AI Love You (2022) [/] Thai rom com set in a near future where every building has a building AI that runs everything and interacts with residents/workers using the building. Lana (Pimchanok Leuwisetpaiboon) is a marketing specialist who is work obsessed such that her only friend is her work building AI Dob who in turn has fallen in love with her. An accident leaves Dob in the body Bobby (Mario Maurer) of an AI tech who was trying to fix him.

Dob decides to become Lana's boyfriend so that she can be happy but the company that makes building AIs knows about this "bug" and their procedure is to send a fixer to capture Bobby, flush out Dob and kill it, or failing that kill Bobby... This was an ok romantic comedy film not very emotional or deep. I do like the building AIs and frequent shots of buildings where the top of the building is like a giant robot head that moves and is sort of the building AIs persona.

The Battle of Polytopia+ (2024) [/] Apple Arcade version which comes with all factions unlocked. This is an excellent medium complexity 4X game where a game takes an hour or two. I had played it a lot before and playing it again makes me realize it's lost its luster. There are about a dozen standard factions and they only differ in looks, which tech they start with, and how much gold they start with. Tech and gold is fairly significant in a short game but does a fairly same-y feel to each game. The four extra factions each have unique powers and units so that's some variety.

But I guess what this game lacks is some sort of campaign mode or more unique factions. I reflect back on Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri where each faction needs to be played a certain way or they'll just lose (e.g. since the Believers are bad at tech and good at supporting big armies you need to go conquer early and steal tech because sitting back you'll fall behind and never recover since a large army is kind of useless when you're vastly out-tech'ed).

Hello, Love, Again (2024) [-] Philippine romantic drama. Set a couple of years after COVID shut down the world. Joy Marie (Kathryn Bernardo) is a health care assistant in Canada saving money for nursing school. Coming back into her life is her old love Ethan (Alden Richards) who is trying to emigrate from Hong Kong. In order to help him she agrees to be his pretend domestic partner so that he can get Permanent Residency. Love follows except for their past wherein flashbacks we see they tried Canada before but then COVID hit and he couldn't take it and eventually left her...

Just watching this movie, it's pretty meh and I don't feel it for the characters. Turns out though this is a sequel to Hello, Love, Goodbye (2019) which, note the date, was made before COVID and I assume goes much more into their first romance.

Beecher's "World's Best" Mac & Cheese [+] This is pretty good frozen mac & cheese, with penne pasta and their homemade cheddar and jack cheeses. Various package sizes. I had the 46 oz one which takes about an hour to cook, has 6-9 servings, and is 2800 calories. Fairly rich and cheesy.

Pursuit of Jade is a Chinese historical romance-drama running forty 45-minute episodes. In a small village in winter local oig butcher girl Fan Changyu (Tian Xiwei) finds an almost dead man and brings him home and saves his life. Yan Zheng (Zhang Linghe) claims to be a caravan guard who was ambushed by bandits but in reality is Xie Zheng, Marquis of Wu'an, who barely escaped assassination. While keeping a low profile as he heals both Fan and Yan start to fall for each other, culminating in some sort of local marriage wherein Fan Changyu is head of household because she has all the assets and he is poor.

But Yan Zheng is "drafted" into the army to fight a war and Fan Changyu goes looking for him eventually also joining the army and doing well because she is preternaturally strong and has excellent combat skills because her father was a disgraced top general (which Changyu did not know about). Changyu will eventually discover Yan Zheng's real identity (good comedic bits as the Marquis orders everyone to pretend he's Yan Zheng when she's around) which leads to a break up but quick reconciliation (one of the great things about this series is that both characters are fairly soberly logical; they break up for an episode or two but then she thinks it over and forgives him seeing what he did as fairly logical at the time; there are other plot elements which other series might milk for multiple episodes but this one resolves it in an episode or two).

Anyway, eventually both end up generals in the capital where court intrigue threatens their lives because they have the means to depose the current emperor, who came to power 17 years ago through betrayal...

