Nk and I have been rewatching X-files since late 2021. It’s a blast. It’s a fun show with relevance today, just as it was in the 1990s. Last week, we reached the end of season 5, which means it was time to watch the first X-files movie.

I wanted to rent the movie through Google TV as I’ve been doing so far, but I learned that unlike the show I couldn’t get the movie from Google TV: I had to use YouTube. I’ve been a YouTube Premium subscriber since I got grandfathered in through Google Music years ago, so the fact that I needed to give YouTube even more money rubbed me the wrong way, but what doesn’t rub anyone the wrong way about Google these days?

With the movie in the X-files in my “movies & TV” in the YouTube app, I casted the movie to my old Samsung TV’s screen, but then I was greeted with a message I’ve never seen before: “Something went wrong,” it read, “This video is unavailable with Restricted Mode enabled. To view this video, you will need to disable Restricted Mode.”

Huh? What restricted mode? I didn’t know anything about a restriction or a mode. The error message had a button with “Settings” on it, as if I could click it with a mouse, but how? My phone was showing the YouTube app with nothing of the sort, and my Samsung TV is about ten years old, with a remote that doesn’t have any “smartness” built in.

My frustration grew when I looked for answers online. Different answers in different places directed me toward different solutions, all in vain. One said to go to my Chromecast’s options and then into a specific tile that wasn’t there. Another said the issue was with my YouTube account, which had a restriction mode but was already set to “off.” Yet another place said to look in my Google account and to make sure I gave Google my very adult birthday. Zilch. I was still blocked from seeing the movie I just paid for.

Even worse, the same happened when NK tried to play one of their videos through their YouTube app, even for a short cute nature documentary starring crabs. We even tried clips from the Muppets. But Google insisted to protect the kids I don’t have from the Muppets.

This weekend, when we tried again, I noticed something odd when we casted YouTube to the TV, but didn’t choose something specific yet to watch. It looked like what the home screen of a YouTube app would look like if I only had a YouTube app, say on Ruko or a Firestick or something similar. But this is a “dumb” ten-year-old TV connected with an old Chromecast, so there couldn’t be any app… right?

Wrong.

There was a menu, complete with settings and an option to sign in - with no one signed in. It seems the Chromecast somehow included some primitive YouTube app. When did this happen, and why? I have no idea. I’m perfectly fine with casting whatever I want to watch directly from my phone, but Google knows what’s best for me and the kids, so it got me a YouTube app that I don’t need on an old TV that doesn’t support it if to judge from how the menus were pushed outside of the frame because my TV’s resolution couldn’t handle it.

OK, so this was some app, but how the hell am I supposed to control it? Only after I gave up and was about to disconnect the phone from the Chromecast did I figure it out. In the option to cast to the TV, there was an option to use my phone as a remote. This option was there before, but I ignored it. Who needs a make-shift-app touch-screen remote on your phone to deal with a menu you don’t know is there on a TV that doesn’t have any apps installed?

Not only did I have to use my phone to painfully navigate the app’s menu which didn’t work appropriately (every menu item opened another pop-up window with instructions that dragged both the screen out of the frame and the focus away from the selection), but I also had to find the “restitched mode option” there, on that app Google created for me, which for some reason was set to “on” by default. I thought that maybe if I could sign into this crappy app with my YouTube account, it would work, but half-baked solutions by Google struck again: The Chromecast did not display a binding QR code as it was supposed to do per the instructions I finally found, because my Chromecast was too old. So… let me get this straight, Google. My Chromecast is too old to work with your YouTube app, so you force it onto it anyway? Yes, yes, I know, the kids, think of the kids. Thanks.

Do you know what works perfectly well? in less than a minute? Connecting my laptop to the TV with an HDMI cable. Primitive, but it’s been working perfectly fine for more than a decade, and I can use a fully-featured media player.

By the way, My Chromecast used to work fine, but now it freezes every time we switch from YouTube to HBO Max or Disney Plus on our phones to stream something else. I know we live in the age of the smart TV, and we stopped buying movies and just rent them, with copyright laws that don’t benefit any of the original creators of the shows anymore, but that’s a different story. The point is that Google’s pushing me to buy a new Chromecast. I expressed my opinion on that with my third finger and looked into getting a Ruko.

