Things I read in early 2023

[roadrunnertwice]

Hey whoa damn, I kind of forgot how to do a bookpost. But, let's do a bookpost.

Tamsyn Muir — Gideon the Ninth and Harrow the Ninth (re-reads)

Jan ?? and Jan 30

These are definitely written to be re-read, and I had a great time re-reading them.

Tamsyn Muir — Nona the Ninth

Feb 19

This series! Oh my god!! I love it. Grim, grisly, joyous, delightful, and sad.

A review which I lost the link to, from right around the time this came out, asserted that this series captures something crucial about how it feels to be alive right now. I agree.

Much like Harrow, Nona continues the story while overturning prior expectations around format and vibe. Much of the surviving cast of the last episode are present, but the POV character wasn't present for any of that, so there's a lot of decoding to be done about who's actually whom and what in the world happened to put them in their present condition. Great fun, IMO.

Somewhere around the third or fourth maddeningly tantalizing apocalypse dream/flashback episode, I decided that it's my book now and I can do as I please with it, and scanned forward to read all of the flashbacks in a row before reading another word of the main plot. I regret nothing.

Joe Sparrow — Cuckoo (comics)

Mar 28

I liked this a lot; it's suffused with a menacing dreamlike feeling that I was extremely down with. You'll probably guess where it's going immediately just based on the title, but it's more about the feeling of that gradual realization that you've gotten something fundamental wrong about your whole reality.

Well, and about Joe Sparrow's psychedelic bendy-limbed cartooning, which I adore.

Mara Bos — Rust Atomics and Locks: Low-Level Concurrency in Practice

Apr 5

Readable online.

This was a fantastic and informative read! Uh, if you're into that sort of thing!! That reminds me, I still need to buy a copy and bill it to my education budget at work.

Although Rust is center-stage in this (the author recently overhauled the implementation of a bunch of Rust's built-in concurrency primitives), much of the material about how low-level concurrency and memory ordering operations work are applicable in many languages. Notably, Rust pretty much shoplifted the entire C++ memory model, so that language's concerns are going to be almost identical.

Some months prior, I had run into some question about... I can't really even remember what, but atomic memory orderings came up and someone was like "pretty much the only intelligible explanation of this is this ~3hr Herb Sutter conference talk from 2012". I think maybe this book is the new default go-to for such questions.

Bonus Level: Sylvie Lime

Apr 16

Game is free on itch.io

Hey by the way, why in the world am I still prefixing video game reviews with "bonus level:" in my book posts? I was about to Stop Doing That because it stopped being funny like six years ago, but I felt a sudden pang of sadness in my heart. I guess it gets to stay?????

Anyway, this game is berserk and I loved it. I guess it's a metroidvania platformer. When you first fire it up, it feels like it's a joke about a game that is Badly Unwell; like the movement physics feel seriously heinous if you've touched any other video game recently, and a bunch of walls and floors seem to be having a problem with existence and have gone on strike.

Before I fired this up, I happened to read this review by Andi McClure, which was definitely instrumental in convincing me to stick it out. You can read that review too, I pretty much just agree with it in toto.

What I'll add is that the tools and items in this game are absolutely galaxy-brain, and you should really play this if you're interested in tool-centered level design at all. I'm sure any pro wrestling enthusiast could have told me this, but the folding chair is mind-bendingly powerful, and the tiny house shocked me to the core.

Also, I played on keyboard, and the control scheme meta-game is incredibly real. Actually I played on dvorak keyboard, which I'm assuming isn't notably harder or easier but I haven't done the comparative analysis. But anyway, if I remember right, every letter A through M (?) is reserved for activating some specific tool, every other letter transforms you into a lime, and space (and maybe one other key?) is jump. So your right hand stays on the arrow keys, and depending on what you're trying to navigate and how you've decided to approach it, you end up developing a repertoire of strange left-hand grips to keep jump/lime/some-tool/some-other-tool accessible by twitch reflex.

Bonus Level: GitCL: Fate of Another World DLC

May 6

An epilogue episode of Christine Love's Get in the Car, Loser, the antifascist road trip RPG with a twitch-reflex cooldown-juggling battle system.

Love has stated that she planned a trilogy of DLCs with the scheme of "comedy, tragedy, romance," and this one is the tragedy.

I liked this a lot! The first DLC was ok; it had one cool boss fight, a few strange battle items (which apparently break the entire game in a speedrun), and like two and a half really funny jokes, but it's entirely nonessential. This one is essential, if you liked the base game. It expands the world and its history, it expands the battle mechanics, it provides an ending for one of your core party members, and, thematically speaking, it left me with A Lot to Mull Over.

Comments

[sporky_rat]

I am interested to see where Alecto the Ninth goes, if we ever get it.

[roadrunnertwice]

same!

[kaberett]

<3! AREN'T the Muir fun.

[roadrunnertwice]

Aren't they!!!!!!!!