roadrunnertwice | Recent Entries

When I was working at the counter in the bakery in Minneapolis, I would sometimes read a library book during downtime. (Hey, listen, you can't really go in the back and start mopping if you need to be ready to react to customers. Once you've tidied up the front, you're out of tasks.)

So at one point, a co-worker asked me "how many books do you even read?" and I realized I did not actually know the answer to that.

Well, it was the turning of a new year, so I decided I'd start keeping track of what I read. (I was also motivated by the cool new note-taking system I'd just built.) And since that was just a high-posting era for me in general (I was 24 and lonely and homesick and broke; Kiki from Kiki's Delivery Service with a bike for a broom and a LiveJournal instead of a cat), I started posting the book log on my blog and saying a thing or two about each book, kind of automatically.

That was at the start of 2007, which means that this year, 2026, will be my

🌌🌋🏜🏚️ ️twentieth year 🗿🕰️💾📟

of reviewing all the books I read (and some video games, as guided by whim).

What the fuck!!! Who even does that?

Well, I've stayed on it because it's been a lot of things to me, I guess. It's a great way to keep my writing knife sharp when I don't feel I have anything else to write about; it's a way to talk about stories, which is one of the great joys in life tbh; it's a way to trick myself into processing whatever else is going on in my life (you'll have noticed I stray from the brief sometimes) and to keep an eye on my emotional and intellectual temperature; and, sometimes, it's a way to connect with my friends or make new ones, which I guess is what I was starving for most in 2007. I think there's actually a small handful of people who look forward to the bookposts on this little journal out in the middle of nowhere, which I never really expected to be the case.

Twenty is a sufficiently shocking number that I feel I should do something special to mark the occasion. I'm considering gathering up a sort of "best of" collection of old reviews across the decades and making an ebook from em? Maybe I'll do occasional retro posts during the process? A zine??

I'm no good at hustling or self-promoting, and so my "audience" has remained very small. But for this kind of writing, I think that's probably best — these are home-cooked bookposts, un-mauled by the depredations of "scale," and you're the local fam that comes over to my house for soup sometimes. I think everyone should have small-scale connections of creation like that, and I'm glad you're in this one with me. Thanks for reading Roadrunner Twice, weirdos.

Well, it's also the end of a year, so here's the

2025 book census

22 Prose Novels

7 new (5 by women, 2 by men), and 15 re-reads (8 by women, 7 by men).

4 Nonfictions

All new; 1 by NB, 3 by men.

29 Comics

All new; 6 by NB, 16 by women, 7 by men. (haha, I had to go back and check on an evolving pronoun situation for that one. Just had a feeling. These categorizations are best-effort and provided "as-is," by the way.)

6 Reviewed Games

As ever, the games category is whim-centric and noncomprehensive; I played some other stuff as well, I just didn't have as much to say about it.

Well?

Prose novel count is up, but much of that's re-reads; new novels are stable, for a few years in a row now. Comics are up (from snarfing down all of Delicious in Dungeon). Games are stable.

What's it all mean? Idk. I never know. But anyway, rereading is good for your mental health when things are going weird.

OK, here we go — the final 2025 bookpost! And it's, uh, well, it's certainly something.

Daniel M. Ingram — Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha (2nd ed.)

Feb. 25

Readable online. There’s also a pdf on the site, but I ended up downloading the html version and scrunching it into an epub. Here's that, if you want it. (Hopefully the author won't mind a little light format-shifting in the name of spreading information. If you meet the Buddha on the road, right-click him and save as.)

This one's been sitting unreviewed because there's a whole big context around it that is going to be kind of annoying to explain. I'll probably make a mess of it, but let's try.

A while back, right before the demise of Cohost, I read this all-time banger of a post by Matthew Seiji Burns. I want you to read it yourself, but basically:

Feeling better is possible. I mean in a baseline, day to day, non-temporary way. [...]

[...] I am going to describe a kind of meditation with a goal to make a specific “thing” happen, because the thing I’m about to describe was the single best improvement to my mental health that I ever experienced. I think it’s important for more people to know about. It is totally achievable— not exactly easy, but not ridiculously hard either. It employs meditation not as an open-ended and never-ending practice, but as a specific, targeted activity. Perhaps surprisingly, you do not need to keep meditating afterward to continue to have the benefit it confers.

And then he gives you the recipe.

( This goes on for a little while, and maybe not everyone wants to hear about my adventures in, uh, let's say "experimental philosophy," so better throw in a cut tag. )

Alison Bechdel — The Secret to Superhuman Strength (comics)

Dec. 25

And then there's the last two reviews of the year, which, due to their content, are somewhat easier to write now that I've written all that context just north of here.

As coincidence would have it, Alison Bechdel's most recent book is all about her lifelong hunger to escape the illusory prison of the self. The framing lens this time around is that she's writing about "exercise," but you know how it goes with these weird spiral-shaped memoirs of hers: she's actually writing about more or less everything, and rummaging through literary history in search of signposts and cairns from people who might have been on this trail before her.

I really like this loose trilogy of autobiographies. Bechdel has this sort of frantic, vibrating intelligence, and these books feel like spending a series of pleasant late nights with her during some period where she's almost-but-not-quite gotten her train of thought under control and can spin out the entire spirograph mandala shape for someone who happens to be on her wavelength. Powerful ADHD friends energy, basically.

Anyway, a recurring thread through this one, both explicitly discussed and arising from things she just depicts happening, is that she very much is on the same hunt as I've found myself: the quest to dissolve some boundaries between the self and the universe, and also to stop fucking hitting yourself with these goddamn illusions.

She also, and I wasn't expecting this, made a case that I should go back and read The Dharma Bums, even though I figured I was done with Kerouac. I'm not sure I'll be able to see what she saw in it; it seems likely situational. But maybe worth a try.

Bonus Level: Slay the Princess

Nov. ??

(Content warning: horror game with lots of murder and some gore.)

I'm still cleaning up some of the weirder inner routes that I haven't seen yet, but I think I've done enough full loops and endings that I can say I've played this game. And: it rules.

