Consortium of Seven: Year 4

        Bits and pieces...       I chanced to see that while Comicon was in play out in San Diego last week, Amazon slipped a standalone origin story for Atom Eve onto their platform, placing it just after the first season finale for Invincible , the animated series based on Walking Dead creator Robert Kirkman's superhero comic series. That was followed by the announcement that the start of season two of Invincible will be arriving November 3rd. Unfortunately, presumably with an eye on the content pipeline and another on the ongoing strike, that will just start the first half of the eight-episode season. So that fourth episode will land on the 24th, the day after Thanksgiving. Currently they haven't announced the date for when the second half of the season will begin, other than to announce it will be "in early 2024." Presumably they'll tell us by the 24th, so as to give the audience a new target date to fix on the horizon. Amazon decli...

     Wednesday, or so we were told, was the official start of summer. Save for this past Monday, and a couple of brief patches of direct sunlight since, here in Eastern PA we've been under clouds, and we're told to expect clouds and frequent thunderstorms through next Wednesday. Gah. That this gives me another extended "out" for desperately overdue yard work is the bright side of that, and I'll take it.         For this week's post, it's a small scatter of items.  As ever, I invite you to look back through previous Friday posts for an array of streaming material options, as there are many items even I haven't gotten around to doing more than preview, and I watch far more video than anyone should.        Despite the much-derided (and deservedly-so, even just at the conceptual and aesthetic levels) move to use AI to generate images for the title sequence for the new MCU series Secret Invasion , I otherwise enjoyed...

      Locally, I'm heading into an often-rainy Friday and Saturday, which is likely okay on the balance because I have plenty do do indoors -- and being able to catch a nap here or there ain't bad either. Sun's set to return Sunday, in time for Father's Day, but I'm not rushing to plow through the weekend.       Any text in blue has been added later than Friday.       This week's new arrivals will start off with two I mentioned last week , as each arrived just yesterday: The start of the second season of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds on Paramount +, and the full five-episode dump of season six of the generally dark, tech-connected anthology, Black Mirror on Netflix. Despite feebly trying to exercise some restraint, I've watched the season opener for the new Trek , and not only indulged in breaking the seal on the new Black Mirror selection but have watched three of the five: Loch Henry (true crime theme with a retro-tec...