jpny01

Yeah, you're right. It must be coincidence. Or maybe when the "story" was being "written", someone said "Hey! If you put Ice & Tee's names together, you get IceTee! We should make them a couple!".

He sure has a nice body. That takes a lot of work when you're "middle-aged".

That is a truly inspired idea.

If you laughed even once, it was all worth it, :)

You're completely missing my point by being overly literal, which I can't help but conclude if you think I'm really saying Eiw's nagging is as bad as he Holocaust.

It's irrelevant if i's good for Cake to have someone pushing him to do homework. The point is that teenagers don't whine their friends into doing homework, waking up early, cleaning their room, being healthy, etc. There may possibly be teens that do, but they'd be so vanishingly rare that they'd still be considered strange and annoying.

And it sounds a little like you're lecturing an introverted gay man what it's like to be an introvered gay teen.

I'm judging it by Umberto Eco's very precise characteristics if Ur-Fascism. 11 of 14 is almost as bad as Germany.

1. "The cult of tradition" Check.
2. "The rejection of modernism", No.
3. "The cult of action for action's sake" Check (in his government, but he was pseudo-intellectual himself)
4. "Disagreement is treason" Check.
5. "Fear of difference" Check.
6. "Appeal to a frustrated middle class" Check-ish. There wasn't much of a middle class, but the elites resented the commercial domination of the Greeks and Armenians as clients of outside powers (under the Capitulations).
7. "Obsession with a plot" Check.
8. "Too strong and too weak". Check (Christian minorities & their outside sponsorship)
9. "Pacifism is trafficking with the enemy" No.
10. "Contempt for the weak" Check.
11. "Everybody is educated to become a hero" Note his "I do not order you to fight, I order you to die" speech (which he never actually gave at Gallipoli, but it became part of his self-generated mythology).
12. "Machismo". No. There is machismo, but not in the fascist sense.
13. "Selective populism" Check.
14. "Newspeak". Check.

But more than anything, his conception of Turkishness was so fundamentally fascist that I can't help but wonder if he didn't inspire Mussolini. Emilio Gentile's checklist also works, and Mussolini's own definition couldn't apply more to Turkey.

I don't romanticize the Ottoman period, but I think the intellectually diverse and free-market empire was a better basis for development into a modern state than the dogmatic Kemalist Statist republic, which distorted Turkish political development by legitimizing miltiary control over political life, not to mention the immense moderating influence a liberal Caliphate could have had on Islam. When people compare the empire and republic, they are comparing a state from over 100 years ago to a modern one. Of course the republic is more advanced. The question is where would the empire be today if it had lasted?

I thought the intimacy scene was brilliantly executed and the New scene was supposed to be dark, because we don't really know who New is and what is really happening in that scene - it certainly has a supernatural element to it. The darkness contrasts with New's white outfit. The mistake in that scene was that was NOT an espresso.

You know, that occurred to me, but I dismissed it without any serious thought - it just popped into my head in Ep 2, and I'm still not convinced it's the case.

The intimate scene was so well executed that I could hardly breathe. Rossi is just amazing - what a talented actor. Meen is also quite good - I thought he was overacting in Ep 1, but it's just his character. They both looked amazing at the pool, but Meen's figure is art.

Anyway, the only competition this series has right now is 180 Degree. There are a few small production errors in this, but given the extremely low budget it's fantastic and artful, and a large improvment over Calculating Love.

But note to production: That was not an espresso. Don't ever do that again. :)

I don't really have much to hate-post this week because this episode was so dull.

One thing I will say is that Plustor is an awesome actor - it was almost embarassing how badly he blew everyone out of the water with a bit part as a homewrecker. He sort of did it on purpose out of mischief, but was obviously really upset to have caused such damage - he managed to convey all that in about 30 seconds of screentime.

The inevitable IceTee is finally happening, as if their names didn't broadcast it from the first time Ice stepped onscreen. If Tee were my boss I'd spend all day under his desk. That man is so sexy.

It was kind of inevitable given their names - it was pretty obvious the moment Ice showed up. Maybe I'm giving the producion too much credit and the names are a pure coincidence.

Ep 4 was a little slow-paced, but Ep 3 was quite nice. There are some sound issues, like people slamming their cups on the table over and over which gets irritating - maybe a better microphone is needed.

Anyway, the cast is beautiful and engaging and I'm enjoying this series. It's interesting that they didn't just have Charlie become a man and ignore it for the rest of the series - JC is really playing a woman trapped in a man's body instead of the usual seeing a woman in the mirror all the time - he's doing it just right, not OTT. If I were suddenly transformed into JC Lopez I'd probably just stand in front a mirror all day doing things, but I appreciate the "realism". The premise can be as fantastic as desired, but within that framework people still need to act like people, so applause to this production.

Then there's the issue of what to do with"su su!" which is "fight fight!" but is translated a million different awkward ways. It's probably better to just translate it literally since there's no real cultural equivalent. I don't know why it gets translated "fighting!", but that's better than "you got this!"

Because Ataturk was fairly benign as far as dicatators go, a lot of people hesitate to call him fascist, but he had the whole bag - cult of personality, single-party state, switch from Islamic universalism to narrow ethnic nationalism, machismo, attributing woes to foreign plots, and the total abolition of the language, blame put on minorities for problems, and its replacement with a new official language. Turkey even adopted Mussolini's criminal code. HIs cult of personality was so persistent that it still hasn't disappeared.

While "fairly benign", political opposition = death, even to the point of people being executed for not switching from the fez (why anyone would want to is a mystery) to the fedora. It was a top-down forced tranformation of a rich culture into a bleak imitation of the "West" which is still hobbling the country - the high and liberal Islamic culture of the Ottomans is gone and only regressive fundamentalism remains.