As I think I've mentioned before, I've had a kind of standoffish relationship with the video game genre called "visual novels". The default point of view for a very large swath of the format seems to be the blank-slate "self-insert" character (this is very much a legacy of the dominant "dating sim" sub-genre of VNs), and somehow something about that kind of repels me? Like, it's meant to be "me," but my agency is constrained to often prevent doing what "I" would actually do? And also, deliberately choosing things foreign to what I would do feels much weirder and grosser with a self-insert stand-in. We always kind of half-inhabit characters in a story, that's much of the point, but I prefer having a more depicted personality as an initial scaffold to hang my imaginings on; even in a CRPG with a blank slate protagonist, you usually go through a formal scaffolding process of building out their appearance and history and capabilities, which goes a long way toward making a more usable vessel for imagined choices.

This is very much an inconsistent reaction; I'm sure you wouldn't have to look hard to find something I like a lot that gives the lie to that as a general principle. But nevertheless, there it is! It's meant I've always held the genre at arms-length a bit, and despite having enjoyed several VNs in the past, I've still been kind of waiting to "get it."

I think Slay the Princess has helped me get VNs a little more! To start with, it quickly becomes clear that the protagonist is extremely separate from the player (and in many ways separate from their own self, but we're getting ahead of ourselves here), so that gets my aforementioned self-insert gag reflex out of the way.

For another thing: the actual gameplay of a VN consists of exploring what is ultimately a static tree structure, and since the branchings are one-way gates, this requires repeated runs. StP weaves these repetitions into the story itself, with two layers of epicyclic repetitions on top of the non-diegetic new-game repetitions. (The innermost loop starts when you're on a path in the woods, and the middle loop ends when you [REDACTED] a vessel to [REDACTED].) This isn't a generalizable technique, it really only works for this specific story, but that's a big part of why the game is so good — the balanced harmony of a story and a gameplay structure that feel made for each other. And the nested repetitions give this illusion of dynamism to the tree structure — your next pass on the innermost loop is profoundly affected by what you did on the last one, with the Princess's protean nature drastically mutated to match the protagonist's revealed personality. Anyway — that harmony helped make the VN tree-traversal gameplay fun for me in a way it hadn't really been before.

The other big part of why the game is so good is just that the art and writing are stellar. Abby Howard is an outstanding cartoonist; I know she's a good writer as well, so it's harder to pick out precisely what her husband Tony contributed, but I consider this a cut above her solo work, so he's doing something in there. There's some killer lines in this that continue to live in my head rent-free. (Solitary lights in an empty city...)

I kind of want to be careful about saying too much about the story, because it's one of those ones where the joy of discovery plays a big part. But: since I already knew the gimmick was a powerful one, I went in prepared for it to be more gimmicky than heartfelt. It was not. There's genuinely a lot going on in here, thematically and dramatically. Including, well... I guess, once you get to the late-game outermost loop scene where the narrator finally plays fair with you, you'll see why I'm lumping this game into this batch of reviews. (And if you traverse to the weird "happily ever after" inner-loop path, you'll see it even more.)

Current Music: Lena Raine - You're Not Real

Another end-of-year bookpost batch; we're down to two remaining books in the queue after this, which of course are some of the harder ones to talk about.

Vajra Chandrasekera — The Saint of Bright Doors

Mar. 24

This book is incredibly flashy and stylish. Dazzling? I think in cover-blurb dialect, you'd say "dazzling." Well, fair enough: I was dazzled.

It does lots of exciting things at the structural level — I'm thinking of things like,

The massive noisy violence of chapter 1, immediately followed by a chapter 2 that consists of six evasive sentences, followed by a smash-cut to Fetter's new home in the city of Luriat.
The long strange segment in the late book where it diverts into a surreal and almost allegorical-feeling prison planet milieu.
The freaky jolt when the narrator finally grabs control of the plot. (And what a strange ending that resulted in; I'm still not completely sure how I feel about it.)

But also the page-to-page prose and momentum are real impressive. And thematically, it feels extremely Now; like yeah, you're an apostate cult assassin and authoritarian shitbirds (including your awful messiah dad) are shredding the city you love, but also your mom's dying and is calling your landline to guilt-trip you, and you're worried that your attraction to this girl you're doing espionage on might be trending in the direction of cheating on your boyfriend, and all the people you go to therapy with seem to be way more committed to the revolution than you are and aren’t including you in the play they’re producing.

I liked this a lot. I think maybe I liked the first 3/5 of it the best, but it kept me extremely engaged all the way through.

Martha Wells — Queen Demon

Oct. 26

All riiiiiight! The sequel to Witch King, another entry in what is now the Rising World Series. This was great.

Like the last volume, this one tells two parallel stories, one past and one present — which is neat, because there was still a lot of missing mileage between the two after Witch King. (Including the source of that title, which we finally get the start of an explanation for this time around.)

Dahin is kind of my favorite, and much of the present-day thread of this book is about him.

Martha Wells — Witch King (reread)

Nov 16

Still good. Hey, here’s something odd I realized about Tahren’s character this time around: she has absolutely no imagination.

So like: from time to time in real life, you’ll run across people who have fucked-up conservative-authoritarian-supremacist politics but who aren’t full chud — they’re actually capable of empathy and compassion, but they’ll still parrot the most twisted bullshit about Black people or immigrants or queer people. I know someone who works at a rural hospital in the US who was interacting with a couple people like this on the regular at work, and we would talk about it and wrack our brains trying to figure out what the hell was going on: how could someone be able to exercise fairly impressive amounts of care and sympathy, but not extend it to anyone on the Republican bogeyman list?

One of the spitballs I threw out once was: what if empathy and imagination are independent, and these people have no imagination? If they have direct extensive personal experience with someone with a marginalized identity, then maybe they can relate that to their inner map of humanity, but they can’t just like hear about or listen to some category of people and then use imagination and analogy to relate to their experience, and so if they’re isolated and living in a homogeneous culture they start watching Fox News and voting for scum.

