Category Archives: Television

Binge Watching into the New Year Once More

The holidays and chilly weather and being at home meant there was ample time to get in an excess of television watching around our house. My wife described the post-Christmas time after our daughter went back to school early to hang out with friends (more compelling than hanging with the parental units when you have your own apartment) as hibernation. We probably ate too much, slept too much, and watched too much TV. But it was nice have that option.

My new TV graphic… AI generated

So this was what we ended up watching… not all of it in that time frame, but around that time frame.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds – Paramount+

We had Paramount+ subscribed for a while and it is the home of all things Star Trek the way Disney+ is the home of all things Star Wars and so we gave this version of Star Trek a shot.

And it is pretty good, which is a tough call because it basically sits directly ahead of Star Trek the original series in the timeline of things, which weighs on it heavily. The only Star Trek I was ever really all in on was the original series and mostly because there wasn’t a lot of choices for science fiction on TV in my youth and it was in perpetual re-runs. I like Pike, I like the younger versions of the original series cast, I like knowing where they end up and the hints thrown in around that, and the end of season one made me go back and watch the corresponding original series episode. Good, worth the effort for original series farts like myself, though it is a bit whimsical at times… not that the original wasn’t.

Halo – Paramount+

We watched this last month and I barely remember anything beyond Pablo Schreiber played Master Chief, which is the only thing I know about Halo, that there is somebody called Master Chief in the game. He represents the power of The Covenant… who are the bad guys? Or are those aliens the bad guys? Is there some point here about shades of bad vs good? Also there is an AI called Cortana, which for a game published by Microsoft seems a bit on the nose. Basically, the whole thing went in one ear and out the other for me, which isn’t a strong recommendation.

Loki – Season 2 – Disney+

Man, I really liked the first season of Loki. I as much as called it a Disney attempt to make Umbrella Academy in the MCU, but I was good with that and Tom Hiddleston and Owen Wilson were so able to carry that through. So I was all set for season two.

And then I guess Disney figured what we really needed was to try and turn the series into Everything, Everywhere, All At Once, right down to grabbing Short Round for the cast, and then turned it into an unwatchable mess of paradox problems. I am going to admit I only made it through episode four… but I was done with it after episode two but just hung on hoping for it to get better. It did not.

The Crown – Season 6 – Netflix

We’re into the dull and petty years of the monarchy now. Elizabeth coming of age was interesting. Prince Philip in his age of dissatisfaction was mildly interesting. Princess Margaret was glamorous and always interesting. But the kids, the boomer royals, what a dull bunch they turned out to be, and they divorced at about the same rate my parents generation did in our family.

This time around we see Diana die, the royal family cope, Charles get remarried, and Kate Middleton’s mom pretty much launch her daughter at Prince William in an unflattering yet tedious crusade to latch on to the royal family. Nobody came out of this final season looking good. I think the whole series peaked when Elizabeth called Margret Thatcher a cunt. (That never happened, but I wish it had.)

Monarch: Legacy of Monsters – Apple TV+

The TV series background story for what was going on from Kong: Skull Island through to Godzilla vs. Kong with Monarch, the shadowy government connected organization that discovers then covers up the existence of these titanic monsters. Neat. Fills in some gaps. Cool, and convincing, to see Kurt Russel’s younger self played by his son. Pretty compelling, looks good. I suppose I am not completely invested, but for a series that answers questions I am not sure anybody was asking, it is pretty good.

Slow Horses – Season 3 – Apple TV+

This show is so well done. Granted, I am the ideal audience. I have read the books recently enough that I get a lot of the context, but not so recently that I remember all the details so I can still be surprised as I am reminded how things turn out. Season three is no exception. It is also just six episodes long, which is exactly how long it needed to be so you’re left wanting more rather than feeling like they padded things out a bit just to hit a contractual obligation for eight or ten episodes.

The Brothers Sun – Netflix

I am going to unfairly compare this to Slow Horses above when I say that this was a great six to eight episode series… stretched out to ten episodes. Art is as much what you cut out as what you leave in. I enjoyed it, the cast was very good, but there were some points after the first three episodes where things began to drag. But I did have an urge to get churros when it was all said and done.

Loudermilk – Netflix

I like Ron Livingston, I kind of like the setup this show has, and I was hoping it would scratch a bit of the Brockmire itch in me as Sam Loudermilk, a former music journalist and now an acerbic recovering alcoholic substance abuse counselor deals with the world around him without much of a filter. And it gets there at times. I laughed. Just maybe not enough. We made it through season one and gave it a break, wondering if it gels more in season two of just continues to skirt the edge of genius without quite getting there.

Only Murders in the Building – Season 3 – Hulu

The problem here is that the show has established a pattern so, in order to not simply be a repeat tale, they need to break that pattern to get viewers invested in a new season. Or that is my theory of the thought process that generated this season’s story arc. Anyway, things swing between too familiar to feel fresh and too eager to subvert expectations to feel comfortable… I know, a tough path to walk… so it never quite grabbed me. Good at holding the “whodunnit” reveal yet not great at making you care once you get there.

Hell on Wheels – AMC+

This five season series follows the construction of the transcontinental railroad. But the legendary figure of Thomas Durant, played by Colm Meany, wasn’t enough to carry things, so they turned one of his historical subordinates into a former confederate officer looking for revenge for the murder of his wife, which leads him to Hell on Wheels, the name of the wild array of camp followers than sprang up around the westward progress of the railroad.

There are actual facts about the building of the railroad included in the series. There is also a lot of mud, local drama, and made up stuff such that for a good two seasons in the middle I kept asking my wife, “Are they still building a railroad around there somewhere?” I wasn’t particularly engaged and might have let it drop after season two, but my wife was into the soap opera of camp life so we ended up all the way to the end of season five and the driving of the golden spike. (I have seen that spike in real life up at Stanford University.)

Looking Back at 2023 – Highs and Lows

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Back again on the path out of 2023 with what is sometimes my final reflective post to be written during the year.

My 2023 banner courtesy of our daughter

Once more I am going to wrap up the year in something of a stream of consciousness flow of highs and lows on various topics. For the historical perspective, here are past posts:

It is a measure, a test, of what stuck with me through 2023 as much as anything, so it probably says more about me than it says about the importance or relevance in the grand scheme of things. If I have forgotten anything critical… and I am sure I have… let me know.

Blizzard

Highs

They have finally jettisoned Bobby Kotick
Microsoft deal closed successfully, and Microsoft is generally a good place to work
Diablo IV shipped and received a good initial response
Wrath of the Lich King Classic delivered all I wanted out of it… I am quite satisfied
Cataclysm Classic announced, so core WoW Classic will carry on
WoW Classic Season of Discovery is an interesting twist
WoW Classic Hardcore servers show Blizz is listening some
WoW Dragonflight held on to its customer base better than Shadowlands
Warcraft Rumble landed on mobile devices
Overwatch 2 shipped or something
Hearthstone is still cranking out expansions
Rumors that they might actually be able to get back into China under Microsoft

Lows

Bobby Kotick was so greatly enriched by this deal that it makes one ill to think about it
Is Microsoft going to necessarily be a better steward of the A-B portfolio of titles?
Diablo IV managed to alienate users with a post-launch, fun killing nerf patch
Overwatch 2 PvE? Unpossible!
It feels legitimate to ask if there is there any point to WoW Classic after Wrath
I mean, I am going to play Cataclysm Classic, but it might just be to get myself ready for Pandaria
WoW Season of Discovery isn’t the Classic Plus some were looking for
Classic Plus will never be a thing
The varieties of WoW now available seem to mean that retail WoW will forever be diminished… at least I have no interest in going back to it
We complained when Blizz did what it took to not get kicked out of China and we complained when they did get kicked out of China… is that market worth the effort?
Wasn’t there some sort of survival game they mentioned a year or so back?
StarCraft?

