If you have any complaints which you'd like to make, I'd be more than happy to send you the appropriate forms.
Friday, October 11, 2024
Tech: 2024 Tesla Model 3 Review, Part 1 - A Self-Driving Car?
With Tesla demonstrating its robotaxi tech to mixed reviews, I thought it was a good time to test out the "Full Self-Driving (Supervised)" 30-day trial on my new Model 3. Does it work? It sure does...mostly:
I've heard people describe FSD as being driven around by a 16-year-old who just got his learner's permit, and they're right. FSD will amaze you with its ability to stop at red lights, signal lane changes, turn into shopping centers, and merge into light traffic. 10 seconds later, it might hit the brakes a little too early, misread a traffic sign, or "freak out" when confronted with a poorly marked road. Like a novice driver, the system performs best on lightly populated highways, and worst in crowded, chaotic city streets.
Tesla would have gotten a lot less flak if they called the feature something else ("Driving Assistant"? "Ultra Autopilot"?), but FSD is still apparently the most advanced consumer self-driving tech out there. Just keep a close eye on it.
Mulliga's Tribute to '80s Horror Paperbacks (Part 1) - Paperbacks from Hell
Halloween is coming, and this year Shangrila Towers is paying tribute to the gory, grotesque, and sometimes goofy world of 1980s horror fiction. Let's start with the book that inspired this series of blog posts - Paperbacks from Hell by Grady Hendrix with Will Errickson:
When I read horror novels growing up, they were usually in paperback form (picture a heavily creased, dog-eared, phonebook-thick copy of The Stand in my middle school backpack). Paperbacks from Hell is a love letter to that bygone era, a nonfiction history of the rise and fall of the mass market horror section. This was a freewheeling time, when books featured everything from Nazi leprechauns to giant mutant cockroaches, with lurid covers designed to pull in curious kids like me.
Written by author Grady Hendrix (with Will Errickson of "Too Much Horror Fiction"), the book does a good job of summarizing trends in the horror genre and highlighting the authors and publishers who made it happen. Paperbacks from Hell is about as comprehensive as a book like this can be; for example, I grabbed a couple of random '80s horror paperbacks from my local used bookstore (which shall be revealed later this month...), and it turned out both were mentioned in the book, albeit briefly.
Tastes would change as the '90s came along, and so ended the heyday of trashy horror fiction. But if you want to re-live those days, Paperbacks from Hell is a fun way to do it.
Miscellany: 2013 BMW 328i final review - Drei-er Lint, Part III
It's been over eight years since I first bought my 2013 BMW 328i, and over six years since my last review of the car, and I am finally saying farewell to the old girl. With over 168,000 miles on the road, my 3-series is positively elderly in German car years, and it's taken a lot of work (and a lot of money) to keep it in decent shape.
What kind of work? Well, aside from normal wear-and-tear items that any car would need (oil changes, new tires, brake pads, spark plugs, batteries, etc.), I've had to replace a couple of front control arms, the fuel tank value, the turbo intake air pipe, the starter motor, the valve cover and oil filter gaskets (multiple times), the coolant system, the driveshaft flex joints, the transmission line, the differential mounts, the horns, the hood struts, the door handles (multiple times), the rear passenger door trim, the cabin headliner, and even the center console cupholder.
Absurdly high maintenance costs aside, the car was fairly reliable (it only stranded me once, when I came out of a store and found the battery was dead), and it still drives like new. But I've grown tired of throwing money at it, so I am getting the lowest-maintenance vehicle I can think of:
Miscellany: Mulliga Runs a Marathon, Part 5 - The Shoes
Swiss shoe company On is a relative newcomer in the world of running, but after famously receiving backing by tennis legend Roger Federer and getting endorsements from the likes of Zendaya, On has been able to take a sizable chunk of the U.S. market. I've been using On's Cloudrunner and Cloudrunner 2 training shoes for awhile now, so here are my thoughts after about 300 miles in each shoe.
The original Cloudrunner was a big departure from the motion control Brooks and ASICS running shoes I had used in the past. The holes in the side of the shoe are On's "Cloudtec" system, which compresses with each step to provide spring-like cushioning to your feet. These were easily the plushest shoes I had ever used, and they held up well through lots of 5ks and 10ks.
Based on that experience, I splurged for a pair of On Cloudrunner 2s. What do you get for your $150? Well, the outsole design no longer catches rocks underfoot, which is nice, but the shoe as a whole doesn't feel all that different. The Cloudrunner 2 is still a "middle of the road" ride - neither minimalist nor maximalist - and I have no complaints with how it has held up.
I wear shoes out quickly with the weekly mileage I am running for marathon training, so the next shoe will be a pair of On Cloudmonster 2s. These shoes are specifically designed for long runs, with maximum foam cushioning and a nylon "Speedboard" plate for enhanced energy return from each stride. The downside is that it's heavier than the Cloudrunner line, so we'll see if all those doodads actually work.
