a character who says actually what you're going to do does matter, and both versions of time travel rules are treated as equally valid.  Eeeeeeeghhhhhh
It delivers on the Big Ass Fights front, and at least one character who I have found utterly, bafflingly popular over the years the franchise has been running its course bought the farm in an underwhelming way, and for that I was quite grateful.  Although this is the second movie in a row where a lady gets chucked off a cliff and the movie compensates with a really contrived lady fight sequence in the CGI finale, which reminded me of those terrible tv shows and movies from the 1990s which thought they were breaking new ground with a lady protagonist doing kung fu on men and they'd introduce the character in a really obnoxious way with like a guitar riff or something while she jumps in from off-screen saying a painfully bad line containing the word "boys"*, even though female action stars were not only a staple of low-budget US action movies for years, but they were even regular draws in conservative territories like mainland China to the point they started importing them.  You do this kind of thing nowadays and apparently it's not cheap and tacky, it's a bold assertion of your creative vision, so basically the "overwrought female badass intro sequence" is the equivalent of having a synth score.
Oh fiddlesticks I'm rambling again - well anyway I did like Endgame but I suspect it was more to do with over a decade's worth of goodwill in the bank more than it was a perfectly acceptable entertainment product.

* which was - oddly enough - how they introduced Spider-Gwen in Into The Spider-Verse, a single duff note in an otherwise great flick.

I try to get my crying done first thing in the morning - get it all out of the way

Jumanji: Welcome To The Jungle is probably best summed up by the fact that it is a film titled after a 30 year old hair metal song, or the scene in which the only female character whose explicit skill set is identified onscreen as - and I quote - "killing men" must impede a pair of guards somehow and chooses to do so by doing sexy dances and having close ups of her bum.  Is it even worth mentioning the character is supposed to be a school-aged child?  Eh, I started watching this because The Rock is in it, I don't know that I can be complaining about it being stupid, but sleazy is another matter.
It seems kind of thrown together, there doesn't seem to be any clear message or character arcs apart from "work together because is good", the antagonist is pretty underdeveloped, and it's a bit long for what story there is.
This is - as the kids of 1985 ITV programming say - "naff" stuff, though amusingly the title is so generic that not only has it already been used multiple times for movies and episodes of tv shows to the extent that I can safely say this is not the best film called Welcome To The Jungle, but The Rock was actually in a movie called Welcome To The Jungle in 2003, meaning this isn't even the best film called Welcome To The Jungle which stars The Rock.

I'm going back to work - reality tv is boring and I've given up trying to follow Westworld

Welp
That was a nice break from blogging, but sadly it's back to business as usual.
Not much has transpired on the old "personal success in my chosen field" front in the year I have been away from filling out the blog pages, but luckily I have always considered my frank admissions of professional failure to be one of the main draws here on the YFaN blog for those happy to see someone's slide into destructive depression play out in real time - and given the success of Charlie Brooker's Black Mirror over the last few years, apparently that's a considerably larger audience than I once assumed - and if you're scouring the internet looking for posts from failed and depressed comic artists, then who am I to deny you?
I probably should have made more of an effort to have something to post about in this, the debut blather of 2019, but when I say it's back to business as usual, I really mean it: rambling, incoherent, often pointless, mostly bitter and entitled - if my posts were anything else, would you even recognise them?  I know I wouldn't.

I don't care about your vampire politics!

