Category: Television

Ahmed Best: Redeemed

Redeemed isn’t the right word, but it’s sort of right.

Did you see today’s new episode of The Mandalorian? Veteran Star Wars actor Ahmed Best plays a roll. You know who he played before, right? Right. Jar Jar Fucking Binks. The nadir or all Star Wars writing. The nadir of George Lucas’ career. The worst thing about any Star Wars story… Jar Jar Fucking Binks. Ahmed Best did the motion capture acting and the voice acting for Jar Jar in all three prequels.

Jar Jar being terrible was not Ahmed Best’s fault. He did the best he could with the terrible character he was given. I put all the blame on Lucas. Still, Mr Best has taken an ocean of abuse over the roll and it’s all unfairly as far as I can tell. Ahmed Best does not need to be redeemed. Jar Jar does, but shouldn’t ever. Ahmed Best is fine just being himself.

Having said that… his brief appearance in today’s episode gave him the opportunity to KICK ALL KINDS OF ASS. His new character is an utter bad ass. I looked him up online and apparently he’s been playing this character for a long time on a Star Wars themed kids game show. He plays the roll of a teacher teaching kids Jedi skills that they use in competitive games. I have never seen the show. I have never even heard of the show. All I know is that his character made the jump to a dramatic roll in completely heroic fashion.

So welcome back to the flagship, Sir. Welcome back to the Star Wars. Here’s hoping you get more screen time soon. There’s still more story there to be told (no spoilers). Good to have you on the team.

Saturday Morning

Just sitting at home having a quiet Saturday morning. Watching The X-Files (the space shuttle episode from season one is pretty terrible, isn’t it?) and trying to get the cats to come hang out with me.

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We won’t be going to the Hockey East Finals game tonight. UMass Lowell lost in overtime. Double overtime, I think. My brother’s old school, Merrimack College beat us. I think I’ll be rooting for Merrimack tonight. If my team can’t win it, his team should. The word on the street is that Hockey East is probably only going to get one team into the national tournament this year. I don’t remember what the reasoning behind that was, but I think I read an article on USCHO that mentioned it.

Mulder was just taking photos of an army secret thingie and he got jumped by a soldier. The camera markings were blacked out so I can’t tell what model it was. The lens looked a little similar to my father’s cheap zoom lens. It was different, but similar. Not quite as ground breaking as seeing Dad’s camera on an episode of Stranger Things, but fun nonetheless.

Happy St Patrick’s Day

Happy everyone in and around Boston, Massachusetts pretends they are Irish day! Even those of us who actually are of Irish descent. It dawned on me yesterday that with all the weight loss over the last year, and all of the needing to buy new clothes, I don’t actually own any green clothing. After I had that realization it also occurred to me that I didn’t own any green clothing last year either.

We are not doing anything special to celebrate my national heritage this year. I floated the idea last week, but after having Harry home for spring break it seemed underwhelming and I didn’t pursue it. I’d like to drive to New York instead, but I haven’t floated that idea at all so it ain’t happening. Unless Jen reads this and jumps at the idea. Heh heh heh.

No stomach issues today. Yesterday I was dealing with stomach aches off and on all day. The day before I had a minor stomach issue at lunch and then a huge issue at dinner. Today, nothing yet. I had a protein bar and a little bit of chicken for breakfast. No problems. I am hopeful that I can keep this trend running for the day.

I’ve been trying to get into Mastodon (@RobJ_1971). I wrote there this morning that if I had my way my agenda for today would include playing guitar and watching The X-Files and nothing else. Obviously that ain’t happening either (thanks, adulthood). Tomorrow though… Sunday though… who knows. I might finally stop thinking about it and start trying to sell my Stratocaster and using the proceeds to make repairs on my ES-335 (frets and wiring harness) and Les Paul Custom (frets, wiring harness, and pickups). Maybe. Frankly, the idea terrifies me. Mostly because I don’t know what a 2000 American Series Stratocaster’s fair price should be. The used guitar market is constantly in flux and I don’t want to let it go too cheap. I also don’t want to try to gouge people either. I’m thinking $1,200, but is that fair? I don’t really know.

Okay. Get to work, Robert. Happy St Patrick’s Day, everyone. Happy Friday. Don’t drink and drive tonight. Be careful out there. Wash your hands and be safe.

I Feel Let Down

I just signed up for ChatGPT. I wanted to have it write a blog post for me. I asked it to write something about the Bruins clinching a playoff spot yesterday. It wrote one, but all the facts were wrong. I feel like AI let me down in a big way. Well… by
“big way” I really mean “totally insignificant way.”

The Bruins clinched a playoff spot yesterday with a month still to go in the season. They are so far ahead of the pack that it’s unprecedented. Unfortunately this level of insane regular season success often doesn’t translate to playoff success. We can’t get overly confident this year.

I was hoping ChatGPT would write this up for me but of course it didn’t. Stupid artificial intelligence.

Change of subject.

We had all sorts of problems with our Disney+ and Hulu subscriptions yesterday. Our passwords suddenly didn’t work. We changed them all and then they didn’t work again. It was annoying. Jen straightened it out this morning so I am celebrating by watching Star Wars TV shows. I started by rewatching Wednesday’s Mandalorian episode, which then inspired me to find a list of Bo Katan episodes across all of the various shows. I’m up to the end of the final season of The Clone Wars now. So I am basically now watching the alternate view of Episode III.

Okay, for now I’m going to watch another episode, then I am going to make some lunch. I might make some for Harry too, if he wants.

Go Bruins.

