Monday (yesterday) I went to Whole Foods about 1510 after I got my vaccinations. Parked underground like I usually do although the parking lot had empty spaces and wasn't crowded with cars looking for parking. Also the store itself wasn't crowded.

Fruit Tart 9in ($30) - I used to love the Whole Foods Fruit Tarts. Maybe I'm misremembering but not quite as good as they used to be though still much better than Safeway's version.

Semifreddi's Sourdough Baguette ($3.80) - I guess I picked the wrong one. It toasted fine and I ate 3/4ths of it that day. The next day by evening even though it was still in the closed bag it was getting fairly stale but toasted ok. I feel Trader Joe's has a better baguette at $2.50 or so.

El Trigal Manchego, Aged 6 months ($22/lb or $9.46 for 6.88 oz) - Trader Joe's version I think is $16/lb aged 12 months but El Trigal is a solid cheese and tastes really good while TJ's is fine not great.

I looked for dried split peas but they don't seem to sell that anymore. They have other dried cereals and nuts and seeds you can buy in bulk.

I looked for Jyoti canned Indian food but they don't sell that anymore either (though they sell a bunch of Tasty Bites Indian food). Too bad because I love Jyoti Delhi Saag.

I kind of looked for nice Tagliatelle nests pasta but I didn't find any at all. I didn't bother looking for the bread I used to buy since they got rid of it before I stopped going to Whole Foods.

I guess this shopping trip leaves me thinking Whole Foods is a bit mid and I still prefer Trader Joe's.

Ready, Set, Love (2024) [/] Thai drama-romance of six hour-long episodes. In an alternate future where there are almost no male births and almost no men in Thailand a popular multi-day reality game show is used to choose who gets to marry a man (marriage between women seems the norm). Day (Belle Kemisara Paladesh) is one of the five lottery winners randomly chosen, with the other 45 contestants chosen based on family wealth and education.

As she competes in the games she meets Son (Blue Pongtiwat Tangwancharoen), one of the five male contestants (the guys play too though they can't be eliminated). He dislikes the contest and all the women especially Day. But then he realizes that she has a necklace with half a coin and he has the other half which he got from a girl who saved him when he ran away from home as a kid. Now he wants to win Day's heart though Day just wants to survive and win because the winners also get to live on The Farm, the island of rich families where you get free health insurance which her sister needs.

Of course it turns out the game is rigged and the odds are against Day. But she has her plucky spirit, help from Son, and is the fan favorite so the show's producer keeps saving her to get higher ratings... Lilly Ladapa Thongkham (supporting role in Harmony Secret, 2025) plays Day's "rival" contestant whose powerful family wants her to marry Son.

The sets, locations, and cast are pretty. Games were cool with lots of props and could believably be actual games in this type of show. But the story was average and so were the feels.


Temple Run: Legends (2024) [/] An Apple Arcade exclusive version of the endless runner Temple Run franchise. This is more story mode with levels so you don't endlessly and can play different characters. Not really my genre but seems quite polished.

Sambal Ebi Waringin [+] Indonesian dried shrimp chili. Made in Medan, Indonesia. "High-quality dried shrimp (ebi), crispy potatoes, fried shallots, peanuts, and bird's eye chilies." Kind of pricey because it's imported. A small bag lasts me a couple of days. I guess you're supposed to eat it with rice but I just eat it plain since mom does the same.

Girl Rules is a Thai GL (girl love/lesbian) romance series running 12 hour-long episodes.

There are three romance plot lines. Primarily it's Prim (Namtan Tipnaree Weerawatnodom) and Bambi (Film Rachanun Mahawan). Prim is a video director and co-owner of a small video production house. Bambi has just returned from overseas and is somewhat of the spoiled heiress who hasn't found what she wants to do in life. But what Bambi knows is that she wants to get back with Prim who is wary because Bambi ended their relationship by abruptly disappearing for five years.

