I stayed in Saturday (09/29/26), after staying up all night and sleeping for about 7 hours. The pain from Friday’s procedure was worse when I woke, but it waned with medication. I worked on several viewing orders (completely reworking and simplifying my American Horror Story viewing order) and also on a writing project that I likely won’t share here because, honestly, I’m not sure it’s legal to post. But posting it somewhere doesn’t really feel like the point anyways; it’s totally personal and just for me.
Poor Aaron. I’ve mostly gotten over the cold we both had, but his seems to have moved deeper into his lungs. He’s going to the clinic tomorrow to see what they say.
I went to bed relatively early on Saturday and slept in on Sunday (09/20/26). Aarn had said that he wanted us to watch some Star Trek this weekend so I suggested we try to catch up on Strange New Worlds, as we were 4 episodes behind and the season will end this Thursday. We were both kind of dreading it as we’ve been very unhappy with the season so far, but we were also both pleasantly surprised but what we saw. First we watched S04E06 “Off-Hour”, which was a take on disaster movies. Each episode of Strange New Worlds of late has a gimmick, a genre, and they’ve often felt redundant or pointless. This episode felt like Trek. It was well written, well acted and well produced. Everything looked great and though some of the violence seemed a bit more graphic than we’d like, it fit the scenario. I would say this was easily my favorite episode of these last two seasons (3 & 4). We decided to watch another episode (S04E07 “Like Chronitons Through the Hourglass”), which we also enjoyed. It wasn’t as good as the previous installment, but was better than anything else this year. I knew some stuff about this one before I watched and I was a bit surprised how much I liked it as it’s essentially a sequel to an episode I don’t love, and I knew it would be providing things I wanted, but in a soap opera scenario that I wasn’t interested in. Most of it worked. The soap opera element was used a little bit longer than I would have liked, but considering all that could have gone wrong with that story, I was relieved how well it did all hold together. And I also felt that Anson Mount, who tends to be one of the weaker elements in this series, felt like he gave a great performance here.
As of now, we only have 9 episodes left of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, 3 episodes this season, 6 episodes next season. Before watching these 2, I was ready for it to end. Now…I’m still ready for it to end. I like more of it than I don’t, but even if the next 3 episodes knock it out of the park (which I doubt), this is still the weakest season of the series to date, and Season 3 wasn’t a winner either – indeed, I’ve liked each season less, as a whole, than the season which preceded it. I practically begged for this series to be made after Season 2 of Discovery reintroduced Pike’s Enterprise, but this is not what I had envisioned, and I know that’s not really the job of those who make the show, to make everything the way that I would want, but for me, Strange New Worlds has been the biggest disappointment for this Star Trek fan of any series in the modern era. There’s just so much untapped potential here – but I’m not sad that it’s ending, because I’m not at all convinced they would explore the characters in any more depth then they already have, which is to say, hardly at all. They are so keen on getting to Kirk and company, that they barely scratched the surface of Pike and his comrades. I don’t get it.
The pain increased as the day wore on. Aaron was playing the new Wolverine game. I decided to distract myself by replaying my favorite video game: The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, which I’ve done many times at this point. I played for maybe an hour. And now I’m trying to get some work done on a few projects. Today has just been a bit blah. Hoping to get back in the groove this week.
Today’s journal entry song quote title is from “The Ballad of the Witches’ Road”, a song from the Marvel Studios Disney+ television miniseries Agatha All Along, written by composers Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez.[1] Eight versions of the song were used throughout the series; the main version is referred to as the “Sacred Chant Version”, but the one stuck that is most often stuck in my head is a mashup by Andy Wu that combines it with “Bloody Mary” by Lady Gaga, and in the video, also includes imagery from the series “Wednesday”, known as “The Ballad of the Bloody Mary Witches’ Road”:
