Archive

Talamasca: The Secret Order: The show fails to deliver a compelling supernatural spy thriller, lacking tension and engaging storytelling, ultimately making it unworthy of viewers' time.

The hidden cost of business travel. I just dropped €200 updating my tech kit (USB-C cables, travel adapters, battery packs). And that was optimized for minimal gear. Tech tax is real. M1 MacBook Pro to soldier on for another year.

Vampire the Masquerade Bloodlines 2 - shiny but soulless. The original was crufty code with genuine storytelling and fun. Fan mods kept it alive for two decades. Both had torturous development, but only the first will be remembered.

Critiquing vibe coding misses the point. Vibe coding is today’s Visual Basic for people who prioritize results over programming craft.

WiFi 8 silicon testing has started, but consumer devices are years away. Most home WiFi problems aren’t about speed. They’re reliability issues. WiFi 8 focuses on stable connections. If it delivers consistent performance, that’s what we actually need.

MTV UK is shutting down its music channels. Maybe it’s dated nostalgia, but when MTV Europe launched in 1987 during the Cold War, it was an eye-opening cultural window into Europe for me.

An AI Addendum Actually, without the AI buildout, the US economy would probably be teetering on the cusp of a recession (which certainly mirrors the view from many of the industries that I track). I think this is why the global economy feels so weird. Consumers are pulling back on spending while …

Peacemaker season 2 saves its only interesting idea for the last ten minutes. The episodes feel like a drawn-out epilogue to Gunn’s Superman movie. A disappointing waste of time and apparently the series finale. What a poor way to go out.

Escape from a grave is hopeless due to the immense weight of the dirt above.

Tron: Ares: Tron: Ares features a simplistic plot with underwhelming action and characters, failing to live up to its predecessors while lacking memorable elements.

The EU’s ApplyAI Strategy: €1B (redeployed spending) to push EU AI forward. The standout for me? The FrontierAI Initiative. Submit your frontier model for development, and they’ll supply the compute.

Amazon granted permission for satellite ground station in Cork, Ireland Amazon this week announced it has received regulatory approval from the Commission for Communications Regulation (ComReg) to operate a satellite earth station gateway at the National Space Centre Ltd (NSC) in Cork County, …

It's remarkable that we've had secure replacements for UPnP, like Port Control Protocol and NAT-PMP, yet most home routers don't ship with them. If you know UPnP is insecure, you probably know enough to do manual port forwarding anyway. Everyone else? They’re on their own.

I don’t care about how bad you think you look or how annoying you think your voice sounds. I’d rather a person voice their own YouTube videos than a text to speech program reading an AI generated script. There’s a lot of the latter on YouTube now and it’s trash.

On Amazon devices moving from Android to Vega OS. Google is in a battle to the death with Apple. Android/iOS now running on beefy hardware. Vega is about running on the smaller things. When you build on Linux, like Vega has, every component maker you go to has a Linux driver you can use. Fast dev.

Brazil’s ferociously litigious society turned to AI to clear its courts system, only for lawyers to use it to fill it up again.

Sodium-ion batteries are going to be so good. You can get the ingredients from nearly anywhere. No conflict minerals used. They are stable, can use passive cooling and are difficult to ignite. You can also run them to zero and not damage the battery. They’ll be great for grid storage.

I read an interesting thing by Daniel Kahneman. Smart people can believe opposite things because they trust different people. It’s rarely about facts, it’s about adopting the views of the people we like. People create reasons to agree with those they admire. It’s about trust, not truth.

The UK’s BritCard is here. Again. A digital ID for work, rent, and services. With the EU’s 2026 EUDI Wallet rolling out, this ‘convenience’ is spreading fast. We’ve long traded privacy for less friction online. Will anyone notice when digital IDs become the only option?

I've switched to eSIMs for roaming. My carrier was charging me €5 a day while in the US (€35/week). With the eSIM I'm just paying €3.79 for 1GB of data for a week. Which is more than enough data to get an Uber on a street when I'm not connected to WiFi. Living in the future is wild.

Even as it flirts with hosting services Mastadon must never “win” in a platform sense. It’s a social experiment in digital democracy, where if you don’t like what you’re reading you just drift off to a different instance. Winning platforms follow you with their crap.

