Comme je suis en train de reregarder Au service de la France, l’idée m’est venue que je devrais aussi revisiter les films OSS 117.

Ce film est stupide mais assume sa stupidité en s’en moquant. Le héros est encore plus stupide mais ne le reconnaît pas du tout. Bref, c’est un film parfait pour mon sens d’humour. Le rire de Jean Dujardin me fait rire moi aussi, et il est tellement doué dans ce rôle.

I don’t remember liking the first Knives Out all that much, but the second and third felt like they were made just for me. It’s religious, it doesn’t pull any punches against toxic religion, it’s funny, and it has interesting characters. So glad I watched.

I felt the same way about this book that I often feel about Graeber’s work: I like where he’s going with things, but I’m not always convinced in the details.

So, the thesis of this book is great, and the last few chapters won me back when I was feeling a bit skeptical. Even with Graeber’s concessions about his data, though, his conclusions sometimes felt tenuous, and I’m not sure we needed the taxonomy of bullshit jobs to get to the conclusions he wanted to draw in the end.

After months of pestering her about it, kiddo relented and agreed to watch the original Star Wars with me (which I will always know as ANH even if I complain about special edition changes, so I guess that’s where I am on the Star Wars purity scale or whatever).

I haven’t watched this in maybe a decade? I noticed the seams and flaws in the movie more than I ever have before, but I can’t not give it full marks for the world that it created. It was interesting to think about all the different directions the not-yet-franchise could have taken after this movie and how many of them I might have liked to see, even if I am a Star Wars canon nerd even to this day.

Cory Doctorow has a bit he returns to in a lot of his writing about how tech billionaires aren’t geniuses, just power-hungry people who got lucky, and now I will always wonder if he got it from this movie. I’m a huge fan of Cory’s, but Rian Johnson’s having Daniel Craig rant about how dumb Edward Norton’s tech billionaire character is in this movie is perfection.

Also, super good cameo appearance by The Verge.

Happy to have wrapped up this series, though I’m sure I’ll be coming back to each of the titles. This last book has some good stuff in it (including a fascinating, existential discussion of the tension between grace and agency), but I found too much of it to be boring rather than captivating. I think that’s probably my fault in part—as I’ve previously noted, I’ve been powering through these books just to finish them—but it’s how things stand right now.

Sometimes, a comic book is dumb in all the right ways. This is one of them. It has an interesting premise (a wizard is sent from a magical realm to conquer Earth but ends uo setting up shop as its protector) that it doesn’t bother being pretentious about, instead leaning into fourth-wall breaking jokes about conventions in comics. It has a Ryan North feel to it, and I love that.

Just as good as the first volume, and it’s disappointing to know that there’s nothing more to read.

I want to describe this series as equally over-the-too and restrained, which feels contradictory, but I stand by it. It doesn’t take the time to overexplain the misogynistic dystopia of its world, it just lets it happen and gives space for the reader to react. And yet, it’s also intentionally campy, too! It’s interesting!

I enjoy a work of fiction that leans into its premise, especially if that premise is wild, with existential overtones. While it did feel slow at times, I appreciated how carefully and thoroughly Pluribus explored its central idea, and I’m looking forward to seeing where it goes from here.

Fun listen! It’s not any kind of deep book, but listening to how The Princess Bride was made is just about as much fun as watching the movie itself, and I enjoyed spening some time listening over the past week or so.

This was a delight, and I’m glad I read this series.

This series is getting even more interesting with time, which I honestly wasn’t expecting. I’m trying to remember if I’ve read the whole series before—I’d thought so, but I don’t remember these details. Looking forward to the conclusion!

Cory Doctorow has regularly referenced this book (most notably, the anecdote about people letting Mark Zuckerberg win at Catan) several times since reading it himself, so I decided it was time to take a look myself. It was an enjoyable (by which I mean horrifying) read, though I think I would have enjoyed it more if the same stories had been collected as part of a journalistic project rather than as a tell-all memoir.

I haven’t yet mentioned how good Chiang’s art is. It’s good! This series continues to be better than I remembered it being.

Vaughan seems to like to be edgy in ways that I don’t always appreciate, but this series has hooked me in the way that Saga eventually did, so kudos.

Starting to recognize the Vaughan stuff I like from Saga: Unapologetically weird but still holds together somehow. I’m enjoying rereading this series.

Funnily enough, there’s a paper TPB sitting on my bedside table from when I checked it out several months ago so that I could revisit this series.

That stalled out, but I am finding it easier to get through as a PDF on my phone. The series is better than I remember it being from whenever I reread it, but it’s still not so good that I feel like I get some of the hype.

I’ve been a Star Wars fan for long enough to recognize unnecessary expanded universe material when I hear it, but I’ve also been a Star Wars fan for long enough to know that some of it is actually pretty good.

I’ve known about this book for ages and always wanted to read it because the idea of the Kobayashi Maru is just fun. I was delighted to find an audiobook on the Internet Archive and enjoyed listening to it. James Doohan can only do so many voices (I had trouble telling his Chekov from his Scotty), but I appreciated what he brought to the role, the music and sound effects weren’t bad, and the premise paid off.

I don’t agree with everything in the book, but it’s full of great observations that I would gladly tweak to draw slightly different, really powerful conclusions. The author’s “reader-centered theology of scripture” is great, and its meditations on the weakness of God also really spoke to me. This made Ether more interesting than I remembered it being, and I’m grateful for that.

I’ve now read all the TPBs for this series that came in the Image Humble Bundle, and I can’t say I’m in any rush to learn what happens next. For such a wild start to a series, this got dull fast.

This series works best when it explores its basic premise, and for that premise to work, the characters have to kind of remain pastiches of better known Batman ones (though, to the author’s credit, they are much more interesting than superficial parodies). Yet, as the series goes on, Casey seems to want to explore worldbuilding rather than riff on the original premise of the book, and I just don’t find that interesting. Also don’t love AT ALL that he is riffing off of an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory for the name of his actual world-controlling conspiracy. Feels like a major faux pas.

I like weird fiction, and this anarchist occult book delivers. I like the mundanity of the occult stuff and the persistent but relatively subtle anarchist themes. It could be better, but the vibes alone are enough for a positive review. Looking forward to reading the next one in the series.

Fascinating read! I’m not as interested as the author in his largely geopolitical thesis, but the raw materials he uses to construct that thesis are depressingly fascinating. They could also make up the elements of an Ellulian thesis on the dangers of power, efficiency, and technical systems. It’s harder to use Apple products after reading the book—and it’s a stark reminder of how the world we live in is so different than the world I’d like us to.

I enjoyed watching some of my favorite characters in this series, but it does not have the coherence or cleverness of the first one.