Silo (Season 3)

 

After the slow pace that led to major cliffhangers in Silo season 2, season 3 finally pushed the plot forward in meaningful ways. Season 3 follows two plot timelines. In the main or current timeline, we follow Juliette (Rebecca Ferguson) in the aftermath of returning to her main silo after visiting silo 17. She learns about the rebellion that occurred in silo 17 and about the silo's ability to dispense poison to kill its inhabitants. When she returns to her home silo 18, however, she has her memory wiped at the direction of Camille in IT and the "AI Supercomputer" running the silo. As the season progresses, Juliette slowly regains her memory, and more importantly Bernard (Tim Robbins) realizes that the "AI Supercomputer" is actually just a human, likely located in Silo 1.

The second timeline follows a US Senator who has a sister that is a pilot for the military. She's involved in an incident in Iran where her plane crashes and her memory is wiped (sounds a bit like what happened to Juliette's memory). Her senator brother becomes interested in what happens and starts a personal investigation. He crosses paths with a reporter who is also interested in what happened (Jessica Henwick). As the season progresses, their poking around attracts the attention of those building the Silos. They are asked to join the Silo project, but decline. However, they accept an invitation to tour the Silos. As they enter the silos to begin the tour, the bomb is dropped annihilating the surrounding area. The creators of the Silo either knew the bomb was going to be dropped, or were themselves responsible for the bomb being dropped. 

As the current and past timelines merge, it is confirmed that the voice behind the "AI Supercomputer" is a human, as Bernard suspects. The voice turns out to be the Doctor who treated the senator's wife after the Iran incident by wiping her memory, and occasionally the Senator himself voices the computer. What we don't know is the reason for the bomb. We now know why people are in the silos, but what we don't know is the motivation behind them or why they are hellbent on keeping people in the silos. I'm sure we will learn more about this in the fourth and final season. After the reveal that the people who built the Silos are (likely) responsible for the bomb, it is hard not to compare this to Fallout. I think the big difference is that people roam outside of the Vaults in Fallout, whereas they are being forced to stay in the silos in Silo. But the general concept feels very similar. 

Your Friends and Neighbors (Season 2)

 

James Marsden's character Owen Ashe was just what the doctor ordered for Your Friends and Neighbors (YFaN) season 2. The way season 1 concluded, it was difficult to understand how they would push forward with a plot for season 2. Queue up the arrival of Owen Ashe, an ultra-wealthy (even compared to the current residents) newcomer to the neighborhood with a mysterious and potentially dark background. John Hamm's character Coop continues robbing his neighbors, and the main plot of season 2 starts when Ashe catches Coop robbing a valuable book from his house. Ashe essentially blackmails Coop, convincing him to invest a large sum of money (like $400 million large) into an investment (or is it a hedge?) fund that is ran by Coop's former employer from season 1. This gets Coop somewhat back into the investment game, but as the season progresses, we start to uncover that Ashe is possibly hiding some skeletons in his closet from his past. In addition, the consequences of Coop's choices are starting to show, especially with his oldest daughter and closest friends, one of which join him in his robbery business. Coop is no longer working alone, which complicates things greatly. All of this comes to a crashing halt, when billionaire Ashe ends up dying by slipping when the group gets into an argument regarding his investments. The season ends with Ashe dead in the bottom of a pond, and everyone else moving on with their lives. 

The final scene shows a fisherman likely finding Ashe's drowned car, so I'm sure the fallout of this accident and Ashe's background will be revealed in season 3. The end also hints that Olivia Munn's character Sam maybe leaving town, I would guess implying that she is leaving the show. I hope this isn't true, because I like her quite a bit as an actor and she isn't in a lot of other shows that cross my television. I'm looking forward to seeing the fallout in season 3. I also have to mention that I cannot get over how these people live. I know they're wealthy, but the parties and social gatherings blow my mind. I know it is a TV show and for entertainment, and they can't have people just sitting on the couch and watching TV all of the time, but do people really live like this? My social tank would be empty all of the time. 

Apple News

 

Apple News was the big deciding factor on which tier of Apple One I would select. I was pretty certain that I would use Apple Music and TV enough to justify that bundle. I wasn't as sure about News because it is an app/service that I had never really used before. However, since Twitter has become X, it has also become a cesspool and I was interested in reducing my reliance on it for news. Additionally, the Indy Star is behind a paywall and by upgrading to the Apple One tier that includes News, I get access to the Indy Star for about the same price as if I paid for the Indy Star by itself, so I decided to pull the trigger on the app.

