Author: Andrew Huey

Shin Godzilla

I finally got around to watching Shin Godzilla today. It’s a weird film, but it’s definitely worth watching. I started hearing interesting stuff about it last year, including good reviews from RogerEbert.com and Ars Technica.

It’s not a movie that I think mainstream American audiences would ever enjoy or understand. There are a lot of scenes of politicians and/or scientists sitting around conference room tables, talking. These scenes are well-done, and not at all boring, if you can keep up with the subtitles. (They’re talking really fast, so you do have to pay attention to keep up.)

The CGI effects are good, but not quite up to typical modern “Hollywood blockbuster” standards. Godzilla’s initial form is pretty weird-looking, but the creature evolves into something more closely resembling the typical Godzilla fairly quickly. Overall, I found the “Godzilla destroying Japan” scenes to be well-done and engaging (though occasionally funnier than they were probably supposed to be).

There’s a lot of stuff in the movie related to Japanese politics, particularly post-Fukushima. A lot of the political stuff reminds me of a manga I read years ago, the name of which I can’t remember right now. At any rate, it’s a lot more ambitious thematically than a typical monster movie.

I bought the movie on Blu-ray; I could really have gotten away with just renting it though. I may watch it again at some point, but really seeing it once was enough for me.

Eighties Nostalgia and weird Christmas stuff

The new Netflix series The Toys That Made Us looks like it should be fun. It looks like it’s concentrating mostly on toys from the 80s. I’m old enough that I was pretty much done with toys by 1980, but I did (of course) have some Star Wars toys. (Though maybe those were my younger brother’s toys, technically. Either way, they were pretty cool.)

My old friend Mike Pajaro is a guest on a recent episode of an 80s-themed podcast called Stuck in the 80s. The two regular hosts and Mike each pick a Christmas special from the 80s to talk about. Mike, of course, talks about the Alf Christmas Special. I was never a big fan of Alf, and have never seen this special, but it sounds like it’s a doozy. (If you’d rather read an amusing text summary of the special, rather than listen to my friend Mike describe it, read this.) The podcast is pretty funny. The other two Christmas specials they talk about are the Pee-Wee Herman special and the He-Man special.

Which reminds me that I added the Pee-Wee special to my Netflix queue when they added it a few years ago, but never watched it. I may have seen it when it originally aired, but I’m not sure. Either way, I should watch it this year. I haven’t really been in the mood for Christmas stuff this year, but I think I’d enjoy the Pee-Wee special.

And speaking of oddball Christmas stuff, I could really use a new Christmas-themed Radio Rashy episode, but I guess they stopped doing Radio Rashy, since there haven’t been any new episodes since 2015 or so. Maybe I’ll go back and listen to the Santa Claus is a Bitch episode, one of the last ones they did. (I’d love to grab one of their old Christmas Jukebox episodes, but I don’t think any of those are still available. I should have saved those mp3s.)

The Last Jedi and the tired old nerd

I really want to see Last Jedi this weekend, but I’m kind of sick, so I don’t want to sit through a loud, two and a half hour movie. (Also, it’s snowing out and very cold.) I checked Amazon to see if they had the novelization, thinking that maybe reading that would be a good substitute, but it’s not coming out until March 2018! That seems kind of crazy to me. I know most movies don’t even get novelizations anymore, but if you’re going to do one, it should come out at the same time as the movie.

When I was a kid, I didn’t get out to see a lot of movies, so my first exposure to many popular movies of my youth was through either the novelization, the comic book adaptation, or the Mad magazine parody. You don’t see a lot of novelizations or comic book movie adaptations anymore. (And Mad is only published bimonthly now.) I also remember that my first exposure to the plot of the original Star Wars movie was through an article in Famous Monsters magazine. I remember it being just basically a plot summary, with a bunch of stills from the movie. (They apparently published a Star Wars Spectacular in 1977, which may have been what I read, but I’m not sure.)

Anyway, I feel like I need an illustrated plot summary or a comic book version or something for the new Star Wars movie. The reviews have all been very good, including the NY Times review. (Though I haven’t read it all the way through yet.)

