I am bored and kvetchy and it’s making my anxiety act up something fierce. I actually got quite a lot done today– no big projects, but a ton of little jobs around the house and I got the oil changed on the car– but since the sun went down I’ve turned into a mess, and I can’t concentrate well enough to read.
That part’s the alarming part, honestly. It’s rare that I can’t focus enough to read. I’m watching someone else play a video game while I’m writing this, and I’m starting to think I need to dive back into Skyrim or something like that; I simultaneously need something new to do and am kind of aching for something familiar and comfortable I can just fall into.
I’m also, for the first time in several years, pretty excited (or at least not actively dreading) Christmas, mostly because I feel like I definitely won Christmas this year. I don’t know if other families do this thing, where they’re competitive about who gets each other the best gifts– hell, I don’t know if my family does this thing or if it’s just me– but one way or another it’s me, hi, I won Christmas, it’s me.
Anyway, I’m going to go take down the wallpaper in the library or something.
I’m finding myself weirdly not in the mood to write about this, but in the absence of anything else not involving profane ranting and raving, I’m just going to tell you that Ender Magnolia is a quality if not life-changing Metroidvania, and that it excels mostly in the exploration side of things. The combat and build styles are really interesting– you bond with AIs called Homunculi throughout the game, and each of them will give you either a travel ability or some sort of new approach to combat, and on top of that each combat homunculus will have three different and sometimes wildly divergent abilities to play with. You’ll have ten or so available by the end of the game, so that’s thirty different abilities, plus items called Relics that can add buffs or tweak your build in other ways, so this is also a game that’s big on build customization.
I liked it, and I platinumed it today, and if you’re into Metroidvanias as a genre at all it should definitely be on your list. Unfortunately I’m tired and kinda crabby at the moment for no particular reason, so I’m going to cut this shorter than I originally had planned. What should I play next? Both of these are on sale right now:
I told myself it was beating Ender Magnolia or bust tonight, and now that it’s 9:30 and I’ve somehow failed to eat dinner I’m forced to admit that my choice is “bust.” Bah.
A warning: I haven’t even written it yet, and I feel like this review might be a little unfair, so adjust your expectations accordingly. This is the third Travis Baldree book I’ve read and the third review I’ve written of his books, which means that I’ve cursed at autocorrect for changing “Baldree” to “Balder” approximately one hundred and forty thousand times.
I loved his first two books. Legends & Lattes was my second-favorite book of 2023 and Bookshops & Bonedust, the prequel follow-up, was an honorable mention. And I’m going to be a bit of a wanker and quote myself in my write-up of L&L for the Best Books of the Year post:
The sequel is on my shelf right now and I haven’t read it yet because it’s set before Viv opened the shop and I’m not sure I’m nearly as interested in her as an adventurer. I want more of the coffee shop. I will read about Viv and Tandri making delicious coffee and being quietly and happily in love for a hundred years, and I will love every second of it.
And Brigands and Breadknives is about Fern, the ratkin bookseller from Bookshops & Bonedust, so it’s still not a book about Viv and Tandri. Now, I knew this going in! Fern’s right there on the cover, and Viv and Tandri are nowhere to be seen. But I figured that since it was at least a chronological sequel to L&L, we’d have a good amount of both of them in there anyway, right?
Not only do we get very little of Viv and nothing of Tandri, the book starts with Fern screwing both of them over, and to make things worse, abandoning Potroast, who was absolutely the best thing about the second book. This book is basically about Fern’s character flaws. I mean, there’s other stuff going on, but I came very close to abandoning this book, which was shocking to me. And what makes this somewhat unfair is that I’m basically punishing the book because Travis Baldree, for the second book in a row, didn’t write the book I wanted him to write, which … isn’t exactly his job as an author? But I didn’t like Fern as a character nearly as much as Viv and Tandri going in, and when Fern gets drunk and pulls a huge asshole move within the first few chapters, I switched from “I don’t like her as much as I like these two characters I really like and this cool pug-owlbear thing” to “I don’t like this character at all, and I want the people I liked back.”
I dunno. It’s not a bad book. I can’t and won’t make that claim. It has a lot of the same strengths that made the previous two books such a pleasure to read, so it’s entirely possible that someone else with slightly different preferences about the characters might have different feelings, and I wouldn’t argue with someone who really liked it. But, man, it just wasn’t what I was looking for, and I still want my damn Viv and Tandri book. They got married! OFF-SCREEN! Write that goddamn book, Travis Baldree!
A slight sidenote, and I’m gonna quote myself again, because I suck:
I need a word for the precise moment when you realize you're not enjoying something you really hoped was going to be awesome.
Careful readers will notice that for some reason there are two copies of Disquiet Gods, Book Six of the Sun Eater series, on that shelf. Exceptionally detail-oriented humans might further notice that they are not exactly the same! The title is a different color, as is the author’s name, the character image is different, and so is the publisher. Further, one title is matte in finish and matches the other books precisely, and the top book appears to be glossy.
You might, just maybe, also notice that the top book is roughly a quarter inch taller than the books below it, but if you don’t, don’t worry; it just means that you’re neurotypical.
