television – Page 2

Irrationally Large Box

October 6, 2025 by Belghast

Good Morning Folks. Starting this morning’s post off with a picture of Gracie being super snuggly. It was a good weekend, but a busy weekend. I spent a lot of time working in the garage and set up the first of the storage shelves, and then cleared the room for the next one… which I will hopefully work on today. Essentially I am trying to get all of my wife’s stuff that I just piled in the center of the garage, up on shelves… and get a bunch of stuff that I will never use that has been in the garage for eons, out into a pile to have hauled off. The thing that is fighting against me, is the fact that we are still having 90+ degree days and the garage is a sauna, so I am trying to limit my time out there to hour long bursts of activity. I just noticed I am covered in bruises from wrestling with items that I probably had help putting out there the last time they were moved. I made it work through and got them into the growing pile in my backyard. There is a service we have used before that will haul it off so long as I pile it up for them relatively neatly.

The big move of the weekend however, was setting up a new television… that again was probably too large for me to be handling by myself. One of the last things that we did together was put together this new entertainment center over my birthday weekend back in June. Last week I added to that a riser, that would allow me to put the cable box, and ultimately my Switch 2 and PlayStation 5 under the TV. The entire reason why we swapped out our entertainment center was to eventually upgrade from our 43 inch television to something larger, and I had been shopping off and on for awhile. The problem is… I did not want to ship a television. There is just too much shit that can go wrong in transit, which meant more or less that I was limited to Walmart, Target, Best Buy, Sam’s Club, or CostCo for which my membership had lapsed. I was specifically looking for a 120hz 4k 65 inch television… preferably one with Google operating system rather than Amazon Fire. Most of the ones that I had seen were in the $800 range, but I found one on CostCo that was a 4k 144hz panel that also came with a 5 year warranty thrown in… so I renewed my membership and snapped that puppy up.

So as such I spent a good chunk of the weekend enjoying the new larger television. I watched a few movies on Friday and Saturday, and then got reacquainted with both the PlayStation 5 and the Nintendo Switch 2. I bounced around a lot on the PS5, but on Sunday night I settled in for some long sessions of Super Mario Wonder and the upscaled version of Bravely Default. I actually got into the last one quite a bit, and stayed up later than I had intended. When I finally made it to bed… Mollie was rather cross with me for not arriving in the bedroom at the correct time and screamed at me for awhile as she demanded attention. I figured it is just me now… I might as well enjoy my life in whatever ways I can, and upgrading the TV was one of those simple ways to get some more quality of life easily. It was also one of the projects we had on our radar, and it felt like actually accomplishing something that my wife and I had already planned. There are a few more of those projects that I eventually want to take care of… but they will require significantly more than $400.

Over in Diablo IV, I landed on a set of Chaos armor that actually works well enough for my build. Vasily’s Prayer is pretty much a requirement for making the build feel good, and I had picked up Chaos version of it on both the gloves and chest. I figured it would be easier to swap out the gloves and then find some other item that can replace Rampaging Werebeast. For now I am running Fleshrender and it seems to be working pretty well, because it makes it so Debilitating Roar deals damage to poisoned enemies… and my Pulverize is always poisoning enemies. So every time I roar I am not just getting a survival boost, I am also doing over 4 million AOE damage to everyone that has already been poisoned by my Pulverize puddles. Now I just need to do massive amounts of farming to knock out the remaining achievements in the seasons journey.

Over in Destiny Rising, I finally bucked up and knocked out several seven minute legendary quests so that I could bump up my ascension level. Essentially I got Silver Medals on Jolder, Estela, and Umeko and now I am stalled out again at 19 Ascension until I get a Gold Medal. For the moment I am closest to getting there on Jolder, but the thing that is going to hold me back the longest is getting my light level up past 65000. I need to run another Legendary mission on Jolder where I take zero deaths… and in truth my previous 7 minute run was deathless… but it did not count because I did not have the quest yet. Other than that I need to upgrade the exotic sword and then swap her artifacts to all exotics, and my weapon mods to all exotics… and I THINK that might get me over the light hurdle. Having long grinds though is perfectly fine, and it is going to take a bit longer because I was later starting the game.

