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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Strategy and Force Planning 2E is a collection of essays, usually republished from other sources, discussing various issues on deciding what a country's (specifically the United States) military force should be structured in the near to mid-term future. The book is published by the Naval War College Press and I found the third edition (2000) and fourth edition (2004) can be read online.

The book is divided into parts, each with several essays.

1. Strategy and Force Planning Concepts
2. Perspectives on International Relations
3. National Interests and Grand Strategy
4. Economic Strategy
5. Diplomatic Strategy
6. Geostrategic Planning
7. Military Strategy and Force Planning
8. The Military in the Future

As you might see from the above, determining an optimal military force structure depends on things like:

What allies do you have to help you? (Part 2)
What are your national priorities? (Part 3)
How can you influence other countries through economic or diplomatic levers? (Parts 4 and 5)
What do you need in power projection to accomplish your goals? (Part 6)
What should be considered 20 to 30 years from now when the nature of war might have a sudden shift? (Part 8)

This is not a book about "these are the answers". This is a book about "what questions do we need to ask" and "what different strategies are possible".

I found this book dense but quite interesting. Even though Second Edition has the Gulf War (1991) as a major example to discuss around I don't feel the book is obsolete. Naturally subsequent editions add and remove articles (at a glance comparing second and fourth edition almost half the articles have been switched out with different ones). But many concepts stay the same.

So overall a worthwhile read.

Let’s Talk About Chu (2024) [/] Taiwanese sexy rom-com of 8 episodes. Chu Ai (Chan Tzu-hsuan) is a wannabe sex talk YouTuber who espouses sex without emotional attachment while her good friend Chou Ping-ke (Kai Ko) secretly wants to be more than just friends with benefits. Ai's older sister Chu Wei (Kimi Hsia) is sexually frustrated because her older husband, a university professor, is neglecting her which also makes her think that maybe he's having an affair with one of the students. Their gay middle brother (I think) Chu Yu Sen (JC Lin) meanwhile is a poker whiz who becomes attracted to sketchy backroom poker manager Lee Yeh (Wu Chien Ho), who turns out to be an ok guy… Three equal plots plus another subplot with their parents makes for too much going on for me and really only Chu Ai's plot was interesting.

1967: Israel, the War, and the Year that Transformed the Middle East (2005) [/] This is a big 600 page book written by Tom Segev and translated into English by Jessica Cohen. It's very detailed on how life and culture was in Israel and what the big figures thought (a lot of material pulled from news stories, diaries, auto-biographies, interviews, etc.). Chapters talking about the attitude in Israel and the government as war loomed and similar as the war goes on. But not really describes what happened militarily. It's a well-researched book but not in my wheelhouse — I'd rather read a book more military history based.

Getting Over It+ (2023) [/] Apple Arcade. A really tough climbing game that was fairly popular a few years ago with streamers. Side view. You are a guy in a kettle with a long hammer. You use the hammer to grab onto surfaces then swing yourself up. The controls are almost just a button to swing the hammer though you slide around to kind of aim where you swing. It's easy to fall and then you bounce down and maybe catch yourself with the hammer or you land on a flat spot. It's frustratingly hard and the controls don't help and that's the draw of the game. I didn't get far in this game.

Chess Universe+ (2023) [-] Apple Arcade. Fairly standard chess against computer or online opponents. Chess lessons are more like puzzles: pick the best move and keep playing until you win. You can collect pets and deploy five of them for XP bonuses (and you have to feed the pets). Collect gold and spend it on chess piece/board themes and clothing for your persona. I don't see anything that makes it stand out so I'd rather play on chess.com or Lichess where the player pool is much larger. (As an aside: would be cool if chess.com had an API so people can develop mobile games that can play on chess.com. Third parties can deliver better UIs while chess.com gets revenue through their premium subscription plans.)

Mediterranean Kitchen, Burlingame [+] Ordered DoorDash. Kreatopita ($13) — “Traditional phyllo dough filled with ground beef, onion, roasted pepper” — and Arugula Salad ($14) — “Mixed Greens, Wild Arugula, Marinated Artichoke Hearts, Toasted Almonds, Dried Cranberries, Crispy Chickpeas, Grated Manchego & Whole Grain Mustard Vinaigrette”. Kreatopita is sort of like an empanada. Arugula salad was very good, tasty and crunchy.

Genie, Make a Wish is a South Korean romance drama on Netflix running 13 hour-long episodes.

Ki Ka-young (Bae Suzy, seen her in several dramas and movies and love her every time even if sometimes the material was not that great) is a woman living in a small farming town with her grandmother Oh Pan-geum (Kim Mi-kyung). Ka-young is a psychopath in that she doesn't empathize with others and doesn't really feel any emotions herself but with the help of grandmother and the village she's grown up with rules of how to live her life (and she's quite OCD about her routines) and an ability to recognize emotions from facial expressions.

