Something new you may already have - Friday Video Distractions with Mike Norton

  What a week!
  Apocalypse 2020 continues. Fully-justified protests against institutional prejudice and worse started to involve riots and looting. Living less than 30 miles outside of Philadelphia, some of this impacted many people I know and work with, some of them dealing with local-to-them looting, groups of baseball bat-wielding vigilantes roaming their neighborhood not at all walking what they were talking -- looking not like the neighborhood defenders they claimed to be, but like people on a hunt -- and sounds of helicopters and explosions in the night, while getting any official word on what was happening perhaps just a street away often seemed all but impossible. So much of the worry of things that go bump in the night is the not knowing.
 Then Wednesday, roughly midday, the literal skies darkened at a pace so sudden as to feel like a special effect, and the first of several violent storms ripped through the region. Not just tree limbs shearing off, but entire, huge, seemingly healthy trees torn from the ground and toppled. Power outages everywhere -- and for many that will be continuing into the weekend, based on estimates from repair crews. 
In the aftermath, as
we were able to find ways to reconnect, many of us got to expand our vocabulary as we learned the word derecho, for intense, straight-line windstorms driven by a fast-moving group of severe thunderstorms.    So, many, many people without power, and local maps suddenly becoming mazes as felled trees and sometimes sizzling, felled or drooping power lines blocked route after route for those looking to get to spots where their phones could reconnect to the Internet, and where they could get prepared food, and where many could try to buy generators to supply power for at least their refrigerators and freezers, not to mention trying to provide some workaround measures for some of their workplaces, especially as this Friday (today) is still set to be the day when the remaining red zone counties here in PA transition to to yellow as we try to carefully pick our way back to, well, something that works and allows more to work. I can't easily use the word "normal" these days, as it's become almost meaningless. Add to this a great many professional challenges that almost could not be more ill-timed, and as strong as the desire has been to just disappear into video, much less write about it, the opportunities have been limited.
   One thing that did come into play just over a week ago, was the formal launch of HBO Max, back on May 27th. The tangle of access hurdles, most often having to do with which sectors of the tech and entertainment market have or haven't established friendly relations, made the question of availability and ease of access depend largely on brands of equipment one owns, and who one buys one's entertainment feed through. For my region, people getting what we older folks still think of broadly as our cable feed via Verizon/Fios have a far clearer shot than those who do so via Comcast/Xfinity. As one of the former group, and someone who has HBO as part of his package, it meant that my ability to sign into HBO Go - their long-standing, online version of the service - directly translated into this new and expanded service. Signing onto the site was just a matter of verifying that one's cable package includes HBO.
 Getting it onto my main, big-screen tv - as opposed to my desktop - had and continues to offer its own challenges. That (and the ample chaos laid out in the first few paragraphs above) have drastically limited my time with the new service, but it's still been interesting to start to move through.
   Along with having access to all of the programming - movies, series, documentaries, specials - generally on HBO, included some curated collections such as all eight Harry Potter movies, for those so inclined, it also features an impressive group of "hubs", offering concentrations of content.
   The DC hub is an interesting, if far, far less than comprehensive mix of DC comics screen properties, including a variety of cartoons a movies. A great deal of their content is for now at least still bound up on their own DC Universe platform, and so beyond reach of this. The single biggest and brightest exception to this is that here we have not only full access to the 15-part Doom Patrol first season, but when the second season lands (or begins -- I think it may roll out in weekly installments) June 25th, we'll have that here, too. That was a big chunk of where I disappeared into last weekend. 

   Based largely on writer Grant Morrison's 1980's incarnation of the team, it's a wacky and profane, adult and loony freak show involving some people from various 20th century eras whose lives came utterly apart and went back together, more or less, in almost unimaginable ways. Layers of mysteries, intrigues and foibles. 

 Includes wonderful turns from Alan Tudyk as Mr Nobody, a persistent villain in the piece, and my absolute favorite character concept from the Morrison era: Danny the Street. Danny is such a wonderful concept, some part of me desperately wants to believe that he exists out there, somewhere, and is waiting to greet me on my most forsaken day, when I am at the end of my tether and am in desperate need of a safe haven and a new start. This isn't to denigrate any of the other performers and characters, but I didn't want to get lost in that level of review.

     A fun time. Not for the kids, but with much that will appeal to whatever bits of kid you still have kicking around inside you. I'd hate to spoil any of it for someone who'd be diving in with little to no background, so I won't. I enjoyed the hell out of it, and am looking forward to the new season late this month.

   The Sesame Workshop hub is an array of Sesame Street and related content. For those who didn't know, a deal with HBO a few years ago tasked them with overseeing new Sesame Street programs, letting them run first on HBO before they migrated to PBS and broader distribution. To the extent that I've been paying attention (I really haven't) it seems to be working out. I believe that more episodes are being produced under this new plan than had been the case when it was just working under PBS. Anyway, I suspect this will be both the last and least explored hub for me for the reasonable future. Your needs and interests may certainly vary. The Turner Classic Movie (TCM) hub is a curated collection of titles, which currently includes Casablanca, the '50s version of Ben Hur, North By Northwest, Singin' In the Rain, Eraserhead, The Wizard of Oz, a broad collection of Charlie Chaplin films, the Criterion Collection of Godzilla movies, westerns, musicals, comedies, sci-fi and horror. Where it seemed appropriate, the content includes fare from more recent times, such as the '80s musical version of Little Shop of Horrors. One can even find not only the straight action 2006 Daniel Craig version of Casino Royale, but the frequently embarrassing comedic and multiple-directorial mess that was the 1967 version -- which at the very least is great for the animated opening titles, with Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass backing.

    I've have to see how often the content changes over in this section.

  The Studio Ghibli hub features animated films from that revered Japanese studio.
  It currently features 21 films in this collection, which most often are fantasies. I'm torn between wanting to revisit Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away and Howl's Moving Castle for the first time in too many years, to trying out many of the others I'm not as familiar with. Some quality material here.
   The Cartoon Network and Adult Swim hubs.

As one would expect, the former features shows from Cartoon Network all ages offerings from over the years, including Adventure Time, Powerpuff Girls, and Dexter's Laboratory.  Adult Swim offers the subset of material from their generally late night material, including Boondocks, Rick and Morty, and Robot Chicken.

  The Crunchyroll hub offers a selection of anime series, and should be fun to explore. Yes, in part it's marketing for the Crunchyroll streaming service -- they're hoping that once you've gone through the 17 series here that you'll seek them out for a far broader array. This all being so new, I've no idea what the planned rate of churn is for this -- how often, if at all, they plan to rotate some of these out and others in, or if this is going to be a static, ultimately dusty assortment. For now, though, it's generally new to me, and I'll be trying to make a little time to wade into it.
 The Looney Tunes hub is relatively new content featuring old and familiar characters. I haven't tried any of it yet, though I'm encouraged by some of the reactions.
  I'm hoping that the near future will find a firmware update on my Vizeo smart tv will leave me with a direct-connect App for this -- that happened a month or three on for Disney+, making connection and control there so much easier. For now, I have an hdmi cable running from my desktop tower to my big screen, so I have to switch it to the right input and navigate the site using my mouse. It's a clunky arrangement given my physical desktop set-up, but it all has that advantage of being a new service that I'm getting for something else (HBO) I was already paying for -- so, a "found" treat.
   I hope you all make it out of this week intact, are able to find some time for disconnecting from the daily struggles, and that we each have better weeks headed our way.  -- Mike