Nova Daily - 4 May 2026: The worst soap
Hi!
It's a bit of an unpopular opinion, but I've always found soap series to be awful. The reason for this is that they often don't know when to stop, and keep introducing new characters and plot twists to milk out the format for ages and ages. And they predictably put a cliffhanger at the end of every episode. Sometimes even every scene. Close-up of someone with sub-mediocre acting talent whose acting cue is "look difficult". If you pause at any moment, you can probably count the number of layers of make-up that these individuals have to wear in order to mask the complete lack of substance.
The story-telling in most soap-series is perhaps a good warning what would happen to you if you let your inflated ego make every decision for you. All the same, I saw my classmates transform into miniature versions of the type of people that I wouldn't want to welcome into my house even if I got paid for it. That's when I stopped watching them.
The worst soap
The absolute worst genre of soap series is undoubtedly the news. It has no well-worked-out plotline. They never heard of this idea "Show, Don't Tell" whatsoever. The stories appear to be completely random, more often than not with absolutely no connection between them whatsoever. And everything is delivered with a ridiculous Wednesday Addams rip-off attempt at deadpan stare. No emotion, no sense of drama. And they almost always gaze right into the camera, breaking the fourth wall in the most cringeworthy way that you can imagine. A cardboard could've elicited the same emotion with the audience.
And what about character development? There's really nothing of the sort. We get no backstory about the protagonist, no hook points that would make the audience identify or sympathise with their character. There's almost no justification for any of the other characters, except some random famous-people cameo or a "Hey, you know what, I also have a convoluted something to tell". They're even cast under their own names! Because for all we know, they might not even react to anything else.
The spoilers are extremely on-the-nose from the start, sometimes even going so far as to literally show the hidden message on the bottom of the screen. It always leaves me discombobulated and wondering where in the world you would even find such a range of poorly-cast acting-class-drop-outs.
The news is such a patchwork of amateurism that you can even skip two whole months of watching and you literally wouldn't need anyone to fill you in on anything that has happened. You'll never have to worry about having missed any relevant plot point for any single episode.
I really have a hard time figuring out why the format has been sold to virtually every country in the world.
Another GM packing
I'm at a level at which I regularly score results against titled players. Surprisingly, my score is pretty okay against IMs with +74=8-78. I even adopted the IMs that I encountered in the bullet pool once, starting with none other than @DanielRensch. I've always had great respect for Danny Rensch, whose Pawn Structure 101: Every Opening Explained video has helped me more than I can express here. Winning against him was a thrill that I still feel, even though it was decided by the most hideous mouse-slip.
Click here for my IM adoption list
Today, I had a GM that I can add to my list of scalps. It's a bullet game so it hardly deserves analysis, but it was definitely worth playing.
After this happened, I thought at first that my opponent had bounced. It has happened recently that a GM stopped playing on the site after I had won my game with them. I feared that this would be the second GM in a row, but fortunately that's not the case.
This game brought my overall score against GMs to +8=2-18. Ten more wins to go to level the score.
