Hi!

My wife and I met through our mutual love of horror films, and really love watching movies together in general-- good or bad. For the past three years we'd go to the local horror film festival around her birthday which, sadly, is not happening this year, so I thought I'd wrangle up some horror films available online for us to watch instead.

Do you have any favorites?

Here's some of mine!:

• Transmission 1 (warning: starts loud): This was a webisode released to help promote the 2007 horror film The Signal in which a sound emitting from electronics affects how people behave.
• Spider: A prankster doesn't know when to stop. (trigger warning & mild spoiler: some eye stuff)
• Lights Out: Something seems off more than the lights (all of this guy's stuff is pretty decent as far as short horrors go).

I know those are higher production value than most of the stuff you'd see at a festival, so don't worry about that. We really enjoyed one last year called Finley that was just a complete delight.

My wife and I enjoy playing mystery walking simulators together and have been looking for more-- Steam's recommendation engine is pretty terrible in finding others or lesser-known titles, so I thought I'd ask around for what others play! They don't have to be full-on walking simulators, just games where dying is rare/not a big component of the experience (looking at you, Visage!), and the rest of the game is all about solving a mystery/thriller of some sort. Preferably first-person games with realistic-enough graphics.

Ones we've played so far and have loved are:

• Dead Secret
• Gone Home (loose fit)
• The Painscreek Killings (really loved this one)
• The Vanishing of Ethan Carter

Ones I've got in my queue:

• Anna
• Bohemian Killing
• Dead Secret 2
• Return of Obra Dinn

I've also played What Remains of Edith Finch, Dear Esther, Firewatch, and some others-- but those didn't really have a big enough mystery component to them (to be clear I liked them, they just didn’t have a dark/thriller vibe to em).

Any other suggestions?

Needing a down weekend, the spouse and I settled in to watch TV, and discovered that Starz' series, Counterpart - spoiler warning, is one of the better series we've seen in quite a while, let alone among science fiction stories. Though The Expanse wins for sheer SFX pyrotechnics and breadth of technical scope, it's wonderful to sit in for a deep, thoughtful drama like Counterpart. The series focuses on character, story, world-building, plausible plotting, and avoidance of the usual alternate universe cliches. Counterpart is a genuine Cold War Noir spy thriller which happens to occur in a science-fictional setting, and the writers have managed to avoid or refresh the tropes of both genres in ways that ask interesting philosophical questions. It's quiet, slow, and meticulous in a way that most current television writing seems to have abandoned. There's tense action, but no primary colored-supersuits, no scary aliens, no gaudy laser beams, just... a split of history that leaves two distorted mirrors, reflecting each other.

J.K. Simmons' performances in the roles of Howard (Prime) and Howard (Alpha) are mesmerizing in a way that outmatches Tatiana Mazlany's Orphan Black characters. There's a slow unveiling of the respective parallel worlds' history, with continuing evolution and interplay of characters and relationships, which brings to mind the best of series like The Wire or The Americans.

To the extent that Counterpart borrows from literary canon, the most significant underlying influences are John LeCarre's find-the-mole games in the Smiley series, China Mieville's The City and the City, and Philip K. Dick (particularly, The Adjustment Team).

The really guilty pleasure, and the lightweight pressure relief from the grimdark of Peaky Blinders or Counterpart, was a spit-and-giggles Canadian production called Letterkenny. I didn't have high hopes, but the 22-minute episodes are exactly what my brain needed to get over the daily doses of blah.

The opening credits of each episode refer to the fictional rural Ontario town of Letterkenny as follows:

There are 5,000 people in Letterkenny. These are their problems.

The plots are barely coat-hangers, with most of the comic tension spent on interactions among the Hicks (farm people), Skids (creative-but-disaffected Internet subculture wannabes), hockey players and Christians - a/k/a small-town tribes recognizable anywhere in North America. The portrayals are caricaturized enough to be both humorously offensive and humorously sympathetic simultaneously. [Could be some toxic racial/gender meta, but mostly, the treatment of women and minorities is in keeping with the setting.]

