It may be that there’s no cliché less true than “You can’t judge a book by its cover.” You not only absolutely can judge a book by its cover, you are supposed to. That’s what the cover is for! It’s to attract peoples’ attention, particularly those kind of people who are likely to enjoy the book.
And let me tell you something: I absolutely encourage you to judge Jackson Ford’s The Bone Raiders by its cover. Five badass-looking women of color holding weapons and a fire-breathing technically-not-a-dragon in the background? Sold. Gimme. We’re done. I don’t quite get why they decided to put the Billy Joel quote on the cover, but that’s not just my biggest gripe about the cover, it’s my biggest gripe about the book. Because this book is everything that you think it is upon looking at that cover, except maybe a little smarter than you’re expecting. I’m super psyched that it’s a trilogy, because I want more of these characters and more of this world, which can be fairly boiled down to “Mongols during the time of Genghis Khan, but dragons and feminism,” and that’s really all I need.
(Every POV character is a woman except for the first and last chapters; the first chapter is an okey-doke and the last chapter is a tease for the next book. There are hardly any men with dialogue. I can’t believe a guy wrote this, to be honest.)
But yeah. This is one of those reviews where I don’t need to belabor the point at all. Violence and humor and violence and world building and violence and lesbians and violence and rebellions and violence and family drama and violence and … animal husbandry. If you’re remotely interested in a book with that cover, go grab it right now. You will be well rewarded. I want the sequel, and I want it tomorrow.
The tl;dr: this was so close to perfect, but probably needed another month or so to cook before getting released.
I beat Wuchang: Fallen Feathers last night after 60 or so hours of gameplay, and for the most part, I was really, really happy with it. Most of my gripes are technical, and the things this game does right, it does very right. This is a Soulslike through and through, which is currently my favorite kind of game, and it hits all the buttons: deep combat, wildly variant weapon builds, obscure quest lines, difficult boss combat, and an emphasis on exploration. The exploration is the best part; Wuchang may have the best interconnected world map I’ve ever played, and it’s incredibly rare that you’ll see a path fork off and one of them end a little bit later in a dead end with a treasure in it. Everything loops around and leaves you somewhere, and it was harder to keep a mental map going (note: this is a good thing) than I’ve seen in a game like this in a long time.
There’s three different major things that this game does that distinguish it from a run-of-the-mill Soulslike. First, what the call the Skyborn Might system. All of your spells and some of your combat abilities are based on how many stacks of Skyborn Might you have at any given time. You can have up to five, and spells will cost from one to all five stacks and weapon abilities generally cost between one and three. Skyborn Might is earned mostly by perfectly-timed dodges, although most weapons have at least one other way you can earn it and there are different items that can add to Skyborn Might as well. One that I kept equipped for most of the game automatically generated Skyborn Might on kills, which came in really handy. Skyborn Might deteriorates over time if you don’t use it, which was good and bad– it encourages you to use your abilities, on one hand, but on the other I felt like it deteriorated too fast, and I’d have liked some way to slow down that deterioration, whether it was a more permanent item or a consumable.
The second is the Madness system. Killing human enemies and dying both generate Madness, and killing nonhuman enemies and various items and locations can decrease it. Increasing your Madness has two major effects: it increases your damage noticeably the higher it is, and it at least supposedly increases how much damage you take, although I went through the whole game without ever feeling like that had caused a death. I never really even noticed it.
On top of that, if you die, you lose a percentage of your currency (Red Mercury as opposed to souls, or blood echoes, or whatever) and that percentage is based on how high your Madness is. If your Madness is less than 100% you can pick your resources up from wherever you died. If it’s at 100%, though? You’re gonna generate a Madness Demon when you go back to get it, and if that Madness Demon kills you, your shit is gone. On the other hand, if you kill the Madness Demon, you get a bunch of other stuff on top of your lost materials, and Madness Demons can be baited into attacking anything, so there are places where generating one on purpose (there are items that raise Madness as well) can be a sound strategic maneuver against an enemy that you can’t find a way to beat. This won’t work on bosses– you can’t generate demons inside a boss arena– but there are occasional more powerful red-eye enemies scattered around, and letting one kill me, generating a demon, then triggering her and running away to watch the two of them fight was fun.
