Zen Pinball Party is first of all a pretty good arcade pinball simulation. There are over a dozen pinball games:

Animated Heroes - 6 children's pinball cabinets featuring Garfield, Snoopy, How to Train Your Dragon, Trolls, Kung Fu Panda, and My Little Pony. Although a bit simpler than the other cabinets these games are still challenging.

Zen Originals - 5 original games (Biolab, Son of Zeus, Wild West Rampage, Adventure Land, Castle Storm)

Williams Pinball - 7 games based on real arcade machines (Theatre of Magic, The Getaway, Attack from Mars, Medieval Madness, Champion Pub, Black Rose, Junk Yard)

Star Wars Pinball - 4 Star Wars themed games: The Clone Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, The Force Awakens, Boba Fett.

Each game has a table guide which goes over the various targets and combinations to achieve power ups and multi-balls and such (and modern pinball games can be fairly complicated).

Controls are simple. Tap on the left or right for the flippers. Swipe left, right, or up to tilt in that direction.

You can play in portrait or landscape, with landscape being more squashed so you can see the whole (or at least the main) playing area at once. Portrait is closer to what it looks like in real life but I kind of prefer landscape as the ball doesn't track as fast vertically.

I didn't try the party stuff. Four players on a special party game. Each player plays in their own table but your actions affect other players. Every 30 second or minute the lowest scoring player is eliminated.

I appreciate that it is a realistic pinball simulator rather than a fantasy computer pinball-like game. Not really a pinball fan but I'll probably keep this game around just in case. There is also Zen Pinball which is the regular version without I guess the party game and with more pinball tables but they're in-app purchases.

Terminator Zero (2024) [+] Anime story running 8 episodes. Resistance soldier Eiko (Sonoya Mizuno) goes back to 1997 Tokyo to stop scientist Malcom Lee (André Holland) from activating Kokoro (Rosario Dawson), an AI he designed to stop Cybernet from destroying the Earth... Good animation and soundtrack, action and gore, voice acting, story, and pacing. Nice throwaway line about how Skynet keeps sending back Terminators and the Resistance sends back protectors and each time it creates a new timeline, hence why all Terminator stories set in the "past" don't need to be coherent.

MasterChef: Let's Cook (2021) [/] Apple Arcade game where you make dishes for a cooking competition show. You get a recipe then gather the ingredients from the cupboard. Cut up ingredients (with precise swipe motions), roll things (swipe up and down), spread sauce (tap, hold, move around to spread sauce). Cook. Prepare the plate -- you get a couple of choices for each ingredient then have to hover and place the ingredient correctly. Then judges score it with comments so you can guess what you did right or wrong. An ok kids game -- I didn't play it much because it's a little laggy on my old iPad Pro.

Giovanni Rana Beef & Short Rib Lasagna [/] I guess this is a Costco exclusive as the regular Giovanni Rana site doesn't mention this exact product. Anyway, it's lasagna with mostly little beef meat ball and the occasional bit of short rib. Tastes fine and it's pretty heavy so quite filling.

Love, Now was a modern-day Taiwanese romance/drama that ran 72 45-minute episodes.

Workaholic Yang Yi-ru (Annie Chen) is tricked by her family and co-workers into thinking she has a terminal illness which is the only way to get her to go on a lifetime vacation to a tropical island. There she meets Lan Shi-de (George Hu) and they fall in love and get married (but it's an island marriage and not a legal marriage). Eventually Yi-ru finds out and rushes home leaving Shi-de what happened.

Later on they meet again because Shi-de, who runs the family company, hires Yi-ru's video production company to do a job. But now Shi-de thinks Yi-ru tricked him so he puts her through the wringer with unreasonable work requests. Once the misunderstandings are explained they fall in love again and eventually get married around episode 35. Then it's about getting pregnant and then she gets cancer but eventually everything works out by the end.

The second half of the series is a lot less interesting. We do have two minor romances to keep it interesting. In the first, Sun Qi-ming (Bobby Dou), Yi-ru's playboy boss, falls for Oncologist He Tsai-jung (Mandy Wei). It's neat that Dr He came in as a bit of a rival for Shi-de's affection but was pivoted to be Qi-ming's love interest once their on screen chemistry was apparent. The other one involves Shi-de's author sister Shi-yun (Vivi Lee) who is pursued a much younger "fan" of hers, Zheng Yu-xiang (Harry Chang), who secretly blames Shi-yun for a failed romance and wants revenge (but later comes to love Shi-yun).

The first quarter is really good with the developing romance. The next quarter is not bad with them finally getting married. After that the series kind of drags on a bit. It's nice seeing the characters continuing but it's not really exciting. Overall though it was a nice series to watch all the way through.

