Category: scifi

Lots of Doctor Who

I’ve been fighting a cold the last few weeks (on and off). I stayed home on Christmas, all by myself, and did very little, other than watching Doctor Who. I’ve really been on a Doctor Who kick lately.

I’ve watched all of the Doctor Who: The Key to Time DVD set that I bought a couple of years ago. That was a lot of fun. The episodes themselves are great, and so are the commentaries. The episodes are from 1978-79. The commentaries were recorded around 2002, I think. So both are capturing a moment in time that’s long gone. It was cool listening to the actors, writers, directors, and other creators reminisce. Especially Tom Baker. He’s a hoot.

I’ve now started watching The Complete David Tennant Collection Blu-ray set, which I bought in 2019. This is a little more recent, but still feels like a relic from a distant past, in some ways. Again, I’m watching the episodes and listening to the commentaries, and having a lot of fun. I’ve probably seen most of these episodes multiple times, but I haven’t seen them in a while.

And of course I watched this year’s Christmas special, Joy to the World, on Disney+. I have mixed feelings about Ncuti Gatwa’s first season, but I really liked this special.

Seeing Doctor Who stories from all three of these different eras all in the last few weeks is interesting. There’s a lot of common threads going through this stuff, but also a lot of change and evolution.

Honestly, this is shaping up to be kind of a rough holiday season. I really haven’t been able to spend time with anyone else, for various reasons. And I haven’t been able to do some of the oddball things I used to do during the holidays, pre-pandemic. So I’m just spending all my downtime watching TV, alone in my apartment.

converting EPUB files to CBZ, and ripping DVDs

Here’s a follow up to my post from earlier today. I went ahead and decided to see if I could write a PowerShell script to convert an EPUB file to a CBZ file. I thought this would be a quick process, but of course it got a bit out of control.

I started by asking ChatGPT to write one for me, given some fairly specific parameters. I asked it to use the 7-Zip command line tool to zip and unzip the files. And I told it where to find the images in the EPUB, and gave it the steps to follow to complete the process. It spit out a script that looked pretty good but (of course) didn’t work.

Long story short: I spent an hour or two tweaking the script and eventually came up with this one. It worked fine, and I used it to convert about a dozen EPUBs to CBZ.

I gave up on calling 7-Zip, since passing parameters into 7-Zip from PowerShell turned out to be a very annoying process that I could never quite get right. (And which gave me a bit of deja vu, when I remembered that I’d had this problem at least once before, when I was trying to write a backup script for my dev VM at work, probably ten years ago.) I switched to the built-in Compress-Archive and Expand-Archive commands, which was probably the better path anyway.

On a separate (but semi-related) subject, I decided to watch a Doctor Who DVD this afternoon. I was going to watch the second DVD from my A Key To Time box set, which I bought in 2022. I watched the first disc in 2023, then never got around to the second. Well, now it’s 2024, so I decided I should probably make some progress with it. But my Xbox refused to play disc 2. So I checked another disc, and it was fine. So it’s not that the Xbox Blu-ray drive is broken. The DVD seems to load fine on my PC though. So now, I’m using Handbrake to rip it, so I can watch it via my Apple TV.

All in all, I’m spending way more time in front of my PC than I intended to today. And whatever disc space I saved by futzing with my comic book files is going to get eaten up by the rip of the Doctor Who DVD. Oh well. I guess this is still more fun than work!

Not at SDCC, 2024 edition, and WordPress issues

It’s become kind of a thing for me to write a “not at SDCC” post every year, during SDCC. I’m probably not going back to SDCC ever again, honestly. The pandemic really created a “hard stop” for me on a bunch of stuff, and I’m thinking now that I’m not likely to go back, ever, on a lot of that stuff.

I haven’t been following the news out of the con too closely. Most of it isn’t that interesting to me, honestly. I haven’t read a lot of comics lately, since I’ve been concentrating on getting through the Wheel Of Time books. And I’m not too interested in any of the upcoming nerd-related TV or movie stuff. I still haven’t watched the latest Star Wars, Marvel, or Star Trek streaming shows. And I only just watched Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, since it just came out on Netflix. I might go see Deadpool & Wolverine in a theater, but probably not. So all this talk about the next big thing doesn’t matter to me, when I still haven’t seen the last big thing.

