KPop Demon Hunters (2025) [+] Netflix animated action film with some musical parts. Huntr/x — comprised of lead vocalist Rumi (Arden Cho), main dancer Mira (May Hong), and main rapper Zoey (Ji-young Yoo) — is both the number one K-Pop group in the world and secret demon slayers. But their greatest challenge will be defeating the Dark's new boy band, the Saja Boys, aimed at stealing Huntr/x's fans and robbing them of their power. Meanwhile Rumi has a dark secret that threatens to blow up the group… Awesome K-Pop songs elevates this film. Also like the cute demon cat and crow buddies.

K-Pop Idols (2024) [/] Apple TV documentary series going behind the scenes with three K-Pop artists: Jessi, American born South Korean rapper already successful but recently left her label to do it on her own; Blackswan, an international group with two Korean and two foreign members going through upheaval when members Fatou and Leia have a falling out; and Cravity, a new boy band trying to re-establish themselves after a failed debut during the Pandemic… the series does show you how hard this particular industry is and I can of feel they overemphasized it for the drama. It's well produced but the content maybe bit more depressing than I expected.

Time Locker+ (2023) [/] Vertical shooter with chunky polygon graphics. You are a bear traveling up and automatically shooting other animals, collecting coins and power-ups along the way. Everything stops if you're not moving (except for this blackness behind you that creep up the screen so you can't just tarry too long). But other than the time-stop gimmick it's not much of a game.

Snake.io+ (2023) [/] Arcade snake game where you and a bunch of other people (and bots) are in a large arena. Eat dots to grow your snake. Cause other snakes to crash into you or walls and they die with their bodies turning into more nutritious dots. I've played this before and still not that interesting.

The Moscow Offensive (2018) [-] I guess this is book 22 of Dale Brown's Patrick McLanahan series. I've "read" (on abridged audio books) Silver Tower and Flight of the Old Dog (1987) and a couple of other books. I only read the first five chapters of The Moscow Offensive and didn't find it interesting mostly because the main tech are small combat Mechs. His previous books I'd read are set on a space station, on a B52, or use advanced fighter jets. For some reason high-tech infantry small-unit (e.g. special operations teams) action doesn't interest me and I guess I was expecting more advanced fighter jets.

Ty & That Guy is a podcast with Ty Franck (co-writer of The Expanse book series and very involved in the tv show) and Wes Chatham (actor and played Amos Burton on The Expanse tv show). They started out reviewing The Expanse episodes, one per podcast, but also the other half of an episode was talking about stuff and a top 5 movies with a certain theme related to that Expanse Episode.

They both love movies, have a really good knowledge of all movies, and have very similar tastes. They also have pretty good chemistry. There are occasional guests mostly from The Expanse tv show, like actors Thomas Jane and Ron Perlman, set costumer Lindsay Walker, and producer Sharon Hall.

Later on they do movie theme shows. Either something in depth like their series on John Carpenter movies or Raiders of the Lost Ark. The podcast is currently at 197 episodes (currently on a 5+ month hiatus) and I've listened to the first 60 or so. They're also on YouTube if you want to see faces.

Overall I enjoy this podcast. Just love of The Expanse and movies and no politics or negativity.

Foundation s3 (2025) [+] The Mule (Pilou Asbæk) is the big threat this season as his mind control powers are rather astonishing — one man who can change history means he can wreck psycho history. I like that after another generation or two the three Cleo's — Brother Dusk (Terrence Mann), Brother Day (Lee Pace), and Brother Dawn (Cassian Bilton) — are all significantly more unstable than before. Demerzel's (Laura Birn) big easter egg about her past is mentioned a couple of times but in passing. It does kind of setup s4 to be either a direct continuation or another jump forward in time.

My Runway (2016) [/] South Korean short format series with six 22-minute episodes. High schooler model wannabe Han Seo-yeon (Park Ji-yeon) accidentally trades bodies with top model Na Jin-wook (Kang Dong-ho) who had previously harshly criticized her modeling audition for a tv show. The difficulty is mostly Seo-yeon trying to be the pro model Jin-wook while her crush Yoon Jae-bum (Kang Chul-woong) is one of Jin-wook's roommates. As the two try to find a way to switch back they kind of fall for each other… It's pretty bare bones but manages to be interesting.

