Kingdom: A Review

I finished watching Kingdom last night.  I'm not a big fan of the horror genre but something about this interested me. I thought this story had a decently well-structured plot.  I think what drew me to this initially was a personal desire to engage with stories about pandemic, though I also had to stop watching this for a while for that same reason (given that I also have a strong desire to see stories that *don't* remind me strongly of real world problems).  

My favorite character was the physician Seo-bi and my favorite aspect of the plot was the medical mystery aspect.  I wasn't really expecting there to be a detailed background about 'how the undead works' in this story, but there was!  Seo-bi is the main character responsible for unravelling this mystery, and I really enjoy how her character develops.

This is a very tightly plotted story.  There aren't many episodes, only six per season, but a lot happens in a very short time period.  I think of each season as a movie in a sort of 'here's what would be possible with a movie if it could be made ridiculously long' kind of way.  

The other thing I really liked about this show was the lavish scenery and costuming.  Obviously there's plenty of gross scenes too but it's contrasted with this beautiful imagery.  Maybe it's shallow but I just like seeing pretty clothes!  Pretty outdoors scenes!  Even the scary flesh-eating dead people get to be aesthetic sometimes!

There's a fair amount of humor interspersed in this story which helps to offset its more grim aspects.  There's also a character who's very clearly a comic relief character, and while I often find such characters annoying, I appreciate the implementation here, and he certainly helps to offset the otherwise deeply somber tone.  There's also a lot of action, unsurprisingly, and I'm a huge sucker for action scenes.

There's a lot of aspects of the narrative where I just accept that 'it's not that deep' haha but there's definitely something more to this story than its surface level features.  I just looked up the work this is based on, The Kingdom of the Gods, and found out that that's a manga.  Also interesting is that while the writer of the manga is Youn In-wan, the idea for the manga was provided by the writer of the television show, Kim Eun-hee.  I've long had an interest in tracing the relationships between an original work and its derivative works, so I might want to see if I can read the manga sometime.  Though for some reason I have difficulty getting into a lot of the comics/manga/graphic novels medium, I definitely have an interest in comparing and contrasting these two works.

Anyway, this was a fun if often grim series and I'd definitely say it was worth watching!

Plastics and the Waste Stream

In the wake of countries like China and India deciding (for good reason) not to accept the rest of the world's plastic waste anymore, I have to wonder what's been happening to all the previously recycled plastic waste recently. Is it just being landfilled?  Dumped in the ocean?  Where is it going?  I know a lot of countries scaled back their recycling systems immensely after they started shipping that stuff out of country, so they simply don't have the capacity to recycle most of that.  So it's definitely not being recycled for the most part, I'd guess.  Even before the recent changes a lot of things people thought were being recycled weren't either because they weren't actually suitable to be recycled or because they weren't properly prepared beforehand (I understand that different recycling plants all have different rules on what they'll accept based on how the plant is set up, but the general public is rarely made aware of these rules).

A Social Justice Conundrum

There's some vacuums in social justice that really, truly need to be filled.  There are times that I think 'well, maybe I should try to step up and fill some of those' but I also have deep misgivings about my ability to organize anything (look at this blog! do I look like an organized person?!) and I deeply loathe taking on responsibility of any sort.  I occasionally discuss political issues on my blog(s), but that's rather less difficult than actually organizing some sort of group, even of the simplest type.  With a group there has to be regular engagement or it fizzles out, and I'm not good at regular anything.  With my blog posts I just post stuff when I feel ready to post it.  Also with a group that's focused on those sorts of issues the problem of burnout becomes even more pronounced as well as the related problem of harassment.  I've seen how much truly nasty stuff gets targeted at activists, in addition to being well aware that not all activists themselves are very good people, and that just all looks so exhausting to deal with.

Reblog Link List Idea

Sometimes I want to share information I see on Tumblr, so I might start some 'reblog' link lists on here and pillowfort.  It's still more work than a Tumblr reblog since I first should check the link to see if it's even viewable outside Tumblr, but this could be one way for me to continue sharing things I see there.