Back in the ’00s before they all got purged or assimilated and the party went full death-cult, you’d sometimes get high ranking Republicans who would break with the party line and start riding for gay rights when e.g. their daughter came out, and I feel like this model might have explained a bit of that; maybe some people just can’t recognize anyone’s humanity unless their face gets physically rubbed in it, but after that they can sort of manage it. Pretty weird??

Anyway, that’s Tahren, actually. Watch for it, you’ll see what I mean.

Linnea Sterte — A Frog in the Fall, and Later On (comics)

Oct. 27

A quiet and gentle graphic novel about some amphibians who take to the road in rural Japan. I liked this, and also enjoyed just stopping reading for a few minutes to take in a landscape and let my mind wander.

Patrick Miller — From Masher to Master 2

Nov. 7

Published on the author's Itch page.

An unusual little ebook about playing fighting games.

I guess what’s unusual about it is that it’s not really about playing fighting games; it’s more about purposefully turning into the sort of person who plays fighting games.

Much of this ends up being about finding ways to engage with (and ultimately help create) the “fighting game community.” Miller’s constant refrain throughout the text is “if you aren’t playing fighting games for the people, you’re missing the point.”

As it happens, I started playing a little bit of Street Fighter 6 in the past year; I fell off in the summer and then entered my shmup era, but I intend to get back on. I was enjoying online play, but the possibility of joining in-person events felt pretty distant. Miller’s perspective is one I hadn’t heard articulated this directly before, and it was pretty thought-provoking. I’m not entirely sure I want to commit to the lifestyle* per se, but this left me with a more concrete view of what that might actually mean.

* Actually, brief sidenote on a different fightin' thing I read earlier this year. There's this bit in Sumac's Street Fighter 6 novice pamphlet where they're summarizing that game's online ranking tiers, and they say the following:

In some ways, this is the point of no return for building your skill level. Once you hit platinum you’re probably going to be able to comfortably beat anyone who plays the game casually and doesn’t go online. If you keep going on past this point, you’re committing to the lifestyle – nobody is going to enjoy fighting you unless they’re at least as into SF6 as you are.

This has become a surprisingly flexible analogy in our household — if you proceed past Platinum, you are "committing to the lifestyle." Ruth and I do a fair amount of trail running, and both of us have crossed the line where you have to start hanging out with running people instead of running with the people you hang out with. The same thing happens with fighting games, and the point of Miller's book is: that's the point.

Current Music: Soul Coughing - Fully Retractable

It's coming up on the end of 2025, so let's do a couple review posts.

Cameron Reed — The Fortunate Fall

Apr. 10

Holy shit what a ride.

Newly back in print after a long period of unavailability, this landmark work by the author of a favorite short story was brought to my attention with a link to an old Jo Walton review of it. Walton is a superior book reviewer, so maybe I should just tell you to close my tab and read her; certainly she made a watertight case that I needed to read this book immediately.

This is a 30-year-old science fiction book that feels new. It’s intense and paranoid and smart and scary. I bought a copy after reading it because I predicted needing to both re-read it and loan it out.

The author has another novel coming out in I think April, and I’m in, sight unseen.

Bonus Level: Persona 3 Reload

May 3

Persona 3 seems to have been the game where Atlus really nailed down their winning formula for the series, which they've been refining ever since. It's also the only one of the three modern main-line games that I hadn't played. And how convenient, they just released a remake of it last year!

With regard to remakes: This era sometimes seems like it would prefer to give us nothing but, and in general I would say I have negative feelings about that. But in this specific case, the brief seems to have been “the dramatic presentation ain’t broken, but let’s match P5’s battle system and visuals,” and frankly I’m on board. P5’s contributions to the state of the turn-based art were not small, and I was happy to pay a bit of a premium to experience a classic story I missed out on with like a solid 50% less slog. (That said, if you already DID play P3 a couple times on the PS2, I would expect that this is completely inessential. Having played P4 Golden a few years back, I have no plans to fuck with the upcoming P4 remake.)

Wow, I’m committing some circumvegetal battery today, aren’t I. Anyway, I enjoyed this a LOT. The characters were superb, the plot was twisty and satisfying, and it had that classic Persona balance of engrossing life-sim loop and risk-hungry dungeon crawling.

All three of these games have some strong point that raises them above the others. P5’s hand-crafted story dungeons and rotating cast of menacing-yet-pathetic villains are SO motivating, and feel decades more advanced than the abstract threats and surprise big-bads of 3 and 4. In P4, the narrative/mechanical harmony of your party members literally confronting their shadow to unlock their powers is the best version of the “Persona” conceit around, and binds your party together in purpose just as well as P5’s superior villainy does; possibly better. In P3, I think the rifts and tensions within the party might be the star of the show. The setting of the game is dark and paranoid, and that paranoia seeps into your own people in insidious ways. The struggle to trust and protect each other despite that is the thematic core of this one, and it remains solid and resonant.

I played this with the Japanese voice cast (the English cast are very good, but sometimes it’s nice to get a bit of listening practice anyway), and there were a couple of standout performances. Well, mostly I mean Yukari. She’s my fave in general, but there are a couple of scenes where she has some emotionally raw material and just kills with it. (She’s the one I had my protagonist ask out, because obviously, and the climactic scene of that path really sticks with me.) Also, honorable mention to your homeroom teacher; most of the game she’s just wry and funny and above it all, but there is ONE scene with her after the final battle that only appears if you complete a particular social link, and it is just about the funniest shit I have EVER heard in a video game. We’re talking severe stomach pain.

Bonus Level: Persona 3 Reload: Episode Aigis

Nov 21

This is a ~$30 optional DLC. I enjoyed some things about it, but it’s flawed and inessential, and I don’t know that I’d recommend it, even if you loved the main game.

First off: it’s a continuation of the main game’s story, but that story didn’t need continuation; it already ends at the correct moment. This also relies on some pretty random contrivances to provoke its conflicts. I see it more as an ok what-if fanfic than as a properly canonical coda. (I had been hoping for a bit more backstory on the original shadow research from before we all got here, but no dice; it’s all looking back at more recent trauma.)

Secondly, and more frustratingly: it lacks all of P3’s life sim elements. It’s just the dungeon-crawling and shopping. So you’ve effectively got half the gameplay of a main-line Persona game, and the dungeoning gets tedious without the social calendar to space it out and contextualize it.

