It’s been 15 years since I have had a cable TV subscription, and except for one month a year, I do not miss it! The one month a year is around October because of the baseball playoffs. The games are available only on cable networks:
ESPN for the wild card round
Fox Sports 1 for the ALDS and ALCS rounds
TBS for the NLDS and NLCS rounds
The World Series is broadcast on the Fox network so you can watch using an over-the-air antenna.
My strategy usually includes subscribing to an over-the-top streaming television service: YouTube TV, DirecTV Stream, etc. to get the networks for a single month.
Fubo and HBO Max and Rabbit Ears
My cord cutter’s strategy for the 2025 MLB playoffs includes…
Fubo TV. Fubo carries ESPN, Fox Sports 1, and Fox sports, including 4K feeds for those channels. That will cover just about the entire playoff schedule, except for NLDS and NLCS because Fubo TV doesn’t carry the Turner networks. At the moment, there’s an American Express statement credit on some accounts: $30 off a $70+ one-time purchase, available up to three times for a total of $90.
HBO Max. The NLDS and NLCS are on TBS and TNT. I plan to watch these games on HBO Max, which carries live sports on the two ad-free tiers: Standard and Premium. I think the Premium plan gets you a 4K feed, but I am not absolutely certain about that.
The World Series is available without a MVPD plan since it’s on the Fox broadcast network. The advantage of watching over-the-air is that you get the game without a significant delay. But the advantage of watching using Fubo, for example, is that there’s a 4K feed available.
Earlier this week, Queens College activated multifactor authenticator (MFA) sign-in for all users to use our apps through CUNY Login. This includes the learning management system, D2L Brightspace, that we use for all of our courses.
I generally appreciate the extra security measures because, yeah, it’s important to have common sense, widely accepted practices to maintain computing security.
But seriously, the MFA rollout was botched!
There were several problems.
The rollout was launched during the summer session. Granted, there are fewer classes taught during the summer sessions than spring and fall semesters. But the administration has been pitching these intersessions as equal to the fall and spring semesters. Our college president, Frank Wu, has stated that the college runs on a year-round schedule on multiple occasions. I am teaching now and potentially locking out our students during an accelerated pace of learning, where a weekday is close to a full week during the fall and spring semester.
The IT Desk help page was irrelevant to the MFA problem. The Queens College IT department kept pointing us to a help page that was not about the MFA problem. The page was about GlobalProtect VPN.
The page to request MFA reset required being signed in with a CUNY Login account. Did any adults think about this? I was locked out of my account, and I couldn’t request that IT reset my MFA.
Queens College IT did not hold a virtual help desk this week. Normally, they let you drop in to virtual office hours on Zoom, but they did not have that this week. They did have in-person office hours. Why cancel these virtual office hours when they might expect more demand? This would be like professors ghosting their students when assignments are due. Nope, in fact, the opposite is true: we expect it to be busier because our students need help.
I think the problem with this launch reflects a broken philosophy about college administration. IT needs to remember that they exist to teach and learn activities of the college. It is not the other way around.
Postscript: I was fortunate that I also taught at LaGuardia Community College this semester, and I got a response from an IT staffer within an hour, and he called me (on the phone!) shortly thereafter. He had me share my screen on Zoom, and he worked with me to verify that, yes, I needed my MFA reset. He filed a priority ticket with CUNY IT, and he got my MFA reset within another hour. He was a true hero!
Hard to believe that it was seven months ago to the day that I went with some friends to watch the total solar eclipse on April 8, 2024.
It happened to be my friend’s birthday that day, and we made a whole weekend out of it. It also helped that he and his wife have a house in Vermont, which was close to the path of totality, but still required us to drive about 150 miles to see the sun completely disappear. We eventually arrived at Lyndonville, Vermont, a village about 50 miles south of the US-Canadian border in the region known as Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom. Not only was Lyndonville in the path of totality, but it was far enough east that there were not any clouds to obscure our view.
A few days before the actual eclipse I had watched a documentary on NOVA about the Great American Solar Eclipse which had accelerated my interest in the event, and made me look forward to it even more than ever. The most fascinating fact about a solar eclipse was that the corona, and that it was the hottest thing we can ever see on earth. The corona’s temperature can reach up to 3 million degrees Celsius, while the Sun’s photosphere, which is the part we see, has an average temperature of around 5800 degrees Celsius. We can really only see it during a total solar eclipse.
My interest in photographing the eclipse was to capture more earthly phenomena. One of those was how we had a temporary sunset and sunrise, and how the light would change throughout the event.
During totality, it would be almost entirely dark. Only the light from the corona and any artificial, such as the lamp posts in this park, would illuminate our scene.
