Category: video

The Holiday Season

OK, I know I already wrote one pointless blog post today, and one per day should really be my quota, but, well, that one was spur of the moment, and I have some other stuff I’d been meaning to blog about today.

Now that the Thanksgiving weekend is winding down, I’ve been thinking about holiday stuff and end of year stuff. I don’t really have an important point to make or anything, rather just some random items to note.

Black Friday

I didn’t do much in the way of Black Friday shopping this year. I certainly didn’t do any in-person shopping, of course. I did take advantage of a few Black Friday deals though:

  • I renewed my Pluralsight subscription, at their Black Friday rate of $179/year. I’ve been doing that every year for the last few years. I think I get enough use out of Pluralsight to justify the cost, but I never feel quite sure of that. Either way, I’m set for another year.
  • I signed up for Hulu, via their Black Friday deal, which is $1.99/month for their ad-supported tier, for one year. (So, after a year, it goes to the normal $5.99/month rate.) I guess I can justify $2/month for Animaniacs and Dicktown and maybe a few other things. I’m not sure how annoying the ads are going to be. And I’m not sure I’ll keep it going after the promotional rate expires.
  • I also signed up for one year of Letterboxd Pro for $12. (I guess that’s half their normal rate.) I mentioned Letterboxd about a year ago. I’ve been logging all the movies I’ve watched this year with Letterboxd. And I’ve been keeping track of my DVD/Blu-ray collection with Blu-ray.com. I’m not quite as fanatical about either of these sites as I am about tracking my books in Goodreads. But they’re useful, and kind of fun.
  • I’ve almost talked myself into getting a 4K Apple TV via Apple’s Black Friday sale. That would get me a $50 gift card, bringing the $200 Apple TV down to $150, effectively. And I’d get a free year of Apple TV+. (I don’t really need Apple TV+, but there are a few interesting shows on it.)

Giving Tuesday

I’ve been overwhelmed with e-mail and snail mail related to charities this year, and of course it gets even more intense around the holidays. I generally like to put together a list of charities to give to at the end of the year, and make some donations. I probably won’t be doing that on Giving Tuesday, but I’ll get around to it at some point before New Year’s Day. I probably gave more to political causes earlier in the year (for obvious reasons). Now, at the end, I should look at more traditional charities, like food banks and stuff like that. NJ.com has a good article listing some worthy NJ charities to support right now.

Cable TV

I’ve been going back and forth on the idea of discontinuing my cable TV service for quite a while. My latest cable bill included a notice saying that my promotional discount would be reduced next month, so my cable bill will go up by about $20/month. That’s just about enough to get me over the fence on that. Of course, their customer service department is closed on Sunday, so I’ll have to call them at some point during the week. If I call, and they offer to keep my current discount, I’ll probably stick with cable. But if they don’t, I’ll probably go ahead and discontinue it. I think I’ve just about made my peace with the idea of no longer having access to live TV.

Christmas

I often send out my Christmas cards over the Thanksgiving weekend. Or at least I start working on them. I don’t send out a lot, but I always send out more than I get back. And I seem to get fewer and fewer every year. It’s really tempting to just give up on it this year. I really haven’t been in anything like a Christmas mood, and I think it’s going to be hard to get too enthusiastic about it this year, for a variety of reasons.

But, on a lark, I picked up my dumb little fake Christmas tree from my storage unit today and set it up. So I’m hoping that maybe that’ll start getting me in the right mood. Maybe I can bring myself to do the cards next weekend. I don’t know. Maybe I can talk myself into watching It’s A Wonderful Life at some point soon. Or if not that, maybe Die Hard. Small steps… (Speaking of Christmas movies, Letterboxd’s list of 25 top rated Christmas movies has some good ones.)

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.

more frog boiling

I’ve had a follow-up to my previous frog boiling post kicking around in the back of my head for the past couple of weeks, and I think maybe it’s time to write it up. This is liable to turn into a massive Old Man Yells at Cloud post. You’ve been warned.

