TV And Films

The shows and movies I like (or don’t).

Weekly Notes: Feb 17-23, 2025

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  • 🇺🇸 On Monday we took advantage of having the day off to hop the light rail into downtown Seattle and go to the Save the Civil Service / 50501 protest in front of the Federal building. Lots of people showed up, which was great (though I do wish we didn’t need to do this). I uploaded a Flickr album with photos of signs and the crowds.
  • 🤖 I’ve added a short AI disclaimer for this blog to the sidebar. In short: No generative AI, traditional/iterative AI for video captions (first pass only, then manually reviewed and corrected before finalizing).

📸 Photos

Protesters carrying signs stand on a wet plaza under buildings that seem to loom and bend over them.

Protesters are seen reflected upside-down in a puddle on a herringbone pattern brick plaza.

Even at protests, I can get a little arty with my photos sometimes.

📝 Writing

📚 Reading

Finished three books (well…a graphic novel, a government pamphlet, and a magazine) this week:

And I’ve started reading Lucy Worsley’s A Very British Murder. It’s good to get at least one non-fiction book in each year.

📺 Watching

  • Our current reality show is season 19 of Project Runway, and then we’re continuing to get caught up on Law & Order, Law & Order: SVU, and NCIS. All three of these shows are great for watching people having worse days than us. Scrubs continues to keep things a little light.
  • After a long pause, I picked back up with my ongoing project to watch all of Star Trek in chronological order (current progress 30.57% complete), and started season two of TNG. Two episodes in (“The Child” and “Where Silence Has Lease”), many, many to go.

🎧 Listening

  • I’m finally getting started practicing for DJing at Norwescon this year, and as always, I’m recording and posting my sessions. Here’s Difficult Listening Hour 2025.02.22. These are always random, seat-of-the-pants, unplanned sessions, so the song selections are a bit all over the place.
  • I also decided to sunset my DJ Wüdi blog (one gig and a few practice sessions a year doesn’t really need its own separate blog), and moved all of the posts that were there over onto this blog. All my mashups and mixes are now part of everything else here on Eclecticism.

🔗 Linking

Weekly Notes: Feb 10-16, 2025

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  • 🤬 Facebook is in one of its occasional moods where it decides that as a 51 year old white male, I should be served ads for guns, holsters, body armor, ultra-right-wing religious clothing, and erectile dysfunction pills. I hide ’em all, and they’ll cycle out eventually (at least, they always have in the past), but it’s always annoying when this happens. (No unsolicited advice about how to “fix” this, please. I’ve heard it all.)

  • 🥶 So tired of the cold and snow. I do have to say, what I originally thought was just a silly joke a few weeks ago got us thinking, and y’know…hot water bottles come in really handy in weather like this! Thankfully, it looks like we’ll be warming up enough to get rain for the next week. I’ll take it!

  • 🇺🇸 I’m not going to get too much into it, but I continue to be amazed at how quickly and thoroughly our government is being dismantled. As I grumbled elsewhere, if I’m going to be forced to live in a world with a megalomaniacal tech billionaire doing everything he can to tear down the world’s superpowers for his own benefit, can I at least get James Bond to swoop in and save the day, please?

📸 Photos

Framed by silhouetted tres, the full moon sets in a sky shading from light blue to pink over the pink-tinted snowcapped Olympic mountains across the water of the Puget sound.

The moon setting over the Olympic mountains one morning before work.

A wooden bench in front of some winter vegetation. Graffiti sprayed on the backrest of the bench says 'me' on the left side and 'you' on the right side.

Amusing (Valentine’s Day inspired, perhaps?) graffiti seen this morning on a bench along the Soos Creek trail.

📚 Reading

Finished the last of this year’s Philip K. Dick Award nominated works, Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Alien Clay.

📺 Watching

Wrapped up season 16 of Drag Race (my favorite didn’t win, but I’m fine with the winner), and decided to take a slight break from Evil to get caught up with Law & Order and Law & Order: SVU. While season five of Scrubs still lands pretty solidly mostly in the “pleasantly distracting amusement” category, their homage to The Wizard of Oz is still a standout episode.

🎧 Listening

  • A few weeks ago I picked up the Resurgence compilation from Spleen+, and it’s really strong. I’m a big fan of compilations, but they’re often very hit-and-miss; while that’s certainly true for this one as well, the ratio of hit to miss is really good here.

