Below you will find pages that utilize the taxonomy term “media”
🍿 movieblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for The Marvels
- kudos:I came for the Ms. Marvel, and this delivered! She’s a great character, and it was fun to see her in this movie. There were also lots of weird-but-fun bits that I enjoyed. There are plenty of things about the movie that didn’t work for me, but it’s no less dumb than most Marvel movies, and I have no interest in feeding what I understand is a bunch of hating on the movie.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for The Undertaking of Hart and Mercy, by Megan Bannen
- kudos:Romance is not my usual genre, but this came recommended by my spouse, who rightly guessed I would enjoy just how bonkers weird this story gets. It was a fun read!
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️🖤🖤 for Queen & Country Definitive Edition, Volume 04, by Greg Rucka
- kudos:I recently came into some Amazon gift cards, so I bought this volume to complete my collection of Queen & Country. I think this is the first time I’ve owned an entire comics series? At least, one of this length. I’m glad I own the whole series, but like the show its based on, I feel like it gets less interesting the longer it goes on. It’s fun to get some peeks into the backstories of the characters who come up in the first two volumes, but it’s just not as interesting as the early stories.
📺 tvblog: ❤️❤️❤️🖤🖤 for Doctor Who (2023 specials)
- kudos:I got really into Doctor Who for the better part of a decade, I have really fond memories of the many seasons I watched, and there are episodes I would gladly return to. I petered out after Jodie Whitaker’s first season, though, and watching these specials showed me I’m still not ready to come back. I don’t know what has changed, but I feel less patient with the show’s goofiness. If it’s going to keep coming to Disney+, I’ll try to keep an eye on it, but hard to say if I’ll ever really reinvest.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️ for The Bezzle (A Martin Hench Novel), by Cory Doctorow
- kudos:I feel like I say this whenever I talk about Doctorow, but I love that his fiction reads like an op-ed. While waiting for this book to come out, I’ve been slowly reading his co-authored book Chokepoint Capitalism, and I feel like The Bezzle is all his (and Rebecca’s) critiques about large and greedy companies wrapped up in a fun, action-driven narrative. Here’s the thing about me: I’m an academic, and I respect facts, reason, and citations.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️ for American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, by Kai Bird and Martin J. Shermin
- kudos:I enjoyed Nolan’s movie so much that I thought I ought to eventually read the book—yet, I couldn’t imagine that it coule live up to the film adaptation (especially after hearing the audiobook narrator’s awful attempts at any language other than English). Yet, this ended up being amazing—perhaps better than the movie. Funnily enough, I felt that the best parts weren’t about the man himself. Rather, his life provides fascinating insight into the existential horrors of nuclear weapons, the authoritarian impulses of McCarthy-era conservatism, and lots more besides.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️ for Accidental Saints: Finding God in All the Wrong People, by Nadia Bolz-Weber
- kudos:I bought this book with a gift card and to thumb my nose at an obnoxious visiting authority at a Latter-day Saint stake conference from over four years ago. This guy spent the Saturday evening session of the conference complaining about young adults who supported gay marriage and parents who pushed back against school discipline instead of giving their kids a whuppin’ (his words, not mine) and then still had the gall to talk about how great Mormonism is because it doesn’t believe in a fire and brimstone angry God.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️ for The Mirage, by Matt Ruff
- kudos:I first read this book a few years ago, making my way through Ruff’s books after enjoying Lovecraft Country. I might like this one just as much—it’s bizarre to the point of absurdity but in a way that gets you to think. This reread was inspired by picking up a copy of my own from the clearance section of my favorite independent bookstore, and I’m really glad I own it.
📺 tvblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for For All Mankind (Season 4)
- kudos:I love this show, and this season was a delight to watch. There were bumps along the way, some characters were done dirty, and I don’t know that I like the characters that the finale wants to be in the right (or that the characters I like weren’t in the wrong), but it was a wonderful piece of television.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️🖤🖤 for Practical Anarchism: A Guide for Daily Life, by Scott Branson
- kudos:I defined myself for a long time as a moderate or centrist, and despite my leftward march in recent years, it still feels weird to be aspirationally reading a book on anarchism. As Branson points out early in this book, there are plenty of people who would never identify with the word but agree with anarchist ideas in science fiction, and I guess that’s how I got here. Twice in 2023, I read Cory Doctorow’s Walkaway, and on the second read, I realized that there were some strong anarchist themes in that book.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️ for Curveball: When Your Faith Takes Turns You Never Saw Coming, by Peter Enns
- kudos:I owe Pete Enns a lot. Reading his books in the years before I hit a faith crisis helped that experience go a lot more smoothly, as did continuing to read his stuff and listen to his podcasts during the process of faith transition. Around the time this book was coming out, though, I needed a break. I felt like I knew most of his stuff, his media efforts felt like they were getting bigger and more corporate, and as much as I owed him, I wasn’t feeling it anymore.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through?, by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith
- kudos:This is a fascinating book written by two authors who began the project wanting to write about how cool it would be to settle space… but after consulting all the evidence, concluded that it might not be a great idea. It’s kind of a downer book in a way—I’ve always been excited about space, and it’s a bummer to think of it as an awful place where we might not have a future.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️🖤🖤 for The Courage to Be, by Paul Tillich
- kudos:I was recently complaining about religious books that I felt were below where I am in my thinking, so this was a slice of humble pie. I don’t do great with dense philosophical or theological works, and my rating is more a reflection of that than anything else. I made it through with an audiobook, but I don’t know how much I’ll retain. Tillich came highly recommended by other authors, but I think that most of what I wanted to get out of it was concentrated in the final chapter of the book.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee, by Bart Ehrman
- kudos:Kind of like the Spong book I recently finished, I enjoyed this book, but I think I would have gotten about as much from a condensed version. I’ve gotten to a point after nearly a decade of this kind of reading that I don’t need to be eased into a lot of these arguments and just want the crux of them. I think the academic in me (though this is certainly not my area of training) also wants more sources and footnotes.
📺 tvblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for Slow Horses (Season 3)
- kudos:What an excellent series this is. The finale was more violent than I’m comfortable with, but I appreciated that it never glorified the violence; rather, it fit in nicely with the series’s habit of showing that as screwed up as the Slow Horses are, it’s the dignified leadership of this fictional MI5 who are the real monsters. Power corrupts, and all that. I’m wondering how next series will go—I have only vague recollections of the book, and what I do remember is that it’s one of the weirder ones.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for Standing By the Wall: The Collected Slough House Novellas, by Mick Herron
- kudos:I’d been meaning to read these for a while and was happy to find them collected in a single (Libby) volume. Herron is great at adding a lot to his universe full of terrible people, and I wish I recognized all the cameos and continuity nods from the main series. I did appreciate Herron’s lampshading of his characters’ not aging despite a decade of publication history—it was clever without feeling out of place.
📚 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.