jeffreyd.org - Wahtever

Fuck Ryan Murphy

2025-11-15T21:05:00-05:00

Ryan Murphy's new All's Fair is being heralded as one of the worst shows of all time, and people seem surprised. Everything Ryan Murphy does is shit. At best you get a few good episodes before the nonsense aliens show up or there's a random super uncomfortable masturbation scene that doesn't add anything to the plot. Keep in mind this is the man who brought you 9-1-1 which has become so ridiculously stupid that even Buck can't convince me to steal it from the internet. It continues to exist because Angela Bassett has to eat and the only thing she can digest is the scenery. The only goddamn actor on that show killed himself at the end of last season. They're pretending it was to rescue Chimney but we all know it was to get away from a sinking ship. No, wait, he stayed through the sinking ship...

We've gotten so used to expecting good TV that anything that pretends to be edgy or shocks is considered great, but Ryan Murphy doesn't make great TV. Ryan Murphy occasionally has an accident that's watchable, generally due to a cast that's better than whatever he's written for them (I'm expressly not looking at Sarah Paulson - Ratched proved she's incapable of pulling off anything beyond FX-level acting). The first half of the first season of AHS is great. Maybe 4 episodes of season 2 are good (I would watch Jessica Lange peel potatoes but I won't watch the Name Game episode). Capote vs. the Swans is probably the best example of a cast dying to pull something out of the toilet that is Murphy's mind but eventually they even lose the thread and it just becomes people staring at each other.

Ryan Murphy is bad. He's bad for TV, he's bad for the human brain. He keeps putting out shit and people keep shoving it up their asses in some sort of parasocial fecal transplant and as long as this keeps happening, we'll never get another The Wire. We'll just continue to see garbage TV with nonsense aliens and uncomfortable masturbation scenes that don't add anything to the plot.

Sail On, Todd Snider

2025-11-15T20:20:00-05:00

I was first introduced to Todd Snider in 1996, right after Step Right Up came out. I was perusing the CD selection at the base exchange on Langley AFB and figured I'd give it a shot. Side Show Blues was the first song that really spoke to me.

It's hard to break the door down wearin' seven dollar shoes

A perfect line if there ever was one. I kept up with him, buying the CDs when they came out, and I loved them all. I do believe The Excitement Plan is my favorite. A lot of people will tell you East Nashville Skyline is his best, and it's great, but for me, his version of Robert Earl Keen's Corpus Christi Bay will always break my heart in a special way, and "his sinker looked like it was fallin' off a table and nobody was hallucinating that" from America's Favorite Pastime never fails to get a grin.

My mother died in 2009 and her death happened as my marriage was on the verge of falling apart. For a good month, I'd do twice daily drives to the hospice house and I kept Play a Train Song on repeat. It became the soundtrack of the worst part of my life, and I won't lie, it's kinda hard to listen to now. But it's playing as I write this, on repeat, reminding me that pain and loss are the same thing as joy. They hurt the same way, just differently colored, and they're the price we pay for being human. While I never met him, I like to believe Todd knew that. He was certainly very good at reminding the rest of us.

Richard Layman - Funland

2025-10-23T21:25:00-04:00

What complete shit. I mean really. Characters I don't give a shit about, "action" that's not fun to read and then an ending straight out of a shitty SyFy channel show. Not even offensive, just offensively bad. Spoilers ahead.

Am I supposed to identify with the horrible violent teenagers? The guy who fantasizes about rape and can be convinced to leave his girlfriend to the wolves by a grab at some bloody tits? Am I supposed to feel something for the "trolls," who are equally as violent and, for some unknown reason, holing up in a funhouse operated by a man who rides a giant spider?

I was looking for recommendations for 80's horror paperbacks and found this on a list somewhere out there. I don't know how it made it onto any list other than Dumbest Shit of All Time or that competition they do for the worst literary descriptions of sex. Giant fucking spider, bloody tits, womens' (no, not women, girls') pants falling down as they crawl over their friends' dead bodies. When I was 14 I probably would have loved this.

AI Apps Update

2025-10-19T11:20:00-04:00

Multiversal is great, the other two are not.

I've been using the hell out of Multiversal now that I've got Lineage on my devices. It works great and while converting everything to CBZ is an extra step on Friday nights, it's worth it. Currently enjoying the 2023 Daredevil title, and I've had no problems as of yet. It just works. I do need to go back in and add keyboard control for page turns and title selection, but I've fired Claude since he tried to kill some dude so I need to get a bit more hep to the Android development world before I dive in there.

Yucheecung works okay but has a problem with random stopping. This might be something I get around to fixing or I may just stick with FinAmp which works fine for my use case.

Bezorger is just a shit show in every sense. I was too confident after early successes with Multiversal and Yucheegung and figured I'd be mostly hands-off with this one and it shows it. Definitely not one I'll come back to, at this point I'm just tracking incoming packages on paper and it's fine.

I do believe these are the only three I'll make in this series of AI generated software. I'm no longer using Claude (or really any AI) except at work where it's a whole thing, and even at work I avoid it where I can. With existing projects, it really causes more trouble than it's worth, I think. Probably not for the people who count story points and give a fuck about burn-down charts, for them it seems great because developer productivity is at an all-time high if those are your favored metrics. Real gangstas know it's just inserting more (and harder to find) bugs than it's solving 95% of the time, though.

Sears SR-3000 VHS VCR

2025-10-19T11:15:00-04:00

Sometimes, the juice isn't worth the squeeze.

I found a Nakajima WPT-150 on Facebook Marketplace the other day. It was an estate cleanout guy, and I aim to make friends with as many of those as I can. In addition, I'd been looking for a decent electric typewriter anyway. Maybe someday I'll just type these journal entries out instead of using Pelican.

He only wanted $20 I think, and even with a few problems it's worth that, so I went and got it. I happened to mention I would also be in the market for VCRs, tape decks, really anything other people would consider obsolete, ane he mentioned a VCR in the other room. I gave him another $20 for that, something in a box that once contained a Pansonic PV-V4020. Once I got it home, though, what was in the box was a Sears SR-3000 from somewhere in the mid to late 80's.

Now, even in perfect condition, this thing is worth about a smack in the face. It's pretty early VHS, it's fucking huge and fucking heavy and fucking ugly. I figured I'd give a shot at cleaning it up and getting it working smoothly and then convince somebody with more money than brains on eBay that it was just what they needed to add to their wood panelled man cave or she shed or whatever it is they call them.

It almost works. Tape insert mechanism is fine and smooth and while there's a bit of noise when the head spins, it's not worse than you could expect for a machine of this age. However, it won't actually play anything. After a long fight with a number of readily marked disassembly screws, I got the bottom off and found my culprit: the two belts controlling the reel mechanism were goo. Not even enough left to measure, and what was there is now just stains on my hands, my mouse pad and everything else within spitting distance of the desk.

I looked around the box for a service manual maybe but no love. I did find a few service receipts from mostly regular maintenance work and looky there, a bag of extra belts...all of which are also goo. The belt sizes are marked on the bag, so I could probably find replacements that will last at least the rest of my life, but am I going to spend hours disassembling a very tightly packed piece of 80's electronics to clean the belt leftovers just so I can get shitty quality out of a subpar player (even in its prime)? No. I'm going to put it in the trash and go back to Facebook Marketplace and find somebody who's go the Panasonic that should have been in this box or something equivalent. It sucks, but sometimes another man's trash should also be your trash.