Review: The Sandman (Season 1)

 I don't have a Netflix subscription so I didn't watch The Sandman when it debuted on Netflix. Between when it debuted and when I was about to cave and subscribe just to watch it, the local library flagged it as being ready for pickup by me!

I thought Tom Sturridge made for a great Morpheus, getting the expressions right, especially the glare he had when he was trapped in the prison. I enjoyed the recasting of Lucifer as Gwendoline Christie. I enjoyed the rewriting of John Constantine as Johanna Constantine. I thought Kirby Howell Baptiste wasn't perky enough for a depiction of the best representation of Grandmother Death in literature.

So the cast was great. The look was good, but given the amount of money spent on the series ($15M per episode) I found myself wondering whether various people were lining their pockets unduely. I expected jaw dropping visuals and those were far and few between. It didn't look like a $15M per episode series.

In general, I liked the story changes such as making Lyta and Hector no longer being former super-heroes. I thought that rather than "A Dream of A Thousand Cats" they should have depicted the story of Nada instead, but those are rather minor. For instance, I thought the Hob Gadling episode didn't add much back when it was a comic book series and don't think much of it now.

I'm very glad that the showrunner chose to do the series at a fairly brisk pace, approximately 2-3 issues per episode. Would I pay for a Netflix subscription to watch it? Sure. Would I go out of my way to watch it? Probably not, despite being a massive Sandman fan. What the show did tell me though is that while reading the books, I thought that the short stories (A Dream of A Thousand Cats, for instance) were much better than the longer story arcs, in a TV show the longer story arcs made for much better depiction.

If you've never read the Sandman the show is definitely worth watching. In this case, the TV show is almost (if not quite) as good as the book.

Review: Netflix's The Witcher

I came to the Netflix series having read a number of the books and played The Witcher 3 all the way to the end.  The series essentially adapts a number of stories from The Last Wish, and one of the best things about that first book was that it retold a number of familiar western fairy tales with a twist, such as Snow White, or Beauty and the Beast. Sure, there's an over-arching plot, but that wasn't at the forefront of that first series of short stories. (To be honest, the video game does a much better job than the books of giving you a plot that's coherent) I was suprised that the Snow White story didn't get played up as much as it was in the original.

The series deviates from the book in giving Yennefer an origin story that's not bad, but also doesn't provide any of the little twists that would have been in character from the books (or the video game, whose writers did an amazing job of providing plots that were entirely inline with the books).  The sword play and choreography is well done, though not so good whenever CGI monsters are in play. The CGI is not of a high quality and will age the worst.

Episodes 4 and 6 are the best of the series in providing the sort of twists that the stories in the book are known for, while episode 3 is the classic opening sequence that everyone knows from the first video game, and is well done enough that if this was your exposure to the story it's worth watching. The episodes are only loosely connected (yes, there are 3 timelines being told simultaneously, and the plot doesn't mark what order the timelines are in).

In any case, the TV series is a successful adaptation, and sets up for a second season well. I'd recommend viewing it.

Review: Magicians Season 3

Continuing on from Magicians Season 2, Season 3 focuses on the restoration of magic. In the mean time, we get various subplots involving fairies, subquests, how rulers are determined in Filory, and timeline jumping, all of which could have served to make the season unwatchable and confusing but the writers somehow managed to avoid all the traps.

Some of the plots of the episode are quite annoying, including one that might as well have been a “It was all a dream” story.  For the most part, however, the execution of each story is well done, including an episode that ended with “Under Pressure” performed by the cast.

Everything comes to a head at the end of the season, with multiple members of the story (all of whom have been working as a team for the most part) all running their own plots. Ultimately, the season ends with a cliffhanger that leaves as many questions as it answers but is still more exciting than the books the series is based on. I’ll look forward to picking up the next season to see if the level of writing and plot execution continues to be superb.

Review: Gatchaman Complete Collection

I grew up in Singapore watching Gatchaman II (in dubbed Taiwanese translation, with the opening and closing songs stripped!), but was probably pre-TV when SBC had started broadcasting the original Gatchaman, so when I saw that BestBuy had the complete Blu Ray collection on a sale for under $40, I picked it up. I didn't expect either Bowen or Boen to be captivated by it, but Boen loved the show, so we've been watching it every so often and are now about half-way through the series.

The physical package has all sorts of details that are only impressive if you're a comic book fan. For instance, the painted box cover and the individual box disc covers (there are 3 boxes, 2 with 6 Blu Rays and 1 with 2) are done by American artist Alex Ross. Ross grew up with the American bastardized version, Battle of the Planets, and had never seen any episode in its original form prior to this set being put together, so there's an interview on the specials disc with him explaining how that art came to be and how he came to be involved, as well as a few  brief seconds of his reaction to his first exposure to the original TV show!

Let's talk about the show proper, since I've already previously reviewed the Gatchaman OAV, which was terrible. First of all, it's a Japanese show from the 1970s. Computers are huge mainframe sized creatures with tape drives, and the fashion is also fairly obvious, with bell bottoms. But more importantly, the Japanese at that time (and probably still don't) have any objections to killing and other such violence for kids TV. So the Science Ninja Team don't just karate-chop their opponents into unconsciousness, they'll run over them with cars, slash them with boomerang weapons, blow them up with explosive yoyos, and poison or kill them with feather shurikens. (Come on, they are Ninjas!) No wonder the Americans felt like they had to dial it back. (Note that despite this heavy dose of TV violence, Japan was and still is a much safer place to be a human many decades later, indicating that fantasy violence has nothing to do with real violence --- both my kids know this)

The parenting norms have also changed. One of the characters, Ken, has a father who disappeared off to do a secret mission, faking his death, leaving others to tell him that he's dead. He reappears as the mentor figure Red Impulse, but of course this isn't revealed to Ken until a critical moment whereupon his father sacrifices himself to save the planet. Bowen didn't find this believable or acceptable, but when I was a kid it seemed plausible. Absent fathers no longer seem plausible to little kids, making me wonder what current parenting behaviors will be considered unacceptable by the time Bowen's an adult.

