roadrunnertwice | Entries tagged with didread

Calvin Kasulke — Several People are Typing

July 10

A surrealist epistolary novel written as Slack transcripts (which is one of those concepts where you’re like ah yup, someone was gonna do that eventually). Anyway, Brenna and Chase recommended this and I quite liked it! Hilarious and cute and incredibly disorienting.

Random fact that Ruth tipped me off to (because she is low-key an internet supersleuth): apparently Kasulke is besties with Isaac Feldman, whose novel Breath of the Sun I quite enjoyed a couple years back.

Bryan Washington — Memorial

Aug. 25

I hadn't heard of this or anything, but Ruth had it checked out from the library while we were on vacation, and it sounded interesting.

It was! I was wary at first, because A: Benson (who narrates the first section) showed signs of being some kinda Joyless Literature Man and I ain't got time for that, and B: the plot that was shaping up would not exist if any of the main characters were capable of having ONE (1) fucking conversation with another human. I stopped sweating so much about item A once we had a scene or two of Benson working at the daycare and it became clear that he really loves and cares about both his co-worker Ximena and all of the kids there. And item B was ultimately kinda the point of the whole book, rather than a classical Dumbass Plot.

Anyway, this is a story about two guys in a relationship that is Bad. Like, The Mountain Goats' Tallahassee caliber Bad. Both of them come from homes where the relationships were Bad. (One of them has also sustained massive psychic damage from contracting HIV and having his family react to that in really bullshit ways, but tbh that might not even be his biggest problem.) I think the main question of the book comes down to: if you become aware that you just suck at being a person, and you do not want to continue doing so, where do you fucking start?

And the story's argument, or its best guess, at least, is that you start with the act of nurturing and care. Knowing why won't help, and knowing how won't help; you have to invite something into your life that you can stand to nurture without succumbing to your self-negating drive to destroy, perform the hard work of nurturing day-in and day-out, and then find a way to apply those strengthened better impulses to the people you're actually vulnerable to and need something from.

Which is definitely something to chew on, and might not be wrong. And I felt very fondly toward both these awful guys by the end. I don't know how I feel about the conclusion that they need to get back/stay together; tbh that doesn't seem necessary for their growth or their happiness, and you can go forward with love for someone without staying in a relationship with them, ask anyone who knows. But never mind. Good book.

(Note to self about an internal taxonomy that might or might not result in a post some years from now: novels by authors whose natural format is the short story.)

Return of the Thief (re-read)

Aug. 18

Still fuckin slaps.

Martha Wells — Network Effect (re-read)

May 25

Still rad.

Bonus Level: CrossCode: A New Home

April 19

CrossCode was fantastic, and this epilogue DLC is more of the same, so go for it! New quests, new biome, new final dungeon, and resolves some story loose ends.

...Some somewhat wild loose ends, which I took a while to chew on! I think one answer I've come to about [why a particular character is sympathetic despite all the reasons they shouldn't be] comes down to: Evotars really aren't their source. Not just because of their different experiences starting at the branch point, but... they just never were to start with. They aren't true "copies," it's a messy and nondeterministic statistical process with a lot of randomness and shear built-in. And then also maybe something about "power corrupts," idk.

Current Music: leon chang — garden of birdly delights

Got a handful of reviews sitting in the bin, so let's do a bookpost!

( Seven game/comic/book reviews )

OK, finally: here's the last three book reviews I still hadn't posted from 2021.

( Two programming books and one ADHD book. )

2021 Wrap-up and Census

The count last year was a fairly grim picture of the state of my attention span and capacity to dream. I'm putting most of the blame on the ongoing and accumulating stress of living in the final days of a rapidly crumbling civilization. 👍🏼 (Which might or might not be what we factually look back on this period as, in fifty years' time, but the verdict of history is kind of beside the point — that's what the evidence points to as we live this, and that's the identity and nature of the stress it inflicts on us.)

6 video games with significant stories
2 comics (one of which was an eight-volume manga that I'm counting as one because 🤷🏽)
- 1 of which was a re-read
19 novels
- 13 by women, 6 by men
- 15 re-reads, 4 new
6 nonfiction or technical books
- 4 by men, 1 by a woman, and 1 by a mixed-gender team (incidental contributors excluded)
1 volume of poetry

So, call it 28 books (excluding the games), more than half of which were re-reads.

The first paragraph of this wrap-up sounds fairly depressive when I read it back, so I want to reassure that I'm doing pretty good, all things considered! It's just that I end up having to allocate my attention and energy a lot differently than I would allocate them if I lived in a healthier world. In particular, I've been having an incredibly difficult time consuming non-re-read fiction these last two and a half years, and that includes video games with significant stories. I can do it, sometimes, but it's much slower and harder than usual. I recently heard another person (and a much more prolific reader than me, to boot) say the same thing; what an odd effect! So a bunch of the energy I would have put into exploring new worlds in my mind has gone into learning skills instead, or just soaking up the time in an anodyne way by playing skill-focused games that are more or less free of story. I don't find myself drawn to doomscrolling to fill the gap, so that's good.

Oh hey, it's been a minute since I posted anything. Well! Here's the half-handful of reviews I had sitting in the hopper. I'm recovering from a cold and feeling somewhat faded/unreal, so I don't have too much else to say right now.

Adrian Tchaikovsky — Children of Time

July 30

I read this in a single day on my phone in a series of airports, planes, and busses, en route to Mammoth Lakes so we could start acclimating to elevation for the John Muir Trail.

I really enjoyed it! Good thinky SF about intelligent spiders trying to keep a civilization up and running. And I kept thinking about it for a long time after finishing.

I was reading Graeber's Debt at the same time as this, and it definitely called my attention to the fact that the somewhat-egalitarian society the spiders have finally come to around the final acts of the book is only possible via free labor from the ants. The characters talk about it like biotechnology or computerization or robotics rather than slavery, and the ants themselves don't appear to have much in the way of a sense of self, but the setup definitely reminded me of Graeber's depictions of ancient Greece and Rome. Not really sure what to do with that, just something I noticed and pondered on.

Content warning: SO MANY SPIDERS, OMG

Bonus Level: Get in the Car, Loser

Oct. somethingth

This was fantastic. I'd had an eye on it in development, just because I was very intrigued when Christine Love said she was building a playable thesis on why FFXIII's Battle System Was Good, Actually.

Mechanically, it lived up to my expectations and then some — the battling was fun and tricky, and I think it had several genuinely novel and cool ideas for how to streamline various elements of an RPG. (The lane-change thing! Burning outdated items to upgrade new ones! The item stories!) The visuals and audio were also really cool and enjoyable.

Story-wise, this honestly hit much harder than I expected it to. I feel like most of us are generally in the mood these days for a story about a trans girl and her friends fighting nazis, but also I was a little wary — like, I feel it's easy for self-consciously on-the-nose media to be slight and flimsy in certain ways. But this felt honest and raw while still being of-the-current-moment, and it even did some formally interesting stuff (like, the whole chapter where Sam's just stuck in her own shitty thoughts was done in a really cool and tense way).

Anyway, this is actually free, weirdly. There's one DLC out right now, which goes for $10 and doesn't feel like $10 of content at all, but I bought it and am perfectly fine with that — the way I read it is, the main game is a bargain at $10 and you just post-pay if you liked it.

Bonus Level: The Outer Wilds: Echoes of the Eye

Dec 20

This is DLC for one of my favorite games of the last year, and it truly rules. I was really skeptical that there was room for something like this in that universe — the main game was so complete and coherent! Where were they even going to shoehorn more lore in?? But it works really well — better than well, it even manages to improve the coherency of the main storyline. (Via... not really a retcon, more just some added context and a valid answer to a particular question that the Nomai eventually concluded was unknowable.)

Mechanically speaking, this adds one very large additional environment to the solar system... plus something sort of else. I feel like I ran into some slightly more frustrating roadblocks in this than I did in the main game; definitely had to look up a nudge for one puzzle in the tower. I'll just chalk that up to it being a more claustrophobic environment — in the main game I could always just blast off to some other corner of the universe if I got annoyed at something, while here I'd eventually hit a point where I just couldn't get around whatever I was blocked on. If you're thinking of playing the game for the first time, I think I'd recommend just buying the DLC before you start and exploring it in parallel with everything else; you'll want to avoid doing the final Echoes segment (you'll know when you're coming up against it, believe me) until you're pretty sure you've sorted out what was going on with the Ash Twin Project, but otherwise it should weave in pretty well, and having more stuff to explore elsewhere will give you some buffer against the more frustrating puzzles.

Also, fair warning, this has some spookier content than the base game and also includes some stealth/evasion challenges.

Only another three or four things in the 2021 booklog after this! Well, like I said before, it was a bit of a slim year for reading.

Ann Leckie — Provenance (re-read)

Aug 2

This book is still great, and in fact it might be better on re-read, now that I know not to expect it to resemble the Imperial Radch series in the slightest.

