Those Were the Days of My Life

    A few weeks ago, amidst a flurry of shocking entertainment news stories, NBC quietly tried to promote its new afternoon news hour, seemingly unconnected to the four-hour juggernaut that is The Today Show.  Buried in the item was the fact NBC would be making room for the new show by moving its long-running daytime serial, Days of Our Lives, over to its streaming service, Peacock.  Apparently, NBC hadn't told the cast and crew of this fact until the news broke.  Now, the show was readying its new season, so this would be a very important thing to know before too many episodes were recorded. [Unlike most other serials, Days is known for recording an entire season in one complete block of dates.  The more common practice is to record for a few weeks, take some weeks off, and repeat.  Supposedly, Days can save time and money doing it this way, but it also can cause problems it there are scheduling changes well down the line.] This part of the item made major headlines throughout the entertainment industry as Days was the last serial NBC was still airing.  Over the past thirty years, the six or seven others were cancelled.  Two, or three, of them, I watched.  I only watched one, Passions, from its debut until the time it was cancelled. [Technically, it did continue for awhile, but on a service I didn't have, and I don't think I even have now.]. I started watching Days one summer in high school.  Maybe the year after I graduated.  It's been over thirty years, so the exact time is lost to me.  Anyway, I was bored that summer, in the middle of the afternoon, so I decided to watch another serial on the same channel as another one I started watching a few years earlier to fight boredom, Santa Barbara.  I think one of the first scenes on that first day involved someone stopping a wedding because the bride was a gold digger who was only going through with the marriage to somehow make money.  I can't be sure, but I think in involved Victor Kiriakis, Justin Kiriakis, and John Black (back when he still thought he was Roman Brady) in some fashion.  Since that first day, I've tried to catch every episode, recording it on one of my trusty VCRs (see last week's post for more on that).  I've missed a few episodes of the years, due to preemptions, power failures, and relocation for a month-and-a-half due to a flood, but I tried to get recaps whenever I couldn't watch.  First from magazines, more lately online synopses.  I should have seen this coming when Peacock aired its second Beyond Salem series with very little lead in, and as a premium show instead of the basic tier like last year. This is what angers me.  See, Peacock has multiple subscription levels.  Basic allows a subscriber to watch a wide variety of older programming, with ads.  That is the level I subscribed to when I signed up to watch the first Beyond Salem series.  However, it looks like Days will be on the Premium level.  No ads, but you have to pay, about five or six dollars per month, possibly less if you encounter a special promotion.  I don't really have the extra money per month right now to be able to do that, especially since I would have to use a credit card as the basis.  Such deals are usually set up to renew automatically.  I am not the one to try and remember to keep checking such services to make sure the money is available.  Now, there might be some benefits for Days by moving to streaming (saucier language, more skin, no preemptions), but the money issue is the big downside for me.  In a few weeks time, I will be forced to survive on recaps and synopses, of rat least another year.  [Days was renewed for two years, but with the move, the contract might be changed.  So, only one year should be guaranteed, not the second one.].  I hate this, especially with the major murder mystery plot going on.  Hopefully, it will be resolved in the next three weeks.  If not, I will say goodbye, incomplete.  "Like sands through the hourglass,..."