The animation is rough at the start of the show but steadily improves all throughout the show. (The show ran for 105 episodes!) Bowen asked me, "What's different about Gatchaman?" My response was: "Stinky and Dirty is great, but you can watch the episodes out of order or even backwards and your experience wouldn't differ very much. Gatchaman is like a novel - you can't watch it backwards or it wouldn't make any sense!"  The show, like almost all Asian TV at the time, has a long story arc (the first one took about 50 episodes to cover), and is full of state: characters change, including our understanding of their relationships, and you're expected to have watched the entire series in order, with very little of each episode spent in recap (which is good - each episode is only 25 minutes long!). For  your reference, the adult TV shows my parents were watching seemed all adapted from long form narrative novels as well, for instance Louis Cha's  天龍八部 would run for 50 episodes. I believe that having early exposure to long form narrative is good for building attention span, but I have no proof to back up that assertion.

As the name implies, there is science in the series. In one of the episodes, a monster that only eats women is revealed to do so because it has an allergy to the Y-chromosome in men. Bowen asked me if chromosomes really exist after that. In another, the Van-Allen belt is the target of the villain's machinations. There's a surprising number of references to eco-friendly/sustainable building methods and lifestyles for a show that was built in the 1970s. Geothermal, nuclear, and other alternative energy sources are discussed (and of course, destroyed by mecha monsters created by the bad guys). Not every episode had a science behind it, and in fact early episodes were clumsy, with the solutions being provided by Professor Nambu who gives the team orders.

And of course, that's the weak spot of the whole series. As a kid having an International Science Organization that runs the world seemed like the way to go, but it's pretty funny to think of scientists having enough budget and power nowdaays to have all those secret bases and fancy projects at the same time while running not one, but two commando-style para-military teams with all the fancy planes, missiles and offensive weaponry.

It's also clear that the creators of the show got exposure to American superhero comics, but didn't have the language skills to comprehend the plot, so had all sorts of irrationality built into the series that are never explained or simply don't make sense. For instance, if the Science Ninja Team was employed by the ISO, why did they have secret identities and jobs? It's clear that all the trappings of a super-hero story was there, but it didn't make much sense, since the Science Ninja Team is more like a special-forces military team than a superhero team. It's just a weird carryover.

Anyway, the show's fun, draws kids attention (but beware the violence if your memories are from the sanitized American version), and has interesting attributes not available in even some of the best American kids shows today. I'm pretty sure my kids will watch it all the way to finish, as will I.

Review: The Magicians Season 2

The Magicians Season 2 keeps going where the cliff-hanger from season one ends. There are TV series that will drag the action out, but in this one, the reveals come fast and furious as one deity is killed off while a demi-god is being revealed. There's maybe a tiny bit of slackening of pace in the middle, but the show is not afraid to deviate from the books.

The story overall is well-written enough and full of twists and surprises that it more than overcomes the bad acting and less than excellent special effects prevalent in the entire show. There's not a lot of pussy-footing and the show ends with a crisis/cliff-hanger to keep you watching into Season 3.

Recommended.

How Alexa captured me as a customer and dragged me into the post smartphone era

I can clearly remember when I knew I'd been captured by Garmin as a customer: it was when I bought their stupendously expensive Smart Scale, which I still use every day. I had a similar epiphany last week, when I started using Alexa on my Moto X4 instead of Google Assistant.

Here's what happened. During Prime Day, I snagged an Audible membership for about $5/month for 3 months. I used it to buy several audio books, all of which were quite long. Google Assistant can start Audible, but for whatever reason it's unable to tell it to resume playing the last book I was listening to. Alexa on the Moto X4, however, not only can do that, but can also fetch the book I want to listen to by title and resume at the last known point. I took a look at the app and to my surprise, what the Alexa app on Android phone doesn't do is to start Audible and start the book, but instead, directly streams the audio from Amazon's server by itself without starting that app! Not only does this mean I don't need to have the Audible app (I do anyway so that I can cache books on the SD card), the latency is also much lower than having Google Assistant start the Google Music app and have it start playing. I haven't tried, but I'm pretty sure the Alexa app also streams music directly without starting the Amazon music app.

I shouldn't have been surprised, but because of my history working for Google and using Google products, I knew that in a million years, no Google product manager would take this approach. I systematically broke down how I ended up with no less than 3 Alexa products in regular use: the Fire TV Cube, the Echo Dot, and now my Moto X4. The Echo Dot was the easiest to explain: it was so Bowen could listen to audio books (again, from Audible).

The Fire TV Cube turned out to be a great entertainment center control device, and now replaces our Logitech Harmony Smart Control Hub, which I sold. Google doesn't have an equivalent unit, because to have one would be to acknowledge that other devices exist outside the Google eco-system, which apparently is a no-no, leading to the elimination of the headphone jack/audio output port from not just Google's phones, but also the Google Home smart speaker series of devices. Which meant that the nice speakers in the living room are now "owned" by Alexa, and so my wife added an Amazon Music subscription, even though all my personal music was sync'd to Google Music. Doubling down on higher end audio, Amazon is even launching an amplifier that supports Alexa.

Similarly, I ended up using Amazon Photos for RAW photo backup, because it was already folded into the Amazon Prime subscription, which bundled in TV shows for the kids that are turning out to be very good. And because of that Prime subscription (as well as the huge collection of books on Amazon), we now have 2 Fire HD8 tablets that the kids use as general purpose Android tablets as well as just video streaming.

