Lark Ascending

Lark Ascending by Silas House

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

SHAMELESS SELF PROMOTION: We talk about this book on the Robot Elf Book club podcast: https://sites.libsyn.com/431112/site/between-the-ley-lines-lark-ascending-by-silas-house

I am always down for post-apoc survival, so I dove right into Lark Ascending when my friend suggested we read it for our podcast. To be precise, we were considering reading it and I said “I’ll read the first chapter and let you know how it goes” and wandered off to take a bath. 40% of the book later, my bathwater was cold and I finally dragged myself out of the tub.

Unfortunately, that was where it all went downhill. Had I read maybe 10 more percent I could have saved my friend from reading this book, lol.

I described this book as “The Road, but without the annoying literary structure of Cormac McCarthy” and I stand by that assessment. I was expecting more of an adventure with a boy and his dog, but it’s a pretty bleak book that opens with a dead baby and doesn’t get a whole lot better. The story is set in a world devastated by climate change, where governments around the world have collapsed and fundamentalist groups have seized power. Lark and his family seek to flee to Ireland, which is rumoured to be one of the last stable havens that is still accepting refugees.

The synopsis itself spoils the fact that Lark is the only member of his family to make it to Ireland, and the story is told from Lark’s point of view as an elderly man, so we already know he’s going to survive the journey, which means the only real tension from the book is what happens to his companions and the world around him. (I managed to avoid going to doesthedogdie.com before finishing the book, but it was tempting). Lark is the only survivor of the voyage to Ireland, which turns out to be just as war-torn and dystopic as everywhere else in the world, and stumbles off to find the mythical Glendalough, which his mother had targeted as their destination due to the belief that it was a place empowered by ley lines that would keep them protected. Along the way he meets a dog named Seamus and a woman named Helen, and they form a ragtag band that travels together.

When things all went to shit in the world, everyone was forced to destroy their pets to save on resources. Mass destruction of pets due to low resources was a thing that happened in World War II, although in WW2 it was encouraged, not mandatory. Also, they didn’t make domesticated animals extinct across the entire world, as depicted in this book. In this book, there were roving hit squads hunting down all the pets and exterminating them, which seems like an awful lot of resources to expend in order to save resources, does it not? I could buy it if it was described as pets being turned loose and going feral, possibly becoming a threat, and then being eliminated that way… but that’s not how the book describes it.
So, since Seamus is apparently the first dog anyone has seen in years and years, he delights everyone that Lark comes across.

I tend to start books at 5 stars and whittle them down. This book lost its first star when it switched to Seamus’s point of view. First of all, the book is supposedly being narrated by Lark himself in his old age, so having a chapter from the dog’s point of view doesn’t make any sense within the structure. (The book also describes what happens when Lark is unconscious… so at least it is consistently wrong about its POV structure). Second of all, this dog is so anthropomorphized that Seamus may as well have had dialogue. It felt like someone who does not understand dog behaviour writing from the POV of a dog to try to justify why the dog is behaving like a human. The dog is more human than some of the other supporting characters, which were so shallow that they were more ideas than characters, really.
Also, Lark feeds mushrooms to Seamus. Mushrooms are incredibly toxic to dogs. Do not feed mushrooms to your dog.

The book lost its second star in the second half of the book. This book is short and feels very rushed, but somehow there is a stretch around the 60% mark where it drags on as everyone sits around and mopes about how shitty the world is. The world IS shitty, but we really didn’t need to waste all this time whining about it, did we? None of this advanced the plot; it just made me dislike the characters.

And then after all that sitting around and whining, the ending felt like “And then they travelthroughthethingsandsomethingshappenandthenTHE END.” It felt like the author just wanted to be done with it. Many of the reviews talk about how this is way outside of the author’s usual genre and I wonder if he decided to be done with this experiment, or if another project came up that he was more interested in, and he just sprinted to the finish. The book finished at 3 stars.

Spoilers for the ending to follow:

Old Man’s War

Old Man’s War by John Scalzi

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I jumped into this with absolutely zero expectations. It was literally just the next book in the list on my Kindle (and had probably been sitting there for a decade, so I forgot why I loaded it in the first place).

Oh my goodness, I enjoyed this. I almost gave it five stars, but the main character was just a little too… I don’t know how to describe it, because it wasn’t quite plot armour and it wasn’t quite a self-insert Mary Sue/Gary Stu. There are just a few too many convenient coincidences.
He wasn’t a Mary Sue/Gary Stu, but there were shades of it there. Every single thing he did amazed everyone around him and earned a promotion, even if it was an accident. His drill instructor randomly turned out to be a fan of his former life’s work and gave him a lead role. He’s constantly coming up with a casual off-the-cuff solution that immediately saves the day. He got a promotion for almost dying. It was just a bit too much and took me out of the story a bit.

Also the universe seems like a very busy place for something no one on Earth gets to hear anything about! Maybe I just don’t remember that part of the book, but it wasn’t clear why Earth was such a sheltered haven while every other planet is a starship battlefield. It felt very “Men In Black” style, where there’s a whole secret world right there but you just never see it, I guess.

I also thought there would be just a little bit more of a dive into the “We show up and blast everything like a bunch of dinkuses without investigating other options” plotline, but it kind of fizzled in this book and we carried on with the “Violence is the way” answer. I’m not really sure how to feel about that, especially since it was somewhat addressed and then dismissed, which seems to sanction the violent response. Maybe the sequels do something more with it.

All in all, just a few too many things that you shouldn’t spend too much time thinking about.

But I’d still give it a solid 4.5 stars for the humour, the worldbuilding (such as it was), and the constant curveballs the plot threw in. It was a page-turner for sure and I had difficulty putting it down.

I also had a moment of deja vu reading about trading broken human bodies for tall, strong, green-tinted bodies that use nature to power themselves (photosynthesis: hence the green). It reminded me a lot of trading broken human bodies for tall, strong, blue-tinted Na’vi bodies that plug into nature. I even checked the dates to see which came first. The book predates the movie by a couple years. As part of that investigation, I also discovered that Scalzi posted on his blog to say “No they didn’t steal it. It’s really not that original, guys.”, lol.

The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo

The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I have this problem where I load my Kindle up with dozens upon dozens of books, and then someone says “I read this book and it was really good!” and then I immediately load THAT book onto my Kindle instead of reading everything else. It’s a good problem to have, I suppose, but still.

Anyway, a pair of coworkers were excitedly sharing how much they loved The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, so I wrote a note for myself and loaded it on my Kindle as soon as I got home. I hopped into the tub that night and started the first chapter.

I think I got to 15% before I got out of the tub. It’s not that the book is super short (~400 pages), it’s that you can’t put it down. The writing is clear and compelling and there is an excellent use of hooks that make you want to know what happens next. My bathwater was cold and my husband made fun of me, but I didn’t care. I had to stop myself from reading it in bed so I would actually get some sleep that night, and then I resumed reading it during my morning poop. I slipped the book into my work bag and spent every break plowing through more Evelyn Hugo, finishing the book the next day.

Wow, what a ride. The book started off as a SOLID five stars, no question whatsoever. Nested narratives that all keep you interested, a vividly painted picture of the period, compelling characters tackling important topics and having intensely human interactions, and a strong voice throughout. This book seemed to be written by someone who is well-steeped in Hollywood culture (and just how awful it is), and knows exactly which beats make for a compelling celebrity gossip plot. It’s a blend of every famous celebrity biography. They’ve mixed all the best parts into a fantastic milkshake that builds everything into a perfect storm of plot. Just thoroughly excellent.

Then around 30-35% it got a little squishy. It devolved into what felt like self-indulgent near-erotica: sex scenes that went on just a little bit too long, and an over-reliance on the “forbidden romance” theme, with characters pining over each other, wrestling with the whole “I want you so much, but we MUSTN’T!” thing. Romance is not my genre and this whole sequence left me going “bleh” but I could see it appealing to someone who was ovulating, maybe. Adding to the “squishiness”, the book has really excellent use of hooks, but in this middle section there are a few areas where the author clearly didn’t have a solid hook to land on, so they shoehorned in a hook; one of those “Little did they know, they would soon find out THE TERRIBLE SECRET!!!!” style of hook that’s just a little too forced. I lowered my mental rating to 4 stars.

And then I got to the ending.

I just really enjoyed how it all came together in the end. My eyebrows went up, the tears flowed, and I spent the next several hours thinking about the book.

A 5 star book is a book that makes you feel like you’ve lost a friend when it ends. The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo is a 5 star book.

Hyperbole and a Half / Solutions and Other Problems

I stumbled upon Allie Brosh’s blog when I was having a tough time and needed something to cheer me up. I don’t remember what linked me over to it, but I recognized some of the comics like the Pain Scale and the Alot, which I had been exposed to because they are linked all over the internet, and went “Oh yeah, these were pretty funny…”. I then spent the entire day reading through the “Best of” list and it really picked up my whole day. It was when I read the entry titled Dogs Don’t Understand Basic Concepts Like Moving and the dog thinking “I created food! I AM MAGIC!” that I wiped the tears of hysterical laughter out of my eyes, decided that Allie Brosh deserved my money, and ordered both books.

When I received them, I opened the cover of Hyperbole and a Half and read the acknowledgement. It said: “For Scott: What now, Fucker?”
Money well spent.

Hyperbole and a Half was excellent, although all the best stories were the ones from her blog so there were only a few really new stories in there. Maybe two of the new stories were fantastic, and the rest were okay but not quite up to the same level. All-in-all an excellent book, and absolutely worth your money, even though most of the best content is available online.

Solutions and Other Problems was… different.

At first I thought it might be a bit of “Second Book Syndrome”, where the first book was made of carefully collected and curated stories, polished to a sheen, until there was a big enough pile of them that it made someone go “Hey, you have enough for a book!” and ta-dah! A book emerges. And then everyone says “DO IT AGAIN!” and the publisher slaps a deadline on you so you dig around frantically looking for content and proudly produce a pile of dirty laundry that is bundled into a cover and then all the reviews go “??? Why isn’t this as polished as the first??” and you get panned.

I thought it might be something like that, because the stories felt forced. A lot of them feel clipped, like there’s no conclusion to them. There are a few pages of anecdotes and then you turn the page and it’s a new chapter instead of a conclusion and you’re left wondering if you got a misprinted copy. And a lot of the stories felt……… weird. They’re not necessarily stories of things happening, they’re more musing about mental health and odd conceptions about things that the reader may or may not agree with. The first book had some of that, but this book seems to be nothing but that. There were quite a few stories where I could probably draw a comparison to Curb Your Enthusiasm, except instead of Larry getting hung up on something ridiculous and causing a comical scene, it’s Allie getting hung up on something and causing a pretty serious problem and then writing a comic about it, and you’re not really sure if you’re supposed to think it’s funny or if you’re expected to agree with what happened when you really don’t, or what the whole point of this story actually was. And a lot of the stories are depressing! Why is there a story about a dying dog in what is purportedly a comedy book? There is no punchline. It is not a heartwarming story. Most of this is just tragic.

But then she tells the story of her sister’s suicide (once again: not at all funny, no punchline, not heartwarming… just tragic), and the context becomes a lot clearer. It becomes even more clear when you realize the event happened at the exact time her blog dropped off, just as she was getting rolling on this book.

This is not a comedy book. This is a therapy session.

I feel like it was probably very important for Allie to write and illustrate these stories and get them out of her head. I also feel like it was irresponsible of the editors and publisher to let this become a commercial product in its current state. Once you know the context you can see the tonal shift and probably draw striations in the layers of granite that this book was impacted into during the seven years of its development. It starts off with light comedy about childhood mishaps and dumb dogs, just like the first book did, and then takes a left turn when life happens and interrupts its creation. You can trace life events like her sister’s death, her scare with cancer, the breakup of her marriage, and her complete inability to deal with life taking a big steaming dump on her all at once. A lot of this book is intensely personal, and not necessarily very entertaining, and I think a lot of readers are not going to get what they expect when they pick it up. There might be a time and place to market this sort of content, but I don’t think this book did it appropriately. It would have been much more responsible for the editor/publisher to split the content into comedy and healing, and make a decision about whether it’s appropriate to market the healing into a different sort of book.

I do not regret giving money to Allie Brosh, but I really hope Allie is getting the help she needs, and is in a better place now. Hopefully writing this book helped her get there.

Mountain in the Sea

The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

SHAMELESS SELF PROMOTION: We talk about this book on the Robot Elf Book Club podcast: https://sites.libsyn.com/431112/site/octopuissance-the-mountain-in-the-sea-by-ray-nayler

Dr. Ha Nguyen is called to the island of Con Dao to consult on something. 30% of the book later we find out it’s an octopus. The book somehow only gets slower from there, until it wraps in a vague and unsatisfying conclusion.

Some interesting ideas, but ultimately this book fell very flat for me. Interesting ideas, bad execution, all wrapped in a pseudo-research-paper approach that lent itself to chapters where there is a sentence or two setting a scene of two characters standing together, who then proceed to spend pages and pages explaining things to each other (often committing the “as you know, Bob” error. “We both know what the Turing test is, and I just acknowledged that directly in the text, but I am going to spend several pages explaining it to you anyway.”). It was overly didactic and bordered on pretentious at times.

The Con Dao chapters with the octopuses were interesting and I felt myself getting sucked in and page turning to find what happened next. Unfortunately, what usually happened next was either a segue into pages of characters explaining things to each other, or a chapter break to either Eiko’s plot, which was interesting but felt very disconnected from everything else, or Rustem’s plot, which was downright insufferable because all Rustem does for 90% of the book is talk about how awesome he is and mope about how people are going to kill him because he’s too goddamn awesome at everything he does. (No, seriously, Rustem ruins this book. I fucking hate Rustem.)
And even the Con Dao chapters were marred by shoddy writing (or perhaps shoddy editing? There are straight-up typos in some places, like “the line went taught” (… taut…)), and the digressions to describe Altensetseg naked every other chapter. (Both Rustem and Altensetseg have a bit of “brooding badass syndrome” which is a pet peeve for me).

I was excited for this book because I’ve done a lot of research into animal behaviour and the nature of consciousness, so I always love to see new takes on it, but the octopuses end up being a surprisingly small part of the plot. For the amount of sensical plot in this book, you will get more out of reading actual textbooks on this topic.

Crimes of the Future (2022)

We were too tired to do thinking so we threw on the first movie that drifted past, which happened to be Crimes of the Future. Knowing absolutely nothing about the movie, I peeked at the ratings and saw that the critics loved it and gave it an 80%. … but the audience gave it a 50%. Oh dear, it’s one of those.

I then did a quick search and found that Cronenberg made this movie in 1970! So is this a remake? … Nope. It is not a remake. It is a new movie, with the same name, by the same director. WTF?

That was the first “WTF”. There were many more, interspersed with laughter. Not the good kind of laughter. The incredulous kind of laughter that comes from trying to process something this ridiculous.

This movie is set in The Future (TM), where humans no longer feel pain, and infection is no longer a thing, so everyone just cuts themselves open all the time for fun. The movie itself states “Surgery is the new sex”, and no one seems to know how to do sex the traditional way any more.

