TV And Films

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

Weekly Notes: November 10–16, 2025

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  • The work week was pretty normal, but felt a little busier than usual because of the Tuesday holiday. Mid-week holidays always throw me off.

  • Other than that, it’s pretty much just another normal week without much to tell.

📸 Photos

Wide-angle shot of fall trees shrouded in morning fog.
We had a really good fall Seattle fog this morning; I snapped this out of our bedroom window.

📺 Watching

Damsel (2024): Slightly flat dialogue and performances, but great creature design and effects. Not destined to be a classic, but an enjoyable fantasy adventure.

🎧 Listening

I happened to discover that Pop Will Eat Itself just released a new album, Delete Everything. I haven’t really dived in yet, but new PWEI is never a bad thing.

🔗 Linking

  • Dahlia Bazzaz at the Seattle Times: Why WA community colleges are about to see their funding change: “Thousands rely on community college as a transition to the rest of their careers: They are the first stop for teenagers on their way to university, or adults who want to switch careers to vital fields like nursing and dentistry. And even in the best of times, they are notorious for running on shoestring budgets.”

  • Jason Bergman at The Comics Journal: Talking Oglaf with Trudy Cooper and Doug Bayne: ‘We’d Stay Up All Night Drawing Stuff To Make Each Other Laugh’: “Other than some time off every year for Christmas, Trudy Cooper and Doug Bayne have delivered a new Oglaf comic, skewering fantasy tropes with absolutely not safe for work humor, every week since 2008. Which, if you do some quick napkin math, makes it nearly old enough to pass its own age check. That’s quite a remarkable run for a sexually explicit, gag-a-week strip with only a handful of recurring characters and no ongoing storyline.”

  • Terrence O’Brien at The Verge: The algorithm failed music (archive.is link): “…in a sort of feedback loop, labels started prioritizing artists that sound like what people were already listening to. And what people were listening to is what the algorithm suggested.”

  • Mike Brock at TechDirt: Chuck Schumer Doesn’t Know What Time It Is: “Chuck Schumer just taught Donald Trump that hostage-taking works. ¶ Not because he had to. Because the framework he operates within cannot imagine doing what this moment requires: actually fighting power instead of managing accommodation to it.”

  • Lana Lam at the BBC: Evidence of ancient tree-climbing ‘drop crocs’ found in Australia: Australia has always wanted to kill you.

  • Mac Mouse Fix: “Make Your $10 Mouse Better Than an Apple Trackpad!”

  • Adrian Roselli: Pre-order “Digital Accessibility Ethics”: “Lainey Feingold, Reginé Gilbert, and Chancey Fleet gathered 36 authors across 10 countries and a commonwealth to write 32 chapters about ethics in digital accessibility. I am one of those 36 authors. ¶ The book introduces the first (that I’ve heard of) Digital Accessibility Ethics Framework. It’s a three-part tool intended to influence, change, & disrupt patterns of disability exclusion.”

  • Alison Green at Ask a Manager: the fake charity, the Photoshop predator, and other times AI got it wrong: “We recently talked about times AI got it really wrong, and here are 20 of the most ridiculous stories you shared.”

  • Jacob Beckert at The Atlantic: The Disappearance of Everyday Nudity (archive.is link): “Today, the only naked bodies that many Americans will likely ever see are their own, a partner’s, or those on a screen. Gone are our unvarnished points of physical comparison—the ordinary, unposed figures of other people. In their place, we’re left with the curated ideals of social-media posts, AI-generated advertising, and pornography. The loss may seem trivial, but it also may change how people see themselves. Without exposure to the normal variety of bodies, we may become less comfortable with our own, more likely to mistake common characteristics for flaws—and more inclined to see every bare body as an inherently sexual object, making nudity even more charged.”

  • Trae Dorn: You Need to Start a Blog.: “Yes, you — the person who is reading this right now, either on my blog or a syndicated version on one of the websites I distribute this to. You need to go out, find some web space or a blog host, and start writing a blog.”

  • Tim Bray: Time to Migrate: “Dear World: Now is a good time to get off social media that’s going downhill. Where by “downhill” I mean any combination of “less useful”, “less safe”, or “less fun”. This month marks the third anniversary of my Mastodon migration and I’m convinced that right now, in late 2025, it’s the best place to go. Come join me. Here’s why.”