Following totality as sunlight began to peer through behind the moon, we were bathed in the whitest light I have ever seen. Everything looked like we were illuminated with fluorescent lights, or as I described at the time, as if someone had turned on the old sodium lights at a ballpark.
The only thing that made the trip difficult was the traffic. It took us about five hours to drive about 150 miles. Each way. And the totality event was only about two minutes long. But as just about everyone who has experienced a total solar eclipse will attest…
The New York Film Festival begins on Friday, September 30. I didn’t buy any tickets, although it’s not because there aren’t any good films playing. There are some great films scheduled, as there always is. But the late Annette Michelson gave me a pro tip: these films will all come out sooner or later in wide release, and if wait a few weeks, and you can see them at a discount.
In 2002, I had bought tickets for a lot of films, including the Hong Kong crime thriller, Infernal Affairs (Andrew Lau and Alan Mak, 2002). At the time, I had two friends from California in town on a production tour for Simple Shoes. I also didn’t have many friends in New York those days. I gave the tickets to a fellow graduate student at NYU to spend time with these friends. He saw the movie in my stead.
Infernal Affairs became a commercial and critical hit. It represented a milestone in Hong Kong cinema, and it even was remade into different films, including Martin Scorsese’s Oscar-winning, star-studded film, The Departed (2006).
For the twenieth anniversary of the film, Film at Lincoln Center is screening the three films of the Infernal Affairs trilogy, through Thursday, September 29, on the eve of the 60th New York Film Festival. (Note: Film at Lincoln Center stages the annual New York Film Festival so it’s very closely connected.)
I went last week to see the three films over a five-day period to atone for missing it the first time around. I especially liked that I saw the first Infernal Affairs at the very same place where it was screening in 2002. Technically, Infernal Affairs screened at Alice Tully Hall in 2002, and I saw it at the Walter Reade theater, but both these theaters are on the Lincoln Center campus.
Here’s my spoiler-free hot takes on the three films:
Infernal Affairs1 is the best of the lot. The stories of the two infiltrators are really deep and complex, and the layers of deceit make this a nerve-wracking experience.
Infernal Affairs 2 gives the background of the two infiltrators and how each came to be. I didn’t find the stories to be as interesting as they were in the story events of IA1, but there were some great revelations throughout.
Infernal Affairs 3 is the most restrictive in terms of character’s point of view. Unlike IA1 and IA2, it focuses more on the story of one of the infiltrators and the trauma he’s living after the killing of the other infiltrator. It also wraps up the trilogy and it’s theme of living in an eternal hell—hence the infernal in the trilogy’s name.
In college, if you have an unpaid balance on your account, the bursar and registrar offices collaborate to block from you from registering for the next semester, you get dropped from your classes, or you won’t be awarded your degree.
This past year has been very difficult for a lot of people because of the pandemic, including some of my students. Some have been infected with COVID-19, some have lost family members, some have lost a job or two (as I did), and others have suffered in other ways that I can’t even imagine. It stands to reason that some students would have fallen behind in paying their college bills.
As part of the last spring’s CARES relief packages, the federal government dispersed funds for colleges and universities, including providing aid for students who might need support.
While CUNY did offer students some support, including providing them with iPads so they could do remote learning, the university has implemented two austerity measures that hurt students:
Students with balances due were purged from their Spring 2021 classes.
CUNY has raised the minimum number of students needed for a class to run, meaning it has reduced the number of classes available for students to take.
The first action causes all kinds of troubles. One Media Studies professor in shared the story of a student who was dropped from their classes and might have their student visa cancelled, which would put the student at risk for deportation. CUNY is cheap so it’s unlikely that the student owes tens of thousands of dollars.
The second action makes it harder for students to graduate in four years. The university has touted its Finish in Four program that largely depends on students taking classes during winter and spring semesters. At Queens College, the college cancelled all of the Media Studies classes this winter semester classes, setting back many students’ progress for finishing their degrees.
The administration just sent around an email proclaiming that CUNY fights for its students. Given how it has shut out students from registering for classes and cutting the number of classes available for them to take, the words ring hollow.
Back in September, a reporter at Cheddar named Antonella Crescimbeni emailed me to ask about the reasons why the movie industry had moved from New Jersey to California. She wanted to interview me for a video—part of the Cheddar Explains series of explainer videos—to learn why the American film industry had migrated from New Jersey to Los Angeles.
We talked over Skype in mid September, and the video was finished and posted to YouTube some time in October. I’m finally getting around to writing about this video.
