Thoughts on Entertainment

Reacher has gotten steadily worse since its excellent debut season, but this most recent one has been calamitous. Its penultimate episode this week was the worst of any in the series—just terrible. I’ll watch the finale, but I’ve seen enough to call this one: ★☆☆☆☆.

Awesome! Now let’s see if I can get tickets in SF…I’m still waiting to find good seats there for The Odyssey. 😞

I’m finishing up my latest trip to Poland for work. Our office is next to Spodek, which is an arena in Katowice. “Spodek” means “saucer” in English, and it’s shaped like a flying saucer. I love that it plays the musical tones from Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

Gah, I’m traveling, and wasn’t on top of this, and now the 70mm IMAX theater in SF is sold out as far as tickets are available, into January.

More reminiscing about The Shield and its finale….

I love this premise. For me, the first thing that came to mind when I thought of “a perfect finale” was the finale to The Shield. For a show that started really rough for me, it was a rare example of one that got better over the seasons. And that finale was, indeed, perfect.

A recent meeting I attended had a fun icebreaker question, something along the lines of, “What was your first favorite video game?” I had two answers, one for an arcade game (Tempest), and one for a computer game: Telengard. What a blast from the past!

“Widow’s Bay” started very slowly for me. But I’d recommend you to stick with it, as there really are some stand-out episodes and moments. I grew increasingly fond of it as I watched, and even more so as I reflect on it now that we’ve finished.

Emily Wilson, who created a modern, well-received translation of The Odyssey, has an incredibly thorough review of the movie. While I liked the movie where she did not, I also enjoyed reading her take.