2026, Q3 - Sometimes I Play Video Games

The Prophet by Khalil Gibran was one of those books I've heard referenced on occasion, so I picked it up on a whim when I found a physical copy from the Cuppa Classics line. I have to admit, I don't get the appeal, but it's also clearly not really for me. If I had to compare to something else, I'd say it reads not dissimilar to Nietzsche's Zarathustra, which also wasn't for me. There's a preachiness in the whole thing that makes it hard to read, and also, depending on your view on religion, difficult to take very seriously. That's probably not the point of the book in the first place. It feels like it's meant to communicate a philosophy through poetry, but since I don't really understand either, it goes over my head completely. It also seems to go entirely counter to the way I read text. I read relatively quickly, I think, but Gibran's writing here forces breaks to make the shape of the language make sense. Perhaps this is a byproduct of my tenuous relationship to poetic verse, but it lengthened the read somewhat.

I finished a first playthrough of XCOM 2: War of the Chosen. It was a busy couple of weeks with a lot of stressors and I decided to unwind in the evening with some relaxed gaming, which I generally get to rarely otherwise. I run out of steam a lot on games, because of the effort of starting up the game from a computer otherwise I use for other stuff, but there is of course a generic solution to that problem that I allowed myself this time: Letting the thing run over the span of about a week. I'm also not strictly speaking good at games. I think this is very literally the fifth game I've finished (not counting pokemon romhacks), which is weird, because I think it's a habit I could get into very quickly and easily, because I am usually having fun playing. I've had several attempts at XCOM 2 previously, but considering how badly the game can kick your ass, I usually got stuck and had to load a very old save. The tactics game of this is, of course, legendary, as a staple of the genre, and it made for a very engaging loop.

Bugonia (2025), directed by Yorgos Lanthimos moves somewhere between horror psycho-horror and black comedy that's at least beautifully shot, but feels perhaps too modern for the thing it's trying to say. I never managed to get too deeply into conspiracy theory content (I don't mean the actual theories, but rather the various formats explaining them, their movements, their errors, etc.), because frankly, I have stuff to do. Too much to spend on things that are clearly wrong, and, more often than not, carry an uncomfortable undercurrent of anti-semitism. As such, my primary impression of the topic is one of cautious warning; a reminder not to get too "lost in the sauce", as it were. I realize it's exhausting to see the politics of the thing, when very clearly it's not the point. This is what I mean when I say that's it's too modern. One of the characters is meant to be a Jeff Bezos pastige, and the optics of two backwater white dudes immediately conjure some political statement. The move struggles and fails desperately to be apolitical and the twist doesn't help at all. I still think the movie is worth a watch, so I won't go into more detail here, but if at all possible, the politics is best regarded as a failed attempt at the topic.

The Magic Order (2018) was written, again, by Mark Millar, and published by Image Comics. I mentioned how well Image Comics illustrates, and this is probably the best example yet of the art capturing the feel of the world. I read the first and second Library Edition Volumes very rapidly, because the world building was just very cool, and up until the very last storyline, the story, surprisingly, was alright. There is the white American-ness that seems to accompany Millar's writing everywhere, but it wasn't egregiously bad for most of it. I would caution that one could read this series the way one could read H. P. Lovecraft stories, but maybe the fact that it exists against a backdrop of Fantasy Literature and iconography, heavily influenced by a different unwitting white supremacist (I'll slander J. K. Rowling all I want until she stops putting money toward banning the existence of people) makes it easier to forgive. I don't recommend that anyone buy this comic, because I don't think anyone should give Mark Millar money, and if anyone wants to ever pick up the series used, or digitally, I'd recommend to stop reading after Volume 4. The fifth one features an almost tragic drop of quality. It's not primarily the change of art style that bothers me - although I preferred the styles of the earlier volumes - but the writing takes a spectacular nose-dive the likes of which I have maybe only seen in American television series after the writers have run out of ideas. I think what bothers me primarily is that the main character becomes very suddenly useless, in order to establish a character that is bland and somewhat inconsequential to the larger story, it features a one-scene revival of a number of dead characters that comes somewhat out of nowhere and doesn't feel earned. It would have been much more interesting to see the protagonist deal with the aftermath of what were catastrophic events in Volume 4. I'll spoil it from here, because this is something I find an interesting recurring topic in fiction generally. The titular Magic Order in this world is a powerful, but dysfunctional organization, primarily because the most people in it were corrupt in one way or another. That is fine, power structures invite corruption. However, at the end of the forth volume, almost the entire Order is dead, and what magi are left, are inexperienced, leaving the so far relatively young protagonist suddenly as the senior member of the Order. The fact that this is the case isn't meaningfully addressed in the fifth volume. The Order had international branches, which presumably collapsed into the single American one. This could have been an interesting place to continue rebuilding the order. This kind of thing had happened in the Order's history, so the ideas of changing how the Order operated would have made for interesting material. Here's also where the world-building fails somewhat. I actually quite liked the world-building, especially illustrated the way it was. Much of the magic remained largely unexplained, so yes, most of the "out of the box" solutions are a little bullshit. Millar is not a good writer. I don't think he knows how the Order works, I somewhat suspect that he lacks the imagination to think about how the Order could change for the better, too. This series was (mostly) an enjoyable read, but tragically, the last volume makes it abundantly clear that it lives primarily off the aesthetics of its illustrators and Image Comic's impeccable sense of style.