One of the things Ms. Crescimbeni asked me was whether it was true that US filmmakers moved to Hollywood to escape Edison’s patents and to escape to Mexico if Edison’s lawyers sued filmmakers who might be infringing on his motion picture patents. This has been a widely circulated myth about the move to Hollywood that is almost as old as the movie colony itself. Lewis Jacobs wrote in his 1939 book, The Rise of the American Film: A Critical History that “the safest refuge [from Edison’s trust] was in Los Angeles, from which it was only a hop skip and a jump to the Mexican border and escape from injunctions and subpoenas” (85).
It’s funny how those two parts of the story have persisted, although there’s little truth to that. There are two main reasons why filmmaking moved to Southern California. The first was because of the dry and mild climate that allowed for year-round production. The second reason is because there exists a lot of different terrains close together: a filmmaker could shoot films set in a desert, in the mountains, on a beach, in a city, and at sea. In fact, the other members of Edison’s cartel had filmed in Southern California; it wasn’t just the scofflaws that didn’t license Edison motion picture equipment.
For those wondering how Ms. Crescimbeni found me, she said that she found a lesson plan on my website about the Motion Picture Patents Company (sometimes referred to as “The Trust” or “Edison’s Cartel”) and the Independents who defied this patent pool, making films and then ultimately taking over the whole industry once feature films came to be.
With age comes a lot of things, most of which are deemed negative by our culture. There comes slower metabolism, a changing hairline, and diminished opportunities to accomplish any meaningful goals. But with age also comes a few gifts, specifically wisdom and perspective.
I won’t pretend that I have acquired much wisdom at this age, but I do think that I tend to make fewer impulsive decisions of consequence at this age than I did when I was younger. But having lived many years, I do feel like I can relate a lot of new things to past experiences. This growing sense of perspective allows me to take things in stride more and not react to everything.
As I write this post on Thursday morning, Vice President Biden needs only six more projected Electoral College votes to clinch the presidency and defeat Trump. A lot of people seem are understandably anxious about the result, but as we’ve been hearing since the summer, there’s going to be a lot of mail-in ballots and it’s going to take time to count them. Officials are calling for patience. We likely won’t have a projected winner until later today or even tomorrow, which is three days after Election Day.
While I am also anxious about getting a result quickly, I am drawing on my memory of the 2000 Election to shepherd me through this time of uncertainty.
The 2000 US Presidential Election was one for the ages. As you know (or at least should know), it was an extraordinarily close race: one decided by the state of Florida, 537 votes, and its 25 electors, who put George W. Bush in the White House. We’ve been living with many of the consequences of that election to this day.
I was in 24 years old at the time, living in Santa Barbara1, and remember that I was applying for graduate school. I remember having a small TV set perched on a table next to my desk, where I was typing up a statement of purpose as part of my application package. Because I lived on the west coast, I was able to catch more of the Election Night drama than most people on the east coast were willing to tolerate. I watched as the networks called Florida for Gore, saw then-Governor Bush dispute that, and then witnessed the network anchors eat their words and claw back Florida as undecided.
Not having a presidential election called by bedtime on Election Day was unusual. I have a fuzzy memory of my dad coming back from voting one year. He was frustrated that the broadcast networks had called the winner of the race when he was in line waiting to vote. The broadcast networks could easily project a winner at the time because those races were not that close.
But that’s not the case in 2000. The uncertainty dragged on for weeks. Part of me felt exhilarated because I was living through a historic moment. I only really became aware of history in the 1990s, and let’s face it, that was a particularly stable, secure, and uneventful decade for Americans on a macro level. But the last couple of months of 2000 were dominated by counting the ballots in Florida.
We all know how things turned out. The counting and recounting in Florida went on. We learned the terms “hanging chads” and “dimpled chads” as ways to divine voter intent. Think about how much history hangs in the balance because some people can’t follow directions. Ultimately, the US Supreme Court stepped in to stop the recount so that Florida could send a slate of electors by the date proscribed in the Constitution.
As they say, you know how the rest of the story turns out…
None of this is to say that history will repeat itself. This appears to be a very different situation. It does not appear as if this race will come down to one state. Also, I’m heartened at the moment to know that Biden has multiple paths to victory—he only needs one of four states to win, three of which are quite likely. Trump, on the other hand, needs all four of them, and that doesn’t appear likely given the projected totals. In 2000, Bush and Gore each had only one path, and it was through Florida.
However, in the back of mind, I do worry that something unprecedented could happen. That is, after all, the precedent of the Trump presidency: it’s all unprecedented because no one has had the poor judgement to do this shit before.
We could see many lengthy court battles, several instances of intransigence among Trump and key members of his cabinet to ignore the results of the election, we could see state legislatures send competing set of electors precipitating a constitutional crisis. And if Biden only has 270 electoral votes secured, could there be a faithless elector or two? Some of these things have happened before, but a lot of is… say it with me… unprecedented.