Digital Killed the VCR Star

     I wasn't able to update my literary blog last week, as I had an appointment with my cable/internet provider to get set onto a new contract.  This also meant that I had to schedule an appointment to get new tech this morning.  The time was initially somewhere between eight and noon.  However, the cable guy arrived around 7:30  (What!?!?  I know.  They never arrive early.). Anyway, it took two tries to find a new 'Google assistant' that would connect the television to the new cable service.  I personally think that someone inserted an extra letter into the contact email, and that mistake led to the difficulties, but who knows what could've really happened.  Anyway, I now will be getting cable service over the internet, linked by the assistant.  Among the many new features provided by the updated service is DVR storage up to 100 hours per month free.  This also means that I no longer need to use my VCR.  In fact, I can't see any way I could connect the two together.  I have been using VCRs ever since I got my first one in ninth or eighth grade for Christmas.  I was actually with my mother when we picked it up.  She gave a cover story that it was a gift for a relative, when it was actually going to be my gift.  I don't know if the original story was true or not, all I know is that I ultimately got the VCR. (My mother has done this to me before.  One Christmas, I got a pair of pajamas that I know were originally for a male relative who died a few weeks before Christmas.  They were too big for me, and I never really grew into them.) At first, I barely used the VCR, until I discovered that it had an adjustable tuner.  Now, my television back then only could pick up channels two through thirteen.  It was an older model.  However, with the help of my VCR, I. could now pick up all of the other channels beyond thirteen, as long as I watched them over the VCR.  Sure, there weren't that many back then, but I could place them in any order I wanted, making watching faster.  This was especially useful when the cable lineup was expanded when I was in college.  I could even get the scrambled channels, although I couldn't see much. The television lasted longer than that first VCR, and my second one still had a tuner, just not one I could adjust to the way I wanted it.  The old television would finally give out, and the new one could get all the cable channels without using a VCR, but I was still recording through newer models until I got my current one in 2003 after the last big flood.  This one wasn't as flashy as the older models, but it has been working fairly okay with only a few hiccups.  First, there was the switchover to the new digital cable system.  While the VCR worked the first few days afterwards, I found out that it no longer had a directed tuner that could work with the new signal.  This meant that if I wanted to record multiple shows on different channels, I would be forced to pick just one to record on the channel I left the cable box on.  That sucked, as I was forced to forego many programs during the day just to get to see the one I wanted most.  Then, I was forced to purchase off-brand cassettes as stores stopped carrying and manufacturers stopped making the ones I liked.  I was thinking about changing to a disk DVR while I was out of town, but I was still unsure.  By the next time I looked for one there, they were no longer carried.  Only the hard drive models with monthly fee were available.  I didn't want to pay for such a service, so I stuck with my VCR.  I had to find a repairman to fix a problem with the power connections.  It wasn't easy, and the man was kind of sketchy and out-of-the-way, but it worked again.  Finally, I had to buy a new set in 2020.  This model didn't need to use the cable converter box, the second iteration of it, but that meant I couldn't use the VCR.  I found a workaround, but it meant using the cable box remote exclusively.  Speaking of remotes, I had to buy a replacement remote for the VCR (and the old television) a few years ago, and that remote started to have buttons that didn't always work, such as "Power," "Stop," and "2."  That last one was hard to deal with, as it made programming new shows to record tricky and changing the time and date after a power failure next to impossible.  That's a minimum of three 2s.  I was lucky I could get that button to work well enough to keep things working.  For the last few months, the cable box remote was also not working right, with at least seven buttons not working at all.  Just last night, while looking for all of the equipment to return, I found the second box and remote.  This second remote worked fine, and I used it for the last day of the old cable box.  Turns out that they only wanted the convertor boxes.  The remotes, cables, and packaging, we could throw away.  Anyway, just before I left, I programmed the assistant to record a show.  This evening, I will know if it worked and watch the show.  If/when it works, I will rewind my last cassette and finally disconnect my VCR.  Even at my most, I was only recording fifty to sixty hours per month.  For the past few year, this has gone down to about twenty-five to twenty-six hours, well under the 100 hour limit.  In another month, this total will go down by twenty hours, as the program I was watching the most ofter, Days of Our Lives, will be leaving network television to stream exclusively on Peacock.  As of now, I don't think I'll be able to watch it, but that is the topic for another post.