Ryoko Kui — Delicious in Dungeon vols. 1-14 (completed) (comics)

Jul. 31

What a tremendous comic! There’s so much there there, thematically and dramatically. I think I already told you this was an all-timer when I was 2/3 through it, and it very much stuck the landing. And it’s so, so funny, between all the world-at-stake drama. You should read this. (I actually bought the whole run, which I won’t normally do with a manga these days.)

Here is something load-bearing in the story that I don’t think I’ve seen talked about much: the way the Winged Lion is so beautiful. My boi is the prettiest kitty. He just like, glows, with a pure inner light of kindness, such that even when you’re starting to get onto his tricks you still kinda want to believe him.

I think the parallel with Aslan must be intentional, and feels like part of a comprehensive Buddhist critique of Christian conceptions of divinity, permanence, and the possibility of satisfying desire. (I may have mentioned the thematic density??)

Current Music: 曖昧code - HIGHWAY

All right, so first off, those Spotify assholes can go fuck themselves. With that motion carried, let's get down to business.

I'm working on a longer version of this post, but I think I'm at the point where I can manage a hyper-compressed version.

You have many ordinary music files. You want to listen to the same library on all your devices. You want the option to create and edit playlists on any device, with changes immediately reflected everywhere. You want to download a subset of the library onto any given device for offline listening, with the option to stream the rest of it. You want gapless album playback because we're not living in a drafty cave in 2003. You want sovereign autonomy, and also maybe the option to share your library with some friends and family.

You are NOT asking for too much.

The task will stretch your abilities, but there's a solid chance that it will not exceed them.

Here's how to Do The Thing.

A Computer
- A normal physical computer on your home network with a bunch of disk to store music files, which is either always on or able to wake up upon network requests. You can dual-task a computer that's already doing other stuff, this doesn't need to be its only job. If you're installing Linux on something, make sure your media is stored on a separate disk partition from your OS and software, in case you need to rebuild the system at some point.
Tailscale
- The only piece of actual black magic involved here. Sign up, and install it on all your mobile/laptop devices and your server. You'll get magic hostnames and IP addresses that let any connected devices securely talk to each other no matter where they are, without having to open a port on your router or anything. Now your music streaming/downloading is perfect inside your house, and possible anywhere with internet.
- If you want to get friends and family onto your server, invite them to your account. Eventually (> 3 users) this costs money, but there's a free re-implementation of the coordinating server called Headscale if you're willing to pay labor instead of cash.
Navidrome
- There are many server apps that can speak "the Subsonic API" for serving personal music streams/downloads to an ecosystem of client apps. Navidrome is the one that has the momentum. It also has ok documentation, multi-library support (for your friends and family), good performance and restrained resource usage, and easy operational characteristics.
Something to manage (and possibly sync) your library
- Navidrome only does the "scan and serve" part; it leaves library management to you, and you can't just add tracks from any random client device, you need to actually get organized files onto the disk somehow.
- If the scarred husk of iTunes is still working for you, just use that on your main desktop and then use rsync or something to sync your library to your server (if your desktop isn't your server). If you're on MusicBee or foobar2000 or something, just use that and sync.
- I wish I had some less fuzzy advice here, but this is the one part of all this that's actually still low-key irreducibly complicated. I will get back to you on this one if I can derive a better answer.
Feishin on any desktop computer
- It's fucking nice.
- Yeah, it's a RAM-guzzling Electron app, but so are spotify and qobuz and probably deezer or whatever. Doesn't matter. If you put enough effort into making things convenient and comfortable and modestly attractive, you CAN counterbalance the Electron Tax and come out on top of the available native apps, and these folks have done it.
- Be sure to configure the keyboard shortcuts to match your preferences, turn on the media hotkeys, and maybe install the mpv helper tool (not required, but it can potentially give slightly better sound quality if it's one of your main listening computers).
Arpeggi on iOS things
- It's fucking nice. It's literally the best music player I've used in a decade.
- Unfortunately it's not in the app store yet because it's in a long-running beta; you have to follow the "testflight" link from the subreddit to install it. It's worth it.
- If you want a backup, you can try Narjo or Flo or Substreamer or Bragi or iSub or Amperfy or Halpoplayer or Cadence or Dromio or Musiver or Soundwaves etc. etc. etc. There's a bunch of Subsonic clients out there, though most are kind of crusty by now.
?? Symfonium or Dsub?? on Android things
- I don't have an android thing and cannot vouch for anything here. Symfonium seems broadly adored by everyone who doesn't mind the one-time $5 or whatever.

Current Music: I.C.KaZe — E.N.K.A. - Stage 5 Part 2 (mono)

I don't think I shared this in my original review, but there was one specific moment in the game ZeroRanger where I went from "rather intent on it" to "full werewolf:" the part where the true last boss deletes your fucking save file.

This is one of the most brilliant pieces of polemical or instructive game design that I've ever encountered. I think it's at the core of why this one particular game has such a startling track record on getting people Into Shmups, but it might take a minute to explain why.

( As foretold, this goes on for a little while! )

Anyway, that's why I'm hard-core now lmao.

Current Music: Boris — Nothing Special (Live at Shindaita Fever 20160924)

Hey, let's do another bookpost. Though first, speaking of comics: please be aware that the Shortbox Comics Fair is now running, through the end of October! It's a limited-run PDF sale of all-new comics, curated by one of the most fascinating and eclectic editorial tastes I've run across. I still need to do my shopping, but figured I'd put out the alert early so everyone else has time to peruse.

Drew Weing — The Creepy Case Files of Margo Maloo vols. 1-3 (comics)

Aug 7

Readable online again!

This is a top-tier kids' comic about a secret world of monsters overlaid on/under/around Echo City (a lightly disguised New York). Weing just started updating it again with a new story, and re-posted all the chapters that he had to make book-exclusive while the physical volumes were in print.

