Artemis II, Congressional backbone, and a no-drama ump shift

I could do separate posts on separate topics tonight, but I'm not feeling really coherent about any of them so I'm just gonna wing it with a hodgepodge.

• ITEM: If We Can Put a Man on the Moon, Why Haven't We Put Anyone on the Moon Since 1972?

  Well, we're on our way to rectifying that with the success of Artemis II, which has been quite impressive and which has been a needed reminder in this age of chaos and idiocy that is the early 21st Century that we as a species and as a culture can achieve great things for the common good if we just choose to. The Artemis II mission went off without a hitch, with the Integrity spacecraft successfully testing and evaluating the launch infrastructure and vessel components as well as navigation to the moon and back. Thus providing key information on what needs to be tweaked and improved for the scheduled Artemis III mission next year—for orbital tests of new lunar landing craft—and Artemis IV in 2028, which will be a crewed lunar landing. Of course, I can't help but be somewhat skeptical of those schedules because the landing craft are to be provided by SpaceX. Any outfit owned and run by Elon Musk can't really be trusted, can it? So for that Artemis III mission I expect problems. We'll see.

  Seth Masket wrote this in his newsletter today and it resonated with me:

  One thing that really stood out is that this is really NASA at its finest. Not that this is the most important mission they ever pulled off, but they did this in a competent way that celebrated the achievements and kept the crew and the science at the forefront of the project. This wasn’t some billionaire throwing celebrities or cars into orbit as a vanity project—this was a collective effort to send experts in to do a job and come home safely. We don’t see that sort of thing much these days. I’m guessing few people would describe many government agencies as inspiring, but this one counts for me.

  Plus, the photos from Integrity are fantastic:

  

  

• ITEM: We Finally Have an Answer!

  Having asked the question for over a year now, we know the answer to "what has to happen before people in Congress call for impeachment?!!" What had to happen, evidently, is for the alleged president of the United States to threaten genocide. Good, yes, this is a war crime and undeniably an impeachable offense, but we all saw some version of this coming the whole way. It's not even his first war crime. But, OK, let's not get hung up on why you were late to the party and just be glad you finally got here. There are now dozens of Congressional Democrats calling for impeachment (or the invocation of the 25th Amendment, but (a) 25A isn't going to happen with this VP and cabinet, and (b) if it did happen it wouldn't work, though the chaos it would instigate would be interesting). I doubt any are under the impression it will go anywhere so long as Mike Johnson remains Speaker, but it's absolutely necessary for Congresspeople and Senators to be calling for the removal of Felon47, loudly and frequently, lest the public fall victim to the wider corporate media's repeated implications that this is all normal and acceptable behavior from any public official let alone a President. Calls for impeachment need to be in the news each and every time Felon47 does or says something criminal, stupid, corrupt, and insanely dangerous, which is basically every day. And the calls should be varied in their presentation—some should be emphasizing the utter stupidity and madness of his war, others the flagrant corruption of the entire regime, still others the abuses of ICE and DHS, still others the rampant racism and misogyny exhibited in all of the various atrocities the regime commits.

  As columnist Will Bunch put it: "We must stop the killing and the crime spree—not 33 months from now, as Trump’s mental health continues to deteriorate before our eyes, but today. The indisputable truth that the president took America into an undeclared and illegal war for no reason, and lost that war in barely a month, should be the wake-up call for everyone still in denial."

  Now, the remaining question is what has to happen before Republicans figure out he needs to be removed?

   

• ITEM: Still No Bingo!

  I had a three-game umpire shift at Capitol Hill last night, which had very little in the way of drama or oddities. Except that it was a championship series, and usually I have prizes to give out to the winning team at the end of such things. Certificates good for credit at a sponsor bar and a discount on future league fees, typically, sometimes along with a token like championship wristbands or T-shirts. Actually, we haven't had T-shirts since pre-COVID. Those might never come back, I don't know. Anyway, last night I had nothing. No prizes to be had. I presume this was an oversight, because some of the other, regular game stuff was also not present in my provided batch of gear, so I merely noted it in my report and assume that the winning teams will be given their prizes at a later date. Meantime, the Bingo card remains un-bingoed:

  

• ITEM: For All Mankind is Back!

  The brilliant alternate-history series For All Mankind is three episodes into its fifth season on Apple TV+ and it is, as usual, awesome. It's changed a lot since its first season, but that's by design—the show begins in 1969, when the Soviet Union is the first nation to land a person on the moon and thus history as we know it begins to diverge and the space race continues on in a much different fashion, with the US feeling the need to one-up the Soviets and vice-versa. (Technically, the point of historical divergence, according to showrunner/creator Ronald D. Moore, was in 1966, when Sergei Korolev survived a routine surgery rather than died from its complications; Korolev was the prime force behind the Soviet moon mission in both "our" reality and in the FAM history, where he was able to continue on.) Each new season begins with a time jump of about nine years, each season premiere showing a brief retrospective on what has happened in the world in the interim, where we not only see things like new technological advances borne of the continued space race, but what became of President Ted Kennedy (who due to the Soviet moon landing fallout canceled his trip to Chappaquiddick in 1969 and defeated Richard Nixon in 1972) and his razor-thin loss to Reagan in 1976; how the astronaut program forges support for the ERA, which is ratified in 1974; how the Camp David Accord meetings end in failure under President Reagan; how John Lennon survived an assassination attempt in 1980 and reunited the Beatles for a concert tour in 1987; that Blockbuster Video opens its first store on the moon in 2007; and so on. All that stuff is just background, though, the show is really about a cast of astronaut/cosmonaut characters and their support people and families, a few of whom appear in all five seasons (spanning forty-some years). Some of my faves aren't in season 5, but maybe they'll make appearances later on even though they'd be pushing 80. As the series goes on, life in space becomes more and more prevalent—by season two there is a permanent moon presence, by season three we have space tourism, season four establishes permanence of a sort on Mars, and here in season 5 we have a proto-Mars colony complete with refugee immigrants. It's more and more sci-fi as we get further and further from 1969, but the show is still, well, grounded in realism and logical politics and is just damn well written with compelling human dramas. It's an awesome show and you should watch it.

Tagged Umping, Politics, Space, TV, Posted on April 11, 2026 at 12:50AM   |   Permalink   |     |  

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Art imitating life imitating art

After listening to some recap analysis of Felon47’s pointless address to the nation last night—no, I didn't watch the thing itself, that clearly wasn't going to be useful—I decided to switch gears into some comic-book inspired escapism and watch the latest two episodes of Daredevil: Born Again. But it turned out not to be much in the way of escapism.