Just in case future historians perusing the blog archives - presumably trying to understand the terrible things I did to all those people - wonder why I suddenly started giving my impressions of books without pictures in them, I am attempting to read what are considered the 100 best sci-fi books of all time, but such a list is obviously a malleable and fluid thing, prone to late entries from fly-by-night flavors of the week, so I typed "100 greatest science fiction novels" into Google and picked a list from a random website - because there are a lot of top 100 lists and they don't all agree - and pasted it into a text file on my desktop and never looked back.
Although I probably should have looked back after reading the dreadfully dull Starship Troopers, though a rewatch of the film adaptation convinced me that science fiction was worth giving another go and I got stuck into the Foundation Trilogy and now A Princess of Mars, which is the tale of the enigmatic John Carter, whose first person account of his interplanetary travels never gets tired of telling you how awesomely manly he is - though to be fair he goes on to recount how he beat up the planet Mars, so I can sort of understand why the man would have a high opinion of himself.  He's a bit of an imperialist scumbag, too, smiting his way through the natives like a walking smallpox until he finds himself a bit of posh Martian tottie to lay some eggs with - but his tale is an enjoyable romp with some good world-building along the way, even if the politics of the text don't bear up to modern scrutiny.

Should you be wondering, the full list is as follows, with books I have managed to read so far being bolded - yeah I know there's only 12 of them so far, but I am reasonably sure I have actually read one or two of the others:

Frank Herbert - Dune
Orson Scott Card - Ender's Game
Isaac Asimov - The Foundation Trilogy
Douglas Adams - Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Robert A Heinlein - Stranger in a Strange Land
George Orwell - 1984
Ray Bradbury - Fahrenheit 451
Arthur C Clarke - 2001: A Space Odyssey
Philip K Dick - Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
William Gibson - Neuromancer
Isaac Asimov - I, Robot
Robert A Heinlein - Starship Troopers
Larry Niven - Ringworld
Arthur C Clarke - Rendezvous With Rama
Dan Simmons - Hyperion
Joe Haldeman - The Forever War
Aldous Huxley - Brave New World
H G Wells - The Time Machine
Arthur C Clarke - Childhood's End
Robert A Heinlein - The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
H G Wells - The War of the Worlds
Ray Bradbury - The Martian Chronicles 
Kurt Vonnegut - Slaughterhouse Five
Ursula K Le Guin - The Left Hand of Darkness
Neal Stephenson - Snow Crash
Niven & Pournelle - The Mote in God's Eye
Orson Scott Card - Ender's Shadow
Orson Scott Card - Speaker for the Dead
Michael Crichton - Jurassic Park
Alfred Bester - The Stars My Destination
Philip K Dick - The Man in the High Castle   
Isaac Asimov - The Caves of Steel   
Frederik Pohl - Gateway   
Roger Zelazny - Lord of Light   
Stanislaw Lem - Solaris   
Jules Verne - 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea   
Michael Crichton - The Andromeda Strain   
Kurt Vonnegut - Cat's Cradle   
Philip K Dick - Ubik   
Carl Sagan - Contact   
Madeleine L'Engle - A Wrinkle In Time   
Isaac Asimov - The Gods Themselves   
John Wyndham - The Day of the Triffids   
Vernor Vinge - A Fire Upon the Deep 
Walter M Miller - A Canticle for Leibowitz   
Kim Stanley Robinson - Red Mars 
Anthony Burgess - A Clockwork Orange   
Robert A Heinlein - Time Enough For Love   
Ursula K Le Guin - The Dispossessed   
Isaac Asimov - The End of Eternity   
Mary Shelley - Frankenstein   
Daniel Keyes - Flowers for Algernon   
L Ron Hubbard - Battlefield Earth   
Jules Verne - Journey to the Center of the Earth   
Philip Jose Farmer - To Your Scattered Bodies Go   
Peter F Hamilton - The Reality Dysfunction 
Neal Stephenson - The Diamond Age   
Philip K Dick - A Scanner Darkly   
David Brin - Startide Rising
Kurt Vonnegut - The Sirens of Titan   
Margaret Atwood - The Handmaid's Tale
Greg Bear - Eon
Iain M Banks - Use of Weapons 
John Scalzi - Old Man's War 
Arthur C Clarke - The City and the Stars   
Michael Crichton - Sphere
Alfred Bester - The Demolished Man
Robert A Heinlein - The Door Into Summer
Alastair Reynolds - Revelation Space
Harry Harrison - The Stainless Steel Rat
Iain M Banks - Player of Games
Edgar Rice Burroughs - A Princess of Mars
Connie Willis - Doomsday Book
Cormac McCarthy - The Road
Robert A Heinlein - Citizen of the Galaxy
Gene Wolfe - The Fifth Head of Cerberus
C S Lewis - Out of the Silent Planet
Dan Simmons - Ilium
Philip K Dick - The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
Richard Morgan - Altered Carbon
John Wyndham - The Chrysalids
Niven & Pournelle - Lucifer's Hammer   
Robert A Heinlein - Have Space-Suit - Will Travel   
Edwin A Abbott - Flatland   
Clifford Simak - Way Station   
Suzanne Collins - The Hunger Games   
Arkady & Boris Strugatsky - Roadside Picnic   
Ursula K Le Guin - The Lathe of Heaven   
John Brunner - Stand on Zanzibar    
Richard Matheson - I Am Legend    
Stanislaw Lem - The Cyberiad    
Neal Stephenson - Anathem    
Clifford Simak - City   
Julian May - The Many-Colored Land
Robert Louis Stevenson - Strange Case of Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde   
Philip K Dick - VALIS    
Orson Scott Card - Xenocide 
David Brin - The Postman   
Theodore Sturgeon - More Than Human   
Arthur Conan Doyle - The Lost World

