Below you will find pages that utilize the taxonomy term “media”
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️🖤🖤🖤 for The Life and Mysterious Death of Ian Mackintosh: The Inside Story of The Sandbaggers and Television's Top Spy, by Robert G. Folsom
- kudos:I’ve been hungering to read this book for months! I watched all three series of The Sandbaggers early in 2023 and have been trying to read and watch everything I can on the series. This includes a couple of YouTube video essays, most of Greg Rucka’s Queen & Country, and whatever else I could find. A relative gifted me this book for Christmas, and I was very excited! I’d known about it for a while but couldn’t find it through public or academic libraries.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for Jesus for the Non-Religious, by John Shelby Spong
- kudos:I have a lot of small irritations with this book: I feel like Spong takes too long deconstructing before reconstructing (though that may reflect my own personal stage of faith), like his arguments are sometimes sloppy, and like he can be awkward (but clearly sincere) to modern eyes in his commitment to non-discrimination. He also seems more sure than I am that this is the obvious and only way to read Jesus; I agree with his reading, but I’m not sure it’s as straightforward as he makes it.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for The Secret Hours, by Mick Herron
- kudos:I enjoyed this semi-prequel to the Slow Horses series. I’d forgotten some series details along the way and wish there were a series wiki out there to help me catch up. Nonetheless, I remembered enough to enjoy the connections and figure most bits out.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for Bookshops & Bonedust, by Travis Baldree
- kudos:I don’t think this prequel is quite as good as the original Legends & Lattes, but it is clearly cut from the same cloth. It’s a fun mix of D&D tropes and general coziness and made for a nice way to spend some of my winter break.
🍿 movieblog: ❤️❤️❤️🖤🖤 for Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny
- kudos:Kicked off the family holiday gathering by watching this with my dad last night. This was a good Indiana Jones movie, I (mostly) had fun watching it, and I’m probably being a little harsh in my rating of it. However, for all we live in an era where punching Nazis is shorthand for some very necessary resistance to some very dangerous far-right action, I’ve been reading about non-violence lately, and that makes it hard to enjoy media like this.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for Nancy: A Comic Collection, by Olivia Jaimes
- kudos:I don’t really like gag-a-day strips (or many comic strips at all), but Jaimes’s run on Nancy speaks to me in a way I can’t explain. I checked this out from the library for kiddo but ended up reading it myself.
📺 tvblog: ❤️❤️❤️🖤🖤 for Loki (Season 2)
- kudos:I enjoyed watching this show, and I really like the aesthetic it’s been rocking for its two seasons. I was inclined to give it a higher rating than this because of those factors and because I don’t really have anything bad to say about it—however, I’m hard pressed to come up with any praise more substantive than “I had a fun time,” so I’m going to knock off a heart for that.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️ for Saga Volume 11, by Fiona Staples and Brian K. Vaughan
- kudos:I had to refresh myself on the last few volumes before tackling this latest one, and there are still lots of details I can’t remember. This series is gory, crude, and profane in ways that ought to turn me away from it, but it’s just so compelling. Great art, powerful characters, and good story. Maybe I should actually subscribe to issues as they come out? I’ve never read comics in a monthly format before, but I don’t know if I want to wait as long as I had to for this next TPB.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for Ultimate Spider-Man: Vol. 4, Death of Spider-Man, by Brian Michael Bendis and Mark Bagley
- kudos:I’ve complained a lot about superhero comics nonsense throughout this series, but it’s still depressing to finally show that a 16-year-old wouldn’t survive all of these fights. It’s an interesting wrap up for this character, and I ought to find and read the Miles Morales series, but after 26 TPBs in a couple of months, I think I need a break from Spider-Man. There are other books I ought to read, and on the comics landscape, I hear there’s a new Saga TPB to get caught up on.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for Ultimate Spider-Man: Vol. 3, Death of Spider-Man Prelude, by Brian Michael Bendis
- kudos:I miss the earlier art, and there’s still plenty of comic book nonsense, but this series has found a good groove. I don’t know a whole ton about main Marvel continuity, but I do feel like Bendis has the freedom to do his own thing here, and I gather that was the point of the Ultimate universe. Kind of wild to have the next volume’s big event spoiled in this volume’s title, but I guess it’s been long enough for it not to matter.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️ for Adventuregame Comics 2: The Beyond, by Jason Shiga
- kudos:I’ve been meaning to read (play?) this for months, ever since we bought it for kiddo after she recovered from being sick. Today, she’s sick again, so we went through it together. This continues to be a great series by Shiga! I might like the first one more, but only slightly. The Beyond is surprisingly thinky for a kid’s book, has interesting puzzles, and there’s a hidden ending that I know exists but need to figure out.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for The Kingdom of God is Within You, by Leo Tolstoy
- kudos:This book took a while to finally get through. After two failed attempts at an ebook, I finally succeeded thanks to a LibriVox audiobook! I have mixed feelings about the book, though I ultimately liked it. Tolstoy’s ideas are radical, and though I aspire to a certain radicalism in my faith and politics, that is certainly not my nature, so I brought some resistance with me into the text. Even accounting for that, though, I don’t think Tolstoy’s argument is as self-evident or well reasoned as he thinks it is.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for Ultimate Spider-Man: Vol. 2, Chameleons, by Brian Michael Bendis and David Lafuente
- kudos:Fun arc! I like the whole range of characters at Bendis’s disposal, and even though it strains credulity sometimes, it is fun to have Peter and friends as teenagers. Lafuente’s art isn’t bad, but I’m not used to it, so I have trouble recognizing Peter as Peter sometimes (especially in this arc!). Nearing the end of this journey, though I ought to read the Miles Morales volumes after that.