This movie was just not for me. It had classic Cronenberg body horror, but there was a lot of bullshit to sit through and absolutely no payoff. The world failed to grab me, and none of the things it explored really made any sense. Instead of asking interesting questions about what might happen if we eliminate pain and infection (which is actually not as helpful as you might think), or even the benefits and pitfalls of evolving to be able to digest plastic (a major plot thrust of the movie: plastic is abundant so it makes evolutionary sense to evolve to consume it, just like we are witnessing today in certain organisms, but if a human starts consuming plastic are they still human? OR should we murder them outright like the mutated monsters they are? HMM! Yeah there wasn’t a lot of debate going on there really…). Instead, the movie seems to be an excuse to have naked women writhing in ecstasy while automated scalpels slice them open. It felt more like a fetish display than a thought-provoking plot.

This snip from the Wikipedia plot synopsis is all you need to know about the movie (minor spoilers ahead…):

” A governmental police unit seeks to use Tenser to infiltrate a group of radical evolutionists. Without telling Caprice, Tenser meets a series of contacts through other biological performance art shows that lead him to the evolutionist cell. One of them, former cosmetic surgeon Nasatir, creates a zippered cavern in Tenser’s stomach, which Caprice uses to access Tenser’s organs in an oral sex act where she fellates his zipper wound and presumably his internal organs while he moans in erotic pleasure. “

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crimes_of_the_Future_(2022_film)

See, this is all my fault for adding the “unnecessary erotica” tag to my blog. The universe is attempting to give me reasons to use it…

Leech

Leech by Hiron Ennes

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

SHAMELESS SELF PROMOTION: We talk about this book in the Robot Elf Book Club podcast:

https://sites.libsyn.com/431112/site/would-you-still-like-your-doctor-if-they-were-a-worm-leech-by-hiron-ennes


Hmm a story about a parasitic creature? Sounds like the perfect book for a Halloween read during a global pandemic where the term “covidyceps” (covid + cordyceps…) is gaining traction!

Early reviews for Leech suggested that it was disturbing and “not for a weak stomach”, which I found intriguing. On its surface, Leech looked like a Victorian-style murder mystery, almost akin in setting to Bloodborne, and really, what could be more disturbing than a game where the “good ending” is you turning into a slug creature?

Leech ended up being fairly unique, but with shades of all sorts of different works. Bloodborne, sure, in terms of setting and general “wtf”ness (Leech put up a good showing but Bloodborne still has it beat in the “wtf” department). It’s very difficult to write a creepy Victorian medical story without a comparison to Frankenstein, obviously. The Thing, in terms of an invisible parasite stalking everyone (inside a sled dog, no less!). The doctor is, well, a doctor… and also self-medicating on analgesics while trying to solve medical mysteries, which is very Sherlock Holmes. At about the 50% mark I considered whether I should call this “Doctor Who: Transylvania”. The conversion rituals of the Institute reminded me a lot of the conversion rituals of The Witcher. The spread of pathogens vaguely reminded me a bit of Blood Music. The mysterious Ventigaux are giant mutated (?) ice-elk things which reminded me a bit of Year Walk. And this world features a broken moon, which reminded me a little bit of Seveneves (although I bet Stephenson would have A LOT of things to say about how well this world recovered from that event). So it’s a lovely blend of all kinds of interesting concepts that amalgamates into something new.

The premise is that a doctor from The Institute is called to a sleepy northern town when the previous doctor was killed under mysterious circumstances. Little does anyone know, the doctors are actually all part of a parasitic network that controls bodies all over the globe. The parasitic network lost contact with the doctor in this town and wants to figure out what happened to the body. So the new doctor actually retains all memory (up to the point of losing contact) of the old doctor, and is simultaneously in contact with the entire network of doctors, which I imagine is incredibly handy when trying to diagnose symptoms and such—a veritable parasitic internet of medical knowledge that works instantly with a thought. The doctor examines the body of the old doctor and discovers it was infected. With a parasite. A parasite that is very tenacious and very difficult to kill.

The chapter ends on a cliffhanger line of “It appears I have a competitor.” DUN DUN dunnnnnnnnnn

And can I just say, this book did a marvelous job of using cliffhangers. There were plenty of chapter ends where I just had to smile at what a perfect punctuation point the final line laid down. The author does a great job of using hooks to keep you turning pages. And I enjoyed the writing as a whole, for the most part. There’s a good use of foreshadowing and twists that were broadcast out in the open and yet still surprised me, and there are a lot of clever phrases, like “They’re here, they’ve heard my calls for help. I have to run.”, which I thought was a fabulous juxtaposition of calling for help and needing to escape. (Even though it’s also technically a comma splice. You can get away with those more in fiction, though.)

The worldbuilding was similarly well done. I’m a big fan of post-apoc, and at first glance you wouldn’t think that this would fall into that category, but the world unravels before you and you start getting glimpses into the past. This is not a fantastical world with invented contrivances… it is the ruins of Earth. (I mean, yes, they are invented contrivances. But it’s somehow different when it’s future Earth as opposed to magical alien planet where we can change the rules however we want). The way the backstory of Earth unfolds was satisfying, and wasn’t shoved into your face too bluntly. The author actually trusts you to make some inferences, which I appreciated. That said, there are also a lot of things that didn’t really seem to add up, so you do have to suspend a little bit of disbelief and just enjoy the ride.

As for the “weak stomach” part… the author is (in my understanding) an actual doctor, so the surgery scenes are vividly (and accurately, no holds barred) described. That’s one part of things, but there are also some major trigger warnings to be aware of, including miscarriage and sexual assault, all described almost as vividly. There’s also just a general “gross” tone to a lot of things, as one might expect when reading passages about a parasitic black ooze with pulsating and seeking tendrils that wants to nestle behind eyeballs.

I noticed some of the early reviews panned it for being “over-written”. I was at least halfway through it and thinking “I have no idea what those people are talking about.” It’s a verbose book, for sure. Even discarding the medical terminology, which can be a bit much if you’re not familiar with it (I have a biology degree and worked in veterinary medicine for a number of years so I only stumbled on the occasional term (like “trabeculated”!), but my Kindle dictionary cleared those up), there’s also a lot of Victorian-style language, and some affected accents (which I didn’t have too much difficulty with and actually found kind of fun, probably because I consume a lot of media involving Tolkien-style dwarves). Even then, though, I racked up a list of new vocabulary words like “dehisced” and “palimpsest”. I never found it pretentious, and it always felt like it fit the tone of the book.

And then I got to the 75% mark, and I thought to myself, “Oh.” The tone really shifts after some events late in the novel, and I think I would agree that those sections might fall into the “overwritten” category. It could be that those sections didn’t get quite as much editing as the rest (there’s at least one section where the doctor performs a bunch of actions, then painstakingly repeats all of it back to another character over the course of several pages. I really did not need to sit through that.), or it could be that the author was trying to say too much in a short period of time, because it felt like the end sequences were getting into an almost allegorical story that was trying to make a much bigger and more serious point. It felt a bit rushed and probably should have been spread a bit thinner over more of the book. I still didn’t think it was pretentious, though, just too thick.

All in all, though, I really enjoyed this book. There are some flaws, for sure, but it was a really enjoyable journey into a unique world with some unique concepts to explore.

Plot spoiler thoughts after the break:

Meet us by the Roaring Sea

Meet Us by the Roaring Sea by Akil Kumarasamy

My rating: 4 of 5 stars
SHAMELESS SELF PROMOTION: I talk about this book with my friend Rose on the Robot Elf Book Club podcast: https://sites.libsyn.com/431112/site/art-with-a-capital-a-meet-us-by-the-roaring-sea

I really loved this book. And if someone said “Oh yeah? What’s it about?” I’d be like “iunno…”

When I originally read the synopsis I thought “Sounds interesting, kind of like House of Leaves.” House of Leaves is a book where the main character reads a manuscript that was written by a blind man who watched a movie. Roaring Sea is about a main character who is translating a manuscript that no one will read, about a movement no one knows about. It wasn’t that far off of a comparison, to be honest. Roaring Sea doesn’t play with the medium the way House of Leaves did, but it has a deep dive into layers of connections that will appeal to anyone who likes to read into subtext.

Roaring Sea is a challenging read that will probably chase a lot of readers off. This felt like a capital-A-Art literature-style book which is something I do not normally do well with, but this time it really jumped out and spoke to me. I may not have understood what it was saying, but it spoke to me. The prose is beautiful, never straying too close to “purple prose” territory, and the themes are really touching and are as brutally relatable as they are uncomfortable. There are a lot of really interesting compare and contrasts between story elements, and I felt like I was missing a lot and wanted to know more about how it all interconnected. It’s not just a book where you re-read it and pick up on more themes, it’s more like a book where you read it dozens of times and then write a thesis about the themes. Basically, I felt like I need to read someone else’s thesis on this book. I need someone to explain it to me, because there’s no way I found all the nuances.

The book features a lot of strange, yet effective style choices. There are essentially two timelines: That of the main character (who may or may not be named Aya? There is a single line near the beginning that could have referred to them as ‘Aya’ but I wasn’t certain if it was intended as a name), set in the near future, and that of the manuscript the character is translating, set in the 1990s.

In the main character’s timeline, the POV is second tense. Reading everything described as “You are doing this” and “Your mother” and “You You You” is odd, but the author has a real knack for plausible ambiguity compounded by intensely human, relatable situations, and it all works almost like a brain worm where you start to feel like the book is somehow showing you a mirror of your own misremembered or forgotten actions. The book itself makes reference to the manuscript “taking over” the main character, making me feel that the use of second person was intended to have the same effect on the reader. In this timeline, all of the dialogue is presented in italics, which adds to the dreamlike feel of everything.

In the manuscript timeline, we are following a group of 17 medical students, and the POV is a collective “We” where we never follow a specific character, only the collective group. In this timeline, all dialogue is presented in quotation marks, making it feel much more present (even though it is occurring in the past…).

One of the challenges of the book is its structure. Scenes don’t always seem connected, or sometimes even coherent. There are no chapters, just marks indicating the end of scenes. Events seem to happen out of nowhere and sometimes leave you wondering why they were introduced. At times the only way to tell you’ve switched from the Main Character timeline into the manuscript timeline is to notice that the POV has shifted. But somehow, this disjointed structure works to build the story, and even enhances the themes of the book—a major theme of the book is memory (along with grief, suffering, technology, and motherhood, among others) and the scenes in the book feel disorienting, almost mimicking the recollections of someone with memory loss.

I almost feel like it might be a bit too ambitious. Like I said: I want to read someone’s thesis on it, because I found it difficult to follow, even after creating a list of characters and searching back through the Kindle to try to piece things together. The average reader isn’t going to put in that level of effort, and they’re likely to either give up or miss all the connections that are layered together, and for that reason I think I can’t award a full 5 stars. But for those who want to dive in, you might have a legit literary masterpiece to dissect here. Or perhaps you will dissect it and proceed to let me know how wrong that statement is, but I still think it will be worth the time it takes to read.

A Half-Built Garden

A Half-Built Garden by Ruthanna Emrys

My rating: 2 of 5 stars
SHAMELESS SELF-PROMOTION: I talk about this book with my friend Rose in the “Robot Elf Book Club” podcast: https://sites.libsyn.com/431112/site/001-a-half-built-garden (Content warning: I read the entire interspecies erotica scene out loud. You have been warned.)

Boy. What do I say about this book.

Aliens recognize that the Earth is dying due to climate change, so they show up to evacuate humans to a Dyson sphere and save us, and then humans are a bunch of whiny entitled bitches about it. And also there is an interspecies threesome with two women and a giant spider alien (who has lots of long tongues, and knows how to emulate hentai with his legs). This book caused me to add the “Unnecessary Erotica” tag to my blog. I was considering adding a “spider sex” tag but I figured there is a chance I will come across more unnecessary erotica, but spider sex seems pretty niche.

I think the only part of the book that description doesn’t cover is the part where you have to slog through dozens of pages of lectures about gender pronouns and non-binary preferences, and some low-key breeder philosophy about how children are the most important thing and being a mother is the most important goal. Basically, as a heterosexual woman who does not have and does not intend to have children, this book felt like it was straight-up “othering” me at some points, which is intensely ironic given the attempt at themes of freedom of choice and acceptance.

I gave it two stars because there are some neat ideas to explore, particularly around near-future technology and anthropology concepts, but ultimately there was far too much agenda-pushing and not enough actual worldbuilding. The book is set in a “near future” 60 years from now, in 2083. It’s essentially post-apoc, which is my favourite genre, but the reason I love post-apoc is because of the worldbuilding; what happened to this world and how did it get to be the way it is now? Half-Built Garden has almost no worldbuilding, which was very disappointing given how much the structure of the world has changed in 60 years. Countries essentially no longer exist (or DO they? NASA exists, which implies the USA might still exist. We wouldn’t know because the book doesn’t explain.), corporations are banished to artificial islands because everyone was sick of them fucking up the climate (but they essentially just sit on the islands and scheme up new ways to exploit everything, and even comically refer to their children as “trade goods”, so I guess that didn’t help much), and anarchistic “Watershed” communities have formed to protect and govern ecologically sensitive areas, like the Chesapeake area that our protagonist lives in. Even the climate change, which sets off the whole plot of the book, is barely described other than some mentions of increased hurricane activity and rivers changing routes.

Since it’s “near-future”, there are some nifty technological descriptions. Everyone has a “mesh” that can scan things a’la Star Trek, there’s various types of functional clothing like boots that offer increased sensitivity to “feel” the ground, and one of the characters has a prosthetic arm (though it is never described how she lost her arm or what benefits the arm actually has. It seems like it only exists to need to be charged at key plot points.). The Watersheds use “Dandelion networks” to crowdsource problem solving. You essentially post your problem, and then everyone contributes solutions, and the most upvoted solution wins. If you are an expert, your votes have more “weight”. It sounds very similar to something like StackOverflow or Quora or Reddit, right?

It seems like the Watersheds use the Dandelion network as their system of government. I don’t know if you’ve ever used Reddit, but the thought of using Reddit as a system of government is goddamn horrifying. Reddit inevitably turns into an echo chamber as people who are like-minded flock to a thread and brigade-downvote those who do not think like them. The Watersheds already sound like an isolated community of like-minded individuals who have broken off because they had radical disagreements with the rest of society. I can’t imagine how intensifying that in an echo chamber is going to help. Go to any politically-charged thread and sort by ‘controversial’ and you will see valid opinions and questions that have been brigaded to the basement for not following status-quo. And that’s when everyone has equal “weight”. In theory it makes sense for ‘experts’ to have more say in something, but it is a literal plot point that the characters lose “weight” because they do something the community disagrees with. That weight change has nothing to do with their expertise, and everything to do with their social standing in the community. It sounds a lot like a social credit system meshed with a governance system, and that is horrifying.

You know why it’s horrifying? Because as soon as I started getting a gist of how this system supposedly works, I was thinking “Oh no no no… this is way too easy to manipulate.” It’s an ongoing issue that Reddit threads are manipulated by bots. You are not interacting with real people; you are interacting with machines (and/or paid actors) that have been designed to downvote certain views, and promote other views. They are deliberately shaping the echo chamber with false interactions (and usually sprinkling ads for products into the mix) to sway public opinion. Well, you’ll never guess what happens in this book! The author probably saw bot-manipulation at work on Reddit and thought “Hey, I have a great idea for a plot!”

