This is Julio's Corner, my corner of the internet, where I talk about whatever is on my mind.

I'll mostly talk about stuff I've watched, read, or listened to, but I may get introspective at times and reflect on life and on society at large.

This episode is being recorded on Sunday, August 3rd, 2025.

And here we are, recording a day early.

I am going to talk about some stuff, not really get into the news as much this time around.

I have some other thing pressing on my mind that's, I mean, not world shattering, but you know, this shows about whatever is on my mind.

And so this is what is what is on my mind.

So we're going to get right into a quick wrap up of the news.

I'm calling it the TLDR News Wrap.

And then we'll get right on to the other stuff.

So here we go.

So, quick news wire or TLDR news wrap-up.

Number one, Trump is still getting away with shit and doing it on taxpayer money.

Two, war is escalating between the Ukraine and Russia, despite Trump's peacemaking efforts.

So there's that.

The only thing that won't stop getting in Trump's way are the Epstein files, that whole scandal that just keeps on brewing.

It's the scandal that keeps on giving.

Every time he keeps trying to...

What's the word?

You know, try to draw your attention to elsewhere.

Don't look at me.

Look at Prince Andrew.

Well, here's a recording of you and Prince Andrew talking about women's, you know, generals and, you know, when Epstein introduced you to.

So here's that little audio, thanks to the people in the UK.

Speaking of Trump, ISIS is still doing horrendous things and they want to ignore court orders, telling them not to do these horrendous things.

The Democrats still suck and their only solution is to continue sucking because they hate progressive ideas and love sucking up to their donors.

And last but not least, because of public backlash, Israel is reluctantly agreeing to let food in to feed the starving Palestinians.

But they're still trying to find ways to continue starving and killing Palestinians because you know Hamas, which is their excuse for everything bad that they do.

So, that's the news wire wrap.

And yeah, I didn't really want to get into it because, I mean, seriously, what is...

It's not much different from the last two weeks of news or three weeks of news that I've summarized here or talked about at length.

And I'm getting a bit of fatigue.

And if you really want to get into the nitty gritty of it, I recommend shows like The Minus Touch, The Majority Report, of course, Kyle Kulinski, Democracy Now.

You can check out, what's his name?

Hassan Piker, Hassanabi, over on Twitch.

If you want to listen to it eight hours a day, he's your man.

You can also check out Denim's.

There's Bad Infanada.

There's, I don't know, Leftist Mafia.

And the people in Leftist Mafia have their own shows.

I'm trying to think of them off the top of my head.

Like Surf Times.

National Rational, I think, is one of them.

The other Canadian guy.

Besides Surf Times, there's the other guy.

His show, I always forget the name of that one.

But yeah, there's plenty of plenty of other leftist media that you can listen to.

Breaking Points with Crystal Ball and Sagar, though it's a bit of a left wing versus right wing.

And then, of course, Secular Talk with Kyle Kliske, as I mentioned already.

And then they have a show together, Kyle, Crystal Kyle and Friends, I think is what it's called.

And of course, Mehdi Hassan, he has Zateo, his whole network of leftist media.

And Francesca Fiorentini, the Bituation Room.

So yeah, those are plenty of sources I recommend you check out if you really want to get into the nitty gritty on the news from a leftist point of view.

I will from time to time, if my mind just can't get away from it, I'll talk about it like I have previously.

But right now, I'm experiencing a little fatigue in talking about the news.

And I want to talk about something else, more media content driven, which is basically what I wanted the show to be more about.

But apparently, I just, well, the news, I mean, this current administration has really captured me, my body and soul, in such a way that, yeah, for the past few weeks, I couldn't stop talking about it because I have nowhere else to release the anxieties and stress and anguish that I've been feeling because of what's going on.

And it's only getting worse day by day.

And if I could escape, I would, but I can't.

I'm stuck here.

There's a little sliver lining of hope with Zoran Mamdani, but I'm also deathly afraid because of that sliver of hope.

The powers that be, that control all the levers of power are trying to extinguish it.

And Trump wants to be a king.

He wants to be a dictator.

And so I'm afraid with that extra funding that's taking effect right now, ISIS is trying to hire more people.

They got that, you know, $70 billion or whatever.

I mentioned of extra funding, so they want to ramp up their Gestapo tactics and just grabbing people that are not white, any people of color, myself included.

And, yeah, it's very, it's very anxiety ridden.

But anyways, back to what I want to talk about.

So as I mentioned, I had a couple of shows that are on the back burner.

I haven't been watching them.

I've been reading and watching a lot of YouTube instead, and, well, really drowning in the news, not really doom scrolling because I'm only watching it on YouTube.

So I guess YouTube scroll, I don't know what you would call it with YouTube.

But anyways, so I watched a few shows here and there, but I haven't gone back to them.