First, to follow up on the last post, I still haven’t decided what to do with my cable TV service, though I’m leaning towards dropping back to the “Broadcast Basic” package. I’m not currently watching a lot of TV shows outside of the regular broadcast channels. The biggest one would probably be Doctor Who on BBC America, but I could just buy that from Apple. That’s what I did for the last few seasons, when BBCA wasn’t part of my cable package. (Side note: I didn’t much like the first two episodes of this season, but it’s really picked up steam since. The last two episodes, the ones with Tesla and the Judoon, where both a lot of fun.) Anyway, I’m going to wait for my next bill, see how much the prices actually go up, and them decide.

The next thing on my list is my web hosting plan with IONOS (aka 1&1). I’ve been with them since 2003. Their monthly cost went up to $11 in 2017. I got a notice earlier this month saying that it’ll be going up to $14 next month. I guess I’ll still be sticking with them. I could get cheaper hosting, if I wanted to, but it’d be a hassle to move, and I haven’t had any issues with IONOS recently. I did just move two of my six domains to the “included” domains that come with my package, so that’ll save me the renewal cost on them. I current have “andrewhuey” and “andyhuey” in the .org, .com, and .net TLDs. I really only need andrewhuey.com and andrewhuey.net. I’m not using the “andyhuey” domains, and I’m not using either .org domain. I’m a little worried that the yearly cost for the .org domains might go up if the .org sale goes through, so I should probably just drop those.

One more item is my AmEx card. I’ve had it since college, but they’re raising the annual fee on it to $150 this year, and that’s kind of crazy for a card that I use primarily as a backup card. I should really drop it and just get a random no-fee card to use as my backup. I have this weird sentimental attachment to it though. It doesn’t make any sense, I know, but I’ve had it for so long.

And of course I’m still considering dropping my monthly comic book order with Westfield Comics. But I can’t quite talk myself into that either. I did manage to drop one book last month (Nightwing). Maybe I’ll talk myself into dropping Batman and Detective this month. My backlog just keeps getting bigger.

Lastly, the price of Flickr Pro is going up. It was $100 for two years when I last renewed it. It’ll be going up to $118 for two years now. My subscription doesn’t renew until March 2021, so I don’t need to be in a hurry on this one. And there’s a deal where I can renew for another two years now at the old $100 rate. If I do that, I won’t have to think about it again until 2023. So I’ll probably do that. I don’t upload that much stuff to Flickr anymore, but I’ve got a bunch of stuff up there.

Well, I guess that’s all I had to get off my chest today. I thought this was going to wind up a lot longer, and possibly a bit angrier. In the end, I guess my attitude is more of a “meh, what are you gonna do?” kind of thing.

The boiling frog

I’ve been thinking about the boiling frog metaphor a lot lately, both with regards to small things and big things. This blog post is going to be about some (relatively) small things. (And also, a bit, about the sunk cost fallacy.)

My cable bill this month had a notice of a rate increase, starting next month. It’s a pretty big increase, both on my TV service and my internet service. But there’s also a note that says that existing customers won’t see their rate increase by more than $14.50. The wording on this was a bit hard to parse. It said “rate” and not “bill” so it wasn’t clear if it meant that no individual charge would go up by more than $14.50, or if the total increase wouldn’t be more than $14.50. I called to ask about it, and of course it’s the former. So it should be two $14.50 increases, plus a handful of fee increases, mostly in the $1 to $2 range. So my overall bill should go up by maybe $35. If they’d actually done the full rate increase all at once, my bill would be going up by more than $60, and that would likely have moved me to (finally) drop my cable TV subscription. But the $35 increase isn’t necessarily going to push me to do anything rash. Every time I think about dropping cable, I remember that I’ve got a TiVo which would become useless if I drop cable. But I bought that back in 2015, so I’ve certainly got my money’s worth out of it, and I shouldn’t worry about that particular sunk cost.

There’s some talk about the new rates on the DSLReports forums. Nobody’s happy about it, but for folks like me that only have one option for internet and TV, there’s not much you can do about it. I have no other option for internet, so I just have to pay whatever they charge and live with it. And I don’t think I’m ready to drop cable TV entirely, but I’m considering dropping back to Optimum’s “Broadcast Basic” package which is $25/month and just gets you the broadcast channels and a few others.

I did briefly consider dropping cable entirely and recycling the TiVo, but I still can’t talk myself into it. And, heck, I should really stop watching television entirely, since it’s probably going to give me Alzheimer’s. (I may be oversimplifying those study results. Still, it’s probably not good for me.)

