Setsuled's Journal

I'm starting to think I didn't get as much sleep to-day as I thought I did. The problem might lie in my conception of eight hours of sleep--I tend to count the hours beginning when my head hits the pillow, like sleep is a form of baseball. I sometimes even forget to deduct time spent web browsing in the middle of the day, half asleep.

I watched the newest episode of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles last night. I liked the episode, though the speech Derek gave to the guy he was torturing sounded like it came out of a text book. I like Jesse, Derek's girlfriend, okay, except I wish they'd gotten a more muscular actress for the role. It's not that Stephanie Chaves-Jacobsen is a bad actress, and at some level I'm always going to enjoy watching an attractive woman. It's just that I'm tired of shows throwing noodle-armed women into warrior roles with the implication that they're every bit the fighters beefy guys like Derek are. I mean, that was one of the really great things about Terminator 2--Linda Hamilton's muscles. You could see the power there. I guess there's a motive floating around in the TV producer creativity jetsam to show women as being the equals of men, but shit like this doesn't help. It seems to suggest that skinny women are the only real women.

To-day I watched the first episode of Ergo Proxy, which a fan of my comics recommended to me. I've seen plenty of movies and television shows influenced by Blade Runner, but none moreso than this. It's practically Blade Runner: The Animated Series but with a few tweaks. The Replicants are called AutoRievs, don't look as human, and there are more of them in the city. Instead of everyone trying to get to Mars, everyone's trying to get into the city. The Deckard character is an attractive young woman. She's hunting AutoRievs infected with something called the "Cogito Virus", which I guess is shorthand for the robots becoming self-aware, thus aiming for the existential conflicts of Blade Runner.

It's hard to say if I think it's a good show or not. I'll probably have to give it a couple more episodes. I like how it uses Radiohead's "Paranoid Android" as its end theme. It's sort of pretty, though the similarities to Blade Runner can only draw attention to how inferior it looks to that movie. But I'm not as crazy about dark, stripped down colour palettes as a lot of people seem to be nowadays.