Little of this, little of that

“We’ve been in the Void for over a decade, Kamiko.”
“Maybe it’s for the best, Ted, things might be a shitshow out there.”

I'm not coherent enough this evening to put together a "real" post, so I'm figuring to do a kind of potpourri of fragmented thoughts about whatever. Because getting some stuff out of my head seems helpful even when it's scatterbrained.

• First, a brief update on my headspace: The crash-and-burn of the previous post isn't quite in the rear view yet; I'm still climbing out and it's a slower process than I thought it was going to be. I think this is one of those circumstances where it hurts me not to have a day job. Maybe. Anyway, getting going in any given day is still a challenge and sometimes doesn't happen until it's safe outside for vampires and then my tendency to be awake all night reinforces the pattern. Work in progress.
• We had a "bomb cyclone" come through the area the other day and I was without power for not quite 24 hours or so. This also did not help my headspace because without electricity there wasn't much to do during the nocturnal hours I tend to find myself most awake. There's only so much reading one can do by candle illumination and awkwardly-held flashlights. No other inconveniences for me personally, but some folks in the (not-immediate) area had a lot of damage to contend with from wind and toppled trees and such. The rain's been pretty steady ever since, though, and whenever I go out to get the mail I half-expect to see someone building an ark in their driveway.
• Michael Schur is good at TV. I mean, we knew this already, he's not only half of the great PosCast about sports and nonsense, he's also the brains behind The Good Place, Parks and Recreation, and other such things that step up the level of quality and thoughtful humor on television. His latest show is called A Man on the Inside, and it's delightful. Ted Danson stars (with small roles for a couple of other Good Place alums and another for Eugene Cordero) as a widower in need of something to do who gets hired by a private detective to infiltrate a retirement home and be the "man on the inside" in an effort to catch a thief. It's only eight episodes, I watched them all last night. Charming, witty, poignant . . . you know, a Michael Schur joint.
• The Seattle Mariners are cutting ties with a couple of players I'd rather not see them cut ties with. Makes me wonder what they think their doing or if they have any sort of plan. Anyway, today they non-tendered (and thus cast to the free agent winds) both Josh Rojas and Sam Haggerty, two of the only bright spots in the non-pitching portion of the 2024 team. Haggs is recovering from a bad ACL injury and this seems an especially heartless thing to do to him since being with an organization when rehabbing and such can make a huge difference, both in terms of available facilities and financial security (though unless he's squandered it, he's made plenty of money by regular-people standards the last few years even though he's a pauper by professional athlete standards). Haggerty can play seven positions on the field and switch-hits and is the best baserunner in baseball right now (well, not right now, but when he has two working ACLs). And he's inexpensive. Why let him go, just to save a tiny-by-MLB-payroll-standards amount of money? Hard disapprove, Mariners. Rojas surprised me last year by being actually pretty good both as a third baseman and as a batter, though the bar was low; I'd thought of him as the least valuable piece received in the Paul Sewald trade the year before and he proved to be capable. Rojas isn't a key piece of the puzzle, granted, but still sad to see him go. And, this creates a new vacancy to fill—before today, Rojas figured to be at least a platoon partner at one of two infield positions; now, both the second base and third base positions have no one ready to step into them. Unless they're counting on Dylan Moore to fill one, which, ugh. No, thank you. (Or they think Ryan Bliss is ready to be an everyday big-leaguer? Mmmmmayyybe? I mean, good on-base chops in the minors, but all we saw of him with the M's was during the Scott Servais/Jarred deHart reign of error, so who knows.) Dropping these two is another cost-cutting maneuver, saves them maybe $6M in player payroll, but to what end? I guess we'll wait and see.
• Including those Cloud Five strips in my last post (and, yes, I know the C5 site is broken, it's been so for a while now, I just haven't been motivated to fix it) has made me think seriously of reviving it, but if I do I'm not sure what to do about the intervening 11 years or so. I mean, a lot of shit's gone down. Do I age the characters up and just drop into today? Do I pick up where I left off and pull a Newsroom and treat the now of the strip as 2014? Do I do both, do any picking-up-from-before in flashback? Or is it better to just start form scratch on a new thing? Or am I not willing to do that format again? I don't know. It's a big thing to take it up again in any form. Meanwhile I'm just doing some unrelated sketching, which is better than nothing.

