Red Sonja (2025) [+] Red Sonja (Matilda Lutz) battles the forces of Emperor Draygan (Robert Sheehan) who is willing to have his armies destroy her forest home in search of an artifact. Actually a pretty good adaptation using characters introduced in the Dark Horse Comics version of Red Sonja. The Emperor is more of the sly inventor type like in the comics.
Annisia (Wallis Day), the Emperor's champion, is tormented by ghosts also like the comics (though with a different reason for her visions). Osin (Luca Pasqualino) makes a couple of appearances. I also like that this is a young Red Sonja sans super powers -- she's good but very beatable.

Zen Koi Pro+ (2024) [/] Maneuver a koi fish through a pond. Eat other animals. Mate with other koi (which can birth a koi of new colors). Eat creature combos so you can upgrade your fish. Level up, expanding the pond and adding more creatures to eat. There are no levels or real difficulty -- it's more of a relaxing pastime.

Trader Joe's Organic Black Beans [+] Cheap ($1.20) and perfectly fine.

WinCo Foods Black Beans (Canned) [-] WinCo being a chain store this is their house-branded offering. Rather watery, like very even. Though it does taste fine there are better options.

Dear X is a South Korean modern-day dark drama running 12 hour-long episodes.

The story follows the rise of Baek Ah-jin (Kim You-jung -- Clean with Passion for Now, 2018; Backstreet Rookie, 2020; My Demon, 2023) from unpopular high school teen to the number one actress in Korea. But her dark secret is that she's a psychopath without the ability to care about anyone else (other than how useful they are to her) and willing to arrange or let people die. Covering for her are her step-brother Yoon Jun-seo (Kim Young-dae) -- who does everything he can to protect her while hoping she can become a better person -- and high-school friend Kim Jae-oh (Kim Do-hoon) -- who is a bit more streetwise and willing to break the law to help her.

The plot sort of goes: someone gets in her way, she eventually deals with them. High school beauty Shim Sung-hee (Kim Yi-kyung) bullies Ah-jin seeing her as a rival and eventually Ah-jin arranges a whisper campaign against Sung-hee and also reveals Sung-hee's secret notebook and gets her kicked out of school. Similarly as a beginning actress her older more famous lead girl Im Re-na (Lee Yul-eum) also bullies Ah-jin so Ah-jin arranges for a couple of Re-na's dark secrets to be revealed leading her to her downfall as a popular actress.

And of course there's dear old father who only shows up to beat her and steal money from her and is considering selling her to some sort of pornography operation. Ah-jin thinks up of a way too complicated plan to have a "hero" kill her father trying to protect her. A plan which fails and she has to do the deed (though with the way the storytelling is done they could have easily added an addendum showing she wasn't the real killer because she blacked out for a bit) and is saved by her step-brother.

Later on she seduces top actor Heo In-gang (Hwang In-youp) for a year. Well not seduce sex but makes him fall in love with her such that he is about to propose but now that she's done with him she coldly breaks up with him and he commits suicide. (There's also the part where In-gang's grandmother dies from an accident while Ah-jin is there and everybody thinks she did it ecept for Kim Jae-oh and it turns out she didn't do it.) Heo In-gang and his grandmother's deaths kind of turns step-brother against Ah-jin so he decides to do an exposé to tear her down at the end.

But we know that Yoon Jun-seo has his own mental issues so that when she's at her low point and he's driving her away the murder-suicide thing is not out of the blue. Luckily Ah-jin survives and is able to stagger off down the road where it says she was never seen again.

Unlike an American psychopath Ah-jin only kills one person. Mom dies because of dad and a kid Ah-jin didn't call 911 (or 112 in Korea). Dad she takes a bat to his head. Heo In-gang gets all depressed and commits suicide. Ah-jin does ruin a couple of women who were picking on her but she didn't start it. Her dad deserved what was coming to him. In-gang she didn't tell him to die just to move on and his grandmother unbalanced herself and fell down the stairs.

All in all Ah-jin is not evil which does keep the series watchable. Kim You-jung is both beautiful and great at showing how Ah-jin is so outwardly emotionless. And at least she didn't die or go to prison in the end.

It is a good series though dark and not romantic.

NFL Retro Bowl '26 as far as I can tell is just standard Retro Bowl but with an NFL license they can use team names, logos, and player names (with approximate statistics). Otherwise I did not see any differences in features or game play than regular Retro Bowl.