After using News for several months, I'm generally happy with it. You can set up channels based on sources or topics, which creates a news feed curated for you. There are some adds within the articles themselves, but they aren't too obnoxious and there are no adds on the news feed itself. One of the best parts of using this app is that you don't have to deal with cookie disclaimers, pop-up ads and videos, etc. It is a much cleaner experience than clicking on links from X. This cleaner and less annoying approach to reading news that I care about is a much better experience than using X. With that being said, I wasn't able to completely get rid of X because of the individual contributors that I'm interested in. However, I was able to trim down the number of people I follow and thus the time I spend on X by quite a bit on a daily basis.

When you subscribe to News, you get access to daily puzzles which is a service that I didn't necessarily want but I do use periodically. Primarily I do the mini crossword puzzle, even if the clues frustrate me sometimes. Subscribing also gets you access to 100+ magazines, most of which I don't have interest in, but there are a handful I will check out from time to time. Retro Gamer is a magazine that I didn't even know existed that I've come to enjoy. The News app reminds me of RSS apps I used to use in the past. Its an app that collects your news stories in one place, and allows for easy access without the annoying cookies and pop-ups. The free service is good, but if you want to pay for the subscription you get access to pretty good additional content. You still have to scroll a lot, so it doesn't eliminate that part of internet reading, but for a low cost you get access to tons of content for the same price as 1 or 2 of the sources individually. 

Apple Arcade

 

I have access to Apple Arcade as a part of my Apple One subscription. The issue that I have with Apple Arcade is that it is the third gaming source that I have behind Playstation and Nintendo, and the fourth gaming source if you count Steam. That isn't Apple Arcade's fault, per se. However, it is important because as a gamer, I want to play the best games that are available and I'm not sure Apple Arcade can say that they have the best games available. Out of the 200+ games available, there are probably 15 or so games that I'm interested in. I'm actually OK with this ratio, but the trouble is out of those 15 games, I've either (a) already played them on a different platform, or (b) I have access to them on a different platform where they're better. NBA2K, for instance, is significantly better on the PS5 than it is on Apple Arcade. 

Apple Arcade has games available for Apple TV, Mac, and iPhone & iPad. Some games are only available on certain platforms, however, and I find this frustrating. For instance, I've been on a huge Final Fantasy kick lately, and Arcade has Final Fantasy I & IV. I do not currently have access to these games on other platforms without purchasing them. However, they are only available on iPhone or iPad. I don't have interest in playing these games on my iPhone with touch controls. If they were available on Apple TV or even the Mac, where I could play with a controller, I would be significantly more interested in the service.

So where does this leave Arcade in the grand scheme of gaming? I'm not really sure. I like the app and interface quite a bit. I think the game selection is OK but not great. I don't think it is all that appealing to serious gamers. I think it could appeal to people who enjoy gaming but don't want to invest in a console or PC for some reason. This includes people who enjoy gaming on their phones and tablets. For me, I'm a bit lost on what to do with it. I'd love to see it expand to more games on the Mac & Apple TV, where you could play on a larger screen and with a controller. I'd also love to see Apple TV get a Playstation Remote Play app (This has nothing to do with Arcade, but I bring it up as an example of how Apple could expand its gaming footprint.). For the time being, I will loosely keep an eye on the games that are available but likely won't participate in it much unless it gets upgraded quite a bit.

Apple Music

 

The Amazon Music app was why I switched to Apple Music and Apple One. Specifically, the Amazon Music app on Apple TV. One of the common ways we listen to music at home is through the sound bar and speakers connected to our TVs. I was using the Amazon Music app connected to our Apple TV via HDMI as the interface. I thought this would provide a higher quality connection compared to bluetooth, and honestly it was just easier to access the content through the app on the TV versus connecting my phone to the speakers via bluetooth. The Amazon Music app on Apple TV drove me nuts, however, because it didn't display the quality of music that was streaming (even though the app for the phone and on the web clearly display this information), and that bothered me because I wanted to make sure I was streaming at the highest possible quality. The sound quality was fine, but I wanted to be sure of the streaming quality. Additionally, Amazon Music has at least some music videos but you can't access them on the Apple TV app, just the mobile app, which made no sense. Lastly, the TV app would commonly log you out, necessitating a 2-factor authentication process that honestly was just annoying. These three things, in addition to an overall desire to rely on Amazon less, made me switch from Amazon Music to Apple Music. I'm into the Apple ecosystem so deeply, that I thought it made more sense to go this route instead of Spotify, plus the price on Apple One made sense to me because of the Apple TV bundle as well as Apple News (more to come on this in a future post). Now that I've explained why I made the switch, let me tell you my thoughts on Apple Music after having used it for a few months.

