What will we do without a shower - where am I supposed to cry?

It would certainly have made the uneven and cliched Jessica Jones a lot more enjoyable if I'd got that memo everyone else did telling me I was supposed to be enjoying rape backstories for tough female characters now, rather than finding them tiresome and lazy storytelling, but here we are again with Into The Badlands.  A post-apocalyptic martial arts series based on Journey To The West - the only Chinese story that has ever been written apparently - it's not always misogynistic trash, it's just that those elements tend to stick out more amongst the mish-mash of other things appropriated from elsewhere.  The kung-fu is often inventive and fun, and carries the rest of the show well, though mostly it's just a nice-looking power struggle in a setting that looks like a conflation of a stereotypical Asian culture and Depression-era America.  It's not rocket science, but it's engaging enough to hold the attention so far, coming off as a well-made late-80s/early-90s straight-to-video post-apocalyptic action film - and lord knows, I do like me some of them.
Of the aforementioned Jessica Jones, I can only say that while by no means a poorly-made show, for me it is likely the weakest of the Marvel offerings so far, reliant as it is upon well-worn storytelling tropes and the dubious novelty of a female lead in an age where roughly 90 percent of television has a female lead.  To make their female lead more distinctive in a crowded field, they make her unlikeable and give her many character flaws - yes, you can already see where I'm going with this, can't you?  There is nothing new to be seen in Jessica Jones, though its attempts to second-guess its audience's tolerance for spandex-clad adventurers might be noteworthy, as it has spectacularly bet on the wrong horse in a tv season notable for having quite a few successful and highly visible superhero shows in contrast to JJ taking the well-worn "it's a superhero show but we don't do superheroes in it" beloved of Smallville and Heroes, now possibly as much an embarrassing anachronism in itself as adventurers in primary-coloured unitards once were.

Atlas Shrugged - and so did most of its readers

Well, there's nothing like a well-maintained blog, and this is nothing like etc etc
Why did no-one tell me about Blood And Oil?  A tale of rich white trash and their literal/figurative catfights, starring Don "I survived the eighties but you can't tell by looking" Johnson and various b-listers I recognise from television shows I presumably watched during a period where I was questioning my sexuality such as "him from Greek", "her from Jane By Design", and a whole bunch of "that one from that thing that was crap but I watched all the way through anyway", it's just the kind of awful I can't resist.  Obviously, this likely means it's been cancelled already, but I am enjoying playing catch-up so far, even if watching episodes without the stopgap of a week in between does tend to highlight how quickly it loses its most interesting elements, especially the setting of the opening episode, where the locale is painted as a kind of gold-rush era frontier town never more than a hair's breadth away from lawlessness (a fictional oil find in Dakota replacing the factual gold of old California), which falls by the wayside along with the broke-as-heck young couple who land in town with only the clothes on their backs and yet can manage to take out a hundred thousand dollar loan before the end of the pilot and are buying a half-million dollar house by the second episode, thus further robbing USTV of money-poor characters - but this is about a fantasy version of America, not the daily experience of 95 percent of its population, so all is forgiven, Blood and Oil.

As they say in my native South Carolina, "It's time to marry your brother-in-law"