Our joke about this book was that it should be subtitled “What the hell, Judy?” because Judy is constantly making the weirdest decisions and she becomes such an unlikable protagonist that it really hurts the book. This whole book is rooted in a foundation of freedom of choice and acceptance, but Judy maintains a narrow-minded view of everything and openly judges anyone that doesn’t choose exactly what she would choose.

More spoileriffic complaining about the book, including the ending, because it annoyed me, after the break:

Fall (2022)

“Fall” and “Descent” are synonyms, more or less. One is a little more less-intentional than the other, but the action is more or less the same. Similarly, the movie Fall is essentially a synonym of the movie The Descent. When we started watching it my husband asked what kind of movie it was and I said “It sounds similar to Descent except they go up a tower instead of down into a cave.” I was not prepared for just how similar it was going to be to Descent, though.

This movie is practically plagiarism. The plot points are so template-like that it could be entirely coincidental rather than intentional, but every plot point is there. She loses her husband and precisely one year later her friend tries to snap her out of her grief by taking her on a dangerous trip. Things go wrong and they are stranded. They discover her friend was having an affair with the late husband and it threatens to place a rift in their friendship, even as they struggle to survive. Exhaustion and dehydration begin causing mind-tricks and they start losing track of reality. The movies are a palette-swap of each other, and the only notable difference is that Descent has demon-like creepy crawlies and Fall has maligned vultures who are just trying to survive, man. They’re just doing appropriate vulture things and searching for carrion and you’re being so mean to them for no reason!

Having said that, the movie certainly wasn’t bad. Unoriginal as all heck, obviously, but the tension is all there and keeps you engaged, even though you know exactly what is going to happen next. I was a little skeptical when we started, because how much mystery and suspense can there be when the set is like 5 feet square? At least in Descent they were exploring a huge unknown cave system. But somehow this movie pulls it off. And it’s beautifully shot. It’s really believable that the actors are standing on a 2000 ft tower, until you remember that it should be so windy up there that it’s unrealistic that they could have a conversation, and that they’re both in tank tops and really probably should be pretty chilly at that height, not to mention that the top of a tower that is unobstructed for miles in every direction should be the perfect place to get a cell signal (though I did get a chuckle out of them lifting their phones EVEN HIGHER into the air to try to get a signal). But god, watching them climb and strain to pull ropes and hanging from things made my arms feel exhausted, and it was an entertaining hour and a half for sure.

Prey (2022)

Prey (2022) is the latest installment in the Predator franchise, and it adds a twist of being set in the 1700s. We follow Naru, a Comanche woman who wants to be a warrior in a tribe that does not see women as warriors. Trained as a healer, she’s been practising her hunting skills and building to a warrior test where she must “hunt something that is also hunting you”. Instead, she ends up hunting the Predator itself.

Prey was great as a Predator movie—shit exploded and neon green glowing blood was spilled, and really what more can one ask for? The Comanche tribe seemed reasonably well depicted and done in a respectful way. But as a movie in general, it was actually pretty shit. The writing was amateur and formulaic. I know Predator movies aren’t typically a bastion of sparkling and innovative storytelling, but the plot uses a cliche template so transparent that it spoils itself. You know exactly what will happen from start to finish, so the remainder of this blog article won’t really be a spoiler. The main character had plot armour so ridiculously thick that you could tell me this was adapted from a 16 year old girl’s Predator fanfic and I would just say “Ah, yes. That makes the most sense.” Naru never once makes a mistake or shows a flaw, and she is belittled the entire time by every single named male character (except her brother, who only occasionally belittles her) simply because she is female (there is a “get back in the kitchen” style joke to kick things off, just in case you weren’t sure about their opinions of women). And then she goes back to her healing training and is belittled by the women, too. But, naturally, Naru is in fact better at hunting and tracking than all the men who belittle her, and also amazing at healing herbs of course, because she is the best at everything and also has a cute dog who is equally best at everything. She’s also subjected to multiple extremely violent traumatic head injuries but wakes up perfectly fine when the plot demands it. Pure fanfic-level writing.

Let me count the ways this movie annoyed me:

Horrible CGI animals. The Predator’s CGI was decent and must have been where all the budget went, because the animals were horrifically bad. Combine that with bad writing, and you get goofy animals that look ridiculous and do not behave anything anywhere near believably. There is a sequence where an ant crawls on the Predator’s invisible boot, and then is swiftly eaten by a mouse, who is swiftly eaten by a snake, who is swiftly dispatched by the Predator. I think the intent of this scene was to show that the Predator is observing to see who “wins” and then challenges the victor, because it wants to prove that it is on top of the Predatory food chain, right? But the sequence was so ridiculous that my husband called it “A saturday morning cartoon.”

None of these animals behave appropriately. A wolf is hunting alone—maybe it was kicked out of its pack for some reason; that can happen. So it tries to hunt a rabbit, and the rabbit runs away from it. The rabbit runs away in a straight line. Like 20 seconds of care and attention to making the rabbit zigzag a bit would have made this sequence less ridiculous. And then the wolf runs into the Predator and… takes it on? Solo? /facepalm. The cougar that just straight up challenges people without stalking them; big cats typically don’t just fly into the face of their prey. And the bear. Good god, the whole bear sequence is about where I gave up on this movie. Not only did it look horrible and, once again, behaves in a ridiculously over the top aggressive way that is not at all how a bear would behave, but Naru dives into a beaver lodge to get away from it and somehow the bear is completely stymied by a pile of sticks and mud and can’t get to her even though it has been smashing logs left and right and the lodge is thin enough that you can see through it. Perhaps all the animals in the 1700s were afflicted by a rare, less-lethal form of rabies that made them really aggressive and also really stupid. And also really slow, I guess, since Naru can run faster than a deer somehow.

Naru puts her healing powers to work by collecting petals off of a plant. These petals appear to slow your metabolism, which is helpful for things like poison or… stopping you from bleeding to death, I guess (I’m pretty sure your heart still needs to pump somewhat but hey, I am not a healer woman, I just have a biology degree.) This actually sent me down a rabbit hole, and while the flower in Prey is never identified as a real-world flower, it seems to resemble Calendula, or Marigold, which does have healing properties. However, even though Calendula was cited as being used to staunch blood flow during the civil war, I couldn’t find any actual description of how it would do that (beyond stuffing an open wound with a bandage, which will staunch bleeding regardless of the herbs included inside). I only found uses for it in promoting healing by increasing blood flow to a wound, which seems like the opposite of staunching bleeding. Naru’s magical orange flower petals also reduce your body temperature, which is at least somewhat logical given the other described effects. But they apparently reduce your body temperature SO MUCH that you appear blue on infrared and are therefore invisible to Predators. And despite your body temperature being so incredibly low that you don’t appear on infrared, you can move around normally as if nothing was different. Also this effect happens literally within 10 seconds of Naru sprinkling some petals on your lips, apparently. Those are some potent fucking flowers, man. (Marigolds will not do this for you, FYI).

The predator itself falls victim to Naru’s plot armor. Not only was it foiled by her magic petals, it simply cannot compete with her stunning innovation of tying a rope to an axe. She does eventually pull some tricks to defeat it so it’s not like she just walks up to a Predator and wins in straight-up hand-to-hand combat, but much like the animals, the Predator is just stupid. This is supposed to be the apex hunter of the universe? I hope it was the dumb lazy one who got sent to Earth because it’s a fuckup that they didn’t expect to come back.

Despite the facepalm-inducing CGI and the lazy, amateur, formulaic plot… it was a thoroughly enjoyable movie. It’s a Predator movie and you’re there to see shit blow up, and shit blows up. And unlike the last, absolutely horrible Predator movie, the female protagonist does not run off into the sunset while holding hands with the Predator, which was really my greatest concern when I heard they were making yet another movie.

For a direct-to-streaming movie you can’t complain too much I suppose. I am still going to, because if the writing had been better this could have been a really stunning movie, but hey, it’s a Predator movie.

The Watcher (2022)

We went into The Watcher knowing nothing about it other than it was a horror/suspense movie that had really good ratings (especially for a horror movie). At the time of watching it was sporting an 88% on Rotten Tomatoes and a 6.3 on IMDB. Typically anything over a 5 on IMDB is a good sign for a horror movie, and the audience score on Rotten Tomatoes (which is far more accurate than the critic score, yet not the score that is first presented to you…) was 67%. And it has the main actress from It Follows which was really excellent, which for comparison is currently sporting scores of 98% critic / 66% audience, and a 6.8 on IMDB. I was very optimistic about The Watcher.

The Watcher is trash. Absolute garbage. This movie made me angry. The existence of this movie makes me angry. The fact that there are so many good reviews offends me. The fact that the only bad reviews seem to pick at the plot being “too cliche” or using too many common tropes bewilders me. Did I watch a different movie? There are definitely multiple movies with this title, but it SEEMS like all these reviews are about the same movie I watched, which was from 2022, directed by Chloe Okuno, and starring Maika Monroe. I had to flee to my blog to tell the internet how fucking bad this movie is because I do not understand how everyone else liked it.

Stupid characters are a hallmark of horror movies. Stupid characters doing stupid shit that makes you yell “NO DON’T DO IT YOU IDIOT” is why a mere 5+ on IMDB means a horror movie might still be worth watching. The Watcher didn’t quite have the typical horror movie brand of stupidity; instead it had completely unlikable characters moping around and whining and acting counterproductive to all logic while not doing a single thing to actually defend themselves or resolve the situation they are in (not even something as simple as HANGING CURTAINS). It was unwatchable and the ending was infuriatingly illogical, so you didn’t even get a satisfying reward for having sat through all of it. The atmosphere is lauded in many reviews, and it did have a great, tense atmosphere fitting of a movie of this sort, but I couldn’t enjoy it because all of the tension was set up by the complete lack of ANY attempt to rationally mitigate the situation, and the completely callous and asshole reactions from her husband and other bystanders. It wasn’t even at the point where I was rooting against the characters and looking forward to them being killed by the murderer by the end—I simply couldn’t stand any of them.

This movie is trash. Do not watch it.

My spoiler-filled synopsis will continue after the break:

Dark Pictures Anthology: Man of Medan

Man of Medan is another game from the makers of Until Dawn—horror games in the style of a point and click adventure game, but with cinematic twists. The real selling point of these games is how your decisions shape the story, and since they are horror games your real goal is to get all the protagonists to the end intact. (Unless you don’t like them…)

Until Dawn followed the horror movie playbook to the letter, and Man of Medan takes a similar vein but in a different setting. In this game, the group of teenagers are out on a boat, and encounter a floating ghost ship. And then things go sideways, of course.

I did enjoy this game, but there are many caveats:

• The controls are terrible. The characters are slow, and the controls feel sluggish to respond, so trying to turn to walk through a doorway can be a chore. The fixed camera means that you’ll be pushing a button to walk one direction, and then change scenes so that button is now making you walk a different direction. I walked into the scenery constantly, and having to fiddle around to get an interact point to light up really reminds you that you’re playing a clunky game, which ruins the immersion. Also, why does EVERY SINGLE ITEM I pick up have to be flipped over? It’s like they added the whole “flip over an item in your hand to examine it” mechanic and then added it to literally everything. I don’t feel like I am investigating an object, I feel like flipping every object is mandatory because you’ve placed everything upside down by default for some reason.
  
• I felt like I got railroaded into scene changes by clicking on certain things or walking through certain doorways, triggering a cutscene and pushing the plot along before I was ready. There was no indication that this particular door or interact point would end the scene, so I missed a number of secrets. It felt like I had no actual agency over the plot at those points.
  
• There were a lot of bugs and quality control issues. I had one hard crash where it froze, and experienced a lot of things like scenes repeating themselves, items clipping through scenery, or scenery blinking in and out. It was very obvious where your choices could have affected things, because the set pieces that could be altered were not behaving appropriately. The game was clearly lacking polish, especially in the end sequences (where they probably did less testing, so as not to give away the ending? Or just because it was developed last…)
  
• Aside from the quality control, there were some really poor design decisions on display, like having the characters speaking in a foreign language (and thus subtitled) during a rhythm QTE event where the player has to focus on the QTE and thus cannot read the subtitles. How did this make it through playtesting?
  
• The story was not exactly scary or unsettling (maybe a little creepy, but not really “horrifying”), so they fell back to an over-reliance on jump scares. Every twenty feet a corpse part would fall out of a closet or something and the camera would rapidly zoom in on it accompanied by a max-volume screeching violin noise. My husband even commented “Wow, that game is loud…” from the other side of the room, when I had the volume set to a level where was struggling to hear the character voices most of the time. The artificial jump scares are cheap and tiresome and far, far too frequent and predictable.
  
• The game prides itself on being affected by your decisions. Your choices do affect the plot points, but what actually affects your outcomes are the QTEs. On several occasions I had to fumble for keys because a QTE popped up, missed one, and ended the scene with something horrible happening. This reliance on QTEs means that your outcomes are not affected by your decisions at all, but instead by your reflexes, which is lame.
  
• It’s short: about four hours. If you want to get all the achievements you can probably expect to play through it 3 or 4 times to get all the outcomes, but the gameplay itself doesn’t seem like it will change that much, so you’re really just playing through to find the decision points to change the number of protagonists that are alive at the end. To be fair, I have not played through it a second time, so maybe it jazzes it up a bit more than that.
  
• The game ends on an unskippable ad for their other games, which I did not appreciate. Yes, it is an anthology, so it’s like a “Next time on …” deal, but I purchased the anthology already, so it was basically an unskippable spoiler. If it was skippable I wouldn’t mind so much, but it really came across as forced advertising, especially since the menu itself also advertises the other games in the series.

Having complained about all of that, I do still somewhat recommend the game. If you can get it at an appropriate price point (it’s worth ~$15, I’d say) it’s probably worth 4 hours of your time. I got the first three games of the anthology for 40 dollars total, and it looks like the regular price is 40 dollars per game, which is ludicrous. If you see it on sale, especially near October when it’s time to play creepy games, it’s worth a look, but do temper your expectations.

Everything Everywhere All at Once

I don’t really know how to describe this movie other than that you should watch it as soon as possible. The only things you really need to know about it are that Michelle Yeoh gives a performance that is absolutely worthy of an Oscar, but that she will probably be snubbed the nomination because the academy will turn their nose up at a kung fu movie with floppy dongs and buttplugs as integral parts of the fight choreography.

I am not being facetious about any of that previous statement. Michelle Yeoh gives a mind-blowing and heartfelt performance that tugs on the heartstrings and makes you think, while also showing her martial arts chops in scenes involving buttplugs. (And also HOW can she be 60 and still be that flexible??!?!?!?!?!?)

This movie must be seen to be believed. It runs a tad long, it got a little bit preachy at the end, and I was not nearly high enough to watch it, but it is absolutely an amazing movie you must see.

[Update] WOOO! Yeoh got the award despite the buttplugs

Lost Ark

Lost Ark is a Korean MMO that has successfully made its way to the North American market. If New World is any indication, the North American market is desperate for a new MMO, so they picked a good time to try to break in.

I have many thoughts on this game, and the summary is basically that after almost 200 hours of casual play I can’t say it’s bad, but I also can’t say it’s good. Click through to read all my many thoughts.

Inscryption

This game is a masterpiece.

I can’t even really tell you anything about it, because playing it is part of the journey. Do not be fooled by its exterior: it is not just a gussied up Slay The Spire clone. There is a deep narrative to explore and a lot of mysteries. The game goes through like four paradigm shifts before you’re done.