Ace and I got together Sunday afternoon and did some more all Ikora nonsense again. We are still seeking the Trikora as Ammo called it during the podcast, but we did have a really successful run. Largely we just followed around the Umeko that we were grouped with and provided supporting fire. Ikora is actually somewhat powerful if you happen to catch players unaware while you still have your abilities active. When her abilities are down though… you just do not have the tools to close the deal. We are past the halfway point in this nonsense though and we just need to do four more rounds in order to knock out her lore item. We also ran a Gauntlet Blitz as Ikora and that was honestly better than I expected it to be. On top of that I introduced Ace to the frustration that is the raid, and we managed to get through that twice. However we did have one run where people who had no clue what they were doing kept grabbing the keys and then sitting on them, so they also know the frustration of when things go south.

I had enough resources to craft an exotic engram and I pulled Polaris Lance, which is a pretty solid scout rifle that I might work on upgrading for Tan-2/Umeko. I am not sure if this is the play over an Exotic Sniper or not, but I remember liking the weapon in Destiny, so hopefully it is also a solid bet here too. The only problem is that Exotic weapons are so costly in resources to keep upgraded, and I just do not feel like I have the necessary resources to build out every single one of them, much like there are heroes that I am just going to completely ignore. I wish the higher you got up in Ascension, the more common some resources got. So that you could get Mythic resources for example much easier than you previously could… or some of the early Exotic resources. However anything yellow…. still maintains a lot of time gated grinding behind it. I am hoping everything is setting up for a really good week. I know this week is also the start for Legion Remix, but I am not entirely certain how much I will be engaging with that. I am kinda digging playing some console games, so I might be doing more of that in the evenings. Hoping by this time next week… I have the garage more under control and have at least been able to schedule the folks to come pick up in the growing pile in the backyard. The post Irrationally Large Box appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Good TV Bad TV

April 11, 2016 by Belghast

Fear Season 2

Something you need to know about me, is that I love Walking Dead. I started watching it during the first six episode season and have been a fan since. Over time it developed into a sort of watercooler moment for me and my coworkers, where we watch it every Sunday night and discuss it the next morning at work. This is the first time in my life that I have really had a show that I wanted to talk about like this, and even more so had people I wanted to talk about it with. So naturally when Fear the Walking Dead was announce we were pumped, because it would be our methadone to help weather the long dry spells between episodes of the main franchise. That said… season one was a massive disappointment, for me at least. It centered around a cast of characters that I simply struggled to relate to. I spent most of the first season rooting for them to get eaten by zombies, and now that we enter the second season I had hopes that maybe just maybe they would finally turn into characters worthy of the franchise. As it stands the only characters that I can honestly say I like… are Daniel Salazar and Victor Strand… the characters that the show runners are very much setting up to be the “bad guys”.

The biggest problem I have with the show right now is that the characters seem so phenomenally dumb. Admittedly the world has just fallen, and they are not quite adjusted to it… however they should have spent enough time by now to realize that the dead are dangerous. They should also know however that humans are even more dangerous. It just feels like they have exited the first season with zero lessons learned. It is like they still keep expecting life to return to normal… even as they are heading out to sea with Los Angeles burning in the background. I don’t want to get into any spoilers, but honestly that is pretty easy so far because nothing of any importance has really happened yet. Right now I am still very much rooting for the zombies because I keep thinking if we can thin the herd of our cast a little bit… maybe just maybe they will start to take the threat seriously. I guess the problem that I am having is that I keep expecting this to be Walking Dead, when at its core it just isn’t. I will probably give the show a few more episodes, because until Game of Thrones starts up in a few weeks I don’t have a Sunday evening show to be watching… and I have gotten into the habit of watching something on Sunday nights. That said… so far the second season is off to a pretty boring start.