Weekly Notes: November 3–9, 2025

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  • Work ramped up again a bit this past week, with two afternoons taken up by the DSSC fall meeting. Always good to connect with colleagues across the state, even virtually.

  • While we did most of our celebrating last weekend, Monday was my wife’s actual birthday. We both had to work, but had a nice dinner that evening, had some cake, and she opened her birthday presents.

📸 Photos

A snail crawls over a leaf-strewn path.
Of the various options for Pacific Northwest animals and bugs to be spotted on walks, I think this was the first time I’d spotted a snail.
A path bordered by low rock walls leads through trees, with every thing covered by fallen leaves.
So many leaves all over the place after last week’s storms. Fall happened all at once this year.
A small red heart with diagonal rainbow stripes against stone.
Spotted along the stone wall bordering one section of the walking path.
Something that looks like the decaying skull of a dog in the midst of thorny bushes.
At one point we both spotted something to one side of the trail that on first glance looked like a skull on a stick, or maybe a dead dog. When we got closer, we realized someone had shoved a Halloween werewolf mask into the bushes. Both creepy and funny, once we figured it out!
A clear, blue, and pink plastic multi-pointed star ornament hanging from a tree in the woods.
The holiday ornament sparkling from a tree branch was much less disturbing of a find.
A blue and yellow sculpted clay mushroom house sitting in a crack between stones in a rock wall.
As was the cute little mushroom house tucked into the rock wall.
A mossy rock wall receeds into the distance next to a path covered with fall leaves.
Just a pretty fall scene on our walk.

📝 Writing

📺 Watching

Since we were out and about with birthday celebrations last weekend, this weekend was a stay at home and watch movies weekend.

  • Alien: Romulus (2024) (I actually watched this one on my own): visually fun, but felt too much like someone just grabbed their favorite scenes and shots from every prior Alien film and strung them together.

  • The Family Plan (2023): An amusing “turn off your brain” action-adventure-comedy; perfect for a weekend afternoon.

  • Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale (2025): A very satisfying end to the Downton Abbey saga. And since one of the presents I got my wife for her birthday was the full season set, now we can start over from the beginning….

  • Death of a Unicorn (2025): This was a really fun mix of comedy, horror, and fantasy. Neat design work for the unicorns, too. Definitely occasionally on the gory side of things, but if you can cope with that, it’s worth checking out.

🔗 Linking

  • Te-Ping Chen at The Wall Street Journal: They Tear Down Walls and Hire Architects to Make Room for Their Lego Worlds: I don’t have the disposable income to be able to afford this much LEGO or to devote this much home to storing LEGO, but as one of those “if I won the lottery, I wouldn’t tell anyone, but there would be signs” situations….

  • Christine Mi at The Washington Post: A week at sea aboard the last ocean liner: Very much in line with my our experience when we did this a few years ago. Worth doing once to have done it and had the pseudo-historical experience, but neither of us is particularly interested in doing this or any other cruise ship trip again.

  • Anil Dash: Turn the volume up.: “Today marked a completely new moment for New York City, and for America. There will be countless attempts at analysis and reflection and what-does-it-all-mean in the days to come, along with an unimaginable number of hateful attacks. But what’s worth reflecting on right now is the fact that we’ve entered a new era, and that, even at the very start, there are some extraordinary things that we can observe.”

  • Chirag Vedullapalli at The Seattle Times: This little-known position in WA is a huge democracy booster: “Each precinct is a civic block roughly the size of a neighborhood or two, with generally a few hundred to 1,000 registered voters. There are about 7,500 of these precincts in the state. Each precinct is meant to elect two people, one from the Democratic Party and one from the Republican Party, to the position of precinct committee officer. […] However, most people don’t know this role exists, and most precincts sit empty.”

  • Jay Kuo at The Status Kuo: Oh, What a Night!: “By now you know, Dems had a big night. We won the marquee races for governor in Virginia and New Jersey. We walloped the GOP on Prop 50 in California. We won down-ballot races and flipped lots of seats. And NYC has a young, charismatic Muslim mayor-elect—a historic first. ¶ There’s a lot to celebrate, so let’s start wide and work our way down!”

  • Megan Ulu-Lani Boyanton at The Seattle Times: Barnes & Noble plans to return to downtown Seattle: “Bookworms, rejoice: Barnes & Noble plans to return to downtown Seattle, according to recent city filings.”