One day she finds a lamp, a magic genie lamp. Iblis the genie (Kim Woo-bin) has been waiting a thousand years for Ka-young, or at least one of her incarnations, to appear and find the lamp. She somehow imprisoned him for a thousand years because her wishes back then were selfless. Iblis has been around since Man was born and has been trying to prove that Mankind is corrupt and he's always been right as anyone who gets three wishes uses them selfishly.

He makes a bet with Ka-young that the next five people they meet (one turns out to be a local dog) will get three wishes and if more of them use their wishes selfishly then he gets to kill her otherwise he will bow his head to a human and forfeit his life to the angel Ejlael (Noh Sang-hyun) who's a local real estate mogul hanging around waiting for Iblis to mess up so he can finally kill him and win the duel they've been having for thousands of years.

So Iblis hangs out with Ka-young also trying to get her to use her three wishes. Their sparring slowly turns to attraction…

This is a good romantic movie with a good amount of comedic bits because a psychopath can be funny in the same way a space alien can be funny: they have an outsiders view of how weird and inconsistent humans can be and they can shortcut things because they don't know social conventions.

Bae Suzy is quite good having like no expression throughout the series (except in the last episode when she gets a taste of experiencing human emotions). Even as a psychopath she's rather charming and I've mentioned before I have a thing for that character type (beautiful, emotionless, but not evil). In contrast Kim Woo-bin has to really act it up and be larger than life to balance the duo.

The main plot kind of climaxes at the end of the 12th episode or the beginning of the 13th episode and the rest is sort of wrapping up to a happy ending. I'm a bit sad about the doomed romance between Ka-young's best (and only) friend Choi Min-ji (Lee Joo-young) and Ka-young's grandmother wished into her younger self, Lee Mi-joo (Ahn Eun-jin). Lesbian romance is kind of rare and this one was nice as a subplot.

Overall a great series.

Too Hot to Handle: Love is a Game is based on the Netflix reality show of the same name where ten nubile 20-something-aged singles are sent to a tropical beach house to spend a month getting to know each other. Apparently the contestants aren't told that is a show where the objective is to mingle but not kiss or have sex otherwise the initial $200k grand price keeps going down for each infraction.

You play a male or female and then interact with the other contestants. It's pretty much a lot of dialog as you talk to people with some inner monologue for your character. In the beginning you get choices as who to hang out with (choose a group of three or more often choose one of three or one from the group). It quickly narrows down to a primary romantic partner and a primary friend.

Now you have a romance meter with your romantic partner(s) and a friend meter with your friend. Make good choices and the meters go up to the second and third levels. Meanwhile you have three meters for sweet, naughty and indifferent and your choices can make one of those go up a bit (and unlike for partner/friend the choices for sweet/naught/indifferent are clearly marked as to which they increase).

As with the tv show there are various activities. Parties, games, workshop exercises, private date, and a private suite with the latter two being the best chance to really romance your romantic partner and get that meter up and also the best chance to cost the group money by choosing kissing and sex. I do like that even if you choose to abstain the dialogue handles it well and in general the dialogue is pretty believable.

Halfway through four more contestants come in and you have two more possible romantic partners to woo you away from your primary.

This game is fairly similar to Episode XOXO. XOXO has a dozen-plus two hour stories while THTH is one 5 to 10 hour story. XOXO has more story-like stories with actual plots while THTH is a reality show so more of a game situation than a story with plot. THTH has nicer graphics and the characters are scantily clad most of the time in a variety of outfits but the model customization is much more limited and the graphics are static standing with the facial expressions changing. XOXO the character models move around and can sit and gesticulate a bit and when they talk their lips move and even if they're not realistic the motions and the models are more primitive they add more to the immersion than THTH's static graphics.

On the audio side THTH has several background music tracks that complement the mood of each scene. But other than that maybe pings and occasional sound effects — no voices or simglish.

THTH seems to have good replay-ability in that you a restart and choose a different romantic and friend partners and each character is fairly distinct in looks and personality. Apparently there are 27 endings (9 other contestants and 3 endings each I'm guessing) though that would be a chore to get all endings. There are sequel games to simulate season 2 and 3.

Overall this was an entertaining game. You need a Netflix subscription to play it.

