Tag: blind boxes

#REVIEW: To Cage a God, by Elizabeth May

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, ReviewsLeave a comment

“I don’t understand reviews sometimes,” he said, as the first sentence of his book review.

I have received two books through my new Illumicrate subscription– one, Fathomfolk, was already on my radar, but Elizabeth May’s To Cage a God was a book I’d never heard of by an author I’d never heard of. Which sounds like snark, but I hope it’s obvious that it isn’t– there are lots and lots of books, as it turns out! Anyway, I looked it up on Goodreads when I was ready to start it, and … well, it didn’t look hopeful. Generally anything under a 3.5 is going to be a rocky road, and this is at 3.3 right now. Sometimes that happens solely because a book is written by a woman or a person of color, though, or– God forbid– features women or people of color, or The Gays, so it’s not always a useful metric, but it’s usually a fair bet that an aggregate score under 3.5 is going to be a mixed read at best.

I’m happy to say, having read the book, that I don’t have any idea what the hell the reviewers are on about on this one. This book is indeed written by a woman, and does feature The Gays, but scanning through the reviews didn’t immediately produce any reviews that appeared to be the result of a pile-on or a Neanderthal eruption, so I just stopped looking and stopped worrying about it.

To Cage a God is a political thriller wrapped up in an intriguing magic system with a dollop of romantasy on top, and at its best moments it reminded me of something that Lisbeth Campbell might have written. And, honestly, this book and The Vanished Queen have a lot in common, and although To Cage a God has the romantasy aspect and tilts just a bit more toward YA than Queen does, if you enjoy one you’ll likely enjoy the other.

I want to talk about that magic system for a bit, though, because it’s super cool. All of the POV characters are part of a conspiracy against the Evil Empress (not actually her name, but it’s more fun to call her that) and all of them have different motivations and abilities that they bring to the revolution. Magic abilities in this world are granted by literally– and, it’s implied at least, physically, take a close look at the cover– imprisoning a dragon inside your body, and dragons are gods. The book uses the words pretty interchangeably, but the gods have teeth and claws and move around and are not remotely beyond inflicting pain on their hosts if they feel like it. In fact, one character’s god hates her and she has to more or less practice blood magic in order to convince it to do anything. The gods also have opinions about each other, and at least one relationship in the book is driven by mutual attraction of the gods as much as the humans involved. It’s really cool, and I’m looking forward to more exploration of the idea in the conclusion to the series, which I believe is currently planned as a duology but stands really well by itself. All of this stands against the background of a war with another nation that is talked about but never appears on the page, so I assume the sequel will delve into figuring out what to do with the new political status quo at the end of the book.

I have some minor gripes– the Evil Empress is a bit much, but in a sort of delightful way– one can imagine Glenn Close or Angelina Jolie just devouring scenery by the handful while playing this character, and the book as a whole is a little tropey, but tropes become tropes because when they’re well done they’re effective, and they are. It’s always nice to pick a book effectively at random and be rewarded by it, and I didn’t even pick this one, so it’s a genuine pleasure to be able to recommend it. I’ve ordered the non-Illumicrate hardback so that I have something to match the sequel on the shelf when it comes out. You don’t need to buy two copies, but definitely check it out.

In search of serotonin

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy1 Comment

I want a Goddamn flumph.

Please understand the following about my relationship with Dungeons & Dragons:

  • That, first of all, I have never been the type to use miniatures when playing D&D. I started playing 35 years ago, so this is a well-ingrained habit by now.
  • That, second, I have nowhere to put a collection of D&D miniatures.
  • That, third, I have played D&D maybe twice in the last year and while I think about it a lot it has not become something that I do a lot recently. If it did, I would talk about it more!

Now understand something about how WizKids does their miniature booster packs:

  • They’re blind boxes, so you have no idea what is inside other than that there are going to be four things, and therefore the more you purchase the more you are guaranteed to have repeats of some figures while you are still missing others, and that short of buying them on eBay or some shit there is no way to ensure that anything in particular is in the box.
  • That they are fucking expensive. Like, $5 a figure unless you get them at a steep discount. Some of them are pretty large, so it evens out, but some of them are tiny. Witness the little frog-thing on the right side of the box there.
  • That they are not generally packaged well, and lots of times things like weapons are bent or broken out of the box. This is just … tolerated, apparently.

Now understand the following about my social media habit:

  • I follow two– two!!— different TikTok accounts whose main function appears to be to open one of these fucking blind boxes every day, searching for a specific figure. One account has gone through thirty boxes looking for a goblin cart. $400 is not an unreasonable estimate for what those boxes cost. In fact, it’s probably low. Another lady is looking for a tyrannosaurus zombie– which, okay, who can blame her– and she’s on, like, box #21.
  • That the main reason I put TikTok back on my phone was because I wanted to know if that lady had found the goblin cart yet.