Great sets, great fight scenes, a plot that moves along with subplots that don't get stuck for multiple episodes. Attractive leads (and really all the women are very attractive in this series). The series manages to stay focused on our two leads most of the time -- maybe an episode or two here and there where other character stories are primary. But seems more than many Chinese historical series where I get the idea that the leads were hired to do 30 of the 40 episodes so the rest have to be filler, maybe good filler but still filler.

This did turn out to be an excellent series from beginning to end.

Castle of Days is a compilation of two previous Gene Wolfe books and then new printed material.

1. Book of Days (1981) - a collection of short stories keyed to various holidays. He intends you to read the story at that holiday and the story somehow reflects on that holiday. For the most part I only liked a few of the stories.
2. Castle of the Otter (1992) - various essays about the Book of the New Sun series.
3. Castle of Days - this part is essays about writers and writing, including letters to people, and reviews that Gene Wolfe has written or presented over the years many previously printed in magazines but not in book format.

I bought this book for the New Sun material which is background stuff and thoughts rather than fiction so I'd say I didn't need to buy it in the first place. Unfortunately I didn't really find this book all that interesting -- it's a lot of little bits and only some of the bits are interesting, mostly the others are ok, a few are boring.

Gokusen (2002-2008) [/] Japanese hour-long high-school comedy/light drama that had three seasons (12 in 2002, 10 is 2005, 11 in 2008). Although heiress to a small Yakuza clan, Kumiko Yamaguchi (Yukie Nakama) or ("Yankumi" to her students) just wants to be a good high school teacher. Each season she is stuck with a new 3-D class which is where all the bad kids go and then spends the season teaching the kids not just math but how to be dependable friends and how to conduct yourself honorably through hardships. Most episodes she ends up saving her "precious students" from the random thugs of the week (e.g. students from another high school or a local gang) wherein she shows off her fighting skills (though the fight scenes are quite bad). I like the concept but it's a very repetitive show and I was hoping the seasons would be different but they also pretty much run the same except Yankumi is a bit older each time.

Lovesick (2025) [-] Taiwanese high school romance comedy. Ever since entering high school the two Ye Zi Jie's -- tall athlete slacker Zi Jie (ZHan Huai Yun) and quite bookworm class president Ye Zi (Chiang Chi) -- have been mostly enemies. Then by happenstance the school comes to believe Zi Jie has cancer and he decides to milk it to get out of classes as much as possible. But with his grades declining the teachers ask Ye Zi to mentor him and help him deal with his illness and it turns out she is ill with something undisclosed until the end of the movie. Naturally a bit of a romance evolves... I didn't feel anything for the characters and the plot kind of moves along unconvincingly to a bittersweet ending. Wouldn't recommend watching.

A Slight Chance of Sawblades+ (2024) [/] Apple Arcade iPhone vertical format game. Little sawblades come down from the top and bounce around. You are a small animal and can move left and right and jump. Jump over one (or more) sawblades and they turn into lights you collect for points. A pure reaction game as there is no time to think. Also a game with little depth but you can play each game very quickly and just trying to break a personal high score is quite the challenge.

Table Indian Restaurant, San Mateo [/] Had chicken biriyani and it's a pretty big serving. Tasted fine though medium spicy was too spicy as I don't eat Indian food enough to get used to the spices.

Affair (2024) and Harmony Secret (2025) are two Thai lesbian romance series (each 8 episodes) from Change 2561 and both feature Lookmhee Punyapat Wangpongsathaporn and Sonya Saranphat Pedersen in the lead roles.

Affair starts with high schooler best friends Phleng (Pedersen) and Wan (Lookmhee) who also live in the same house because Phleng's family is rich and Wan's mother is the housekeeper. Phleng is a talented musician but rather cold and aloof to everyone except Wan who in turn is fairly popular and devoted to Phleng. The first two episodes establish that Wan is seriously in love with Phleng who is kind of clueless about it and believes they have more of a friendship love.

