Story: Natural
"It isn't natural," says the man, his minted breath curling past curated crowns, carving clear crisp consonants capable of conveying complex concepts; utterly ubiquitous, yet unique to the singular species that shields its skin with sheet upon sheet of synthetic plastics and polyesters shipped by smoke-spewing ships across sea and sky, fabricated in factories by mute masses and machines for the sole sake of lining the sacred silk pockets which make trillionaires of billionaires of millionaires off the fools convinced they'll scale the same pyramids they slave beneath, each block a pyrrhic victory in the effort to ever increase the imaginary indices of "wealth" and "value" splayed across their personal pixelated prisons, ever clawing to crawl atop the crowd, ever climbing closer to the searing sun, ever fleeting further from the filth of flora and fauna, ever grasping for godhood as they forsake their forgotten past and fall so far from that first bite of forbidden fruit. What knows now man that he may name "natural"?
Nothing.
Story: The Table-Maker
A short story about a guy that used to love making tables (and still does)
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Book Thoughts: Shroud
Having recently listened to two Tchaikovsky standalone sci-fi novels, I figured I may as well stay on course and picked up his Hugo-2026-nominated novel Shroud.
I think Tchaikovsky really excels at portraying alien perspectives and eliciting empathy towards weird consciousnesses. This was on display in his Children of Time series, and he flexes those muscles in this one with interesting radio-signal-based entities on a lightless and hopeless planet. Maybe it was his blatant painting as humans in the role of planet-stripping extraplanetary predators, but he really had me rooting for the home team.
It was a very engaging read and the author did a couple of clever things with the premise and setup; there was a lot of intent behind his decision to put two people in a single explorer pod, which added to the sense of claustrophobia initially and mirrored some of the multi-part-brain concepts at play later. I don't think there's anything here that was particularly mind-blowing, but the ideas were explored in creative and satisfying ways.
Good clean scifi fun, this one.
Book Thoughts: There is no Antimemetics Division
This was another random fun sci-fi audiobook purchase and it was a good time!
An SCP-inspired (inspired is strong here, the author wrote out a good chunk of this book as part of the SCP archives) about unknown cosmic-horror entities and memory.
Specifically about the antimemetics division of an international secret institution dedicated to safely containing cosmic horrors (and not-so-horrifying interesting entities). Antimemetics being, of course, the study of antimemes, which are things or ideas which cannot be remembered.
It was a very interesting read, and I enjoyed a lot of the speculative ideas surrounding the concept of an antimeme and the ways they were worked around. When the very nature of your work is to study things that you will naturally forget you need to get creative, and the author definitely did!
I wasn't the biggest fan of the second half of the story -- it all got a little too epic and cosmic-horror-y for my tastes. Overall, though, a fun lightweight sci-fi read with some neat and novel ideas!
Book Thoughts: By Night in Chile
After stumbling blindly through Roberto Bolano's "The Savage Detectives" I ran out and bought all the books by Bolano I could find. While I'm clearly not equipped with the literary capacity to fully grasp his works I really enjoyed something in his writing (or rather, in the translations of his writing,) and wanted to try some more.
The first thing I picked up was By Night in Chile which is a very short and initially baffling read narrated by a narcissistic priest / poet / literary critic on his deathbed. The story is delivered in a single exhausting paragraph that never lets up.
I definitely missed a lot here thematically on my initial read, but was still swept along by the braggadocios narration wherein our protagonist tells of his time drinking at the houses of wealthy artists, his rise to fame as a literary critic under a nom de plume, and his less successful but equally proud work in poetry.
After finishing the book and reading a couple short reviews to help it click, it is clear to me now that this is a story about omissions. The narrator tells a grandiose story about his life and importance and accomplishments while dancing around his guilt.
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Game Thoughts: Final Fantasy 9
I have a very deep nostalgia for Final Fantasy titles -- specifically for 7-10 which I played as a teenager. These works made a fairly a large impact on my life and my artistic tastes.
I'm not normally one to replay long games, and have recently had trouble finding joy in traditional random-encounter JRPGs, but after recently opening a few packs of Final Fantasy Magic the Gathering cards and pulling a Vivi card, Final Fantasy 9 was calling.
