#543

What's making me happy 2016-02-06

Another week, another post of #happy. I've been watching three television series lately that I've really enjoyed: The Expanse, Billions and The Magicians.

The Expanse is a fantastic sci-fi thriller. It is probably the best show to hit SyFy since BSG. The season just ended, and the first season was fantastic. io9 has a great summary of why the first season was great, but be warned, the article does have spoilers, and the show is a mystery.

I've also been hooked on Billions, mainly just because it has two amazing actors, Damian Lewis and Paul Giamatti, putting out fantastic performances. It's a drama through and through, but so far, it's been fantastic.

The Magicians I am basically watching because I loved the book series. So far the series has had a lot of changes from the television show, and the acting has been mediocre at best, but I found the book to be slow at first as well, so I'm going to give the show some room to grow.

Finally, Louis CK released a surprise web series with Steve Buscemi which is super weird. Worth a watch if you like drama.

Outside of television, the latest Reply All episode, In the Desert is quite fantastic. It hits all the right parts of my nerdom. Also the most recent Radiolab, I Don't Have To Answer That, taught me a bunch about history and how it affected and created the journalism of today.

I also watched the film Burnt, which had a pretty predictable plot, and amazing cinematography. It wasn't quite as good a film as Chef, but it had a similar flavor, and I would watch both again.

Mary Rose Cook published herself live programming a drum machine. If you like Javascript or programming for the web, it's worth checking out.

It was announced that Julian Assange was 'unlawfully detained' in Ecuador embassy according to a U.N. panel. This makes me super happy. I love the work that wikileaks has done, and Assange's case has been super weird.

My parents sent me a link to Changing New York, an online collection from the New York Public Library which has a bunch of really cool photos of New York City from the 1930s.

My team was featured in Wired on Monday with an article titled Clinton Camp Gives the Iowa Caucus a Silicon Valley Upgrade.

There were probably other things, but oh well! I hope you had a great week, and I wish you a good one next week as well.