Below are posts associated with the “media” type.
📚 bookblog: Now Let's Go Commit Something Mildly Subversive (❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️)
Still enjoying this! I really appreciate Willis’s charitable, nuanced take on non-fundamentalist religion that comes out here while Joyce is wrestling with her faith.
📚 bookblog: Up Here We Can Be Garbage (❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️)
I really ought to scan back through each volume as I read it so that I can give it a more thorough review, but these go fast, blend together, and just make a generally good impression. I’d like to wrap up the reread so that I can turn my attention to other stuff, but sometimes you also just need a quick, easy rebinge of a high quality webcomic.
📺 tvblog: The Night Manager Season 1 (❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤)
Took me a while to watch this. It’s not bad, and I liked it more than my spouse did, but I really want to read the source material now to see how it holds up.
🎙️ radioblog: Square One (❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️)
It came as something of a surprise that this next part of the story felt even better. It takes some liberties with the British political system, but since it came out in November 2016, it is clearly doing so to criticize Donald Trump, and I can live with that. The story continues to play with the basic concept of the Silents as a supernatural villain, and I’m enjoying seeing where it goes.
🎙️ radioblog: House of Silents (❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️)
I’ve made a few comments alluding to how interesting it is to explore expanded universe material in another franchise after a near-lifetime of exploring Star Wars auxiliary fiction. This is a good demonstration of how EUs can be good: The Silents are an interesting villain, and this story makes good use of them while fitting it nicely into the broader Doctor Who canon. I enjoyed the listen.
📚 bookblog: Just Put Down the Ukelele Only Then Can the Healing Begin (❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️)
DoA is funny because its plot takes place over a few months, but the story has been told over years and years. That makes it hard to remember what happened when. I feel like this volume has some of the changes that most lead to contemporary characters and storylines, and yet that all happens earlier than I expected.
📚 bookblog: The Machinations of My Revenge Will Be Cold, Swift, and Utterly Ridiculous (❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️)
Still blurring together in my head, still enjoying the read.
📚 bookblog: Hey, Guess What, I'm a Lesbian! (❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️)
I wrote about this on my first read through (I think), but it’s very interesting to read this take on the college experience when mine was so very different. It’s interesting to see Joyce, for example, grow in ways I didn’t until a decade or so later in life.
📚 bookblog: Amazi-Girl is Always Prepared for Anything (❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️)
These are such fast reads (and I’m waiting so long to review them) that I can’t say I remember the specifics of this volume, but I’m continuing to enjoy this reread, and that’s what counts, I guess.
🎙️ radioblog: Expiry Dating (❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️)
My favorite thing in these audioplays is getting the tv actors to come back for their parts, and this is especially fun when it brings back Peter Davison and Colin Baker, too. It’s a good story that makes the most of these characters, and I enjoyed it.
📚 bookblog: Your Stupid Overconfidence is Nostalgic (❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️)
I’ve noticed this throughout the reread, but this collection really got me thinking about the connections between Willis’s previous work and this reboot/remix. It’s also amazing to me just how long this series has been going on! I’m reading material that came out when I was just starting grad school.
📚 bookblog: I Beg You, Don't Cast Your Body Into the Cragged Shame Pits of the Lustwolves (❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️)
Still enjoying this reread!
🎙️ radioblog: The Black Hole (❤️❤️❤️🖤🖤)
It wasn’t bad, but I wasn’t very engaged and kept waiting for it to be over.
📚 bookblog: This Campus is a Friggin' Escher Print (❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️)
I had been trying to read some of Willis’s other work, making it through the whole Shortpacked! archive and trying to go through Roomies!, etc., but ultimately I realized that what I really wanted was a Dumbing of Age reread, and so here I am. I enjoy this series much more in collected form than I do one strip at a time, and it was fun to start again at the beginning.
🍿 movieblog: Zootopia 2 (❤️❤️❤️🖤🖤)
I like what this movie is trying to be, but it’s so committed to gags, a breakneck pace, and a certain amount of self-defeating essentialism that I don’t think it ever gets there.
📚 bookblog: La boutique des émotions (❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤)
Ce n’est pas souvent qu’on tombe sur un livre en français en visitant la bibliothèque ici au Kentucky, et j’ai donc du emprunter celui-ci. On l’a lu ensemble en famille. C’est une jolie idée avec du joli art.
📺 tvblog: Un village français Saison 3 (❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤)
Cette série continue à m’engager—et à me faire réfléchir. Il faut quand-même que je me rappelle que c’est un drame et non un documentaire, car j’ai tendance à trouver les détails historiques plus intéressants que les conflits interpersonnels.
📚 bookblog: How to Fall Forever (❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤)
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.
📚 bookblog: More and More and More: An All-Consuming History of Energy (❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤)
Cory Doctorow’s end of year recap of books he reviewed always puts a few titles on my list, and this was one of them. The history of energy is not inherently the most interesting topic ever, but once I got past the fact that I was reading in translation (which only bugs me with French, since I can read that pretty well) and trying to figure out how the translation was done (worried about AI, to be honest), I really enjoyed this book.
🎙️ radioblog: False Coronets (❤️❤️🖤🖤🖤)
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.
📺 tvblog: The Muppet Show (2026 special) (❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤)
I didn’t grow up watching The Muppet Show, so I can’t say how it compares to the original, but it was a fun way to spend a “freak ice storm, school is cancelled” afternoon with kiddo. In fact, kiddo wants to start watching the original stuff, so maybe we’ll be comparing with the original after all!
🎙️ radioblog: The Light Keepers (❤️❤️❤️🖤🖤)
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.
🎙️ radioblog: The Top of the Tree (❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤)
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.
🎙️ radioblog: The Calendar Man (❤️❤️❤️🖤🖤)
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.
📚 bookblog: The Martian (❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤)
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.