What I did do instead was I finished watching this Kdrama that came to my attention called Friendly Rivalry.

It's a 16 episode show, which is about the standard 12 to 16 episodes.

But this shows each episode was an average of 30 minutes each.

So that's the duration time.

So it's an eight hour show.

So naturally, I finished this show in like two days.

And yeah, that was what I was willing to stomach content wise.

And I realized with that, because instead of watching, going back to Person of Interest, where I'm stuck on like season four right now, it's, I just started thinking, why is that?

What's going on?

And it's because of Kdramas.

Kdramas have rewired my brain to get tired of shows, long running shows much quicker than I had in the past.

In the past, I would be willing to watch multi-season shows, even though, well, because I didn't know better until Kdramas came into my life during COVID.

And this one-and-done medium of Kdramas is just better, because the quality of writing is better, because you know exactly how much time are on, is going to be allotted to tell this story.

And so you have a beginning, middle, and end.

And for the most part, they land it perfectly and succinctly on like these other shows where they, western shows tend to, they tend to write for the season, season one when they first come out.

And they try to leave a cliffhanger open because if we get picked up for multiple seasons, then we can go from there.

There's very few exceptions like The Good Place, Babylon 5 that I know of where the creator of the show really had in mind exactly how many seasons.

Babylon 5, the creator wanted to do exactly five seasons, hence the name Babylon 5.

And The Good Place, the creator of that show, wanted to do exactly four seasons.

And even though he wasn't sure he was going to get four seasons, that's what he had in mind.

He wrote season one, he got picked up for season two, and I think immediately got picked up for season three.

So he continued and then he got picked up for season four.

And I think they probably asked him, okay, so are you going to go further?

And he's like, nope, this is the last season.

Because that's what exactly he had in mind.

So with the exception of those two shows, most shows don't write that way.

And so, for instance, like I said, persons of interest, I'm stuck on season four.

I just got a little bit of fatigued on that show.

And the reason for like that show's format, especially, it's very much a, it's mostly set up as an episodic show.

So each episode is like a one story show, a one story episode, self-contained almost.

But at the same time, there is this long running arc for the season, because that's what they got picked up for.

And so even though each episode is a one-shot story, at the same time, there's a couple of subplots to help move this other plot along to keep you engaged for the next episode and so on, even though each episode is pretty much self-contained.

And I think four seasons of that is sort of my limit, even though when I first watched that show, I...

well, this was before Kdramas, so I was able to binge through three seasons with no problem.

Again, this was before Kdramas and those were the only seasons available on Netflix at the time.

Now I'm watching them on Prime Video, but I got fatigued and I didn't...

I just haven't gotten back since Episode 1 or 2 of Season 4.

What else?

So I noticed there's a bunch of other shows I have on the back burner, for instance, Scandal.

I was watching Scandal months ago, and I saw the first four seasons with no problem, because again, when I was watching that show back when it was first on Netflix, those were the seasons available.

I think it was still on TV at the time.

So seasons five and six were not available, were not, you know, haven't aired yet.

And now, for whatever reason, I got after season five, I just put it on the back burner, because so many things have happened.

The characters have all kind of changed.

They're almost unrecognizable from seasons one and two.

They've all completely had a just, just drastic changes in their persona.

And it, for whatever reason, I just, I needed a breather, and I haven't gone back to it since, and it's been many months now.

I just started Game of Thrones.

I'm on Episode, I don't know, two or three, maybe Episode four now, Season one.

And the fact that I know it's multiple seasons, for whatever reason, I'm just taking my sweet time with that one.

Penny Dreadful, I just started as well.

I only finished two episodes of that.

I know that's like a four-season show.

And speaking of Babylon 5, I actually never finished that either.

I've only seen three seasons of that, and I mentioned some time before that I was on Orphan Black, and I'm on, I'm stuck on season four of that.

So, so yeah, I'm having sort of like this...

I'm calling it show fatigue, just because these long-running shows, they don't really, they just feel like they're, they're just, they're continuing, they're just going and it's just dragging on.

And I, I'm kind of tired of where it's going.

And in some cases, like Person of Interest, the first three seasons were very compelling, but then they, they've added all these like extra forces, you know, antagonists.

And so they had to really, I guess, make the world bigger or whatever, and just make it a little more outlandish, you know, make it, try to one up the previous three seasons because, well, because they got the budget for it, and because they got picked up for multiple, for more seasons.

And so they, I guess that's how the creators felt.

They had to, they had to, that was the direction they had to go in and to keep the interest going.

But by doing so, I feel like it got a little more convoluted.

And in some ways, it's the show kind of lost its footing.

And that might be part of the reason why I'm stuck on season four, because I feel like they kind of they kind of moved on from the original template of the show, of them using this supercomputer to help people and whatnot, and also stay under the radar of the government.

Now it's something else.