CCP

Highs

Hey, EVE Online is 20 years old now!
Two new expansions shipped this year
The “back to expansions” plan seems to be working so far
The Viridian expansion seemed able to fight off the dreaded “summer slump” even if it wasn’t all that exciting
The Havoc expansion saw a big boost in players online
Lots of players online since October, whether you prefer the average online or peak concurrent measure
Actually have plans for other products including a board game, a mobile title, and what might end up being a PC title
Got that EVE Online API Microsoft Excel plug-in to work finally, long after it was announced
Finally seemed about to ship EVE Vanguard, that first person shooter they have so longed for

Lows

20 years is an achievement, but the baggage is not to be ignored
Jury still seems to be out on pirate insurgencies… I mean, the pirate factions love them, but the system might need some tuning
WTF CCP? Why is EVE Online chat breaking still a thing after what… five years with the new system?
CCP giveth and CCP neglecteth or something… the Abyssal tournament and the EVE Portal app die for lack of attention
EVE Vanguard is on the main launcher, so we’re going to have to live with it even if it too dies of neglect
EVE Vanguard is a long way from being done
The Microsoft Excel plug-in only works with the Office 365 version of Excel
Expansions aren’t ALL going to be faction warfare focused, are they?
Project Awakening, the crypto blockchain title promises to be a disaster, and while it is $40 million of Marc Adreesen’s money, it is still an opportunity cost for devs to work on that rather than something that won’t be a flop

Daybreak / Enad Global 7

Highs

Expansions for all the titles… or all the Daybreak titles I keep an eye on
Doing well financially
Being publicly held means we get more detailed news about the company
EverQuest 25th anniversary is coming up
Plans for a new EverQuest title
Plans for a new H1Z1 title
Roadmaps adhered to and generally good updates adopted

Lows

Ji Ham still pursuing his acting career
Most of the financial good news is on the back of My Singing Monsters, a success that is receding
Being publicly held, capitalism is requiring that the company hand over half of its profits without any consideration about reinvestment
Oh, it just so happen that the profit demands benefit greatly those in charge at EG7, so no surprise they didn’t argue for reinvestment
No remaster for LOTRO and no 4K support for LOTRO any time soon, if ever
Do I need to say “Console plans for LOTRO scrapped” as well? I guess I do
The “new” H1Z1 title is reviving H1Z1 Just Survive, which was previously closed for not being financially viable
The new EverQuest title might land in 2028, maybe
The idea that an EverQuest title that is hardcore like Elden Ring is a good idea

Tech in General

Highs

We have finally turned the corner and blockchain isn’t constantly being touted as something worthwhile
The FTC is finally reigning in crypto organizations that were clearly just trying to bypass trading and securities regulations… those laws are in place because unregulated capitalism becomes a con game very quickly, as we saw in 1920s Wall Street
The metaverse has gone back to being a niche talking point for enthusiasts… even Raph Koster, the most believable of the metaverse proponents, says he needs a game there first before a sandbox can be achieved
Decentraland proving that trying to cross pollinate crypto AND the metaverse was, at best, a comically premature idea, though I am convinced that the perverse incentives it created doomed it and will doom any future imitator

Lows

Did I mention layoff under games? Under tech in general as well… that link in the last section covers tech as well
The subscription model for software like Officer 365 is becoming harder to avoid… my copy of Office 2021 looks to be the last version that won’t require a monthly fee to use
Getting out of the blockchain cycle required a lot of people being scammed out of their investments
I am sorry so many people bought into the hype and failed to understand either the technology (slow, awkward, expensive, and a poor alternative to existing solutions) or basic economics (BitCoin only has value if you convert it to a real world currency so it hasn’t replaced anything) but the signs were out there and people were shouting it was a scam all along
How are people still having their bored apes stolen? How are there any left and how do they even have any value that makes stealing them worth the effort?
Now eight out of every ten headlines at VentureBeat, my personal barometer for over-hyped tech, is about AI or LLMs, meaning we’re headed for an AI crash at some point
Having been there for the rise and fall of Netscape, I have always been convinced that Marc Andreesen was more lucky than good, but his Techno-Optimist manifesto just confirmed to me that having money and being smart are not the same thing (I generally go link and tag free on these posts, but for that monstrosity I’ll make an exception)
The New York Times suing OpenAI essentially because if you prompt it correctly it will summarize articles from the paper… a paper that has a long history of summarizing without credit the works of others… is not just typical hypocrisy, but also a return to the bad anti-AI idea that remembering and learning from reading something is somehow a copyright violation

Television and Movies

Highs

Writers and Actors strikes settled with some gains
Some necessary consolidation of streaming services
I have settled on a focused set of streaming services, though I will add or remove them as we go off to find some new show
Netflix has something new on a regular basis… every Friday night for me… that it remains worthwhile to us
Apple TV+ rolled out some surprisingly good stuff this year
We’re starting to get some bundle deals, to you get Hulu and Disney+ for a reduced price, or when you subscribe to Paramount+ you also get Showtime content
We went out to the theater to see a few movies this year
Movie theater popcorn is still the best

Lows

The meager ask of the writers versus the profits of the studios just highlights the greed inherent in the system
Studios spent many months not negotiating hoping to starve the writers out, expressing a desire for them to lose their homes
The implosion of HBO, ditching the name, removing shows, and otherwise making easy for me to cancel it… sorry John Oliver
Disney is just determined to milk the MCU dry with more content that just isn’t getting much traction
Same with Star Wars, with the possible exception Andor
I think we saw THREE movies in the theater, Barbie, Oppenheimer, and Ferrari, which isn’t enough to keep theaters alive no matter how much popcorn we order
My wife steadfastly refuses to allow butter on the popcorn… it is still good dry, but I love greasy, over-buttered (or whatever it is they pour onto it) movie popcorn
JFC why is there always some old guy… and it is always an old guy… who has to check their phone five times during a screening? (And it isn’t me, I put my phone in my pocket when the previews start and don’t take it out until the credits are rolling)
Streaming as a revenue stream has completely failed to replace the old post theatrical release DVD sales channel
There isn’t room in the market for more than Netflix and one or two competitors in monthly subscription zone… sounds like MMORPGS
For Streaming, there is a parallel free to play future called FAST… Free, Add supported, Streaming Television… which is exactly what it sounds like, a return to TV with ads just like when many of us were growing up, just on demand now
Those who can’t be Netflix and haven’t gone towards FAST yet remain locked into the “one episode a week” model to try and keep their audience subscribed
More services, including Amazon Prime, are now going to put ads into their current model and require you to pay more to remove the ads which sounds like a very “I don’t understand consumer psychology” view of the world… seriously, just raising the price of Prime and offering a discount if you wanted ads would have been a much better path

Social Media

Highs

I mean, Elon Musk hasn’t completely broken Twitter… you can still block him, the nazis, the racists, the anti-semites, the MAGAs, the insurrectionists, and the awful tier of ads now showing up… Cheech & Chong edibles are dearly missed… and just stick to the “Following” tab, you can still achieve a nice balance of interaction with the Twitter circles that remain
Nobody is calling Twitter “X” and even news outlets who try to always feel they have to append “Formerly Twitter” to every article because “X” is a bad name that left behind the value of the brand
Most of the really dumb ideas Musk has floated… Twitter will be a bank, or a dating services, or a floor wax, or a desert topping… have failed to come to pass
Grok, Musk’s AI addition to Twitter became “woke” immediately and called out his own lies when asked
The PopTarts Bowl mascot coverage this week was a brief flash of what made Twitter great
There was the rise of the Twitter alternatives in 2024, with Post, Tribel, Substack Notes, Mastodon, Spoutible, BlueSky, Threads, and probably a few more I have forgotten
There is also Reddit, Facebook, Tumblr, LinkedIn, TikTok, and whatever…

Lows

Twitter is in an awful position (for users) of remaining the unquestioned dominant player in whatever its category is, so you cannot leave it without leaving friends and communities behind, while just being run by the least well adjusted billionaire in town… and as a class billionaires are the worst people
Musk has vowed to re-work Grok until it is as horrible as he and his fans are
Twitter hired a CEO whose job it is to follow Musk around and whenever he shits the bed, the take in a deep breath of the aroma and announce to the world that it was a masterstroke and smells better than Channel No. 5
The Twitter alternatives, the seven (or however many) dwarves, all started off against Twitter, but now have formed their own little silos where they complain about each other, often more bitterly than their actual primary competitor
If you want news about Twitter go to Mastodon, BlueSky, or Threads, as there is an audience on each absolutely obsessed with Twitter and ready to bring back any tidbit of news
And even if they aren’t talking ABOUT Twitter, they are copy/pasting Tweets FROM Twitter
Also, a good percentage of those people are still ON Twitter and cross posting everything anyway
I am not above blame as I am still on Twitter while using a few of the other platforms
I have almost no followers on any other service… despite being one of those people who cross-posts all the same stuff across multiple platforms… and the few I have are often the same individuals from Twitter… and with low engagement comes low interest
I am also very bad at finding people from Twitter on other services, so I am also not following that many people
How can we be beyond a year of Musk owning Twitter and its major competitors still don’t have all the basic features of Twitter?
Meta Instagram Threads has the same algorithm that Amazon has where when you buy a new router every decade the site offers up new routers for the next six months every time you visit the site like you buy 20 routers a year… so I hit “like” on a post about some Threads feature and then got several dozen similar-to-identical posts in my feed
WTF did Reddit change the UI to be like this time… seriously, I am not a old Reddit adherent, but after a dozen years or so there I am in danger of becoming one…

