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1. Friday, September 27, 2024:
   Review Day: Salute the Dark by Adrian Tchaikovsky    Salute the Dark  is the fourth book in Adrian Tchaikovsky's Shadows of the Apt series, It is a definite high point, offering a strong, exciting convergence of all of the threads introduced so far.   Although Uctebri the Mosquito-Kinden has finally claimed the feared Shadow Box, it comes at a time when the Wasp campaign may have stretched itself too thin, undermined by personal machinations of its Generals, growing alliances in the Lowlands, and unrest in several key border cities. Stenwold Maker and his allies scatter across the world to put their fingers in different parts of the proverbial dike, hoping that the combination of all their efforts will be enough to turn the tide. Meanwhile, the tortured Tis...
2. Friday, September 20, 2024:
   Review Day   There are no major spoilers in these reviews.       Yellowjackets, Season One : We watched this in the spring but it must have slipped out of my review queue. This is a tense, unsettling thriller about a high school soccer team that crashes in the Canadian wilderness, intercut with flash-forwards to the only survivors in the future hanging onto a collective secret. Great performances (especially by Juliette Lewis and Christina Ricci), although be warned that the show starts leaning more heavily into horror elements as it goes on.   Final Grade :  B+     That 90s Show, Season Two : The first season of this sequel show had a campy ch...
3. Friday, September 06, 2024:
   Review Day: Blood of the Mantis by Adrian Tchaikovsky    Blood of the Mantis  is the third book in Adrian Tchaikovsky's Shadows of the Apt series. The book offers a brisk, tightly-focused cloak-and-dagger story and avoids the excessive sprawl which colored my enjoyment of the previous book.   The story begins after the siege of Collegium. Stenwold Maker must keep his military alliances intact in the face of differing opinions about who should benefit from the schematics for the Wasp-Kinden's deadly snapbow. Che travels to a Spider-ruled border town at risk of falling to the Wasps in hopes of warning the populace and gaining new allies. Acheos, Tynisa, and Tisamon hunt for the mysterious box stolen from Collegium, fervently desired by the Wasp emperor for some s...
4. Friday, August 23, 2024:
   Review Day   There are no major spoilers in these reviews.       Supacell, Season One : This superhero show feels like a British version of  Heroes  before it went off the rails. It isn't very different from what has come before it, but offers a fresh setting and a lot of hip-hop music. There's one frustrating episode where delaying the plot hinges on a contrived unwillingness to communicate by the lead character, but it wraps up in an excellent season finale with twist after twist. On Netflix.   Final Grade :  B     Warcraft  (PG-13): This movie flopped enough when it came out that there probably won't be a sequel -- it's not as bad as...
5. Friday, August 16, 2024:
   Review Day: Deep Black by Miles Cameron     Deep Black  is the conclusion of the Arcana Imperii duology by Miles Cameron. The book finds a perfect endpoint for the story of Marca Nbaro with a good balance of resolved threads and open-ended future scenarios that are fun to fill in with your own imagination.   The book's identity is very much the second half of a continuing story rather than an independent sequel with its own dramatic arc -- like  A Drowned Kingdom  and  Last of the Atalanteans  in P.L. Stuart's excellent Drowned Kingdom series, or  Ships of Merior  and  Warhost of Vastmark  in Janny Wurts' finally completed 11-book Wars of Light and Shadow series, this duology should be treated as a single, ...
6. Friday, August 09, 2024:
   Review Day   There are no major spoilers in these reviews.       Death of Slim Shady  by Eminem: I haven't seriously listened to any Eminem albums since the early 2000s. His newest album takes me back to that era with the expected amount of clever lines and decent beats. However, it doesn't really bring anything  new  to the table and the album's theme of cancel culture didn't really grab my attention. After three or four repetitions of jokes about Caitlyn Jenner, the album feels like it's overstaying its welcome.   Final Grade :  C+     Key and Peele, Season Three : A fun, final season that finds the right balance between funny and w...