For me, this was high hopes, low delivery. It goes to show that foreign doesn't necessarily mean sophisticated.

The story consists of a bunch of tropes mashed together. The bad: witches, BDSM, lesbians, and orgasms (combined with those). The good: men, vanilla sex, and orgasms (combined with those). Yes, it's from the 1970s, and I should expect the glorious age of knights in shiny armor who push themselves upon competent women who turn them away but somehow lose all ability of self-discipline toward the end and need help to be saved.

This would be boring enough, but see, Carroll Baker works well as Baba Yaga; her piercing eyes bewitched me, and fell under her spell. She has depth, the only one in the cast who seems to be more than a paper-cut character... but no. She's evil, she's a witch, and even though she seems to care about a lot of things (including the well-being of the women under her control, at least at the start), all of this goes to hell when (oh no!) the BDSM scene comes out. The poor lady, all she wanted was another plaything for her and her sub to have some fun with. Instead, she falls into a hole just when things get interesting, to the tune of "Here Comes Your Man" as our knight shows up to make sure all crooked, beautiful things break down to fit nicely into a happy, appropriate ending. Behhh.

Still, I enjoyed some of the cinematography going on. A few nice tricks in a movie lacking a budget for special effects show that you don't need to go far to get a nice spell-like story going.

This was the week of the analog journal 📓, and I discovered two unexpected benefits.

First, writing by hand is much slower than typing, and if I want my handwriting to be decipherable, I need to slow down even more. This means writing much less. Because I write only a few paragraphs, they need to mean more. This is a good exercise for my hyper-brain, forcing it to slow down and think about what I have to say.

Second, There’s no editing, no spellchecking, no revising. This means that when I close the journal, I’m done. No going back to it to add stuff or edit later. This is a sense of closure that is missing from a digital journal.

On the wiki, I updated my Micro.blog page . It includes more of the philosophy of Micro.blog (the way I see it) with an illustration.

I wanted to create a short video for Lillihub, a new Micro.blog client, but it didn’t come out as good as I wanted. I’ll probably make a page in the wiki for it.

Another exciting addition is computer games 🎮 reviews on my blog. For this, I use Backlogg. The games page is broken for now; I need to improve my knowledge of Backlogg and get all the parts working. Nevertheless, I’m excited to include these reviews. I spend plenty of time on games, and reviewing them as I review movies makes sense.

On my Gaming PC, I renamed World of Warship’s desktop shortcut to Sad Addiction. That’s a good summary of what I think about this game.

It is a solid, tactical, and balanced game for the most part. Each ship class you choose plays differently, and there are differences between different ships of the same class. You can upgrade and add special weapons and tactical bonuses to your ships, choose different captains, and more. Technically, the game is stable, the servers rarely lag, and the graphics are excellent. And, being a Wargaming game, it’s also free to pick up and play.

Here comes the but.

Being a multiplayer online game, your fun from it depends mostly on who you play with. Unfortunately, this usually means bad experiences are more common than good ones, at a ratio of about 3:1. What’s worse, the developers understand most of their gamers are teenage hornballs (or at least they act like ones) and target that constantly. Game updates are explained in video clips presented by sexualized women. Avatars are anime and even hentai-oriented characters. Many in-game events emphasize stuff from Megadeath to Transformers. So yes bro, there’s no surprise that the gaming experience often feels like a bad high school reunion.

On the technical side, the game includes huge patches every month or so, with 70% of things you won’t care about (Sailor Moon captains anyone?) or won’t affect your gameplay directly (a ship that costs 60 US dollars). There are also other questionable practices, like an annoying Windows system notification that warns you if you switch away from the game to a different program for a minute or a broken reporting system that colors your name in the game pink (Oh no! Not pink! What would friends say?!) for the most idiotic things, like choosing to play a plane carrier, since some players hate this class of ship so much they report you if you play them.

Since I already commented on the price of some of the ships: the game is free, yes, but that means Wargaming will do whatever it can to get you to buy stuff. A premium account, a season pass, a ship with an advantage in the game, etc. In fact, if you play this game long enough and get to high-tier ships, it becomes nearly impossible to progress without spending at least a little bit of money to move up.

So, if this review reads more like a vent, it’s because it is. I love the game, and I hate the game.