Temple Run+ (2023) [/] Apple Arcade version which I guess is the same game minus the in-app purchasing. It's a reflex game where you are running ahead and have to turn left and right and almost immediately have another action to do like turn again, jump, or slide. I guess intentionally still seems to be the same graphics as 14 years ago. It's fun for a few minutes.

Bold Moves+ (2023) [/] Apple Arcade version. An elegant match 3 game where you are also trying to solve a Wheel of Fortune-style phrase. Some of the matches have letters which if they exist in the phrase are then revealed. Besides completing the standard match 3 objectives you can also guess the phrase to win (though sometimes being able to guess is locked until you complete some objective). It's a nice twist and a nice UI to a rather tired game format.

Taishoken, San Mateo - Tokyo Classic Aburasoba [+] Dry ramen (which means no soup, there is a sauce you mix in along with the toppings). Ramen, green onions, bamboo shoots, raw egg yolk (mixed in you can't tell it's in there), sauce with a slice of fatty pork and a slice of dried seaweed. Tastes good.

Crash Course in Romance is a South Korean romance drama running 16 hour+ episodes. Nam Haeng-seon (Jeon Do-yeon who played the female lead in Kill Boksoon) is a single mom, well not really, she's a single aunt raising her teen niece Nam Hae-yi (Ron Yoon-seo) after Hae-yi's mom ran off because she couldn't deal with a young kid.

Hae-yi decides she needs to attend a math academy since that's her weakest subject so Haeng-seon gets her enrolled into the best math academy in Seoul with star teacher Choi Chi-yeol (Jung Kyung-ho). But unknowingly Haeng-seon had already tangled with him a couple of times other disastrously so they didn't exactly like each other. For Chi-yeol it becomes harder — he often finds food unappetizing but has found that Haeng-seon's side dish (banchan) restaurant has food he actually likes.

The series is Haeng-seon and Chi-yeol falling in love which brings them both trouble with accusations that he's breaking up her "marriage" or that she's using sex to get her daughter favors at the math academy. Meanwhile Hae-yi gets bullied by one of her classmates while being pursued by another one. And then there's the factor that when he was a young teacher one of his female students committed suicide and people think it was his fault.

Oh I forgot that last one is important because that student's brother is out for revenge which later in the series brings an element of danger to Haeng-seon mostly.

It's rather annoying that other people use their influence to sabotage both Hae-yi's education and Haeng-seon's relationship with Chi-yeol. There is a monkaS moment when Chi-yeol's stalker kills one of his students (I guess he kills her since he goes on to kill others) but it's never mentioned again and it's like her parents didn't care enough to inquire why their daughter never made it back home?

Anyways this is a mostly good series and quite enjoyable.

I went back and played Marvel Strike Force for a few months, going from level 35 to level 100. I previously reviewed MSF this a couple of years ago and even a spot review five months ago.

This is a game about collecting Marvel Comics characters, upgrading them, then doing missions. Characters are from the comics and MCU and some original ones. Characters have:

• Tags - things like Hero/Villain, City/Cosmic/Mystic, Support/Brawler/Protector/Blaster/Controller, Fantastic Four/X-Men/Sinister Six. Every character is a hero or villain, has a domain (e.g. City), has a role (e.g. Support), and one or more affiliations or other tags. Characters with the same affiliation buff each other if teamed together. Many missions require certain tags.
• Level - you use gold and training xp to level up characters up to a max of your player level. You are often low on gold (used to buy lots of things) or training xp so you're only going to have a few characters at max level but since missions require certain tags you'll be leveling up secondary characters as you need to.
• Rank, Red Stars, Diamond Stars - You rank up by collecting enough character shards and they go from 0 to 7. Red Stars you get from red star character upgrades (random from certain rewards or you can buy them semi-randomly if you have certain monies) and also go from 0 to 7. Diamond stars from diamond star character upgrades similar to red stars but harder to get. Ranking up just increases all character starts.
• Equipment - six equipment slots and you often have to craft equipment and get components from missions. Equipment ranks up to (hero level / 5 - 1) so a level 85 character can get up to rank 16 equipment. Lots of components and equipment can be used by multiple characters (and equipment is always add on never take off).
• Skills - most characters have four skills (minor soldier types have three skills) and skills go up to level 7. You have skill points of various grades to increase skills.
• ISO-8 - each role has five ISO-8 greens stats which you can upgrade to level 5. Then at character level 50 you can upgrade them to ISO-8 blue stats (if they've maxed out on green first). Then at 75 you can upgrade to ISO-8 purple. When you max out a color you can choose a specialty (e.g. Striker or Healer) which then gives you extra bonuses and/or abilities (e.g. Healer would make some of your attacks also heal allies a bit). I think you can switch specialties though I never did.
• ??? - I saw an upgrade component in the stores but didn't get to a level where I had the option to use them so don't know what it does.