The series reimagines a more-than-a-decade-old Marvel Comics storyline wherein Wilson Fisk, the Kingpin of Crime, becomes mayor of New York City. It's good, well-done in a way that's true to the characters and compelling to watch (though brutally violent in spots), but also depressing because the parallels between Fisk's governance of New York and Felon47’s governance of the United States are a bit too on the nose.

Not intentionally, of course. The source material predates even the administration of Fraudster45, and the scripts for the series were being written before the 2024 election campaign. But how could it not parallel?

The premise of placing a career criminal in a position of massive political power demands plotlines and story tropes that show staggering corruption, manipulation of the press, mob-tactic intimidation, shocking levels of cruelty, even an extra-legal "police force" terrorizing the public. So it's really inevitable that the real-life career criminal given a position of massive political power mirrors the fictional one.

Thankfully, the real-life analog of Wilson Fisk is not nearly as smart. Fisk is a cruel, psychologically broken, utterly corrupt narcissist, but he has intelligence enough to be truly terrifying. Our alleged president is, by contrast, one of the stupidest people on Earth. Which is its own kind of terrifying, to be sure, but does set him apart.

Fisk is opposed by our hero, Matt Murdock aka Daredevil, a lawyer by trade and, despite his tactics of masked vigilantism, believer in the rule of law ultimately taking down Fisk and his corrupt empire. Also on the side of good is internet journalist BB Urich, who by day produces videos that show New Yorkers supporting Fisk's outwardly keeping-us-safe policies while by night making subversive videos that mock Fisk as "Mayor Kingpin," exposing what she can of Fisk's corrupt and violent underbelly. We don't have Daredevil to oppose Felon47, but we do have rule of law, at least for now. We don't have a BB Urich either, and we could use one; but there are journalists outside the mainstream that keep digging for evidence of criminality that might finally take the regime down.

As the series approaches resolution, we know Fisk will be deposed and receive some sort of comeuppance; sadly, we don't have the same surety for his real-life analog. But it does give me a weird sort of hope.

 

Tagged Politics, President VonClownstick, Daredevil, TV, Comics, Posted on April 2, 2026 at 4:56PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

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SFA honors The Sisko

SAM taking in the exhibits of the Sisko Museum

The newest Star Trek show, Starfleet Academy, dropped its fifth episode this week. Titled "Series Acclimation Mil," which is the full name of the holographic alien character known as SAM, it does everything right that much of Strange New Worlds season three did wrong. It's offbeat but true to theme, character-driven in ways that are wholly satisfying, and honors what came before—specifically, major aspects of the third Trek series, Deep Space Nine—with reverent fealty.

SAM is a character that we knew nothing about other than that she's a delightful mystery. This episode, as she tells us directly in the first minute, is all about her. We learn about her background, but we also learn a lot about who she is—and so does she, which is precisely the sort of writing a show like this, with a YA focus, absolutely needs.

We learn that SAM is an emissary from the planet Kasq, created to learn about the species and cultures of the Federation and determine if they, as organic beings, are basically trustworthy or are they likely to behave as the organic beings that created the Kasqians long ago did and attempt to oppress artificially-created beings like the people of Kasq into servitude. SAM refers to the Kasqians as her "makers," and the makers are really impatient. They've given SAM a task and want results; they're not interested in SAM's experiences on a personal level or what she thinks about music, just find out if it's safe to leave isolation and present copious evidence why or why not.

So when SAM learns that there was an historic figure named Benjamin Sisko that was not only a great Starfleet wartime captain but also a mythological figure in the planet Bajor's culture as the emissary of the alien beings known as the Bajoran prophets, she immediately feels a kinship and wants to learn more. When it seems that Sisko's reluctant acceptance of being the emissary and his ultimate disappearance—believed by the Bajorans, at least, to be a transition from living as a human being to living among the prophets themselves—meant that he was not able to live the life he wanted to live, she really identifies.

It's brilliant. It uses both in-universe history and a writers' room expertise and respect for DS9 to tell a story all about this new character of SAM, one that parallels a lot of people's experience as a youngster gone off to college to fulfill a parent's desire for them—become a doctor, a lawyer, a business mogul—only to discover for themselves that they want to be something else, or at least to find their own way to a path. As with the best of DS9, we also get mysteries of spiritualism versus provable facts, ponderings of what traits are really the important ones in a personality, and questions of free will and destiny and whether they can co-exist.

There's other goofy stuff in this one too, small bits furthering the stories of other characters and a B-story developing Holly Hunter's Chancellor Ake and her War College counterpart Commander Kelrec's odd relationship and giving Bob Picardo and Tig Notaro scenes to show off their comic chops (my favorite line in the episode might well be when Tig's Commander Reno just says "No" through a mini-bullhorn to Picardo's Doctor). But really this is SAM's journey, and I'm loving it.

There's still a lot of ambivalence about Starfleet Academy as a project; it is a YA-oriented show and as such isn't as interesting to some in the demographic that has long enjoyed this now-60-year-old franchise. But this episode, written with reverence by Tawny Newsome and Kirsten Beyer, two women who both know their Trek backwards and forwards and know how to handle story structure and character development, shows how appealing to a YA audience doesn't have to mean dumbing down your material.

Tagged Star Trek, TV, Posted on February 6, 2026 at 10:57PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

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Academy points

The latest Star Trek series premiered this week, and as will surprise no one, I have opinions.

What might surprise some is that generally my opinions are positive.

From the moment it was announced, this new show—Starfleet Academy—was met with cynicism, or at least trepidation. Some of that comes from previous projects centered around the titular institution that never got very far along in a production process before dying at the studio. Some just comes from the idea that by its nature, a series set at Starfleet Academy will largely revolve around youngsters, and the derisive nicknames began flying around social media: Star Trek: 90210, Dawson's Starship, Ten Things I Hate About Starfleet, Hogwarts in Space, you get the idea.

For myself, I wasn't concerned about the potentially YA-focused nature of an Academy show; Star Trek's universe is vast and can support all sorts of shows. Besides, some of my most favorite TV series have been YA-centric, from My So-Called Life to Buffy the Vampire Slayer to Freaks & Geeks. It's all about how its written.

