Entertaining, sometimes gruesome, sometimes funny and sometimes sad collection of stories about the gods of Asgard and the elves, dwarves and giants around them, book-ended by the Norse creation myth and the world-ending battle of Ragnarok. Itās a storytelling approach, not a scholarly description. And itās not the shiny, techno-magical Asgard of Marvelās Thor, or the ethereal Olympus weāve come to think of with Greek myths. For all the magic and impossible feats that get tossed around, itās still a gritty, harsh world with wars, murders, lust, deception and betrayal.
The stories are mostly separate, but a pattern emerges: not just when stories refer back to earlier events, but the slow transformation of Loki from the kind of trickster who steals Sifās hair, tricks rival smiths into creating fantastic gifts, and generally outwits his opponents (while finding ways to embarrass the other gods if he can) to the kind of trickster who thinks it would be hilarious to trick a blind man into killing his own brother.
In his introduction, Gaiman notes that we donāt actually have a thorough record of the stories. Like most myths, they were told and retold and changed through oral storytelling. The Norse didnāt write them down until well after Christianity had established itself in the region. And so there are a lot of figures who are mentioned in passing in one tale or another that we donāt really know much about.
And I realized that most of what I know of the mythology comes from modern works influenced by it. Comic books of course, not just Marvelās Thor, but Vertigoās Sandman and the manga and anime Ah! My Goddess. The Ring Cycle (by way of Bugs Bunny). Oddly enough, a lot of it by way of Neil Gaiman himself: Sandman, American Gods, Odd and the Frost Giants, probably a handful of short stories too.
This has always been one of the annoying things about remote interactions in Mastodon: While you can seamlessly follow remote users and reply, boost, etc. through your home instance, if you just visit a remote user or post in a regular browser window, you have to jump through a few hoops to pull it into your own accountās view.
This automates the hoops.
Setup is simple: You enter your home username and site in the preferences.
Incidentally: Remember your username is case-sensitive! If you have mixed case in it, you have to type the capitals correctly!
Very flexible, and can sync bookmarks across many different devices and browsers. You can use your own Nextcloud server, or store the bookmarks encrypted on Google Drive or another cloud service. Either way, you know who has access to them, which is a big bonus for privacy.
The desktop browser add-on is mostly set-and-forget and you just use your regular browser bookmarks. For as many browsers as you want. Iāve been using it to sync between Firefox and Chrome since 2020, and while it had some problems syncing early on, itās been solid for so long I canāt even remember the last time I encountered a sync error. (Though it does sync faster with app-specific passwords.)
The mobile app syncs your bookmarks to itself, since most mobile browsers donāt let add-ons access their bookmarks. It took all of 30 seconds to set up the Android version with my Nextcloud, and the initial sync didnāt take much longer. The UI is simple, letting you do the basics of adding, removing, editing and moving bookmarks. They open in your default browser, and you can share a link from your browser to Floccus to bookmark it.
A fun, breezy story about unexpectedly landing a job at a secret scientific base on a parallel world studying giant Godzilla-like animals. Which is about as dangerous as it sounds. Plus, of course, not all humans are interested in the kaijusā welfare, and the KPS has to step up the āPreservationā part of its name.
Thereās some interesting world-building in terms of what kind of environment and ecosystem would actually support 100-meter-tall animals, what kind of biology would be able to handle the size, the energy, shooting beams of radiation, etc. And what might evolve to protect itself in a world with kaiju. And of course: what role nuclear explosions have in the whole thing, because these are kaiju after all!
Itās also weird because it takes place in 2020. Like, real 2020, complete with Covid-19 lockdowns and everything. The main character starts out working for a GrubHub competitor at the beginning of the pandemic.
The first half of the season is mostly stand-alone episodes, vaguely linked by plot tokens in the form of faster-than-light signals from a winged being they dub the āred angel.ā And those are the ones I liked best: Investigating a dark matter asteroid and finding the survivors of a ship thought lost during the war, with only one crew member responsive. Finding a small population of humans who were transplanted across the galaxy during World War III, and actually threading the line between interfering with a pre-warp culture and letting some of them know that yes, Earth survived and is thriving. Exploring what else lives in the ecosystem formed by the mycelial network*.
But after a while they start getting way too cavalier about changing the fates of entire planets without thinking the consequences through, doing things because the plot requires it, or because it would be more dramatic (regardless of whether it makes sense for the character to do it) and generally handing out idiot balls left and right.
Also: how big is Section 31, anyway?
Characterization
One of the things that gets better, though, is the Sarek/Amanda/Spock/Michael family relationship, both present-day and in flashbacks to Spock and Michaelās childhood on Vulcan. (And we get to see other biomes on Vulcan than just red-rock desert!) The season starts out with them dancing around some HORRIBLE SECRETā¢ of Michaelās, but once thatās out in the open (to the audience) and the two of them start having to work together, itās interesting to watch them as they start dealing with their past and finally develop a rapport again.
Spock himself feels just a little bit off, but I canāt quite put my finger on why. Partly itās the voice. (Same with Sarek, actually.) But I think itās also because Ethan Peck isnāt as intense as Leonard Nimoy (or Zachary Quinto) when Spock is just being himself. Then again, he is recovering from trauma at that point, reevaluating how he wants to balance his human and Vulcan sides, and technically on vacation rather than active duty, so a bit of uncertainty makes sense. I havenāt picked up Strange New Worlds yet, but Iām curious to see how his portrayal carries over.
Captain Pike is an incredible contrast to Captain Lorca from season one, coming onto a ship whereā¦letās just say everyone starts out with trust issues. And they managed to keep Georgiou around, in a way that Michelle Yeoh is clearly having fun with.
It was nice to get to know the other crew some more. Saru is still my favorite of the
second-level main characters. Even the third-level characters get a little more attention this time through, though in one case itās a bit of too little, too late. And while we donāt see a lot of her, Reno is a great addition to the cast as someone who just cuts through the BS and calls things as she sees them.
Finale
As for the finaleā¦ The first half is tedious and all the worst aspects of this season are on display, plus an annoying display of two-dimensional thinking (on the parts of the characters, the writers, and the visual effects team) in a four-dimensional story.
Though let me say, once you get to see inside the Enterprise, theyāve done a great job of updating the aesthetics of the sets and costumes so it looks high-tech to modern audiences and still looks like the same ship we saw in the original show.
The second half actually moves really well and is (mostly) a satisfying conclusion, though one of the major dramatic threads in the battle just doesnāt make sense (apparently their blast doors are really strong). But the epilogue goes way further than necessary in explaining away why we never heard of Spockās sister or the spore drive before. All you need to say is that Spock never mentioned Michael on camera and no one is known to have ever found another giant space tardigrade. Done.