sideways | Entries tagged with !media round-up

• I haven't yet finished my octopus book, but I have read it in front of enough co-workers to be repeatedly asked whether I'd watched My Octopus Teacher yet. Can finally say yes - and I really enjoyed it! A short documentary on a man who visited a wild octopus every day for nearly a year, there was of course anthropomorphising and spiritualism mixed in heavily with the animal behaviour, but not in an unbearable way; I honestly sympathised with many of the sentiments expressed. I think it's fairly well-known these days that peaceful observation of nature, and building a sense of connection and belonging with the entirety of the world around you, not just the societally elevated human parts of it, is good for one's health. The footage is stunning, too. It's funny that we look so wistfully to the stars for strange life when it's right there in our oceans. What an amazing little creature.

• Finished book 6 (Babylon's Ashes) of The Expanse with some effort. After the high stakes, game-changing events of book 5, this one proved enough of a drag that for a while I was getting through it one stubborn chapter at a time. Part of this is down to the decision to spread the story across over a dozen POVs, which resulted in far more navel-gazing than felt justified by the quality of the navels on offer. After a certain point we've heard it all before, guys - enough with the philosophising. The ending was decently punchy, at least, and the story seems to be shifting back towards the mystery I'm most interested in. I did also enjoy touching base with a few characters who hadn't been seen for a while.

• Space Sweepers has been doing the rounds as a recommended film in my circles, so I hopped on board. Visually, it's a treat; narratively, it's chockers with found family, dystopic social commentary, ridiculous action dramatics, and melodramatic personalities. So, you know, absolute chaos, but very endearing chaos. Bubs was a delight.

• I'm only a handful of episodes away from finishing Rebels, but damn if I can get myself to commit those last few hours. The final season is just... not great. (Also did something of an incredulous spit-take to find out Hera and Kanan weren't supposed to have been a couple this entire time? Y'all.) Futurama thus remains my primary dinner entertainment at present, occasional soul-deep cringes aside.

• Also struggling to commit to the last legs of Fallout 4. The beautiful, expansive world is consistently undermined by the fact that 98% of the quests I receive are exactly the same: go here, kill things, return. I managed to slip into a Skyrim-esque mood that provided me with some rhythm for a while, but the underlying story just isn't intriguing enough to pull me through the time investment needed to wring real value out of this game. I like shooters! I don't like playing shooters masquerading as RPGs for 70+ hours. I feel little connection with these factions who paste different faces over the exact same shopping lists of sidequests. It doesn't matter who I do it for, the demands never change: go here, kill things, return.

Whoo, have a bit to catch up on here, so I'll spare everyone the real misses (do not be lured into watching The Good Liar just because it stars Helen Mirren and Ian McKellen, the end).

• A number of friends have been trying to wheedle me into watching Schitt's Creek, but my mother won by fairly unbeatable advantage of physical proximity. We worked through the better part of five seasons during my stay, and then I wrapped up the remainder once I was home again. As delightful and warm-hearted a comedy as promised, with many laugh-out-loud moments and also a few tears. I'm not sure I could stand any of these people in person, but I very much enjoyed watching them grow and triumph.

• I put the Clone Wars on hold to segue into Star Wars: Rebels, mostly for the change of pace that comes with following a smaller, more dedicated cast of characters. It lacks some of TCW's spicier frontline brutality, but won me over quickly with the foster family set-up of the crew of the Ghost. Unfortunately I know one very key thing that happens in season four and I am getting close and I am NOT looking forward to it 8(

• Idly started Infinity Train this Friday, and finished the series on Saturday. Wow. Creator talk says it may not be picked up for further seasons / 'books' as publishers are getting antsy about it being too dark for its nominal younger audience, and if that is the case I will be deeply disappointed because this is one of the best cartoons I've seen in years. Inventive and heartfelt, with natural dialogue supported by stellar voice-acting and plots that handwave surprisingly little given the setting is an eldritch genius loci. Loved the characters, loved the stories, loved the conclusions. That said, absolutely would have had me up at night screaming as a kid so they may have a point.

• The steady march through the Expanse novels continues (just started book 5, Nemesis Games!), and as promised it has rapidly improved as it goes. I still feel like I've read better character writers - after a point you can see similar tropes starting to appear, and there are some stereotypes that never quite get off the page - but combined with the strong worldbuilding and a genuinely interesting overarching plot it's going on the favourite sci-fi list. Definitely looking forward to hunting down the TV show at some point.

• I really wish I liked Soul more than I did. It was very pretty? The deuteragonist partnership with Soul 22 just didn't seem to have the same sparkle that the best Pixar movies manage, however, and Joe's storyline felt weakened as a result.

• If you're looking for a quick but fun puzzle game, The Last Door offers an atmospheric gothic Victorian horror experience in eight short episodes. The sound design deserves serious credit, backed up by a gorgeous soundtrack, elevating the simple pixel animation into something that gave me genuine palpitations.

• After many years, and despite several setbacks including the part where his house burnt down, Ben Fleuter has wrapped up his webcomic Sword Interval. I was a fan of the comic that preceded this one, 'Parallel Dementia', and it's been fascinating seeing familiar faces and concepts gently reshaped and replaced into a tighter setting and plot - a tangible showing of Fleuter's development as a writer and artist. Overall a good romp through pre-apocalyptic urban fantasy, with plenty of action scenes and enjoyable characters.

• Finished Dune! Worth reading once, but I think I'll leave it there.

• After browsing around for a bit, I decided on The Expanse as my next literary challenge, on the recommendation of

weirderwest. I was warned that Leviathan Wakes is probably the weakest book in the series, so I went in with comfortably low expectations that allowed me to survive the clunkiness and cliches, and ended up solidly enjoying the uniquer elements of the worldbuilding and concepts. Going to need Holden and Miller to reevaluate some life choices though.