The Blog and Blogging

Highs

There are still a few active bloggers out there on the MMORPG beat
WordPress.com turned 20 years old in 2023, and I’ve been around for 17 of those years
WordPress.com, for all my complaints, has been and remains a reliable platform on which to write a blog… the end metrics that count, things like availability and uptime are solid
Kind of a strange and unexplained uptick in traffic in the last two months of the year
That traffic coincided with a boom in ad quality during the holiday season, which meant I paid off my annual hosting bill in two months (Please use ad block, I want bots to pay my hosting bills, not actual readers)
I still have a core base of readers who comment now and then
I made enough that I put EVE Online Pictures on a personal plan to remove all the toxic ads from it
Bing relented and put me back in their index, so them and the services that use Bing like Duck Duck Go and Yahoo, gave me a thousand page views in 2023… or less than 1% of what Google sent me… but it is NOT nothing….
I now have 52 email subscribers, a net gain of 2 in 2023
RSS is still a thing, and a good thing at that… read about it… wow, another link, I am really breaking tradition

Lows

WordPress.com does keep breaking things
The favored WP.com technique is to push something to production and let the customers find the problems in a way I would be embarrassed to do as a professional in the industry
The late 2023 traffic boom will end and things will settle down to the old, post-blogging era normal
The comments to posts ratio went down again, landing at 2.8 comments per post… in 2009 the ratio was at its peak with 9 comments per post and even as late as 2016 it was 6.4 comments per post, and comments are the life blood reader activity for a blog
At some point WordPress.com lost/purged/forgot a few hundred email subscribers… maybe… I look at the list of 52 and I don’t see myself on it, but I get daily notifications in one inbox
WordPress.com introduced a new paid promotion service called “Blaze” that absolutely does not deliver on its promise… seriously, promote something through Facebook before you bother with that (I did a couple of parallel tests because I was bored and curious)
There was that whole WordPress app versus the Jetpack app thing that I still don’t understand
WordPress.com introduced AI assisted search for blogs… but only if you pay for it, and it doesn’t seem wort the price
It feels like a lot of us on the MMORPG beat have branched out into other topics… myself included with all those telephone related posts
The EVE Online blogging neighborhood especially, once a large and vibrant community, has shrunk to a few regular writers and even the EVE Online news sites, once considered a threat to the blog community, have all but gone silent… it is bad when I am writing more EVE Online news posts than the news sites…

Real Life

Highs

I am still here, married, relatively happy, employed, and with only the typical health problems for my advancing age… my doc keeps saying these things are common for somebody of my age and profession
Oh, and I have pretty decent health care options
Our daughter will be graduating from college in the spring; parental op success!
My wife and I have managed to make it through four years of paying for college for our daughter… grad school, should it be a thing, will require negotiation
In my current job I do something that seems to matter, that makes things better for some people… more so than a modem or a computer caller ID device ever did
I work from home, so I no longer waste time and money on commuting, and my car racked up a whopping 4,000 miles on it this year
I got a 3% raise this year… which is tiny by my early career standards, but between 2010 and 2020 I think my biggest raise was 2%, was more likely to be 1%, and was just as often a “you should feel lucky you have a job” sentiment from the C-suite, where everybody got at least six figure, and sometimes seven figure, bonuses
At least I stopped hearing the word “charcuterie” so damn much in 2023… though that is what we’re having for new year’s eve

Lows

Having reached something of a major parenting milestone with our daughter’s college graduation… there is still marriage and grand kids or whatever possible out there… one does begin to feel like one has entered the denouement of one’s story… is this the end of my purpose in life?
Also, continuing with the naive assumption that life has purpose beyond biological imperatives
Those typical health problems are all quite annoying
Working from home means I can go five or six days straight and never venture further than the curb to roll out the trash cans for pickup
I do not miss the commute per se, but I miss the time I used to spend with an audio book while commuting
I no longer work for what one might consider Silicon Valley or on telephony related products, and my ongoing telephony tales will eventually come to that juncture

The World

Still in crisis. Covid is going to be with us for a long time, though at least vaccines mean it won’t kill another million people in the US alone. But it is still a hazard to the old and ill. My mother’s assisted living home has been on Covid lock down a few times this year. I wear a mask when I visit, both to avoid bringing anything in and carrying anything out… and the one time I forgot was the one time they called me two days later to tell me my mother was positive for Covid.

The war drags on in Ukraine, Israel and the Palestinians are back to escalating violence, there is still a civil war going on in Syria, and we’re on the edge of terrorism here as Republicans declare that if they can’t win at the ballot box then they see violence as a completely acceptable alternative, as they did on January 6th. The curse of interesting times seems to be ours.

2024

I cannot get there yet. I’m going to stay in 2023 for now. We’ll get to next year when it arrives on Monday.

Binge Watching into yet another Autumn

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The summer has passed. We’re past the false autumn and the last gasp of summer heat, the mornings are cool, there is some occasional fog, and it is time to start thinking about closing the window in the bedroom at night.

AI generated televisions out enjoying an Autumn day

It isn’t quite time yet for the leaves to fall, so we can sit on the couch and watch some more TV before having to get out the rake. And what have we been watching.

Ahsoka – Disney+

My reaction to this series is no doubt a sign that I am not really a Star Wars fan. Here we have a Star Wars show, a spin off setup in The Madalorian, with some recognizable characters and a framework that should be appealing and… I was bored. Sure, maybe I don’t care all that much about Ahsoka and I didn’t watch the cartoon that led into this so few of the other characters resonated with me, but there was Thrawn! I’ve written about Thrawn. If he was the bad guy surely they wouldn’t mis-use him. Alas, I watched the whole thing and found it flat, predictable, and lacking in any engaging qualities. Thrawn? More like Yawn! Not as dumb as The Book of Boba Fett, but still dull.

Loki – Disney+

Here is the flip side. I have no investment at all in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. There are maybe three movies out of the whole lot I would watch a second time. So I was prepared to be bored. Add in the fact that the whole thing feels like they saw Umbrella Academy and said, “Hey, let’s steal that idea for the MCU and make Loki the star!” and could barely be bothered to hide the fact. Then I actually quite enjoyed it. Granted, it is almost entirely carried by the performances of Hiddleston and Wilson, but sometimes that is enough. Can they carry it into season 2? I don’t know, but season one was fun.

The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon – AMC+

Where can we take The Walking Dead franchise next? How about France? Is France good for you? Daryl ends up on a boat to France for reasons then gets thrown overboard or something and washes ashore in… France. And they have zombies in France, because they are everywhere, but they’re late season TWD zombies where they only show up when the plot needs a jump scare. The real lesson, as always, is that people are the real monsters, even if they all speak English with a French accent. I honestly think one of the show runners just wanted to go see Jim Morrison’s grave. So op success on that front. I didn’t care for it, as it didn’t add anything new to TWD and it world vie, but my wife pines for Daryl and Carol to get back together, so we’ll have to watch the next season I am sure.

The Wheel of Time Season 2 – Amazon Prime

I think I am the ideal viewer for this series. I’ve read all the freaking books, but long enough ago to have forgotten all but the major story lines, so a mini-series treatment that hacks off huge useless hunks of a bloated story… works for me. I enjoyed this season as it blazed through the tale and look forward to the next. The Seanchan were dealt with, Matt blew the Horn of Valere, and Dragon Reborn was declared. I think we’re into the fourth book by this point. Robert Jordan purists… well, I know their pain, it is what I feel when I watch the Lord of the Rings movies, but nobody cuts me any slack. Suck it up.

The Fall of the House of Usher – Netflix

I like this show. First, it is not literally a series based on the titular Poe short story. Rather, it is a result of taking the works of Poe, blending them in with the family dynamics of Succession, and using the whole thing to indict the Sackler family and Purdue Pharma, the company that brought us the opioid epidemic through outright lies, which means it has plenty of fun gothic imagery and there is a whole “which Poe work is this bit in reference to?” side game along with it being pretty much spot on when it comes to the whole topic and what some people might richly deserve. Good stuff, would watch again… though if I have to hear another Philistine say they thought it was about the rapper I might scream.

Summer Binge Watching as the Writer’s Strike Carries On

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The Writer’s Guild of America (WGA) has been on strike since May 2nd, with the Screen Actors Guild – American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) joining them on the picket lines to strike in mid-July.