While the U.S. (thanks to SpaceX) has mastered reusable launchers, Europe’s Callisto (delayed to 2027) and Themis are still in early testing. Challenges? Late start, funding gaps, and risk aversion. Can Europe stay in the race? It’ll take faster innovation, private investment, and bolder decisions.

Big change for SaaS in the EU. As of this week customers can cancel contracts with 2 months’ notice. No lock-in. By Jan 2027, early termination fees are to be removed. This applies to consumer and business SaaS contracts.

Mojeek remains Europe’s only search engine with a fully independent index, but there is progress on that. Qwant & Ecosia are now using their own European index (EUSP) for some results, and OpenWebSearch.EU’s pilot index is ready for commercial adoption. Let’s see if anyone builds on it.

The US NBER report on ChatGPT has some surprises. Coding is just 4.2% of use, companionship only 2.3%, and non-work chats soar to 73%. It’s more daily info tool than a coder or a therapist.

12 years since Spike Jonze’s Her was released but it’s still fascinating to see Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation and Jonze’s movie give each directors perspective on their mutual divorce. She (Johansson’s character) felt abandoned, he (Phoenix’s character) struggled with intimacy. Both had guilt.

I’m a big Demon Slayer fan, but the movies are always badly paced with too much filler. I’ll wait for their TV editors to streamline the Infinity Castle footage for a better watch.

AI is more like the smartphone era, where you didn’t buy your hardware and OS from two people in a garage, than the early PC days. Today, two devs in a garage aren’t selling LLMs to hobbyists. Megacorps own all the model innovation.

Immutable Linux distros are perfect for handing older PCs to family. Skip the regular distros, unless you want to be tech support forever.

Anthropic admitted to degraded Claude output for nearly a month due to inference bugs. Tough pill to swallow for $200/month users who were getting lobotomized responses for weeks.

Hypertension alerts on the new Apple Watch are a great step as hypertension is often underdiagnosed. If you get an alert, see a doctor. To double-check, use a validated blood pressure cuff from a pharmacy. If readings stay high, go see your Doc.

In the US, YouTube rolled out an age estimation tool that estimates the viewer’s age from their viewing history. If it judges you to be a teen, you get put in the teen bucket, and some content is restricted. To remove the teen flag, YouTube wants a credit card, a government ID, or a selfie.

Microsoft joins the World Nuclear Association, Google and Amazon invest in Small Modular Reactor (SMR) technology. The first deployments of SMRs could be used to power AI anime waifu chatbots.

Satellite TV was revolutionary in Europe, but in Ireland & the UK, its days are numbered. The Astra satellites at 28.2°E, are nearing the end of their service lives, and KA-Sat 9A (Saorsat in Ireland) ends its service life around 2026. You may have to talk to your Granny about IPTV soon.

The European Processor Initiative has developed its first ARM based European designed microprocessor (Rhea) and RISC-V vector/stencil/tensor accelerator chip (EPAC). No path to consumer commercialisation that I can see. That’s going to make TMSC charge an arm and a leg for fabbing low volume parts.

It’s remarkable that PowerPC is dead in the consumer market. At one point, it was in the Xbox 360, PS3, and Wii all at the same time. ~300M units in homes. Now we’ve got x86-64 or ARM. Maybe you’ll get a RISC-V CPU on the controller of your next SSD. Maybe you won’t.

The internal battery of my Sega Saturn has gone kaput. So tonight I party like it’s 1994.

IPV6 is now the infrastructure protocol of the Internet, and most end users never noticed. HTTP3 is built into all Chrome-derived web browsers. It’s been in web servers since 2019. Handsets will make it the default. And most users will never notice. Except for their page loads getting faster.

20 a month for access to AI has created history’s largest beta test group. I think mass exposure is a good thing, as the more people use it, the better they’ll get at detecting when AI starts making things up. There’s a point where you can almost feel it collapse under its context window.

Having looked at several different public DNS resolvers I can say that those who have DNS Over TLS running correctly are the large operations (money to hire nerds with OCD) and the one person outfits (has nerd OCD). There’s a lot of poorly configured junk out there from those providers in between.