Tagged The Black Hole, Baseball, TV, Seattle Mariners   |   Posted on November 22, 2024 at 9:58pm   |   Permalink   |     |  

Distractions

There is no escaping the political situation and impending clusterfrak this country and the world is facing, but just to keep sane I've indulged in pop-culture distractions lately. Some highlights:

• Lower Decks has come back strong in its fifth and final season. I rather enjoyed the Klingon sibling rivalry in the latest episode ("A Farewell to Farms") and the setting of a world newly post-scarcity partying hard while burning all their money in a prior one ("Shades of Green").
• I've also been enjoying the series Shrinking on Apple+. I watched one with my dad while I was down in California and found that it really is impossible to make any sense of it coming into the middle cold, but that's easily taken care of—just start at the beginning. Jason Segel and Harrison Ford and Jessica Williams, all wonderful as therapists that are more screwed up than their patients.
• Superman and Lois is in its final season as well, and it's been . . . fine. I mean, at the end of last season they killed Superman, so picking up from that was a mess, and the show had its budget cut by a ton and they had to lose some supporting characters, but I'm still enjoying it because I'm a big nerd.
• Season two of The Diplomat (Netflix) is just as excellent as season one was. I binged its six episodes in one evening. It might be weird to seek escape from real-life political turmoil in a fictional political mystery/thriller/drama, but I nevertheless recommend it. Great stuff and a big cliffhanger making us suffer the wait for season three.
• I haven't seen any of The Penguin yet. HBO Max, which I don't have access to. Anyone know if it's any good?
• I dug out some old novels from my bookshelf to reread, including some Heinlein books. I just finished Friday, which I first read in 1988 and had almost completely forgotten. Now I'm halfway through Job, which I must have read around that same time in the late ’80s but have no recollection of, so it's like a brand new read now. Kind of unfortunate timing in that Job is a sort of multiverse story and we've been inundated with such premises in our pop culture of late. I was going to reread I Will Fear No Evil, but apparently I don't own a copy of that one. Thought I did. I guess I borrowed it from someone else when I read it in high school; maybe I'll pick one up used somewhere. Heinlein was an interesting character, a real dichotomy of political leanings (mostly libertarian, with an unpleasant penchant for people going armed as a measure of civilization, but also in favor of regulations protecting civil rights and equality) and a brilliant futurist while still retaining a shocking-by-today's-standard level of sexism—Friday and Job are among his later works, published in the early 1980s, while most of his catalog comes from the ’50s and ’60s—in nearly all of his characters. But all of his stories have big ideas, big romance, big personalities, and fine writing if sometimes a little scattered. Some of my earliest sci-fi reads were his YA books, and I'd be curious to revisit one or two of those to see how they hold up.

Anyone have other recommendations for good distraction media? I think we're going to need a lot of it.

Tagged TV, Books   |   Posted on November 12, 2024 at 6:45pm   |   Permalink   |     |  

TV time and other stray thoughts

Did you know there was more Resident Alien? There is!

Last night I was umpiring playoff games, which was a reminder that we're nearing the end of 2023’s softball action for umpiring (softball action as a player ended for the year several weeks back). As the staggered-schedule late-summer leagues wrap up, there are fewer of them to go around for us umps and the last one standing will end in just a few more weeks. With luck, the remainder of my season will follow the pattern of last night, which featured many of my favorite players/teams to work with and was a fun time. It may have been a first, a shift of 3 or more games in which every game had at least two faves in it. Those are the good nights. No troubles. Or rather, even if there are troubles, they're minor and nobody raises a stink if I have to do something unconventional to make up for missing something on the field, as was the case with a weird multiple-baserunner play yesterday. Attitude is everything for umpires at this level of rec league, we're not invested in who wins (well, we're not supposed to be, anyway) we just want everyone to have a good time and to not be yelled at or belittled if we screw up a call. (And especially not when we didn't screw up a call but a player thinks we did. Those are the worst.)

Anyway, this is not an umpiring post but one about how I'm going to have a lot more free evenings going forward. Some of which will be occupied with a resumption of nerd nights here with fellow Trek geeks a couple times a month reliving the awesomeness that is Deep Space Nine, but also with new entries in our golden age of television. Such as:

