A good story has more than a plot; it has a message.

The plot of Riot Women revolves around 'a group of middle-aged women forming a punk-rock band to participate in a talent contest'. As only the Britsh can do it, the theme is a powerful, anger-inducing look at how misogeny can be weaponised.

Riot Women says a lot about English culture, and how good it is to fight back against injustice.

The plot of Perfect Crown is a slow-burn romance between a self-made wealthy woman and the Crown Prince who contract a marriage of convenience to trade money for status. The marriage contract containing a clause requiring divorce within 3 years is leaked. (Our royal hero agreed to this to prevent our heroine being bonded to him against her will which would happen if he became King.) Between various assassination attempts things get complicated. This stretches it to 12 episodes, when 6 or 8 would have done. The theme, however, is the unpleasantness of social class and the constraints and nastiness of being royal.

Perfect Crown says a lot about Korean culture, and perhaps why Korea does not miss having a royal family.

As soon as Macs switched to unix I entered the Apple ecosystem. Inspired by my friend Peter's review ("I did not expect to like this smart watch, but I love what it can do") I expanded my ecosystem to an Apple watch¹. There is quite a plot associated with the watch going wrong.

Originally, I could charge it while watching an episode of Big Bang Theory. One day I noticed that my watch had taken about 90 minutes to get even a workable charge. I made an appointment with the local Apple shop, and took it down. Sure enough it charged way too slowly, about 0.5 percent per minute. We checked the spec, and it looked more like 2.5 percent/minute up to 80%. The person I was talking to wondered if it might be the inductive charge cable. We swapped it over, and behold, 2.5 percent/minute. Looked fixed.
It was not fixed. It was then 18th March, and I made the first measurement you see in the plot at right. I could see how we were fooled by the cable swap... looking at the data from 8 to 11 minutes it was clear that it did sometimes charge fast; sadly not in a sustained manner. I took it back, and this time it went off for repair.
It came back with a "no fault found" message. Essentially, I guess the routine checks don't look at charge speed, and that is understandable. I made further measurements. I got Peter to check how fast his watch charged, and that is the "healthy" trace on the plot.
I measured again, and got an even worse result. I showed the plot to one of my old lecturers. He instantly said exactly what I suspected: "Oh, something is overheating!"

This time, when I got back to the Apple shop, I had solid evidence that my watch did not meet spec, but that another one of the same age and model did. The poor 'genius' was quite embarrassed... the message was "we decline to repair this as it was purchased overseas." It seems that Australian consumer law does not protect anything bought overseas. Apple (Australia) can hide behind this law. So much for it being a truly global product. Merinda is taking it to NZ and we shall see if their consumer law is taken seriously.

The plot of this Apple saga is a complicated series of attempts to get Apple to acknowledge a serious problem. The theme is that Apple is not really so good at taking care of customers.

My Apple saga says a lot about support in an age of disposable tech, when that tech is expensive. What happened to being able to go into any Apple store in the world?

It feels good in Riot Women when someone gets their comeuppance. The ending of Perfect Crown is satisfying. Ah, but these are fairy tales. It remains to see how my saga with Apple comes out.