1. I am extremely thankful that there is a break coming up: the last few weeks have been exhausting. Working with teenagers is no joke.

2. Ridley Scott really needs to retire. All accounts are that Gladiator II is…well, exactly as bad as you’d expect a 2024 sequel to a highly-regarded film from 2000 to be. Scott was always a hit-or-miss kind of director, but he’s now pretty much all miss and no hit, increasingly by feeding upon the remnants of his own past successes.

Directors in general have a tendency to lose their touch as they age, for one reason or another. Consider also Steven Spielberg, who hasn’t had a successful or well-regarded film to his name since…probably Lincoln in 2012. That actually makes me wonder how many directors have continued to make consistently great films throughout their careers (maybe Kurosawa? Hitchcock?).

3. There are categories of internet videos I’m learning that I dislike. For instance, anything that promises to prove “X Martial Arts style is Useless!” loses my interest from the title. The trouble is that I think anyone qualified to make such a statement is not the kind of person who would waste his time making self-promoting YouTube videos with clickbait titles. It strikes me as the sort of thing done by someone with an ego who wants to present himself as a kind of later-day Musashi. Only, in order to reach a place where you could legitimately form a judgment on this, you ought to be beyond such pettiness.

4. I’m also getting very tired of the ‘Crazy Liberal Reactions to Trump’s Victory’ videos. They feel very old and stale by now. Really, who cares at this point?

My sense is that a lot of internet Conservatives (many of whom are of the clinically-nostalgic Generation Y) really want to relive the experience of 2016 and so cycle through the same routines: the “Trump Can’t Win” compilations, the “Mainstream Media Reactions,” and so on, aiming for the same feelings of triumphant euphoria. Personally I’m over it.

5. I’ve been watching a lot of boxing documentaries lately. This has helped me to fill in my knowledge of some famous names, like Sonny Liston, George Foreman, and Rocky Marciano (so far my favorite of the bunch). It’s also given me an idea of just how impressive these men were as athletes. I was watching the first Mohamed Ali-Joe Frazier fight, where these two incredible human specimens wail on each other for a good hour. Frazier in particular takes punch after punch from Ali, any one of which would probably knock an ordinary man to the canvas, but he keeps going for fifteen full rounds. At one point he even lowers his gloves and dares Ali to hit him. It’s pretty amazing to watch.

6. On a more elevated note, I learned of this video 765874 – Unification: a fan-made short film starring William Shatner (under some pretty good de-aging CGI) playing Captain Kirk one final time, picking up right after the character’s anticlimactic death in Star Trek: Generations as he enters the afterlife and meets a few familiar faces before taking his proper place alongside his dearest friend as they go where all men have gone before.

It is far and away the best Star Trek story in decades. A truly fitting send off not only for Kirk, but for the whole franchise (which has long since succumbed to the corporate death cycle). So I shall consider it.

7. It’s also a reminder of just how good an actor Shatner can be. With no dialogue and working under multiple layers of CGI, he slips back into the character like he played him yesterday and delivers an absolute knock-out performance.