Hey there, !

1. I just want you to go watch the Sopranos

"It's good to be in something from the ground floor. I came too late for that and I know. But lately, I'm getting the feeling that I came in at the end. The best is over" - Tony Soprano, 1x01

You ever feel that? That the best is already over? The golden ages are done?

The Sopranos tells the story of the Italian-American Mafia in what turns out to be the story of how it decays. Tony Soprano, our titular protagonist, starts the series suffering from panic attacks and starts to go see a psychiatrist. This already is a fascinating premise, but it gets explored in lots of details through the series - having to balance his family life with his Family life.

The show is also really great at showing the struggles of the Italian American life across those years - especially how stereotypes could be harmful, but ironically, creating so many of them in the process as well. The Office scene with the gabagool?! I finally got to watch where it came from :D

The Sopranos was also a response to all the sitcoms of the time (Frasier, Friends etc.) which were mostly standalone episodes that people could watch at any time. It's incredible to watch a show from that time have long story arcs - characters who do something in one episode, and three episodes later they get their consequences for it. Or an antagonist who is absolutely annoying the shit out of another character over like 5 episodes anad then BAM - a big moment of violence that is so satisfying to watch.

Okay sure, that’s normal now, but it wasn’t back then!

And obviously, based on the time it was written, there are lots of things that haven't aged well... like out-of-date technologies, casual racism, blatant misogyny, and weird storylines like how one of the mob bosses was rumoured to perform oral sex which became super embarrassing.

But other than that, it has some really good meditations on the guilt of living a double life, existentialism, what death means in a world where extreme violence is common, what's considered 'fair' and 'just' in the mob, and some amazing dream sequences.

"You steer the ship the best way you know. Sometimes it’s smooth. Sometimes you hit the rocks. In the meantime, you find your pleasures where you can." - Corrado Soprano

2. And the themes, I mean, marone - come on!

There's a saying in Chinese: “富不過三代” - essentially, that 'wealth doesn't last beyond three generations'.

• The first generation makes it

• The second generation keeps it

• The third generation spends it

Things decay over time, y'see?

In the past, the reasons why wealth wouldn't last were usually about wars, or famine, or emergencies, or having to migrate and losing everything.

These days, it's more about the spending habits of the next generation, and how the lessons of hard work and effort don't get passed on to subsequent generations.

The decay is in the attitudes, the rules, and the hard-won lessons of the past.

The Sopranos is a beautiful example of this - the first generation of mobsters in the show were before Tony's time, and the stories they have of them are legendary - crazy hits, the wealth, the girls, the gangster life - and is something that the next generations try to emulate all the time. That first generation was able to set up the whole business, how things got done, the rules - and the second generation really aspired to that as well.

But in trying to help the next generation come up, the show illustrates how the lessons of that first generation don't get all the way down to the third one - they become drug addicts, they're stupid, unable to see the bigger picture, or just want to do random shit that has no purpose to try and emulate what the stories used to tell them about. The second generation doesn't know why things are the way they are - they just impose it on the next generation and aren't really good at helping them understand how to adapt to a new world.

And, well, most of them die.

So...there's not really a third generation to come up lol.

The whole show is about them coming to terms with being the last ones living this kind of life...and I LOVED that. Watching the decay of the Sopranos family was like watching the Roman Empire fail, slowly. The different little cracks here and there, the hope, the destruction - the inability to learn and grow from their lessons was both infuriating but so in character for the flawed characters they were.

3. The takeaway

I go about in pity for myself, and all the while a great wind carries me across the sky. - Ojibwe saying

Well, is there a way to get around this? Have those lessons be passed on wholesale all the way down the chain? Prevent the decay in happening over time?

We read history, sure, and we try to learn its lessons - but I wonder how much you can really internalize those lessons without having experienced them.

As much as we know what you 'should' do when there's a war, or an emergency, or how we should protest against injustice - how many of us have done it? Know the detail of the decisions, and learn the lessons from what went wrong?

I wonder whether this kind of progress and retreat is inevitable. Order and chaos, yin and yang kinda shit. This life is just a continuous whirlpool of growth and decay - and we're all just livin' in it baby.

Or…maybe thinkin’ about this is all a big nothing-burger anyway.

And all the while, a great wind carries me across the sky...

Anyway, this was just my attempt to try and get you to bump The Sopranos up your list. GO WATCH IT ALREADY.

There's genuinely so many more philosophical points to make about the Sopranos - about existentialism, psychopathy, leadership, the immigrant dream, religion / spirituality, capitalism...it's a fantastic microcosm of the world in six seasons of PRIME television.

Although…and this a real quote from the show:

The framus intersects with the ramistan approximately at the paternostra - Paulie

Such great writing, eh? Damn stunads.

Chat soon :)

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✔️Real Life Recommendations

1. Umbrellas of Cherbourg - 4.5 stars - if you liked La La Land I think you'll like this. It's a bit less moody and modern (I mean, it was made in 1964), but it's a colorful romp of a love story in Paris. A mechanic falls in love with an umbrella store employee (played by the BEAUTIFUL Catherine Deneuve), but is called away to the draft and goes to war. Does she wait? You'll have to watch to find out. Note - it's all in French, and all the dialogue is sung. So...I guess it's a certain type of movie HAHA. Anyway, highly recommended - I loved it.

2. Pho Chu The - it's good pho. They only do pho and spring rolls so you know they are specialty!

🚌 Adventures on the Information Super-Highway

1. When Stick Figures Fought - I used to find this on Newgrounds or some random flash websites called 'stick fight 1' or 'stick fight 5' but didn't know it had a Chinese author and that he went to go do commercials for people either! What a fascinating piece of Internet History.

2. Why Busy Beaver Hunters Fear the Antihydra - SUCH a nerdy article but written so clearly. I wrote about [Busy Beaver numbers] in the past before, so here's more of that if you liked learning about busy beavers!

3. The strangest letter of the alphabet - yogh, how interesting is this?!