The Princess and the Bodyguard (2022) [/] A pleasant made for video romantic movie. New Yorker Lexi (Emily Alatalo) has been a normal adult life for 15 years but when her royal parents come calling she has two weeks to decide whether or not accept being next in line to rule. Meanwhile she's assigned a local bodyguard, Noah (Ryan Bruce), whose charming down to earth normalcy contrasts with the high society dates her mother starts foisting on her... I like the bit where Noah can lip read and it's used to advance the plot a bit though less than I had imagined.

Backcountry (2014) [-] Canadian film. City girl Jen (Missy Peregrym) and her boyfriend Alex (Jeff Roop) go on a multi-day hike to a lake that Alex has been to before several times but not since high school. They meet a suspicious Irish tour guide (Eric Balfour) and then get lost on the way... It's an hour of buildup before the action starts but then it's over and Jen trying to get back to safety in a no-dialogue sequence. The movie poster is quite exciting with Jen hanging partway down a cliff with a bear at the top and I was expecting more of a woman vs bear story but this film was not it.

Rolling Thunder in a Gentle Land: The Vietnam War Revisited (2006) [/] A collection of essays about the Vietnam War. Articles on the history before US involvement, various articles about the US and South Vietnam side, and some articles from the North Vietnam and Vietcong perspective. Since this are essays the quality varies and all lack polish but there are different viewpoints here that you don't often get. Certainly not to be used as a first or even first two or three reads on the war. Osprey now has a 2013 edition though not sure what it changes.

Avenida Restaurant, San Mateo [/] We had delivery for a Wednesday dinner. Avenida Fried Chicken ($24) comes with french fries. Chicken & Pork Adobo ($25). Chicken Inasal ($24) is grilled half chicken. Adobo Rice ($18) is fried rice with lots of adobo sauce and pork bits. Garlic Rice ($4). It was all ok but nothing particularly delicious. A bit too expensive I think so probably won't order from there any time soon.

Trader Joe's Organic Cheese & Tomato Pizza, Family Size [/] A perfectly ok $6 cheese pizza and quite good for the price. Tactical mistake on my part since it's too big for a toaster oven so you have to cook it in a bigger oven. Possibly you can cut it in half and cook each half separately in which case the value goes up. In any case, it's a lunch for two people (or four if there are other things to eat like a salad).

Thirty-Nine is a South Korean drama romance with 12 episodes. Three 39 years old women and best friends deal with relationships and an impending tragedy.

• Cha Mi-jo (Son Ye-jin, who I first saw in Crash Landing On You) - dermatologist who has her own clinic along with older sister Mi-hyun (Kang Mal-geum) who is the administrator. She is a former orphan but grew up in a loving adopted family. Mi-jo starts a relationship with newly hired dermatologist Kim Seon-woo (Yeon Woo-jin).
• Jeong Chan-young (Jeon Mi-do) - acting teacher who due to an accident missed her chance at acting. She's been in love for a decade with talent agent Kim Jin-seok (Lee Moo-saeng) but unfortunately he's married and doesn't want to divorce because of his young son.
• Jang Joo-hee (Kim Ji-hyun) - manager of a cosmetic counter at a department store and rather unhappy with her job due to rude customers. She becomes attracted to Park Hyun-joon (Lee Tae-hwan), owner and chef of a small new restaurant and quite younger.

Early on the three go for a long-overdue checkup then later Mi-jo is told that Chan-young has terminal cancer. Chan-young decides to forego chemotherapy since she only has a 1% chance of recovery and doesn't want to be bed-ridden until the end -- later on we see in a flashback that the three helped Jo-hee's mom beat cancer but that's the reason Chan-young doesn't want to go through the experience if she's dying anyway.

The series is about helping Chan-young live her last six months without regrets. Chan-young also has two goals for her friends: hook up Joo-hee and Hyun-joon (though he has a girlfriend) and help Mi-jo find her birth mother (which does not turn out to be a happy ending). Meanwhile now that she's dying Cha-young wants Jin-seok to stay married though her impending death has made him realize that he'd rather divorce and spent all his time with Cha-young.

It's a rather sad series but not depressing. Lots of cathartic crying but lots of happy and funny moments. All the women and their boyfriends have character subplots and arcs. The ending is well done and not depressing and they have ten episodes to build up to it. Overall it's remarkably good.

Alto's Odyssey - Remastered is an updated version on Apple Arcade. I have and enjoyed Alto's Odyssey and at first glance it's hard to see what's new.

