Overpriced for the amount, but still pretty tasty. I wonder if I’m starting to like matcha more or if this was so stuffed with other flavors that I didn’t actually experience any matcha.

This won me over from the beginning. I’ve been complaining recently about the difficulty of enjoying “robots are people, too” media since the emergence of AI chatbots, but I didn’t feel any of that here.

Part of that is due to the way that Zdarsky works contemporary concerns about generative AI into some throwaway references. Maybe more importantly, he challenges us to think about whether we are all meat machines rather than special soul-having humans, which is a pretty good response, actually, even if I still think Anthropic is teetering on the edge of the deep end.

John Le Carré taught me to love stories where people make dumb decisions and you know things will all end poorly, and this is one of those. I wasn’t sure it was going to work for me, but the premise is interesting on a couple of levels, and it is fun to watch the train wreck play out on page. The art isn’t my favorite, but I think it dulled what would have been some even grosser scenes otherwise.

Sad sack but genuinely good Spider-Man is the best kind of Spider-Man, and I loved this take on that kind of story. Also, making fun of The Punisher while using him as a character is the best possible approach, and I’m here for it.

Never thought this silly parody account on Mastodon would make me tear up, but this is just perfect.

A fun and worthy conclusion to the series! I am rating it slightly lower to channel all of my minor complaints from the whole series (and because many of them were present here), but it’s not bad at all.

Still wary of it crossing into sitcom territory (and clearly trying to wrap up plot threads for a finale), but it’s also so damn good at being a cozy little self-contained world that I’m giving it a pass.

Yes, the series is starting to get a little hokey, but it gets credit for exploring all of its different characters and having fun with the world its built.

There are things I could critique about this series, and the last story in this omnibus feels like an awkward not-quite-but-maybe-finale that makes me worried about what’s to come, but it’s so darn cozy that it’s hard to find fault with it. I love a story that combines the fantastic with the mundane, and this does it so, so well.

Slow Horses Season 6 made a lot of strange adaptation choices, but I appreciate that they kept the “Poirot” bit and made it work for television despite being so heavily dependent on narration in the original.

Adapting two books (and maybe half of another? I have trouble keeping the books straight) at once was an interesting choice, and I thought they were going to pull it off at first. By the end, I was annoyed at how many plot threads were being jammed into a single finale. Herron can be cruel to his characters, but this adaption just did two of them dirty; similarly, the terrible twist at the end makes hardly any sense in the adaptation when compared to how it’s set up in the source material. I enjoyed watching this season, and I’ll always take more Slow Horses, but this ultimately felt like another disappointment.

We stopped following the Alan Tudyk Syfy adaptation of this comic after a while, but I remember enjoying the first season, at least. Rereading the original comics reminded me how different—and how much better—the source material is, though. More subtle, more heartwarming, more interesting. The Dark Horse Humble Bundle I bought a while back only had the first omnibus, but I’m going to have to hold my nose and turn to hoopla to read the rest.

On peut voir que je m’ennuie de mes podcasts en ce moment, car je continue à écouter cette série parfois ridicule mais toujours intéressant.

This got an interesting ending, but I don’t know if it’s a satisfying one. I appreciated some of the ideas it explored, though, so still a good(ish) rating from me.

J’ai fait une grosse pause en écoutant cette série, car l’appli Radio France est bien pénible, et ça m’a empêché de vouloir continuer. Regarder Quai d’Orsay m’a donné envie de reprendre la série, et puis j’ai enfin appris à me servir de la file d’attente sur l’appli pour rendre les choses… moins pénibles.

C’est donc une deuxième saison intéressante. J’aime la façon dont on fait de la fausse radio pour rendre plus intéressante une série radiophonique.

Still good, though I’m ready to get to the end of the story after some clear ratcheting up of tensions.

Il y a plusieurs années, j’ai eu le plasir de lire « Weapons of Mass Diplomacy », la traduction anglaise de la BD qui a inspiré ce film sur l’expérience d’un homme qui travaille à Quai d’Orsay dans les mois qui précédaient l’invasion américaine d’Irak. J’ai beaucoup aimé la BD tout en reconnaissant que j’aurais mieux aimé la lire en français.

Quand j’ai vu que ce film était disponible chez Kanopy, j’ai su que c’était ma chance de saisir les nuances qui disparaissent en traduction (même si d’autres nuances disparaissent en adaptation, bien sûr).

Cette semaine, je vais faire livrer le nouveau tome Brume jusqu’aux USA pour moi et ma fille, mais ce n’est qu’en commandant un tas de choses de chez Fnac que les frais de port deviennent supportables. J’accepte donc tout conseil sur ce qu’il faut lire de francophone en ce moment !

Nothing special about this volume, but it’s still good, and I’m very invested in the story now.

Looking back, I’m surprised I rated the TJ’s English Breakfast full marks because I’ve kind of been avoiding it recently. That didn’t stop me from trying their Irish Breakfast, which wasn’t bad but wasn’t exciting either. Cheap tea tastes cheap, I guess.

This is an amazing chocolate and coconut black tea that I’m going to enjoy all five sampler ounces of!

Still good art, still interesting story, still difficult to interpret “let’s treat robots as people” in a post-2022 world. That said, the Driller flashback in this volume helped me think more about how the folks who want us to believe AI models might be alive also want us to make those models do our work for us.

The art is still good, and the story is still interesting. It may not grab me as much as some other comics, but I see why it gets the praise it does.

Generative AI has made it very hard for me to enjoy a “robots are people, too” story in the way I used to, but this is good, and I’m looking forward to reading more!

Like the first issue, there’s enough here to like but also some I could have done without. The flashbacks work for me, but the story feels a bit rushed—and as though it will need to rush more if it’s going to conclude in issue 3, as seems to be promised.