You must go forth and experience Inscryption.

Encanto

Nursing my New Years hangover, I decided to lie on the couch and watch some Disney action, and fired up Encanto.

Maybe it was the hangover, but this movie just did not do it for me. It was okay, certainly—the animation was mind-blowingly gorgeous and I found the story interesting—but I’m usually in love with the songs in a Disney musical (I have a whole collection of soundtracks like the nerd I am) and these ones just felt………. not good. I am not even the slightest bit interested in this soundtrack. I don’t even know if I can articulate what it was. The songs didn’t mesh freely into the narrative like they usually do. It almost felt like we had to take a time out to do a musical number before we could move on. I listened to the Moana soundtrack daily for months after watching that movie. I did not have that feeling with Encanto at all. It all felt forced. I’m not sure what the problem was… maybe because in Moana the songs complemented the exposition, and in Encanto it feels like they are taking the place of it?

I went into this movie completely blind. I haven’t been watching the releases and honestly didn’t even know there was a new Disney movie out until we were browsing to see if Spider-Man is streaming anywhere yet. So I had absolutely no idea that the soundtrack was headed by a big name like Lin-Manuel Miranda. That might actually be the problem… it’s quite possible that they threw all of their budget at a big name for the soundtrack and propped the movie up around the songs, instead of focusing on integrating plot and music into a cohesive whole. That’s how it feels to me, anyway. But on the other hand… Miranda also wrote the songs for Moana which did not have any of these problems! So, I dunno. Maybe the success of that movie led to them giving him a raise for this one and blowing their writing budget.

And such a huge cast where only two characters really do anything. I’ve seen speculation online that they’re deliberately setting up a series for Disney+ and it seems a bit too plausible, and might help explain why things felt so disjointed. They weren’t focused on making a standalone good movie, they were focused on getting blockbuster names on the cover and setting up a future revenue stream. I hope this isn’t a portent of Disney forsaking solid movie storytelling to cater to Disney+ revenue streams in the future…

The plot was interesting but it had some issues for sure. The setting was interesting, the cast was interesting, but a lot of it felt very shallow or threadbare, like they didn’t spend enough time on exposition for the amount of content they tried to cram in. I know, I know, it’s a kids movie blah blah blah, but Disney movies usually at least have a decent plot flow to them. This felt like a rehash of Frozen with a lot of the same story beats, up to and including a limp ending that boils down to “and then… the solution is LOVE!!!”

I feel like it would have flowed a bit better if the confrontation with Abuela came early, rather than late. If it started the whole journey, rather than resolved it. I think they were trying to set up Abuela as the “surprise twist villain” but it just didn’t work that way (especially since she wasn’t really even treated as a villain after the reveal), and it would have made a lot more sense if everything crumbled and the family worked their way through the rebuild as the bulk of the film, revealing their secret inner worries and the nuances of their family interactions as they work together (or don’t) to rebuild, and eventually culminating in the restoration of the charm as they make amends. As it was, I felt the characters were behaving very irrationally in the beginning and it wasn’t explained well enough why Mirabel was being shunned (for something that seemed entirely out of her control—again, shades of Frozen, except that Mirabel can’t even be perceived as dangerous like Elsa…) or why Bruno was outcast (for literally doing what he was asked to do???) and how any of that tied together to the themes. The link could have been made clearer, and the message more powerfully presented as it unfolds. As it is, it feels kind of like an afterthought that I had to think back to tie together once I was done. (Granted, again: hangover might not have been helping. But if I hungover me can’t follow it then the subtleties are going to go right over your kid’s heads. Well, at least for the first 15 viewings I guess. Which is like, the first day they start watching it, right?)

Not to mention, the overall theme is “You are the miracle” and “You are not just your gifts”. Luisa’s entire character arc is how she thinks she will be worthless if she doesn’t have her gift. And the denouement is “We love you for you, not for your gift. But also, here are your gifts back. Please keep being superheroes forever.” It would have been a much more powerful message if they had spent the bulk of the movie gift-less and succeeded despite that, instead of having their gifts for the whole movie, losing them briefly and panicking, and then getting them right back and carrying on. Ah but of course, you can’t make a Disney+ spinoff of these characters if they don’t have their gifts, right? (well, it could always be a prequel, I suppose)

All in all, a solid movie but definitely a bit disappointing.

Poppy War: Burning God

The Burning God by R.F. Kuang
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

Was Mao Zedong a petulant screeching child who lucked into victory despite having absolutely no agency of his own? Because if Rin is based on him, that’s the impression I’m getting from Burning God.

I really had some optimism that Dragon Republic faltering for me was just a “middle book syndrome” issue and a bit of a misstep as Rin evolved from “hopeful protagonist” to “anti-hero” status, and that book three would complete the evolution and redeem the trilogy. Let’s recap: Rin spent book two nullified, her powers locked, making absolutely zero of her own decisions, and loving every minute of licking other people’s boots like a beloved puppy that wriggles with anticipation of its master looking down and patting it on the head. And then she is inevitably used and betrayed and gets all pissy about it and runs away (no, wait, she fucked that up too and had to be bailed out) and starts book three looking to rule her own army and start a vendetta war now that she can blow shit up again.

And she starts book three whining about how the guys she recruited to her side won’t let her command anything. WHAT???

I get that the whole point is to show her slide into supervillain dictator status but she’s like… not sliding anywhere. There’s no character progression here. She’s just doing evil things, because someone else told her it would be the right thing to do, and then thinking to herself “That was pretty evil and I should feel bad about it. But I liked doing it.” That’s not a subtle way of showing a character sliding into chaos, allowing the reader to watch with horror as a character makes what seems to them to be reasonable decisions with whatever consequences they deem necessary. That is straight-up telling the reader “This character is making the wrong decision, and they know it’s wrong, but they’re doing it anyway, and they liked doing the wrong thing”. It’s unsatisfying and disappointing with the amount of potential here.

What baffles me is that people are reviewing these books as if Rin is a beloved protagonist. It’s widely stated that Rin is supposed to be an anti-hero that is based on the communist tyrant Mao Zedong. In the author’s own words: “The question the trilogy tries to answer is: how does somebody go from being an irrelevant, backwater, peasant nobody to being a megalomaniac dictator capable of killing millions of people?” Rin’s terrible decisions lead to death and destruction, and she ultimately destroys herself. I feel like it should be a cautionary tale at best, but maybe I am just not a Maoist? It does seem like this series strikes a different chord in the Asian audience, due to the real history that is tackled throughout, and I’ve never been much of a history buff. Nothing in this series struck a chord in me. I recognized the allegories, and was disappointed by how shallow they felt. The reactions confuse me. I don’t know what the intended thesis statement of this series was, because it doesn’t appear to be the one I got…

Mixed in with the history lesson is an injected magic system. The shamanism was intriguing in Poppy War, but was all but absent in Dragon Republic due to Rin being sealed and the entirety of the Cike being killed essentially off screen without casting a single spell. In Burning God it basically acts as Rin’s trump card. Any time she wants her way, she throws a fireball around to intimidate people. That’s her one move, and it gets really tiresome. By the end of this book I was left feeling like the magic systems didn’t add much to the story. Hey you know what would get this shaman out of this situation they’re in? Calling a fucking god! Oh wait they can’t because opium smoke or something I guess. It added a layer of anime to a history lesson, feeling out of place, and not following a concrete rule system other than “whatever is convenient for the plot right now”.

I don’t know. This series is so popular (and was recommended to me by someone whose opinions I trust) that I feel like I must have missed something major along the way. I appreciate the historical lens, but the fictional window dressing is so amateur that I feel like I would have been better off reading an actual textbook than slogging through this.

Poppy War: Dragon Republic

The Dragon Republic by R.F. Kuang
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

I didn’t hate the first of the Poppy War books, I just found it disappointing in a number of ways. So, with optimism, I dove into the second book. I thought that with a little experience, and a break from cliche templates into something unique, there was the potential to elevate this series to the status that all the accolades suggest it should have.

This review will contain spoilers. Not overt ones, but enough that if you are looking forward to reading this book you may want to hold off. If, however, you have already read the book and have come here to froth at the mouth over the poor rating I gave it, let’s do this!

The Poppy War

The Poppy War by R.F. Kuang
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

When I started reading this book, it felt 100% formulaic. The template was so clearly visible that I was predicting events and character traits several chapters in advance. Then, it shattered the template and at last deviated somewhere unexpected. It became… a Wikipedia article.

I certainly didn’t hate this book, but the writing felt amateur and the characters are flat. I was at first worried that Rin would be a Mary-Sue. It’s all very Harry Potter-esque: orphaned protagonist discovers they have special abilities and overcome all odds to realize them despite the typical sources of adversity. Rin couldn’t fail. Her mentor is impressed by her abilities. Even when she felt she was failing, oh hey look you’re the top of the class and everyone is amazed by you!

But then it all takes a turn into the left field and breaks the template, which is good, because the template is a little too predictable now, but it’s also bad, because the character of Rin does not grow. She starts off as a naive but determined protagonist, learning as she goes, discovering secrets, and making poor choices but hopefully learning from them to improve herself to overcome the next challenge. And then, once she’s finally coming to a point where she has earned that power… she becomes an empty shell. She loses all of that determination and spends all of her time being baffled until things are explained to her, and being grumpy about what people tell her to do even though she needed them to explain it to her.

Rin has a lot of potential to be interesting, but she becomes completely unsympathetic by the end. Not because of her actions, but because of her whining. A lot of time that could have been spent exploring the nuances of other characters is spent listening to Rin wallow in her thoughts. As a result, Rin is an unlikable protagonist and her supporting cast is a bunch of shallow cut-outs that leave you wanting to know more. I can barely tell Suni and Baji apart, let alone tell you anything deeper about their motivations.

The attempt at a “shades of grey” buildup to Rin’s decisions is appreciated, but it fell flat. Instead of either rooting for her and supporting her decisions, or watching with agonizing tension as she is dragged down a spiral, I was mostly just exhausted by her sullen stubbornness and the heavy-handed allegory messaging. There was a lot of potential for subtlety here, getting us to invest in Rin as a character and then watch in horror as it unravels, but it doesn’t connect. Instead, the book pulls back out to focus on the historical contexts, and neglects the development of the characters that are navigating it.

I mostly found this book frustrating because of the unrealized potential, but I did appreciate what it attempted to do.

Host (2020)

My husband has the October horror itch almost two months early, so he found a list of “best horror movies ever” (and discarded all the lists he disagreed with) and decided we’d do a mega horror countdown to Halloween, watching one (or two) movies a night and ending with the best ones on Halloween itself. First up on that list was Host.

“The Stephanie Meyer book???” I said, and momentarily horrified him (how apropos), but no, not “The Host“, just “Host“.

The movie has this for a description:

“Six friends hire a medium to hold a seance via Zoom during lockdown, but they get far more than they bargained for as things quickly go wrong. When an evil spirit starts invading their homes, they begin to realize they might not survive the night.” The tagline is “Someone new has joined the meeting”.

Now, if you’re anything like us, you read that, laughed, and moved on to the next movie. I actually snickered again when I looked it up (to make sure it wasn’t actually “The Host”) but when I checked the ratings I was pleasantly surprised. It actually holds a 100% on Rotten Tomatoes right now which is pretty impressive for a horror movie, let alone a gimmicky pandemic horror movie.

Here’s one more rating: it was really fucking good. I’m glad we found an internet listicle that made us check it out because we absolutely would have passed on it otherwise.

There’s not exactly anything surprising in the plot. The description above pretty much sets it up for you. They hold a Zoom seance, and bad shit happens. But the movie uses the medium very cleverly. We’re all familiar with Zoom now, to the point where I played the movie full screen and the Zoom interface popped up and I pushed buttons to try to make the interface go away, popping up the player controls overtop of the movie, and then internally doing a mega facepalm as I realized what happened. I actually laughed out loud with delight when the credits played by opening the participants window in Zoom, too. Bravo.

The movie itself is gripping. It takes just a little bit too long to get to the seance which makes the character introduction sequence a bit tedious, but once things get rolling there were parts that even managed to trigger my anxiety a bit. There was only one singular jump scare scene that felt excessive to me, near the end when they probably felt they had to ramp it up and maybe got a little too excited trying to make it feel hectic. The rest was a slow burn of tension that actively makes you feel claustrophobic and helpless. None of the characters act overtly stupid (although I did occasionally want to yell “TURN ON THE FUCKING LIGHTS FIRST YOU IDIOT”) and all of their decisions and reactions feel natural and unforced (other than ensuring that their camera/phone comes with them when they explore every little noise), which is refreshing in the horror genre. I think the only thing that bothered me and took me out of it a bit was the occasional closeup of someone’s face, which was intended to highlight their reactions (and possibly highlight when the director thought someone had a particularly good performance for a scene) but it actually distracted me a lot because Zoom does not behave that way. If the person is not speaking, it should not maximize their portrait, and that’s all I could think about whenever it did one of those kinds of cuts.

It actually reminded me (in a good way, despite being a more mediocre movie) of Unfriended, which was another horror movie that took place entirely on Skype. (For the young’uns, Skype is a program we used for video chat roughly a millennia ago. No one uses it anymore.) It’s a very similar concept, although Host did a better job in almost every aspect, particularly when it comes to making it feel like an authentic computer experience. All of their references are things you will understand after having gone through a year and a half of pandemic-fuelled Zoom interactions, and you will appreciate every one of them. As a computer nerd, Unfriended did a lot of things that made me go “Well that’s not right…”, but other than the aforementioned portrait closeups, Host didn’t really do anything to trigger my internal technology pedant. I probably missed something and I’m sure the Internet has documented every single one of the goofs visible, but if they exist they weren’t enough to distract me.

Glancing over my review for Unfriended, one of the major differences that makes Host stand out is that I didn’t hate the characters. Seriously, I don’t think I was rooting for any of them to die! Has that ever happened to me in a horror movie before?? I may have to reflect on this.

Another thing Host does well? It doesn’t overstay its welcome. The movie is only 57 minutes long, which is just long enough for it to make its point and be done with it. Nothing is dragged out. It hits all the appropriate notes and takes a bow, and I appreciate it for that.

Host is a must-watch for the pandemic Halloween seasons.

[edit] I am skimming through some of the negative reviews and lol. Most of these are like “IT WASN’T SCARY I WASN’T SCARED!! YOU’RE DUMB IF THIS SCARED YOU!” which feels a lot like someone who is so burned out on the horror genre that they’d hate any movie, or someone who is desperately trying to prove they are not a pussy because a movie scared them. God damn people are angry about the characters taking their laptops with them to check out noises, though. Yes it did feel contrived, but would you rather the entire movie be the characters walking away from their computers and then screaming in the other room? C’mon.

Pig

If you have ever wondered what a crossover between John Wick and Ratatouille would look like (and really now, who hasn’t?), look no further than Pig, the movie where Nicholas Cage plays a hermit celebrity chef with an (implied) eidetic memory who relentlessly hunts down some truffle sellers who steal his truffle pig. Except, instead of being a badass assassin, he cooks them delicious meals and makes them cry. And also gets punched in the face repeatedly, which is never adequately explained.