The first handguns I ever bought were CZs - a WWII-era CZ-27, and a CZ-75B from the '90s. Despite their age, both pistols shot well, and I became a big fan of the brand. When I got my CCW permit, I wanted to carry a CZ, but none of the models being imported back then had the exact combination of features I wanted: an aluminum alloy frame (to save weight), a manual safety (for cocked-and-locked carry), and a standard CZ-75 pattern (for maximum compatibility with holsters, grips, and sights - sorry, CZ RAMI).
After about a decade of waiting, CZ Custom released a limited number of "Compact L" variant guns. I had found my unicorn gun:
Feature Breakdown
At first glance, the Compact L looks just like a P-01 with a manual safety instead of a decocker. But the gun has been worked over by CZ Custom, and the difference becomes apparent when you pick it up. There's a CZ-85 trigger and CZ Competition hammer instead of the normal P-01 curved trigger group. Those special parts, combined with a trigger job and lighter main spring, give the Compact L a very light trigger in both double and single action, probably as light as I'd go in a carry gun:
Other little durability upgrades include a "combat firing pin" and stainless steel guide rod. Frankly, I don't think these affect day-to-day function much, but they're nice to have:
The CZ Custom shop polished the gun's barrel and internals. The Compact L felt very slick out of the box, like a good 1911, with a much nicer internal fit and finish than a typical CZ. The whole thing is topped off by tritium night sights, front and rear.
Range Report
The Compact L is one of the most accurate and reliable alloy-framed compact-size guns I have ever shot. Most importantly, it has never malfunctioned, despite being fed every type of 9mm I could find, from steel-cased Tula, to bargain range ammo (Blazer, UMC, and Perfecta), to high-end JHP ammo (Federal HSTs and Speer Gold Dots).
Aguila 115 gr. at 15 yards:
A whole magazine's worth of Federal HSTs at 15 yards:
A whole magazine at 25 yards with S&B 124 gr. range ammo:
A whole magazine at 25 yards with Winchester 115 gr. range ammo:
A failure drill shot at 15 yards as fast as I could go:
Perfecta 115 gr. at 25 yards:
Remington UMC at 15 yards:
American Eagle at 15 yards:
A 30-round grab bag of miscellaneous 9mm rounds, fired at speed:
Federal 115 gr. +P+:
Winchester Super-X 147 gr. at 15 yards:
Conclusion
I don't normally review guns that are hard to get here at Shangrila Towers, but I had to make an exception for the CZ Compact L. There's only a tiny chance you will ever spot this one for sale at your local gunstore or even on GunBroker, but if you do, be sure to give it a look.
For my marathon training up to this point, I had been tracking my runs with my Apple Watch Series 8. It worked well overall (the GPS and heart rate monitor were really accurate), but it required constant charging, and the darn thing just broke after only 18 months of use.
So, I bit the bullet and ponied up for a Garmin Forerunner 965, a smartwatch that's almost twice as expensive as an Apple Watch Series 9. Is the Garmin worth the coin?
The Forerunner series is Garmin's line of running-focused watches, and the 965 is the most advanced model in the bunch. Its main selling point is a large 1.4" AMOLED display that makes the MIPS displays of older Garmin smartwatches look like middle school graphing calculators. The brightness, pixel density, and color range of the 965 trump every GPS watch out there, save for smartphone-style Apple and Samsung watches. The nicer display does mean a slight hit to battery life, but the Forerunner 965 still lasts me about 8 to 10 days between charges, including many hours of running with both the GPS and Bluetooth music playback on. It was nice to wear a watch that I didn't have to charge every single day just to use.
The big drawback to the 965 is that aside from tracking your runs, the watch really doesn't do all that much. It's not trying to be a smartphone on your wrist, so there's no apps for browsing the Internet, checking your bank account balance, or pulling up an airline ticket. And paradoxically, if you don't need some of the Garmin-specific bells and whistles the Forerunner provides (full featured navigation, Spotify integration, and contactless credit card payments), there are running watches like the Coros Pace 3 that do the same thing but cost several hundreds of dollars less.
All that said, I am happy with the Forerunner 965 so far, and would recommend it to any amateur athlete looking to quantify their fun.
The decades-old Alien franchise is receiving a new installment this weekend, Alien: Romulus, so I thought it would be fun to take a look back at all the movies in the series, excluding the iffy Alien vs Predator crossover movies, and ending with a review of the new film...
Alien
Very few space movies from 1979 still hold up today (this was the same year The Black Hole and Star Trek: The Motion Picture were released), but Ridley Scott's Alien is absolutely one of them. The special effects have aged fine, the cast is still one of the best ever for a sci-fi/horror flick (Sir Ian Holm! Sir John Hurt! Three-time Academy Award nominee Sigourney Weaver!), and the story effectively pits a blue-collar team of civilians against one hostile xenomorph.
