Still alive. I haven’t been posting lately, or been around much online, mainly due to being busy with real life issues, issues which have crowded out most reading. But I have managed to watch a little TV.
Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die, starts off with a man in a goofy getup walking into a diner, terrifying the customers by claiming he has a bomb, that he’s from the future, and there to recruit some of them for a mission to save the world. In the early stages, you’re going to wonder if you’re just watching something about a crazy person. The only thing I’ll reveal about what follows is that he’s not crazy. Other than that, this is a movie best experienced cold. The ride gets increasingly wild as the film progresses. I enjoyed it.
Per Aspera Ad Astra takes place on an interstellar spaceship taking years to reach a destination. The crew is in suspended animation living in dream fantasies managed by the ship’s computer system. But when the ship comes under threat, it becomes necessary for the lone awake crew member to wake some of the others. However, things have gone wrong, and waking key crew members requires entering their dreams.
I think the film was going for the wacky antics of Everything Everywhere All At Once, but we’ve all seen Inception and so see the antics coming long beforehand. It turns out that the surprise of the antics is just as important as the antics themselves, at least for me. Not that the movie is terrible. It was entertaining enough, but didn’t deliver the same emotional punches as those other films.
Silo season 3 continues the story of characters in a post apocalyptic underground silo discovering the nature of their world and how to survive in it. Juliette has made it back to her own silo but has lost her memory. She and her allies struggle against the intelligence trying to control them. That struggle is shown with flashback interludes to the 21st century revealing the origin of the silos. The answer to many mysteries have been revealed, but there will be one more season for the climatic battle and final reveals. I’ve enjoyed this series immensely and definitely recommend checking it out if you haven’t already.
The new Ghost in the Shell show is basically a fresh adaptation of the story from the original manga series. I can’t say I found it compelling, maybe because I’ve seen the story repeatedly, and I found some of the style choices distasteful, namely periodically infantilizing the characters to show their emotions. If you’re completely unfamiliar with the franchise, this show might be worth checking out, although personally, I think the 1995 anime movie remains a better option.
Currently, both the Doctor Who and Star Trek franchises are in the crapper, I think deservedly so. The recent writers on both shows don’t seem to take their premise seriously anymore, except for tying in to past versions of the show. Both have gone off the silly end repeatedly in recent seasons. In the case of Strange New Worlds, the show seems preoccupied with tying things into the original series. That does lead to some cool moments, but the many excuses to have James Kirk on the ship have become pretty lame.
And the stories of the individual episodes often seem more like attempts at comedy skits than serious storytelling. I don’t mind the occasional humorous episode, but when watching the last couple seasons, my patience gave out multiple times while enduring the 1960s TV show episode, the everyone is an obnoxious Vulcan episode, the haunted ship episode, the everyone’s stoned episode, the black and white noir episode, the everyone is a muppet episode, and the soap opera episode.
Reportedly there will be one more season of Strange New Worlds, although it will be abbreviated. Hopefully that means less throwaway silliness. I’d love to see the stories live up to the excellent casting and production values.
The Pendragon Cycle: Rise of the Merlin is a pretty fun show if you’re familiar with Arthurian legends. It has lots of little easter eggs throughout to heighten anticipation. But there have been critical reviews from people not up on the mythology. The show begins generations before Arthur, and even before Merlin, with Merlin’s parents. Then it jumps 75 years to an adult world-weary Merlin, filling in his backstory with flashbacks. The only thing that lessens the experience, at least for me, is the anachronism of Atlantis as an explanation for the fay folk, a story of a lost island nation invented by Plato several centuries before the events shown in the show. (At a minimum, they could have renamed it like Tolkien did.)
But I enjoyed it enough that I’m hoping for additional seasons. Reportedly the show is based on a book series, so the material is there.
Lately episodes of Babylon 5 have been getting posted to YouTube and I’ve been rewatching key episodes. I actually have the whole series on DVD, but these are high definition and I think have been remastered. They certainly look better than I recall from the DVDs. Watching them is reminding me of just how good the show actually is. Certainly it’s far from perfect and not everything has aged well, but it still stands head and shoulders above most sci-fi TV.
When I was in my comic book phase in the late 1970s and early 80s, there was only one Green Lantern: Hal Jordan, a superhero who got his abilities from a powerful ring, a piece of technology from the Green Lantern Corp, an intergalactic police force. I knew there had been another Green Lantern character in the Golden Age (1940s), but Jordan was the one when I was reading. Apparently since then there have been others, and Jordan himself underwent a number of transitions.
None of which I was aware of when I started watching Lanterns. In this show, Jordan is an older, grizzled, and somewhat bitter character, who has been forced by the Lantern corp to take on an apprentice, John Stewart, who he knows the corp sees as his eventual replacement. So he treats Stewart like shit. Stewart is an exceptional character, who in the beginning accepts Jordan’s treatment stoically, but eventually there is conflict.