Khan Academy is a non-profit offering online courses for everyone. From the selection it seems to be mostly high school level material and some amount of college level material.

I went through the Financial Literacy course which took me a couple of months at maybe an hour a day. It covers:

• Budgeting and saving
• Consumer credit
• Financial goals
• Loans and debt
• Insurance
• Investments and retirement
• Scams & fraud
• Careers and education
• Taxes and tax forms
• Employment
• Banking
• Car buying
• Housing

I would guess it's at an early high school level and some of this would be covered in a home economics class but since I think few people take home economics this course is quite useful. I think it's mostly common sense but I did learn a few things.

A topic is broken into lessons. Each lesson has videos, text, and a quiz all reinforcing each other. At the end of the topic is an overall quiz. Overall I found this an effective format.

There are two additional topics which at this point in time seem to be works in progress. The last topic is split into lots of topics and mostly videos, many of which you've seen previously. It does end with two unusual topics: how to pay for college with videos done by a third party college strategies company, and how blockchain works also done by a third party and a bit too much like promotional material.

So overall I'd recommend taking this course because it has a lot of basic things people should know. And I'd recommend skipping the last two topics (teacher resources, additional resources).

A Family Affair (2024) [+] Netflix movie. Zara (Joey King) is the overworked assistant to action movie star Chris (Zac Efron) who is shocked and vehemently against the budding relationship between Chris and Zara's mother Brooke (Nicole Kidman)... This movie contrasts the other older-woman/younger-and-famous-man romance of The Idea of You (2024) which concentrates more on how paparazzi and fans affect that relationship whereas in this movie that doesn't come into play at all. In this movie it's Zara that's the main obstacle and two-thirds through the film I realized this is actually a story about Zara's coming of age going from self-absorbed young adult to someone who starts to be a better daughter and friend. Overall a fairly nice film and much better than The Idea of You.

Super Stickman Golf 3+ (2021) [+] The Apple Arcade version of SSG3, an excellent cartoony side-view miniature golf game. IIRC SSG3 was disappointing because it had lots of ads and micro-transactions but in Apple Arcade no ads and everything is un-lockable without paying money.

wurdweb (2021) [/] Apple Arcade word game. A bit like a simple Scrabble: a grid with some spaces that give you +1 or +2 words (and points if that is the variant), a list of words and a starting word in the middle of the board. You take a word from your list and connect it with an existing word on the board by overlapping one of the letters (and as far as I know you can only touch one board word so you can't do vertical and horizontal words in one go like in Scrabble). The objective is to get 10 (or more) words down and you need to hit the +1 to +3 bonus squares so you get more words to pick. All puzzles are randomly generated so that's interesting. An ok game but not terribly interesting.

Chicken Meets Rice [/] Fast food (Singaporean-style?) chicken and rice. Fried or steamed chicken, rice, two of about six sauces, broth, sliced cucumbers, sliced carrots, cilantro. I had the fried chicken which is more like asian style chicken nuggets with a light fried batter and the rice is good, made with chicken broth. Tasted fine and it's $14 + tax so not bad for fast food meal.

Bizaardvark was a Disney Channel sitcom that ran three seasons. The show focuses on YouTube creators Frankie (Madison Hu) and Paige (Olivia Rodrigo) as they balance school and creating videos at Vuuugle Studios where they also interact with fellow creators -- mainly Dirk (Jake Paul) and Amelia (DeVore Ledridge). There's also Bizaardvark's "agent" Bernie (Ethan Wacker) who may be younger than everyone.

Season 1 is a typical sitcom format with the occasional video clip. Season 2 has a Bizaardvark video in most episodes and adds meme stunts that the actors perform as their characters with no script. Season 3 drops Dirk and has the remaining cast live in a content house adding two boy creators, Zane (Maxwell Simkins) and Rodney (Elie Samouhi).

It's an enjoyable Disney Channel sitcom and nice to see Olivia Rodrigo before she switched to a music career.

Dungeons & Dragons Expert Rulebook is part of the second BECMI boxed set and covers level 4 to 14. In 64 pages it covers:

Player's Information

• Progressions for each class to level 14 or maximum level for demi-humans (dwarves to 12, elves to 10, halflings to 8). For the most part quite simple and logical except for more Cleric and Magic-User spells.
• A bit more equipment.
• A bit on adventuring outdoors.

Dungeon Master's Section

• Miscellaneous rules for creating keeps and strongholds, attracting followers, hiring mercenaries and specialists.
• Sample wilderness area (Threshold) and rules for wilderness travel and exploration.
• 50+ new monsters
• A few pages of more magic items

BECMI Basic Set I was quite impressed with as it was a complete rewrite and reformat. Expert Set rules seem not that much different from the previous edition. There is a lot of information but not really dense writing the way D&D 3E became. Overall I guess it's a functional ruleset but not as exciting as Base Set.