Relating to boiling the frog, but not to anything else above: Boil the Frog is a neat service that generates a Spotify playlist linking any two artists together, in a (nearly) seamless way. I tried some random artists and got some interesting lists. The one linking Jimi Hendrix to Boards of Canada is nice.

sick day

Back in November, I realized that I had two PTO days that I had to use by the end of the year, so I took today and next Friday off. I kind of thought I might use today to go see Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. But I got very sick over this past weekend, and have been struggling through the week. I’ve actually burned an extra day and a half, by taking Monday off and a half-day Wednesday. So I’m feeling a little better today, but not “go out to see a two and a half hour Star Wars movie” better. More like “sit on the couch and binge-watch the original trilogy” better.

Anyway, I’m well enough to kill some time writing a blog post. And I have a bunch of random thoughts I’d been meaning to organize, so I’m going to make this a bit of a catch-up/catch-all post.

First, some post Catalina upgrade thoughts: As I mentioned previously, I don’t have any major issues with the new Music app. I’m a little disappointed in the TV app though. While there is still a list view, there doesn’t seem to be any way to turn on the old column browser for it. So if I want to filter it down to show just, say, my Doctor Who season 10 episodes, there’s no quick way to do that. It’s also gotten the seasons and episodes of Doctor Who quite mixed up at this point. (That may have been the case previously, but I hadn’t noticed it.) See the screenshot below for an example of how a bunch of random stuff has all ended up under “season 1, episode 1.” Doctor Who is maybe an edge case, since I’ve purchased several different seasons and collections, and there are a bunch of odds and ends, like Christmas specials and stuff like that. But there should be a better way to organize it all.

I’m also a little disappointed in the new Finder interface for syncing my iPhone and iPad. It’s mostly fine, but they’ve lost the old status display that used to show at the top of the iTunes window. Now, you just get a tiny circle in the Finder sidebar, so you can’t really tell what it’s doing. It’s not a big deal, but it’s a pain, and there’s no reason they couldn’t fix that. I guess we’ve gotten to the point now where syncing an iDevice to a Mac is the exception rather than the rule. I assume most people either sync to iCloud directly, or don’t sync at all.

Next topic: VPNs. There’s been a bit more news about PIA since I last mentioned them in my blog. Here’s an interview with the COO of the combined KAPE/PIA company. And here’s a recent blog post from PIA. They’re saying a lot of the right things, and it’s cool that they’re open-sourcing their desktop client. On the more general privacy today, the NY Times is running a series on the smartphone tracking industry that looks interesting. There really wasn’t anything in the first part that I didn’t already know. The second part has a fairly simple guide to what you can do on your phone to limit tracking. Again, not much that I didn’t already know, but useful for a more general audience. I found it interesting that they recommended a specific VPN app, Privacy Pro SmartVPN. I wasn’t familiar with that particular app/service, but it’s worth looking into. The third part talks about national security implications, which is pretty important, though again, there was nothing in there that surprised me. The series is still ongoing, and it might be worth reading the rest of it.

Last topic (probably): music. I enjoyed reading The Catastrophist’s 2019 Tech Gift Guide in the NY Times this morning. I wouldn’t give any of these items as a gift, and the only item on the list that I own are the AirPods. And, even on those, I kind of agree with their observations about disposability and the darker side of Apple’s ecosystem. (Though maybe “Your nephew dies alone.” is a bit of a stretch.) And I’m still thinking about streaming music services, though I still can’t quite talk myself into signing up for one. On a practical level, I think either Spotify or Apple Music would make the most sense for me. Spotify is the most popular and has a lot of interesting public playlists available. Apple Music is less popular, but would work better in terms of syncing my existing library to the cloud. And it has a 100,000 track limit, vs Spotify’s 10,000 track limit. (This article is a couple of years old, but as far as I can tell, that’s still the case.) And even if the track limit was higher, there doesn’t seem to be a way to get my iTunes library into Spotify without third-party software. So, I’d probably opt for Apple Music if someone held a gun to my head and told me I had to sign up for a streaming music service today. Of course, nobody’s holding a gun to my head. But every time I look at an artist’s web page and see links to their music on Spotify and Apple Music but no obvious link to buy it in MP3 format, I get nudged a little closer to signing up.