Most of the story takes place in a small town in Nebraska named Rushville, where some murders have taken place that Jordan is convinced involve extraterrestrials. The people in the town don’t want them there, but there turns out to be a lot going on under the covers.
Like most DC Universe shows, it’s darker and grittier than its Marvel counterparts, but I mostly enjoyed it.
That’s what I’ve been watching. Have you seen any of them? If so, what did you think? Watched anything else interesting lately?
Not sure the real world issues can have been very taxing! You’ve managed to watch an awful lot of entertainment….
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It was boning up on investing to be sure I was making good moves for retirement. And it really crowded out fiction reading. Although bear in mind that this is just about everything I watched since June.
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I do hope you are sticking to diversified bond and stock index trackers with periodic rebalancing. And diversifying out of the US to some degree – although markets are so highly correlated these days. Shun stock picking and discretion. 40 years in finance has taught me that if nothing else. My big money was made when the dice were firmly loaded in my favour. Most recently it has been arbitrage spot / perpetual in crypto. Had to give it up – very successful but the tax reporting is simply intolerable. Mostly in trackers now. Too old for all that stress.
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Definitely. I went in with a bias toward index investing, and nothing I read dissuaded me. I spent a lot of time feverishly backtesting various portfolio combinations with mixtures of large cap, mid cap, small cap value, REITs, and gold, but, at least for now, it’s going to be simple and boring, mostly copying what Vanguard does in their all-in-one funds, but with ETFs and municipal bond funds in my case since most of my stuff is taxable.
I am moving slow though due to all the current uncertainty.
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Simple and boring is the ONLY way. Unless you are Gorden Gekko
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Gordon “greed is good” Gekko? Ha, no thanks.
Just read your latest post. Looks like you’ve turned off comments? Just wanted to note that one of the books I read, probably the best, is Burton Malkiel’s “A Random Walk Down Wall Street”. He looks at many attempts over history to predict stock movements, both chartist/technical and with the fundamentals. None succeed consistently, so don’t feel bad about not succeeding. Ironically, Malkiel himself takes a shot at long term predictions in his 2020 edition (with appropriate caveats), which have mostly turned out wrong.
Anyway, looking forward to seeing what you have with the AIs, although I think the question, “Are they conscious?” is too ambiguous for a meaningful answer. It seems more productive to ask in what ways are they similar and dissimilar to us?
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As you can see my endless work has turned me into a functionalist and probably a physicalist of some sort. Endless hard work but every inch of the way had something to teach. The forum will, I hope, be somewhere where people post comments or ask for comments and all four of us reply. Not at once and not altogether. Your question is exactly right: and similarity not just to us but all forms of sentience, including the octopus and the cockroach. Current philosophy and science is far too caught up in the human species.
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Welcome to the dark side 🙂 Functionalism does seem hard to avoid if you’re going to get into the details. Of course, those from other camps will say they don’t deny the functionality, just that it’s a complete accounting. But the question always then becomes, if these additional aspects have no causal effects (otherwise they’d be functional), then how can we know anything about them?
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During my long career I have been persuaded by the rock solid evidence: there is absolutely no persistence in mutual fund returns over the long term. My best years came from speculation on tech IPOs in the 90s. Although arbitrage such as market making and the basis trade I outlined also work. Many / most other methods ( such as trend following – see the big mouth Michael Vivek) do not work consistently over time. Although of course the S&P itself is a trend follower. Driven by hoped for economic growth. Out of interest when I began in the City in 1980 or thereabouts, insider dealing (a la Gekko) was the way most stockbrokers made their big fortunes. Which was outlawed by the Companies Act 1985. If memory serves correctly.
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Michael Covel. Autocorrect!
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The Pendragon Cycle
Yep, it is based on the books by Stephen Lawhead. It was originally a trilogy of Taliesin (Merlin’s father), Merlin and then Arthur.
But commercial pressure and Lawhead’s own crisis of faith led him to continuing the series and the sequels/prequels/whatevers were not nearly as good.
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Not sure if I’d heard of that series before. I like that the story mostly feels late antiquity rather than high middle ages. It does take a lot of historical liberties, but it is fantasy, so I’m willing to give it space.
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We’ve already talked about Good Luck… and now we’ve both posted about it. Good movie. I wouldn’t mind watching it again.
I’ve been eying Per Aspera Ad Astra wondering if I’d like it. Thinking I’ll give it a try.
Don’t have Apple TV (and don’t want it).