Dracula's Brunch Club (2025) is a graphic novel more or less about the what's in the title. It was published by Oni Press, which so far I'm not familiar with. As far as short, inconsequential stories go, this was fine, but I can't pretend that I wasn't a little bored reading it. The whole thing could be described as "cute", if one is in the mood for such a thing. I'm actually quite certain that it achieves the things it sets out to do just fine, but I just picked it up at an inopportune time. It uses most of the well-known vampire tropes and builds a story around discovering them and positioning them in their coexistence with humans, though it's primarily a story about sticking together as a community, so much of the logistics and conflicts foes unaddressed. I guess for younger readers this might be a fun read.

I Was A Fashion School Serial Killer (2025) is another Image Comics joint, though the style was less striking this time around. Considering the subject matter, that might be a good thing, but I think it might have gained something from a more textured art style. The story escalates relatively quickly, though the place it starts out in is already somewhat out of the ordinary. In contrast to the other Image Comics serializations, I found this one a lot simpler as a story. It exists somewhere between a highschool movie and b-grade horror, where the characters are simple, but strictly defined by a couple early moments in the story in which they got to showcase their role in the story. The vast majority of named characters don't make it to the last volume, and the titular 'I' in the story isn't responsible for all of them. The story has enough taste not to revel in the kill itself, which, considering the subject matter of the final issue specifically, is wise. At the same time, I'm not entirely sure who this story is for. The characters are too flat to be very engaging, and the protagonist is slightly unlikable. She gets a few moments to open up, which are a little heartwarming to read, but it's not quite enough to make me invested in her success long term. The fashion on the page, wasn't too striking to my eye either, but then again I'm probably not the target audience there. On the other hand, it's a lot less problematic in its brevity than some other stories that Image Comics has published, even though I'm well sated for stories surrounding that cast in that world.

Merrily We Roll Along (2025) is a recording of the Broadway production of Sondheim's classic musical, with big names Jonathan Groff and Daniel Radcliffe in two of the leading rolls. I'm not as big into Sondheim as perhaps I should be, considering my whole musical theater kind of background, but I still appreciate a good recording of a show. I just find his stuff has a particular sound that doesn't really stick in my brain the way other musical composers do, but then again I've never played a Sondheim show myself, which would have surely given me the Stockholm syndrome that comes with rehearsing for any production. The setup of the show though is very touching, very American, I think. It opens on a catastrophe, and works backwards from then, until the first time they meet (or reunite, depending). It's a piece of art about art, and those have a very particular feeling to them which makes me a little ambivalent toward them if it's not almost perfect. It's not quite convinced to keep an eye out for the production in my part of the world, but I'm still relatively happy I saw it. There's a few numbers that I might revisit at some point in the future, but at after an initial viewing I couldn't sing a single tune.

Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man (2025) is the Netflix-produced wrap up the BBC's prestige TV series Peaky Blinders, which I loved. This movie, all in all, was fine. I think Peaky Blinders works primarily, because it's a TV series, which gives a lot of its characters the space to do stuff and develop. The story is a somewhat natural development of the place where the series ended, and it concludes definitely. Condensed to a 2 hour movie, the typical Peaky Blinder formula does feel a little like it's instrumentalizing characters to tell Tommy's story. Johnny Dogs gets it the worst this time around. It's still fun to see the Peaky Blinders shoot Nazis, so it's a fun one-time watch, but it really just makes you want to watch the original series again.

Kae Tempest's On Connection (2020) happened across me in a bookshop in my area that's quickly shaping up to be one of my favorites. I knew the name from their music, early work, I assume, since between it, and this book, a name change happened. I liked their style and politics, and occasionally their name popped up in interviews, which made me at least curious about the book. It read, surprisingly, not unlike their lyrics. There's a rhythm to their language, even in essays, which comprise this book, and on occasion there's a single sentence that make me sit and think for a long moment. It's barely 100 pages, so it's a quick read of well under 2 hours, and I read it in a single sitting. There's a nice cadence between the segments, and even between the essays that makes reading them in one go like reading a drama. The subject matter of the essays is a difficult one to grasp in less than the length of the essays themselves. It may be structured like a performance, but it's not so much about performing art, as it is taking in what happens around you. Tempest peppers their observations with thin slices of their own experiences, their wants, memories of people that accompanied her journey, and connects them to how they now perceive the things around them. In these essays, art is a form of connection that just happens to be more difficult to escape without denying it fully. I recognize some of the growth that I either had to go through myself, or am conscious of lacking as I am now, though it probably comes from a different place, with less urgency. My life isn't particularly dramatic. There are some writers whose words make me realize that I'm probably never going to be a writer. Kae Tempest is shaping up to be one of them. I love producing text and working creatively, and I'm probably not going to stop doing that ever, but what Tempest can do with language is much truer to any felt emotion than what I can even imagine when looking at a blank page or document. Considering it's a very short read, and it's not prohibitively expensive, I think this is well worth a recommendation.

Slanted (2025) by Amy Wang is a horror comedy about the effects of white supremacy. It centers an Asian American highschooler who struggles with being othered or being invisible, and asks the question of what a transition into whiteness could offer. It strikes a chord on several occasions during its run-time, and what it succeeds very well at portraying is how living under white supremacy can instill the ideology even into people that aren't white. The movie's setting pairs those moments with the quasi-paedophilic idea of beauty promoted by US highschool paegantry, which is unsettling from the get-go, if you're not immersed in American culture, but for this movie it's highlighted and exaggerated into further absurdity. As far as the core message goes, it does a fine job, even if it's a bit preachy on the way. I don't think that's necessarily a problem, it's just very noticeable. The central family is divided into what could be considered archetypes on integration. There is the daughter, who reveres the white culture and aspires to be them enough to change herself in irreversible ways; the mother, who refuses to adapt and differentiates herself clearly along racial lines; and the father, who acknowledges that they'll never be exactly like the culture they transplanted to, but are determined to find their place. In that, the movie clearly positions one of the three as in the wrong, which perhaps isn't a hundred percent correct, but makes for an easy way to grasp the differences.

I'm a Lost Angel (2026) by Europe Comics is another graphic novel in the line of "I Am Their Silence". It's less fun in tone, but still engaging, following a much more straight forward investigation, with fewer creative leads than its first outing. I'm not sure I like the change in tone overall, because its turned much of the book down somewhat and I think the charm really did come from the chaotic tone. Still, departing from it gave some of the strongest sequences of the book. I'm thinking of a sequence involving a Lorcas poem in particular.

The Juniper Lodge is a sci-fi horror anthology, tied together by the common thread of obsession. Reading it feels like reading Lovecraft, in that the worlds are populated by odd and striking faces that go otherwise unaddressed. It gives the stories a surreal feeling, even though the plots themselves are already a little removed from reality. A lot of the stories contain some form of mental contagion that turns out to be a creature or person preying on the obsessive. What somewhat sets this apart feom other anthologies I've read is that it's drawn by just one artist, cycling through styles. Most are somewhat realistic, which gives the more bizarre elements an even more unsettling effect.

