A personal blog for Michael Mitchell
⚠️ SPOILER WARNING: FULL SPOILERS
In “Slingshot” (2024), two determined men face a cosmic divide, caught between duty and destiny in a high-stakes space thriller.
My Rating: ½ (0.5/5 stars)
Don't waste your time. It looked interesting and had some big-name actors and actresses, but it wasn't worth it. The movie was too long for the ending it had, and the plot was weak.
This has been some week for hardware and appliance problems in my household.
Thursday, I had a silent hard drive crash. It could have happened before then, but I didn't notice it until Thursday. The drive was there last week, but Windows 11 would not recognize it. I tried it in two different computers to rule out bad cables or a motherboard issue.
I didn't realize the drive was 10 years and 3 months old until I removed it and looked at it. It is kind of like a washer, you don't think about how old it is until something happens. I had a stale backup, so I probably lost 5 to 10 percent of the stuff that was not backed up.
Read on ign.com · View original Mastodon post
Here is another example of what I was talking about in a recent blog post TV Isn't What It Used to Be. According to IGN, the first season came out 3.5 years ago. That is a long time to wait for a second season.
I will watch it because the first season was good. But if I miss it, I won't really care. By this point, I would have to rewatch Season 1 just to remember what happened before starting Season 2.
Celebrating 10 years of exploration, discovery, and adventure in the vast, ever-expanding universe of No Man's Sky.
Happy Anniversary to Hello Games, No Man's Sky. It is 10 years, and hopefully another 10. A sequel would be great. Thanks, Sean Murray, for a great game that started rough but has grown into a masterpiece, and all free after initial purchase. I don't play as much as I used to. When I do jump back in, I am there just to explore. I don't really care if I never reach the center of the universe. Game companies can take lessons from you, the bad and the good. The good has outweighed all the bad.
Look at all the free DLC content over 10 years:
For a more in depth review and history of this game see this post I made No Man’s Sky – Nearly 10 Years Later
Read on ign.com · View original Mastodon post
I don't watch this series, though it has interested me. Still, its general theme fits what I want to talk about here.
People wonder why TV viewing and TV series are dying. Well, when you have to wait a couple of years for 8 to 10 episodes, maybe 12 if you are really lucky, that is ridiculous. From an outsider's point of view, something is clearly wrong with the TV industry.
I have said this a hundred times, and I will keep saying it: when I was growing up, TV had an actual season. You knew roughly when it would start and end, within plus or minus a week or two. There were holiday specials, and every “TV season” usually had anywhere from 18 to 30 episodes. Of course, there were exceptions, like first seasons with fewer episodes to test interest and ratings.
Now, there is no set schedule. You get 8 to 10 episodes every couple of years, and by the time a new season finally comes out, you have already lost interest. You have forgotten what happened, stopped caring, and moved on.
Then, on top of everything else, they do not even drop all the episodes at once. Come on! That is frustrating.
So I would rather wait until every episode is available, even if I have to wait a couple of years before watching something new. In the meantime, I have been watching more old TV shows. I barely get invested in new ones anymore because of these shenanigans.
Celebrating 25 years of blogging with gratitude, reflection, and a sweet slice of success surrounded by creativity and joy.
August 6, 2001, 25 years ago. I started blogging. I had a website made by Microsoft FrontPage and hosted on GTE (now Verizon) in the homepages they offered back in those days for residential customers. In fact, your ISP provided everything for you. You had so much website space and an ISP-provided email, which you lost if you changed providers. That's foreign today.
But I started on Blogger before it was owned by Google on this date in 2001. Hard to believe it's been 25 years since I started blogging. Here is my first post ever. It's even harder to imagine I've been doing this for that long. I think blogging helps me get stuff off my chest, though very, very few people read it. I like to vent, review, or just get my thoughts down about different subjects. I like to think not only have my website and my blogging improved, but my knowledge has improved. Here's to 70 more years of blogging. I hope to be blogging and to have a website of some kind, no matter how they may change in the future. So Happy Blogiversary to me.
Related posts: 20 years
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I saw the title of Antonio’s post the other day on bubbles.town, “I Couldn’t Live Without My Glasses”, and it intrigued me.
The first thing I do when I wake up isn’t checking my phone or making coffee. It’s putting on my glasses.
This was never me. I was the opposite. I could see my phone and other things up close, such as the alarm clock. Putting on my glasses was usually the second or third thing I did because I needed them to see at a distance.
Before cataract surgery, I was nearsighted and also had astigmatism. I could see things up close without glasses, but I needed my glasses to see clearly at a distance and for almost everything else. What Antonio wrote still struck a chord with me because I could relate to nearly every word in his post.
Do you ever have a bunch of blog post ideas bouncing around in your head but no idea where to start, what would actually be interesting, or how to flesh them out? That's been me lately.
My vision is improving, but my eyes aren't fully healed. My right eye, the first to be operated on, just hit the one-month mark. The left is about two weeks behind. I have one more doctor visit to get a prescription for reading glasses and maybe fine-tune my distance vision. Distance seems okay, but reading and intermediate vision are tricky. The intermediate could use some fine tuning, and my short-distance vision is definitely worse and needs more correction. With this better vision, I'm trying to blog more, get more done, and make progress before the next hurdle.
Catching up feels overwhelming. I keep trying to do five things at once, so I need to slow down and focus. On top of everything else, I have a backlog of podcasts to listen to or watch and a pile of unread items in my RSS reader. I'm slowly whittling the list down.
I'm trying a new program called Wispr Flow to compose this post and see how it works. I've always wondered if composing this way, using my voice, would be easier than typing and then refining. I'll give it a shot for a little while and see if it helps me focus. If it goes well, I might use it more for quick drafts.
I just wanted to say I saw the news of John C. Dvorak passing yesterday. I hadn't heard much from him in years and often assumed he had retired. I was first introduced to him by watching Leo LaPorte and TechTV back in the day.
I remember being introduced to Google Voice when Mr. Dvorak and Leo talked about it on a show. I can't recall the exact show or episode, but Mr. Dvorak talked about how he and his son used it to save on phone costs. If I remember correctly, it helped with long-distance charges, though I'm not certain. I also remember reading the articles he wrote for PC Magazine.
What I didn't know until he passed was that he came from a semi-famous family, the inventor of the Dvorak Keyboard (never used one).
It's getting to the point where some of the pioneers from the internet era are starting to pass, and that's a sad reality. I knew of John C. Dvorak more than Om Malik, even though Mr. Malik and I were closer in age. These losses feel like the end of a chapter.
Praying for his family to have strength and resolve.
A thoughtful couple contemplates the evolving intersection of creativity and technology, symbolized by a brain merging artistic tools with digital circuitry under a spotlight.
I was browsing topics and titles on bubbles.town when I came across a post by Panagiotis Vryonis, AI-generated blog post images are not cool any more. It reminded me of another post I read a few months ago, On AI Images and Feature Images in General by Kev Quirk. I have been meaning to respond to his piece.
Last year, I wrote a post about using featured images called To Feature Image or Not. That post surprised me by getting a couple of responses. I usually get almost no feedback, so the email replies were unexpected.
The readers who responded basically said the same thing: It is your blog. You can use featured images if you want.