So a lot of effort to upgrade characters though other than choosing ISO-8 specialties a given character upgrades the same so another player with the same character at the same level and upgrade is exactly the same. The choice becomes which character to upgrade as you kind of want teams or widely used characters but characters also have rarity so legendary characters are always better at a given character and upgrade level.

The rest of the game is a lot of missions to do. Missions take energy points of various types and give you set (though sort of random) rewards so you are often doing certain mission to get certain components or character shards. Luckily if you go to a component or character and click Find it'll show you the missions that have that item and you can do them.

There are also alliance wars and high level challenges. Overall I think I was spending two or three hour a day playing. A lot of it waiting for a combat to complete (you can do combats in auto at 2x speed) and the AI is not too bad.

Good graphics. Slightly laggy on my iPhone SE3 (and much more so on my old 2018 iPad Pro). I didn't spend any money so nothing lost and I can always come back and continue.

Overall still kind of a mid game since you don't actually have much choice in building up your character pool. It's just doing missions and getting random rewards and you can lean it one way or another but it doesn't feel like you have a lot of choices.

Splinter Cell: Deathwatch (2025) [+] Animated half-hour series on Netflix. Season 1 is 8 episodes and ends setting up season 2 though no announcement if there will be one. Set maybe after the video game, Fourth Echelon agent Zinnia McKenna (Kirby Howell-Baptiste) is wounded and on the run from enemy mercenaries. Somewhere in Eastern Europe with no allied assets Anna Grímsdóttir (Janet Varney) sends Zinnia to the only safe place nearby, the farm where a retired Sam Fisher (Liev Schreiber) lives… Has some really good action scenes (and some graphics deaths) and lots of stealth action which is very Splinter Cell (well, the latter is Splinter Cell, when I played the game getting into firefights usually got me killed). I also liked that the main bad guys are Diana (Kari Wahlgren) and Charlie (Aleks Le) Shetland of Douglas Shetland, a major character in the video game.

I Am the Secret in Your Heart (2024) [/] Taiwanese high school romance movie. Wang Hsiao-hsia (Moon Lee) immediately falls for transfer student Cheng Yin (Tsao Yu-ning) whilst her best friend Yang Zhong-you (Shou Lo) keeps secretly pining for her. At first Yin is indifferent to her advances until he realizes she's the childhood girl who befriended a lonely boy briefly before Yin had to move away… An ok movie.

Farming Simulator 20+ (2023) [-] This version of FS is mobile only and "free" as part of Apple Arcade (and there are other versions in the App Store). You drive farm equipment and run a farm. I couldn't get past the tutorial because driving a combine is tough. I accidentally unhooked the blades then couldn't figure out how to get back on since there is no good help. Also first person view not that good for my motion sickness. Maybe easier with a controller… oh, doesn't say it has controller support.

Hill Climb Racing+ (2023) [/] Physics-based side-view driving game. You have accelerate and brake controls and a nitro button if it's charged. It's mostly driving over hilly terrain (in various weather and road conditions) trying to go fast while not flipping upside down (though you can do full flips for bonus points), picking up coins and all-important gas. In between you can buy and upgrade vehicles and there are daily challenges and different game modes. I found this a fairly hard game though a good concept for mobile with limited touch controls.

Our Interpreter is a Chinese romance drama running 36 45-minute episodes.

Lin Xi (Victoria Song, Find Yourself [2020] as female lead) is the head of the special customer department at a prestigious translator company (they do live walking translations — like walking around in a trade show or business function translating as needed, live booth translations — this is like translating at a UN meeting or speaker presentation, and static document translations and all three are shown in this series). The special customer department handles the high profile accounts so they're the best translators at the company.