Rating: 10/10
Aliens
Jim Cameron's sequel famously turned the volume up to 11 on the series. While there are moments of tension and horror, Aliens is more of a sci-fi action/war movie than anything else. Everyone knows all the catchphrases ("Game over man, game over!", "Get away from her, you b----!"), and the runtime gets a little bloated in true Cameron tradition, but this is still one of the greats.
Rating: 10/10
Alien 3
It's fairly rare that a sequel completely reverses what happened in previous movies, and when it happens, it is usually disastrous (cf. The Rise of Skywalker). Alien 3 made this mistake by unceremoniously killing off several beloved characters from Aliens, and things just went downhill from there. This was also David Fincher's directorial debut, and we should all be glad that the troubled production didn't put him off of directing forever, or we would have never gotten Se7en, Fight Club, and The Social Network.
Rating: 4/10
Alien Resurrection
This was the first Alien movie I saw in theatres, and I recall being psyched that Sigourney Weaver was (somehow) returning to the franchise. Alas, the movie was a cruel tonal mismatch between content and director (I liked director Jean-Pierre Jeunet's The City of Lost Children and Amélie as much as the next guy, but they are very different from an Alien film). There are some interesting ideas here that later films would develop, but it was an uneven movie overall.
Rating: 5/10
Prometheus
Prometheus marked Ridley Scott's return to the director's chair in the franchise, the first film without Sigourney Weaver, and a shift in direction to focus on the history and machinations of the nefarious Weyland-Yutani Corporation. It's a strange movie, because it tries to do its level best to be an Alien movie without being an Alien movie, as if Scott had been hired by The Asylum and was worried about infringing on his own creation.
Rating: 7/10
Alien: Covenant
Ridley Scott's next film is a sequel to Prometheus in all but name, with more Michael Fassbender on screen than ever before. Still, fans were treated to the return of the Xenomorph we all know and love, with a lot of other throwback elements mixed in for good measure (the protagonist, Daniels, is essentially Ripley-lite, down to the final battle). It's an okay movie, but some truly boneheaded characters and bizarre sequences ("I'll do the fingering") undercut any suspense or horror.
Rating: 6/10
Alien: Romulus
Fede Álvarez successfully rebooted the Evil Dead franchise, so I can see why Ridley Scott tapped him for Alien: Romulus. It's a tough film to review. On the one hand, it's well-made, has fine special effects, and plenty of horror.
On the other hand, almost everything in Romulus, including entire scenes, are lifted from past films in the series. Sadistic android taunts from Alien? Check. Sentry gun sequence from Aliens? Check. And despite the supposedly stripped-down, back to basics nature of the plot, even elements from Alien Resurrection and Prometheus surface, especially in the third act. If you're an Alien superfan like me, you might get a lot of nostalgia mileage out of this, but I think more casual viewers might be lost.
I caught a fun performance by The Marías this weekend. Miami Beach provided perhaps the perfect crowd for an indie-pop/rock band that performs both English and Spanish songs, and the place was hopping. The highlight of the set for me was "Run Your Mouth," a catchy number off The Marías's latest album, Submarine:
With the Summer Olympics right around the corner and me training for a marathon, I thought it'd be fun to look at two books written by Meb Keflezighi, perhaps America's greatest living marathoner, and co-writer Scott Douglas:
Meb for Mortals: How to Run, Think, and Eat like a Champion Marathoner
If there was ever a book that does "what it says on the tin," Meb for Mortals is it. This is a plain English guide for intermediate and advanced runners that does indeed tell you how to run and train like Meb. It's a full spectrum look behind the scenes in a world-class athlete's life; in addition to the usual training guides and running plans, there are chapters on form drills, diet advice, cross-training, and most importantly, mindset. Yes, there are times when even an incredible athlete like Meb doesn't feel like getting out the door, and the book has some good concrete suggestions for setting goals and overcoming adversity.
26 Marathons: What I Learned About Faith, Identity, Running, and Life from My Marathon Career
Runner's memoirs are a dime a dozen, but Meb's 2021 memoir stands out for what it does not contain. It's centered almost exclusively around the 26 marathons Meb ran in his competitive career, without too much information about his childhood and college years. In some ways, that's a shame (Meb and his family immigrated as refugees from Eritrea by way of Italy in 1987, and their story is a compelling rebuke of anti-immigration rhetoric), but the focus on the 26 races does give the book structure and purpose, much like a marathon does to running in general. While Meb is famous for winning a silver Olympic medal and the 2009 New York and 2014 Boston Marathons, it turns out the other races in between taught him plenty of lessons.