Cyberpunk 2077: XOXO is a graphic novel set in the Cyberpunk 2077 universe. Its art style feels very squishy somehow. It consists effectively of four characters, and is generally short on words, which made reading it a little odd for me. I didn't vibe so much with the visuals and without the words I suddenly had little to enjoy on the page. I also didn't really love the blocky layout of the panels. The trouble is, that it works on theme with the ooint of view the reader is meant to inhabit: that of a heavily augmented gang member, in a near-constant state of almost-psychosis. It's a bleak story, but mercifully short.

Crashed (2018) by Adam Tooze is a very detailed recounting of the 2008 housing market crash, and how the ensuing financial crisis influenced policy and economic decisions in the years that came afterward. It's not an easy read, if you're not fluent in the economics lingo, which, despite having read Ha Joon Chang's Economics: The User's Guide earlier in the year, I never managed to get to. Having Tooze describe the moves by the banks and finance ministers of various European countries. It's certainly a tome worth skimming once, just so one gets an idea of what a crisis of this sort can do. I think it's safe to say that a financial crisis is going to be uncomfortable and unpopular in the wide population, so seeing how heavily it impacts future decisions and downstream economies, even years on, how it shapes the mentalities of the governing bodies that had to interface with it, and how the sudden motion toward austerity burns bridges between allies is chilling, especially, since we keep creating new ones in recent years. I'm not sure the insights of this book could be applied without a semi-fluent understanding of the banking business, debt-lending and interest rates, but it gets across the general chaos and paranoia that this crisis specifically ushered in. Tooze write a lot about the sudden break in confidence between states and banks, and how their collaboration suddenly turned into one of necessity.

Supergirl: Misadventures in Midvale (2026) is the beginning of a new run on this character, which I'm not very familiar with. The art style was what caught my eye this time around, because it seemed a lot crisper than what I usually get with the standard superhero fare, and I also saw it around the time the Supergirl movie, which I'll most likely won't be seeing came out, so it seemed conveniently timed. It's a cute six-issue collection of relatively simple stories, but despite the lore in the background, that I have to infer, obviously, it was a relatively easy read. It also includes a full super-pet issue, which is always charming, if very inconsequential, even though it doesn't do it as well as that one Hawkeye issue that to me has set the standard for a good dog-led story in these kinds of settings. It's certainly a very nice book to look at. The crispness of the art makes each panel's motion very easy to understand at a glance. The color palette reminds me a bit of a cartoon, though I couldn't say which.

Trinity: Daughter of Wonder Woman (2026) read similarly to Misadventures in Midvale, to the point where I'm starting to suspect that there is a formula to these. What I liked about this one, though, was the Cerberus story, and the bickering the character has with themselves as they recount the story to themselves at different ages. Beyond this, I think almost everything I wrote about in the previous entry applies one to one. Between the two books, I think I prefer this one, because the subject matters of the stories are a little more heartfelt.

The Bat-Man: Second Knight (2026) is another prohibition age reimagineing, and this one, fortunately, kinda works. It's still set in Gotham, seeing as the city is about as important as its cast in the franchise. It reads pretty quickly, because, as is typical for these things, if they're not especially ambitious, it's not a story that stands out in any way. It does, to its credit, look like an old comic through the art style, with its stark shadows and detailed faces. There is an odd charm to the aesthetic, but I wonder how often I want to try reading these, because there's just no real staying power to the books.

Cyberpunk 2077: Psycho Squad (2025) follows a officers of the Cyber-Psycho Squad of MaxTac, which is more or less the special operations unit of an already highly militarized police in Night City. Cyberpunk 2077 has a problem with depicting policing, mostly because it's a convention of open world video games that almost all major productions are struggling to shake. This story somewhat reflects the video game's philosophy about the topic as well, but the framing of the story, just by separating itself from the reader, comes with a slightly bitter aftertaste that I think is more than appropriate. Art spoke to me more than XOXO, but that is very much a question of taste. I think there is an implicit understanding of the flaws of a militarized police depicted in the book, but it is at points like these that I'm unsure whether the author should have been more explicit about it.