Their new account is with a hot AI translation startup that happens to be run by Lin Xi's ex-boyfriend Xiao Yi Cheng (Cheng Xing Xu). She broke up with him in college, her secret reason so that he would go overseas to get his PhD. Now he's successful and wants her back.

Love rivals are Tong Xin (Yu Sha Sha), VP of Xiao's company and he makes the mistake of trying to make Lin Xi jealous by intimating they're married. There's Cheng Yao (Fei Qi Ming, Ski into Love [2025] supporting role) who is a young rebel translator. Both Xiao and Xin Li want to hire him but he goes with Xin Li because he's attracted to her and soon competes with Xiao Yi Cheng. That doesn't last long and Cheng Yao goes on to woo Tong Xin which is a nice subplot.

Lastly there's Wei Tian (Wang Sen), Lin Xi's second in her department and good friend since college to both her and Xiao Yi Cheng. He becomes the target of new hire Tan Sha Sha (Lin Zi Lu) who is Lin Xi's younger cousin and has a history with Wei Tian, though he doesn't remember. Their romance is a bit rougher because she has health issues which he doesn't notice and she does all the personal sacrifices and he takes her for granted. They end up breaking up and getting back together though it's late in the series by then and the getting back together is not done well.

Major subplot for Lin Xi is her relationship her grandfather who forced Lin Xi's mom to choose between a translator career or love. Mom chose the latter and was ostracized by grandfather. So although Lin Xi has fairly frequent contact with grandfather (a sort of legend in translation circles) she is rather cool and standoffish towards him. Reconciling with him and with her aunt (Tan Sha Sha's mom) is a series-long subplot.

This is a nice romantic series with clean sets and attractive cast. Victoria Song plays a character much like in Find Yourself — very serious and occasionally showing happy emotions. Fei Qi Ming also plays a similar sort of personality as in Ski into Love. Towards the end it does focus more on the two minor romance subplots rather than the mains which I find kind of means they didn't pace it right or the season was bit too long.

Overall though it's a fine romance series to watch.

Dungeon Fantasy Companion is a compilation of three bonus books that were stretch goals of the Dungeon Fantasy RPG Kickstarter. I don't have the companion but do have the individual PDFs but I expect the companion is just the PDFs with some reformatting.

Dungeon Fantasy Traps (26 pages) - DF RPG has half a page of sample traps and the included adventure probably has a few more. This traps book divides traps into several sections and has a second chapter for tricks and puzzles. Complete examples rather than a trap construction framework.

Dungeon Fantasy Magic Items (26 pages) - DF RPG has four or five pages discussing magic items but the GM is supposed to come up with new magic items themselves. This books has chapters for Always-On Items, Casting Items, Limited-Use Items, Potions, Rare Artifacts. More importantly this book is more of a magic item building guide with tables where you can pick powers with their costs and sample names (e.g. flaming weapon can have a prefix flaming or fire or a suffix "of Flame"). The exception is Rare Artifacts which just has 12 unique magic items.

Dungeon Fantasy Against the Rat-Men (26 pages) - This is a sequel to the DF RPG's I Smell a Rat adventure, though not a direct sequel in that adventurers are assumed to have been doing other adventures and gaining some amount of experience and magic items — Against the Rat-Men has a couple of pretty tough fights. It reuses the I Smell a Rat dungeon, restocked in a way that makes sense, which allows re-using the DF RPG battle maps. Actually this adventure also uses the one battle map included in DF RPG but not used in I Smell a Rat.

Dungeon Fantasy Companion is actually quite useful for $16 PDF. Traps and Magic Items is very useful since DF RPG devoted little space to those topics. A second adventure is also nice and the adventure is about twice as big as the first one and because it uses the same dungeon area it's great for reusing the battle maps.

Once Upon a Crime (2023) [+] Japanese detective fantasy movie. Little Red Riding Hood (Kanna Hashimoto) enters, Claire de Lune, a kingdom that prizes beauty. She meets and befriends Cinderella (Yuko Araki) and after two witches give them fancy ball gowns and crystal shoes and a pumpkin carriage with mouse attendants they go to the royal ball. On the way they run over Hans the royal hairdresser (Masaki Kaji). Once at the ball the body is discovered and due to how he died one of the guests must be the murderer and even the handsome Prince Gilbert (Takanori Iwata) is suspect. It's up to Red to use her excellent memory and deductive ability to eventually solve the crime… It's a clever take on Cinderella mixed a good amount of comedy for family audiences.

