Doctor Who s2 (2025) [+] Belinda Chandra (Varada Sethu) joins The Doctor (Ncuti Gatwa). But when she wants to return home the TARDIS can’t get back to Earth in May 24 2025. Subsequent episodes hint and then reveal that the Earth was destroyed on that day but not how or why. The mysterious Mrs Flood (Anita Dobson) makes a cameo in every episode since the last season no matter where The Doctor happens to be and late in the season it’s revealed who she really is as the final boss is unveiled… A nice two-season arc for this current Doctor and at the end he is regenerated into a new surprise Doctor for s3. The episodes are mostly good with my favorites being the Christmas special “Joy to the World”, episode 2 “Lux” with a cartoon cat villain, and episode 3 “The Well” with it’s sci-fi horror motif.

Miraculous Webisodes (2017) [-] Two seasons of webisodes each about three minutes. 36 episodes in all. Each covers a topic, is composed of clips, and is usually narrated by Marinette. I guess it's a way for new viewers to get information without watching older seasons though they do contain a lot of spoilers. Overall not worth watching as they don't add anything.

Kingdom Rush Vengeance TD+ (2022) [/] Tower defense game and this is the Apple Arcade version. Apparently this time you're the bad guy trying to reclaim his kingdom. You have orcs and goblins and evil heroes to lead them. Although you're nominally on the offensive this is a tower defense game so in each level you're trying to stop the good guys counterattack from reaching your rear areas. Level three on normal beat me so not an easy game to play.

My Talking Tom+ (2022) [-] Apple Arcade kids game, like for really young kids (it says 4+ but that may be too old already). Take care of a cat by periodically petting, feeding, letting it potty, or letting it sleep. Buy stuff to customize your cat or accessories. There is nothing to do other than letting the cat ask you if needs something (via Notifications). Oh, you can also speak to it with the microphone and he talks back, though I didn't try it.

A Dozen Cousins - Rice Cooked in Bone Broth with Sea Salt [-] “This flavorful rice is cooked using real chicken bone broth instead of water so that each serving contains 7g of collagen-rich protein.” Microwave for a minute then eat. The rice came out a bit stiffer than I like so it wasn’t that satisfying to eat. Would not buy or would eat mixed with traditionally made rice.

The Story of Pearl Girl is a Chinese romance drama set in ancient times. Duan Wu (Zhao Lu Si) is a slave pearl diver who manages to escape during a fire. Zhang Jinran (Tang Xiao Tian) is a scholar who is also a roving agent for the Empire who met Duan Wu at the pearl farm and helped her out a bit.

Although Zhang Jinran has affections for Duan Wu unfortunately he is the third wheel. Duan Wu instead ends up as part of Yan Zijing's (Liu Yu Ning) merchant caravan, working herself up from lower decks servant to the main deck and finally one of the merchants in the caravan (although for the first half of the series it's a ship and even later the traditional caravan part is suggested more than shown). In the meantime both leads start to become attracted to each other.

Meanwhile Yan Zijing is on a mission of vengeance as his family was wiped out when he was a kid by the combined treachery of two families (one of them owned the pearl farm and the fire that destroyed it was cause by Yan Zijing and his men).

The first family is the Cui. Yan Zijing is pitted against Cui Shi Jiu (Xie Ke Yin). She's the daughter of the head but not in line of succession because she's a woman, yet she's also the most capable scion since her brothers are lazy. That makes her a ruthless person in a man's world and I like her arc — she is defeated and broken down and finds love and builds herself back up to eventually almost at the end she's Duan Wu's ally. It feels like she was intended as a minor character that goes away after the first half (the first and second halves of the series are quite different) but was popular enough to keep around.