I scratched my head as to how Amazon ended up with me as a loyal customer despite my background, and I realized that this was where Amazon's product design/product managers trumped Google's superior engineering. Sure, Alexa is not bilingual, while Google Home/Voice Assistant is. But since all that speech recognition is done in the cloud anyway, I'm comfortable waiting for Amazon to implement it eventually (or if it doesn't, we've learned to live with the limitations). But not having a device that can hook up to our entertainment system meant that Google Home speakers was never in the running for the living room. You can't upgrade hardware that doesn't have the proper I/O channels, while you can easily upgrade software in the cloud!

Similarly, not having a decent e-book reader meant that the default e-book reader of choice was always the Amazon Kindle, which has superb integration for my favorite book vendor of choice, the local library. And ever since Google abandoned the low end Nexus 7 tablets in pursuit of Apple-like prices (and presumably profit-margins) for Android tablets, that meant that the tablets would default to Amazon's ecosystem as well, since no one else is selling decent tablets at $50 each.

What would I do if I was a Google product manager trying to counter this onslaught? There are probably some things Google will never do, like produce a decent e-reader, so that's probably out. But bringing back a decent low-end Android tablet is probably something Google can do, since it has done so in the past. I'd bundle Google's services: Google shopping express, Youtube Red (or whatever it's called), Google Drive storage/Google Docs should all be bundled in together in one price. Put out a Fire TV Cube equivalent with sufficient control for other devices in the living room (an I/R blaster is enough) Even all that might not be enough, but at least it would make it feel like Google is trying. As it is, it definitely feels like Google doesn't have a coherent, integrated strategy where everything fits together, while Amazon does (and at a very high value to price ratio!). Google's strategy feels like a company that's chasing after Apple's customers, but with none of the integration, social prestige, and marketing prowess that Apple puts into its efforts.

Review: Agent Carter Season 1

Agent Carter got stellar reviews, and came up on Woot for $8 shipped. I figured it was a low risk, and at 8 episodes, wouldn't be an excessive burn on time. I was right on both counts, but hadn't figured out the biggest issue with reviews of TV shows.

Reviewers don't watch the entire TV show in order to review a series. They watch at most a couple of episodes, and then provide that impression. Agent Carter's first couple of episodes are decent. They're decent not because of the plot (which is dumb and uninspired) or the acting (which is reasonable), but because of the image quality, set, and beautiful people involved. In addition, the writing is very feminist, illustrating all the issues with being a woman in the 1940s and 50s trying to make it in a male dominated profession.

That's great. But that's not enough to carry even a short 8-episode show. As a result, after about 4 episodes you feel like even the mediocre plot is being dragged out an d stretched far beyond what could be done, and by the end of the series you feel a complete lack of drama and tension: the fight scenes are short, nothing like the fabulous ones seen in Daredevil. I can see why even though the show was a critical darling it couldn't draw (and keep) a long term audience.

Not recommended.

Review: Vizio Smartcast M70-E3

The renter wanted a TV in the rental unit, and was willing to pay for it, so we gave them our old TV, and went shopping for a new one. Costco had a highly reviewed Vizio M70-E3 for under $1000 with a 5 year warranty, so I bought it and brought it home with help from Costco's employees loading into the tiny car.

Replacing our older 60" TV, the newer device had feet spread further apart, so it barely fit on the TV stand. Unlike the older TV unit, the smart TV features built into this one is actually worth using! It happily streamed Amazon Prime video, YouTube, and Netflix without breaking a sweat, and the latency was relatively low. This meant that there was no need to get a streaming TV unit like the Roku or FireTV to go with it.

To my disappointment, there doesn't seem to be a lot of HDR content available from my favorite streaming service, which is Amazon Prime Video. And of course, even 4K streaming probably won't hold a candle to the higher bandwidth of BluRay or Ultra BluRay HD. I did watch Blue Planet II on it, and the picture quality is impeccable even without paying for the Ultra HD version, indicating that the 4K upscaling is very well done.

When I decided on a HDR source, the obvious two choices were the XBox One X or the Playstation 4 Pro. If I didn't already own a PS4, I would probably have gone with the XBox One X, since that came with a UHD Blu Ray player built in. But with several years of PS4 content (much of which is actually HDR compatible), and the availability of the Spider-man PS4 Pro edition at a reasonable price (i.e., not the $550 that it's going for on the open market now), I went for the PS4 Pro. This turned out to be a good move, as the game that's bundled in with that unit was astonishingly good, and it's very useful to have cloud save enabled portability for the game to move between living room and bedroom.

HDR + 4K is a very subtle change from 1080p. I played the game both on the Vizio M70 and on an ancient 1080p LG TV hooked up to a PS4 (non-pro). Since the two TVs were in separate rooms, it was impossible to make side-by-side comparisons of picture quality. The Vizio unit driven by the PS4 Pro was subtly better, but I'd be hard pressed to point out the exact places in the picture where HDR was making a difference. Insomniac Studios did such a great job making the two versions equivalent that I could detect no frame-rate or gameplay difference between the two systems, despite the viewing distance I used for the 1080p TV being much less than the viewing distance I used for the 4K HDR TV. Both units were equally immersive and beautiful, but if you spend a lot of time playing on the 4K unit, you'll go back to the 1080p TV and realize that it's quite a bit dimmer, and the sunsets just don't look as nice. The picture is also not as sharp. But it's nowhere as big a jump in quality as the introduction of DVD players was, for instance.