This movie has some absolutely phenomenal acting (yes, even from Cage, but with a very special mention for David Knell who was in the movie for like 10 whole minutes and put on one of the most amazing facial performances I think I have ever seen), and a nonsensical plot that zips from scene to scene in a contrived fashion to make the points it wants to make. It feels like it makes sense until you spend a few minutes thinking about some of the individual events, and then you just have to go “????”. But the underlying message is still good.

Do note: don’t go in expecting a lighthearted zany tale. This story is about grief and healing. There is very little in the way of levity to be found here and it will almost certainly not lift your mood.

I don’t know if it deserves the 97% it currently has or if that is just the cult popularity of Cage propping it up, but it is absolutely worth investigating if only so you can go “wtf?” with the rest of us and then ultimately decide it was worth the time invested.

Seveneves

Seveneves by Neal Stephenson

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


I was in the mood for a good post-apocalyptic story, and Seveneves had recently been mentioned by a coworker so I thought “An exploding moon causing the evacuation of Earth? That sounds interesting!”

I read post-apoc because I like the worldbuilding of it. What happened? What was the response to it? What happens next? What does the world look like afterward? What has changed?
But I also really love the survival aspects of it. How did they innovate to succeed in these circumstances? Did they do anything clever or unusual? Unexpected?

Seveneves has all of those things (except the “What happened” part. What happened? The moon exploded! Why? shrug guess we’ll never know!), and it’s in a unique situation where they literally cannot return to Earth, which throws a whole new wrench into the resources they have to use. By all accounts, I should have loved it.

But the book just could not get out of its own way. This was not a fiction novel, this was a speculative documentary in text format.

I’m sure everyone is familiar with the adage of “Show, don’t tell”. This book shows you lots of stuff. And then immediately tells you about it. Like, holy shit. Okay. I am not an aerospace engineer, and I am not going to understand the mechanics behind everything being described so I appreciate some explanation… and I certainly appreciate the level of detail and the depth of research behind it. I know there is an audience out there that will read this and be like “Yesssss! Tell me about how these space suits are constructed!” But I am not that audience. Stop telling me about the space suits and start telling me what they do with the space suits. Stop taking a paragraph-length aside to explain every single acronym.

The worst part was, I couldn’t even skim effectively because it was interspersed with actual plot, but so sparsely that it was easy to miss if you skimmed too fast. A conversation would have one line of dialogue, then three pages of explaining some science doohickey they had just mentioned, then another line of dialogue, then another three pages of explanations… I know this is an attempt to appease both types of readers but I feel like it’s mostly just going to annoy both of us. I had to fish dialogue out from the buckets of science facts, and the scientists kept having their speculative documentary interrupted by dialogue.

The third part of the book was actually the worst, which is really unfortunate. The evac from Earth was interesting, although cumbered with overly detailed descriptions of things I was somewhat already familiar with and thus not all that interested in (e.g. space suits and how they function). The second part was interesting because it described how they proceeded to survive, which is the part I was craving. That, too, was cumbered with descriptions, but at least they were mostly novel things. The third part was a description of how it all played out, 5000 years later. I got to this part and was like “Oh yeah, 70% of the way into the book we’re FINALLY getting somewhere!”

Alas, no, we were not. This part of the book, perhaps because I was so interested to see what had transpired, was painfully bogged down with descriptions. And not descriptions of the things I WANTED to know about! Why is Kath named “Kath Two”? What happened to “one”? Ironically, we aren’t going to tell you that, for possibly the first time in this entire novel. Instead, let’s describe her tent! Then, oh hey she saw something that sounds really important for the plot! But we’re going to describe an elevator for 5 pages instead.

The things I really wanted to hear about were reserved for “plot progress” I suppose, but there were so many new things that had popped up in the 5000 years between books that we never get to the goddamn plot. Your space station is really cool and it’s great that you can describe 5000 years of them building it to me, but I want to know what is happening on the Earth for fuck’s sake!

And the descriptions of how the races had developed was interesting, certainly, but I felt it was a little too contrived how everything always folded back to the original Eves. I mean, yes, they were literally the entire human race and it makes sense that they are baked into everything that exists now, but 5000 years later we’re still using the original code programmed by the eves? 5000 years of offspring genetically engineered for intelligence and no one advanced the source code at all? And the only thing we watch on TV are clips from after the last book ended? It felt like a really contrived way to expand on the plot of the previous book further, when what I really wanted was plot from this book.

Things didn’t get much better when they finally did get to Earth, either. A 5000 year old wooden Craftsman branded handle? I’m afraid I just don’t accept that. Maybe if it were 100 years old, but not 5000.

Seveneves was very promising, and almost hit a lot of notes that hooked me, but it was ultimately very disappointing because it wouldn’t just get to the point. This novel will be spectacular for a certain kind of audience, but apparently it is just not for me. I would have loved the plot of the novel to be separated out (which would probably only be, like, what 200 pages?) and all the rest in appendices or something, available for me to marvel at but not in my way all the time. As it was, I spent too much time skimming the science to get to the plot.

If this does make it into a movie format I will be excited to watch, because then it can show me the cool space suits instead of spending 5 pages describing them.

Nomadland

I am trying to solidify my thoughts on this movie. It was not a bad movie—not in the slightest. Does Frances McDormand deserve the Oscar for best actress? Fuck yes. Does Nomadland deserve the Oscar for best movie? Ennnhhh…

I think my quibble with it is that it doesn’t know what it is trying to be. Even though the plot is poignant and powerful, you have to sift through the sand to actually find it. The rest of the time the movie is trying to be a pseudo-documentary with lots of disconnected snippets that, together, paint a picture of a life and a lifestyle… but individually they leave you wondering what the point was.

I did a bit of reading and it turns out that description might literally be the case. The movie is based on a book, which is a collection of stories of real people who live like nomads in vans. Many of those people play themselves in the movie, so it is almost a literal documentary. Except that the character of Fern was invented for the movie. Her backstory is real, and is essentially an amalgamation of the people who were displaced from the town of Empire (which is also real), but she herself is fictional.

This movie is a documentary that got distracted with fiction. Fern’s story is powerful and moving and thought-provoking, but instead of plumbing those depths, you’re left with ambiguous hints of what it all means (which people in reviews are more than happy to dig up and lay out for you), while constantly going on side paths to explore the lifestyles on display, most of which never do more than help you take a couple more steps toward the finale. It feels like I have almost an opposite opinion on this than a lot of other reviewers, who view Fern as a mere vehicle to get a glimpse into the lives of everyone else. (There’s probably a van pun in there somewhere if I could be bothered to find it). The “slice of life” expositions are interesting, but without Fern to tie it together it’s really nothing more than a Netflix-style documentary that you might have on in the background. And while they do set the stage for Fern, since it all inspired the creation of her character, I’m not sure that the movie was better for not digging deeper into Fern herself.

Without the absolutely stunning performance from McDormand, I’m not sure this movie would have worked at all. Frances McDormand should get the Oscar for best picture too. She earned it.

The Mitchells vs the Machines

If you’ve read many entries here before, you’ll know that I am an unabashed animation nerd. Netflix basically demanded that I watch The Mitchells vs the Machines and I was like “okay.” I certainly had high hopes when I peeked at the current reviews and it held a 98%.

I looked around a little more after finishing it and all the reviews are absolutely glowing. Everyone fucking loved this movie.

Everyone but me. I feel it necessary to voice my dissent because this movie absolutely did not get 98% in my book. I even started to wonder if I am maybe just not enjoying animation as much as I used to, because I feel like there is no fucking way Soul should have won best animated film at the Oscars, either. It was okay, but Oscar-worthy? Ennnhhhh no. It was a fine movie, sure, but I really didn’t feel it was Pixar’s best work. It felt like it was retreading storylines and not really doing anything innovative with them. BUT. Onward fucking blew me away. And Soul won over Onward??!??? Something is fucking wrong here and I’m not convinced it’s me.

Anyway. This review is about The Mitchells vs the Machines, which was worse than Soul and MUCH worse than Onward.

First: I have many complaints about the complete lack of subtlety in this movie. It was about as subtle as a brick to the face, and you need look no further than the opening scenes for an example. The entire opening sequence is essentially the movie version of “character looks in a mirror and describes themselves to you” except she does it for her entire family and all the worldbuilding elements, which don’t even come into play until like an hour later in the movie (where they helpfully repeat it all for you, in case you forgot, I guess). When Katie first compares her dad to the gibbon and it pops up the image of it, I chuckled. And then it proceeded to overlay the gibbon on her dad and flash it back and forth for like a full twenty seconds, as if not trusting you to get the comparison unless it shoves it down your throat. Worse: they loved this joke so much that they repeat it. Every point or joke it makes I was like “uh huh” and then it would emphasize itself and draw attention to the point over and over again. I suspected they were targeting a younger audience, maybe even a group under the age of 10? But the protagonist was 18. Is the 18 year old YouTube generation really this incapable of focus that they have to do this? I probably don’t want the answer to that…

I will say that this movie had absolutely stylish animation. They had a blend of traditional “Pixar” style 3D cartoony CGI, and overlaid it with hand-drawn animation to represent the creative elements. I really enjoyed that. The movie also had pretty decent pacing which helps set it apart from what you might typically expect from a “bad” movie. The jokes landed on schedule (although I found most of them a bit immature, maybe because they were so unsubtle), and the plot points didn’t feel rushed or dragged out.

My main beef is with the plot points themselves. I completely disagree with the message this movie tried to make, and am dismayed that they went this route when the most obvious route was right there and would have resolved almost all of the issues I had with it.

Read on for a more spoiler-ish explanation of what I mean:

Hereditary and Midsommar

I will start this by saying I have read some rather erudite analyses that pose as reviews. If you have come here for one of those, you are in the wrong place. I’m sure this post will annoy many people as I lay out my complete inability to understand the nuances.

But if you’re here for a quick and dirty impression of these two horror films, read on!

I will try to keep this spoiler-free, but if you’re here wondering if you should watch these movies, the short answer is stop reading right now and go watch Hereditary, because it will be better if you don’t know anything. You might want to wait on Midsommar, though.

The Expanse – Cibola Burn (OR: I fucking hate Basia)

This is going to be more of a rant than a review. Although, if you’ve read much else on this blog, you probably won’t be surprised.

We watched The Expanse TV show and I felt like a lot of the politics were going over my head and I’d be better able to digest them in text format, and also we ran out of show, so I decided to dig into the books. I fucking loved Leviathan Wakes. I highlighted so many passages because I just enjoyed the way it was written. Simultaneously, I was impressed with how well the show took the exact same plot and improved on it without cutting anything. The casting was as close to perfect as you can get with real humans who also happen to be actors, and it was obvious how they took nuances from later book character development and started developing it earlier in the show. I also appreciated the introduction to characters like Avasarala earlier on, and the melding of the plot lines of multiple books to make sure it was integrated well. Also, even though I enjoy Amos in the books, show Amos is improved on SO MANY LEVELS I love him so much. A+ performance so far.

Anyway, enough about the show. I finished Leviathan and moved on to Caliban’s War. It was… okay. Not quite as sparkling as the first book, but serviceable enough. I did find a lot of the writing just plain… clunky, though. “James Corey” is a pen name for two authors and I found myself wondering if one of them was responsible for Leviathan and the other was responsible for Caliban… that’s how much of a departure it was at points. A lot of telling instead of showing. Like, in every single scene that Bobbie appears in, something makes a comment on how big she is. “He craned his neck to look up at her” “She had to crouch to get through the door frame” “She dwarfed the chair” “The cup looked tiny in her meaty hands” like holy shit she is big we fucking get it. Book needed a serious editing pass.

Then into Abaddon’s Gate. Boy. What a slog this was. My coworker was reading them at the same time I was and ended up quitting here. I soldiered on but I just did not care at all about this book. I remembered Clarissa from the show, so I was able to connect a little bit that way, but god. I did not care about her. I did not sympathize with her. I didn’t give a single shit about the preacher (who I also remembered from the show, but primarily because my husband giggled every time they said “Dr. Volovodov”). My primary entertainment came from trying to figure out who they replaced Bull with in the show, because that whole sequence of things is VERY different. (And much improved).

Everything I and my coworker read said Book 3 is the weakest one so, okay. I made it. Let’s dump this garbage and get on to Cibola Burn.

What a slog it was. I thought Book 3 was a slog but Book 4 actively made me put it down in disgust. I bitched about it to my coworker, who said “Yeah, I read that book 3 AND 4 are the worst in the series, but it gets better after that.”

God dammit they said it got better after 3! The internet lied to me!

But I am stubborn so I vowed to finish this goddamn book. And I did. And I deleted it off my Kindle with a sigh of relief.

There are a bunch of problems with this book, not the least of which is having a female character spending half of it having sex dreams about Holden (which was, fortunately, cut from the show) and then solving that problem by shagging her coworker instead and having lovey-cuddle scenes with him for the rest of it (uggghhh).

Another problem is that we have four factions in this book, all fighting over the same resource. We have the UN who want to colonize the new planet. We have the Belters who illegally colonized it before they got there. We have the rebels who want to defend their right to stay on the planet. And we have the Rocinante that has been sent to mediate this situation between them. We have four factions in this book, and four POVs in this book. And all four POVs are from the POV of the Rocinante.

We have Holden, who is obviously from the POV of the Rocinante.
We have Elvi, who is a POV of the UN on the planet, but is allied with Holden (and literally spends FAR too much time thinking about Holden), so really it’s a POV from the Rocinante.
We have Havelock, who is from the UN ship, but he ends up defecting and joining the Rocinante.
And we have Basia, who is from the rebels, but ends up joining the Rocinante.

You know what would have been more interesting? Actually being inside Murtry’s head. He is presented as comically evil, fucking over and literally blowing up people just because he wants to get his way. He gives no fucks about human decency, and is portrayed as the ‘big bad’ that must be stopped, because he’s a psychopath and letting him run loose is unthinkable. A few shades of grey and actually being able to see his motivations would have really deepened a lot of this book.

But all of that aside, here is why I hated this book:

Basia.

I. Fucking. Hate. Basia.

Every time a Basia chapter came up, I’d turn off the Kindle. I really should have just skimmed over them, but it resulted me in being bogged down in this fucking book for a month because I kept dropping it.

Basia was removed from the show (and THANK GOODNESS for showrunners who can figure this shit out, right?), and the show also did a number of other things to improve on this plot, so if you’ve seen (or are planning to see) the show and are considering whether to read the book, let me spoil all of this for you.

Skyrim – VR

We bought a Valve Index for Christmas and I proceeded to use the Steam sale to purchase what felt like every single VR game in existence. One of those games was Skyrim – yes Skyrim, the decade-old Elder Scrolls game. If you have stumbled upon this review because you are wondering if it is worth purchasing a decade-old game again for possibly the third or fourth platform you have purchased it on, NO. DO NOT GIVE ANY MONEY TO THEM FOR THIS PILE OF SHIT. THEY DO NOT DESERVE ANY OF YOUR MONEY FOR THIS.

BUT. Also, yes, it is one of the best VR experiences available right now.

Confusing? Let me explain.

Skyrim VR is being sold for full price (yet again), which equals about 60-80 dollars depending which country you hail from. I purchased it for 25 dollars (actually 26) during the Steam Christmas sale. I felt like that was a little steep for such an old game, especially since other games like Hellblade offered a VR version to owners of the original for free, but Skyrim in VR just sounded like a cool concept, right? So it went into the cart with all the rest of the VR games I was piling in (which did NOT include Fallout 4 VR, thankfully, after witnessing this mess.)