• It took a couple of false starts, but I finally managed to get into The Umbrella Academy enough to finish the two available seasons. I wish it was a little less inclined to prioritise spectacle over substance, but it was still good fun. Fingers crossed for season 3 bringing us a team of siblings capable of working together in less than 5-6 episodes.

• I'm currently working my way through The Clone Wars animated show, courtesy of an online guide that cuts it down to the Must Watch arcs. As such, it's hard to say if the parts that rub me wrong are valid complaints or if I'm just skipping around too much (i.e. the relationships between characters seem lacking sometimes? but maybe I'm just missing all the quieter bonding moments). The highlight absolutely has to be the development given to the clones as both people and walking war crimes. I've never had serious beef with the Jedi before now, but this series is giving me some PRIME STEAK MARINADE. JUSTICE FOR CLONES.

•

syntheid is running a oneshot Numenera campaign for myself,

seven, and a couple of their friends, which is proving very fun! Kudos to Lane for putting up with us insisting on ransacking libraries for no reason and scaring off monsters rather than fighting them. Last session we found an isolated village of peaceful pastoralists and immediately went on nervous high alert.

• Webcomic time is webcomic time but oh my god it is such a relief to have Paranatural kick off a storyline that provides some actual fodder again. It has been so many years. Please provide some forward momentum.

• For Father's Day we went and saw TENET, Christopher Nolan's latest, and I found it overall enjoyable if harder to follow than Inception. (Though that was in part because I struggled to hear several important conversations; I've seen at least one other review complain about the sound mixing, suggesting it wasn't just me.) It had the usual strengths: stunning cinematics and creative choreography, interesting sci-fi concepts put into brain-wrinkling practice, and a soundtrack that crawls inside your ribcage to pound in place of your heart. It also had the usual flaws: bland characters (though it was nice to see a black man in the lead!), women corralled by the whims of men, and interesting sci-fi concepts largely used as visual staging for stock standard action/adventure dramatics. Fans of his work can count on having a good time.

• Unsurprisingly, upon getting home I went and checked out Interstellar, one of the Nolan pieces I hadn't yet seen. I liked it more than TENET, because at the end of the day eco-disasters and space are more my thing than spies and security. At the same time, it was a struggle to stave off a feeling of resentful malaise throughout, because, well. There Is No Planet B. Watching fictional escapes from a very real problem lacks catharsis, these days. Still, the imagination that went into portraying wormholes and black holes and other worlds was very satisfying.

• Romance is not a genre I usually gravitate to, but I have a soft spot for visual novel / choose-your-own-romance that I mostly blame on BioWare. Fallen Hero: Rebirth has to be one of the better I've run into! The worldbuilding is familiar - superheroes in a modern society - but you're positioned as an ex-hero slowly building your rebirth into a supervillain and the story was handled with surprising nuance. The romances promise to be a slow build with rightful emphasis placed on plot concerns as they arise, and I enjoy the complexity and variety of the choices you're offered. I'll be sticking with this one, I think.

• As part of my solemn swearing to work through my purchased backlog I've been focusing on my collection of short games, which has honestly been exactly what I need right now anyway. Unavowed is the second of Wadjet Eye's titles I've tried, and I had just as much fun as I did with Primordia. They're not difficult point-and-click puzzles, but the stories are engaging and the characters very endearing, though a couple could have used more depth. Yes, Logan, you used to be an alcoholic. I know. We all know.

• Gris I'd dithered on because I was under the impression it was a puzzle platformer, and I'm a bit hit-and-miss with those. Turns out it's the most perfect puzzle platformer ever. Every single thing about this game was a treat for my eyes and my brain and my feelings and I cannot recommend it more fervently.

• Somehow I've gone on a bit of a Disney Favourites binge: The Lion King, Fox & the Hound, Mulan, Rescuers Down Under. Reminds me for the nth time how much I miss 2D animation as a regular cinematic feature. Whence again will Disney offer something as captivating as Marahute's flying sequence, or the vicious fluidity of the hound pursuing the fox?

• Also started watching Westworld. Only a few episodes in so far, but it's holding my interest. So many boobs, though. So many.

• I've breached the halfway point in Dune and am continuing to chip away. The text is old and dry, but while I have to take it in small doses I'm coming to agree it's worthy of its status; even more so when one considers how much it pre-dates and has clearly influenced. Herbert set himself a curious challenge in writing a story in which precognition is a dominant and active player, and is so far rising to it. Funnily enough, though, I picked the book off my shelf at long last by chance decision - and then found out there's to be a movie soon! The trailer looks surprisingly promising. Even from what little I know, the right scenes, lines, and atmosphere seem to be there. If nothing else, it should be good viewing - reading about the worms is one thing, seeing them in full realistic scale is another. Dang.

• A belated addition that I left off some earlier round-up post - Terminator: Dark Fate had caught my eye with the promise of a tall buff woman supersoldier wrecking shit in the name of protecting another woman, and I caught it on sale for a doable $3. Happy to say that it did provide the one thing I was there for! It is otherwise a fairly average addition to the Terminator mythos, and while I wouldn't go out of my way to recommend it I've done worse things with my time. Just wish Cameron had better resisted the urge to craft a rebootquel that, as is the fashion, completely undermines the in-universe successes of the movies that came before. Our future is evil robots and that's that, apparently.

• And on the theme of buff women wrecking shit, I also watched The Old Guard. The summary of my post-watch discussion with

syntheid would be "great characters! some cool concepts and fight scenes! wow that plot hinges entirely on a number of unexplainably bad decisions". Thumbs up on that undeniable gay, though.

• My trashy military series re-read involved me flicking through a few favourites and then jumping ahead to the two new books that had been released since I last paid it any attention. Not going to be new favourites, boo. As much as I like a number of the newer characters, it's becoming gratingly obvious that the series has gone on longer than it needed to and the writer is struggling to find things to do with the remainders of the old cadre. Sudden, gruesome, and unfair deaths are the name of the game, of course, but there's shooting the dog, and then there's shooting the dog so hard it retroactively obliterates entire arcs. On the upside, I had to quirk a smile over how present women are across every echelon of the hierarchy these days, which is a marked change in a series that didn't have a single female character of note until book three. It's still very A Man Wrote This, but good for you, dude. That's growth, or at least a better editor or ghostwriter or something. (Heh. Ghostwriter.)

