Running Commentary 4/14/2025

Hello,

My phone’s power button broke. The rest of it is fine, but it really does seem like the power button is dead. Thankfully I can still turn the screen on and off using tap gestures, but if it ever does turn off I don’t think I’ll be able to turn it back on.

Anyway...

Watching...

Daredevil

I’ve finished my re-watch of Season 1. I think Daredevil is genuinely a pretty good show, if an odd fit for the MCU. Like, it’s hard to imagine that all these gritty characters had, months before the events of the show, witnessed Loki, God of Mischief, lead an army of space aliens to attack their city. But yeah, that happened; that’s what’s giving Fisk the opening to rebuild Hell’s Kitchen to his tastes.

Both Murdoch and Fisk were characterized really well, and that carries the show. The side characters were a bit more mixed: Karen was done really well; Foggy was funny but the main thing they did with him in the back end of the season is have him get mad at Matt for concealing his abilities and his alter-ego, which, while understandable, was awkward, uninteresting television that made me feel like it was something in the show that I just had to wait out. Rosario Dawson’s character started interesting but quickly became merely functional before disappearing off-screen for the second half of the season. Leland Owsley I really liked, though I could see that Fisk would eventually kill him for a while during my original watch. Stick shows up and…gives some good background on Murdoch, I guess, but he’s really just there to set up things in Season 2.

But that aside, I really did like season 1 of Daredevil. The rather extreme gore of the early episodes sort of faded away as it went on; the show remained pretty violent, but there weren’t more exposed bones or anything. I think that seasons of the Netflix MCU shows were always a couple episodes too long, in terms of the pacing of certain things, but they generally managed to end strong, which is more than can be said for many Marvel TV projects since.

I’ll be getting on to Season 2 shortly.

BattleBots

• TOMBSTONE vs ORBITRON - This was the best fight in this event, either part. Orbitron did a lot of damage to Tombstone here, and lasted a lot longer against it than many bots have, and if it hadn’t gotten high-centered I think it could still have won in the time it had left.
• VALKYRIE vs HYPERSHOCK - Another good fight. Valkyrie is up to their third or fourth driver now; Bam Singhasaneh has done quite well in all her fights here, and I think Valkyrie is finally living up to its potential as a two-wheel undercutter.

Martin Mason showed up at the end there to let us know that there will be another set of Face-Off fights, featuring Mad Catter and some other bots, including one I don’t recognize that looks like a crab. So I guess I’ll be back to talk about that whenever it drops.

By the way, did you notice that Orbitron was sponsored by…

Playing...

Warframe

I’ve successfully spawned and defeated one of the new nemeses, the Technocyte Codas. These play a fair bit differently than the Kuva Liches or the Sisters of Parvos do, so here’s my thoughts on them:

• I appreciated that the progression through spawning and defeating the Coda was significantly more streamlined and quicker than Liches or Sisters. And while I do think that the process of spawning Sisters is too complicated and could use a fix I don’t think I’d want either of the earlier nemeses to be changed to be like the Codas. The Codas work being short because a) the On-Lyne personals don’t have the variance that Lich or Sister characters get and b) Codas come at the end of player progression, when people don’t really want another highly time-consuming system in the game. Liches and Sisters come earlier on, and a lot of the fun and accomplishment comes from how long it takes to deal with them, and in how much of a threat they are if you don’t come properly equipped.
• I will say that Coda weapon acquisition is better than Kuva/Tenet acquisition, and I wouldn’t mind Liches and Sisters being changed so that you didn’t have to constantly spawn candidates hoping to get the weapon you want; particularly I’d like Sisters to get this change, since they’re such a hassle to spawn in the first place.
• The boss fight was not painful but was rather boring to play. I was a bit confused as I played, but it seems you just kill techrot enemies until the band’s immunity expires and then you kill the band. It seems the band has attacks it delivers from onstage during their immunity, kind of like the Jackal has, but, whatever they were, I managed to dodge them all without really understanding what they were. I will say that it’s probably best to do this solo so that you don’t have to play the same fight for times in a row. This is true of Liches and Sisters as well, technically, but they’re easy to do quickly one after the other in a squad.

Bird of the Week

This past weekend I was rather busy, so I didn’t get my next bird quite completed in time, so here’s an old bird with a refreshed write-up.

This week we have a jewel of the American West. The Lazuli Bunting is a songbird of the cardinal family that is found in regions of Canada, the U. S., and Mexico west of the Rocky Mountains, especially in the Intermountain Basin. They are close cousins to the all-blue indigo bunting, with whom they interbreed where their ranges overlap, producing blue birds with white bellies. As with other cardinalids male lazuli buntings are much more colorful than the females. Males look quite a bit like bluebirds, though they can be distinguished by their smaller size, thicker beaks, white wing bars, and generally brighter color. Females are a pale brown, without even the traces of blue in the wings that indigo buntings have, though they do share the males’ wing bars.

“Lazuli” derives from the Latin root word from which most Romance languages get their term for blue (and from which English gets the term “azure” by way of French) and ultimately derives from the Persian lājevard, which refers to the location where a blue mineral was mined, called in Latin “lazulum”, which thus became part of the Latin term “lapis lazuli” for a semi-precious stone mined in Central Asia.¹ Lapis lazuli is a deep blue color, for which it has been prized since ancient times. The Bible references lapis lazuli (incorrectly called “sapphire” in certain translations) as featuring in the ceremonial breastplate of Hebrew high priests², and as the second layer of the walls of the New Jerusalem in Revelation.³ In Mexico, rather than comment on the blue color it shares with many other buntings, they call it “colorín pecho canela”, the “cinnamon-chested bunting”. To science, it is Passerina amoena, the “attractive sparrow-like bird”, a rather straight-forward name given by the Quaker naturalist Thomas Say, who was one of the first scientists to study the wildlife on the far side of the Rocky Mountains. Say was the first to formally describe the coyote, as well as this and several other birds, though his career mainly focused on insects and shellfish.⁴

Curation Links

The Secret History of the Manicule, the Little Hand that’s Everywhere | MessyNessy

If you’ve read Rian Hughes’s XX you might have noticed that the words of the 19th Count were often punctuated with ☛ little disembodied pointing hands ☚ indicating emphasized words. If you haven’t read XX, you should, it’s neat, but first read this article about those little hands, bits of proto-emoji pseudo-punctuation that actually go back farther than the 19th Century. Treadmill vs. Real Hill: Which is harder to run | Steve Mould

[VIDEO] "Thanks to Galilean relativity it should be just as hard to run on an inclined treadmill as it is to run on a hill of the same incline. But you don't gain gravitational potential energy on a treadmill, so can it really be true?" (27 minutes)

The world’s oldest pants are a 3,000-year-old engineering marvel | Kiona N. Smith, Ars Technica

“With the help of an expert weaver, archaeologists have unraveled the design secrets behind the world’s oldest pants. The 3,000-year-old wool trousers belonged to a man buried between 1000 and 1200 BCE in Western China. To make them, ancient weavers combined four different techniques to create a garment specially engineered for fighting on horseback, with flexibility in some places and sturdiness in others.”

The Babysitter’s Crush | Roseanna Blackwell, Necessary Fiction

[FICTION] The story of a boy growing up and his thoughts, and later memories, of his babysitter.

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