brokenmnemonic

1) For those who use Zoom for meetings, something to be concerned about: WebinarTV Turning Zoom Calls into AI Podcasts. Stanford has issued guidelines to campus users to prevent it happening.

2) Turns out Xfinity offered us free Peacock (supposedly Peacock Premium but we have ads anyway). Getting Peacock access was quite a process though. All I should have had to do was click the email link and accept the offer. In fact, everything I tried kept sending me to a 404 page. ( Read more... )

3) When I finally did get into Peacock, I used it to watch Song Sung Blue and thought it was mostly an enjoyable film. I liked Hugh Jackman and Kate Hudson leaning into their ages and downplaying his looks. The music was fun and it was a nice, small scale love story. ( spoilers ).

3) The Peacock issue wasn't the only technical frustration of the last few days. After finishing my taxes and other to-dos I had pending, I wanted to take some time to get back into my LEGO Star Wars game on the Xbox which I'd last tried almost 3 years ago. ( Read more... )

4) I feel surprisingly upset to hear that Starfleet Academy is essentially cancelled. (There's another season coming but that had already been planned before S1 began). I wrote earlier about how much I was enjoying it, and that was before I watched the fourth episode. I will miss these characters, and it seems there's so much more that could be done.

5) The latest marchmetamatterschallenge writing prompt was "How do you define genres? Is it still a useful tool to find entertainment you like, or have offerings become so niche and melded that it's hard to use categories anymore? Was it ever something useful for you, personally?"

To some degree yes, but increasingly no. ( Read more... )

1) It was nice to see that when Jeopardy used "slash fiction" as a clue, they actually had the correct definition.

2) This article which looks at Hamnet's role as an Oscar nominee was interesting but asked an odd question at the start: "(Chalamet) is not wrong in noticing that the classical arts have less mass appeal than pop art...Given this logic, if the classical arts have a connotation of decline because the masses no longer engage with them/or they are inaccessible, why does William Shakespeare—arguably just as distant from everyday popular consumption—continue to carry enormous cultural prestige, especially in industries like awards-season filmmaking?" ( Read more... )

3) Enough time has passed now that I'm not entirely sure what I wanted to discuss regarding several Netflix shows, but I think it had to do with what made them memorable. ( Read more... )

1) Curious events yesterday. A takeout place we order from every other month or so couldn't be reached. Its website was not working over a half hour period. I looked up their number and at least 3 other sites listed the same one. Called it and was told it was not a valid number. Since I wanted more oranges, I figured I'd stop by to see if the restaurant had closed down.

Nope. They seemed completely unconcerned the website was down, and told me I'd used the wrong number (also seeming completely unconcerned a wrong one is widely available!) But at least we are not down yet another restaurant.

2) Got many yummy oranges but this store sells them by count not by weight. So I picked all the largest oranges I could and I swear some of these are bigger than both fists.

3) Nesting time for ducks is great for all the adorable little fluffs we will be seeing soon. It is definitely not so when we have to keep watching drakes attacking the female ducks. This week there was one poor female attacked simultaneously and sequentially by 5 drakes. She was finally able to get out of the lake (I felt half sure she had drowned) and one followed her and kept attacking her on land, which was the first time I'd seen that happen.

4) Was watching Life of Chuck and can I say I am incredibly tired of the romantic convention of looking at stars together and (usually the man) pointing out the constellations to the person they are wooing. Come up with something else!

That said, it was a nice little film. ( Read more... )

5) Belatedly I was not impressed with the Oscars. I was glad there were only 2 of the nominated songs sung and that there was no opening number, but I also would have preferred to skip that whole pre-filmed Conan bit and just have a very strong monologue (which I didn't think it was). ( Read more... )

1) Whoa, the changes at Tumblr have meant a flood of people signing up for accounts at Pillowfort. I just went through a feed four times longer than usual.

2) We've watched four episodes of Starfleet Academy and are both pleasantly surprised by it. I confess I haven't been very enthused by the new crop of shows. In fact my favorite season was one that it seems most viewers didn't care for, which was S1 of Discovery. ( Read more... )

3) Looks like it isn't just late night shows that are winding to a close but talk shows and entertainment news. I can see why podcasts would be far cheaper to make and competing with the audience, but I do wonder if most can put out episodes as consistently as is done with larger productions. (I note, for example, that Access Hollywood has four hosts).

4) Not being a reader of Outlander, I had no idea there was a separate Lord John Grey series. A spinoff based on the books sounds great, and you'd think with the success of Heated Rivalry (it was a Jeopardy question this week!) that the timing would be perfect. Granted, a period piece with a large cast would be significantly more expensive, but it also has a built in audience via its linked TV show and books.

5) Watched Zootopia 2 and enjoyed it. I particularly liked how they worked in references to favorite things from the first film without having it slow down or detract from the story in progress. For us this was wolves starting a howl, and the appearance of the sloth. There were lots of little in-jokes (such as the Hulu menu) and things moved along quite well, with fun new characters to meet.