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Moody and Atmospheric

Netflix does it again.

As we often do when nothing catches our eye on cable, we pick up the remote and say, “Netflix.”

Sometimes even that comes up empty, but a week or so ago we started watching Bodyguard.  I was initially reluctant to dive into it because the subject matter didn’t pique my interest, but once I started watching it gripped me. It’s one of those dark British dramas whose inscrutable characters, subtle soundtrack, and saturnine cinematography immediately drew me in.

Bodyguard is the story of Sgt. David Budd, a war veteran who helps thwart a terrorist attack, and is then assigned to protect the Home Secretary who was a major proponent of the conflict he fought in. Sgt. Budd harbors a secret and carries with him a host of conflicts and issues that must be addressed, but not until circumstances force him to confront his demons does he finally find peace.

I give this one a 9 out of 10 stars only because of a couple gaping plot holes that were never fully addressed. It’s only a six-episode season, but worth every minute.

And Richard Madden (Sgt. Budd) is very pretty too.

 

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Released 22 Years Ago Today

The Addams Family (1991)

Another one of those films (along with its sequel) that when it appears on cable I drop everything I’m doing to watch. Raúl Juliá’s death in 1994 was an absolute tragedy. The Addams Family films had the potential for becoming such a wonderful series. Watching Pugsley and Wednesday grow up would’ve been delightful…

It turns out that the film had a very tortured birth and that there actually was a third film with a totally different cast, director, and production company that went direct to video and crashed horribly—as it should have. You don’t mess with classics.

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Fourteen Iconic Quotes From the AHS: Apocalypse Finale

Whenever you’re in a room with the American Horror Story witches, you’re all but guaranteed of hearing some fucking amazing burns, but this season’s finale really outdid itself. These surely raised welts on their recipients…and had me screaming like a schoolgirl!

Ms. Venable: “You might as well ask me to explain your hair.”
Myrtle Snow: “My hair is an eternal mystery, never to be fully understood.”
Myrtle Snow: “Purple is for royalty, dear. Not middle management.”
Madison Montgomery: “Alright ladies, we’re here. Don’t forget to rate me five stars… please.”
Myrtle Snow: “Darling, it seems Daddy didn’t tell you the most important rule of bringing on the apocalypse. If you want to finish the job, the thing you have to do first is get rid of all the witches.”
Marie Laveau: “She needed the help of a powerful voodoo queen… but that ain’t you, sis!”
Madison Montgomery: “Sorry about your little toy, bitch.”
Marie Laveau: “You will not pass… you’re dealing with the HBIC [Head Bitch In Charge] now.”
Coco St. Pierre Vanderbilt: “Die again, fuck face.”
Myrtle Snow: “It appears as though we’re fucked, my dear.”
Cordelia Goode: “I look at you and I don’t see a man. I see a sad, scared little boy so pathetic he couldn’t even kill me with a thousand nuclear bombs.”
Cordelia Goode: “Satan has one son… but my sisters are legion, motherfucker.”
Constance Langdon: “Go to hell.”
Nan: “Hi, bitches.”

Did I miss any?

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Blogging

Blogging about blogging. Has it really come to this? Am I that bereft of any new, interesting ideas?

Apparently.

I started blogging in 2004. Or maybe 2005. I don’t remember at this point and it really isn’t that important. I wasn’t in on the ground floor of the movement (craze?), but came in at what was probably close to the height of its popularity.

I’d kept a personal journal from late 1987 to mid 2002, mostly chronicling my debauched San Francisco adventures, aborted romances, my near-continual financial woes, and multiple moves to and from Arizona over those 15 years. I finally gave up in 2003 with the arrival of my cancer diagnosis. While it might’ve been interesting for me to use the journal as a vehicle to work through my fears and insecurities regarding my diagnosis and subsequent treatment, the general consensus (myself included) was that I would beat the cancer and the last thing I’d wanted was a written record for all posterity of what I had gone through. I’ve never been one for a pity party, and that’s what I feared it would turn into.

This decision left a gaping hole in my expressive life that was eventually replaced with blogging. Initially I was more than a little fearful of putting my personal life out on the internet, but realized quickly that while it could be used that way, blogging really wasn’t intended to be a traditional journal; I could include as much or as little as I felt comfortable revealing to the world.

As GW Bush entered his second term in office, it also afforded me a venue in which to vent my frustration at the direction the country was taking—and to connect with like-minded individuals who felt the same way—not to mention facilitating meeting the man who was to eventually become my husband.