The short story is that I like Apple Music a lot. The TV app has never logged me out. It allows me to go into settings and adjust streaming to lossless, and I can press an icon when songs are playing that confirm that they are streaming in lossless audio. This isn't done by default, which I find kind of odd, but nonetheless the option is there. The music videos are available on the TV app, and there are a lot of them. My only criticism on the videos is that the interface on accessing them could be improved. The mobile app is also better, in my opinion. It isn't littered with podcasts and audio books and other non-music features. It just has music, which I like. Amazon used to have a desktop app for Mac, which apparently they no longer support because when I got my new Mac last year I wasn't able to download it. I like that Apple Music has its own separate app on the desktop, primarily because it brings back one of my favorite features of desktop listening - the mini player. It's so nice to have a small, rectangular box in the corner of my widescreen monitor showing me what is playing and allowing me to pause or skip to the next song. I don't know that the music selection is better than Amazon Music, and in fact for some playlists I actually like Amazon better. But I think the apps and ways of accessing the songs is much better with Apple Music, and like having the comfort of knowing that it is streaming in lossless audio on the TV.

Your Friends & Neighbors (Season 1)

 

Season 2 of Your Friends & Neighbors (YF&N) just released, and subsequently there has been a lot of chatter about the show on Apple social media as well as other news feeds I follow. The chatter has been mostly positive. I like Jon Hamm, and really like Olivia Munn, so I decided to give it a shot. Overall I enjoyed the first season, though I thought a couple of the episodes right in the middle of the season dragged a bit in plot progression. Below is the summary of the premise of the show from ChatGTP:

Season 1 of the Apple TV+ series Your Friends & Neighbors follows Andrew “Coop” Cooper, a wealthy hedge fund manager whose life falls apart after he loses his job and goes through a painful divorce. Desperate to maintain the luxurious lifestyle he and his family are used to, Coop begins secretly robbing the homes of the rich people in his upscale suburban community.

What starts as a way to stay financially afloat gradually becomes addictive, and Coop discovers that the seemingly perfect lives of his friends and neighbors are filled with affairs, lies, blackmail, and dangerous secrets. As he digs deeper into their lives through his burglaries, he gets pulled into a larger criminal mystery involving a suspicious death.

This show is different than most shows I watch (it's non sci-fi) and was a nice change of pace. The drama was uncomfortable at times, but overall it was enjoyable and even funny at times. Seeing how the 1% live (Patek Philippe watches for example) is both interesting and amazing, honestly. I know the show was fictitious, but I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of what was shown is true in certain communities. It's interesting how Coop's perspective of his rich neighbors changes once he falls on "hard" times and learns about some of their questionable actions. Like I said above, the show overall was enjoyable with some lull in plot progression and uncomfortable drama, but I liked it enough that I plan on watching season 2. I like a lot of the actors in the show, and I think this is the first thing I've seen Olivia Munn in since her Attack of the Show days (except for the one X-Men appearance). I enjoyed the watch references in the show as well! 

Drive to Survive (Season 8)

 

I've always been interested in watching Drive to Survive. However, I'm like the only person in North America who doesn't have Netflix, so in the past the show has been unavailable to me. I previously had Apple TV+ intermittently, but now have access to the channel on a more consistent basis because of my Apple One bundle. Formula 1 moved from ESPN to Apple TV+ this year, and one of the perks of this move is that the newest season of Drive to Survive became available on Apple TV+. It's the first time in the history of the show that I've had a chance to watch it, and it was the first show I watched on Apple TV+ after picking up Apple One. It did not disappoint.

Drive to Survive is a behind-the-scenes documentary on Formula 1. One of the interesting aspects of this show is that Formula 1 historically has been tight lipped, not really allowing people much access to the teams and drivers. This show was a complete change for the sport in terms of allowing access, and it is credited for helping the explosion in popularity of the sport in the US. I follow the sport relatively closely, and while I have heard of almost everyone featured on the show, several of them I had never heard speak before. Even for a relatively big fan of the sport, this level of access is huge. 