I watched the first five episodes of the new TGitS and seriously didn’t care for it. Took some notes for an eventual post but haven’t been able to induce myself to watch the other five episodes. And now it’s been so long, I’ll have to watch the first five again. And I should watch them again; I was distracted the first time and wasn’t paying that much attention. I have been watching and enjoying the older GitS:Arise episodes available on Amazon. I’d really like to see the older GitS:SAC series. Overall, though, I quite agree the original movie is the pinnacle.
Star Trek and Doctor Who are dead to me and have been for a few years now. Your description of the silly episodes … big eye roll. Clearly the original ethics of Star Trek are long forgotten.
No interest in Medieval fantasy.
I keep thinking I should watch Bab5 again. It was an extraordinary show. OTOH, I’ve watched that series at least four times, if not more, so the draw isn’t all that strong.
My buddy is watching Lanterns and seems to like it. I’m thoroughly checked out on superhero shows, though, unless they bring something very unique to the table. This one just sounds like more revisionist gritty superhero grunge, and been there, done that plenty.
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Per Aspera… isn’t bad. It does have some terrible science, but overall I do think it’s worth checking out.
GitS:SAC is on Tubi for free. (Or more accurately, for the cost of commercials; they do add a counter to make them easier to bear.)
Apple TV has had some pretty good shows in addition to Silo: For All Mankind, Foundation, Severance, Pluribus, Star City, etc. They also have an adaptation of Neuromancer reportedly coming in January. For me they’ve actually been earning their keep better than Netflix recently.
I don’t know how many times I’ve watched B5. I know I watched the original run, then the full sequence when it was in syndication. I don’t recall ever going all the way through the DVD set. I think it’s working for me now because it’s been decades.
Lanterns does a pretty good job with the characters, and manages to avoid feeling too much like a superhero show. We only rarely see anyone in their superhero getup. If you have HBO, the first episode might be worth a shot, and then bail if it isn’t clicking.
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Thanks! I’ll keep Tubi in mind (though I really hate commercials).
Apple is too firmly on my shitlist for me to subscribe to any service of theirs. It’s bad enough I’m now trapped in their ecosystem due to the books and music I bought (along with the iPhone I’ll have to update one of these days). I agree that Netflix has been a disappointment more often than not lately. I may have to reconsider my subscription, especially if they rise the price again.
I don’t have HBO, either, though it’s one I would consider. I enjoyed it a lot back when I had cable. Until recently, there wasn’t much I’d heard about on HBO that attracted me, but that seems to be changing. And I never got over my disappointment with Westworld or Deadwood. That said, the whole idea of superhero stories. I think I’m seeing them the way I do time-travel stories: it’s hard to tell a coherent one because the basic concept is inherently non-physical.
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I know what you mean on Apple. I’ve always been leery about buying anything within their ecosystem. You can buy shows and movies in Apple TV, but I never do. Anything not included in the subscription, I get somewhere else. If I cancel my subscription, the only thing I’ll lose is the subscription itself.
Of course, I’ve developed that kind of dependency on Amazon, but at least in their case their stuff isn’t tied only to their own hardware. For that reason, I wasn’t even tempted by Apple TV until they made it cross platform.
HBO is another one I sometimes go through dry spots and wonder why I keep it, as least on an ongoing basis. I did drop Hulu a few months ago, but then realized some of the Disney stuff I watched was actually Hulu content. Disney solved it by offerring Hulu back as a $1/month add-on.
Yeah, if you’re going to watch superhero, time travel, or most fantasy stories, you have to be willing to relax a bit on coherence. I’m usually okay with that as long as the movie or show isn’t taking itself too seriously, but I definitely have my own sore spots along those lines.
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I also tire of real life issues. Things should be getting back to normal for me soon, though.
My partner and I just finished watching The Good Place. If you haven’t seen it, I think you’d enjoy it, or at least get a good laugh from some of the philosophy jokes.
I haven’t finished the new season of Strange New Worlds yet. I think the Muppets episode was the last one I watched before life got crazy. I really, really want to love SNW, but they’re making it kind of hard.
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Good to hear things are improving.
I tried The Good Place several years ago, but the first episode didn’t really work well for me. Not sure why. I know I’m an outlier here.
On SNW, I think part of the problem might be that they’re constrained by the original series. Any storyline they come up with has to be compatible with TOS canon, and that has likely crimped what they could do. OTOH the show seems at its best when the crew is dealing with a weird alien society, or a peculiar space danger, which seems to leave room for a lot of stories.
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I really enjoyed the musical episode from season two. I get the impression a lot of people really liked that one, but I think the writers may have learned the wrong lesson from that episode’s success. One episode with a weird, silly gimmick is fun. Doing something like that every episode? Not so much.
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Totally agreed. I might have even been okay if it had been one episode a season, but now they’ve done it to the extent that the show is in danger of just being a satire of the original series.
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