I think the big new addition is one new biome: The Lost City (hence the old title Alto's Oddysey: The Lost City). It's more ancient ruins and introduces special Lost City goals that run parallel to your normal "three goals per level".

Otherwise though I think it's the same game so if you have Alto's Odyssey you don't need to get Apple Arcade to play a 10% better version.

But if you do have Apple Arcade and haven't played previous Alto games then give it a shot. It's a chill endless runner where you are snowboarding down sand dunes doing flips and grinds. It has different characters each which changes what you can do a bit. Lots of challenges urge you to do a bit better each time and as you level up the game gradually adds more stuff. Quite fun.

Run Silent, Run Deep (1958) [+] During WWII US Navy Commander Richardson (Clark Gable) finagles his way into command of the submarine USS Nerka perhaps making Lieutenant Bledsoe (Burt Lancaster) resentful as he was due for promotion and command of Nerka and it certainly makes the crew resentful when in addition Richardson endless drills a specific anti-destroyer attack. Tensions mount as the crew realizes that Richardson is taking them to Bungo Straits where a Japanese destroyer, the Akikaze, has sunk four previous US submarines... A good submarine movie with lots of tension.

Come From Away (2021) [-] Musical performance. The story is set during 9/11 when all air traffic over USA was grounded and that happened to leave a couple dozen passenger plane passengers stranded in a small Newfoundland town. It's about the townspeople coming together to help out and the passengers from many places coping with this strange place. A mixture of narration, dialog and song... I watched half of it and I guess I didn't like the format.

Warhammer Quest: Silver Tower (2020) [-] Free to play fantasy combat game based on Warhammer Quest board game and set in the Warhammer Fantasy universe. Turn-based, square-grid, battles only. Collect heroes, level them up, equip them (one item slot so not that complicate4d) and give them a boon (once again only one slot per hero). Several resources to collect: summoning stones (so you can summon new heroes), experience (to level up heroes), gold (to buy stuff). Watch ads to get more resources... Graphics are good. Gameplay is good if a bit boring since it's a linear story line of battle scenes. FTP mechanic can be addictive which is why I'm stopping after an hour.

Trader Joe's Tarte aux Champignons [+] This is a thin pizza with mushroom and a blend of cheeses. I thought it had meat but I guess not -- it just tastes like it has bits of meat. It's a tasty light meal of 580 calories for $4.80.

Hummus Mediterranean Kitchen, San Mateo [/] We ordered delivery. Stuffed Eggplant (Vegetarian) ($18.50) - baked eggplant with onion, garlic, bell peppers and tomato sauce, with rice, salad and pita bread. It's a lot of sliced onions and tastes fine with the rice (less so by itself). Greek Fries ($6.50) small thin fries topped with parmesan, garlic, feta. It's a lot of fries and pretty good. For a vegetarian meal this was ok though not as good as Indian food. I guess I'd try it again with a more meaty meal.

Because This Is My First Life is a Korean romance/drama.

Failed assistant drama tv show writer Yoon Ji-ho (Jung So-min) moves into a cheap bedroom rental in very logical chief software developer Nam Se-hee's (Lee Min-ki) condo. It's funny because they manage not to see each other for several days and believing that the other party is the same sex.

Eventually though the truth comes out but after some awkwardness they decide to continue the landlord/tenant relationship. She really needs a cheap place to live and she's also the best tenant he's ever had. A couple episodes later, to fend off pressure from his parents to get married, Se-hee proposes to go into a contract marriage with Ji-ho and it takes another episode or two for her to agree.

They both want to keep it strictly professional but being around each other more and more they develop hidden feelings. Se-hee is amazingly poker-faced so Ji-ho just doesn't know how he feels. Meanwhile Se-hee is not great at interpreting facial expressions so he also doesn't know how Ji-ho feels about him.

That goes on for half the series and when you think they're actually going to admit their feeling for each other -- and by then everybody around them knows one or the other is in love but perhaps only one person knows it's a mutual hidden love -- they instead break up. The last half of the last episode flashes forward a few months when they happen to run into each other again and finally admit their feelings for each other.

There are two other relationships involving Ji-ho's childhood friends. Ho-rang (Kim Ga-eun) has had a boyfriend (Kim Min-seok) for seven years and is yearning to get married but when she pushes him into it it eventually leads to them breaking up then eventually realizing they still love each other. Meanwhile Soo-ji (Esom) is a businesswoman who is sexually harassed by her coworkers and being pursued by Se-hee's friend company CEO Sang-goo (Park Byung-eun). Her arc involves accepting a long-term relationship -- previously she's always been a one-night stand kind of gal -- and finally standing up to her coworkers.