Which is where my concern lay, because at its core Starfleet Academy is a spinoff from Star Trek: Discovery, a series that was... let's say problematic. I liked Discovery generally, but it suffered from writing issues throughout that annoyed me no end. As this new show was building off that one, and it was coming on the heels of the disappointing third season of Strange New Worlds, my expectations were low. But so far I'm pleasantly surprised. It's well done. At least, I think so; your mileage may vary.

Somewhat counter-intuitively, by placing the show in the far-future of Discovery's later seasons (the mid 3100s), thematically SFA can be about more contemporary 21st-Century issues—as established in Discovery, around the turn of the millennium an event colloquially known as The Burn happened, which effectively prevented interstellar travel for over a century and thus fractured the United Federation of Planets and plunged the various galactic civilizations into a kind of technologically varied dark age of isolationism and conflict. By the end of Discovery, the issues of The Burn had been solved and galactic society was beginning to interconnect again. So this new show exists in an era where the next generation has to clean up the messes of prior generations and where a regression in human (and alien) behavior has become something of an embarrassment in need of repair. So, climate change metaphors, political overtones recalling some of Felon47’s policies, things like that can be done in a way that would be impossible in other, more utopian Trek eras.

The characters, both the young cadets and the more mature adults, are all interesting in their own ways. The "legacy" characters imported from previous shows—Bob Picardo's holographic Doctor from Voyager and Jett Reno and Charlie Vance from Discovery—are delightful, series star Holly Hunter is as brilliant as one would expect Holly Hunter to be as Captain Ake, and the villain played by Paul Giamatti is fun in a completely over-the-top melodramatic sort of way. As for the young'uns, the main cadet, Caleb Mir, is played by Sandro Rosta, who thankfully has the acting chops to make him likeable and indentifiable while also being a young punk with a chip on his shoulder. With the rest there are some TV tropes used, but so far not to the point of being detrimental.

Mir and fellow cadet Darem Reymi suffer from too much machismo, both exuding the sort of manly-man competitive alpha-dog energy that I would hope would be extinct by the 23rd century, let alone the 32nd. They are clearly being set up to be the bully and headstrong tough guy types that initially hate each other but become buds, and the pilot episode (cleverly) contrived a scenario where they and their fellow core cadets have to work together in a crisis and learn to respect each other's skillsets. Then we have Cadet Genesis Lythe, the requisite nepo baby; daughter of a Starfleet admiral, she's lived her whole life in space and likes to verbally prank people. She's the one with natural leadership ability that takes charge. Our "outsider" character, a must in Star Trek casts, is Cadet SAM (short for Series Acclimation Mil, whatever that means), a "photonic" (read: hologram) that while programmed to feel 17 has only existed for four months. SAM is a delight, but I have many questions about her character that have yet to be addressed, not the least of which is, how does she exist and what sort of culture created her and why? We also have med student and oddly gentle Klingon Jay-den Klaag, who likes to birdwatch and has no desire to seek glory in battle. We've not seen much of him yet, but I like the concept.

The character I don't like much at this stage is Lura Thok, the "cadet master" and first officer of the Athena, which is both starship and, when docked on the Academy grounds, main campus facility. Thok is a Klingon/Jem'Hadar hybrid (something that also demands explanation at some point since the Jem'Hadar of the 24th century are all grown artificially), and thus has an overtly militaristic attitude and a hostile affectation. She behaves much like a drill sergeant, which I would also hope would be out of favor in the future but I might be able to headcanon as appropriate in a post-Burn society.

Most of these are supporting characters to the leads of Captain Ake and Cadet Mir, who have a relationship based in Ake's guilt for being part of a legal proceeding that separated Mir from his mother during the Burn times, an event that started Mir on a path of petty crimes in a lifelong quest to find his mom (played in a flashback sequence by the exquisite Tatiana Maslany, whom I hope we'll see more of). Ake is recruited to head up this new Starfleet Academy in part by Admiral Vance pulling strings to locate Mir and put Ake in position to free Mir from an alien prison, though the whereabouts of Mama Mir are still a mystery. The dynamic between the two is complex and it works very well, with Ake supporting and nurturing Mir while Mir works to balance his own agenda with being a cadet and learning to respect and forgive Ake for their past history.

So I like it. It's a strong pilot episode with a lot to work off of.

The one real problem I have, and I'm not sure how to mitigate it, is the use of contemporary language and slang in the scripts. One of the great jokes in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home revolved around Kirk and Spock trying to fit in with 1980s Americans by using profanity and doing it poorly because it wasn't part of their contemporary culture. Yet here in 3100-whatever, people are using 2020s slang terms all the time. It's jarring and takes the viewer out of the scene. And yet, I understand using it; it's unreasonable to think young 20-somethings would not use slang, and the alternative is to go the Battlestar Galactica route and invent made-up slang and swears, but that would also be jarring. Still, I don't think anyone of any age would be saying things like, "I'm [fill in the blank], bitch" in a thousand years' time.

Episode two brings more characters into the mix amidst a story centered on Vance and company's attempt to being Betazed back into the Federation; two children of the Betazoid president end up enrolling at the Academy (well, one does, the other enrolls in the Starfleet "war college," a remnant from the Burn years that we've yet to learn much about). It's a classic Trek episode with diplomacy and politics and smart dialogue with none of the failings of Discovery anywhere to be seen. A strong and promising start to a series I didn't think I would care for.

What'd you all think, fellow nerds?

