Media diet this week. I’ve been reading:

• I finished The Tainted Cup, and thought it was fun and interesting. I’ll definitely read more in the series.
• Listening to Circe. It’s excellent and the audiobook reading is perfect.
• Started reading Metal from Heaven

And some TV:

• Season 2 of Severance is here. I re-watched Season 1 a couple of weeks ago and was struck by how tight it was, how specific and articulated its vision and its characters are. The first episode of Season 2 hit all the notes I would have wanted: It surprised me and promises so much.
• We finished the final season of Loudermilk. It walks a fine line between jokey and sincere, and I think ends as a really moving story about found family and addiction, while managing to frequently be really, really funny.
• American Primeval is very violent depiction of a violent era in the American West, and centers on the Mountain Meadows Massacre. It’s well done; I don’t know if I’d recommend it.

And some music I’ve liked:

• The Weather Station, Humanhood
• Rosali, Bite Down: I really like this album
• MJ Lenderman, Manning Fireworks

We rewatched Severance s1 this week, ahead of the second season finally dropping next month. Remembering most of the twists let me watch the performances and art direction even more closely. What a banger show.

🍁 I expect I’ll keep mentioning autumn in these roundups for the foreseeable future. Today being the autumn equinox? One hundred percent, talking about fall. We haven’t dipped below about 50º F yet, but it’s consistently cool enough that some of the neighborhood trees are already showing quite a bit of red or orange. I’m excited to see what our own trees do; they’re all still quite green.

📺 We’ve been watching Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End, at suggestion of kiddo. It has some monster fights, but it’s mostly a really gentle, thoughtful story about an ageless mage re-tracing the steps she took on a ten-year journey with her adventuring companions who are now aged or passed.

🦵🏻 I had a pretty good spike of ankle pain this week from an injury a couple of years ago. Having old joints sucks, sometimes. It’s improved after a day, but persistently wondering how it’s going to feel day to day is pretty fatiguing.

I got a pretty good chicken sandwich this weekend!

☕️ I’ve become incrementally more insufferable about my espresso preparation, having adopted the Weiss Distribution Technique using this little wire tool. Verdict? I think it’s improving my coffee! More sip research sip is needed.

📚 I’m reading and really enjoying The Adventures of Amina Al-Sirafi by Shannon Chakraborty. So far it’s fun, interesting, and really engaging.

🎧 Don’t do the math, but Blues Traveler’s Four was released in September, 1994. It’s been reissued on vinyl for the first time in many years, and it’s a treat. (I bought this album originally on CD, from Hot Poop on Walla Walla’s main street.)

A couple more good things to read this week:

• I like this work in process from Hadley Wickham about R in Prod. The chapter outline suggests a lot of really good content to come.
• Dead Internet Souls by Vicki Boykis. Generative LLMs are filling the internet with garbage, resulting in the poignant shutdown of wordfreq. Vicki encourages us to continue to be live people on the world wide web, and I appreciate that. (Vicki is a brilliant machine learning and data engineer and you should be reading her!)

Happy week, gang.

I mentioned The Big Door Prize in my weeks’ notes. We finished the season last night, and I would like many more people to watch this show, for all the reasons I previously mentioned and because it has a delightful set of John Prine Easter eggs that I want to appreciate together.

I thought the first couple of episodes of Andor did a little too much table-setting at not quite enough speed. But episode three was sharp and exciting, and brought together a more complex story about occupation and resistance than any of the Star Wars films have really done before. I hope they keep it up.

Severance has some amazing Oldest House vibes going on. I’m eagerly awaiting the appearance of Hiss.

Two episodes in, I’ve decided to be Ted Lasso when I grow up.

Watching TV 📺! I have mixed-at-best feelings about Dan Simmons’ novel The Terror, but I’m mostly impressed with the TV adaptation. It’s utterly suffused with dread and has some striking visuals and strong performances, so far. Anybody else checking it out?