Because of limitations of the human eye (which by the way, is not universally applicable, since my brothers and I all have better than 20/20 vision when corrected with glasses), the general consensus is that for most American living rooms, any screen less than 70" is a waste of time for 4K. But HDR is a significant improvement and does make for a gorgeous display with content that drives it. My hope is in the future we'll get more content with HDR and it will make a significant improvement in the viewing experience. In the mean time, I'm not convinced that even in 2018, it would be worth upgrading a 1080p unit to 4K. Since the prices are now comparable to equivalent 1080p screens however, if you're buying new you might as well get a 4K HDR unit, and this one is a good one, especially if you can find a good deal.

Recommended.

Review: Blue Planet II

BBC's Natural History unit has a well deserved reputation for being the best in the business. I'd go so far as to say that their documentaries look better than most of the multi-million dollar fictional TV series you can find, which is surprising because those TV series have the benefit of controlled studio lighting and don't have to spend multiple years hunting down footage in the wild.

Blue Planet II is part of this tradition, and is the most amazing TV series I've ever seen. When Amazon had a $10 sale on it and I had a few slow shipping credits to use, I jumped on it, and it was worth every penny. The image quality is nothing less than superb, even over streaming video, and the details are amazing, both on a 70" 4K TV and on a 42" 1080p screen.

The sequences are amazing, ranging from the grouper spawning scene to the one where the film unit caught a cuttlefish pretending to be female to sneak into a dominant alpha male's lair, and cuckolded him right before his eyes. My jaw dropped in scene after scene, which made me watch even the "making of" video that came as part of the set.

There, I continued to be blown away. For instance, the first time they tried to shoot the grouper spawning scene they failed, missing the spawning by a few hours. So they returned a year later with a big enough scuba team to get 24 hour coverage of the grouper in order to get the shot. For the "boiling seas" sequence, they first tried Australia but got unlucky to start filming at the start of El Nino. They waited 18 months before approaching the shoot by using chase helicopters and following a pod of dolphins. The TV show took 4 years to make and the results more than speak for itself.

There are several sequences where the camera got so close to the action that I thought to myself: "This must have been shot by an underwater drone. There's no way the fish let them get that close." Then you see the "making of" video and in some cases not only was it a person shooting it, in some cases the guy was free diving, not even wearing scuba gear! The skill and dedication of the unit is nothing short of amazing.

Needless to say, this TV series comes highly recommended. If you watch nothing else this year, watch this one.

Review: Fire TV Cube

For the living room, we  had an echo dot hooked up to the sound system and the harmony hub. It's great to be able to turn on everything with voice, but I didn't have a good solution for the bedroom setup.

The Fire TV Cube, however, looked like it solved the problem. You hook it up to the TV, and it has IR blasters that would control the TV, soundbar, and also do smart things like say, "Switch to Playstation" and it would set the HDMI inputs on the TV to the appropriate thing. It's even smart enough not to use its built-in speakers for music, and would be smart enough to turn on the soundbar and use it.

There are interesting limitations that I wish it didn't have. For instance, it only has a HDMI output, and doesn't have sound output (either headphone jacks or RCA output), so it can't directly output to the soundbar, forcing the device to turn on the TV to stream music to the soundbar. It doesn't have a Bluetooth hub built in, so it can't turn on or control the Playstation. Of course, to solve these problems require additional hardware, and the integrated voice control has its own problems. For instance, to turn up the volume you have to talk, which interrupts any movie you're watching.

Nevertheless, the device works for what its intended for, and works well enough that I won't be returning it. Amazon has done a good job figuring out what people want, and how to make it good enough. Recommended.

Review: The Magicians Season 1

The Magicians was a fair-to-mediocre novel by Lev Grossman billed as "Harry Potter for Adults".  That actually meant that the TV series had potential, because it's quite possible for the TV series to be better than the book.

Indeed, I appreciate almost all the changes in the TV series, except the selection of Jason Ralph as the actor for Quentin Coldwater. Ralph appears to have no emotional range, and just walks through the entire 13 episode series with a surly look on his face. He never quite sells any of the relationships Quentin has with other characters in the show. The TV series brings in many elements of the second book, The Magician King as well, which is great, because as in the book, Julia's story is far more interesting than Quentin's. She's also a much more interesting character.

The big reveals in the series are well done, and the rest of the setup (Fillory as Narnia, the visit to Antarctica) was a lot of fun. The boring part of the book was also eliminated, which is a wise decision --- alcoholism is too mundane for a TV series about fantasy.

If you've read the books, I think you'll like the TV series better. If you haven't, this is actually a fairly good TV series and worth your time.

Review: Netflix's Altered Carbon

To say that I'm a fan of Richard K Morgan is an understatement. I've bought and read everything in the Takeshi Kovacs series, including Altered Carbon. I'm not usually a fan of TV, however, so when I heard that Netflix adapted it into a TV Series, I didn't even think about using my free trial. Then some idiot signed up for Netflix using my e-mail address, essentially deciding to turn on my free trial for me.

OK, so I started watching it to see if it was any good. I'm not going to hold back from spoilers, because that's the only way a fan of the book can properly review the TV series. The big change is that Reileen Kawahara got changed from being the big bad to Kovacs' sister. That's probably done to heighten drama, but doesn't make any sense: the series depicts Kovacs going from CTAC conditioned soldier to shooting down members of his own squad, and then asks us to believe that he would RD (real death) his own sister. The actor portraying Ryker's sleeve simply wasn't good enough to convince us that Kovacs would do this.

Other changes: the Envoy training is changed from being part of the protectorate to being part of a Quellist uprising. This is of course unbelievable in and of itself, so Quell herself becomes the inventor of the sleeving technology. They also weakened the Envoy conditioning.