Expert Set also came with X1 Isle of Dread which I will review someday.

Delicious in Dungeon s1 (2024) [/] Netflix anime series based on a manga. In a fantasy world with dungeons, a party of four -- Laios (Damien Haas) the human fighter/leader, Marcille (Emily Rudd) the elf mage, Chilchuck (Casey Mongillo) the halfling rogue, and Senshi (SungWon Cho) the dwarf fighter/cook -- venture deep into the dungeon to rescue Laios' sister. But to do that they have to travel light and so resort to cooking up and eating the dungeon monsters, the various dishes of which are presented as in a cooking show... The cooking part gets a bit boring but there is a larger plot, good characters, and ok humor so the anime is still worth watching.

Doodle God Universe (2021) [/] Apple Arcade game. You start with two elements which you combine to form a third element (element being generic, material maybe better as you can create sand or lava). Now you have three elements you can combine to create further elements. Objective is to create 138 elements with a trial and error game play. Nice graphics and animations and little quotes whenever a new element is created. Seems rather limited of a challenge though which makes me see this as a game for youngsters.

Izakaya Mai - Yaki Udon (Stir Fried) [/] "Stir fried udon noodle with mixed seafood, pork, fish cakes, veggies, yaki soba sauce, sesame seed, and fish flakes on top." ($20) I had it with pork and yellow noodle. I guess too much like a Chinese stir fry noodle dish and not remarkable. Steph ordered fresh oysters which were a bit lemony and maybe would have tasted better with the sauce (which we didn't see).

The Clone Wars is an animated series set during the Star Wars Clone Wars, between episodes 2 and 3 of the movies. Early seasons scatter the stories among a variety of characters -- Anakin Skywalker (Matt Lanter) and Obi-Wan Kenobi (James Arnold) and sometimes separate, various clone troopers, some other Jedi like Mace Windu (Terrence C Carson), Padmé Amidala (Catherine Taber) sometimes with Jar Jar Binks (Ahmed Best). One episode here, the next episode there, and then an episode that continues from a previous episode.

Later seasons are a bit more coherent with two to four episode stories. This culminates in Season 7, produced for Disney+ six years after season 6. That has three excellent story arcs, the first one with The Bad Batch to establish a spin-off series with that group of Dirty Dozen-like clone troopers. The second arc is what happened to Ahsoka Tano (Ashley Eckstein) after she left the Jedi order (and before she became involved in Star Wars: Rebels and later her Ahsoka live-action series). The third arc is Ahsoka with Bo-Katan (Katee Sackhoff) and her Mandalorian forces joining with Anakin, Obi-Wan and their forces to free Mandalore from Darth Maul (Sam Witwer).

I previously tried watching The Clone Wars but was unimpressed and stopped after three seasons. I'm not saying a second viewing is better, though as mentioned I like the last three or so seasons better (there's a neat arc with Yoda (Tom Kane) finding out about Dagobah and explains why he ended up there), but it's watchable for the most part once I know what to expect. Now that I've seen the Ahsoka series it's nice to see her in The Clone Wars going from a young teen Padawan to an accomplished almost-Jedi Master.

Overall I'm glad I gave the series a second chance.

Asphalt 8: Airborne+ is a re-made version of the 2013 game bur for Apple Arcade. Previously I gave the game 4 of 5 stars as it was a pretty good racing game. As far as I can tell this version's game play is the same as previous. I think there are more tracks and cars and maybe it adds Mastery (each car has 15 mastery races), Gauntlet (pit your best five cars to get a best time then try to beat other people's best times), or World Series (3+ vs mode) modes (and a Motorcycle Blitz mode which I didn't try).

The racing is much better with a controller which I may not have had in 2013. The cars for the most part are barely different from each other -- I'm assuming acceleration, top speed, handling but you will have cars that seem to be the same or barely different.

When I first tries to play this version I bought cars willy nilly and got confused since it's hard to keep track of which car I had upgrades and with a long list of cars it's hard to find the right car. I reset the game and this time didn't buy any cars since the game gives you a new car every five or so Career mode races. Those car I improved and it was a funner experience for me.

In the end it's still quite a fun racing game and surprisingly performs well on my 2017 iPad Pro.

Madame Web (2024) [/] Netflix movie in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Hard luck paramedic Cassandra Webb (Dakota Johnson) starts developing precognitive powers which she immediately has to use to save three girls -- Julia (Sydney Sweeney), Anaya (Isabela Merced), and Mattie (Celeste O'Connor) -- from the spider-powered supervillain Ezekiel Sims (Tahar Rahim). The movie is about Cassandra coming to grips with her powers and responsibilities (although a paramedic Cassandra is a rather "that's none of my business" sort of loner). The three girls don't get to do much which I suppose sets up future tv series or movies. That first third of the movie is quite boring but it gets better and the final act is fairly exciting.