Understand also that:

  • I understand that all of this makes purchasing these Goddamned things a terrible fucking idea.
  • That nonetheless I have a brick– a fucking brick, eight Goddamned boxes– showing up at my house tomorrow, because I want a fucking flumph.
  • That despite the flumph being listed as a “common” figure, there isn’t going to be a fucking flumph in the boxes.

My ability to adult is simply gone this week, and I don’t know what the fuck to do about it.

Shit.

The Winston Box: #review

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reviews1 Comment

I don’t usually do disclaimers, but let’s put this front and center: This isn’t any kind of sponsorship/influencer thing. They aren’t paying me, and I bought my clothes like everybody else.

A couple of weeks ago I became aware of The Winston Box. You’ve probably heard of similar services; this is one of those subscription box thingies where every so often at an interval of your choosing they send you what is effectively a blind box with some clothes that they picked out for you. You specify a few options regarding color and style choices and then you’re basically rolling dice. The hook with these guys is that they specialize in big and tall sizes. As someone who has sized himself out of entire stores– more of them than I care to admit, frankly– this was attractive. There’s a Fat Man Store out by the mall where I buy clothes from periodically, and they’ve got nice stuff but they’re expensive as hell— think $25 for a plain T-shirt, $75 for a sweater level– and the idea of a $75 box that would include two or three items that were likely to fit me seemed like it might be worth a shot.

Plus, and I cannot emphasize this enough, coronavirus. I’m pretty sure I just got involved in this because of my seething need for novelty and entertainment. So, fuck it, here’s $75; send me some shit.

This is why I was so mad at FedEx yesterday, by the way.

So that’s my box. It looked a little on the small side at first, until I thought about just how little space clothing takes up when it’s vacuum-packed. As it turned out, there was plenty in there. But hell, let’s open this thing!

Okay, I admit it: a lavender winter hat as the first item out of the box did not excite me, both because we had damn well better be well out of winter hat weather until next November and … yeah, lavender hats aren’t really my thing? But this was my first box, and they let me know there would be some extra stuff in the first box. So okay, Becky can wear the branded winter hat. I mean, it felt soft and warm, and all that. I’m sure it’s a fine hat.

I figured out pretty quickly that taking pictures of stuff in the bags wasn’t very interesting, so everything else is unpacked, in the order it was in the box:

ITEM THE FIRST! This t-shirt, featuring a vaguely phallic, vaguely Mesoamerican dude. I mean, I wear t-shirts. Like, all the time. I’m not over the moon about this one but I’ll wear it.

Now, this item, on the other hand:

homer drool dot gif, y’all. I will wear this. I will wear this a lot. It fits great and it’s super comfortable and it’s absolutely something I would have picked out for myself. I’m actually kind of mad that we’re moving out of hoodie weather for the year right now, but I expect to live in this thing for the rest of the weekend. Thumbs up A+ will wear. Honestly, this all by itself convinced me to stick around for the next box, because this would have been $100 at the fat man store, easy.

And then there’s Item Four:

Hmm.

At first glance, this was a huge no. One, I don’t wear sweatpants. I have one pair of what I think of as Comfy Pants(*) that I sleep in when it’s really cold, but I don’t even wear sweats around the house. Two, and it took my wife pointing this out for me to realize it, but I have very different rules for colors in shirts than I do for pants. I have at least two shirts very similar to this color, and I wear them as often as anything else I own. All of my pants? Jeans, except for the shorts I wear to bed, which are black.

These are sweatpants and they are baby blue. They are never going to get worn outside the house under any circumstances and I’m really not the laze around in sweatpants guy. Even when I’m lazing about the house, I do it in jeans.

Then I touched them, and … yeah, okay, I’ll sleep in these tonight and see how I feel. I’m a little concerned about the size, since I feel like my waist and inseam measurements for jeans are going to be massively oversized for something with an elastic waistband, but I’ll find out tonight, I suppose. Also, they had a $75 price tag on them, which, again, was the cost of the entire box.

So, one thing I’ll wear constantly and already love, one thing I’ll wear but am kind of meh about stylistically, one thing I immediately gave to my wife, and To Be Determined. Fuck it, bring on Box #2 in a couple of months.

(*) What makes them Comfy Pants and not Sweat Pants? No cuffs at the ankles. I dunno why that makes a difference to me but it does.