Nym

I'm a recent MacOS user after a lifetime of Windows/DOS/Linux.

Must be about a year since I took the plunge and bought a good Macbook with enough power to be futureproof/keep some resale value. More reluctantly, I followed with phone and watch, giving Apple all my savings so I could get the integration. Thing is, I don't like how Apple does things. I'm confident with computers, command line, Linux... whatever. I can code, program, compile, hack - play confidently in the OS sandbox anywhere else. Mac's OS is just technobabble spellwork to me - I can't grasp how it does stuff.

I love the basic end-user ease of use and that it makes computers so accessible to folks who don't want to know how stuff works as long as it does, but the second I want to do something Apple doesn't deem essential to modern living, I have to ask a search engine or ChatGPT how the hell to make it happen. And half the time I still can't get it to happen.

Example: I decided to take the plunge and buy a month of Adobe Premiere Pro to find out if I can get my rusty, VCR-based vidding skills up to date. I signed up, I paid, I downloaded... and found that it's impossible to install the sodding thing on a computer that's - theoretically - the best machine short of a pro/studio one to run it. The MacOS system security won't take my admin/user password to allow the installation to proceed. The 'fix' is to reset the password, which works for some people but didn't work for me. Wut?

A quick google shows this has been a known issue since at least 2014. HEADDESK.

So I used an illegal copy of the software, which - lo and behold - installs and works perfectly first time with no fuss at all.

What the actual, Apple/Adobe? Is each so opposed to the other getting a slice of the money pie that they can't sort this out between them?

Rob Benedict and Richard Speight Jr have achieved the impossible and got me to - subscribe and listen to their Supernatural: Then and Now virgin watch-through podcast.

I do not podcast. I do not radio. I just don't! Like phone calls, I find audio-recorded informal chatter incredibly hard on my brain. And I am finding Then and Now hard, to the point of having to lie in bed in the dark to listen, breaking the episodes into short chunks, but it's very rewarding. It goes without saying that the two hosts bring plenty of silly and laughter, and their interviews with fellow cast and crew seem to be saved from falling into total chaos only by Rob Benedict's impressive MC skillz.

The idea of trying to unpack what made Supernatural so successful as they watch it through for the first time is just where my own brain is at, at the moment. They can have my money, no problem, and even my braincells when I can spare them. Great project. Maximum fanservice. A+++

I wondered if I'd have some big revelation about Supernatural once I saw the whole thing - if I'd get some big epiphany about how it held up for 15 years or whatever.

My main takeaway overnight, however, has been marvelling (while ocassionally grinning crazily at a flashback) at what the creatives got away with just by building up to it slowly. Network TV in the US remains absolutely hogtied by the prevailing moral discourse, and by the money-power of controversy-shy advertisers to be the arbiters of what can and cannot be shown on a syndicated show. Syndication is its own money-slave and it's incapable of fully breaking free, short of the US viewership achieving consensus on both good taste and bad influences.

Supernatural worked its way up from a mythology of isolated urban legends and cryptids to pull in the occult, then religion. The latter two subjects have been shockingly taboo for telly even here in the arguably post-Christian UK market within my lifetime. The spluttering outrage of the Mary Whitehouse Brigade would've turned to fatal aneurysms watching Supernatural play witchcraft, demonic possession, and angelic lore with equal irony and humour.

The heroes drink so much and live so badly that only their canonical Plot Armour, courtesy of failed-writer God, keeps them functioning as human beings. They're outlaws, criminals Robin Hood-style, defrauding their way to a living because their day job, the heroing, doesn't pay for food and shelter. They pass themselves off as badged figures of authority without difficulty. They never have to face the everyday moral or practical consequences of career-criminal actions that would be the moral backbone of the average movie or miniseries.

Dean routinely has carefree, casual sex with equally willing and available women during his travels, free of consequence and guilt, while the (currently) male angel Castiel occupies the textual role of Dean's love interest/romantic antagonist for most of 12 seasons because that happened to be where the show found the equivalent chemistry. They didn't just let it lie - they upped the ante season after season. That can only mean that the creatives of Supernatural have awesome poker-faces in serious meetings with their network-suited counterparts. ("No homo," they said gravely, sipping coffee and resting one hand half over the scene(s) where Dean takes the role of devastated widower every time Cas gets dead.)

They made everything about free will and standing for what's right. Even some of the sparkier demons got there before their arcs closed, grabbing agency and choosing to serve the greater good, or to act from love, but the angels consistently struggled to do the same. The angels are an unholy mess on Supernatural, opting for largely self-inflicted genocide having been abandoned by God.

Supernatural made God the ultimate baddie then had Lucifer's son - actual son of Satan - kick his arse and replace him. The Antichrist showed up too, but turned out to be a nice kid who caused so little trouble he never returned to the show. Fantasy usually only gets away with that (Christianity-defined) blasphemy shit by cloaking it in not-our-world trappings; sword and sorcery, worldbuilding from the ground up to provide a safe otherspace for questions that half of society in the target market isn't comfortable even asking, let alone answering or turning into casual entertainment.

Supernatural did that too - 14 seasons of slow, epic worldbuilding set in what looks, sounds, feels and tastes like modern America, is a love poem to its land and uniqueness at times, especially under the original showrunner, but turns out in the end to be a fictional world written by a self-obsessed deity who's run out of new ideas and settled for endless reruns with his comfort characters. Our Heroes are puppets and God himself is the bad guy jerking them around. Season 15 pays off that buildup in spades, then wipes the floor with God, leaving him a pitiable irrelevance in the Supernatural America of free will and doing-what's-right.

I've seen the show take a lot of vitreol for being unambitious, and a lot of fans being very unhappy over what the show didn't do or attempt. After my first viewing, I'm just pouring one out for the cunning shit they got away with while the networks who kept the lights on for 15 years were too distracted by the comfortable, mainstream headline of "two marketable white dudes (but no homo) drive around America in a cool car being manly-man heroes" to do anything about it.

That was... a season. *headscratch*

I'll watch through from Whittaker's regeneration again before I try having major deep thinky thoughts, and I know from experience that I enjoy New Who more as a boxset than a weekly drip feed, but... Yeah, I think I still missed the point, there. It... hit all the right notes but not necessarily in the right order? It lacked the cohesion and satisfying pacing I've come to expect from RTD's works going back to Dark Season? I know Ruby better after this storyline than I know Fifteen, and can't square that with the new, more open and share-y Doctor?

Didn't hate it. Lost patience with it way too often and cringed more than I have since the tacky, nonsensical intro to the McGann pilot in 1996. Laughed where I was supposed to, went aww at the big kiss. Held my breath in genuine alarm during Ruby's near-solo ep. Followed the season arc, such as it was between musical interludes and left-field oddness. So, up from Flux. Down from New Who 2005 a la RTD.

Pinterest just filled my dash with good quality photos of that time Tom Hiddleston won Comic Con as Loki.

I died happy.