I wasn’t sure how I’d feel about this series, but I like it so far! Interesting playing with hubris, imaginative story and art, and compelling characters (even if I have trouble remembering who’s who, but that’s my fault).

My one annoyance is that there are a lot of two-page splashes that do not work well for reading PDFs on my phone. I get that that’s on me, but it’s still a pain.

Brb, nearly doubling the number of my entries in the Day One journaling app by importing a partial archive of all my tweets.

This has everything that annoyed me about the rest of the series but also some weird pro-monarchist vibes to it? Glad to be done with this series, and I hope the next one is better.

Moi, j’ai toujours préféré manger un kebab, mais il m’est arrivé de manger chez McDo une fois ou deux lors de mon séjour en Suisse. Le prix m’a choqué, même en sachant que le coût de la vie était beaucoup plus élévé en Suisse. J’avais honte d’être là avec un ami américain qui parlait français mais qui faisait sa commande en anglais parce que c’était une chaîne américaine et qu’il avait donc le droit.

Meh. I really don’t like the narration in this series, and even though I was a bit distracted while listening to this one, I’m not convinced I would have liked it much more if I had been giving it my full attention.

Early 2025 was a difficult time for my focus and mental health given all of the nonsense happening in my country at the time. I channeled a lot of my anxiety and distraction into messing around with my Hugo site, which is both something I find genuinely fun and something that is professionally useful, since I teach a course on content management systems where I’ve doubled down on Hugo as a teaching tool. Yesterday marks the one-year anniversary of my observation that it was “[t]ime to write up a summary post,” and I’m finally getting around to that today. Waiting so long to write that post means that some of my memories are a little fuzzy now, but I made some further updates to my site over the summer and then again last December, so a “the last year in Hugo adventures” post allows me to capture some of that stuff, too.

This story was more interesting, with some additional voice acting to make it feel more like a play than an audiobook. It was also bonkers science fiction in a very Doctor Who way that worked for me.

I gripe a lot about audio plays being dumb sometimes, but this “narrated story” approach is a lot less interesting than an audio play, and that annoyed me. Jacob Dudman does an excellent Eleventh Doctor, though, so it wasn’t terrible.

For about the first half of this book, I was convinced that it was better than the movie and that I had gravely sinned by not rereading it in the past decade.

I am glad that I reread it, but after finishing it, I’m a bit more reserved in my judgment. I can see the seams in the book, there are some comments that feel stuck in the early 2010s, and the scenes that the movie skipped aren’t as interesting as the beginning and end of the book.

As a side note, I just want to say how glad I am that I now write these posts because over the weekend, I was trying to remember whether I liked a particular blend, but it was from before I started teablogging, so I had nothing to rely on!

Anyway, this was another good midmorning work tea. I’d gladly drink it again, even if I can’t say I’d notice if I never had it again.

Just like the first time around, rereading The Martian just makes me want to play some Kerbal Space Program.

I’ve spent the last decade believing that The Martian was the exception to the “book is always better” rule, but rereading the book is challenging that notion.

This volume seemed to depart so drastically from the first that I had to make sure I hasn’t skipped something by accident. The stories are mostly recognizable as part of a shared universe, but the worldbuilding feels overly ambitious and underserved by the actual plot. The topless Galatea robots are unnecessary, and the lampshading of their luridness by attributing it to an in-universe pervert doesn’t help. I was willing to give the first volume in this series the benefit of the doubt, but I’m glad I don’t have any more of this to read.

See, this one I should have loved: I really want to like Paul McGann’s Doctor, and I do like the Vashta Nerada. This felt like excessive EU riffing, though, and I just couldn’t get excited about it.

I shouldn’t like this! It took a trip to YouTube to remember who the Carrionites even were, and there are so many Doctor-Who-dumb, audio-play-dumb, and just generally dumb elements to this play. Yet, it somehow came together into something that I enjoyed listening to during a stressful week.

Doesn’t knock one’s socks off, but it was a good mid-morning work tea.

I hesitated to give this full marks because I know it gets less interesting with time, but that’s also true of my chocolate mint tea that I love, and it’s been a while since I’ve had any of this, so my taste buds are very happy.

Since I’ve been posting about Doctor Who and Tinker Tailor: I had heard of the Valeyard before (my Classic Who knowledge is limited 😬), but I only recently learned that he was portrayed by the actor who played Peter Guillam, and this is really messing with my head.

I would never claim that Käärijä and Baby Lasagna’s #eurodab is a good song, but having it stuck in my head the morning after poor sleep is doing more help than harm.

I like the actor who plays Jim Prideaux in the Tinker Tailor miniseries, but even though I don’t speak a word of Czech, it’s very clear that he doesn’t either.

The Racnoss struck me as dumb in their first appearance, and this play hasn’t done much to disabuse me of that impression. That said, this played enough with interesting Doctor Who themes of peace and conflict that it won me over anyway.

Look, I’ve heard some good orchestral versions of the Doctor Who theme, but that song was meant to be as electronic as possible.

Interesting art, and some interesting ideas (like a foulmouthed human being transported to a land of animal wizards). I think there’s something here, even if I’m not totally hooked.

The art is good, and there are elements of a rollicking time travel romp hidden in here, but the story ultimately comes down to tech bros doing what they want because they have the power to, and we’re lucky that they decided to have a conscience at the end. That is not the kind of story I want to read in 2026.

I’ve read this too many times in the past two decades for it to feel as innovative and interesting as it once did, but it remains good!