• Where the Water Tastes Like Wine was one of my Steam summer sale purchases, and I wish I liked it more because the aesthetic is choice. It's such an interesting little concept too, putting you in the skeletal shoes of a cursed drifter planting and harvesting stories as part of their pact, and the tales themselves are colourful and inventive. Alas, they forgot a core rule of video gaming, which is that it should be fun to play. WtWTLW just isn't fun enough to demand more than a couple of hours out of the player, and I have a pretty high tolerance for walking simulators. Ah well. At the very least, the music is very enjoyable.

• The Beginner's Guide, on the other hand, was well aware it didn't need to be any longer than it was, and for that I am especially grateful because I struggled terribly with motion sickness throughout. No the game's fault, really; I remember having similar issues with The Stanley Parable, so it must just be something about the engine they use. I liked it overall, and I think I've come to like it more in the lengthy aftermath than in the immediacy of playing it. There were some interesting points made and it was a good choice of medium for them, allowing the writer to explore these ideas without straying into the preachy.

• Still chugging along through A House of Many Doors in the meanwhile, albeit at a less frenzied pace, to collect all my dangling plot threads. I've found the City of Glass, aided a tentacled abomination in romancing a polluted river, fed a god-corpse to the Lord of Crows, become a Poet-Knight, accidentally facilitated two coups and deliberately started another, and no consequence has left me underwhelmed yet.

• Spiritfarer has been released! I'm not allowed to purchase it until I clear a few more off my to-play list, but it looks like such a darling of a game? It's from the same studio as Sundered so has the same gorgeous hand-drawn art style, but seems a far gentler story as you take the role of a ferrymaster to the dead, and any game that has "care for your spirit friends!" as a selling point immediately has my keen interest.

• Mum has been wanting me to watch Saving Mr Banks for a while now, and during my stay I finally got around to fulfilling her wish. I can see why she likes it so much: on a superficial level it's a very heartwarming story, I'm always a fan of Australians getting to be on screen, and, yes, I cried at least once. I wish I could leave it at that. Unfortunately, an inch below the surface lies the fact it's not just a fluffy fictional narrative - it's a just shy of outright propagandist portrayal of a very real woman who was badgered by Disney (the man) for 20 years for rights to a movie adaptation, fought fiercely for creative control of her story, and ultimately lost. In that context it was difficult to watch Disney (the machine) spin out a tale in which her collaboration with the company was a healing, cathartic experience. See how Walt and the gang tease out and sympathise with her traumas; see her overcome her bitter, shrewish nature to literally link arms in peaceful understanding with the mouse! Never mind that none of this actually happened, and they saved this movie for when she was too dead to protest it. I don't know. There's something... almost cruel about them choosing to tell this story in this way. To not only rewrite her work, but her life. (My father, at the end, declared, "Have to watch Mary Poppins again!" Yeah. That would be the point.)

• We also all watched Hamilton together, which I had more genuine fun with. As a testament to the start of the United States as an independent nation, it was a bit melancholy given current events; as a passionate love letter to some old dead guy, the shilling was occasionally so gratuitous that by the end I also wanted to shoot Hamilton. But as absolutely stunning wordsmithery belted out by a killer cast to a range of brain-monopolising tunes? Entirely worth one's time. "Wait For It" was probably my favourite.

• Mortal Engines is a book that shook me as a child, so I've been casting dark looks at the film production ever since they first made it clear they would be taking a character described as having facial scarring so significant she looks like "a portrait that has been furiously crossed out" and giving her a light slash instead - a decision earnestly and without any hint of self-awareness justified as it just being too distracting and unrealistic for someone so grossly deformed to take the lead role and have a love interest. Yikes to the power of ten, lads, and a spit in the face of a young girl who had never before had it so baldly suggested that you could be both ugly and important. It kept me away from the cinema - but enough wistful curiosity remained that I couldn't quite resist the Netflix appearance. As expected, the unwillingness to commit to Hester's appearance extended to an unwillingness to commit to the story's darkest elements, and as such the movie pretty much missed the entire point of the book from start to finish. Yet despite the gross injustice done to the story, I still kind of enjoyed myself? I credit this wholesale to the architecture and the costuming because my god. It was gorgeous. The people who worked on that side of things at least brought one element of the books to life, and they deserve all the praise.

• A series of sad flops on the literature front. Tried reading The Scar by China Mieville for the third time, and failed for I think the last. He's a hard one, alas; awesome ideas and wicked writing, and I loved The City & the City, but works like The Scar are so slow and dense I feel no drive to continue with it. 100 pages in I still couldn't tell you what the plot was, you know? I then took another stab at The Traitor Baru Cormorant, also got frustrated again, and stomped off to read the short story instead... which I liked quite a lot! That in and of itself kind of summarises my struggles with the novel; it just felt like a lot of waffle to me.

• The final literary failure: I successfully started rereading one of my trashy military fiction series. Why can't I have TASTE.

• I was put onto Sundered by

quietmoon and have been having an absolute blast. This is my first "metroidvania" style game and it took me a while to get the hang of exactly what that meant, but I'm currently two bosses down and madly in love with the art design. I never knew hand-drawn games were a thing! The story itself is also highly compelling: a woman trapped in a labyrinth of nightmares, aided (however willingly is up to you) by a creature that calls itself the Shining Trapezohedron... The only downside is I have to give myself frequent breaks lest I injure my hand with my frantic button-mashing.

• Kentucky Route Zero released its final chapter some time ago, so I'm slowly working my way through to it. It's a very ploddy game in some ways - and barely a 'game' in others - but still beautiful.

Feels like I blink and weeks disappear, lately. Nearly at July! Nearly holiday time!

In the meanwhile, there is media.

