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Last week, on my birthday, was the day I scheduled for the delivery of the OLED television to replace my dying LCD set. For simplicity’s sake I kept the size the same, a 55″ diagonal, so that the new television would fit perfectly on my already existing stand. The delivery notification indicated an arrival window starting at 3:00 p.m. and terminating at 6:00 p.m. Naturally, the thing did not arrive until 7:20, giving me and my sweetie-wife just barely enough time to take down the old television and mount the new one with a short period of relaxation before she headed off for her bedtime.

I connected my Xbox One and region-free Blu-ray player, installed a few apps, established that the set worked and made sure that there would be no motion-smoothing to destroy the films I watched before heading off to bed myself.

The next day I took care of recycling the packaging that the television had arrived in and taking the LCD to an electronics recycling location to deal with the heavy metal and special materials that required it. With all of that completed I could spend the weekend making sure that everything worked and settling in with my new tv.

Eight years ago, when I had purchased the LCD,  OLED technology had been frustratingly out of comfortable reach for me. Now with the tech having tumbled in price and a discount that I got through my employer, this television actually cost me less than the one it has replaced. Overall, I have to confess that I am quite happy with the OLED screen. It has the infinite contrast that comes from being able to produce true black in the image and the colors look great. When I put it into gaming mode and get the full frame rate the image looks fantastic and the response is quick, though I am still far from the most talented player in the Call of Duty matches that I enjoy.

The most frustrating thing about the new set is that its smart features are not Roku, and as such I lost two apps that lived in my old set that are not available with the LG operating system: Kanopy a free streaming service that builds off your library membership, and The Criterion Channel which fortunately I can replace because an app for that is available on the Xbox operating system.

The only thing I do need to be vigilant about is switching from one device or app to another. Saturday evening I had been playing a match and then decided to move to YouTube and watch some reaction videos. I killed the game and launched YouTube on the Xbox and not the native app on the set. The reactor was watching Taxi Driver and for several minutes I wondered if she had launched her copy of the 70s classic in High Frame Rate with motion smoothing. I knew Scorsese had not filmed that movie with overly bright and flat lighting that looked like a soap opera.

No, it wasn’t the reactor, switching from a game to video on the Xbox the set had remained in gaming mode and played the video at 60 frames per second, inserting a dozen invented frames per second into the masterpiece. Lesson learned. I am now quite careful about switching apps and inputs.

That aside, I am quite happy with my new television and hope to get a decade of use out of it.

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Last night I got most of my streaming applications loaded onto my new OLED television and while some of them worked just fine a few, (Disney+ and others) wouldn’t actually load and stream content. It was late, I was tired and sweaty from taking down the old tv and putting up the new one so I figured I would just let the matter rest until today.

I got the rest of my apps loaded but I was still seeing the loading circle of doom when I tried to play content from some of them. HBOMax had to be the final app loaded because it had a very different login than the others. (When I originally signed up for my AT&T fiber internet access way back in 2016 the promotion included free HBOMax for as long as you kept the service. They no longer offer that to new customers but those of us who signed up then still get free access to HBOMax.)

When I sorted out the special login and got it working, HBOMax displayed a failure message when I tried to play anything, advising me that I should go into the settings of my device, find the one for IPv6 and switch it off. I did that and HBOMax played just fine, and so did all the other apps that had been giving me trouble. Only HBOMax bothered with a dialog box for the user. Thank you, HBOMax, for thinking about the people at the other end of the internet connection.

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Well, here it is early evening, and my birthday is coming to a close. I received plenty of well-wishes on Facebook from friends both near and far. Each and every one was treasured and lifted my spirits.

Though, to be honest, for most of the day my spirits were in no need of lifting. My sweetie-wife took half a day off from her work and spent it with me. We went out for lunch to Outback Steakhouse. I had wanted to try out Texas Roadhouse, but they did not open until 3pm and other considerations made that a non-starter. I have a nice New York Strip, a side salad, bread, and mashed potatoes, still counting the points for my Weight Watchers journey, down about 26 pounds so far, but not caring if I failed to stay under my daily quota, which I exceeded but not by very much. I had intended to order an indulgent dessert but the server failed to return promptly and so I simply paid via the tabletop device and we came home.

My sweetie-wife gifted me with a 4K UHD copy of Godzilla Minus One (in my opinion the very best Godzilla film, even better than the 1954 original.) She also got me a Call of Duty game so I could waste more hours being slaughtered by mutant cyborg teenagers and their inhuman reflexes. Now all I needed was the delivery of my new 55″ OLED television. It was scheduled for between 3pm and 6pm.