7. Friday, July 26, 2024:
   Review Day: Dragonfly Falling by Adrian Tchaikovsky    Dragonfly Falling  is the second book in Adrian Tchaikovsky's Shadows of the Apt series. I loved where this chunk of the story ended up, but had trouble staying invested in the growing sprawl of the storyline across characters and Kinden.   War has come to the doorstep of the Lowlands, forcing the people of neighboring provinces to put aside their traditional enmity and fight back against the Wasp-Kinden. A multi-pronged assault begins with frontal assaults, sneaky alliances, or even just simple words of threatening diplomacy. The protagonists of Book 1 spread out across the Lowlands to sound the alarm and muster defenses. New locales and new types of people with different arthropod traits (the Kinden) ar...
8. Friday, July 19, 2024:
   Review Day   There are no major spoilers in these reviews.       In the Heights : The movie adaptation of this musical is pleasant, harmless fun. The music is Lin-Manuel Miranda's signature style of "safe" hip-hop that sounds a little too similar to what he's written elsewhere. The inclusion of a main character, Benny, who seems identical to the Benny in RENT seems like an odd creative choice.   Final Grade :  B-     Death to 2021 : The sequel to  Death to 2020  is just as enjoyable as the first, and is a great way to reminisce about this crazy year now that we aren't living it anymore. On Netflix.   Final Grade : ...
9. Friday, June 14, 2024:
   Review Day   There are no major spoilers in these reviews.       Jumanji: The Next Level  (PG-13): This unnecessary sequel lacks all of the charm of  Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle  and the plot is paper-thin once you strip out the endless CGI sequences of monkeys and ostriches. Jokes about being old are used and reused to oblivion. Even Danny DeVito and Jack Black can't save it. On Hulu.   Final Grade :  D     Death to 2020 : This mockumentary about 2020 (from the creators of Black Mirror) is a lot of fun, especially in hindsight. It mixes real footage with famous actors pretending to be normal people. Diane Morgan (of Cunk on Earth)...
10. Friday, June 07, 2024:
    Review Day   There are no major spoilers in these reviews.       Righteous Gemstones, Season Two : This season takes a few episodes to find itself -- held back by too much focus on the original three main characters when the origin story of John Goodman's character is far more intriguing. The overall shtick is getting a little old, but there's a few great laughs along the way and satisfying conclusion.   Final Grade :  B     Ripley : This limited series is beautifully shot and perfectly acted, but so so glacial in pace. It's clearly going for a vibe rather than a plot and sometimes gets self-indulgent in how many extended scenes of near-nothing...
11. Friday, May 24, 2024:
    Review Day: Song of the Mysteries by Janny Wurts   There are no explicit plot spoilers, although I describe aspects of character development and the flow of the book in broad generalities.      The Wars of Light and Shadow series is a massive geoglyph, painstakingly shaped by hand across miles and years. We may not have had the authorial bird's-eye view to see what it would become, but this final volume perfectly completes the image and vindicates the author's efforts.  Song of the Mysteries  works as a culmination and callback to the entire 11-book series, resolving and reshaping everything that I've fervently read and reread over the past 30 years. It weaves the vast, abstract planetary perspective back together with the intimate, introspectiv...
12. Friday, May 17, 2024:
    Review Day: Empire in Black and Gold by Adrian Tchaikovsky    Empire in Black and Gold  is Adrian Tchaikovsky's very first published book and kicks off the ambitious, ten-volume Shadows of the Apt series in high form. It took me a while to begin, as I'd heard it blandly described as "insect people fighting each other", but the book is so much deeper and more imaginative than that false encapsulation.   In a world of industrial city-states and provincial rivalries, mankind has taken on traits of different arthropods, like the Ant-kinden who can communicate telepathically with each other or the Spider-kinden who can charm or manipulate and are masters of political intrigue. Stenwold Maker returns from a distant land to warn his people that the Wasp Empire is expanding...
13. Friday, May 10, 2024:
    Review Day   There are no major spoilers in these reviews.       Key & Peele, Season Two : The second season of this show feels a little more experimental so more of the skits fell flat for me. Good for a few laughs at the end of the evening, but not as great as the first season. On Netflix.   Final Grade :  B-     Shogun : This limited series started strong and remained strong, but I personally lost interest towards the last few episodes. The acting and set design were all great, but I no longer felt invested in where the story was going and I can't really explain why. Perhaps it was one of the later episodes that fixated too heavily on a "wil...
