TV: Russian Doll (Netflix, 2019)

In a few decades (if we still have genre entertainment) the idea of characters stuck in a time loop will be either completely forgotten, or one of those strangely long-lived subgenres that most people aren't familiar with the origin of, like "zombie apocalypse" or "people flying around inside giant robots." I've seen it done half a dozen times and you basically always get the same story beats, where the person accumulates a lot of information about people and has to repeat a series of actions to get toward whatever the goal is and make it all stop. Usually, unlike the original version in Groundhog Day where the limit is the end of the day or death, they just go with it being death (which kind of parallels how the zombie idea evolved from Romero: he had every dead person coming back and also it's contagious, but now it's usually just that it's contagious). And usually, unlike Groundhog Day, there's some attempt to explain why this is happening other than "because you're a jerk and it's funny." And usually I just don't see the point, except for Edge of Tomorrow which is great.

Anyway, Russian Doll deceptively looks at first like just another one of these things. ( Read more... )

I guess you had to be there

I ran across someone recalling the early generations of troll commenters on Usenet [message board-ish system of the '80s and '90s], and it reminded me that I actually spent a couple years hanging out on there a lot, mostly in a handful of literary and science-fiction-related groups—and was a little freaked out by all the strange ways people would behave. I'd kind of seen trolls and flamewars on dial-up bulletin boards before, but nothing on this scale.

Some guys were into really elaborate trolling games, where they were trying to bother people in a certain style. The one I remember best is that someone would show up in a book group and ask a really vague, naïve question like: "So, what style does James Joyce write in?" Anyone who'd been there for a while would recognize the shtick and ignore it. But newer people would earnestly try to figure out what the guy was talking about, and he would keep leading them on with confused-sounding replies, like: "If Joyce writes in multiple styles, which is considered to be the best?" Several months later, this would start all over again. It was a dickish game, but it did at least take some creative ability.