{"id":2636,"date":"2014-07-16T17:26:06","date_gmt":"2014-07-16T15:26:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sunpig.com\/martin\/?p=2636"},"modified":"2014-07-16T17:28:51","modified_gmt":"2014-07-16T15:28:51","slug":"mixed-media-16-july-2014","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/martin\/2014\/07\/16\/mixed-media-16-july-2014\/","title":{"rendered":"Mixed media, 16 July 2014"},"content":{"rendered":"

At some point during my last trip to Edinburgh I watched The Machine<\/i><\/a> after seeing JWZ mention it on his blog<\/a>. It’s mostly forgettable. The scientist protagonist is unlikeable, and the “accidental hive-minding” turned out to be peripheral to the plot.<\/p>\n

Here in France, I finished reading Hugh Howey’s Wool<\/i><\/a> trilogy, which I found compelling all the way through.<\/p>\n

I’m pretty sure that Julian recommended Signal To Noise<\/i><\/a> by Eric S. Nylund to me years<\/em> ago. We had a copy of it, and we must have brought it to France with us at some point in the past, because it was on the bookshelves here. I picked it up after finishing Dust<\/i>, and read it on our mini-break to Montpellier over the weekend. Last summer I saw a copy of its sequel, A Signal Shattered<\/i><\/a> in a bookstore in California, but didn’t buy it because I couldn’t remember if we had a copy of the first book. I’m regretting that now, because it isn’t available in any kind of ebook format for me to download and dig into straight away. (Not that I would have known to bring it with me on this trip anyway.)<\/p>\n

Instead, I’m now about 200 pages into Nemesis<\/i><\/a> by Jo Nesbo. As dark thrillers about alcoholic Scandinavian police detectives go, it’s pretty lightweight so far.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

One of the things we do on holiday here is scarf down TV show box sets in the evenings after sunset. In previous years we’ve been through Merlin<\/i>, Leverage<\/i>, Burn Notice<\/i>, and Fringe<\/i>. This year, we’re on Elementary<\/i><\/a>. We’re big fans of Sherlock<\/i>, but Elementary<\/i> has a whole different flavour, and is fun in a completely different way. Painting Holmes as a recovering drug addict is an excellent narrative hook; I hope that the fact it’s an American prime-time TV show won’t impose a set of excessively puritanical storylines. It shows promise with its playful attitude towards Holmes’ sexual needs, and the episode “A giant gun, filled with drugs”<\/a> wasn’t nearly as self-righteous as it could have been.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At some point during my last trip to Edinburgh I watched The Machine after seeing JWZ mention it on his blog. It’s mostly forgettable. The scientist protagonist is unlikeable, and the “accidental hive-minding” turned out to be peripheral to the plot. Here in France, I finished reading Hugh Howey’s Wool trilogy, which I found compelling … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Mixed media, 16 July 2014”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1782],"tags":[1787,1790,1786,1789,1788],"class_list":["post-2636","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mixed-media","tag-elementary","tag-noise","tag-sherlock","tag-signal","tag-wool"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/martin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2636","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/martin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/martin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/martin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/martin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2636"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/martin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2636\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2640,"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/martin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2636\/revisions\/2640"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/martin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2636"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/martin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2636"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/martin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2636"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}