This is a very thoughtful series with conversations about what it means to be in love and how it contrasts with marriage and we also get Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs relating to both. Besides the three main relationships we also have the parents and how their imperfect marriages work. Part of why Ji-ho breaks up with Se-hee is to see if it's their marriage that is keeping them together or if there is actual love between them.

I did love this series and watched it over a few nights. The chemistry between the leads is good (and there is little romantic competition for the two leads so the story can concentrate on their inner conflicts). Jung So-min is very charming yet playing a fairly subdued character that still contrasts well with Lee Min-ki's performance which has to be very deadpan with hints of emotion.

Although I think the ending didn't quite stick it (I'm not into the break up then skip a few months for the reconciliation) overall it's a good and touching romantic drama.

The Mote in God's Eye is a science fiction novel by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. It's set about a thousand years in the future after mankind has expanded into the stars, built a star-spanning empire, had that empire torn down into a long night, and is now being consolidated by a second human empire.

In the middle of this consolidation where the second empire is pitted against the outward systems there is a ship with aliens though due to mishap all the aliens are found dead. Still, this is the first alien contact in human history and they know where the aliens came from.

Two ships are sent to establish first contact. The Battlecruiser MacArthur is commanded by Captain Roderick Blaine and has a team of civilian scientists and experts on board. The Battleship Lenin is there to be a silent witness, isolated to avoid any contamination, and prepared to destroy MacArthur to keep its tech secret from the aliens.

The aliens are Moties. Very class based in that different Motie classes are physically quite different and some interbreeding is possible. The Moties seem quite peaceful and agreeable and although a lower tech level have an amazing grasp of learning things and building/modifying tech on the fly at a speed that is impossible for humans. And they have a huge secret that if revealed would make humans see them as a mortal danger to humanity...

The storytelling is excellent. The first part introduces our main human characters. The Moties are alien and mysterious and you rarely get to read their thoughts and inner workings -- it's a story mostly from the human POV.

I liked this story as it is "shiny space ships with a big mystery". As the story gets to the climax the questions is whether or not human and motie can live peacefully together or if it will be war (and really with humanity having a temporary tech advantage the question is more to commit genocide or not).

Overall a gripping classic science fiction story. There was eventually a sequel, The Gripping Hand (1993), though it did not review well so I'll probably skip it. Even though The Mote in God's Eye is set in the CoDominium universe with other novels, it is very standalone and I had no trouble reading it without reading other novels.

Megan Leavey (2017) [/] Biographical drama. Megan Leavey (Kate Mara), a 20-something who can't keep a job, decides she needs a change and enlists in the US Marine Corps. During training she's not that good a Marine but falls in love with the K9 unit and transfers there where she is partnered with Rex. They ship out to Iraq where after seven months of duty they're injured by an IED. Megan returns stateside and eventually leaves the Corps but Rex remains and when it's time for Rex to be "retired" Megan works tirelessly to become his guardian and eventually manages to do so... It's a nice family movie.

Echo (2024) [-] After the events in Hawkeye (2022), Maya "Echo" Lopez (Alaqua Cox) flees New York for her hometown of Tamaha, Oklahoma where she has to face her family and friends that she abandoned. Meanwhile Wilson "The Kingpin" Fisk (Vincent D'Onofrio) is not dead and follows Maya in order to bring her back into the fold, or exact revenge... This is not the superhero power level I really like so this street level story was often subpar to me. It is great that it has both a lot of Choctaw (American Indian) characters and that our heroine (and actress) is deaf. Lots of sign language used in the film and lots of dialogue scenes that are almost silent.

Frenzic: Overtime (2021) [/] Apple Arcade and removed May 16 2024. This was a speed matching game. There are pie wheels that take six pieces (sort of like completing a Trivial Pursuit pie). A piece appears and you can flip it. Move the piece to one of the pie wheels and place it. Complete pie wheels with bonus points if all the pieces are the same color. Each level has three goals and you have to complete at least one to advance. It is frenetic action that plays well with controller or touch.

Oceanic Restaurant, San Mateo [/] We had delivery from here: beef and broccoli, sweet and sour pork, west lake beef soup, garlic eggplant, complimentary fried spring rolls. They messed up CSr's beef chow fun and we got a different beef dish (maybe kung pao beef). It's perfectly fine Chinese-American food and they have a pretty big menu.