    Embark on a sonic journey with “Resurgence”, the latest conceptual release from Brussels-based Spleen+ (a division of Alfa Matrix). This deluxe collector’s edition brings together 133 active bands from across the globe, spanning the diverse sub-genres born from post-punk’s iconic roots. Spread over an impressive 7-CD collection, this box set captures the essence of a movement that has influenced generations of music, art, and culture.

  • Soft Cell will be touring through Seattle in May (along with Simple Minds and Modern English), and while that’s a really good and very tempting lineup, I decided to go to Underworld (also in May) instead. However, that did lead me to digging through Soft Cell’s website, where I found that they’d recently released a very nice six-disc box set reissue of Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret that I picked up. It arrived this week, and so for the past few days, that’s about all I’ve been listening to.

🔗 Linking

  1. Marcin Wichary: The hardest working font in Manhattan

    A lot of typography has roots in calligraphy – someone holding a brush in their hand and making natural but delicate movements that result in nuanced curves filled with thoughtful interchanges between thin and thick. Most of the fonts you ever saw follow those rules; even the most “mechanical” fonts have surprising humanistic touches if you inspect them close enough.

    But not Gorton. Every stroke of Gorton is exactly the same thickness (typographers would call such fonts “monoline”). Every one of its endings is exactly the same rounded point. The italic is merely an oblique, slanted without any extra consideration, and while the condensed version has some changes compared to the regular width, those changes feel almost perfunctory.

    Monoline fonts are not respected highly, because every type designer will tell you: This is not how you design a font.

  2. Ex Urbe: History’s Largest & Most Famous Disability Access Ramp

    Time for the largest, most famous disability access ramp in the world, paired with a twist about how our feelings about a piece of history can reverse completely based, not just on the historian’s point of view, but what questions we start with.

  3. The Braille Institute has updated their excellent Atkinson Hyperlegible font to add two more versions.

  4. Washington state Republicans have introduced a bill to get rid of voting by mail (bill info, current bill text (PDF)). This would have no substantive effect on safety or security, but would disenfranchise many voters and would make voting much more difficult for many more. Please voice your opposition to this bill and help protect voting by mail.

  5. Seventeen states (and no surprises as to which: Alaska, Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, and West Virginia) are suing to get rid of Section 504, which would remove all protections for disabled people. The link has more information on the case and pointers for how people in those states can contact their state Attorneys General to urge them to drop out of the case.

  6. A few software things that I’d like to see if I can find time to play with at some point:

    1. FreshRSS is a self-hosted RSS aggregator that can serve as a backend to NetNewsWire.

    2. linkding is a self-hosted bookmark service like the old del.icio.us.

    3. Both are supported by PikaPods, which looks to be a reasonably priced way to bridge the gap between where I am (I understand what the above software packages do and would like to use them) and what’s necessary to use them (self-hosting has moved on from LAMP setups and now tends to require Docker setups, which I vaguely understand but don’t know how to use and which aren’t supported by my Dreamhost account anyway).

    4. And if I could get linkding up and running, I’d love to figure out how to hack into the old Postalicious WordPress plugin so that I could get it working with modern WordPress and linkding and finally satisfy my long-dormant urge to get my old linkblog posts up and running again. Realistically, I probably don’t have the PHP/programming knowledge/time to manage it, but a guy can dream, right?

Weekly Notes: Getting Started

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So I noticed Cygnoir do one of these, and I really liked the template, and thought (as she did) that it might be a good way to help me reboot my blogging habits. So here we are! My thanks to Cygnoir (and to Jedda for inspiring her) for the template and inspiration!

  • 🌨️ This week’s weather meant that we ended up with one full snow day and two late-start half days…with an end result of the week just being weird and not feeling as productive as usual.
  • ♿️ I’ve gotten started on my Section 508 Trusted Tester certification training. In theory, you have 180 days to finish this program; I’m approaching it as “180 days or until the current administration gets around to pulling the plug” and doing my best to get through as quickly as possible. Hopefully because this program is hosted under Homeland Security it won’t be in the crosshairs as soon as others, but we’ll see….
  • 🚀 Norwescon and Seattle Worldcon 2025 planning continue to move right along.
    • We’re just about two months out from Norwescon, so this is when website updates start to ramp up, I start spending more time making sure my laptop music library is ready to go, and I make sure everything is set for the Philip K. Dick Award ceremony. There’s always something to do.
    • Worldcon is still about six months out, and I have less to do there, but there’s still a pretty reasonable constant stream of stuff, with website updates and queuing up posts for the con’s blog once they’re edited and signed off on.

