The Challenger Disaster (2019) [/] TV movie about the engineering team at an unnamed corporation (referred in the film as the company that made rocket boosters) as they realize that with a launch temperature near freezing the O-rings on the space shuttle Challenger might fail and their efforts to warn NASA which eventually fail due to bureaucracy and NASA's insistence on launching as scheduled after multiple previous attempts were cancelled.

Has a poignant scene where the television shows an interview with teacher Christa McAuliffe being interviewed and saying that even after several launch cancellations she still believed that the thousands of people working on the launch were doing their best to keep everyone safe. There's also footage of President Reagan's speech after the disaster.

Although a talky drama film I found it interesting and watched it in two sittings. Note that there's a 2013 tv movie of the same name with more star power so it comes up first in searches.

Napoleon (2023) [-] I watched the first 1-3/4 hours then parts of the last 45 minutes. This Apple TV+ movie focuses on the adult life of Napoleon (Joaquin Phoenix) and his love and relationship with Joséphine (Vanessa Kirby). A lot of talking, politics, and more talking. A few battle scenes with Austerlitz and Waterloo getting enough coverage to be interesting. Sadly though it was quite a struggle to watch.

Cut the Rope Remastered (2021) [/] In this Apple Arcade game you are trying to get all the fruits in the level into the mouth of a gremlin. The fruits are tied to ropes tied to anchor points and you swipe to cut a rope so that the fruit(s) swing down correctly. You try to hit three stars for extra points. There are also other gadgets like blowers and bubbles or the level might be underwater in which case stuff floats up. Physics based and cute. Puzzles get tricky and require timing.

Hellboy: The All-Seeing Eye (2008) [-] In this novel Hellboy, Liz Sherman and Abe Sapien travel to London to stop a bunch of cultists from releasing the All-Seeing Eye using sacrificed victims. Hellboy meets a nice coroner and they go on a date and then she gets kidnapped and eventually sacrificed but I kind of expected that Bonanza-like subplot. In the end though our heroes do very little to solve the problem: the cultists release a great evil that consumes them then Hellboy fights said evil but it's with the help of two other NPCs that he wins. Overall I think this is a churned out mass-market paperback novel and a waste of time to read.

She Would Never Know is a South Korean romance drama set in the small marketing department of KLAR, a higher-end cosmetics brand. Chae Hyun-seung (Rowoon) is a first or second year employee still under the guidance of third year Yoon Song-ah (Won Jin-ah), who he's been attracted to since meeting her at a college recruitment event.

Unfortunately Song-ah is having a secret affair with department head Lee Jae-shin (Lee Hyun-wook) but then Hyun-seung sees Jae-shin with his fiancé Lee Hyo-joo (Lee Joo-bin). Hyun-seung hides it for a bit but soon shows Song-ah the truth which she actually doesn't really appreciate and at first she rather she didn't know. But eventually shock turns to hate and she breaks it off with Jae-shin without revealing she knows for several episodes. Instead the excuse is she found a new boyfriend in Hyun-seung (which is what he wanted and she didn't want to do but a situation kind of forced it on them).

It takes a few episodes of them pretending to be a secret couple before she starts to like him. Then there's happiness for a while and the rest of the team at first realizes something is going on and then the truth is revealed and they're happy for the couple. Unusual, there is never a romantic rival for Hyun-seung's affection and there's never like parents or family that is against their relationship.

Episode 13 is a twist as she decides to take a job in the new Europe branch for five years and they commit to keeping their love alive. But episode 14 starts three years later with her returning to Korea early and apparently they had broken up a year before. So the last episode and a half is Song-ah trying to woo Hyun-seung and fortunately there's a happy ending.

Several subplots

Hyun-seung's oldest sister Ji-seung (Wang Bit-na) catches the eye of Jae-shin's manager Lee Jae-woon (Lee Kyu-han) who is the grandson of the company's owner. Jae-woon spends a lot of effort trying to be mysterious and cool to impress Ji-seung until she falls for him.

