Earlier today, I wrote a review of the second season of Severance where I mentioned how hard it is to follow up on a stellar first take on an idea. I was really nervous about this sequel in the same way, but it really works!

Kiddo somewhat begrudgingly admitted she liked the first movie enough for us to watch this one over the long weekend. It was great! I have been giggling about Ben Reilly jokes for the past 24 hours. I also love how Reilly looks like he’s from a 90s comic book, and the whole movie does a good job of following up with the creative blend of animation styles (the LEGO joke was fine, but the Da Vinci Vulture was fun, as was the “-Ed.” joke, which I’m surprised they didn’t use in the first one.

It’s hard for a tv show to follow up on an amazing season 1 premise with a solid season 2. This definitely has some creaky spots in it at the beginning, but it works up to something that won my trust back. What a deliberately, excellently weird show this is.

I understand why this movie is well-regarded, and if I were watching it from the perspective of someone seeing it for the first time in 1991 (which I couldn’t have, because I was 3 and from a no-R-rated-movies Mormon family), I might have different thoughts.

Instead, though, I noticed all the obvious ADR, I learned the context for all the lines I already know from playground conversations and pop culture osmosis, I shrugged at the over-the-top action, and I thought about how much more banal the threats of AI are these days than Skynet and a T-1000. It was a real meh for me.

Look, to enjoy this film, I had to set aside a lot of concerns about the glorification of war and violence, uncritical U.S. patriotism, and more besides. I did set those (mostly) aside, though, and it’s a fun, well-done movie. I wish there were more Stellan Skarsgård (the actor) in it, but I really enjoyed Jerry Westerby (the character from another franchise) popping up as the Soviet ambassador.

I own a physical copy of this book but sold out to hoopla to listen to it over the weekend so I could say I’d finally read it. I appreciate just how practical this book is: outlining steps one can take rather than simply appealing to an abstract anarchist ideal.

I also felt a real tension while reading this. The ideals it sets out really speak to me, but the amount of work and commitment that it would take to actually follow these principles feels intimidating to me.

On one hand, this is the first manga I’ve read where I saw why the art form is as revered as it is. Good art, interesting premise (somewhat silly, but no more than XIII, which I love more than I should), and not too gratuitous (but still some).

On the other, I felt that it didn’t catch my attention for the whole volume, and I’m torn on whether I’d enjoy reading the next four.

Top Gun is probably the better movie, but if I had to watch one US Navy aviation recruitment video dressed up as a blockbuster film, I think I’d pick this one. It wrestles with more interesting ideas, and more of it happens on a carrier, which is fun.

And yet, I am annoyed by two things that I recognize stand in tension with each other: 1) the jingoistic “look how cool our war toys are” vibes and 2) the shaggy dog nature of the story that ultimately rules out showing off those war toys and doesn’t do anything with the time travel premise that a short story couldn’t do better.

A lot of what I was looking for in this book is already available in other sources, and while I appreciated the normalizing of Latter-day Saint temples for a lay audience, it would also smack of apologetics if Stapley weren’t also so unflinching in addressing controversy and taboo. It’s a wonderful resource, and it’s accounting for important events of the last decade made it an invaluable read.

This movie is a pure delight, and I’m glad I talked kiddo into watching it with me. Maybe it’s time to finally watch the sequel after three years of meaning to but never getting around to it.

I struggled with how to rate this one. I’m going to settle for this: Just because a series that knows it’s being dumb and fanservicey does not automatically elevate it above being dumb and fanservicey.

I have been meaning to read this book for years and finally got to it. On one hand, it’s excellent, and I’m kicking myself for not having read it before. On the other, it’s so well-suited to a current project that I’m not sure I would have appreciated it earlier.

Not life-changing, but a pretty good comic. I didn’t know about this apparently legendary story, but it was fun to learn about.

Like the last volume, I’m less convinced by the plot as it continues, but there’s still so much about this that’s good. I appreciate the portrayal of faith without being preachy, I like the art, and there is still plenty of humor.

This is the last PDF I own, and I didn’t realize there was a fifth TPB that rounds out the story. I’ll have to track it down somehow…

Horror is not my genre, but this was funny and interesting enough in other ways that I (mostly) enjoyed the series anyway.

J’aime bien un petit drame politique, et voici la première fois que j’ai eue la chance de rencontrer un tel drame à la française. J’avoue que je ne suis pas arrivé à tout suivre, mais j’ai été content d’avoir reconnu plusieurs détails qui auraient échapper à la plupart des Américains. J’aime le cynicisme des personnages, même si certaines parties de la série deviennent fantabuleuses.

I’n pickier about this volume because it’s harder to follow up on a good premise than to set it up, but it hasn’t entirely jumped the shark, and I’m still enjoying it.

This volume has some more obvious furniture moving so that important things can happen later, but it’s still great so far.

Uh, this is amazing—and in a way I never would have expected. I don’t usually do body horror, but it’s just restrained enough for me to work with. The concept is fascinating, the art is good, and there’s a sense of humor that has me checking every detail in every panel for a chuckle. Glad to be getting back into this huge bundle of comics (but also, I just bought a bunch of Dark Horse titles, sooooo).

I hate a dumb movie, but I love a movie that is so intentionally dumb that it loops right around to genius. There are excellent jokes of all kinds in here—from riffs on video games to subtle musical jokes—and even if I could have done without an “Indian fur trader” character, I’m hard pressed to find anything (else) that gave me pause in this movie. I wish I hadn’t watched it on my phone while doing chores, because I’m sure I would have gotten even more out of it on a full screen.

Such a helpful collection of data, and I’m pleased by how many echoes of Ellul are in there, as I move forward with trying to apply his thought to Mormonism.

This movie is well done, and Turing is a figure I’d love to learn more about, but I got the sense that these two observations were in tension with each other. In short, I’m so annoyed at how obviously the history has been made (and changed) to conveniently fit a movie that I can’t enjoy what is not a bad film otherwise.

A deserved masterpiece that I enjoyed watching despite much that’s aged—some things were just out of date while others were more problematic.

I thought for sure that I would be more critical of this the second time through, but I found (again?) that the last third of this is the interesting part, even if the leading up to it feels confusing.

It’s very interesting to read this after having reread Dawn of Everything and after reading There Never Was a West for the first time. I can better see the connections between those three pieces—and how they might inform my future writing.

Rereading The Dawn of Everything finally pushed me to use an on-hand Libro.fm credit to get this in audiobook so I could give it a try. I find Graeber to be a bit uneven (I appreciate most of what he writes, but I don’t find all of his arguments totally convincing), and so I waffled on whether to give this full marks.

Ultimately, I went with the more generous rating, because even if some of his ideas didn’t land with me, it’s useful to have so much of his thinking captured in one place. In fact, I’m pretty sure I’ll need to get a print copy of this for the same research project that Dawn of Everything had me thinking about.

I avoided this series for a while because I was afraid that it would provoke some existential angst, but wow is it ever good. Despite what I just said, existential horror is my favorite horror, and this series delivers; it also has analog horror vibes that I find delightful.

I would say that I regret not having watched this earlier except it’s nice not having to wait for the second season in real time.