I love this comic. The story is a recipe you've seen before (monsters are largely just misunderstood and want to be left alone; there's a code of silence and stealth that's starting to wear at the seams as conflicts with humans become more common; our private detective heroine is caught between worlds trying to keep the peace), but it's prepared with so much grace and verve that it honestly tastes brand new. It's also quietly subversive under the fun and excitement, in a manner reminiscent of Pinkwater at his best.

One thing I especially love here is that since Margo's not our main POV character (that's Charles, who's a bit of a bumpkin but who catches on quickly), Weing's free to just make her unrestrainedly badass. She has clearly not been to school in a decade. She drives a moped she absolutely does not have a licence for. She's up all night shmoozing at the diner or putting the squeeze on informants down at the casino. She's fuckin' great.

Calvin Kasulke — Several People are Typing (re-read)

Sept. 20

I still like this surreal little office freakout.

It was much easier to follow the whole Lydia/Bjärk situation on this re-read.

Evan Dahm — 3rd Voice, webcomic backlog through early September 2025

Sept. 15

Readable online.

Oh man this is the good stuff. This is that high-purity gritty weird fantasy SHIT. Strong recommend.

I'm captivated by the mysteries of the world in this; it feels big and powerful and very badly damaged. I think the setting reminds me a lot of Martha Wells' Three Worlds setting (the Raksura books) — there's a very wide variety of "people" species, and it's not clear whether there's common descent or something else going on.

I'm also really invested in the troubles and triumphs of Spondule and Navichek, who make a lot of really bad impulse-driven decisions but who still manage to be tenacious survivors, and I've developed a real liking for Zelitte, a secondary character from the current arc, who I hope manages to extract herself into a life that feels more honest to her (but it could really go any way at this point).

I think the first volume of this may have hit print just uhhhh this past (i.e. prior to Sept. 15) weekend?

Hey, let's do a Friday bookpost.

Naomi Novik — the Scholomance trilogy

A Deadly Education — Dec 26, 2024
The Last Graduate — Jan 4, 2025
The Golden Enclaves — Jan 13

These were delightful, and I blazed through em. (Only slightly delayed by waiting for Ruth to finish each book ahead of me, lol.) They're a wizard school story, with a bunch of familiar shapes and tropes, except the wizard school is a gruesome shithole with a staggering mortality rate, tolerated only due to the higher mortality on the outside.

The world has most of the same coherency problems you always get with stories about a separate magical society secretly overlaid on consensus reality, but Novik knows the correct solution: briefly wave a partial explanation around, then floor the plot and place your faith in the motion blur. Don’t worry about it too much.

What makes this series work so well is mostly two things: first, that Novik is just really that good at pacing, making exaggerated characters sympathetic, and understanding the core function of well-worn tropes. She’s done her time in the fanfic mines and she knows how to work a crowd! Second, she actually put a lot of thought into what an international magic school might look like in the 21st century — the political tensions/alliances/resentments, the compromises and adjustments over time, all kinds of stuff.

Anyway, if you wanna guzzle a dark fantasy trilogy that’s indulgent while never being dumb, this is a great pick.

Moëbius and Jorodowski — The Incal vol. 1: The Black Incal (comics)

Mar. ??

During a discord conversation about weird influential French sci fi comics, I remembered that I had PDFs of this series from a bundle somewhere, so I cracked it open.

This comic is unhinged, and teeters constantly on the edge of nonsense. It’s pretty cool.

All the Commonweal books over again

May ??

Sometimes you gotta re-read.

Susanna Clarke — Piranesi (re-read)

May 14

Sometimes you gotta re-read. I finally bought my own copy of this one.

William Gibson — Agency (re-read)

May 19

Sometimes you gotta re-read.

Ann Leckie — Translation State (re-read)

May 22

Sometimes you gotta re-read. Still really good!

William Gibson — Count Zero

June 9

Ah, the attraction and revulsion of cyberpunk.

Out of Gibson's Sprawl trilogy, I had only ever read Neuromancer, and that was a long-ass time ago. This one was frustrating and compelling; it has the grace and momentum I associate with Gibson, but it also has some amount of tedious macho horseshit, and the weird brand-name fixation that became the default gesture for any pastiche of these particular works. (His later work remains brand-interested, but he legit toned it way down.)

Anyway, I don't see this becoming a comfort re-read the way his later works (starting around Pattern Recognition) are, but I did enjoy it. Also, mixed in among all the cyberdeckers, one of the three main threads involved a woman with a background in the arts being contracted by a billionaire to search for something obscure, which was the same plot setup as the whole Blue Ant trilogy; I wasn't expecting to see a prototype of that in the Sprawl!

Martha Wells — the first four Murderbot novellas again, plus Fugitive Telemetry

June 25

Sometimes you gotta re-read. A friend started reading these and I got enthusiastic on his behalf.

Had a fun experience today — one of my friends finally took the bait and asked me for the full download on how to make my default crusty bread. I said “hang out at my place for a full day and I’ll get you to the next level,” and he actually did it. First graduate of nick’s bread school!

(Most people want nothing to do with that whole process; you’re looking for someone who gets excited by how many parameters they’re gonna have to hand-tweak to get shit dialed in.)

Anyway, the reason I said hang around for a full day is that there’s a bunch of technique elements that are just plain unexplainable. You have to see it, and then you have to immediately do it with your own hands (and ideally instant feedback on how close you got to the right moves). YouTube can be a godsend for this but there’s nothing as good as the real deal, even if your teacher is mid at explaining physical movements. I had him do his own batch and reproduce my actions right after I did em, which also meant he got to go home with his own loaf.

With the caveat that this is only fractionally useful without some supplementary visual (and ideally tactile and olfactory) aids, I went to the trouble of writing up some notes to print out for him, so I figured I’d dump em here as well.

( Excessive bread exegesis )

Current Location: the skidmore bluffs, havin a beer

Sure, why not, let's bookpost.

Wren Hyde — Beneath a Burning Sky (zine)

Feb 27

A friend we know from Ruth's shapenote singing community wrote a zine about going on long bike tours. It's good! Wren generally puts a lot of energy into thinking about things like the practical exercise of freedom and the purpose of risking yourself on an adventure, and I always value the sense of being gently shaken out of autopilot that I get from talking to (or reading) them.

