I don’t regret pitching in $5 to support a webcomic I have loved for almost twenty years, but even after years of listening to The Incomparable’s Dark Sun campaign, I just don’t know if I know/like that setting enough to really enjoy this story. Alas.

J’ai des souvenirs très précis du monent où un ami Suisse m’a conseillé ce film et m’a fort déconseillé la version américaine. Cette conversation a eu lieu il y a 17 ans, et je suis enfin arrivé à regarder le film.

Bon, je crois que je ne suis pas suffisamment français (ou bien francophone, si c’est un Suisse qui me l’a recommandé) pour apprécier le film. J’avoue que le regarder en faisant la vaisselle ne fait pas meilleure impression, et j’assume. Pourtant, bien que je me débrouille assez bien en français, j’ai plus du mal à comprendre le dialogue d’un film qu’une conversation face à face. En plus, les sous-titres en anglais n’aidaient pas trop, et je n’avais pas le choix de les mettre en français. Il y a plein de blagues qui ne se traduisent pas bien, et j’ai attendu la moitié du film avant de comprendre la blague Jacquouille, Jacques Ouilles, M. Ouille, qui est assez marrant en fin de compte.

Il me semble que parmi les Français, ce film est aussi bien aimé que le premier, mais je trouve que je l’aime beaucoup moins bien, moi.

Il y a des trucs drôles dans le film, mais je le trouve trop compliqué. Ce qui est pire, c’est que c’est bien difficile d’avoir un héros aussi raciste mais sans pourrir le film même. À mon avis, on réussit à trouver l’équilibre juste dans le premier film, mais dans ce film, on ajoute des assassins chinois avec des accents impénétrables, et on commence à se demander si ce n’est pas eux la blague au lieu de Hubert.

Happy to have wrapped up this series, though I’m sure I’ll be coming back to each of the titles. This last book has some good stuff in it (including a fascinating, existential discussion of the tension between grace and agency), but I found too much of it to be boring rather than captivating. I think that’s probably my fault in part—as I’ve previously noted, I’ve been powering through these books just to finish them—but it’s how things stand right now.

I enjoyed watching some of my favorite characters in this series, but it does not have the coherence or cleverness of the first one.

Still kind of meh at this point, and I’m wondering if there’s only so far that the premise of this series can go. There are some interesting plot developments, though, so we’ll see if things get more exciting in the next volume(s).

Parts of this are good—especially the Batman-analogue/Catwoman-analogue date subplot that bookends this volume—but a lot of it is meh. I’m also not a fan of the “rich dude has to work to make a problem go away for his company” plot, though we’ll see if that changes any.

Still appreciate what this series is aiming for, and there are some good bits in here, but the plot still takes leaps I can’t follow, and my nagging concerns still nag.

I keep expecting to like Matt Fraction stuff to be better than I do because I’ve heard so much good stuff about him. There’s something interesting in here, but it also seems sleazy and grimy as an intentional style decision, and I don’t know if that’s my kind of fiction. I’ll probably keep reading this, and it was helpful to read the cast pages at the end so I could remember who everyone was, but I don’t know if I’ll like it any more.

Look, now more than ever, I’m sympathetic toward a story of Canadian resistance to American bullying, and you’d think that giant mech combat would only make that more appealing.

There are just too many strikes against this to be better than “meh,” though. I don’t like blood and gore in my comics, the characters are kind of flat, and the French dialogue needs another edit.

This comic has the raw ingredients (including solid art) to make a compelling story about mortality, existential dread, privilege, and so many other topics. Yet, it doesn’t seem to be able to organize them into something coherent and compelling.

This series ended as a disappointment. The grace I was willing to give it with the last volume is gone after it finishing in a pile of anticlimaxes and overused science fiction tropes. Meh.

I read this series ages ago; when I got it through an Image Humble Bundle, I decided it was worth a reread.

The art isn’t bad, and the basic ideas of the series are interesting, but it’s remarkable how much generative AI has kind of ruined what the series could be.