Nerdy observations

• In addition to the prominent "James T. Kirk pavilion" and "Sato Atrium," the Academy grounds has a "Boothby Gardens" and the Athena has a wall of heroes with prominent names from Star Trek history. Amusing to me was "Admiral  Harry S.L. Kim," referencing the ensign from Voyager who appeared destined to never be promoted, a thing that was expertly parodied on Star Trek: Lower Decks; it would be hilarious if sometime later on we learn that that refers to someone else with the same name. Irritatingly, it also lists "Lt Julian Bashir," which, great, shoutout to Julian, but the dude never got a promotion? Come on. :) Oh, there's also "Cmdr Hugh Culber," which is nice but I presume all the names on the wall are memorials for deceased folk? Is Hugh dead (again)? He's still fine last we saw him in Discovery.
• Stephen Colbert voices the "digital dean of students," which means we hear his voice announcing various things in the halls. Sometimes funnyish, but is "hanger" also a term that will still be used in the 32nd century?
• Ake and her bridge officers are quick to consider and eventually implement lethal measures against the pirate crew that attacks the Athena in the pilot, and characters are seen to celebrate them (one joyfully declaring the casual obliteration of the pirates' ship "a teachable moment"). I'm hopeful that this sort of thing will be an ongoing sort of subplot of the show, a look at behavior that during the Burn era became acceptable and second-nature but will be recognized as something counter to what Starfleet and the UFP are supposed to be; this seems like a good area to utilize Tig Notaro's Jett Reno, someone who spent the majority of her life in the 23rd century, as a voice of conscience. I'm not confident in that, though, given that this is still an Alex Kurtzman-led show and he remains tainted in my head as a big part of the J.J. Abrams movies.
• A cover of the song "San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)" by Rufus Wainwright is played during the sequence where the Athena docks at the Academy grounds. It's just score, it isn't something heard by the characters, but it's still an anachronism that I could have done without.
• At the end of episode two, Betazed agrees to return to the Federation when they are offered to host the new UFP capitol/seat of government. Cool. But I am now wondering about any Vulcan/Ni'Var officials having to live on Betazed surrounded by telepaths who are comparatively hedonistic. I imagine it might cause people to think twice about running for a Federation Council seat. Human politician: "You would be great on the Council, T’Zal, you should run for a seat." Vulcan: "Perhaps, though I am reluctant to commit to lengthy residences on Betazed; it would tax my psionic discipline." Human: "Well, you've got the figure for formal events. Besides, it could be worse, the capitol could have gone to Delta IV." Vulcan: [silence for several seconds, then turns and walks away]
• Captain Ake continues the tradition of Starfleet captains that prefer paper books to reading on PADDs. She also wears reading glasses, an anachronism that might be explained away the James T. Kirk way (allergies) or the Kovich way (stylistic affectation). Unlikely that it would be the Pelia way (hoarding things from her Lanthanite youth) as she's too young at 422 to have been around when eyeglasses were a common thing.
• The look of the show is largely appealing, but there's a bit too much J.J. Abrams/Discovery creep with things being shiny. Also, the bridge of the Athena is impractically ginormous, and what's with the sort of heatlamp-like overhead lights?
• It's going to be a sort of drinking game with this show whenever they need to include a line explaining why the instantly-jumping spore-drive-propelled USS Discovery can't come to the rescue. We got the excuse that's it's undergoing a refit in episode one.
• Sadly, the tradition of pointed sideburns did not survive the Burn, it seems. The 'burns were burned?
• I've seen/heard a few Californians nitpick that for all the talk of Starfleet Academy being in San Francisco, when the Athena lands and docks on campus it's across the Golden Gate in Marin County (consistent with where The Next Generation placed the Academy). I can easily explain that away by saying the boundaries of the city of San Francisco have had plenty of time to expand and subsume other Bay Area territory, just as Seattle has annexed huge swaths of land since its inception! By 3100 Berkeley, Petaluma, Oakland, and Palo Alto are probably just neighborhoods in San Francisco. :)

Tagged Star Trek, TV, Posted on January 17, 2026 at 11:36PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

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Pop culture and fighting the black hole

My mood since returning from my California travels has been in a state of flux, vacillating between "meh" and "we live in the worst timeline everything is misery." OK, I exaggerate slightly—truly miserable hasn't been part of my black-hole-of-depression episodes since the Zoloft Rx, it's actually more ennui than misery. But you take my point, it's not been peaches and cream. Unless the peaches are moldy and the cream curdled, I guess you could go that route in your metaphors if you like. "Darmok and Jilad at the expired food buffet."

Anyway, I won't go into the state-of-the-world portion of what's depressing in this post. You can look to the news media or your health insurance renewals for those sorts of bummers for now. In fact, for this post I don't think I want to go into any of the stuff that's been bumming me out, the bulk of which is something I don't really have a handle on anyway. Instead, let's discuss some stuff I've actually enjoyed lately.

My consumption of entertainment on the TV machine of late has included a few standouts that I heartily recommend:

• 

  The Big Thing of the Moment in the streaming world is Plur1bus, on AppleTV+, and it really is as good as its hype. It's high-concept sci-fi, so not for everyone, but the story follows Carol (Rhea Seehorn), a romance novelist with contempt for her readers, who is among a very few people worldwide who have not been afflicted with a mysterious ... something? Ailment? Virus? Extraterrestrial takeover? Freak sunspot storm? ... that has put the vast majority of the global human population into a sort of group mind. There have only been three episodes so far, so the mystery is still quite mysterious, but it's a premise that poses a Big Picture question, if you will, which is: Are people better off content in a happy groupthink mental commune, or as individuals with all of the messy conflicts that are possible between them? Created by Vince Gilligan of X-Files fame, the show's tagline is "The most miserable person on Earth must save the world from happiness." The show works only because Carol is such a well-realized character and Seehorn is so good at embodying her. Without Seehorn in the role I think the show would fail, or at best be something quite different. It's intense, but very well done.

• 

  Wayward, on Netflix, is a mystery show from creator/star Mae Martin. I liked Martin's prior show Feel Good, so I thought I'd give this one a shot too. It's a whole different kind of thing—Feel Good is a semi-autobiographical slice-of-life comedy/drama, Wayward is about a tiny town in Vermont where there are no children and an academy for teens that "students" run away from as often as possible because horrible things happen there. Based at least in part on the experience of a childhood friend of Martin's who was sent away to a "troubled teen" camp of sorts called CEDU—that friend is a consulting producer of the show—the series follows two parallel tracks: one, a pair of Toronto teenagers who find themselves "enrolled" in the cult-like academy; and two, Martin's character, a cop newly-transplanted to the tiny town who dives into figuring out the mystery of the academy while the entirety of the town tries to prevent anyone exposing its secrets. It's good, but the ending is unsatisfying; it gives two different versions and its unclear which character imagines the false one or if it's supposed to be more of a you-the-audience-can-choose-which-ending-you-like-better kind of thing or what. I liked it overall, though, and it's worth spotlighting the sort of "troubled teen" institutions that still exist and still cause problems in our world of abuses.