Structurally, I think this book is more or less a farce! It just maybe takes a minute to catch on to that, because it’s a farce with a deeply strange sense of humor.

I read this on my phone while we were acclimatizing in Mammoth, it looks like.

Ann Leckie — Ancillary Justice, Ancillary Sword, and Ancillary Mercy (re-reads)

Aug ??, Aug 29, Sept 6

Then I launched directly into an Imperial Radch re-read, because why in the world not.

David Graeber — Debt: The First 5000 Years

Oct. 1

God I miss knowing David Graeber is out there.

This book was a lot to take in, significantly more daunting than Bullshit Jobs. But although it was slow going at times, I found it really enjoyable and thought-provoking.

Martha Wells — Fugitive Telemetry (re-read)

Oct 3

Sure I’ll re-read a book I already read this year. Why not!!

You’ll be pleased to know this is still good.

Bonus Level — Inscryption

Nov 9

This game's great! Everyone has probably already told you this. A bunch of the fun is in the wild twists it makes, so I'll try and make my comments somewhat cryptic.

Somehow I whiffed the neon-vision puzzle in Act 1 by being too good at the Act 1 card game. 🤣 I didn't need to invoke the triggering condition until the final boss, and if you do that it skips the post-battle restore and jumps straight to the end of the run (although it does something cool to your memorial card). I did like two more fruitless runs after that, and had to ask Isaac for a hint! Anyway, if you're at a dead-end and there's an in-game tool that you've been avoiding using, try using it in a couple runs before the last boss fight.
Re: events around the ending, and some of the surrounding lore that came out of the postgame ARG: I was originally a bit hung up on the implausibility of the Karnoffel Code (a ~48-element permutation) containing something THAT complex and autonomous, and also couldn't make sense of the protagonist's reactions after being exposed to it. But after thinking about it some more, I've decided it doesn't contain anything at all; it's just a completely arbitrary symbol. Like a name. The name of something very bad, which knows when its true name is being spoken and is able to influence any system that speaks or perceives it. 💀
Apparently the dev is releasing an infinite roguelike version of Act 1 as an alternate game mode (with expanded mechanics and a difficulty-ratcheting ascension system like in Slay the Spire), because Act 1 has the most thoroughly fleshed-out gameplay loop and there's a chunk of the audience who wanted to keep improving their runs instead of being pushed into the story-focused late-game.

I find this hilarious. I mean, it's great: Act 1 works very well as a game and it'll be cool to let the mechanics breathe like that, I'll totally play this. But literally this is happening because a bunch of the fans think Leshy was right and are insisting that the developer should allow his plan to succeed! Mullins couldn't have designed such a perfect extension of the game's lore if he'd tried to on purpose.

Ben Hatke — Zita the Spacegirl (comics)

Dec 20

I finally read my ex-library copy of this before sending it to my nephew as part of his Christmas present. (The other part was Hilda and the Troll.)

This is a great kids’ comic! Something like fifteen plus years ago I read a bunch of the wordless Zita one-shots Hatke used to post on the Flight forums; I remember them having excellent cartooning, and this had excellent cartooning too. Cute art, good critter designs, clear and strong action and acting, good stuff.

This reminded me of, like, a very B-side Henson Company joint from the late ’80s. I will not expand or clarify that.

Nephew reportedly liked it too. :]

Bonus Level: Celeste: Farewell

Dec. 9

Farewell is a free DLC for Celeste, which they dropped as a surprise a couple years ago. (The game has had many mechanical updates and tweaks, but this was the only new content it ever got.) It's very very good, if you're willing to struggle.

It adds to the story, but only a tiny bit — the whole thing takes place in a dream, where Madeline does some Symbolically Authentic Mountaineering to work through some grief and guilt. (Granny [the old woman who lives on the mountain, not her personal grandmother] eventually died, and Madeline Got Anxiety too severely to make it to the funeral.) At the end, she wakes up and has a video call with Theo, who found an old photograph showing that his granddad (the famous photographer) once hung out with Granny on the mountain when they were both like twenty. It's cute, it fits with everything we know about these characters, and it's wholly nonessential.

This expansion is just a little less than a whole extra game's worth of new content and new mechanics, and it is flat-out the hardest video game I've ever beaten. 😧 After finishing it, I started burning through the C-sides; I bounced off them before because they were too daunting, but now they've been downgraded to nice little post-Farewell cool-down exercises.

But while it ends up at well above C-side difficulty, it gets there gradually, and I think it fills out a bit of a difficulty chasm that the game used to have — the jump from Core-B to Anything-C was so severe, and now you can get past some of that in a setting where there's a little bit of dialogue and interaction and new mechanics to lure you onward. Like with many of the best video games, much of Celeste's quality lies in how carefully it teaches things to the player, and there's now a genuine on-ramp to the outrageous level of play that the speedrunners have been developing all these years. (Like, oh my god, it teaches and requires the Wavedash, an emergent movement tech so busted that I can hardly even believe it's always been embedded in the game rules.)

Really what Farewell adds up to is a celebration of just how unbelievably solid the base game was. The core mechanics were so good, and the balance and challenge were so satisfying, and it's a delight to have an excuse to go back to it and really push myself to my limits and beyond.

Also, I honestly feel like Farewell forced me to learn new fundamental things about how to approach an impossible physical and intellectual challenge. (For example: I knew about "chunking" being a critical part of human perception and memory, but I hadn't quite put together the effect it has on perception of time — if you can consolidate a chain of actions into a "chunk," it clears a little moat of extra time around it! You can do all kinds of little adjustments and corrections before and after the chunk, even though you know there wasn't previously enough time for any of that! It makes sense when you think about it, but the screens in this game were laid out in a way that let me watch it happen in real-time, which felt absolutely bananas... and gave me a new bone-deep faith that I can clear little moats for myself like that in any effort where I can consolidate a chunk. That might actually qualify as "life-changing.")

Also also, at some point after Farewell came out (in 1.4.0 maybe?), Maddie Thorson patched the splash screen with her new name and new company name, and I think that's cool. 🏳️‍⚧️

Time for a bookpost again! Well, past time, really.

I'm catching up with the 2021 reviews pretty quickly, because I plain didn't read very much this year. (Looks like around 33 books so far, here at the tail of December.) Didn't have the brain for it; I did have the brain for some other think-y pursuits, but fiction was just too difficult to process for a lot of the year.

Martha Wells — Murderbot Diaries: Fugitive Telemetry

April 28

The sixth Murderbot book! (Fifth chronologically, though.) Murderbot is still great, and I loved this book. I don't have anything really smart to say about it.

all the graydon saunders commonweal books over again

May 9

Apparently I was feeling stressed and just wanted a comfort re-read.

Robert Nystrom — Game Programming Patterns

May 17

Available online! (Reminder that I made a thing that's very nice for reading technical books on the web.)

This was really interesting and useful! Isaac recommended it.

I've been learning some stuff about game development recently, and doing some experiments with the hope of building some little games for myself and others sometime soon. And while tutorials and stuff are nice, I also really like getting a more systematic view of a problem space — it's not really a good way to truly internalize knowledge (that just takes practice, alas), but IMO it IS a good way to build up your instincts about where to look for something once you need it.

Megan Whalen Turner — The Thief, The Queen of Attolia, The King of Attolia, and A Conspiracy of Kings (re-reads)

May 17 through July? Somethingth?

These books still rule! This was only my second reading of these, and they're perhaps even better on re-read than on initial read.

There's this thing Eugenides says only rarely, when he's well and truly lost his temper and is 100% not playing anymore — "I can do anything I want." Just in absolute terms, it's an excellent line for a tantrum, but there's also a very specific subtext to it that I didn't really gather until this re-read. He's not saying that he's immune from consequences; gods know he doesn't think that. He's saying: if I ever decide I care more about winning this than I care about the consequences, there's no one alive who can intervene in time to stop me.

Megan Whalen Turner — Thick as Thieves

July 16

Right, here we go.

Ruth had a very ambivalent reaction to this one when it came out, which made me decide to put it off until the final book was out. (Luckily that was only like a two year gap, unlike the customary seven years or so between the others!) I actually liked it a great deal, but I can absolutely see why she was a little turned off by it.

The thing is, this book is an extended detour about as far away from the main action of the series as you could practically get. It somewhat serves as setup for a couple of subplots in the final book, but for the most part what it seems to be is, Megan Whalen Turner wanted to write a big old digression of a road trip novel, and she therefore did so. May as well sit back and enjoy the ride!

Now that I think about it, I think it has more in common with The Thief than it does with the other four books in the series. And both this book and The Thief were great! But it's definitely the lull before the storm, and doesn't move the story forward more than a couple yards.

Megan Whalen Turner — The Return of the Thief

July 20

And then this one was the full-force gale.

This book, against all possible odds, flawlessly sticks the landing for the entire Queen's Thief series. It's one of the better fantasy novels I've ever read; certainly in the top 20, probably in the top 10, possibly nibbling at the heels of the top 5.

