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Iskaral Pust

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Everything posted by Iskaral Pust

  1. Yep, we’re just repeating the battles of yesteryear: content producers vs distribution utility. The funny thing is that neither Roku nor YouTube TV seem powerful enough to get into a battle. I like Roku and have used them for years, but they’re hardly crucial to the ecosystem when most TVs can stream directly, albeit with bad interfaces. The signs are strong that more content will get trapped in over-sized and over-priced bundles — that’s what would stop us from dropping the subscription whenever we’ve finished bingeing a given show. And ads will stealthily return. We have Disney+ back on for my son to watch the Falcon & Winter Soldier show, but that’s finished now. Not much else that I can see worth watching. We added BritBox on Amazon Prime for all of the detective shows. We’ll go back to HBO Max when their new movies start to arrive.
  2. I watched the first episode. It was OK but I don’t find Greg Davies funny. He suited the character in Inbetweeners, but his stand-up is terrible. Richard Ayoade’s low key travel show got more laughs from me than anything Greg said in that first episode.
  3. Because the spring has been so dry, our town is already restricting garden irrigation to just two days a week. I’m still trying to save some trees that have suffered from dry conditions (and insufficient care by the prior owners) in recent years. This is when they should be drinking deep ahead of summer. Our new plantings look very well. We’re going to add some more shade-tolerant shrubs and ferns along our tree line for a better border between wooded area and lawn. It’s sloped area, so good visual space for tiers of plants.
  4. I posted a review of this in one of the quarterly reading threads. I think it was Q1, but could have been Q4. I don’t recall the details of what I wrote but I agree that it was much better than Lethal White (and really, really needed to be). The procedural unfolding of the cold case was a better plot, and Galbraith’s strength (at least in this series) has always been the way she can portray in such detail the minute to minute behavior and thoughts of the characters. They may be unlikable most of the time but you’re definitely immersed in them. And the emo romance arc is thankfully cooled down a bit compared to the last book, but still omnipresent, despite Strike being a slobbish pig with no redeeming romantic qualities and (Mary Sue) Robin being so entitled and whiny and entirely shaped by her PTSD. And once again Galbraith’s personal politics, especially on class, suffuses all of the characters. The working class are the salt of the earth but deeply patronized (reading their dialogue makes me cringe), while the upper class are useless but always in a benignly fey way, while the middle class are reviled for their bourgeois aspirations and pretensions. Strike and Robin are both heroes for rejecting middle class expectations and embracing a working class life instead. I didn’t feel at all like re-reading it, especially when it is so drawn out, but I did enjoy it and was glad to see the series rediscover its quality as it concludes(?).
  5. Irrigation systems can have sensors for moisture or, at lower cost, can link to an online weather report for local rainfall. Our sprinklers stay dormant if there has been rain above a certain threshold in the prior two days. Less hardware needed for that. I can change the threshold on my app controls.
  6. Our landscaper does the spraying for us. I think in CT you have to be licensed to be able to buy those pesticides. That’s true for fungicides too for treating trees. When spraying for ticks, they use a high pressure spray that reaches 20-30ft beyond our property line. That gives you a buffer of several months before any ticks will reach your property at the pace they move.
  7. Really? The furniture store on the Post Road? It doesn’t stand out. We like modern and contemporary, so RH has been soaking us for shocking amounts.
  8. Yep, we must be pretty close. We’re in one of the coastal towns of the CT Gold Coast. I guess that means your gardening choices should all work for me too, although we are so close to the LI Sound that it might change the soil slightly.
  9. It sounds peaceful and bucolic. We have a nesting pair of hawks in the neighborhood, but no shortage of chipmunks or squirrels regardless. There are old Connecticut stone walls on the hillside just above our garden, which have a huge colony of chipmunks to reinvade our garden if we’re ever running low. I tried peppermint oil to keep the chipmunks away from the shrubs right next to our house, but it didn’t bother them much. (throwing out my shaving water on the shrub roots seems to bother them more). We spray for ticks and mosquitoes. I don’t like having pesticides in our environment but there is too much disease risk now.
  10. I’m embarrassingly ignorant but want to know more and do more. I grew up with a pretty good garden but my role was mainly as directed labor. My mom had all the knowledge. I need to be able to plan our garden or it won’t happen. Unfortunately my wife is actively hostile to almost all fauna and flora. She’d have a full acre of paved patio if I would allow her. And she only likes cut flowers indoors because living, breathing flowers outside attract insects. She loves tulips but won’t let me plant any, despite having a deer fence. She thinks it will just produce more chipmunks. (She may be right). Narcissi are critter-proof but she doesn’t like them. We usually do elevated planters of chrysanthemums in the late summer to early fall. I could persuade her to do more flowers in planters for short seasons earlier in the summer. My first spring project is to feed all of my immature trees. It makes them happy. I get an enormous sense of well-being when my trees are happy. We’ll probably make some changes to our shrubs directly in front of our house; the oak leaf hydrangeas at a minimum are too sprawling for my wife’s desire for neatness, and their foliage, color and (lack of) blooms are prettying uninteresting. The boxwoods, dogwoods, hydrangeas and the ornamental grass are ok, but lacking some bold color. I’m think of adding a dwarf Japanese maple for some color without getting too tall in that location.