Cyberpunk 2077: Big City Dreams (2022) follows people trying to get by in the cyberpunk setting. The point of view is given through someone living the life of crime, but craving the serene life he finds in one of the braindances. It's almost a work of reverse-escapism, but despite having the depiction of the exploitation that is rife in that setting as something all-encompassing and corrupting, that is kinda all it is. Of the stories I've read from this collection so far, this one feels the most like the game in story-telling. There is a struggle, but there's no way to escape the end already laid out from the very beginning.

I didn't quite get the point of The Souffleur (2025). It's an Austrian film with a lot of static, lingering shots, but otherwise with many tropes of a documentary. If I had to pin down a particular theme to the movie, it would be "goodbyes". It centers the long standing manager of a hotel that is about to be bought by a foreign real estate developer, and torn down, to be replaced by a new one. It follows that manager's last few days, before saying goodbye to the building, documenting as one facility after another is slowly shut down, and ending in a haunting sequence of two of the staff playing a last song on the grand piano after it has been removed from the performance hall. There's heavy use of narration, but very little dialogue. The characters communicate a lot through silent stares into the camera, which brings a certain strained intensity to the situation which feels very indicative of German speaking culture. Films like these are oddly intriguing to me, but I find it hard to put a finger on why. It was definitely an interesting watch for me, but I would struggle to recommend it, because of how little happens in it. I think it would be good to get more exposure to this type of movie.

Spectregraph (2024) by Tynion and Ward was certainly an experience. It kind of came out of nowhere for me, because I'm not familiar with any of the people involved (I'm too new to the medium) and the label didn't seem familiar either. It's a somewhat grounded story about grief and belonging, with a technically simple setting that is immediately brimming with mystery. The majority of the "real-time" plot is set inside a house that was built to also be a machine to produce ghosts. We follow two people who have had strong impressions of rejection, on different scales, with differently heavy consequences. In a way, for both characters, moving through this house makes them grow up a little, and it becomes apparent that the things that the house creates aren't "just ghosts". The art is also stunning, using a comic book's ability to overlay different graphics in a way that are framed intentionally while retaining some semblance of subtlety. I also enjoyed having the loose, but still realistic style of the characters against the painterly backgrounds, The most striking impression probably comes from the use of colour splashes, which are also heavily worked into the character designs of the named figures.

I read a bunch of other Cyberpunk 2077 comics contained in the "Library Volumes" of which there are two so far. The first one consisted of stories I hadn't seen before, and the second one consisted mainly of the ones mentioned above. In sum, I think the stories in the first Volume are slightly better than the ones in the second, but "BLACKOUT", which I think is the final story of the second Volume I really liked. In general, I think these comic books are a very cool idea. Several artists get the opportunity to work on a world that is already popular, and I think I might be looking into the artist for KICKDOWN, for example, as well as the author of BLACKOUT. At the same time, it does make me want to play something like Cyberpunk 2077 again, perhaps even before the sequel comes out, so it's more than effective marketing in my book.

Mephisto (1936) by Klaus Mann is a story about a spineless and myopic man. A specific one, even though the back of the novel includes the line "", which loosely translates into "all characters depicted in this book are types, not based on real people". This, of course, is a lie in some sense, but I also think that the author managed to capture a "type" as it were, in a sense that usually people from the left wing, familiar with some political theory are familiar with. To couch it in common terms, I think it depicts the type of what in German is called a "Mitläufer". I'm not aware of the equivalent English one that carries the same connotations, but in general it describes someone who follows, even against their own ideals or better judgment. It carries connotation of being somewhat of a push-over, and not having any values, which is perhaps a little uncharitable, but then again it rarely does matter. The story around and behind the book are a little more interesting than the book itself, as is, unfortunately, the novel it spawned as an almost reactionary reflex of the author's more well known and more prolific father, which I think I should reread with this one in mind. The fact that it does somewhat depict a character that the author was intimately familiar with, did get the book banned for what amounts to "character assassination". The novel is a little dry, and it's filled with a lot of character descriptions that cycle and recycle each time they do anything, which is a little tedious. The underlying story is more than worth a read, mostly because of the perspective that it presents, against the very familiar backdrop of Germany's transition from the Weimar Republic to the Third Reich. Stories set in this time tend to focus on the resistance, and often we get a brief look into the lives of the perpetrators, but the ones in between who either couldn't make themselves take a resistance stance, or chose to look away instead aren't often put into focus to this degree.