• Binged the Toy Story trilogy, which was a nice and easy bit of fun. Was anyone going to tell me Joss Whedon scripted the first film, or was I just going to have to suddenly notice that in the opening credits as an adult myself? I say trilogy, however, because I got about a third of the way into the fourth film before deciding it was the same kind of "so okay it's average" cash cow grab that had failed to delight me when they tried it on Monsters Inc, Finding Nemo, and The Incredibles. Maybe just make new movies, guys? I dunno.

• On the upside, browsing Disney+ ended up with me rewatching and rereading Holes, which held strong as an awesome little tale. As a kid, I made up my own tune for the woodpecker nursery rhyme and you know what, turns out I can still remember it. I think I was in grade nine when they assigned the book in English, in part because it was the year the movie came out and we got to go see it as a field trip. By far one of the better adaptations in the world.

• The other end of the scale: I sat dead-eyed through the Artemis Fowl movie trailer and then silently moved on.

• Season 2 of Kipo landed and that has been my dinner viewing this last week. It's still very good! This season, to me, shone in demonstrating how it's possible to tell an old story - for honestly, there is nothing especially unique about the plot or the messages - and tell it well with heart, great characters, and a bit of personal flair. It's not Avatar: the Last Airbender... but it's not that far off, either. I did think Kipo herself took over the plot a little this season, and I hope the focus is rebalanced some in the third; but I still enjoyed seeing the gang so open and accepting of their friendships, and conflict was couched almost entirely in working together against outside forces, not interpersonal squabbling. Also, I can't stop singing Heroes On Fire. Send help.

• Realised I had some catching up to do if I want to meet my "watch movies outside my usual genres goal", so took a shot at Moonlight. I finished it, which is a step up from some of my other attempts to diversify my fictional intake (the problem with trying to watch things outside my interests: often I am not interested). I also feel like it wasn't a movie made for me, if that makes sense; it's not intended to resonate with me as an individual, and there was a sense of being a distanced, curious outsider to a deeply personal story as a result. It's been interesting reading the commentary by the writers and filmmakers.

• Haven't done much gaming lately, but I did muck around with Creatures Such As We on my phone. Cute and clever! I am still debating my own philosophical positions with myself days later.

• The Last of Us 2 is out and... I'm not racing to get it. I think I still want to play it someday, but ultimately it's not a game I thought needed a sequel, and I'm a bit over being disappointed by unnecessary sequels and clumsy adaptations.

• Conversely, I am ALL ABOUT the upcoming Miles Morales game, ohhhh!! I loved the first game, so I have considerable faith that they'll do well by him here.

• I broke my digital media streak by plunging into a re-read of every Diana Wynne Jones book in my house: Charmed Life, Dogsbody, and Hexwood. She had such a knack for telling stories outside the formulaic mould, and Dogsbody in particular still feels like something that was written exactly for the tastes of my younger self. I loved it so much as a kid that I tried to copy it out by hand once, because I was moving away from the library it was in. Fortunately there were still copies in print by the time I was able to buy it, years later.

• A group of friends held an online 'convention' over the Memorial Day long weekend, and though I couldn't attend everything scheduled because timezones, I did manage to sit in the group watch of Justice League Dark: Apokolips. I don't know exactly what it is about comic book franchises and the urge to write Kill 'Em All storylines, but unrelenting grimness is far more fun when you're all screeching together as a group. Also, there was, you know, the shark thing.

• We also played a oneshot, which ended up becoming a twoshot, haha. Very enjoyable, even if I'm still not terribly adept at tabletop gaming. I stutter out into silence far too often, fret constantly about whether I'm being too passive or demanding too much spotlight or just otherwise not doing what I 'should', always seem to come up with better ideas far after the fact... I was never much of a natural at improv in drama either. Brain just a little bit too hamster in some respects, and a little bit too sloth in others. Regular practice in a smaller group would probably help, but them's the breaks. I still had fun, and still hope to participate in any future oneshots we do! (Again, alas: timezones.)

• Apparently it was Time for the personal pilgrimage that is rewatching Ergo Proxy. It's still very dear to my heart, wonky as it is. Another case where someone just managed to appeal to some ridiculously specific tastes of mine.

• Inception is back on Netflix, so I sat down with it again. Actually felt a bit bored? It's a decent action film with some light heist flavouring, but the grand cinematics it was so famed for aren't as impressive after a decade dominated by high octane CGI-driven superhero films, and there really is a lot of extrapolation that crunches up dialogue time. Poor Ariadne is only half a character: the rest of her is a Google search bar.

• Apologies to Mass Effect; StarCraft has briefly consumed my life again. I'm no whiz at strategy games, but I've done decently so far... and I also still remember 'power overwhelming'. Be interesting to see if that still works. Mostly I have my eyes set hungrily on the zerg campaign, and the promise of cooing lovingly once more over the Queen of Blades. (Queen of my heart.)

• My brief dreams of watching The Wire were shattered by HBO apparently being exclusive to the northern hemisphere, so back on the shelf it goes with Fringe and Mr Robot and other shows that somehow keep dancing just out of reach.

• Can't really complain about not having enough to watch, however, as a whiny complaint to my parents weeks ago ended up netting me their Amazon Prime log-in and - sigh - their Disney+ log-in. Whatever my grudges against the corporate monolith, I can't say I haven't enjoyed having access to a huge wad of my favourite media. The highlight so far has been catching up on the last of the unseen Pixars, Ratatouille and Coco: I watched the latter twice in a row and wept both times. The low has been having to bail out on Aladdin: King of Thieves when it turned out fuzzy memories of liking it as a child did not brace my adult self for the really bad caricature designs somehow getting even worse having already done some awkward squinting throughout the first movie. Clone Wars/Rebels is next on my list, I think!

