Thanksgiving was nice and peaceful, pretty much exactly the way we all wanted it, and rather than a big meal with a giant turkey we just made a ton of side dishes. Fried pickles and queso and mini cheesecakes and meatballs and a bunch of other shit that probably really doesn’t go together but we did it anyway. A small part of me misses mashed potatoes and stuffing and this corn casserole that is a family dish on my wife’s side of the family, but fuck it; Christmas is three weeks away.
Anyway, I’ve Consumed some Media, to use a deeply odious phrase, so let’s talk about it.
I finally finished Blasphemous II the other day, and other than an enormous and highly annoying difficulty spike on the penultimate boss, I’m a big fan. I turned my YouTube channel back on the other day so if you want to see what the original game was like, feel free (I don’t plan on going back to regular recording, but I wanted to watch some of my videos, so I had to turn the channel back on) but the basic idea is this: Blasphemous II is an outstanding Metroidvania with a deeply weird, pseudo-Catholic skin laid over it, only, like, insanely creepy Spanish occult Catholicism. It’s really something, and I’d love to pick the brains of the people who wrote it because I want to know what they’re like. The sequel smooths out some of the rough edges of the original, removing some bits of nonsense like instadeath from touching spikes and adding some weapon choice, and again, other than that difficulty spike, which nearly led to me putting the game down until I remembered I don’t take shit from video games, I really really enjoyed it.
I know about Neal Shusterman’s Unwind “dystology,” (fuck you, it’s a trilogy that got dragged out to four books because one of them ended up longer than the author wanted) because my students are reading the first book. They really enjoyed it last year and I resolved to read it at some point or another, and then I found a really good deal on the entire set (four books plus a fifth that is apparently a short story collection, by other authors?) and picked it up. There may very well be a full post coming from the series once I’m done with it, but I wanted to complain about something very specific and very weird about the third book: the main characters spend a fair amount of time hiding from the authorities on what is more or less a Native American reservation, only the weird thing is that the book treats all the characters and situations taking place at the res as people we should remember and events we should know.
I was convinced this place had never been mentioned before. I am open about the fact that my recall between books isn’t great; this is a YA book, so I don’t really get to blame my reading comprehension … but this was a lot, and I didn’t remember any of it. So I actually took the step of going back through the first two books today and looking for any mention of this place. And do you know what happened? The first book literally passes over it, saying “this character had some adventures, and we’re not going to talk about them,” and no, that’s not a joke, and I remember noticing it and raising an eyebrow on my first read, and the second book mentions that this one character did some stuff on a reservation during happy adventure time. And that’s it.
It’s obviously possible that the short story book fills us in, or that it’ll happen as a flashback later on or some shit, but this was a really bullshit move. Questioning myself over whether I’d read anything about this place and these characters before seriously affected my enjoyment of the book, and the whole thing was either a deeply bullshit move (if it’s a short story published somewhere else) or a seriously bad authorial decision if it isn’t.
This one’s going to have to be a full post on its own, but before I write it: has anyone out there read this? Because I need to talk to someone about it and hash some shit out before I write a big post out about it. The short version is that I think Sapolsky does make a pretty good case that there’s no such thing as free will … and I don’t care. There’s a lot more to say but that’s the gist. Anybody read it? Let me know.
The three of us, one of whom, let me remind you, is twelve, went out for dinner tonight, and somehow dinner for three at BW3s cost ninety fucking American dollars, so lemme channel some misplaced rage into some quick reviews. First, a video game, because since I’m not doing the YouTube thing any longer I need to put those here again.
Lies of P (Xbox Series X) is a surprisingly competent Soulslike for, like, eighty percent of its roughly 35-hour playtime, and while the plot line overlaps quite a bit with Steelrising, which came out earlier this year and occupies a lot of the same territory, it’s better put together. Combat is satisfying, it feels like a variety of builds would be viable (I went with a strength build, which is called Motivity in this game, and I found a pretty good whackin’ stick pretty quickly and stuck with it) and the difficulty level is on a pretty even keel for most of the game except for maybe one boss whose weak spot isn’t even really hinted at and who will wreck you mercilessly until you figure it out yourself.
Actually it’s worth it to take a second longer to discuss the weapons: each weapon in the game comes with a handle and a blade, and they can be mixed and matched to your heart’s content. The handles bring certain qualities of the overall weapon with them– the moveset mostly attaches to the handle, while upgrades apply to the blade– and they can affect how scaling affects your weapons, along with certain other items that can actually tune a weapon further toward the build you want. I ended up using the blade from a huge axe called the Live Puppet’s Axe, which is a literal axe made from puppet arms, and the handle from a bludgeoning weapon from much earlier in the game that sped the weapon up and cut the weight a lot. It was neat to play around with the different combinations and see what came from them.