Daredevil Season 2

As disappointed as I am in Fear… if there was a polar opposite I would feel that about Daredevil season two. While the season did not have the strong single story arc that the first one did, it chopped up into what felt like three smaller separate story arcs that were equally enjoyable. This is really the season where we see Daredevil emerge to be the hero we recognize from the comics. Its like over the course of season one and the first half of season two… the pieces were falling into place one by one. I guess that is part of what I have loved so much is that you can see the progression from a vigilante wearing essentially black sweatpants to the badass hero that we have come to expect. There are going to be spoilers in this write up because I am not sure how to talk about it without really going into spoilers. The quintessential moment for me was the creation of his “cane” weapon. From that point on this show turned into exactly what I always hoped it would be and I was constantly getting rewarded with awesome shots of him throwing it into baddies and then retracting it just in time to hit someone else with it. While he has better armor in this show… I like that it still shows the personal toll that being a hero has on not only his body but his relationship with Karen and Foggy.

The highlight of the season however has to be the introduction of the Punisher. “Shane” was a character that I loved to hate in The Walking Dead, and when that character left the show there was a big hole that never quite got filled… that is until Rick himself started to fill that role. Jon Bernthal makes a phenomenal Punisher, and I hope beyond hope that eventually we will see his own spin off series. As a kid my favorite comic book character was The Punisher, and my friends was Daredevil… so it was always an extremely special moment whenever we got to read comics where the two characters interacted and teamed up to fight the Kingpin. I have this feeling that we are heading in that direction, because in this season the Kingpin also finally became the Kingpin that we love to hate. As far as the Elektra arc I have to say it was done pretty well, and the whole hand vs chaste concept. The season was essentially a condensed version of all of the story lines that I can remember relating to Elektra/Daredevil/Stick/The Hand. Unfortunately the whole “Black Sky” concept is not something that I remember from the comics, because in that version The Hand worship a demon called the Beast. So this appears to be the point where we leave the story line and go off in a different direction. Regardless I am sure we will see Elektra once again, and I am certainly hoping that Season 3 will show us more of the Punisher and Daredevil team up as well.

Streaming Goodness

February 4, 2016 by Belghast

RWBY

Rooster Teeth is one of those groups that I have known has existed forever… but never really watched much of. I was not a Halo player, but I do admit to watching quite a bit of the first few seasons of Red vs Blue. Similarly RWBY is one of those products that I have known was available, but for whatever reason never actually watched. There was a certain bit of fitting tribute the other day that I started watching the show, on the Anniversary of its creator Monty Oum’s death. Over the course of several hours of watching I went from knowing absolutely nothing about this show, to becoming a huge fan. I had always heard it described as “An American Anime” but didn’t really know what to expect from that. I mean Avatar: The Last Airbender and Legend of Korra are pretty much what I think of when I think of American Anime. I love both of those shows and a lot of other continuous narrative cartoons like Steven Universe, Adventure Time, and Bravest Warriors. So as to why I never started this one in particular, is as big of a guess as any.

I guess what I like about it so much right now is that it has pretty much everything I loved about Bleach, without all of the stuff I didn’t love about it. What attracted me to Bleach was this premise that created a universe full of really interesting characters. Sure while Ichigo is the “main character” there are a bunch of other extremely interesting good guys and bad guys that make up the tapestry. RWBY does this through the creation of teams that fight together, and can either be positive or negative influences on the story setting. Also there are shades of post apocalyptic, in that the characters exist in this world that is being plagued by a bunch of supernatural creatures known as the Grimm. The only way mankind has managed to survive is by harnessing the power of dust, refined elemental essence to power up their abilities and be able to fight back. The show itself takes place in a sort of Hogwarts for demon hunters, a school known as Beacon that trains individuals to become either Huntsmen or Huntresses. So all of those elements like Bleach and Naruto are there, to keep churning out interesting people to encounter in the world.