Because Ataturk was fairly benign as far as dicatators go, a lot of people hesitate to call him fascist, but he had the whole bag - cult of personality, single-party state, switch from Islamic universalism to narrow ethnic nationalism, machismo, attributing woes to foreign plots, and the total abolition of the language, blame put on minorities for problems, and its replacement with a new official language. Turkey even adopted Mussolini's criminal code. HIs cult of personality was so persistent that it still hasn't disappeared.

When Puen asked Talay to do something to make him drowsy I was thinking "A hand-job should work." Because I'm a bad person. And if something interesting didn't happen soon I was afraid I'd lapse into a coma.

Fortunately Neo showed up, but he eventually left. That boy has the sexiest legs in BL>

The very last scene was adorable, but it wasn't enough to make up for 6 eps of nothing happening and endless product placement. I'm not sure you can even call it product placement - it's like entire commercials are dropped into a skeleton of a story.

The "plot" is so weak it's almost hard to believe. It's basically Talay and Puen saying sweet things to each other and then backing off with hardly any progression. I'm sorry, but if two men in their 20s can't understand that they're already actual boyfriends then why should I care? Other than I like to see Jimmy and Sea with their shirts off?

I think I probaby wouldn't be able to sit through this if not for Neo, and as it is I find myself leaving it on 2x and skipping scenes, like the memorial service. That's another thing - they keep throwing in things that are meant to give urgency to their predicament, but it never goes anywhere. There are a few lines about the transience of life, then they get back to just normally living their lives.

What a disappointment this series is - I was looking forward to it when I saw the cast.

He did have a good point that Mark was easy with him. Also, Vee invariably took responsibility, apologized and made up for it when he did something wrong, which is a major green flag. People grow by making mistakes and learning from them. Mark, on the other hand, stalked Bar and tried to get him even though he knew he was in a relationship. Just because they're all boys doesn't make that less bad than Vee's situation because it involved a girl, but everyone gives him a pass. He also got with Vee even though he knew he had a girlfriend, so that's two times he did he same thing - but again he gets a pass.

Also, Vee was going through confusion about his sexuality, and I really think a lot of BL fans don't understand how painful and difficult that is, and facing overwhelming and oppressive heteronormative pressures. I don't think it's right to enjoy series about boys loving boys while being intolerant of what that entails in a society that is largely unable to accept it. It's not like Vee trying to decide between two girls - it's Vee having to change his perception of who he is, against what everyone around him expects of him.

Don't mistake me - I give them both passes. It's not easy to control who you like, especially at that age, and both of them had character arcs where they ended up better people than they started - that is good writing. A story about two morally perfect people is coma-inducing.

It was realistic that Tin returned from the dead without explanation? Or if had been in a coma, which was somehow never mentioned, he came out of it with nobody bothering to tell Tol? If he could walk and look perfectly healthy, he came out of it months ago.

He didn't care that Tol died? Then why did he try to revive him for 30 minutes and have to be pulled off the corpse by the rest of the staff?

We were hearing his interior monologue all throughout the first 9 episodes - he had anger toward drunk drivers, but not to he extent of looking the other way while their organs were harvested, and Sak was taking organs from non-drunk drivers too, like Fiat. That it was his fault Fiat lost a kidney never even came to mind the whole time Tol was trying to save him.

I'm glad you liked the show because it was good overall and I want them to make more "out of the box" series like this, but this isn't a political campaing or a cult - we can evaluate its faults without pretending they don't exist. It's a common phenomenon in Thai BL to have the plot lose cohesion at the end as the author struggles to tie up the loose ends of the plot.

He'd be fantastic in a role like that.

This is not and attack, just directly expressed opinions.

Hyperbole is a form of humor and sarcasm - you have to work hard to be offended by that.

I'm sorry, but I don't understand how you can miss the incredibly strong uke-seme dynamic here - to the point that cake actually tied Sieew's shoes for him - I often jokingly use that as an example of somehing an uke can't do on his own, but here it really happened. And fainting after eight paces? That isn't uke enough?

BLs often have a fantasy element - I'd be fine if Cake were dead, if Sieew had magic powers, if there was a portal to anyother dimension in the 3rd toilet stall in the 2nd-floor boy's bathroom. But people still need to behave like people or it's ridiculous and distracting. You pointed out that they're teenagers trying o figure themselves out - but how many boys that age follow a friend around nit-picking everyhing he does like an old woman? It's so alien that you have to wonder if the author has ever even met a teenager.

Likewise, you can be terrible at sports - I certainly was - but you can't faint after 8 paces. My father is 83 and has late-stage Parkinson's and even HE can go 8 paces without fainting (although not very quickly). Why have SIeew faint? Why not trip? I'd even prefer the overused basketball to the head cliche. Because it gives Cake an opportunity to uber-seme the situation.

If a teenager faints after 8 paces, you need to rush him to the hospital because something is so terribly wrong he may be minutes from death. It's just silly and lazy writing.

The Thais were lucky that he was a relativlely benign fascist, as far as fascists go, and much smarter than most, as he was able to join the Axis in the war yet exploit Western security concerns to escape any penalities for Thailand afterwards. The Turks were even luckier with a fairly nice guy as their fascist dictator.

I was actually fearing that the show would be black and white, and after Ep 1 I specifically brought up the example of uniforms and one of their purposes being to eliminate class difference at school, so it felt good that Ayan had a nuanced view of the subject. He believes the idea is obsolete, but that it was introduced for some positive reasons.