The second family I kind of forgot as they don't have a strong character to lead them. They're based in another city and head the jewelry guild — Zhang Jinran is a jewelry merchant from the West who specializes in colored stones (i.e. rubies and sapphires and such) rather than jade and pearl which are East jewelry. By this time Zhang Jinran and Duan Wu have split up for the usual "he wants to protect her from getting hurt in his machinations so he alienates and breaks up with her". Duan Wu sets up her own small jewelry shop (Clear Mind) and proceeds to make it a success even though the jewelry guild is arrayed against her.

This is a 40 episode series of 45-minute episodes. Lots of sets and excellent production — not meant to be realistic but the nice version of ancient times in terms of clean and bright cities. Zhao Lu Si is very good and as I called out Xie Ke Yin is also quite good. The ending is not ideal — sometimes I think Chinese dramas set in ancient times are prone to bad endings to show that life goes on and you have to accept your fate.

Still, a very good series and I quite enjoyed it.

I've been using DuckDuckGo as my primary web search engine so it was natural to try out DuckDuckGo Browser. I believe the browser on macOS uses WebKit engine so it'll have the same rendering behavior as Safari.

It includes a lot of privacy stuff built-in and blocks lots of cookies and popups and such. I guess because of that focus they don't have an extensions support — perhaps someday but extensions can get so much data from you if they really want to it'd be hard to prevent.

It also doesn't integrate with macOS Passwords and since no extension support there is no Apple-provided extension like for other browsers. It does have its own passwords vault and you can import from macOS Passwords but it won't be kept synced.

I use DuckDuckGo for Twitch modding. That way it's a separate environment and if Safari crashes it won't cause problems while I'm modding (not so much a problem these days). I do keep logged into Instagram to check collab streamers and I'd rather not have Meta track me so I don't login on Safari.

One thing I miss is that with Firefox I can make the Twitch window smaller while still having chat showing. With Safari/DDG at the same size Twitch hides the chat.

Anyway DDG browser works well and I like that it uses WebKit engine (tbf it uses the native OS html rendering engine so on Windows it'll be different).

Another privacy-focused browser is Brave which is based on Chromium if you like that engine. There's also Orion Browser by Kagi which is also WebKit but when I tried it last December still rudimentary on the other hand it does support extensions and macOS Passwords integration.

At the Moment (2023) [/] Taiwanese romance anthology series of 10 hour-long episodes each episode being a separate story all set during the COVID-19 Pandemic and soon afterwards. Took until about halfway to realize that characters recur in multiple stories. Each story is a separate romantic couple but one or both can appear in other stories and that was nice showing interconnectedness. Still, hour-long romance stories not really my thing. I like that they showed one gay story (with kissing) and one lesbian story (with a very light kiss).

HEROish (2022) [/] Apple Arcade battle rush sort of game. Your hero gets magic points and spends them to summon warriors or cast spells. The warriors mostly stay with your hero and meanwhile the level villains are doing the same. You have a set of cards and four are available to cast spells so your card mix makes a difference. Different heroes too which you can level up and raise their skills (and you can also level up cards individually, not by unit type). It's an ok game.

Hanx101 Trivia (2022) [/] Apple Arcade trivia game with several modes. The 101 mode is 101 questions split up into sections of 5 or 6 questions to a category. I was getting like one or two wrong per section and the questions have a wide variety of difficulty but not designed to be Trivial Pursuit hard. I think maybe it's a little too cutesy with the narrator and his comments but not trying to be funny like You Don't Know Jack.

Kajiken, San Mateo - Wagyu Roast Beef Aburasoba [/] “Wagyu roast beef, crispy onions, green onions, butter onion sauce, yogurt sauce, raw egg yolk” plus noodles. You mix it yourself. Tastes fine though the roast beef is worse than I imagined (not sure I’ve had Wagyu beef before). Probably wouldn’t get this specific entrée again. $25 + $4 on DoorDash, $23 + tax/tip dine-in.

Boss & Me is a Chinese romance drama running 34 45-minute episodes. Xue Shanshan (Zhao Liying) is a new accountant at a big software company run by Feng Teng (Hans Zhang). She somewhat unqualified and later finds out she was hired because of her rare blood type — the first episode starts with her going to the hospital to donate blood to Feng Teng's sister Feng Yue (Zhang Yang Guo'er) who is in labor.

