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.