While the federal government continues to dive head-first into inept authoritarianism (which I will continue to say, while the government still allows me to say it), at least state governments are still occasionally doing what they are supposed to do. Earlier this week, the state of California passed a new law requiring streaming services such as Netflix, YouTube, and so forth to limit the volume of ads to be no louder than the volume of the actual content.

This may seem like a minor thing that shouldn't need legislation. Which is true. It really should not require legislation, as streaming services and advertisers should have known to self-regulate this to begin with -- especially considering that there is already a similar law for broadcast TV and radio! But then again, when does corporate self-regulation ever work? But even though this bit of self-regulation would seem like common sense, this has been a massive pet peeve of mine for years, and it still had to come down to a government regulating it.

I'm sure I'm not the only one who gets frustrated by having to turn the TV volume up almost as high as it will go, just to be able to hear and understand dialogue in a movie or TV show, only to have an ad come on and deafen me, almost blow out my speakers, shake the house, and wake up any family who are sleeping. I've been ranting and complaining about this privately, at home, for years (and have probably posted complaints about it online a few times). Now, it appears, that streaming services might finally have to address the problem.

The new California law doesn't go into effect until July of 2026, and I don't live in California, so I might still be waiting a long time to see this change in my own personal TV and movie streaming experience. In fact, it might never change at all. But I am hopeful that it will. It is quite common for corporations to implement state regulations in their products and services for all states or jurisdictions. This is because it's often simpler and cheaper to just apply the change everywhere, rather than have to have different versions for different jurisdictions. So if YouTube, Netflix, and so forth have to develop an algorithm to match the volume of ads to the volume of content, there's a good chance that new code will be applied to all their content everywhere; rather than having to specifically check and apply it only if the viewer is in California.

So there's a strong chance that, even though I don't live in California (and many of my readers probably don't either), we will all benefit from this new California law.

Thank goodness for California!

It's been a few years since Black Mirror released any new episodes. The last 2 seasons, and the interactive special, Bandersnatch were all let-downs, and it was starting to feel like the show had run out of creative juices. I kept hearing that the reason for the hiatus was a combination of the creators having run out of ideas, and also that some of the ideas that had come up with were getting too close to being real, and they didn't want to give real-life companies any ideas. (But I can't find a primary source for any of these claims, so take them with a grain of salt).

Well, Black Mirror is back with a seventh season, and I think it's a return to form for the series!

If you were disappointed with Bandersnatch and seasons 5 and 6, then you will be in for a pleasant surprise, as season 7 comes out of the gates swinging with an episode that I believe to be one of the series' best. It follows that up with 2 underwhelming episodes. I feel like these are more a problem of a failure to stick the landing, than of being fundamentally bad ideas, as they both start out with interesting premises. But then it goes on a real tear with 3 good-to-great episodes to close out the season. The penultimate episode is also fantastic and ranks among my favorite of the entire series.

Image ©: Netflix.

Image ©: Netflix.

Season 7 includes 2 of the best episodes of the entire series.

Where can the Marvel Cinematic Universe go after Thanos? My vote is for Doctor Doom to be the next overarching big baddie now that Disney owns Fox (and the Fantastic Four license). Thanos already successfully wiped out half of all life in the universe, and despite the Avengers gaining access to a time machine, they did not undo any of that! How do you up the stakes going into the next phase of Marvel movies?

Well, introducing a multi-verse seems like the logical next step.

It's so logical, in fact that Marvel didn't even seem to hide the idea in Far From Home's marketing. The second trailer, which I think premiered within a week of Endgame's release, pushed the multi-verse idea hard -- as well as spoiling Tony Stark's death for anyone who hadn't made it out to see Endgame within that first week.

It's all spoilers from the next paragraph on. If you haven't seen the movie yet, then I recommend it. It's good! Not Into the Spider-Verse good, but Far From Home is one of the better Marvel movies, and Mysterio is totally awesome.

...

I think I've finally decided to take a stab at some long-form video analysis and critique on Youtube. My first go at this came in the form of a nearly-hour-long breakdown of my frustrations with the Madden NFL video game series (broken up into 2 parts). For the benefit of my readers, I'm also transcribing the video onto this blog post. Though reading this post will certainly convey all the same points that I make in the video, I still highly recommend watching the video, as the video footage included will do a better job than screenshots of demonstrating the problems I report. The entire video is embedded below.