They are striking against the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP), which represents the studios, which includes Netflix, who happen to have offices not far from where I live. So I have seen a picket line there on a couple of occasions. Not every day. If you’re a serious player you probably live in LA or New York, but we have some people up here.

Striking not too far from our house

The AMPTP’s strategy for the strike seems to have been devised by C. Montgomery Burns and involves not negotiating until the line members are losing their homes. That and the dystopian nature of some of their proposals, things like a perpetual license to use a digital likeness of somebody, cast them poorly against the wage and benefits requests of the unions.

We won’t be getting any new seasons of anything until this is settled, so maybe we should be rationing out the TV have left. But we’ve been burning out what is left somewhat fresh on the shelf like it was a normal time.

Black Mirror – Season Six – Netflix

Oh my. The danger here for this ongoing anthology is whether they put their best show in the season up front, leaving everything else to feel like a letdown, or if they save the best for last and then maybe nobody gets there.

They went with the former, running Joan is Awful first, and it is so on point with so much of what is wrong with corporations and privacy and AI and greed today while being awesome and hilarious, that the rest of the season feels kind of tepid. Anyway, watch that first episode at least. It feels like it was written for the strike. The rest aren’t horrible, but feel dull and drawn out in comparison.

For All Mankind – Apple TV+

There are soap operas and space operas, but now we have a space soap opera. FAM asks the question, “What if the USSR landed on the moon first and the US got all pissed and decided to keep going with the space race onward into the next 40 years rather than punting on it after five moon missions?” Also, what are the flaws and motivations of the people in the program at NASA?

While the progress through the decades… each of the three season covers one, 70s, 80s, then 90s… is of interest, a lot of the fun for me is the peeks at the changes in the timeline, where Ted Kennedy is president in 72, Reagan is president in 76, John Lennon’s assassin misses, but John Paul II succeeds, Jimmy Cater is the senior senator from Georgia, and we all get iPods a decade earlier due to the technological advances driven by the space program. Oh, and the Soviet Union survives into the 90s.

It has been renewed for a fourth season… but the strike means nobody is working on it yet.

Three Pines – Amazon Prime

A Canadian mystery series, so everybody is polite, though it takes place in Quebec, so maybe not as polite as you might expect. Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, played by Alfred Molina, a member of the homicide division of the Surete du Quebec, keeps ending up in the small town of Three Pines because… murder. The season runs for eight episodes, which are divided into four two episode cases along with a season long story arc that revolves around a missing teen, who is also from Three Pines.

A decent set of mysteries, though one benefit of the show is that we didn’t know many of the players outside of Alfred Molina, so it did not suffer from the whole “the most famous person did it” problem that so many police procedurals run into. The season ends on a big reveal and a bit of a cliff hanger… but since it didn’t get renewed for another season you’ll just have to make up your own resolution.

The Walking Dead: Dead City – AMC

Tired of a bunch of rando survivors pottering about the woods trying to have normal lives, but think launching nuclear weapons from a beached submarine was a step too far? Hey, how about we take Negan, everybody’s favorite self-reflecting bad guy, and Maggie, whose husband was killed by Negan right before her eyes and whom she has vowed to kill, and team them up to go find Maggie’s missing son Herschel in post-apocalyptic NEW YORK CITY!

Kind of fun, largely driven Jeffrey Dean Morgan’s humor and Lauren Cohan’s rage, and better that where ever Fear the Walking Dead is these days. At least we have a new setting with some new factions. It feels like a place where Gary King from The World’s End might show up.

They put out six episodes, took a break, then the strike hit. Also, they are having the show runners and such do and after episode commentary, which are starting to become pretty self-indulgent rather than adding anything to viewer knowledge of the show. Also, during the pandemic they were doing them in casual settings with low quality video because we were all stuck at home, but they have decided to keep that low quality aesthetic for… reasons? Anyway, better than a lot of later Walking Dead, most because it shed so many back stories to track.

Jack Ryan – Season Four – Amazon Prime

Jack Ryan becomes a heist movie or something… at least for a couple of episodes. More international intrigue in the field and betrayal back at home. It works pretty well, though overall the series feels a little flat. John Krasinski plays Jack Ryan just kind of flat, which is right for the character, but then doesn’t have enough flamboyance to play off of unless Wendell Pierce is on screen.

Also, a “me problem” with the series is that I read all the Tom Clancy books in the 80s and 90s, at least until Executive Orders, when the whole series became a Tom Clancy power fantasy, such that various character have biographies in my head, so I get tripped up when he isn’t married to Cathy in the show when in my head canon they are wed and have kids.

The fourth season is the end of the series, so if you want a show you can binge all of, it is now ready. They are reported to be working on a Domingo Chavez spin-off with Michael Pena… but, writer’s strike and all of that.

FUBAR – Netflix

If you are looking for a smart, sophisticated, and subtle twist on the action spy drama… boy, did you come to the wrong place. This is an Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle that is something of a mix between fan service and simply indulging Arnold in being Arnold… or Ahhnald, if you prefer.

So the whole thing is kind of a big silly good, with lots of comic quips and unlikely situations. Fine if you like that sort of thing. I made it through the season and its story arc. But now I’ve read it has been renewed for a second season and… I’m not sure I’m ready for that. There is only so much Arnold one can take before the novelty wears off. But, once again, writer’s strike.

That is what we have been watching of late.

Binge Watching Between the Deluge and the Floods

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In California the idea of “average annual rainfall” is complete garbage. We either have way too much rain or a drought. In that situation the average is like the guy with his feet in the oven and his head in the freezer: On the average he is the right temperature.

This year was a rainy year. The initial floods have subsided for now, but the snow pack up in the mountains will soon be melting and the next round of flooding will begin. We’re on a patch of high ground, so we’re safe, but others will be in trouble when the rivers rise and the levees break.

My new TV graphic… AI generated

All of which has nothing to do with this post, but sometimes I feel like adding some color to the opening of these. I suppose I could just jump in with “Here are some mini-reviews of shows we’re watched so far this year.”

A Spy Among Friends – MGM+

I am probably alone in being tired of the Cambridge Five, but not only have I read all about them, my great uncle was friends with Kim Philby and used to pal around with him in Beirut when we wasn’t helping overthrow local governments. (My uncle, that is, not Philby.) I even have a letter from Moscow from Philby to my uncle. But my wife wanted to watch it, which also meant we had to subscribe to MGM+, yet another streaming service, in order to watch it.

It covers the details of Philby’s defection in 1963 and the subsequent investigations and events. It was okay, but not exactly action packed. I was, however, able to pause the show when my wife had questions and give brief bios of most of the main characters, which at least made me feel engaged. The acting is fine, it looks good, and I’ll take any indictment of the the old boys network I can get, but overall it felt like style over substance. Also, I was a bit salty about having to subscribe to MGM+ for this.

War of the Worlds – MGM+

What if they had an end of the world apocalypse show that was set in Europe for once and half the cast spoke French?

Given the past versions of H.G. Well’s 1898 story, I was pretty sure I could guess how it was going to go. But I was wrong. I will give the series that. It starts off as expected, though the aliens are more like Daleks in robo-dog suits. Then you think it is going Invasion of the Body Snatchers. And then it veers of into time travel and paradoxes and parallel timelines. It wraps up and feels done after three seasons, and it did keep me guessing most of the way… though I have a sneaking suspicion that it wasn’t all mapped out that way in advance. The whole thing was a bit of a slow burn, so if you’re expecting giant three legged machines striding over the earth and destroying cities, be advised.

The Last of Us – HBO Max

What if The Madalorian met The Walking Dead, but everybody he and Grogu ran into ended up dead? What if we had plant based soy zombies that were really scary… and as scarce as zombies in later seasons of The Walking Dead? What if they made a TV series based on a video game you never played?

It was okay. Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey work well together. But I was not invested in the story, its message (hint: people are the real bad guys again], or its fidelity to the video game, and I got to the end of the season and wasn’t really sure where they could take the story from there or if I really cared.

The Night Agent – Netflix

On the rocks FBI agent, who is the son of a disgraced FBI agent, is relegated to answering the night phone in the basement of the White House, a phone that “night agents,” who are off the book operatives, has the phone ring finally, only to get a message from an agent being attacked. For not good reason they send him out to take custody of a survivor of the attack and it turns into a thing and there is a conspiracy to kill them and a plot within the White House including an attempt to kill the president and it all works out, leading to promotions and a new career and a new love.

Also, every plot twist is telegraphed well in advance and the whole thing ends like it is the prequel for a completely different show. I don’t know. It was okay, but my wife and I had fun shouting out what will happen next at the TV, but it isn’t like The Wire or anything. I couldn’t see myself re-watching it.