• Resident Alien. While listening to a political podcast today, I heard mention of the renewal of the great Alan Tudyk show for a fourth season. All right! I thought. Quickly followed by, wait there was a third season already? How did I miss that? Turns out, yeah, the third season premiered earlier this year on a cable network, thus I completely missed it (my days as a cable subscriber have been over for a while). But knowing it exists, I will find it. If you've not seen it, the first two seasons are on Netflix. Check it out.
• Orphan Black: Echoes. The original Orphan Black series was awesome, with Tatiana Maslany expertly playing multiple roles as a woman discovers she's one of many clones and joins up with some of them to solve the mystery of their existence. This is a sequel centering on the daughter of one of the Tatiana Maslany clones, now an adult played by Krysten Ritter (who will always be Jessica Jones to me). I didn't know this even existed, but since the original was so great I will now look it up on whatever platform I can find it on. Apparently it's not a critical hit, but that isn't going to dissuade me.
• Quantum Leap. The first season of the sequel/reboot show on NBC was pretty good, but I was assuming it would be canceled, because networks tend to cancel their good genre shows before they find an audience. (Still upset about Defying Gravity? Yeah, kinda. That show would have been a big hit as a streaming show today.) But no, it got renewed and will be back in a month or so!
• Sunny (サニー). Nearing the end of its first season on Apple TV, this show appeals to me as a sci-fi show set in a near-future with "homebots" and as a show set in Japan with a fair amount of Japanese spoken. Also it stars Rashida Jones, who is always great, and a woman who goes by "Annie the Clumsy," whom I'd never heard of before but who is both funny and super-cute.
• Only Murders in the Building is back. Always fun.
• Leverage: Redemption. Again, how did I miss that this had another season? Well, it did, and I will be watching it. Moving platforms probably didn't help in terms of my missing it. It's getting a season three, too, which is cool even though it'll be on Amazon. &@%$in' Amazon.

I'll have to wait a while for Lower Decks season 5, Silo season 2, Severance season 2, The Diplomat season 2, Good Omens season 3, Outlander season 7B, and For All Mankind season 5, but those are on the way too. It's a good time to be a couch potato. Assuming you also get some exercise, of course.

Tagged TV, Umping   |   Posted on August 29, 2024 at 8:24pm   |   Permalink   |     |  

Hollywood on strike

I just started "Silo," so it's not on my list yet, but it might get there. So far so good.

With the Writers' Guild of American and the Screen Actors Guild both on strike—for very good reasons I wholeheartedly support, for whatever that's worth—we likely won't be getting much in the way of new TV for a long while. Nothing good, anyway; I'm sure there will be lots of brainless unscripted "reality" garbage and revivals of old game shows galore, but the real stuff we look forward to might be off the menu for the duration of what could be a lengthy battle with studio greed and exploitation.

So what to do in the interim? If you're like my dad, nothing changes; he doesn't watch much TV outside of news. But if you're like many of us, you'll need to find something to fill your entertainment hours. For those sorts, I have recommendations.

There's been so much quality programming out there since the streaming era dawned and chances are you've missed some of it. I'm sure I have too, so if you like something that I don't mention below, say so in the comments and maybe I'll give it a look.

But these shows are gold. They might not all be your personal cup of tea, but the quality of production and writing in them are top-notch. So add these to your streaming queues if you've not already partaken:

Other recent/current shows are also worth a look—Only Murders in the Building, Hello Tomorrow, Russian Doll, plenty of others—but those listed above are my cream of the crop. Of course, even I have not seen everything. What are some of your faves from the last couple of years? Sound off and let me know.

Tagged Star Trek, TV   |   Posted on July 29, 2023 at 4:54am   |   Permalink   |     |  

The Apple problem

I'm late to the Ted Lasso party. I had heard from many people in many contexts how it was a great show that I would really enjoy and the I was missing out by not watching it, but there were two issues in addition to the general reality of there's-so-much-enjoyable-TV-these-days-and-only-so-much-time-I-can-watch. They were: a) It's a show set in the world of English soccer, and I do not like soccer; and b) It is a show on Apple TV+.

Now, (a) is not a problem, as it turns out; as with many workplace shows, the soccer thing is merely a setting for the characters and not liking soccer is not a detriment to enjoying the show. But (b) was a real trouble spot.

Apple's streaming platform has garnered a reputation (deserved) for quality. The programming is high-end, no doubt, and the high-definition stream is as good or better than anyone else's, but on that technical side of things there is no accommodation for viewers who do not have one of the following: An Apple-made television; a Roku or other reception device dedicated to streaming video; an Apple device like a Macintosh computer or an up-to-date iPhone that can run the TV+ app (there is an Android app, but it won't work on most Android devices); or a PC equipped with a top-end internet connection and supercharged modern processing hardware. They clearly tailor the service for Apple machines as a way to try and increase the Apple marketshare.

