TV #24 of 2024: Abbott Elementary, season 3 Every serialized TV show — which in today’s landscape includes most sitcoms — has to branch out and try new things as it goes along, lest the initially-entertaining formulas for its episodes grow stale through over-repetition. Sometimes that change in direction can feel like an organic extension …
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TV Review: Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, season 2
TV #23 of 2024: Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, season 2 The second year of this TOS prequel and technical Discovery spinoff isn’t flawless, but I’m comfortable saying it’s the single best season of Star Trek we’ve gotten since Deep Space Nine went off the air a quarter-century ago. The first run of Strange New …
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Book Review: The Other Valley by Scott Alexander Howard
Book #78 of 2024: The Other Valley by Scott Alexander Howard An astonishing debut novel that introduces one of the most original conceptions of time travel that I’ve ever encountered, yet then wisely waits to fully deploy it until the very end. For the majority of the plot, we are instead lingering in the present …
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Book Review: Dragonsteel Prime: A Sanderson Curiosity by Brandon Sanderson
Book #77 of 2024: Dragonsteel Prime: A Sanderson Curiosity by Brandon Sanderson [Disclaimer: I am Facebook friends with this author.] A fresh release of an old unpublished novel — one that began all the way back as author Brandon Sanderson’s undergraduate honors thesis, and long existed as only a single physical manuscript that could be …
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TV Review: Bob’s Burgers, season 14
TV #22 of 2024: Bob’s Burgers, season 14 This is a weird season to review, because I actually don’t remember most of it particularly clearly! The writers and actors strike resulted in the episode order getting slashed from 22 to 13 installments, eleven of which aired from October 2023 to January 2024. Then one more …
TV Review: Saturday Night Live, season 49
TV #21 of 2024: Saturday Night Live, season 49 The last season of SNL was cut short by the onset of the recent writers strike, and the premiere of this next one was delayed while negotiations were ongoing. Whether due to those factors or not, there wasn’t any significant cast turnover in-between, with no one …
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Movie Review: Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes (2024)
Movie #12 of 2024: Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes (2024) Another thrilling post-apocalyptic adventure, with some excellent worldbuilding for this new era of the setting: “many generations” beyond the lifetime of Caesar, the chimpanzee protagonist of the 2011-2017 trilogy who experienced the collapse of human civilization and the rise of his own people …
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Book Review: Book of Games by John Peel
Book #76 of 2024: Book of Games by John Peel (Diadem #12) This novel is one of two that author John Peel self-published (in a single bound volume) to close out his long-running Diadem fantasy saga, but I really wish he hadn’t bothered. It’s an embarrassingly poor effort, riddled with typos, repetitive wording, and rather …
Movie Review: War for the Planet of the Apes (2017)
Movie #11 of 2024: War for the Planet of the Apes (2017) [Edited version of my original review from 2017.] When I first came home from seeing this in theaters, I noted that it was “probably the best Planet of the Apes movie ever made.” Having had seven years to sit with that assessment, and …
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Movie Review: Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014)
Movie #10 of 2024: Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014) [Edited version of my original review from 2017.] Still a very strong picture, but not quite as good as Rise in my personal opinion. This sequel is the first time that the modern Apes series goes fully post-apocalyptic, but we’ve jumped forwards ten …
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The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more 