As anyone who’s been here from the beginning (and I applaud you) knows, over the years, my blogging has gone from personal rants, political opining and an occasional dash of male hotness to mostly male hotness with everything else being secondary. 8 years of the smooth-running, scandal-free Obama White House afforded me precious little to bitch about, and nekkid menz always seemed to draw more interest anyway.

My only regret through this journey was my failure to back up my blog prior to our relocation to Denver. I did a damn good job of stringing words together on several of those posts and wish they were still around. (I’m in the process of pulling what I can from the Internet Archive “The Wayback Machine” and back-publishing those posts here, but it’s time consuming and I’m only able to retrieve text, not pictures.)

Of course, with the arrival of the Orange Russian Wig Stand in the Oval Office, that’s changed. I once again find myself getting very worked up about what’s happening in the world and have plenty to bitch about, but there are many days I just can’t. Thankfully there are others out there—others far more erudite than I—whose work I can pass on to fill the void when my own words fall short. I occasionally rant about Apple, provide unnecessary movie and television reviews, and post funny pictures and way more male hotness than I ever thought I would when all this started.

I’ve often thought about shuttering the whole thing since I get so little feedback these days, but after all these years, Voenix Rising has become my online identity, my “brand” as it were, and I don’t really want to give that up. I know that one day—like its author—the Voenix Rising blog will take its last breath, but until that time I shall continue to use it it as a vehicle to scream into the void and hopefully provide some salacious entertainment and humor along the way.

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“Purple is for Royalty, Dear…not Middle Management.”

God, I love Myrtle Snow.

AHS: Apocalypse has wrapped up, and I have to say—despite a few hiccups along the way, this was in my opinion, the finest season of AHS so far.

The series been—for the most part—enjoyable. That being said, I couldn’t make it through last year’s Cult (perhaps its themes struck a little close of home with the arrival of the Orange Menace in the White House) and stopped watching about four episodes in. I thought Freak Show and Roanoake were the weakest from a series standpoint, while Murder House, Asylum, Coven, Hotel, and Apocalypse were the strongest.

[spoilers ahead]

The hiccups in Apocalypse I referred to concern Mutt and Jeff, along with the last ten minutes of the final episode. That episode in particular would’ve been much so stronger if they’d just left those ten minutes off altogether, leaving the now Apocalypse-free future open-ended,

Apparently I’m not the only one who feels that way. Regarding the ending (and a ton of other unanswered questions), Digital Spy opined:

Ever since season one, it’s been established that the Antichrist can only be conceived through the union of a living woman and a dead man, so how did Emily (Ash Santos) and Timothy Campbell (Kyle Allen) give birth to Satan’s spawn in the new timeline? We’ve known for some time now that their DNA is “perfect” or special for some reason, but they’re not that special, right?

The only explanation that seems to make any vague kind of sense here is that their so-called “perfect” genetics are perfect precisely for the job of conceiving the Antichrist and the Cooperative knew this all along. While this still flies in the face of everything we’ve been told up to this point, such a theory does help tie up some of the loose threads that were created by their very existence in the first place.

If this is true, then it’s likely that them meeting again in the new timeline wasn’t a coincidence either. Through some demonic manipulations from behind the scenes, Satan was able to use Emily and Timothy as a contingency plans of sorts, encouraging them to create a replacement Antichrist in the event of Michael’s death.

So is the future simply to play out again and again as a battle between Satan and the witches?

Still an incredibly satisfying season, and I can’t wait to see what Ryan and Brad come up with for next year, although if there isn’t another season at all, this one left it on a decidedly high note.

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Death By a Thousand Cuts

Back in September, after months of playing around  the macOS Mojave beta on an external drive and then installing the final beta on my main drive (and then almost immediately removing it), I wrote about my reluctance to upgrade when the final product was released.

Well, you know me. Is early-adoption/masochism a thing? The day it came out—despite everything I’d bitched about—I went ahead and upgraded, thinking that I’d eventually be able to live with its quirks because, you know…new and shiny!

After three months, I’m here to say I can’t.

The further I got into it, the more annoying all those little quirks became. Yeah, I got over not being able to use cDock, but having to choose all dark or all light in the UI became intolerable. The fix I’d found for letting you have a dark menu bar and dock while leaving everything else untouched? That is what was causing Adobe Bridge to come up with a solid black screen, and the only way to fix that was to totally uninstall and reinstall Bridge!