TO BE CONTINUED

I Can't See What You See

     A little over two weeks ago, I had an eye exam.  I had to get new glasses that day as well.  Although I was told that it would only take a week for the lenses to be made and installed, the process took about two weeks instead.  That is why I couldn't write this post last week.  My new glasses weren't in.  I'm not sure why it took so long.  Maybe I had a difficult prescription or there were supply problems or whatever.  By contrast, I was able to get not one pair, but two pairs of glasses one of the last times I needed new frames when I went to a mall on a day trip in about an hour.  Now, neither of those pairs were too complicated.   In fact, I still have the prescription sunglasses that I got that day.  Alas, the other pair broke about four years ago while I was cleaning them.  I had to make an emergency trip to a local optician to get a replacement pair that would work with my lenses.  Fortunately, I was able to find a pair I liked that worked with my current frames.  Unfortunately, the job was slightly rushed and adhesive traces were left on the lenses that couldn't be removed.  Considering how long it took me to find that original pair (months), I was lucky to find anything.  A little later after that fiasco, I had an eye exam.  Although I had an early appointment, I had to wait over two hours, maybe close to three, before I was even called back for prep.  Since I had already passed the time I had said I would open the store, I had to reschedule.  It just wasn't fair to me to wait any longer, especially the thirty plus minutes for my eyes to get dilated. Fortunately, that second time, I didn't have to wait as long.  However, the doctor hinted that I might be needing bifocals soon.  Well, my vision problems started immediately after that visit, beginning with the fact that my eyes took over a day to get back from getting dilated.  Now, it usually took my eyes awhile to get back to normal, that time was well longer than that.  Sometime later, I noticed that I would need to take my glasses off to read sometimes.  This became more frequent, but not too bad, up to the point of my most recent eye exam.  It was with a new doctor, so I had hopes that things would be better.  Most of my waiting time was taken up by filling out my electronic forms on a tablet.  I actually had to ask for some assistance, even though I had read up on how some of those devices work.  The actual exam was fairly routine.  I asked not to have the dilation drops put in.  The staff offered up an alternative, a machine that I could stick my head in to get a better view of my inner eye without having to have drops.  I opted not to go with that either, as it was about thirty dollars that wouldn't be covered by insurance.  At least the other digitized tests had enough information to show that I had a low risk for any problems.  I would be needing bifocals though.  I went with the progressive lenses, thinking that the line in regular bifocal lenses would be off-putting.  That might be the reason for the delay.  It took me longer than normal to find a pair of new frames that I liked as well as afford.  My new frames are in a different style, partially made of metal, so they are slightly heavier than I am used to.  They will probably need to be adjusted so they will sit right.  Getting used to the new lenses is taking awhile.  Everything outside my center of vision tends to move as I do.  Blurring occurs at the edges of the lenses.  This wouldn't be too much of a problem, except I tend to check my peripheral vision constantly and look down frequently when I walk.  The blurring is making hard for me to clean my glasses, as I'm unsure what is a smudge and what is just the natural distortion.  I have had a slight headache, but I am not sure if it due to the weight of my new glasses or if it is my eyes getting used to the new perspectives.  I no longer need to remove my frames to read, but I find myself still wanting to do so.  I've even switched back to my old glasses once for a few hours so that I could work at the computer more comfortably.  I technically can see clearer now, but I still think I might not have made the best choice for the new glasses.

