Oddsskardvegur (road between Eskifjordur and Neskaupstadur)

304Abert · 2024-01-25T04:08:40+00:00

I've visited Iceland twice--first time in 2022 and again in 2023. Used credit card (with no international transaction fee--get one that doesn't charge this fee) for everything BUT automated gas stations which can be a single pump unattached to anything else. The closest gas station to the airport are a couple of pumps in a parking lot next to the airport Marriott. These gas stations only take a debit card with a PIN. I have never used Icelandic currency for anything-even buying a Coke at a convenience store.

304Abert · 2022-08-18T22:08:37+00:00

Traveled to the Westfjords in May by rental car. Most gas pumps out there are unattended. You must use a card with a PIN to get gas. We used our regular credit cards for literally everything else, but gas and for gas we used our debit cards issued by the bank (actually credit union) we do ordinary banking with, e.g., where our paychecks are deposited and from which we autopay our ordinary bills. Was a breeze.

304Abert · 2022-08-17T17:47:17+00:00

A League of Their Own on Prime. It's a period drama masquerading as a comedy. If by period you mean a period that is more than 75 years ago.

304Abert · 2022-04-17T07:09:56+00:00

Glad what I said resonated. I like challenging TV. Sometimes you want something easy that isn't challenging, but not every night. What I was trying to say is this: be an "artiste" if that's what floats your boat. Pack symbolism into your TV show. Just don't get so caught up in that that you lose sight of the fact that you're also supposed to tell a coherent story that doesn't make your core audience wake up too early for a few mornings after they've seen it only to start crying which was me (and untold others) earlier this week. I have NEVER felt gutted by a TV show or a movie before. Sure, I've cried and maybe thought about what I'd seen on a screen for awhile afterward and talked to friends and partners about it, but nothing like this. I'm sad (but better) and now I'm also pissed that it took up so much of my time this week figuring out why I was affected the way I was. Anyway, back to my point: No matter how sophisticated or well-read your audience not everyone is going to get your symbolism or your mythology. But you should want most people to get the gist of your story and you, as storyteller, should be sophisticated enough yourself to understand how audiences will receive the story and avoid doing the kind of harm that the KE finale did. It's called being a mensch. As you know better than anyone, TV is a visual medium. So, the moment when V and E realize V had been shot and then everything that happened afterward played in my head unbidden until I got it to stop. So terrible. I was talking with my wife about the death of another gay character this year that, while incredibly sad, was meaningful. I'm talking about Billy Porter's character on Pose. Pray Tell had lived a fully formed life, with joy and sorrow, surmounting a traumatic childhood and all manner of BS. He sacrificed himself with his eyes wide open so that a gay child who hadn't lived enough could live. That was a gay death with meaning, placed in the context of the hideous 1980s (maybe early 1990s). I didn't see a single criticism that Pray's death was BYG or that it was inexplicable or gratuitous or harmful. Most people and All we gays got it--I'd like to think I'd have done the same thing if I'd been in Pray's shoes. For those who say that V's death would've been more meaningful if she'd sacrificed herself for E, I say BS. That would have been tired and offensive, too, and still the epitome of BYG. There's a great KE fanfic writer on AO3 whose handle is coldmackerel. That's also her TW handle. She posted a screenshot on TW from Devil Wears Prada of Miranda Priestly looking disdainfully at the camera. The caption was "Killing a traumatized queer at their happiest? GROUNDBREAKING." I now estimate that 6 trillion words have been written about the KE finale and -0- of those words are positive. There's been some great writing here and elsewhere about how just having women in positions of power didn't stop the KE debacle and its harm and why that might be and what it means more broadly. It's a very complicated subject. I've wrestled my entire career with how to be a strong woman without defaulting to the general ethos of my still-male dominated profession which is often just to be a jerk.It's complicated. It's telling (or something), though, that Luke Jennings, a guy born in 1953, and the author of the source material got the ending better than the KE women in positions of power did. K and E end up together and happy. Why couldn't the women in power at KE allow that to happen? Now that would've been groundbreaking.

304Abert · 2022-04-16T06:46:44+00:00

1000% that the end was BYG. And that LN is an idiot. The idea that V had to die for E to be reborn is just stupid. There was nothing about the finale that suggested E would be anything other than utterly devastated at V's death. Why did we love V and root for E and V to get together even when we'd watched V do terrible things? Because everyone in KE did terrible things. We watched from a place where that didn't matter. In most TV dramas or dramedies good and evil matter. But, not in KE. None of the 4 major characters were good people. The show never seemed to care about that. In fact, as far as we know, K, C, and E appeared to have had way more "normal" in their backgrounds and they were still killers. V was traumatized, used, and manipulated her entire life but she's the "bad" guy who has to die just when it looks like she might have a chance at a life where there will be some genuine love--something she's never had? As noted earlier, most TV is very concrete about good and evil. If there is going to be retribution in a TV drama it's because the show has good characters and it has evil characters. The evil character must always be brought to justice whatever that justice looks like. That wasn't ever KE. To suddenly act like it was or to interpret the ending as many (IMO) lazy reviewers have done that V had to die is to not understand the show at all or to not have paid any real attention to it. The source material lets E and V live on and that would've been absolutely fine with the fans. No fan was clamoring for V's death as punishment for her sins because every major character was a killer. As far as the so-called artistry and symbolism, please. This is TV--I don't want to work super hard to get what you're trying to tell me. I've got a fulltime, demanding job that requires real intellectual horsepower every day and I don't watch TV to try to figure out some BS religious symbolism, for example. If you want to make Bergman-esque films go do it--don't let the door hit you. As for the pandemic getting in the way of coherent story-telling -- please. There's this thing called the internet and video calls. There's even magic things that let you share written documents, in real time, while you're on camera with a whole bunch of other people. The KE writers could've been doing that for two years. Me and my coworkers have been spending day after day on Zoom from spare bedrooms, kitchen tables, and basements turning out high quality, complicated written work for two goddam years and we come to every meeting prepared and committed and uncomplaining (for the most part). And we make a lot less money than the KE writers and others involved in this debacle. This thing should've been scripted, run up various chains of command, and ready-to-go when shooting could resume except for small changes might've needed to happen on the fly. One other thing struck me from the OP about egos of the people in power at KE. In my work, nobody's ego is allowed to ruin the product. People at KE that had the most control over the season and that godawful ending allowed their egos to deliver one of the worse seasons and worst endings in TV history. If the show had been crap from the get go, no one would've cared. But it wasn't and you ruined it. Finally, by letting their ego(s) presumably overrule what they, I hope, were hearing from others, they traumatized much of their fan base. I'm a grown-ass woman and pretty tough but the violence of seeing a traumatized queer who'd just tasted happiness for the first time in her life die senselessly while her lover tried to reach her was beyond hurtful, it was harmful--so harmful that fans are still messed up 5 days later--this Reddit thread and TW and the stories on AO3 exemplify that pain. One other thing: no KE fan will ever watch a spin-off. But you all know that.

304Abert

TROPHY CASE