Trader Joe's Mushroom & Black Truffle Flatbread with Mozzarella Cheese [-] It's just what the title says. 720 calories for two small servings, maybe the whole thing for a one-person lunch. $5.50 and about 20 minutes to prepare. Taste is ok but not as good as other flatbread-type dishes I've gotten at TJ's so I wouldn't recommend based on price + taste.

When the Weather is Fine is a Korean drama/romance in the standard 16 1-hour episodes format.

Cellist Mok Hae-won (Park Min-young) returns to her small hometown for the winter and falls for the quiet and enigmatic Im Eun-seob (Seo Kang-joon) who has secretly liked her since high school.

This is the winter that her former best friend Kim Bo-young (Im Se-mi) tries to patch up their differences though their rift is much deeper than either thinks and it takes on and off through most of the series to resolve to a truce.

Then there's Hae-won's aunt Sim Myeong-yeo (Moon Jeong-hee) and mom Myeong-joo (Jin Hee-kyung). Mom murdered dad, who had been abusing mom. But the truth is worse and aunt has been self-destructing for a decade.

For Eun-seob there is also family drama -- his father was a vagrant living on the mountain and raised Eun-seob there until dad disappeared leaving Eun-seob to be adopted by a kind family but always seen as the "mountain boy" by the other kids. Eun-seob is very much a loner but has depth -- he runs a book store, holds book club meetings, and is quite literate.

Anyway, there are a lot of issues for the main characters to work out which kind of drags down the romance part. It seems like our two protagonists finally get together for two or three episodes before more drama breaks them up as Hae-won returns to Seoul leaving Eun-seob behind and then they come back together in the last bit of the last episode.

Park Min-young is fairly good. Saw her in Her Private Life (2019) where she plays an energetic fan girl. Here the character is quite reserved though unlike Eun-seob she holds all her emotions inside rather than being kind of indifferently emotionless. I also love Eun-seob's younger step-sister Im Hwi (Kim Hwan-hee), a high-schooler who talks a mile a minute and crushes hard on the top student of the school.

Overall a bit too much drama and the last couple of episodes are bit muddled. At the end of watching it's not like I was satisfied but there was 10 episodes in the middle when it was good.

Legends of Kingdom Rush is a turn-based tactical game where you take a team of three heroes through four campaigns. In each campaign you travel a point-to-point map where each node is a battle, trader, or skill-based event. In the second half of each campaign you are joined by a (random?) fourth member.

Battles are turn based with an initiative order. Each unit can move then fight (ranger and another unit can fight then move). Every unit has a couple of special skills which can be used then take one or more turns to recharge. Attacks do damage (+/- 1 or 2 around the base damage for the attack) which first goes through armor (some attacks bypass armor) then subtracts life points. Units can be stunned (lose a turn), immobilized (can't move but can attack), poisoned/on fire (damaged each turn), and have other effects on them.

Each battle or encounter gives you experience which can be used to level up your units to level 2 and the maximum level 3. At the beginning of a campaign all units start at level 1 which keeps the campaigns balanced as you redo them with different units -- which you do because there is a separate experience each unit gets at the end of the campaign which eventually increases their tier to 2 or 3 (max for common units) or even 4 or 5 (max for legendary units). Each tier adds an ability option and when a unit levels up they get one more ability (with higher tier units getting a choice of abilities to add).

Each campaign has distinctly different enemies: orcs; ice people; fire people (lots of burning effects); wood people (poison effects). Each campaign ends in a boss battle which can be tough the first time until you learn the mechanics and patterns of the boss (two or three turns is enough to see the pattern). Unit life points carry over from node to node (before travel you can heal with potions and some units can regenerate during combat). If a unit dies then after the battle they come back with one less max life point (though that can be cured with an item). If all units die in a battle the campaign ends and you have to restart.

Graphics are cartoony and sounds/voices are suitable for kids. Mechanics are not hard either though the game is more suitable for 12+ rather than the 9+ rating. There are 18 units (6 legendary -- a party is one legendary and two common units and the fourth is also a common) so good amount of variety as you play different combinations even though each campaign stays the same (the map node contents are random each play and each combat node you see a unit type so you can go around hard combats, though travel is always forward and never side or backwards).

I think I played this game about 20 hours before I got bored and I've used about 2/3rds of the units. It's a fairly worthwhile game to play an Apple Arcade.

Easy A (2010) [+] Nerdy student Olive Penderghast (Emma Stone) sees a small boastful lie blow up until she becomes the school harlot with a nod to The Scarlet Letter. At first she takes advantage of it but as her infamy grows she finds that school ostracism is not as fun as she thought it'd be... Great performance by Stone. Charming characters in her witty parents Dill and Rosemary (Stanley Tucci and Patricia Clarkson). This is a rewatched movie and it's still quite good (with a few misses).