The middle sister Yeon-seung (Ha Yoon-kyung) is married with a cute daughter. There's a bit where maybe she's getting to friendly with her husband's best friend. But then a dark secret is revealed that sends her marriage spiraling down.

Jae-shin's impending marriage is almost against his will. He owes Jae-woon a lot and Hyo-joo is so in love with Jae-shin she tried to commit suicide when he didn't reciprocate. So he's marrying her because there doesn't seem to be another solution but he still loves Song-ah and his deadbeat dad keeps asking him for money. All in all Jae-shin starts out the most troubled in the story but manages to carve out a somewhat happy life for himself by the end.

Comparison

When I read the description of this show I thought it would be more like The Rational Life which I loved. In that show the age gap is 12 years which becomes quite an obstacle. Also the romance moves slower so it's more like half-way through the series that the woman realizes the man likes her. That series has more ups and downs while this one is a gentle rise until the rollercoaster drop in episode 15. So unfortunately this series was a bit disappointing even though it's still an ok story.

The Last Hill: The Epic Story of a Ranger Battalion and the Battle That Defined WWII is an account of the 2nd Ranger Battalion during World War 2. We get a bit on how the 1st Ranger Battalion was conceived and formed and their success during Operation Torch led to the formation of the 2nd Ranger Battalion.

The main narrative is their training then going to England then D-Day with their job of taking out the guns at Point Du Hoc and the fierce battle once they got up the cliff. They did some refitting then participated in taking Brest on the western coast of France. More miscellaneous missions and refitting until we get to the final part of the book.

During November 1944 the allies were attacking towards Aachen and the Roer river in Germany. The Germans were building up for Wacht Am Rheim (Battle of the Bulge) so were desperate to keep the Americans at bay so they wouldn't find out. The Hurtgen Forest was to the side of the advance and General Hodges wanted to secure the forest to protect the advance.

On the other side of the forest was Schmidt and the 28th Division was assigned to take it but couldn't (exciting to me since The Gamers' Objective: Schmidt game covers the Nov 2-6 attack by the 112th Regiment of the 28th Division). Anyway there is a hill near there, Hill 400, used by the Germans for artillery observation. After several failures to get close to the hill and take it the 2nd Battalion was called upon to do the job that would normally be assigned to a Regiment.

The last exciting part of the book is the attack on Hill 400 by essentially two Ranger companies -- I think there were 6 in the Battalion but the other four were holding the town before the hill and would come up as reserves, which unfortunately they did not do for a while. The Rangers secured the hill then held on as their numbers dwindled and then were finally supported.

Throughout the book we've gotten to know various Rangers, although I guess it was all commanders, captains, lieutenants and sergeants but not sure if Rangers had lower ranks. Anyway half the book is anecdotes woven into the narration so it's one overall story (I've read books where the anecdotes are told one after the other and it's reading this little separate episodes that together eventually give you a story, but it's a rather piecemeal way of telling it). On Hill 400 a lot of them die and it's a bit teary for me.

The book pretty much ends once the 2nd Ranger Battalion returns to the States. There is a long Afterword where each of the survivors gets a brief mention of their post-WWII life. There are some footnotes and a bibliography which is always nice.

Apparently the official US Army History of WWII doesn't really mention the Rangers much and of course there's the depiction that Point Du Hoc was a wasted effort since the guns had been moved, which this book dispels since the Rangers did a lot more than just get up on top of a cliff and find empty gun emplacements. Also the Hurtgen Forest battles tend to get sidelined by the Battle of the Bulge so it's nice having more detail there (make no mistake this book is focused on the Rangers so what the rest of the US Army did in Hurtgen Forest is barely covered).

The writing style is a bit too breezy for me -- I'm more for more detail on what the unit did than on knowing the people in the unit. But you still get a fair amount of detail and the book is intended to have more of a human touch.

