what I read/watched finishing off the year...

...posted today because it includes my yuletide canon review.

Books:

How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler by Ryan North I finished this, but it was a slog. The sheer contempt the narrator has for the entire history of human endeavor is just tiring. I kept going because it was interesting beneath the contempt, but oh wow, do I not recommend you read this book. I finished it to see how he was going to explain computers, and then he pretty much didn't, and that was all there was, and the end. I also felt in parts that this book could be outright dangerous, such as the part where he explains how to eat food that you might be allergic to or might poison you.

If you're thinking of reading this after an xkcd book, just go read the xkcd one again instead.

American Gardens by Monty Don & Derry Moore: This is a coffee table book that complements the TV miniseries of the same name, with a lot of photos (Derry Moore is the photographer; he gets equal billing on the front of the book but not, for some reason, in the library catalog listing).

There were a few lines that made me raise my eyebrows, but this one is worthy of being preserved for eternity:
"Everybody is a sucker for the sun, and Florida has almost endless sun without ever being too hot or too humid."

Just. What. Monty, what are you talking about?

Extraordinary Gardens of the World by Monty Don. Coffee table companion book to Around The World In 80 Gardens, but deeply awful. For each garden, the first paragraph is in big text, but then all the rest of the text is in small font like it's captions, but it's not captions. The photos are frequently uncaptioned and they don't tell you what exactly you're looking at. This font size and placement gives the impression that you're not actually meant to read the text, and considering that the text is frequently unreadable, that meant I did not much reading and pretty much just looked at the pictures. And if coffee table books of pictures are what you want, I am sure there are better ones.

How unreadable, you ask? Here's a sample: "As people came from the countryside to live in Córdoba, looking for work, especially from the nineteenth century, families would occupy a room of two of the large square buildings built around courtyards on three or four floors."

I also noticed two places where there wasn't an initial capital after a period, and that's with skimming large parts of the book.

Movies/TV:

Ocean's Eleven. Rewatch. Still has all the problems it always does in terms of plot, but still a good time. Danny really does nothing at all to attract Tess to come to him, huh. All he does is set up a reason for Tess to want to dump Benedict (I do not understand why they are together in the first place and neither does the movie), which is transparently contrived, since it would take half a second for someone to say "oh, right, Benedict's just saying this because whatever, why wouldn't you lie to a guy in order to get your money back". But Danny is just gliding on being a guy Tess used to date. Who she also... dumped and divorced. He does nothing to indicate to her that she should give him another chance. At all.

Ocean's Twelve. Rewatch. Good god, this movie is incoherent. Someone put on imdb that everything after 52 minutes in is the con on the audience. The movie is 2 hours long. That's absurd. This movie would have been much better if it didn't have that at all and it played it very straight forward, and then the audience got to go along on the con. There's also not necessarily much point in them doing it anyway and going to such an extent, since they already had the mcguffin. Plus, what a way to put a thumb on the scale by having Super Incredible Master Thief give them special treatment. And it does the stupid sequel thing of invalidating part of the original by having someone else give Danny the idea to rob Benedict in the first movie.

Ocean's Thirteen. Rewatch. Ah, yes, the movie where they torture a guy in order to, *check notes*, get someone a bad AAA* rating. Did they consider any of the other ways they bribe/blackmail/manipulate other folks? And then Linus roofying that woman via his cologne, what the fuck. They stimulate an earthquake in a packed hotel full of people. But, yes, the villains are the bad guys.

There's fewer moving parts, but this movie just feels so long.

*I would like to state for the record that I said it was a bad AAA rating as a snarky joke. It turns out, according to IMDB, that the award they are going for is, in fact, from AAA.

Ocean's Eight. Rewatch. Everything from my first watch holds true. Also, watching them all close together, it strikes me that there's no real motive for the theft other than "oooh money". In the first movie, Danny (and Reuben) wants to screw over Benedict. In the second movie, well, I could not tell you concisely or non-concisely what the actual plot is, but the crew are manipulated into it. In the third movie, again, it's about revenge. This one is "we could rob a bank because that's where all the money is, but really, why go to all that trouble when you can just steal some jewelry from a jewelry store and some extra from a museum display".

Grand Designs New Zealand: I am not certain if this remains the best Grand Designs. They swapped out the hosts for some reason, which I don't mind per se, but there's also now some random sexism thrown in and having to skip ahead just like I'm having to avoid Kevin McCloud's insufferable opinions. However, despite the added marriage drama, it does still remain More Educational Than Other Versions, which probably still gets it over the line.

However, I need to scream at them for 7x04 where he kept calling it a circular house even long after admitting it was not circular, it was 12 sided and the cladding was meant to make it look circular (spoiler: it did not). And even after that, he kept repeating that it was a circular house when it wasn't.

Grand Designs has done circular houses before! This was not one of them! Notably the circular houses were all made of materials that want to be circular, not made of straight beams of wood, which do not! Argh.