Entertainment

Received this email. Blech.

Dear Prime member,

We are writing to you today about an upcoming change to your Prime Video experience. Starting January 29, Prime Video movies and TV shows will include limited advertisements. This will allow us to continue investing in compelling content and keep increasing that investment over a long period of time. We aim to have meaningfully fewer ads than linear TV and other streaming TV providers. No action is required from you, and there is no change to the current price of your Prime membership. We will also offer a new ad-free option for an additional $2.99 per month* that you can sign up for here.

Merry Christmas everyone.

Here's the TV shows I watched last week:

• Archive 81 S01
  • Finished it, this is a solid horror show. Bummer that it's canceled after 1st season
    spoiler

    I like how it became more eldritch horror involving time travel and alternate universe
• X-Men Evolution S01
  • This just doesn't grab me, the whole season seems to be aimed at high school students. X-Men The Animated Show is better in every way. Heard that S02 fixes some of the writing though
• JoJo's Bizarre Adventure S05
  • I read Stone Ocean years ago, and it's great to see it in motion. The ending hit me hard, was not expecting it.
• The X-Files S02
  • I enjoyed this season more than the first one, especially the ones involving extra-terrestrials.
• 30 Rock S02
  • Finished it. I really enjoyed how absurd some of the humors are.
• The Ministry of Time (El ministerio del tiempo) S01
  • I dislike the melodrama / soapy parts, which I find bit common in Spanish movies / shows. What I really like is the fish out of water part, where people from other era uses contemporary tech items. There's this one scene where the man is in 18th century, and he whipped out a Toshiba-like notebook and a scanner. Somehow reminds me of Beforeigners, which I really like.

Some of the movies I watched:

• The White Storm 2: Drug Lords (2019)
  • This is worse than the first one. Too much melodrama
• Gangs of Wasseypur - Part II (2012)
  • I like part 2 bit more than first part, but they definitely need some trimmings. The 2nd part is bit more brutal than the first one, however I find some characters might be under-developed, e.g. Definite.
• The Creator (2023)
  • The story didn't grab me. The visuals are amazing though.

What have you been watching last week?

Good news for anyone who owns this content, but the damage is certainly already done. The original news broke as I was making the transition to a Plex home Media server + vpn, and I only feel further validated for it.

So, what have you been watching last week?

Edit: I always forgot that I watched some movies too:

After Clarkson pointed out that Cher was the only musician to have number 1 songs over seven decades, the Grammy Award winner noted that she and the Rolling Stones actually shared the accomplishment.

"Two of us have," Cher said. ""It took four of them to be one of me."

Cher is savage

"Can I just say one other thing?" Cher asked. "I changed music forever with ‘Believe.'"

Yup.

Hello all! I've been a Christopher Nolan fan since I saw Inception for the first time, but I'm also starting to see the flaws in his film making, especially in the way women are represented. This is especially clear in Oppenheimer, as this movie is based on actual facts and still he clearly under develops the female characters compared to their real life counterparts. I feel that this article gives a good and nuanced take on the issue and helped me reconcile the stuff I adore in his films with the clearly flawed and problematic parts.

I don't have a lot to add to, still watching the same TV shows:

• Fringe is still good
• What We Do in the Shadows is okay, got me some chuckles, but no laugh out loud moments yet
• Amazing Stories (1985) is still boring
• JoJo's Stone Ocean arc is still great
• Love, Death, & Robots' tones are still all over the place

The only other thing that I watched is David Fincher's The Killer. While I don't dislike it, I am just not feeling it, unlike other Fincher's works.

Edit: I forgot that I did watch 2 other movies, Predators (2010) and Bad Boys II, I barely remembered anything happened in Predators, on the other hand, I find Bad Boys II ok, it suffers from Michael Bay's excessive cuts without breathing moment.

So, what have you been watching last week?

I just realized that every streaming platform seems to have a couple heavy-hitter big-budget sci-fi series these days. Most of them turn out to be critically acclaimed as well.