📺 tvblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️ for Taskmaster (Series 7)
- kudos:We got really into this show during the height of the pandemic and then left it alone for a while. This was a great season to come back to and provided a lot of laughs. Probably won’t come back to the show for a while (we have a few other series we’re behind on now), but this was exactly what I needed.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for Ultimate Spider-Man: Vol. 1, The World According to Peter Parker, by Brian Michael Bendis and David Lafuente
- kudos:I don’t know how to deal with the renaming and renumbering going on in this series, and trying to read up on it on Wikipedia is just making me more confused. This is very clearly a “reset the status quo” effort, but it’s not entirely bad? Bendis continues to mistreat Mary Jane, and I feel like it’s actually getting worse, so that’s not great. I do like the dynamic of Aunt May taking in more and more superheroes, though, so we’ll see how that turns out.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for Ultimate Spider-Man: Vol. 22, Ultimatum, by Brian Michael Bendis
- kudos:I’d heard a lot about Ultimatum before, but this was my first time actually reading the arc. There are things I don’t like in these issues—including some of the low-level misogyny I pointed out in previous volumes—but for a major crossover event filled with comic book nonsense, it was actually pretty good.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for Ultimate Spider-Man: Vol 21, War of the Symbiotes, by Brian Michael Bendis and Stuart Immonen
- kudos:I really shouldn’t like this volume. I don’t care that much about Venom or Carnage, and I think their Ultimate origin stories are dumb. Gwen Stacy got treated terribly earlier in the series, and this comic book resurrection is as silly as her death was stupid. Yet, I thought the framing story was interesting, Venom is compelling as an eldritch villain, and I… enjoyed myself? Dunno what to make of all that, but four hearts it is.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for Queen & Country Definitive Edition, Volume 03, by Greg Rucka
- kudos:I think this might be my least favorite of the three volumes I now own (need to track down the fourth to complete the collection). The first arc was good enough (and felt straight out of The Sandbaggers—Rucka borrows HEAVILY from a couple of episodes), but the second seemed like supplementary material to Rucka’s novels. I like this series when it’s riffing off of The Sandbaggers, but when it feels like its own thing with lots of continuity, it’s harder to enjoy.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for Ultimate Spider-Man: Vol. 20, And His Amazing Friends, by Brian Michael Bendis and Stuart Immonen
- kudos:This volume also feels like a step in the right direction! It seems like Bendis is willing to stretch with and fill out the universe some: What he did with Liz Allan and recurring villain/joke The Shocker are especially interesting. I’m having fun with this series again!
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for Ultimate Spider-Man: Vol. 19, Death of a Goblin, by Brian Michael Bendis and Stuart Immonen
- kudos:I feel like this series found its groove again! I miss Bagley’s pencilling, but Immonen makes a fine replacement. A lot of the stuff that bothered me in recent volumes has been redeemed here: Kitty Pryde is interesting instead of just a drama device, Norman Osborn gets some depth, S.H.I.E.L.D. is engaged with as the creepy organization they are, and it turns out that comic book nonsense can actually be fun sometimes.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for Ultimate Spider-Man: Vol. 18, Ultimate Knights, by Brian Michael Bendis and Mark Bagley
- kudos:I’ve complained a lot about comic book nonsense in recent volumes, and there’s plenty of it here, too, but this pulled a lot together in a way that just plain works. Interesting crossover action, classic Spider-Man morality of superheroes, good art, interesting stakes. I guess this is why I keep reading this series.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️🖤🖤 for Ultimate Spider-Man: Vol. 17, Clone Saga, by Brian Michael Bendis and Mark Bagley
- kudos:I almost gave this four hearts because I kind of like how it turned out, and it did touch on some good Spider-Man themes. However, I then remembered all the comic book nonsense that happens here—and the way that so many of these issues demonstrate how terrible it would be to live in the (Ultimate) Marvel universe.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️🖤🖤 for Ultimate Spider-Man: Vol. 16, Deadpool, by Brian Michael Bendis and Mark Bagley
- kudos:As has been the case for the past few volumes, this has some genuinely interesting stuff in it (the X-Men crossover was more engaging than I’d like to admit), but for the most part, this feels like advancing a broader Marvel landscape than doing actual Spider-Man stuff.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️ for A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens
- kudos:Over the weekend, I watched The Muppet Christmas Carol with kiddo for the third year in a row. That makes three years that I’ve been meaning to read the source material, so I went to LibriVox and found a free audiobook. It was an excellent read! It’s aged, and not always well, but the message is just as biting, and I appreciate the Muppet adaptation all the more. Dickens has clever writing, which I appreciated, and it was nice to read the original after seeing so many adaptations.
