It can be surprising how dark and melancholy Doctor Who is sometimes, but this story does an excellent job of capturing that vibe in audio. Really enjoyed this one.

J’aime beaucoup le dessin dans cette série. Le scénario est fort intéressant, lui aussi, mais il y tant d’histoires de ce genre qui se ressemblent toutes, et je suis content de combien ce monde imaginé ne leur ressemble pas du tout au niveau visuel.

Good mix of a clever idea that holds the story together, alien world-building (including an alien comics shop, which earns full marks on its own), and some semi-meta reflection on the importance of wardrobe in this franchise.

Even by Doctor Who’s famously wibbly wobbly standards, the rules of time travel make zero sense in this story, but it’s so fun that I don’t care.

Sometimes silly is good, and this story features a gorilla quoting Monty Python within a goofy but interesting premise, so I’m here for it.

Up until the twist, this was a fun story—after the twist, it was fantastic. I really like the idea of filling the universe of Doctor Who with people who have their own stories and agency, and this did a good job of it.

Okay, now this is perfect. It feels like a high quality “Doctor lite” tv episode would. Creepy as heck, fun playing with mundane presentations of sci-fi-concepts, and a lot that I like in fiction. I really, really enjoyed this.

Mon épouse s’intéresse à cette série depuis un an, et on a donc commandé le coffret complet en faisant notre grande commande de livres français il y a quelques semaines. C’est une histoire intéressante, j’aime bien l’art, et ça fait rire notre fille.

Je ne sais plus comment j’ai découvert cette micro série Arte il y a plusieurs années, mais je l’ai trop aimée à l’époque, et cela m’a bouleversée quand elle n’était plus disponible sur YouTube. J’essaie de la retrouver depuis des années, et après avoir regarder Intouchables, j’ai essayé une fois de plus.

Heureusement, elle est maintenant disponible sur le site d’Arte, et grâce à mon VPN, j’ai pu lui convaincre que j’étais à Bordeaux et que j’avais donc le droit de la regarder.

Il est sympa ce film ! Il est émouvant tout en faisant rire aussi. J’avoue qu’avec un oeil plus critique, je trouverais des choses qui me gênent (d’abord, il n’est pas hyper féministe comme film, et puis on préfère une histoire « feel-good » au lieu d’interroger les relations entre les hyper riches et les immigrés pauvres), mais c’est vraiment un film qui me plaît et qui me permet d’apprendre un français un peu plus courant que ce que j’ai appris pendant mes études.

This book is the perfect kind of unexpected blend. It never hides that it’s an alternate history novel, but what begins as a relatively cozy mystery story gradually becomes more and more of a reflection on unsufficiently resisting Nazis and slow decline into fascism.

It will be 20 years old this year, but it feels written for this time.

This book is great! I have some quibbles—I found Brueggemann a bit more literal in his exegesis than I would have expected—but I get why this is a classic, and I’ll have to buy a print copy to reference in the future.

As I noted yesterday, I think there’s a lot in here that also appears in the anarchist writing that’s appealed to me lately: refusal of the status quo, skepticism of power, and the audacity to imagine a better world. It’s good stuff.

Comme je suis en train de reregarder Au service de la France, l’idée m’est venue que je devrais aussi revisiter les films OSS 117.

Ce film est stupide mais assume sa stupidité en s’en moquant. Le héros est encore plus stupide mais ne le reconnaît pas du tout. Bref, c’est un film parfait pour mon sens d’humour. Le rire de Jean Dujardin me fait rire moi aussi, et il est tellement doué dans ce rôle.

I don’t remember liking the first Knives Out all that much, but the second and third felt like they were made just for me. It’s religious, it doesn’t pull any punches against toxic religion, it’s funny, and it has interesting characters. So glad I watched.

After months of pestering her about it, kiddo relented and agreed to watch the original Star Wars with me (which I will always know as ANH even if I complain about special edition changes, so I guess that’s where I am on the Star Wars purity scale or whatever).

I haven’t watched this in maybe a decade? I noticed the seams and flaws in the movie more than I ever have before, but I can’t not give it full marks for the world that it created. It was interesting to think about all the different directions the not-yet-franchise could have taken after this movie and how many of them I might have liked to see, even if I am a Star Wars canon nerd even to this day.

Cory Doctorow has a bit he returns to in a lot of his writing about how tech billionaires aren’t geniuses, just power-hungry people who got lucky, and now I will always wonder if he got it from this movie. I’m a huge fan of Cory’s, but Rian Johnson’s having Daniel Craig rant about how dumb Edward Norton’s tech billionaire character is in this movie is perfection.

Also, super good cameo appearance by The Verge.

Sometimes, a comic book is dumb in all the right ways. This is one of them. It has an interesting premise (a wizard is sent from a magical realm to conquer Earth but ends uo setting up shop as its protector) that it doesn’t bother being pretentious about, instead leaning into fourth-wall breaking jokes about conventions in comics. It has a Ryan North feel to it, and I love that.

I enjoy a work of fiction that leans into its premise, especially if that premise is wild, with existential overtones. While it did feel slow at times, I appreciated how carefully and thoroughly Pluribus explored its central idea, and I’m looking forward to seeing where it goes from here.

This was a delight, and I’m glad I read this series.

I don’t agree with everything in the book, but it’s full of great observations that I would gladly tweak to draw slightly different, really powerful conclusions. The author’s “reader-centered theology of scripture” is great, and its meditations on the weakness of God also really spoke to me. This made Ether more interesting than I remembered it being, and I’m grateful for that.

Cory Doctorow recently reviewed a newer book from Lubchansky, which I’d love to read. I can’t easily get a copy, though, so I checked this one out again from the library. It is bonkers and beautiful, and there should be more comics like it.

Wow, wow, wow. I was intrigued by what I knew about this book when I first bought it but am only now getting to it, five years later. It’s a beautiful book and quietly radical, using the story of Mormon to develop a theology of the world ending around us. Miller explicitly invokes the climate crisis at the end of the book and calls for disciples to be willing to sacrifice all things instead of simply waiting to lose all things. Even outside of that context, Miller’s quasi-mystical reading of Mormon has so much to offer—and is pleasantly aligned with some of the theologies I’ve heard in Community of Christ. This is a good one.

This remains one of the best pieces of short fiction I’ve ever encountered, and I have trouble imagining ever finding anything that replaces it in my mind. It is existentially terrifying and yet beautiful, it’s clever in even the smallest details, and I will never stop thinking about it.

I have tried to rewatch this a few times since discovering it in 2023, and I’ve always stalled out by the final episode of Series 1, which is so cruel and cynical that it’s difficult to watch. Yet, it fits nicely with the themes of the show (and especially the first series), so I’m glad I made it through this time. I’m still critical of the misogyny and brownface that led me to dock points from my last review, but seeing how carefully the show sets up that final episode of the series (especially during an era where season arcs weren’t nearly as important as they later became) has won my respect.

Honestly, I was getting bored of this series, but this story got me back on track! It helps that it features a Project 2025/DOGE-type villain, anticipating our current nonsense. The characters are also as (or more) compelling as usual, and things felt less outlandish than in some of the preceding books.