• 

  Then there's The Lazarus Project, a British sci-fi show that follows George, a new recruit to a secret government agency that intervenes to prevent disaster from befalling humanity and uses its most powerful tool to turn the clock back if the worst comes to pass. George notices he's in a time loop, repeating three months of his life, and since people aren't supposed to remember things that happen before a "reset" the agency takes interest and brings him into the fold. When someone has the power to reset the world—always back to the most recent July 1st—there have to be understandings that resets only happen in the most critical circumstances or else there's nothing but chaos. But what if one of the agents feels his/her personal needs outweigh the rules? And what happens if other people discover this whole time-reset thing and try to develop their own method? Or a way to send someone back beyond a reset point? Time-travel stories all tend to have similar elements, but I like the way this one skews them and the way the multiethnic British cast fills out a complex bunch of characters. It's not a show that has any real standout staying power, but its well-produced and well-performed. I enjoyed it.
• A Man on the Inside is a show I watched when it first came out last year, but I rewatched it while visiting Dad & Marty in California a few weeks back. It has a new resonance for me now that my dad is going through some stuff that relates heavily to some elements of the mystery Ted Danson's character of Charles is placed in a retirement home to investigate. Really great stuff, and season two is scheduled to drop this week. Looking forward to it.

Then there's the world of comics. I've been asked a few times, mostly by my friend Nikki, why I, a middle-aged adult man, still spend anywhere from $50-$100 a month on comic books. I don't always have a good answer. Lifelong hobby, appreciation of the art form, investment in the fictional worlds they embody. A lot of them I read and then say, well, that's not memorable or special at all, and think I should reassess my ordering habits. (I'll turn some of them around and sell them on eBay if I don't find any other value in them.) Sometimes I keep getting a particular title for the collector-completeness motive even though there's not much there. Mostly, I simply enjoy them and that's good enough for me. But occasionally something will surprise me, a mainstream superhero comic or a little indy curiosity that reminds me, yeah, that's why I always loved comics.

The most recent of those standouts are Detective Comics #1100 and the 2025 Titans Annual.

Detective #1100 is an oversized milestone edition with several Batman short stories, all of which are stylishly done and satisfying in their own ways. "Lost and Found" is a silent (i.e. no dialogue, no narrative captions) tale of Batman, aided by Ace the Bat-Hound (a deep cut going back to the goofy Batman comics of the 1950s), helping a deaf child recover his lost dog. It's derivative—Matt Fraction and David Aja did a fantastic issue of Hawkeye several years ago that was from the perspective of Hawkeye's dog Lucky (aka Pizza Dog) that wasn't exactly silent, but the only dialogue rendered in non-gibberish were words Lucky knew—but still fun. "The Knife and Gun Club" barely features Batman at all, it's a peek into the doctors and nurses on staff at the emergency room that treats people involved in a typical night in Gotham City—victims of crime and perpetrators of same that, in one way or another, are sent to the ER by Batman. One doctor is outraged at the number of injured people arriving thanks to the actions of Batman. Another much prefers the injuries they treat now over the fatalities that were the norm pre-Batman. A reveal at the end has Batman himself sneaking in to have a laceration stitched up. "Your Role in the Community" juxtaposes Batman's crime-fighting efforts with the image cultivated by his alter ego Bruce Wayne, who is shown at a fund-raising event in Gotham being browbeaten by a journalist who takes him to task for merely throwing money at society's problems. The last story is "The Fall," which doesn't do anything for me but is illustrated by Bill Sienkiewicz, whose gritty, ink-wash style is always interesting even if not particularly appealing to me.

Titans Annual 2025 is a more traditional single-story issue, entirely character-based as Donna Troy recounts her attempt to meet and get to know her birth father. That particular character has had a mysterious background for a long time and there have been a few iterations of "Who is Donna Troy" going back to the ’80s, but this was a welcome addition to the canon, spectacularly written and drawn by Phil Jimenez. The regular Titans title I should probably quit buying, it's one that I simply have a lot of nostalgia for as one of the favorites of my comics-fan heyday even though lately it's been forgettable and ... let's say, unsophisticated. But, had I not been getting it I might have passed on this Annual, and I'm glad to have gotten it.

 I've also started the novel Ancillary Justice, by Ann Leckie. It was recommended to me as "in my wheelhouse," but thus far I'm kind of struggling to get into it. Hopefully it'll pick up soon.

So, anything y'all would recommend I add to the entertainment pile?

Tagged TV, Comics, The Black Hole, Posted on November 19, 2025 at 12:48AM   |   Permalink   |     |  

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Lazy writing: SNW season 3 fails to meet high standard

It will surprise no one that I have very high standards when it comes to Star Trek. The original series was, along with superhero comics, the biggest cultural touchstone of my youth; it informed my thinking, development, maturation, ethics, politics, and more. I was a nerd's nerd, if you will, while growing up and then reveled in the resurgence of Star Trek on television that began when I reached voting age.

It's important. It not only means something to me when it's done well, it also feels almost offensive to my soul when it's done badly.

The just-finished third season of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, the prequel series that leads up to what we saw in the original 1966-69 series, had its moments, but by and large was done badly. Seasons one and two were consistently good, with a couple of caveats, but this one was just ... sloppy.

With one exception, no episode of SNW season three really stinks, and even that one has one or two brief moments of fun; there are no analogues to "Profit and Lace" from Deep Space Nine or "Code of Honor" from The Next Generation here. But the writing across the season is slapdash, like each script went into production as a first draft and at no time did anyone do any refinement on them or get a second set of eyes to see if things made sense or not, let alone run them by a science adviser.

There might be a reason for that—the season was delayed for a year thanks to the writers' and actors' strikes, and perhaps the studio rushed these episodes into production to get them out as soon as possible. But we already waited two years for it, I think everyone would agree that it would have been worth it to wait another few months if it meant the scripts were run through a better quality-control regimen. On the other hand, the people running this show—executives Alex Kurtzman, Henry Alonso Myers, and Akiva Goldsman—don't exactly have stellar track records when it comes to quality (I mean, they have Star Trek Into Darkness and Batman Forever on their résumés) and they may simply have thought these were all good to go. Despite being retreads of episodes from past Trek series and/or inconsistent within SNW, let alone all of Trekdom, and/or fundamentally misunderstanding why Star Trek (the shows) is Star Trek (the overall cultural phenomenon).

Star Trek is not space-fantasy, it's science-fiction. There are some less-realistic elements that we accept, concessions to television budgets and formats—transporters, a plethora of humanoid aliens, the universal translator, subspace radio—but we accept them within the overall worldbuilding established in the original and refined in the shows from the ’80s, ’90s, and ’00s. There are rules to be followed with the technology and anything outside of those few accepted conceits has to pass an at least rudimentary scientific smell test. Also, it's fundamentally about ideas and allegorical to the human society we're living in today; at its best, its stories have something to say, ideally through well-developed flawed but idealistic characters.