What makes the show better for me… is the fact that thus far at least over the course of the three seasons I chain watched… there isn’t a lot of repetition. The frustration with Bleach is when you have the realization that every single season is the same. Ichigo gets his ass kicked by some new bad guy > Ichigo trains to unlock some previously undiscovered ability > Ichigo wins… but just barely… but still enough to save his friends. While RWBY borrows heavily from Anime tropes, the way it puts things together feels more fresh to me… because it is based in a culture I already understand. The problem with Anime in general is that there are so many cultural experiences that I lack, and I simply cannot understand without having to research why the hell “this thing” was funny or important. When I watch most Anime, there are certain points where I feel I need footnotes to understand the subtle nuance of what is happening. RWBY however makes sense out of the box, with nothing lost in translation… because it quite truly IS “American Anime”. So I have to say… I am now hooked and will join the folks waiting every week for the next show to release. I’ve even gone so far as to hook others on the show, which I guess is the truest sign of enjoyment.

Heroes Reborn

When I am sick I seem to ratchet down my game playing and increase my television watching. So over the last few days I have been hunting for things to watch, and over the last two nights have picked back up on Heroes Reborn. I started the first episode of the show some time ago, but it either failed to grab me… or I got distracted. I’ve now chain watched my way through the entire first season and I have to say… I really enjoyed it. Heroes is one of those shows that I have both extremely fond and extremely negative memories of. The first season was among the best single television seasons I have seen… and then that second season…. I would probably rank among the worst. The third season came along and fixed some of the problems with season two… but by that time the audience was gone and the show was doomed. I don’t think I actually watched any of that fourth season… which honestly after watching Heroes Reborn, makes me want to go back and chain through the originals again.

Reborn is the perfect example of a show that stands on the shoulders of the original, but doesn’t actually require you to have watched any of it. Sure there are plot points that you will get earlier if you know who certain characters are from the original, but you learn soon enough what powers they have. The entire show takes place in a very “Days of Future Past” storyline, where the heroes… now called Evos are being forced to register their powers. There is very much a “humans” vs “evos” undercurrent that runs through the show, along with the expected “no evos allowed” signs. What makes this season work however is the same thing that makes me question if they are setting themselves up for a crappy second season again. Much like the “Save the Cheerleader, Save the World” plot of the first season of the original, there is a clear narrative path that ends up being concluded in a massive event. The problem is… I am not really sure how they top this. I mean you can only quite literally save all of humanity so many times during a television show. All of this said… I really enjoyed myself and I guess I am along for the ride when the second season releases.

Media Consumption 11/28/2015

November 28, 2015 by Belghast

Rainy Morning

It’s been a good morning, albeit a cold and rainy one. I got up and made a beeline to the kitchen to fix some breakfast. We’ve recently had a renaissance with the little triangle sandwich maker thing that became popular during the 90s. Recently we started playing with making pancakes in it, and the resulting tiny triangles of pancake goodness are awesome. So I fixed pancakes and sausage and my wife and I nommed happily. From there I ended up popping into World of Warcraft for a bit to do some garrison stuff, and shortly thereafter found The Goonies on cable. Around about this point my wife and I decided it was a good idea to go lay down and snuggle with the cats. It was around this point where my wife asked me… if I had already done a blog post. It had quite honestly slipped my mind. I live my life based on a sequence of rituals, with each one kicking off the next ritual… and if any of them happen out of order all sorts of mayhem occurs.

So that folks is how one almost breaks a three year streak of daily posting… not with tragic circumstances… but just a charming morning that made me forget that the internet was a thing. As a result I am getting a really late start at the day, but have now officially had some coffee so I believe I can functional properly once more. I’m back on the sofa wrapped in my blanket cocoon and tapping away on my laptop. Generally speaking Thanksgiving is usually this difficult holiday filled with running around like crazy, but this year a bunch of things have happened ending up making it the most chill and relaxed time ever. Firstly we wrapped up the work on the house just before the extended weekend, and with that there was a flurry of cleaning to make the house feel “finished”. Then we were able to load all of our meals into an evening and a morning… giving us the rest of the break just to chill. At this point we are taking advantage of the constant rain and the cold temperatures to simply stay in doors and hibernate.

