Big Damn Streaming Preview 2026

 For any of you who have spent time parsing my sparse archives, you may remember when I did yearly previews of major motion pictures and video games, all of which were completely real and totally coming out. And we all remember how they did, because I'm psychic and shit. Never doubt me. Ever.

To get back into the swing of things, I've decided to jump of Hollywood's hottest trend from eight years ago, and take a look at the new series offered by the major streaming services. So without further ado:

BIG DAMN STREAMING PREVIEW 2026:

Brother Voodoo: Starting with Disney+, which is pretty much just Marvel content these days, comes the story of Jericho Drumm, everyone's favorite Voodoo superhero who is totally part of the shared Marvel Cinematic Universe, even though he never showed up to fight evildoers in any of the previous crises the world faced in a series of movies and shows going back nearly 20 years. Played by Donald "Childish Gambino" Glover, who smirks his way through the entire performance, the American psychologist-turned-Haitian houngan joins the forces of S.H.I.E.L.D. to fight - naturally - an evil capitalist businessman (played by an equally smirky Jay Mohr) who is attempting to harness otherworldly energy for his own means. Written by some hack attempting to be Joss Whedon, with plenty of meta jokes and sentences that start with "like."

I'm a Lesbian, Not Some Redneck: This Apple TV series, featuring lesbian stand-up comedian and lesbian actress Tig Notaro, depicts a middle-aged lesbian moving from Portland to her hometown of Pushmafukkal, Mississippi, and encountering the same intolerance that made her flee in the first place. In the process, she encounters a local lesbian, and begins a lesbian relationship with her. All of the townspeople are portrayed as toothless hicks with three teeth between them (except the lesbian, of course), who simply hate our heroine for being "different," because they simply refuse to understand her lesbianism, until she finally snaps and lectures them all about how backwards and stupid they all are, and how they should be grateful for the benevolence of their benefactors in coastal cities, whom she wishes to keep them dependent on to survive, a position that she also paradoxically complains about constantly. Written by Tig Notaro, who is also a lesbian writer. Also, lesbian.

Wombats: Exclusive to Peacock, this limited series involves a group of college freshman girls who are members of a gang-ish feminist clique called the Wombats, for no particular reason. Led by the charismatic and vaguely ethnic Faith (played by Aleyse Shannon, replete with Scary Spice hair), the girls display a lot of "attitude" and continually tell off (and occasionally beat up) everyone outside their circle, then begin to turn on each other after murdering a sociology professor (Jackie Earle Haley, in a blink-and-you'll-miss-it role) for attempting to rape the timid new member Amber (Lily Marie Donoghue), who actually is more dangerous than she lets on. Written by Sophia Takal.

Max Payne: The newest video game adaptation for Prime, this series is largely a retread of the first game, starring Tom Hardy as the eponymous character, but now with a female officer Beauty Ballbreaker (played by Ruth Negga) largely replacing him for most scenes, getting approximately 60% of the screen time (which becomes 100% after Max is unceremoniously killed off in the season one finale). The series will also be largely set in the daytime, and not during a snowstorm (although it will be filmed with an almost impenetrable blue filter), and will end with Ballbreaker being hailed as hero in the city and having a parade thrown in her honor. Executive produced by Seth Rogen, written by someone no one has ever heard of and likely never will again.

Chief of Staff: The newest comedy series from Netflix will star Julia Louis-Dreyfus as the newest White House Chief of Staff, Julie Puregood, working under the new controversial Republican president Ronald Rump (Brendan Gleeson, in a blonde wig with lots of spray tan). She continually works behind the scenes to undermine all of his orders, which he's simply too idiotic to pick up on, and secretly runs the entire country behind his back. The show will portray her as a hero for "saving democracy," by subverting the democratically elected president, and ends with her publicly renouncing him and extolling the virtues of the Democratic Party. Written by Julia Louis-Dreyfus, of course.

Thieves' World: This new HBO Max exclusive series, in an effort to recapture the success of Game of Thrones, will be an adaptation of the Robert Lynn Aspirin's book series about the various thieves and lowlifes in the fantasy city of Sanctuary. Starring Kit Harrington, Matt Smith, and lots of unknown blonde women with British accents and impressive bust lines, the series will be rich on lore for one season, then rich on nudity and CGI magic sequences for another five. Written by Ryan Condal, with absolutely no input from anyone who has ever contributed to the Thieves' World book series at all.

So, there you are. Be on the lookout for these new shows, all of which are destined to get between 70 and 80 on Rotten Tomatoes, then be forgotten about after the hundreds of people who bother watching them move on to something else.