Anyway, I wanted to see if I could recapture some of the old “con spirit” this weekend, so I decided to watch Alan Tudyk’s Con Man series yesterday. I watched the whole first season. (Which isn’t hard, since the episodes are just 10 minutes long.) I watched some of those previously, when they were on Comic-Con HQ, which I subscribed to, during its brief existence. The show is now available on Amazon Prime, so that’s convenient. I laughed out loud a few times, which is pretty rare for me, these days.

On an unrelated topic: My blog has been kind of flaky this week. I got notices that it was up and down all last night. That doesn’t really matter much, of course, since nobody really reads this blog, and there’s nothing much important on it. But it annoys me. So it sent me down a rabbit hole of WordPress troubleshooting. I don’t think I have much to say about that, though. No big revelations that would be worth sharing, or documenting so I remember them next time. Just a bunch of stabs in the dark, then a shrug, and an “eh, good enough for now.” Everything is working, but still kind of slow, so I’ll just have to see if it gets better on Monday.

I haven’t been sleeping well the past few days, so my energy level is pretty low. I got some exercise this morning, and now I’m likely to spend the rest of the day reading, watching random bits of the Olympics, and maybe watching Con Man season two later.

some follow up on grammar checking and AI

First, a bit of follow-up on my post about Grammarly and other grammar checkers: I missed one obvious alternative, Microsoft Editor. It’s a little confusing. It seems to be available as a free browser extension, but only for Edge and Chrome, not Firefox or Safari. And the “premium” features are part of Microsoft 365, which I do subscribe to. I guess it also works in MS Word, so I could theoretically copy my blog posts into Word, check the grammar there, then paste them back into WordPress, but I know that won’t work well. Or I could switch to Edge, but that’s only on Windows. Or I could switch to Chrome, which will work on Windows and Mac, but I’m really trying to avoid that. So… I guess I’ll think about it. Probably not my best option.

And, in general AI news, I liked this snarky article from Gizmodo. Sam Altman and OpenAI are certainly fascinating. I’m not sure if the company is going to change the world, or if it’s a load of B.S. and it’s going to fall apart a year from now. There are a few good lines in the article, like this one: “So far, ChatGPT is very good at writing limericks and telling lies.” Which is basically true. I’m pretty sure that we’re still a long way from AGI, if such a thing is even possible. (Though it’s pretty hard to even nail down what would count as AGI, at this point.)

I’m not sure about the whole “effective altruism” thing. It’s been getting a lot of negative press lately. The article says “Effective Altruism posits that the solution to humanity’s problems is for people with good intentions to get extremely rich and then donate the money to good causes,” which is… not exactly correct, but probably close enough, in practice. I’m not sure if I trust folks like Sam Altman to effectively redistribute his wealth once he decides he has enough to do that. Or for other effective altruists to make all the right decisions for the rest of us…

Something else I saw recently reminded me of the concept of fully automated luxury communism, which I remember some folks talking about on Twitter a few years ago, in a generally jokey way. My naive understanding of that, at the time, was that it was basically describing a post-scarcity future, like Gene Roddenberry‘s conception of what Earth would be like in the future, as envisioned in Star Trek.

And of course I just asked ChatGPT to compare and contrast Effective Altruism and Fully Automated Luxury Communism, and it came back with a pretty good summary. And then I asked it what Gene Roddenberry would have thought of FALC, and it came back with, again, a pretty reasonable answer. So maybe this ChatGPT thing isn’t just good for limericks and telling lies.

Patrick Stewart

If I had the spare time, I’d be really interested in reading Patrick Stewart’s new book Making It So. Maybe I’ll put some of my podcasts aside for a while and give the audiobook a try. Here are a few links about the book:

Time Marches On

So it’s Sunday morning again, and I’m futzing around on my laptop, aimlessly, as is my wont.