In the meantime, we all anxiously wait. And for me, my hair will get only more gray as we grind through each day towards December 14 (the date the Electoral College votes) and noon on January 20 (Inauguration Day).
I was living in Goleta, which at the time wasn’t even in its own city. ↩
The publishers at Take Control Books have just published a free ebook, Take Control of Zoom Essentials by Glenn Fleishman. You can register to download a free copy as a PDF, EPUB, or version for Kindle. Registering gives you access to updated content as it is released.
This books follows the release of another ebook, Working from Home Temporarily, released for free earlier this spring just as millions of us were dispatched to establish our homes as our workplaces.
The new academic year is upon us, and I suspect that many of us are using Zoom a lot more than we were a year ago: for courses, for meetings, and for webinars. One thing I don’t think we’re using it anymore for is those bothersome “Zoom Happy Hours.” I think that trend died off about a month after the pandemic, or as soon as it was deemed safe for us to gather outside to engage in moderately low-risk distance socializing. It got old really fast.
If you’re new to Zoom or, if you’re like me, and took the summer off from any and all videoconferencing software, this seems like a good introduction or refresher.
Here’s a few “tidbits” of trivia related to the book. Take Control Books was started by the folks who founded and have been publishing the Apple news website and newsletter TidBITs for over thirty years. However, they have since sold the imprint to another company since then. And although I don’t know Glenn Fleishman personally, he’s a respected figure in tech and nerdy circles for, among other things, winning on Jeopardy!… twice.
This is the final TV listings ever printed in the New York Times.
Over the summer, I swapped my subscription to The New York Times from a digital-only to an old-fashioned home-delivery print subscription. One day, my neighbor picked up a copy and was amazed that the TV listings were still printed every day.
In yesterday’s print edition, the Times announced that it would stop printing TV listings, something the paper has printed since 1939. The reasons for discontinuing the listings are obvious to anyone today: most everyone I know watches TV asynchronously. We don’t need to know what’s on TV tonight any more than we need the paper to find a job, a used car, or a secondhand couch. Also, this gives the Times more space to write about—not simply list—television programming, of which there is more than ever.
Today, in the Sunday, August 30, edition of the Times, we see the final run for tonight’s TV listings. Curiously, today’s listings were printed in the Metropolitan section, which home subscribers like me received yesterday, as part of the Saturday delivery. It is perhaps one of the most succinct—albeit unintentional—messages that speaks to the anachronous nature of timely news still being delivered in print in 2020.
Earlier this month, I did something rather unusual for 2020: I switched my subscription to the New York Times from a digital subscription to an old-fashioned home-delivery print edition.
I have had a subscription to the New York Times, in some one form or another, for as long as I can remember, even before I moved to city in 2001. While still living in Santa Barbara in the late 1990s and at the urging of one of my college professors, I subscribed to the New York Times at the same time I was receiving home delivery of the Los Angeles Times. Let’s just say that my recycling bins were never so full as they were during that era. I continued the subscription when I moved to New York, and it followed me from one apartment to another. Finally, in 2010, while living in Long Island City, I frustratingly gazed at my overflowing paper-recycling bin and decided that my print-news era was over. I switched to a digital subscription.
Yet in 2020, when almost every aspect of my life exists in “cyberspace,” I decided to restart home delivery of the print edition. Let this sink in: I am now paying someone to bring over many sheets of paper to my home just so I can get the news, as if there was no other way to get it.
Here are some reasons why I switched to home delivery of the print edition:
Over the summer, I often go to the beach and prefer to read the news in print. I can’t read my phone or tablet under the bright, hot sun.
No stores in my East Williamsburg–Bushwick neighborhood carry the New York Times anymore. Only a handful of bodegas even sell newspapers, but those few only carry the New York Daily News, the New York Post, and/or a Spanish-language daily.
I have access to a 50%-off academic rate, otherwise this would be completely unaffordable.
It comes with two bonus digital subscriptions. I gave one to my dad and another to a bartender in the neighborhood who used to do the crossword everyday until “all this happened.”
It’s a much more pleasant and focused experience to read the news in print than it is to drink from the proverbial firehose that is getting news online, especially on social media and especially in “these times.”
I had money in my Subscriptions budget after cancelling my AT&T TV Now “skinny bundle.” I soured on the package once it had swelled from an affordable $10/month package in 2016 to a bloated $35/month, including subsidies for the right-wing news outlets as One American News Network and Fox News.
Earlier today, after a month of receiving the paper on Saturdays and Sundays, I upgraded the subscription from weekends-only to seven-day delivery because I have enjoyed reading news in print so much. Also, in the age of the virus, where I don’t have to leave my apartment for work anymore, going downstairs to fetch the paper every morning seems like a nice healthy ritual.
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