The Recruit – Netflix

A young, smart ass CIA lawyer gets mixed up in affairs outside of his usual scope, ends up in the field chasing down a lead while goes hilariously bad on multiple occasions. Funny, wry, silly, it is one of those stories where a simple goal is presented to the main character who finds himself constantly thwarted by complications, office politics, and unreliable rental cars. It is just eight episodes and a lot lighter and more enjoyable than The Night Agent.

The Diplomat – Netflix

And unlikely premise and an absolutely ridiculous series of events as Kate Wyler is appointed to be the US ambassador to the UK because the president wants to try her out as a possible replacement vice president, but she is a Middle-east expert and doesn’t really want that job and her husband is a former ambassador who put her up for the job and their marriage is strained in part because he can’t take a back seat in any of this and Alfredo from Elementary is her deputy chief of mission trying to get her up to speed for a job she doesn’t want and he is sleeping with the CIA head of station and the UK Prime Minister is a egocentric half-wit, so at least they got something true to life in the whole thing. Rory Kinnear plays the prime minister, something he has done in the past, in that Black Mirror episode where he has to fuck a pig.

The performances are good, the whole thing is a setup for a second season, and it has been popular enough to spawn a bunch of “that’s not how any of this works” articles in the press, save for the deputy chief of mission, whose role was apparently portrayed somewhat accurately. Fun, if you like that sort of thing.

Beef – Netflix

The lesson here is to be judicious in the use of your car horn. A road rage incident entangles the lives of two people who just can’t fucking let it go, and tracks their obsession and how it impacts the rest of their lives and relationships. Also, it is something of a comedy I think. I don’t know. It comes across to me as the gold/blue dress sort of situation, where you’re either going to become invested in the two main characters and hope they get their acts together or you’re going to be like me and spend 10 episodes wondering at the time and dedication the two main characters invest in self-sabotage.

The Mandalorian Season 3 – Disney+

After 2.5 seasons of The Mandalorian… because we got about a half of season of it in the middle of The Book of Boba Fett… this season felt mostly like an unsuccessful attempt to recapture some of the early magic. It has some “problem of the week” episodes about pirates and helping Jack Black and Lizzo maintain their droid oppressing regime. It had some “I don’t really care” episodes about New Republic re-education camps for Imperials. And then there was a whole “retaking our home planet” thing with the different Mandalorian factions coming together after bickering about helmet etiquette for an episode.

There were some good points, but the through line of the season was kind of choppy. I will say that the last scene of the last episode was about perfect and that they can just leave it right there and call it done. But they won’t. Disney will need to beat the life out of this. Maybe that will slow them down in their desire to do a remake of the original trilogy.

Perry Mason Season 2 – HBO Max

I was reading the Raymond Chandler Philip Marlowe series when this dropped, and it was kind of nice in that this too was set in 1930s LA. Perry, having won last season’s big case tries to stay with just civil rather than criminal law… but a new case and a need to see justice done drags him back in. Racial tensions, immigration issues, blackmail, prosecutorial misconduct, and baseball all pile up to make Perry’s job impossible. But do you think he loses the case in the end? Overall it was okay. It looks a lot better than it plays.

Shrinking – Apple TV

Harrison Ford plays himself as a grumpy old therapist of some sort… they never really go into details… at a practice where he is something of a mentor to his two younger colleagues, one of whom lost his wife in a car accident a while back and has never recovered and his life is spinning out of control, but in entirely humorous ways appropriate to a sitcom. Well, maybe a sitcom on streaming, since blow and hookers enter into it. Anyway, that guy is the center of the story. For all the absurdities, it is solid, well written, and funny with a solid cast that turns in good performances. What else are you going to ask for?

1923 – Paramount+

Harrison Ford plays himself as a grumpy old rancher in this Yellowstone prequel. If you watched Yellowstone, then you know the drill. Good, honest cattle ranchers are beset by land speculators, city slickers, and sheep herders and have to defend themselves by gunning them down or stringing them up from the nearest tree. Everything that makes the show what it is, but it is in 1923, so they have to ride horses into town rather than big pickups.

There are also side stories about the abuse that Native American children received at the hands of Catholic missionaries sent to teach them the ways of the modern world (when your boarding school has a graveyard for students, it might be a sign you’re not doing this right), the unlawfulness of marriage between the races at that time, and the difficulties of international travel in the age of steam.

Succession Season Whatever – HBO Max

I am not even sure this is done yet. There might be one more episode of horrible rich people being horrible to each other and those around them. It was a bit of a spectacle in the first season, and kept me interested in the second, but I am not sure I even finished last season, and this season I am done with it. I mean, which character in this whole show would you want to pal around with?

The strange thing is that this is the show that people keep talking about on Twitter, but Yellowstone gets something like 5x the viewers per episode. Facebook is where the Yellowstone memes are to be found. Maybe the last episode will be a cross-over and the Roys will try to buy Montana then Kevin Costner and the Duttons will ride up into New York City and string the lot of them up on Wall Street. A man can dream, can’t he?

Changes at Netflix, HBO, and MTV

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I am still catching up on notes I took almost two weeks ago, but there were some video related topics I wanted not note involving three different video services that have had something of an impact on me.

Netflix ends DVD Service

I haven’t subscribed to the Netflix DVDs by mail service in a good six or seven years. I haven’t felt the need. But I was always happy it was there as a fall back because, while the Netflix vision was always to stream video, we have learned that streaming services are, at best, fickle stewards of our video culture. And then the announcement came that their DVD service was going to be shut down.

A Netflix Company

For openers, that is bad because if you REALLY wanted to watch something specific, some movie or TV series, the Netflix DVD service had you covered in a way that a dozen streaming service subscriptions will absolutely fail to do. You couldn’t do it that night, on demand, but with a little bit of planning that red envelope would show up in the mail and you would have the disk set to watch.

For years we got those red envelopes in the mail regularly… though it helped that we’re very close to their distribution hub. Netflix is still just up the road from us.

Moving away from DVDs to streaming only is a blow due to the attrition that always comes to pass when we change formats. There were a lot of titles on VHS that never made it to DVD. And from DVDs to BluRay more titles fell by the wayside… though at least players supported both formats. Likewise, there are a lot of titles on DVD or BluRay that nobody has bothered to factor for streaming.

DVDs aren’t going away. You can still find them and watch them if you have a player or an optical drive in your computer. (I do still!) But Netflix was by far the easiest way to access the vast library of titles on DVD and, come September, it will be no more.

HBO becomes Max

For whatever reason HBOs owners, Warner Discovery, have decided to throw away a reputation 50 years in the making and rename HBO’s streaming service to Max.

Everybody to the Max or something

I mean, it was already HBO Max… after having been HBO on Demand, HBO Go, and HBO Now… but to finally ditch the anchor name that has been around since late 1972 seems like a dumb marketing move.

Yes, the plan is to merge it with Discovery+ content, so maybe the two streaming services combined deserve a new name… but did nobody consider HBO Discovery? I mean, that maintains the continuity of the services in people’s heads because, because in the case of HBO people think of those three letters for shows like The Wire, Game of Thrones, The Sopranos, and Westworld.

Okay, maybe not Westworld, which has been part of the original content purge at HBO so they don’t have to pay the talent in order to save money. This is another reason Netflix DVD services going away is bad, because you cannot stream some titles now.

But it feels to me like people who don’t pay close attention aren’t going to make the leap to Max.

Also, and this is what leaped into my brain first, HBO’s has a sister service on cable called Cinemax (or Skinemax, as we used to call it for its propensity to show soft core porn back in the day) that has been branded on and off again as just Max.

Is that the association they want? We’ll see this Tuesday, as May 23rd is the cut over.

Anyway, it seems dumb, but I guess they have already trashed the HBO brand by this point. I got a deal last year to subscribe to HBO Max for a year at a low price. I did that, then they started the purge and doing dumb things. I think we’ll be able to live without Max when that subscription lapses.

I miss my MTV

Finally, there is the demise of MTV. It was announced that MTV News, the last bastion of the once influential network, would be integrated into Showtime as Paramount engaged in cost cutting measure that include slashing 25% of its overall staff.

The idea that MTV would be finally gone for good as something of an independent channel did stir something in me.

Yes, I know, it hasn’t been what I think of as MTV for a couple of decades at this point. But back in the day it was something.

If you’re like me, seeing this image triggers music in your brain

MTV feels very much like a milestone for my generation. I first saw it when we were going to move back in May 1982. The people buying our house wanted cable, something we didn’t have, so it got wired up while we were still moving out. My sister and I found MTV on the channel options and wouldn’t turn it off. Our parents hated it… boomers… but we wouldn’t let it go.

