Week 04

January 27, 2020

January has been 2 months long.

Catlina

Upgraded some of the boxen I own to Catalina, now I get a passive agressive message in my terminal saying I should use zsh. Don't tell me what to do Apple, if Bash was good enough for the Victorians it's good enough for me. Everything else was fine, even Logic and the many music plugins I own are working.

Agency

New William Gibson alert! It's a direct sequel to The Peripheral so lots more stubs and post-Jackpot London. I'm rapidly devouring it (Kindle says 70% currently) and had a total nerd moment when some of it was set in the The Clift in San Francisco. I've stayed there! The stub this time is one where Brexit and Trump didn't happen, but it hasn't made things much better:

“How is it there, given that?”

“Grim,” she said, “what with every other ordering principle and incentive still in place. And they’ve a Mideast crisis now, as well, with drastic and immediate global implications. That aside, though, they’re being driven into the same blades we were, but at a less acute angle.”

Pretty accurate I think. Also contains some major London borough shade:

Hackney, he thought irritably, glaring at it. Always gotten up as something it wasn’t.

Good Things (plus some OK things)

Star Trek: Picard was everything I expected. It's very obviously a kind of ST:TNG greatest hits and aimed squarely at those of us that grew up watching Picard & crew, but I don't care. The only downside is that it makes Discovery look even more all over the place than it already did, maybe they'll sort it out next series *sigh*

Finished The Witcher and The Expanse Season 4. They were both...good?

With The Witcher, I'm not entirely sure what’s going on but at least it’s enjoyable, mainly due to the actors. Seemed very much like what it is, the first book in a N part fantasy saga.

The Expanse S04 was fine. It's based on (imo) the worst book of the series so I was never holding out that much hope. They start getting really good after Cibola Burn, in fact each one from here is probably better than the last so there's that. Sometimes I get the feeling people are giving it more credit than it deserves because it's SciFi, lets hope it'll delivers on the promise at some point.

I also started watching another fantasy series, The Newsroom. It's basically Aaron Sorkin doing to news what he did to politics with The West Wing. Watching it 8 years after it was broadcast really amps up the foreshadowing for this weaponised media hellscape we've found ourselves in. I always love a bit of Sorkin though so I'm enjoying it a lot, only Amy Sherman-Palladino (Gilmore Girls, Marvelous Mrs. Maisel) matches him for quick fire dialogue.

Hot Tip: If you haven't watched The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel you really should, it's probably the best TV program around at the minute.

Remember

The first month of the year doesn't really count, it's just recovering from Christmas so don't worry, we're all going to sMaSh iT! in February, no problem.