The third is the upgrade system, which runs off of an upgrade tree. Each weapon style (Spear, Greatsword, Axe, Dual Blades, and Longsword, and I spent most of the game in Greatsword) has its own tree but you can go anywhere you want on the tree and you can respec any time at will. Weapon upgrades are also built into the skill tree, and the awesome thing is that 1) any weapon upgrade affects every weapon of that type, even if you get a new one later, and 2) you can respec your weapon upgrades just as easily as your own abilities. So unlike, say, Elden Ring, where if you make a change to your preferred weapon late in the game you’d better hope you have enough upgrade mats available to level that weapon up, if you had a +9 axe and you want to switch to greatsword your greatsword will automatically be +9. In fact, all five of the greatswords you’ve found will be +9, and if you find a sixth that’ll be +9 when you pick it up. In every other Soulslike I’ve played, just because you leveled up Longsword A doesn’t mean Longsword B is improved as well. This is a huge improvement.
The problem is the performance. This game, at least on Xbox (I picked it up here because it’s currently free on Game Pass) is very poorly optimized, and while you can lock the framerate at 60, you’re going to see constant blurriness and focus issues as the game struggles to keep up with itself. I played without the frame rate locked for a little while and the frame drops were so bad I had to switch back. This is on the Series X, mind you, which is supposed to be the beefy one; I can’t imagine what this would play like on the less powerful Series S. There are some balance issues– there’s a huge difficulty spike with a boss about a third of the way through the game, and the game really expects you to use a certain mechanic to beat that boss, only all weapon types don’t have access to that mechanic. As it turned out, I’d started with a Spear build, and the Spear build is the one least capable of managing this boss. I had to respec, and once I did I sailed past her. Now, again, the game encourages painless experimentation, and I could have switched back afterwards, but it left a sour taste in my mouth. I don’t object to the idea that certain bosses are weak to certain styles and stronger against others; that’s a staple of the genre– but “you need this type of ability to win here, and this weapon doesn’t have that at all” is a problem.
There’s a few other things; it’s way too easy to fall off of ledges, which is partially a skill issue, and until very recently the icon that shows where you dropped your resources was really hard to see against some level backgrounds and invisible if you were unfortunate enough to die in shallow water, but they’ve patched that problem out in the last couple of weeks. I know Soulslikes aren’t for everybody, and if they aren’t your thing you’ll want to stay away from this, but if they do, and especially if they do and you’re on Game Pass? Hooooooly shit. And it’s only $50 at full price, and it’s a good enough game that I’m considering picking it up for the PS5 anyway. Check it out.
On the right, my five-year-old chair. Or the middle, if you’re counting the half of my wife’s inferior desk chair that you can see. On the left, the new hotness, ready for duty.
Again, I haven’t bothered to, like, dust, or de-cat-hair or anything like that, but the old chair is still in perfect shape, after five years of daily use. I couldn’t be happier with this company’s products, y’all.
I’ve read some really good books this year– 108 total, with 17 good enough that they’ve made my end-of-year shortlist. But the story this year has been the nonfiction— I have five nonfiction books on the list so far, and all of them have been tremendous. And there are three or four novels that have been really, really fun, but I’m pretty sure Michelle Jabès Corpora’s His Face Is The Sun is the first “#1 with a bullet” novel of the year. I mean, I just finished it twenty minutes ago (it’s 500 pages and I basically read it in one sitting) so standard disclaimers for early enthusiasm, but … yeah, this is real real good.
Oh, and this is also the second book in a row that I’ve bought mostly on vibes? I was wandering through B&N, having just given myself permission to buy another book on top of whatever else I was carrying around, and I picked it up because of the pretty edges. Then I saw the word “Egyptian” on the back and money flew out of my wallet.
The setting is second world Egypt– in other words, it’s Egypt, even keeping the names of the Egyptian gods, but they call it Khetara and the rest of the world hasn’t impacted upon anything. There are four rotating POV characters and one cat. I absolutely love the cat. The book starts with triplets being born to the Pharaoh, delivered by three goddesses when the expected nursemaid is held up in an unprecedented storm. One of the POV characters is Sitamun, the middle child of the triplets and the only daughter. The others are Raetawy, a farmer’s daughter and political revolutionary; Karim, a tomb robber (and his dog); and Nefermaat, the daughter of a spell merchant who sees visions and eventually becomes a priestess.
Throw in a prophecy or two, the living dead, a ton of political maneuvering and fate slowly drawing the four together over the course of the book and you have something I really, really liked. This is my second review in a row where I don’t really want to spoil anything, but the way these four end up interacting with each other and the way all of them have pieces of the larger story happening around them but no one can see the whole picture yet is fantastic, and Jabès Corpora does an excellent job of keeping all the plates spinning and revealing just enough in each chapter to make the book really hard to put down.
