Ternaugh

How Labyrinth Should Have Happened

Wargames: I've watched this a few too many times, I have the launch code memorized. This was a recent 4K release of the movie from Shout Factory, and it looks and sounds better than it did on my old Blu-ray copy. A good watch. (4K UHD Blu-ray) I'm slowly watching the first season of Star Trek: Discovery on Paramount+. Once I accepted that I was watching Trek fanfiction, I was good.

My Dad taught me when I was a kid, he had a degree in Forestry.

I was walking through a convention hall, where a man was on a stage giving a presentation about the success of a product--"21 million have been repurposed into productive units for the good of society"--apparently a corporate necromantic program to create low-cost zombie workers according to the slides.

I'm now current with Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, which I've generally enjoyed. (Paramount+) The Monuments Men: Based on the true story of the men who tried to find and return the art stolen by the Nazis at the end of WW2. It has a real problem with deciding to be a comedy or a drama, and rarely succeeds at either. (Hulu) Renfield: Comedy in which the titular charater attempts to escape from his controlling boss. This one's pretty good. (Peacock)

The animation is typical for more recent DC direct-to-video movie releases. As for the plot, to quote Ivanova, "I think you're about to go where everyone has gone before."

"I'll take my peanut butter cookie recipe to the grave!"

Former Nevada Lt Governor Lonnie Hammargren has passed away at age 85 Hammargren was a colorful character who collected Las Vegas memorabilia in his homes, and he'd occasionally open them on Nevada Day for tours.

I work across the street from City National Arena, which has been extremely busy for the last couple of weeks. I'm guessing that it's going to be absolutely wild tomorrow.

I've been having a few issues with my router (a Netgear Nighthawk 7000) locking up occasionally, and I finally decided to replace it with one on sale at Amazon (TP-Link AX3000). It had been reviewed well by a few tech sites, had many decent reviews on Amazon, and was discounted off about $20. After futzing around with setup, and updating the firmware, I decided to run a few tests through Speedtest.net. Now, I'm on a 250 Mbps down/10 Mbps up plan from Cox, and I've been getting a fairly solid 300 down/10 up using the old router. My first test on my desktop pegged at just a hair shy of 600 down/52 up (through Ethernet). Ditto for my cell phone through the Wi-Fi. My old iPad was a little lower, at 400 down/50 up. So far, so good!

It's interesting to note that the LVCC Loop, which utilizes Teslas in a tunnel system below the area around the Las Vegas Convention Center still uses a driver in each car. Autonomous driving of a Tesla isn't something that's foolproof in a single lane, one-way tunnel with traffic limited only to about 70 vehicles.

Now, yes. My first time watching Victor/Victoria was during its theatrical run at the old Athens Theatre in DeLand, Florida.

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever: A friend of mine had tickets to an employee movie night at her work, so this one was shown in the Encore Theater at the Wynn. It was fun to see it with friends. The Three Amigos: Three silent film actors are mistaken for the heroes that they play, and are recruited to defend a small village from a bandit gang. This movie has a plethora of enjoyable moments. It's a good watch. (Max) Victor/Victoria: Blake Edwards comedy starring Julie Andrews as a woman playing a man playing a woman. A nostalgia watch. (Max)

Why, when he was a young warthog When I was a young wart-hoooog! Very nice! Thanks! He found his aroma lacked a certain appeal He could clear the Savannah after every meal I'm a sensitive soul, though I seem thick-skinned And it hurt that my friends never stood downwind And oh, the shame (He was ashamed!) Thought of changin' my name (Oh, what's in a name?) And I got downhearted (How did you feel?) Every time that I- Pumbaa! Not in front of the kids! Oh... sorry

One the way to lunch today, I saw a raven fly by and land across the drive. It was playing around in the decorative landscaping near the base of the hotel tower, and stopped to look at me as I passed. It is a juvenile, maybe half the size of its parents.

When someone at work first told me about it, I said, "That's the plot to the movie, Stealth." He then said, "We will need to worry when the computers start talking to each other." To which I replied, "That's part of the plot to Colossus: the Forbin Project."

I've finished season 3 of Star Trek: Picard, and it is much better than both seasons that came before. Part of that is a return of the Next Generation core characters, behaving in ways we expect (even if the details have changed). There's quite a bit of nostalgia at play, and this season as a whole seems amost like a continuation of the Next Generation movies, or even a throwback to some of the better Next Gen episodes. It's also fairly obvious that the actors enjoyed the chance to work with each other again in the Star Trek setting, and it's perhaps our last chance to see all of them together onscreen.

But on the bright side, the roof leaks.

Octopus returns to the Companions to collect 150 septims.

I've completed the second season of Picard on Paramount+, and I have to note that it is an improvement over the first season, though that's a low bar. I've watched a few episodes of Star Trek: Lower Decks, which i like so far. Meanwhile, my copy of The Last Starfighter Limited Edition in 4K arrived today. It's an Arrow Video release, and comes with a bunch of bonus features on the disc and in a booklet. The image quality is good (better than my Blu-ray released by Universal about a decade ago), and there's a choice between stereo, 4.1 (remastered from the original 70mm print's sound mix), and 5.1, and multiple commentary tracks. The computer-generated graphics look surprisingly good, with the HDR smoothing out some of the color banding that shows up on the Universal Blu-ray. It is, however, priced for collectors, with a $49.99 list price (I paid $35 at Amazon as a new release/preorder).

I spent much of my childhood with a reproduction of Gainsborough's The Blue Boy hanging in the living room. While that copy was probably painted somewhere around 1900, you can purchase brand new reproductions painted in oil right now. Some reproductions can be worth a fortune. Some are worth a few hundred bucks, with shipping.