I only get naked for math

For some reason I decided upon reading SevenEves (or is it Seven Eves?), Neal Stephenson's 900-page science fiction novel that I have in my possession for some reason, despite it not containing any pictures, or battles between ripped truck drivers and post apocalyptic vampire hooker biker gangs, and as you know I require at least one of those two things in my entertainment or the chances of me making it to the end are touch and go at best.  I guess if Pewdiepie can review a philosophy book - even if it's only one written by beef fetishist and professional Kermit impersonator Jordan Peterson - I can probably impart my impressions of this, and I am pretty sure I can even get to the end of this review without endorsing far right extremism or exclaiming a racial slur.
SevenEves is about the moon blowing up and pelting the Earth with Moon bits and everyone dies OR DO THEY etc and then some people in orbit fight among themselves and then they go live on some Moon bits and gen-et-ik-ally en-gin-eer their kids because from the entire human race there's only seven women left - the Seven Eves of the title - and their kids become Star Trek races 5000 years later but some people were left behind on the surface and they weren't keen about their ancestors being left to die via flaming radioactive moon bits, so some disagreements ensue...
This was a very long and dry reading experience for me, and I had some nitpicks, but mainly I had issues with the long, long, long descriptions of technical stuff like orbits, and the disjointed nature of the overall narrative wherein there are three parts to the book, but the third part just jumps ahead into the far future with a whole new bunch of characters and settings.  It brought me back to my attempt to read a Tom Clancy book many years ago that I had a bit of trouble with because the Russian characters were addicted to eating sardines or something like that - the cold war was a crazy time for us all, clearly - and it seemed like there was very little by way of actual story, just walls of text so the writer could illustrate they'd done the research.
I think I only read this because it struck me as similar-sounding to The Wandering Earth, whose movie adaptation I recently watched, though there's not much in the way of similarity apart from the general apocalyptic scenarios and the notion of humanity's survival being a multi-generational endeavour.  The Wandering Earth movie was heckin-dumb-but-brief, and while I am sure SevenEves is very smart by golly it is a drag to read.  I can see the movie version being one of those non-linear narratives where the future stuff is intercut with the stuff in the present to spread out the dullness and create some cliffhangers, but as a linear exercise I can never quite shake the notion that the wrong characters were being followed by the novel, and that all the interesting stories - the survivors on the surface of a devastated Earth, the astronauts that resort to cannibalism as a practicality - were ignored.

SOME people are starting to complain about all the hugging and I don't want to name names but it was definately me

Even though it is a horrible website run by terrible people and has a comments section choking with pedophiles and fascists, I kinda love Youtube now - just in time for it to have been arguably replaced by Twitch or God knows what else is out there I am unaware of as a grown adult with other things to do, but hey I got there in the end.
It's pretty much solely responsible for my falling disastrously behind in my tv watching lately, as sometimes you just don't want to watch the biceps in human form of the Hawaii Five-0 cast pummel their lips around whatever random collection of vowel sounds the script algorithm has spat out for them this week and instead want to hear the dulcet tones of your man-crush explain the philosophical basis of democracy, or your woman crush explain the erotic appeal of lobster-fetishist Jordan Peterson, or the Donkey Kong trans rights activist what shit Graham Linehan right up to the point he's still moaning about it on Twitter a month later man talk for FUCK ME 1 hour and 49 minutes about why the BBC's Sherlock is a load of old cobblers - I mean he's absolutely right and it's good he took the time to articulate his reasoning and issues with it in words and all, but 109 minutes is... 
Anyway I like Youtube is what I am saying, it is a great place to find content even before you get to the fact they have live performance videos of Alvin Stardust.

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'll finally be present at the birth of something I'm proud of

