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Book Thoughts: Seveneves

Despite really not enjoying Snow Crash due to the sheer amount of cheese involved, I was convinced to try out some other Neil Stephenson works and picked up the audiobook for Seveneves.

I'm glad I gave the author a second chance as this work is definitely of a different make and model than Snow Crash.. though it wasn't without it's own different kind of absurd issues.

The premise of the book is very interesting: The moon's exploded and the earth will end -- what does humanity do? The story tries to follow that question and we watch, from the perspectives of several scientist-types, as humanity scrambles to save what it can of itself.

There's going to be a lot of spoilers in this one.

Comic Thoughts: Tomie

I've mentioned this in a previous post, but I've been a fan of Junji Ito ever since I read his Amigara Fault short comic. I've picked through other works over the years, but I've had a copy of Tomie sitting unread on my shelf for ages.

Tomie is a collection of short stories about an immortal girl (named Tomie, obviously) who repeatedly drives men insane with love for her, generally culminating in said men murdering her and chopping her into little bits.

It's a pretty fucked up concept, and the first couple of chapters definitely had a good gut-punch feeling to them as the concept was introduced and Tomie kept returning, but after a few of these stories it honestly started to get old. The stories each had a bit of merit, but most amounted to a "What if Tomie did THIS?" accompanied with a payoff at the end of a couple stellar body horror panels.

What if Tomie was underwater? What if Tomie was in the snow??

The final few chapters tied together a semblance of a larger narrative with some extra deranged nonsense, but the collection ended on a pretty unsatisfying note. I came for unsettling, and honestly the most unsettling story was the very first one in the collection, before any of the body horror or immortal girl stuff comes into play.

Year End: 2024

Another year has come and gone with its ups and downs. I've finished my last day of work for the year and already descended into hedonism, forgetting the civilized world and consuming a full party sized pizza to myself in the basement while grinding out roguelike games and generally being of no use to anybody whatsoever.

Note, this opening paragraph was written December 16th, and the hedonism has continued through until today.

I really liked writing up a year-end summary last year, so having finished what's likely my last book of the year it is time once again.

Book Thoughts: Infomocracy

I saw the book Infomocracy listed as a "hopepunk" novel on some forum recently and it piqued my interest. As a fan of other modern alt-punk settings (solarpunk being of particular interest), the word "hopepunk" leapfrogged the novel to first-place on my reading list. As we rapidly arrive at the dystopian future predicted by so many cyberpunk novels, the hopepunk genre apparently aims to tell stories of non-dystopian futures and the challenges that come with obtaining or maintaining them.

The story takes place in a future where national borders have been dissolved, and the world is now cut up into micro-democratic sentinels, with many different parties vying globally for votes. These parties range from corporate-led to policy-led, and a central (neutral) group that provides information, or essentially is the internet.

A lot of the novel's configuration was reminiscent of one of my favourite sci-fi series: Terra Ignotia, though this was somewhere closer to the modern world and reality than Palmer's series was. It felt attainable, like it could be the world in 50 years if things don't continue to go to shit.

Game Thoughts: Mouthwashing

The second low-poly-aesthetics game I picked up recently was Mouthwashing. I'd heard a bit of commotion made about this one and was excited to jump into it as I'm a fan of narrative-only games.

This one was dark. Like, Children of the Sun was dark, but Mouthwashing put it to bed.

You play as the captain(s) of a stranded cargo-hauling spaceship, and the game primarily consists of scenes where you navigate the small ship and talk to your crewmates as they become increasingly desperate, with the occasional minor puzzle or micro-minigame like making a cake.

Potentially a slight spoiler here, but I've mentioned before that I had trouble in Disco Elysium willingly playing a horrible person. You don't get a choice in Mouthwashing. You play as a horrible person and you find out just how horrible as you go. You witness the human failings of the crew as they fall into insanity, and everyone suffers the entire time. It was awful and it was magnificent. It was literature.

I need to address again how refreshing the game was aesthetically. Something about the washed out colors and low-poly visuals felt amazingly on-point and I want to explore more games using low-end 3D to tell compelling stories.

Highly recommended, but maybe check the trigger warnings.

Game Thoughts: Children of the Sun

Nothing was clicking for me game-wise for a bit. I'd had my fill of pixel art for the year, and my usual fare wasn't holding my attention for more than a couple of hours. Fortunately for me, there appears to be a resurgence in a new retro aesthetic that feels surprisingly fresh: Low-poly.