In thanks Yue sends daily lunches to Shanshan and eventually she starts eating those lunches in Teng's office with him. She also eats lunches outside of Teng's office by herself and she doesn't realize the window is one-way so she acts naturally by herself while Teng watches her.

Teng becomes attracted to Shanshan and her openness and honesty. Meanwhile most women after Teng look down on Shanshan because she is from low background and is quite unsophisticated and less attractive (I guess this was intentional but pretty much every other woman in this series is taller and more attractive than Shanshan). One of those other women is Teng's childhood friend is Yuan Lishu (Li Chengyuan) who is sophisticated, runs a bookstore chain, and is secretly in love with Teng.

The last major player is Zheng Qi (Huang Ming), good friend of Teng's and the software company's head of design. He's a ladies man and every woman is attracted to him including Shanshan. Shanshan is attracted to Qi who is much more charming whereas Teng is taciturn and seems to pick on Shanshan even though he then makes sure Shanshan is not bullied by others…

This is a fairly typical Chinese romance drama series. It focuses on Shanshan and we often hear her thoughts (and no one else's). Shanshan tends to overthink things and is quite insecure and spends a lot of time trying to decipher social cues from Teng and others. So most of the problems in their budding relationship stem from Shanshan and it does get kind of annoying at times.

Still, I do like this series though more average than good.

Exit Plan is the third book in Larry Bond's Jerry Mitchell series. Larry Bond designed the Harpoon naval warfare game and co-wrote Red Storm Rising with Tom Clancy and has subsequently gone on to write a bunch of military fiction books.

I haven't read the other books in the series. Jerry Mitchell is a former naval fighter pilot who had to change career tracks due to an injury. In the first book Mitchell is already to a submarine as weapons officer. In Exit Plan has XO on the USS Michigan, a fast attack submarine converted for special operations — less Tomahawk missiles to make room for a Navy SEAL platoon and their equipment.

The main threat is that the Iranians announced they're going to test their first atomic bomb (which means they have two or three others already made) but it's a ruse to make the Israeli's attack and destroy the Iranian atomic facility as a casus belli. Two Iranian informants must be retrieved — a scientist at the atomic facility with a lot of files and knowledge that the Iranians are years from developing Uranium enrichment.

After the primary pilot is injured Mitchell is assigned to pilot the mini-sub that will take a SEAL team of four plus Mitchell and a SEAL co-pilot into the Iranian coast to retrieve the informants. Unfortunately a fire sinks the sub stranding Mitchell and the four-team SEAL team in Iran trying to keep their informants alive while waiting for rescue…

I found this to be a readable book with an entertaining plot. I'm more interested in naval action of which there is little in this novel. The scenario seems quite realistic with the timings and details of US vs Iranian responses making sense. Characterization is not great but that's not really a military fiction thing since the space is needed for the exciting stuff.

Skimming the other series novel descriptions this one is the worst to have jumped into. The other novels seem to be primary submarine warfare or situations and Exit Plan is more SEAL team boots on the ground action. Debatable whether or not I give this series a second shot.

Elevation (2024) [/] Post-apocalyptic Earth after it's overrun by monsters except the monsters don't go above 8000 feet so the few human survivors live there. Set in Colorado, Will (Anthony Mackie) needs to go down to Boulder for medical supplies for his ailing son. Nina (Morena Baccarin) is a scientist who may have a way to kill the monsters but her last attempt ended up killing Will's wife. Katie (Maddie Hasson) tags along because she likes Will. The movie is them going to Boulder, avoiding/fighting monsters, and getting back and it has a small setup for a sequel because turns out the monsters are extra-terrestrial which means some alien race sent them to wipe out humanity (the monsters only target people and they're drawn by exhaled carbon dioxide). It's an ok film, fairly low budget but well implemented.

