Reads, Listens, Watches

Reading list of books, magazines, newspaper articles, other physical documents, or online posts
Playlist of posts listened to, or scrobbled
Playlist of watched movies, television shows, online videos, and other visual-based events
Watched "Ghosts" Who Do You Think You Are? from HBO Max
Who Do You Think You Are?: Directed by Tom Kingsley. With Lolly Adefope, Mathew Baynton, Simon Farnaby, Martha Howe-Douglas. Cash-strapped Alison and Mike think their dreams have come true when they inherit a grand country house, unaware that it's falling apart and teeming with the ghosts of former inhabitants.
Watching the credits of the American remake, I noticed the British roots and had to go back to see the source material. Perhaps not too shockingly, it’s an almost exact remake. The chamber maid has turned into a flower child and the caveman(?) has turned into a Viking, but almost everything in the original has been moved directly into the remake. 

Poorly reflecting on the remake, I think the original is actually funnier, though I do like the Viking character in the remake more.

I was a bit surprised to find the original airing on HBO Max instead of BritBox.

Watched "Ghosts" Alberta's Fan from Paramount+
Alberta's Fan: Directed by Nick Wong. With Rose McIver, Utkarsh Ambudkar, Brandon Scott Jones, Danielle Pinnock. Alberta is thrilled when a super-fan visits the mansion; Thorfinn convinces Hetty to go on a walk that would hopefully spark a special memory.
I was waiting for the hammer to fall on this one and it went the other direction. 
Watched "Ghosts" D&D from Paramount+
D&D: Directed by Nick Wong. With Rose McIver, Utkarsh Ambudkar, Brandon Scott Jones, Danielle Pinnock. After Jay is kicked out of a Dungeons and Dragons game with his city friends, Sam agrees to facilitate a new one between him and the ghosts; Isaac confronts his feelings for Nigel, a ghost from whom he's been keeping a gigantic secret.
This show isn’t good at handling the vast amounts of context that Jay is missing in the conversations with the ghosts. He just sits there not showing how uncomfortable things really must be for himself and it makes him seem so much less human.
Read The Other Invisible Hand (NOEMA)
Economics and evolution are basically in the same business: Both are all about productivity selection, though one has been at it for billions of years longer than the other. Both involve “invisible hand” magic — intricate, unplanned, “self-or...
Folks who have been reading David Wengrow and David Graeber’s The Dawn of Everything are sure to appreciate the sentiment here which pulls in the ideas of biology and evolution to expand on their account and makes it a much more big history sort of thesis.
 
I’m reminded of Kate Raworth’s excellent Donut Economics as a potential remedy.
 

Raw capitalism mimics the logic of cancer within our body politic.

Read Digg users are dumber than goldfish by markpilgrimmarkpilgrim (Dive Into Mark)
So what happened was, I was talking with Joe about the fact that Dive Into Python appeared on the
Users of some aggregation sites collectively forget prior articles and news and resubmit them at intervals. This may give rise to the colloquialism “goldfish effect”.
Read - Want to Read: Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States by James C. Scott (Yale University Press)
Why did humans abandon hunting and gathering for sedentary communities dependent on livestock and cereal grains, and governed by precursors of today’s states? Most people believe that plant and animal domestication allowed humans, finally, to settle down and form agricultural villages, towns, and states, which made possible civilization, law, public order, and a presumably secure way of living. But archaeological and historical evidence challenges this narrative. The first agrarian states, says James C. Scott, were born of accumulations of domestications: first fire, then plants, livestock, subjects of the state, captives, and finally women in the patriarchal family—all of which can be viewed as a way of gaining control over reproduction. Scott explores why we avoided sedentism and plow agriculture, the advantages of mobile subsistence, the unforeseeable disease epidemics arising from crowding plants, animals, and grain, and why all early states are based on millets and cereal grains and unfree labor. He also discusses the “barbarians” who long evaded state control, as a way of understanding continuing tension between states and nonsubject peoples.
Recommended by Dan Allosso while we were reading The Dawn of Everything.
Watched "Tattoo Redo" Hot Mess, Spicy Bets from Netflix
Hot Mess, Spicy Bets: With Matt Beckerich, Rose Hardy, Miryam Lumpini, Tommy Montoya. Twig gives a silly chile a spicy makeover, Matt replaces Michael Jackson's glove with a rose, and Tommy vanquishes a quote from "Gladiator."
The second episode isn’t any better. The artists’ work is great, but there’s not any real drama or surprise here.
Watched "Tattoo Redo" Who's Ready to See Some Bad Tattoos? from Netflix
Who's Ready to See Some Bad Tattoos?: With Matt Beckerich, Rose Hardy, Miryam Lumpini, Tommy Montoya. Matt transforms a black blob into a bouquet, Tommy Montoya gives a raunchy quote a skull and 'shrooms redo, while Rose tackles a tribute to an ex.
Lowest common denominator television. Watching out of morbid curiosity.
Read - Want to Read: Wild Songs, Sweet Songs: The Albanian Epic in the Collections of Milman Parry and Albert B. Lord by Nicola Scaldaferri (ed.) (Harvard University Press)
In the 1930s, Milman Parry and Albert B. Lord, two pioneering scholars of oral poetry, conducted adventurous fieldwork in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and northern Albania, collecting singularly important examples of Albanian epic song. Wild Songs, Sweet Songs presents these materials, which have not previously been published, for the first time.
Watched “Shetland” Red Bones: Part 2 from BritBox
Directed by Peter Hoar. With Gemma Chan, Steven Robertson, Douglas Henshall, Alison O'Donnell. With two murders and no strong leads, can Perez apprehend the suspect before crowds descend on the Shetland Islands for Up Helly Aa, the biggest fire festival in Europe?
The Up Helly Aa could have been used to up the stress and tension even more than it did here.

While a good pair of episodes, I think I definitely liked the book better , especially for building character.

Watched “Shetland” Red Bones: Part 1 from BritBox
"Shetland" Red Bones: Part 1 Directed by Peter Hoar. With Sandra Voe, Douglas Henshall, Erin Armstrong, Steven Robertson. As DI Jimmy Perez investigates the murder of an elderly lady who is shot dead outside her croft, he finds evidence of a massive, bitter dispute between two families.
Finally circling back to watch some of the earlier episodes that I either missed or only caught portions of on PBS airings.

Subscribed to BritBox just for this (and its new season) and a few other things in the coming weeks.

Read Advent of Bloggers 2021 by James (James' Coffee Blog)
For the last week or two, I have been thinking whether there is a December blogging series I could take on, similar to how Advent of Code publishes a new coding challenge every day throughout Advent. I thought that I would just continue with my regular blogging until yesterday when I came up with an...
The idea of an Advent of Bloggers is a heartwarming one.

Reminiscent of N-day challenges: https://indieweb.org/100_days#December_and_or_24_Days

Read - Reading: Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer (Milkweed Editions )
As a botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer as been trained to ask questions of nature with the tools of science. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she embraces the notion that plants and animals are our oldest teachers. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer brings these lenses of knowledge together to show that the awakening of a wider ecological consciousness requires the acknowledgment and celebration of our reciprocal relationship with the rest of the living world. For only when we can hear the languages of other beings are we capable of understanding the generosity of the earth, and learning to give our own gifts in return.
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Learning the grammar of animacy.
What a sea change of perspective!! English speakers have trouble with other humans’ pronouns, wait until they need to pronoun animals and bodies of water.

Read a thread by @Klonick (Twitter)
I keep hearing more horror stories like this about Hertz. Where is the actual government regulation to protect consumers en masse? Without protections against corporations like this, their service just becomes a tax on society which only benefits the corporation.