Then disaster strikes, Phleng disappears from Wan's life, and we skip forward 13 years. Phleng is now a struggling singer/musician who ends up in the hospital with the flu and Wan happens to be a doctor there. They reconnect and Wan offers to let Phleng stay at her place since Phleng got kicked out of her boarding house room. Wan is still in love with Phleng and now Phleng has feelings also but doesn't admit to herself. Complication when high school friend Ek (Pop Pataraphol Wanlopsiri) shows and he had pursued Wan in HS but is now Wan's ex-boyfriend. Ex-boyfriend until it's revealed later that actually they were married and are still married because he refuses to sign the divorce papers...

Affair is really good. Lots of crying. Lots of sexy scenes. Good chemistry between the leads. And more crying.

In Harmony Secret Maple (Pedersen) and Ai (Lookmhee) are two heiresses being groomed to take over their companies and their first big project is securing the bid for a major shopping mall development with both their companies being the top two contenders, with a third company run by Ai's unethical and abusive ex-boyfriend to have a bad guy in the mix (in Affair even Ek is not really a bad guy).

Turns out Ai is really into Maple and pursues her relentlessly with some flashbacks to when they met in high school -- that's when Ai fell for Maple though Maple in turn remembers it as Ai beating her in a big competition. To go along with that we also have a parallel romance between Ai's assistant Jam (Belle Jiratchaya Kittavornsakul) and Maple's assistant G (Lilly Ladapa Thongkham)...

I saw Harmony Secret first and I thought it was a good romance series. Affair is a lot better though Affair has a lot more crying to the point it was getting humorous. Both are good series to watch. Professionally filmed with great locations and attractive actors all around. It's also nice that the lesbian relationships are seen as unusual but not really stigmatized -- the attitude is more like love is positive no matter who you love.

Tome of the Mask is an 8-bit phone arcade game. You are exploring a dungeon with orthogonal corridors. Swipe to move in that direction but you keep going until you hit a wall. Avoid obstacles and monsters as you collect coins and stars to reach the end of the level. In level mode it's mostly a thinking game and sometimes you have to time things and swipe quickly in the right order. But there are also lave levels where lava rises up slowly so you now have a time limit.

As you play you get chests which give you cards or coins. Masks are unlocked through a random wheel prize or by spending coins then cards are used to level up masks. There are many masks and for the most part you can think of them as skins. Each mask gives you one to three bonuses: increased chance of something (i.e. more coins, more magnets) or disabling some enemy (i.e. no monkeys or no snakes, but disabling is only in arcade mode not level mode). You also level up global abilities: how long a shield, magnet, freeze, etc last.

Besides level mode there's an arcade mode where there is lava rising quickly so you have to always move up and get as far as you can.

There are also a number of events that are enabled for a day or three each week. Most event using the arcade mode play:

• Jewel Gate: arcade mode but there are picks to collect which you use to uncover treasure.
• Fortune Maze: arcade mode but you there are dice to collect. These are used to move in a sort of chutes-and-ladders board and you are competing with other players to get to the end first.
• Lava Quest: puzzle mode but you have to complete half a dozen levels and if you die it ends immediately (though you can get one save/revive for 200 coins).
• Boss Clash: arcade mode with few coins and added swords. Each sword you get does a point to the Donkey Kong-like boss and you need to hit him 250 times to kill him. He also drops things though there is plenty of warning (but there's also lava to distract you). There are other bosses too. Once you die five times you have to wait an hour to continue.
• Blast Off: arcade mode but adds flags and you need to collect 50 before your competing players.
• Tomb League: a longer event where you complete special tasks for crowns. Things like dying by spikes 10 times or collecting 5k coins. You compete against others and want to finish in top 100 for rewards.
• Tomb's Season: like tome league but solo. As you get crowns you hit thresholds and get rewards.
• Snake: a venerable snake game but you want to collect more apples than other players and finish with a high ranking.
• Gem Seeker: puzzle where you are trying to maneuver gems onto you but as you swipe to move all gems it also moves all bats and you don't want to move a bat onto you.
• Color Quest: puzzle where you try to paint all the squares (by running over them) on the level. Do all six levels to get a reward.

So there is enough variety that I didn't get bored with level or arcade mode.

