Logocentric (adj).Regarding words and language as a fundamental expression of an external reality (especially applied as a negative term to traditional Western thought by postmodernist critics).
Blogocentric (adj).A portmanteau of "blog" and "logocentric" devised by a word nerd with way too much time on his hands.
Sometimes I just write whatever I feel like. Other times I respond to prompts, mostly scavenged from the following:
@Annette - I doubt I'll track where I watched something by default, but I'm always happy to tell anyone who asks. We Own This City is on HBO Max. Or Max. Or HBO Now. Or whatever Warner Bros. calls its streaming service currently before Paramount buys them and changes it again.
Steal and Vox Machina and Leverage: Redemption are on Amazon Prime, and "Memory of a Killer" is on Hulu.
One suggestion for these entries: could you put a little add on where you watched the shows? I know Lincoln Lawyer is on Netflix. I've watched the previous three seasons and will likely watch the fourth one also. Thank you for writing about it without spoiling anything. I would be interested in watching "We Own this City" if it's on a service that I have.
I'm not able to play the video. Could you tell me the band and the song so I can find it on my own. thanks. Don't know why it does this. Sometimes the link works and sometimes it tells you to Watch Video On YouTube as an error. Odd.
The intro deal was something like 6 cassettes (and later, CDs) for a penny each. That was how they got you, because to get the deal you had to enroll in their subscription plan where the regular price of the albums was seriously jacked up (to like $20-$25) and if you didn't make a selection every month, they'd bill you and send you a featured one every month. Most people signed up for the freebies, then ended up canceling just as soon as they could get out of their one or two year long contracts. But hey, when you're a teenager and building your music collection? The first batch of albums is practically free.
And I remember those days of calling into a radio station, requesting a song, then trying to record it off the radio when they played it. Yeah, you'd always miss part of the song, or the recording quality would be terrible because most people just put a tape recorder in front of the speaker to record it and you'd get ambient noise or interruptions all the time. I don't want to admit how much time and money my teenage self invested in a stereo system designed to optimize recording songs off the radio.
You could buy an album for one cent? Dang, I got ripped off growing up in Germany.
I had to buy empty cassette tapes and record off my radio, always missing out on the last ten seconds of each song because the radio host was talking.
To qualify for my Watch List every month, a title has to be something that I've watched that's new to me. It doesn't necessarily have to be a current show, but it can't be reruns or rewatches of something I've already seen. If I'm including it in this list, it means this month is the first time I've watched it. I'll put "DNF" (Did Not Finish) next to anything that I stopped watching and have no immediate plans to finish. If I'm watching an ongoing season of a series across multiple months, I'll only list it once.
Movies
Anaconda (2025) Avatar: Fire and Ash The Bad Guys: A Very Bad Holiday The Boss Baby: Christmas Bonus Eternity Hamnet The Housemaid Marty Supreme The Night Before Wake up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery Wicked: For Good
The movies that I didn't think were that great and I don't have much more to say about were Boss Baby: Christmas Bonus and The Night Before.
The movies that I thought were just okay or pretty good and I don't have much more to say about were Bad Guys: A Very Bad Holiday, Wicked: For Good, Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery, Marty Supreme, and Hamnet.
Going down the list of others, Anaconda was a surprisingly good spoof/remake of the franchise. Jack Black, Paul Rudd, and Steve Zahn are all hilarious, and there are just enough twists and references to the old franchise to keep it fun and interesting. It was probably my favorite movie of December from a pure enjoyment perspective; everyone in the theater was cracking up as we watched it.
Avatar: Fire and Ash was much better than the last installment, IMO, even if it felt repetitive from a storytelling perspective (oh no, the humans are converging all of their watercraft into one place where they'll have a climactic air and sea battle!). But Varang and her fire tribe were great antagonists, and the pacing of this one was much better.
Eternity was a great premise for a romantic movie (which I don't want to spoil), which felt a little slow to start, but got much better as it went on and the tension ratcheted up.
The Housemaid was a decent adaptation of the bestselling book. I thought Sydney Sweeney and Amanda Seyfried played really well off each other, and the film did a good job preserving the twists in the book. It was an entertaining domestic thriller.
Television
Black Rabbit The Franchise (Season 1) Industry (Season 2) Law & Order (Season 25) Law & Order SVU (Season 27) Only Murders in the Building (Season 4) Owning Manhattan (Season 2) St. Denis Medical (Season 1)
I don't have much to say about Law & Order and Law & Order SVU, and the second season of Industry was pretty dull expect for a few episodes toward the end. Same with the third season of Only Murders in the Building, which feels like it's getting further and further away from the magic of the first season.
The Franchise was pretty terrible, with the sole exception of Richard E. Grant's performance... I definitely understand why it was canceled after one season.
The second season of the reality series Owning Manhattan was pretty good; I like the fact that this season focused more on the challenges of growing his business rather than the drama of fame-hungry real estate agents. Ryan Serhant is an interesting guy and it's definitely entertaining reality television to watch him try to build his own brokerage into one that competes with the giants in the space.
The two shows that I really enjoyed this month were Black Rabbit and St. Denis Medical. The first is a Netflix limited series starring Jude Law and Jason Bateman as brothers who own a restaurant and get in over their head with debts that they owe, and the latter is a broadcast sitcom from the guy who created Superstore, which could probably best be described as "Superstore, but this time at a regional hospital." But the formula works and they got a great cast, so who am I to complain?
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