The latter is the worst part of the conversion in the TV series. In the novel, Kovacs is smart, and figures everything out. In the TV series, he's a reactive person who only figures anything out when he has it shoved in front of his face and it's so obvious even the dumbest person in the audience can understand it.

There are lots of tonal changes. For instance, the book is actually much more brutal and violent than the TV series (I know: if you've seen the TV series, you wonder how it could actually be worse, but the interrogation at the Wei clinic is one major example --- in the book Kovacs is sleeved into a woman's body so that the torture would be more effective, something that probably wouldn't be acceptable when shown to a mass audience). That's understandable and I'm quite OK with it.

All in all, the TV series could be seen as quite good if you haven't read the book. If you have a choice, however, read the book first. If you've already seen the TV series, go read the book. I re-read it for this review and it's a different experience and significantly better. Morgan manages to restyle Raymond Chandler for a more cynical world, and brings a unique stamp on it that's compelling reading. It might be a great mindless read, but if you pay attention, it's got much deeper themes in it that's worth your attention as well.

Review: Planet Earth II

The original Planet Earth was the must-buy BluRay demo disk that heralded the world of 1080p high resolution screens. Planet Earth II looked like it would do the same job for the UHD/4K TV set. I still haven't upgraded to 4K yet, so I simply checked out the BluRay discs from the local library, where the hold queue was surprisingly good and the discs arrived in surprisingly good shape.

One reason for not buying the series during an Amazon sale was that I was afraid that it'd be a rehash of the original. By and large, that's not turned out to be true. There are a few sequences in the rainforests and deserts episodes that were a little bit too familiar, but the rest of it felt original.

In particular, the last episode, Cities was a revelation. And it's well worth buying that one episode watch if you're not interested in the usual nature shows. Time and time again when I watch episodes in this series I'm reminded that these are the best nature photographers/cinematographers on the planet. No doubt they'll go on sale frequently and you'll get a chance to acquire them at a good price, but if you recently got a 4K/HDR set and want something to show it off this is definitely the series to get.

Review: The Flash Season 1

Modern TV series have state: in other words, you're expected to watch them from beginning to end in sequence (and that's a good thing!), and watching episodes out of sequence wouldn't work as well. As a result, my habit is to wait for a sale on the TV series and then buy them and watch them, rather than wait a week between episodes.

The Flash is, of course, the TV show about the fastest man alive. With a big budget and high production values, it's a crowd pleaser. The initial set up is fun, and all of the characters are given little twists that are a lot of fun. For instance, Barry Allen is given a highly motivating back-story (i.e., his Dad's unjustly put in jail for his mom's murder). He's also given a support group consisting of a personal doctor, a tech guy who makes his gadgets and costumes, and a coach in the form of a professor Harrison Wells. He's given a long-standing love interest, a father-figure, and a romantic rival.

All of this is weaved into a story where the appearance of super-humans is given a rationale: the origin of The Flash also turns out to have created a bunch of super-powered humans, most of whom turned out to be villains, but some of whom get spun-off into their own superheroes, including some pretty obscure ones like Firestorm, which I got a kick out of.

What I liked about the series is that the exploration of Barry Allen's powers are gradual and staged. You're never overwhelmed with the large number of things that the Flash can do, and he never has so much power that he isn't vulnerable. Most of the characters are also very sympathetic and believable. I also liked the way the end of the first season's plot wrapped up, though it also introduced all sorts of time paradoxes that's left to the next season to follow up on. I also love the color palette of the world of The Flash. It's been fashionable to do "dark, grim and gritty" super heroes in recent years, and I like how bright and optimistic Barry Allen's world is.

What I disliked about the series is the early denouement of the villain. I felt like that robbed the reveal of any dramatic impact whatsoever, and by the time Barry Allen figures out who his enemy is, I'd long reconciled myself to it and his feeling of betrayal never quite got through to me. The last episode was by far the weakest, with multiple plot holes you can pour a speedster into. Also, comic-book gobbledy-gook seems a lot more acceptable when it's on paper than when it's spoken by actors.

Nonetheless, the show's quite fun and I found myself wanting to keep watching. It's not quite Buffy, but then again, even Josh Whedon has yet to top himself on that one.

Review: Daredevil Season 1

One of the challenges of a superhero series is the expectation built up over the years from having some really great stories. For Daredevil, there's Miller & Mazzucchelli's Born Again. That story, however, stood in context of a long series, while the TV show (for whatever reason) feels obliged to tell the origin story, recasting it in a different fashion.

TV shows get much more room to deal with their subject matter: tension can be added to scenes, and longer stories get a chance to play out. With series on streaming video like Netflix, shows don't even need to have a 3 act structure to give room for commercial breaks. Towards the end of the season, the producers and directors take advantage of this to deliver 55 minute episodes instead of 45 minute episodes, which allow them to derail expectations in certain sequences while heightening the climaxes.

The chief villain in this season is Wilson Fisk (known in the comics as The Kingpin, but never gets that label here). The actor does an amazing job, portraying Fisk as a man with genuine goals and ideals and viewing himself as a good guy.  The show spends about as much time on him as it does on Matt Murdock. Daredevil himself never gets a name until right at the end, nor does he wear a costume for most of the series.

The storyline is reasonable, and the action sequences are justifiably praised by critics. The entire thing was done on a budget, but done well. The show even takes advantage of its ability to depart from the comics by killing off characters that were long standing actors in the books, adding more shock value to those who read the comics.

Is this the best superhero show on TV? I haven't watched enough shows in recent years to be able to tell you. But it's pretty good, and with the holiday discounts, enough to justify the microSD card storage space I had devoted to it while I watched in 15 minute chunks during the holidays. Recommended.

