I almost can’t believe it myself — and I like zombies and the genre — but The Walking Dead is the best-written, most well-acted and generally the finest show on television.

This was not true of seasons 1 or 2 however — while there was some good episodes from that period, and even some great ones, it was incredibly uneven, sometimes outright bad and it treated women characters as useless appendages or background noise.

In Season 3 this started to change. That outing had some truly excellent episodes. Seasons 4 and 5, however, set the bar for what television could be — with characters like Carol and Michonne and Hershel and Sasha. Well, there are just too many to list and each one felt like a real person. Like someone you could sit down and have a chat with, not some cardboard creation moving around from scene to scene as the plot demands it. Which alas all too often is the case even in many shows that I like and watch avidly.

Whatever kind of strange magic happened on The Walking Dead in seasons 3-5 where a TV show transcends its genre, transcends what you thought TV could be, and achieves some sort of grim accession to a higher reality — well, I have not seen its like before.

The Walking Dead also does dread better than any TV show I’ve ever seen. It just does so many things right and has that rare quality that Lost had of actually watching its characters not with love or derision but with studied care.

And Carol? Best female character and perhaps best character ever in a TV series? The answer to that is yes, always yes.

I remember these days.

In 1980, the Apple II computer that sat on a desk in the corner of my dining room had my neighbors thinking that I was a complete freak. To hear them talk, you’d think I had a centrifuge on my kitchen counter. And it was not because the computer was in the dining room or because it was an Apple.

Another one of those huge cultural shifts that for some reason causes people to insist that how things are now is the way it’s always been.

But I remember when having a computer made you weird. Like, really really weird.

It was like having a nuclear reactor or as she points out as a centrifuge in your house. And people would say, “Why are you wasting your time with computers? You’ll never find a good job playing with those things. Learn some real skills.*”

So glad I kept playing with those useless computers.

*Almost a direct quote by several people to me when I was young.