Then there is freelance stylist Gorya (Love Pattranite Limpatiyakorn) and famous fashion model/influencer Shasha (Milk Pansa Vosbein). Shasha is immediately attracted to Gorya though in the beginning Gorya is chasing after Prim. The difficulty here is that Gorya is unsure of Shasha's commitment because Shasha is a party girl that sleeps around.

The last pairing is between Prim's co-founder Min (View Benyapa Jeenprasom) and freelance photographer Praew (Mim Rattanawadee Wongthong). Min is straight with an abusive boyfriend who she breaks up with early on. Praew chases Min and protects her from her ex-boyfriend. But does Min actually want to try a lesbian relationship?

As with other GL series I've seen this one has nice sets, pretty cast, relatively low conflict storylines. It did take maybe more than half the series before I started rooting for Prim and Bambi because the latter is fairly annoying and conniving whilst Prim just kind of ignores all that because she's still in love with Bambi. Still it does turn around and all the storylines end well.

Overall a nice series.

Chatterino is a Twitch chat client which has a macOS version (along with Windows, Linux, and BSD) that I've been using. It can monitor multiple channels, I think each with a separate login user if you want.

I mostly use it for chat history -- I set it to keep 10k lines per chat which I can then search fairly easily, unlike Twitch UI which only keeps a couple of hundred lines and has no built-in search so you have use browser search. I keep Chatterino running all the time so it can record chats even when I'm not around. Also you can have it log chats to a text file (which I just discovered as I was writing this review) though it loses a bit compared to using the UI to read old chats.

Some nice things:

• Supports various Twitch emote extensions like BetterTTV and 7TV -- I forgot that I also use this since I don't have those extensions installed so I can check what the emote is without looking it up in BetterTTV/7TV.
• You can see deleted messages -- useful where I'm not a mod to see if a user was particularly offensive in another chat in which case I might ban him in the chats I mod.
• Beeps when my name is mentioned. Not sure Twitch does it and I have it off or it doesn't do it at all. A little useful in case someone is trying to get my attention as I'm not always reading chat.
• Can do mod timeouts and bans from Chatterino. But although it has its own notes facility it doesn't integrate with Twitch mod notes so would guess Chatterino notes are for me only. And in general I find Twitch mod view much more useful than trying to mod with Chatterino.

I guess, besides lack of mod tools, the biggest drawback for me is the rather ugly UI.

It's free software. Open Source -- MIT License which looks to be as unrestrictive as BSD License.

Queen Woo (2024) [/] Korean drama running eight 50-minute episodes on Paramount+. After the death of the King, Queen Woo Hee (Jeon Jong-seo, Ballerina, 2023) must choose one of his brothers for levirate marriage in order to remain Queen and save herself and her family (and in a levirate marriage the new husband gets everything the old husband had so Kingship that bypasses the council of five major families).

Most of the series takes place overnight as she and her small escort travel to the Third Prince, Go Bal-gi (Lee Soo-hyuk), who turns out to be much more brutal than she knew, then to another prince and back to the castle just in time offend everyone and then prepare for war with the Third Prince and his allies. Meanwhile we also get stuff back at the palace as Prime Minister Eul Pa-so (Kim Mu-yeol) tries to find who poisoned the King. And we have flashbacks, each a minute or a few minutes, of Woo Hee's life with the Prince she married who later became King.

The series ends as the Queen and her army charge out to fight which is rather ambiguous ending I guess, though there is a scene early in the series where Woo Hee is on the battlefield and defeats the last enemy general (who I don't remember who it was) and a brief recap is seen before the last battle so I guess they're trying to indicate she already won.

I've never seen a Korean series with nudity and this one had at least one brief glimpse of nudity (and sometimes more than a glimpse) in the first half and maybe one more time in episode 7. Also lots of women getting killed -- I guess lots of men getting killed two but most of the men are armed whereas most of the women are not (but the Queen's escort is mostly women warriors which is cool and they mostly die).

