Category: Uncategorized

At some point when I was messing around with trying to get programming to the TV in the back of the house (which I usually only use when exercising) I was playing around with a way to get movies and TV shows from my computer to the TV. The TV isn’t really a smart TV, but it does have Chromecast built in. I wound up casting shows that I had recorded from my DVD’s and put in my phone, which seemed to work better than trying to cast those shows from the computer to the TV via the phone. In the end, I bought an Amazon Fire TV stick for that TV and got a Tablo (for recorded local broadcasts) and Netflix so I didn’t have any shortage of programming. I usually watch Late Night with Seth Myers while exercising and if he isn’t on that week, then something on Netflix. I think at some point in there I looked into options to create a home media center that I could access over the network, but at the time I was only using Chromecast.

Continue reading “Plex”

Once again Black Friday is now on Thursday, right after Thanksgiving dinner. So I got to eat a delicious dinner and then drive to Best Buy. This wasn’t a spur of the moment decision, but the result of a year’s worth of patience and research. I had been buying a lot of Blu-rays this year, so there wasn’t much more that I really wanted, plus I don’t feel like this has been a particularly strong year for movie releases, so I really only wanted about five titles.

Similar to last year, Best Buy’s ad generally had the best deals and their Black Friday ad came out in early November. Walmart had a decent ad, but it didn’t say what all they had for sale, instead saying “50 titles at this price,” but only showing 8 titles, leaving you no clue on the other 42. Target had a few okay deals. Frys didn’t really even try this year, with only a small selection of 4K movies for $1 more than Best Buy’s price. I came up with this list of Best Buy picks (the last numbers are the Rotten Tomato and Metacritic scores):

1. Avengers Infinity War, $6.99, 84/68
2. Black Panther, $6.99, 97/88
3. Blade Runner 2049, $5.99, 87/81
4. Manchester by the Sea, $3.99, 95/96
5. Paddington 2, $5.99, 100/88

Continue reading “Black Friday”

Last night Best Buy had a special online sale of Black Friday items for their Elite and Elite Plus customers only. I don’t really spend that much at Best Buy, but last year I got their credit card and all of my purchases on that card count as if I was spending there, doubling or tripling for some purchases. I just recently reached Elite Plus status, primarily by using the Best Buy credit card to buy lunch instead of paying cash and getting double credits for every dollar spent. Over the last year they have probably given me over $100 in store credits that I have used mostly for Blu-ray purchases. With all that buying done already, I was thinking Black Friday would be pretty tame this year, picking out about 5 movies I would like to get. However most of those were not available during the preview sale (I still bought 3 movies, 2 of which I didn’t know would be on sale), so I will have to wait for Thursday like everyone else.

I had never been to a Dollar General store before. But if you live long enough, you get all kinds of new experiences. On Blu-ray Forum people were saying that Dollar General would soon be having a Buy One Get One Free sale on Blu-rays. When they ran this sale last year, there was a “glitch” that caused movies to ring up BOGO but also 50% off. The movies in question were all priced at $4.95, dropping the price to $1.24, which is pretty amazing. Maybe not as amazing as $1 like Dollar Tree has, but the selection seems to be better at Dollar General. The sale runs Sunday before Thanksgiving to Wednesday. This morning as stores opened, people reported the return of the glitch. So I looked up where my nearest store was and off I went. Continue reading “Return of the Glitch”

One of the few movies where the upgrade to 3D was really worth it was probably Gravity, a space disaster movie that came out in 2013 and wound up at the top of my list of best movies of the year. I got the Blu-ray last year and finally watched it. Just like the first time it kept me on the edge of my seat the whole time and I was blown away by how realistic everything looked. So I watched it and enjoyed it all over again and started watching the making of segments which are really amazing. For the space stuff they had two light sources, earth and sun, and as an actor moved or spun the lights would have to go around the actor since they couldn’t really spin Sandra Bullock and George Clooney that much. So they got robots like they use for making cars and would have one robot hold the camera, one the sun light, and one the earth light and the actor wouldn’t have to move that much. In the scenes that take place in space, really the only thing that was real was the actor’s face. Everything else was pretty much CGI. On scenes inside space ships they had sets (but still did a great job of mimicking weightlessness, which I won’t go into).
Continue reading “Gravity”

I have been on Blu-ray forum for two years now, which I noticed this week made me a “Senior Member” (edit: actually it is because I have 400 posts; has nothing to do with time). Like any online forum, reading about what other people are getting makes everyone spend more money than they would otherwise, just like with flashlights. However, while I have been buying entirely too many movies this year, I am paying a lot less. In January, I read about Dollar Trees around the country getting shipments of Blu-rays (so $1 each) and I wound up buying a few titles including Fargo and Enough Said, the former a classic Coen brothers movie and the latter a mostly overlooked gem which I still haven’t watched (edit: watched it later, B-). I also got the less well reviewed Dom Hemingway which I did watch and wasn’t that crazy about (C-). And in order to get some cheap replacement Blu-ray cases, I bought a few copies of Parental Guidance, a terrible Billy Crystal movie with the key feature being it includes a Blu-ray and DVD version of the movie. This let me get rid of some old Blu-ray cases and gave me homes for bare Blu-ray disks I had bought from Redbox, but I will probably never watch the movie.
Continue reading “Dollar Tree Blu-rays”