Sure, we all know that there are Star Trek fans who dislike Discovery and Picard, or Foundation fans who dislike Apple's adaptation. Even though much of what is on TV is still decades-old franchises, it seems that we're getting more original sci-fi along with it.

• Scavengers Reign
• For All Mankind
• Invasion
• Cyberpunk: Edgeruners
• Tales from the Loop

I could go on...

No longer is it simply a single channel on cable tv that was also 50/50 with horror content, plus Star Trek and a handful of others that other networks syndicated.

Today there's a rich tapestry of new ideas, concepts, and just plain art in media that was normally reserved for paperbacks published by Tor and others.

Don't get me wrong, I still love me some SG1, TNG, DS9, B5, and others - all shows I grew up with; but I'm so happy that we get so much more now!

An ad? Or a really creepy short film?

I have no idea what they were smoking back then, but it must have been great ;)

Found it on Reddit

Here are some shows that I have watched or have been watching

• Fringe (S04)

  • I'm at episode 9 right now
    I'm really liking

    how they interact with characters from season 1, and from alternate universe

• Amazing Stories 1985 (S01)

  • This show won some Emmys, right? Somehow it feels like a kid's show. I was expecting it to be tonally more like 1959's Twilight Zone, but it doesn't seem so. Maybe I should adjust my approach to it.

• Impractical Jokers (S01)

  • I've finished the season, and it's definitely up there as a comedy show. I still feel weird / scared about some of the pranks, e.g. randomly eating people's food at a Chinese restaurant, but they are hilarious.

• What We Do In the Shadows (S03)

  • The first 2 seasons were okay-ish, but it seems like the 3rd season is way funnier. The jokes are funnier whenever Matt Berry is involved

• Castlevania Nocturne (S01)

  • It was suddenly over. I'm just not feeling it. Just like the other Castlevania shows.

• Love, Death & Robots (S01)

  • Just finished the first episode... it looks pretty. Not sure about the writing yet.

• Gunbuster (S01)

  • Finally finished all the 6 episodes. I can see it as a prototype for other more bombastic mecha shows like Gurrenn Lagann or Evangelion. It started out low key, then undergo a sudden tonal shift to darker tone.

• JoJo's Bizarre Adventure (S05)

  • Netflix really hurt the season by splitting it into two parts. I've just finished watching the episodes where they defeated the invisible zombie guy and started to fight the feng shui geezer. It's still really good, I still prefer Jolyne's story arc to Giovanna's. I wonder if they'd eventually do a Steel Ball Run anime.

• Oppenheimer (2023)

  • I'm amazed at how much I'm liking it. Somehow social media buzz was making it to sound like a jingoistic nuclear proponent movie. But it's not, it's a story about Oppenheimer's feeling about atomic weapons, the slimy politicians and physicists who became slimy, and surprisingly around half of the movie is about McCarthyan red scare witch hunt.

That's the recap of my week, how about yours? What have you been watching last week?

I'm in the first hour of this video. It's about how YouTube / influencers plagiarize / straight up stealing works from others.

So far, in the first hour, hbomberguy has covered

• Filip Miucin, (ex-IGN plagiarizer)
• Newt (wrote for Cinemassacre? I don't follow cinemassacre stuff),
• Illuminaughtii (I've never heard of this person before, apparently she pivoted from making bigoted content to left leaning stuff??)

With the House of The Dragon trailer release and a "next summer" timeframe ... I don't remember S1 at this point but don't remember it being so good as to be worth a full rewatch. Which got me to searching for the title. There are a lot of shows at this point that air so infrequently, it would be nice to just get an RSS notification when any TV show airs its finale.

Best I can find is RSS feeds of torrents, which I specifically don't need. I found one that claimed to be what I was looking for but turned out to be rumours about shows ending.

Ideal notifications would be "The last episode of X just went live. Here's the link to X's IMDB page." I know there are things from years ago I wasn't willing to commit to that may be worth going back to, but that's a different sort of search.