The Guardians is a 13-part dystopian drama series made in 1971 about Britain in the far-off space year of 1980 and was never shown in my neck of the woods (Northern Ireland) on account of terrorists being portrayed as no worse than the British state they opposed, a once-radical notion now sadly overtaken by reality in that the British state is usually far, far worse than terrorists - if only because ISIS don't make any bones about the fact they're going to murder you and at least have the human decency to not make you jump through months of benefits claims and sanctions to get you to the point where you'll walk under the wheels of a truck, they just fly your plane into the ground.
A couple of minutes of screaming and crying and then it's all over - I'm not saying I would definately vote ISIS over the Tories, but... actually no, I probably would.  I like the idea that once The Event comes to pass and we have to deal with our political classes once and for all, I want them going to their grave hissing and spitting at me all the way so I know I don't have any choice in the matter and it's them or me, which seems much more preferable to someone blubbing on their way to the guillotine like a baby and trying to bribe me to at least spare their kids and then I spend the next couple of decades only living so that God can make me suffer with the knowledge of what I've done and develop true fear for what judgment awaits me beyond the veil... which is likely how it'll all go down if we're being honest.  We'll hate ourselves for what we do during The Event, and we might even come to resent the happiness known by future generations because it wasn't them who paid the cost of it in blood and decades of nightmares, but it's not like we can change course now.
Anyway, I liked how the early episodes would wrong-foot the viewer by making you wonder who the show's protagonists might be, as people get bumped off after being built up more than the characters that actually make it to the final episodes, though if I'm honest it didn't convince me of the country-wide scale of the government's reign of terror, the titular Guardians never really presented as anything other than regular coppers who indulge in brutality, and we have those already. 
I liked the downbeat, bummer ending where it all gets a bit theatrical and the only hope you're presented with is "if things get really bad after this point people might not stand for it."  HA HA HA I guess we'll see when we build the foundations of our future upon the literal bones of capitalists.

The Wandering Earth is a pretty decent mainland Chinese attempt at replicating dumbass Hollywood moviemaking like what Michael Bay does, and I know China is a repressive authoritarian state, but there really should be some limits to the kind of cruelty you're allowed to inflict on your population.

The story of an impending global catastrophe caused by an expanding sun which can only be escaped by strapping engines to Earth and driving it to Alpha Centauri, the film reminds me greatly of Armageddon both visually and in that for a while you can delude yourself that the movie might make good in the end and not pull anything too stupid out of its ass in the final stretch that makes you go "nope", and even though it does just that, this is essentially a movie version of Space 1999 except with Earth instead of the Moon so I probably can't act like I was expecting better than arguably the dumbest bit of big screen science I've seen in a long long time which in retrospect may actually be pretty ambitious in the scale of its breathtaking stupidity, but here we are anyway.
"Well if Earth is driving through space what happens to the Moon, then?" I hear you ask, to which I reply "you shut the fuck up."  This film is not for you.

WOW this wake is LIT

"When did people get so angry?  What has happened to the civility of our discourse?"
People are dang angry, it's true, and we act like it's a new thing, but if we're honest it's been here this whole time just like peanut allergies and gender dysphoria, we just didn't have to acknowledge it because it wasn't an issue that affected us or the people we know and love.
Social media sure changed that by creating connections between us, however tenuous or slight, and rather than admit that we happily lived in ignorance of the suffering of others and would like to go back to that, we tell ourselves that politics has polorised and extremists have taken over and we want a return to "sensible" or "the middle ground" when what we really want is for those who have found a voice to shut up because the terrible alternative is to admit that we just choose not to see that we are still living in history and that's the reason the glittering futures promised in our youth never arrived.  We're still serfs, this is still the dark ages, and nothing has changed just because we have the sum total of human knowledge and experience at our fingertips at all times because the only thing we've chosen to do with that knowledge and experience is to get angry at it when it tells us something we don't like.
"When did people get so angry?"  Fuck you.

I should go walk off this boner

I don't want to worry anyone, but I think this time travel story featuring Robocop doesn't make logical sense.
It's interesting to find myself not getting along with Robocop/Terminator: Kill Human, as how does one say with a straight face that something "does not respect the Terminator continuity"?  This is a franchise that has Genesys in it, after all - and strange but true, Genesys is actually a massive rip-off of Terminator: 2029-1984, a Zack "Not Joss, But Close" Whedon comic from 2011, which is not actually as dreadful as I imagined it might be - surely the highest praise I have ever given anything.  That comic was about a character from the future traveling back in time to the events of the original Terminator movie and OMGod what is it with me and rambling posts about Robocop?  Anyway