So much of this reads differently now: the premise of people seeking companionship in sycophantic robots, the secondary premise of people being convinced that there’s true intelligence behind the scenes just waiting to be unlocked, the idea of “robots rights” in a society that’s skeptical of artificial intelligence. What would have been pretty standard scifi 4 years ago now hits differently, feeling like an allegory for the most delusional parts of pro-AI advocacy.

I was more generous to the first series this time around because I was impressed by how tightly it works as a single story, despite being episodic. While there are lots of gems in this series, it doesn’t feel as tightly constructed, and there are also some weird things that don’t really work for me (like a conspiratorial diatribe against the FBI?). I don’t regret rewatching it, but it just isn’t as good as the first series.

This season wasn’t awful so much as “just okay,” but I’ve come to expect more from the show. It took my least favorite book and changed it in weird ways that didn’t feel like they fixed much. A few changes were good, but others felt like they added too much complexity to the plot or that they were trying to lend a gravitas to characters that don’t need it.

This comic is dumb, but mostly the funny kind of dumb, but still not quite enough to get more than a middling review.

As a member of Community of Christ, I’m supposed to be a Trinitarian, but if I’ve learned one thing in recent years, it’s that I have very little patience for insistence on Trinitarianism. It doesn’t make much more sense to me now than it did when I was a practicing Latter-day Saint, and if I can recognize value in the theological reflections that emerge from an assumption of Trinitarianism, I am just not sold that it’s the only (or even best) way of understanding God.

Ellul can be hard to review, and especially in this book! The core metaphor here is interesting and useful—I plan to draw from it personally and professionally. It’s also combined, though, with wild assertions, exegesis and theology that don’t land (for me), and moral panic that might be intentional hyperbole or might just be off base.

So, there are some parts of this that are excellent and some parts that don’t really work. That makes it hard to evaluate as a whole!

I will be interested to see what the TV adaptation of this book is, since my least favorite books have sometimes been redeemed by the TV adaptation. For the time being, though, I didn’t love this one. It seems to exaggerate all the things about the books I don’t like, and I found the characters especially unsympathetic.

There’s a really interesting quasi-theological question at the heart of this book, and I’m rereading it for the first time in over a decade because I think it will be useful for a sermon I’m scheduled to give in a couple of months. What “imaginary versions” of Jesus do we create for ourselves and how do they get in the way of our connecting with the heart of Christianity.

There’s also a goofiness to the book that almost works. I don’t think it quite lands, coming off as what I imagine a trying-too-hard youth pastor might deliver, but if it did land, it would be right up my alley.

I felt like this one didn’t stand out to me. I’ll gladly keep reading, but this was the most “meh” so far.

This wasn’t bad, but I just didn’t find it as interesting as the first. I know the whole series is beloved by many, but I’m wondering if I just like the first novella? I ought to keep going to see if persistence pays off, but I had trouble sticking to this listen, so I think it’s time for a break.

Look, I know I haven’t read enough of the Murderbot source material to get snippy about unfaithfulness of adaptations. What’s more, this is a pretty good show! Great design, great casting, and lots of fun.

I just didn’t like it as much as I remember liking the novella. I got annoyed by what felt like unnecessary expansions, and there are parts of the worldbuilding that just can’t be captured on TV. Skarsgård does a great job but doesn’t capture how I perceived the main character. I just feel grumpy about it even though I recognize that it’s good.

Dumb but fun is how I would describe this. It’s got good art and an interesting premise, but the longer it went on, the more tired I got of twists and the harder time I had following the story. It wasn’t bad—but nothing special either.

This one almost won me over. It has good art, and the kind of worldbuilding that goes with an interesting idea rather than explain things. It had a bit more violence than I like and some objectifying art that wasn’t really necessary, but what really lost me was an unnecessary fridging late in the second arc. It could have been something interesting—and frankly still was—but that scene cancelled out a lot of that potential.