It's SO FUCKING GOOD. It resolves a huge number of threads and questions, in tremendously satisfying ways, and if you've been waiting because you didn't want to get sucked into another unfinished series, definitely stop waiting.

Kimmy Walters — The Faraway

Sept. 24

This poetry collection has no copyright date printed in it, and I can’t remember if it’s post-pandemic or just prophetic, which is an extremely Kimmy Walters mood. Anyway, it’s excellent. I just ordered a replacement copy, because I let Ruth give my original copy to a friend for Christmas.

Current Music: Toby Fox — Battle Against A True Hero

There's nothing else interesting happening today, so let's post some book and game reviews! 😅

( Several reviews, cut for length )

(* Well, first post of books I read in 2021. I posted some 2020 reviews back in March.)

Current Music: Nicolo Telesca — The Canopy

It's been a minute, but I finally bothered to wrap up my reviews of stuff I read/played in 2020. Here's the last of them!

Isaac R. Fellman — The Breath of the Sun

Oct 16

This was really good, and it did some things I haven’t seen much (if ever) in a fantasy novel before. It also had an excellent narrative voice and some genuinely hair-raising climbing, and I’m still chewing on some of the questions it was asking about faith and truth. Solid and unique addition to the genre of non-Euclidean and symbolically authentic mountaineering adventures.

I read most of this on my phone while we were hiking the Wonderland Trail, which was an excellent setting for it. (We were going around a mountain rather than up one, but still.)

Especially recommended to anyone who was never able to get the back third of The Left Hand of Darkness out of their heads, the part with Genly and Estraven walking across the ice in the endless polar twilight.

Catalogue note: The author transitioned at some point after publication but not long enough ago for everything to finish reorienting itself, so depending on the edition you run into it might be listed under his old name instead ("Rachel Fellman").

Bonus Level: Ikenfell

Oct 31

I liked this a lot! Cute art, good characters, solid pacing and plot, really good soundtrack, and a really engaging and challenging battle system.

I kickstarted this project back in... 2016? 2015? And forgot about it for a long-ass time, and was entirely startled when it suddenly shipped.

I liked a lot of things about the story in this, but I don’t have much to say about that — well, either that, or I have a bunch of things I could talk about but I'd rather just leave you to encounter them on your own. It’s good! It goes to a lot of effort to be kind. I particularly like how the person who's initially set up as a Draco Malfoy analogue ends up being one of the most sympathetic people in your party.

The battle system was absolutely fantastic, and felt really well-tuned. It goes something like this:

It’s somewhere between the Lunar games and a more standard tactics RPG, plus a Mario RPG style attack/defend timing system bolted on. (That mechanic seems to be having a resurgence lately; Sea of Stars is going hard on that too.)
- The battlefields are extremely cramped, which forces you to think really hard about where you're moving to and how to stay out of the way of your own best attacks.
- The timing bonuses/penalties are large, with sometimes a whole order of magnitude between a "great" and an "oops". Personally, I liked how that forced me to stay on my toes; Persona 5 gave me a taste for swingy battles where shit might turn hard against you if you're careless, and this is definitely that. But if you hate that mechanic or just can't get the timings down, there's a setting to nerf it (no "oops", so it defaults to medium) or disable it (always "great").
There's no MP or spell charges (and only two or three skills have cooldowns), and there's no "normal" attacks; every character just has eight spells (eventually) that can be used at any time and are all very situational/positional. I loved this, it really encouraged me to use my whole range of powers.
Somehow, and I have no idea how they sorted out the math on this, there is very little damage inflation over the course of the whole game. You're still doing single- or low-double-digit damage by the end, and although you can withstand a lot more whomping by the time the endgame rolls around, 15 or 20 damage still feels catastrophically massive. I think this really contributed to how tense nearly every battle felt! And also to how significant the equipment upgrades felt — plus or minus 2 damage a pop is a big deal.

And finally, just on a technical quality level, the game just felt really solid and well-constructed.

Strong recommend if you're at all in the mood for a wholesome JRPG that nods to the classics and then does its own thing.

Martha Wells — The Wizard Hunters, The Ships of Air, and The Gate of the Gods (re-reads)

Nov. 19 through Nov. 25

This series remains a huge fave of mine, and also remains wildly underrated. I keep hoping more people will discover it after running out of Murderbot.

Ann Leckie - The Raven Tower (re-read)

Dec 9

This book still rocks.

Bonus Level: Persona 4 Golden

Nov. 9

I'd wanted to play this game for ages, but never had a good way to do so... and then they re-released it on Steam! Hell yeah.

I've got a whole bunch of nitpicks, but first-off, respect where due: I enjoyed this a ton, and wow, playing the original in 2008 must have been incredible. I'm kind of amazed at how much of the Persona 5 formula was already up and running at this point! And the story explanation for how a person's persona emerges is actually more coherent than P5's.

Also, the translation is definitely superior to P5's. The story I heard (from a translator who heard it as gossip from other translators) was that P3 and P4's translations were an in-house team with way more access, context, and iteration time than normal, but they laid those folks off at some point and did P5 in the industry-standard contractor-based style. Boo to that.

That said: today this game is a flawed gem, and Persona 5 improved upon it in nearly every possible way. Still worth a play, but the state of the art has advanced.

The story dungeons are boring — each one has its own style of corridors, but they're just laid out randomly without any interesting landmarks or distinct areas to traverse. Mementos was like this in P5, but all the story dungeons felt like solid places.
The mook enemies are also boring! Well, okay, their visual designs do have a certain berserk charm. But they have no particular personality, and just kind of read as mathematical collections of mechanics to be parsed. For P5’s mooks they decided to just repurpose the massive stable of mythological Personae they've spent the whole series cultivating, and it was a brilliant move -- there's so many of them that they didn't need to fuck around with palette swaps or minor reconfigurations, and they all have their own weird personalities, and the hold-up negotiation dialogue, and and and! That also solved the issue of where the fuck your protagonist's personas come from — in P4 they're just awarded to you as cards after battle, because... why??? Who knows.
The protagonist is a charisma-free pint-sized old man, which is confusing because of how good the rest of the cast is. I mean, yes, I sort of get it — a silent protagonist is a self-insertion vehicle, blah blah. But P5's protagonist was a distinct person with distinct personality traits and some major Byronic charm, and even 13 years prior to P4 you had Chrono Trigger showing how to let the audience project onto a silent hero while still giving him a life of his own.
ACAB.
Five or six of the social links were just filler, including the one they added for Golden (who is key to the best ending, but seems extremely pasted-on). P5 did a better job with making the bottom-tier confidants interesting and fruitful. (Like the disgraced politician — I totally overlooked him in my first playthrough, but he turns out to be completely OP!)

Well, still though, if most of my complaints just come down to "P5 was better," that's still a pretty great game — P5 was better than most things.

Oh huh, I was thinking I had so many games to review because I've been playing more than reading during the pandemic, but looks like these ones were all wrapped up before things really kicked off in the US.

Bonus Level: Return of the Obra Dinn

Feb. 9

My friend Isaac summed this excellent game up best, so I'll just try and quote him as best as I can remember:

In a lot of other games where your character does detective stuff, like in Witcher 3, the effect ends up as "Geralt is an awesome detective." But the effect in Obra Dinn was "I'm an awesome detective!"

The actual game part of this is basically a huge logic grid puzzle, except many of the clues are visual or auditory instead of textual. If you have fun with logic grids (I do), then this is a blast. A+, felt like an awesome detective.

The dramatic presentation part of this was SUPER WELL DONE. I loved the weird old one-bit halftone "school library Macintosh except IT MOVES" graphics, and the voice acting was stellar, and the weird conceit of the death pocketwatch just really made for a unique experience.

Random sidenote: At one point I briefly started a new game just to show someone how the gameplay works, and the player character (who has maybe four lines, and whose hands are all you ever see of them) had a completely different voice! It was a woman when I played all the way through, but in that scratch newgame it was a man. (...or was that the other way around? Anyway.) I don't think I've seen that before, where there's multiple gender options except it's completely randomized and also has no effect on anything.

Edit: Kar's comment below reminded me that I'm sloppy with content warnings sometimes, so just fyi: nearly everyone on this ship died nastily (this is not a spoiler), and corpses and phantoms pile up in the walkways over the course of the investigation. The bodies are at roughly an old newspaper woodcut level of visual detail.

Bonus Level: Hollow Knight

Jan. Something

My brother had to nudge me to get over the floaty controls and the drab palette of the starting area. I'm glad he did! This ended up being a really good time. (The controls are precise, satisfying, and masterable; it's just that they don't initially feel that way if you've played any other 2D games this year. And the art is beautiful, it's just that they wanted that first zone to have a very particular effect.)