The banter, and the utter Spock-like deadpan of Wayne (the toughest guy in Letterkenny)'s Hick character are the stars of the show. Some people have complained that the rapid-fire use of heavy dialect in the dialogue is impenetrable; that actually helps with comic timing. When your brain catches up to what was actually said, it's like receiving a two-by-four between the eyes of funny. I've got a bit of home-team advantage in the midwestern North American dialects area, and usually get it on the first run, but it's good enough to re-watch happily if the spouse needs a do-over. Transcripts are available, but watch the show before looking.

We now have a new battery of in-jokes and gag lines to add to our secret spousal language - "Hard no.", "That's what I appreciates about ya", "...and he was never the same after that."

There's really nothing quite like Letterkenny, and it's exactly smart/dumb enough to make fantastic comedy. Two seven-episode seasons are currently available on Hulu.

Today NASA launched the Parker Solar Probe which will dive closer to the sun than any other man made object in history.

In celebration of this event I watched Sunshine, a really well cast sci fi thriller. It was pretty darn good. I would highly recommend a watch if you are into this sort of thing, I had entirely missed it somehow. Casting is great, visuals are great, story is good, pacing is excellent. Don't be put off by the age of the movie, I don't think vfx would be any better today.

50 years into the future, the Sun begins to die, and Earth is dying as a result. A team of astronauts is sent to revive the Sun - but the mission fails. Seven years later, a new team is sent to finish the mission as mankind's last hope.

It may not be on US Netflix but it is on Amazon.

Trailer

Link to Google doc: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Hc-Ti6Pff_qUZLAfzzL7WjhFNh2m_XPvMkdYBL6mLzI/edit?usp=sharing

I created this document a while back and update it every couple months. There's an Introduction tab with guidance on how to browse the spreadsheets, which I've copied below for reference:

(1) This document outlines various TV shows and is broken up into 3 tabs: Watched, Watching, and Want to Watch.

Watched: Shows I've completed through series finale or given up on. Some of these were canceled early.

Watching: Shows I'm actively watching day-to-day or shows in between seasons that will air new episodes in the future.

Want to Watch: Shows I haven't started and want to watch. Many of them are recommendations I jotted down to avoid forgetting, so this list will sometimes be unalphabetized.

(2) Certain columns of information were exported directly from IMDB, and the page for each show is linked in the rating from the IMDB column.

(3) On the Watched and Watching tabs, there are columns for Recommend? and Notes to provide background that will help decide what to watch. Don't let any of my negative comments stop you from watching a show you're interested in.

(4) The Recommended? column is divided into the following categories: Must Watch, Yes, Maybe, No. These are all based on personal opinion with extra discussion/information in the Notes column.

(5) I've shared this with most people using View Only permissions, so download the Excel file (or copy to your Drive account) to filter columns by genre, rating, and personal recommendation.

Disclaimer: not everyone will have the same tastes as me - that's okay. I welcome any disagreement about how I've rated shows and hope to get some discussion going.

• What shows have I missed that I need to watch?

• What shows did I strongly recommend that you didn't like?

• What shows did I give up on too early?

I expect to take some heat for quitting Brooklyn 99 around season 3.

• What shows haven't come out that I should keep an eye out for?

Like Jack Ryan which debuts this month.

• How can I improve the document?

I considered including a column with the show's network or where it can be legally streamed, but this is pretty tedious given the nature of broadcast rights.

The show premiered on Audience Network a couple of weeks ago.

Seems to be a classical CIA show, more in line with 24 than Homeland, I think. So if you miss the CTU, you might like this. It's not as fast-paced so far though.

Dialogue is acceptable and acting is generally good. Nothing spectacular visually.

There was some amount of conflict and the tension builds up during the episode, with the mandatory cliffhanger ending.

Nothing disruptive in general, but entertaining and with maybe some potential.

The main character is too much of a hero (too much of a good guy) to be able to achieve some depth, IMO. He's too smart, too honest, too humble, too attractive, etc. That's my biggest grip once I accepted the show doesn't seem to want to create anything new, but was certainly watchable. I'm gonna watch the second episode now and see if it gets better

I'd say 7/10, but maybe it's just because I usually enjoy the genre. So maybe 6/10 trying to be more objective.