Gene L. Coon and Ira Steven Behr, the best of Trek's showrunners

The Genes—Roddenberry and Coon—famously either rewrote or rode herd on every script during their respective tenures as line producers on the original. Rick Berman may not have been all that good a writer, but he took it seriously when he was charged with safeguarding the franchise for Roddenberry after the latter's health became too poor for him to keep working on TNG. Ira Behr ran the best Trek writers' room as showrunner of DS9, insisting on a certain fidelity and depth of storytelling despite the demands of a 26-episode season. For the most part, these streaming series—with a new normal of first 13 and now merely 10 episodes per year—haven't had someone like that in charge, someone who knows what makes Star Trek work.

I don't know why it's apparently so hard for people who are by all accounts enthused to take on Star Trek as a property—J.J. Abrams (films), Kurtzman (all streaming series and the Abrams films), Gretchen Berg/Aaron Harberts (Discovery)—to comprehend what it is. Why it has had such staying power. Why it appeals to the people it appeals to. Abrams was and seems to remain completely clueless, he thinks it's a space-fantasy like Star Wars. The others seem to grasp only a surface-level understanding of it. Mike McMahon of Lower Decks and Terry Matalas of Picard season three get it. Michelle Paradise (Discovery season 3-5) fell somewhere in between getting it and just knowing the trappings, as did, I had thought, Goldsman and Myers. After seeing SNW season three, I have to reevaluate; Goldsman and Myers might be closer to the Abrams end of the scale.

In this admittedly lengthy and probably too-nerdy-for-most post, I want to break down the season episode by episode and look at what worked and what didn't. To prevent this one nerd-post from overwhelming the home page, I'll shunt the bulk of it to its own page, so follow the link below to read on.

See full post: "Lazy writing: SNW season 3 fails to meet high standard"...

Tagged Star Trek, TV, Culture, Posted on October 30, 2025 at 5:09PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

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The work is mysterious and important

The celebratory fruit head of mourning

Let's talk about Severance for a minute. I have questions.

If you haven't been watching the utterly fantastic Apple TV+ show, you're missing out. A friend who hasn't seen it asked me a while back, "what other shows is it like?" as a shorthand way of seeing if she'd like it, but the answer is, "none, there are no other shows similar to Severance." I mean, it's a workplace drama, sort of, I guess, but don't look for any other connections to, say, ER or Hill St. Blues. The closest parallel to it that I've seen is probably the film Being John Malkovich, which is still very much different. It's uniquely weird and incredibly well-written. So check it out if you haven't already. (Or if you kind of forgot about it because it took three years for season two to drop after COVID and writers' and actors' strikes combined to delay production.)

Then maybe you too will be wondering:

• Just what is Milchick's backstory? At times he looks to be a gung-ho Lumon partisan, but with his new supervisory gig he seems to recognize himself as a sort of Uncle Tom, and not just because of the racism-tinged gift he got from the higher-ups. He appears to really want to make things better for the severeds, and aware that he's balancing on a knife's edge to do it, but is now doubling down on being the good employee. I think. He's a tough nut to crack.
• What the hell has Irving been doing all this time on the outside with his research into Lumon? Who has he been talking to on the pay phone?
• How much, if any, of Burt and Fields' religious rationale is for real and how much, if any, is a cover story? What's Burt's real history with Lumon? Is he an OG Lumon architect or was he doing something else with them pre-severance? Or is Fields just drunk?
• Who was the guy with all the keys that was going through Irving's things? Is it Donovan? Someone else? How does he know about Irving's research? (I don't recall if that might be something Helena learned while "undercover"; I don't think so.) Is he in cahoots with Burt, going into the apartment while Burt had Irving occupied elsewhere? And what did the guy do, if anything, to Radar? Radar wasn't growling and barking at the intruder?
• WTF is up with the goats?
• Why is Gemma/Ms. Casey "essential?" What is she doing in that sub-basement when not doing wellness sessions with the severeds? We know that "Ms. Casey" only exists on the severed floor, so is she just, I don't know, comatose or something down below, or does she have a third persona? Or is she Gemma down there?
• Is Helena doing what she's been doing all season just as a way to spy on and manipulate the gang, or is she also motivated by intense loneliness and jealousy of Helly R. and Mark S.'s spark for each other? I think her line that she "didn't like" who she was on the outside was at least partly honest, and when she joked with Mark Scout that he would "be the first" guy she'd ever introduce to her father she wasn't making that up. Britt Lower plays that double role with uncanny subtlety.
• Is Miss Huang severed? If so, holy moly. If not, also weird, as Dylan has asked multiple times, "why are you a child?" She's on a fellowship? What's "wintertide material?" Is Wintertide some sort of Lumon college, maybe?
• What were Ricken's other books? That's not really important to the plot, I just wonder. I want more revelatory observations like, "Bullies are nothing but bull and lies," and especially like, "What separates man from machine is that machines cannot think for themselves. Also they are made of metal, whereas man is made of skin."
• Will Dylan tell his co-workers about his family visits? If he does, will Milchick cancel them?
• Why didn't the production crew make the hole in Mark's head more realistically tiny? Big as that seemed to be he (and all the severeds, presumably) would be at constant risk of massive infection. :) (Yeah, yeah, nerdy nitpick that means nothing, I just think it wouldn't have been that hard to put a magnifying lens in the shot for a hole that more realistically would have been about 1/16"-1/8" in diameter.)
• And, of course, what is the macrodata, why is it being refined, and what's the "Cold Harbor" project intended to do? (I think we can safely assume it's not, as Irving once postulated, to take the swear words out of movies.) If even the upper echelon at Lumon says the work is mysterious, how much do they even know about it?

Tune in Thursday for probably no clear answers and even more questions, because that's how good this show is.

 

Tagged TV, Severance, Posted on February 23, 2025 at 6:37PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

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The world sucks, and other observations

Quality TV as an escape from the world crumbling around us

It's been a rough week. Following a rough few weeks. I mean, in the world. I've already mentioned how it's been influencing my state of mind, and it continues to. But there is life beyond the chaos and destruction raging all around us. For now, anyway.