Overall it's a fairly interesting book and I think I'd recommend it.

Taken (2008) [/] Rewatched this on streaming, though I mostly skipped the first half hour of setup. That leaves about 55 minutes of action as Bryan Mills (Liam Neeson) searches for his kidnapped daughter in Paris. He's got some clever techniques such as hiring an Albanian language tutor to do a spot translation. The action is also good. After 16 years the film is still entertaining.

When Worlds Collide (1951) [-] A few astronomers discover a rogue star, Bellus, that will collide with Earth in 8 months. Nobody believes them but they get private funding and volunteers to build a space ship that will take 40 people from Earth to Zyra, an Earth-like world orbiting Bellus. But the timing is tight since the trip has to be made at the closest point when Zyra brushes past Earth... It's an old film and the drama is people vs people. There's also a bit of a love story. I did find it surprisingly watchable but doubt most people would like it.

Mahjong Titan+ (2021) [-] Apple Arcade tile matching game using mahjong tiles. There are different backgrounds and tile sets and each board is a set puzzle (1900 regular boards, 600 premium boards). It's what you'd expect, nothing remarkable and maybe only the minimum you'd expect from a competent implementation. I think I played a couple dozen boards and it was still boring.

Trader Joe's Tomato Basil Marinara Sauce [+] Like $2 for a 24 oz jar and it tastes good. Unlike the Olive and Basil Pesto I give this a plus because it tastes like what I expect. Perfectly fine with pasta and fine if you add a bit more to it like cooked chopped lettuce.

Bridge of Spies is a Cold War spy drama based on historical events.

In 1957 Rudolf Abel (Mark Rylance) is arrested as a Soviet spy and to show the fairness of the American justice system a competent attorney, James Donovan (Tom Hanks), is asked to represent Abel. Although his expertise is insurance law, Donovan was a prosecuting attorney at the Nuremberg Trials and besides nobody else wants the job since it'll make Donovan and his family quite hated by their neighbors.

Donovan tries his best even though the judge, and a friend of Donovan mind you, is quite fine with bending the rules to stymie his efforts to assemble a credible defense. Naturally they lose, though Donovan does convince the judge to not impart the death sentence; but Donovan persists in appealing and willing to appeal to the Supreme Court even though he has no obligation and nobody wants him to do it. It's his personal honor and his high regard for Abel's character.

Throughout the above we get occasional scenes of Francis Gary Powers (Austin Stowell), hotshot US Air Force pilot who, along with a few others, are assigned to work with the CIA flying the U2 plane over the USSR taking photos. On his first mission, in 1960, Powers is shot down and captured by the Russians (and the scene is apparently somewhat accurate to what happened).

Through some machinations the CIA realizes that the USSR wants to trade Abel for Powers but the US government can't be officially involved in such talks so they turn to Donovan who accepts. He's taken to West Berlin and with CIA guidance is sent across the newly built Berlin Wall to make contact at the Soviet Embassy; East Germany being a sovereign country hence the embassy.

Oh, almost forgot. US student Frederic Pryor (Will Rogers) was arrested in East Berlin as the wall was being completed and he was charged with espionage. Donovan's negotiations are complicated by the fact that he wants to also bring back Pryor which the East German government wants but the East Germans have their own goals not quite in sync with the USSR so Donovan has to somehow get the East Germans to release Pryor for essentially nothing.

The last scene is the actual exchange which is a bit tense. Abel and Powers are to be exchanged at one crossing point and Pryor will be released at another crossing point. There is a bit of drama when the East Germans are late and Abel returns a bit of friendship by refusing to cross for a few minutes, long enough for Pryor to be released...

This was a surprisingly interesting film. Tom Hanks does a great job. It's a character drama and both Donovan and Abel are interesting characters. The story has lots of drama with practically like no violence. Definitely worth watching.

I haven't played Sudoku until I started with Good Sudoku+ on Apple Arcade.