I fired it up and it was unplayable. Like, the game ran, and I even made it out of the tutorial area, but by default it didn’t recognize the Index controllers, so the button prompts were all showing for controller buttons I didn’t have (Press Y! Uhhhh…) and half of the things I tried to do didn’t seem to have a button mapped to them at all. Picking up items was a process of pointing my hand at something and pressing a button (a very unintuitive button at that, because it was mapping them weirdly) to make it vanish into my inventory, which was unsatisfying when it seemed like it should be possible to actually pick up items like in Alyx. And it honestly looked like shit, even for a decade-old game. It was blurry and sparkly and I couldn’t make out what was going on around me. I couldn’t figure out how to open a menu to even save the game, so after mashing all the buttons and button combinations I could think of, I ended up having to take off the VR headset and force quit it.

After a lot of research, the internet informed me that this is all normal and expected and it is up to you to mod the game to resolve those things and make it playable. Furthermore, the official stance on modding is “It is not supported for this edition” but don’t worry, you can still do it.

Fuck. That. I refunded that pile of garbage on Steam and left a nasty review. They sold me a lazy port that was unplayable and didn’t support the only means to MAKE it playable. More insultingly, they expect people to pay full price for this?

I went on to play the other thousands of VR games I bought (being disappointed in most of them if I must be honest. Some are cool, especially the ‘escape room’ style games, but most are like “Hey look you’re in VR isn’t that cool? 20 bucks please”)

After finishing the VR masterpiece that is Alyx, I was really craving another VR GAME. Not a VR tech demo, a GAME. I started side-eyeing Skyrim again.

After reading a lot about modding, I picked it up again and gave it another crack.

Modding it took a literal entire day, and I followed a “lightweight” guide that contains the words “After all is said and done, we come in at under 100 mods”. Yes, 100 mods is the “lightweight” bare minimum to make this pile of shit playable. Woe to those who purchased this on PSVR where they can’t mod…

Also note, if you are relying on Steam refunds as a backup, doing this much modding will probably put you outside of the refund window before you even begin playing. That’s fun, right?

To be fair, I didn’t install 100 mods. I skipped a lot of the ones on the list and just installed what I thought would make it an enjoyable experience. Read on for the sordid details.

Shadow in the Cloud

Okay. I need to spoil this goddamn movie for you. It’s one of those movies that is so ridiculous that it becomes an unintentional comedy, and you just need to tell someone about it.

One of the reviews states “Part creature feature, part war movie, and part social commentary, Shadow in the Cloud doesn’t always blend its ingredients evenly”. That is a fantastic description, because this movie has no idea what it is. It’s not sure if it’s trying to be a remake of “Nightmare at 20,000 feet”, or punch you in the face with feminism, so it ends up doing both poorly.

I was reading a bit about this film while watching it, and it sounds like the lead writer was canned because of sexual assault charges, at which point the writing was taken over by a woman and the plot was significantly altered. I am really curious about the changes between the drafts because the feminism is so heavy-handed that it ends up having the opposite of the desired effect. Instead of “Fuck yeah, women can do stuff!” it’s more like “Oh fuck, here’s the women squawking about being better than the men, again.” As a woman, I really dislike “social commentary” that resembles the latter. I feel like the context of the re-writes might have forced it into an over-correction, which is really unfortunate because it hurts their position and takes what could have been an effective “This is a competent and powerful woman” plot and turns it into an eye-rolling caricature. The woman does EVERYTHING. Literally not one single positive plot point is attributed to the men. Not even the single “good” man. Plot deaths are presented as if they are some sort of social justice for sexism, which was uncomfortable.

Spoilers with more details below.

Half Life: Alyx

I’m not sure I can gush about this game enough. It’s a fantastic display of VR tech, but better than that, it’s a GOOD GAME.

The exploration is fantastic, and flipping over boxes to find ammo and resin is extremely satisfying. Everything in this game is a physics object, including your fingers and the tip of your gun. You can nudge objects open or bat them away from you. Other games that only let you interact with specific markers suddenly feel limited and immersion-breaking, while Alyx has you searching literally everything, because *everything is in play*. The game itself is linear, but somehow it doesn’t feel that way because everything around you feels real and reacts to your touch.

The tense parts have you jumping out of your skin, but the humour is fantastic and is timed perfectly to punctuate the tense sections. The cinematics are excellent and they did a great job of making you feel like you are standing right in the action, even if you’re not in control.

One thing I have noticed bouncing between Alyx and other VR games is that Alyx does a phenomenal job with the Z axis. Dropping a grenade through a hole in the floor and peeking through a hole in the roof to get a shot off is just something most other games haven’t tried to design in, yet. It makes the levels feel huge and immersive. And despite that, the movement system meant I could stay relatively in-place and not get tangled up in my cord, while other games expect you to physically turn and move in your space. But the movement never felt limiting (EXCEPT when trying to run away from something. Reverse is difficult when using teleport movement, so I had to get used to turning around and running away rather than backing up, which was unpleasant. I got good at bending my wrist to move the feet markers behind me while aiming my gun forward, I tell you what!)

And obviously, they’re Valve’s controllers and Valve made this game to showcase them, but the Index grip controllers are really amazing in this game. It makes all the other games really feel dull, even if they’ve patched in Index support. Items don’t get “stuck” to your hand as badly as in other games. Opening and closing your hand picks up objects “naturally”. It can be a little janky sometimes still, but it’s smooth as silk compared to the control of a lot of early games. Warning though: USE THE WRIST STRAP. I accidentally chucked the controller across the room when I was trying to throw a grenade. Oops…

10/10 fantastic. Kind of ruins all the other VR games we have thus far.

[edit] and having finished it, I can say that the ending sequence might possibly be the best gaming experience I have ever had. And I’m not even a mega Half Life fan. I can’t imagine how amazing that was for someone who is invested in the lore. Incredible.

Final Fantasy XIV (Updated 2022!)

The game is fine—if you’ve ever played an MMO you know exactly what to expect, and it’s one of the better ones out there (as evidenced by the subscription requirement).
This company is ridiculously difficult to do business with, though. Here is my sordid tale:

I was in the mood for an MMO so I fired up FFXIV thinking I’d do the free trial, fully expecting to quickly cap out and shell out for the subscription. This was basically a free sale for them—I was absolutely their intended sucker for the trial levels. After repeated failures to even install the demo, I discovered that I had once participated in a free weekend/trial event and already had a level 15 character, which completely precluded me from activating the trial to level 35. I did several hours of research and found no way around it, and finally gave up. No free sale for Squeenix.

Fast forward a year and myself, my husband, and some friends all have a week off. It was suggested we all dive into FFXIV together. I knew the trial wouldn’t work for me, but I figured eh, why not drop the 20 bucks on the base game and subscription for a month.

I logged into my old account to confirm it was still there, purchased the starter pack on Steam, and tried to activate it. No dice. All sorts of billing errors occurred. Searching for the codes suggested I would need to call support. You know what? I’m really not invested in my decade-old trial character, so I tried to register a new account. — email is in use. I guess that makes sense. So I plugged in a different email and successfully created a whole new account.

Then my husband tried to join me and ran into errors. He tried three different email addresses and got locked out of each one, being told the email was in use but when he tried to log in being told no account is associated with that email. He contacted support and was told that because an account was registered at this IP (my account…) he could not make an account for 24 hours.

Seriously? They’ve never encountered a situation where two people at the same residence want to create an account together? I am absolutely boggled by this. Furthermore, support absolutely refused to help him. The only response was “Wait 24 hours”, but all of us were playing *tonight*. That was unacceptable when there must be a solution for them to remove a lock on account creation. If they don’t have that in place I don’t know what to say. The starter pack is non-refundable, and he was completely unable to play, so at that point they had essentially stolen his money (for a minimum of 24 hours).

He tried to register using a VPN but that was detected and blocked too. He finally registered from a different location entirely, then came back to log in to install the game. It was the most ridiculous process I’ve seen. What possible evils are they preventing by being so restrictive about account creation? Oh no, someone might give them money :(

The game is fine. We’re playing and getting our starter pack’s worth out of it. I’m terrified to actually do any more business with this incompetent company, though.

—
UPDATE after 100 hours:

The game is really good, and lives up to its reputation as one of the better Final Fantasy stories. The MMO portions of it are fine too, and live up to their reputation as one of the better MMOs. This game is worth your money.

BUT. Do not buy it through Steam. The entire purpose of purchasing a game like this through Steam is to gain the protection of my locked down Steam account, consolidating my accounts in one area, and lessening mess and clutter. I thought I would be able to use the Steam subscription features like I did with Elder Scrolls Online, which was quite convenient because I don’t like handing out my credit card to websites.

You cannot use the Steam subscription features with this game. You can pay through your Steam wallet, but you still must pay through (and enter all payment details into) the Mog Station website. Paying with the Steam wallet works the same way paying with a credit card does. It does not let you use the subscription feature.

Buying this game on Steam only gives you a link to the launcher and a CD key, which you then have to take to their website to create an account with. Steam cannot even keep your game updated, because it only links to the launcher. Worse, once you purchase through Steam and pair it with your account, you are locked to purchasing through Steam. You gain NO BENEFIT for doing this. All it does it lock your options and add a secondary layer of DRM to your gaming experience.

This game is worth your money, but they should be forced to provide their own customer service and update their aging systems, not leech off Steam for advertising with no additional benefit to the consumer.

—
UPDATE 2022:

I have two weeks off for holidays and I finally finished Cyberpunk and wasn’t sure what to waste all my time on, so I thought “Hey maybe I should check out the new FFXIV expansion!” But then, remembering how difficult it was to give this company money, I decided I should secure a subscription before spending money on the expack.

The Steam experience of this game continues to impress in all the worst ways. I “installed” the game and, of course, Steam just provides a link to the launcher. So I launch the launcher figuring I can at least get all 80GB of the game installed and such, only to have the launcher tell me I cannot install the game because I do not have a subscription. Awesome.

So I wander into the Mog Station and clicked on the Pay With Steam option and it prompted me to add money to my steam wallet. So far so good. I loaded money into the wallet, and I even generously figured why not pay for 6 months, and then I don’t have to deal with this for a while and I will (maybe) feel less pressure to log in and play all the time since I’ve already paid in advance and got a teeny tiny discount. (I know it logically doesn’t make any sense but that’s psychology for you). So I loaded 120 dollars into my steam wallet and headed back to pull the trigger.

When I attempted to subscribe I got an error. Fortunately this error happens BEFORE it takes your money or I’d be really pissed, but it also means I’ve loaded a shitload of money into my steam wallet and I can’t actually give it to them now. I tried all sorts of different things, including different browsers, and no dice. I googled the error code and it suggested the problem is that I am Canadian and there’s an issue with the exchange rate. But Steam already handled the exchange rate when I loaded the wallet… ugh. It also wasn’t an error code about insufficient or unrecognized funds or anything like that, it was literally just “There’s a problem. Contact support.”

I futzed around for a bit and then finally followed the error code’s advice and opened a support ticket. Or tried to.

The link on the error code said “Contact support”, so I clicked on it, but instead of taking me to the contact page it took me to a FAQ. I had to click through a bunch of troubleshooters that had nothing to do with subscriptions before it would believe I actually had a problem that required support to solve, and finally, begrudgingly, took me to a support form.

The support form wouldn’t let me submit my question unless I filled out my home address. They did not provide any options for Canada, so I literally couldn’t fill out my address. I picked a random state and hoped it would go through. I also very explicitly stated in my problem description that I am from Canada and the error code might be linked to the exchange rate with Steam.

This was on a Friday night, so I had no real expectations of hearing back quickly, and found a different game to play.

I heard back from them on Monday morning. Their advice was to run a virus scan and try again.

Seriously.

WHY is it so difficult to give these people money??

So I guess I won’t be buying Endwalker in the Steam holiday sale…

Short Term 12

With much dismay, I discovered my Netflix “Watch list” was entirely populated with TV shows instead of movies, but I didn’t want that sort of commitment at the moment. I wanted to be in and out with closure in under two hours, man. Since Netflix has completely castrated their ratings and sorting options to be beyond useless, I did a search for “Highest rated movies on Netflix” and the internet did not fail me. The first movie in the list that I had not already seen was Short Term 12. My husband declined to watch it with me, citing that it looked like it had “too many feelings” in it, which was fair enough. I, however, have been writing a story that has a subplot involving foster children, so I thought it looked pretty interesting.

Straight up front: This was a good movie and I enjoyed it. It stars Brie Larson (before she was famous), Rami Malek (before he was famous), and John Gallagher Jr. (to which my husband glanced over and said “Hey, it’s that guy” so maybe before he was famous too?), all working in a care home for, as Rami Malek’s character so eloquently stuffs his foot in his mouth to describe, ‘disadvantaged children’.

This movie is about broken people, and it does a fantastic job of portraying how broken they are without jamming their backstories down your throat. You see them. They are broken. And there are just enough hints as to why they are broken that you don’t ask any more questions. But it never preaches at you, which I really appreciated.

That said, the plot isn’t really anything special. It’s interesting, and there are a few points in the story where I was thinking “Oh man, so this could go either this way or that way, and both of those are pretty unique twists in this story!” Instead of either of those things, it went for the absolute most vanilla storybook ending possible, which, under these circumstances, actually made it less believable than any of the more unique alternatives. For that reason alone I kinda disagree with the 98% that is currently displayed on Rotten Tomatoes. This movie could have taken some risks and really been something. Although, I have come across a comment or two about how they had to edit it a number of times because it was simply too depressing, which is maybe why it went the route that they did. Unfortunately, I think it makes the movie stumble a bit right at the end, which is a shame, but ultimately it doesn’t ruin anything.

But boy.  The depictions of emotions in this movie are, for the most part, on point.  When a character is feeling something, you feel it.  When a character is acting irrationally, you have a good idea why.  It was well done and well written.
Except for the ending.

More ramblings about that past the spoiler break:

Shadow of the Tomb Raider

Back in 2013 (good god that was 6 years ago), I professed my adoration for the Tomb Raider reboot. Except for the camera and its motion-sickness bobbing. Fuck that camera. The Bobbing Rant entry that the camera spawned is one of my most linked entries (mostly by me, bitching about cameras in other games, but still!).
I got 100% in Tomb Raider and I wanted more.

In 2016 (or the end of 2015, at least), I played Rise of the Tomb Raider. It was a release day purchase for me. I enjoyed it, and I thought I posted an entry about it, but apparently I was mistaken. Rise was a good game, but it really didn’t add much on top of the first one. But I enjoyed the first one and wanted more of the first one, so I was happy with it. (But apparently not happy enough to write a blog entry about it. So, there’s that.)
I intended to get 100% in Rise, but I kind of wandered off and realized I had no motivation to boot it up again, so I uninstalled it and filed it under “completed”.

And in 2019 (I waited until it was on sale), I played Shadow of the Tomb Raider. Imagine my joy when, FINALLY, they included settings to minimize/eliminate camera bobbing. THEY FINALLY FIGURED IT OUT! IT ONLY TOOK SIX YEARS! I was able to play this installment of the series without motion sickness headaches!

