guys, i can't believe they fixed the freaking spaceship

holy crap

Space is overwhelming. There is just so much of it. Every now and then I will look up at the night sky and see all the stars and try to comprehend the thing where every one of those is kind of like another sun and then I try to stop thinking about that because the vastness of the universe is unsettling if you ponder it for too long. It’s amazing how quickly you can go from “ooooo sparkly” to “Why should I pay my credit card bill when the entire planet is nothing more than a speck of dirt screaming through the unforgiving jet-black cosmos?” It’s a frustrating experience for a lot of reasons, starting with the feeling of massive insignificance it leaves you with and extending to the thing where the customer service representatives at Discover are surprisingly unmoved by this argument when you make it to them over the phone.

Sometimes space is awesome, though. It can be fascinating. I mean, consider what just happened last week, when a group of scientists managed to repair Voyager 1, a spacecraft that was blasted out of the Earth’s atmosphere in the damn 1970s, even though it is hurtling through interstellar space 15 billion miles away. That was incredible.

I recommend reading the actual blog NASA wrote about it all because I exhausted my knowledge of space by using the words “cosmos” and “interstellar” already, but here was the main issue. 

Voyager 1 stopped sending readable science and engineering data back to Earth on Nov. 14, 2023, even though mission controllers could tell the spacecraft was still receiving their commands and otherwise operating normally.

There are a couple things going on here. One is that this sucker has been out there for almost 50 years just floating around space collecting information and sending it back to us like a little spy, which is an incredible feat of human ingenuity that we should probably stop and think about more when we’re pouting and whining about stuff on our various social media platforms. Another is that the sentence up there in the blockquote kind of makes Voyager sound like our planet’s loser high school boyfriend. 

“I KNOW YOU’RE GETTING OUR MESSAGES, VOYAGER. IT SAYS YOU READ THEM ON THE SCREEN. ARE YOU TALKING TO VENUS AGAIN???”

Gaslit by a spaceship. Earth was in shambles. Luckily, the scientists stepped in. There’s a lot of chat about code and chips and software involved here that I don’t understand, but here’s the wild part.

The team started by singling out the code responsible for packaging the spacecraft’s engineering data. They sent it to its new location in the FDS memory on April 18. A radio signal takes about 22 ½ hours to reach Voyager 1, which is over 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) from Earth, and another 22 ½ hours for a signal to come back to Earth. When the mission flight team heard back from the spacecraft on April 20, they saw that the modification worked: For the first time in five months, they have been able to check the health and status of the spacecraft.

Three notes in conclusion:

• It is so cool that they just figured out how to shoot radio waves 15 billion miles into space to fix a satellite that was launched the same year Smokey And The Bandit hit theaters 

• It does in some ways feel like an attack against people like me who put off updating their various electronic devices for months because “it’s gonna be a whole thing”

• Once again, the screencap at the top of this page is from an episode of the show For All Mankind, and I cannot stress in strong enough terms that the episode followed it immediately with the opening notes of “X Gon Give It To Ya” and a smash cut to the closing credits

Guys, I can’t believe they fixed the spaceship. 

A Couple of Things About The Shogun Situation 

Shogun was a blast. The updated take on the James Clavell novel that FX put together came to an end last week. I dug it a lot. There was some good storytelling and a bunch of stunning visuals and it gave us a fun lil meme to play with, which is all I ever really ask for out of a show. The only problem here is that the show told the whole story from the book over the course of the season and so now, instead of a discussion about how cool the season was, we are doing the “WILL THERE BE A SEASON 2???” thing we do when this happens. Which I get. But still. It would be nice to stop and appreciate the thing you just enjoyed instead of jumping into a discussion about if and when you can have more of it. Says me, the guy who has been shouting about a Nice Guys sequel for half a decade now. I never claimed to be consistent. 

The Hollywood Reporter sat down with the showrunners, Justin Marks and Rachel Kondo, to discuss some of this, and this answer by Marks hit the nail pretty squarely on the head. 

I don’t know. I keep saying it’s like we want to let everyone be on the same page when it comes to the book. And hopefully now the TV audience and the book audience are on the same page with what the story is and where it resolves. I think if we had a story, if we could find a story, we would be open to it. But I don’t think that anyone ever wants to be out over their skis without a roadmap and everything. And it’s also just about, do people want more of it?

So, here’s where I come down on this, and I do understand if your mileage on it all varies…

On one hand: If they have a good idea to continue the story and legitimately want to do it for that reason, and not because there’s pressure from business-types or rabid fans who will turn on you if you don’t give them everything they want as fast as possible, then fine. The Leftovers was based on a book and that show exhausted the source material, too, but it continued and built on it and gave us something incredible as it continued. This can be done and done well, but it is tricky. Maybe Shogun can try including a scene where Carrie Coon and Regina King jump on a trampoline while a Wu-Tang song plays. That seemed to help The Leftovers. Something to consider. 

On the other hand: It is also fine if they decide not to and it would be a good thing for all of us as a society to learn to live with not getting everything we want RIGHT NOW RIGHT NOW RIGHT NOW and instead learn to sit with and enjoy the things we already have. 

In conclusion, Shogun is a land of contrasts. Thank you. 

STUFF I CLICKED ON

— my only complaints about this terrific and funny interview with Emma Stone and Nathan Fielder are as follows: it should be longer and I should be able to watch it

— The Onion was purchased from its nightmare owners by a bunch of people who like The Onion, which is cool

— “Apple TV+ just might be the HBO of Mid”

— I dug this blog about why restaurant reservations are suddenly much harder to get

— it was the Phillie Phanatic’s birthday last week and all his friends came over to hang out

— wild story about “Enty Lawyer,” the dishy gossip site about celebrities written by a veteran entertainment lawyer who was not exactly what he claimed to be

— a good blog about video games being too hard these days

— the maniacs at Shutdown Fullcast raised over a million bucks for charity!

— do not bring your snake to the emergency room

— chocolate heist

— I love this kid 

— speaking of teens: “Teens who sat in on Trump trial decimate lawyer's performance”

— Inside the NBA remains the greatest show on television 

— lol Schwarzenegger tried to sabotage Stallone using Stop Or My Mom Will Shoot

— headline: “NBC will display the heart rates of parents watching their kids during the Olympics”

— headline: “Cicadas are so noisy in a South Carolina county that residents are calling the police”

— school canceled due to squirrels 

— The Accountant was the number two movie across all streaming services and I am just going to go ahead and take credit for that

— highlights from the 2022 World Dog Surfing Championships, which I watched for reasons I do not have to explain to you

Okay, that’s all for this week. Please share and subscribe and update your damn phone.