It loses a point or two for the final act, which is a fucking slog unlike anything I’ve seen in a Soulslike in a while; there’s this tower you’re supposed to climb to the top of and Christ it just goes on forever and by the end of it I was just wanting the game to end, but the first, like, 30 hours or so were quality, and if I was more willing to take my time with the last section it might not have bothered me as much. I’ll call it an 8/10.
Shadows of the Short Days, by Alexander Dan Vilhjálmsson, is Icelandic urban fantasy and was more or less a blind impulse buy from Barnes & Noble however long ago I picked it up. I finished it in a few big gulps over a few days and it’s on my shortlist for the end of the year, mostly because of the atmosphere and how it handles magic. The book throws a curveball at you early on, where one of the two main protagonists is getting kicked out of what more or less appears to equate to magic grad school because he won’t calm the fuck down and learn about magic in the safe and boring way that THE ESTABLISHMENT ™ wants him to. Every other book you’ve ever read in your life conditions you to immediately assume that the elder professors are Wrong and that the kid represents what will surely be a series of important breakthroughs in gjáldur research against the calcified Establishment. He will show them the way! They will be ashamed of themselves for not recognizing his greatness!
Hah. Spoiler alert: they were absolutely fucking right and he’s completely over his head and things do not go well. If anything the book’s big weakness is that this guy doesn’t get enough time on the page; there are overlapping different kinds of magic in this series and his is focused mostly on big, showy rituals and, well, demon summoning; at one point he murders a couple of people to steal a book from a library and maybe also touches off a magical pandemic along the way? The book drops it. I didn’t want it to turn into a police procedural or anything, but I wanted to know more about the consequences of his actions.
Toss in a political revolution and a bunch of other weirdness worthy of China Miéville at his best and, oh, a six-page glossary at the front of the book full of unpronounceable Icelandic words with letters I don’t know how to reproduce with my keyboard– this book isn’t going to hold your fucking hand for its vocabulary, I’ll tell you that– and you’ve got something I really liked. It’s not perfect but I ordered the sequel before even finishing it and I’ll likely be getting to it sooner rather than later.
Adam Nevill’s The Ritual is the worst book I’ve read this year, and it’s not close. It is divided into two parts. The first part is about a bunch of Goddamn idiots who get lost in the woods on a hike. Two of them have no business at all being on a fucking three-day wilderness hike in Sweden, of all fucking places, and one of the less realistic parts of this very unrealistic book is these two dudes agreeing to go on a multi-day nature hike in the first place. Two of them get injured– one hurts his knee, and the other has really bad blisters on his feet– and they decide to cut through the forest as a “shortcut,” rather than go on a longer, established path, and, well, I’d say they get what they deserve except there’s also Something in the Woods and occasionally it eats one of them. The first part is entertainingly bad. It’s overwritten and repetitive(*) but it’s hard to fuck up being lost in the woods, chased by something scary, and slowly running out of food.
Then one of them gets kidnapped by a teenage death metal band– that’s not a fucking typo, that’s what happens– and held hostage, and what was once entertainingly bad becomes mortally shit impressively quickly. The last book I read that shot itself in the dick this effectively was Neal Stephenson’s Seveneves, and this was very much Not a Neal Stephenson Book in terms of quality before going to shit. It becomes very clear very quickly that Adam Nevill hates fat people and Adam Nevill also isn’t very fond of women, and Adam Nevill really, really hates fat women, and the book became fucking unreadable with a fucking quickness. Reading the one-star reviews on Goodreads is more entertaining than the book was, and the number of people who closed the book and put it down at the exact point that I did is impressive.
It is worth pointing out that this book was turned into a movie, although I think it strains credulity to call it a “major motion picture,” but the fact that the movie completely jettisoned the plot of the back half of the book should tell you something.
(*) This is the first sentence of Chapter Eighteen: “The very thought of which was exactly why Hutch could not prevent the unnaturally vivid images of the dream from recurring as he walked slowly away from the hovel, with one of Dom’s arms around his shoulders.” Thought of what? I have absolutely no fucking clue, and this sentence disappears up its own ass, never to be understood again. It’s not a reference to the last sentence of the previous chapter. It starts a chapter all by itself. I cannot explain it.
One thing I miss about the YouTube channel is that if I got buried in work and Baldur’s Gate III for a couple of days and forgot the rest of the world existed, at least videos would be showing up to confirm that I was still alive.
Also, I don’t know if I ever announced this, but I’m off damn near everything now. My sole remaining accounts are here, GoodReads, and TikTok. Everything else has been shut down. Technically I suppose I have a Discord account but I only interact with one community and it’s closed, so it doesn’t really count.
Anyway. Did I mention disappearing into video games? Because the PS5 is calling again.
I am, with one more day of forced quarantine before finally being allowed to go back to work, at 95% healthy 95% of the time, and I mean that math fairly precisely, because literally for about three minutes out of every hour I will have a quick coughing fit because of a dry spot in the back of my throat or (this happened yesterday, and it was fun) convince myself I can’t swallow for a minute or some other bit of nonsense, but most of the time I am completely fine. I feel like I’ve been sick; I no longer feel like I am sick. My son, unfortunately, tested positive too, but I’m convinced that he got it through some other pathway than from me, because he has a completely different set of symptoms. Mine is nearly all a head cold, despite those previous complaints; his is in his lungs and throat, and he’s got a really mild case, to the point where I think if we hadn’t tested him he wouldn’t even be missing school.