📸 Photos

Not much of a week for photos. But since this is my first time doing one of these weekly notes, here’s a simple one from last week, showing my current set of laptop stickers.

The top of lid of a MacBook Pro with six stickers: A rainbow A11Y, the United Federation of Planets seal, Norwescon, a classic ranbow Apple logo, Seattle Worldcon 2025, and Gothic Pride Seattle.

That’s an A11Y (accessibility) sticker I got at this year’s Accessing Higher Ground conference, the seal of the United Federation of Planets, Norwescon, a classic rainbow Apple logo that I’d had stashed away for probably close to two decades (maybe more, I don’t know when they stopped producing these), Seattle Worldcon 2025, and Gothic Pride Seattle.

📝 Writing

📚 Reading

📺 Watching

  • Evil: We’re just starting season three, and continue to really enjoy this show. Smart, creepy, funny.
  • RuPaul’s Drag Race: About midway through last season, and so far Dawn’s my favorite, though I don’t know if they’ll win. Q’s costuming skills are impressive, and Plain Jane is a strong all-arounder (but I can’t stand her attitude).
  • Scrubs: We’re early in season five in our rewatch. When we started the rewatch we were pleasantly surprised at the solidity of the first few seasons; by this point, the show’s pretty much settled into its groove and is generally pleasantly amusing, but not as strong as when it started.
  • NOVA: “Dino Birds”: Neat look at recent science exploring the evolution of birds, their ties to dinosaurs (they are dinosaurs), when flight entered the picture, and so on.

🎧 Listening

  • I now have tickets to see Underworld in May and Nine Inch Nails in August (the night before Worldcon starts). Really looking forward to both, and kind of wishing I could time travel and tell my nin-obsessed 20-something self that it would take 30 years, but I’d finally get to see them live.

  • For Reasons™, I’ve recently added the Chipmunks’ The A Files album to my collection, where they cover a bunch of vaguely SF-themed songs.

    They do a cover of “The Purple People Eater” that I swear sounds like it could have been produced by the same team behind The Rednex’s “Cotton Eye Joe”, and they’d probably mix together disturbingly well.

    “Cotton Eye Joe” is always something of a guilty pleasure (except that I’m not fond of the “guilty pleasure” thing, and prefer to just enjoy things I enjoy without guilt, however cheezy they are), and now I’m sitting here being amused at how catchy The Chipmunks’ “Purple People Eater” is. If you’re into goofy ’90s technopop, it’s better than it has any right to be.

Linking

  1. WSDOT: Brick-by-brick: The quest to get a custom Lego model on a ferry

    Local artist Wayne Hussey is a lifelong Lego lover and architect. One of his creations now lives aboard our ferry Issaquah. Getting it aboard was also quite a puzzle.

  2. Blogroll.club: A categorized list of blogs, in something of a throwback to the “old school” days of blogging. I like that there’s a single RSS feed that aggregates posts from all the blogs in the lineup, and have subscribed to that for a daily selection of posts from random (to me) people. I’ve also submitted Eclecticism to be included whenever they get around to it.
  3. Culture, Digested: Neil Gaiman is an Industry Problem

    Even taking into consideration their years of exploitation and abuse, Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer remain models of artistic success in the 21st century. Gaiman created an extremely sellable brand — affable, “oh goodness,” harmless Britishness wrapped up in a “I have read a lot of books” kind of storytelling — and the publishing industry used that not only to sell a lot of his books but that of his friends as well. Amanda Palmer has crowdsourced her way into a perfect little Patreon pyramid scheme, where all money flows to her and she gives back vibes and requests for domestic labor. This is the ideal artistic arrangement these days, where stars receive 95% of Patreon/Substack/other crowdsourced forms of income and everyone else competes for scraps. Both are reliant on a dedicated, servile audience, willing to turn over their time and bodies and cash to get a piece of that bohemian existence that only millionaires can manage these days. It’s the bohemianism not of Weimar, which Palmer constantly references, but the bohemianism of contemporary Burning Man, full of tech billionaires wearing the worst outfits you’ve ever seen in your life.