Sudoku by MobilityWare+ (2021) [/] This is the second one I tried. MobilityWare seems to have a bunch of basic card games and such on the App Store. Their version of Sudoku is also fairly basic though colorful.

You get a partially filled board. There are two edit modes: one to put in the little numbers (to specify possible values of a cell) and one to set the number on the cell.

When you are adding little numbers it helpfully highlights numbers that are not currently in the same house (though ignores rows and columns so you have something to do) and if you tap an invalid value it gives you a little shake "no".

When setting a number if you get it wrong it gives another little shake then removes the little number since you know it's wrong. If you set the number right it removes the little number from house, row and column cells. Once there are only a few cells left (and maybe also if the solution is certain) then you can just auto-finish the puzzle.

Other than there's no other helpful bits. You can't do other highlighting. There is no undo. No recover board to solvable state in case you really mess up (though I guess unnecessary since it doesn't let you put in invalid cell numbers).

I'd say this version would be more familiar to people who are used to pen and paper sudoku where you get no help so any help is great. I would not recommend this version though, especially for beginners because there is no help, tutorial, nor learning techniques section. Wait until next week when I review a better Sudoku app.

2010: The Year We Make Contact (1984) [+] Recently rewatched this movie and I like it. Nine years after 2001: A Space Odyssey scientist Heywood Floyd (Roy Scheider) finagles himself and two other Americans on board the Soviet ship Leonov in a mission to recover the Discovery and investigate the huge monolith David Bowman (Keir Dullea) found. Meanwhile back on Earth tensions mount as the USA and USSR redo the Cuban Missile Crisis... Like 2001 ASO this is a low action film though fairly suspenseful at times with several 2001 ASO mysteries to unravel. Much like Star Trek: The Motion Picture this is a very think-y, high concept story.

Bloodshot (2020) [/] An origin film based on the super-hero comic book from Valiant. US Marine Ray Garrison (Vin Diesel) is murdered by a terrorist then brought back to life with nanite-infused blood by Dr Emil Harting (Guy Pearce) who then uses Ray as an unkillable assassination machine against Harting's former co-workers. KT (Eliza González), another enhanced soldier, helps Ray break out of his prison but Ray has to battle other enhanced soldiers and then finally defeat Harting who is also enhanced... Does have a bit of a deus ex machina ending and the plot is more complicated than I can summarize in two sentences. The movie is not bad though, other than the ending.

Trader Joe's Olive and Basil Pesto Sauce [/] It's a bit chunky and less saucy than other brands. It has bits of olive and definitely has that flavor (almost too much at times). Tastes fine but the chunkiness makes it a bit hard to use with pasta. It's like $2.50 for a 6-1/3 oz jar so for the price it's great.

Mini Metro+ (2021) [+] In this game you build a metro railway layout. Locations pop up, each with one shape. Connect the locations so that people of each shape can reach any location with that shape. Every week you get a new resource such as a new train line, passenger car, tunnel, or bridge. If too many people stack up long enough you lose the game so you need to build efficient networks (and it's easy to reconfigure networks on the fly or while paused). This Apple Arcade version is essential identical to the App Store version (released in 2015) and the gameplay is still quite addictive.

Use for My Talent is a Chinese romance drama. Shi Shuang Jiao (Shen Yue) is a recent and jobless college graduate who gets a job at Clean First, a cleaning company that is transitioning from manual to robotic cleaning. There she attracts the attention of mysophobic CEO Gu Ren Qi (Jasper Liu) who finds that his phobia mostly goes away whenever he's with Shuang Jiao...

This is either a remake of the Korean Clean with Passion for Now or an adaptation of the same web toon. I found this series not as good. For the most part the Chinese cast is more photogenic and there are two romance subplots which are quite nice.