Jessica Jones

With the hibernation has come a lot of Netflix or equivalent digital streaming. Over the past week I have been watching the new Marvel Netflix series, Jessica Jones. I have to admit that this is a character that I only know of in relation to the other characters she surrounds. I went through my “Kung Fu” phase where I read a lot of Powerman and Iron Fist, and ever since have had a certain affinity for the characters in that chunk of the Marvel Universe. In truth… after the amazing results of the Daredevil series, I would have watched anything produced for Netflix feature Marvel characters. Jessica Jones however took a completely different tone, but one equally gritty. While Daredevil shows the clear physical toll of being a hero… Jessica Jones does a good job of showing the mental and emotional toll. Jones herself is completely walled off from the world in her own emotional bomb shelter, trying to keep as many people away from her… because she is convinced that is the only way she can actually keep them safe.

The show also digs into a lot of themes of violation and betrayal but does so in a slightly different way than we are used to seeing. The Purple Man has always been such a strange character in the comics, and I was not quite sure how they would end up making it work for the screen. David Tennant’s portrayal does this excellent job of walking this razor line between making him completely horrific and likable at the same time. There are times you think that maybe with the proper role model, he could change and be a force for good… only to get those hopes dashed when you realize that this is a person without any sense of a moral compass. The actor playing Luke Cage also does an amazing job of bringing that character to life, and I am hoping we see a significant big more of him in the future seasons and the supposed upcoming Luke Cage Hero for Hire show. My favorite insider moment in the show was when Rosario Dawson’s Clare Temple, and it is setting her up to be the Night Nurse taking care of all the supers in trouble. I could gush about Ritter, but really without her the show would have fallen apart completely. I highly suggest watching it… and I am trying really hard not to do any serious spoilers here.

Inside Out

Last night I also finally got around to watching Pixar’s Inside Out. I have to say that in all honesty there has yet to be a Pixar film that I have not loved, and that is saying something because in truth… I can’t say the same about Disney animated films in general. There is a certain magic that Pixar brings to the screen, and a certain timeless “realness” that they give their characters. This film was a bit of an emotional roller coaster but I guess that makes since as it is kinda the “Feelings Have Feelings Too” movie. There were so many moments where I laughed out loud, and several moments towards the end of the movie where I failed miserably to fight back tears. Maybe the whole nostalgic binge I have been on served to deepen the experience of this movie. There were so many profound messages like… you can’t really be happy without also feeling sad sometimes. There were moments I related to the dad, especially when he was straight up oblivious… because so often I get lost in my own head and forget that I am supposed to be paying attention to the world around me. One of my favorite bits came at the very end of the movie when it showed the inside of the cats head… I am pretty sure that is exactly how it works inside our cats at least. This morning while laying in bed… every so often one of them would go tearing through the house for no apparent reason… only to come back and snuggle a few minutes later.

Heroes Reborn

Another thing that I started last night was Heroes Reborn, which is the reboot of the much acclaimed Heroes television show from a few years back. I say much acclaimed… and by that I guess I really just mean the first season. The show as a whole went tragically downhill quickly after that, and I blame the writers strike on pretty much killing all hope of that show living up to its full potential. I mean I realize strikes have to happen, but that managed to kill a number of would be amazing televisions shows. This time around we have zoomed forward to several years after the events of the first series, to a time where the “Evos” as they are now calling folks with super powers are out in the open and an act of terrorism has turned the public against them. The show has shades of the Mutant Registration act from X-Men, and the first episode centers on the dad from the first series, who has apparently forgotten any knowledge from the event. The first episode was intriguing enough to get me to start watching it, and I figure at some point today I will continue on that process. Will be interesting to see where they go with this one, and I hope that maybe just maybe they can live up to the promise that the first season started.