Drive to Survive is really well done. It does a good job of explaining the pressure that these teams and drivers feel, as well as highlighting the drama of the series. On the surface, it is really easy to turn on an F1 race and see Max dominate and think that it is boring. When you are given some behind-the-scenes access, however, you realize how competitive the sport is in reality. It inherently makes the sport more interesting. So much so that my interest level in the 2026 season has increased a lot, despite the fact that it has been a bit of a mess. I also started playing the F1 game again because of my motivation from watching the show. We are planning on temporarily picking up Netflix in the near future. I don't anticipate watching past seasons. However, as long as future seasons are available for me to watch, I will stay current with the most recent season. 

Timepiece Blueprint - Year 0 - My Current Collection of Exercise & Quartz Watches

 

My idea of putting together a watch ("timepiece") blueprint came from a Teddy Baldassarre video. As I discussed in my initial post on my blueprint, there are too many watches that are appealing to own them all. Doing so is both impractical from a logistics standpoint (you can only wear one at a time and what's the point of having so many watches that you wear them infrequently, plus where do you store all of them?) as well as being irresponsible financially. Instead of owning a bunch of watches that you never have time to wear, he argues that you should have one good watch in a small number of watch categories to wear. I agree with this approach, and thus that is the approach I decided to take with my own watch collection. 

The watches I am talking about in this post fulfill two categories of watches on my timepiece blueprint. I'm grouping them together and naming them Year 0 because these are watches that I owned well before the concept of developing a watch collection was born. The first category of watch falls into a "rugged" or "wear and tear" style. Basically, a watch you aren't afraid to get dirty and possibly scratched. Most of the time, you would think of a Casio G-Shock or maybe a Timex for this category. However, I try to exercise five days per week, and really enjoy using a fitness tracker to monitor my vitals and distance. Since I'm heavily involved with the Apple ecosystem, it makes the most sense for me to use an Apple Watch as my fitness tracker. Since I wear this watch to exercise and thus get sweaty while wearing it, I placed this watch in my "wear and tear" category, a category that I've renamed exercise watch. I don't find myself in situations where my hands and forearms are going to get excessively dirty. If I did, I probably would get a Timex for this category. But since that isn't the case, and my Apple Watch already gets a little dirty from exercise, I use this watch for times when I may be getting a little dirty.

The second group of watches for my blueprint is a quartz watch. Quartz watches are highly accurate and reliable. As long as the battery is charged, they are easy to put on and will have an accurate time without having to wind the watch or reset it. With the exception of the Apple Watch, every watch I have ever owned is a quartz watch. Prior to starting my timepiece blueprint, I owned two quartz watches and have subsequently added two more. At this point in time, I have this category covered. However, the oldest two quartz watches I own are Citizen watches that are powered by Eco-Drive, and they do require some babysitting to keep them running as they run on solar power. If they do not receive sunlight, they will die and can take a bit of time to get them fully charged. I actually have a light source specifically designed to power these types of watches, that I have to periodically use to charge them if I haven't worn them much in the recent past. Luckily, I did pick up a Bulova quartz watch as a gift for my work anniversary, which I like quite a bit and it fits nicely into the traditional battery powered quartz category. Additionally, the watch I bought for Year 1 of my timepiece blueprint (more to come on this watch in a subsequent post) is also a quartz watch that is battery powered, so at this point I have this category covered.

Timepiece Blueprint - An Overview

Owning a watch at any price point is a luxury. This is especially true in the current day and age where clocks are already on our phones and computer desktops, etc. Essentially clocks are already everywhere, making the concept of a watch almost obsolete. Despite this modern reality, I really like watches, and I know I'm not alone. I first remember liking watches in my teenage years, when I had a Timex and then a Fossil chronograph. In my later teenage years I transitioned to Citizen, which was my first watch that I bought at a jewelry store. After that, however, watches took a back seat to school and the business of life. Low finances contributed to this as well. It wasn't until the Apple Watch debut in 2015 that I became interested in watches again, and even then it was only smart watches that I was interested in. The Apple Watch became an integrated tool for improving workflow while at the office, so much that I wasn't interested in switching to a non-smart watch and sacrificing office efficiency. However, technology has changed and I no longer rely so heavily on my watch for office efficiency (my phone has taken this over). This switch from my Apple Watch to my phone has sparked my interest in traditional watches again, and man is it a complicated landscape. 