I thought I should mention Twitterrific again, as it now seems to be 100% officially dead. So I guess I should remove it from my iPhone and iPad and give up on Twitter completely now. I’d been holding out some hope that Elon would reverse course and turn the API access back on, but I guess not. Sigh.

I was also looking around at the “on this day” links on the sidebar of my blog, and noticed this one, originally linking to the website that my brother Pat and his wife Heather set up. Heather gave up the domain name for that, heatherandpatrick.com, a long time ago, after Patrick passed away. But, just for yuks, I decided to see what, if anything was at that domain now. Turns out that another Heather and Patrick are using it as a website for their upcoming wedding! That’s kind of nice. (Certainly better than the domain squatters who had been sitting on it every other time I’ve gotten curious about it over the years.) Anyway, they seem like a lovely couple, and I hope they have a great wedding!

On a completely different subject, I just got a notification that TiVo is turning off their suggestions feature. Kind of sad to see this going away, though I hadn’t used it much since I dropped back to the Broadcast Basic cable plan. This news got me curious about what alternative are out there to watch broadcast TV, rather than cable + TiVo, for me. First, it looks like I would still have no luck with an antenna. AntennaWeb still indicates that I’d need a major-league outdoor antenna to pick up anything from here. So that’s out. And some of the streaming services like Hulu + Live TV include the major broadcast networks, but that costs $70/month, which is way more than Broadcast Basic is costing me. So I guess I’m sticking with minimal cable + TiVo for now, even though TiVo seems to be in a slow death spiral, and my cable provider’s support for CableCARD is probably dicey at this point.

The Giants lost to the Eagles last night, so my interest in football for this year is mostly done, though I might watch the rest of the playoffs and the SuperBowl anyway. I really got interested in football this season, and that was kind of a surprise to me, since I’ve been losing interest gradually for quite some time now. I guess it was mostly the Giants doing well that kept me interested? Maybe also that, this season, football seemed to be just about football. There was almost no talk about politics or racism or COVID or brain injuries or anything. I realize that all those things are still going on, but I could watch a football game and pretend that it wasn’t for a few hours? Or at least not think about any of it? It was a nice escape. (And yes, the Damar Hamlin thing was a sudden jolt of reality, but he seems to be doing reasonably well, so that’s good.)

Speaking of escapism, I started watching Star Trek: Discovery season 4 yesterday. I signed up for Paramount+ a little more than six months ago, largely so I could watch all the new Star Trek shows, and I still haven’t watched a lot of it. I’ve mostly just been using Paramount+ to watch Inside the NFL lately. I need to catch up on both Discovery and Picard. Maybe now that the Giants are out of the playoffs, I can catch up on all my sci-fi TV.

Klaus Schulze & Dune

I’ve been thinking about (and listening to) Klaus Schulze a lot lately. He passed away in April. I’ve been listening to his music since I was a kid, when I first started getting interested in electronic music. I remember buying this 1983 live album on CD, at some point in the 80s (though probably not in 83, since I don’t think I had a CD player yet). I need to dig that out and rip it at some point, since it’s not on Apple Music.

And he showed up in a few Matt Howarth comic books. I think I’ve read both of the comics mentioned on this page. I know he’s been in at least one or two others.

He released an album called Dune in 1979, which is on Apple Music (or at least part of it is). And there’s also Deus Arrakis, which came out earlier this year. The Bandcamp page for that one has this quote from Schulze:

On the one hand this album was created as spontaneously as all my albums before, on the other hand it has a special history: when I produced my eleventh album ‘Dune’ in 1979 I already knew the ‘Dune’ trilogy by Frank Herbert inside out like other people knew their ‘Lord of the Rings’. I was totally fascinated by this monumental story of the desert planet and I read the books over and over again.

He continues on about Dune and his thoughts about the books and movies. It’s interesting.

