Finally getting back to the Newitz and Anders Humble Bundle collection I recently came into! This was a fun, cozy, quick read, and its throwaway reference to a David Graeber book and last-minute praise of platform independence to avoid Apple-style skimming off the top made me smile.

I remembered liking this more than I actually did! It was a fun watch, especially as something to put on in the background while doing something else, so I can’t say for sure why it didn’t land as well as I feel like it has in the past.

I’m rating this a bit higher than I expected. Like the last radio play I reviewed, I just don’t know if the Third Doctor is my thing, but with some hindsight, there were some fun bits of this that will stick with me.

I found this very useful!

I’m still struggling a bit more with these story arcs than I did with earlier ones, but I can’t put my finger on why, and I don’t think it’s because they’re any less good.

It is also very interesting to be reading these books at a time where I’m digitizing journals from my college years, worrying a lot about grades and relationships.

Excellent adaptation of a book I remember enjoying. My “book is better” brain wanted to quibble with some choices, but I think those choices made sense when considering the change of medium. I also really, really appreciated the almost-throwaway joke about the Phantom Zone.

Still good, but I’m still ready to wrap up this reread and turn my attention to some other things.

Ça fait maintenant plusieurs mois que j’ai l’habitude d’écouter en boucle un concert des Cowboys fringants aux Plaines d’Abraham à Québec lors de la fête nationale québécoise en 2013. Vu combien de temps j’ai passé avec cet enregistrement peut-être piraté, quand j’ai découvert que les Cowboys vendaient un enregistrement d’un concert film enregistré une décennie plus tard, quelques mois avant le décès de Karl Tremblay, je me suis dit que j’avais une certaine obligation de l’acheter.

This review is slightly more negative, and I don’t know if that’s because I’m ready to move on to something else to read, because I don’t like all of the subplots in this part of the story, or something else. It’s still good, though!

Amazing pictures—might have to replace my computer desktop.

It’s recognizable as a Doctor Who story, and there are some parts that are fun and interesting, but it just didn’t land with me.

Post-timeskip Dumbing of Age is good; some parts feel rockier, some parts feel even better.

Part of me thinks that I shouldn’t enjoy this particularly dramatic, action-packed sequence, but Willis does an excellent job of it—and of making it fit within the broader world and story he’s built.

This last story in the series wasn’t quite as good as the others, but I’m just happy that they made interesting use of the Silents.

This series continues to be fun. It’s making use of a scary villain in compelling ways, and even the “let’s treat UK parliamentary elections like a US presidential race” doesn’t bug me too much.

I barely got the livestream up on time for this, but I’m glad I did, because it left me teary eyed.

Still enjoying this! I really appreciate Willis’s charitable, nuanced take on non-fundamentalist religion that comes out here while Joyce is wrestling with her faith.

I really ought to scan back through each volume as I read it so that I can give it a more thorough review, but these go fast, blend together, and just make a generally good impression. I’d like to wrap up the reread so that I can turn my attention to other stuff, but sometimes you also just need a quick, easy rebinge of a high quality webcomic.

Took me a while to watch this. It’s not bad, and I liked it more than my spouse did, but I really want to read the source material now to see how it holds up.

Neat that I live at a time where I can set this kind of alarm on my phone.

I really enjoyed watching Artemis II lift off yesterday and immediately realized that I would also enjoy tuning into the live broadcast over the course of the mission. The YouTube feed is pretty good, but what I’d really love (and haven’t been able to find) is to find an audio-only feed that I could plug into my internet radio client and just listen to. I’m mostly interested in tuning in to the mission while working, and while the audio will make for good white noise, I don’t really need (or even want) the visuals in there.

Artemis II has not captured a lot of my attention because it’s hard to get excited about anything my country is doing right now, but I made a last minute decision to put the launch on, and even just listening to mission control is super neat.

It came as something of a surprise that this next part of the story felt even better. It takes some liberties with the British political system, but since it came out in November 2016, it is clearly doing so to criticize Donald Trump, and I can live with that. The story continues to play with the basic concept of the Silents as a supernatural villain, and I’m enjoying seeing where it goes.

I’ve made a few comments alluding to how interesting it is to explore expanded universe material in another franchise after a near-lifetime of exploring Star Wars auxiliary fiction. This is a good demonstration of how EUs can be good: The Silents are an interesting villain, and this story makes good use of them while fitting it nicely into the broader Doctor Who canon. I enjoyed the listen.

My vision is bad enough that I can see better wearing my prescription sunglasses indoors than wearing nothing, and since I brought an empty glasses case to work today, I guess that’s what I’ll be doing.