I still have a few thoughts rolling around in my head, but it’s time to give up on this blog post and go do something else. Maybe start into that Star Wars binge I mentioned at the top.

 

macOS TV app

Organizing my DVD collection

This post is a follow up to my like Goodreads, but for movies post from last week. Since then, I’ve managed to scan a little over 100 DVDs (and one Blu-Ray) into my blu-ray.com database. (According to the site, I now have 88 movies and 38 TV seasons in my collection.) This is maybe a third of my collection, I think. Maybe “accumulation” is a better word than collection, since it’s in mostly random order, and I barely know where anything is. But I’m trying to transform it from an accumulation into a collection, and hopefully pare it down a bit.

I’ve mostly been scanning older stuff that I’ve watched already, but I’ve hit a handful of DVDs that I’ve never gotten around to watching, and a few that I might have watched, but I don’t really remember. So I’m trying to get a handle on the watched/unwatched status on everything, in addition to just cataloging it and trying to organize it a bit.

Figuring out what to do with old DVDs can be a challenge, since they don’t have much resale value. There are some that I might be able to sell on eBay, but mostly, it wouldn’t be worth the trouble. I have a bunch of DVDs that I got through Peerflix back around 2006-2008, and those aren’t really suitable to resell or even donate, since Peerflix’s model basically required you to send the DVDs in a plain envelope, tossing out the case and the inserts, so I only have the discs. (And they’re usually a bit scratched up too.) I’ve already tossed out a few scratched up Peerflix discs, and I might toss out some more eventually.

I donated some books to my local library book sale last week, and I included a few DVDs in with the books. I’d like to donate more, once I can sort out some stuff that I know I’ve watched, and that I’m pretty sure I won’t want to watch again.

Anyway, back to Blu-ray.com: their mobile app has worked out pretty well. Most of the stuff I’ve scanned is in their database. The stuff it doesn’t have is generally oddball kung-fu movies. (Actually, sorting out and organizing my oddball kung-fu movies is probably worth a whole other blog post.) The site includes a number of useful features, though it’s missing some stuff I’d like to see, and the organization is sometimes a little weird. They have an export function, but it just exports a list of UPC codes (no titles or other info). So I guess that would be good if I wanted to move my collection to a different service that allowed UPC import, but not if I just wanted to export it to a spreadsheet. They do also have a printer-friendly view that could probably be cleaned up a bit and copied into a spreadsheet, so that’s good. And there’s some ability to facilitate trading between members, but I haven’t figured that out yet, and it doesn’t seem to be at all automated, really, so it’s not like Peerflix.

On the subject of stuff that I’ve had sitting around unwatched for way too long: I just started watching an Invader Zim box set that I bought in 2007. This one has apparently gone up in value, since I bought it for $16, and used copies are now going for $84 on Amazon. I don’t know if that’s a realistic price, since there’s a newer version of the set that can be had for $35, though I guess the newer version doesn’t have the commentaries or special features that are on the older version that I have.

like Goodreads, but for movies

It’s common (even clichéd) to describe a web service or app as “like X, but for Y.” It’s especially clichéd in cases where X=”Netflix” or “Uber.” But it’s the best way to describe what I’m looking for right now: “like Goodreads, but for movies.” I get a lot of use out of Goodreads, and, at this point, track pretty much every book I read and/or buy on it. The mild discomfort I get from sharing my entire reading history with Amazon is offset by the incredible usefulness of the service. (Which, now that I think about it, describes quite a lot of free, but troubling, web services. But that’s a subject for a different blog post.)

I have quite a collection of DVDs and Blu-ray discs. And I have digital movies in iTunes and other services. (Now all, thankfully, centralized in Movies Anywhere.) And I, of course, watch movies in movie theaters, and rent them occasionally, and watch them on Netflix and Amazon Prime, and so on and so forth. And I’ve really lost track of what I’ve watched and what I haven’t. I’ve started keeping track of some of this stuff in Evernote, but not in a really systematic way. And I try to add a note to Day One every time I watch a movie. But I’d really like something like Goodreads to get all of this information together in an organized fashion. (And I’d really like something that lets me scan the UPC codes off all my DVDs and Blu-rays, because I really don’t want to enter them by hand.)