Some stray items and thoughts on the past week or so:

• I had some folks over the other night for food and conversation and general socializing, which was good. It was good in that some of these folks I hadn't seen in a long time and it's always good to catch up a bit; it was good that some people got to meet some other people that had only existed as faceless anecdotes before; it was good in the very base sense that human interaction is necessary. I've not had as much of that as I'd like of late.
• Some of the human interactions of late weren't good, though, including a near-fistfight at one of my umpiring shifts the other day. It made no sense to me, was based entirely, it seems, on some machismo bullshit carried over from prior seasons—the sort of Phil Nevin/Anthony Rendon/Jesse Winker-type posturing I have no patience for even on the best of days—and it ruined an otherwise decent afternoon/evening. I had to stop being Fun Umpire Guy on a dime and immediately shift into Guy In Charge With Authority, warn players, and was a hair's breadth from ejecting multiple men and women (!! it's almost never the women, but this time...) before one of the team captains settled his crew down a literal instant under the wire. There are on occasion days when I half-expect some sort of nonsense to occur during a shift, but never in the winter time. The teams that sign up for winter league are the die-hards that play all the time, that are so familiar to each other and to we the umpires that it's generally easy-going. (The real assholery tends to happen in the summer, when guys that are bitter about not making their JV teams in college sign up for a slot and ruin things with uber-competitiveness.) Fortunately, my relationship with the involved teams is good enough that when I saw a bunch of the players the next night everyone was cool and ready to play a conflict-free game, but hoo-boy was I not receptive to being told by rec-league softball players in a stakes-less environment that I needed to abide by some macho code of utter crapola because they were pissed off about a guy on the other team lining one back through the box. Half a dozen f-ing Phil Nevins in my face at the end of that game. Get a grip.
• Apple TV has some really good programming. If you've got budget for only one streaming service, that's probably the one you want—not just the best-of-the-best Ted Lassos and For All Mankinds, but there's great stuff in Severance, Silo, Shrinking, The Big Door Prize, The Morning Show, Sunny, Dark Matter, and the two shows I binged through in the past week: Constellation and Shining Girls. Both are just single-season, eight-episode series; the former deserves a renewal and more but won't get it, the latter wrapped up at an end point. Constellation—I had to watch it with that name, right?—is a mind-bending story following an astronaut who survives a massive accident on the ISS and returns to Earth to find things not as she left them; we learn over the course of things that two other former astronauts experienced much the same thing in years past and it's a WTF sort of mystery and psycho-thriller sci-fi exploration with quantum physics. Shining Girls is a more gritty, Earthbound murder-mystery sort of thing that also hinges on mind-bending quantum physics weirdness that stars Elisabeth Moss and only disappoints a little bit when it gets to the end and the source of the mind-bendiness is located but remains unexplained. Ambitious and well-done, both of them.
• Ty France has a job again. The former Seattle Mariner first baseman signed for the upcoming season with the Minnesota Twins and explained to reporters why he's coming off of some bad seasons. Spoiler warning: I was right. France had some smallish injury issues last year, but as he said to the press, it wasn't really the injury. He doesn't name-drop former Mariners manager Scott Servais or former Mariner "batting coach" Jarret DeHart, but he said that after he hit a rough patch early in 2023, he focused on analytics—Stacast-type nonsense like launch angles and barrel rates—which are the only things DeHart seemed to know anything about or care at all about. “There was a lot of it—the analytical side—where I tried to tap into, that I shouldn't tap into,” he said. “I should just worry about being a baseball player and hitting the ball.” After leaving the Mariners and the Servais/DeHart school of not-hitting, France started coming back into his own with Cincinnati. “When I’m at my best, I’m not focused on analytics. I’m just simplifying hitting ... the last year or two hasn’t been fun baseball for me. I think my time in Cincinnati last year, having that reset, I found that joy again." Do I still think Ty France is going to win a batting title or two? Well, I'm not as sure as I was when he first came to the M's, but if he can stay away from Jarret DeHart and keep from getting hurt too much, then...yeah, it wouldn't surprise me at all.
• And, back to the collapse of the nation, I thought last night's "A" block form Rachel Maddow was worth passing around. I live in the Pacific Northwest, and though it's not like Hanford is in my back yard, it is in my state. And similar issues are rampant across the country now that POTUS47 and his boss Elon are taking a blowtorch to the government. It just astounds me that this is allowed to happen—every single elected Republican, it seems, is on board with destroying the United States. The Senators just confirm these dangerously unqualified and destructive cabinet officers without objection, the Representatives in the House have the power to impeach all of these agents of chaos and disaster but don't see any need. They've all got to go. All of them.

Tagged Politics, TV, President VonClownstick, Baseball, Rachel Maddow, Umping, Posted on February 19, 2025 at 2:21AM   |   Permalink   |     |  

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Technical difficulties

So, the reconstruction referenced yesterday didn't happen; I discovered some other minor problems before uploading and am having to address those first. Also, I've been spending a lot of time cybershopping because my TV is failing, and I need my TV. I mean, not really, I could live without it and could watch most of what I watch on a computer or even my phone, but how could I have my Trek Night parties or baseball gatherings if all I have is a 14" PC monitor?

So I'm shelling out for a new set. I could repair this one myself if I want to get adventurous, but even that would cost me money for parts and I don't really have the room to disassemble a 55" flatscreen and keep all the parts organized and free of cat hair and (if in the garage) sawdust. Paying someone else to replace the LEDs, which is the failing component, would cost about as much as I paid to buy the thing in the first place. So, new one it is.

Initially, I figured as long as I'm getting a new one I might as well go up a size since I have room, but it's $100 more for the bigger one unless I get a lesser quality model, so the decision came down to what do I want more, a better screen or a bigger screen? Better won. So, same size Roku Plus model is on the way from Best Buy. Even if the current one was still watchable for a while I figured better to buy this now before the tariffs kick in, because our new POTUS is a fucking idiot that still thinks tariffs are magic money that comes from Chinese genies or something and not effectively additional sales taxes.

Anyway, all of which is to say that the site update is still to come. Hopefully in the next couple of days. Unless things go awry yet again.

Now I'm off to umpire in the frigid cold again.

Tagged Site issues, TV, President VonClownstick, Posted on January 20, 2025 at 5:43PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

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Miscellany

Weird but fun, Interior Chinatown is worth a watch

Today's post: A random assortment of disjointed stuff!