Overall it was interesting series and I liked that each episode we only get a couple of hours or so through the night, which is dramatic but doesn't seem to make sense as then every place is too close together. The ending was disappointing even if they did a previous flash reveal that Queen Woo won the battle. It just feels disappointing to build it up and then cut to credits.


Food Truck Pup+ (2024) [-] You are a dog running a crepe food truck. Advertise your business, buy/gather ingredients, make your crepes, serve the customers, collect money, go to the bathroom (to pee and bathe), go to sleep, clean the food truck. With 8 bit graphics and iPhone-sized screen so a bit hard to maneuver. I found this game to have way too many elements especially once a bunch of customers show up.

Goya Black Beans [/] Lots of water but the beans weren't like broken up and mushy like for WinCo Black Beans. Tastes fine though I think Trader Joe's is preferrable.

Filing for Love is a South Korean romance-drama set in modern-day Seoul and running 12 hour-long episodes.

At one of the bigger conglomerates Noh Ki-jun (Gong Myung, Love Untangled, 2025) is a handsome fast-track assistant manager at Haemu Group's Audit Department. Unfortunately he makes a bad impression on new Head of Audit Joo In-ah (Shin Hye-sun -- See You in My 19th Life, 2023; Welcom to Samdal-ri, 2023) who already has a reputation for being a shark. Ki-jun is transferred from audit team 1, which handles embezzlement and executive malfeasance, to audit team 3, which handles moral codes, mostly sexual misconduct and office affairs.

As the perceived problem employee In-ah makes sure he gets the worst assignments but she also often accompanies him to supervise and also shows him how to be dedicated even with unglamorous assignments. Naturally Ki-jun starts to see In-ah in a different light, as someone honest and fearless in her duty and he starts to develop feelings for In-ah, though it's harder to tell what she thinks of him beneath her gruff exterior. Eventually though they do start getting romantically involved even though it's against company policy and the very misbehaviors their audit team is supposed to investigate.

To complicate matters Vice Chariman Jeon Jae-yeol (Kim Jae-wook -- Her Private Life, 2019; Melo Movie, supporting role, 2025), who is unhappily married, wants to rekindle a romance with In-ah that they almost had before he was married. On the other hand she feels nothing romantically for him any more but her personal loyalty and old promise to protect him does it make it seem like there's something going on between the two. Which makes Jae-yeol's secretary Park Ah-jung (Hong Hwa-yeon) quite jealous as she's long been attracted to her boss and has pretty much told him so but he keeps their relationship strictly professional...

Overall a pretty good series with a fair amount of humor.

Queens at War is the fourth historical book by Alison Weir about England's Medieval Queens. This one spans 1403 to 1485, from Joan of Navarre (Queen to Henry IV) to Elizabeth Widville (Queen to Edward IV) and Anne Neville (Queen to Richard III). The Hundred Years' War ends in the middle. The War of the Roses starts just after the Hundred Years' War and ends a couple of years after this book ends.

The writing style is readable and just a tad of fictional supposition. Weir uses a lot of sources but I guess Queens did not write much or have works commissioned for them so the accounts are from contemporary historians and writers and often there are conflicting accounts because people in these times were not afraid to bald-face lie and rumor monger. Although the printing press was invented halfway through this period apparently no newspapers yet. Weir often points out contradictions in the various accounts and makes deductions based on believability -- who stood to gain from this statement or does it make sense someone would say or do something that is against their benefit?

The closest to the Queens' point of view sometimes are letters. There's a lot made of accounting records: what was bought and where, living expenses which then point to where royalty moved around, recordings of gifts given and received also places people. Taking all this Weir often paints life of the Queen and the people around here and makes conjectures. Weir also writes fiction novels, many (all?) centered on English queens.

I did not expect to find this book interesting but combine a good writing style with lots of research to bring out these queens to life (another thing is that history tends to focus on kings unless the queen is particularly infamous). Overall a great big book that's an interesting and informative read (I'll add that Weir does provide overviews so readers have more context but a good grounding in English history of this time would have been nice to have before I read this book).

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.