YouTube Obsession

I’ve spoken about my love Mythbusters before¹ so of course I am fully interested in the video version of the Mythfits Podcast.

Kari Byron and Tory Belleci share stories and bring on guests from the Discovery show. This is perfect millennial content to put on while I answer emails at work. The podcast really drives home the idea that they were doing Mr. Beast-type content before and better than MR. Beast ever could because everyone involved with Mythbusters actually had skills and talent.

The only missing piece of the podcast is obviously the late, great Grant Imahara (RIP dude!), though hopefully they do a full episode on him someday.

Watching

I read through all of Martha Wells’ Murderbot book series in 2023/24 and I really enjoyed its unique voice and take on hard SciFi. The books are a good mix of drama, thriller and comedy. Good books, read them

The Apple+ series is adapting the books in it’s own style which as a fan of the books is actually quite refreshing. Before the spoilers; This show is worth watching if only for the bold move to make the episodes 30 minutes long. In this day and age, I respect the balls of Apple+ to not stretch each episode to an hour. The show feels lighter, quicker and more fun when it’s not bogged down with filler.

!!SPOILERS!!

Light and fun is exactly the angle the show is leaning toward with this adaptation; A very smart move. The hardest part of any book adaptation is finding what translates to a visual medium and what does not. Murderbot (2025) wisely expands on parts that don’t get much representation in the books because they are better suited for television. This is most obvious in the show’s translation of the book’s in-universe soap opera “The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon.”

In the book series, Sanctuary Moon is Murderbot’s favorite show, he references it and talks about it often but never gets into details because writing about what your character watched on TV is not exciting reading. In the show, however, these scenes are expanded into actual clips of Sanctuary Moon (Perfectly casted btw, starring John Cho, DeWanda Wise, Clark Gregg and Jack McBrayer) unfolding in its full over dramatic soapy-ness. It’s an excellent choice by the show runners to explore this nugget of the world while also giving fans of the books something new to see.

The adaptation makes more great choices: In the books the Corporation Rim is described as a terrible place to live, governed entirely by capitalist free market ideals and cut-throat corpos out only for profit. In the show we actually get to see what living and working in the Rim is like. Again, easier to see all this world building in a show than read it in a book.

My only gripe is how the Preservation Alliance is represented in the show. In the books the Alliance is a co-op of planets living outside the Corporation Rim; The people are friendly, loving and most importantly not profit driven. The books do a great job of showing how shocking it is not engage with with capitalism in this universe. This alone makes the characters of the Alliance outsiders and weird to most people in the setting.

In the show, however, the Alliance are turned into They/Them ploycule kumbaya-hippies. I would be more mad at this if it weren’t handled so well and fit the voice of the show. The show is obviously leaning more on the comedy elements of the books so it plays almost perfect but there are still some cringe “that’s what woke people say harharhar” moments of humor.

Overall, it’s a fun show and I’m interested to see how some later characters make the transition to the screen.

Reading

I am famously not a fan of Neon Genesis Evangelion media past the original series except maybe -because Hideaki Anno hates it- End of Evangelion. Until recently…

I discovered that there was a series of teen light novels published in the late 2010s called Neon Genesis Evangelion: Anima by Ikuto Yamashita.

I am not exactly sure why I became obsessed with reading and acquiring these books. It’s partly because the premise of “parts End of Evangelion never happened and Shinji saved the world actually” is so absurd and antithetical to the series I must know how they pull it off. Also, I just think its a weird ass piece of media that I doubt many people have read. Or pieces, in my case…

Each book is about 300 pages and for the audience this is going for the writing will bore most teens. Though, I really do like the technical read-outs and glossy pages of illustrations scattered throughout the books.

So does it pull off the premise? Yes, but mostly no. It reads more like a lore expansion for someone’s EU fanfiction so it is interesting but as an adult I want it to explore the depressing and deep themes of the show. So this is not a must-read for fans, but it’s good light reading between all the heavy non-fiction books I’m on right now.

Other Notables

** I hate agreeing with MAGA but Trump is absolutely on the Epstein list.

** Boomers had the best serial killers because they ran on lead and arsenic. Future serial killers will only have micro-plastics and AI girlfriends to blame.

** Matthew Lillard reincarnated as a rubics cube speed solver. Also! really fun story.

1  I think? I cant find the post so it’s from before the content tag era lol.