I have been so, so down on the Marvel Cinematic Universe lately, but there are still a couple of projects coming that I’m genuinely excited about: specifically, the Disney+ series for Moon Knight, She-Hulk, and, of course, Ms. Marvel. Kamala Khan is one of my favorite comic book characters– there are two of her on my desk– and while they appear to have made some substantial changes to her powers and her origin for what mostly seem like reasonable reasons, the core of the character seems to be there. That “I’m a superhero!” dorky running away moment at the end there? That’s Kamala Khan. I don’t mind the look, at least, of the crystalline new power set, although I do hope they find some way to make her powers intrinsic to her and not something that’s triggered by those bracelets she puts on in one shot. I don’t have a problem with making her not an Inhuman, since the Inhumans are dumb not part of the MCU yet anyway, but I don’t want her powers to be part of her costume. Make ’em sparkly, whatever; she’s gonna be tricky for TV budgets anyway. Just make them her powers and make her her and I’m on board.
(I can– and have— bitch for hours about how the movies have fucked up Superman and Batman. I really don’t have any of those moments yet for Marvel characters. Once they got Tony Stark and Captain America perfect, I knew the characters were going to be in good hands, and I’ve not seen reason to back off on that initial assessment.)
Just … please, please, please, can we get through this series without the word “multiverse”?
I almost forgot about you today. We had kind of unexpected visitors and then I spent a couple of hours trying to beat a boss in Elden Ring and I’m still kind of sick (no Covid; I tested again today) and well that was my Sunday. And now I’m going to bed so that’s as exciting as I get today.
Also, fuck Daylight Saving Time. I hate you, and so does everyone else, and it’s ludicrous that something that absolutely no one wants is still having to be endured by all of us twice a year. This is stupid and it should be repealed or banned or cast into the pits of Hell or whatever you do with stupid pointless cultural practices that exist for no fucking reason.
Y’all know this; I’ve been pushing myself for the last several years to broaden my reading, both in the types of books I’m reading and the kinds of authors I was reading books from, and this year I kind of wanted to just step back and retreat into my comfort genres again. I’m still looking for new authors all the time, though, but I’m maybe a little more likely this year to buy a book where the cover is a giant fucking dragon threatening a warrior who is smaller than one of its teeth.
I mean, come the fuck on. Gimme.
I wasn’t previously familiar with John Gwynne’s work, but he’s been around for a while, and he’s clearly got enough pull with his publisher to be able to say “this is a trilogy” and know good and well that all three books are getting published. Because this particular first-book-of-the-Bloodsworn-trilogy is really clearly structured as the first book of several. It has three main protagonists, and none of them ever meet, although their stories knit together satisfyingly in the last pages, where the book throws a couple of curveballs (one of which I feel like I should have seen coming and didn’t) that set up wonderfully for the next book– which, conveniently, comes out pretty soon.
The setting: proto-Norse, set in an unspecified Cold North (actually, I don’t know for sure that they specify north, but definitely Cold) where nobody really bathes enough and everybody’s a badass and we call daggers seaxes and everyone carries an axe and a seax and if you see those words together enough they start blurring together, and there’s lots of words drawn from Middle English using weird letters, like niðing, which is pronounced “nithing,” and you may as well know know that that letter is pronounced eth and pronounced like a -th. There are monsters and trolls and little goblin-things that eat teeth and oh God it’s so good.
Oh, and the gods are all dead, and everybody’s pretty cool with that. So it’s sort of post-Ragnarok, although they don’t ever use that word (there are no direct references to any actual Norse mythology or history things, at least not that I noticed, although everything’s pretty clearly inspired by them; this is second-world fantasy.) And the greatest thing about it? I would forgive you if you were taking arch note of the fact that I’ve gone from deliberately reading books from all over the world and a year where I focused on books by women of color to singing the praises of a book set in, literally, the whitest place on Earth. To which I will point out the following delicious little detail about the book: it’s got this awesome subtle feminist thing going on, where most of the leaders are women, where two of the three main characters are women, and where as near as I can tell everything exists in a state of near-perfect gender equality. Nowhere is it even hinted that women aren’t just as able to be warriors as men are, and while there’s a subplot with one of the protagonists involving avoiding a forced marriage, the book actually does a pretty cool job of you have to do this because you’re the jarl’s kid and not you have to do this because you’re a gurrrrrrllllllll.