That still means it remains a very entertaining American football manager with optional arcade game play. First choose a name and 8-bit image for your coach. Then pick your favorite team, which you don't get immediately. Instead you get a random team and start with a three round draft to fill out your 10-man roster (QB, RB, TE, K, WR, OL, DL, LB, DB positions with the first four being 1-active in a game and the others max 2-active).

Then you go through a normal season. A game can be skipped (just gives you results), simulation play (where it synthesizes each 4-down set into one play), or full arcade mode where you control the players. Players have skills which improve to various maximums, energy which goes down game by game so you might need to rest a player for a game, morale which improves when you win but if a player bottoms out in morale I find it's time to cut them instead of putting the major effort into improving their morale (low morale is infectious). Players can get injured and you can trade them out (only for draft picks), cut them, and sign free agents.

With simulation play a season will take a couple of hours then it's playoffs and on to the next season. Contracts expire and players will want more money and like the regular NFL you can't have a team of all-stars because of the salary cap (though also like the NFL drafted players are paid substantially less so drafting ready-to-go players is really nice). Oh, you can also upgrade your Offensive and Defensive coaches and improve three facilities (stadium, training, rehab).

Then after two seasons you get the chance to move to a different team (a selection of random teams). Changing teams is one way to avoid salary cap hell because you won't be around when all those high draft picks and free agents need to re-sign.

Anyway, with an official NFL license it's kind of nice coaching the Arizona Cardinals instead of the Phoenix team. You have real players with approximately the right stats -- and there is no "prone to injury" stat so Kyler Murray is likely to last the entire season. Unfortunately even with real names Retro Bowl still has the quirks that in simulation mode it often doesn't use player names and never when referring to the other team.

NFL Retro Bowl '26 is the same fun game made 10% better with real teams and players (and they start with the right uniform numbers but as you start acquiring randomly generated players they don't get uniform numbers).

2026-08-11 addendum: Thinking about it I'd like a preview (with ability to scout) of the next draft or two so that I can trade (or not re-sign) players when you know I'll draft their replacement. You even have to decide whether or not to re-sign expiring contracts before you get to the draft (and re-signing a player means cutting or trading them in the first year decreases team morale).

Sapphire & Steel (1979) [+] British children's show (I assume as it's half-hour episodes) that ran four seasons although only six stories (2 each in s1 and s2, 1 each in s3 and s4). Cosmic agents Sapphire (Joanna Lumley) and Steel (David McCallum) are sent to Earth to stop supernatural entities that threaten the planet and it's more apparent in s2 and on that they are sent to stop time catastrophes that would destroy history. It's a lot of talking and low budget with a few sets, a few guests, and rudimentary special effects. I watched s1 before and found it boring but this year I watched the whole series and found rather interesting. Very atmospheric and slow-paced buildup to the finale of each story.

Veil of Shadows (2026) [-] Two Formless Moon nine-tailed foxes -- Wu Wangyan (Chen Duling) and her younger "sister" Lu Wuyi (Ju Jingyi -- The Legend of White Snake, 2019) -- team up with a young Shilin Sect demon hunter -- Ji Ling (Tian Jiarui) -- and a rogue demon hunter -- Wu Shiguang (Zeng Shunxi) -- on a murder mystery case which then segues into trying to stop the evil Jiu Ying (various people as he keeps taking over bodies) from full resurrection.

On the positive side a really attractive cast and nice CGI effects and I liked the beginning story as all the main characters have secrets. On the negative side over-reliance on CGI means it's often a character doing a cool stance or hand gesture and then lots of CGI "magic powers manifesting". Also the story is fairly convoluted because lots of time travel and lots of bad endings that are reversed because, guess what, time travel.

Overall the last third of the series was fairly confusing so what started out as a promising story ended up disappointing.

Punch Kick Duck+ (2024) [/] A simple fighting game where you play a duck and have three actions: punch, kick or duck. Each of the animal enemies is countered by a specific action so this is mainly just a timing game which gets frenetic as more and more enemies appear.

Rabbids Multiverse (2024) [/] Apple Arcade move-forward combat game based on Rabbids IP. In each level you use gold to place units, which then constantly move to the right and automatically battle enemies until you reach the level boss and defeat him. Units get upgraded and they have special abilities you can trigger manually. I've seen many games like this and nothing different here except the IP characters and dialogue.

Daily Dose of Sunshine is a South Korean serious drama taking place at the psychiatric ward of a university hospital. It runs 12 hour-long episodes.