As I don't own any Apple hardware or a Roku-like dedicated streaming device, the Apple TV+ service was incredibly problematic to use. My dedicated streaming device is an old laptop PC running Windows 10 and hooked up to my television. It has perfectly adequate processing power to run any other streaming service with no problems. But trying to watch Apple TV+ on it was nearly impossible—livestreams, like when the Mariners are on the exclusive Apple TV Friday night telecast, play with more buffering and stuttering than is even remotely tolerable; and their shows would load and play through the opening preroll ad and then freeze up on a black screen. So, even though the Apple TV+ subscription fee is quite reasonable, it was basically worthless to me.

Still, I had two or three times signed up for the service in an attempt to legitimately watch one of the greatest shows ever made for television, For All Mankind. When I could not make the service work, I resorted to piracy to watch that excellent program. Because it is awesome, and I had given Apple a month's worth of subscription fee for zero return so I felt OK about it. But after the last time the Mariners game was unwatchable on Apple TV+, I went on a quest to find a way to make the damn thing work, and the ultimate solution was to completely wipe the laptop and reload a bare-bones Windows installation, add no programs to the machine except for browsers, a video player, and antivirus software. Give it the lightest workload possible while still running a relatively modern operating system, then tweak the browser settings in every conceivable way to prioritize the handling of video streams.

It now works. I can watch Apple TV+. Livestreams still suck, presumably because I don't have a T1 line and a massive quad-core processor on that old laptop, but recorded programming does play properly so long as nothing else is running concurrently. (Apple TV+ livestreams, incidentally, also suck on my office machine, which is considerably more powerful.)

I have therefore, as of last night, become a Ted Lasso convert.

All the folks who sang its praises to me were right. It unabashedly showcases a hero that is the nicest, most generous guy that ever lived, who takes mounds of abuse and lets it roll off his back, and who slowly wins over the critics by simply doing his own thing and being dedicated to his values. Totally my kind of thing. I love it. Even though it's ostensibly about a soccer team.

I'm about halfway through the first season now, so please no spoilers, but since the Mariners are off tonight I will likely spend my late-night tonight watching a few more episodes after I get home from my umpiring shift and will no doubt binge through the rest over the next few weeks.

Unless, of course, my brilliant machinations to run Apple TV+ stop working.

Tagged TV, Apple+, Streaming, Ted Lasso   |   Posted on September 12, 2022 at 5:32pm   |   Permalink   |     |  

Streaming service economics

I watch a lot of TV. My friend Erik watches tons of movies, which I don't do that much; he's your go-to if you want to know what recent release is worth your time. But I revel in the age of television we now live in.

Which is becoming a problem.

Not in the couch-potato, get-off-your-duff-and-go-outside sense, though I could definitely use a bit more exercise. But in the how-much-is-this-costing-me? sense.

Used to be TV was the free alternative to movies. You had to sit through 10-18 minutes of commercials per hour, but no out-of-pocket. Then we had cable, which still had commercials to sit through but gave a wider selection of content for a fee. Then satellite gave cable real competition, but it was still the model of pay-for-a-variety-of-content.

Then came the internet. As shows and news and sports went online, we began cutting cords, as it were. I dropped my DirecTV service several years ago when baseball became available to watch online. Cable shows I enjoyed were still out there to see on websites and/or with DVD releases (and Netflix came around, providing easy DVD rentals).

Now it's internet streaming. Cool. At least, cool when it was just Netflix. Then Netflix and maybe Hulu. OK. Netflix and Hulu cost a bit, but it's still way cheaper than paying for cable/satellite.

Today it's a different story. Everyone, it seems, has a streaming service, and each one has some great stuff one wants to see. To subscribe to every service with a show you want to watch you're now having to, once again, pay the amount of money you dropped cable to save. And more services keep appearing.

Some of us work around this by sharing accounts. Netflix in particular wants to crack down on this and make every user pay their own way. If they succeed, I'm not sure it will redound to their benefit—for a lot of us it simply isn't affordable to pay everyone, there's a finite sum to pay out for TV streaming and some services will be dropped.

I absolutely love shows on several services, and most of the best TV is now streaming-only:

• Netflix has fun original series like Sex Education, Dead to Me, Another Life, Never Have I Ever, The Umbrella Academy, Stranger Things, Ozark, Big Mouth, and on and on. Plus, among the tons of international stuff are Japanese shows like Fishbowl Wives and Midnight Diner, which besides being good shows offer an opportunity to test my Nihon-go language skills.
• Hulu has essentials like The Orville and Only Murders in the Building and The Handmaid's Tale, as well as old series I enjoy revisiting occasionally like M*A*S*H and Mary Tyler Moore.
• Paramount+ is now home to all things Star Trek, making it critical.
• Disney+ likewise has all the Marvel stuff (and Star Wars stuff, which, yeah, cool, but not as essential).
• HBO Max has the DC Comics series like Doom Patrol and Titans.
• Apple TV+ has For All Mankind. (Also Ted Lasso, which I have not yet seen but hear is excellent.)
• Amazon Prime Video is a tough one, because Amazon is an evil corporation even by evil corporation standards, but it has some of the best stuff: Paper Girls, Man in the High Castle, The Expanse, A League of Their Own, The Boys, and one of their first originals from several years back, Alpha House.