I REALLY liked the atmosphere, environments, characters, and voice acting. The plot, well, that was a mixed bag. A lot of the stuff you need to do to get the good ending and reveal the story of what actually happened down there (or, reveal the subset of it that can ever be revealed) was really obscure and arbitrary, without nearly enough signposting IMO. Which is frustrating, because for me a lot of the satisfaction of a good metroidvania comes from investigating and sniffing around and unlocking stuff on my own, and genuinely arbitrary obscurity sabotages the stuff that isn’t obscure — looking up some nonsense always spoils a few other things that I would have figured out on my own.

Anyway, that doesn't ruin the game, it just makes it a flawed gem. And this one was so combat-heavy and technique-heavy that there was plenty of satisfaction to be had just from successfully executing on stuff, even if the exploration suffered from obscurity.

Bonus level: CrossCode

Feb 1

I played the demo of this game, and very nearly decided not to play it. So don't play the demo!!! It doesn't put its best foot forward, and it isn't very representative.

But do consider just going for it and playing the game, because I had a great time with this. The story ends up being quite good, and the sentence-to-sentence writing improves greatly once you escape the intro zone and make it to Rookie Harbor.

The exploration and dungeoneering gameplay is the star of the show here, and man, it's good. It starts with the best parts of the action RPGs of the 16- and 32-bit eras (the outrageous dungeon puzzles from Alundra, the big technical melée movesets of Illusion of Gaia and Terranigma, and even a smidge of the party-based chaos of Secret of Mana*), then expands on that with a twin-stick shooter moveset, looting and crafting, a system of elemental weaknesses and bonuses that becomes legit frantic when juggling multiple enemy types late-game, and some seriously delicious pixel art.

A lot of the structure of the game is MMO-like; the conceit is that you're playing an in-universe MMO (which takes place in a real physical landscape with telepresent avatars), and they went ahead and just embraced all the tropes and conventions. So there's a whoooooole lot of hunting and herb gathering quests. But I was fine with that! Yeah, some of it is rote, but when the ass-kicking feels this good, I don't need a 100% unique excuse to go kick some ass. Plus the dungeons were top-notch, and the "real world" plot provided some fun ways to mess with the MMO shape a bit.

I totally plan to re-play this at some point. I think maybe the New Game + lets you choose what to carry forward? If so, I'd be down to start fresh except for the botany collection;** the challenge level was excellent, and the reason I'd replay it would be for the challenge. So... I guess [REDACTED] was right after all. (Although I saw in a video that they made a bunch of special dialogue for if you go into ng+ at level 60+, which was pretty hilarious — since it's taking place in an MMO, everyone around you KNOWS you're level 60 and are NOT necessarily cool with it!)

* Not very much, mind; party members are NPCs, and they can only join you on the overworld, not dungeons. Still though! More than anything else has given me!

** Update: Yes, it totally let me do that. 🤩 I fired it up again the other night and got to the start of the Bergen Trail.

William Gibson — Agency

Jan 23

Late-career William Gibson books (say, starting halfway through Pattern Recognition) are some of the most soothing comfort reading I've ever found. Some of that's the pacing, some of it's the tone and the slightly off-shear way his POV characters experience the world, some of it's the intellectual stimulation, but the effect is way more than the sum of the parts (or at least of the parts I've managed to identify thus far). If I'm re-reading some Bill Gibson, that probably means I'm dealing with some major shit and the book is helping me keep an even keel.

Anyway, I loved this but I have absolutely no capacity for or interest in "reviewing" it as a normal aesthetic object. It's simply not possible.

By the way, if you're not sure how to Gibson: go ahead and start with The Peripheral. His books come in clusters, but they all stand by themselves and can be read in any order... with the exception of this newest one. So, start with the newest one that can stand alone.

Martha Wells: The Murderbot Diaries: Network Effect

May 12

Hell yes. The Murderbot series is fantastic and you should definitely read it.

This one is just as good as the others, if not better. It's also longer.

Comfort Food Re-Reads

William Gibson — Agency (Feb 12)
Martha Wells — The Serpent Sea (April 20)
Martha Wells — The Siren Depths (April 23-ish)
Martha Wells — The Murderbot Diaries: Rogue Protocol (May 31)
Martha Wells — The Murderbot Diaries: Exit Strategy (June 1)
William Gibson — Spook Country (July 24-ish)
William Gibson — Zero History (July 24-ish)
Andrea K. Host — Touchstone series (Sep 1-ish)
William Gibson — Agency (Nov 6)

This is a season of survival, not a season of growth. I endorse doing some re-reading of your own in these continuing plague times.

W. E. B. DuBois — The Souls of Black Folk

Sept. 30, partial

Some remedial essay reading. These were really excellent, and both the content and the voice were surprisingly current. Even the ones where he goes deep into the details of the material conditions of Black people in the rural American South circa 1890-something feel current, somehow.

Le Chad Tartine — Tartine Bread

April ??

This book was incredibly helpful in nailing down some fundamentals of natural leaven usage and dough handling technique and really just raising my entire god damn game, bread-wise. I used to make pretty ok bread, but now I make bread that can actually meet my own high standards.

This book is also full of blind spots and unstated regional/environmental/monetary assumptions, and might not even be legible without some serious prior baking experience. (I had go deep into the bread forum zone to fill in some major gaps around water handling and starter lifecycle.) So don’t start here, ok? Cool.

I think the original Ken Forkish book is a pretty decent intro to baking good rustic bread, and the skills in it are all directly transferable to the Tartine formulae. KF’s “overnight white” recipe is relatively forgiving while still yielding very nice flavor, and it gives you a chance to get comfortable with handling extremely wet dough, playing chicken with long fermentation times, and baking freestanding loaves with a steam jail before requiring trial-by-combat against unpredictable wild microflora that sometimes get unhappy and destroy dough with corrosive mystery compounds. Also, I think he gives some of the more lucid explanations I’ve seen about treating time and temperature as ingredients, about fine-tuning the four-way balance between room°/water°/leaven%/time, about flour protein content, and about the importance of good note-taking practices (btw, get a moleskein to keep in the kitchen, you want something that will stay closed and durable in the junk drawer).

Anyway if we’re buds or acquaintances and you wanna pick my brain about anything bread-related, I’m down to video chat or whatever.

Current Music: Quantic — Theme from Selva

Usually I do a bigger batch, but this includes the last book from 2019 that I hadn’t reviewed yet and also rambles on a bit, so hey, why not.

Greg Van Eekhout — Pacific Fire and Dragon Coast

Dec. 22, 2019, and Sept. 17, 2020

Sequels to the excellent California Bones. Hey guess what: This is a rare example of a back-heavy trilogy that maintains good pacing and sticks its landing!

Well — probably it's a back-heavy trilogy:

Book 1 decisively disposes of its big bad.
There's a time skip of years (~ a decade?) between books 1 and 2.
Book 2 ends on a cliffhanger, and books 2 and 3 are both about one main project/problem that wasn't on the map at all in the first book.
The second story sprawls out a little bit (new POV characters, etc.).

Seems about right. But: you could argue that it maybe has a Star Wars shape, where it's three book-shaped books except the second one has a bad ending. And that, I think, maybe points the way to a general theory of how to not wipe out and eat shit on Mt. Back-Heavy: instead of spreading one act structure across two books worth of space, use a Bad Ending to divide it into two parts with their own distinct shapes. The difference is kind of subtle, but it feels substantial.

Oh right, anyway, about these books! I loved this series, but I also set it aside in the middle of Dragon Coast for uhhh a LOT of months, just because it's a whole lot to deal with and there was a big chunk of the year where I kinda couldn't.

Eekhout writes about violence in a way that makes me feel incredibly ill. Not on account of physical gruesomeness; I've met worse. More like, I've never encountered an action writer who's this good with moral revulsion, especially w/r/t "justified" acts of violence or coercion. Reading about Daniel Blackland makes me feel like my soul ate something bad. In case this paragraph is unclear, I think this is excellent, and I also think it's aligned with how Daniel himself experiences his (incredibly bloody) life. Dragon Coast really leans into that; it seems like half the book is about all the ways in which his actions at the end of Pacific Fire were unforgivable (and won't, in fact, ever be forgiven). And again, I like Daniel a lot!

I think maybe the core idea this series is trying to get a handle on is: making the best choice you have available doesn't actually absolve you of anything. It goes hard on that in regards to violence, and it also goes hard on it in re: the use of fossil fuels, which he brilliantly re-casts in this series as a generations-long act of cannibalism. Never mind the surface tropes and trappings: that unblinking existential horror is what REAL noir is about.

Good shit.

Current Music: Dirty Projectors - Unto Caesar

Time for a bookpost! Well, tbh it's always time for a bookpost, given the state of the queue. But here's the ones I have ready to roll:

Michael Lewis — The Big Short

June 8, 2020

I originally picked this up because I was in a state where I couldn't process fiction very well but figured some trashy nonfiction would go down okay. Which, I was right, but tbh this was almost too trashy.

