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.

Cette dernière saison est un peu bizarre, car on voit bien qu’elle est divisée en deux parties, dont la deuxième n’est pas vraiment nécessaire pour conclure l’histoire de la série. Pourtant, j’aime bien ces personnages, et j’ai donc été content de leur dire au revoir comme ça.

C’est une jolie série à laquelle je m’intéressais depuis plusieurs années. Même si c’est bête de le dire, je suis fier de moi d’avoir enfin tout regardé !

I wasn’t expecting to count this as a “work read” when I decided to reread it a couple of months ago, but wow, did it ever help make sense of some ideas I’m kicking around for a potential book project.

Like my last read, I have to admit that I’m ill-suited to evaluate the historical or anthropological claims. I really appreciate the framework it brings to its inquiry, though, not least for the way it echoes similar ideas in Jacques Ellul’s work. This gets me thinking about anarchist commonalities between these authors, which is something I want to explore more.

Kiddo and I went to go see this at the library, and in the few minutes before they actually hit play, whoever was running the event played some of the Blu-ray special features to tide us over. One of them was about all of the “easter eggs” we were going to see in the movie. This annoyed me a bit, because if I’d heard one thing about the movie, it’s that it was stuffed full of (perhaps gratuitous) Nintendo references, and I don’t think it’s an “easter egg” if the movie is built around hitting you over the head with reference after reference after reference.

Would I read more of this? Absolutely. But I’m also glad to have exhausted the volumes available at my library, because as fun and cute as the premise is, there’s only so much I can read in a short time without getting tired of it.

Part of me feels like there’s only so long you can drag along the premise of “retired yakuza becomes stay-at-home spouse,” and a lot of the humor here builds on, rather than outright challenges, traditional gender roles. Yet, it remains a fun read!

This series is clearly formulaic and episodic, but it’s still fun (and since I struggled to follow the ongoing plot of My Hero Academia, maybe it’s an easier entry point for me).

“Cozy Yakuza comedy” was not a genre I was aware of, but it seems I like it!