The male urge to stay up all night putting 10Gbps Ethernet into the house and building a DNS resolver & cache “because if I dumped that hardware it would just be e-waste anyway.” Then I watched this week’s episode of Foundation, where none of my networking changes mattered.

Larry Ellison’s dream of revolutionizing agriculture on his private island of Lanai has led to one of Hawaii’s most expensive produce offerings: lettuce, which is priced at $24 per pound. The Oracle database was a hell of a trick. But Larry has a disease where he thinks he can repeat it on anything.

I’m impressed by the HD remaster of The X-Files on streaming. I was never a “monster of the week” series fan so I skipped it when it first aired, but this show now looks pristine. It’s a great looking procedural TV time capsule show.

It’s amazing that the Atari ST had such an effect on 80s and 90s music. Some engineer pitched building in MIDI because it was a cheap differentiator versus the Amiga. That gave bedroom musicians a digital music studio in a box. Wintel killed the ST. Internet piracy nearly killed the music biz.

I remember mocking No Man’s Sky when it first came out. It was janky and felt small. I’m not laughing now. It’s possibly had the best comeback in gaming history.

Weird streaming issue where some services claimed to be having technical issues. Quad9 was routing my IPv6 DNS lookups to a resolver of theirs in the US. DNS0.eu routes it just up the road from here and the streams are flowing. I’ll use that for now.

Today is failed hard drive destruction day. Which involves a Torx 6 & 8 set of screwdrivers to get into the case and then a hammer to finish off the platters. Five down, three to go.

Thomas Harris: Red Dragon: Media has made killers cute. We've given them sardonic voice overs in TV shows. Some have become "I can fix them" characters in books. They'll kill only the bad people, or so the authors would have us believe. That's not how these people work. The reality is that everyone around a serial killer will …

Dante: The Divine Comedy: When Dante wrote this narrative poem he did so in Italian instead of Latin to make it as accessible as possible. Alas, I can't read 14th century Italian so I have to depend on translators and their copious amount of footnotes. Over the past 700 years the footnotes have piled up at the bottom of the …

Lorde’s transparent CD for her latest album is giving older players fits. Because it’s not a CD. It doesn’t have the Compact Disc logo. It’s a low reflectivity disc being used in a laser reader that requires reflectivity. It probably leans heavily on modern CD player error correction just to work.

The Naked Gun (2025): In 1996, Liam Neeson starred in the historical drama Michael Collins; likewise, Pamela Anderson was in Barb Wire. If you had told me at the time that they’d reboot The Naked Gun franchise together, I’d have laughed at you. In this reboot of a franchise that first started in 1982 with the six-episode …

I walked into someone’s office to have a discussion, and he grabbed a stack of dot matrix printer paper and then marked up the issue we were discussing in penmanship that was so clear you could almost smell the computer pioneer off it.

Superman (2025): Superman (2025) isn't a movie by someone who studied Richard Donner's Superman. It's a movie by someone who studied Christopher Reeve's performance in Superman. David Corenswet gives Clark Kent/Superman a Reeve's like charisma even though he falls short of giving his Superman a Reeve's like …

Anthropic had AI run a minifridge. It had an identity crisis and went broke. Project Vend: Can Claude run a small shop? (And why does that matter?) \ Anthropic

Having built my MiSTer FPGA system, the first thing I did was delete every core that wasn’t… Amiga Atari ST C64 ZX Spectrum PC Engine Vectrex Neo Geo Pocket MSX X68000 Saturn There are enough hidden gems on those systems for a lifetime.

Sweatshops for clothing. Sweatshops for AI. Some types of work never change. The AI Con book excerpt: The hidden workers who keep things running - Rest of World

I have clusters of smart home devices and sensors using different protocols. WiFi, Bluetooth mesh, Zigbee & Z-Wave. I was looking at standardising on Matter over Thread but the device selection for Matter is poor.