I don't think I would have made it through the game without the Memoria mod, so I want to highlight how much that helped. Besides helping upscale and widescreen the graphics, it enabled a few cheats for some of the groan-inducing minigames (frogs, jump-rope), as well as options to change the awful card system to the Final Fantasy 8 game, make battles actually turn-based (battles pause when a character has a turn) and enable quick buttons to double the game speed and turn off battles temporarily. I shamelessly used all of these, and even switched on "9999 damage every hit" a handful of times when I needed to grind.
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Book Thoughts: Service Model & Alien Clay
I forgot for a little bit there that listening to audiobooks could also just be done for fun. Not that I've not been having fun with Borges and "The Weird" short story collections, but I've been trying to challenge myself a little more than the usual sci-fi/fantasy fare.
Well after a few hellish months at work leading me to abandoning most of my hobbies and my morning stream I decided to take it a little easy and fall back to old habits and purchased some good old-fashioned sci-fi novels to keep me company on my walk.
I absolutely adored Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time, though I found the subsequent books in the series felt a bit more like watching a fun sci-fi TV show rather than having the impact of the first title. Nothing wrong with that, so I picked up two books that had a slightly similar feel to them: Service Model and Alien Clay -- both one-shot novels by the author.
Service Model follows a totally-not-sentient valet robot through an apocalyptic wasteland. It's campy and funny and overall very enjoyable junk-food with a handful of memorable moments.
Alien Clay is Australian Prison Colonies X 1000 with exoplanet exploration, authoritarian regimes, and alternate biological evolution. It's sarcastic and anti-authoritarian while it digs through its ideas about modular biology and alternative evolution.
I like them both a lot as fun sci-fi romps, though admittedly both felt like the author was a little too on-the-nose with the political undertones (or I guess just normal tones?) of the two books. I am a great lover of le conte philosophique, but a little creative subtlety goes a long way.
I don't think I'd recommend these books to people the way I recommend Children of Time (I have given away about 5 copies of that to people, now) but they gave me the lightweight audio entertainment I was craving.
Book Thoughts: The Weird
Hungry for more audiobook short stories I came upon a monstrous collection of strange fiction curated by the Vandermeers: The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories.
Going into the 70-something hour collection I knew there would be many stories not to my taste -- cosmic horror and ghost stories, while appealing on a conceptual level, have never held much for me -- however with other names like China Mieville, Borges, and Kafka listed in the long directory of authors and over 100 strange stories to dig through, I was confident I'd discover some gems.
Here are said gems:
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Book Thoughts: The Savage Detectives
Continuing my meandering literary exploration to scratch my new-found Borges-flavoured itch, I stumbled across a name as I perused a used book store: Roberto Bolano.
While I admit that jumping at a random latin-american-sounding name and hoping for some similarity to Borges is a fairly ignorant stretch, it paid off in this case. It turns out that Bolano is frequently compared to Borges -- though the book I picked up, "The Savage Detectives," is definitely an entirely unique flavour all its own.
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Game Thoughts: The Playdate
On my recent international vacation I found myself in transit with alarming frequency. Between trans, taxi rides, layovers, and 14-hour flights I had a lot of time in my hands.
I also had a gaming console in my hands, for I rarely leave home without at least one mechanism for playing games. I recently got my hands on a second-hand Playdate which I very quickly fell in love with. The Playdate is a retro-inspired console with a monochrome LCD non-backlit screen and a crank.
(It was designed in partnership with Teenage Engineering, and I'm honestly a huge sucker for anything those folks design.)
Games for the playdate can be "side-loaded" (downloaded from Itch.io or other places) or purchased and installed from the official playdate store -- after which you need to actually download the games which takes a very long time. Perhaps the slow downloads were another attempt at retro, invoking the pain of a dial-up connection.
Games range from $2-$15 on the online store, and most of the games fall into the "cool tech demo" range that, quite honestly, I wouldn't normally pay for. $5 will get you a full-blown 10+ hour game on sale on Steam, while $5 on playdate indies might net you a basic arcade game or a 3 hour Zelda clone that would normally be free somewhere like Itch.io.
That said, I didn't find myself hesitating to drop a few bucks on Playdate titles. Maybe this was just excitement for the platform, but it may also just be part of the magic of what feels like a smaller indie-focused community -- much like buying music from Bandcamp.
I'm going to break my game insights down below into the following categories:
- Intentional Purchases where I actually directly paid money for a game through the Playdate store
- Season Games which kinda just show up on the device (I also dropped like $30 on season 2)
- Sideloaded Games which were either free or bought on Itch.io
And finally an overall review of the Playdate after abusing it for a few weeks.
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