Well; it was, and it wasn't, depending on what you bring to it. What bugged me was all the goddamn pop-song chord changes in what's properly a doom drone album of a story. But for all that it drove me nuts that he was focusing on these small groups of eccentric personalities using their insight into the massive fraud of '00s capitalism to try and strike it rich, it actually did end up providing an interesting perspective into the sheer scale of banal, bullshit evil that built the rubble-pile of a world we now live in.

My main takeaway was that we should have fucking washed the streets with the blood of the wicked back in 2008.

Bonus Level: Baba is You

April 4, 2020

This is the most satisfying puzzle game I've ever played. It's so well-constructed that it feels like a naturally-occurring object someone found, not a constructed device.

The thing it reminds me most of is Celeste. Totally different game styles, but they share a certain exhaustive rigor — within the boundaries of the mechanics they set up, they really commit to following down EVERY implication and consequence, and if the player follows them the whole way up, they're left with a feeling that they genuinely reached the summit of something.

And good lord, that finale — I can't even express what it felt like to crack through some of those last barriers down there in the Meta. It was like... God himself can't keep me out of here. BABA IS ME.

Anyway, usually I only include story games on this list, and Baba is the opposite of that. But also... sort of... not. Like, there's a certain existentialist vibe to it all, with these named characters whose relationships, proclivities, and fundamental realities keep shifting from level to level (and within each level) based on this totally arbitrary logic grammar. It’s hard to describe the effect, but it’s kind of like if hyperdimensional machine elves tried to create Krazy Kat or Nancy. It gets in your head.

Bonus Level — What Remains of Edith Finch

June 8, 2020

An excellent walking simulator! Good garbage and completely outrageous environments, good acting, rock-solid vibes and feels. And some cool innovation on the formula, with the mixup gameplay in all the family story segments.

It's interesting to compare this and Tacoma as responses to Gone Home. I think they recognize the exact same core strengths/weaknesses of that game, but take different approaches to maximizing/minimizing them:

Segmentation of the play field made no sense as living space:
- Tacoma solved this by moving to a profoundly unnatural living space with serious environmental limits, where both the investigator and the absent crew were subject to constant interference and busybodying by corporate overlords.
- Edith Finch solved it by twisting the absent family into a seriously Gothic horrorshow. Basically, they started with my observation that it seemed like people had been picking up camp and moving to a different section of the house every month and a half and then went like: let's say they actually literally DID; now what kind of people would do that? And then you end up with the sealed-off shrine bedrooms and the constant additions and accretions to the house over time.
Narration was temporally disconnected and revealed information your character wasn't uncovering from the living space: Gone Home's narration was all excerpts from a written diary that's discovered at the end, because they wanted the game's emotional beats to be performed instead of just dropped. But that messed with the timeline and kind of severed the player from the character by giving them information she doesn't have.
- Tacoma solved that by framing the performances as actual recordings, presented out of order because they're semi-corrupted and were never meant to be viewed in the first place. (And it did that really cool AR conceit that let you follow those gesture-ghosts around through the 3D space.)
- Edith Finch solved it by breaking the diaries / artifacts into discrete units that get fully discovered en route, and having them interact with dank family lore that your character already knows (or thinks she knows) parts of. (And it did that really cool mixup thing where you played through Edith's imagination of the moments leading up to each family member's death, changing the controls and gameplay and aesthetic and framing each time.) Oh, and plus it let Edith herself comment a bit more on the proceedings; not necessary in a framing like Tacoma, but valuable here because much of what we observe IS coming from Edith's memories/imagination.

Bonus Level: Final Fantasy XII: The Zodiac Age

Jan 12, 2020

(I missed FFXII completely when it came out because there was a stretch of my 20s where I didn't have any way to play current games.)

All told, I really liked this! I mean, I was predisposed to, just because I love the feel of all the Ivalice/Matsuno games so much, but I think it mostly fulfilled its promises and added up to a satisfying video game, which isn't something I could say about, e.g., FFIX when I replayed it a few years back.

Which isn't to say it's not a bit of a mess! Like pretty much all of the post-SNES FF games (AND many of the earlier ones tbh), twelve's reach very much exceeded its grasp, and its pieces don't fit together seamlessly. The plot is pulled in a bunch of different directions, and it's really obvious that a: they tried to fit too many stories into the box, and b: development of this game went on for a LONG time and ran into some kind of wild troubles along the way. Various plot threads never quite get woven back in, villainous plans don't quite make the amount of sense you'd hope they would, you know the drill.

But while the broader intrigues are a bit of a hash, they at least managed to keep the emotional cores of the story spinning throughout, and I really liked the party! I especially liked how Vaan and Penelo totally do not belong in this story at all, and all the other party members know it.

And I liked the setting, too, although maybe I already said that. Lots of cool cities, lots of cool wildernesses, love it.

The gameplay still works too, I think. This was the one where they tried to bring some lessons from MMOs into a JRPG, and the result aged pretty well — after all, that's kind of what most games are, nowadays. I enjoyed hunting the marks, combat moved fast, and the "gambit" system (where it's basically menu-driven combat, but it moved the "game" part of the game away from inputting commands in the right order and toward programming a set of conditional actions that will result in the right commands in the right order) worked way better than I'd been led to believe from the ancient online discourse I vaguely remembered. Summons were kind of fun — they swung wildly between underpowered and overpowered, never quite feeling properly balanced, but tbh that seems about right with the setting and conceit. You're always taking a risk whipping one out, but maybe it'll pay off this time, you never know.

The "quickening" attacks were the only thing that really felt like they didn't fit the rest of the system at all. They seem like an encouragement to play the game completely the wrong way, and they don't really complement any of the other systems or make any damn sense within the setting. (Isaac told me a story about how, on the original PS2 release, he got perma-stuck a third of the way through because he'd just been cheesing his way through all the boss fights by being really good at chaining the quickening roulette minigame, and eventually hit a wall that he didn't have any other tools for because his characters were all underleveled/underequipped/underdeveloped.)

Graydon Saunders — A Mist of Grit and Splinters

Jan 21

The semi-parallel time-ratchet structure on this one and the diffuse overlap with the last book made it a bit more challenging than the previous books in this series, which maybe is saying something. I'm also still not wholly sure where I'm at w/r/t the various moral arguments that have been simmering in the background but really come to a boil in this one.

Current Music: PB&J's "Darker Days" on vinyl

Well: here's a bookpost. There's still some stuff from 2019 in the queue, because what even IS time, anyway.

Laurie J. Marks — The Elemental Logic series — Fire Logic (re-read), Earth Logic (re-read), Water Logic (re-read), Air Logic

July 4, July 7, July 26, Aug 1, 2019

It's about time to give up on writing the review these books deserve and just post a short one: This is one of my favorite fantasy series of all time, right up there with the Broken Earth trilogy. It is unique and powerful and delightful, and does things that only fantasy could do but which no other series I know of has dared to. Fire Logic is a peerless opening statement, and Air Logic does the impossible and sticks the landing.

A fragment from the review I ultimately didn't manage to write:

The elemental magics of this setting aren't what you'd expect from prior genre experience, and fire magic is a power of intuitions and connections. In the opening sections of Fire Logic, the nature of fire logic is obscure, verging on plausibly deniable. But by the halfway point, it comes into blazing focus: fire mages can short-circuit cause and effect, break free of history, erase the entire plot of the story to come, leaving the future a blank slate where anything could happen.

You should probably read these.

Richard Morgan — Altered Carbon

Sept. 4, 2019

Trivia: I think Ben Heifitz recommended this to me like almost 20 years ago. What is time. More recently I guess there was a TV show, which B (among others) has spoken highly of; anyway, I grabbed it for vacation reading when I was off in Vermont with my fam.

This was a solid-ass O.G. hardboiled!? I was not expecting that's what it would be, but I DID happen to be in the exact right mood for that, so fuck yeah. I gladly accept this delayed serendipity.

I'll totally read some more books in this series the next time that urge grabs me.

A. Lee Martinez — The Last Adventure of Constance Verity

Nov. 26, 2019

For the first like 3/4 of this book, I couldn't decide whether I thought it was good or bad!

Well: it's decent enough; I didn't love it, but I liked it. What I do maybe love is the amount of stylistic risk-taking going on here. I think the first several acts of this book function as a parody of a bad parody of a thing, which is kind of a dangerous level of meta to attempt and which I didn't initially trust Martinez to pull off. (Only other time I ever saw that in play at novel-scale was In the Night Room, which IMO fell flat on its face.) But I think it ultimately worked!

(Am I overthinking this? Was this actually just supposed to be a fun silly romp? Dude, absolutely.)

Hiromu Arakawa — Silver Spoon, vols. 5 through 12

Jan 2 through Feb 8, 2020

I think the final volumes of this are probably out now, but I can't get them from the library yet because things are still kinda shut down for covid.

Anyway, I still like this comic a lot. In the later volumes it's kind of accelerating, skiping large chunks of time and lowering the resolution of detail; for example, I really like the new underclassman on the equestrian club, but I can't remember if they ever actually mention her name.