I don't know of anywhere a random person could obtain this from, but it's worth picking up if you happen to see it around.

Ken Liu — Laozi’s Dao De Jing: A New Translation for a Transformative Time

Mar. 30

(For now I’m putting Liu as the author here rather than Laozi, but I might reconsider at some point. He has a lot of commentary in his own voice interspersed throughout the book (on the Dao, on other Daoist writers, on the theory and practice of translation), so it’s not attempting to be an invisible translation.)

I picked this up because the ebook was on steep sale. My only real prior familiarity with this text was indirect, through the prints it leaves on the surrounding world, and those prints are ambiguous and elusive. Well... the text is also ambiguous and elusive. Even more so than I was expecting, and that’s saying something! Having carefully read it, I do not feel equipped to tell you what I think Daoism is about. Ask me in some later year, maybe.

I’m glad I read this and I expect to return to it. It’s deliberately aggravating and provocative, but in a gentle way. I really had no idea what to think of it right after finishing, but there are one or two ideas in there that have yielded a bit more as I mull them over in the background. (In particular, some paradoxes about the entire concept of “leading.”)

J.-C. Mézières, P. Christin, E. Tranlé — Valerian and Laureline: The Empire of a Thousand Planets and The Land Without Stars (comics)

Apr. 14

This long-running French sci-fi comic series came up in a conversation about The Fifth Element; I hadn't really heard of it, but it's apparently widely influential. The library had a bunch of it, so I checked out a couple volumes.

The art and the environment design in these is fabulous. But I found the stories a bit tedious and slight, and the cartooning (as distinct from the superb draftsmanship and composition) wasn't to my taste, so I don't expect to read much more of it.

This is that style of comic where the panels are lushly and meticulously detailed, but there aren't enough of them to properly control the narrative flow, and so they compensate by cramming a goddamn paragraph of captions above every other panel. My personal name for this phenomenon is "That Prince Valiant Thing," in honor of a baffling Sunday newspaper strip from my childhood that always seemed to have like one panel of dudes staring into space and a half-page of turgid narration in which absolutely nothing ever happened. I'm sure there's people who like this (or at least are better able to tolerate it), but I personally feel that it misses the point of the medium.

Tamsyn Muir — Princess Floralinda and the Forty-Flight Tower

Apr. 10

I loved this gory inverted fairy tale about a self-made monster.

This novella has an extremely good Shape, and I wish I could define that better for you. I've had an ongoing background ponder running for years about what exactly the novella as a form is good for, and my current (tentative) thinking is that it's either for episodic stories, or for stories where you're trying to draw a very particular geometric structure with the plot (which requires more elbow room than a short, but which will have less success in a longer novel because it's harder for the reader to hold the whole of the shape in their head at once). The failure states for the novella are, of course, "short story that wasn't cut enough" and "novel with insufficient development."

Oh, hmm. I've had some of these reviews sitting around for a while, let's thin the herd a bit.

Isaac Safron Robin — Witchtrade, issues 1-6 (comics)

Mar. 11, 2025

Available at author's itch.io page You might also know Robin as the character artist from Christine Love's Get in the Car, Loser.

I liked these a lot! I think I previously reviewed Robin's short comic Baby Universe here; I thought the cartooning on it was delicious and the boys were extremely cute, but it ended pretty quick and I was left wishing for something with compatible vibes but a bit more room to breathe. This is that!

Well, the first issue isn't that, but after that it spreads out a bit and lets you take in the scenery. (You could probably skip that first one, tbh, or come back to it as a curiosity after you've read the rest of the series.) You can see Robin getting better at developing engaging ways to drive a story to nowhere in particular; lots of loose threads pointing at shared history between characters, pauses for exposition on cultural and geographical landmarks, decorative architecture... cuties........

Anyway, I liked the characters a lot, and I also really liked the city-as-character; it's a dreamy place that makes you hungry to visit.

( Also: Three game reviews in which I go on AT LENGTH. One that you should at least consider attempting, one that you or your kids might enjoy depending on your locus of nostalgia, and one that's for sickos only. )

Current Music: eebrozgi — Affection Air (Void Stranger OST)

Sometimes, an item will be on my packing list, and I'll deliberately decide to not bring it because it's not relevant to the upcoming situation, and then it turns out it's also important in situations that aren't obvious from just looking at the list. Recent cases-in-point:

Just because it's a temperature where I'd wear shorts on a run, doesn't mean it's not a temperature where I'd wear gloves.
The re-used gelato jar we use for cold-soak lunches on the trail is also an important prep tool for certain dinners, and we might have one of those even if we don't have soakable lunches.
That cold-weather neck buff also forms part of my camping pillow, by keeping my face from sticking to a nylon stuff-sack.

Whenever you Do This To Yourself, the trick is that you have to go back to your packing list and explain why you want to be sure to bring it next time. Your future self does not like following orders, and they're going to be uncooperative and chaotic unless you tell them what you were thinking.

Ah right, since I've got all the reviews (but one) posted, may as well do the wrap-up:

9 fiction:
- 2 by men
- 7 by women
- 2 re-reads, 7 new
16 comics:
- 8 by men
- 7 by women
- 1 by non-binaries
5 video games with significant narratives

Not exactly a red-letter reading year! But, some slightly interesting trends:

Significantly more comics than in the prior five years.
Prose fiction is down from 2023, but oddly, the amount of novels I read for the first time is stable (and up from prior years).

I've been a bit quiet on the internet lately; most of my "ambient sociality" quotient these days is going toward a couple of discords I'm in. I'm working on some projects, I'm hanging out with folks in person, and I'm doing a lot of running and reading and playing games, and then there's work. And then there's the constant drain on our sanity and energy from all the fucking fascists running roughshod over the place!!

Well, anyway: I still review books and games and stuff, and I've got the whole remaining balance of what I read/played in 2024 sitting in the hopper (with the exception of Naomi Novik's A Deadly Education at the end of December, which I'll review as a trilogy later). Let's dump the whole thing at once! Looks like this batch is mostly comics.