Subscribing to all of these services at the no-ads rate would run you about $75 each month. You can save a little by opting for commercials, but not a lot. And that's just today, rates are of course going to eventually go up. So now we're over the cost of cable TV, except none of this stuff is available there. And we're not even counting the lesser-known services like Peacock Premium or Starz.

Is this model tenable? Or will the proliferation of new services that snatch content away from the existing ones, ala Marvel's Netflix originals moving to D+ and Star Treks to P+, reach a breaking point?

One of the chief benefits of these services is that they're 100% on-demand, you can choose what to watch when you want to watch it, but how much is it worth when you're only interested in one or two of the service's offerings? Especially since a TV "season" on streaming is half of what we grew up with on network. Or less—Paper Girls' first season was only eight episodes.

Those of us that are more cash-strapped are sharing for now. The more services make that difficult/impossible the more we'll start to see if this can continue or if the model needs to change and consolidate. Hulu might be the first casualty now that all the corporate merging has brought it under the Disney umbrella; after various rights agreements run their course it might just get absorbed into D+ (which would inevitably up the fee for D+).

I suppose a patient person could wait until a show's season has run its course and subscribe for one month, binge the season, and cancel. Stagger the services you pay for throughout the year. At least with traditional TV you can record stuff to watch multiple times, you can't do that with streaming, so you'd have to be content with one-and-done if you staggered the binges. Or "buy" seasons if/when they become available on Vudu or iTunes or the like.

Anyway. It's a bigger budget item all the time. Eventually it will max out.

Tagged TV   |   Posted on August 23, 2022 at 12:56am   |   Permalink   |     |  

Potpourri

I don't feel coherent enough today to put together a cogent post on any particular subject, so here are a few fragments of thoughts on several topics...

• I didn't get around to doing my usual baseball postseason predictions, but if I had I would have predicted thusly:
  • LDS: Houston over Boston, Cleveland over New York; Los Angeles over Arizona, Washington over Chicago.
  • LCS: Houston over Cleveland, Los Angeles over Washington.
  • World Series: Houston over Los Angeles.
  So I'm batting .500 so far. Houston is, unfortunately, very very good, and I don't see them losing more than a few games the whole way. If anyone can beat them, though, it's probably LA; the Dodgers are crazy deep and might be able to keep the Astros in check, but it'd be an upset. So far, the playoffs have been fun but not that memorable save for the Cubs/Nationals Game 5, which was insane. Reminded me a little of the 15-14 game in the 1993 World Series, but the '93 game at least had rainy conditions and a wet field to blame the horrible pitching on; the Nats and Cubs were just playing as if hexed, which some Washington, DC, fans might think is plausible given the Nationals' seeming inability to win a playoff series no matter how may leads they take. One of the freakier games I've ever seen.
• My housing search has been going in earnest for a few months now, and I'm getting rather discouraged. When I was looking "unofficially" over the past year or so, before I had the money in hand to actually buy anything, there seems to be enough listings popping up every now and then to make me feel like this would be a relatively quick to-do once I had the cash in hand, but it's not turned out that way. Just in that time the market seems to have inflated to a disturbing degree, and I've started expanding my search radius outside of the city. I don't want to leave the city proper, but thanks to fucking Amazon and other big biz luring people here with higher-end paychecks and a lack of development in housing starts, I might not have a choice. Even if I continue to rent, things are bad — I got socked with the second rent hike of 20+% in the last few years recently, making staying where I am untenable in the long term. Goddamn Amazon.com... I'm having a look at a townhome near the edge of the city limits tomorrow at an open house. We'll see how that goes.
• In addition to Discovery, the premiere of which I opined on here and which continues to be solidly engrossing, I've been enjoying The Orville, The Good Place, Mr. Robot, and The Gifted on the TeeVee. I'm unsurprisingly disappointed so far in The Inhumans, though. Still, it's a good time to be a nerd with all the geeky TV series these days.
• I thought I had more brain droppings to write about, but my mental haze must be thicker than I realized. Bleh.

Tagged Baseball, TV, Housing   |   Posted on October 14, 2017 at 11:58pm   |   Permalink   |     |