Jung Da-eun (Park Bo-young, I've seen her in five other drama series and she's really good) is a new nurse transfer to the psychiatric ward. As she adjusts to the routines and patients she can't help but become too close to the patients which sometimes help and sometimes hurts the patient or herself. Each episode generally concentrates on one patient and their particular illness and often one of the nurses has similar issues but maybe not as strong and hidden.

Half way through the series a crisis develops after one of the patients commits suicide. Da-eun is deeply affected but keeps it inside and slowly starts to break down in private until she snaps and forgets what happened, thinking that patient is still alive and fine. She goes on leave where she breaks down further until finally she tries commit suicide and ends up at another psychiatric ward where for the most part the staff don't know she's a nurse.

The second half of this is that once she recovers she tries to keep what happened to her private (the head nurse knows) but it eventually backfires and causes a backlash from families of the patients who don't want a former mental patient treating their loved ones. There's also a slight romance arc as a doctor from another department, Dong Go-yun (Yeon Woo-jin -- Marriage, Not Dating, 2014, as lead male; Thirty-Nine, 2022, in a supporting role as boyfriend), finds that his neurotic habits subside whenever Da-eun is around...

It's a pretty good series. Serious without being dark (even with a suicide). The two to four episodes when Da-eun is going to snap and then in psychiatric ward is very well done. Throughout the series he hear her inner monologue so when she's committed she all "I am sane. I just have to prove it so I can be released and go back to my normal life." and you see that she also does all the crazy patient behavior (e.g. pretending to take her meds) and rationalizes it to herself much as other psych patients probably do.

A good drama.

STFC Database is a storehouse of specific information about Star Trek Fleet Command. I don't think it has guides or strategy pages or crew suggestions. But if you want to know info about a specific ship, system, building, research, officer, or mission this is a really nice resource. I'm not sure it was an official site all along but now it seems to be run by STFC developers Scopely in STFC there are now info links that go to stfc.space pages.

Things I use it for:

Ships - Resource requirements to go from Tier x to Tier y. Also warp ranges at each tier.

Buildings - Resource requirements at each level and also if there are dependencies to get to that level. For events where I can spend a building resource I can estimate how many resources I'll spend before I hit a level cap or run out of that resource.

Officers - Mostly to look up synergy bonuses.

Missions - See if a mission is part of a chain and if so how many more missions. Also if someone mentions a mission I can look it up and see where you get that mission (if it's a specific system it says so, if not then the answer is unfortunately not helpful).

Unfortunately I haven't been able to do some searches, like "where is the mission to unlock XYZ path?" or "which officers are good against Borg?". For the latter I'll have to build my own spreadsheet of data.

Still, it's nice having all this info in a database you can search on.

Ripe for the Picking (2024) [/] Japanese drama of 9 20-minute episodes. 32-year old office worker Kosaka Maiko (Kusumi Koharu) is a virgin and wants to finally have sex but is finding it hard to find a nice partner until she meets IT contractor Kagiya Senri (Sato Taiki). They start a bit of a friendship over Pac-Man but both have small issues that lead to misunderstandings. Meanwhile we also have three other subplots with Maiko's co-workers: a mom who is a manga artist as paying hobby but her work is suffering due to family issues, a workaholic who is ignoring her boyfriend and straining the relationship, a part-timer who thinks she's ugly and finds a good-looking date that's too good to be true. Overall a nice short series that gets a lot of material in with a sexy sex scene near the end.

Fabulous - Wedding Disaster+ (2024) [/] This is basically one of those restaurant games where customers come in, say what they want, you click on the items they ordered then deliver it to them, take their cash, clean up afterwards. The theme is a wedding dress shop where you are also an aspiring designer so in between orders there is a design task you do. Fairly typical of the genre and it's developed by Gamehouse who are not known for novelty.

Summer Pop!+ (2024) [/] Match-3 Candy Crush sort of game with cute animals. It's fine for what it is.

Girls Next Door podcast (2025) [/] Actress/Model Wallis Day and her best friend Francesca Allen do a girls talk podcast sometimes with guests. I guess it's more about their lives and celebrity gossip than anything serious. They're both British and I do have a hard time telling them apart -- I think I got it down to Francesca has a bit more energy and loudness. It's kind of pleasant.

Fight for Love is a Chinese historical romance-drama running 40 45-minute episodes.

To investigate who betrayed her family in a crucial battle Chu Yu (Victoria Song) marries into the Wei family. After the Wei patriarch and the six eldest songs die in battle (betrayed again) she then teams up with the youngest son, Wei Yun (Ding Yu Xi) to find the traitor even though he half-suspects she is the traitor...

