It was cold (near freezing) and raining this morning, with the possibility of snow, so I didn’t go for my usual Monday run.
By late afternoon, I was feeling guilty enough to get on the treadmill for half an hour. The last time I did this was eight months ago.
The most surprising part wash how weirdly easy it felt. I turned the incline to 1, the speed from 6.0 to 6.5, then to 6.7. I never felt tired, I was never thinking, “Why won’t this END?!”
It turns out that running regularly makes walking fast kind of easy!
“Here comes that great writer they told us about. Oh…his ship just blew up.”
At last, we have the answer to the question, “What happens when a beloved animated series gets cancelled (again) and is revived 10 years later?” And the answer, in the case of Futurama, whose last new episodes aired during the Obama presidency, is you get 10 episodes that feel like Futurama, look like Futurama, but mostly lack the spark the show originally had.
And I can’t help but wonder why it turned out this way. While 10 years is a long hiatus, it’s also plenty of time to work on new and clever stories, with solid writing and jokes. Instead, most of the new episodes were mildly amusing, often just weird and didn’t leave me yearning for more.
First, the good news (everyone):
All the voice actors are back. I felt Billy West (Fry, Farnsworth and Zoidberg) and Katey Sagal (Leela) sounded a bit off in the first episode, but were mostly fine after that. For West, it seemed more like he just wasn’t used to doing the voices again (admittedly, none of the cast members are exactly young anymore), where with Sagal it felt more like she was sometimes struggling to recapture the character, something compounded by generally weak or uninspired writing and possibly direction that may have deferred to the actors, giving them freer reign (I have not read anything about the production, so I could be way off base here).
The episode introducing Kif and Amy’s kids was probably the best of the season and, tellingly, character-focused. It expanded the show’s storytelling while keeping the full Slurmy flavor of Futurama.
Continuity remains excellent. The show has picked up without missing a beat three times now. The first episode of Season 11 literally starts right after the end of the last episode of Season 10.
The Momazon episode was pretty decent.
The not good news:
The writing was generally limp. A lot of the episodes just weren’t that funny. It seemed like the writers in particular didn’t know how to treat Leela. A lot of it just fell back to old stuff, while adding nothing new.
I think they may have done their worst episode yet: Episode 9, where the characters are shown as toys, was weird, unfunny, and the framing story was kind of dumb.
The final episode, written by co-developer David Cohen, held promise with a high concept: the gang question whether they might be in a vast computer simulation. But it then gets bogged down in a lot of technobabble and mostly forgets to be funny.
The attempts to riff on contemporary topics, which the show has done successfully before, almost universally fizzled. The pandemic episode was something that could have been clever, but it went nowhere. People coughed and acted violent. None of it was especially funny, or even interesting. Except for the Momazon episode mentioned above, all of these attempts really didn’t click.
I am a bit baffled that the episodes were so mediocre. Maybe 10 years off is too long. I read that three more seasons (presumably 30 episodes) have been ordered, and I think they can still turn the (Planet Express) ship around, but only if they examine what they failed to achieve in an unremarkable Season 11. Or, you know, just hire better writers.
Probably my most-used Signal sticker. What does it say about me? Speculate!
Hello! If you are not a bot or LLM scraping this site to help churn out AI-based internet flotsam, then welcome to my blog! I don’t know how you got here, but if you stick around for a few moments, here are a few things you may find useful to know as of January 2024:
I like lists
I frequently write about my jogging (three times a week, usually). This is probably not interesting to anyone but me, but I never found another good place to write about it. I at least include a photo or two in these posts for you to enjoy as you scroll past.
Other popular topics include:
Book reviews (these have fallen off in the last few years).
Complaining about Apple (they’re big and carry an outsized impact on us, so I hold them to a higher standard; I am trying to reduce complaining in general, though).
Technology (I am not an engineer or anything fancy like that).
This blog (I often go meta).
Birding (started this back in 2021).
Writing prompts (both creating and using them).
Photography (mostly birds–see above) and drawing. I don’t get into the technical aspects of photography, I just post my photos.
Like a dinosaur, I use WordPress’s Categories.
I have plans to redesign the blog, but until I do, some things, like photo galleries, are hard or even impossible to find. This is bad and I feel bad.
