I can't speak for Bates Motel, but I liked the final season of Hannibal. The over the top artiness if the first half was fun to roll with and the Red Dragon storyline was a nice return to the feeling of the first season.

There's Shadowrun Anarchy, which keeps the world but throws out most of the rules and replaces them with a sort of free-form story based system.

Explaining The Toast has always been interesting. "It's a feminist humor blog that leans heavily into the interests of librarians and the librarian adjacent. Some of the best articles are just making fun of western art history. The commenting community got so close that they once facilitated a kidney donation…

I'm there with you on the Temeraire series. Even after buying the first book it took me months to actually start reading it because I was still half convinced that it would be a slog. Instead it sucked me in almost immediately and it's taking all my willpower not to just plough through the rest of the series.

It doesn't help that it premiered in the same season as The Following and Bates Motel, which made it really easy to write it off as the latest in a trend of unpleasant serial killer shows. (I've heard that Bates Motel got better, but the point stands.)

Also, so much of adult television is just exhausting. There are exceptions, but so much of it is heavily serialized, full of unlikable characters, and focused on content that can be really difficult to watch. After watching all that for a while, the better examples of kids' programming, which manage to combine…

I'm gonna say that Harry Potter is probably a big part of that. Admittedly, I was a kid when the books came out, so I don't really know what the landscape looked like beforehand, but part of what made the Harry Potter series such a big deal was that everyone was reading it, regardless of their age. After such a…

What irritates me is that people think millennials are being sincere about the avocado being emblematic of our generation. It's a semi-ironic shorthand for all the times that people talk about how we're ruining everything, like the real estate developer who claimed that we spend all our money on avocado toast instead…

I apparently had a great-great-grandfather who was like that. When I was doing some research on my great-grandma I learned that he led the family in such endeavors as a cattle ranch that froze over, a government job on a reservation, and running a boarding house in Washington that eventually burned down. Through all…

Actually, what happened was that it was after an air show where they'd both been on the program, the Blue Angels doing their thing and Yeager breaking the sound barrier. After the show, Yeager's drinking at the bar and my mom's about two seats away from him. My dad's on the other end of the room using the pool table…

Whenever I hear Chuck Yeager mentioned I can't help but bring up one time in the early 90s when my mom got caught in the middle of an Officer's Club bar fight between Chuck Yeager and the pilots of the Blue Angels.

I could have sworn that I saw the French kid on the rescue boat, but the soldiers all got kind of hard to tell apart once they were covered in oil. I may just go with my original assumption because I'm having fun wondering what a French soldier in English uniform on English land would do next.

I haven't decided if I'm going to read the rest of the series yet. A couple of people in my book club are planning to read the other books and keep the others updated, so I may just go along with that and focus my energy on the two series that I'm already reading.

I just finished Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer for a feminist sci-fi book club that I recently joined. It was really enjoyable in a strange, nightmarish sort of way. Next assignment for the book club is Fledgling by Octavia Butler.

Also, calling ahead before bringing people over is more the sort of thing you do with your significant other than your employee.

I've read a fair bit of her work and I believe I vaguely remember reading Hexwood when I was about 12, but I don't remember the details so it may be time to revisit.

I started the month with Fire and Hemlock by Diana Wynn Jones. It was as lovely as the ending was baffling and I followed it with a couple of essays trying to explain the whole thing. I'm still not entirely sure that I get it, but the confusion itself is pretty enjoyable.

I thought of the music as being more about setting the tone of the town and Vulcan's whole setup. It had a sort of unhinged military march vibe that got a bit pared down in the more private scenes and would have been fitting for the character regardless of how things had turned out.

I just finished Whispers Underground, the third book in the Rivers of London series, which I'm really enjoying and trying to spread out a bit so I don't finish too soon. Just started XO Orpheus, an anthology of short stories based on folktales and legends. It's a follow up to a similar collection called My Mother She…

At this point I think I may have seen more penises than sets of breasts, which I don't think I can say for any other show.