Kill Human starts with the rogue AI Skynet finally winning its campaign of extermination against the human race, and though this first chapter sets up an intriguing spin on the cornerstone premise of the Terminator franchise while delivering a neat twist, it doesn't actually explain how this alternate timeline in which Skynet is victorious comes to pass, as not winning the war against the humans is not only the aforementioned cornerstone of Terminator lore, but the comic itself later references events in Terminator 2 which can't have happened if Skynet won the war, as it was losing the war that prompted it to take the actions that caused the events of the first two movies.  It's a bizarre breaking of the grandfather paradox at the heart of the franchise that was entirely avoidable and is never explained, much like Robocop traveling through time despite... well, despite being Robocop and not being covered in organic matter - not being covered in organic matter is kind of the cornerstone premise of Robocop, too.
Terminator doesn't have many rules, and there's no reason to think you can't break those rules or subvert expectations that those rules will be adhered to in order to tell a story, but Kill Human doesn't do that and tries to have it both ways: it disregards the closed temporal loop in which Skynet attempts to prevent its own destruction and instead ends up guaranteeing it, but by the second issue predicates the rest of the series on those same elements still being in place.
Maybe Robocop's line "Show me how the time travel works" is some sort of meta self-awareness thing, delivered mere moments before he travels through time in a way that the Terminator movies have expressly stated to be impossible.  I dunno.
Fun fact: I read the novelisations of the movies - I was a very lonely child - and they had the T1000 traveling through time by first covering itself in cloned flesh.
So, so lonely.

Fellow Norn Arishman PJ Holden does get to render Robo sticking the nut on Arnie, surely a defining moment in our culture, but his Robo - like all other Robocops in comic form - is emotional and expressive rather than deadpan and mechanical, and I totally understand why artists do this - especially with scripts that explicitly call for Robocop to shout and scream and look anxious and angry, etc as this one does - but I can't help but feel that it misses the appeal of Robocop as an unflappable straight man in a ludicrous world, though obviously going down this avenue of criticism involves me, an amateur comics artist with (counts fingers) 7 professional credits to his name, criticising someone who has drawn Judge Dredd for over a decade, so uhhhhh probably this is the wrong hill to die upon.
I don't like my Robo to be too emotional or ahead of the game is what I am saying, as he's at his best when he's doing that deadpan reactive thing, or - at a push - when he is driving a burning pimpmobile.  Which he does not do in this, I notice.

The art is actually pretty good once you look past the whole emotional Robocop thing, with a particularly great money shot of a character from the franchise getting their head lopped off that I would have greatly appreciated seeing when I was 12, but there's only so much heavy lifting it can do for the script, which after the first issue covers some very Genesys-like ground in the final three chapters before just sort of stopping without answering any questions, the most obvious of which center around Robo suddenly turning into a time-hopping Machiavelli.  I guess they expected to do a follow-up series or something.

Take off your top and come shotgun a beer with me

Okay, I have figured out my Robocop metaphor conundrum, and I am reasonably certain that what I was working towards when equating the UK's welfare system with the prison system was establishing that even at its most childish and anodyne, the Robocop franchise was still capable of tackling subjects that would remain relevant even in the crazy world of the future we call 2019, as there is legitimately an episode of the 1990s Robocop tv series in which the lead character deals with the fallout of the establishment of Universal Credit as an alternative to existing benefits.  No, really.

They don't call it Universal Credit, obviously, because Sweet Christmas you guys the writers of Robocop weren't actually looking through time itself and using this ability to write episodes of a children's tv show, within the fiction it is called "Webcare", but otherwise things are absolutely identical to what has happened in reality: a sanctimonious, slimy shitheel character representing the worst in humanity and an obvious parody of fascist capitalism hiding behind an unconvincing facade of self-righteousness takes bribes to implement a replacement for the regular system of benefits that already exists, but it's all a ploy to control the poor by forcing them into debt through an obstructive application process overseen by third party contractors who are rewarded for withholding benefits to which people are legally entitled via a regime of sanctions which actively prevents them from finding jobs, and eventually the disgusting, slimy subhuman piece of trash behind this is taken to court to force him to act within the law, so he simply has the law changed to protect himself from prosecution, all the while being protected from exposure by a corporate-controlled media whose clumsy attempts at deflecting blame are just about believable for a television show aimed at 8 year olds, and amazingly, this is also what happens in the episode of Robocop called "Provision 22".

Would this have actually helped my clumsy blog post about Robocop comics from the 1990s?  In retrospect, probably not, but dedicating brain space to figuring out where I was going added a dash of mystery and excitement to an otherwise drab couple of weeks, and now it's over I don't know how I'll ever get that sweet rush back again.
I did like the episode ending essentially being where an old white guy swoops in and declares a return to the shitty old welfare system and everyone hails him as a hero, which was probably quite black and funny in 1992 but in 2019 is probably the absolute best outcome to events that we in the UK can actually hope for.