not today or tomorrow

• Prior to watching Osomatsu-san, I would have said it was an anime about six identical brothers who don't really do anything. Turns out that's not untrue, but it omits the crucial context of it being an affectionate tribute to an old school gag series called Osomatsu-kun, and an adult comedy that vacillates between crude humour, genre jokes, and hilariously savage slice of life skits that should resonate with anyone who has ever experienced siblings frustrations. I wouldn't recommend it without caveats, but I had a surprisingly good time.

• Mouthwashing rocketed across Tumblr and I managed to get curious enough to watch an LP just before the hype backlash started to kick in. Well-crafted, overall! The ending dragged a little and I have various complex feelings about Anya's storyline, but it did some genuinely impressive things with the medium.

• Having been there for the beginning of Destiny, it felt wrong not to be there at the end, so I ended up purchasing and quickly mainlining some of the key expansions I'd missed during my, er, seven year hiatus: Shadowkeep, Beyond Light, and Witch Queen. The last one was by far my favourite, even if it forced me to continually crush Ghosts with my bare hands, aaaugh.

• The Final Shape itself was... okay. I applaud the decision to make Ghosts its narrative heart, and the continuation of the alliances built with other aliens, and some of the nostalgia button mashing. I can't say it stuck the ten year landing, though. Destiny's slipping grasp on its own core mythology - the conflict between Light and Darkness, and what that actually looks like and means - was disappointingly obvious. On top of that, the expansion threatened to not even be that fun to play as a solo campaigner thanks to six hundred annoying ass shield mechanics and three boss fights per level. Bungie. Please. I have other things to do. Still, I got through it (with help) and got a little misty-eyed about it, and now I feel comfortable never spending money on Destiny again, so it's at least it is an ending.

• Arcane's second season either greatly delighted or greatly disappointed people. Alas, I am on the side of the haters. So it goes. Spreading the story across three seasons rather than two might have salvaged it for me; but there were also some choices I simply didn't vibe with at all.

I managed to keep a media tracker throughout 2023, which was quite fun. Nothing terribly in-depth, but it does make it possible to pull a few stats out.

Books

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TV

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Movies

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Games

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Overall

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I've gotten so far behind my media round-ups that I think this is going to have to be a 'greatest hits of the interim' post or it's going to go on for far too long.

• I have a soft spot for cephalopods, so the premise of The Mountain in the Sea was instantly attention-grabbing: a scientist is hired to investigate the possibility that a population of wild octopuses have developed a level of consciousness and intelligence comparable to humans, and the consequences of this possibility slowly spiral outwards through adjacent plotlines. I ultimately enjoyed this book, as there were a lot of interesting ideas thrown around, and the writing style was refreshingly brisk. I don't think it rose to its full potential, though; the octopus were there and I loved every second of them, but in a way the story was less about the discovery of a new, non-human culture as it was a treatise on communication and social identity, explored through a series of near-future sci-fi thought concepts. The character voices in particular were pretty weak. This is the author's first published novel, though, and it will be interesting to see if he grows more adept at spinning a truly extrapolative story with more long-form writing experience.

• From the future to the past: We Have Always Lived in the Castle is my first Shirley Jackson outside of The Lottery, and whoo. Whoo. There really is just something about the greats and their ability to re-write your brain a little, isn't there? I find myself fascinated with the way Jackson works with absence; the story is as much, if not more so, about what isn't on the page as what is, and it leaves so much room for the reader to insert themselves into the experience. This book troubled me for days.

• Galavant is easy and fun. Apparently its creators claim it as a mix of Princess Bride and Monty Python, which are some rather large boots I don't quite think they fill, but I'm a sucker for musical comedy and the cast is very charming.

• I never dabbled in Critical Role, mostly because that is just a lot of time to give over to a single story good grief. Thank goodness for cliff-notes then! The Legend of Vox Machina promised well-animated fight scenes, which as usual is an easy sell for me. There really aren't many complaints I can make that aren't immediately explained away by the fact this is a fan-funded project based on a tabletop game that a bunch of friends played together for the lulz, and given that foundation I've been pleasantly surprised by the quality of the accompanying storytelling. Like, yes, it could use a pre-season to actually get to know everyone before we launch into major dramatics, but I know why it doesn't exist and I accept I'm not the priority audience. Maybe the pacing could be better; it does well enough. Maybe the quantity of crude jokes aren't to my taste; I guess they were to somebody's. The animation and soundtrack are both fantastic. I'm looking forward to season three.

