Fred and Loathing on The Internet

I tried to finish a 700ish page history book about the European Revolutions of 1848. (For the record, that book is Revolutionary Spring by Christopher Clark. Published in 2023) I had heard such good things about it. So, so many. I can feel guilt weighing down my inner intellectual street cred. Knowing I stopped at page 300 on a juggernaut among recent history non-fiction book critics. The critics are right in giving accolades to this book. It is an excellent book as long as you are very very interested in every single European nation 's history in the years 1848-1849. I thought I might have been but there were more nations that I could fit inside my brain’s bandwidth.

It was my own fault for thinking a 700 page book would give me the survey level view of this event. Or that it would stick mostly to Germany, which was the area where I had the most queries. I did not find a ‘Germany’ chapter. Rather they were chronologically distributed. My own faults in book reading would not matter as much if the writer did a better job at telling a riveting story instead of stating so many facts in a sludgy staccato of names and places.

Instead, what is getting reviewed is ostensibly about political revolution. The target for today is the second volume of the 2000’s Ghost in The Shell anime series Stand Alone Complex. AKA The 2nd Gig. The twenty or so episodes of this 2nd Gig had a political revolution as the big plot that the episodes worked around. This evolving...

New TV series are rare for me. Has been that way for at least one or two decades. There is just too much investment to get involved in a show. Good ones or bad ones. At least with bad ones you don’t sink any memories into them before letting go of them. That is if you are wise enough to quit before you know it's not going to get better. Who has time to take that risk? I just drop a show if more than three episodes hold me through. Often even less. It’s a poisson distribution close to 0.

One season of a bad show, or a few half-baked attempts at watching a whole season, can demonstrate to you what is lacking about them. What the good shows have and what that dreck did not are hard to notice if you exclusively seek out ones that please you instantly. Sometimes you gotta push through television programming that displeases you. Or into mediums that aren’t your favorite yet it offers something up your alley. Big robots fighting big anything is up my alley. Any medium should have an easy task ahead of them if that is the subject they’re working with.

The TV series that I gave an honest effort to enjoy and then wrote about it here will be: Blue Gender. Sounds a little gay doesn’t it? It’s an anime from the late 90s. From an era when gender wasn’t so directly a LGBTQ buzzword. It's hard to tell why it is called gender at all. Blue is used dozens of times per episode (it’s the name of the show’s space bugs). The gender in the title probably has to do with the...

The creative wheels turn slow over here at fredlambuth.com. There is a lot of inertia to get a review of a piece of media off the ground. To complete a full-blown blog post with copy and graphics published takes more than you think. It takes a lot of careful consideration for conjuring up les mots just!

Ruminating! A whole lot of ruminating going on.

To stumble right into a banal topic would be unfair to the reader. The salient points need to be considered. Sometimes in an imaginary storyboard meeting between the writing and graphics departments. We don’t just push out rubbish. Not intentionally, that’s for sure.

I saw all four seasons of The Righteous Gemstones recently. Probably finished the series over a period of three to four weeks. Finishing within a month or so. Watched among the many screens at home, with some web enabled device to pipe in HBO Max.

A month or so is recent enough to say my impressions are sufficiently fresh for an authentic Kerouac take on the subject. Yet that’s the same amount of time to have my thoughts on the subject baked in my psyche enough to also call it a Ginsburg take. For this TV series, I think I’ve honed in to the golden median of the Beatnik school of writing.

The Gemstones show has a stacked cast. More than the usual Danny McBride show. Stacked as this show may be, – and with the case of John Goodman being a contender for the role of ‘protagonist’-- it still has the feel of a Danny...