I keep notebooks in a bottom drawer that cover years of work and thoughts. While I may need to check last year’s notebook for work-related stuff a couple of times, I never look at the plans or thoughts. The plans serve as a direction, the thoughts are no longer deep. I Deleted My Second Brain

I’d ride an electric bike were I not convinced I’d die in road traffic. But I’ve waited so long that subscriptions have come to bicycle hardware. The Basic tier provides a rider dashboard, basic security, a stolen mode, and updates over Bluetooth for free. You can then pay £6.99 / €7.99 (around $9) …

8BitDo 2.4G controller kept disconnecting from my docked Steam Deck during Dead Rising 2. An incompatibility between the 2.4G dongle and the dock’s USB 3.1 ports. But there’s a USB 2.0 port inside the controller charging stand! 🎮

As of December 2024, AI wrote 30.1% of Python contributions from US users vs 24.3% Germany, 23.2% France, 21.6% India, 15.4% Russia, 11.7% China. Chinese devs favor Gitee over GitHub. First-mover advantage? Doubtful. These gains may plateau as easy tasks get automated first.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

I have the sneaking suspicion that PlayStation and Xbox are raising prices above the hardware loss line to be ready for Grand Theft Auto 6. Some people will buy a system just to play GTA 6 and will never buy another game for the system.

Shockingly, LLM users were far less able to recall or quote from essays they had just written. In fact, 83.3% of LLM users failed to provide even a single correct quote from their own writing, compared to just 11.1% in both the Search Engine and Brain-only groups. That would be because they didn’t …

MIT Study Warns of Cognitive Decline with LLM Use

The Louvre staff went on strike. We didn’t plan to go on strike, but the people are so exhausted, they can’t support the conditions getting worse and worse Source: NYT The issue with Europe becoming the world’s largest museum as its native population declines is that tourist overcrowding is making …

In tech, the days of spending a lot of cash upfront and spending little on each user are over. AI means you’re not making it back on volume anymore. Every customer using AI increases your costs. This is why AI companies are chasing enterprises instead of trying to build the next Gmail or …

OpenCore Legacy Patcher always adds a bit of excitement to older Mac hardware. Is it a bug in the latest OS release? Or is it all the work that has had to be done to get that release running on an absolute potato of a Macintosh? 

As datacenter production gets automated, the cost of intelligence should eventually converge to near the cost of electricity. (People are often curious about how much energy a ChatGPT query uses; the average query uses about 0.34 watt-hours, about what an oven would use in a little over one second, …

Apple’s new container support in macOS 26 is nowhere near as feature-rich as Docker. It doesn’t support memory ballooning or loopback networking to the host. But it’s much lighter on Apple Silicon resources and launches containers like greased lightning.

The 6G wireless spectrum auctions are coming soon. Telcos: We’ve learned our lesson after overhyping 5G, something that was an expensive, incremental upgrade. Me: Oh good! Telcos: 6G will provide holographic communication and facilitate the Internet of Senses. Me: Get out.

The phase-out of Rosetta 2 in macOS was just a matter of time. But as someone who runs an ancient MMO client on top of WINE, this is a new challenge. Windows x86 code → WINE translation layer → macOS Intel APIs → Rosetta 2 translation to ARM64. That chain could break.

Apple are doing okay with AI. AI will be like databases. Big models in the cloud and tiny ones in everything else. Whenever I see people give Apple advice, I remember that if they had followed mine from 20 years ago, the company would be 1/20000th its current size but make the best desktops ever.

YouTube introduces an ad-free tier, changes its mind. YouTube’s offer is to rival TV ad revenue for content providers. They’re also going hard on AI content creation tools to allow creators to pump out more videos to keep eyeballs. Of course, to pay for all of this, they’ll continue to flood the …

Fantasy game books for kids in the 80s and 90s. You’d flick through them in the bookshop, and there was something dangerous-looking every few pages. It was great. You’d wonder, ‘I’ll have to fight that?!’

This time of year I enjoy looking at all the new games I won’t have time to play. But then I see most of them are built on the jittery, traversal-stuttering mess that is Unreal Engine 5. Then I’m relieved I won’t have time to play them.

The next time you go to pay at a supermarket, look up. I remember doing this years ago at the Amazon Go in Seattle and being disturbed by the arrays of cameras looking down. Supermarkets are catching up. You’ll take something off a shelf soon, and a camera lens will stare back at you from the shelf.