Shall I explain? Let me explain. Author and apparent personal nemesis Christopher Ruocchio originally had a five-book contract with DAW for the Sun Eater series. Upon writing five books and not completing the series, he asked for a two-book extension to the contract. DAW offered a single book. And Ruocchio said “bet” and bounced, taking the last two books of the series to Baen, where he used to work as an editor.
Oh, don’t worry, said Baen, we’ll make sure the new books match the old ones! Promise! We’ll use the same artist and everything! And, well, they did use the same artist, but they switched from the matte paper to the glossy paper and made the books ever-so-slightly taller, just different enough that I suspect no one noticed, me included, until the book was on the shelf with its series-mates.
And then a certain subset of humanity of which I am a member lost their minds, because why in the merry hell would you do your best to make sure that the books mostly match, except for those two kind of important details? You get no credit for that at all! None! We hate you!
(By “you,” I mean the publisher, a faceless corporate entity; I’m completely certain Ruocchio had nothing to do with this decision. The man is an author so I suspect he’s One of Us anyway.)
Here’s how they looked originally:
And, again, if that doesn’t bother you, it just means you’re normal. It’s okay to be normal. Also, the book isn’t deeper than the others, just … puffier? I don’t know why it looks so much further forward on the shelf than the books next to it.
Anyway, at some point DAW came to their senses? And apparently bought his contract with Baen out, and now they’re publishing the whole series again, including their version of the book that Baen originally published and the final book. I have to believe this cost them more money than just giving Ruocchio the two books he wanted at the beginning, but I have no idea. So the new DAW version of the book matches the rest precisely, as it should. I’m going to do another book cull over winter break, and the original version of the book will end up in the basement. I can imagine a universe where it’s worth slightly more than cover price in the future, but I’m not going to hold my breath.
(For the record, I bought most of my Christmas presents with my Amazon card, which I get 5% back on. Not that paying for it would have stopped me, but I got the second copy of the book basically for free.)
This is, believe it or not, not the greatest spine-matching sin that has been perpetrated on my bookshelves. I bought an entire special edition of Ken Liu’s Dandelion Dynasty series so that I didn’t have to look at this abomination any longer:
Again: why are they just sort of the same? Why change things, guaranteeing you’re going to enrage a certain portion of your readers, but just change them a little? If the shit’s not gonna match, just fuckin’ go nuts and completely redesign everything. This makes no Goddamn sense at all. I was already mad enough when Veiled Throne lost the gold and the embossed title, but I was willing to put up with it. The rest of those changes are just gratuitously evil.
I’m going to go take some sort of pill; I suspect I need one.
Sometimes you stay home from work because you feel like hell, which means you have to push your Algebra final back a day. But then your son also has an Algebra final on Wednesday, so you end up having to prepare an 8th grader for an Algebra final anyway.
I have never seen “The Wolf of Wall Street”. And yet, somehow, this is one of my favorite scenes in all of film, and I have most of it memorized. And it is damn near entirely due to Rob Reiner’s performance. My understanding is that most of the sequence was improvised, and Reiner is utterly breaking everyone in the room. The only one who can keep up with him is Jonah Hill, who is obviously cracking– you will never convince me that the laughing is acting– and the needling he’s directing towards Reiner just keeps winding him up more and more. DiCaprio is trying his damnedest to play the straight man in the scene, and he can’t hold it together either. I love every second of this scene, and I love it in a way that made me love Rob Reiner as an actor.
I don’t talk about it much, and I haven’t watched it in quite some time, but Stand by Me was one of my favorite movies as a kid. I was 10 when it came out, just a bit younger than the characters and a touch younger still than the actors playing them, but I’m willing to believe if I put it on right now I could still do a significant amount of the dialogue along with the movie.
The line “Suck my fat one, you cheap dime-store hood” (and River’s underrated “Whoever toldja you had a fat one, Lachance?” a few moments later) is going to be stuck in my head until I die. I’ve probably seen the film a couple dozen times.
And then there’s The Princess Bride, a movie that I have seen even more times than I’ve seen Stand by Me, an absolutely fucking immortal movie.(*)
I wish it was more common to realize the effect that a stranger has had on your life before they pass away, particularly when someone passes away in as tragic and hideous a way as Rob and Michele Reiner did. I’m generally not especially pressed by the idea of meeting celebrities (although I did meet Mandy Patinkin once, speaking of Princess Bride, and yes, I made him say The Line) but damn, the chance to tell Rob Reiner thank you is an opportunity I’m deeply saddened to have missed.
May his memory be a blessing.
(*) There is talk about doing a remake of this movie, which I thought was a horrendous idea until today, when I suddenly realized how to do it right: you must cast Fred Savage in the role of the parent reading the book, and he’s reading it to his own son or daughter(**) as they’re home sick, and you make it very clear that Savage is playing the same character as an adult. This neatly provides for new casting as well as any updates or changes the new director might decide to make to the story– it’s someone new hearing it, and we’re seeing their imagination and their interpretation, not Savage’s.
(**) Not to be too gender essentialist about it, but I kind of love the idea of a girl rolling her eyes at the fight scenes the same way The Grandson does at the kissing.
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