It's an iPhone game so on iPad you get a centered screen and occasionally I swiped to far off the screen. This is important because you can just have your finger down on the screen and move it slight up right down left to move your character -- minimal movements which is good otherwise full swipes slow you down and are tiring. I found this game harder to play on iPhone maybe because my iPhone is small.

Overall a fun game that you can play when you have a few minutes free time.

For All Mankind s5 (2026) [/] The series moves ahead about 18 years and at this point they finish off a couple of characters that are very old in the timeline and introduce four high school graduates to show the changing demographics of the Mars colony. Mars independence is in the air and a bloody confrontation to climax the season. And in the background the search for life on Titan. There will be one more season of this series.

Super Monsters Ate My Condo+ (2024) Cartoony arcade game. You have a condo building where each small floor is a colored apartment. Two or three monsters want to eat. Slide an apartment that matches the colored monster and they're happy. When you get 3+ apartments of the same color they morph and I think you can morph three morphs into a higher morph. Keep the monsters happy while combining apartments for more points. The monsters also have special powers to activate. Seems like a fairly original idea and implementation is very polished.

Viki Plus [-] I tried Viki's Plus Pass for a month ($12 per month or $120 per year). Compared to Standard you get 1080p instead of 720p, can play on up to 4 devices at a time, and can download and watch offline. 1080p I can tell is a bit sharper but I don't think enough to justify unless I'm using a full monitor (which I don't). Play on multiple devices is less than useful because Viki doesn't support multiple profiles -- you could slightly simulate with each user having a separate collection though it would throw off recommendations and following actors. Watching offline is a feature I just don't use. So will be going back to Viki Standard ($8/$80).

Tai Er Sichuan Cuisine, San Mateo [/] A bit of a nicer restaurant. Everything has bit of sauerkraut flown in from China. Sauerkraut Fish is delicious, the fish especially. We ordered with no spice so the rest didn't taste that great (like eating hot and sour soup without any spicyness). Other than the fish itself and rice the rest of the meal was not to my taste though seemed fine enough if you like sour/pickled taste.

Supergirl is a fun fast moving drunk girl's binging adventure where, by helping out a younger girl's revenge quest, she finally comes to terms with the death of her world and parents.

Kara Zor-El (Milly Alcock) and Krypto are celebrating her 23th birthday by going to an bar on a Red Sun world where she can get blitzed. Unfortunately her revelry is interrupted by Ruthye Marye Knoll (Eve Ridley), a teenager who wants revenge on the Brigand that murdered her parents. Ruthye gets in trouble and Kara has to save her showing off that she has moves even without super powers and half drunk.

Kara does not want to get involved with Ruthye's quest except that same Brigand, Krem of the Yellow Hills (Matthias Schoenaerts) and his band steal Kara's space RV and poison Krypto. Now Kara has to take a space bus and go after Krem to get the antidote and save Krypto. During this trip the two girls bond and Kara spends the whole film convincing Ruthye that murder is a heavy burden to bear. Also Lobo (Jason Momoa) shows up on his own quest and sort of helps in his chaotically violent fashion...

I like the story. Kara's background is shown in short flashbacks which is good because it's kind of boring compared to the rest of the movie. I like that Kara is fairly clever and combat savvy without super powers and when her powers kick in she still fights with a more martial arts style than Superman. Ruthye is a bit annoying in a typical teenage way but not too bad and she does show herself capable, more thief like rather than a fighter.

I do love Lobo and it's great that he shows up to add chaos -- he's after a bounty but it's not Krem it's one of his lieutenants. In the final battle he's willing to help out a bit because he owns Ruthye a favor.

It's an entertaining film. It seems to run faster than the 140 minutes real-time which is a good sign.

Larry Niven's Ringworld I've known about forever, maybe the first time in the early 1980's due to Chaosium's Ringworld RPG (1984) and probably through reading science fiction stories. But I've never read the novel until now.