It lost its edge a bit with time… there was a lot of Rod Stewart in the early rotation… but it remained a channel you would just throw on with people around, and we all knew the VJs… who didn’t have a crush on Martha Quinn or just want to hang out with her… and they did crazy things. They had a contest with Madonna that encouraged viewers to make a music video for her song True Blue in 1986.

And then they showed the entries, one after another, so that song was stuck in my head for years.

Eventually interest in just music videos waned and other content began pushing that off the schedule. Then there was MTV2, the joke being that they need some place for the music videos to go. Then VH1. My wife and I would turn on the VH1 video count down on Saturday mornings in the late 90s and early 2000s to watch music videos.

MTV broke gound with shows as well, with Liquid Television, which saw things like Æon Flux emerge, as well as Beavis and Butt-head. (Beavis and Butt-head also sat around watching music videos and commenting on them. This is the clip that always comes to mind for them.) Then there was MTV’s Real World, the start of reality television, which I won’t thank them for, but which was certainly influential.

The final bits of MTV being subsumed into Showtime has very little meaning to me and my actual viewing habits today. I haven’t watch the channel in over a decade and if I want music videos, then there is always YouTube. I have no idea what directions it has gone in since the days when I used to watch it. But the mention of its name will always bring up the moon landing channel ID clip they used to play back in the day.

That is my MTV, part of the bygone era that was my late adolescence and early adulthood.

The Big 2022 Binge Watch Summary

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I keep starting a fresh binge watching post every time we finish up a couple of shows then never get around to finishing the write up beyond getting a draft with a couple of titles in it. So this is going to be my rapid fire, 2022 binge watch round up.

2022 is what we get

No deep analysis, no title cards, just quick observations and reactions.

Lord of the Rings: Rings of Power – Amazon Prime

Really wanted to like it, but didn’t finish watching it. It turns out Amazon didn’t have the rights to the Silmarillion, so they had to create whole cloth tales based on hints and suggestions in the appendices at the end of Return of the King. They seemed to feel Tolkien was right, that his stories without Hobbits aren’t as compelling, so they made some up. Also, Gandalf origin story is… well, now I want to know how they think Radagast and Saruman showed up. I would, however, watch a second age sitcom about Elendil and his family on Numenor, with young Isildur fighting with siblings and goofing off in boating school, which is what one of the episodes seemed to be developing into.

House of the Dragon – HBO Max

Wasn’t really that interested in it to start with but, you know, more Game of Thrones stuff. We are required to watch by law or something. Finished watching it, but wasn’t impressed. Turns out I don’t really care about the Targaryens. Paddy Considine was solid, but 10 episodes of court intrigue with a supporting cast that felt at times both indifferent and under utilized… Matt Smith had such menace at the start and then fell off into sulky tedium… left me looking at my iPad a lot. Seriously, court intrigue in Game of Thrones worked because the characters were all so interesting on their own… Tyrion, Cersei, Little Finger, Varys, Olenna among many… and interacted so well with each other and every new character that showed up. That cast was golden. The Dragon Clan just doesn’t get there.

The Peripheral – Amazon Prime

I read the William Gibson novel when it came out (see my 2019 books post), so had to watch the show. Does translate some of the concepts from the book to the screen well, and actually comes out and explains “the jackpot” to viewers, unlike the book. But the story was still somewhat choppy and diverged from the book. I know, different media requires a different telling, but it was coming close to leaving the theme of the book in my view. But that is my hangup, and if you didn’t read the book I doubt you’ll care. I’ll watch the next season, but I wasn’t fully satisfied with it.

Resident Evil – Netflix

I mean, I didn’t hate it. It had some compelling points. But it didn’t really sell me in the end. It suffers some from doing the “telling the story in two different time settings” thing, which is both over used and easy to do badly. Not sure how it fits into the whole Resident Evil universe… and, also, I don’t really care about the Resident Evil universe… a problem Netflix had as well I guess, since it was cancelled after one season.

Andor – Disney+

Star Wars is for adults… again. Because Star Wars wasn’t all a Muppet kiddie universe until Return of the Jedi. Slow, with insights into how things worked in the empire before Rogue One, as we see the formation of the rebellion. The dark side of a lot of things, and even the “cute” droid is old and cranky. Very much a slow drama, though not without some *pew* *pew* now and then, it is much more about bureaucracy and organization and keeping secrets and eventually enabling space battles. Star Wars through a John Le Carre prism, and much of what that implies. I wanted a full, US, 22 episode season of this. Mainly suffers from the name sounding a lot like Endor, the planet with the moon where the Ewoks lived.

Wednesday – Netflix

I’ve always been a big Charles Addams fan, so we had to watch this. The story is kind of shaky, but Jenna Ortega in the titular role carries it through rough patches. I enjoyed it. Normally I fret about who plays Gomez… John Astin was only topped by Raul Julia in the role… but the parents matter less than Wednesday. The show is named after her. Also, props for Christina Ricci, who played Wednesday back in the day, being included. I don’t know what she is like in real life, but I adore the characters she plays these day.

Better Call Saul final season – AMC+

The wrap up of the Breaking Bad prequel about the rise of Saul Goodman ended well as it tied up loose ends and fitted itself smoothly into the original show without feeling the whole thing was predictable or pre-ordained. The whole series was high quality, if not exactly the same feel as Breaking Bad. But that is fine. The self-sabotaging Saul, in his own world with his own story, was a good time. Enjoyed the whole series, would recommend.

The Walking Dead final season – AMC+

By this point all I wanted to know was what happened to Rick and Michonne, and they wait until the final episode to even get there. 11 seasons in, and the show stopped caring about zombies around season 6, I was tired and just wanted it to end. My wife insisted we finish, only to find that the final season was all about launching new spin-off shows in the Walking Dead universe. I am so done with this franchise… or will be once Fear the Walking Dead winds up.

Only Murders in the Building Season 2 – Hulu

How do you take a quirky, funny show that worked for a season and go for two? Well, another murder, of course. And maybe frame up the main cast for that… and toss in some more quality supporting characters… and get Tina Fey in there more. Yeah, it works. It isn’t as charming or compelling or fresh as the first season, but it is still quality work.

Dickinson – Apple TV+

A quirky, humorous, anachronistic telling of the life of 19th century poet Emily Dickinson whose works were largely unknown until after her death. Technically not a series we binge, because it is one of those “better in small doses” shows, but still very good. And I was so very much there for the portrayal of Henry David Thoreau. So very much there.

We Own This City – HBO Max

David Simon, who you may remember from creating The Wire and Homicide: Life on the Streets, has returned to Baltimore, this time to tell the story of police corruption and specifically that of the Gun Trace Task Force. This is a dramatization of real events and not a character development police drama, so it isn’t as engaging as The Wire, but it still hits pretty hard.

Inside Man – Netflix

We will literally watch anything with Stanely Tucci in it at our house. And we were rewarded with this show, enjoying pretty much every moment he was on screen. We also like David Tennant, but almost every minute of him on screen evoked exasperated “Why would you do this? What are you thinking? Are you an idiot?” comments from us. Not his fault. Bad script. But still, there we were hating it. And almost every moment that had neither of them on screen was just kind of okay. Tough to recommend outside to the Tucci performance, but it is only four episodes.

So that is me sort of catching up. There are a few other shows that might have made the list, but which I want to write more about. We shall see if I get to that.

Looking Back at 2022 – Highs and Lows

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Looking back at 2022 makes me feel tired. Tired for a lot of reasons, including getting laid off and having to start a new job, the failing health of my parent’s generation and having to manage that, another election season, the Russians, the general state of the world, and Elon Musk… I am very tired of Elon Musk.

I am also tired of hearing the word “charcuterie,” which I think I have heard more in 2022 that in all my past years combined. I believe my wife unironically said “charcuterie” 14 times last week alone.

2022 is what we get

But here we are at the end of the year and another staple annual post here, something else that makes me feel a bit tired. Some years I start writing this post in May or June, so it is easy to wrap up. And then there are years like 2022 where I am throwing something together at the last minute.

For looks back at past years, there is a list.

Anyway, let’s step right into this steaming pile so I can get it over with.

