A collection of sad poems filled with gaming terminology and obscure gaming references.
I picked this up because I thought it was a weird premise, it is, but I’m not convinced it’s very good.
What we encounter in the case of correlationism surprise mode is the specter of paranormal action. Distilled into its most basic form, what is haunting communism is the specter of spectrality itself. Why? Because spectrality is the flavor of the symbiotic real, where everything is what it is, yet nothing coincides exactly with itself.
p. 54
heavy sigh
Why are philosophers like this?
One part racist sexist misguided grandpa waxing philosophical about the meaninglessness of life, one part letters responding to Durant’s inflamattory prompt on the meaninglessness of life, one part toothless conclusion. Meh.
Some of the letters were interesting to read but most of the rest of this was not.
Constant “mystery cucking” for 95% of the novel, a super rushed ending and paper-thin antagonists heavily detract from the interesting POV and the “promised land” religious/scientific colonial premise and setting, which is sadly a little underdeveloped.
Meh.
[…] (I rarely make revisions once I have written).
p. 216
No shit girl, we can tell.
This story is about an autistic woman who remembers and describes being born, she goes through some shit (homelessness and stripping, etc.), discovers a passion for gorillas and leverages her understanding of gorillas to help her understand other people.
The Fifth Head of Cerberus is three novellas Frankenstein-ed together, it lacks the cohesiveness that Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun has. It feels like a prototype of what Gene Wolfe would go on to write.
A grounded yet fantastical story about a young woman, Sasha, who is selected to attend the Institute of Special Technologies. Sasha attends this mysterious college and is thrust into a world of dark academia with widespread and fantastical implications.
“You can’t beat no orc marines
When we fire our M16s!”
p. 151
Mary Gentle’s Grunts in a nutshell. Grunts is a satire of the schlocky high fantasy Tolkien ripoffs of the 70s and 80s. It pokes fun at the aesthetic of the American military as portrayed in film and literature. It combines Grand Guignol (think slapstick but extra gory and violent) dark comedy with satire on bad fantasy.
The Kaiju Preservation Society is John Scalzi’s attempt at writing a Jurassic Parc-esque light sci-fi romp that pokes fun at billionaires and postures as hard as a heterosexual white man like John Scalzi can about inclusion and diversity.
What I Mean When I Say I’m Autistic is more of a personal diary made public rather than a memoir or a primer on Autism and suffers for it. I’m not sure it’s something in-between either, I don’t really know what it is. It’s OK, I guess?
In working through my thoughts after reading this trashfire of a novel, I wrote five first drafts of a review. They’re incomplete but I’m posting them here mostly un-edited (just some typo fixes) for posterity. They’re either too incomplete, too snarky, too snooty or too mean-spirited to post on Goodreads.
A Memory Called Empire has big “Hugo award winner” energy: an interesting premise, consistent and intriguing world building, a promising start and a propulsive ending.
I loved my time with it and very excited to dig into the next book in the series although I suspect that it won’t be as good.
Terry Pratchett is an all-timer. The rare case of an author who is immensely popular for the right reasons.
This is a biography about him, and it’s the best one we’re going to get.
A cool guy devil and a flamboyantly effeminate angel living on Earth try to stop the end times from happening because they’ve come to enjoy all of Earth’s pleasures (mosly driving fast cars and reading, respectively). Also, there’s the anti-christ, a descendant of a prophet who’s predicted everything, some dude, etc. There’s a lot going on here.
Games are a unique art form. They do not just tell stories, nor are they simply conceptual art. They are the art form that works in the medium of agency. C. Thi Nguyen’s Games: Agency as Art dives deep into these ideas and expands on them.