Mariko Tamaki and Rosemary Valero-O'Connell — Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up With Me (comics)

June 16, 2020

This was so fucking solid. What a good-ass comic. Rosemary Valero-O'Connell is such an outrageously good cartoonist (UGH, these characters, these environments, these pages), and she syncs up so well with Tamaki's pacing.

This is the second Mariko Tamaki thing I've read, and both of them (this, and This One Summer) have kinda low-key been about the temptation to start becoming an awful person, about social situations that reward you for not being there for your people. Or at least that's been one of the major strands in the braid. This one leaned super-hard into that; intense enough that I ended up setting it aside for quite a while because I wasn't ready to deal with the mortification I knew was standing between my bookmark and the resolution. Yes, I know, it's Yrs Truly getting too stressed out by the gay romance comic for young teens, but I contend that this is some legitimately dark shit to contemplate at any length, and is tbh probably darker if you ARE in your 30s-plus and have had more time to re-evaluate and come to some tentative conclusions about whatever went down in your own teens and 20s.

It has been an approximate eternity since the last bookpost, so let's see what I've got in the queue.

Alfie Kohn — Punished by Rewards

Aug 12

I was tweeting about an (excellent, tangentially related) article by Alfie Kohn, and my friend Audrey said that this book changed her life, so I put it on hold immediately.

Sure enough, it rules. It's eye-opening and challenging and surprising, and also occasionally a fist-pumping delight to read.

Apparently, there is overwhelmingly strong experimental evidence that manipulatively directed rewards and incentives don't actually motivate people to change their behaviors in the medium-to-long term, and in fact can create aversions to the behavior they were intended to reinforce. This is a book about that paradox, the bizarre and persistent societal refusal to believe the evidence of said paradox, and the fucked up non-linear effects of both.

This material could have been presented several different ways and still been interesting, but what really won my heart is that Kohn is serious about anarchy; like, if this guy'd been born on real live Annares, he'd still be constantly rocking the boat and making everyone uncomfortable with hard questions. It’s just so refreshing to read pop nonfiction from someone who’s willing to openly say that trying to dominate and control someone else for your own convenience or comfort or profit is actually fundamentally corrupt.

David Graeber — Bullshit Jobs

Dec. 24

I read this months after the Kohn, but it still felt like a continuous dialogue of some kind. Guess 2019 was a good year to think hard about anarchism.

This book kicked ass, and I spent some months recommending it to everyone irl. Now I'm recommending it to you! It's an excellent exploration of some fundamental shit in our culture and politics and economy that is plainly observable but genuinely seems to make no sense, and it starts the project of making some sense of it.

The bits about the bullshitification of legitimate work and the divisions between the caring and administrative classes have proven particularly fruitful for understanding how certain infuriating things happen. (Cf. for example this post about the staggering amount expertise necessary to be an underpaid preschool teacher.)

Yoon Ha Lee — Ninefox Gambit (re-read), Raven Strategem, Revenant Gun

July 19, Aug 17, Aug 29

Yoon Ha Lee is a writer I've followed for quite a while because I'm fond of his short stories, and I remember several years of blog posts he made about the long process of writing and re-writing what sounded like an absolutely un-writeable space opera trilogy, which involved math, psychopaths, military tactics, an RPG-like system of excessively codified societal factions, and, for some reason, geese.

Well, somehow he successfully wrote it, and it's amazing.

This series is imperfect and bizarre; at many times, it feels like it's barely holding together against the internal forces working to pull it apart. It has some outlandish tonal shifts, and much of the third book reads like some combination of gonzo horny fanfic about the prior canon and an extremely bad dream. But there's nothing else like this series anywhere, and I love it.

Continuing to run down my list of stuff that isn’t Machineries of Empire or Elemental Logic, lol.

William Gibson — The Peripheral (re-read)

Dec. somethingth

I was in the mood for a soothing re-read, and also I'm super hyped about the next book in this setting coming out in January.

Hiromu Arakawa — Silver Spoon, vols. 1 and 2 (comics, re-read)

Dec. 20

Hey, this excellent manga finally has an official English release! It's about a burnt-out freshman from the city who is WAY out of his depth at a hardcore agricultural high school.

I previously read a fair way into this in scanlation, and on re-read I still like it quite a bit. Hachiken is such a disaster in the first couple volumes.

Hiromu Arakawa — Silver Spoon, vols. 3 and 4 (comics, re-read)

Jan 1

I feel like the cast's casual fat-joke cruelty to Tamako is rankling me a bit more on this re-read. But the way it's handled is kind of unusual! The author clearly considers Tamako a sympathetic, interesting, and active character, and also clearly doesn't consider her fatness any kind of problem... AND also dosen't cast any particular judgment on the boys for saying some callous nonsense about her. Not that I need an after-school special or anything, but usually an author's between-the-lines take isn't so ambiguous.

Anyway, IMO Tamako is great, but heads up if that kind of hands-off approach to fatphobia is a dealbreaker for you.

Susan C. Pinsky — Organizing Solutions for People With ADHD

Dec 19

By recommendation from spacetwinks . I would also recommend this! I think Pinsky’s got a good eye for root causes of household things that are particularly hard for scattered attention, and has a flexible, pragmatic approach to working around those invariant root causes. (And, even more importantly, a sound framework for deciding a conventional solution is actually useless bullshit with no staying power.)

Here are some things I already arrived at independently, which this book validated:

The 'splode box. I have a medium-sized box worth of stuff that it makes no goddamn sense to ever "put away," because I'm going to put it right back on the next time I leave the house. (Backpack, purse, rain pants, gloves.) So I have an actual (durable, attractive) box for it next to the door. That stuff doesn't really act like clutter as long as I confine it to the 'splode box, and if the box does overflow, then I need to put something "away."
Predicting where you'll look for something beats remembering where you put it. (Even people with "normal" memory abilities really suck at that; IMO everyone would be better off just assuming it's impossible.)

Here are some things where either I was sometimes doing it without really understanding it, or I already had the right idea but could stand to apply it more decisively:

Store it where it's used.
"Worn but still wearable" clothes are actually just clean, so stop overthinking it and put them back in the drawer.
For things that participate in clutter, ease of putting away is more important than ease of retrieving.
Storage that takes more than one action for access might as well be a black hole. Opaque storage is also dangerous.

This book also kind of challenged me a bit about reducing the amount of stuff that's around! Like, there was a bit where she argued that you should run out of tupperware sometimes. Kind of still wrestling with that! In that way where I know she's right but I'm mad about it.

Mark Fisher — Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?

Aug 9

I remember feeling that this was a bracing and illuminating read as I was reading it, but uhhhhh I’m having a hard time remembering what exactly it illuminated. I’d be down to read it again as a refresher, though; it was short and engaging.

Well, anyway, iirc the central thing the book circles around is a sort of shared delusion of inevitability that surrounds capitalism, which is propagated deliberately by some actors and inadvertently by others. The argument for that inevitability usually plays out in aesthetic subchannels, which is partly how it gets propagated by those who don’t think of themselves as agreeing with it. Or something like that!! It was some very slippery content.

Current Music: Earthgang

I haven't bookposted about most of what I've read during the second half of the year. This is because I read all of Elemental Logic and Machineries of Empire in July and August, and I'm mildly intimidated by the task of saying something interesting about them. They're both incredible series that meant a lot to me, so I don't want to just post a dumb one-liner! Well, I will if I have to, but for now I'll let those marinate a little longer, maybe plink away at them over the holiday break.

In the meantime, here's a small handful:

Yuko Ota and Ananth Hirsh (colors JN Wiedle & Rachel Cohen) — Barbarous, ch. 1 and 2 (comics)

Nov 10

This ongoing webcomic is once again updating (with chapter... 5? I think), and also they're running a Kickstarter to print ch. 3, so I went back and read through my print copies of ch. 1 and 2.

This comic is excellent and I highly recommend it. Chapter 1 is admittedly a little odd; I remember thinking a lot of the interpersonal drama seemed unreasonably bombastic, and that it kind of came out of nowhere. But re-reading it with knowledge of what comes later, I feel like the conflicts actually make sense and are correctly proportioned. Just gotta have faith!! And/or not be reading it at two pages per week.

Man, these print editions are some gorgeous books. They're these massively oversized perfect-bound things, but super skinny, a format that reminds me of some French comics. I don't really know how well these sell; the Kickstarters always blast through their number, but woof, they're certainly priced like there's zero economy of scale.

I'll be buying the whole series anyway, despite wincing at the price; the art just fuckin' sings at this size. But if you're not as devoted to these authors as I am, you might want to just read the webcomic and/or wait for the inevitable one-volume edition.

Vandana Singh — Ambiguity Machines and Other Stories

Sept. 6

This short story collection was excellent. I hardly know what to say about it. Whatever, you should totally read these. Here, try the title story.