• In the meantime I have, at very long last, been working my way through Community after it unexpectedly turned up on Netflix. I've had a fantastic time with it overall and have particularly enjoyed playing mental bingo every time I catch a line that I've seen pop up on some gifset, meme, or other source that cannot resist the incredible quotability of the show. It has its rough patches, mind - during the first season I was getting close to going to my knees begging for just one episode without a demeaning gay joke, good grief - but when it's at its peak and focusing more on spearing genres and tropes than minority groups, and setting the characters' quirks against absurd circumstances rather than each other? Amazing. Hilarious. A truly next-level sitcom. Unfortunately, I've just broached season 4 so I know my time is limited, and I'm going to miss it. It's been a good evening dinner-time show.

• I rented Birds of Prey for an evening and ended up really liking it! I might try and write a short review at some point, so I'll just say I thought it was great character capture for the most part and a lot of fun.

• Have also watched Frozen 2 and Ant-Man and the Wasp as part of some long-distance movie nights with my old housemate. Frozen 2 was cute and had a surprisingly apt moral message ("when everything is dark and difficult, all you can do is the next right thing") but did not make one goddamn iota of sense. Ant-Man II was about the same as Ant-Man I - that is to say, harmlessly mediocre - with the welcome addition of more women characters getting to do cool things.

• Ex-Housie has also locked me into a Friends trivia night next weekend. I may have to mainline the TV tropes page to prep, it's been a while and I can't say I remember that much anymore.

• Still plodding slowly through Mass Effect 1, and have also been replaying Pokémon White on the side for no particular reason? Unless Scolipede counts as a reason. It's a pretty good reason.

• I don't seem to have picked up a book in a while, but I have been reading a lot of fanfiction lately - old favourites and fandoms for the most part.

• Dark Matter season 1 ended up being a pleasant run if not an immediate, overwhelming favourite. The character moments were the big highlight, with some very warm fuzzy found family feels kicking in quickly, but it was a little undone by a weirdly bland setting as far as sci-fi goes and some scripting decisions that felt very... late 90s / early 2000s and not always in a good way. I'll probably watch the following seasons at some point.

• I have had the attention span of a gnat when it comes to video games lately. Sort of restlessly settled into trying a Mass Effect franchise replay currently, which is sometimes very fun and sometimes a reminder that the ME1 combat was tolerable at best.

• I'm not very good at podcasts as a rule, but since I had to sit through 13 odd hours of travel early in March I thought it would be a good time to take a stab at The Penumbra Podcast, which

anneapocalypse has been blogging about so enthusiastically! I've been sticking with the Juno Steel storyline: a loving noir replica with a private investigator lead and all the best clichés, but set on Mars and queered through the roof. The voice-acting is sharp and the dialogue has had me laughing out loud on more than one occasion; the 'homme fatale' romance threaded through the storylines is also extremely charming. It has its flaws though, because what doesn't, and it's not one to pick up if you need to be surprised by the plot. I actually started struggling around the middle of season 2 because there were "twists" dragged out across multiple episodes that had been painfully obvious from the start, and it was starting to hurt the narrative - characters making bad decisions because they're messed-up is delightful, but characters making bad decisions because that's what the plot needs to function is a pain, especially when the lead is meant to be making a moderately successful living off his observation skills. Anyway. By the end it started picking up again, and I'm looking forward to what season 3 brings!

• Patrick Ness' "The Knife of Never Letting Go" has been sitting on my bookshelf for a long time, so I finally pulled it down and gave it a go. For the first half I thought I might have found a new favourite; then I had to agonisingly claw my way through the second half, so, maybe not. Weirdly, yet another case of "revelations" being spun out for longer than the actual content justified (among a couple of other things). I'm not asking to be shocked, really, I just... want to be curious. I can't maintain interest if the narrative is expecting a large portion of that interest to hinge on wanting to find out The Answer when The Answer was, uh, pretty apparent a while back.

• Supposedly HBO is giving up 500 hours of free TV. Hoping that carries across the ocean, because I've never watched The Wire but I'd like to try.

• Rewatched Gone Girl (still great) and The War of the Worlds (not great, cannot really justify why I still like it anyway).

• On

nyctanthes recommendation I watched the animated film I Lost My Body on Netflix, and it's a recommendation I am delighted to wholeheartedly pass on. A French, adult film about a severed hand and the person it was once attached to, it's a little surreal and a lot emotional and I enjoyed it very much. Perhaps be cautious if you have a weak stomach, though, just because... well, there's a severed hand functioning as a viewpoint character.

• Finished Transistor. An undeniably beautiful game visually, and the worldbuilding is unique enough to carry the narrative with ease, but the gameplay wasn't much my thing. It might have made more of an impression on me if I wasn't already familiar with most of the main story points.

• Started Detroit: Beyond Human! Another one of my PS+ "freebies" (though I ought to find some online game to play with regularity again or that's not really going to be so free when you add it all up). I suspect I'm somewhere around the two-thirds to three-quarters mark, and I'll probably make a proper review post once I'm done because it's certainly leaving me with many Thoughts, not all of them kind. It's been an interesting game overall, and I'm quite fond of the main characters.

• May have impulsively restarted yet another Dragon Age: Inquisition playthrough on the side. Help me.

• I finally acquired Killjoys season five - the grand finale. Like Orphan Black, I found myself generally happy with where all the characters ended up and there were plenty of the gleefully, outrageously fun and/or heart-wrenching character moments that made this show such a good ride, but the plot was much weaker compared to other seasons and the struggle against the antagonist was underwhelming considering all the lead-up. Which, I mean, - hey, it was fine and I've certainly watched worse endings (Person of Intereeeeest), I just wish they'd managed to retain a wee bit more of that high-tension strapped-to-a-rocket punchiness that was Killjoys at its best.

• Since JB Hi-fi was having a 2-for-1 sale and didn't have season one of Mr Robot, I have also acquired season one of Dark Matter, so that'll be the next thing I throw on when the need for dinner TV strikes c:

• Re-read the Books of the Raksura. O to be a buff lizard-bee person in a giant family community, hanging out in a treehouse and obsessing over drainage.

