Still in Hollywood

So I got Disney+ again. I guess I saved two months of subscription money. But I really wanted to see the new season of Only Murders In the Building. It's just not autumn without it. I'm two episodes in and I'm very glad I came back for it--so far I think this may be the best written season. The first episode features the characters visiting a movie studio in Hollywood, Paramount, in fact, surprising given that there was actually a line in the previous season disparaging Paramount+. It was a funny sequence, particularly a moment on a backlot where the show satirised how New York is depicted in Hollywood films. I was just recently showing a powerpoint to students I made about New York and L.A. and I spent a lot of time telling them how many of the depictions of New York they're familiar with actually came from L.A. (or, these days, often from Georgia). I might have shown this sequence to them.

I also watched the first episode of Agatha All Along which was really quite funny. I know, ratings-wise, it's suffering for how Secret Invasion demolished the Marvel brand on TV. But, at least for the first episode, Agatha is a really funny parody of HBO crime shows like True Detective.

By the way, I get Only Murders in the Building with Disney+ because I'm in Japan, where, as in most countries, Disney+ comes with a "Star" section which includes content from Hulu. Oddly enough, I couldn't sign up for a Japanese plan, which is a shame because Disney+ is still only around seven bucks in Japan. But I can't use an American card to pay for most Japanese streaming plans (Amazon Prime seems to be an exception). I had to use a VPN to get access to the American page and spend my American money. Fortunately I found a free VPN that was good enough to allow me to do that. In the process, I discovered I was able to access my PayPal dashboard for the first time in three years. They evidently fixed something that was preventing me from accessing it without an American phone number. These are just some of the hurdles in the obstacle course if you want to buy anything foreign in Japan. At least now maybe I won't be punished for not paying 75 dollars a month to have an American phone number just so web sites can outsource their security. One can hope.