• A couple of movie nights with weirderwest worked us through Dungeons & Dragons: Honour Among Thieves and Alien, which were entertaining in, um... very different ways. D&D was very silly, but wow, loved the platonic life partnership at the centre. Alien was also sort of silly, but mostly in the sense of watching a pop culture tragedy and going noooo stop making all these inevitably terrible decisions!! Love that old school sci-fi aesthetic though, truly we've gotten more boring.

• A whimsical rewatching of the ever-classic Muppet Treasure Island ended with me starting to pick through a sampler of The Muppet Show itself. I keep thinking 'wow, why haven't they brought this back, it's such a simple but fun formula' and then I remember they did do that and it apparently sucked. Something something worst timeline.

• Like ten months after my parents showed me the first couple of episodes I've FINALLY finished Deadloch - the delay was less because I didn't want to continue and more because it's taken me this long for me to grudgingly sign up for Amazon Prime. The ratio of comedy to drama was weighted rather more in the latter's direction than I expected over the course of the show, but I ended up really invested in the mystery, and the character arcs were compelling as well. I think my only real whinge is I wish they'd folded Tammy and Miranda's B plot more snugly into the A; for a second in the final episode it looked like they would, and then they weirdly veered away from it? Let the girls be plot-critical! The actors were great, they deserve it.

• I've hit a bit of a wall with Baldur's Gate 3... Act III is definitely the roughest, aheh.

• Mum leant me a copy of Water for Elephants, which I read during my trip into the mountains. She liked the colourful writing style, and it did have that! It also hit unexpectedly close to home during the elderly Jacob's reflections - we've been going through the process of moving my grandmother into aged care, and my lower lip may have done some quivering. It otherwise seemed fairly standard mainstream book club fare, if with at least one moment that genuinely upset me. I can't say I particularly liked most of the characters save Walter, who deserved better.

• The Greatest Showman had a far more romantic take on circuses, including a list of foot-tapping songs and some fun choreography. They titled the movie well, though - it's not about the circus or family or class struggles, and it's certainly not about the burden of discrimination or a group of outsiders finding a home. It's about Hugh Jackman getting to prance around as the star of the show, flawed but so, so, so good-hearted, really, look how much he loves his children and he was poor once so he's not really exploiting anyone, right? Right. I'd almost rather they'd just owned the shallowness of the motivations rather than trying to bake weak meaning into it.

• Speaking of gratuitous male flexing, I got about nine episodes into Suits and had to bail. Couldn't do it. The cases were interesting, but the narrative positioning of the majority of the women was so off-putting, and instead of using Mike's status as the underdog outsider to interrogate an established system of rich and powerful people, it was mostly used to emphasise how Cool and Awesome it is to be rich and powerful. What. Why.

• weirderwest and I had a movie night reliving the joys of Pacific Rim. I think the funniest thing was both of us confirming how hard Tumblr gaslighted itself in some respects - can we all now finally admit Raleigh is a poorly acted blank space of a character who sucks up screentime that should have gone to Mako, the vastly more interesting protagonist? Still, the wish fulfilment of PacRim is at least fun, and there is ample glee to be had in its shameless love and indulgence of the appropriate tropes. The giant robots? Epic. The giant monsters? Even more so. Worldbuilding? Cool. Drift compatibility? Great concept. Music? SLAPS.

• I stubbornly dragged my ass back to the first season of the His Dark Materials TV show and successfully, if not enthusiastically, finished it. I'm sorry. I really tried. The visuals are on point, I'll cop to that without reservation; it was seeing some lovely gifsets that lured me back, in fact, and the second and third season title openings are as incredible as the first. The show's interpretations of the characters are often very different to the books, however (though I quite liked what I saw of Will), the depiction of dæmons remained clunky and inconsistent, the pacing was all over the shop, and the dialogue was just... awkward, to me. I know there is a lot going on in the setting, but like. C'mon. The books are literally right there.

• In contrast, I had a marvellous time re-reading and re-watching Watership Down! Now there's an adaptation that knew what it was doing, and I say an emphatic fie to all those reviewers of the time who dared suggest it would have been better to do it Disney style. Things get lost, of course - most of the supporting cast gets flattened out, for one thing, but you can tell the writers still clearly understood who they were meant to be. The condensing of plot events are logical, the physical depictions of the characters are striking, and they fit in as much of the lore as they can manage. The only really questionable decision is the amount of time we spend on Fiver's weird Bright Eyes fever dream. 