14. Friday, May 03, 2024:
    Review Day: Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom (Switch)   There are no major spoilers in this review.     We purchased this game almost a year ago, and haven't played it in at least 4 months, so I think it's safe to say that we'll never finish it.    Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom  is the sequel to  Breath of the Wild  which I gave a  solid C-  to. Looking past the hype, the first game was a tedious grind only made bearable by the fact that Maia loved watching me play it and there was nothing else to do during the pandemic.   This game reuses the same engine and takes place in the same world (although the world is so altered that it felt very different right off the bat). Though it has some newness ...
15. Friday, April 19, 2024:
    Review Day   There are no major spoilers in these reviews.       Mr. and Mrs. Smith : This limited series remake is a misfire that's barely worth watching. The spy aspects of the show are just a throwaway canvas for the lead actors to argue and be miserable in their marriage (it sometimes reminded me of  Fleishman is in Trouble  in that regard). There are some sparks of creativity in the last few episodes, but it takes way too long to get there. This might have been better with a different title -- the one selected misleads you into thinking you'll be getting something completely different. On Amazon Video.   Final Grade :  C     Untitled Goose...
16. Friday, April 05, 2024:
    Review Day   There are no major spoilers in these reviews.       Key & Peele, Season One : We gave this ancient sketch comedy show a try after rewatching the first season of Fargo that included Key and Peele as bumbling FBI agents. It's aged surprisingly well and has a few great laughs. It felt more experimental than SNL and less so than Tim Robinson.   Final Grade :  B     Maybe Man  by AJR: While I like the songs on this album, there are too many songs with obvious swearing that prevent me from playing the album with the kids around. I have no problem with swearing on tracks (as evinced by the fact that I play Australian hip-hop music on car ri...
17. Friday, March 22, 2024:
    Review Day: FreeTaxUSA   After too many years of piggybacking off of the family TurboTax purchase, we finally took the plunge and used FreeTaxUSA.com this year. It took the same amount of time as TurboTax and was a pleasant experience.   The base product is free (you just need an email to make an account). You can e-file Federal for free and pay $14.99 for state e-files. It handled our investments just fine. We did W-2s, 1098, 1099-INT, 1099-DIV, 1099-B with the base product.   It can import a PDF of last year's taxes to use as a roadmap. We found that it imported the official Returns just fine but overlooked a few details from Worksheets. However, it didn't cause any errors of omission as a result, it just said "We don't have ...
18. Friday, March 15, 2024:
    Review Day: Children of Memory by Adrian Tchaikovsky   There are no major spoilers in this review.      Children of Memory  is the final book in the Children of Time series by Adrian Tchaikovsky (although the author might revisit this world if ideas lead him there in the future). The book works very well as a capstone on the series, taking the ideas from the earlier books and then stretching, weaving, and elevating them to logical conclusions.   The story begins in a familiar way, with the convergence across time and space of ancient human terraformers seeking to build a new Earth and the modern, uplifted species traveling across the galaxy in search of life. This recognizable setting effectively toys with your expectations while the aut...
19. Friday, March 08, 2024:
    Review Day: A Lion's Pride by P.L. Stuart   There are no major spoilers in this review.      A Lion's Pride  is the fourth book in The Drowned Kingdom saga by P.L. Stuart. I absolutely love where the story takes us in this book, the midpoint of the series. However, I found myself frustrated by aspects of the writing that stalled the momentum.   King Othrun of Eastrealm seems to have attained a period of stability for his fledgling kingdom. He has acquired considerable political capital from his past strategies and hard-earned reputation as a warlord, but still can't always resist the urge to step straight into trouble (especially when it involves a pretty face). Othrun's growth as a character continues to be a compelling threa...
20. Friday, March 01, 2024:
    Review Day   There are no major spoilers in these reviews.       Kindle Oasis : I was perfectly happy with my 9-year-old  Kindle Paperwhite , but the Oasis was my prize for coming in 2nd place in our company's Advent of Code competition (The Meta Quest 3 was already claimed and I didn't really want a Playstation 5). In terms of features, Oasis has two dedicated forward / back buttons (in addition to its touch screen) which I end up using maybe half the time. It also flips from left-to-right-handedness by turning it upside which I really like. The last new feature is that it's supposed to be submersible in the bathtub which I obviously don't plan on testing. The reading experience is as good as...

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