Covert Affairs was shit, and Quantico is some next-level Godawful shitness I can't even bring myself to tear apart piece by shitty piece lest I be responsible for someone reading my words and deciding that it sounds so bad it must be good rather than just so bad it's bad - but to clarify, there is no hypothetical scenario in which there is a dial measuring Quantico's quality which features a needle swinging all the way around on some imaginary dial from "bad" until it gets to "good" and then keeps going until it becomes "bad" again, because that would imply that at some point the needle nestled in the "good" area, and with Quantico that never happens, not even in the hypothetical realms of fantasy, because Quantico is never less than terrible.
Homeland aside, it is not a good time to be a female-led espionage series, so I do not even know why I decided to watch Agent X, which I knew ahead of time was Sharon Stone slumming it in tv because Hollywood does not forgive female actors for getting old.  I am glad that I did, however because Agent X is a hoot, and is a welcome antidote to the charmless po-faced faux-grimness that is live-action television's current default state outside Disney programming - did you know The New Girl was commissioned as a comedy?  Crazy.  What Agent X makes me think of is a Disney programme whose greenlit proposal has sat on a shelf for a while until it became apparent that the Mouseketeer for which it was originally written has decided to become batshit insane on a full-time basis and will not be available for filming because she's drunk-driven a car into the line outside an Apple store or married a badger or something so the script has been made anyway, with adults, only no-one has changed any of the preposterous premise before things went before a camera, so Agent X is the tale of Sharon Stone becoming Vice President of America which also means that she is now secretly M from James Bond, as was intended all along by the Founding Fathers when they wrote it down in the original draft of the Declaration of Independence, which the VP has in her secret Vice President Cave under the Library of Congress.
You really know all you need to at this point, it's a nonsense of a show and highly enjoyable for it, even if I am not quite sure where it's going in its portrayal of women types, as despite Stone being the headline act, this is a very male fantasy about a daring he-man saving young women from nasty Russkies.
It's early days and the rough edges could still be hewn off, but it seems to be off to a good start.

It's not for me to say, but have you considered investing in food and running water?

Not much to report today, as real life stuff had to be taken care of, so I couldn't sit down and construct one of my usual blogging masterpieces.  Still drawing away, though, so there's that.  Got a ton of Hawaii Five-0 to catch up on, so plenty of blog filler to come as I try and fail to disguise my man-crush on Scott Caan - a man so ludicrous that his own father showed up in his show once to tell the character played by Scott Caan that his dad must think he's ludicrous.  Yes, I am waffling away about the new series of Hawaii Five-0 and I haven't even watched an episode yet, so just imagine how fun the blog will be once I've actually binged on a couple of hours' worth of it.

All the broken glass is like a puzzle for the kids - you give 'em a tube of glue and you watch 'em go

More Twilight Zone-y goodness - SPOILERS FOR A FIFTY-SIX YEAR OLD TV SHOW FOLLOW:
I Shot an Arrow into the Air is the "our rocketship got lost in space and we crashed on some planet or asteroid that has a suspiciously breathable atmosphere" story and it has just the twist you'd expect it to have, but as ever the tale is in the telling rather than gimmicks, and the story wisely concentrates on being about a cowardly, murderous crewman picking off his crewmates in order to make supplies last longer on this suspiciously Earth-like planetoid on which they find themselves marooned without hope of rescue.
The Hitch-Hiker - the tale of a woman driving alone who keeps seeing the same lonely figure trying to hitch a ride, no matter where or how far she drives.  It meanders a little, but the twist is solid, as there's some doubt where it might be going as you probably think it's a more obvious twist than the one they go for.
The Fever - too comical to be convincing, this, for me, is probably the first outright turkey of TZ's premiere season.  The story of an uptight skinflint who accompanies his wife to Las Vegas on a free flight and who succumbs to the gambling bug and blows all the couple's cash on a one-armed bandit that begins to follow him around, eventually causing him to fall out a window to his death.  Not great.
The Last Flight - a WW1 pilot lands his plane in the 1950s after passing through a mysterious cloud while deserting a comrade in the midst of an air battle.  When the people of the future tell him his comrade made it out alive, the pilot can't believe it was possible to survive such odds - at least, not without help...  A solid take on the predestination paradox plot, as usual TZ buries the quirky sci-fi in a more accessible allegory, in this case the story of the cowardly pilot's redemption.
The Purple Testament - a soldier sees the mark of death on the faces of those of his comrades who are about to die and starts to lose his marbles.  Eventually seeing the mark on his own face, he glumly accepts his fate and boards a jeep driving towards a road rumored to be littered with mines.  I didn't really get along with this one, as it didn't seem to be going anywhere in the end, and the main character just accepting his coming death seems kind of daft, especially as it means taking someone else with him when he goes.  An okay episode, I guess, but this is the TZ equivalent of landfill.

