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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.

Book Thoughts: Amber 6+ (incomplete)

I picked up the second half of the Amber series immediately after finishing the first 5 books, and I'll not be finishing the second half.

The series continues with the first protagonist's son, and while it feels like it did a slightly better job at fleshing out the female characters this time, the new protagonist is insufferable. All the cock and confidence of the first narrator with half the sense and 1/10th the speed. Where the first half of the series would occasionally result in whiplash for going so fast, the second half continuously slows to a crawl.

I found myself zoning out entirely every time I picked it up, and by book 7 just didn't care what happened next.

And so I shall never find out.

Game Thoughts: Incomplete 12-2024

I'm really having trouble finding something that sticks this year in terms of games. I've been grapling with my inability to play any legacy JRPGs lately (a genre I dearly love, and of which I have MANY remakes on my to-play list) and looking for other shorter-term solutions to scratch my gaming itch, but nothing seems to do it.

The first shot I took was something on my to-play list for ages: Solatorobo for the DS: a 3rd person action game featuring anthropomorphic animal charatures and mechs with lots of dialogue.

This game shows up on basically every "DS Hidden Gems" list available, and for good reason. It's terribly unique and tries a lot of things -- it feels like a game from the N64 era where everyone was trying new things that may or may not have been a great idea. The combat is definitely one-of-a-kind, and consists mainly of grabbing and throwing your enemies into one another.

There's a lot of charm here -- the characters are distinct and have personality, the story's there, and technically it's quite impressive for the DS.

I got to a spot about 1/4 of the way through, I think, where there was a mario-kart style race, and called it quits after that. While there's plenty to love about the game I figured I'd call it quits while the aftertaste was still pleasant, as the combat was getting annoyingly janky and the sidequests repetative.

The second game I recently put down was Caves of Qud. Suprisingly this one's been in development for 9 years, and despite being an avid Dwarf Fortess and Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup fan in the early-to-mid 2010's I'd never heard of it.

Version 1.0 just dropped so I picked it up to have a go, and wow! It's a great roguelike with way more going on than I expected. It mixes the random world gen with some stable points around which it builds a storyline, and it's got tonnes of options for character builds. I don't think I even got to try all the menus available by the time I hit the 10 hour mark.

The game also ships with RPG and Wanderer modes if perma-death aren't your cup of tea, and it works great (with a few bugs still) on the SteamDeck. I played through a couple characters before giving RPG mode a try before realizing I prefer classic mode, but don't have the time in my life anymore to truly enjoy a roguelike. In the same way that grinding in JRPGs has been grating lately, the idea of wasting my time on a randomly generated dungeon is a little upsetting, and I find myself regretting having lost the weekend to the game.

So I'll put this one down for now, and maybe pick at it in the wee hours of the night if sleep eludes me.

Book Thoughts: Amber 1-5

I wanted to switch it up for my next audiobook and tried to delve into some older fantasy. I remembered really enjoying "The Lord of Light" at some point in the last 2 decades, and pivoting off those vague positive memories grabbed the entire Amber series by the same author (Rodger Zelazny).

So far I've gotten through the first 5 books which covers the complete story of one protagonist. I figured I'd write my thoughts this far before continuing as it's a good breaking point.

Books 1-5 were penned in the 70s, and boy do they show it. The main character (Corwin) is written in that stupid hard-boiled-smartass archetype that permeates a lot of detective novels and old-school fantasy/sci-fi. A personality constructed primarily of wise-cracks, cigarettes, and blatant disregard for one's own safety. The kind who attract trouble like they attract fantasy women. Perhaps this was a new innovation in the 70's, but you could see every stupid remark coming from a mile away.

The blatant and frequent misogyny was another great 70's throwback that marred the titles for me. It's just not something you expect nowadays -- least of all from your protagonist. One scene sees him literally slapping his girlfriend for telling him about a dream she had. Then she cries and he goes along his business. This isn't some flaw to overcome or some kind of message from the author; just machismo.

"But these fabled Amber books inspired so many modern fantasy authors; surely there's some treasure to be had here, right?"

Well for one the premise is a bit neat. Here is a fantasy world in which our earth is merely a shadow cast by the "real" city of Amber. A city housing a royal family of cunning, plotting narcissists that can travel through said shadows to find any alternate universe they want -- yet they battle for control of the throne in the one and only true Amber.

Honestly the family politics and "magic" in the series was pretty good. Each of the brothers felt distinct (the sisters had next to zero distinguishing features or depth), and while the author played it pretty fast and loose with magic nothing felt too out of place. Zelazney set up some great reveals and the books move at a breakneck pace. Why write exposition when we can just go from zero-to-faithful-army in three pages?

It's refreshing and light, but can most definitely be disorienting at times. The fast-and-looseness definitely also leads to levels of deus ex machina that should make a modern author blush (by the way I have a magical sword I didn't mention till now). As long as the entire ordeal isn't being taken too seriously it was mostly good fun. Again, blatant 70's sexism aside.

What makes the mess decently good is that it doesn't take itself too seriously. It lets itself be handwavy or silly very frequently, the pacing is all over the place, half the characters are less than one-dimensional, there's plot/world-building holes you could drive a car through -- but much like a slightly drunk one-off D&D session with a very generous GM it's fun and has enough intrigue and random unexpected deep / introspective moments to get into it.

It wasn't great, and I don't know what parts of it were inspiring to the next generation of fantasy authors, but it wasn't terrible. We'll see where things go in the second half.