Oh, and my sense of taste and smell has gone wonky against that’s par for the course with Covid at this point.
So the good thing about being home from work– and this is where the real whining is going to begin, so brace yourself– is that I’ve had tons of time to play video games in between monitoring my email for replies from students and staring off into space. The problem is that every fucking game in the universe came out in the last two weeks, and I cannot decide what the fuck I want to actually play. Just in the last couple of weeks, Armored Core VI, Blasphemous II, Starfield, and Baldur’s Gate III came out. Sometime next week I get Lies of P. I haven’t even downloaded Blasphemous yet. Starfield and Baldur’s Gate III are both hundred-hour-plus games. I enjoyed having a YouTube channel, but I shut it down precisely because of shit like this; I’d be going absolutely batshit trying to come up with episodic content worth watching right now.
Anyway, I spent yesterday playing BGIII and today playing Starfield and the idea I had was I was going to pick one and stick to it, then go back to the other later … only right now I think when I finish this I’m going to play Armored Core, which … wasn’t the plan. I’m not good at bouncing back and forth between games so this is maybe weirder for me than it sounds, and I’m annoyed that out of all this shit nothing has jumped out and made the choice obvious yet. Like, I’m mad at myself that none of these games have grabbed me by the beard and demanded my attention yet. None of them are bad, they’re just not doing it for me right now for some damn reason.
Point is: blech.
I’m going to get to that book review tomorrow, I swear.
This is another one of those “Whoops, forgot to post yesterday, ought to put something up” posts, and again I don’t have much of an agenda. The rest of the world is playing Baldur’s Gate III; I, who do not own a PC and refuse to play games on my Mac, am loyally awaiting the PS5 release and until then…
I think this afternoon might have been the first time I’ve really regretted shutting down my YouTube channel, as I played through the entirety of Venba while my son was at camp this afternoon, and I think this would have been a fun little game to livestream. I played it through Game Pass on the Xbox Series X, where it is currently free, and I believe it’s $14.99 on the PS5. I’ll cut to the chase and say that if you have Game Pass access you should absolutely download this delightful little game and give it a chunk of your afternoon, and $15 is fair in a “reward the developers for making something cool” way as opposed to a pure price-for-playtime thing.
Anyway. Venba, which I have just now learned is the word for a form of classical Tamil poetry, is the story of a Tamil immigrant family that has moved to Canada. It’s very story-based, and for a lot of it you’re watching conversations between family members and occasionally choosing a dialogue option from two or three available choices, and this isn’t the kind of game that lets you go back and change your mind if you want to. Having only played it once, I’m not sure if the game changes based on your decisions or not, so that might be a reason to go back through it tomorrow just for the hell of it.
The gameplay comes in during– wait for it– the cooking sections, where you’re attempting to recreate old family recipes based on a poorly preserved recipe book that has pieces missing. Based on the instructions you’re given along with some verbal suggestions and occasional flashback memories, you’re expected to prepare the recipes properly. This sounds absolutely wonderful and for the first time I found myself wishing smell-o-vision was a thing; I’ve also got a serious yen for Indian food right now. If you can already cook, you’ll sail through it; if you don’t know a thing about Indian cuisine specifically or cooking in general there’s probably going to be some fairly simple trial-and-error involved. I’m … in the middle, I suppose? There were a couple things I sailed through on the first try, at least one where my stupid fingers kept messing me up, and another that took me some actual thinking to figure out what the game wanted me to do.
Is it fun? Yeah, but I don’t feel like fun is necessarily the goal here. This game has a story to tell, and something to say about the immigrant experience, and it’s one of the most unique experiences I’ve had with a controller in my hand in a long time. Even just the simple interactivity of being able to choose a dialogue response during a conversation now and again brings you inside the characters in a unique way that you don’t get with novels or television. The generational aspect of the game– at the beginning, it’s just the parents, and it ends with their son as a grown man, trying to read the Tamil in his grandmother’s cookbook– is really neat as well, and it’s really cool how much emotion the game is able to elicit over, again, a very short runtime.
Venba isn’t going to be Game of the Year or anything like that, but it deserves some attention and it’s a great use of the short time you’ll spend with it.
I’ve done basically nothing but play Diablo IV this week, to the point where I haven’t updated my YouTube channel in five days because I’m not playing the other game– which I was really enjoying, mind you– and as soon as I finish this sentence, I’m going to go play some more.
Also, I had a doctor’s appointment today, an appointment where I thought I was going to have to have a prostate exam and (again!) didn’t, but I did get to talk about colonoscopies. Hooray!
Welcome to infinitefreetime dot com 