The Walking Dead 9x03 Warning Signs

Going into the new season of a beloved TV show knowing that not only one, but two of your favourite characters will be gone by the end is tough. If it was up to me, I would forbid actors and writers to spoil things like this beforehand, because really, what’s the point? Don’t you want your audience to be surprised and outraged when it happens? That’s like the best part of watching any TV show: the fucking plot twists. And while killing off Rick Grimes might not have been such a big twist four seasons ago, it damn well it is NOW. For my part I always thought Rick would die eventually and Carl would take over his legacy, but now that Carl is dead, Rick might as well be invincible… and THAT’S why it would have been the mother of all surprises if he just… died. And then Andrew Lincoln would have been like „Guess what my dudes, I knew this would happen a year ago when I quit my job, but I kept it a secret for all these months because I didn’t want to spoil it for you”. Wouldn’t that have been neat? I can’t believe they cheated me out of it.

Babel: Around the World in Twenty Languages - Gaston Dorren (2018)

As an amateur language enthusiast/wannabe polyglot, a book like this is heaven for me. I’m constantly in the mood for starting to learn a new language, and then I never actually do it, but I have plans, you see. Before reading this book, my plans were, in a nutshell: touch up (basically re-learn) my German and my Spanish, really lay into my Swedish (so that I won’t start forgetting it like the other two), and start either Welsh, Russian, French, Finnish, or maybe all of them at the same time, who cares, languages are fun! Then I read this book and basically it went like this:

Chapter 20: Oh hell Vietnamese seems really interesting! Sure all those diacritics look complicated as hell but it makes the language look so fun, and it would be way more unique to learn Vietnamese than Mandarin. Might give this a look later.

Chapter 19: I never in my life thought about learning Korean but now that I’m reading about it, I’m loving this concept of ’ideophones’ (basically words that imply their meaning just by how they sound, kind of like onomatopoeias but not exactly). Maybe it would be worth a try?

Chapter 17: Turkey and Hungary have a lot of history together, so I already knew that we have a lot of loanwords from Turkish, but somehow I never thought about how much easier that could make learning the whole language. Plus, I do want to go to Istanbul at one point, so maybe it’s not such a crazy idea.

Chapter 13: Japanese used to be on my list back when I was briefly really into anime (I know, typical), and I never completely lost my interest in the language, even though now I only occasionally watch anime. I never knew about this really werid distinction between male and female Japanese, however, and that seems like the kind of challenge I would like to take on. Maybe I should put it back on my list.

Chapter 8: Russian was already on my list but this chapter was one of my favourites. I love etymology, and this short breakdown of how some complicated-looking Russian words actually have cognates in English was brilliant, and it only reinforced my belief that I need to learn Russian one of these days.

Chapter 6: Both the look of Bengali and its system of indicating vowels by attaching different tiny marks onto its consonents remind me of Sindarin. If I ever bring myself to learn an Indian language, I’m now almost certain it’s gonna be Bengali.

Chapter 5: The chapter about Arabic was actually a short dictionary of loanwords that made it into English, but I made tons of notes about words that are even more apparent in Hungarian. For example, the Arabic word for parrot is apparently ’babagá’, which somehow morphed into ’popinjay’. But in Hungarian, parrot is actually ’papagáj’, which is much more similar. Same with kahwa – coffee – kávé, and a few others I can’t recall right now. Did I mention I love etymology?

Chapter 2: Yep, Mandarin is exactly as complicated as I suspected. But I got enamored by the part about compound characters, how one half of them is a clue about meaning and the other about pronunciation. It makes learning the characters a bit like solving riddles, and I love a good riddle.

So yeah. It was a journey, with a lot maybes and mights in there, and I know myself well enough to know that there’s a 90% chance nothing will ever come of this. But that doesn’t make my time reading this book any less meaningful or amazing. Even if I don’t actually learn any of these langauges, I sure learned a lot about them from Gaston Dorren’s Babel.

You 1x07 Everythingship

Things have improved a lot for Joe Goldberg in the past couple episodes. Not only did he manage to convince Beck to give him a chance, he also eliminated his last remaining rival for her affections, her best friend Peach. Of course, getting rid of Peach didn’t magically make all his problems go away, as any sane person could have told him if only he asked for a second opinion. Murder is very rarely the answer, Joe! But at least it did take the show to some previously unexplored places, for example we got to see Joe and Beck spend some quality time together that was not constantly interrupted by her other jealous psycho stalker. Things were only perfect for a short time, though, as Beck grew increasingly resentful of Joe just… being there for her. If Joe was anyone other than you, you know… himself… I would actually feel bad for him. As it is, I spent a good chunk of this episode gleefully cackling. Finally, he has all he’s ever wanted – that is, Beck all to himself – and she’s ruining it. Fantastic. I truly love this new development.

American Horror Story 8x04 Could It Be... Satan?

 

If you, like me, were starting to get this deep, sinking feeling in your stomach about halfway through the premiere of AHS: Apocalypse, that you and everyone else are about to see your hopes crushed when it’s going to be revealed that the so-called „Murder House/Coven crossover” storyline was supposed to be taken metaphorically… You know, because the season is gonna take place in something like a coven/secret society, but there are also ghosts and shit like in Murder House, but no actual characters from those seasons were ever gonna show up… Well now you can breathe again because nope, the witches are finally here!

This Is Us 3x02 A Philadelphia Story

 

The Pearsons are back! And for some reason I feel really optimistic about this season. I know that we ended things last spring with some pretty difficult cliffhangers that foreshadow dark things ahead, but for me the one big hurdle that made me almost anxious before watching every episode is finally out of the way : Jack is dead. I mean, he’s really dead this time. We saw it, we cried, we never have to worry about „Will this be the episode where Jack dies? Oh god, I can’t watch this.” ever again. It’s kinda like a weight has been lifted off my shoulder and now I can just watch the show, like a normal person. Yay!

You 1x05 Living with the Enemy

Unbelievably enough, Joe and Beck are now officially in a relationship, or I think so, anyway. In American media they usually make a big deal about whether two people are „just dating”, „messing around”, or „being exclusive”. I said it once that this is weird to me because I always imagined that if you don’t like someone after about three dates you should just cut it off and not stay in this undecided place until you can finally decide whether you want to make it exclusive or not, because that’s not fair to anyone. Anyway, Beck was referred to as Joe’s girlfriend by another character in this episode and Joe didn’t correct her, but why would he? It’s Joe. He not only thinks he’s a boyfriend, he’s the PERFECT boyfriend. Jury’s still out on Beck’s opinion though ,since it was already established that she likes to mess around with guys on Tinder and have one night stands, so I’m not sure whatever it is that she has with Joe constitutes a relationship in HER mind. What’s clear is that they’ve been spending a lot of time together, which means that Joe constantly has to hang out with Beck’s awful friends, and needless to stay, things spiral out of control pretty quickly.

Mayans M.C. 1x05 Uch/Opossum

It’s been a while since I checked in with the boys and girls of Santo Padre, but the truth is, not much has happened in the past four episodes that merited a full review. That’s not to say they were bad - if they were, I wouldn’t watch them every week (okay that’s not strictly true since I’m still watching One Dollar too, even though I feel like it’s going absolutely nowhere). It’s just that the storyline is still extremely simple and right now it’s being dragged out to the point of paper thinness, which means that there’s not much to say about it on a weekly basis. That said, the show did earn the fall’s first renewal out of all the new series, so I figured that’s a nice enough reason for me to check in and summarize where we’re standing right now.

The Gown - Jennifer Robson (2018)