mvu.one

Despite my best efforts I've got yet another pile of unfinished games. Just stuff that I didn't have the patience to get through or wasn't clicking with me. For the sake of preventing future me from repeating my mistakes, here are the reasons for putting them down:

(Sekiro, Mother3, Void Stranger)

The following is a short story / writing exercise I'm titling A King De-Phoned. It's a fairly mundane tale of first-world problems involving relatively privileged individuals and occasional hyperbole. That said, this stuff actually happened and was pretty shitty.

Thrusting out blindly for my next read, I ended up settling on the most recent Nebula winner: The Saint of Bright Doors. The audiobook version is superbly narrated, and the whole experience was a very fun departure from my normal fantasy/scifi reads.

The setting is a modern-tech alternate indo-inspired continent with very different takes on magic. Where I frequently enjoy fantasy that provides clear constraints on it's magic system, this book leans heavily into a more mystic world of vague demons and inexplicable occurrences -- such as how any door left closed too long in the City of Luriat will seal forever.

The author brought the city to life, painting an extremely vivid and interesting world with which they tell the story of Fetter, a man with strange powers trained from childhood to assassinate a spiritual leader.

Spoilers below.

With a little too much time on my hands I decided to finally give Tokyo Ghoul (main series plus :re) a read. I remembered enjoying the first season of anime 1000 years ago, but recall that the second season didn't hold my attention at all -- but as they always say: "the manga was better".

I just finished the last chapter of Innocent & Innocent Rouge. I was craving some grown-up-oriented manga and settled on this. It was certainly something.

After another back injury I found myself bedridden once again. I decided it was time to finally get through Disco Elysium.

It's a game I've struggled to play for a while now. One that felt like it was very much catering to everything I could want in a game, but frustrated me at every attempt to play.

I was looking for my next book after reading Chain-Gang All-Stars and saw a random post on Mastodon about a novel called Someone You Can Build a Nest In, which pitched itself as a horror fantasy romance novel. The rest of my to-read list looked a bit daunting so I dove in.

It was a fun short read. The protagonist is a shape-shifting monster who falls for a human, and the rest of the story surrounds the resolution of their differences (and the fact that the protagonist's new girlfriend's family are monster hunters).

While I've been trying to finish all the games I start, sometimes I just don't have the energy or a particular game just doesn't hit right and I put it down early. As a result I don't get around to writing about them, which is a shame because I frequently refer to my own blogposts as a refresher on what I did or didn't like about a given game or book.

So, for future me's reference, here's a handful of recent games I didn't quite make it through:

(Drilldozer, Pokemon Unbound, Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow, A Space for the Unbound, Cocoon)

A friend of mine recently recommended Chain-Gang All-Stars and I thought it was a really cheesy title for a book, but gave it a shot anyways.

After finishing the audiobook version of the novel, I'd just like to say: Holy shit.

I've wanted to read a bit of philosophy-of-the-mind for some time now, but never really got around to it. After a discussion on consciousness with a friend a bit back, I was recommended the works by Douglas Hofstadter. His big-dick book "G.E.B" was a little intimidating, but the title of his more recent work "I Am a Strange Loop" resonated with me (my own online identity being tied to my loop-like spiral logo), and I've just finished the audio version!

Firstly, a bit of praise: I'm a philosophy noob, and the author's heavy use of allegory and analogy made digesting the book's core ideas approachable and entertaining. I've managed to grind my attention span into dust and was concerned the general dryness of philosophy texts would have me reaching for other things to read -- but while it wasn't a particularly gripping read, it absolutely held my attention the whole way through.