The 1984 Dune movie had a soundtrack mostly by Toto, which is a thing I probably knew at some point, but had completely forgotten about until I just now looked it up on Wikipedia. There’s one lone track on there by Brian Eno, Roger Eno and Daniel Lanois, though. I just brought that album up on Apple Music, and it’s quite something. The Eno track sounds pretty much like you’d expect an Eno Dune-related track to sound. (Good!) The rest of the album is… mixed. The tracks have names like “Robot Fight” and “The Floating Fat Man.” A few of them have dialog from the movie mixed in with the music. Some of them are quite nice, actually, but a few are pretty bad.

The 2021 film has a soundtrack by Hans Zimmer. There are actually three albums out related to it. The main soundtrack itself, something called The Dune Sketchbook, and another called The Art and Soul of Dune, which is apparently a companion to a book about the film. (The Sketchbook album also has a contribution from Schulze.) I’m not a huge fan of Zimmer, but I generally like his stuff, and his Dune music is very good. Here’s an interesting article from the Times about it.

And one more Dune-related bit of music: April Larson’s You Stand in a Valley Between Dunes, a 2017 album inspired by Dune.

Doctor Who and Godzilla

If you were to judge my life based on my recent posts here, it would seem like I spend all of my time reading comics, listening to podcasts, watching movies, and so on. I do still have a full-time job as a programmer, and I spend most of my time on weekdays heads-down at my computer, working hard, I promise! I just haven’t had much to say about it here recently. There have been a few things I’ve thought about writing up, but they’re such niche topics that I can’t imagine them being very interesting to anyone but me. (Of course, most of these posts probably aren’t interesting to anyone but me…) All of which is preamble to excuse writing another post about comics and movies and podcasts and stuff. (What else am I going to do with my spare time in 2021?)

After finishing Doctor Who: Flux, I had a hunger for more Doctor Who content, so I dug into my backlog of comics and audio. I listened to The Lost Stories: The Fourth Doctor Box Set, a Big Finish audio drama that I’d bought back in 2016, featuring Tom Baker’s Doctor and Louise Jameson as Leela. I really enjoyed it. I wrote in my Goodreads review that it was the first Tom Baker audio I’d listened to, but I was organizing my notes this morning, and realized that I’d listened to a set of novel adaptations with Baker and Lalla Ward back in 2018. My Goodreads review for that set was pretty short, but I guess I liked it.

I’ve now started the Destiny of the Doctor series, which is a series of eleven stories, featuring the first eleven Doctors, that was released for Doctor Who’s 50th anniversary, back in 2013. I got it as part of a Humble Bundle in 2017. I’ve only listened to the first one so far, but it was pretty good. These aren’t full-cast dramas, they’re stories read by one or two narrators.

I also started reading the Ninth Doctor comic book series from Titan. I have the first two volumes of that from a Humble Bundle from 2018. It’s a pretty good series, featuring the Doctor, Rose, and Captain Jack.

I have a good backlog of other comics and audio dramas from those Humble Bundles, but of course every time I start reading/listening to this stuff, I start poking around for more stuff that I don’t own yet. I’d like to pick up the rest of that Ninth Doctor comic series, for instance. And more of the Tom Baker audios. And the new Ninth Doctor audios. And so on.

On the related subject of consuming DRM-free comics and audio from old Humble Bundles, I should mention that I’ve been using Panels for the comics, as I’ve mentioned in a previous post. I had some trouble with it repeatedly crashing on me yesterday, but I updated it to the latest version, and that’s been stable. So I guess there was a bug that got fixed. I’ll probably commit to a yearly subscription on that at some point. And on the audiobook front, I’ve been sticking with the Apple Books app to listen to stuff, using Audiobook Builder to put MP3s together into single audiobook files. (I bought that back in February.) I also recently downloaded BookPlayer to my iPhone, to try out. BookPlayer is an open source player for DRM-free audiobooks. It looks promising, but I haven’t actually tried it yet. Since it seems like it can pull stuff from OneDrive directly, I could simplify my workflow a bit by using it rather than Books.