Generally, I write about whatever I want to write about.
Last year, I gave myself permission to write about anything that popped into my head. I have done this multiple times since.
I have a Mac and a PC. I generally prefer the PC. I do my drawing on an iPad Pro.
My tone can be sarcastic at times. I try never to be mean. I think life, in a way, is absurd, and my writing here may reflect this at times.
Starting this year (2024) I am writing a monthly newsletter called Doodlings and Noodlings1We’ll see if this one comes back to haunt me.
I am working on my first video game. It should come out this year2We’ll see if this one also comes back to haunt me. Also, I like using footnotes..
I am white, male, Canadian, left-handed (but I use a mouse right-handed) and gay.
That’s about it for now. Thanks for reading. I don’t have comments turned on due to spam, but if you want to say something to me, or just send me an inscrutable emoji, I can be reached on Mastodon here: @stanjames@mstdn.social (I’m on other social media platforms, but rarely check or post to them these days. I’m a very low-key social rebel). You can also reach me using old-timey email here: ned@creolened.com
Pretend it’s me blogging on WordPress. I would be wearing socks, though. God, I love stock photos. Photo by Canva Studio on Pexels.com
EDIT: Shortly after posting this, I came across a list of blogging platforms in a post on Mastodon. Coincidence or serendipity? Or both? Coincendipity?
This isn’t a complaint about WordPress! WordPress is a rich, diverse tool that can sing, dance and probably rub its belly at the same time. I’ve been using it for this blog since 2005–around 19 years! Obviously, it’s been doing a decent job of letting me get my inane thoughts online, or I would have switched to something else by now1Or become a crazed hermit living in the mountains, eschewing all technology, perhaps.
So why am I tired of it?
It’s big, bulky, and jammed full of features, many of which I don’t use. Its company, Automattic, is increasingly pushing even standalone blogs like this one toward monetization, with plugins like Jetpack having more and more paid features under the premise that if you are using WordPress, you are intending to make money from it, otherwise why aren’t you just posting your cat pictures to Facebook for the price of free2Not counting the price of YOUR ETERNAL SOUL?
What I yearn for is something that is light, clean and simple to use, yet still allows me to do the bloggy things I like:
Write down my inane thoughts
Write lists, like this one
Post photos and drawings
Present these things in some kind of organized manner
I feel that WordPress has moved away from the simplicity of humble, handcrafted artisanal blogging. I want to get back there again. I want to touch (virtual) paper.
Where to go next
(I didn’t really need a subheading here, but you see them a lot on important blog think pieces, and I’m always keen to look fancy and smart.)
My choices are roughly as follows:
Keep using WordPress and just shut up about it. It works, right?
Actually switch to a WordPress alternative.
Stop blogging altogether.
Post my cat pictures on Facebook for free3I would also need to get a cat.
I’m actually unsure which option to pursue. The last few years I’ve been, in some ways, reconstructing many aspects of my life, and I don’t always know where these things will lead. I suppose this makes it exciting. Whee!
Where: Centennial Beach (Delta), Piper Spit (Burnaby) and Tlahutum Regional Park (Coquitlam)
Weather: Partly sunny, 3-8°C
The Outing
Our first birding outing for 2024 started at a rather chilly Centennial Beach, with a brisk wind and the tide in, so shorebirds, while present, were not nearby for good photo opportunities.
But we did see a bunch of golden-crowned sparrows, a northern harrier we didn’t have time to get shots of, and a bald eagle in a tree by the parking lot. Unfortunately, the perspective meant all I could do was catch a shot of its butt. I also got a shot of a robin’s butt. It was a butt kind of day.
After rounding out our trip there with shots of some good peeps (wigeons), we headed off to Richmond Nature House, where there was no parking at all, and two other cars waiting for a spot. Sadly, we had to move on, and went next to Piper Spit.
As compensation, we got a visit from a handsome Steller’s jay, and also a bufflehead that, rather than hanging back like they usually do, actually came in close to the pier, allowing us to get our best bufflehead shots ever. There were also a lot of gulls hanging around, trying to pull unspeakable things out of the water when they were not strutting around, proudly showing off the golf balls and other spherical objects clutched in their bills. Gulls are weird. We also saw our first Canad geese in a while. They are also weird and we have the pictures to prove it.