TBH tho, I rarely know what to say about short stories in general. I realized while reading this that while my taste in shorts is extremely particular, I have a very difficult time expressing what it actually is:

Something to do with elegance, and economy of motion. Well, I mean, that one's obvious. But I don't mean just lapidary prose or whatever, it's more about choosing and cutting.
Something to do with the largeness of the story's idea and the openness or closure of its boundaries. I think maybe a truly good story almost has to be about something that's impossible to know, or has to fail to encompass some crucial part of its premise. Otherwise it's just a really short and boring novel.
Something to do with... well, I'm already kind of lost in the weeds here, no need to push it to three. The way that middle bullet point crashed and burned pretty much says it all.

Wow, what a singularly unsatisfying digression! 🌻

Martha Wells — Stories of the Raksura vol. 2: The Dead City and The Dark Earth Below

Oct 13

Speaking of short stories! So, I consider Wells to be a supremely novelistic writer (her small-scale structures are very simple, but she's a master of layering them to create magnificent large-scale structures), and tbh I think her short stories often aren't quite good. By my incalculable and inarticulable standards, cf. above! If I step aside from myself a bit, I think they're probably solid stories in the vein of the old SF and adventure magazines; it's just that I have no particular interest in that, and am looking for something entirely else whenever I wade into some shorts.

But, I generally enjoyed these anyway, because for the most part they're not precisely short stories; they're shrapnel and fragments flaking off a larger novelistic edifice that I'm already familiar with and invested in. The hypertext halo around a good novel. I don't think they stand alone very well, but they don't have to.

More evidence of that effect: The one non-Raksura story in here happens to be the second story I've read about that group of characters, and it retroactively improved that other story. I suspect she's got about a short novel worth of story for these people and it just hasn't really made sense to tie it together yet. A writer with a higher natural density level might be able to show that depth holographically; use subchannels and interference patterns to give the impression that you're reading book-sized people in a short. But Wells maybe needs more space, and sure enough, once she doubles these characters' page-time and gives them a wider variety of situations to deal with, they start to round out a bit.

Still though, the best one of this bunch is the longest one, "The Dead Earth Below." Which is unsurprising, since Wells is very good at novella scales, cf. Murderbot.

I've still got a pretty big bookpost backlog from this year, so let's plink away at it a bit more.

B. Zedan — Before Dungeons, Dragons & Dives: Reives

May 17

$1+ ebook on Gumroad.

My bud’s been playing what sounds like an excellent cooking-themed D&D game, and wrote some cool shorts about their character’s backstory. (They are a kea-kenku rogue, which always reminds me of the fuck the police keas.)

I liked this.

J. Kathleen Cheney — Dreaming Death

May 14

This is shaped like a police procedural, but with psychic powers and ancient technology and soulbonds and stuff strewn around all over the place. Solid and competent and enjoyable; I had a good time with this.

It's also low-key extremely weird on a structural level, much of which has to do with the wild-ass setting. What it feels like is, maybe the author spent a shitload of time on a big technofantasy epic in this setting — fate-of-the-world and lost civilizations and all that — and then she decided that it was unfinishable or would never be as interesting as it was in her head, so she recouped some of her investment by writing a completely opposite type of story in that setting and reusing maybe one and a half characters. And not only that, but the characters themselves all have a solid scrapped novel worth of backstory behind them, and it’s distinct from the scrapped epic that spawned the setting.

I think this was a Martha Wells recommendation, which makes perfect sense.

Graydon Saunders — Under One Banner (re-read)

Aug 7

I've been doing a lot of re-reading this year, and I highly recommend it. Nothing new to really say about this one.

Carolyn Nowak — Girl Town (comics, compilation)

Aug 19

This collects several of Nowak's existing short comics, and adds a few new ones. I previously reviewed Diana's Electric Tongue, and it's still probably my favorite in this collection, but all of these comics are excellent. I read them one-by-one in different sittings, and they all left me in a sort of contemplative, pleasantly off-balance mood.

Strong recommend, especially if you're down for a Kelly Link sort of vibe.

Ann Leckie — The Raven Tower (re-read)

Sept. 3

God this book is still so good.

John Vonhof — Fixing Your Feet

Skimmed, somewhere in the second half of August

We went backpacking with our friend Melissa a few months ago, and she said this book was really useful in recovering from the foot injury that ejected her from the trail in California and in avoiding further hurts.

The library had it in their free online reader, so I gave it a skim. I don't think I'd recommend reading it all the way through, but I did glean some interesting info from it, especially the argument against letting calluses build up and the accumulated shear forces theory of blister prevention. A combination of filing off thick calluses and using vaseline to reduce friction in the sock has already improved my life on long runs, so skimming that PDF was definitely time well spent.

Sarah Webb — Kochab, ch. 0-3 (webcomic)

Sept. 30

Ongoing at http://kochab-comic.com/

This is excellent! Slow and gentle and atmospheric, with gorgeous lush art. (It's on hiatus while the author builds up a backlog, but it sounds like she basically has the final three chapters thumbnailed, so it's not like someone's unfinishable started-it-at-age-19 epic or anything.)

It's about a girl from a snowy village and a lonely ifrit she meets while trying to traverse a ruined palace/arcology that's blocking her route home. The ifrit might have some memory issues, and it's not clear why she's been asleep for (probably) centuries. There's some slow-burn romantic tension going on. I feel like a lot of you'd be into this.

I wish I could remember who recced this, but at any rate it was in my file of "cool-looking webcomics that I want to get to someday but probably won't." And then I built a thing that makes it easier to get around to reading all those, and this was one of the first payoffs.

Gengoroh Tagame — My Brother’s Husband vol. 1 (comics)

Apr 22

This was decent and I enjoyed it (although this first volume ends in a really odd and arbitrary spot). Yaichi’s confusion about why he and his brother drifted apart feels super uncomfortable and real. When I’ve drifted away from people I cared about, it has sort of that texture; not a big clear break, but a sort of smoky forgetting.

I'm real curious about the intended audience, all up and down the chain. Like who was Tagame writing it for, who was his editor and Japanese publisher hoping to sell it to, who is the English translation aimed at, etc. Because the level of sophistication kind of veers all over the place! There's all this incredibly basic stuff strewn around throughout, like the dramatic realization that there's no "wife" in a gay marriage, but the art marks it as being for a gay male audience,* who I don’t think need the remedial material. And then there’s the jacket blurbs?!

I know this was a bit of a departure for Tagame. I wonder if it was a bit of a departure for the Japanese literary comics publishing market, too. I wonder how much mid-stream editorial input there was.

Well, I wonder a lot of things, it’s kind of my whole deal. That's all mostly beside the point; this is a pretty good comic.

* Yaichi is the most implausibly jacked work-from-home sad-sack dad I’ve ever seen in fiction. I’m not complaining, I’m just saying.

N.K. Jemisin — The Killing Moon

May 9

Once upon a time I bounced off this, but on a second attempt I liked it quite a lot. This is half of a duology, and it looks like it’s a two-book-shaped-books series, because this one came to a pretty comprehensive end. TBH I'm not sure where it goes from here! Guess I'll find out.

What this reminds me of most isn’t Jemisin’s other work, but Kate Elliot’s Spirit Gate, which was another series-starter I bounced off of years ago and have been meaning to revisit. They’re both doing this sort of hyper-intellectual system-model mode of high fantasy, where they set up this society that seems just way too balanced and static to be plausible, then reveal the instability at the core so we can watch what the engine does when you drop a handful of pop-rocks in the tank. A top-down highly-plotted approach that’s sort of the antithesis of the rambling character-driven fat fantasy mode (e.g. Song of Ice and Fire); it can yield very satisfying outcomes, but it can sometimes feel a little sterile, especially at the start.

In both cases, I think I initially bounced off because 1: I couldn’t quite believe in their initial steady state, and 2: the system-driven plot was making me worry that the characters were going to be bullshit. When I started this again, I immediately saw why I'd bounced; chapter one asks you to stipulate that people in this country are generally happy to be visited by a euthanasia incubus, way before showing any of the material benefits of having euthanasia incubii around, and the next few chapters mostly avoid that whole question in favor of quadrupling the cast and introducing like four more plot threads.

Anyway, I pushed through that this time, and I’m glad I did. The characters filled in a bit — they're still kind of flat if you compare them to the Broken Earth or Inheritance trilogies, and you can kind of tell that she wrote this before either of those, but they were perfectly serviceable. The texture of the world is real good; a variety of sorta-related but very distinct cultures and nations in long-term low-key conflict, and a cool and very detailed ancient Africa setting (it's Egypt, I gather, but not the Egypt you generally see around in fantasy; very B-side, brings in a lot of... I think ancient southern Nile geography and culture? NOT AN EXPERT HERE).

So yeah, it's very systematic, and it's somewhat more interested in the plot and the world than it is in the characters, but if you're in a good headspace for that, this is pretty great.

Sarah Pinsker — “And Then There Were n-1” (long-ish short story)

May 16

Available online, and it looks like it's also part of this recent collection.

A murder mystery where all the characters are alternate-universe versions of the same person. Hilariously, because of the way Instapaper displayed this and because I wasn't already familiar with Pinsker, I didn't realize until the end that said person was literally the author.