I also noticed that a graphic novel adaptation of the last Star Wars movie, Rogue One, came out just this week. It looks kind of weird. I think it’s supposed to be a “YA” version or something? I guess if I decide that I really need to read a Star Wars comic this weekend, I could buy that one.

SDCC Open Registration

Today is the day for open registration for San Diego Comic-Con. It’s a good day for it: it’s snowing outside, I have a cold, and there was a derailment on the Raritan Valley tracks yesterday. So going into NYC would have been difficult even if it wasn’t snowing and I didn’t have a cold.

I turned on my desktop computer early this morning and made sure it was current with Windows updates, Firefox updates, and any other updates I could think of, so hopefully nothing will get in the way of working through the registration process. I also am all stocked up on ramen noodles, herbal tea, and cough medicine.

I’ve completely failed to get tickets for the last few years, and I’ll probably fail again this year, but hey, I have to try!

I’ll quit tomorrow

I like this Dawg Yawp song a lot, for some reason. And not just because it’s got a lot of sitar. Here’s an article about the album it’s taken from. And here’s a Tiny Desk Concert they did. I feel like their sound is something I could get tired of pretty quickly, but right now, I’m liking it.

 

New SSL certificate

This blog should now have a new, slightly less fancy, SSL certificate. I had been using a $49/year certificate from 1&1, my hosting provider. It was issued via GeoTrust, and worked fine. A while back, 1&1 switched me to a slightly more expensive plan that included a free SSL cert. But of course they didn’t automatically move the paid one over. And there wasn’t an obvious way to do it from the control panel. I meant to call them about it, and didn’t get around to it before the cert renewed in June. So I had planned on doing that at some point next year before it renewed again. But I got an email this week telling me that it would renew this month. I do have an invoice from them saying that I renewed it through June 2018, so I’m not sure why they think it’s expiring now. But that finally motivated me to call them and get the cert moved over to the free one. The call was pretty simple and easy: only a short hold time, and the rep I got spoke English well, fixed things quickly, and didn’t try to sell me on any new services. Looking at the cert in Firefox now, It looks like a perfectly good DigiCert certificate, good through December 2018. Now let’s see if they really canceled the old one, or if they try to bill me for the renewal next month.

Sisyphus Stones and Good Fences

A Mystery Solved: Why the ‘Sisyphus Stones’ Rise and Tumble – from the NY Times. This sounds like something i would have liked to see. The article is from September, so there’s a good chance that it’s all gone now, but maybe not.

And this reminds me that there have been a few interesting public art installations in NYC recently that I’ve wanted to see. I’ve probably missed a few, since I’m not always that organized about remembering them; I usually see something that sounds interesting, and save a bookmark to it, then forget about it. But there is an Ai Weiwei thing called Good Fences Make Good Neighbors going on right now that’s pretty interesting. It’s also pretty spread out though. (Here’s a link to a map.)

Slacker Radio changes

I got an email yesterday announcing that the Slacker Radio Plus subscription I have will no longer include offline streaming, as of 12/31/2017. This is a bummer for me, since that’s the main reason I pay $4 per month for Plus. My data plan from Verizon only includes 3 GB per month, and I get pretty close to that most months, so I can’t really stream music over Verizon’s network unless I change my data plan.

To keep the offline streaming feature of Slacker, I’d need to upgrade to their $10/month Premium plan. That’s basically equivalent to Amazon Unlimited, or Apple Music, or Spotify. I’d get full access to their whole catalog, being able to listen to whatever I want whenever I want. (The Plus subscription just lets you listen to streaming radio. You’d can’t pick exactly which songs you want to listen to.)

I started using Slacker back in 2014. Back then, I had a 4 GB data plan, so I could do a little online streaming (though not that much). I’ve been pretty happy with it. I’m currently also using Amazon Prime Music, which is free with my Prime subscription. The iOS app for Amazon Music is pretty good, and it does also include offline streaming. It doesn’t, though, have the same kind of variety in streaming stations that Slacker has, and it has only a limited subset of the music that would be available if I went the next step and signed up for Amazon’s Music Unlimited service, which would cost $8 per month (after a $1 three-month trial).