Tetris Beat (2021) [/] Apple Arcade's version of Tetris. It's Tetris but you want to drop the blocks to the rhythm of the song which makes it very hard, especially without a controller. There is also a classic mode. Oh, it's no longer in Apple Arcade.

Monster Hunter Stories+ (2021) [/] Apple Arcade version of MH Stories ($20) with no changes. A third-person JRPG set in the world of Monster Hunter where you play a kid capturing and taming monsters. It plays better with a twin-stick controller than using the virtual sticks.

The Last Astronaut (2019) [/] Science fiction novel by David Wellington. In 2034 an extra-solar asteroid is found to be decelerating towards Earth which means it's Humankind's first alien contact. Unfortunately with NASA scaled down to almost no budget they have to put a middle-aged Sally Jansen, who led the last NASA manned mission and it ended in disaster, in charge of a crew with three non-astronauts. Oh and it turns out they have to compete with KSpace, a commercial space exploration company, who is sending their own ship with a three-person crew... Once they get inside it's a very alien environment and there's the mystery of whether or not the aliens are friendly. It's the kind of setup I should like but the tone is a bit more horror than wonder so in the end I'm ambivalent about the story.

Morey's Fine Fish & Seafood - Wild Alaska Salmon Seasoned Grill [+] Individually wrapped salmon fillets already seasoned. Cook in a toaster oven for 30 minutes (from frozen) and it comes out very tasty and juicy and goes well with plain rice.

Military Prosecutor Doberman is a Korean military drama. Captain Do Bae-man (Ahn Bo-hyun) is a successful prosecutor in the Korean army's justice department of the 4th Division. But it turns out he's quite corrupt as he throws cases based on the wishes (and payments) of his boss Yong Moon-goo (Kim Young-min), who in turn works for the ambitious Major General Noh Hwa-young (Oh Yeon-soo) who claws her way to command of 4th Division.

Enter Captain Cha Woo-in (Jo Bo-ah) assigned to be Do Bae-man's junior prosecutor. Turns out though her secret agenda is recruiting Do Bae-man to join her in taking down Yong Moon-goo and Noh Hwa-young. Yong Moon-goo had a hand in Cha Woo-in's father fall from grace and suspicious death whilst a then Major Noh Hwa-young murdered Do Bae-man's military prosecutor parents.

The first part of the series is working cases and then some courtroom drama. As the series goes on the two leads get more evidence against Noh Hwa-young and there's a larger corrupt organization within the Army, the Patriotic Association, that leads even to the head of the National Defense Department. There are some fights to show off Cha Woo-in's vigilante fighting skills and that Do Bae-man is not so bad himself. A hint of a romance between the two but nothing happens 'til the last minute of the series.

This was a series I struggled watching mostly because I wanted a romance not a drama. Both leads look great in uniform so I kept watching. The military corruption and twists are not that interesting -- maybe because it feels like the plot is moving rather slowly. Overall a nice enough series but replace the two lead actors and maybe I wouldn't recommend.

Previous appearances:

Ahn Bo-hyun
- Her Private Life as the female lead's adopted younger brother and a bit of a romantic rival to the male lead.
- See You in My 19th Life as the male lead

Kim Young-min
- Crash Landing On You as the NK intelligence analyst working for the bad guy
- Queen of Tears as one of country town's residents who has a semi-senile mother

SpellTower+ is a word game and another excellent game from Zach Gage.

In the base game you have a 9x13 letter grid with some dead spaces and some yellow (double score) and blue (eliminate row) letters -- blue letters are the harder to use ones like Q and X. Tap and trace to make words anywhere on the grid with bonus points for using yellow and blue letters. Those letters disappear (and long words take out surrounding letters) and higher letters fall down to fill the space. No new letters appear so it's all about making the big words and thinking ahead to get letters to come down so you can make other words.

Search is a 7x7 grid where you are trying to make words that use the central letter, which has a star. Letters three squares away are yellow and score 3 points (regular letters are 1 point). Find the word that scores the target 1-, 2- or 3-star points. I guess it's setup so you can make one good word at the start and you need to find it. You can also make zero-scoring words to make letters fall so you can make the big word but that's a lot of thinking.

Puzzle starts out with a 5-high letter tower but after each word a new line is added at the bottom and game ends if a letter reaches the top. My favorite mode.

Rush is like Puzzle but if you take too long a line is automatically added. I don't think quickly so this game mode is quite difficult.

Graphics are nice and simple. Sounds are subdued so you can think. Quite polished UI and game play. It's also a fun word game.