  11. We added back Disney+ to watch The Mandalorian S2, and then cancelled again. Now we’ve added HBO Max instead because a few of my wife’s friends recommended The Undoing (I’m not loving it so far), so we might keep that for another month or two to try some other shows there. We’re just cycling short periods for different services. Only Netflix and Prime are persistent for us.
  12. I only watch sports in the Live TV part of Hulu, the rest is from their streaming library. The ads on streaming are shorter than for Live TV but still annoying to have a 1-2 minute interruption at all when I have spent years on Netflix, Prime, HBO, etc getting used to no ads, and when I have explicitly paid extra to have no ads. The ad creep seems to be steady and cynical: the more popular content has more ads because they think they can. It looks like the networks want to have their cake and eat it: they want to get paid direct fees by viewers, cutting out the cable company, but also reintroduce the ad model that they love so much. You and I may have different taste in TV. I have no interest in reality TV, gimmicky talent competitions or banal police procedurals. There is very, very little that the core broadcast & cable channels have produced of interest in recent years. AMC is probably the only channel there that has produced really good stuff, perhaps one or two from FX, and those were all available on Netflix for several years so I’ve already watched them. Just like HBO’s best stuff from their back catalogue was on Prime for several years.
  13. I’ve subscribed to Hulu + live TV for the past couple of months in order to have NFL and college football games available, especially while exercising at the weekend. But other than live sports, there doesn’t seem to be anything we want to watch on Hulu. And if we ever do try something, it still has ads even though I paid the premium to remove ads.* *there’s a footnote in fine print that “ad free” does not apply to all content. I’ll definitely drop this very soon. I’m just trying to decide whether this football season is worth another $60 per month to keep watching.
  14. I was talking to my brother as the England vs Italy game was ending. He was so confident that Ireland would beat France by enough of a margin to snatch the 6N. That’s a bit disrespectful to France in Paris, even if they have been less consistent in recent years. They’re still a dangerous opponent and they’ve a long history of beating Ireland in Paris. Plus this Irish team still isn’t all that convincing.
  15. The 5th Cormoran Strike novel by Galbraith/Rowling will be available on Amazon US next week. I’m undecided about this one. The last installment wasn’t great and the predictable (forced) romance arc is tedious. But I did enjoy the way the story follows Strike’s daily routine and thought process so closely.
  16. Jonathon Strange & Mr. Norell by Susanna Clarke available for $1.99 on Kindle
  17. Steven Pressfield’s Gates Of Fire (historical fiction of the Battle of Thermopylae) is available for $1.99 on Amazon
  18. That’s a great book but probably even more depressing to read right now.
  19. @ithanos I also enjoyed The Fall Of Civilizations, and it is indeed comprehensive. I’ve listened to the first four or five. My only complaint is that the topic is ultimately so downbeat that spending 2+ hours on each subject eventually feels too gloomy, especially since the novelty of each civilization converges toward an unfortunately similar process of collapse. @Triskele the standard podcast app for iOS works pretty well.
  20. Thanks, I bought it already. If your offer isn’t getting much traction then you may be bringing coals to Newcastle (perhaps too many board members already own a copy). It was still a nice gesture.
  21. We watch Disney+ on a current model Roku. No problems at all. Agreed though that the sound on the Mandalorian specifically was unusually low.
  22. That’s very generous Derfel. I’ve read both books and I would recommend them highly.
  23. France losing to Scotland gives Ireland and outside chance of winning the 6N with a win over France in Paris. That doesn’t look easy, but perhaps the Irish team can finally rouse themselves. Winning the 6N title would still depend on Ireland and England’s results against Italy, if those even go ahead at this stage. England has an advantage in bonus points.
  24. Ireland don’t currently have a way to win when physically out-matched. But that’s a real problem for a nation with a smaller population: the likes of England and France (not to mention the Southern Hemisphere three) have a greater likelihood of finding athletes who are extreme physical outliers.
  25. Much better from Ireland to beat Wales pretty handily. Much of the improvement came from the back row and from Conor Murray rediscovering some form. It’s a bit surprising they got such improvement from that selection, but let’s see how it goes at Twickenham. England beat the Scots but it didn’t sound like much of a game. I know the weather was bad but England had a point to prove after the French game.
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