Tomb Raider: The Legend of Lara Croft (2024) [/] Animated half-hour series with season 1 being 8 episodes and ending setting up season 2. Lara Croft (Hayley Atwell) has returned home to inherit her father's estate and sell off everything due to grief. But one her artifacts is stolen by Charles Devereaux (Richard Armitage). Along with her friends Lara first aims to recover her artifact but then she learns Devereaux is trying to get four gems and activate a power that could destroy the world… It's nice animation and action. Not a particularly interesting story — young Lara Croft who makes mistakes is not my thing: I prefer Angelina Jolie's Lara Croft who started out as a badass from the first time she was introduced.

Lotus Chess - Opening Trainer (2025) [/] "Lotus Chess is a personalized opening trainer that enables you to quickly perfect your chess openings." It will load your chess.com or Lichess games then analyze your openings and recommend improvements or teach you where you went wrong. Subscription based $10 per month or $70 per year. I like that it integrates with the top two web-based chess platforms and it's not just trying to be a chess game app.

Episode - Choose Your Story (2014) [-] Episode is Episode XOXO's big brother. It's an engine where creators can make visual novels and people can download and play them. Good customization of characters, ok cartoony graphics with some animation, and with so many stories many of them are pretty good. It does have a free-to-play model where you buy gems and in turn many story choices (the good choices) require gems. That's the major drawback — I'd rather have gems pay for stories rather than story choices as even with a discount a good choice costs like $1.50 and with many choices in a story it will be very expensive. I guess overall then I would not recommend Episode because in practice it's a very expensive game.

Ski Into Love is a pleasant Chinese rom-com running 23 45-minute episodes. Wei Zhi (Esther Yu — Find Yourself (2020) in a supporting role and Love Game in Eastern Fantasy (2024) as female lead) is a talented web comic artist and writer but after an AI image scandal her publisher shuts down her studio and takes away her comic and online persona, giving them to another artist.

She decides to start a new web comic by herself and this time her topic will be something snow related so she and her best friend Jiang Nan Feng (Jenny Zeng) go to a ski resort for inspiration. There Wei Zhi ends up being instructed by former champion snowboarder Shan Chong (Lin Yi).

He's quite prickly and maybe torments Wei Zhi but obviously is attracted since he never takes on beginner students. Meanwhile Wei Zhi is enamored with this mystery snowboarder that she saw in videos but he always wore a ski mask. Turns out that person is Shan Chong.

Even though the western title is Ski Into Love the main sport is snowboarding. At the end of episodes they have snowboarding tips, Wei Zhi cartoons about the episode, or later Wei Zhi animation of her Ski Into Love web comic which I suppose reflects the series title but the web comic is a minor plot point.

Anyway, two other romances are Jiang Nan Feng and snowboarder Lao Yan (Wei Qi Ming) who turns out to have a longer history but she doesn't recognize him because he was much fatter. Then there's Shan Chong's younger sister Shan Shan (Zeng You Zhen), who lost both her legs in a snowboarding accident. Wei Zhi hires her as an assistant web artist before she finds out Shan Shan and Shan Chong are siblings. Shan Shan is secretly dating Shan Chong's former national team teammate Dai Duo (Xia Hao Ran) and Dai Duo keeps showing up to challenge Shan Chong and bully him into returning to the national team (Shan Chong quit the team for undisclosed personal reasons after a serious accident, later on we find out it was for his mom).

Lots of snow and snowboarding action. Lots of seeing professionals (substituting for the actors) doing snowboard jump tricks. Great panoramic ski resort shots. Half the series is spent outdoors in the snow.

Not too much drama. Wei Zhi's former employer is rather spiteful and wants to ruin her career so he does underhanded things. Dai Duo and Shan Chong is more of a friendly rivalry. Wu Man Man (Xu Shi Yue), one of the artists in Wei Zhi's former team, takes on the mantle of Wei Zhi's alter ego and "creator" of her old web comic, but Wei Zhi is never really angry at Wu Man Man and is quick to forgive and towards the end lets her back into the team.

This is a good drama-free romance series with some humor, attractive cast and locations.