  • Tim Nudd at AdAge: Apple TV’s colorful new branding was built with glass and captured in-camera: “The five-second version of the new branding, which will run before Apple TV shows, nicely highlights the colored-lights effect. The lush visuals are meant to capture the platform’s cinematic ambitions and remind viewers that Apple TV is where prestige storytelling lives. ¶ Many might assume the visual effects were made digitally, but in fact, it was all done practically using glass and captured in-camera.”

  • Rachel Moody at The Daily Tar Heel: Column: “Low skilled” workers are a myth: “I have worked as a restaurant server and hostess. I’ve also worked as a research intern and an office assistant. The most difficult of the two categories? Food service, without a doubt. And yet those jobs were the worst paid.”

  • Ashifa Kassam at The Guardian: Europeans recognize Zohran Mamdani’s supposedly radical policies as ‘normal’: ““Normal. That’s the word,” Verbeek wrote in his newsletter, The Planet. ‘Here, taking care of one another through public programs isn’t radical socialism. It’s Tuesday.’ ¶ That view hit on the wide differences in how Mamdani’s promises are seen by many across the Atlantic. ‘Europeans recognize his vision about free public transit and universal childcare. We expect our governments to make these kinds of services accessible to all of us,’ said Verbeek. ‘We pay higher taxes and get civilized societies in return. The debate here isn’t whether to have these programs, but how to improve them.'”

  • James Whitbrook at Gizmodo: 20 More Lego ‘Star Trek’ Sets I Want After the ‘Enterprise’-D: “As cool as those massive, pricey replicas can be, Star Trek sets could be so much more than ship models. For almost 60 years across dozens of shows and films, there’s tons of inspiration for sets that could fulfill a multiple range of price points.”

  • The Associated Press (no other byline) at NPR: Fedora man unmasked: Meet the teen behind the Louvre mystery photo: “For Pedro, art and imagery were part of everyday life. So when millions projected stories onto a single frame of him in a fedora beside armed police at the Louvre, he recognized the power of an image and let the myth breathe before stepping forward.”

Weekly Notes: October 27–November 2, 2025

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  • Our big thing this week was taking a weekend mini-break to celebrate my wife’s birthday (coming up tomorrow). As soon as work was done on Friday we headed into Seattle and checked in to the Olive 8. We’d stayed here over the summer during Worldcon and enjoyed it, so we decided to come back. Once we’d checked in and had dinner, our first thing for the weekend was…
    • Shrew, a great version of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew. Really funny, but not at all shying away from the play’s more controversial and problematic elements, even to giving Katherine’s final monologue a wonderfully creepy, horror-movie-esque staging that worked wonderfully well.

    • Saturday we had a nice lazy morning before braving a Seattle windstorm to walk down to the Pike Place Market to get breakfast and pick up fixings for lunch. Back to the hotel for lunch and lounging, and then we heading back down toward the Market for dinner and a show at the Seattle Can Can’s Hitchcock Hotel. Humor, dance, songs, nudity, and a great time; we even ended up with seats right by the stage (any closer and we’d have been part of the show…thankfully, that honor went to another member of the audience).

    • After the show and a quick stop back at the hotel room, we headed up the hill to the Mercury for this month’s Saturday. This wasn’t on the original plan, but we had energy and it seemed like a good addition to the weekend’s plans. Amusingly, since this wasn’t in the original plan, I’d packed for walking around a rainy and windy Seattle, and I do believe that this is the first time I’ve ever gone to the Mercury wearing pants!

📸 Photos

My hand placing a Washington ballot envelope into a blue-and-white King County ballot drop box.
It’s time to vote! If you’re local to Washington and haven’t done so already, get your ballot filled out and to a drop box!
A Washington state ferry pulls in with the Seattle waterfront ferris wheel in the foreground on a grey fall day.
This was just such a Seattle scene.
The Can Can room all in red and gold, with a stage on the left with a closed red velvet curtain, red fabric stretched aross the ceiling over strings of lights.
The view from our seats at the Can Can.

📝 Writing

I took a look at this week’s updates to the Affinity design suite, and came out cautiously hopeful, which was a better place than I was afraid of ending up.

