Two Nerds Sitting on a Couch began, like so many things these days, with epidemic and unemployment. We both found ourselves unemployed in the last few months, on top of a year spent in quarantine. We did start and mostly complete some house projects — we sorted all the crap in the basement, and I’m almost done painting the floor a sweet leaf green — but more than anything, we’ve been watching movies. Being who we are, they are most often science fiction and fantasy. After the umpteenth post-movie chat, we thought, why not inflict ourselves on the world? You’re welcome.
I do intend to talk about books at some point, but that’s always a little harder. My reading has been disordered by the pandemic. After months of mostly being incapable of finishing a book, I turned to a lot of light fantasy and historical romance — with both genres, you can be assured things won’t get too dire, the environment is nothing like our current shitshow, and I can be assured that everything will turn out ok. Which meant that a lot of my preferred genres — post-apocalyptic, alt-history, dystopias — were inaccessible to me for more than half a year. Even now, it’s taken me months to get 85% of the way through The Deep by Nick Cutter. I simply can’t take the claustrophobia for more than a couple pages at a time. We’d also have to read the same thing at the same time, and neither of us is especially responsive to assignments. So it’ll probably be movies for the foreseeable.
Due to the vagaries of the queue, we ended up falling into a young adult dystopia hole for most of the recorded episodes. One thing suggested the next, and then you wake up one morning realizing you’ve watched almost a dozen teen movies. I don’t intend to keep that up going forward. While it was pretty cool to see them together, and notice the similarities in theme and staging — like if we hadn’t done it this way, I never would have noticed the evil older lady politician in suffragette white who pops up over and over and over again — I still feel pretty done with adolescent revelations of the crushing intractable system we all inhabit. You kids get off my lawn.
So. Lessee. If anyone ends up listening to our nonsense on the regular, I’d love to get suggestions for what we should watch or read next. For myself, I am absolutely on the hook for anything zombie-related — fast, slow, musing or murdery — it’s all good to me. Richard loves himself some steampunk (or cyberpunk). We’re both pretty open to whatever. We both agree on the awesomeness of Lynch’s Dune, and are similarly confused and compelled by Aronofsky’s The Fountain. We don’t quite agree about Battlefield Earth: I feel like meh, Richard has more enthusiasm.
So, with that, I’m signing off to hit the queue and set what we’ll rant about next.
—Ceridwen
The public demands an episode devoted to _Population 436_, you cowards.
Also _Time Trap_.
Oh my God, _Population 436_ is so hilariously awesome. Maybe when we’re done with time travel, we’ll try to watch all the Census movies we can find. Which I think is just that and another movie called _The Census Taker_, which doesn’t look nearly as fun as Pop 436. I would totally watching _Time Trap_ again, I remember that being pretty rad, B–movie trappings notwithstanding.