Iskaral Pust

I’m embarrassingly ignorant but want to know more and do more. I grew up with a pretty good garden but my role was mainly as directed labor. My mom had all the knowledge. I need to be able to plan our garden or it won’t happen. Unfortunately my wife is actively hostile to almost all fauna and flora. She’d have a full acre of paved patio if I would allow her. And she only likes cut flowers indoors because living, breathing flowers outside attract insects. She loves tulips but won’t let me plant any, despite having a deer fence. She thinks it will just produce more chipmunks. (She may be right). Narcissi are critter-proof but she doesn’t like them. We usually do elevated planters of chrysanthemums in the late summer to early fall. I could persuade her to do more flowers in planters for short seasons earlier in the summer. My first spring project is to feed all of my immature trees. It makes them happy. I get an enormous sense of well-being when my trees are happy. We’ll probably make some changes to our shrubs directly in front of our house; the oak leaf hydrangeas at a minimum are too sprawling for my wife’s desire for neatness, and their foliage, color and (lack of) blooms are prettying uninteresting. The boxwoods, dogwoods, hydrangeas and the ornamental grass are ok, but lacking some bold color. I’m think of adding a dwarf Japanese maple for some color without getting too tall in that location.

We added back Disney+ to watch The Mandalorian S2, and then cancelled again. Now we’ve added HBO Max instead because a few of my wife’s friends recommended The Undoing (I’m not loving it so far), so we might keep that for another month or two to try some other shows there. We’re just cycling short periods for different services. Only Netflix and Prime are persistent for us.

I only watch sports in the Live TV part of Hulu, the rest is from their streaming library. The ads on streaming are shorter than for Live TV but still annoying to have a 1-2 minute interruption at all when I have spent years on Netflix, Prime, HBO, etc getting used to no ads, and when I have explicitly paid extra to have no ads. The ad creep seems to be steady and cynical: the more popular content has more ads because they think they can. It looks like the networks want to have their cake and eat it: they want to get paid direct fees by viewers, cutting out the cable company, but also reintroduce the ad model that they love so much. You and I may have different taste in TV. I have no interest in reality TV, gimmicky talent competitions or banal police procedurals. There is very, very little that the core broadcast & cable channels have produced of interest in recent years. AMC is probably the only channel there that has produced really good stuff, perhaps one or two from FX, and those were all available on Netflix for several years so I’ve already watched them. Just like HBO’s best stuff from their back catalogue was on Prime for several years.

I’ve subscribed to Hulu + live TV for the past couple of months in order to have NFL and college football games available, especially while exercising at the weekend. But other than live sports, there doesn’t seem to be anything we want to watch on Hulu. And if we ever do try something, it still has ads even though I paid the premium to remove ads.* *there’s a footnote in fine print that “ad free” does not apply to all content. I’ll definitely drop this very soon. I’m just trying to decide whether this football season is worth another $60 per month to keep watching.

I was talking to my brother as the England vs Italy game was ending. He was so confident that Ireland would beat France by enough of a margin to snatch the 6N. That’s a bit disrespectful to France in Paris, even if they have been less consistent in recent years. They’re still a dangerous opponent and they’ve a long history of beating Ireland in Paris. Plus this Irish team still isn’t all that convincing.

The 5th Cormoran Strike novel by Galbraith/Rowling will be available on Amazon US next week. I’m undecided about this one. The last installment wasn’t great and the predictable (forced) romance arc is tedious. But I did enjoy the way the story follows Strike’s daily routine and thought process so closely.

Jonathon Strange & Mr. Norell by Susanna Clarke available for $1.99 on Kindle

Steven Pressfield’s Gates Of Fire (historical fiction of the Battle of Thermopylae) is available for $1.99 on Amazon

That’s a great book but probably even more depressing to read right now.

Thanks, I bought it already. If your offer isn’t getting much traction then you may be bringing coals to Newcastle (perhaps too many board members already own a copy). It was still a nice gesture.

We watch Disney+ on a current model Roku. No problems at all. Agreed though that the sound on the Mandalorian specifically was unusually low.

That’s very generous Derfel. I’ve read both books and I would recommend them highly.

France losing to Scotland gives Ireland and outside chance of winning the 6N with a win over France in Paris. That doesn’t look easy, but perhaps the Irish team can finally rouse themselves. Winning the 6N title would still depend on Ireland and England’s results against Italy, if those even go ahead at this stage. England has an advantage in bonus points.

Ireland don’t currently have a way to win when physically out-matched. But that’s a real problem for a nation with a smaller population: the likes of England and France (not to mention the Southern Hemisphere three) have a greater likelihood of finding athletes who are extreme physical outliers.