Review: The Stinky and Dirty Show

I don't usually review TV shows, but The Stinky and Dirty Show has captured Bowen, and I'm not horribly unhappy about that, so I figure I'll talk a bit about why it's special as well as tie it to why Amazon doesn't care about killing Netflix.

The premise of the show is simple: a garbage truck (Stinky) and a bulldozer (Dirty) are friends. Through the course of an episode (about 11 minutes each, with each "streaming episode" being 2 episodes joined together), the two friends encounter problems and solve them. Most of the problem-solving involves brain-storming many "what if" scenarios before settling on the correct approach. Some of them involve calling in friends who can help, and many of the solutions are found through serendipitous observations. I can't watch an episode with Bowen without saying, "Wow, what a smart show for kids!"

What's more, Bowen's been brought up on a steady diet of shows where the protagonists are female (e.g., Nausicaa, Totoro, Frozen), so it was nice to introduce some diversity and have a show that's mostly about boys (sure, the vehicles are gender neutral, but names like Stinky and Dirty typically apply to boys :-).

Incidentally, we went and checked out the books from the library (it's an indication that the show has not yet hit the mainstream yet that the books are still easily available at our local library) and the books are disappointing and much worse than the TV show. No brain-storming or problem solving to be found anywhere in the books, which aren't nearly as smart as the Amazon show. How rare!

So the show's good and recommended. But why is Amazon doing this? The big factor that drives parents to become Amazon Prime customers is diapers. I once did the math and the savings from diapers alone pay for the Amazon Prime membership. But of course, kids do eventually grow out of diapers, and so after that Amazon needs something to hook families on them. While shows like Peppa Pig are easily found on Youtube (and free if you're willing to put up with ads), unique shows like The Stinky and Dirty Show could very well drive me to keep the Amazon subscription even after the littlest one is out of diapers. Here's the thing --- parents don't have time for TV/movies (we've long cancelled our Netflix subscription). As much as I'd love to watch the new Daredevil show, I just don't have time for it. But kids not only have time to watch shows, they keep watching the same show over and over. It doesn't take too many such shows before they become a "must-have" for the parents. This makes Amazon Prime a much better value than if it's just for 2 day shipping.

Review: Mysteries of Modern Physics - Time

I started auditing the Great Courses Physics series on Time by Sean Carroll on a whim. Carroll is a physics professor at Caltech, and a great lecturer even for those of us who had a liberal arts education. For one thing, the topic is a great motivator: understanding the mysteries behind Time and the Arrow of Time, it turns out drives you wanting a better understanding of philosophy, psychology, neurobiology, cosmology, ideal gas laws, the second law of thermodynamics, Newtonian mechanics, quantum mechanics, relativity, and touches on high energy physics and of course string theory.

What astonished me was that Carroll successfully did this using minimal mathematics: he didn't even get around to PV=nRT, but still managed to explain the combinatorial expansion that drives the scientific understanding of entropy and what it means. I think it was Richard Feynman who said that "If you can't teach it to a smart undergraduate, then you don't really understand it," and Carroll's understanding and explanation more than passes the bar.

The mystery behind time, it turns out, isn't that it exists, but that there's a directionality to it. Since physics equations don't actually manifest an arrow of time, we're left with trying to explain it, but Carroll points out that ultimately, the question isn't "why is entropy going to go up tomorrow?", but "why was the entropy lower yesterday, and even lower the day before that", and so forth all the way until the moment of the Big Bang.

Along the way, Carroll takes us through a grand tour of modern physics, touching from gas laws, Boltzman's equation, and quantum mechanics as well as modern cosmology. It's a lot of fun. If physics had been taught with as much energy, literacy, and fun at my high school, I might have been a more interested and motivated student of the subject. And yes, he'll also address questions like: "Why am I always late?", and "Does time really start flowing faster as you get older?"

So yes, watch the series, or forget the video and just listen to it as you drive/hike/run errands. If you've been exposed to the material before, it'll be a great refresher, but if not, I can assure you that the presentation is much lighter and less intimidating than say, Lisa Randall's book. Recommended!

Review: Macross

Years ago, I wrote a review of the Macross TV series. I wanted to hyperlink to it recently while writing another review, but realized that it came from an old website which I never updated and has now been lost in time. So I'm reposting this review. Macross was one of the best shows out and still holds up well today, and it turns out that my AnimEigo set is now a collector's item. Who knew?


Introduction
I first saw Macross when I was a kid of about 15 in Singapore, rushing home from school every Thursday evening to try to catch the latest episode, which had been dubbed into Mandarin by the Taiwanese. My brother recently got a DVD player, borrowed the entire TV series (36 episodes) from his friend Jason, and we watched it all over again, this time in the original Japanese with Chinese subtitles. What a difference 13 years make!

Macross is a girl’s story
For some reason, when you’re a kid, you don’t notice that Macross is really a girl’s story. Sure, it’s got giant transforming robots. It’s also got space batttles, lots of neat gadgets, and a cool science fiction plot that stands up even to adult scrutiny (well, the corny parts of the science fiction plot are motivated by the romantic bent of the whole series). But the heart and soul of Macross is the romance between the main characters. Nobody’s motivated by anything else!

The plot revolves around 3 main characters. Hikaru Ichijou, a boy pilot who grows up eventually to be a squadron leader, Linn Minmei (also spelled Lynn MinMay), a school girl of about 16 who wins a beauty contest and goes on to become a pop singer, and Misa Hayase (a good translation might be Lisa Hayes, which the American "Robotech" uses), a flight controller/battle coordinator for the ship, Macross. Of course, there’s a love triangle between them, and how the interaction between the characters play out and whom Hikaru eventually decides in favor of presents the series with its romantic climax. To give you an idea of how unimportant the military climax was, it occurs fully 8 episodes before the end of the series, to give the creators more time to focus on what was obviously dear to their hearts. The science fiction elements of the plot are discussed elsewhere (see below for a collection of links to various home pages), so I won’t go into them in detail.