Now it's like this private company help create, make their computer into a boogeyman to get that operation shut down in the Pentagon, so that they can get picked up for their super computers.

So now it's two super computers fighting against each other.

And so they're trying to fight it in some weird way, but at the same time, they added like a virus into that other computer to keep their identities sort of hidden whenever they get picked up on all the cameras around the world.

But at the same time, even though they have that little fail safe, at the same time, they can't be too outrageous with their actions because that will override that bug that they added into the new supercomputer that's being that's their arrival, so to speak.

So, yeah, I mean, with that being said, on the top of getting that like fatigue, like feeling that it's dragging and it's becoming more like homework than enjoyment, I'm also thinking in the back of my head and how many more Kdrama shows I could be watching in that span of time, because, for instance, to use Person of Interest as an example, that show each season is like 20, 20 plus episodes.

So that, in essence, could be two Kdrama shows.

Each season is two shows of Kdramas that I could be watching.

But not only that, each episode is like 40, you know, with commercials gone, it's about 48 minutes.

So, so no, again, it's the same, it's about the same.

It's about two shows, two Kdramas that I could have gone through instead.

And I'm actually picking up on, I'm actually rewatching another Kdrama right now as I'm recording this episode, which is kind of funny.

So instead of going back to Person of Interest or Orphan Black or any of the other shows that I mentioned, I was just watching, well, I was checking out Friendly Rivalry, which I watched in two days, and just watching YouTube videos and even checking out a Korean Variety show.

Like those are, I was doing that in lieu of going back to these shows just because I feel, like it's feeling more like drudgery than entertainment now.

So even though I had a good running with those first few seasons of these shows, the fatigue kicked in.

And now I'm once again going back to Kdramas instead.

So yeah, it's just an interesting change in my mindset that I really cemented and upon this reviewing.

Because at first I thought maybe it was just because I wanted something different, especially during COVID.

And that's why I went back to, I started watching Person of Interest and Orphan Black and so on and Warehouse 13, I think.

And yeah, I was like, oh yeah, yeah, I do like these shows.

I do remember these episodes.

And let me finish these shows actually.

And as the seasons were going, as the episodes were going, it just started feeling like I started feeling that drudgery that I don't feel with Kdrama because I know once I'm done with the show, so it's over and I'm looking forward to the next one that some of these actors might be in or the writer of this show.

Like maybe let's see what else that they wrote and so on because I liked what I saw in them.

Whereas with these shows, with Western shows, it's just, it's just not the same anymore.

I feel it's sort of like growing up, you remember how great the cartoons were when you were a kid.

And then you try to rewatch those cartoons and you're like, oof, these kids, I am so much, they were definitely for my younger self because I can't watch them anymore because they're not as great as I thought they were.

It was just my rose-colored glasses and my nostalgia kicking in my remembrance of it.

And then trying to watch it now as an adult, as a grown-ass man, I realized, oh yeah, these cartoons were definitely meant for kids because I can't watch them anymore.

Like I tried doing that with like, DuckTales, Transformers, Ninja Turtles, I think.

I think I tried Ninja Turtles.

Darkwing Duck for sure.

And I realized, yeah, these shows are definitely not meant for me now.

They were meant for me when I was, you know, back when I was watching them, back in like high school and middle school.

And now, yeah, maybe for, you know, it's meant for kids.

That was the target audience.

That's in the style that they were written.

And now that my mind has obviously matured from that age, from that, from that time, it's just not, those shows are not enjoyable.

I need something a little more sophisticated, a little more nuanced and more for my age.

Well, the same thing is with these Western shows.

I don't know if I can ever get back to them like I did.

Maybe just movies.

I should probably just stick to movies because, again, like the Kdrama, a movie, you know, exception of sequels, of course, movies are generally a one and done medium.

So maybe I'll just do that.

But I like Kdramas because I like episodes.

I like to...

I mean, that was the appeal of TV shows in the first place, which is why I liked multiple seasons, so I can really dig into these characters.

But Kdramas have...

they just got the formula right.

Like, you really don't need more than 12 to 16 episodes to really tell you a story about people and whatnot, you know, how they develop and grow and flesh them out and so on.

I mean, maybe there's an exception, but I'm finding it harder to do multi-seasons now than I had in the past.

So yeah, that's really what I wanted to get into this episode.

Anyways, let me get to the outro and go from there.

And that wraps up the show.

If you're watching this on YouTube, don't forget to like and subscribe.

Maybe write a comment down below.

Otherwise, if you have any questions or any thoughts you'd like to share, you can meet me via the contact form on my website, or click on the contact me link in the show notes.

If you're feeling extra generous, you can click on the donate link in the show notes as well, and send some money my way.

This show is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

This means you can share the audio or video, remix it or do whatever you want with it.

Just say where you got it from.

And as always, thank you for listening.