Anyway, I liked this quite a bit. I later read another of her stories, and I liked that too.

Current Music: Broken Social Scene - Shoreline

I’m posting this from mobile just to revel in the entry page not being blown-out and zoomy anymore, yayyyyy. Maybe more about that later. For now:

Molly Knox Ostertag — The Witch Boy (comics)

Feb 19

Whoa, this was superb! Excellent and very expressive art, tight plotting, solid dialogue, A+.

It also had a keenly observant eye for a certain distinctive type of Thing one gets as an AMAB kid who just finds Girl Stuff better and more interesting than the masculine nonsense people keep demanding. Particularly the variants that crop up in otherwise benign and supportive environments, and particularly the sub-variants that crop up in otherwise feminist spaces.

Anyway, this impressed me on a bunch of levels.

Molly Knox Ostertag — The Hidden Witch (comics)

Mar 24

But this one was uneven.

Stuff I loved:

Aster and Charlie’s friendship. What a good set of buds.
The way Ariel didn’t see any conflict between sending A SPECTRAL MANIFESTATION OF MISCHIEF after someone and honestly courting them as a friend. That was so 100% real. Kids are the worst!
Even though they’ve collectively agreed to teach him, the teachers don’t all suddenly fully accept Aster now, and a couple of them still kind of act like shitty kids to him. Also super real!!
Sedge being fuckin traumatized about getting mutated and not wanting to shapeshift, and not feeling comfortable about going to anyone except Aster about it. That was... maybe let’s call it “faster than real,” but it worked.

Stuff I was not ok with:

MIKASI.

Conveniently disposing of Mikasi via heroic self-sacrifice was lazy and dishonest, and it undermined so much of what was good about this book and the first one. The established mechanics of how magic works in this setting didn’t demand it. And it dropped what could have been a nuanced consideration of how to move forward from a history of loneliness, and from a justified rage that’s permanently entangled with the unjustifiable wrongs you’ve committed, in favor of a kinda shitty can’t-fix-what’s-broken purity/contamination frame!

And that resolution was also wicked unfair to Ariel! It reduced her shadow to something foreign to be destroyed instead of actions she had to own up to and surpass, and like... ugh, imagine if A Wizard of Earthsea had ended with one of Ged’s friends sacrificing himself to kill the shadow Ged summoned. LIKE THAT.

Mikasi should have stayed a problem indefinitely, trying to be a person instead of a monster and succeeding more and more of the time but not all the time. He should have gotten to teach Aster something that would challenge his self-image and force him to grow beyond himself. The other witches should have had to find their own ways to co-exist with him on the compound. Hell, it even would have been better if he’d sacrificed himself and it didn’t work and they had to try something else. Without Mikasi, Aster’s story is a coin with only one side.

Obviously I wouldn’t be this disappointed in the book if it wasn’t already good enough to get me really invested, but I kind of wish I’d had to return this to the library only 2/3 read, it whiffed the landing that hard.

Silvia Moreno-Garcia — Prime Meridian

March 17

I can’t decide whether this was good or not. I do know I didn’t like it.

I found Amelia pretty repellent. Some of that was the good kind of repellent, that “oops, guess that’s a familiar impulse” feel — the passivity and self-loathing and resentment in the face of just being completely economically screwed and socially disrespected, that all felt super real and relatable. But man, she doesn’t enjoy anything! (Like I don’t think she ever even gets entertained during this story, and entertainment is the most minimal possible form of pleasure.) Even if a character spends their whole story miserable, their likes and dislikes are part of who they are, and if half of that is just completely absent, there's not enough person left for me to identify with. Even Amelia's moment of triumph where she gets to go fulfill her lifelong ambition feels like a grim forced march.

I don't think her characterization was unrealistic. Like, I've met people whose humanity has been shaved down like that, and a lot of what the story is about is how the gig economy and accelerating inequality seem to be optimizing the process of alienation and grinding people down to resentful nubs. But I can't love a book that spends its whole length just staring at the result and not blinking.

Bonus Level: Beglitched

Jan ??

This was by the same developer who did Fortune 499 (and the same pixel artist, too), and I really appreciate their approach to looking askew at some familiar mechanic and then really going deep on all the implications and variations that follow from that initial minor change. I've enjoyed both of their games I’ve played, and I’ll have an eye out for new ones.

The combat in this gonzo (and very pink) hacking game was a satisfyingly cracked take on the ol match-3 routine — you’re sort of playing Bejeweled, but only as a means to get objects into position to whomp someone who’s physically hiding behind the game board. The interface was a little cramped on an iPhone SE, but still totally playable. The difficulty curve is a little uneven at times; there was even a joking aside in Fortune 499 about the difficulty spike at Catnet, but on later consideration I felt like Catnet’s toughness was good characterization for Chewie. (Frustrating if it’s a brick wall for you, tho.)

The story was pretty spare, but I kept mulling it over for longer than I thought I would. That core thing about mistaking a superficial shared interest for a deeper personal connection... I haven't been burned as hard by that as the Glitch Witch was, but that sensation is relatable.

Stay dry, Fish Sticker.

William Gibson — Zero History (re-read)

Mar 4

I was in the mood for a soothing re-read. Hold the corprophagia.

Grayson Saunders — The March North and A Succession of Bad Days (re-reads)

Mar 17

I was in the mood for some soothing re-reads.

Graydon Saunders — Safely You Deliver (re-read)

Apr 17

Eventually decided I couldn’t just re-read half of the homeschool kids duology.

Martha Wells — The Murderbot Diaries, vols. 1-4 (re-reads)

May 1-5, read in the wrong order (2,3,1,4)

These are still great! I don't remember why I was initially only going to re-read the second one, but I got sucked in again and just rolled with it.

Current Music: Hood Internet mix tape

Oops, looks like maybe I haven't posted any of the books I've read this year? Well, here's a batch:

Italo Calvino — If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler

Jan 1

Equal parts exhilarating and frustrating.

I thought the framing story's main romance plot was obnoxious, and a couple of the later first chapter fragments were too choked with Dudely Bullshit to actually enjoy. But wow, the first five or so fragments created such an enchanting effect! That stylistic mimicry must have been tough as shit to do, and the framing device of translation and mistranslation and forgery made my brain fizz, at least until the answers to the mysteries started shaking out.

All told, I think I class this with Cloud Atlas, where I admire it for its technical accomplishments but don't really think it has a lot to say or find it rewarding as a whole. The first half is totally worth a read, but I endorse bailing whenever you feel done.

Kohei Horikoshi — My Hero Academia vols. 8-16 (comics)

Jan 9-10 (vols 8-12), Jan 18 (vols 13-15), Jan 30 (vol 16)

Well, I blazed through the rest of what's available in English at the library, and now I'm probably done with it for a while — a volume goes down so fast that reading them as they come out is kind of a drag.

Anyway, this brought me up to the point where the large-scale outline of the story has finally emerged. And I think I'm still sort of invested, but,

There's a sort of fatigue that tends to set in on a long series right around this point, where the real plot finally comes into view and then another episodic complication kicks in and it takes forever for the plot to actually move forward again, and that's often where I fall off a series, so we'll see.
The one transgender character so far (a villain) met an ignominious end right around the time I paused, and I'm annoyed about how that shook out.
I'm not really enjoying anything about that one blood-themed schoolgirl-sexy shapeshifter villain, and at pause point it looked like she's who the author is most interested in right now, bleh.

Whatever, we'll see! I did enjoy what we got to see of All For One, he was a very impressive Fucker.

Rory Frances and Jae Bearhat — Little Teeth (comics)

Jan 17

Episodic and meandering, but delightful. A series of interwoven vignettes about a group of young queer folks having drama and getting by.

Catherynne M. Valente — Space Opera

Feb 19

IMO the crucial bit about correctly doing a Douglas Adams riff isn't the prose styling or genre trappings; it's all about joking around on the outside while being really pretty desperately torn up about something quite important and incredibly sad.

I enjoyed this.

Maria Capelle Frantz — The Chancellor and the Citadel (comics)

Feb 19

This was really strange and really compelling. It feels like something I dreamed, and I look forward to re-reading it in probably a similar daze.

Ann Leckie — The Raven Tower

Feb 27

This book rules. Also, I find it low-key hilarious that Leckie’s god characters are way more traditionally AI-like than her AI characters. The narrator was great, and I loved the little bits that helped cement their oddness and the oddness of their place in the world, like the repetitions of “Here is a story I heard.” I really liked The Myriad, too. (Would I trade a reasonable sacrifice of blood every year for total immunity from mosquitoes? INSTANTLY.)

Anyway, this was a delicious layer cake of revenge stories — a satisfyingly bloody Hamlet riff on top of... I guess Reverse Cask of Amontillado?

Lots to love about the setting, too. Man!

I hope things turned out ok for the hero and his girlfriend. What a wild run of wrong-place-wrong-time, god damn.