Unfortunately, that might be the only good thing about this installment.

Crypt of the NecroDancer

I picked up Crypt of the NecroDancer on sale for something like 3 bucks, played it for about an hour, then bought every single piece of DLC available on steam.  I even bought the soundtracks.  I never buy soundtracks.  But this one was worth it.

NecroDancer is a roguelike with a twist – it’s also a rhythm game, like Dance Dance Revolution or Rock Band.  You need to move your character in time to the beats to preserve your multipliers, which means you have to ‘dance’ with the enemies, who each have their own beat-based patterns and often have a weak side you want to be attacking from.  If you stop and wait for them, you lose your beat and your bonus, so you keep a steady rhythm as you maneuver yourself.  Coins upgrade you within the map, and diamonds unlock permanent upgrades.  Sometimes you locate NPCs to rescue, and that unlocks more upgrades to choose from.  If you feel like you need practice on a certain type of enemy, you can practice your patterns.

I’m always on the lookout for somewhat “zen” games where you can zone out and make progress without overly taxing the brain.  NecroDancer offers a perfect mix of going with the flow (or beat) and making progress, but with plenty of challenge options when you want to really test yourself, too.

And apparently they have a beat detector that will work with any music you feed into it, so you can dungeon-delve to whichever beat you prefer best.  I haven’t tried it yet, though, because the original songs are so good.

Buy it.  I think you’ll like it.

Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom

I am not a fan of reboots, particularly if the thing being rebooted isn’t going to gain anything from the process.  That’s not ‘rebooting’, that’s ‘cashing in’.

Fallen Kingdom, however, is straight-up plagiarism.  Can you really call it an ‘homage’ if every second scene was lifted straight from a predecessor?

I can’t decide if that’s worse than a reboot.

Stuff exploded and I was entertained for about an hour and a half, so that’s nice and all, but I couldn’t help but feel that there was nothing in particular about this movie that caused that enjoyment.  All the best scenes were lifted wholesale.

The Black Lung Captain

The Black Lung Captain by Chris Wooding

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I’m afraid I abandoned this one around 30%, but I’m leaving it in the “maybe I will return to this” pile. It seemed like it should be right up my alley. I was looking for a lighter read with some memorable characters, and a story about some swashbuckling air pirates sounded perfect.

The characters were memorable, if a little bit cheesy, but there was just a little bit TOO much effort put into making them “whacky”. That’s fine. There was plenty of lighthearted humour to appreciate and I can handle rolling my eyes every now and then as long as it’s reasonably entertaining in the meantime. But then I found myself slogging through page after page of exposition. The bits of action that happened in between were interesting, and I kept waiting for the story to get rolling, but then we’d scene cut to another character and sit through pages of inner monologue as they brooded about their past. It was really starting to get exhausting because the book kept pausing the plot to do this and I didn’t really care, yet.

I realized shortly after I started it that I had inadvertently skipped the first book. I did a quick peek and it seemed like the stories were standalone, so I didn’t bother to go back and find the first one first. As a result, I was not already invested in the characters when wading into this one, which might be part of the problem. But… the problem is that there’s TOO MUCH exposition, not too little.  Especially since it opens with the main character looking in a mirror and describing himself.  UGH.  There is a chance that there is a more gradual introduction to the characters in the first book, which would lend the infodumps in this one a bit more value, but if you’re checking this review to see if it’s okay to start midway through the series, my advice is to stop now and find the first one instead.

This is the passage that made me quit:
“He watched the shuttle descend with a deep sense of trepidation. She would be on it, of course. The woman he’d loved once, back when they were both young and didn’t know any better. The woman he’d deserted on their wedding day. The woman who’d tried to kill herself in her grief and only succeeded in killing the baby inside her. His baby.”

Like being hit in the face with a brick wrapped in exposition.

I didn’t hate it and I think it has some potential if you can hang with it, but the writing just felt a little too unpolished for me. My habit of reviewing books might be turning me into a writing snob :( *weeps bitterly*

Fran Bow

I think I purchased Fran Bow during a Halloween sale.  It got lost in my vast backlog of adventure games until I was finally in the mood for a point and click story experience.  I spent the next few hours sending messages to my friend which all said something along the lines of “Wow, this game.”  “WTF.”  “This is like the most fucked up game I’ve played in awhile…”  It actually reminded me a bit of Year Walk, although not nearly as ambiguous and without the same level of puzzle solving.  Both games come from Sweden, so perhaps that’s less of a coincidence than I first thought.

Fran Bow is a ten year old girl who survives a terrible family tragedy, and is then placed in a mental asylum.  The game takes place in 1944, so this is an old-school asylum environment with all of its various mental illness stigmas.  Fran was separated from her beloved cat, Mr Midnight, and she embarks on a mission to escape the asylum and find him.  The game has some mental illness themes that I found intriguing, and unraveling what’s going on is an engaging journey.

The game has quite a few mixed reviews on Steam, and I think that’s because there’s a huge tonal shift in the third chapter.  The opening chapters are fucked up.  There is a lot of really disturbing imagery and suggestions of some really dark content, which is probably what a lot of people dove into the game expecting after looking at the synopsis (and possibly got even more than they bargained for).  The third chapter, though, loses a lot of that imagery and becomes a fairly generic point and click story.  It doesn’t really return to its disturbing roots until closer to the end, and even then it doesn’t seem to reach the same heights.  I can easily see how someone who was engaged by the opening chapters would lose a lot of momentum in chapter three and not really manage to stick it out.  And the ending was… strange.  Many reviews point it out for being too abrupt, but I felt it had enough closure to seal off the story.  I wouldn’t say it was disappointing, but it might have been a little more effective if they had been more concrete rather than leaving some of the lines to interpretation.

If you can handle the disturbing underlying suggestions of the game, it’s probably worth the 4-6 hours that it will take to see Fran through her story.

Ancillary Justice

Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I’ll reserve the right to update this review, because I’m not quite finished yet, but it’s taken me several months to get through 70% of the book and I’m usually a pretty quick reader. That’s a pretty definite sign that it’s failing to engage me.

It’s interesting, though, because the book is good. It’s unique and has an interesting world. I was excited when I first cracked it open, completely blind, and by chapter two I had learned that the main character is a 19 year old female, who is also a 2000 year old ship, and the sentence “She was probably male” appeared. I thought to myself ‘I better not drink alcohol while reading this one…’

I had no problem following the narrative, even though it was disjointed and jumped around a lot. I even had a bit of fun deciphering what the actual genders of the characters probably were. What I had problems with was giving a damn about what happened.

The plot is slow, and you spend roughly 50% of the book following the main character doing something without knowing what it is or why, and history is slowly revealed in flashback. By the halfway mark you’ve got a grasp on what the plan is (such as it is), but you had to kind of slog your way there without anything to really latch on to. The main character is also relatively flat and robotic—probably quite deliberately, since it’s an AI—but that makes it even harder to invest in. The character agency doesn’t really click and things just seem to sort of happen without a lot of foreshadowing or anticipation. Many things are literally happenstance and the character even reflects on how random and/or pointless it is. As a reader, you wonder why you’re being forced to read through it if even the main character thinks it’s pointless, which is just a big ol’ Chekov’s gun, because if it ends up being actually pointless in the end, you just wasted an awful lot of words in this book, and if it ends up being super important despite the character’s perception of it being useless, there goes any sort of surprise when things finally play out. Even once the entire plot is revealed, the goals don’t make a perfect amount of sense, and it’s handwaved away by the main character when addressed.

It could be that it ties together more over the course of the series, but I’m not sure that I’m invested enough to continue to the next book. Which is a shame because I do really like the uniqueness of it.

Alienate

I picked “Alienate” on Netflix because it looked like a (probably bad) post-apoc alien invasion movie.  I usually enjoy post-apoc even if it’s bad, so I figured we’d see what was up.

It was roughly an hour and ten minutes of melodrama involving completely unsympathetic characters, occasionally interrupted by brief bouts of vaguely interesting alien apocalypse.  It’s basically “What if the aliens invade and I never get to tell you how much I love you?  Except, while professing my love, I discover you cheated on me, and then I am conflicted about it and make it my priority while we sit in a car in the dark hoping aliens don’t find us.”  Except somehow not even that interesting.

I suppose everything you need to know is in the title, but they need to work on their genre marketing.  After the umpteenth terrible decision by a main character that most unfortunately was not being eaten by aliens at the moment, I turned it off.  No thanks.

Star Trek: Discovery (first impressions) – OR: I really hate Michael Burnham

I grew up on Star Trek TNG.  I was, in fact, one of ‘those’ trekkies, with the encyclopedias and the model Enterprise, and even every single one of the extended universe books.  I would rush home from school every day and wait for it to begin at 4PM.  And then I would despair when the syndicated episodes ran out and it would start over at season 1 episode 1 again and I’d have to wait until the channel caught back up to presently airing episodes.  Ahhhh, the late 80s/early 90s.  And now we have the internet!  What a savage and primitive world this used to be.

As most people are probably aware, the world of Trek has been languishing of late, and so did my interest.  I was happy to leave nostalgia back in the 90s with TNG and not worry about reviving it.  I don’t think I even saw an episode of Enterprise before it got canned.   So I hadn’t even really heard about Discovery, except maybe in passing.  I paid no attention to the hype, or the trailers.  I had zero awareness or expectations for it.

Then we ran out of TV to binge and wandered into The Orville.  If you’re not aware of The Orville, it is Seth MacFarlane’s love letter to Star Trek TNG, which basically means TNG with dick and fart jokes.  Here’s your bonus review: I actually really enjoy The Orville, but god damn is it awkward, ahahahahahaha.  It doesn’t know what to do with itself.  I saw one review/comment that said ‘Basically, it’s a perfect show, except for the part where it is a Seth MacFarlane show.’  Right in the bullseye.  The show tackles deep and interesting plot lines and tries to develop its characters and world in ways that are, dare I say it, TNG-esque.  It pulls you in and hits you with nostalgia that reminds you why you liked TNG.  And then it remembers that it is a Seth MacFarlane show and shoehorns an awkward fart joke into the mix and it falls over itself.  Now, I am ALL FOR a show that is literally TNG with dick and fart jokes, but c’mon guys, you gotta have better delivery than that to make this work.  I will continue to enjoy The Orville and facepalm at its horrible awkward delivery until its inevitable cancellation :(

So, anyway, we exhausted the current run of Orville episodes and found ourselves wanting more Star Trek.  Rather than binging through TNG again, which was my first inclination, we decided to check out Discovery.  It’s new, it’s fresh, it’s Star Trek, and we’re out of shit to watch.  Why not!

In case you are wondering why not, I will explain to you why not.  Full disclosure: at the time of writing, only four episodes of Star Trek Discovery have aired, and two of them are the pilot which kinda don’t even count as episodes.  I am intrigued to see where this goes and will continue to watch, but I am not optimistic.  The best case scenario would be if I can come back to this after the season is finished and lauuugghhhhh. We’ll see!

I’m also breaking rules by logging this under “movies” but since bitching about writing is my MO, you’re just going to have to deal with it.

The Book of Henry

I was having a bout of insomnia and picked the first movie that looked like I might not care if I fell asleep in the middle.  That movie happened to be The Book of Henry.  I went in blind with only the blurb and cover art to guide me.  Based on those, I was expecting a whimsical yet dramatic tale, probably fraught with some sort of underlying moral lesson.  The “crime” tag intrigued me, though.

I think I was only 15 minutes in when I started googling reviews to see what I had gotten myself into and whether it would be worth suffering through.  The titular character was INSUFFERABLE.  Like, it says in the blurb that he’s a boy genius, but he was the WORST KIND of boy genius.  The first half hour of the film can be summarized as “Henry is very smart and they all would be lost without him, except for [plot adult] who does not listen to him despite all of the evidence that Henry knows best.”  The worst.  I didn’t think I could sit through two hours of it, so I glanced at the reviews.

The first review I landed upon (yay Wikipedia) was this one from Owen Gleiberman:

“There’s the kind of bad movie that just sits there, unfolding with grimly predictable monotony. Then there’s the kind where the badness expands and metastasizes, taking on a jaw-dropping life of its own, pushing through to ever-higher levels of garishness. The Book of Henry … is of the latter, you’ve-got-to-see-it-to-disbelieve-it variety.”

Oh god damn, I’m actually kind of excited now!  Let’s see what kind of train wreck prompted that!

Whatever you are thinking right now—it’s worse.  Believe me, it’s worse.

Spoilers will follow.  You won’t be missing out, but you might want to experience it for yourself first, just for the novelty of it all:

Baby Driver

I’m not really certain why I disliked this movie as much as I did.  It did do some things I liked – the integration of music into the scenes was great, and somewhat unique.  The cinematography was good.  The actual driving sequences were well shot.  Apparently they used practical effects for the driving, so that’s awesome.  The rest of it was pretty much crap.

The main character is a child prodigy with a tragic backstory who listens to music all the time and wears cool sunglasses and is just SO INEXPLICABLY GOOD at driving that he wows everyone.  For some reason, every single person in the movie has to go out of their way to be a gigantic dick to him, and then he acts all cool at them, and then they gain some grudging respect when they see how cool and good he is.  Repeatedly.  Like, that’s basically the movie because there wasn’t much else in the way of plot.  If you’re looking for a definition of Gary Stu, you probably want Cypher Raige, but this guy will demonstrate it fairly well too.

Despite being ridiculously good at driving (at the age of, what, 17?), Baby doesn’t seem to have a whole lot of common sense because he never figures out that if you switch cars, then continue driving like an asshole, the cops can figure out which car you’re in.  This seemed to really bother my husband, who finally blurted out “Has this guy never played Grand Theft Auto?”

Then Baby meets The Girl, and spends the second half of the movie pining after her.  Then he must inevitably protect her from The Bad Guys.  And then he tries to run off with her, and she’s all for it despite knowing him for like, two days, and having heard him speak like half a dozen words.  The movie would have gained a significant number of points with me if he had shown up to run away with her and she had gone “Are you fucking crazy?  I barely know you and you’re clearly a criminal!  Get out of here” and then he went to jail wondering where it all went wrong.  INSTEAD, she’s head over heels, and the entire city rallies to explain what a great guy he is despite very obviously being a criminal.  Because he’s just that god damn cool.

And then at the end, she’s like “I can’t used to your real name being Miles!”.  Is it, perhaps, MILES PROWER????  GET IT???  GET IT??? (Miles per hour, get it????)  lolololololol

I guess that was a spoiler.  Oops!  Sorry for ruining this movie for you.

I have a headache.  The writing in this movie gave it to me.

Oryx and Crake

Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I found this intensely unsatisfying. I love dystopias, and I love post-apocalyptic worlds, and I found the worldbuilding in this to be wonderfully imaginative and intriguing, but somehow it managed to be incredibly dull and plodding at the same time.

I think the problem is that nothing happened in this entire book. I was fully halfway through it when Jimmy finally decided to leave his tree, and I thought “aha, finally there will be some plot”, and then his adventure simply served as the prelude to more flashbacks which still only served to build the world, not have anything happen within it. I would have much rather learned about the disaster from a present-day perspective than the hackneyed flashback structure used here. The characters weren’t likable, and they did nothing of note for me to care about, which made the entire thing fall flat on its face. Which is a shame, because the world is a fascinating backdrop.