I could also give Apple Music a try. I thought about that when it was announced in 2015, but it didn’t look like a good idea then. Looking at it again now, it’s still maybe a little iffy. It does have offline capability, but I’d need to check on how easy it is to use. And I’d need to review things to make sure I can set it up without screwing up my iTunes libraries on my Mac and PC.

Spotify still seems to be the 800-pound gorilla of streaming services. I’m considering Spotify simply because so many other people are on it. I often see links to interesting Spotify playlists on Reddit or elsewhere on the Internet. (I never see links to Apple Music playlists, and I’m not even sure if you can share them.) But, last I checked, Spotify’s iOS app isn’t very good for offline streaming. It’s possible, but it apparently doesn’t give you much control.

And as long as I’m looking around, I might as well look at Pandora too. I used to pay for a Plus subscription with them, before I switched to Slacker. Pandora Plus is now $5/month, and includes limited offline capabilities. Probably not enough to justify the cost. Premium is $10/month, and lets you copy anything down for offline listening.

My cheapest option would be to drop Slacker entirely, and rely on Amazon Prime Music for offline listening, along with podcasts and old-fashioned MP3s synced to my phone. That’s probably what I’ll do for now. Maybe at some point I’ll talk myself into being OK with paying $8 or $10 per month for a streaming music service, but not quite yet.

 

Rurouni Kenshin and other problematic entertainment

So I mentioned in my post earlier today that I was thinking about getting back into reading some manga, and maybe finishing Rurouni Kenshin, though I was having mixed feelings about that, due to the creator’s arrest for possessing child porn. Well, I did some soul-searching on that. (And by soul-searching, I mostly mean that I checked reddit’s r/manga, r/anime, and r/rurounikenshin sub-reddits for other people’s opinions.) I decided that, since I already own all 28 volumes, and have already read the first 19, it won’t do any harm to read the rest and see how the story ends. And also that maybe I should make a donation to The International Centre for Missing and Exploited Children. (I don’t want to imply that making a donation to a related cause “evens things out” in any way, but it helps, I guess.)

I’ve already gotten rid of the first 19 volumes of the Kenshin manga. I either included them with the big donation I made to Superheroes for Hospice in 2015, or to a more recent donation for a library sale. I’m not sure. Once I’m done reading the rest, I’ll probably donate those too, though I’m not sure how I’ll do that. (Or maybe I’ll sell them on eBay and donate the money.) Either way, once I’m done with them, I think that’ll be it for me and Kenshin.

I’ve been a fan of Kenshin for a long time. I just checked my Amazon order history, and I bought the Samurai X: Trust DVD back in January 2001. And I see that I was watching the regular anime series on Cartoon Network in 2003. (I’m pretty sure that I managed to watch the whole series, or at least all the episodes that aired on CN.) For the manga, I was buying it as it was being released by Viz starting in 2003 and running through 2006. I was reading it regularly for awhile, but fell behind, and then abandoned it at some point (along with a lot of other manga and anime that I was buying). But for a long time, Rurouni Kenshin was one of my favorite things.

In the wake of all the scandals that have plagued Hollywood since the Harvey Weinstein story came out, I’ve seen a few articles wrestling with the question of whether or not it’s still OK to watch Kevin Spacey movies or Louis C.K. comedy specials or Charlie Rose interviews. It’s pretty easy for me to answer “no” on all of those, since I wasn’t that big of fan of any of those guys to begin with. But figuring out what to do with Nobuhiro Watsuki’s work is a lot harder. I guess that finishing up the manga volumes I already own is OK, but after that, I should put it behind me and move on to something else. (Sigh.)

(And yes, as a disclaimer, I should say that I realize that I’m just agonizing over mindless entertainment, and my problems here don’t compare in any way to the problems of abused or harassed women, or abused children. “First world problems” and all that. I just felt like this was something I had to think through, write up, and get out of my head.)