Oh My Ghost (2018) [-] Thai version of Oh My Ghost (2015) — Ghost Kaopoon (Gypsy Keerati Mahapreukpong) possesses clumsy and shy restaurant assistant Jiew (Noona Nuengthida Sophon) in order to romance and bed Chef Sun (Pae Arak Amornsupasiri). Compared to the Korean version this one is cleaner and brighter (in terms of the city and sets and video quality). Also this one explains things a bit better — small little bits added to explain motivation or show causation that is sometimes assumed in the Korean version. The Thai version though seems beat for beat almost the same not trying to change the story in any way (other than being set in Thailand so for example the food is Thai instead of Korean). I also feel the acting is not quite as good as for whatever reason I didn't invested in the characters like I did with the Korean version. I think in general if you watch the Korean version this one is too much the exact same story to bother watching.

Disney Spellstruck (2023) [+] Scrabble type game you play against the computer. A level is only a few turns and there are spells (power-ups). It has a nice UI and simple but elegant graphics.

Disney Getaway Blast! (2023) [/] Apple Arcade. A color matching game. Each level a shape is filled with colored balls. Tap a ball and all adjacent matching color balls are removed — if you do 5+ balls a power-up appears. You collect Disney characters which have skills which are basically power-ups you need to charge before using. As you complete levels collect stars which are used to beautify a remote island. Very much in the Bejeweled to Candy Crush lineage though possibly this is a simpler version for kids.

Disney Coloring World+ (2023) [/] Apple Arcade. Mostly a kids-level coloring book with various Disney images. There are also some random games. Free coloring disturbs me as it's impossible to color inside the lines with touch, maybe ok with an Apple Pencil.

La Petite Camille, Millbrae [/] Cheap (I’m assuming) Vietnamese restaurant that my parents like. We ordered delivery. I had Butter Garlic Noodles Mi Xao Tai (with BBQ chicken, $17 base price, $21.42 total). Not bad. CSr added Pan Fried Catfish Filets ($31 base price, $38.99 total) for me and that was good with the noodles (I love deep fried fish and garlic noodles which you generally can’t get as one dish). Actually I guess this was kind of expensive so maybe not worth it.

Captivating the King is a Korean historical romance drama of 16 episodes. After the Korean Joseon is defeated by the Qing they become a vassal state and change sides from the Ming to the Qing. As part of their assurance of loyalty Prince Jinhan (Jo Jung-suk, played the male lead in Oh My Ghost [2015]) is sent to Qing.

A few years later Prince Jinhan returns to the Joseon capital. But in the meantime the royal court has changed. There are two sides vying for the throne: one is the queen and her son who is the king's son by blood and the other is Prince Jinhan's mother who wants to see him take the throne. It doesn't help that the king, Prince Jinhan's older brother, has kind of gone insane — paranoid about everyone and refusing to declare a Crown Prince to succeed him.

Prince Jinhan is isolated and on his lonely wanderings around the capital he sees people playing baduk (Go) of which he is an expert. The mysterious Kang Mon-woo (Shin Se-kyung, played the female lead in Run On [2020]) is beating everyone and taking their baduk sets as prize. In return he will only reveal his name if he loses. In reality Kang Mon-woo (named that after he plays Prince Jinhan) is Kang Hee-soo, the independent-minded daughter of the king's principal minister.

Prince Jinhan and Kang Mon-woo form a brief friendship. But right after the king dies in the presence of Prince Jinhan and Court Lady Dong (Park Ye-young). She backs him up confirming that the king named Prince Jinhan his successor and so he becomes King Yi In. Unfortunately as part of those events Kang Mon-woo is implicated in a plot to have Prince Jinhan executed and so he is sent off to be executed with the other traitors. But Kang Mon-woo manages to escape in such a way he is presumed dead.

Three years later King Yi In is now cemented as a bad king who spends his time being idle and not running the country, letting his new principle minister Park Jong-hwan (Lee Gyu-hoe) effectively run the country. Kang Mon-woo returns to compete to become the king's baduk trainer, a new position just created. In reality Kang Hee-soo wants revenge — to somehow oust the king and replace him with the boy prince and son of the last king. But King Yi In has secrets of his own and has his own machinations. This while they both acknowledge they love each other especially once he realizes his baduk trainer is female…

This is a clean historical drama where the world is pretty and even the violence is toned down. I love the two lead characters and how their relationship progresses. There are lots of little comedy bits. Lots of plans and wheels within wheels (but not too deep). Very watchable. The last episode is after the confrontational climax so it's just wrapping up several things and has a satisfying though it could have been a better ending (it's implied they finally end up together though not what form).

Pretty good Netflix-exclusive series.

Apple Pages is a free word processor you can download and use on macOS and I guess it's the default word processor. I use Pages some although mostly I do things in text files for BBEdit is easier to use for me. Pages is more for stuff I want other people to read or for stuff I want to print.

It's a fairly basic yet full of features in terms of writing simple to medium length documents. It's not for long books (even though you can publish directly to Apple Books) — I'm thinking back to Microsoft Word v5.1 which had good support for end notes and index and chapters whereas Pages can do it but is more manual about it.