I see it is a series, so I assume this serves as the introductory paragraph and there will be plot in the later books, but it’s already lost me. I might read a synopsis of the rest of them, I guess.

The Orenda

The Orenda by Joseph Boyden

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I was given this for a book club, and I am glad they chose it because I don’t think I would have read it otherwise. I’m not a big fan of historical fiction, and historical fiction based on Canadian history (the most boring type of history on the planet) just does not grab me. The Orenda turned out to be a gripping read, though, and lays out historical tribal life in brutal fashion, not sparing any details. If my history classes had been anything like this I might have actually been interested.

I was initially turned off by the first-person-present-tense and how difficult it was to tell which point of view we were following, but once I locked down on the fact that we were only following three different characters it wasn’t too burdensome. The ‘voices’ of the characters weren’t distinctive enough, and you had to wait until they observed something to orient you, or dropped a snippet like speaking to “my love” or “Lord” to figure out who the chapter was following, so I dislike the choice and I think it would have been easier to follow if it hadn’t been in first person. At many points the minor characters change names based on which viewpoint we’re following, the events that happen to name them, or even whether the person we’re following likes them right now or not. I was able to keep up, but I thought I would issue a warning that it’s going to require a bit more attention than usual.

I really liked how the story drew parallels between the three viewpoints we were following, but at no point did it seem to take a side. Each group had their beliefs and motivations which made sense to them and they acted appropriately within those beliefs and motivations, weaving a strong narrative as the cultures clashed. I think my only complaint would be that I wish the ‘magic’ had been more plausible, to draw a stronger compare/contrast between belief systems. It started losing me when they started having prophecies. Ambiguous visions and their interpretations of them is one thing, but literal visions of what is about to happen was kind of ehhhhhhh…

The book is nearly 500 pages and I don’t know that there is much else for me to elaborate on. I really enjoyed the journey through the story, but it might also be worth mentioning that it is not for the faint of heart or those who deal with depression.

Horizon Zero Dawn

I don’t know if I can say something about this game that would do it justice.  I didn’t even know it existed until I happened to see some comparisons between it and other games that were released around the same time (and the answer to ‘which should you buy’ is ‘why not all of them?’), but then I saw the main character was a female with a bow who primarily uses stealth and I was like “well… I guess it was made for me.”  I suppose we have Katniss Everdeen to thank for the “badass female with a bow” trope becoming more popular lately but as someone who always picks the archer when it’s available (even when it suuuuuccckkkksss), I’m pretty excited about this trend.

If someone were to take all of my favourite games and blend them together, the result would probably be something similar to Horizon Zero Dawn (HZD).  Post apocalyptic, stealth elements and tactical combat, collections and crafting, good dialogue and interesting characters, a plot that holds a lot of mystery and doesn’t let you down with the reveals… all it’s missing is terraformable terrain and economics systems to hit pretty much every one of my favourite games, so it’s probably not surprising that I loved it.

I had expressed some interest in it after reading a little bit about it, and I happened to be sick and confined to the couch, so my husband brought it home for me.  I spent the next 2.5 days piling tissues around the couch and binging through HZD until my wrists hurt from holding the controller.  My husband watched the first couple of quests and then decided he would play it after me, and it was brutal to not be able to talk about the plot points as I went through it (I had to settle for repeating “Oh my god it’s so good…” and he kept repeating “Well hurry up and finish it so I can play it, then.”).  He’s playing through it now, but he’s on very hard difficulty and dallying around doing all the side quests so it’s going to take forever *shake fist*.

For those who like a challenge, the combat offers plenty of ways to be creative.  I had it set to the easiest (“tell me a story”) mode, so I spent the majority of the game sneaking around being a backstabbing goddess of invulnerability… but even on the easiest setting I had to use tactics, set traps, duck into cover, and learn the weak spots of the enemies in order to expose their weaknesses and go in for a critical hit.  Being on easy mode meant I could be sloppy and just be like “fuck it” and flail away when things went wrong.  My husband is playing on very hard and when things go wrong it means he is swiftly dismembered and gets to start the sequence over again.  I expect a lot of cursing on some of the later bosses.

What did I like about HZD (besides everything?):  It’s got pretty standard open world gameplay (go to places, unlock travel points, collect plants, find quests, clean out the map of points of interest) but the world itself is interesting to explore.  You start out as an outcast, which is a well-done version of putting the player inside of a protagonist who doesn’t know much about the world, in order to learn along with them (not facepalm inducing like ‘amnesia’).  The main plot point is Aloy trying to figure out why she was outcast as an infant, so she works her butt off to earn a way back into the tribe and get some answers.  As a player, you’re just as invested in discovering those answers as she is, and the writers did a fantastic job.  The world feels real.

What really won me over was the writing, by far.  I loved the story and I’m still thinking about it a week later.  I went onto the wiki and re-read all the data points.  The plot zags when you expect a zig, and even though some elements may play out the way you expect, there are enough flourishes that it will still surprise you.  As the ending sequences played out I was watching it and trying to rank it against my favourite games of all time, and I was sitting there thinking “It’s REALLY REALLY good, but it hasn’t really made me cry yet, so I don’t know if I wou—… … … fffffffffffffffffffff okay I’m misting up now.”
I think my “story enjoyment” final ranking would be just above Mass Effect, but not quite to the level of Last Of Us.

So we’ve established that I love the game.  How about Criticisms?  I really only have one, but it’s kind of a big one.  The game spends a lot of time hyping up its strong female characters.  I have no problem with that—more games need to have badass, yet realistic females that have more depth to them than just their badassery.  When I think back across the characters you meet, though, I can’t think of a single male character who isn’t pathetic in some way.
The ironic thing is I can’t tell if it’s intentional or not.  The cast of characters includes (I presume quite deliberately) a hugely diverse cast of races and cultures, and yet every single accomplished character is female.  Every named male in the game is either a failure, or outright evil.  Many of the males who are failures need females to solve the messes they’ve made.  Many of the males who are outright evil are thwarted by females, and solely females.  Even among the scientists, the ones with the most screentime and the most showcased roles are females, except for the one who programs the questionable content, who is, of course, male.  Avad seems to be a strong male character on the surface, until you dig deeper into his story and find he’s actually obsessed with his (female) Military Captain.  That’s a pretty minor character point in the grand scheme, but if you were to apply some sort of reverse Bechdel test to the game, it would go back to a fail right there.  Meanwhile, there is precisely one female in the game I can think of off the top of my head who could be considered pathetic or evil… and it’s made abundantly clear that she’s just misguided and following her own values.  And even she comes around in the end.

I’m not sure if I would call it misandry, and I’m certainly not certain if I would call it intentional misandry, but it’s skirting a line that I think needs to be balanced a bit more.  It is ENTIRELY possible (if not preferred) to have a strong female protagonist without shitting all over males while you do it.  The whole “mother earth” theme is pretty strong throughout the game, so maybe it’s intentional, but if “males ruin earth, females save earth” is intentional subtext, that’s pretty lame, to be honest.  I’m hoping any sequels, should there happen to be some, will rectify the imbalance by continuing the trend of badass females but also mixing in badass males to balance them, along with some pathetic evil females to balance out the pathetic evil males.

That niggling detail aside… I love this game.  Once again I lament the existence of exclusivity contracts.  Everyone should have access to this game on whatever platform they choose, because it is a masterpiece of storytelling that needs to be experienced.

 

Above All Things

Above All Things by Tanis Rideout

My rating: 1 of 5 stars

I was given this to read for a book club and was pretty interested in the premise as presented by the book jacket. The story of Mallory tackling Everest is pretty interesting in itself, but to see the homeward side of things adds a fascinating twist. Unfortunately, the book opened with a harlequin-esque erotica scene and went downhill from there.

The blurb makes you believe the story will be about Mallory’s wife. In practice, Ruth is a two-dimensional character that does absolutely nothing but pine over George. She has no other substance to her. The bulk of the story ends up being about George’s expedition, which is sort of interesting, but it’s not what you were probably expecting to read and it’s incredibly slow with occasional breaks to follow his companion for no apparent reason. There are jarring switches in POV between George and Ruth, swapping between third person and first person with one spanning weeks and the other spanning a day. Also there are occasional breaks where both George and Ruth consider times when they cheated on their partners (complete with cheesy erotica scenes, as if there weren’t enough opportunity for them already). I don’t even know.

Even ignoring the misleading blurb, on the surface the plot looks like it should be interesting: a deep investigation into George’s struggle between his obsession with Everest and his desire to be with his wife. Instead, it’s a hot mess with shoe-horned sex scenes and plodding filler.

If it helps, the other women in the book club seemed to enjoy it. Maybe you will like it if you are ovulating.

Homefront

Homefront by Chuck Logan

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I queued this one up because the premise sounded interesting. As I work through my reading queue I often forget why I added books to it, and a chapter or two into this I had to stop and look it up to figure out why the hell I had added it. Then I was like “Oh, right. That DOES sound interesting.” I slogged away at it but… I just can’t do it. The writing is pretentious and overdone, littered with isolated sentences and choppy wording that’s designed to hype up the drama. There’s a complete lack of subtlety here. It feels like being bashed over the head with words. Watching the movie will be less painful.

Republic of Thieves

The Republic of Thieves by Scott Lynch

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I started late on the Gentleman Bastard journey (thankfully? Since the fourth book has apparently been delayed, which is unfortunate) and it’s been a bit of a rollercoaster. The first book was so full of promise—a few novice mistakes, but with characters so loveable that I couldn’t wait to see where the series went. The second was a disappointment, still full of promise but rushed and unpolished to an unfortunate degree. When I saw what a gap there was between the second and the third I was eager to see how the writing had progressed, because the potential here simply NEEDS to be fulfilled.

I have very few complaints about the third book, and I’m picky as fuck. At worst, I’d say I saw a few places where the characters did some things, then immediately turned around and explained all those things in detail to another character who wasn’t present, which smacked of bad editing. The plot maybe had some contrivances you could bitch about if you wanted to, but I chose not to because I could see the purpose of them.

It actually felt more like two books in one, which I’m not sure I like all that much. It’s got the time-skip stuff again which I disliked in the first books, skipping back and forth from the past and the present, but in previous books that mechanism was used to show the characters acquiring an item or skill which was then presented in the present, and it felt a little contrived. In this book, the past story and the present story are running parallel, and I kept waiting for them to converge and it never really did. The two timelines merely exist to show the relationship of Locke and Sabetha developing side by side. I think it works, but I would have been equally satisfied with two distinct books, and less distracted besides.

I also noticed a couple exposition dumps that I felt could have been handled a little better because I started drifting off in the middle of them, but I feel that’s a victim of the two timelines. You get invested in one story and then blam, dropped into an exposition dump for the other and you’re all “I don’t give a shit about this, I want to know what happens next in the OTHER story” and you end up skimming, which is bad for the story as a whole. I also felt like I didn’t really need to sit through everyone rehearsing their lines for the play, but maybe I started skimming and missed the point.

I think that’s the extent of my bitching. The characters were fantastic, the banter was fantastic, and I burned through it until I had eyestrain. Be warned, though, if you’re not already invested in the characters, you might find it hard to get into. I loved it BECAUSE I love the characters. The fact that the plots took a backseat to character development became an asset BECAUSE I love the characters. If you haven’t reached that level of commitment to the characters, you might be a little annoyed.

I don’t normally like to draw comparisons to other works, but the plot actually really reminded me a lot of Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern, in that it was a battle of wits between two forbidden(ish) lovers. In Night Circus, the “battles” were fantastic displays of magic which were very pretty to describe but ultimately made no fucking sense because they never opposed each other, and that was kind of dumb. Locke and Sabetha oppose the shit out of each other with non-stop displays of wit and connivery and it is awesome. I think the snake rebuttal was where I decided it would probably get a five even if it went off the rails at the end.

I’m a little surprised at the sheer hate I see for Sabetha in some of the other reviews.  I suppose that’s the risk of leaving a character shrouded in mystery for two books—people will make their own expectations, and you will never, ever, live up to them. She’s a character driven by pride, which can be a little hard to swallow for some, but all of her motivations seemed logical to me. A little more communication would certainly help matters, but there are pretty clear explanations for most of those difficulties too.  She’s essentially a femme fatale who is not entirely defined by the male protagonist, and I enjoyed that.

I was a little annoyed that
WARNING: SPOILERS:

The Other Side of the Bridge

The Other Side of the Bridge by Mary Lawson

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I was a bit surprised to see that this book is newer than Crow Lake, because the writing didn’t feel quite as polished. Much like Crow Lake, though, the author excels at writing emotions… and it almost hurts the book because they feel so similar that you can’t help but compare them and find The Other Side of the Bridge to be the lesser of the two. It failed to grab me in quite the same way as Crow Lake and that could be equal parts less sympathetic characters (I found many of them to be flat, which was a shame after the excellent characters in Crow Lake) and just me not being able to relate to them in quite the same way, but it was still an interesting read even if it didn’t grip me and keep me up. A solid 3.5 stars.

Red Seas Under Red Skies

Red Seas Under Red Skies by Scott Lynch

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This book was desperately in need of a ruthless editor. The plot was bloated and aimless, and it was only the excellent characters and witty banter that kept me going. The first book had its fair share of bloat, but it wrapped up fairly tightly by the end, with only a few stray threads that you could argue served as obfuscation. This book has endless ramblings and descriptions that make your eyes glaze over, that ultimately serve no purpose other than to show off how much research the author put into the background. I think the sea training montage was a good 15 to 20% of the book on its own and served only the barest of purpose in terms of setting up later plot points, not to mention the 40% of the book you had to get through before being jarringly dropped into it. The plot threads didn’t tie together as well as in the first book, and it took me so long to slog through everything that I started forgetting who all these people are or why they’re important, so a lot of the impact was lost. It felt like it was trying to weave a super complicated twisty-turny plot but it really should have stuck to one or the other: deal with the casino con and pitting the two men against each other, or deal with the piracy plot. Mixing the two together just didn’t feel like it was working.

The book as a whole felt “immature”. Not in terms of banter, but in terms of polish. A lot of it felt like first pass writing that never got a proper second going-over. It needed to age a bit more, to let all the nuances seep in and flavour it throughout. And it needed all the useless crap strained out of it before it was bottled. In short: it needed an editor.

It does the same time-skipping bullshit as the first book, and I found it even more intolerable this time somehow, probably because we’re skipping between a short period of time instead of decades. Those interludes taper off midway which was a relief, but there’s a big one that the book opens with that isn’t resolved until the end, some 500 pages later. That resolution was so eyeroll-inducing that it could have knocked a whole star off the rating on its own. Seriously. Stop it. Along with that one, a couple of the big “twists” were so badly telegraphed (as well as being tacked onto plot threads that were basically ENTIRELY optional if not for the need to have this thing happen because it has been decreed that this should happen) that it was really cramping the book. One of my favourite parts of the first book was that their narrow escapes always seemed to have wit behind them, and some of their escapes in this one are blind luck or coincidence.  Unfortunate. If this one had been left in the polisher just a little bit longer it would have been a rock-solid romp with some powerful moments.

Having said all that, the characters were as fantastic as always, and the plot was reasonably entertaining even if it felt a bit rickety. The witty fast-paced banter is something I really enjoy, and I’ll probably venture into the third book just for the hell of it.