Well that’s a brand new sentence.

The Good Place - Excellent characters, excellent humor, brilliant commentary, and one of the most thoughtful endings I’ve ever watched.

Ted Lasso - Excellent characters, people who hate sports can still love this show, unexpectedly hilarious (not funny, not humorous, I almost died laughing a few times), the worst character becomes one of the best characters, the nicest character becomes the most tragic characters.

Pachinko - Absolutely perfect in design and execution, the best period piece I’ve ever watched (covers multiple periods, as well), biting (almost damning) commentary on Imperial & Post War Japan, characters you either side with out of the gate or grow to understand and empathize with.

And just as he sped off, Push It to the Limit came on the radio.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOYuTOZ6Q0o

Everyone who wants out starts shaving without lotion.

Small child: “Grandpa, tell us about the banana wars again!”

Old man: “The year was 2026, that was before 3D-printed food…”

For ‘driving’ reasons.

Sad wound-be King in snow.

That title was written by The 700 Club.

I’m a father living in Japan, so any competent display of childcare is still met with shock and confusion.

The mere act of being told that something bad will happen changes your actions and choices on a subconscious level thereby likely avoiding the exact chain of events that lead to the moment seen in the vision without doing anything overtly different.

RI startup.

That’s just good advice in general.

Every 100th bird has a squeaker inside!

Pi written out is a real number, yes, I’m referring to the symbol representing Pi. Does that not count?

I always like seeing π.

2025 is certainly a year. What kind of year it is depends on which country you live in.

Household spaghetti recipe.

So happy that the spaghetti that was made for me I now get to make for my kid.

Reverse onion. I thought this was satire at first.

Yep, there’s an export feature built into the site now. It used to be by request only, but now anyone can create a backup from the Settings > Data page on command.

For people outside of the loop,

Trakt has been running since 2010, it got popular because it lets you track and record your watch history with a UI that no one else seems to offer. It connects to Plex and other services so you can scrobble your watches, get notified of new episodes and movies, and has a social layer throughout the site to commune with other users and comment on what you’re watching.

In the past few years, however, there has been one controversy after another.

Trakt abruptly stopping using TVDB for its data due to API costs and now uses TMDB. This created a number of problem with data being mismatched or completely wrong. The leadership of TMDB has a lot of weird ideas about how shows and movies are formatted, splitting episodes into multiple episodes here and merging episodes and entire series together there, or even disqualifying series from being listed over arbitrary technicalities. Trakt blindly follows whatever TMDB does and their admins locked a long-running thread complaining about these issues on their own forums.

Trakt started arbitrarily changing the way the site looks. Including locking the original color scheme behind a paywall, leaving free users a new, gaudy bright purple color scheme that isn’t even complete (random elements of the free site are still the original maroon). The site overall is getting harder to load and uses far more resources than it did just a few years ago. Trakt launched a “lite” version of the site which is not light in size, it’s just the mobile UI for desktop which is just as resource intensive.

Recently, Trakt nerfed crucial features for free users (and even for paid users in certain ways), limiting playlist making and record-keeping to the point where free is almost useless. And the reduction of playlists, which are curated and shared by users on the site, reduces engagement throughout the entire community.

Now this.

The whole company is becoming corporate and as a result been subjected to enshitification.

I am still using it, for now, because I still benefit from the recommendations it gives me based on what I’ve already watched. Once that stops being the case, I’m just going to leave.

I keep text documents of everything I watch. What I enter into Trakt is just a mirror. Trakt does allow all users (including free users) to download their data and just bugger off. So everyone who uses them should go test that feature.