I still keep busy enough with my preferred work, but I've essentially stopped doing one job that's increasing trouble -- often way too much trouble -- and pays very little, so that the public service aspect of it gets replaced by the saying about no good deed going unpunished, and even the system of getting paid is harder to finalize. And this was the job that used to take more of my time than anything else I do. So, since I essentially quit, I have a lot more time on my hands. It's unavoidable that a good deal of that time, especially at nights and on weekends, gets used to watch television. For me, it's what's on Netflix, (Sc)Amazon, Hulu, or Vudu.
What turned out to be the worst of the bad news was the first episodes of ''Breaking Bad" and "Orange is the New Black." I've heard about both of them over recent years, but I had never watched either. I got through Season 1, Episode 1 of each, and that was all I could stand.
Very many steps up from that was "The IT Crowd" series. I've seen all of it before, but I really like them, so I watched again. Great stuff. There's plenty of other great British comedy, but this one was burdened with another of my crushes, Katherine Parkinson, who is wonderfully funny. Chris O'Dowd is also great, and I have reverence for Richard Ayoade. I first saw him in "The Mighty Boosh," and I've seen him in some British comedy game shows, too. Of interest, Ayoade was a classmate of John Oliver's at Cambridge. Ayoade studied ("read") law, but he went into comedy instead.
The other two things -- both very captivating -- I watched lately were series. "The Most Hated Man on the Internet" was only three episodes long, and it was an infuriating story of a 24 year old kid, if I may say a 24 year old is a kid, with whom some woman apparently broke up (imagine that: an unsuccessful relationship), and he responded by starting a "revenge porn" site which accepted submissions from some women who were trying to make money from showing off their naked selves doing very provocative things, but which also included "selfies" some women took, and stored in their computers, which were hacked, and some submissions from angry ex-boyfriends, and from whom many of these women could not get this infantile creep (Hunter Moore) to agree to take down their photographs. In a later evolution of the site, he even included personal information like material from their social media, as well as their addresses and phone numbers. How this guy got sentenced to 30 months for hacking (30 years wouldn't have been enough) is inexplicable. He referred to himself as a "professional life-ruiner." All because some woman broke up with him. This was, as I say, infuriating to watch, and Hunter Moore didn't get nearly what should have been coming to him, but it was a well done documentary, and I'm glad I watched it.
"Inventing Anna" ran for about nine episodes. It was about some European (first Moscow, then somewhere in Germany) 25 year old, who moved to NY and passed herself off as a German heiress, and whose specialty seemed to be somehow to convince people who should have known better to put her up in very expensive NYC hotels, and provide funding for some foundation she imagined herself creating. She claimed to be in line for about a $65M trust, which somehow, no one could confirm. She mostly didn't pay for anything, except sometimes she mysteriously had stacks of $100 bills to pass out as tips. She came from nothing, and it was unclear whence she got this ambition to start the foundation. It became increasingly clear that she mostly just wanted to be famous. There were people who fawned over her, and imagined themselves her "friends," but she was completely psychopathic, and she was incapable of having any feeling for anyone. She was 100% manipulative. She lied to and took advantage of everyone, the vast majority of whom couldn't see it for what it was. She eventually got arrested, tried, convicted, sentenced, then deported. The name she used was Anna Delvey. You can look her up. One funny part of this series, which was otherwise not funny at all, was that each episode began with printed language like "This story is completely true, except for the parts that are totally false." And they didn't help you know which was which. Anyway, many references in this series were derogatory about Donald Trump, who was portrayed as being a complete and advantage-taking dishonest and manipulative phony, just like Anna Delvey. But by the end, it turned out that everyone was taking advantage, and acting (which is what led them make stupid and wrong decisions that allowed Anna Delvey to get away with as much as she did) in their own misguided interests. So it was sort of an interesting tricky device, where the audience was supposed to demonize Trump, only to find out to what extent they have similar (if less grossly psychopathic) available reactions. It was a good and interesting series, setting aside a bit of ineptitude in the way the story was constructed, and I'm glad I watched it. The acting was mostly not particularly good but that in itself didn't detract too much from the story-telling. The woman who played Anna Delvey apparently, according to my daughter, is a regular in "Ozark." I think I might have tried to watch the first episode of that one once, but I couldn't stay with it. My daughter says it's loaded with drugs and violence, both of which she knows I don't like.
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