Much better from Ireland to beat Wales pretty handily. Much of the improvement came from the back row and from Conor Murray rediscovering some form. It’s a bit surprising they got such improvement from that selection, but let’s see how it goes at Twickenham. England beat the Scots but it didn’t sound like much of a game. I know the weather was bad but England had a point to prove after the French game.

The entire Expanse series is available today on Amazon at significant discount. Amazon Kindle

Irvine Welsh’s Dead Men’s Trousers, a continuation of the Trainspotting characters, is available on Kindle for $1.99. A highly recommended author. Kindle

That is hilariously cynical and abusive of the trust of their customers. I expect it to show up in Kindle books any day now: the book will be free on Kindle, but the last chapter costs $10.

I’m another of the view that the fragmentation/Balkanization of streaming will be terrible for consumers and will just lead us eventually back to some sort of bundling. It’s the very same as the evolution of cable TV. Unfortunately we have to go through it because each provider wants the chance to be the winner, and they certainly don’t want to just concede the space to Netflix any longer. The loss of DVD sales and rentals has had a huge impact on movie studio finances (and therefore their preference for relatively low risk action blockbuster sequels), and streaming will similarly affect the finances of syndication for TV studios. Personally, I have Netflix and Amazon (because we’d have Amazon Prime anyway) on top of our TV cable/phone/internet bundle. I recently canceled HBO and Starz, and turned on Shotime instead to try Billions (kinda meh). I expect we’ll start rotating through subscriptions to binge their best content and then move on. I guess grazing is a fitting model for the mindlessness of TV consumption. We don’t watch much TV but I want to have available some good viewing options whenever I do sit in front of the TV. None of individual streaming services look worthy of maintaining long term subscriptions. I do notice that we also spend at least $20 per month on one-off movie streaming rentals, usually from Amazon. Those are mostly for family movie night with our son at the weekend. On Amazon specifically, their interface and infrastructure is weak. They emailed me recently to say they will no longer “support” our Roku, and offered us a discount on a Fire stick instead. It does still work on the Roku, but they’re basically disowning any future problems or eventual breakdown. They have definitely moved to a model of pushing more and more content behind additional subscription channels, which basically reflects the ongoing land grab for content rights. More and more content is being pulled back from low cost general distributors like Netflix and Amazon and instead moved behind some niche paywall. I don’t think that is Amazon’s fault particularly, but they clearly orient their service to show you what you cannot have, and therefore push you to make additional purchases all the time.

If you’re a fan of cosy mysteries, Amazon seems to offer a lot of them heavily discounted for Kindle. They show up most days in my daily email of Kindle special offers.

Thanks. I watched a couple of episodes of Wallander (on Netflix?) and liked the story and character, but also found him a bit too gloomy. I don't know if the books will be the same but there were many long scenes of Kenneth Branagh being depressed about his marriage, his father, etc.

Great thread. I'll be mining this for recommendations. I do enjoy detective/crime/mystery novels, although with some specific preferences. Anything with a thriller/conspiracy plot feels too cliche, improbable and by the numbers. Some mysteries are too twee, with prose and characters that are more comfortable than engaging. I also find that some US crime novels are too focused on serial killers locked in a personal battle with the detective, which becomes too narrow and tips slightly into the horror genre. I generally find that UK authors have better style of prose in this genre. Agatha Christie is the OG for me, and I really enjoyed them around ages 10-12 but I would not reread them now. Rowling/Galbraith's series is pretty good, even if it leans too heavily on a forced romance arc. Beyond that I have sampled several over the last few years. Jo Nesbo's Harry Hole series is pretty good so far (Scandinavian noir), Boris Akunin made only a so-so impression, Anthony Horowitz writes meta mysteries that are both a mystery novel and about mystery novels as a genre, Kevin Wignall had good characterization, Mike Carey's Felix Castor series (urban fantasy mysteries) is good. A lot of the others blend together and don't stand out in my memory. I also enjoy a humorous twist on mysteries. The Mystery Man series by Colin Bateman was very good, and the Dublin Trilogy by Caoimh McDonnell was good too.

Born and raised in Ireland. Have lived in the US for most of my adult life.

I just recently started watching this on Netflix, although S1 on Netflix is obviously not the actual first season of the show. They keep referring to prior seasons and expect the audience to be familiar with the format. My wife finds it boring but I find it very relaxing. The contestants all have a self-effacing middle class gentility. It’s the mirror opposite of all other reality shows: instead of casting the trashiest embodiments of train wrecks, they sought the bland, affable likable-but-forgettable types. There’s no-one you love to hate, no raging ego heading for a comeuppance, no friction or sparks headed for showdown, just technical mastery and creativity in a field that is familiar without being technically well known by the audience. It’s very soothing viewing.

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