So I did some internet searching and found a bunch of possibilities. First, it occurred to me that, since I like Goodreads so much, maybe Amazon owned something similar for movies. Amazon does own IMBD, and that seemed like a good place to start. IMDB allows you to create an account, and you can add movies to a watchlist, but it doesn’t have anything at all like the capabilities you get from Goodreads. So that’s one down.

And it also occurred to me that this might be something that Rotten Tomatoes would be in a good position to do. But, as far as I can tell, they don’t really do that either. So that’s another one down.

At some point, I might have had some of my DVDs cataloged in Delicious Library on my Mac. I stopped using that a long time ago, but apparently it still exists. But I don’t think it’s really a good candidate for what I’m trying to do either.

Searching for like Goodreads but for movies in DuckDuckGo led me to a number of semi-useful Quora questions, reddit discussions, and random blog posts. But a lot of them were pretty old and out of date. Sifting through recommendations, I found a few possible candidates that were still in business.

First, there was iCheckMovies. It allows you to create lists, and track what you have and haven’t watched, but there’s not much more to it, as far as I can tell. There’s no iOS app to scan discs.

Next up was Letterboxd. I liked this one enough to create an account and play around with it a bit. The web site looks really good, and there’s an iOS app too. But the iOS app doesn’t allow barcode scanning. Other than that, it’s a really nice service. You can easily track which movies you’ve watched and haven’t watched yet. And you can create your own lists to track things in other ways. There’s a CSV importer, but I don’t have my movies cataloged at all right now, so that’s of limited usefulness to me. There’s also a Pro tier for $19/year that gives you a few extra features. I’d be all-in on this one, I think, if only there was a way to scan barcodes.

The last thing I tried, which I only really stumbled across when searching for something else, was Blu-ray.com. I’d gone to the site in the past to read news and reviews, and I was aware that they had a forum, but I didn’t know that they had built up a system for tracking Blu-ray collections. Well, they have, and it’s pretty good. They have an iOS app with barcode scanning, so that’s my one big feature need checked off. I used it to scan about a dozen DVDs, and that worked pretty well. Two or three of them weren’t in their database, but most of them were. And, since they’re disc-oriented rather than film-oriented, I’m not just tracking that I’ve seen (for instance) The Matrix, but that I own a copy on DVD or Blu-ray or whatever. So that’s helpful. They have certain standard categories, like “owned,” “rented,” and “wishlist,” but you can also add your own. The organizational features aren’t quite up there with Goodreads, but they’re ok.

So I guess that, for now, I’m going to try to get a bunch of my discs scanned into Blu-ray.com and go from there. I’m not sure how far I’ll go with it, but it’s better than anything else I’ve tried.

(I have a few related topics I want to write up at some point, but I probably shouldn’t try to shoehorn them into this post. One topic relates to a recent attempt to rip a DVD on my PC. Another has to do with my attempt to whittle down my DVD collection a bit. And yet another could cover my related attempt to actually watch some DVDs that I’ve had sitting on the shelf for 10+ years. But I’ll get to all that eventually. Maybe.)

Star Trek: Discovery

The internet probably doesn’t need another opinion about Star Trek: Discovery, but I binge-watched the first season over the weekend, so… here’s another opinion about Star Trek: Discovery.

I avoided this show when it first aired, since I didn’t want to pay for CBS All-Access. It’s out on DVD now, so I picked it up that way. I’ve been a Trek fan since watching reruns of TOS on channel 11 (WPIX) when I was a kid, and I’ve watched every show since (TNG, DS9, Voyager, and Enterprise). Ever since Enterprise went off the air, I’ve been hoping for a new Trek show, in the same vein as those shows. In particular, I’d have loved to see a show that continued on from the TNG timeline, rather than a prequel or alternate universe show. Well, Discovery is a prequel show, and honestly feels a bit like an alternate universe show too. Which is fine. Enterprise ended in 2005, and TV has changed a lot since then, so this is a new show that’s more in the style of the 2004 Battlestar Galactica reboot than it is to any previous Trek series.

Here’s a review from the NY Times that I mostly agree with. The Times even has recaps/reviews of every episode of the first season. Their recap of the season finale makes some good points.