Blizzard

Highs

Shipped the Dragonflight expansion in 2022!
Characters don’t use “borrowed power” directly in Dragonflight!
An actual plan announced for how Dragonflight is going to play out!
Shipped Overwatch 2!
Shipped Diablo Immortal!
Launched Wrath of the Lich King Classic!
Gave us a ship date for Diablo IV!
Actually announced a NEW GAME, something in the co-op survival genre!!!
Microsoft acquisition promises a cleaning of house when it comes to their loathsome corporate overlords

Lows

Dragonflight didn’t get that “what a great launch” compared to past expansions press release, a staple of expansions since WotLK, which is probably a bad sign
Dragonflight repeats the Shadowlands theme of a quick run to level cap and then the next two years in end game grind
Dragon riding on special dragon mounts… is still borrowed power
That two year Dragonflight roadmap is pretty light on dates and details
This new survival title is way out in the future
Overwatch 2? That didn’t seem to make much of a splash
Heroes of the Storm??
StarCraft universe???
Diablo Immortal just lacked a cryto connection to fufill all of our worst monetization expectations
Diablo IV seems unlikely to hit its mark when it comes to a ship date and that was probably thrown out there for the benefit of Microsoft
No matter what happens with the Microsoft acquisition, the people who made Activision Blizzard a horrible place, who led by example in making it a hostile work environment, will be rewarded handsomely for all of their bad deeds
Oh, did I forget about Blizz and NetEase falling out, leaving Chinese gamers in the lurch?

Enad Global 7

Highs

EverQuest and EverQuest II get expansions, updates, and 64-bit upgrades
Mini-expansion and new starter areas for LOTRO
PlanetSide 2 hits 10 and tops its past world record
A lot of press coverage about their unannounced Marvel super hero title
They shipped some other titles… I’m sure…

Lows

EverQuest and EverQuest II got absolutely no other attention from the company
The idea of LOTRO on consoles seems less likely now than it did two years ago
Marvel super hero title cancelled… again… after getting all that attention
Daybreak titles make up most of the software revenue and almost all of the recurring subscription revenue
The company is now pretty much run by the Daybreak team, which has a track record of shipping nothing new and simply milking old titles
It probably says something that I have this little to say about the company

CCP

Highs

FanFest was back!
Big expansions were back!
The Uprising expansion saw players coming back and the daily population count rise!
The MER is now better than ever!
Faction Warfare finally got some love
The Photon UI is starting to come together
Finally listened to players on about the economy
Finally listened to players about resource harvesting, and specifically about locking resources into low sec
Finally gave us corp/alliance logos on ships
Came out against putting crypto in EVE Online
After many complaints CCP pulled the Prospector Pack, which sold a fitted ship, from the web store and promised not to sell ships in exactly that way again
We actually had a few big brawls in null sec, including that recent one at H-PA29

Lows

Whatever EVE Vegas was, or whatever was going to replace it in the US, that seems to be dead
Kind of a long wait between announcing Uprising and actually getting to it
Spent a whole YEAR not listening to players about the economy or resources while every obvious prediction came to pass
EverMarks for logos are annoying, gated busy work to get logos that we would happily spend money or PLEX on
Faction Warfare remains an all-in commitment for your character, so if your corp or alliance isn’t all-in you need an alt
The Photon UI is still slower and less responsive that the old UI, especially under TiDi
We’re quite a ways from the next big war in null sec
33% price increase for subscriptions… in US dollars and Euros, which means it was a lot more for some people in other countries
Did you see the player count between the subscription price increase and the Uprising expansion?
The player count is on its way back down now that the expansion has been around for a bit
CCP prefers Monthly Active Users over any direct player count, and they have been obviously goosing that number with generous login rewards and give aways, but MAU does not reflect people in space
The infrastructure of sites that support EVE Online saw a notable decline in 2022 with sites going dormant or altogether dark
CCP only backed away from crypto “for now” after putting them in the Alliance Tournament and highlighting their CEO meeting with crypto evangelists
CCP thought the Prospector Pack was a good idea and, while they claimed to be listening to feedback, did not remove it from the store until their pre-planned promotion was over
Also, while CCP removed the Prospector Pack from the web store, they continued to sell it directly in-game as a pop-up offer to new players who ran the career agent missions for mining, thus making their statements about not wanting sell fitted ships generated out of thin air yet another bald faced lie
CCP is clearly going to sell fit ships again
EVE Valkyrie and CCP’s other VR games have now been shut down.
CCP is still devoting resources to making a first person shooter despite that market being both crowded and dominated by a few titles as well as CCP having shown no special insight nor innovation on that front

Other Gaming Industry Notes

Highs

Valheim gave us the Mistlands at last
Pokemon Scarlet and Violet!
Another big Minecraft update
RimWorld got the Biotech expansion
LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalks Saga finally made it out the door
Guild Wars 2 got End of Dragons
Pokemon Violet and Scarlet
New World seemed to be trying to get its act together
Lost Ark has hung on to its opening success and remained pretty stable
Solesta was a pretty solid, if a bit low budget, table top RPG simulation

Lows

That Game Awards were boring; stop trying to make them the Oscars and just do your own thing
Amazon took its sweet time trying to fix New World, and it is still something of a mess
Meta can’t make the metaverse happen even with an annual burn rate in the billions
VR actively set back by Meta after they kicked legendary John Carmack to the curb along with his idea of lighter, more affordable headsets, instead opting to follow the Juicero guy and his plan for a more expensive, more awkward path forward for VR hardware
Much of the year was spent again with crytpo bros trying to conflate their horrible idea with things like the metaverse and online gaming
Just when it seems to be clear to most that cryto in video games is a bad idea, THAT is when Richard Garriott decides to prove once again he is the 21st century harbinger of death for video game trends by announcing his own shamelessly transparent cryto NFT video game scam
Crowd funded MMOs continued to prove, with very rare exceptions, that their promises are empty and that you should never give Wimpy a hamburger today on the promise of being paid on Tuesday

Television, Books, and the Media

Highs

Still a lot of stuff to watch
Amazon gave us a Middle-earth show and William Gibson’s The Peripheral
HBO gave us House of Dragons and more Westworld
AMC gave us the final seasons of Better Call Saul and The Walking Dead
Netflix continues to surprise with new content like Wednesday and The Glass Onion
Even Disney+ managed to give us Andor, a welcome entry in the Star Wars canon
I liked most of the movies I saw this year, including Top Gun: Maverick, Bullet Train, The Batman, and…. um….
Books… I am sure there were some new books released… lots of them probably

Lows

A fair chunk of what I mentioned above ended up being something of a disappointment
Netflix is chaotic and is as likely to green light garbage or cancel something you really enjoy
I feel the fragmentation of so many streaming channels more and more with each passing year
It was a bit of a struggle to find things that were both new and good in any media
HBO Max is just pulling a bunch of their original content to avoid paying royalties, proving once again if you want to have access to something reliably you should own the physical media
I think I saw one movie in the actual theater this year, Top Gun: Maverick
Thor: Love and Thunder really tried hard to recapture the magic of Thor: Ragnarok… and kind of failed
Top Gun: Maverick was the US box office leader in 2022… not that it was bad, but there apparently wasn’t anything better (Avatar: Way of Water fans will bring up the overseas box office, but that is like losing the objective and claiming you won the ISK war… it doesn’t count… also, TG:M is still winning on that front)

Blogging and Social Media

Highs

The blog is still here and running, now sixteen years into is existence
I posted for 1,000 days in a row
Blaugust was a thing again this year
Some people still visit this site regularly
I did have some good interactions on Twitter, which remains my social media of choice
I spent quite a bit of time on Twitch
If social media gets bad enough, blogging might see a revival!

Lows

Fewer people visited this site this year than in any year since 2007
Any resurgence of long form writing like blogging will probably bypass established blogs to jump onto whatever the trendy platform of the day ends up being
Posting for that many days in a row sounds a lot more interesting than it is… and it doesn’t sound all that interesting
Email subscriptions on the blog pretty much broke this year, and WP.com doesn’t care in the least
Bing decided it doesn’t like WP.com sites, so the bit of traffic they sent me petered out
The local neighborhood of blogs shrank some
My time on Twitch was mostly it being in the background so I could collect channel points or game drops honestly
Facebook remains a horrible dumpster fire
I cannot train Instagram’s algorithm to show me what I want
Elon Musk is trying to turn Twitter into the biggest and loudest dumpster fire in social media
There is no direct replacement for Twitter and what it was
Mastodon has moved from a small collection of individually managed fiefdoms with their own rules and norms and tribes and echo chambers into a somewhat larger version of all of that
Post News is that condo you just bought and are trying to furnish with a limited budget and no free time
Hive doesn’t run in a browser
I used to joke that Linked In was business Facebook, but it has really become that, and I don’t mean in a good way

The World

I’m not sure I have any highs. There is a war in Europe, COVID is still a thing no matter how hard we try to pretend it isn’t, attacks on voting rights, democracy, and free speech have become just part of the normal way of things, and, as always, nobody wealth or famous ever faces any real accountability unless they hard somebody else wealth or famous. And don’t get me started on people who are billionaires. If we could harness self-absorbed narcissism, our dependence on fossil fuels would be solved.