Filler King

     For all of you who don't recognize the source for the title, it is a pun (again) on a song (AGAIN!).  This time, it is a pun on the song "Killer Queen" by Queen (duh).  I used it because the regularly scheduled post for this week had to be cancelled, practically at the last minute.  See, I had something planned for over a week now.  I had everything worked out in my head and ready to type down.  However, that post was contingent upon something else happening.  That event has yet to happen.  It was supposed to have occurred earlier this week.  It might happen later on today.  However, I always try to have my blogcast over with by eleven on Wednesdays.  Because the event is still in the future, I needed some filler post for today.  Experts that I have read suggest a blogger (I prefer 'blogist') should have some 'evergreen' posts ready in case of various emergencies.  Since I prefer to write extemporaneously, that rarely happens.  Instead, I'm just typing away about the reasons why a really great post has to be delayed by a week.  Maybe longer.  Don't worry.  If there is another delay of schedule, I will have a much better fill-in post ready to go.  Some weeks, I do have a choice of topics to relate upon.  This week, I was so expecting something to happen, that I didn't plan a back-up.  I mean, when someone says something should take a week to do, one doesn't expect it to take much longer than that.  I wish I had more to write about, but I don't.  Wow.  This post is going to be extra short, isn't it?  I've written such short post before, but the majority of those were at the beginning of my blogging days.  Currently, I try to write just enough that my screen will have to scroll down automatically so that I can type more.  At least I have made this post an pangram, a work where every letter of the alphabet is used at least once.  Well, I guess that's it for this week.  Bye, for now.

I Think You Might Want To Watch My Peacock Stream

    As I have mentioned here before, I am not really into streaming online content.  I've got much better things to do on my computer than watch a 'television' show or 'movie,' much less trying to binge an entire series.  I have work, social media, and games.  Hey, just because I'm limited to about forty-five new levels a week of Candy Crush Saga doesn't mean I'm not trying to keep my near champion levels skills up.  Besides, I'm kind of cheap in that department. Anyway, when the new streaming service Peacock debuted last year, I took the plunge and subscribed to the basic level of service.  The main reason I finally entered the streaming market was the original content, specifically Days of Out Lives:  Beyond Salem.  I know, it feels slightly cheesy, but I've been watching the original soap opera since high school.  I got bored during summer vacation one year, okay. I've been watching fairly regularly ever since, recording it during the day and watching it that evening.  I was interested in the wider variety of stories that the service could supply.  The five-day event was something else, as various Salemites were traveling around the world, only to get involved with an international jewel heist.  The rainbow selection of gems were the controls to a satellite defense system, and a despondent villain wanted to use the ancestral peacock statuette that the controls were placed in to take over the world.  No, I'm not joking.  There were special guest stars, crazy cameos, and a twist reveal near the end that tied the entire story into Days history.  It took me over two weeks to schedule the time to watch the entire event, but I was satisfied.  I didn't watch any other show on Peacock since, even with the constant emails I get sent about their latest programming and special offers.  I least I set up a special email address to handle such things, or I would've gotten overrun.  Then, last fall, I heard about a special Christmas-themed movie for Days.  Basically, it was an alternative universe where certain events were changed, causing familiar couples to be broken up and leading very different lives.  Unfortunately, I have yet to see this movie, as it was sent directly to the premium level of service.  I was not going to pay anything just to watch a one-off movie with altered events.  What surprised me was the the original Beyond Salem got nominated for a few Daytime Emmy awards.  I would've thought that the event would be tagged as a main Emmy mini-series, but it was placed into the Daytime categories.  I don't think it won anything, definitely nothing major, unless it was the shared nomination with Days for casting.  Well, all of this was a set-up for the second chapter of Beyond Salem, which debuted last week.  The main stunt this time around was the return of Kristian Alfonso as Hope Brady, a role the actress had once suggested she would never return to due to what she felt was unfair treatment on the show.  Once again, I had yet to see something because of the premium level of service.  I did catch the spoilers online, although the cookies such searching left are causing my Facebook feed to veer towards soaps.  The plot was something similar to the first 'Chapter.'  Various people are traveling, visiting relatives, only to get caught up with a new plan to steal some weird crystal prisms, first mentioned decades ago on the show, that have the power to cure brain tumors.  The main villain this time is a once-thought dead member of the infamous DiMera family.  (I would tell you which one, but there have been so many of them, especially those from the time before I started watching, that I'm not sure which one it was.)  The series brought back many characters that hadn't been seen in years, including introducing a few new ones.  At least one character will be seen on the main show fairly soon.  Unlike the first event, the villain actually wins this time around, and the prisms were used to help cure someone who had been cryogenically preserved for years.  This person's identity was the big cliffhanger of the series, so I won't spoil it here.  What will come of this person's possible return is still in the air, as the series hasn't 'caught up' to the timeline of the show just yet, but the two are close.  I just hope I get get to watch it sometime without having the cough up extra money.