Mac development hero, Bill Atkinson, has died. He leaves a lot of fingerprints on modern computing. He also created the Venice font. The only original Mac font not created by Susan Kare.

Ballerina. Now that Keanu’s knees have given out, the John Wick stunt show needs a new face. That face is Ana de Armas, and she’s fine. Two hours, which I found long, but you know what you’ll get with this John Wick continuation. Nothing else to say.

I have low expectations for Ballerina (John Wick spinoff). But as it’s pouring rain outside, let’s take a look.

Rogue One is more enjoyable to watch right after the finale of season 2 of Andor. In 2016, who’d have thought there would be an Andorverse? Well, besides creator Tony Gilroy.

Apple’s WWDC 2025 is next week. And when it comes to major releases, to paraphrase Sean Connery: Captain Ramius: Once more, we play our dangerous game, a game of chess against our old adversary - macOS hardware obsolescence.

Tonight, sleep. Tomorrow, world’s best uncle.

I’m in the queue to pick up a Nintendo Switch 2 pre-order. There’s over a hundred people here. Nintendo will be around forever.

I’ll say one thing about Laurene Powell Jobs, in 2020 she said she was going to donate the family fortune. "I’m not interested in legacy wealth buildings, and my children know that,” she added. “Steve wasn’t interested in that. If I live long enough, it ends with me." I raised an eyebrow at that …

The Bonfire of the Vanities: The Devil’s Candy doesn’t need a review. People set out with the best intentions and a lot of money. They made an unloved movie from a popular novel. That’s it. But I’ll mention that Melanie Griffith puts in a better performance in film version of The Bonfire of the Vanities than Tom Hanks or Bruce …

Today I finished reading the 30th anniversary edition of The Devil’s Candy, covering the torturous filming of Brian De Palma’s “The Bonfire of the Vanities.” While the movie is a dud with fun moments, nothing in this book screamed it was a fiasco. I’ll rewatch the movie before I review the book.

Season 2 of Andor shows you how good Star Wars should be. The World War II occupied France storyline. How ambitious people can slide towards hideous acts. The timeline compression that keeps the story moving. All the episodes work.

I took my nephew into a Warhammer store for the first time. But my mother was with us. Proving you can never be too young or too old to learn about the grim dark future.

This won’t go well. This does raise a question: is Dark Sun coming back? One of the big reasons that WotC gave for not releasing the Mystic or the Psion was that there was no book for it to accompany. Source: Bell of Lost Souls Dark Sun is a post ecological collapse setting where social stigma, …

The Phoenician Scheme: A stronger entry than Asteroid City, but it’s smaller scale than The French Dispatch. It’s a three-hander film where the interplay of three characters drives the narrative. Benicio del Toro gives a charismatic performance as magnate Zsa-Zsa Korda. A shrewd entrepreneur of strategic foresight who is …

Moving day from Typepad has completed and it’s over now. Except for DNS propagation and SSL cert autoupdates. Both of which are like air travel; you have no control, so sit back and assume you’ll get to your destination eventually.

When The Going Was Good by Graydon Carter: I finished reading Graydon Carter’s memoir “When The Going Was Good” last weekend. Committed to getting the most value out of the least amount of personal effort, he succeeded. Carter’s lazy ambition is impressive. I couldn’t guess to how many hours of the week he spent eating at some work related …

Until Dawn: Horror movies done well are cheap to make, pack in viewers and make much more money than they cost. The good ones leave an impression. Neither "Death of a Unicorn" nor "Drop" left enough of an impression for me to write a review but Until Dawn is different because it doesn't try to adapt the source …

The Monkey: This movie is a surreal and absurd look at death. Deaths so terrible that sometimes you can only laugh. It doesn’t make you uncomfortable, nor does it look to hit you with jump scares. It’s a typical cursed MacGuffin movie that knows its to be laughed at no matter how high the body count gets. …

The Gorge: Two charismatic leads can carry a lot. Anya Taylor-Joy and Miles Teller are two charismatic leads and the burden they carry is the flimsy story of this movie. There is a mist filled gorge somewhere where two concrete observation towers face each other from opposing sides. Opposed geographically and …