I knew a little girl looked enough like you it makes my memory water

Back to my Twilight Zone watching, if you don't want the endings to episodes of a 56 year-old tv show ruined for you, best read no further, but if you're one of my fellow small pressers and you're stumped for a short story idea, you can do worse than read my shite:
Perchance To Dream - a man visits a psychiatrist and insists that if he falls asleep, he'll dream that he dies and will thus die in the real world FOR REAL.  Driven paranoid by lack of sleep, he throws himself to his death through a window after a couple of minor coincidences, and it is revealed that he was dreaming his entire session in the psychiatrist's office, having fallen asleep the moment he lay down on the couch.  This was a twist that came across as a bit comical in practice, but the episode was entertaining enough.
Judgment Night - a guy with no memory of how he got aboard but who has a German name and a German submarine officer's uniform is on a British freighter during WW2 that's being stalked by a submarine.  Yes, the twist you're thinking of is the twist that happens, but it's played very well right up until its natural end point where the sub's first officer announces "I worry there's a special kind of Hell for men like us" but keeps going for about two minutes anyway, really hammering the thing home to the point it risks becoming parody.  A decent episode, but nothing special.
And When The Sky Was Opened sees an astronaut trying to convince his best friend and co-pilot that there was a third man on their manned space flight.  It's a typical "people are forgetting I exist" plot, that ends with the expected twist of the main character disappearing as well.  I am not sure the science holds up, and the drama is of the hysterical type where the actor(s) work their character into a lather until they're screaming, which I find gets old quickly.
What You Need is one of those episodes that centers on an unlikely series of events putting someone in the exact place at the exact time to meet their maker, but it's not as well-constructed a series of events to get them there as it could be, essentially rambling in the second and third acts as it puts a panto villain center-stage to get his contrived and unconvincing comeuppance because of, I dunno, hubris probably.  Not great.
The Four of Us Are Dying is another episode that centers on an unlikely series of events putting someone in the exact place at the exact time to meet their maker, only this time it adds a central character who has the ability to change their face to resemble anyone they've seen in a photograph, right down to changing their voice to perfectly match the person in the photograph, apparently.  Also not great.
In Third From The Sun, some blokes escape a nuclear war on a rocketship and head for a new planet that's called Earth.  That's it.  A warhorse of a plot/twist this one, I have a suspicion that this might be the sci-fi writers' equivalent of The Aristocrats, as it's in the telling rather than the twist itself that we find our entertainment, and as tellings go, this one plays a decent shell game by concentrating on the intrigue of getting everyone on the rocketship in time.  A pretty good episode, although right at the end when they're talking about it being Earth, they don't seem terribly enthused about selling it as a twist, making me think that it was a warhorse even in the 1950s.