📺 Watching

  • I finished the first (currently only) season of Alien: Earth early this week. That was very enjoyably and often disturbingly creepy, and does a better job of working with the perennial “what if xenomorphs made it to Earth” question than I was afraid it might, especially given that this is set before the original movie. I was particularly impressed with the work they did in blending the original very ’70s aesthetic with modern tech and techniques; it’s as good or better as the work done with both Rogue One and Andor in the Star Wars world.

  • Sunday afternoon we watched Jurassic World: Rebirth. Mostly it was fine (I mean, it’s hard to go wrong with dinosaurs chasing people), but it kind of fell apart at the end with the “D-Rex” (dubbed the “Disappointment Rex” by my wife). Studios really need to remember that it’s entirely possible to write a good, enjoyable, fun adventure/horror sequel without constantly having to one-up the last one with something bigger (figuratively and literally). Still, sometimes you’re just in the mood to watch people make bad decision around dangerous animals, and the series continues to entertain on that front.

🔗 Linking

  • Tom Ellison at McSweeney’s: Hi, It’s Me, Wikipedia, And I Am Ready For Your Apology: “In 2004, you saw some college guy using me and thought, ‘What a lazy cheater.’ ¶ Now you’d think, ‘At least he’s not asking Gemini.’ ¶ In a few years, you’ll say, ‘Wow, look, a human being who can read.'”

  • Jesus Diaz at Fast Company: Canva’s new free Affinity app wants to sink the Adobe flagships: “Combined with a good toolset (still have to test this one) and the zero price tag, Canva may be launching a philosophical and strategic H-bomb at one of its biggest competitors. If it delivers, the creative world is about to feel the shockwave that may finally bust Adobe’s decades-old foundations.”

Star Trek: The Manga Volume 1: Shinsei/Shinsei edited by Luis Reyes

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Book 57 of 2025: ⭐️⭐️⭐️

An anthology of six short pieces; five manga-style comics and one short story. Seeing TOS-era Trek through the eyes of manga artists is amusing, and all the stories were fine for Trek in this medium (though the “twist ending” of the first story was pretty clearly visible quite early on). I think this came from the Norwescon Little Free Library table a couple years back, as I’d had no idea this kind of thing existed. My favorite stories were Chris Dows’ “Side Effects” (even with the predictable ending) and Rob Tokar’s “Orphans” (the Enterprise vs. giant mecha!).

Me holding Star Trek: The Manga Vol. 1

Ranking the Star Trek Films (Again)

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An update to my last attempt at doing this back in 2009. I originally posted this to Mastodon back in April after watching Star Trek: Section 31, and after realizing I hadn’t cross-posted it here, am doing that now. Also somewhat prompted by a friend sending me this ranking from Den of Geek, which is close, but not identical, to mine; I do broadly agree with their summaries of the various films.

I gave it some thought, and while the exact placement of any of these might vary slightly depending on time/mood/etc., I think this is a pretty good stab at my personal Star Trek film ranking, best/favorite to worst/least favorite:

  • Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
  • Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home
  • Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country
  • Star Trek: First Contact
  • Star Trek: The Motion Picture
  • Galaxy Quest
  • Star Trek (2009)
  • Star Trek Beyond
  • Star Trek III: The Search for Spock
  • Star Trek: Generations
  • Star Trek V: The Final Frontier
  • Star Trek: Section 31
  • Star Trek: Insurrection
  • Star Trek: Nemesis
  • Star Trek Into Darkness

A few more details:

The first three (TWoK, TVH, TUC) are essentially a three-way tie for first. At any given point, the order could be shuffled around and would probably be acceptable.

TMP remains in that place whether it’s the theatrical, TV extended, or directors cut, but of the three, the director’s cut is definitively the best.

Some purists might be surprised at the two Kelvinverse films ranking that high, but for all the faults, the casting was so good at embodying the characters without slavishly copying or parodying (intentionally or not) the original actors, and I think both films are a lot of fun.

Christopher Lloyd’s Kruge almost pushes TSfS higher, but…not quite. But it does mark the dividing line between “films I can put on at just about any time and enjoy” and “films I’ll watch when there’s a reason to” (chronological rewatch, someone else wants to watch one, etc.).

S31 is barely Star Trek. It’s a generic sci-fi spy film that someone spritzed with synthehol and Starfleet emblems; it ranks as high as it does because it’s an acceptable generic sci-fi spy film, entirely suitable for having on in the background and occasionally paying attention to. Michelle Yeoh (and Georgeau) deserved better.