• I finished

killyhawk's gift of An Unkindness of Ghosts, which proved a thought-provoking sci-fi debut bursting with diversity, and also one of the grimmest things I have ever read. I'm glad to have experienced it but I don't know that it's one I would re-read, in the same way I don't feel compelled to re-read Toni Morrison's Beloved - it lands like a blow and you never quite forget the bruise. Kudos to the author for pulling no punches.

• On a lighter note, Killyhawk also put me onto the new Netflix-Dreamworks animated series Kipo and the Age of the Wonderbeasts! The story follows a 12 year old Kipo who finds herself stranded on the surface world some several hundred years after an undisclosed cataclysm has left the world overrun by "mutes" - mostly anthropomorphic animals of various wacky description - and has many adventures while seeking a way back to her underground home. Where Over the Garden Wall was an autumn fairytale making homage to various Western animation styles, Kipo is a similar level of humourous fever dream but in the flavour of neon afroculture anime. It's easily digested and a visual treat with some surprisingly deep character moments scattered throughout. Also, Wolf is the best.

• I finally threw on Klaus a few weeks ago, having heard the animation lauded here and there, and found it really enjoyable. Certainly the visuals are the big highlight - it is so goshdarn pretty, and a solid feed for the 2D craving - and the story had some messages in it that I appreciated seeing. I do wish they'd been just a little more willing to stray from formula, though; the romance felt more like a happenstance of expectation than something with real chemistry and was nowhere near as interesting as the various platonic relationships that developed, and the Third Act Misunderstanding honestly felt downright silly when the character in question had put the barest possible effort into hiding his secret. Still very much worth a watch.

• I didn't find myself clicking with Witcher III despite my efforts, so I switched tack and had unexpectedly huge amounts of fun with Titanfall 2, which in retrospect is not that surprising because I love shooter mechanics more than hack-and-slash and am just always the biggest sucker in the world for bond companions. Allowing me to run around with a 30 foot tall war machine who is my Friend and Pal will get me to overlook any number of cliches, I tell ya. The campaign was quite short but the level designs were genuinely very entertaining, and after running through it the first time in about 7 hours I immediately turned around and burned through a second time on the hard difficulty just to see if I could. (I could!) Can't recommend picking it up for full price unless you think you'll get lots of mileage out of the multiplayer, but luckily it's easy to get at reduced cost; I nabbed it for free on one of the PS+ runs.

• I also picked up What Remains of Edith Finch and Transistor on sale - finished the former and am nearing the end in the latter. Edith Finch is a masterclass in the storytelling possibilities inherent in video games as a medium, and also broke my heart in about four different ways.

• The next Unsounded chapter has started, hooray! Feeling very [teeth] about what this one promises to cover, but [teeth] is honestly the central Unsounded experience, so.

• Well, my brother nicked his friend's Disney+ log-in, so I did get to see the rest of The Mandalorian. My opinion remains largely unchanged: good fun but very formulaic. That said, the last two episodes had a smidgen of spark to them (there was even a brief conversation between two people who fought on opposite sides of the war that pleased me), and there remains the possibility that with this comfortable success the Mickey masters will greenlight a slightly more adventurous second season.

• We also marched our way through Netflix's rendition of The Witcher! Now, I have no history in this series at all beyond vague facts garnered from gifsets and comments from friends, so I can't readily comment on how it compares to any of the source material. As a blind delving, though - it was pretty good? Deeply confusing at all times, but for the most part I was both intrigued and invested. I did find Ciri's subplot disappointingly bland - my understanding is that she's something of a fierce tomboy, which is not at all the impression the show managed to give - and elements of Yennefer's story annoyed me towards the end. Undeniably awesome fight choreography though, and it's prompted me to finally slide the Witcher III disc in to start installation. ("Aren't you in the middle of Black Flag-" Shhhhhh.)

• I've also finally cracked the spine on Call of the Reed Warbler, an ex-sheep farmer and modern environmentalist's take on regenerative agriculture in Australia. A co-worker described it as dry, but I don't think reading is his favourite hobby in general; so far it's brisk but detail rich. The hard part is not getting overwhelmingly crushed by just how much damage we've done to the planet, and how monumental a task its repair will be.

• At least I've a good selection of fiction to offset it!

killyhawk sent me An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon, and

syntheid gave me God's War by Kameron Hurley, both of which look right up my alley ovo The struggle is deciding which to start first...

• The Christmas break means half my webcomics go on hiatus... still waiting mournfully on the return of Unsounded and Paranatural.

A brief round-up to capture some of what I've been squeezing in lately.

I gave The Dragon Prince a try shortly after it came out and found it underwhelming, but a friend recently convinced me to give it another go with the promise it improved - and, sure enough, mid season 2 I found it started to develop a sense of pacing, stakes, and character development that was really catching my interest. It's still not the best children's show I've ever watched, but I like many of the elements it prioritises - strong sibling relationships, breaking cycles, grey moralities and the justifications we use - and every now and then the humour is genuinely very clever. The absolutely blase, zero-fucks-given attitude towards displaying non-hetero relationships is also both unexpected and delightful. It's the very opposite of queer-baiting; as a (different) friend said to me, you feel free to read whatever you like into anything because attractions of all kinds are so casually embedded in the narrative. Hats off to the creators.

The Outer Worlds was very good :) I found it a smidge heavy-handed at first and I wouldn't call the combat anything special, but it was reliably Obsidian fare with emphasis on the areas they do well: character development, freedom of choice, ruthless social commentary. The overall story was strong, and the maps were pretty good. It absolutely felt like a mash-up between Fallout: New Vegas and Mass Effects, but since those are both games I enjoy and the mash-up was actually done well, it worked. There was also an explicitly asexual character! I had some feelings about it. (Good ones.)

