The finale was...good, actually? Again, grading on a curve. It is still a bad show. But it's one of those bad shows where you get the sense that there is someone in the writers' room doing their best and sneaking all kinds of fun content in (see also: Archie singing IWW songs in Riverdale).

I had to check Reddit to see which case this was based on—it takes most of the episode to get to it. A seemingly unremarkable middle-aged travel agent drops dead in his driveway while his wife is out for a jog. It looks like a heart attack, but a cop in 44 Division suggests to Holness that she might want to get "her best" on it. Unfortunately the best that Toronto Police Services—sorry, TPD on the show for some reason—have are Graff and Bateman.

( spoilers )

And that's a wrap. I guess I'll have to find some good show to watch now.

 I hear some of you like podcasts and some of you also like books so why not have a podcast about a very good book that you can pre-order now. The latest episode of Wizards & Spaceships, "Blight ft. Rachel A. Rosen," celebrates not just the beginning of the podcast's second season (!!!) but the release of. Well. Tentacled queer magical Canadian anti-fascist fantasy. And the trials and travails of bringing such creative pursuits into reality. So go check it out (preferably on an app and not on the website), like, subscribe, share, etc.

Just finished: Someone You Can Build a Nest In by John Wiswell. Sometimes people ask me, Sabs, why do you keep reading books that you hate? When you encounter a phrase, like say, "allosexual virgins," in a passage set in a medieval fantasyland and you know you are not going to vote for this book to win the Hugo, why not DNF? Well, Dear Reader, it's so that I can rant about how Big Mad I got reading this and how it typifies why I nearly always despise cozy fiction and queernormative fantasy settings.

( spoilers and ranting )

Okay glad that's expelled. Onwards.

Currently reading: Bad Cree by Jessica Johns. This otoh avoids all the pitfalls you would expect in a story where the main character is guided by dreams and visions, and none of the characters around her disbelieve her. Largely because it's dreamy and literary and so embedded in Cree culture, so the conflict is not "are the dreams real? Is any of this happening to her?" but "did she abandon her family in the time of their greatest need."

The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley. This was a very hyped book that's also up for a Hugo, and I am liking it a lot more so far. The British government somehow gets time travel technology and experiments with it by dragging people who would have otherwise died in history (a member of the Franklin Expedition, a WWI soldier, a plague victim, and someone from the French Revolution) into the present day. Each "expat" is assigned to a "bridge," someone who can explain the modern world and help them assimilate. Our heroine is a Cambodian-British civil servant assigned to the Franklin Expedition guy, who falls in love with him. There's a lot about race and colonialism here, as well as the kind of baseline British bureaucracy satire that I tend to enjoy; this one is pretty good so far. Even though I'm annoyed b/c I started writing a story like this and thought the concept was too silly to continue.

 I'm once again lagging behind on podcasts, not in the least because ICHH is reviewing Andor episodes faster than I can watch any TV show, and also I have negative amounts of time in May. But anyway, my pick for the week is their episode "Who We Talk About When We Talk About Borders." 

Lost in the discussion about "hey is it bad to deport little children with brain cancer?" and "is it constitutional to offshore a concentration camp?" is the fact that the border is part of land that does not belong to the US. I mean, none of the US belongs to the US any more than Canada or Mexico is a real thing. This episode focuses on the damage done to Indigenous communities whose traditional territory encompasses both sides of the imaginary line, and the horrors they face, from harassment by the regime's Gestapo, to grave desecration, to environmental war crimes. It also looks at the differing news coverage under the Biden and Trump regimes, and how the plight of both migrants and Indigenous communities can be ignored when it's inconvenient for media to cover.