I purchased Mouthwashing and Children of the Sun, both sitting somewhere between PS1 and PS2 visuals, and heavily utilizing low-rez textures and muddy palettes to maximum effect.

Children of the Sun has you playing as "Girl" who, as surmised by fever-dream still frames, is out to get revenge on a cult that resulted in a loved one (her father?) being killed. Girl has a special power: the ability to change the trajectory of bullets.

And that's the whole game. You check out a scene, you fire a single bullet, and every time that bullet kills someone time freezes and you get to aim it again. Each level simply consists of "kill everyone in a single shot".

It's beautifully done. Each level is a puzzle awash in acid highlights waiting for you to cover it in gore. You progress linearly, get some additional bullet-bending powers, kill everyone, continue to the leader. There are a couple unfortunate mini-game levels where the creators strayed from this formula (a car-chase and a weird pacman thing) which were both awful, in my opinion, but I think they were intended to shake things up a bit.

It wasn't a long game, but it was the palate cleanser I needed to get back into gaming right now and worth every penny.

Game Thoughts: Mischief Makers

There's this game for the N64 called Mischief Makers. It's a side-scrolling action platformer by the company that made Gunstar Heroes and would eventually make Ikaruga. I've never personally met anybody else who's played or heard of this game, but it's been an important part of my own gaming experience.

As a kid, the small town we lived in had a single movie / game rental place, and every weekend my younger brother and I would rent something for the N64 or the PS1. There's a couple games that stand out in my memory, but Mischief Makers is definitely top 10.

We rented this one all the time, but our save would always get deleted, as was the way of rental cartridges of the time. We played through some sections countless times, and often played other peoples' saves to see some of the later bosses. Half of it honestly feels like a fever dream, but to this day any time I shake something a little voice in my head says "shake shake" like the main character in the game.

I've got the game in my collection now and last night my brother showed up for the holidays, so we decided to beat it once and for all.

Comic Thoughts: Chainsaw Man

In my efforts to relax a bit on my holidays and not work, I picked up my trusty e-reader and one-shot the entirety of Chainsaw Man over the course of 10 hours. I watched the anime when it came out so the first chunk wasn't anything new, but I was excited to see where it went.

As an aside, I really wish I could read a book for 10 hours straight, but apparently my attention span has rotted to the point where only videogames and manga can hold my attention for this long.

Anyways, Chainsaw man is interesting. It's some good old-fashioned hyper-violent hyper-sexy bizarre media only Japan could pull off (though the hyper-sexiness is very different than what we would have seen if this debuted in the 80s/90s). There's a world of devils with powers that scale with how scared people are of them, and there's devil hunters that kill them. Due to reasons revealed later in the series the devils do eventually resurrect, so there's never a shortage of work.

Story: The Day's a Wash

A short story about how I spent my day with my old friend the broken washing machine. WARNING: Contains lots of swearing and clamping.

Book Thoughts: System Collapse

I really like Murderbot. The series was a breath of fresh air when I got into it a couple years ago. The casual scifi, the sarcasm, the characters, the guy they have narrating the audiobooks -- it's all wonderful, honestly, and I've kept coming back for more. The latest entry is System Collapse.

This entry wasn't the best in the series. It's a better entry than Fugitive Telemetry was, and I'm glad they've decided to extend the story instead of whatever they were doing with that book.

All our favourite characters are in this one, and coming back after a year or so I do need to admit that it was a lot of names being thrown around. I could vaguely recall feelings for most of them but it got disorienting at times.

The story was classic Murderbot stuff: the interactions, the corpos, the protecting of one's humans. This round we spend a lot of time with MB worrying about their on state of mind. A LOT. The books always spend a lot of time in inner monologue, but I think the character interactions and overall story suffer a little for it this time around.

I really liked the portion of this one where MB was creating content. Our protagonist that spends so many countless hours consuming media made for humans making media for humans felt like a big character development and in-character. While the rest of the storyline was a little meh, this bit felt somewhat profound.

It also made me realize that Murderbot is to me what Sanctuary Moon is to Murderbot: A comforting soap opera of bots and humans in space. For all my minor quibbles I'll happily consume hundreds of hours of this stuff if Martha Wells keeps pumping them out.