Good TV

Yesterday’s episode of The Mandalorian was one that we will someday look back on as one of the best from the series. It was fantastic. Literally everything about it worked perfectly.

Today’s new episode of Star Trek Picard? Same thing. We’re going to look back at this one as a highlight not only of this show, but of Next Generation Star Trek in general. It was so good that I was sad when it ended.

It’s a good time to be a television viewer and a science fiction/fantasy/action adventure fan.

Leaving space behind, temporarily, the season one finale of Poker Face is out today too. I am really happy with that show. I’ve enjoyed every episode, and there are a couple of A+’s in there too (looking at you, episode nine and the one with the mom from Who’s the Boss, and episode one). I’m trying to get back into Extraordinary as well as I started watching that with Jen but she said she wasn’t interested anymore and let me finish it on my own. I still have 3-4 more episodes to go, but it’s a good show… just maybe not quite as good as Poker Face. Oh yeah, and let’s not forget that a new episode of The Bad Batch came out yesterday too and while that show has been hit or miss in season two, the two most recent episodes are both major hits. Yesterday’s was great.

In closing, let’s not forget that as I am listing off excellent TV shows that are currently airing that the single best show that’s out right now is going to wrap up it’s first season on Sunday. I’m talking about The Last of Us, of course. As good as all of these other shows are, and they absolutely are, The Last of Us leaves them all in the dust. It’s gut wrenching and emotional and exciting and terrifying and pretty much perfect and Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey deserve all of the awards. All of them.

I’m Freezing

It is 44 degrees outside, which almost feels like Spring. It’s 66 degrees at my desk in the cellar. It feels like 22 degrees. I’m freezing. No one warned me that losing 200 pounds would result in me being ice cold 24/7. Brr.

I have nothing really to write about. It’s almost 2:00pm and I am super late for starting lunch. I had to turn off the space heater while I was on a conference call and it feels like the temperature dropped 180 degrees. I’m cold!

I am doing a lunch time experiment. I am air frying some frozen french fries. The plan being to use french fries as a salt-delivery -system. Salt is supposed to help with whatever causes my occasional bouts of light headedness. Over the last few weeks I have honestly felt myself craving french fries. That might be the weirdest thing that’s ever happened to me, dietarily speaking. I’m craving salted peanuts too. It’s so weird. Peanuts and fries for lunch, babie.

Change of subject. Did I mention last night’s episode of The Last of Us yet? Season one, episode eight of nine. I’m still pretty screwed up over it. It was good, but it was dark. Like, super dark. Like, disturbingly dark. I almost watched it again this morning during my jogging (yogging) but I couldn’t bring myself to and switched to a Deep Space Nine episode. The one where we meet The Grand Nagus for the first time and thus usher in the annual Ferengi comic relief episode.

Back to the french fries thing, I suck at estimating small amounts of weight. We are supposed to track our food intake by weight, but we are supposed to weigh everything after it’s cooked. I shook what I thought was just a couple of ounces of frozen fries into the air fryer basket only to find that when they came out of the air fryer there were 5.5 ounces. That’s WAY too much for me today. I’ll eat as much as I can handle and see what happens.

Okay, I have to get back to the grindstone now. I really don’t have anything to write about anyway. Consider the bottom of this particular barrel scraped. We did dodge a bullet at work today. I won’t give details, but it made me happy. Okay, that’s good enough for now. Go eat yer lunch, Robert.

NESN on AppleTV

Why didn’t anyone tell me that NESN has an AppleTV app?

I just installed it and now I am watching spring training Red Sox baseball on my AppleTV! Will regular season games be blacked out by MLB? Will regular season Bruins games be blacked out? I have the account I’m using for the app tied to our Verizon cable account and NESN is in that package, so I don’t think so.

The next B’s game is Thursday. Fingers crossed until then.

Standard Definition

I said in the last post that I was watching an episode of Star Trek Deep Space Nine. Unfortunately it was season one episode nine (which is actually the eighth episode, but the pilot counts as two episodes so… yeah) which is also probably the worst episode of the series. One of them at least. It’s the one where the bad guy possesses the doctor and you can tell when he’s the bad guy because he… talks… slow. Ugh.

Alexander Siddig having a bad day at the office* is not what I am here to talk about though. I am actually here to talk about screen resolution.

Deep Space Nine premiered in the 90’s. In those days there was no such thing as high definition television, never mind 4k or 8k or (n+1)k or whatever. I taped all of the episodes of the show onto VHS off of our cable feed (except for one season when I taped it off of the air, which was really funny) and seeing them on DVD at a later point was like the god of television rubbing my tummy. It looked so good.

Now, in the 2023 world, streaming the show on Paramount+ in standard definition is actually hard to watch. It all looks blurry. Maybe blurry is the wrong word. How about soft. The focus looks really soft. It’s not quite, but almost hard to watch. I am so spoiled by high definition and higher resolutions that standard definition can be hard to deal with. I switched over to season one episode two of The X-Files, which is also in standard def, and it looks a ton better than DS9. X-Files had Fox money behind it where Star Trek shows were syndicated. Is that the difference now? All I know for sure is that Deep Throat just showed up in this episode for the first time. Smoking Man is in episode one, Deep Throat is in episode two. Bring it on, kids.

*I’m sure Alexander Siddig is a decent guy, but I have never really been able to get along with his acting skills in Deep Space Nine. I was really pleased when he showed up in Game of Thrones and he wasn’t bad. He was the only thing in the entire Dorne story line (apart from Pedro Pascal, of course) that wasn’t terrible. His performance as the leader of Dorne was pretty good, while literally everything else in that entire story line was unwatchably terrible. Good on you, sir!