Oh, Pun Says Me

     In case you haven't noticed yet,  I use a lot of puns in my post titles.  Pretty much too many.  I can't help it.  I like writing, and I like games.  Put the two together, and you get quite a few groaners.  Or a rhyming word that begins with 'b.'  Hey, wordplay is my thing.  Before writing today's post, I looked back over all 300+ posts, including a few I hid, to make sure I hadn't used today's title in a previous post.  I hadn't, but I was surprised that I hadn't used such an easy and obvious pun before.  It's funny, for multiple meanings, that I chose to use this pun today.  Frankly, I'm running out of things to write about, so I'm forced to write about what I write about.  Boy, was that a self-referential sentence or what?  I noticed that a rather high percentage of my post have puns in their titles.  On the one hand, puns are an easy way out of coming up with a pertinent title, one with just the tiniest bit of humor to help set the mode of the entire post, even when the post isn't always so funny.  On the other hand, I've been forced to stretch the meaning of a pun so far, that the original source becomes lost.  Take today's title.  It's from 'Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves.'  I'm afraid that some of puns get lost on some people because I take them too far.  Now, some may think that puns should go out very far to help make their point.  Others feel that using too many puns cheapen a work.  This is all accounting to a person's taste level.  Let's take a famous pun, that some literary critics still disagree about, from William Shakespeare's Twelfth Night.  Some researchers claim that the pun in question doesn't really exist and that even if it does, it may not be as directly a pun as some say it is.  The line in question is from Act 2.   Scene 5.  Malvolio has just found a letter he believes comes from a woman he is smitten with.  However, it is actually a forgery committed by Malvolio's rivals Sir Andrew and Sir Toby (heh, heh) to get him into trouble.  In lines 89-90, Malvolio comments on certain letters that he feels confirms that the handwriting is that of his female love interest.  When taken together, along with a repeated reference later on, the lines suggest something rather lewd.  Some critics say that the wordplay involved is too convoluted to contribute to something so suggestive, even when other contemporary authors use similar puns.  As Twelfth Night is a comedy, I prefer to think that the wordplay was intentional, at least to some degree.  Now, it might not be as bad as some of the suggestions in The Decameron by Boccaccio, an influence on Shakespeare.  (Just look up the third day, tenth story.  Very funny, but quite lewd, even in most English translations.  Many of the stories are like that, so be warned.) Anyway, I just hope that my little excursions into puns can one day stand up with such great works.  Probably not, but I can dream.