The Last Dangerous Visions. Edited By Harlan Ellison.: By the time I had read Harlan Ellison’s work, his talent had deserted him. A lifelong career isn’t guaranteed, but watching one’s career fade must be a terrifying, waking nightmare. The Last Dangerous Visions, the irrevocable part of a once ground breaking trilogy of short story collections, …

Wolf Man: Vampires one week, werewolves the next. Unlike the highly cinematic Nosferatu, Wolf Man is merely a good-looking streaming movie. It could be psychological scarring from Covid, but monstrosity because of disease has taken root in the mind of horror writers. In fiction, lycanthropy has been …

Nosferatu: There’s a silver undertone to this movie that reminds me of vintage black & white film stock. But then everything about this movie is looking to remind you of something vintage. Once again, a couple opposes a personification of evil. A misshapen, diseased creature of catastrophic power. Of the …

The Godfather Part II (4K UHD): If you want to tell a good story about a man, show him fail. He can recover but there needs to be a journey into darkness. Part II of the Godfather trilogy is Michael Corleone’s journey into darkness. By the end of the movie he’s lost his wife, his mother, the trust of his adopted brother and his …

Secret Level: Episodes 1 to 8.: While lacking a 6’ tall sword wielding heroine in boob armour riding on a flying reptile, Secret Level still gives off Heavy Metal movie vibes. This is a character driven show that has to hook you fast. Some episodes are less than 15 minutes long. Stories with famous actors get a bit more time, but …

Like a Dragon: Yakuza. Episodes 1 to 3: Are “honourable criminals” lying to themselves? Is servitude worse than death? Less a criminal drama and more a criminal soap opera Prime Video’s Yakuza has thoughts on these questions. Focusing on four orphans, two male and two female, on the cusp of leaving their orphanage the four protagonists …

Megalopolis: I commend Francis Ford Coppola for taking an idea he wanted to do for 40 years, putting his money into it and bringing it to the screen. But this is an experimental movie overstuffed with his fancies which does not resonate with an audience. He brought it to life through his will, but he is the …

Joker: Folie à Deux: This doesn't work as a musical or a villain movie but it held my attention for most of its running time. The massive flaw in the production is that it's not supposed to be this horrific a musical. The wasted life is a goldmine for an operatic performance. That's what Arthur Fleck's (Joaquin Phoenix) …

The Substance: The Substance About 25 minutes into The Substance we're introduced to Sue. A younger version of Demi Moore's network television fitness goddess. It's a writhing in pain, blood-stained introduction. I sat there in the dark and thought to myself, "The third act is going to be wild." It was. Because …

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice: A female-centric movie for the Wednesday Addams audience, this film is overstuffed and unfocused. The team seem afraid of never getting another shot at this. So, they crammed as many plot ideas as they could into the running time. Some of it works. Some of it doesn’t. The Deetz women are not having …

Terminator Zero: Terminator Zero Few sci-fi franchises are as limited as The Terminator. It’s not like it has anything novel to say about AI or humanity's hubris. Humans unknowingly reach the pinnacle of their culture and creativity. They are then sent back to scrambling in the dirt for survival after that culture …

The Rings of Power: Season 2, Episodes 1 to 3: Is it better than season 1? Yes. Will it bring back the audience it lost after its meandering first season? No. The superchat farmers on YouTube say nothing has changed. But there are improvements. The issue is that this show’s story arc is set and has to build on the dull foundation of season 1. …

The Crow. (2024): This movie is cinematic depression. Not that it makes the viewer feel hopeless, worthless and low in energy. But what the audience watches is a hopeless, worthless and low energy movie. Putting aside Brandon Lee's ability to stir..feelings..in generations of teenage Goth girls who have discovered …

Alien Romulus: I liked it. This is a well-made popcorn horror movie. It is not interested in big ideas. It's about tension. Alien was a movie about skilled labour in a claustrophobic jump scare-filled small space with a monster. Aliens brings in corporatism, adds a larger space and more monsters. Prometheus is …

Borderlands: It isn't that this movie is terrible, it's that it gets boring. The Borderlands series is darkly irreverent. It's gory in a visceral "ewwwhhh" and laugh way. It's funny in a "well this will hurt" way. The movie has none of that. It's Borderlands with the life rung out of it. Yes it has the colourful …

