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One Piece (2023) - 5/5 Dreams

The live-action remake of the One Piece manga/anime was a lot of fun. I slept on it after the disappointment of the Cowboy Bebop live remake, but I'm glad I finally checked it out. Unlike Cowboy Bebop, I didn't go into it familiar with the source material except the scant details, and now I'm curious to check it out.

The show is fun and silly. I watched some of it with my mother-in-law in town, she patiently sat and watched an episode with me. Later that day she was describing 'that pirate show' to my wife and she said, "I enjoy much of what you all watch, but that pirate show is one I don't get." I am not overly surprised by this, it's far outside her standard sort of thing she'd watch, but I found her overall befuddlement somewhat amusing.

Anyway, I highly recommend you all watch it if you haven't already.

Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip's Best Segment

Katie and I watched the series, and while it has numerous problems, we still enjoy it. However, without a doubt, and by a wide margin - this clip from their Christmas episode is the best.

It features artists from New Orleans being brought in to perform on the show (and in real life.)

Hijack (2023) - 3.5/5 Stars

Idris Elba drama about an airplane hijacking. Overall an enjoyable watch if perhaps a bit predictable for me.

Strange New Worlds x Lower Decks

As others have said, the #StrangeNewWorlds x #LowerDecks crossover episode was a delight. I identify so much with Boimler's reaction.

It reminds me of the time I briefly met Adam Savage at Dragon*Con and ended up unable to stop talking as I told him how much MythBusters meant to me.

Jury Duty - 3 out of 5 verdicts

I'm watching the finale of Jury Duty and I am boggled at the idea of dealing with the insanity and stupidity of the show for three weeks for a stupid civil lawsuit.

Overall, the show was fine. It was silly and ultimately not a show I needed to see. It was heartwarming in the finale but also it just... was fine.

I wouldn't tell anyone they have to see the show.

The Bear, Season 2 is really good

This is not a surprise to anyone who saw Season 1, but wow is Season 2 really good. I have really fucking enjoyed it. The Christmas episode (Seven Fishes) is rough and hard and does exactly what it was meant to do. Additionally, Jeremy Allen White is fucking fantastic. Again, not surprising.

Ahren Belisle on AGT

I had seen this video the other day but didn't watch it at the time. Came back across it this morning and was definitely impressed. We'll see how far he goes, but regardless, I think this will launch his full comedy career.

Pat Sajak will retire after 41 seasons on Wheel of Fortune

All I'll say is, I'm ready when the call comes. I'll fill in those shoes.

Smartless on Max

Katie and I watched several episodes of Smartless on Max today, both before and after my D&D game. They are video episodes from live shows of the podcast they do with the same name. Starring Jason Bateman, Will Arnett, and Sean Hayes. Fun stuff.

And it makes me think about getting a podcast app on the Roku so Katie and I can enjoy their other episodes of the podcast together in the evenings.

The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel

Season 5: 3/5 laughs

I felt the last season was a bit disjointed as I didn't really enjoy the hopping around in time as it worked to make a cohesive story which answered questions.

Entire Series: 3.5/5 laughs

Overall, I thought it was a fine show, which had some high highs and some low lows in the narrative.

Ted Lasso was special

Blog readers know that I have a deep love for this show. This show is something special and I genuinely don't know if I'll ever appreciate another show like it.

Un-fucking-believable.

Eurovision

Just finished watching my first-ever Eurovision championship. I, of course, knew what it was but only in the dictionary sense. I had never really seen it. Due to my friends who live in Europe I probably knew more about it than most Americans, but it was still only from afar and without having a real understanding of it.

Katie and I put it on, seeing it available on Peacock. And as we were about six countries into the introduction I decided we needed to stop and watch it with our friend Annie. We had been planning to do movie night tonight but we pulled an audible and watched this year's finals.

As far as first viewings, we really enjoyed it. And we also appreciated the ability to fast forward through some of the VERY drawn out segments. I'm all for giving the countries the ability to chime in and be involved, but the vote counting was a part we jumped through.

Katie and Annie were both very disappointed to learn that people could win Eurovision multiple times. They felt it should not be allowed.

I can definitely see us planning to tune in for it next year, we'll see if we watch it live or wait for the recording on streaming. Also, I can't help but wonder if we would ever see a similar competition in the US, separating by state and protectorate. Probably not, but who knows. Then we could have the classic SuperVision, between Amerivision and Eurovision champions.

Poker Face, Season 1 -- 5 out of 5

I loved the show. Best show in recent memory as far as I'm concerned.

Pedro Pascal remains a treasure

Slingers

This video was originally published 13 years ago on Vimeo as a sizzle reel for a potential tv show. It has lived rent free in my head since then, and it was resurfaced with the passing of Tom Sizemore due to the shared surname with Mike Sizemore, its director.

I love so much about this sizzle, from the tone and setting, to the characters and overall concept.