We should try Australia - I hear they speak English there

Blindspot isn't taking any chances with its star Jaime Alexander, as it starts off getting her naked and then crafts a premise from there that allows for numerous instances of enforced nudity such as people having to "scan" or "consult" the mysterious tattoos on her body that contain clues as to her amnesiac character's true identity and/or violent crimes that are about to happen, combining the Bourne Identity with Memento I don't know.   There's a bit where it probably said in the script "and then she like takes off her clothes and checks herself out in the mirror, just totally looking at her boobs and stuff" and by that point I am pretty sure that the fictional version of Patrick Stewart from Extras is writing this show.  There's a plot to blow up the Statue of Liberty and all Asians are martial arts experts - you now have enough information to decide if this show is for you or not.
Limitless is based on the film of the same name, which is based on a book of a different name, but that name was changed to "Limitless" in later printings to cash in on the film with which it has only passing elements in common, and yes, I did bring up the book so that I could use the phrase "cash in on the film with which it has only passing elements in common" because I thought that would be clever of me, even though I haven't actually seen the film so I cannot speak as to how accurate this phrase may be in this context, making my opinion/insight on the matter utterly unreliable, but hey, I'm still not as big a windbag as that Guardian writer who, on the day Terry Pratchett's final book was released, dismissed Pratchett as a mediocre writer in the same paragraph he let slip that he'd never read anything by Terry Pratchett (and whose name I have hilariously/aptly forgotten) because at least I don't expect to get paid for shovelling my horseshit opinions through the monitor at those unfortunate enough to come to my blog during a perfectly innocent Google search for - I dunno - inter-racial dwarf pornography thanks to my random use of tags to attract pageviews like flies to shit.  Limitless is, however, not going to be much like the film, I can at least reasonably speculate, because Limitless the film is a high-budget allegorical drama with an A-list cast, while Limitless the tv show is a low-to-medium budget odd-couple buddy cop drama starring Dexter's skinny sister because of course it is.  It's not terrible by any stretch, though it does often display an expedience in jogging through its plot beats that is as admirable as it is an admittance of its own unoriginality: we, the audience, know that the dedicated cop will be teaming up with the slightly unlikeable junkie guy to solve crimes because The Series Premise That's Why, but you know, the show could at least pretend there's a chance it might not happen, for like, tension reasons or something.
I'm not crazy about the superdrug McGuffin, either, as I am pretty sure the reason no-one does that whole "this drug will let you use one hundred percent of your brain instead of the five percent that normal humans use!" plot thing anymore is because it was thoroughly debunked many, many years ago, firstly on the basis that people pointed out that you didn't use 100 percent of your brain because you don't actually need to do so on account of you have bits of your brain that does different stuff at different times, like dreaming, reading, pooping, swimming, masturbating, running, martial arts, urinating, erm... origami?  And secondly because some doctors and boffin types hooked up someone's brain and watched it for a bit before deciding that, yep, that was how a brain worked: one problem at a time.  I suppose you could do all those things at once, and admittedly it would most likely be spectacular to watch, but not in the way that Limitless seems to think would be the case - though it's certainly lively enough on its own terms, interspersed with action beats for the main characters to negotiate in inventive fashion because someone opening up their brain's full potential also seems to make them a super athlete because of course it d-- you know what?  Fuck it.  I'm no scientist, that is probably how body science works for all I know.

I'm going out tonight to find a hot chick or two uggos

Ghosts of Mars was originally written as a Snake Pliskin outing, but the studio didn't want another Pliskin movie after Escape From Los Angeles bombed, so Pliskin was changed to "Desolation Jones" and the studio cast Ice Cube in the role because they wanted "an A list actor" to draw the crowds.  Crazy times...  The actress playing the main character in the film wasn't even considered for the part until the original actress who was cast in the role (the fifth choice for the part) injured herself and one of the male cast mentioned his girlfriend was free, so yes, you can go ahead and call this one as an utter car crash of a project, I nonetheless love it to bits.  It's just such a wonderfully trashy b-movie, although reminiscent of other John Carpenter outings like The Fog and Assault On precinct 13.  I'm actually on a bit of a Mars kick at the minute, and this seems like it's a huge homage to Ray Bradbury's Martian Chronicles canon, though the influence of Nigel Kneale can be felt on the edges, too.

And your chosen catagory is: "hermaphrodite Nazi sympathisers"

"How does she smell?"

Just a quick return to scribbling to test the old arms out for the themed blog. I tend to draw Judge Anderson much, much too young and fit considering where she's at in the comics (a middle-aged burn-out more akin to Helen Mirren circa Prime Suspect), but this being Dreddworld, I imagine 50 to be the new 30 and the lesser prominence of Psi-division in Judge Dredd in recent years gives me the impression she'd be more of a street cop at this stage.
Arms feel all right despite the scribbling, though. Reckon I'll play it safe and put the sketch to bed finished or not, though the return to random screen grabs at least stops me posting random panels from my awful comics.