Until next time.....

A Selection of Strange Snapshots

    There's not exactly any sort of through line in today's post. I'd just like to share a few old, odd black and white photos that have accumulated on my computer(s) over the past 20 years. Many of these I don't even recall the origins of, and the origins I do recall aren't really worth sharing. Take them for what they are: Old, odd, and without context.

You're doing it wrong!

Proof that "broad humor" is not a product of the modern era. Well, this, plus anyone who's ever read ancient Roman graffiti...

Geez, calm down, kid, it's just a bird. Unless it just shat on her. Then the face is definitely justified.

No, that's a pig. Easy mistake to make, though.

Now that's one sexy firearm! Given the time period, it's probably meant to be something like a Colt 1908, but ironically it ended up more resembling a much later (and godawful) Raven MP-25.

Well, at least they're all normal. Relatively speaking, I assume.

Girls, if the air is that dangerous, maybe don't be out dancing in the first place? I also have to assume that band doesn't have a horn section.

That's all for today. Ciao.

Anatomy of an Automotive Train Wreck

 Following the automotive world on these here interwebs for as long as I have, I've seen unusual cars come and go. Those of you too young to remember the pre-Reddit/Twitter era won't remember it, but once upon a time, every automotive niche had its own website with its own UBB forum. And on those forums, automotive lore would quickly jump from one site to another. 

John Hennessey has a meltdown and starts calling one of his customers a "nutswinger?" That customer has a Chrysler 300. He tells members of the Chrysler 300 forum. One member of that forum is also a member of the Jeep Cherokee forums, so he spreads the story there. Soon the story goes to the Dodge Charger forums. Most of Hennessey's customers drive Vipers, so naturally it spreads to the Viper forums. Forums for completely unrelated brands - and even non-automotive forums - are soon also spreading the story, linking to the original forum, and everyone is talking about it. Internet lore is propagated. There are countless incidents from back in the day: 

• The Suzuki GSX-R rider who stopped at a gas station to put NOS fuel additive in his bike, only to realize too late that he had put NOS energy drink (!) in the tank. 
• The Honda Prelude owner who decided to port his engine by "sand-blasting it," meaning putting a bag of sand up to his throttle body and having his buddy rev the engine ("Now it won't start? Does anyone know what I should do?"). 
• A Spanish wannabe-tuning outfit calling itself "Cracker Competicio," which built a Mitsubishi Eclipse (the "Eclipse Proway Project") in the most bodged-up way possible, including not replacing rings or gaskets for the high-mileage engine, installing a new crank without measuring or plastigauging the bearings, painting over the door window mechanisms, and most egregiously, filing "sin grooves" into the cylinder head - ostensibly intended to be Singh grooves - without measuring or even spacing them.
• Or one of my all-time favorites, a fresh-faced amateur engineer who posted to the GM Modern Muscle forum and announced that he had invented a new form of aspiration, which he dubbed DEI - Direct Exhaust Injection, and even uploaded this proof of concept

The automotive equivalent of routing your colon directly to your mouth

And yes, based on his defensive reactions when the other users laughed at him, I think he was entirely serious. 

One of these that I recently recalled was a certain ever-evolving monstrosity documented in photographs from the Fort Worth, Texas area. I first saw it on Ricecop's Rice or Not, a site which against all sanity I still visit and post on in 2022, despite being one of only about five people still regularly doing so.

So here's how it starts: In 2005, a member there posts the following image, which he got from another forum (natch), and none of us can believe our eyes.

Were you fooled into thinking it was a Corvette?

At the time, nobody even knew what this thing was. Just looking at the shape, I kept thinking it could have been a Renault Fuego, but the joke was on me: Renault Fuegos all stopped existing long before 2005.

So the various automotive fora spread this oddity, had a laugh, and then moved on to the next laughing stock. But this thing wasn't done. It...evolved. Fast forward one year.

GAH!

Well, beyond the obvious change of the new red, white, and blue paint scheme, now we know what those two random antennae sticking up from the back of the car were. They were braces for that strange, multi-level Cosworth-style rear wing assembly. Other photos of this thing started popping up.

A member of a certain Honda forum finally got too curious, and apparently either being or having access to a private investigator, looked up the license plate. The car was apparently registered to a woman named "Stormy," and the mystery of the car's original manufacture was finally solved: It's a 1986 Acura Integra. A rare photo of the front taken not long after this made this a bit more obvious.

