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’ve listened to a lot of radio dramas recently, and this series is avoiding all the sins of the medium while providing some powerful strengths. Top notch.

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. At the same time, this sets up so much of the world that Le Carré will later flesh out, so it’s a fantastic beginning of the franchise.

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. This one is also a quick, easy, funny read in a way that prize-winning French books aren’t always.

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? It’s not great, but it’s good for what it is, and I enjoyed it:

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! For one, it expands a two hour movie into a nearly six-hour radio serial, and so it crams in a lot of material that isn’t present in the movie (or even—as far as I can tell—the original script).

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.

Once again, anthologies are fun. I almost didn’t read this, because it felt weird to read and review a single issue of a comic, but I’m glad I did! Q meets Decker who’s wrestling with what it means (along with Ilia and V’Ger) to be an all-powerful being! There’s a funny and great story about Data’s cat! Ezri Dax consults with past symbiont hosts in a way that makes it seem more interesting than DS9 ever did! These are fun.

Anthology collections are fun, and this is no exception! Some stories are better than others, but short stories spanning Trek time and characters make for a good read.

This was a very interesting subversion of stories like The Last Starfighter, where a young “chosen one” is called to save not their own people but another, not through violence but through peace. It wasn’t perfectly done, but it was a compelling story and invoked the then-contemporary Gulf War in all the right ways.

I had an awful experience with the last Sam Vimes adaptation, so I wasn’t sure about this—especially since it is one of the longer adaptations in the collection I have. I think the key is the adapter, though, because Robin Brooks’s shows have been my favorites, and this one was quite good.

I really got why people like Sam Vimes stories, I appreciated nods to Discworld continuity even if I didn’t understand them, and I am a real sucker for “time travelling into your own past” stories. It was even not terribly problematic for a cop story, which was nice. I am finding some renewed faith in Discworld!

And thus ends my Queen & Country reread! I remember being disappointed by the final volume when I first read it, and I’m glad that it held up better this time around. I also appreciated some of the technical details that came up in the supplemental materials. There is so much that goes into comics that I just don’t notice!

Word of mouth and website games are exactly what got me to watch Napoleon Dynamite.

This ended in a confusing rush that spoiled all the fun that I was having, but up until that point it was great. Not high art by many means, but exactly the sort of thing two comics companies should do as a crossover so long as they had the licenses to make it happen.

Comics are an undervalued medium capable of telling powerful stories with great beauty—and also they let you do dumb-but-fun franchise crossovers like this one here.

I have more Star Trek IDW comics to read, but I’ve completed this whole series! It ended on a good note, with a tribute to Leonard Nimoy and then some semi-fourth-wall breaking explorations of what it means for there to be two timelines in “main” Star Trek canon.

I have a lot of complaints about this volume, not least making Khan look like Benedict Cumberbatch. It also has some of the stronger stories of this series, so I’m trying to give it some benefit of the doubt.