(I cannot think of a single place where a character’s skin color is explicitly described. I might be wrong about that, and I’d be happier if Gwynne had made it clear that some of his characters are people of color, but I’m also not the most careful reader in the world, so I might have missed something, and he definitely doesn’t go on about everybody being white, either.)
Anyway, I enjoyed this a hell of a lot. It’s not High Literature or anything but if you’re looking for a bloody fantasy romp with cool monsters and well-written combat and people eating from trenchers, you’ll like this series a lot. I can’t wait for the second book to come out in April. Check it out.
… no matter how many times I get the day wrong, today is not Friday, and tomorrow therefore is not Saturday. Today is Thursday, so it’s not payday and my wife is not making a grocery run tomorrow, and I am going to see most if not all of the same co-workers I saw today while I am at work tomorrow. Because just because it’s a teacher record day tomorrow and we do not have kids does not actually transform Thursday into Friday, regardless of how much I might really, really want it to.
… and I’ve been staring off into space for a good twenty minutes, so apparently this fact has broken my brain.
First, the I’m-maybe-a-third-of-the-way-through review: Elden Ring is phenomenal, a towering achievement that has all sorts of interesting things to say about its predecessors from FromSoft and the notion of “open world” gaming to boot; this is one of the best games I’ve ever played on any console, and if my opinion ends up changing on that front it will be because ultimately there ended up being too much of it and it got overwhelming.
What’s killing me is I’ve got the next two games for the channel on deck already, and they’re both also huge, and I recorded episode forty-seven tonight for Elden Ring and … yeah, I’m maybe a third of the way through. Maybe. This is going to dominate my channel for two months, easy, unless I increase the number of episodes per day that I’m airing, and even then I could see it going two months. Three episodes a day for 60 days is 180 episodes. That’s not unimaginable. And I’m regularly crushing my typical 30-minute limit because breaking every half hour just doesn’t make sense the way the game is structured– there are no missions, like there usually are in an open-world game, so there’s not a situation where you can go do something and it takes 20 minutes and it’s discrete. There’s always a tower in the distance or a cave to explore or a new boss that’s killed me five times in this episode and I’m pretty damn sure I can kill the motherfucker with one more try, and it leads to longer episodes. The cool factor is off the charts. I’ve already used the word overwhelming once; it’s absolutely the right word.
What’s a real pain in the ass is feeling like I’ve got to record it all. I started the channel last June, so we’re at about 9 months now, give or take, and I’ve been rock-solid about not missing episodes that entire time; at least two a day, with occasional but rare 8:00 episodes as well. I’ve got 115 subscribers; I was led to believe by the Internet that subscriber counts would start rising more drastically once I hit 100, and so far that hasn’t happened, and … I may be getting tired of waiting. I mean, the chance that this was going to lead to any kind of money was slim to begin with (it is worth pointing out that that 115 followers puts me in the top 5% of YouTubers globally) and the channel definitely has some fans, but having to spend an hour a night or more locked in my office playing video games and occasionally dealing with tech or editing hiccups which takes even longer is kinda getting old. I think I remember what the boy looks like; he comes in occasionally to ask for money.
I dunno. This could just be the tired talking, but I’m starting to feel like the work/fun balance in this whole thing is starting to tilt too much toward work, and I might need to reevaluate some things. I’ll finish this series out, so it’ll be a minute, but I need to think.
(I uploaded four episodes while I was writing this, by the way.)
Another shitty day today, for an excitingly different reason than yesterday, but I’m spent again and have no energy for bloggery. I will endeavor to be interesting tomorrow, I promise.
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