So, ok, Macross is a trashy romance/soap opera. But if all soap operas were like this I’d watch them. None of the characters are stilted or artificial. Hikaru seems like a dork at times, but he does wake up to his situations and corrects himself. Lynn Minmei seems like your stereotypical cute airhead at first, but even she has to suffer the consequences of her decisions and becomes a stronger person. Misa Hayase seems like a rigid, strictly military person, but she suffers from her own bouts of insecurities and when she eventually gives in to her feelings becomes such a sympathetic character that you find yourself rooting for her. Nobody’s a bad guy (or a bad girl), and character development is handled consistently and with great care. Everybody has to suffer a little in order to grow up, and the primary characters in Macross are not immune to suffering. A common theme seems to be that the characters have to let go of their desires in order to deserve what they desire. But unlike the morality plays you see in Saturday morning cartoons, these themes are handled very subtly (so subtly that they were lost on me, of course, when I was a kid).

How has Macross aged over the last 15 years for me personally? What I’ve found is that the situations I found myself in over the last 10 years or so were in some ways paralleled in Macross. There are lots of little touches, like in the ambiguous way Minmei treats Hikaru throughout most of the series was something I’ve encountered in the Asian dating scene. It is entirely possible that if you're not familiar with how Asian-Asian dating works a very few of the cultural cues might not work for you. There are some poignant moments, like the time when Misa Hayase waits a whole day at a road side café for Hikaru, who shows up in the evening after being much delayed. While Misa is waiting, a little friendly dog comes up to her and she looks at him and says, "Hey, you’re alone too." She picks him up and starts feeding him but in the middle of it the dog’s owner (a little girl that we can’t quite see) shouts the dog’s name from across the street and the dog leaps out of Misa’s arms and bounds towards the little girl. Hikaru shows up right after that and the parallels that the preceding scene has with Misa's relationship with Hikaru and Minmei just about broke my heart. These quiet scenes become by far the most powerful ones. They have a haunting quality that sticks with you even after you’re done watching the series.

While technology mostly stays in the background, the characters in Macross are facile with it, and use it naturally as part of day-to-day life. In one episode, for instance, as Hikaru escorts Misa's shuttle towards Earth, he sends a farewell message to her by signalling (in Morse code) with the wing-tip lights on his fighter.

There are quite a number of corny scenes however. Given the series' preoccupation with romance, it shouldn't surprise you that characters find themselves working through their issues while bombs are literally falling around them. But then again, I've already told you that Macross is a trashy romance, haven't I?

One of the things I missed watching the series in Singapore was the end title credits. The end credit sequence shows a helmet, and a photo album. A hand moves in and turns the photo album’s pages, revealing photographs of Minmei, and Minmei and Hikaru. The helmet is a standin for Hikaru’s pilot’s helmet, but what you don’t realize is that the hand moving the photo album isn’t Hikaru’s (the helmet doesn't belong to Hikaru, either)! The scene shows up 28 episodes into the series. The final episode ends with a freeze-frame, and a hand turns the page over to the end of the photo album while the caption comes up "2012: So long!", giving one a sense of closure about the story as a whole. The end theme is also sung by a different performer for the last episode. It is little touches like that that distinguish the long running Japanese/Asian TV series from the American series. It is quite obvious that Macross was a story planned with a beginning, middle, climax, and end right from the start, while American series (except for the mini-series, which don't typically run as long as the Asian series) do not usually have the coherency of a single vision guiding their work.

Animation
All TV animation series have to be relatively low budget. Watching all 36 episodes in order in relatively short time gives you a very good sense as to which episodes were important to the producers. There are entire episodes that seem stitched togther from flashbacks in order to either let the audience catch up from the previous episode or in order to meet a deadline. Then there are episodes like the military climax, or the last 4 episodes of the series, where the producers pull out all stops---the machines and ships look almost real, and the women and men look gorgeous. It almost looks as if Misa Hayase underwent a facelift in the last 8 episodes of the series! Even in the best-drawn episodes, however, budget seems a primary consideration: you can definitely recognize battle scenes that have been cut and spliced from previous episodes. However, don’t let this deter you—even the badly drawn episodes have the virtue that the story line is consistently high quality. There’s an episode devoted to Hikaru’s dream sequence that is hilarious, for instance. It is not at all unusual to find humor thrown into the mix to good effect, and even the serious episodes can have a bit of farce thrown in.

Minmei's singing
A frequent source of derision whenever the Macross comes up among anime fans is Minmei's pop songs. If you like Japanese pop, there's nothing wrong with her performance. Iijima Mari is a pop/idol singer who did voice-acting as Lynn Minmei when she was nineteen (Minmei is 16 at the start of the TV series), so not only was she a good fit for Minmei's voice, she could sing as well. If your exposure to Minmei was through the American dubbed series, you will definitely find Iijima Mari to be at least someone who can hit the notes when she wants to. That said, however, even Iijima Mari is embarrassed about the most overused song in Macross, Watashi no Kare wa Pairotto (My boyfriend is a pilot). Apparently, things that weren't embarrassing to sing when you were nineteen have a way of catching up to you when you're 35. Well, you can always fast-forward through the singing without missing anything.

The background music in Macross is reasonably well-done. In fact, if you watch any kind of Asian television, you will run into some low-budget Taiwanese shows that have "borrowed" background music from Macross. (Presumably, they just cut their background music from the myriad CDs that have sprung up) If you're going to buy a soundtrack album, the movie soundtrack has the best orchestrations.