There are some really nice fight scenes in that they're designed to be artistic and beautiful rather than bloody and realistic. There are three other romance subplots, one of which ends tragically. Once Chu Yu and Wei Yun admit their love they have many difficulties because the Emperor has other plans for Wei Yun and technically she's his sister-in-law. Lots of family honor stuff complicating their lives.

Victoria Song looks great. The story does have her character be about six years older which is nice and un-ageist. The first half was especially good when there is tension between the two and once their romance is established it gets less interesting. Still, a pretty good series.

Vampire Survivors is a frenetic arcade game available on Apple Arcade (or as a free to play with in-apps) and I think the game is vaguely reminiscent of Robotron: 2084. You play a guy on a big flat map with monsters slowly coming at you on all sides. You have one control which is moving around and you attack automatically (the beginning character has a whip and attacks left or right depending on facing but he also adds other weapons that auto aim or whirl around him).

Monsters drop coins. Special bats drop chests with very needed loot and upgrades. There is a bit of a Fortnite storm effect where these man-eating plants form a big circle around you and start closing in and you have to beat a boss to make the plants also go away. As you survive longer monsters get tougher and more numerous but you've also been upgrading your character to maybe keep pace.

There are four characters and several different though other than the initial character and map the others unlock later. Similarly upgrades unlock as you accomplish various things like survive along time or upgrade something a lot. The graphics are kind of 8-bit retro and the background music is unremarkable enough I don't remember it.

The iPad version feels like a direct port adding touch movement. Put your finger down on the screen and move it to go in that direction. On my iPad the game takes 3/4th of the screen and is on the upper right which means sometimes my finger goes tracks off the game and my character stops moving. And in general this game is not that easy to play with touch. A controller would be better.

This is a good action arcade shooting game but it's not a great adaptation to iPad or I suspect other touch-based devices.

Edit: I did get it to go full screen (do an expand touch gesture) but it's still a hard game to control with touch.

AI Love You (2022) [/] Thai rom com set in a near future where every building has a building AI that runs everything and interacts with residents/workers using the building. Lana (Pimchanok Leuwisetpaiboon) is a marketing specialist who is work obsessed such that her only friend is her work building AI Dob who in turn has fallen in love with her. An accident leaves Dob in the body Bobby (Mario Maurer) of an AI tech who was trying to fix him.

Dob decides to become Lana's boyfriend so that she can be happy but the company that makes building AIs knows about this "bug" and their procedure is to send a fixer to capture Bobby, flush out Dob and kill it, or failing that kill Bobby... This was an ok romantic comedy film not very emotional or deep. I do like the building AIs and frequent shots of buildings where the top of the building is like a giant robot head that moves and is sort of the building AIs persona.

The Battle of Polytopia+ (2024) [/] Apple Arcade version which comes with all factions unlocked. This is an excellent medium complexity 4X game where a game takes an hour or two. I had played it a lot before and playing it again makes me realize it's lost its luster. There are about a dozen standard factions and they only differ in looks, which tech they start with, and how much gold they start with. Tech and gold is fairly significant in a short game but does a fairly same-y feel to each game. The four extra factions each have unique powers and units so that's some variety.

But I guess what this game lacks is some sort of campaign mode or more unique factions. I reflect back on Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri where each faction needs to be played a certain way or they'll just lose (e.g. since the Believers are bad at tech and good at supporting big armies you need to go conquer early and steal tech because sitting back you'll fall behind and never recover since a large army is kind of useless when you're vastly out-tech'ed).

Hello, Love, Again (2024) [-] Philippine romantic drama. Set a couple of years after COVID shut down the world. Joy Marie (Kathryn Bernardo) is a health care assistant in Canada saving money for nursing school. Coming back into her life is her old love Ethan (Alden Richards) who is trying to emigrate from Hong Kong. In order to help him she agrees to be his pretend domestic partner so that he can get Permanent Residency. Love follows except for their past wherein flashbacks we see they tried Canada before but then COVID hit and he couldn't take it and eventually left her...

Just watching this movie, it's pretty meh and I don't feel it for the characters. Turns out though this is a sequel to Hello, Love, Goodbye (2019) which, note the date, was made before COVID and I assume goes much more into their first romance.

Beecher's "World's Best" Mac & Cheese [+] This is pretty good frozen mac & cheese, with penne pasta and their homemade cheddar and jack cheeses. Various package sizes. I had the 46 oz one which takes about an hour to cook, has 6-9 servings, and is 2800 calories. Fairly rich and cheesy.