TV insights into the filming of 'Last of Us' arcade scenes

Forum user JoshODBrown discusses being brought in by HBO to assist with the Arcade:

So ChanceKJ and I were brought in by HBO to work on this arcade for the show. Theres lots to unpack, so I'll be brief for now until i have some more time to explain some more stuff.

Inside the Mortal Kombat II cabinet was actually a 46 inch OLED panel that we rotated 90 degrees. The gameplay footage was all played and captured ahead of time by myself while Chance and I worked through the script, making sure we got all the moves down that they wanted to show (fatalities included). I treated the footage with scanlines, some curvature, and rounded the corners off so it looked a little more like a real CRT. We programmed an interface we could control remotely on the day that would instantly play a clip from the game on demand and basically played it back in real time with the actors as they shot the scene. So when you see them drop one coin in, thats an individual clip, 2nd coin, another clip, character selection, yet another clip and so on.

Sync'ing a camera to CRT displays can be done, but you really can only guarantee it'll sync with a few at a time. Some games stray slightly or drift, so even if you get the camera to sync, you'll lose the CRT and start to get some bad flicker at some point. For Cinematographers, there is a rule of 180 degree shutter. So if you're shooting at 24fps, 180 degree shutter angle will put you at 1/48 shutter speed. This is what gives you the cinematic look and feel and blur that we're all used to. You can change shutter angle slightly but it will impact the feeling of the movement of the shot. Obviously CRT refresh rate doesn't divide into 24/48 very well, so thats why you get the flicker.

While we got Mortal Kombat to MOSTLY look like a CRT on camera, it was an expensive process (time and money) and we did do it for a few other games in the arcade, but time was not on our side to make it happen for every game. Some games we killed the monitor completely (like the Asteroids deluxe), the thought was that after sitting for a bunch of years, a good chunk of the games are not going to quite work right. We were ready to kill Black Widow, but the director liked the look of it, so it was kept.

Some games we programmed to have a glitch or sync issue in. We had a few games legit shit the bed. There is a shot early on in the arcade scene where you can see a Buck Hunter game with a failed hard drive in the background and the screen is flickering. Totally plausible and we just ran with it!

In regards to another poster being afraid arcade games were damaged for filming purposes:

Nope! we didnt trash anything at all. No arcade games were harmed in the making of this show.

there were a half dozen games that were brought in from Toronto before we got involved, they are all scratch built LCD versions of games like Robotron, Galaga, Tetris, Centipede. We didnt love them, but we had to use them to fill up space in the arcade (if you watch carefully you'll see there are actually TWO robotrons - one real cabinet, and then the fake one behind Ellie when they are busting the change machine open). The rest of the games were brought in by myself or Chance, a handful of pinball from some friends in town, and a shitload of Atari games from another local collector.

Regarding the realities of licensing material for television:

Another fun fact. It is quite expensive to license some games to show in TV/Movies. Williams and Midway stuff seemed to be most expensive, while Atari stuff was super reasonable. Older stuff is easier to license.

We had some pinball machines and arcade games not make the cut because they were too expensive to license, or the IP owner wasn't licensing that particular game for that use at that particular time. We had a Ms Pac-Man that wouldnt clear because they were not allowing a license at that time. Golden Axe was axed, no BurgerTime, NBA Jam, or TMNT either. WWF Pinball, Evel Knievel, Comet. New titles from the 90s were all mostly too expensive to license or use, let alone trying to find some of them as most conversion games were all restored to original around here. Also forget about doing anything with Nintendo. Some licenses only allowed for showing the game in the deep background, or couldn't feature game play, but only attract modes (Street Fighter II for example). Its a complicated world, and you only have so much time and money to get it all done.

Fascinating stuff. There's more in the thread but these three posts jumped out at me as super interesting insights.

Inject it into my veins

I am not ready for this show to end.

Pedro Pascal on SNL was great

Watching the episode from last week and, as expected, it's fantastic. Pedro is a delight, and the sketches kept me laughing.

Wednesday (2023) - 4 Things out of Five

Overall, I enjoyed the show's first season. It has some fantastic casting and that really carried some middling narrative. But, if you enjoy the Addams Family, you should enjoy this show.

John Oliver's Last Week Tonight, Season 10, trailer

As I saw someone else point out online, the comedy belies some truly excellent investigative reporting.

The Traitors, Season 1: Rating: 3 out of 5 Murders

Hosted by Alan Cumming, a group of reality stars and "normal" people gathered in a castle in Scotland to play what amounted to a very slow and drawn out game of Werewolf. It is a social deduction game where a group of players are secretly murderers and the rest of the group has to pick them out and eliminate them before they murder the entire group.

There were some interesting twists and turns along the way. By far Alan Cumming's attire played an outsized role as a character in the show.

It provided an excellent show for me to yell at and question peoples' judgment, but as a show goes I wasn't heavily invested and didn't really care who won.

If it returns for a second season, I think I would watch but I also wouldn't care particularly if it didn't return.