2023

And we’re on to a new year this weekend. Let’s hope for something better.

The Return of Law and Order

3 Replies

Law & Order was a show that ran for 20 seasons, from 1990 until 2010, when it finally ended. It was one of the shows my wife and I used to watch regularly together back in the day. We enjoyed it, and were sad to see it end, though it was very formulaic and followed a seeming set of rules that were rarely violated which often pointed to the answer of every episode.

Law & Order – The original

The pattern of the show was almost always a pre-credits sequence where the crime was committed/discovered, with the police detectives showing up and examining the scene of the crime, something that always ended with a quip from the senior detective on the show, which for many years was the late Jerry Orbach.

Then the show would run the opening credits, after which would come the investigation stage of the hour long drama… the “law” in the title… followed by the district attorney’s office prosecuting the person tracked down by the detectives… which I guess is the “order” part.

There were occasional variations or switch ups… sometimes the first person arraigned wasn’t the perpetrator, and sometimes the perp got a not guilty verdict… but it was a solid formula that spawned a whole franchise, including adaptations in France and the UK.

But the original, with its “bum bum” or “chung chung” musical notes that were a hallmark of the show, went away even as other variations carried on… or died quick deaths, like Law & Order LA.

Now, however, the original is back. It even has some of the original cast, including Sam Waterston as District Attorney Jack McCoy, still on the job after all of these years, and Anthony Anderson as Detective Bernard, still working as a detective in homicide.

Stephen Hill, who was District Attorney Adam Schiff for the first decade of the series, seemed like an old guy when he was playing the part, but Sam Waterston is now older than Stephen Hill ever was on the show. Meanwhile, Anthony Anderson spent a most of a decade starring in the sitcom Black-ish.

The rest of the cast has been filled in by newcomers, with Jeffrey Donovan of Burn Notice fame taking on the role as Bernard’s partner in homicide, Camryn Manheim as their Lieutenant, Hugh Dancy as the assistant DA on the “order” side of the fence, working with Odelya Halevi working as his assistant on cases.

So all the roles are filled and I am fine with all the choices, save for perhaps Hugh Dancy, who comes off as a bit of a dandy at times… though that probably fits his character, so is a minor gripe.

And all the elements of the show are in place, just like the good old days. The pre-credits scene, the opening music with and updated credit sequence, the story flow, it is all there.

But it all feels a little wooden… a little too unsubtle… a little too much like it is trying to make a point and afraid somebody might not get it unless the telegraph it with a big red marker.

Not that the original series was a master class in subtlety. You knew the pattern. You could often spot the killer because they most recognizable guest star wouldn’t be wasted on a subsidiary role.

Here though, every character seems to have an assigned role/point of view they are scripted in every episode to express.

Jeffrey Donovan… who I fear will never have another role as good as Burn Notice… is the brusque, cranky old white guy who must voice the politically incorrect opinion.

Anthony Anderson is the tired of it all black man who has to speak about the way minorities are treated in the US.

Hugh Dancy is the ADA who wants to win his case more than he wants justice, while Odelya Halevi has to be his conscious about right and wrong.

And I am not complaining about the show suddenly being too woke of socially aware… the old episodes could manage that now and then… as much as how the characters are so predictable that you know when they are going to go into those defined roles before they even start speaking. Even the actors seem to realize they are checking a box as their delivery tends to go a bit flat when they are required to step up and fill those roles.

The actors in question… especially Jeffrey Donovan and Anthony Anderson… are capable of much better performances, so it really makes me wonder what is going on. What kind of direction are they getting?

The season does get better as it goes along, and the whole thing has been renewed for another season, so it passed muster better than Law & Order: LA did, but it doesn’t have quite the same spark that the show did back in the day.

Then again, a lot has changed since the original went off the air in 2010. Maybe it is more a sign of the changing times, the way Dragnet became something of a parody of itself as the series wound down in the late 60s.

Back on Tatooine with Old Ben

4 Replies

More Star Wars, more Tatooine. I say yet again, this planet is so important in the galaxy that I don’t know why the Republic or the Empire don’t keep it constantly staffed with masses of troops.

And Disney+ brings us back, this time to follow in the footsteps of Obi-wan Kenobi in order to fill in the gap between Revenge of the Sith and Rogue One, because the company is sure we don’t want any NEW adventures in the galaxy, just an ongoing attempt to fill in any possible gap in the Skywalker narrative. What did Obi-wan get up to while waiting for Luke to grow up?

More Star Wars because more is better

Ten years down the road from the rise of Darth Vader, Obi-wan is living in a cave in the desert and making ends meat by working at the local Hormel meat processing plant where they are stingy with wages, but don’t seem to mind him cutting off a slice at the end of the day to feed his mount. Maybe it is in the union contract. He doesn’t really hide what he is doing.

He tries to keep an eye on Luke, but uncle Own isn’t too keen on that, so Obi-wan becomes a creepy middle age guy with binoculars.

Then there is Leia, a precocious 10 year old on Alderaan, who is living the good life while her twin brother helps eke out life on a moisture farm in the desert.

And, finally, there are the inquisitors, under the command of Darth Vader, who spend their time tracking down Jedi because, as I have suggested elsewhere, the success of Order 66 seemed to be mostly imperial propaganda.

All three of these intersect and Obi-wan has to dig up his lightsaber, leave Tatooine, and get mixed up with the empire again. He and Darth Vader meet up, Obi-wan discovers that Darth Vader is Anakin Skywalker, which I guess could have been a thing… though Anakin getting left for dead and a week later the Emperor has a powerful new Sith Lord by his side seems like it would raise at least a few “so where did he come from?” question in the tabloids… they fight, and then part ways because the beginning and end states of the stories were already set in stone.

Some interesting characters pop up, a few people die, but in the end Obi-wan is back on Tatooine hanging around waiting for Luke to grow up while desert life changes him from 51 year old Ewan McGregor into 63 year old Alec Guinness… I guess that age gap kind of works, which kind of worries me because I am the middle of those two ages… while Darth Vader… I guess completely forgets this whole episode? I don’t know. Again, in his place I might have kept a closer eye on Tatooine going forward given how much shit seems to just happen there.

Was it any good?

Sure, it was fine. I enjoyed it. There were some very good performances. It was originally slated to be a movie, which is how I suspect it got such a good cast… though maybe just being in a Star Wars series is enough. The story kept my interest despite being bound within the constraints to the overall story arc. There were a few insights into the characters that might have been worth the effort.

It didn’t grab me like The Madalorian, where a new and interesting character led us through a different aspect of the Star Wars universe.

But it was much better than The Book of Boba Fett, where we spent four episodes being force fed a dull, and eventually inconsequential, backstory before The Mandalorian came in and dragged the story away from bacta tank flashbacks into the present day.

Anyway, if you’re into it you’ve probably already watched it as well. I mean, the next season of Westworld didn’t even start until the last episode was already live. But, if you decided to give it a miss, you can get the summary with some good visuals from the Honest Trailer.

And, if you’re like me, you’ll watch the commentary for that as well, where they dive into discussing the series. I wasn’t engrossed enough to watch the weekly episode discussion videos, but an overall run through I was good for.

Going Commando – The Obi-wan Show

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds – Paramount+

Halo – Paramount+

Loki – Season 2 – Disney+

The Crown – Season 6 – Netflix

Monarch: Legacy of Monsters – Apple TV+

Slow Horses – Season 3 – Apple TV+

The Brothers Sun – Netflix

Loudermilk – Netflix

Only Murders in the Building – Season 3 – Hulu

Hell on Wheels – AMC+

Blizzard

CCP

Daybreak / Enad Global 7

Other Video Game Items

Tech in General

Television and Movies

Social Media

The Blog and Blogging

Real Life

The World

2024

Ahsoka – Disney+

Loki – Disney+

The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon – AMC+

The Wheel of Time Season 2 – Amazon Prime

The Fall of the House of Usher – Netflix

A Spy Among Friends – MGM+

War of the Worlds – MGM+

The Last of Us – HBO Max

The Night Agent – Netflix

The Recruit – Netflix

The Diplomat – Netflix

Beef – Netflix

The Mandalorian Season 3 – Disney+

Perry Mason Season 2 – HBO Max

Shrinking – Apple TV

1923 – Paramount+

Succession Season Whatever – HBO Max

Blizzard

Enad Global 7

CCP

Other Gaming Industry Notes

Television, Books, and the Media

Blogging and Social Media

The World

2023