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media round-up
Aug. 7th, 2022 07:39 amReturning to the format of old because I'm clearly not organised enough for anything else, haha.
• Like most of the internet I eagerly jumped on Stray when it released, which proved to be a quick and largely delightful little game with more plot than I was expecting. The care taken in rendering dozens of small interactions and discoveries, flush with cat humour and familiar behaviours, was honestly a greater joy than the overarching story though.
• I picked The Space Between Worlds off a sci-fi rec list, and it was decent: I enjoyed the premise, in which 'traversers' are hired to travel to adjacent spheres across the multiverse to collect data for fun and profit (mostly the corporation's profit, of course). The protagonist had a compelling narrative voice, full of cutting bitterness and longing. It lost points for wobbly worldbuilding, though - after a point you can't help but notice how little description we get of anywhere outside two neighbouring population centres, which sits poorly when your personal standard is the works of Hobb or Cherryh or Reynolds - and I found the main romance fairly dull, in part because the love interest receives so little characterisation outside the narrator's perceptions. An understandable trap when you're writing in first person, but one that could have been avoided with a little more effort. Thematically, there was a lot of focus on class and race, and it seemed to be handled well.
• Dug up a bootleg of Jujutsu Kaisen 0 because it's otherwise taking a longass time to come to streaming, and it was pretty much exactly what I expected based on my watch of the first season: incredibly animated and inescapably corny. Every possible declaration of "I will fight for my friends who have made it possible for me to exist in this world!" you could hope for. So yeah, I had fun. I groaned lot, but I had fun. I only wish they did more with Rika because that whole situation had so much potential.
• I don't think I've read such a brutal, bizarre black comedy as Slaughterhouse Five since Catch-22. Apparently war does things to people, who knew. Hard to say I enjoyed it, but at minimum it was interesting to at last experience Vonnegut's peculiar writing style. There's an argument to be made about the extent to which fanfic is often unexpectedly Vonnegutian.
• Watched the first episode of the Netflix adaptation of The Sandman. Interesting enough? Will probably continue? I've never read the comics so at least I can worry less about dissatisfaction than I had to with Good Omens. EDIT: Finished it, loved it :)b
• Like most of the internet I eagerly jumped on Stray when it released, which proved to be a quick and largely delightful little game with more plot than I was expecting. The care taken in rendering dozens of small interactions and discoveries, flush with cat humour and familiar behaviours, was honestly a greater joy than the overarching story though.
• I picked The Space Between Worlds off a sci-fi rec list, and it was decent: I enjoyed the premise, in which 'traversers' are hired to travel to adjacent spheres across the multiverse to collect data for fun and profit (mostly the corporation's profit, of course). The protagonist had a compelling narrative voice, full of cutting bitterness and longing. It lost points for wobbly worldbuilding, though - after a point you can't help but notice how little description we get of anywhere outside two neighbouring population centres, which sits poorly when your personal standard is the works of Hobb or Cherryh or Reynolds - and I found the main romance fairly dull, in part because the love interest receives so little characterisation outside the narrator's perceptions. An understandable trap when you're writing in first person, but one that could have been avoided with a little more effort. Thematically, there was a lot of focus on class and race, and it seemed to be handled well.
• Dug up a bootleg of Jujutsu Kaisen 0 because it's otherwise taking a longass time to come to streaming, and it was pretty much exactly what I expected based on my watch of the first season: incredibly animated and inescapably corny. Every possible declaration of "I will fight for my friends who have made it possible for me to exist in this world!" you could hope for. So yeah, I had fun. I groaned lot, but I had fun. I only wish they did more with Rika because that whole situation had so much potential.
• I don't think I've read such a brutal, bizarre black comedy as Slaughterhouse Five since Catch-22. Apparently war does things to people, who knew. Hard to say I enjoyed it, but at minimum it was interesting to at last experience Vonnegut's peculiar writing style. There's an argument to be made about the extent to which fanfic is often unexpectedly Vonnegutian.
• Watched the first episode of the Netflix adaptation of The Sandman. Interesting enough? Will probably continue? I've never read the comics so at least I can worry less about dissatisfaction than I had to with Good Omens. EDIT: Finished it, loved it :)b