Into Darkness…I just have so many issues with it. I will be quite unpleasantly surprised if they ever make a Trek film that knocks it out of the bottom spot on this list.

Star Trek III: The Search for Spock The Making of the Classic Film by John and Maria Jose Tenuto

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Book 51 of 2025: ⭐️⭐️⭐️

The third in Titan Books’s series of Star Trek films “behind the scenes” coffee-table art books, and the second from the team of John and Maria Jose Tenuto. It’s always fun to see all the production art, photos of models and setups, and all the skill that goes into the films. As with the prior books, much of the information I knew, but there are always some gems and stories that I hadn’t come across yet.

Me holding Star Trek III: The Search for Spock: The Making of the Classic Film.

Weekly Notes: September 1–7, 2025

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  • 🇺🇸 Monday we recognized Labor Day by heading into Seattle to participate in one of the local protests. It was a small but enthusiastic group; my one slight disappointment was that though held on Labor Day, it was more generally anti-Trump than specifically pro-labor/union. (Not that anti-Trump is bad, of course. It just seemed to dominate the sentiments, and the day itself was just relegated to being a convenient day to protest because some people had the day off of work.)

  • 📷 I did post an album of photos of the day’s adventures, before, during, and after the protest. I had fun playing a bit with these; the only lens I brought was a Pocket Dispo, a disposable camera lens mounted in a 3-D printed fitting. It gives the images a fun bit of distortion. Definitely not an everyday lens, but fun to have in my kit for when it feels right.

  • The rest of the week was a pretty standard week, with no particular stories of note.

📸 Photos

A metal firefighting hose pipe fitting on a brick wall, with sticker graffiti that says, 'destroy monotony write on walls'.
Somewhat ironically, this is sticker graffiti, not written.
A curved grey brick wall with graffiti that reads, 'those who have found less humiliation and more advantage in a life of crime than in sweeping floors will not turn in their weapons, and prison won't teach them to love society', surrounded by more graffiti of cat heads and text that says, 'bigots beware' and 'trans hearts run this park'.
I’m kinda digging how the Cal Anderson Park gate house has become a point of trans solidarity and resistance.
A woman sitting on a brick wall and smiling, holding a sign that says, 'Palantir is how Númenor fell'.
The intersection of geeks and political protest always results in some great signs.
A crowd of people, many hoding protest signs and some holding U.S. flags, gathered in a brick plaza and watching people speak.
Some speakers were better than others, but our current state Attorney General Nick Brown spoke well and was the highlight of the rally. At this point, he seems good. Of course, our former AG, Bob Ferguson, was great in that role as well, but has not been nearly as impressive as Governor, so…who really knows?

📚 Reading

Read one Star Trek novel, Gene DeWeese’s Into the Nebula.

📺 Watching

  • We finished our rewatch of Scrubs; our first time watching all the way to the end, including the Scrubs: Med School ninth season/spinoff. The first few seasons of Scrubs are definitely the best; much of the latter seasons are very hit-and-miss, but generally still at least amusing.

  • We also watched Murderbot, which was a really good adaptation of the first book in the series, and even got my wife, not as much of a sci-fi fan as I am, invested and enjoying (most of) the show. The one disappointment was a section in the final episode that fills in a period of time that’s skipped in the book, and which was tonally very different from the rest of the show, enough so that we skipped forward through a chunk of it. Still, overall, really good, and I’m looking forward to the second season when it shows up.

🔗 Linking

  • Micah Lee: Unfortunately, the ICEBlock app is activism theater: “Joshua makes strong claims about the security and privacy of his app without backing any of them up with technical details. Many of his claims are false. He also chose to target only iOS, and not Android, because of a misunderstanding about how Android push notifications work. And even worse, during the Q&A, he made it clear that he didn’t understand terms like ‘warrant canary,’ ‘reverse engineering,’ or ‘security through obscurity,’ which doesn’t inspire confidence.”

  • Jason Aten at Inc.: After 18 Years, This Is Still the Most Useful macOS Feature You Probably Forgot Existed: “…one of the most underrated features in macOS is also one of the oldest: the Guest User account. It’s been around for more than 18 years, first appearing in Mac OS X Leopard in 2007. Yet most Mac users barely remember it exists.” It’s a very clickbait-y headline, but honestly, I’d not thought about the Guest User account in years, and it’s worth keeping in mind.