My vacation was very relaxing, thank you for asking. I sat on the beach and did very little all week besides reading and eating. A thing in my possession: a mini pc I've been interested in these small form factor PCs that have been popping up in the last few years. Their closest progenitor is probably the Mac Mini, in that they're all very small form factor boxes designed to sit on your desk and be a fully functioning computer. Most of them have a footprint of something less than six inches by six inches, and rarely more than half that in height. These aren't like the Raspberry Pi and similar Single Board computers at the ultra-low end of the spectrum, but rather designed to be capable enough to run real operating systems and function as your daily driver for most people. They're not overwhelmingly powerful (in general) but are good enough. There are some that can be pretty beefy, with higher end gaming capabilities, but those become much more expensive and at the relative price point you can get a lot more bang for your buck going with a traditional tower.
I started looking at them because I was thinking about what should replace my apple TV 3rd generation when it finally goes kaput. I was lamenting how most couch-based tv boxes have terrible UIs and tend to be unitaskers when you get down to it. I thought it would be cool to have a device that could switch between being a Streaming box, but also do things like access my Steam library, so I could play some of my older/lower-requirements games from the couch. Steam even has a couch mode, called Big Picture, which is designed to be controlled with a gaming controller rather than a mouse and keyboard. Sadly there doesn't seem to be a device that merges the two together. You want remote friendly streaming apps? You have to have a roku or apple tv or amazon fire TV. You want to play one (1) video game that wasn't first designed for a mobile interface? You need a full featured OS. Steam OS, which runs on the Steamdeck handheld computers, is close, but if you want to stream something you're basically stuck running the service through a browser.
But after some research, I went ahead and bought one anyway. Mostly what I learned from the research is that at any given price point they're all pretty similar, so I found one that was good enough in my budget and hit the buy button. I also had to buy a handheld keyboard/trackpad, so I could control the thing from the couch when I wasn't in Steam, but that was easy enough and a relatively small expense. I've had it hooked up to my TV for a while and since my apple TV is still working fine, I haven't been using it to stream, but my hopes were correct in that it's nice to play some games from my couch. The one I've put the most time into while testing is probably Super Retro Retry which is a delightful and challenging platformer with 100 single screen levels in a variety of difficulties, served to you randomly. Any mistake will kill you and send you back to start over, so the meat of the game is learning the levels, and hoping you get a good run.
Poorly organized thoughts on: Blue Sky era tv shows There was a period in the early 2000s where the cable channel USA cultivated a particular brand of TV shows. They were relatively light takes on fairly common procedural formats, often defined by a strong central character. In the mystery/cop show genre you had Monk, White Collar and Psych, Royal Pains was a medical Procedural, Burn Notice and Covert Affairs were different variations on the Spy show, and Suits was a legal drama. There's probably a few I'm missing, but these were all part of what was called the Blu Sky era of USA. You might also remember it by the slogan "Characters Welcome." And while the slogan was from USA, the style wasn't limited strictly to that channel. There were shows like Leverage or Rizzoli & Isles on TNT and Warehouse 13 nd Eureka on the channel formerly known as Sci-Fi that had a very similar vibe. But you'd be hard pressed to find anything like that on the air today. They've mostly disappeared. And I blame one show: Breaking Bad.
In 2008 AMC premiered a show that, if you weren't paying attention, could have easily slotted into the Blue Sky genre. "He's a science teacher, but also a criminal mastermind" feels like a twist on the "he's x but y" of frankly a lot of those shows. He's a psychic detective, but it's fake; he's practicing law, but he's a fake lawyer; he's a spy, but cut off from all his resources. It even has the requisite blue sky in the promo materials. Top that off by the lead being played by comic actor Bryan Cranston, and it seems like a natural fit. Of course Breaking Bad didn't turn out to be light and silly (although you could be fooled by the pilot,) Instead it became dark and haunting and frankly one of the best TV shows of it's era. But it also set the tone for so much of what drama tv shows would become. If you weren't paying attention when it happened, I don't know that you understand or remember how much the TV landscape was bent around the success of Breaking Bad. It launched dozens of imitators and the new TV shows coming out now still bear hallmarks of its style. I don't think you could get Yellowstone and it's murderous ranchers without Breaking Bad. Other shows also contributed to the sea change in TV (Lost and Game of Thrones, to name a couple) but I think Breaking Bad was the tipping point.
But as TV became darker and grittier in a race to see who could make the most despicable leading man anti-hero, the light and fluffy shows slowly started disappearing. It wasn't immediate, but now, sixteen years after the start of Breaking Bad, there's not much to be found that could be called a Blue Sky show. Of course TV has changed in a lot of other ways, too with the rise of streaming (on the back of complex dramas in the style of Breaking Bad, one could argue,) to shorter seasons (doctor who went from 13, already short in 2004 to 8 in the latest season airing now) and a perceived hunger from audiences for long season-plus story arcs instead of episodic episodes.
Now I don't think this will last forever, and TV has been known to cycle back to older ideas before, but I don;t have a lot of hope that it'll be happening soon. I have been trying to find currently airing shows that fit the bill and I have found a couple, but they're hardly trend setters. Resident Alien, is a goofy fun time about an alien hiding out as a town doctor in a small Colorado town, and Elsbeth is a mystery show that is a throwback in more ways than one. There's also the recently cancelled So Help Me Todd where's it's deviation from the standard TV norms was it's own downfall (In my opinion.) Hopefully we'll get some more. And maybe we'll even get lucky enough for a 24 episode season. But I'm not holding my breath on that one.
Stuff I'm watching The Star Trek: Discovery season finale aired this week. I don't have a lot of good things to say about the season or the finale. I can say my expectations were low enough that it didn't disappoint me, and that the show ended as it started, being all about Michael Burnham.
In more exciting scifi tv shows, the latest season of Doctor Who has really been killing it in the last three episodes. Russel T Davies back as the showrunner and Ncuti Gatwa as The Doctor are a marvelous pairing. The first couple episodes after the Christmas Special were fine if not great, but the last three episodes have been solid bangers. It's also being treated as a whole new show, so you can absolutely jump on here if you've not watched Doctor Who before, or not in a long time. It's made me excited about Doctor Who in a way I haven't been for a while.