Time Bandits: An unfortunate miss. It looks too sharp in that Doctor Who/British children's TV way. The cast doesn't gel and it lacks the dark undertones of the original movie. The absence of delight and absurdity in humour drags the production down. Some of the jokes land. But this is a show about burglars with …

Batman Caped Crusader: Season 1: Bruce Timm's Batman Caped Crusader is an iteration on the Dark Deco style of his work on Batman: The Animated Series. This like that show has a villain/monster of the week format but unlike that show Gotham itself is not a character. Bruce Wayne is good, but Hamish Linklater hasn't found Batman's …

Deadpool & Wolverine: Better than the ill thought out slop Marvel has been releasing but not close to the heights of the finest entries. There is no story to spoil and the villain is underwhelming. The only spoilers you need to beware of are cameos and pop culture jokes. This is a fan service movie on steroids for …

Twisters: The good news is dumb big budget disaster movies are back. The bad news is the same as the good news. Twisters has a lot in common with the 1996 original. The plot is nonsense, the characters are paper thin and you'll never think about the movie again after seeing it. Unlike the Jan de Bont movie …

The Boys: Season 4: With the trashed audience scores you'd be forgiven for thinking something has changed with The Boys. But the only thing that has changed is the show runner trying to distance himself from a part of his audience for his career. Here's a Stan Edgar moment. No one wearing a red hat can damage that …

Interview with the Vampire: Season 2: This is one of the better fiction series currently airing. A reworking of the novel of the same name, and drawing from Anne Rice's body of work, a wonderful sense of unease flows from the screen. This isn't a show that tries to be clever, it is clever. It can also be funny, dreadful, supernatural …

The Acolyte.: This is a kids show. The plot nor the characters have any sophistication and the story operates on a level just above a 90s television sitcom. Instead of twin sisters separated at birth and reunited as teenagers it's twin sisters separated as children and reconciled in their early twenties. Neither …

The Fall Guy: A stunt show movie as flimsy as an empty bucket of popcorn but it has a summer romantic comedy charm. It's very early 2000s in its Hollywood commentary. That kills the momentum after the first hour as it is not presented well enough to hold interest. For what the producers were looking to do it …

Late Night with the Devil.: What do you want and how much do you want it? That's the question faced by the horrified guests on "Night Owls with Jack Delroy." Delroy (David Dastmalchian) has everything a successful talk show host needs. He's articulate, comfortable bantering with the audience and has a comfortable rapport with …

Fallout.: The spaghetti western turns post-apocalyptic in this high-budget production of a gritty tale. We have cringe-worthy but endearing optimists. Antiheroes whose cruelty disfigures them more on the inside than radiation has on the outside. Striving zealots of gleaming order and anarchic savages who'll …

Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire: This is the dumbest movie in a franchise that includes the brainless Godzilla: King of The Monsters. Kaiju fights are awesome. Everybody knows this. Even if you don't know it you do. But this movie is so dumbly dense it's a Saturday morning cartoon playing in the heart of a neutron star. When we …

Road House: Road House is stupid and enjoyable. I'd watch a sequel. When we first see a ripped Jake Gyllenhaal his character comes across as one of life's losers. Why this man, Elwood Dalton, with his warrior's physique is so unmoored from existence is the mystery in the early part of the film. He is not doing …

Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire: This is a streaming movie. It didn't start out as a streaming movie but that's what made it to the screen. While I enjoyed its prequel, Afterlife, this doesn't build on its strengths. If there is a third movie, I fear the performance of this movie may not justify that expense, the cast needs to …

Dune Part Two.: Is this an exciting movie to see on a cinema screen? Yes. Is the movie and the actors' performances overhyped? Also yes. Dune Part 2 is exactly what you need from the second half of a story but it feels less...grand. The universe building was in the first movie and besides a glance at Kaitian, home …

Shōgun. Episodes 1 & 2.: A luscious-looking adaptation of Clavell's 1975 novel FX's Shōgun is a worthwhile watch. You can tell there's money on the screen when the doomed ship Erasmus emerges from the fog. It looks like an oil on canvas painting. While the Samurai tropes are long exhausted, 17th century Japan at this scale …