September 17,

Ghost in the Shell

I was looking for something to watch yesterday afternoon, and decided the finally watch the Ghost in the Shell 4K Blu-ray that I bought in 2020. I enjoyed it a lot. I hadn’t seen the original Ghost in the Shell movie in quite some time. And there’s a nice audio commentary on there too, with four folks who had a lot of interesting things to say about the movie.

Sometimes, it seems like I can’t watch or read anything without it pushing me to either buy something else or at least add something to my wishlist. In this case, it motivated me to buy the Blu-ray set for Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, which was only $12 on Amazon. And to buy a digital copy of Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence from Amazon, which was only $4.

I know I’ve seen Innocence before, but I can’t remember when or how. I dug around in my piles of DVDs and Blu-rays, and couldn’t find a copy of it. So maybe I saw it in a theater. I kinda remember liking it, so I wanted to watch it again.

And I really liked SAC when I first watched it, probably on Cartoon Network. I have a couple of DVDs of the second season of that show, and one volume of the first season, but I never bothered buying the box sets or the rest of the DVDs.

Speaking of SAC, I watched the first season of SAC_2045 on Netflix in 2021. The second season is out now, so I want to watch that too. (I had mixed feelings about the first season, but it was good enough that I want to watch the second.)

So overall, watching one movie yesterday has moved me to buy a new Blu-Ray set, a new digital movie, and add a season of a TV show to my Netflix watch list.

SSD upgrade, part two

I finished my SSD upgrade last week. (Here’s part one and part zero of the SSD saga.) The bracket showed up in the mail, so I opened the case up, took out the drive cage, screwed everything together, buttoned it all back up and… it all worked. It took me a while to figure out how to orient the bracket in the cage, but once I figured that out, it was easy enough.

The old spinning hard drive is now a secondary drive, and not giving me any problems. I’ll probably reformat it soon so I can use it as a backup drive. The new SSD is working great. The machine boots faster and loads programs a lot faster.

I’m not sure why I held off on doing the SSD upgrade for so long. I know my excuse is that I was waiting for prices to come down on 1 TB SSDs, but I could have done this a year ago, and they wouldn’t have been that much more expensive, really.

Oh well. I’m hoping this upgrade will help me keep this PC usable for a few more years. I don’t want to have to replace it any time soon.

Making the best of it

I decided to take the train into NYC today to see the new Rodin exhibit at the Met. But I hit a couple of snags with that. (This post probably won’t be interesting to too many people, but it was interesting enough to me that I thought I’d write it all down. Feel free to skip it if you don’t want to read a narrative of “my day in New York”.)

The trip in was not smooth. First, there was track work between Union and Newark, so we all had to get off the train in Union and switch to a bus. I made the best of that by enjoying the scenic drive through Union. We went down Morris Ave, and passed the building where I used to work, a long time ago. The building is still there, surprisingly. And the Mark Twain Diner is still there too, where I ate many cheeseburgers in my youth! (I hadn’t been through Union in a long time, so that was actually fun.)

Then, in Newark, there were no trains running to NY Penn, due to a switching problem. So I took the PATH to WTC. I hadn’t been to the WTC since they opened the Oculus, and had been meaning to take a trip in to check it out, so this was a good excuse to do that. It’s pretty cool; I should try to get in again and spend some more time exploring it.

From there, I took the 4 train up to 86th and walked the rest of the way to the Met. (Of course, the 4 train got held at the Grand Central stop for 15 minutes for no discernible reason.) I didn’t make it to the Met until about 11:30, so the total delay came to just over an hour.

The Rodin exhibit was pretty cool, though maybe not worth a three hour trip, in and of itself. From there, I walked down to the Met Breuer, to see the Delirious exhibit.

On the walk down, I listened to the John Luther Adams Soundwalk 9:09 piece that he wrote for the opening of the Breuer last year. I’d been meaning to listen to that on the walk from the main Met to the Breuer, since the Breuer first opened, but I never got around to it until now. It’s definitely an interesting experience. (I listened to the “downtown” piece today. Now I need to take the walk in the opposite direction, and listen to the “uptown” piece.)

From the Breuer, I was initially planning on going down to MoMA. There’s not much going on there right now, but I figured it was a good spot to grab lunch and maybe sit outside in the sculpture garden for a bit. I didn’t want to walk all the way down, so I hopped on the M4 bus. When we got near MoMA, though, there was a big police presence for some reason, and a lot of barricades up, so I decided I didn’t need to deal with that and stayed on the bus.

I got off the bus in front of the NY Public Library on 42nd St, and decided to pop in. It’s only open from 1 to 5pm on Sunday, and it was around 2pm when I got there, so my timing was pretty good. I’ve never been in that “main branch” building before, and I’ve always meant to check it out, so I did. It’s a really cool building, and there’s some nifty stuff in there. I wish I’d come on a day when the gift shop had been open though. I saw a few things through the window there that looked cool.

The trip back home from there was relatively uneventful. I walked from the NYPL back to Penn Station with a brief stop at Midtown Comics.

The trains between NY Penn and Newark were running on-time again, so that was OK. I had to do the bus from Newark to Union, but it wasn’t a big inconvenience. Overall, I got home a bit later than I’d intended to, but still reasonably early.

So, as trips go, it didn’t go quite as planned, but I got to do some interesting stuff that I’d been meaning to do, and had a pretty good time.

NY Times for free

The NY Times has stopped charging for access to select articles on their web site. The whole thing, from 1987 to the present, should be free now. Yay! I never saw much point to their TimesSelect service; from my perspective, it seemed like they were charging for the stuff I was least interested in anyway.

Meanwhile, The WSJ still costs a bunch. I’m not sure if I’ll renew my print & online subscription next year. Maybe I’ll drop it and try and catch up with some alternative reading material instead.