The Shannara series by Terry Brooks has a reputation as being an homage to LotR, and they are quite enjoyable.

Waaay back, this was what I turned to after reading LotR. He had only published the first then and it was what made me understand the difference between good writing and bad. It gave me nothing else other than that lesson and certainly didn’t scratch the itch that I had for something like LotR. In fact nothing did and I found it best to look for something completely different that was good in it’s own right rather than poor imitations.

They can sleep for longer. There is the incident of a Egyptian snail that was collected for the British Museum in 1846 - seemingly dead - and which then woke up in 1850.

Yes, I thoroughly enjoy short stories, for all the reasons that you give.

I grew up on the classic fantasy tales: Conan, Fafhred and the Grey Mouser, the Dying Earth tales, and all of Dunsany, Clarke Ashton Smith etc etc as well as Lovecraft, Poe and M R James and the rest.

As well as focusing on a single mood or concept, as you suggest, short stories - particularly the more literary ones - are great as single character studies, or dealing with particular interactions in a way that isolates and brings them to the forefront simply by being given a beginning and end.

It is pretty clear that this is a joke sign/poster - akin to “you don’t have to be crazy to work here but it helps” and so on.

Definitely worthwhile!

feels a lot like Columbo.

It is very conciously like Columbo - even down to the font of the titles I think. I see it as 3 parts Columbo, 1 part The Fugitive and 1 part Knives Out. There are a couple of wonky episodes but I enjoyed it a lot overall - especially the penultimate one.

Another BF listener here - I really liked Walker and McGann on screen in Annika too.

Otherwise, my SO and I have the Ted Lasso finale lined up. The third season (yes, I know, but I agree with the Americans that there is a distinction between series and season) has been a necessary conclusion to the material in the previous two, but not without some fun moments.

And - in terms of other UK TV - we are just on to season two of Jam and Jerusalem which I totally missed at the time but am enjoying now.

Otherwise, in non-UK shows, Drops of God and Shrinking are the clear highlights in our lineup at the moment.

A week.

I was in my teens and had no commitments at the time and just spontaneously decided not to eat or sleep for a few days - which I later decided would be a week. At the time, I had no idea of the world record for this or I probably would have tried for that - although, obviously, I was not supervised or anything.

The afternoons from the second day onwards were the worst - when I felt pretty lousy - but otherwise I was running on serotonin and was pretty much on a natural high for most the duration.

At the end, I cycled 12 miles during which one of my feet cramped and left me jabbing at the pedal as it went past, but I did it ok.

I slept extremely well when I finally did, but I took some while to get back into the whole eating thing again.

There is no way in hell that I could do anything like that now.

Ahh - ok. I had not met that bug before. I certainly did intend to post there.

Thanks!

Removed by mod

Some that I have enjoyed:

• A Spy Among Friends
• Slow Horses
• The Ipcress File (both the recent TV show and the 1965 film are great)
• Traitors (2019)
• The Night Manager
• London Spy
• The Game (2014)
• Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (both the TV show from 1979 and the 2011 film are great)
• Smiley’s People

Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.

You can’t get a lot cooler than that.

A deckchair? A pub sign?

My ‘big read’ this year is Finnegans Wake which I am reading weekly along with the reddit TrueLit sub. It would be a very different experience without the comments and interpretation from there, so that’s something that I will be thinking about…

Otherwise, The Twisted Ones by T Kingfisher, which is engaging and well paced, a Doctor Who novel from the '90s and am listening to Ron Hutton’s Queens of the Wild. This books are always authoritative and entertaining but I have only just started this one so can’t say a lot so far.

If I have to pick one, then the 1955 Ealing comedy The Ladykillers.

I know that the Coen brothers did a remake, and I am a fan of most of theirs, but I have no interest in this remake. The original could not be topped, IMHO.

I have a Plex server for film, tv, audiobooks and music and and a Calibre server for ebooks. I have shelves for my physical book collection that now need re-organising, since I have recently moved. Getting the Plex and Calibre server up and running was a lot quicker, I have to say.

At some stage, I expect that I will move to Jellyfin, but Plex is still ok for now.

I have three "!subscribe pending"s in my list after a session of joining a few days back. For me, they are showing up in my sidebar and I can post to them as usual, it seems. It is just that they don’t change from ‘pending’.

We’ve recently moved. The house is basically in order - give or take a couple of stacks of boxes in the corner - and the shed is kinda there too, so this weekend is ‘doing things in the garden’ with hedge trimming the first on the list, along with scanning Gumtree for a suitable mower. I am not going to be borrowing our new neighbour’s one for a third time however friendly and happy about it he is.

Presumably this was not a single snow crystal, but an agglomeration. More details on large snowflakes here.

Yes, AMC. Releasing weekly and ep 7 this week.