Junkies arguing about mundane things is one of my favorite things about New York

Forever is basically Castle if the character of Castle from Castle was also the character The Highlander from The Highlander, and is about a guy who keeps dying and coming back to life, and the first time this happened is when he was transporting slaves hundreds of years ago, and no, that moral minefield is never mentioned again beyond this scene.  He dies and comes back to life and assumes that this incident was somehow the cause of his immortality rather than simply the first instance of his resurrection, but don't look too hard at this kind of reasoning because the show is rife with nonsensical and often contradictory deduction, like that bit where the doctor deduces that someone has tried to make a murder look like an overdose of heroin when he sees that the heroin has "pooled in the muscle" because it was injected postmortem and thus didn't enter the victim's bloodstream on account of his not having a bloodstream by this point, and then less than two minutes later, the doctor instructs his aide to catch a rat that chewed on the victim's face in order to obtain a sample of the heroin that wasn't in the man's system.  In a previous episode, a guy has his briefcase stolen by a mugger who runs off when the guy dies of a heart attack.  Later, the doctor opens the briefcase that was brought in with the older man's body to see what's in it, and don't even get me started on the heavy use of coincidence to bridge story elements, the biscuit possibly being taken by characters simply running into escaping suspects on the notoriously deserted NYC subway system.
Forever is not a good show if your attention span is 80 seconds or more, which is probably why they front-load each episode with pictures of the lead male with his shirt off instead of a blank screen with the words "ELEMENTARY IS ON A BREAK SO PLEASE WATCH THIS WHILE YOU WAIT FOR THE NEW SEASON" emblazoned across the tv, and the way they haven't made a single reference to Elementary or Castle a full five episodes in makes me think the people making Forever are being a bit precious about their piggybacking on the success of other, better NYC-based murder-mystery shows, because the goofy and light-hearted atmosphere of proceedings is screaming out for some conspicuously-absent lampshade-hanging or at least a bit of genre-awareness.
Forever is televisual landfill, a placeholder until you find something else to watch in its stead and the way it's written and the way it shirt-offs its lead at the drop of a hat (without ever asking why he isn't on a sex offender's registry for streaking public places every week) suggest that those making it at least know that much and have built their product accordingly.  It is not good, but it is amusing and passes the time, and I suppose that's the best they were hoping for even if we might have been holding out for something better with such a romantic high-concept premise at the heart of what is essentially an identikit mystery show you've seen many times before even in the current televisual season.  There's plenty of other shows coming up with an identical setting, too - iZombie is likely the one that springs immediately to mind as it's going for the teen viewership for some reason, but I'm not sure who Forever is aimed at.  I suppose that's just another one of life's mysteries.