Cooking Mama: Cuisine! (2022) [/] A cooking simulator exclusively on Apple Arcade. Choose ingredients (as you get better new ingredients added) then go through several steps to prepare the ingredients. Cutting is swiping, flipping is swipe down then up, stirring is swipe in a circle, sprinkle is swipe up and down repeatedly. For each step you have about 15 seconds to do it right and get three stars and at the end you have a prepared dish. Meanwhile Mama encourages you, there is happy music, and the graphics are cartoony though the dishes look good. But it doesn’t really seem like much of a game and I guess this is more of a kid’s game. Note: unlike most Apple Arcade games, Cuisine seems to be a limited version for Let’s Cook rather than the same or better version.

Subway Surfers Tag (2022) [/] Apple Arcade arena brawler game where you control a teen skateboarder. You go into an arena, collect coins/powerups/weapons and fight off the guard and guard robots while tagging things, riding rails, and doing tricks. You keep going until you die but there are new arenas for variety. Probably plays great with a controller but was fine with fingers (virtual joystick and auto-aim). Didn't find it that entertaining but it's a good polished game.

Joy Sushi, San Mateo - Tokbokki [/] Joy Sushi has some K-Food items and when we went there for dinner I had the Tokbokki ($16). “Stir-fried rice cake with fish cake in Korean chili sauce.” Thinly sliced fish cake with wide circular noodles in a tomato-y sauce and fairly spicy (definitely strong spice but not uneatable). Seems like a fairly basic “home cooking” sort of dish and sometimes see this on K-Drama shows. Pretty good.

Nescafé Black Roast [/] Instant coffee. Tastes horrid even with milk and that may indicate I make my usual coffee a bit light. Still, it’s a quick coffee fix without using the coffee maker and also allows me to make double-strong servings. And the taste is about as unappealing as the other instant coffee I had from Trader Joe’s.

Welcome to Samdal-ri is a South Korean romance/drama running 16 hour+ episodes.

Cho Sam-dal (Shin Hye-sun, who I loved as the female lead in See You in My 19th Life) is a talented photographer with her own studio but after allegations of employee abuse she and her sisters flee back to their small home seaside town of Samdal-ri on Jeju island. Once back home Sam-dal has to deal with her ex-boyfriend Cho Yong-pil (Ji Chang-wook, male lead in Backstreet Rookie and Lovestruck in the City) who even eight years later is still in love with Sam-dal.

It takes a while for them to re-hookup. Lots of flashbacks to their childhood and how they broke up (two different perspectives) and how they were as a couple — flashbacks are out of order and often don't reveal the whole truth until closer to the end of the series. The big obstacle to reconciling is that both their parents are sort of against it: Sam-dal's mother Go Mi-ja (Kim Mi-kyung, has played many mom roles) because she doesn't want to see Sam-dal hurt again, and Yong-pil's father Cho Sang-tae (Yu Oh-seong) who blames Mi-ja for the death of his wife and Yong-pil's mom.

A couple of other romantic subplots for variety. Sam-dal's older sister Cho Jin-dal (Shin Dong-mi) divorced her rich husband Jeon Dae-young (Yang Kyung-won) who has returned to the area in order to finalize a deal for an amusement park in the next town. They both still love each other but she divorced him so he wouldn't be ostracized by his family after she did a whistle blower thing on the family conglomerate.

Sam-dal's younger sister Cho Hae-dal (Kang Mi-na) is a single mom who got pregnant at 20 but her boyfriend died. Now she has an adorable 9 year old Cha Ha-yul (Kim Do-eun). In any case Ha-yul befriends Gong Ji-chan (Kim Min-chul), who heads a local Dolphin Center, and then Ha-yul plays matchup between her mom and Ji-chan.

One of the strong elements is the haenyeo, a name for the female divers of Jeju Island who dive daily harvesting ground sea-life such as abalone and seaweed. Go Mi-ja is the head of the town haenyeo and Yong-pil's mother was a haenyeo. It's kind of nice seeing this uniquely Korean thing which I didn't know about before.