But the plot elements are more muted. Lu Xian (Dai Yun Fan) is the psychotherapist next door vying for Shuang Jiao's affections but after one episode he quickly gives up. The Korean version has a major end plot element where the Gu family did the Shi family a big wrong but in the Chinese one it turns out to be a misunderstanding. Similarly Ren Qi and his grandfather have an animical relationship but it's only touched upon here. Mysophobia is not nearly as emphasized her.

I guess all the above mens the Chinese show does not hit the dramatic lows of the Korean show but it also doesn't hit the highs. So other than a pretty cast and cutesy storyline there's no reason to watch this after watching Clean with Passion for Now.

This Apple Arcade game is a fairly typical free-to-play loot box game without the micro transactions. You are the faceless captain of USS Artemis which has gone into the Nexus to rescue people trapped there. This gives you an excuse to add anybody from any Star Trek series (I think you start with Michael Burnham from Discovery, Worf from TNG/DS9, Leonard McCoy from TOS and B'Elanna Torres from Voyager).

The main story arc is sending four people on missions where you interact with characters cut-scene-like, use your skills to choose paths (not that big a deal though if you want 100% completion you have to redo missions), and do lots of fighting. The main story is eight episodes of six missions each as you collect people and try to find out who is using the Nexus as some sort of power source/weapon.

You collect Nexus shards which allows you to summon random crew (duplicates let you rank up that crew).

You collect items then upgrade your characters. Kind of like the Marvel combat game I was playing you can:

• level up characters
• rank them up (not sure what it does in this game)
• unlock to the full four abilities on each character
• level up abilities to level 2
• equip four slots on each character
• level up equipment to level 5
• rank up equipment
• equip two particle slots (Nexus particles for bonuses)
• level up particles to level 5

You have three shuttles to send three 4-person teams on shuttle missions which take time and then you get rewards. There is a percentage chance of bonus rewards that depends on the crew so you have to send at least some competent crew. Crew on shuttle missions can't be used elsewhere but it gives you something to do with all the extra crew.

There is PvP and Operations which are basically just 4v4 combats either against players or set computer opponents. Daily goals to keep you playing.

Combat is 4v4 in order of speed. Each character has a basic attack and up to three other abilities (which all have cool downs). There's a lot of buffing and debuffing so combinations are nice. Usually two characters on each side start with some cover and some characters can create cover (and as long as cover has 1 hp it'll completely protect the covered character).

You can let the computer fight for you which is fine for most Mission combats since you overpower the enemy so much. But computer control is not very efficient and characters don't try to synergize.

Overall it's an entertaining game for what it is and not one of the best of the genre. Not really what I'd choose to play but at least in Apple Arcade it's not trying to sell you stuff all the time.

Ballerina (2023) [/] South Korean action film. Martial arts expert and former VIP bodyguard Jang Ok-ju (Jeon Jong-seo) finds her old friend committed suicide and left a note for her. Tracking down the note she finds the man, Choi Pro (Kim Ji-hoon), who had turned her friend into an escort. Bloody vengeance follows... It's fine as an action film where the plot doesn't need a huge budget.

Liaison (2023) [-] A six episode French/British drama on Apple TV+. Terrorists have burrowed inside the UK's secure networks. A Syrian hacker and refugee might have the code to stop them. Former French DGSE Gabriel Delage (Vincent Cassel) is sent bring the hacker back to France while his former lover Alison Rowdy (Eva Green), a British Home Office special advisor, wants him so he can stop the terrorists... A bit of a confusing plot and not much thriller to it. Episode five has some nice action. But overall I think this series is a waste of time.

Laughing Monk Brewing and Gastropub, Sunnyvale, CA [/] Upscale-ish American bar/restaurant and micro-brewery. Kind of typical for this area. I had the Fish and Chips which was ok. An Apple Cider mixed drink which was also ok. Perfectly fine food and atmosphere though no reason to ever come back here.

