Welcome

Welcome to my ever-evolving blog. It started out as a blog on Beachbody workouts and products, mainly when I was a Beachbody coach. I no longer coach, not because I don't believe in Beachbody's programs (I subscribe to Beachbody on Demand and use their workouts every day), I am just not a salesperson and hated that aspect of it. I am more than willing to answer questions about my experiences with their products and the various workouts, and I feel freer to do so without the appearance of giving a biased review of something.

I have also started adding reviews for various things I have purchased like movies, books, CDs, and other products. This was brought about by a fight with Amazon in which all of my reviews were removed over a completely bullshit allegation that I posted a review that violated their terms of service. After going back and forth with the morons in the community-reviews department (even after they admitted that my posts did not violate their guidelines) they restored my account (which took them six months to do), but I have been posting my reviews on my blog to have them preserved in case something like that happens again. And here, I will post uncensored reviews so I will swear from time to time and post reviews that may be longer than Amazon's character limit. Everything I post here on any topic or product is my personal opinion, and I take no compensation for any product reviews I post. I am a member of Amazon's vine program and because I get those products for free, I keep those reviews on Amazon only, but everything I have purchased with my own money, whether from Amazon or some other store/website/outlet, I will post here.  

I also plan to do some longer blog posts on various topics, such as how to learn physics, how to get through calculus, and longer reviews of workout programs as I do them. Basically, whatever strikes me as interesting at the time.  As you can see if you navigate around the blog, I had many years in between postings. During that time I was going back to school to get an engineering degree, and learning material that I avoided my first time through college was a different experience and one that gave me a lot of insight into how to do well in those classes, which I will try to impart here for those who are looking to get a science or engineering degree. 

Monday, May 16, 2022

DVD/TV Series Review: Family Guy: Season 17

 


This is the DVD set for the seventeenth season of Family Guy, and is, as of this writing, the last season that is available on DVD. That is a bummer for those of us who prefer physical media to streaming, but not all that surprising given that DVD and Blu-Ray sets for TV series have very low sales numbers and are pretty much going extinct, especially Fox series as Fox is notorious for wanting their stuff exclusively on their various streaming platforms. In fact, this season includes an episode, "You Can't Handle the Booth" in which the characters from the show do a DVD commentary on an episode, and joke about how a lot of people (especially young people) have no idea what DVDs are.

The episodes are split over three discs, and they are uncensored. They definitely use jokes that cannot be used on the broadcast versions and drop multiple f-bombs. The extras include deleted scenes for most of the episodes, a commentary free track of the You Can't Handle the Booth episode, and a traditional commentary track on You Can't Handle the Booth that includes the writer, producers, and editor in which they discuss the process of making the episode and the layers of doing a regular episode, having the characters do a fake commentary track, and then including dialog by the actors talking to their characters (and including Sarah Paulson as a guest commentator). The episode seems to be either loved or hated by the fans, but it was very complicated to pull off, so the "regular" commentary track is actually pretty insightful.

Realistically, the show has been on long enough now that you will know if you like it or not. The show has definitely evolved over the years, but for those of us who have been watching from season one up to now, it is actually nice that the show does some callbacks to the early episodes (including a return of Lacy Chabert, who voiced Meg for the first thirteen episodes before Mila Kunis took over the role), and making fun of how characters (especially Stewie) has changed over the years. If you are a fan of the show and have the other DVD sets, this is worth picking up to keep your collection complete. But otherwise, you may just want to stick with streaming it.

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