• I've been watching the HBO adaptation of The Last of Us and... you know what, I'm surprisingly into it? It's not perfect. It's not going to supplant playing the game as the truest emotional journey. There are one or two things that have already raised my sceptical eyebrow, and I'm so far ignoring all the surrounding actor interviews and writer podcasts and excess wanky hype because I would like to just experience the text as presented onscreen, thank you. But I'm really enjoying the casting, the main emotional beats are mostly hitting right for me so far, and it's very cool seeing the scenery and wetting my pants every time an Infected enters the scene.

• Extraordinary Attorney Woo was a recommendation from my uncle of all people, which I would not have guessed given it turned out to be an endearing law drama with more soap opera elements than hardline procedural. I'm not the right person to comment in depth on how well the show handles its autistic main character, but I do think its obvious good intentions count for something and, if you view it as aimed at people and societies still lacking in understanding and sympathy towards neurodiversity, it has some very valuable points to make and went unexpectedly hard in making some of them. Plus the characters were charming as hell and the episode plots generally entertaining.

• The promise of good animation lured me into watching Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, and it was indeed a promise delivered upon in full. Bright, dynamic, and very in the vein of Into the Spiderverse (which is a good thing!). As far as plot goes, it was mediocre. Possibly I made the mistake in seeing it on a Friday evening because there was at least one point where I found myself considering I'd rather be in bed; either way it definitely still isn't up to the comedic snuff of the original franchise founder, despite one interestingly dark little plot thread.

• syntheid and I have been playing through Divinity: Original Sin 2 on the weekends and I'm having so much fun. High points so far: we have finally escaped Fort Joy; our commitment to not murdering animals needlessly is mighty; Lane has turned multiple beings into chickens for maximum hilarity points; my idle flirting with a random NPC had unexpectedly adorable consequences. Low points: I keep catching on fire. All the time. So much. Do you feel the same, or am I only dreaming. Is this burning an eternal flame.

• Enola Holmes was so bad TAT I swear watching things with my parents is like a 50/50 split between receiving something excellent that I will love forever, and having to sit there with a rictus smile on my face frantically scrounging the dusty recesses of my brain for something positive to say at the end that isn't just a blatant lie. See also Avatar 2: The Way of Water, to which my feeble offerings amounted to, "It was really pretty! I liked the whales!"

Returning 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

Read
7. Merchanter's Luck, CJ Cherryh

DNF: The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey Into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred, Dr Chanda Prescod-Weinstein

( thoughts )

Watched
4. The Wire (s4)
5. Turning Red
6. Abbott Elementary
7. Hunter x Hunter (20 eps)
8. Parks & Rec (s1)

Rewatches: The BFG (1989), Red Vs Blue (s1-3 & 6-9)

( thoughts )

Played
Red Dead Redemption 2 (in progress)

( thoughts )

• My Christmas treat to myself was the Mass Effect: Legendary trilogy - I made it about 2/3 through the second game before I had to put in on hold for travelling reasons. Always a nostalgic treat to return to this series, and I was relieved to find the updates weren't too intrusive and in fact made ME1 much less clunky. Did find myself a little disappointed by some of the face / hair changes; I always liked how 'plain' my Shepard looked, and now her hairstyle is unavoidably coiffed. A small price to be for being able to use the sniper rifle from the very beginning, I suppose.

• Nem recommended a lesser known Cherryh to me on the basis of our mutual love of bond animal companions, so 40,000 in Gehenna became my holiday read. My heart will always belong to the nighthorses, but Gehenna was a fascinating complement in terms of showing how a stranded human colony might become slowly drawn into the alien ecosystem it had recklessly sought to appropriate with the justification that no definably intelligent creatures existed there. The uneasy sense that we are witnessing the domestication of humans lingers, and like all good Cherryh books so too does the feeling that all the mysteries could be unravelled if the text would just give us the correct cipher... but of course it does not, because a lack of natural understanding is the point. 

• A lot of reboots this year, but surprisingly quality ones! All Creatures Great & Small (2020) is the newest adaptation of the classic James Herriot stories, and I found it charming and gentle - perhaps a little too gentle, given the sadder stories and severer embarrassments tended to be either softened or wholly omitted. The cast were wonderful though, with a greater range of accents on display than in the original, and careful attention paid to the roles of Helen and Mrs Hall to balance out the otherwise fairly man-dominated array of characters. Highly recommended for anyone seeking some feel-good media featuring many scenic shots of rolling green hills and various cute critters.

• Dune (2021) made an impression and no mistake. Slow, solemn, and occasionally a little strangely paced - I had the sense that things went south within a day or two of the Atreides' arrival, which doesn't seem right - but the aesthetics were on point (the ornithopters!! the bagpipes??), I loved what they did with characters like Kynes, and they handled the strange back-and-forth of the precognition and the power of the voice well. Of course, the worms were the real standout. Superb. 10/10. Would feed them entire civilisations.