On the other hand... the His Dark Materials TV show has been a huge let-down. Northern Lights is a book I hold very dear to my heart so I don't pretend I was ever going to be anything but fussy, but given they went out of their way to show us trailer scenes that emphasised the canon accuracy I've been left increasingly bewildered by the many choices to stray from the events in the book in favour of different scenes that don't even capture the spirit of what was originally being expressed. I've ended up uneasily wondering if the writers/producers just don't care so much about this story as everything that will come after it - the big, dramatic war story that may appeal more than that of a reckless ragamuffin growing wise. Plus, alright, the animation for the daemons has indeed improved, but it's hard to appreciate that when it's apparently at the cost of rarely having them onscreen. From what I've heard, those new to the series end up with wildly inaccurate ideas of what daemons are and how they're meant to operate, at which point it's just like, come on, You Had One Job.

• Fell into re-reading a couple of the Matthew Swift novels. They're a tricky one to recommend because the prose is extremely purple and it leans shamelessly into the most dramatic beats of urban fantasy, but it just scratches one of the biggest itches I've nursed regarding the genre and that makes it worthwhile. After the mountain of books that take the Dresden Files approach, I hunger for anything that makes an attempt to really dig into what city magic would be like. Less werewolf baristas, more reading the terms and conditions of an oyster card to cast a protective ward and the Bag Lady as a modern god.

• Also re-watched Wolf Children. The first half of that movie really is just pitch-perfect and it still makes me snivel by the end.

• It's been a very long time since I read Good Omens and I'm happy to see the TV adaptation seems to be resonating with people. I am tragically one of the few people to walk this earth who appreciates Terry Pratchett but never found his books to be overmuch My Thing, so while I liked GO I wasn't ferociously into it and I'm not doing excited backflips over the new series. I'll make time for it at some point though, I'm sure, and it sounds like it's been made with a lot of love so it should be a great romp.

• On the other hand, I am excitedly hoovering up every scrap of info about the impending His Dark Materials TV adaptation. All the signs so far are pointing to a faithful telling of the story, the cast is solid, and the CGI looks... well, much better than last time, anyway.

• Where Is My Animated Animorphs Television Series, Universe, It Has Been A Thousand Years.

• Successfully ran through Uncharted 1 a second time, and found it so surprisingly simple that I fired up Uncharted 2 and ended up reaching a new milestone in my gaming sphere: completing a game on hard mode. Am I absurdly chuffed about this? Yes, yes I am. I have a complicated relationship with "being a gamer" that is in no small part linked to being a woman and all the discourse that surrounds "girl gamers", and it means there is a streak of proud defiance after years of hastily explaining that I'm really just a casual player. I am still a fairly casual player, mind, but - it's nice to have this.

• I've been meaning to play Journey for a long time and finally picked it up in the Easter sale. What an utterly gorgeous little game. I thought perhaps it would have aged since the heyday that saw it declared One Of The Best Games Ever, but its sweetly simplistic style has given it an ageless quality that means the experience remains intact. The first time I played through it, I did so mostly solo as no one I ran into was interested in sticking together, but that meant I was free to explore and puzzle at my own rate so it worked out well. The second time I did find a partner only three sections in with whom I journeyed through to the very end, and my god I had misty eyes by the conclusion. We drew interlocking hearts in the snow as a farewell.

• My successes with Uncharted 2 prompted me to give Bioshock a go, a game which I once found far too intimidating and scary to play myself, though I watched a playthrough out of interest in the plot. I'm proceeding competently but having trouble being interested enough to stick with it. The gameplay isn't hugely my thing and I already know the story, so... eh. Half wondering if I shouldn't try Bioshock 2 instead, since I don't know much about that one. (I bought the trio of games on sale ages ago; they're sitting there regardless.)

• It's been a very game-y few weeks.

• Watched Castlevania, gory as all get-out but funnier than I expected - which all made sense the second I realised it was written by Warren Ellis. (I followed FreakAngels diligently back in the day.) Second season was a little slow, but all action scenes were [chef kiss]. Definitely prime OT3 material between the mains, good lord.

• Saw Captain Marvel and liked it. It didn't blow me away but it was pleasing and I like Brie Larson as an actress in general. My brother did not love the film - he found Carol's dry confidence bland and uninteresting - but I've seen enough of her in the comics to find it an appropriate adaptation.

• I'll probably be seeing Endgame next weekend. I didn't... really get a lot of enjoyment out of Infinity War so I'm a long way from hyped, but I've had enough fun with the MCU over the years that I'll probably get some wistful feelings, and otherwise it's just nice to do things with my friend. I haven't been trying hard to dodge spoilers but have somehow mostly succeeded until very recently, when one or two "spoiler-free" comments nonetheless managed to leave me with heavy suspicions about something. Malesh. Not that fussed.

• Continued to keep accidentally reading The Circle Opens to the point where I re-read the whole damn series. Welp.

• Also accidentally read a, like, 300k Assassin's Creed fanfic duology despite having never played any of the games? Don't look at me like that, I don't bloody know how it happened either. I just opened a fic written by a friend-of-a-fandom-friend out of curiosity about their style, and suddenly I was ten chapters deep in a deeply messed up slowburn relationship between two assassins. This is the quicksand the cartoons warned me about.

• Blitzed through Russian Doll in a single hit, which was not my intention when I started. As good as promised, and more heartwarming than I was expecting. The acting was sharp, the dialogue was fantastically weird, and the fundamental messages of the narrative were ones I could whole-heartedly get behind. I really enjoyed Nadia as a character, partly through the fascination of watching someone who lives in the same general world as myself - a white woman in a western city - but such an utterly different part of it. I think I may also just have a bit of an envious interest in selfish women characters in general. The nice thing about shows like RD and The Good Place is they point out the obvious flaws of such an approach to life but allow the characters to grow without denying the existent strengths either. Sometimes situations need a bully, using their powers for good.