Even after the 10.14.1 update came out a couple weeks ago the window transparency problems I’d written about weren’t addressed, leading me to believe this is what Apple wants. (In prior versions of the OS, when you turned off transparency in System Preferences, it shut off everywhere. Now it only turns off parts of windows.) I like my wallpaper as much as the next guy, but I don’t want to see blurry splotches of it coming through on stacked windows above it, and I don’t want to have to live with a solid dark grey background for the life of the OS just to force things to behave the way they did previously.

Speaking of wallpaper, prior to Mojave, whatever wallpaper you had chosen was lightly blurred on the initial login screen so you could easily see everything  in front of it. In my opinion, it was a beautiful effect. The blurring is now gone, with no way of getting it back.

You can no longer use any quartz-based screensavers like my favorite, Minimal Clock.  You can’t delete (without disabling SIP and resorting to a bunch of terminal commands) any of the preinstalled bloatware they ported over from iOS (Voice Memos, Stocks, News, and Home).

And the spinning beach balls. Don’t even get me started.

When selecting a different wallpaper, it now took forever for the app to generate the thumbnails that you’d choose the wallpaper from. Prior to Mojave, it was near-instantaneous. Wallpaper. It’s always fuckin’ wallpaper. Problems with wallpaper are the reason I finally left Microsoft for Apple nine years ago.

Death by a thousand cuts.

By yesterday morning I’d had enough. I know for the most part my complaints are all little, UI-related issues, but the UI is the forward-facing part of the OS, and for me these issues made what used to be a pleasant experience nearly unbearable.

First world problem, I readily admit.

I knew from my previous attempts at going backward with anything Apple related would be a pain in the ass. Even though I had a current backup, I wouldn’t be able to use Migration Assistant to restore my data after I rolled back the OS to High Sierra. So I performed my due diligence, made sure everything that I would have to manually restore was at the ready, and reinstalled High Sierra.

Everything went fine until I opened iTunes.

“You need to upgrade your OS in order to use this iTunes library.”

FUCK. ME.

My heart sank. 11000+ songs, carefully curated. Inaccessible. Oh, the files were still safe, but my playlists, history, metadata…couldn’t be accessed. I briefly thought about manually reloading the files, but realized that wouldn’t solve the problem. The playlists would still be gone, as well as the yearly history of when the songs had been originally added.

At that point—frustrated and very, very angry at Apple—I wiped the drive and booted off my Cloned drive. I started the process of restoring the whole thing back to Mojave. Access to my music was more important than the UI annoyances.

By this time Ben had gotten home and after venting my frustrations to him, I sat down in the living room while the restore proceeded, and pulled out my phone, Googling “restore iTunes library.”

There was a solution.

Of course there was. Ten minutes after wiping a day’s work.

So I stopped the restore, wiped the drive again, and started reinstalling High Sierra. I needed to step away from this clusterfuck for a while, so we went to dinner. By the time we’d returned my little Mac was sitting there waiting for my input to finish the install.

The first thing I did was check the fix I’d found online. It worked. (I’m missing a lot of album art, but I have that backed up too, so it will just be a matter of manually restoring whatever’s missing.) And then for the next five hours, I reinstalled all my apps and manually transferred my data from the backup drive.

It was during this whole fiasco that I realized that Apple truly has become Microsoft. Not just any Microsoft, but the Microsoft of 2009 that sent me fleeing to Apple in the first place. Once upon a time, Apple did “just work.” You’d be able to restore your drive with a minimum of fuss, but—and I hate to say this, because it’s almost a meme at this point—since Steve Jobs’ death, quality control at Apple has gone to shit and some days it seems nothing works. Apple is now all about pleasing 12-year old rose-gold iPhone girls with winking emoji and candy colors everywhere, leaving their once-core customer base twisting in the wind, making it as difficult as possible for them to do anything other than what Apple has decided is in their best interest.

Remember Microsoft Vista? Remember how the howls of outrage actually got someone’s attention in Redmond, resulting in Windows 7, probably the most stable OS that company ever produced?  I believe that’s where we are with Apple. Mojave is Apple’s Vista. The question is if anyone in Cupertino is actually listening, or even cares…

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gingerium:

Justice for Jack. Dylan is a fucking monster. Drag him, and expose him.. noodlesandbeef needs to be stopped..

Absolute monster. He needs to be brought to justice.

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