Okay, yes, I just listened to this a couple of months ago, but I was doing a relisten of the BBC Radio 4 Smiley adaptations, and I wanted to see how this held up reading it where it fits chronologically. It holds up well! I like this novel a lot. It’s fun to see Smiley being competent in the field, and I appreciate how it complicates Ann without making Smiley the bad guy in the relationship.

I don’t know if this is a DuckDuckGo thing or an underlying Bing thing, but I’ve started noticing something weird happening when I search for things that don’t get a lot of results. When it happened again earlier this week, I finally grabbed a screenshot: So, here I am searching for something related to the (relatively obscure, relatively progressive) religious denomination I belong to, and when DDG (or maybe Bing) couldn’t find anything related to the specific thing I was searching for, the first text result that it gave me was the best result it could find for a subset of my search matched with the town I live in: Lexington, Kentucky.

One of the perks of building some new content taxonomies for my review posts is that I can get a quick view of whose stuff I’m reading (or listening to) most… and realize just how much of my reading is comics.

Am I feeling excited about the Fantastic Four because the new trailer looks good? Or because the idea of Galactus, the Devourer of Worlds doesn’t sound so bad right now?

Not only did my e-bike’s battery charger short out but the slow leak in the rear tire also turned into a straight up flat soon thereafter. Thanks to the student-run bike workshop on campus, I still got home in time to pick up kiddo from school, but I remain grumpy.

Not thrilled about the faint burning plastic smell that was coming from the charger for my e-bike’s battery today. (I immediately unplugged it and have reluctantly added replacing it to today’s to-do list).

I made a mistake with this reread—not in the reread itself but in starting it this early. I forgot how much these collections suck me in—and, therefore, how quickly I go through them—so now I’m done and there are still several weeks to go before the next PDF gets delivered to me and I still have to disentangle my brain between what I’m reading daily and the specific context of the new collection.

I enjoyed this collection, too, even if Billie and Ruth’s relationship always makes me slightly uncomfortable for how broken it is. Willis is good at this, and I enjoy reading these in collections even better than one strip at a time every morning.

I’m rating this higher than on my last readthrough. I couldn’t tell you why I held back last time, but this time, I was reminded of some excellent strips that have really made an impression on me, so full marks. Why am I rereading in the first place? I did two full(ish) archive binges of DoA in 2024, so I don’t strictly need to reread this. I did back the Book 14 Kickstarter, though, and I wanted to have some context for when that PDF arrives.

Bon, je regrette pas avoir commandé un livre depuis la Suisse juste avant l’annonce des taxes douanières, mais j’espère quand-même qu’il arrive avant la prochaine folie américaine.

Feeling optimistic!

How about a sequel to “The Measure of a Man” where some future tech bro (Trek bro?) uses the events of the original episode to argue that his LLM is sentient, and so Picard, Riker, and Data team up to respond “wtf, no.”

“Came In From the Cold” may be Le Carré’s best, but I think “Looking Glass” is my favorite. That’s true of the book, but Ian McDiarmid as an incompetent agency director is also a lot of fun. Le Carré has a particular kind of plot that boils down to “stupid people making stupid decisions,” and I think this is the best of them. It’s a damning story of toxic World War II nostalgia, desperation to be doing something meaningful with one’s life, and manipulation by more competent cynics.

I know that “Tinker, Tailor” is good, and I’m looking forward to revisiting it for the nth time, but I really think this is the best of the Smileyverse. The most twisty, the most cynical, the most appalled at its own cynicism. It’s no surprise that the most recent additions to the Smileyverse have revisited this story—it’s the best.

I think I’ve finished my IDW Star Trek comics binge. I was hoping to conclude with their TNG/Doctor Who crossover that I bought for Kindle years ago, but reading comics in that app is so much worse than I remember.

I didn’t like this at all. The art is weird, and I didn’t like the story. It very nearly got more interesting in the final part, when it started pulling together the previous, seemingly standalone stories, but I still feel like it didn’t stick the landing.

I won’t pretend to be able to distinguish the very fine line that separates boring comic nonsense from amazing comic nonsense, but this is on the right side of things. Gary Mitchell elevates Kelvinverse Kirk to godhood so that they can play a game of multiversal chess using as pieces infinite Kirks in infinite combinations. The gender-flipped Enterprise comes back! There’s a Kirk raised by Klingons and a Spock (“Simon Grayson”) who’s rejected his Vulcan side!