Ahh, the optimism of delivery windows.

It arrived at 7:20 pm.

We had already eaten, and my sweetie-wife helped me take down the old failing television, remove its brackets, affix them to the new set, and hang it on the stand, an evolution that took in total about 40 minutes.

So, with the television mounted on the stand, but not yet with any devices connected, the day is drawing to a close. Once she retires to bed, I will set about getting the television working and all the settings just where I want them. Tomorrow, which I also have off, I will cart the old one away for recycling.

While I had hoped to be watching my brilliant infinite-contrast set already, I still cannot complain about the day. I spent a lot of it with my sweetie-wife, had a tasty steak, and no true disaster struck. Not bad for the day I officially join those who for Medicare.

This past weekend was a celebration of cinema with two trips to the local multiplex and the last feature film to be watched on my 55″ LCD television before its replacement later this week, so, it is fitting to kick off the week with reviews.

First up, the horror film Hokum.

Neon

The third feature film from writer/director Damian McCarthy Hokum is once again set in his native Ireland. Successful American author Ohm Bauman (Adam Scott) has traveled to the small and isolated Irish hotel where his parents had honeymooned and, after many years delay, to spread their ashes in the thick nearby wood. Bauman reacts to stories of hauntings and witches trapped in the sealed off honeymoon suite with the skepticism appropriate to not only an American of the 21st century but of a writer known for his dark, bleak novels of human futility. After uncharacteristically warming to a member of the hotel staff, Fiona, Bauman returns to the hotel as it is closing for the season to discover that she has gone missing, and Bauman begins investigating, a process that draws him into the supernatural dangers of the hotel and his own terrible history.

A common comment I heard about Hokum before seeing it was that in tone and intensity the film compares to Ari Aster’s Hereditary, a film that I very much enjoyed and found unsettling in the best possible manner. Now, having seen Hokum I disagree with that comparison. Hereditary was relentless in its narrative and focused with tremendous precision. I found this movie to be a little less focused, some of the plot turns struck me as fairly obvious, when Bauman spoke obliquely about his childhood trauma, I knew instantly what the third act would reveal, and Hokum’s plot meandered a bit, but not to any great detriment, just enough to make a comparison with Aster’s film misplaced.

The film I would compare this one to is 2020’s critically underseen and undervalued The Night House, written by Ben Collins and Luke Piotrowski and directed by David Bruckner. Both films spend considerable time in exquisitely shot darkened scenes with fantastic use of negative space and briefly seen and unsettling imagery. Where Hereditary finishes with imagery and a resolution that might be fitting to one of Bauman’s own novels, Hokum crafts a more traditional if not entirely settled ending for its tale that again fits as a comparison with The Night House.

A second element that Hokum shares with The Night House beyond its cinematography is that by the ending of the film events can be reasonably interpreted as either supernatural or a product of the protagonist’s own mental state with just enough ‘evidence’ to push most viewers into the supernatural conclusion.

Colm Hogan’s cinematography for Hokum is, pardon the pun, picture perfect. The deep shadows and blacks of both the night and the isolated area of the hotel are dark enough to conceal the threats from both Bauman and the audience and yet never so dark as to become frustrating to a moviegoer. McCarthy’s script, while suffering from a touch of predictability, is populated with enough realized characters as to make the plotting work even when that obvious reveal is telegraphed well in advance.

Hokum is enough of a slow burn, quite the opposite of a ‘slasher’ horror film, that it works best in the theatrical environment where someone watching the film will not be continually distracted by their electronic devices, the well-lit room, the kitchen beckoning them with snacks, and the ever-present noise of the outside world. This should be, and needs to be, seen in a darkened auditorium with others reacting to every moment of suspense and shock of a sudden appearance. If you are a fan of horror films, particularly of one that rewards patience, then waste no time in getting to your local theater and seeing Hokum.

Well, as I mentioned in a previous post my 8-year-old 4K TCL smart television has been developing faults that are annoying, faint vertical lines that were apparent in some scenes and invisible in others. This past weekend, after several attempts at resetting the set in hopes that would clear up the trouble failed, I bit the bullet and ordered a new set.

Where the old set was an LED, the new one an OLED LG B5 smart TV is a technology that had been outside of comfortable financial resources in 2018. It also has better response times well suited for my casual Xbox gaming of playing Call of Duty on the weekends and getting my butt kicked by teenagers with mutant reaction times.  I ensured that the set also had a setting to display films as films and not as some unnaturally clear, motion-smoothed soap opera.

