The funniest thing about watching* The Starry Night, the Starry Sea season 2 on youtube was following the comments. At the start, most of the comments were the same kind I'd been seeing on the Filipino teleseryes I've also been watching on youtube, i.e. excited comments of people who are watching the first time, supportive comments about how much they love the show and/or its actors, "who's still watching this in [year]", those kinds of simple things.

But over time.... ho boy! I don't know exactly when it happened, but there was a period where the positive comments slowly thinned out and then an outright tonal shift into majority frustration and complaints, because:

• The Female Lead, who was introduced as spunky and rebellious against social norms for women's roles and crossdressed in order to pursue her dreams, turned into a weeping, helpless heroine whose only recourse to having any sort of agency is to cry and beg;


• Which contrasts even more unfavourably with a side character who continues to be spirited and stubborn to stand up for what's right through the whole show;


• Also the singular central conflict of the entire show is a long misunderstanding due to a single villain character who dies before getting any sort of comeuppance or realization. A long con by a villain may be typical, but there's usually other subplots and the conflict itself has its starts and stops, instead of a single pressing weight of stress that gets worse and worse as EVERYONE falls for the lies put into a place by a single mastermind. There's no storytelling rhythm to it, just frustration.

(*watching = I skipped a lot, especially towards the end when people kept dying and there was no catharsis.)

As for me, I thought the show was indeed frustrating for the same reasons, but I knew it would have a tragic ending from the beginning because it's a prequel! Obviously it's going to end badly. But I think most viewers did not and hoped that all that suffering would be rewarded by peace and happiness instead of a last minute rugpull of death. I think the uploader saw that wall of rage coming so they went and UNLISTED the final episode for the show outright.

The episode is still up, but I had to find it through someone else's playlist instead of their own channel. Which is, you know, fair enough if they don't want to get swarmed with negativity (not that they have to read it, but I understand). But that still made me go 👀

Ahhhh remember when FuckYeah[Thing] was everywhere in the fannish parlance?

Anyway some years back I was an avid watcher of NerdCubed's youtube channel, because as someone with horrible hand-eye coordination I found his irreverent skill and enjoyment at taking video games to their absurd limit really fun, and such LPs as I still remember for "Bully", "Shadow of the Colossus", "Psychonauts", "Outer Wilds" and one of the Jurassic Park games where you can actually build a theme park (and the raptors kept escaping, which enraged him to no end). These days I still have him subscribed but don't watch him as often, as there's way more content I follow now.

Regardless, back when he announced that he'd written a book, I ordered it as a way to say thank you for all those hours of entertainment, which is why I have a copy of Daniel Hardcastle's Fuck Yeah Videogames. It is, in my opinion, near incomprehensible if you don't already know Daniel and his brand of humour, as it is an irreverent list of various video games he loves and some he does not, the history ("history", in places) of various video consoles, plus a healthy dollop of semi memoir in the little stories he tells about himself, his family and friends, in explaining the way various video games make him feel. It's less a book and more like longform stand up in text form, I think. Maybe the audio version would be better, as someone who's enjoyed his rambling, but in text form I found it a bit tiresome.

At the back he lists his 100 favourite games of all time and I was shocked to see Outer Wilds was not there (he introduced me to the game!). Then I checked, and oh the game came out in 2019 and he finished writing the book in 2018, which explains it.

I read Sarah B. Pomeroy's Goddesses, Whores, Wives & Slaves, which explores what daily life was for women of classical Greece and Republic Rome based on the thin historical record, plays, poetry and so on, for the purpose of illuminating an otherwise ignored or invisible faction of society. What rights did they have or not have, how were they viewed by and treated by the men who had power over them, what were the gender essentialist turned institutional mechanisms used to control them, and so on. Pomeroy argues that evolution towards increasing freedoms isn't a-given, with her analysis that ancient Greece had more freedoms for women, then a tightening of those freedoms after wartime and a reduction of the male population, then more relaxation of freedoms into the Hellenistic era.

I admit, although the topic itself is interesting to me, I found the prose hella dry and the style tough to get through at points. But then I realized that the book was published in 1975, during a very different time of historical scholarship! I still find it dry and heavy-handed in places, but I can appreciate the groundbreaking feminist view of analysis, and the necessity of spelling things out clearly in order to argue against common perception of the time, even if it's tiresome to read now. Particularly enjoyed Pomeroy mentioning her male historian predecessors who made assumptions about women's attitudes back then due to the societal blinders they had about the women of their own time (eg. assuming women are happy with their lot).

One thing I will take away from the book with the glee is the description of how in ancient Athens, high class women were kept secluded at home and away from the eyes of men who weren't family, with exceptions to go outside behind a veil. That is... the purdah. Ancient Athens, birthplace of the modern concept of democracy, practised the purdah, the same way medieval Arabia did. (Low class women and slaves were allowed to go about freely without the veil, same as in medival Arabia.) That's rather funny, I think!

In my further adventures of "watching" Filipino mermaid-centric TV shows, I've started watching Aryana and the opening situation has a poor woman (Ofelia) and a rich man (Victor) having already gotten married despite the casual classist cruelty of Victor's mother (Elnora). You've got the regular shorthand of Ofelia not knowing how to handle herself in unfamiliar rich-people-enviroment situations (which is also Victor's fault for not helping her, not that these kinds of stories acknowledge that most of the time) which earns Elnora's ire and verbal abuse. Ofelia=good, Elnora=bad, as these things go.

However! Ofelia tries to assert some financial independence by selling cheap lunch food, hawker style, and we're supposed to go, YAY @ her, and BOO @ Elnora for belittling Ofelia's efforts. But! Ofelia has chosen to sell food in the same dang office building, and I think it's hella tacky to take money from your VERY RICH husband's employees, even if you are selling food to them. It's not wrong, but if I were an employee I'd be side-eyeing that fam.

I got my hands of the trade paperback of the first Superman '78 comic! A local reseller surprisingly had it in stock, so I pounced when I saw it. So now I have read both, the first story of which was published over 2021 and the second (which was the first book I got) was published over 2023-2024.

They're continuations of the Christopher Reeve Superman universe, and I was excited to read them, though when the plot kicked in I paused and had the very distinctive thought, "Oh no... bad things are going to happen to Clark! I don't want bad things to happen to Clark!" Even though bad things have to happen in order for there to be a story at all, but there was a funny mismatch in my brain because the Reeves Superman movies are so comforting and familiar and safe, while you don't know what you'll be getting with new canon! ("Canon", of course.)

Anyway both stories are charming and earnest and funny, but nowhere near as goofy as the movies were*, which I think is a consequence of trying to tell a story set in that era now, with our modern sensibilities and nostalgia and reverence tangled up in each other. Plus, it may just be the format, since there's no cinematic pauses or dramatic music to amp up the feeling, but I felt there was less weight to the stories, though the first story literally up-ends the status quo by ( spoilers ) Clark makes his typical choices and sacrifices in both stories, but he's noble and at most sad about it. He doesn't get angry or have break downs as he does in the movies.

*The plot and resolution of The Metal Curtain is goofy but in an idealistic way, where doing the right thing immediately has his "enemies" realizing that Superman has good intentions and doing a heel face turn. It's not goofy in a Superman-turns-back-time-by-flying-really-fast or throwing-nukes-into-the-sun-creates-a-sun-based-villain way.

Also! Very funny that the plot of the first comic sounds like what James Gunn said the second Superman DCU movie is going to be about, namely ( potential spoilers for a future DCU movie. ) That's this comic!