Quelle tristesse !

I dunno, I guess there’s some good stuff in here, and maybe I’d be more patient with it if I weren’t reading a lot of Star Trek comics in a very short period of time. It just feels like I’m reading it to complete my binge, though, and I can’t say this volume impressed me much.

One of my favorite tea brands is a local one that imports its own leaves. I think one of my weekend projects is going to be to bulk order from them to get ahead of tariffs.

Devinez qui c’est qui a commandé un livre depuis la Suisse la semaine dernière ?

In some ways this is the least interesting of the Smiley stories. There’s something fun about a retired Smiley doing detective work, and it’s fascinating to get glimpses at the British class system, but it’s not Smiley in his element (as it will later become), and it feels like a distraction in that sense. Yet, the radio adaptation is so, so nicely done that I can’t help but give it full marks.

I love these radio dramas so much. I honestly can’t remember if (an imagined) Ann serves as a narrator in the original book, but she does in the dramas to great effect. I can’t listen to Call for the Dead without thinking about the ambiguous continuity of the Smileyverse. On one hand, Smiley feels like a one-off character here, and it’s weird to start him off as resigning from the Circus when Le Carré will want to use that to greater effect later on.

I didn’t need to read a printer recommendation article today, but I’m so glad I did. The rage about the world we live in is great.

I have vague recollections of watching The NeverEnding Story as a child, but they are vague. I was young (nine at the oldest, but probably younger), it was at someone else’s house, and it was only once, so it didn’t leave much of an impression on me. My next substantive encounter with that movie—or, more accurately, its theme song—was the ending gag in this Homestar Runner cartoon, where the title character sings “the never ending sooooodaaaaaa” to the tune of the movie’s theme song.

It took an embarrassing amount of trying to figure out the business model my VPN provider was going for—and its implications for my privacy—before I remembered the date.

This book reminds me of Hervé Le Tellier’s L’Anomalie, which feels insulting and maybe even heretical. L’Anomalie is a Prix Goncourt-winning, highbrow, Oulipo novel; this is by a guy who writes Star Trek parodies and kaiju books. L’Anomalie is relatively restrained in its conceit, with an impossible “duplicate” plane landing three months after the original one; this has the moon turn into cheese for a lunar cycle. Yet, both books are powerful in their exploration of how the world responds when something ridiculous and clearly impossible happens.

I think I got this in an NPR Humble Bundle, and I’ve been meaning to relisten to it for a while. It’s a real mix of good and bad: Thanks to John Williams and Ben Burtt, it’s got some great audio to work with; however, it does a lot of awkward “tell since we can’t show.” It sometimes feels like it’s reaching to fill in an extra four hours, but also it maybe demonstrates that Star Wars could maybe be a miniseries with some better writing?

I’m in a grumpy mood this morning, so I might be a little harsh here, but nothing’s really standing out. There are some interesting things here (Spock resisting the Borg! Minor Wrath of Khan cameo!), but I think there are continuity errors, and even if there aren’t, it’s just not super interesting.

The NPR radio adaptation of Star Wars would be a lot worse if the movie’s sound design and music weren’t so dang good.

Joli, ça !

We keep talking about generative AI as though it’s a tool that can be used for good or bad when I think it’s better to think of it as an entire system that benefits some at the expense of others. It’s not that I want to put a tool back in a box—it’s that I want to live in a better world.

I recently finished an audiobook of Jacques Ellul’s The Technological Society and have been finding other things to listen to now that I don’t have mid-twentieth century French philosophical reflections on technique to think through anymore. Last night, I began (re)listening to the National Public Radio Star Wars radio drama—adapted by Brian Daley—while cleaning up the kitchen, and I continued listening on the way in to work today. The radio drama is interesting in so many ways!

I kind of thought this was dumb. There’s an interesting idea in there, and maybe I would have liked it as something shorter in an anthology, but I didn’t enjoy it in the form it took.

C’est fou combien ça provoque de la nostalgie, voir la gare d’Aigle (VS) pendant quelques secondes dans un « cabride » sur YouTube. J’ai passé peu de temps à Aigle, et c’était il y a 15 ans ; je ne connais pas du tout la ville et pourtant…

Tfw you’re running late and your first meeting is running early, so his first impression of you is of someone bundled up in warm, neon clothes awkwardly carrying an ebike up the stairs because the elevator is out.