The End of Section 31

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The more I think about the Section 31 movie, the more I think that there’s a possibility that it might have one good outcome: Solidifying Section 31 as being nothing more than a run-of-the-mill black ops/special forces/Delta Force/Seal Team Six/Mission Impossible/whatever department, and therefore 1) not the Big Scary Thing it was originally presented as, 2) not something we really need to be terribly concerned about or excited by, and 3) not something we really need to spend any more time on.

As Edgar Anderson (@pithyphrase.net) noted on Bluesky:

In Deep Space Nine, it was never 100% to me whether Section 31 actually existed or Sloane was just a very capable but insane person acting on his own. I wish that ambiguity had been maintained.

As far as I’m concerned, this — or perhaps something that’s a little bit of both — is the best way to look at Section 31. While the “sooper sekret ‘good bad guys’ doing the dirty work so you fragile little snowflakes can have your Federation utopia” idea fit with DS9’s take on the Trek universe, for me, Sloane’s ambiguous nature is part of what made DS9’s Section 31 bearable. For a concept that was so very antithetical to the established Star Trek universe, having it be presented as a “…wait…really? Or is he…no. But…maybe?” thing worked, and worked well. Maybe it was a thing. Maybe he was a very talented psychopath.

William Sadler as Agent Luther Sloan in Star Trek Deep Space Nine.

But then, over the years, particularly with Discovery diving down the Section 31 rabbit hole in ways that made no sense with the concept (the super-secret covert ops branch of the Federation that almost nobody knows about, exists only in the shadows, and will be denied at every opportunity if mentioned, has its own all-black comm badges and fancy ships, for V’ger’s sake), and now this particularly “meh” attempt at merging Mission Impossible with Star Trek, it’s time to give up on the concept.

Just write it off as a special forces unit that, both on the individual member level and the institutional level, let its ego get far too out of control, and while it has occasionally been useful, it has also occasionally been dangerously embarrassing and embarrassingly dangerous, and it needs to be disbanded. Both in-universe and out here in the real world.

Let it go.

Star Trek: Section 31

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Michelle Yahoo as Philippa Georgiou, dressed in leather and sitting on a chair with her foot resting on a body.

🎥: Star Trek: Section 31 (2025): ⭐️⭐️

Well, that was definitely a movie. Strip out the Trek references and call it “Generic Space Spies”, and it would be an entirely acceptable and inoffensive, if not particularly groundbreaking, direct-to-video movie. As a Trek film…well, it’s a generic space spy movie with Trek references. Doesn’t break anything, but doesn’t really add anything to the franchise, either. Michelle Yeoh is always fun, the cast does acceptable jobs, and it’d play in the background during a “Trek movie marathon while I clean the house” session just fine.

For more spoilery thoughts that I jotted down as I was watching it, see this Mastodon post.

Johnny English

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Rowan Atkinson and Natalie Imbruglia from the poster for Johnny English

🎥: Johnny English (2003): ⭐️⭐️⭐️

Rowan Atkinson’s take on a Bond spoof is an entertaining bit of fluff. Atkinson himself is fun to watch as he flips between a variation on his rubber-faced Bean buffoonery and occasionally slipping into actually projecting the suave confidence of a Bond-style spy. It’s ridiculous and silly, and that’s fine.

Recent Netflix Spooky Shows

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After finishing off Mayfair Witches S1, Interview With the Vampire S1, and A Discovery of Witches S1-3, we decided to stick with the theme and started watching Evil again.

TV show posters for Interview With the Vampire, Mayfair Witches, A Discovery of Witches, and Evil.

Mayfair Witches was a fun way to get back into Anne Rice’s universe. I was pleasantly surprised to see Harry Hamlin, and we’ve consistently enjoyed Alexandra Daddario in everything we’ve seen her in.

I’d seen good things about the new Interview show, but even with that, I was really impressed. I’m really enjoying the way they’ve updated it, keeping the bones of the story while making a lot of fascinating updates…and ditching anything remotely resembling subtext.

A Discovery of Witches we knew nothing about and grabbed on a whim, but it sucked us right in. Fun take on creatures, lots of political maneuvering, and we really liked the magical effects. Good enough that we now have the book trilogy on our to-read shelves.

We’d watched S1 of Evil, but didn’t keep up with it, so decided to just restart from the beginning. This show is a lot of fun, the daughters are so adorable, and Leland is such a great creep. It’s a perfect balance of creepy and really funny.