( Delicious in Dungeon, Silver Spoon, Neon White, 1000x Resist, the revenge of the webcomic backlog, and more )

Our cat Halla died last night. She was getting a promising new treatment for her lifelong painful mouth issues, and had a violent reaction to it that no cat has ever had before, and it damaged her lungs. The drug company paid to rush her to critical care at the emergency vet (this was a final-stage approval trial for the treatment), and the vets did everything possible to stabilize her and give her a chance to recover, but it wasn’t in the cards; she died a day and a half later. It was one of those times where something random and bad happens for no comprehensible reason, and you just don't have any agency to stop it or fix it.

(How rare and random? Our emergency vet ran a lit search and found exactly ONE paper about a human experiencing something vaguely similar after a somewhat related treatment. Why did you have to be special this one last time, kitty?)

We already miss her a ton, and I think Annabel does too. It sucks so much! She was the sweetest and weirdest little cat, a perfect and unique being in this world full of perfect and unique beings. We wanted another seven years with her, but even that wouldn't have satisfied.

I'll try and do a memorial post with photos at some point.

Well, uh, everything is pretty fucked up right now, buuuut I feel like I'm not going to benefit the dozen or two people who read this journal by hollering about it. But I can at least validate your parking: the amount of cruelty, greed, and chaos in America right now is absolutely off the chain, and if you're feeling stressed about it, IMO that's rational and normal. I don't have anything to suggest that you haven't already heard, tho.

What I DO have that you haven't heard are some recs of rad stuff to read, so that's what I'll go ahead and post.

Sylvan Migdal — Carboniferous (comics)

May 17, 2024

Readable online!

This (completed, GN-sized) sci-fi comedy webcomic is an order of magnitude smarter than it looks, while still being exactly as fun as it looks. A squishy galactic federation nepo-baby blunders into a backwater lost-colony planet and instantly re-inflames a botched first-contact detente, an infinite number of local power struggles, and a weirdly lethal AR game that no one remembers signing up for.

I almost never saw anyone talking about this one, and I think it's heinously underrated! Peak webcomics, tbh!

Heads-up for workplace comic-readers: this series is perfectly SFW, but it shares a domain with a whole bunch of good-natured porn by the same author, so be careful where ya click.

Zito Madu — The Minotaur at Calle Lanza

Nov. 13, 2024

A mostly realistic memoir with a lone surreal episode. A brutal practice of self-knowledge? Traveling “wrong” in order to claim a place more thoroughly? The meaning of labyrinth for its denizen?

^^ That was meant as notes for a later expanded review, but on reflection I don’t think they can be improved, so I present them as-is. No refunds.

Valerie Halla — Curse/Kiss/Cute, episode 0

Jan 27, 2025

Readable Online!

If you do everything I tell you to as a matter of sensible policy, then you may remember Valerie Halla as the cartoonist of Goodbye to Halos, a gentle and queer fantasy webcomic that looked fresh to death, seemed like it wanted to go somewhere real exciting but didn’t quite know the way yet, and eventually ran aground and wiped out. (By the way, a halted-unfinished webcomic is never a true failure, in my book. It was always worth sharing that thing shouting from your heart, and for us it was always worth watching. Every wipeout expands the possibility space and teaches us something new to want.) You might also be aware that she was the colorist on the last 1/4 or so of Octopus Pie, speaking of looking fresh to death.

This is not a comic; it’s the “pilot episode” of a horny urban fantasy illustrated prose serial. But formally speaking, it does a couple real interesting things that draw from the modern English-language strain of “visual novel” video games, which in turn are heavily influenced by the formal/narrative tendencies of 00’s–10’s webcomics. So it’s not a hard break, if you get me.

Ok, listen: it feels a little risky to push this on even my treasured gayer-than-baseline readership. It is ever so slightly closer to the furry lane of the freeway than most people vibe with, and it’s not porn but it is kinda rowdy and rude. But I formally recommend that every one of you take a chance on it anyway, because!

ITEM 1: It’s plain fucking good!! It’s witty and sly and cute, the characters are fun as hell, the prose is a delight, and I love the illustrations.

ITEM 2: It’s formally interesting! Give that sound-cue feature a try, see what it does to the scrolling-fiction experience and see what it makes you feel. IMO it’s part of a unified whole with the distracted and evasive narrative voice, contributing to a particular ludo-mechanical reading experience that feels fresh and raw.

ITEM 3: In its own soft and oblique way, this might actually be the most inherently and irreducibly transgender thing I’ve ever read, and IMO that is good and urgent and intensely exciting all on its own. The central themes of “monstrosity” and self-answering questions are incredibly potent, and the whole thing is suffused with the joy of expanding possibilities and the removal of constraints. I trust you to already know why someone might be desperately thirsty for that in this present historical moment; I'd like to suggest that maybe you'd benefit from it too, even if you weren't actively looking for it prior to reading this.

Sarah Webb — Kochab (comics, re-read)

Feb 10, 2025

(readable online! Or, grab the book.)

Previously reviewed, this is a standalone (web-serialized) graphic novel about a free-spirited village girl and an immortal ifrit imprisoned by her own memories (girl-by-force-of-will) who tentatively fall in love while traversing the wreckage of a dead arcology-palace in the arctic.

This re-read was via the beautiful Hiveworks paperback edition that kickstarted a while back. The story benefits greatly from the collected format; I remembered it feeling a bit circular and oblique during the middle, but it turns out that was just the serialization delay, and everything feels clear and speedy without it.

Anyway, I love this comic.

Current Music: Basia Bulat — It Can't Be You

I’ve continued to lean into my shmup era lately, focusing mostly on Touhou 10 and Blue Revolver: Double Action (a brand new remaster of an acclaimed 2016 game).

I started playing Blue Revolver some time after making that last post, and it is a proper jewel of a game. Actually: it’s the very next shmup I would recommend to a newcomer after ZeroRanger. ZR taught me why I should care about shmups, and BR:DA is in the process of teaching me how to care about shmups.