Louis Wu, a 2-century old human (with prolong is a healthy 50'ish), is approached by Nessus, one of the mysterious puppeteers (a two-headed I guess horse-like race of herbivores known for their advanced tech and extreme cowardice) because they are assembling a team to explore a mysterious remote star system with some sort of line obscuring the star. They are joined by the Speaker-to-Animals, a Kzin (big cat people who waged several wars against humanity but always lost, the "Animals" in his name because humans are "animals" to Kzin so his name denotes his function as an ambassador of sorts). The fourth expeditioneer is the young and beautiful Teela Brown of Earth, who has never experienced hardship or pain because Nessus believes she has incredible Luck.

They set out in a ship and Nessus reveals it's a Ringworld on a star slowly leaving our galaxy, a Ringworld being a 10 mile strip of land that circles the star at approximately Earth distance and with the land area of a million Earths. The tech to build and maintain a Ringworld is as far advanced of puppeteers as puppeteers are to humans which makes the puppeteers scared and so this investigative mission which immediately starts in disaster as their ship is shot down by asteroid defenses and now the four get to explore the Ringworld on air bikes and try to find a way to repair their ship and return home. More difficult because it seems the Ringworld creators all died out leaving lots of humans (a mystery in itself) living primitively among ruined cities.

It's kind of matter-of-fact storytelling getting straight to the point. I like how something is said off hand and then pages later or chapters later the other characters catch on the implications (e.g. Nessus implies puppeteers can attract sun worms which eventually leads both Louis and Speaker to realize the puppeteers indirectly helped humanity win the Man-Kzin Wars). Teela's unconscious power is also interesting as at first Louis doesn't believe in it and Nessus's faith is shaken after they are shot down. But most of the way through the book and several improbable coincidences later, more and more improbable as the book goes on, they all realize that Teela is the most dangerous person in the team and possibly a danger to themselves too.

And of course exploring this vast space (of which they travel a few hundred thousand miles to wards one edge and back to their ship), meeting the peoples, seeing the artifacts, getting explanations of how various things worked, is quite fascinating. There is a giant vertical hurricane that looks like an eye, all due to a puncture in the floor with atmosphere escaping and creating the pressure imbalances that form a hurricane, except vertical imbalances hence a vertical hurricane. It's quite neat all the things to see and well thought out.

Overall a great read and interesting science fiction. Although the writing feels a bit dated the characters feel real and the ideas are still relevant science fiction five decades later.

The Pirates (2014) [/] In ancient Korea a pirate leader, Yeo-wol (Son Ye-jin), and a bandit leader, Jang Sa-jung (Kim Nam-gil), have to team up to find a whale that ate the Joseon Dynasty emblem (statuette) which is also pursued by each other their nemesis (the pirate leader that Yeo-wol deposed and Jang Sa-jung's former army commander who committed treason). There is a nice action duel in the beginning and it's mostly an action-comedy with a hint of romance. It's an ok movie -- I watched it for Son Ye-jin and she gets plenty of screen time split with the other lead since they're two separate groups most of the time.

Sago Mini Trips+ (2024) [+] Toddler diversion activity. Pack your bags (drag clothes into suitcase), choose your companions, choose the mode of travel (boat, plane, train, car), then off you go. You can drag around to change direction and lots of interesting scenery. I did plane and you could go up into space and hit donut planets then down and fly with birds then down to the water and see flying fish and eventually you land. Weirdly relaxing since there's enough stuff happening it's not boring.

Trader Joe's Spicy Cheese Crunchies [-] $250 for 7oz. This is TJ's version of Cheetoh's Crunchy with a little bit of spice and a slightly lemony flavor. It's not a good combination of flavors. They have a lot of different dishes and also do catering.

Up to Speed (2026) [/] An F1 podcast where four hosts -- "Drive to Survive star and F1 journalist Will Buxton, racing driver-turned-broadcaster Naomi Schiff, 13-time Grand Prix winner David Coulthard, and F1 presenter and content creator Jolie Sharpe" -- talk about F1 three times a week, about 30 minutes to an hour per episode. A good number of interviews with drivers, team managers, and others. Fairly informative and I like having a couple of former racers giving their perspectives.