If you want to see more (better-produced) video content like this from me, then I invite you to support me on Patreon.

EA's ethos of releasing a new Madden entry every single year has become a tremendous detriment to the game as a whole. Modern games have become very large, very complicated, and very expensive to create, and every game series that has relied on an annual release cycle has, in my opinion, suffered for it. Even companies like Ubisoft have recognized this, which is why the company has decided to end the cycle of annual Assassin's Creed releases, opting instead for a major release every two or three years, with some large-scale DLC and expansions to fill out the intervening period. Despite re-using the same game engines, the huge cost of creating a new game every year stretches the company's resources further than they can go. Though I still didn't think that Assassin's Creed: Origins was particularly great, the game still clearly benefited from the extra design and development time that the year's hiatus provided, and the general internet consensus is that the game is very good.

Assassin's Creed: Odyssey was released only a year after Origins, and it looks like a terrible, derivative, waste of time fueled by a grindy micro-transaction economy pulled straight out of a mobile free-to-play game, except with a $60 upfront price tag. We'll have to wait and see if Ubisoft follows through on its promise to "spend more time making fewer, better games", or if it goes back to milking its franchises with slapped-together annual releases.

EA's Madden game is in an even worse boat than Assassin's Creed was in. Not only is Madden an annual release, but it's internal resources are being stretched out between multiple, completely divergent game modes! EA has to chose how much resources to devote to each of these modes, and that commitment comes at the expense of the other modes. In addition to having to make general gameplay improvements every year, the team is also tasked with coming up with new features and improvements for Franchise mode, Ultimate Team, and now Longshot. They're basically developing three different games, and trying to squeeze them all into a single annual release cycle.

Madden's resources are divided between three divergent game modes every year!

Worse yet, one of these game modes clearly makes a lot more money than the others...

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Internet service providers have a reputation for being some of the worst, most un-ethically-run companies in the country. I hadn't imagined that a company could be worse than Cox Communications. As a child, pretty much every time my dad had to call them for any problems, they refused to take any responsibility for their poor service, and always blamed the issues on his hardware or on his computer having viruses -- which was only sometimes true. Basically, they would blame his hardware as an excuse to upsell him new hardware that would also only barely work.

When I moved into my own place, I wasn't happy with having to purchase Cox as my internet and television provider. But to their credit, they gave me an affordable price, and the service was pretty reliable. At least, up until a few years ago.

Don't do it! It's a trap!

My internet started failing intermittently. It would go out almost every night for minutes or hours at a time. Sometimes resetting the router and/or modem would fix the problem, but only temporarily. I had multiple technicians come out to the house to troubleshoot the problems. They would aknowledge the problem, but would be unable to find the cause. To my surprise, they even told me that it was almost certainly not a problem with my local network set-up. I had thought for sure that they would blame my hardware or network in an attempt to upsell me more hardware. They even ran a new line from the street out to my house. I had my own, dedicated DSL line going into my house! That would be pretty sweet, if it would work. Cox even reimbursed my bill for the disruptions.

Sadly, none of Cox's efforts worked. My internet still failed consistently. My girlfriend was dependent on our internet to do online classes related to her job, and so this was inexcusable.

And then I got scammed by CenturyLink

Like a predatory evangelist waiting to swoop in and take advantage of a tragedy to sell a grieving person on the "comfort" of Jesus, an opportunistic CenturyLink salesman showed up at our door. He was claiming that CenturyLink had just laid fiber optic lines in our neighborhood and was offering a sweet deal to switch. I had been thinking about switching to CenturyLink, if only to be able to have a reliable service again.

My frustrations with CenturyLink, and my feelings of having been scammed started as soon as the service was set up in my home. The service that was installed was not the service that I thought I had signed up for.

When the sales rep had come to my door, he had specifically asked me what services I was receiving from Cox. I told him that I was getting HDDVR, a second cable receiver, and high-speed broadband internet for about $150 per month (a price that had been locked-in for life). The sales rep told me that I could get all of that for $75 per month. I should have recognized that this was too good to be true, but I made the mistake of signing on the dotted line. When the technician came to install the hardware the following week, I realized that the sales rep had flat-out lied to me. I had fallen victim to a bait-and-switch scam, which is apparently CenturyLink's modus operandi...