Fred and Loathing on The Internet

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...

The threat of a self-imposed deadline has crept upon us again. Earlier in the month I was flush with ideas for blog posts. New games, new books, new TV series. So many new pieces of media to talk about, with the trademark sloppy panache this blog is known for. Even with such a wide plethora of blogworthy items to choose from, none can overcome good ol’ fashioned procrastination. Procrastination is a specialty among the staff at fredlambuth.com. And this “at least one blog post a month” is not a rule written on a stone tablet handed down from the gods. It’s just some thought I had when I was writing the front-end stuff for the blog navigation menu. Anyway, here’s a blog post squeezed into the last few days of the month.

On the blog today we are talking about Parker. What is his first name? Hell if I know. It does not get mentioned at all in the book I just read, The Hunter by Richard Stark (aka Donald Westlake). His first name did not get mentioned in the 1999 movie adaptation called Payback. The character was called Porter in the 1967 adaptation called Point Blank, also without mention of the first name. The question of his first name does get brought up by characters in all three renditions of the story. The only sobriquet he is given is his assumed last name.

There are over a dozen novels with Parker as the protagonist. Maybe it will get addressed later on in the series. The long and the short of who Parker is, is that he’s a skilled professional. His...