• The dishwasher saga is over, with a new one purchased, delivered, and installed and the old one carted away to whatever scrap heap such things are taken to. I hadn't initially planned to replace the broken one so quickly, but holiday sales at Lowe's convinced me I was better off spending $600 now, on a good one on sale, than later on a cheaper one at regular price. It works, it's quiet, and most importantly, it doesn't leak into Rachel's kitchen downstairs.
• I've spent a chunk of time doing maintenance on this here website, including recreating the sketches page and beginning to populate it with stuff readily available, i.e. mostly stuff from the last few years that was either already scanned into my computer or at hand in my currently in-use sketchbook. There's other stuff in my hard drive already digitized, things that were on prior versions of my blog, but they were posted in the olden days of the Internet when nobody had a screen resolution bigger than 800 pixels and are thus pretty lousy scans. I'll have to find the originals and rescan them at some point. Anyway, the current format has clickable icons that produce a fullscreen image and a button to continue to "notes and comments" that takes you to a page for that individual sketch and any blathering I may have done about it, plus a commenting form just like a blog post. Click anywhere other than the button to close the fullscreen image and return to the sketch menu.
• I had my Christmas the other night at K&E's place, enjoying delicious food and talking about the world and also TV. All three of us love the Hulu show Interior Chinatown, starring Jimmy Yang and Chloe Bennett. It's a wacky comedic sendup of action movies, the Law & Order franchise, and meta-storytelling that takes place both within a Law & Order-style TV show and around a mild-mannered Chinese-American's family in a fictional Chinatown neighborhood. Recommended. We also agree on the greatness of Michael Schur's A Man on the Inside (Netflix), which I discussed briefly earlier but deserves a second recommend. The Diplomat (Netflix) also works for all of us, and we commented on the overlap of cast and crew from The West Wing on it (even though neither of them have ever really watched West Wing, which is really a bummer for them). Shrinking (Apple TV+) wasn't something they'd seen but which I think is terrific; they liked Slow Horses, which I've not sampled to this point. I'm very much into Silo (Apple TV+) and, naturally, the just-concluded (boo) Star Trek: Lower Decks, but know better than to try to convince K&E to watch those.
• I was gifted the book What's Next on that early-Christmas evening, and though I've yet to start into it, I am anticipating some great West Wing reflections and truly wonder how it will feel to revisit the details of the fictional Bartlet Administration while living in the impending nightmare of Trump 2.0, Now With More Oligarchy.
• I just learned that baseball Hall of Famer Rickey Henderson died today. One of the all-time greats, Rickey was a fantastic character with is arrogant self-assuredness, his speaking in the third person, and his generosity to others. Despite being exactly my kind of ballplayer—the stolen base king! Consistently walked more than struck out!—he was never one of my favorites, maybe because he took the steals record away from one of my faves, Lou Brock, or maybe because he spent his career primarily with the Oakland A's and the hated New York Yankees. He did spend part of one season in Seattle as a Mariner, in 2000, in the waning days of his very long career, and was always fun to watch no matter who he played for. My two favorite Rickey Henderson anecdotes come from other players. One, from former Seattle Mariner Harold Reynolds, who won the stolen base crown in 1987 with 66 steals (because Henderson was injured that year) and got a postseason call from Rickey congratulating him but also containing Rickey-style mockery, with Henderson ending the call with "Rickey would have had 66 by the All-Star break." Two, from fellow Hall of Famer Mike Piazza, who was Rickey's teammate with the New York Mets; Piazza recounted how Rickey voted when teams would be divvying up the postseason bonuses among the support staff. “Rickey was the most generous guy I ever played with, and whenever the discussion came around to what we should give one of the fringe people—whether it was a minor leaguer who came up for a few days or the parking lot attendant—Rickey would shout out 'Full share!' We’d argue for a while and he’d say, 'Fuck that! You can change somebody’s life!'” Apparently Rickey died from pneumonia, less than a week shy of 66 years old. Bummer.
• Earlier this week, Craig Calcaterra referenced a Washington Post article called "America's Best Decade" in his newsletter. The article analyzes results from polling 2,000 American adults on which decade was best for 20 different things, like best movies, best economy, best music, best reporting, and so on. There are some interesting (though not surprising) things, like Republicans are twice as likely to think the 1950s were awesome as other people are (hey, Republicans, that being the case, let's go back to the 90% marginal tax rate that existed then, which made for a lot of the circumstances you say you want!), or that people think the "best music" is the music they listened to in their formative years. But Craig's takeaway was surprise at the generational consistency of people liking their own youth (not just the music, but everything). "Americans feel nostalgia not for a specific era, but for a specific age," says the article. "The good old days when America was 'great' aren’t the 1950s. They’re whatever decade you were 11, your parents knew the correct answer to any question, and you’d never heard of war crimes tribunals, microplastics or improvised explosive devices." There's a handy graph to illustrate:
  

  

  
  If they'd polled me, I might have skewed the results just a smidge. I mean, if I followed the pattern, I'd have my bests coming in the 1980s, and frankly there was a lot about the ’80s that wasn't all that. I mean, sure, those years were largely good for me (well, not ’89), but thinking big picture not so much. I'd say... Best Music? 1970s. Best Movies? I'm not really big into movies like some people, so I don't have a real feeling on this, but I guess the 2000s? Best Fashion? Hell if I know, but certainly not the ’80s; maybe the ’60s, since it spanned a lot of stuff. Happiest Families? Again, WTF do I know, but I'd say maybe 1990s since (a) women had far more agency than in prior decades, and (b) economically things were stable and good throughout. Most Moral Society is a question that inevitably tracks one's politics and I'd be tempted to say the 2020s if not for what happened last month to show us how many millions of Americans are still racist, misogynist, cruel asshats. Most Reliable News Reporting? 1970s again, though it really depends on how you quantify; there's a lot of fine reportage more recently, but also increasingly widespread BS from the dawn of cable TV forward. Best Economy? 1990s. Best Radio? I've no proper context for this, but given how much more radio was a thing the further back you go, maybe the 1940s or ’50s? For me, again the ’70s. Best TV? Right now, man. So much great TV being made even as the TV delivery system is transmogrifying. Least Political Division? Um...never? I mean, now is the worst in ages, but there's always been a lot; maybe the ’40s, what with the war being a unifying purpose. Best Sporting Events? For me, that's limited to baseball, really, and in this area I fit the trend—1980s baseball was great and I wish we could exhume Bart Giamatti to be Commissioner again. Best Cuisine seems like a dumb category, as food doesn't change, really, it's how we eat that changes. I like good food whenever it's eaten. Anyway, kind of an interesting survey.

Tagged Site issues, Politics, West Wing, Baseball, TV, Craig Calcaterra, Posted on December 21, 2024 at 8:37PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

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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   |     |  

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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   |     |  

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