Even though it was already golden hour-y by the time we finished up at Piper Spit, we still went to Tlahutum, where we did see more golden crowns, some mergansers and another bufflehead (!) Generally the number of birds was small, so we mostly took shots showing off the setting sun.
In all, a decent outing to start the year, with cool but mostly sunny weather.
Taken on the way to exciting uptown New Westminster and converted to black and white for extra spookiness. When I saw the crow land on the gravestone, I wished I’d had my camera (again), and not just my phone.
This, of course, doesn’t look anything like me, and the hands are the usual nightmare stuff that screams “AI-generated”, but I still kind of like the composition.
These days I am restricting most of my social media stuff to Mastodon, and lately I’ve started doing non-posts. They go like this:
See an interesting post from someone I follow, or someone whose post has been boosted by someone I follow.
Start writing a reply to the post.
Question whether the reply adds anything of value.
Exit out of the reply, opting not to post it.
Repeat Steps 1-4.
Why do I do this? I’m not entirely sure, but I think it’s related to this latent fear of saying the wrong thing, somehow, of offending or coming across as weird or odd. I am a fairly shy person in face-to-face interactions, and I think this might be the online equivalent to that. I just prefer to watch others talk. Or type, in this case.
Proving this, I was originally going to make this a post on Mastodon, then changed my mind and posted it here instead.
OK, Nic pointed out that the “12 Days of Christmas” apparently begin on Christmas Day, which means the last one of these 12 days is today.
Still, I feel this does not explain the preponderance of so many Christmas decorations that are still up. Some yards are still chock-full of inflated Santas, and festooned with sparkly lights. The lobby of our building still has the Christmas tree up. It’s just weird. It’s all going to clash with Valentine’s Day marketing soon. Not that people decorate their yards for Valentine’s Day. At least not yet.
Anyway, ho ho ho from New Westminster!
A snowman very happy to still be around on January 5th
I took this photo on the way to the store today. I like the clouds and the contrast of bright light and shadow. It would have been better if I’d had my camera and not just my phone. It’s not great, but it’s okay. So here it is!
Emojis that are converted from emoticon text such as :) turning into a happy face
Emojis that are entered using an emoji picker, such as the one in Windows 11:
The former work fine on this blog, but because the database goes all the way back to the ancient internet time of 2005, it uses an old type of character encoding that can’t handle emojis and turns them into question marks instead, like so: ??
This means creolened.com can never show the full and resplendent range of emojis.
🙁
I could convert the database over to accommodate this, but that risks mucking things up on a sitewide scale. And as much as I’d <31WordPress support suggest this should auto-convert to a heart emoji, but alas it does not appear to do so. to have a full array of emojis to draw from, as I am a silly person, I am also at least a little practical.
View from Cariboo Dam, pre-run. Calm, cool, colourless.
Sorry for the non-imaginative title.
Yes, today was my first run of the Year 2024, and what a kooky and possibly terrible year it may be!
But today’s run was fine. I ran on another odd day, as I opted for two days of rest after Saturday’s run. It was cool, so I wore two layers, but I beat the forecast light showers, so remained dry for my short loop clockwise at the lake.
My BPM was the same as the previous run at 157, but my pace improved by seven seconds, to 5:41/km, which was nice to see (I am not trying to run fast at this point). The knees felt fine, the left hip was a bit cranky, but tolerable. I should probably get it looked ta, as I suspect it is not going to magically improve as I keep getting older.
Conditions were good–the trail was dry, there was little wind and while it was 6C, it never felt cold.
Overall, a perfectly cromulent start to the new year, running-wise.
View of Avalon Trail, post-run: low bridge!
Stats:
Run 843
Average pace: 5:41/km
Training status: Maintaining
Location: Burnaby Lake (CW, short loop)
Start: 9:48 a.m.
Distance: 5:04 km
Time: 28:35
Weather: Cloudy, some very light drizzle
Temp: 6ºC
Humidity: 83-84%
Wind: light
BPM: 157
Weight: 172.0
Total distance to date: 6105 km
Devices: Garmin Forerunner 255 Music, iPhone 12, AirPods (3rd generation)
Shoes: HOKA Speedgoat 5 (240/450/690 km)