Is it worth 18 hours?
So how do I feel about spending 18 hours watching this series over a period of a few weeks? I’d do it again. I wouldn’t do it unless I could watch all of it, since you will not be satisfied without getting to know the climax and the ending, and there’s no easy way to skip episodes without missing some character or plot development. There is one catch-up episode around episode 12 that you can skip because it’s used to catch laggards up with the series, and that’s about it. If I had only 2 hours to spend, I’d definitely just watch the last 4 episodes or perhaps the last 8 episodes if I had more time. (These are the "reconstruction of Earth" episodes—other science fiction shows have the heroes saving the world, this one has the heroes failing to save the Earth) These episodes focus almost solely on the romance, but the caveat is that you’ll miss a lot without getting the setup that the first twenty-something episodes give you. For instance, Roy Fokker plays a major part early on in the series, and episode 33 doesn’t make much sense if you don’t know who he is. If you can, watch the series in the original Japanese. Not only is the voice acting much better, but you’ll get a stronger sense of what gets lost in the translation. (I’ll never forgive whoever translated "Merry Christmas" into a long awkward Chinese sentence!) There’s a surprising amount of English in the TV series, too, so you might not find yourself as lost as you might imagine.

The movie
A final word before going into the hyperlinks. The movie isn’t the same story as the TV series. If you’ve seen the movie, it will still be worth your while to watch the TV series, just as it’s worth your while to read a novel of a movie that was made from a novel. There are many plot differences between the movie and the TV series. Outright contradictions are common: in the TV series, Minmei is never kidnapped by the Zentraedi, while in the movie, she was captured and persuades the aliens to return her with her songs! Your feelings about the characters will be much stronger if you watch the TV series. If you had to choose one or the other (and given that the movie’s only 90 minutes but the TV series is 18 hours, they’re not quite comparable), the TV series is definitely better. The movie, as might be expected, has gorgeous animation, and if you want to see the characters drawn at their best, that’s a good place to see them!
Web-sites
Just a note. I've tried to keep spoilers away from this review of Macross in the hopes that you'll go ahead and try to watch it. Some of the hyperlinks below contain spoilers that you might not want to see. (In particular, the compendium site can be very dangerous)

• The Official Macross Website. Hosted in Japan, this is a very poor site with relatively few stills from the movie or the TV series. However, the description of the characters in "Japlish" is hilarious! If you want to see pictures of the characters I've mentioned, this site contains no spoilers.
• The Macross Compendium. This is the mother of all fan-sites, and has a chronology as well as explanations of all the varying Macross TV series.

Review: Arrow Season 1

Green Arrow is definitely one of the second tier heroes in the DC universe. This is both a good thing and a bad thing when you build a TV show like Arrow after him. There's not a ton of baggage associated with the character, so the writers and directors have free reign over what to make of him. I don't even remember his origin story from the comics.

I watched the TV show on Blu Ray on a HDTV system setup at optimal viewing distance. The transfer and quality of the picture is amazing. You can see every pore on the faces of the characters on closeup. This is a show where the production values are definitely way up there.

The plot revolves around Oliver Queen (Green Arrow, though he's never referred to as such in the show), a billionaire by inheritance who was rescued off an island he was stuck on for 5 years. The story then flips back and forth between his time on the island, where he went from being a playboy to becoming a badass, and his time in Starling City, where he uses his badass MMA skills (with several trick arrows) to beat up bad guys and in some cases kill them.

The story is dark: as dark as the Batman movies, but not as deep as say, Buffy. It's decent watching, but I wouldn't put it up there with my favorite TV series (either Buffy or Macross). Nevertheless, the set pieces are jaw-droppingly beautiful, and tastes vary so you might as well take a look.

Mildly recommended.

First Impressions: Fire TV Stick

As mentioned in the PS4 review, one advantage of the PS4 is that you can use a PS Vita to stream a game while someone else uses the TV to watch live TV or do video streaming. Of course, any games running on the PS4 tend to use the entire CPU and GPU to do anything, so you can't actually stream video on a PS4 while the CPU is in use playing a game. The solution is a Fire TV stick, Chromecast, Roku Stick, or so-forth.

Of the 3, Chromecast requires a phone or tablet, and doesn't really support Amazon Instant Video. Roku is the most versatile, but the most expensive. The kicker for me was when Amazon offered the FireTV Stick at $19 for Prime customers. That got me to buy pre-order it.

Installing the device was a cinch. Plug in the HDMI extender, plug in the Stick, plug in the power supply that's a micro-USB port, and you're done! The device supports Amazon Music, TuneIn, Pandora, and Spotify, as well as playing back Photos and Videos from Amazon's cloud. This is a very nice setup, with the biggest disappointment being that there's no support for DLNA, which is what I actually use at home. There are various apps that claim to support DLNA, but what really happens is that they're really apps for throwing content over from the phone to the stick, rather than a full-on DLNA client, so this doesn't quite make up for the PS4 not being as powerful a media server as the PS3.

The UI is fast, and better yet, you can pair your phone via WiFi to the stick and not have to use the remote for text entry. Voice search even sort of mostly works. Playing an Amazon instant video is smooth and quick, though there's missing support for VUDU.

For me, the biggest problem is that there's no separate sound output, so you can't get surround sound if you the output from the TV downgrades surround to stereo, which is what most non-Sony TVs do.

All in all, the FireTV Stick is a better device than the Chromecast, but not nearly as good as the Roku Stick or standalone players. This is disappointing because from the specifications, the stick is a far more powerful device than any of the other sticks.

All in all, at $19 (cheaper than any of the other sticks by far), it's worth while to have as a backup for the scenario I mentioned in the first paragraph above. At full price, I'd give this a pass.