My other recent pop culture obsession has been Godzilla. I’m working my way through the Criterion box set that I bought earlier this year. I’ve watched through to Son of Godzilla. Destroy All Monsters is next! For most of these movies, it’s the first time I’ve seen the original Japanese version. The last time I’ve seen most of these was probably back when I was a kid, on TV, as a Saturday afternoon movie. And that would have been the chopped up, dubbed, American version, obviously. For something like Son of Godzilla, it’s a goofy movie either way, so watching the uncut original, in Japanese with subtitles, doesn’t turn it into Citizen Kane, but it’s a more interesting experience to watch it that way, I think. I’ve been logging them all on Letterboxd, which has some pretty fun reviews for some of these movies.

Oh, and thinking about Doctor Who and Godzilla made me wonder if there’s ever been any kind of crossover between the two. There’s fan fiction of course, but the closest I could come to a “real” crossover is the Dr. Who character from the Japanese King Kong show and King Kong Escapes movie. Godzilla has of course met King Kong, so that puts Godzilla just one degree of separation from a character named Dr. Who, even if that character isn’t exactly a time lord.

Thanksgiving Eve

I had some PTO days to use up this year, so I decided to take this entire week off. Originally, I had some semi-ambitious half-formed plans about maybe going in to NYC and visiting some museums again, and maybe even staying overnight. But I got a bit sick a couple of weeks ago, and, while I’m mostly over that, I’m still not keen to go out in the cold, get on a train, and deal with NYC, crowds, and so on. So I’ve largely been sitting in my armchair reading comics, or sitting on the couch watching TV.

My Thanksgiving plans are, shall we say, minimal. I have no plans to go out, and I haven’t bought any traditional Thanksgiving foods. So maybe I’ll have a turkey and cheese sandwich for lunch, and a frozen turkey burger for dinner, and that’s about as close to honoring Thanksgiving as I’ll get.

Looking at some posts from previous Thanksgivings, I guess things could be worse. 2018 was a particularly bad year, with the snowstorm and the Christmas music debacle. Somerville hasn’t played Christmas music on Main St. in a few years, and hopefully they won’t start it up again this year. But there was one thing this year, from last weekend: some kind of issue with the sanitary line out of my apartment building that caused the building to have a bit of a stink going for a few days. (That actually almost moved me to go into NYC for a day or two, but they got it fixed before things got too bad.)

And for anyone who’s still reading after all that, here are some notes on the comics I’m reading this week, and the TV I’m watching.

I’ve read through a couple of B.P.R.D.: Hell on Earth omnibus volumes. I have all five, in hardcover. I bought them as they were coming out, in 2018 and 2019. I’d read most of the previous BPRD run in single issues. The end of that run and the start of Hell on Earth happened right when I’d stopped buying monthly books. So picking up the hardcovers for Hell on Earth seemed like a good idea. I don’t know if it really was though. Dark Horse has a 50% off sale going on right now for digital stuff, so if I’d waited and just bought the digital versions, I could have gotten all five for just over $30, and I wouldn’t have to worry about what to do with these big hardcovers once I’m done reading them.

And I did wind up spending some money on Hellboy-related stuff from that sale yesterday, including all of the Lobster Johnson volumes, and all of the Witchfinder volumes that I didn’t already have.

I’m mostly enjoying Hell on Earth, even though I’m not generally a big fan of post-apocalypse fiction. I should probably take a break from it, and read something different today, but I think I’m just going to go ahead and jump into the next volume. If I’m not enjoying it, then I’ll switch to something different.

For my TV watching, I finished season two of Locke & Key on Netflix. It’s a pretty good show. I’ve been listening to the Locke & Key: Unlocked podcast after watching each episode and that’s been fun. I’ve mentioned this before, but I do really like the idea of companion podcasts for TV shows. They can sometimes be too silly, or too fawning, but if you get the right mix of elements, they can be really good.

I’ve now started watching season four of The Expanse on Amazon. Season six is coming out soon, and I actually didn’t realize that I hadn’t even watched season four yet. I knew I hadn’t watched season five, but I thought I was only one season behind, not two. Either way, it’s been a good season so far. And on the podcast front, I’ve started downloading some season four episodes of The Churn podcast, which was originally the official SyFy channel podcast for The Expanse, back when it was on SyFy. Even though the show has moved to Amazon, I guess the podcast is still being done by SyFy, though I’m not completely sure about that. I’m also curious about the Ty & That Guy podcast, which is hosted by Ty Franck and Wes Chatham. That’s more of a rewatch podcast, I guess. They’ve only just gotten through season three. If they start season four soon, that might work out well for me.