I learned about this game from an enthusiastic video about it from a youtuber called Electric Underground. I thought his analysis was onto something really interesting; the nutshell version goes something like:

The complex act of balancing scoring systems against survival is where most of the depth emerges in a shoot-and-dodge game. To serious shmup genre heads, the real game begins when you start playing for score.
BUT: scoring mechanics and the scoring metagame are traditionally opaque, and hard to grasp without an external community.
Therefore, the next design frontier for shmups is to integrate the metagame with the core game — transparently expose the full depths of the scoring systems, and build on-ramps to score-play through all the rest of the systems, so that new players find themselves beginning to play for score long before they even get competent at playing for survival. Shmups may never be appropriate for anyone but sickos, but that’s how to recruit and train new sickos (e.g. yours truly).

( Extensive mechanical exegesis, you know you love it )

shmup (n): Shortened form of “shoot-em-up;” a genre of 2D video games based on shooting down waves of enemies while dodging waves of projectiles. (Usually in an aircraft, usually scrolling in one direction, but not necessarily either.) Japanese synonym: STG (short for "shooting game").

Shmups are one of the most fundamental forms of action game; most of what I used to play on the Atari 2600 as a kid qualified as a shmup. But sometimes it's easy to confuse "fundamental" with "basic," and there was a long period where I wrote the genre off as a low-nutrient diversion that relied on cheapness instead of challenge.

So a couple years back I got obsessed with a vertically-scrolling shmup called ZeroRanger. It drew me in with stellar audio/visual design and a spare and cryptic story about eternal recurrence and the cycle of suffering, but then it kept me invested with some intensely satisfying shoot-and-dodge gameplay. The varied weapon loadouts offered a ton of agency for approaching a challenge, and the risk/reward balance of the complex scoring systems pushed me to keep improving my aggression and accuracy. I played the shit out of that game and frankly so should you.

My main takeaways, once I had beaten the true last boss and gotten all the White Vanilla achievements, were:

System Erasure rules, and I should grab Void Stranger sight-unseen when it drops. (This turned out to be absolutely correct; more about this some other day.)
Shmups as a genre also actually rule, so what am I missing by not playing very many?

Thus, I roved out a-questing. I started out with some stuff I already knew of or had recently stumbled across, then started digging deeper with the help of some kind of opinion poll on a forum for intense genre otaku.

Here's some notes so far.

( 3000 words about various shmups )

In Conclusion

Play ZeroRanger, because it's probably still the best "gateway shmup" to show newcomers what that world has to offer. But many of these other games also rule, and I'm having a great time exploring them.

So if you have access to an Apache2 server that allows .htaccess overrides and has mod_actions turned on, you can make a single CGI script take over the whole URL hierarchy for an entire site. (Or just for a subtree of it, although the app would need to be aware and ready for that.)

In short, you make a new directory called __internal (or something) at the top of your site, and put your CGI executable in there with a filename of my-app.cgi (or something). Then you make TWO .htaccess files.

The root-level .htaccess disables special handling for bare directories, then tells the server to unconditionally use your CGI script to handle every URL pointing into your site, without consideration for whether a path would otherwise aim at a file on disk.

# Root-level .htaccess file
Options -Indexes
DirectoryIndex disabled
Action my-app "/__internal/my-app.cgi" virtual
SetHandler my-app
AcceptPathInfo on # that's the default, but still

That CGI path in the Action directive needs to be a URL path pointed at somewhere reachable on your site, rather than a path on disk. That's kind of odd, and it hung me up for a while when I was trying to get this working! But the upshot is, we now need a second .htaccess in that __internal directory that un-does everything we did in the root-level .htaccess so that the server can actually resolve that script. (Otherwise you end up in a recursive loop and the site doesn't work.)

# .htaccess file in /__internal
Options +ExecCgi -Indexes
SetHandler None
AddHandler cgi-script .cgi

Ta-daaaa! Now your program can handle all the top-level routing for your site, using CGI vars like REQUEST_URI to reconstruct the original request and do your routing. (And don't worry about needing to keep __internal private or anything, it just needed some kind of weird name to avoid trampling on any of your app's real URL paths.)

( A lengthy digression on the nature of Script Soup )

You can print your own paper money at home, of course, and it can sometimes fool someone who isn't paying much attention. A really dedicated counterfeiter can fool a lot of people. The last mile of craft goes on more or less forever, in terms of accurate fiber content/distribution, ink consistency, foils and inclusions, etc., but generally you pick a use case for your counterfeits and determine a "good enough" fidelity level.

The thing is, though, the value of money doesn't come from the fidelity of the object to a physical standard; it comes from recognition of the authority and integrity of the central bank that issues it. In other words, it's just a symbol that refers to an external thing. If you produce a quantity of perfect, indistinguishable counterfeit bills, you can use it to fool nearly anyone, cause a lot of chaos, and greatly profit in the confusion. But what you can't do with it is magically control the central bank to change the quantity of money that's known to be in circulation. You haven't actually produced money at all.

This is also how "knowledge" works — language operates as a system of symbols in reference to actually-existing external things (or hypothetical things that in turn relate to actually-existing things by analogy, etc.). If you produce flawlessly plausible language but are not correlating the symbols to the proper external referents, you aren't exercising "knowledge;" you're doing something else. Specifically, what you're doing is counterfeiting. Maybe your counterfeit will be good enough to trick someone out of some drugs or a meal or a jug of Tide (figuratively speaking), or maybe you'll get caught with your pants down and find yourself in a world of hurt.

When you hear these LLM guys saying shit like "our next model will reason at a graduate school level" or whatever, they're asserting that if we can make our monopoly money realistic enough, it will transform into real money. But they don't command the central bank, because an LLM does not have any concept of symbols and referents that would allow it to "reason" or "possess even a single fact worth of knowledge;" all it can do is correlate statistics about how language tokens have been placed together in its training corpus. It can print fancy paper, but it can't make money.

Are real and counterfeit money actually different, though? In any way that matters? Well, if all you're trying to do is pass off a bill to acquire some goods, it can maybe seem like there isn't. But keep doing it, and I bet you'll eventually hit a scenario where you will perceive a meaningful difference. Or maybe all you need to do is stand still and watch, because whenever some dipshit completely destabilizes the currency, the result is usually pretty tough to ignore.