• And speaking of strong, independent, and selfish women characters - I finally, fi-i-inally pulled Uncharted: Lost Legacy off my shelf and worked my way through it. Very fun! It was a much longer, fuller game than I thought, and every outlet that marketed as a DLC or even an expansion was kind of underselling it frankly. I applaud their choice of side characters to be elevated to the position of protagonists, as Chloe and Nadine made for an endearing and balanced pair, and I was hugely relieved when a feared injection of heterosexuality failed to manifest. There is no grand kiss, of course, but it's left remarkably open to interpretation. I'm going to have to go fanfic hunting.

• Playing the game also made me itchy enough for more fun parkour that I've gone and booted up the first Uncharted game again. Le sigh. We'll see if I stick with it, though getting to hang out with Elena for an entire game is pretty decent motivation. Proud to announce that in the time since I first played it, my skills have progressed enough that I am confidently plowing through on normal mode so far. Ooh la la.

• I am going to finish Tyranny. I swear. I promise.

• I read a bit of Serpent's Reach, then decided that was too much of a brain work-out straight after Cuckoo's Egg; so I swerved into City of Stairs as another new book I'd picked up, and found it good with worldbuilding that's very up my alley, but not executed with quite as much poise as I'd like; which is probably what contributed to me getting distracted and accidentally re-reading the second Emelan novel again. In other words, I'm a bit all over the place on the book front right now. I do want to get back to City of Stairs, but I'm still waiting wistfully for the next new thing to really, properly grab me.

• I think I just started the questline to become A Person Of Some Significance in FL O: Started from the bottom four times now we're here.

• I have the barest minimum possible tolerance for horror and just watching the trailer meant I had to leave the lights on for a week, but I am so fucking desperate to just find out what the story behind Us is. I'm so curious. What is going on.

• Watched most of Umbrella Academy. I confess I started skipping around a bit by the end; I liked it but not enough, and the pacing was too slow for that lower level of engagement. I seem to be cursed with finding Netflix series just a few too many episodes long for my liking.

• Planning on queuing up Russian Doll as my next to-watch though, it seems to be well-received.

• I'm still enjoying Tyranny but oh my god. Oh my god it's so stressful. "I want choice-based roleplaying games with consequences!" I cry, and then chew my fingernails to sad nubs when a game actually delivers. And everyone's awful, including me, and I'm doing such awful things, nominally to serve my end goal of getting into a position where I can strike at my enemies from within, but at what point am I no better than them, huh? Huh??

• I have no intentions of picking up Anthem, which judging by the reviews has turned out to be exactly the Destiny copycat everyone feared, insofar as it's copying all of Destiny's worst flaws too. I'm nursing some real sorrow over this. Mass Effect was one of the two series that catapulted me into gaming with a will as an adult; I still hold ME2 dear as one of the best gaming experiences I've ever had. The wild lack of logic behind forcing a company like BioWare to create a game with little focus on story, characters, or choice is almost unfathomable.

• Sea of Rust is terrible and I don't recommend it. Speaking of wild lacks of logic: why would you write a series about robots and make them think and feel exactly like humans?

Media round-up:

• Finished Animorphs. Cried during the last book. The very end was a bit bizarre, but otherwise I'm glad to have finally experienced the whole of the story. I find myself wondering whether Applegate's hopes for the books - a sixty-book anti-war anthem - panned out for the generation it was written for. After all, it was one of several pieces of formative media in my childhood with an equally strong environmentalism message, and here I am, seeking the professional tree-hugger life. Do It For Cassie. (Somewhat relatedly, I also managed to depress myself with the thought that in some ways I'd rather buy into the future presented by the end of the novels than the one we're facing currently but haha, that's enough of that.)

• The next book on the list is Sea of Rust! I'm a few chapters in and ehhh, it's okay. I'm hoping it'll pick up a bit once an actual plot emerges; at the moment it's almost more a series of short stories about life after the robopocalyse, and I don't find the narrator very interesting yet. I think I just prefer my robot fiction to be more Ancillary Justice - which is to say, actual xenofiction, rather than non-human characters that seem to think and feel identically to humans save for the copious technobabble.

• Gifs of smooth animation and crafty fight choreography caught my eye on Tumblr, so I've watched the episodes of Dororo that are out and I like it a lot! It's a straightforward, fairy-tale-ish sort of story (a man makes a deal with 12 demons for power and they take his firstborn son's body parts as payment; the boy manages to survive and now, grown, seeks to re-gain his parts by defeating the demons) but that's part of the charm for me. The animation's smooth as silk, the pace is slow but not painful, and - as anyone who knows me even slightly will know - I am the hugest sucker for that older distant hero figure and their tagalong kid companion found family nonsense.

• The Liar, the Whiskey, the Thief is still one of my headbopping earworms at present.

• Sunless Skies is out and I am absolutely not allowed to touch it until I finish more of the games I already own, damnit.

Media round-up:

• "Completed" my Goodreads challenge by squeezing some Animorphs books in there at the last second, a move that's kicked me into continuing to re-read the series. Not intending to count the ones I read this year towards this 2019's reading challenge (15 books! remember that year I read 52? sigh), but they're a nice warm-up. I'm still very fond of Ax as a character.

• Saw Spiderverse 1.2 times again, the .2 reflecting the viewing that got cut short when the movie theatre was evacuated due to a fire.

• I watch/played Bandersnatch, which I enjoyed enough to look up some of the other top recommended Black Mirror episodes (USS Callister, White Bear, and White Christmas). I found myself fairly ambivalent to them, however. USS Callister was solid except that it felt about twenty minutes longer than it needed to be, and the other two episodes seemed to rely heavily on social / technological conceits that were so contrived the narrative fell flat. A sense of horror and any social commentary tends to wither when these situations would really only arise if everyone lost all possible grasp of common sense, and White Bear's twist in particular was painfully clumsy. Ah well.

• Still slowly moochin' along in Tyranny. It's a hurdle to feel the usual attachment to your companions when you're all...terrible people, basically, but I've acquired a couple more neutrally-aligned individuals who I'm more sincerely protective of. I've decided my Fatebinder's key motivation is revenge, because I've never done that before and this seems as good a game as any to roll with it.

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Winger

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