🍿 movieblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️ for The Muppet Christmas Carol
- kudos:It has puppets, Christmas, and social justice—what more can you ask for? This is at least the third year in a row I’ve watched this with kiddo, and it still makes me laugh and cry when I watch it.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for The Fall: Volume One, by Jared Muralt
- kudos:I picked up this comic about a post-pandemic-apocalypse from the library on a whim. I have mixed feelings about this genre—especially since it’s hard to believe that it was begun before COVID-19. The story is somewhat interesting but choppy, and the characters are compelling but flat. The translation is rouuuugh, and I wonder how much better it might be in the original German. What saves this for me, though, is how clearly Swiss it is.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️🖤🖤 for Ultimate Spider-Man: Vol. 15, Silver Sable, by Brian Michael Bendis and Mark Bagley
- kudos:There’s some interesting stuff here, including Bendis’s riffs on power and responsibility and how that relates to secret identities. However, there’s too much welding to the broader Ultimate universe, including introducing characters I just don’t care about. I also still feel like Peter’s attitude toward MJ is more low-level misogyny than anything justified.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️🖤🖤 for Ultimate Spider-Man: Vol. 14, Warriors, by Brian Michael Bendis and Mark Bagley
- kudos:Definitely not my favorite of the series. Lots of crossover nonsense with characters I don’t really care about. Way too much casual misogyny (Peter toward MJ and creators toward the women they put in impractical fanservice costumes). Starting to question my commitment to this series binge.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️ for Queen & Country Definitive Edition: Volume 02, by Greg Rucka
- kudos:This volume was excellent. Much more of the Sandbaggers vibes and less saving the world spy fiction. I ordered the third volume today!
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for Queen & Country Definitive Edition: Volume 01, by Greg Rucka
- kudos:I’ve been wanting to read this since binging all three series of The Sandbaggers, since I’ve seen it repeatedly referred to as a spiritual sequel. They weren’t kidding—the first story arc feels like a remix of the show! The third story arc was the least interesting to me (and probably the reason this didn’t get full marks). The first two deal with the cynicism of espionage and the brokenness of spies in the way I expected the series would, whereas the third arc felt more like a traditional spy story with maybe some furniture moving for future arcs.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️🖤🖤 for Ultimate Spider-Man: Vol. 13, Hobgoblin, by Brian Michael Bendis and Mark Bagley
- kudos:Peter and MJ’s relationship is one of my favorite things to follow in this series, and that makes this volume a real disappointment. It seems like so much of the story is built around forcing drama and idiot balls into these two characters for the sake of adding twists and turns to the plot. Plus, it really comes through in this volume how often MJ is treated as an extension of Peter instead of a character with her own depth and agency.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for Ultimate Spider-Man: Vol 12, Superstars, by Brian Michael Bendis and Mark Bagley
- kudos:This is mostly crossover nonsense, but it’s actually kind of good? The Doctor Strange issues feel overly dramatic at points, but Peter’s nightmare is classic Spider-Man responsibility angst, so I’ll give it a pass.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for Ultimate Spider-Man: Vol. 11, Carnage, by Brian Michael Bendis and Mark Bagley
- kudos:Gwen Stacy gets done dirty in the Ultimate continuity, and I have even less interest in Carnage than I do Venom. What saves this volume for me, though, is the throughline of the classic Spider-Man theme of power and responsibility.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for Ultimate Spider-Man: Vol. 10, Hollywood, by Brian Michael Bendis and Mark Bagley
- kudos:This is a shameless attempt to profit off of whatever Spider-Man movie was coming out at the time, but it’s still a pretty fun story. It continues to strain credulity that this kid could keep up superhero hijinks without Aunt May finding out, but it’s enough of the mythos that I can deal with it (mostly).
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️🖤🖤 for Ultimate Spider-Man: Vol. 9, Ultimate Six, by Brian Michael Bendis
- kudos:This story is interesting, but it suffers from too much of superhero continuity bloat. I also miss Mark Bagley’s illustration—this artist’s faces all look alike, whereas Bagley’s characters are distinct and familiar to me. It’s just meh.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for Ultimate Spider-Man: Vol. 8, Cats & Kings, by Brian Michael Bendis and Mark Bagley
- kudos:The first few issues of this are just about peak Spider-Man, and I came very close to giving this full marks. By the end, though, there was too much treating female characters as fanservice—and I have never liked temptation to infidelity as a plot device. So, some ups, some downs.