Microsoft Word compatibility seems good. Naturally I communicate with other people via Word files since it's unlikely everyone has Pages but everyone has a word processor that can read Word files. As usual there are some conversion losses going back and forth so for back and forth collaboration of a graphically complex document it would be a bad experience.

Once again it's nice that you can also edit the same Pages documents in iOS, iPad, and iCloud.

I guess there's not that much to say about it. For a free app it's really good. For a paid app (if it were, say $30) it would still be good. I've found that it fills my writing needs for personal writing and when writing documents for my HOA.

The Final Countdown (1980) [+] The US aircraft carrier Nimitz is caught in a weird storm and ends up back in December 6th, 1941. With the power to stop the Japanese sneak attack and sink their fleet will the Nimitz change history? It's a good cast with Kirk Douglas as the Captain of the Nimitz, Martin Sheen as a defense contractor system analyst fortuitously assigned to the Nimitz for this voyage, James Farentino as the CAG (commander of the air group), Charles Durning as a US Senator who supposedly died on Dec 6th, and Katharine Ross as the Senator's secretary and behind-the-scenes speech writer. This film has not the best plot but does have a whole lot of authentic carrier ops as it was filmed on an aircraft carrier and the film crew was allowed to film a lot of stuff.

Doctor Who: Hidden Mysteries (2023) [/] Apple Arcade hidden object game wrapped with a Doctor Who storyline starring the Thirteenth Doctor and her companion Yasmin Khan. The hidden object levels are not that hard and even less so with powers. There are also some mini-games. Good storyline animation with characters walking around and talking about the mystery. Nice graphics. I guess this is aimed at a younger audience in terms of difficulty.

Grand Mountain Adventure+ (2023) [/] Apple Arcade version of this skiing game. It's a ski resort where you can do various courses for time and do tricks as you down the mountain. The mountain also has lots of bonus areas you can trek to and do. Apparently other activities as you go the next mountain and so on. I guess there's a certain lack of story though even though you're always controlling your guy and after a run you have to get him to the next area for that challenge. The freeform format seems purposeless.

Summon Quest (2023) [/] Apple Arcade action/arcade game with a fantasy theme. In each level control a character and fight monsters. You can also summon helpers with special powers, though they only last a few seconds. Bit more of an arcade game as different enemies have specific attacks you can dodge and behaviors you can take advantage of. I guess plays well with a controller. Not a particularly interesting game though.

Superstar Dim Sum and Seafood Restaurant, San Mateo [/] Low cost American-Chinese in downtown San Mateo with food that tastes just fine. A fair number of tables if you want to dine in with a large group.

The Liar & His Lover is a Korean romance drama running 16 hour+ episodes.

High school student Yoon So-rim (Park Soo-young) dreams of making music with her friends and bandmates, guitarist Baek Jin-woo (Song Kang who plays the male lead in Forecasting Love and Weather [2022] and My Demon [2023]) and drummer Lee Kyu-seon (Park Jong-hyuk).

A chance meeting with a stranger who borrows her phone to record a few lyrics. So-rim immediately falls for Kang Han-gyul (Lee Hyun-woo) who later turns out to be the secret song writer and producer K of the hit pop band Crude Play. It takes a couple of episodes for Kang Han-gyul to notice So-rim, partly because he just broke up with pop artist Cha Yoo-na (Hong Seo-young, who played the female romantic rival to the female lead in Her Private Life [2019]) or rather she broke up with him because Han-gyul is too absorbed with song writing to really be empathetic about the people around him. Han-gyul's initial attraction to So-rim is her great voice which immediately inspires him to write a song that is perfect for her voice.

Anyway, So-rim's band is signed on to the same label as Crude Play and Yoo-na and they are named Mush & Co. So-rim continues to pursue Han-gyul and even after they form a sort of relationship she doesn't find out he's K until later. So-rim also attracts the attention of Crude Play's bassist Seo Chan-young (Lee Seo-won) who becomes Han-gyul's romantic rival for So-rim.

Meanwhile the environment is a small music label where CEO Choi Jin-hyuk (Lee Jung-jin, supporting actor in The K2 [2016]) manipulates his artists in order to make sellable music for more sales. Although it turns out that pretty everyone is fairly manipulative — lots of half truths or not telling people things — which makes for a rather dysfunctional music label. Only So-rim and her friends seem to remain naive and mostly honest.

The songs are fairly good. Park Soo-young is also a singer so she does several of the songs and Hong Seo-young also does a couple of songs. In terms of characters I guess I like Mush & Co the best since they're more idealistic whereas everyone else is not all that nice, even Han-gyul who does improve somewhat because of So-rim but is still not a character I was sympathetic to.

Overall kind of an up and down series. Ok to watch but a clean miss without being outright bad.