You can see the Acura trapped inside if you look at the front edge of the hood on those pop-up headlights.

Now we move ahead four years: 2010, for those of you keeping track. Although there's no telling what happened to the Acura all of this crap was stuck on, a photo surfaces of that same red, white, and blue Corvette rear stuck to the back of an unsuspecting GMC Sonoma, stretched to fit with lots of black streaks of fiberglass filler.

In my quest to find the photos of this thing for this blog entry, I unfortunately was not able to find this picture, though I can still clearly remember it. I was however, able to find the next evolution, from not long afterwards, where the rear has now been primered black and the truck has suddenly spawned three wings, including one on the roof.

The aerodynamics aren't the only thing that's a drag.

Move ahead another 2 or 3 years. Now the whole truck is primered, covered in random strakes and scoops, and has a 5th generation Camaro front. The truck is also being posted on the brave (at the time) new world of Reddit, and a low-res video of it even popped up on YouTube.

What in the name of SANITY?

It's not done, though. Far from it. Not long after, the thing popped up for sale in the Facebook marketplace for $10,000, with a claimed $15,000 invested. The truck also seems to have gained some hood louvers since the last picture.

8 people liked this, though we're not sure why.

A picture of the rear from around this time doesn't reveal much new, other than apparent Chevrolet emblems now cut into the fiberglass beneath the taillights.

Finally, around 2015, the final images of this thing hit the internets, being covered by the likes of Jalopnik (the blue-haired SJW Gawker bitch-fest posing as a car blog). 

Are those supposed to be turbo scoops, or its EYES? Also, is that the shape of Texas cut into the center of the hood scoop?

This seems to be where the story ends, at least as far as I can follow the thread. But for all I know, this vehicle could still be out there, ever-changing, turned into something I can no longer even tie to its earlier form. Perhaps, as with its earlier change from the Integra, pieces of it live on in a third car or truck.

Who could even speculate? Or dare to dream?

Until next time....

Girl Watching

 

This is a crop of a much larger photograph of a Detroit street corner in 1905. While I suspect that the fellow is looking down the street instead of at the passing woman, it's fun to imagine him caught in a more compromising candid moment.

Naturally, looking at images like this today makes me ponder the ghosts of our past: Not just the people, but also the places long gone.

The building is the Cincinnati, Hamilton, and Dayton Railroad Office, at the northwest corner of Woodward and Jefferson. None of this is still here; this lot today houses a giant mid-century skyscraper, One Woodward Avenue.

The full image

In any case, it struck me, so it's here. Until next time, kids.

Awakening From My Slumber

 Geez Louise, has it really been over eleven years since this blog was updated? 

Besides concentrating more on real life (which frankly, all of us should do), I've also wasted time on social media and attempted to jump-start my YouTube channel every couple of years. Somehow, this blog fell by the wayside in that time.

While I always got the impression that I wrote this blog for maybe four people, Blogspot tells me that about 75 people a month are still looking at it. That's more than look at anything else I do online. Mostly people cruising in through Google searches, no doubt, but I should still do something with those views. Hello, random people.

For anyone revisting, you may notice a few changes here. The outdated format has been yeeted in favor of something a bit more managable, and the godawful pond-scum-green-and-orange color scheme is gone. While that did seem appropriate for a blog called "Murky Depth," I have to appreciate that people have EYES.

I also no longer use the tagline "Rants and Ruminations of an Acrimonious Young Man." For one thing, while still managing to be under 40 doesn't quite make me an old bastard, I'm not totally comfortable calling myself "young" anymore, either. Also, I've lost quite a bit of interest in "ranting." That was a holdover from the old days of the internet, when everyone was trying to channel George Carlin and Dennis Leary, yet forgetting that rants have to be FUNNY to be entertaining. 

My old "Pugnacious Kerfuffle" format, however, where I simply post about three random things that bug me with no through-line between them, may still be around: For some reason, I'm awfully attached to it. I'm also more interested in goofy creative writing projects here in the future....except for "We Three Kings" of course. I don't know where the hell I was going with that one. I'm not sure I ever did. It seemed to be a one-joke premise (they're all named King, get it?) that didn't evolve as it should. Still some funny dialogue, though.

I've become far more interested in ephemera, so you may see updates in the future about random things that interest me. Cars, firearms, history, or just goofy memes that make you facepalm. Who knows?

You may also see more connections to my YouTube channel in the future: Posts that combine video and audio.

This rebirth will be a process, but Phoenix, ashes, all that jazz. See you guys really soon....