Argylle (2024) [-] A spy comedy action film. Elly Conway (Bryce Dallas Howard) is a best selling spy novelist but one day Aidan Wilde (Sam Rockwell), a real spy, shows up, saves Elly's life from a team of assassins, and tells her she is also a spy who lost her memory... Other than Elly is the real spy twist the rest of the story is quite bad in terms of plot, dialogue, and action scenes. $200M budget but it looks like an over-ambitious $100M CGI-filled action movie (maybe too much money spent on name stars). This is like the third Apple TV+ recent spy film but The Family Plan (2023) is good and Ghosted (2023) is ok both having better writing and better chemistry between the leads. Argylle is a hard pass.

Aiko (2023) [/] Mac app that uses OpenAI's Whisper (running locally) to transcribe audio to text. Very simple UI: drag an audio or video file to the window, or you can use a microphone. When you start the app it warns that it's meant for Mx CPUs not Intel and when I tried a video it was transcribing about 1/2 speed of the video using 800% CPU. When it's done you can copy/paste the output. It seems fairly accurate and splits up sentences into paragraphs.

Impossible Burger Patties [+] Mom bought me a 6-pack. Fries very well and tastes close enough to a beef patty that it's satisfying. Though once I looked at the nutritional label there's a lot of protein and fat and sodium. I guess it makes sense why it tastes good though this is a product for vegans (no meat) rather than vegetarians (want to eat healthier).

Trader Joe's Italian Tomato & Red Onion Focaccia [/] Small pizza crust with cheese, tomatoes and red onions on top. About 20 minutes to make from frozen and when it comes out it's hot and bread-y goodness. 830 calories. This would not be my favorite pizza-like meal at Trader Joe's but for $3 this is perfectly fine.

In 2903 AD a human spaceship, Prometheus, arrives on an alien world where scientists Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace) and Charlie Holloway (Logan Marshall-Green) believe the race that created humanity lives. It turns out to be an uninhabited world with no signs of habitation, except for this one sort of mountain structure.

A team is sent out to investigate and they eventually find remains of the alien inhabitants. And they find something else alive in the ruins...

I've reviewed Prometheus after I saw it in a theater. Recently rewatched it on my iPad. It's still a pretty good science fiction movie. Shiny spaceships and space suits, unlike previous Alien movies that are more grungy. But the alien base somewhat makes up for that being fairly dark and creepy.

There is no actual "Alien" alien until the credits. Instead we have a snake-like life form that kills and has acid blood; Body horror when one of the crew is infected and is transformed into a creature; and eventually one of the bipedal aliens is awoken and causes havoc because it turns out he is the most danger to mankind.

It's nice that it's a standalone story. A couple of characters survive and they're off to find the alien home world. But that's more of an epilog thing after the conclusion to the main story.

Overall it's still a good film and the CGI still good a dozen years later.

Nexus: The Gaming Connection was an adventure gaming magazine published by Task Force Games and almost exclusively focused on their games. It ran 18 issues and then TFG went under.

I'd say about half the content was Star Fleet Battles and Starfire. History, stories, scenarios, rules and errata. Rules and errata less interesting nowadays since both lines have publishers with the latest corrected rules. For the other materials some of it has probably been reprinted especially SFB since ADB owned all that even in Nexus.

TFG also published pocket games and war games and these are supported. Battlewagon has several articles and scenarios. History of the Second World War has lots of material considering only two games were published but it does like it was an interesting grand strategy game. There are other articles for their other games but not as much those first two.

Towards the end TFG published Delta Force RPG so there are articles for that. A couple of scenarios, which are basically detailed background, maps and setup and then once the clock starts the GM is on his own. Also weapons and equipment articles and an article on playing a SWAT team with accompanying scenario.

I remember quite liking the magazine because of the SFB and Starfire material though I remember Battlewagon looked interesting. On rereading all 18 issues it's quite nostalgic and made me interested in HOTSWW, Delta Force, and Viceroys. Unfortunately I think everything is out of print with no publishers except for SFB (going strong) and Starfire (mostly PDF rules but still being developed).

No I was wrong. ADB does have the right to some of the stuff. Nexus on DTRPG (Warehouse 23 has some of the issues) and Battlewagon 2E on Wargame Vault.

Overall this magazine mainly of interest for historical purposes unless you have some of those TFG games. I like the focus of the magazine and it did have a lot of useful content for TFG buyers.