Overall, it was a fun show to watch. But there were parts that really didn’t hold together well, or make much sense. A lot of the plot twists were predictable. And there were a lot of clichés, including a Groundhog Day episode. (I’m starting to think there’s some kind of legal requirement that all sci-fi TV shows must do at least one Groundhog Day episode.) The TV Tropes page for Discovery is quite long (and fairly amusing). The season felt a bit like the creators were desperate to keep up a stream of big reveals and big plot twists. There weren’t too many moments where they slowed things down for character development or anything like that.

Season two is running on CBS All-Access right now, and is up to episode four, I think. I haven’t looked at any reviews too closely, to avoid spoilers, but from what little I’ve read, it might be off to a good start, with some course correction from season one. If I stick with the “only watching it on DVD” plan, I won’t get to see season two until, probably, this time next year. I’m OK with that. I have plenty of other stuff to watch. But I will probably buy those season two DVDs when they come out.

Batman: TAS on Blu-Ray

I’m tempted to pick up the new Batman: TAS Blu-Ray set, but it’s a bit expensive, and I probably won’t get around to watching it anyway. I have the first season on DVD, which I bought many years ago, and probably haven’t watched that yet. (Of course, I’m pretty sure I’ve seen every episode of the series, more than once, back when it was on TV.)

Lazy Sunday

I had tentative plans to go in to NYC for the Frankenstein exhibit at the Morgan today, but it turned into one of those mornings where I couldn’t quite talk myself into getting all my stuff together and heading for the train station. Instead, I finished reading a big Avengers hardcover, then spent way too much time writing a review of it on Goodreads. I’m kind of in a mood to read some more Marvel stuff now, so I might spend the afternoon reading Avengers vs. X-Men, which I have in Comixology.

DC was really pushing their new DC Universe service at NYCC last weekend; every DC-related panel started with the DC Universe trailer, and the service got mentioned a lot in some of those panels. I’ve alternately been talking myself into and out of signing up for the service. On the one hand, I’m a long-time DC fanboy, so there’s probably lots of stuff there I’d like. On the other hand, I still have a huge pile of unread comics and graphic novels that I haven’t read yet, and DVDs and Blu-rays that I haven’t watched. And I haven’t watched the most recent season of any of the Marvel shows on Netflix. So I already have a lot of superhero content to consume, that I’ve already paid for. But at $75/year for the service, that comes out to $1.44 per week, which is less than the price of a single comic book. So… maybe.

I’ve been curious about the game Stardew Valley since I heard it discussed on an NPR podcast a couple of months ago. (Here’s the article that they mentioned on the podcast. And here’s another NPR article that makes me wonder what kind of Stardew player I’d be…) I was kind of hoping that the game would have been available for the Apple TV, since I have a game controller for my Apple TV that I never get to use for anything. But no. It’s available for most other platforms, including Mac, PC, PS 4, Switch, and XBox One. The only game console I currently own is a PS 3, so I’m out of luck there. I could buy it for Mac or PC, but I was looking for something I could play on the TV. I saw an article a few days ago announcing that it was coming out for iOS, so I had some hope that would include Apple TV. Still no; just iPhone and iPad. And I saw that Minecraft for Apple TV has been discontinued for lack of players. So if Apple TV can’t support something as popular as Minecraft, it probably can’t support any big, interesting, game. Oh well. Maybe I should buy one of the current-generation video game consoles, but I just don’t think I would use it enough to justify the price. (I was really hoping Apple TV gaming would take off at some point.)

I didn’t make it to the big Doctor Who panel at NYCC last weekend. I’m sure it would have been fun, but it sounded like it was going to be very crowded and I was too tired to deal with that. The full panel is up on YouTube now, on the official Doctor Who channel, so I’ll have to watch that later. I watched the first episode last week, and liked it enough that I’m looking forward to this week’s episode. I don’t get BBC America, so I get the episodes through iTunes, which means I don’t get it until tomorrow. I’m not liking this new Sunday night schedule for the show. When it was on a Saturday night schedule, I could watch the new episodes on Sunday afternoon. Now I have to wait until Monday after work. Well, at least it gives me something to look forward to after work on Monday.

OK, so this turned into a long rambling post, it’s almost noon, and I’ve killed my entire Sunday morning reading comics, listening to music, and writing pointless reviews and blog posts. Eh, there’s worse ways I could have spent the morning. Time for lunch.