Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks and your family does
its’ best to make you feel worse. You cannot escape them, not really, and certainly
not legally, and if you aren’t ready to cross the legal lines, you are in
trouble, and if you are-? Then you are ready to spread your trouble to your
immediate vicinity and beyond because you are that badass, (but in a bad way,
so do not get too cocky). …And so I tried to escape into the realm of TV for
some sweet release, and what do I find there? ‘Kings of Pain’.
Now, I have been talking about them in passing in our last
few entries, but I tried to avoid talking about them directly, because there
were, and are, better topics to talk about; this time though there aren’t any.
Oh, sure, there are also the news that the Marvel TV as such is being
assimilated into the greater MCU, but this was in the cards all along: FOX
mutant TV shows and FOX itself – cancelled/concluded/assimilated. Netflix TV
series – cancelled or finished. AoS – finished in summer 2020. C&D –
cancelled. Runaways – finished this winter, (2019/2020). And then there were
none, and Disney+ is coming out soon, so any outsiders shall be dealt with
accordingly. Yes, Sony showed that Disney/Marvel juggernaut is not so tough.
Yes, until Netflix’s rights expire properly and for real, (we’re talking about
the Defenders here), Disney/Marvel isn’t about to use any of them in its’ movies,
TV shows, and so on, lest there be a copyright conflict issue. Quite a while back,
Lionsgate made an animated ‘Planet Hulk’ film, and so we got ‘Thor: Ragnarok’
film the way we got. Disney/Marvel isn’t quite as badass as it appears to be,
but it’s close enough, the end.
…Not that DC is much better – remember the Maxwell Lord situation
that we have mentioned earlier? That is typical for DC, however – the ‘Arrow-verse’
is tight, and nothing else in DC-verse is. What does it have to do with ‘Kings
of Pain’?
Here’s what: just as Disney has clamped down tight on its’ YouTube
aspects – ‘Mulan’ barely got any discussion, and what did occur was carefully controlled
and positive – so has ‘Kings of Pain’ stopped appearing on YouTube at all, even
on the official YouTube channel of History TV. Why?
…Before we get into it, let us give a dishonorable mention
to NatGeo, and not just because its’ website is now a paysite. Aside from the online
paysite, NatGeo has two other main sources of sharing its’ info: the magazine,
(which is always available on the site, of course), which is available as a corporeal,
paper magazine, (duh!), and also on the YouTube channel – as videos. Actually,
there are several connected YouTube channels that are property of the NatGeo
brand, but…
…But now that the mothersite of NatGeo is a paysite, NatGeo
releases its’ videos on its’ YouTube channel very rarely and very sparingly and
they are only clips from its’ various shows now – no news. You get only what
you pay – how commercial. They are not about to share much freely, but neither
are they about to abandon this venture either.
Why is NatGeo’s YouTube info free? Hard to say. Various
movies, TV series, etc., are for cash only on YouTube, but not short episode
clips – just look at BBC Earth YouTube channel, for example. Video clips that
are under 5-10 minutes are free, and apparently, NatGeo has to follow this rule
slash guideline as well. Therefore, it does, and it does so by releasing only a
couple of clips per week at most – yay. No.
How does the History channel compare to this sort of thing?
Just like the BBC TV family on YouTube, it reveals plenty of episode clips from
its’ shows on its channel – the full episodes are available on the History
website where you need to sign-in, join-in, etc. Fair enough, but lately there
are no episode clips of ‘Kings of Pain’ on YouTube, only full episodes on the
History website proper. Why? Does the team of the History channel consider this
show so good? Let me give you a hint: they are not.
…On this week’s episode, ‘Kings of Pain’ dealt, first, with
the toe biter, aka a giant water bug. Note the ‘bug’ in its’ name – this is
important, because the leads of ‘Kings’ called it a ‘beetle’ repeatedly on the
show instead. ‘Bugs’ aren’t ‘beetles’: the two groups of insects are separate
and distinct as much as – cats and squirrels, for example.
How you differentiate beetles from bugs? Beetles have two
pairs of wings. The hind pair of wings is membranous and transparent and is
used by beetles for flight. There are flightless beetles, of course, but they
still have front pair of wings that are more properly called the elytra and
aren’t wings at all, but hard covers that protect the vulnerable hind pair of
wings and the soft abdomen of the beetles.
Bugs also have the membranous hind pair of wings and they
too can fly, and they also have the elytra, but their elytra is only partial,
it only covers part of the hind wings and of the abdomen, giving bugs a very
different appearance from the beetles.
The second main difference of true bugs from true beetles is
that all of bugs have a proboscis – a sharp syringe with which they stab their
food, liquefy from the inside and sap it up. Beetles, conversely, usually have
jaws called mandibles and they chew their food up – but they are a very varied
group, and some beetles have adapted to eat liquid food also – we are talking
about the stag beetles and their kin, so this method of separating true beetles
from true bugs is not as reliable as the first one.
…And then we have the Wikipedia that already has done the
hard stuff and you can always look it up to see just what you are dealing with,
broadly speaking. Team ‘Kings of Pain’ did it – in this episode, they also list
a number of lay names for the giant water bugs aside from the primary toe biter
moniker that they clearly got from the Wiki – so why did they insist on calling
this insect a ‘beetle’? Giant water bugs are no more beetles than cats are
squirrels, you know!
…My money is on the show itself – it has its’ good aspects
still, but so did AoS, and on ‘Kings of Pain’ we may be dealing with an AoS
level of bad. The main leads seem to be decisively unenthusiastic when working
with each other, they have no chemistry, and sometimes they appear to honestly
hate each other sometimes, or at least – not like each other very much.
Sometimes their banter does seem natural, but this isn’t enough to save the
show entirely, so why the apparent VIP treatment by team History? Because they
consider the new show to be that good, (it isn’t), or that bad, (it just may
be)? Everyone can draw his or her own conclusion.
…The other animal featured on this week’s episode was the
scorpionfish and that came with its’ own problem. You see, the term ‘scorpionfish’
applies to a very large family of fishes, scientifically known as Scorpaenidae. The lionfish, which appeared
in an earlier episode and was referenced here, is actually a lay name for a
fish genus named Pterois: it includes
several fish species and is a part of the Scorpaenidae
family, aka the scorpionfish. This particular ‘scorpionfish’ featured on ‘Kings
of Pain’ didn’t look anything like a lionfish, but there are several genera of ‘scorpionfish’
that resemble each other very closely, (which is why the scientific names of
their genera sound similarly), so it’s hard to figure out just what species of ‘scorpionfish’
‘Kings of Pain’ used in their show. Of course, in the wild the scorpionfish
live mostly in Indo-Pacific, which is nowhere near Baja California where this
episode supposedly took place at, but not exclusively so, as the wild lionfish
do, so let’s give ‘Kings’ the benefit of doubt on this one and call it a day.
Anything else? Well, Boris Johnson, who is the U.K.’s PM
(for now, but still), had hid in his fridge to avoid an interview on live TV –
nice. It is because of actions such as this one Ms. Greta Thunberg became TIME
magazine’s person of the year… but we have already mentioned that real life
sucks, so let us call this an end for this rant.
…Ergo, this is it for now, so see you all soon!
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