This is the first book of a planned trilogy, and Goodreads claims the sequel is coming out in May of 2026, which is too Goddamned far away and I want it right now. You should read it.
Al Yankovic is 65 years old. It was literally 90 degrees in the shade in Indianapolis yesterday evening. I have no idea how anyone on stage even survived the experience in the first place, and they put on a two-hour-plus show featuring at least a dozen costume changes (everyone in the band, not just Al himself) and startlingly impressive dancing. If my foot ever ends up above my head, it is not going to be on purpose, and it is likely that I have either just died or am about to. Al did a high-kick like five or six times during the show. And when I talk about costume changes, I don’t mean, like, wearing a different shirt. I mean getting into a full-blown fat suit complete with facial prosthetics in three minutes and then doing an entire song in that getup, or doing the last fifteen minutes of the show in Jedi robes.
The man’s voice is still on point, too. The set list was ridiculous; some of the songs were done medley-style where he’d do a verse or two and then move on, but he’s been doing albums since the early eighties and while there probably wasn’t literally a track or two from every single album, the show absolutely spanned his entire career. I discovered that there are Weird Al songs that I probably haven’t heard in thirty years that I still have memorized. I was singing along with songs and mentally trying to jump ahead to the chorus to figure out what the hell I was singing.
The polka was new, and there were at least a couple of songs that were unreleased. He covered the costume changes with video vignettes featuring every single time anyone on a TV show has ever mentioned him, random little clips of weirdness, and a bunch of junket-style interviews with celebrities where I’m pretty sure some were him being inserted into other interviews, some were him interviewing people who had no idea who he was, and some were piss-takes where everybody was in on the joke.
(I’m going through my MP3s right now. Nothing was played from Poodle Hat. No, that’s wrong, he did Ebay. Still looking.)
(Okay, I’m pretty sure the only album he didn’t do a song from was 1993’s Alapalooza. That’s it.)
My son and I are having a movie day for Father’s Day, and I’m finally getting him to watch the Lord of the Rings movies, en route to eventually conning him into reading the books. So I’m going to make this quick; I assume you can find it within yourselves to forgive me.
Dinner was at the Bosphorous Cafe, and dinner made the trip worth it all by itself. The damn show could have been rained out and driving down just for Turkish food would have been completely fine. I had Lamb Mediterranean, along with a pile of other stuff. Absolutely delicious. And the first things I noticed when we walked in was a relative lack of white people and a table or two speaking Arabic, which is always a good sign in any restaurant featuring non-American cuisine.
We had really good seats:
That’s without any kind of zoom happening, and there were huge screens on either side of the stage, so … yeah, great seats. And we’ll be back in a few weeks for Weird Al, and we have better seats for that show.
The openers, the Gaslight Anthem, weren’t bad at all, and they played a deep Pearl Jam/Mother Love Bone cut called Chloe Dancer, which … well, I figured out who my people in the crowd were really fast.
The Crows hit the stage at 9:03. Here’s the set list, if you’re a fan. They did four songs from the new album, all of the ones I wanted to hear except for one– they didn’t play Bobby and the Rat Kings, which is one of my favorites. We got an acoustic set and a few piano songs over nearly a two hour show. Adam had to stop a song because he sneezed. And the crowd got really into the show:
This. This. This is Right and Correct and if I go see this movie and it disappoints me I am done with DC movies for the rest of my life. I talked some shit about the costume when we got our first look at it and I’m still not a hundred percent on board with some of the decisions they made there, but it looks like Gunn has gotten the core of the character right after decades of on-screen misrepresentation, and if that’s actually Superman on the screen they can put him in a French maid’s outfit for all I care.
I had like four different posts planned for tonight and seeing the trailer knocked all of them clean out of my head.
You’ve got me back in theaters for a superhero movie, DC. Don’t fuck this up.
I am proud to report that, for what feels like the first time in years, I went to work five days this week, and in fact managed to be early to work on two of those five days. I am hoping to be able to continue this trend next week, which is going to be the end of the quarter and includes two ILEARN days and Pi Day, which math teachers are supposed to pretend is important and I generally do my best to ignore. This year it’s falling on a Friday on the day after all of my kids’ work is due and my grades are due, though, so coming up with something fun and foolproof might actually be a pretty good use of my time.
One month until Spring Break. If you’re counting. I’m not counting. I refuse to count.
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