I like the series. Nothing groundbreaking but well executed and delivers on the romance.

Hellboy and the BPRD is a natural continuation of the main BPRD series which was set in the present but had covered the beginnings with BPRD: 1946, BPRD: 1947, and BPRD: 1948.

Spanning Hellboy and the BPRD: 1952 to 1957 these are mini-series, one for each year, starting with Hellboy's first mission in 1952. A young Liz Sherman makes an appearance and Trevor Bruttenholm is often around but none of the other regular characters appear so Hellboy is hanging out with human teammates, some from BPRD 1946 et al.

I like these stories as going back to more classic Hellboy: talking and investigating, monster appears, Hellboy punches it. Although occasionally someone dies these stories are lighter than the later Hellboy and really all related series set in modern times.

There's also a nice through-line about a secret US government organization competing with the BPRD. Whereas BPRD is mostly defense oriented "how to stop these creatures" this new organization wants to weaponize some of the BPRD research.

Overall a nice series and good change of pace to the regular series.

Tron: Uprising (2012) [/] Animated half-hour series set in the Tron universe between the original movie and Tron: Legacy. Argon is the last city conquered by Clu and Beck (Elijah Wood) is a mechanic who wants to fight the system, first as "The Renegade" and later after an injured Tron (Bruce Boxleitner) recruits him as the new "Tron". Beck's escapades are opposed by General Tesler (Lance Henriksen) who governs Argon and his chief lieutenant Paige (Emmanuelle Chriqui), who is actually idealistic and a potential ally for Beck but not in season one. Unfortunately this series wasn't renewed and ends at an episode 19 cliffhanger. I found the animation ok but more interesting was showing life as a program. Besides Tron being a secondary character that appears in several episodes you also have Clu (Fred Tatasciore) for an episode or two and Quorra (Olivia Wilde) in an episode.

Frogger and the Rumbling Ruins (2022) [/] Puzzle game on Apple Arcade. You are Frogger as an Indiana Jones-type. Each level has paths and platforms, some of which you can manipulate by moving side to side or up and down (at any time). There are switches which Frogger must step on to activate. Three hidden Froglings on each level to optionally rescue. There might be monsters or other things to kill Frogger (or a Frogling if you're not careful!). It's 3D and you can rotate the map and zoom in and out and you'll need to do it to see things on the other side and so forth. Nice family-friendly game with 100+ levels. Apparently this game was removed May 15th and is no longer available so maybe it'll be released in the regular App Store.

Hellboy in Hell TPBs (2014-16) [/] Two volumes which cover Bellboy's stay in Hell after he died and before he was resurrected to finish the BPRD series. It's a bit dark and not as hopeful as early Hellboy although I suppose BPRD/Abe Sapien covering the same time period were also descending into bleakness. It's nice to have it to bridge that gap but don't think I'll ever re-read this.

Trader Joe’s Brookie [+] This is a brownie layer on bottom and a chocolate chip cookie batter layer on top. Together a bit too rich so I usually eat the brownie first then the cookie (since it’s batter layer and then baked it’s more like a hard dessert than a cookie). It’s like $6 for 8 180-calorie pieces though I usually have half a piece a day with two cups of coffee, so it turns out to last longer than the blueberry muffin and it doesn’t go stale as fast. This is now my coffee companion of choice.

Pho Little Saigon, San Mateo - Beef Stew w. Egg Noodle Soup [/] Perfectly fine Beef Stew Soup with regular thin noodles. Had it delivered so the noodles come separate and you mix it yourself. Lots of beef actually. Large serving was $22 from DoorDash.

Campbell’s Cream of Potato soup [/] For cheap condensed soup it tastes fine. You add milk so it’s soupy/creamy. Bits of potato to give it some texture. 225 calories (I suppose with the added milk) so kind of a snack thing for me.