I’ve been keeping current with Doctor Who: Flux, watching the episodes as they’re released. I’m getting them through Apple, so I can’t watch them until the day after they’re released, but that’s good enough for me. I have mixed feelings about this season, but hey… it’s Doctor Who! I haven’t had much luck in finding a good Doctor Who podcast. There are a lot of them! I did find one I liked a while back, but it seemed to be dead the last time I checked. Maybe I’ll try the Radio Times one.

And I will likely watch the first episode of the new Hawkeye series on Disney+ today. It seems to be loosely based on Matt Fraction’s Hawkeye run, which is very good. I read the first two volumes of it some time ago, and just bought volumes 3 and 4 from Comixology, where they’re currently on sale for $1.99 each.

I’ve found that my stay-at-home vacation routine is basically to read comics until my eyes are too tired for that, then watch TV until my eyes are too tired for that, then listen to podcasts until it’s time for bed. I can’t say that I’m proud of that, but it is what it is, and it’s about all I feel up to doing right now.

So I guess that’s about it for this low-stakes blog post. Honestly, I was mostly writing this because it’s too cold out to go for a walk and I don’t feel like doing any indoor exercise right now, and I’m not really ready to dig into any reading material just yet. I’m still waking up.

distractions

I mentioned in my last post that I was thinking about signing up for Disney+. Well, I did that, and have now watched most of the first season of The Mandalorian. It’s a pretty good show. It’s basically just silly Star Wars escapism. (And silly escapism is something I need right now.) I’ll definitely be keeping Disney+ through to the end of the year at least, so I can also watch season two, and Soul. Since Soul is being released on Christmas day, maybe I’ll actually watch it on Christmas. (I won’t have much else to do…)

I feel kind of bad about giving Disney any money right now, especially given the recent news about how they’ve been treating Alan Dean Foster, but I know that one random nerd boycotting Disney+ isn’t going to get them to pay Foster his royalties.

And, as I’ve probably mentioned before, the pressure to sign up for even more streaming services is increasing. It was just announced that the new Wonder Woman movie will be going straight to HBO Max on Christmas day, so that’s two big movies I could watch at home, assuming I can talk myself into paying $15/month for HBO Max. And the new Animaniacs on Hulu premieres tomorrow, I think, so that’s another thing I’d like to watch.

The return on investment for my traditional cable subscription seems to be shrinking, so I am once again considering dropping it. I still watch some news and a few late-night shows, but I could probably get enough of that online if I dropped cable. Most of the drama shows I would have been watching in the fall never started up, and, for a few, I’m not sure if I’m really interested in them anymore. NCIS and NCIS: New Orleans both just started new seasons, and I’m really not that interested in them. Those kind of shows have always been kind of a guilty pleasure for me, but, in the wake of the pandemic and some of the other stuff that’s gone on this year, they seem kind of pointless now. Unless they can find a way to reinvent their formula to work under current conditions, I think maybe it would be better to just take a break for a couple of years on the whole “police procedural” genre. NCIS is side-stepping the pandemic for now, by setting the current season in 2019 (at least to start). NCIS: NOLA set their first two episodes in March 2020, during the early days of the pandemic, and they’re trying to address it, but I’m just not that into it. So, dropping the “police procedural” shows, that leaves maybe the CW DC Arrowverse shows, which should start back up in January and February. But that’s not really enough to keep me paying for cable. (And I’m not sure if I’m all that excited about those shows either, to be honest.)

One related item that I’ve discovered recently, while watching The Mandalorian: The best way for me to watch stuff like that is on my Apple TV, with my AirPods. The AirPods can pair with the Apple TV box directly, bypassing the actual TV entirely. And the Apple TV setting to reduce the loudness of music and sound effects really helps even things out so that I can understand dialog better, I think.