Thanks to a discount through my employer, Kaiser Permanente, and a spring sale code from LG itself, I managed to knock nearly $200 off the already discounted price. I am not sure, but I may have paid less for this far more capable television than I did for the set that will soon be recycled.

The original shipping date had it arriving this Thursday, May 7th, but that wasn’t going to work for me as I would be at the day job. I rescheduled the delivery for next Thursday, which just happens to be my birthday and part of a long weekend I had planned for celebrating the fact that I will have officially reached Medicare age. So that is when I will take down the old set, set-up the new one, and the next day have a company come out and pick up the discarded television for e-waste disposal and recycling.

OLED has superior black levels and ‘infinite’ contrast, so I will have to decide among my 4K discs, which one will christen the new set.

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Even as people fled the scene of this year’s White House Correspondents’ Association’s dinner, others safely at their keyboards asserted with the confidence of fools that the shooting had been manufactured as a ‘false flag’ to either generate sympathy for a historically unpopular president or distract the people from other massive troubles dogging this administration.

The WHCA shoot was not a false flag.

The Butler assassination attempt was not a false flag.

The Golf Course ambush attempt was not a false flag.

The Las Vegas mass shooting was not a false flag.

The Unite the Right March and killing was not a false flag.

Sandy Fucking Hook was not a false flag.

False flag attacks do in fact occur, but it is nearly always a state attacking another state, such as Nazi Germany claiming Poland attacked them in September of 1939 and as in that example they are also nearly always so terribly transparent as to fool no one. America is a nation of violent people with easy access to weaponry. It should shock no one that our political leaders face the threat of violence so often.

I have decried and denounced political violence repeatedly here on my blog, from the very deadly and serious attacks on any president or corporate officer to the street level assaults of ‘punch a Nazi.’ Political violence is a beast that, like cancer grows on itself, and once loosed is difficult to excise. I am glad that the assassination attempts against the idiotic, narcissistic, petty, vengeful, and cruel person have failed.  Should a major blood vessel in that rotting matter he calls a brain burst like an ancient bicycle tire, and he dropped dead, you would not find one portion of grief in me, but should you confess a plot to murder him, I would turn you in without a moment’s hesitation.

Murderers and would-be murderers must face the law in a court that resolves their matters without fear or favor, and the political troubles must be solved politically and not from high-speed projectiles.

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.April has been a chaotic month.  The most impactful event, so far, has been the bout of RSV that I managed to contract. Respiratory Syncytial Virus as the name suggests is a virus of the respiratory system, specifically the upper respiratory regions which in the very young, the aged, or the immunocompromised can be a very serious illness. A vaccine for RSV has been developed and two years ago, because I am not an idiot, I took that vaccination. Now, people often think of a vaccination as a perfectly protective shield, but that is not the case with all vaccines. In many cases what a vaccine will do if it doesn’t prevent infection and illness is reduce the severity of that illness when contracted, The fact that I contracted RSV and was ill is not evidence that the vaccine had no effect. In all probability the fact that I was vaccinated likely saved me from a hospitalization as I am no longer a spring chicken and the medication that keeps my arthritis in check compromises my immune system. Note that while I was home sick for a week, coughing my lungs out and having a terrible time, my sweetie-wife was exposed to the virus and has not, now more than a week later, shown any signs of catching the bug. For her the vaccination looks to have been that perfect shield.

It was a week and a couple of days ago that I returned to work and I am just now starting to really get back in something that feels normal health-wise. The coughing has subsided greatly and I am managing to reclaim much of my former energy.

Last night, April 16th, was the season finale for the second run of The Pitt, the medical drama that I never thought I’d get so totally sucked into. Season one turned the final few episodes into a massive dramatic sequence with a spree shooter at a local music festival and many fans, including myself, expected some major event to drive the second half or later of season two, but that was not the plan by the show’s creative team. Instead, with much of the focus on its central character of Dr. Robby, this season seemed to be much more focused on stress for the characters and just how much they erode under its corrosive pressure. A wise choice to avoid repeating the form of season one, keeping the writing fresh and the fans off balance.

I have little to say on the state of the world. The government of the USA is out of control, violating its and international laws with abandon as we suffer the whims of a malignant self-absorbed moron whose petty and greedy nature shatters the post war world order.

After the break in coherent thought brought on by RSV I have returned to my Cascade mountain set folk horror novel with the outlining process now under way.

My best to everyone, stay safe, stay hydrated, and remember don’t be mean.