As I have become interested in traditional watches again, of course I've become interested in owning them as well. The challenge with this is that there are a lot of cool watches and watch brands in existence, and they can be quite expensive. At times I find myself becoming a bit overwhelmed with the choices. There are a lot of watches that I like and could see myself wearing, and deciding which one(s) to purchase to wear can be overwhelming. I've decided that I want to start a small watch collection, a decision that will require me to purchase new watches to add to the existing watches that I already own and have started wearing again. I don't want to own a large number of watches where I could never wear them consistently, nor do I want to focus on rare or collector's only watches. Instead, I want to focus on watches that I like and that I plan on wearing on a weekly or at least every other week basis. I'm somewhat lucky in this regard in that I wear dress clothes most days of the work week, so it is easy for me to wear a nice watch and not worry about it getting damaged or feel out of place. 

With this approach to my new watch collection, I've come up with a 4 year "blueprint" for my new watch collection. I'm hoping to have this collection complete within 4 years, with a new watch per year. I'm going with a smaller collection where each watch has certain attributes. Because of this, I'm OK with spending a bit more per watch since I anticipate the quantity of watches to be fairly low. There are a few types of watches I hope to get in my new collection, such as a dress watch and the always important go anywhere, do anything watch (GADA). The nice thing about this 4 year blueprint is that I'm already in year 2, despite coming up with this blueprint idea just a couple of months ago. In subsequent posts, I'll discuss each watch in my collection and the reasons why I selected it for my collection.

Apple One & Home

 

We've been long term Amazon Prime subscribers. Due to increasing cost and perceived decreased benefits (along with some other things), we've decided to discontinue our Amazon Prime subscription. The reason I'm bringing this up here is because of some downstream ramifications that come with discontinuing Prime. When I first started subscribing to a streaming music service several years ago, I went with Amazon Music Unlimited, partially because of a discount that was received if you were a Prime subscriber. I'm not sure if we still receive a discount for Music Unlimited, but the decision to drop Prime got me thinking about switching music services as well. Generally I've been happy with Music Unlimited. However, like everything else it seems, the price keeps going up for the service. Additionally, and I'll get into more details on a future post, I had issues with the Music Unlimited app(s). We're heavily involved in the Apple eco system, and so I started looking into Apple Music. This escalated quickly as I discovered Apple One, a bundle package that includes all of the apps shown in the picture above. There are already a handful of shows on Apple TV that I watch, and there is another handful of shows that I'm interested in watching. Additionally, with Formula 1 switching from ESPN to Apple TV, there was additional incentive to pick up Apple TV again. I was already familiar with TV, but I decided to do a trial of Apple Music to make sure it would work for us. Apple News is part of the bundle, and so I decided to pay attention to it again as a potential source of news. After doing about a month trial of Music and News, I decided that it was worth switching from Amazon Music Unlimited to the Apple One bundle. On the one hand, the per month cost would go up. On the other hand, I like the Apple Music app better than the Music Unlimited app, I will watch content on Apple TV, and I'll use the News app daily. This is what I mean when I say that things escalated quickly. None of this was on my radar until one Saturday morning Sarah suggested we get rid of Prime. This decision, plus being heavily involved in the Apple eco system and the overall quality of the apps in the One bundle made the decision make sense for us.

What I plan on doing is having subsequent posts where I talk about (at least some of) the apps individually. Like I said above, I've been doing trials over the past month with the apps and have subscribed to the One bundle now for a little over a week, and so I have enough experience with them to have opinions and thoughts moving forward. The other thing I wanted to mention in this post was Apple Home. We have some lighting automation in our home, some of which is electronic (as opposed to being dawn to dusk with solar sensors). The electronic workflows were a bit of a mess, because of a mix of software being used. Some of the lights were running on Alexa, some on Belkin Wemo, and some on Apple Home. In January, Belkin discontinued support for their Wemo smart plugs, which were running all of our lighting timers. I decided that moving forward I wanted to run all of our smart home workflows through Apple Home. The app is readily available to me on all of my Apple devices, it is a nice looking and easy to use app, and Apple TV can be used as a smart home hub to help control your smart devices. Since my original go around with smart home devices, a standardized protocol called "Matter" has been developed, allowing for interoperability between devices made by different companies. This is a great step forward. For me, ensuring that my devices work with Apple Home is how I am going to standardize where I go to control my home workflows. The app is really nice, and the ability to use Apple TV as a hub is a nice feature as well.