The Game Is a Book

     I was expecting the new version of a tabletop role-playing game (TTRPG) to come in today, but because of the holiday shipping schedule, it won't be available for pick-up until tomorrow.  If it even comes in.  Now, some may be asking "Why didn't you order it through your book store?"  Good question.  The short answer is that the publisher stopped dealing with my distributor at the start of the year.  The long answer is very complicated and starts back in the mid-90s.  I was still suffering through my major panic attack/anxiety outbreak, when I decided to try new things.  One was an RPG system.  I had heard about it for a few years, and I finally broke down and starting buying some of the books before actually playing with other people (that part still hasn't happened, either in real life or online).  The system was reaching the height of its popularity.  While the individual lines shared the same 'universe,' as it was, the various games didn't always interact precisely.  While the main rules and a few systems were the same, others were not, to the point where the games couldn't really be played together.  Sure, you could try, but something had to suffer so that the games would work, either one game had to change a fundamental rule or an important aspect of the metaplot would have to be ignored.  Not much fun, but it could be done.  One of the reasons I decided to open a book store, when forced to start a business, was so I could get my books easier, and cheaper, than going through my local gaming store.  While they had a fairly good selection back then, they also had a spotty record of remembering all of my orders.  The fact that my main distributor at the start didn't work with that publisher forced some change, but I was still able to use a secondary distributor to get my books.  In 2003, the publisher realized that the games were not going to be able to work together, supplements were starting to just be updates on older material, and the hanging metaplot of overarching destruction needed to be dealt with.  Therefore, they decided to end all of their game lines the following year.  This really affected me, as I found this out a few months after I had lost about 75% of my books in a flood.  While I was able to get most of the core books and a few supplements, the thought of never being able to ever get full replacements weighed heavily on my.  Even the promise of a new, updated system barely helped.  This was also coupled with the publisher being bought out by a Scandinavian video game company (Iceland, I believe).  Well, the new game lines were still carried by my secondary distributor, as well as the new primary distributor I had to switch to when my original one went out of business.  This worked well for a few years, until some shipping hiccups began starting.  It was harder to get any books from my distributors, as well as having not a single order come in from the gaming store.  Turns out that the publisher was getting ready to switch to a print on demand (POD0 model, with the possibility of downloadable PDFs.  They were also sold to another video game company (Iceland, again). Since I didn't own a computer back then, this meant I was no longer able to get any more books.  As such, I basically lost interest in gaming.  I would occasionally look some news up online, but I barely followed such things anymore.  That's why I would miss out on the great deals on special anniversary editions of the original game line, featuring bonus deals on PDFs of older supplements and the possibility of new material as well.  I got my computer just after the last of the first anniversary editions Kickstarters had ended, so I missed out on everything that I would have liked the most to get.  However, I was able to purchase and download the PDFs of the new material.  (I couldn't afford the costs of getting physical copies.). Since then, I have participated in the Kickstarters for some new projects, getting some of the new PDFs as bonuses.  I was even able to get some older material as well for a discount.  Not as much as I would've liked, but a few things I would like.  I also found out that the original company was dissolved when it was purchased by a third Scandinavian video game company (country of origin unknown).  All of this new material was created by a new company created by some of the staff of the original company.  They still had to get permission from the current holders of the intellectual property (IP) though, for each new supplement, as well as the extras featuring older material.  Well, the video game company saw that there was a market for this material. So, they got a European TTRPG company to create a new version of the most popular game line, using the sensibilities that the company could use to cross-promote the IP in other formats.  This RPG company did so, to mixed results.  Many fans were thrilled that there was a new edition coming out, but they were sort of turned off by the many, many changes in the rules, systems, and even plotting.  This confusion was increased when an early version of a supplement was sent out featuring material a little bit too politically incorrect to stand.  Changes were made, but the company would soon loose the license.  Meanwhile, the video game company was forcing changes in some of the new material being made for the anniversary editions for the second company.  The second company would wind up making a few supplements for the new edition, to a much better received following.  However, they were not offered the license to take over the new edition of this game, or any others.  No, the video game company first went with one other RPG publisher, only to go with a second one for various reasons.  Things got a little dicey, when plans for the second game line's new edition got delayed for a different, less popular one.  This new edition sped through very fast.  This is the book I expected to get in today.  Early reviews from those who bought the early PDF suggest that it will not follow the original's basic design at all.  While it's not too bad, I fear it might not be that great either.  At least early criticism got the cover image changed to something a little better.  Anyway, for some reason, the RPG company has stopped doing business with my distributor.  This includes the reprinting of works made by the second company rebranded under the RPG's banner.  At least I was able to get one last supplement before it happened.  Again, reviews suggest that the book fell just a little short of being really good and reflective of what a sizable portion of the fanbase wanted. As such, I was lucky enough to be able to order this book from my local gaming store.  I don't know if they will receive it, but we'll see.  I'm not up to ordering directly from that company just yet, or trying to start having my store deal with them directly either.  Quality issues aside, I'm just glad I get to return to the things that helped me get through some hard times.