Chameleon Run+ (2021) [/] Apple Arcade auto-runner. In each level you want to get to the end as fast as possible. You have a change color button (your guy has to match colors with the ground) and a jump button (and you can do double jump). There are globes to pick up, speedups to run over (and you also get a speed boost by changing color just before you land on the ground), and probably other things. It's a fairly polished reflex game.

Crash Landing On You is a South Korean romance drama that ran sixteen 70-minute episodes.

South Korean business mogul Yoon Se-ri (Son Ye-jin) while doing a paragliding publicity shoot is caught in a tornado and dumped on the wrong side of the DMZ. Captain Ri Jeong-hyoek (Hyun Bin) finds her and believes her story. He decides to hide her and help her get back to South Korea.

The first half is in North Korea where Se-ri gets to see life in a typical small village and it's quite a culture shock -- little electricity, no hot running water, very little meat in their diet. Besides being noticed by State Security Department officer Cho Cheol-gang (Oh Man-seok) who senses something suspicious about her (and later he becomes intent on murdering Jeong-hyoek to cover his criminal activities) Se-ri has both a romantic rival when Seo Dan (Seo Ji-hye) arrives intent on marrying Jeong-hyoek and Se-ri also has a potential love interest in Gu Seung-jun (Kim Jung-hyun), a South Korean con man who almost married Se-ri.

Anyway eventuall Se-ri realizes that Jeong-hyoek loves her and she loves him. But they can't ever be together once she returns to South Korea. Of course when she does return Jeong-hyoek follows her because Cho Cheol-gang is also in South Korea plotting revenge by murdering her. The second half of the series Se-ri is now the one with power and Jeong-hyoek is the handsome outsider who poses as her new bodyguard. Meanwhile the four members of Jeong-hyoek's squad follow him to bring him back and they end up having adventures of their own as South Korea is quite different than what they imagined (except for the one guy who is addicted to K-Dramas)...

Once again it takes three or four episodes to really get going and then it's pretty good. Romance is great and the contrast between North and South is pretty cool. The ending is not the best but at least a mostly happy ending for the main couple. I quite enjoyed the series.

Fantasian is a JRPG from the creators of the Final Fantasy series. You're playing a young man with amnesia exploring a fantasy world being invaded by tech globes that poison the land and people. You gain two female companions -- one raised by a hermit mage and has healing magic and the other a princess with cold magic -- who kind of vie for your affections. Later on there is adventuring in the Machine Realm which has been invading your world.

This has a typical 2-1/2 D perspective as you move around, though photo-realistic diorama backgrounds which is a nice effect. Combat is turn based and everyone has special abilities that use magic points. A lot of the exploration is picking up random items, mostly consumables and components (though I didn't get to the part where you use components to upgrade items). In general the UI is easy to use and responsive.

One thing I hate about JRPGs is random combats as you wander around. In this game early on you gain a device that stacks encounters with a limit of 30 monsters. So if you get a random encounter of 4 monsters the device count goes up by 4. At any time you can initiate combat with all stacked monsters which goes into a special combat arena. In the arena you fight 9 monsters at a time (when you kill some more are added not quite immediately) and there are power-ups (regular combats don't have power-ups). In general you can go quite a while before having to fight the monsters which cuts down on annoying combats.

The story is not too bad. You can talk to most people and there are a few side-quests. The game has a nice log where you can see your main quest, side quests, by location and their status. Later on you also get a teleporting device so it's easy to jump around from main quest to side quest. As usual the main quest is gated and fairly plain what you need to do next -- this is not an open world game.

I've played 11 hours and this game is 60 to 90 hours long. Did stop playing because it's kind of a slow game, though typical of JRPGs -- lots of moving around, talking to people in slow dialogs, cut scene-like dialog expositions where you have to keep tapping, also backstory recollections which are just walls of text which are also a bit slow and tap-heavy (though fairly well done for walls of text format). I think JRPGs are not my style.

Still, it's a polished and mostly interesting game that I might come back and continue later.