• West Side Story (also 2021) did what I have often wished more musical movies would do and made ample use of the fact that it is, in fact, a film and not merely filmed theatre. Can't comment on how it compares to the originals, which I haven't seen; can't comment on its portrayal of Puerto Ricans, which is outside my purview; can mournfully comment that "America" remains a devastatingly catchy song and the dancing was amazing.

• My fam also plunged through a random handful of easy family appeal flicks: Ron's Gone Wrong, Big Hero 6, Jungle Cruise. Nothing outstanding; nothing too awful.

• ...except Spider-Man: Far From Home, which I couldn't escape in time. Gyllenhaall seemed to have fun, at least. It otherwise felt like watching an extremely long tourism advert with perplexingly bad CGI. 

• After five years I felt the sudden urge to rewatch Person of Interest, and have at last made it to the season 2 finale, which remains a solid favourite. I love an AI very much ;__;

• Picked up Death Stranding on sale, and have subsequently experienced the notorious writing decisions of Hideo Kojima for the first time. The concepts and worldbuilding are fascinating; the actual experience of playing the game is - well, also fascinating I suppose, but in more of a bewildered boggling way. Even setting aside the part where nobody talks like a normal human being who understands how conversation works, and fighting really hard to set aside the bizarrely fetishistic nature of half the game mechanics (I did not expect to have so much time devoted to Norman Reedus' bodily fluids, what the absolute hell), I'm having a hard time getting past the fact the developers seem to have forgotten to make the fundamental gameplay... y'know, fun? It's like Kojima played Skyrim and decided the best part of the whole game was slowly and painstakingly picking your way through rocky mountains, getting lost and falling off cliffs. To each their own...

• I've had Invincible on my list for a while, and then at weirderwest's recommendation I idly threw on the first episode and proceeded to accidentally down the whole thing in one sitting because I don't have self-control. A solid 8/10 - fantastic animation and likeable characters, nothing especially ground-breaking in the well-populated genre of "superhero deconstruction" but it executes its story well. It also executes a lot of other things. Mostly people. Dang.

• After some brief dithering I decided to treat myself and put in an order for a 25th anniversary edition of Sabriel. I've always regretted not getting the fancy hardcover limited editions of His Dark Materials, and the Old Kingdom trilogy holds a similarly dear place in my heart.

• As amusingly often seems to be the case, several of the webcomics I follow are approaching long-awaited confrontations at the same time. Unsounded and The Property of Hate are the ones that have me sitting on the furthest edge of my seat: TPOH for the tantalising possibility of answers to an underlying mystery, and Unsounded because, oh god, oh no, this is going to really hurt.

• Subnautica was one of the games Sony offered players for free last month, and though I've only journeyed in a short way I would firmly declare it one of the better survival games around, or at least the most personally appealing I've come across to date! It crashlands the player in a gorgeously rendered alien ocean, which immediately offers a fun twist by letting you live your secret dream of being a marine xenobiologist. I adore the ocean almost as much as I fear half of what lives in it, and Subnautica offers delight and terror in turn throughout its varied biomes. It also offers a reason to keep going beyond simple survival: there's a plot that doles out pleasantly attainable goals and clues to muse on as you dart around gathering kelp and fleeing giant alien sharks. My only complaint is that finding tool fragments to advance said plot can sometimes be a pain, but t'is the nature of survival games to require some grind.

• The Bone Ships held the skeleton (ha ha) of something I'd truly love, but fell short on providing any real meat. The opening chapter was solid; some of the world-building elements were interesting; the fundamental plot conceit should have grabbed me. Alas, protagonist Joron Twiner is so devoid of personality that even once he starts developing a spine, it's mostly a copycat pastiche of his captain's - sorry, shipwife's. (The decision to take as notoriously jargon-thick a profession as sailing and reinvent all the terminology was... questionable.) Had the story dived deeper, it could have been something great, but it never seemed to really drift beyond the shallows. The author's acknowledgement speaks of writing to a deadline. Maybe that explains some of it.

• Somehow I fell into re-reading the Harry Potter series for the first time in what has to be more than a decade. It's been... well, you know. The first three books retain a good amount of the charm I remember from my childhood; four and five show some promising nuance, but also some dangerous clumsiness. Six and seven? I still just do not like them much at all. I have to give Rowling some credit for managing to cram in so many romances at the last second and have NONE of them resonate with me.

• As can be gathered from previous entries, I've also watched Infinity Train Book 4: Duet, and The Mitchells Vs the Machines, both of which were very enjoyable.