When I wasn't looking a movie sequel to Avatar: The Last Airbender got released this year. I was a fan of the original series, and I think it was the first series I ever consciously followed during its original release. I was also didn't think the Korra sequel series was terrible, and I think I'll be attached to the series as long as somebody is producing it. Except for when someone comes along with a live-action attempt. I just don't understand what a live-action adaptation is supposed to grant the story when immediately the first thing they have to do is age up the characters, because working with child actors is hard. Given that the latest attempt on this story was Netflix's live-action adaptation, seeing a movie sequel made me a little nervous. I think some of that nervousness was justified, in hindsight, because there are moments in the writing that didn't work with me at all. The original series was an adventure series during which we got to see the cast grow up, and in a way, our core cast has grown up, except when the story needs to introduce drama or interpersonal conflict. The overarching plot is fine. It's nothing we haven't seen before, from the same franchise, oddly enough, but maybe for a movie that wasn't the worst way to play it. I find movie sequels to series are often a little rushed, because the writers were used to longer storylines with that cast and that setting, and having to squeeze the same amount of events into the same time either leaves holes, or feels like a checklist. What immediately stands out though, is how much better it looks. In terms of the visual style, it finds a really good middle ground between the two series we already know, and all the visual effects got a lot more detail since we last saw anything from the series period. It occupies the somewhat unfortunate situation that it's not really allowed to have consequences, because we have a prequel series and a sequel series, both of which are at least partially invested in the cast of Aang and what they did after the main plot. Still, it was an okay watch.

The Legend of Vox Machina's fourth season (2026) was paced a little oddly. I get that this is very likely not a play by play of the original actual play series by Critical Role, and that doing so would probably be very tedious and slightly boring to watch, but leaving out the in-between parts leaves the story kind of full of holes. Maybe I'm not used to serialized media of this type anymore, but the time skips in between each episode were jarring. And then that last episode was a choice to end on. I suppose there's no real alternative with dealing from that episode either way, but boy was I kinda frustrated when I watched it.

April Gray (2026), frankly, was kind of bad. There is a quote from Susan Sonntag "The Medium is the Message", and this book is perhaps the worst case of this. I've been noticing that original graphic novels have a slightly juvenile style of writing anyways and more often than not it saves itself the effort of nuance. That's why I often mention that they're "just fun". That's fine if they're creatively written or have something interesting to say, but if they're not, they have the capacity to be genuinely awful. Then there's the benefit of coming with pretty pictures. Considering most graphic novels only contain direct speech or thought in some kind, and the narration needs to be short and snappy, there's not much prose to enjoy most times, so the art is really the hook. This read felt the most like King of Spies, which had similarly empty messaging, but at least looked nice. April Gray is heavily stylized, but looks a little unfortunate rotorscoping, where the faces take on really disquieting qualities, and I'm not a fan of empty backgrounds, which this one chooses to employ en masse.

Memories of Giselle (2026) made me deeply uncomfortable. It's a beautifully illustrated portrait of trauma while growing up, and how it creeps into the many different situations, even often influencing their outcome very directly. Their reminders are accompanied by the illustration of a sailing boat, which quickly turn into a sort of syntax for the scenes. Diegetically, they are images that the point of view character remembers, but it might just as well act as a censor-bar. There is a distinct sense at the end of the book that by having been affected by the trauma, the main character has lost a lot of opportunities in her youth, simply through trying to avoid exposure to it, but she nevertheless ended up in a place where she can be content with herself, which is a nice place to end this story. In a way it's a story where little happens, since it consists mostly of single scenes plucked out of a life, most of them not directly connected to one another, though there is an easy to grasp continuity between them, almost moving chronologically through a life. It uses this format very well though, and that format is what ends up largely responsible for the pivotal scene having the impact it has.

I was aware that there was expanded Avatar lore in form of comics, but I never got around to reading any of it, mainly due to access issues. Since I've found a fairly reliable source of comic books and graphic novels though, and I was made aware of the series again by the release of the movie and the new series, I was reminded to check those books again as well. Kya and the Secret of the Sand (2026) was the first book I found. It's a story that takes place between season's of the Korra series, and it deals with fairly heavy themes. It's reminiscent of the colonial practice of removing children from their families for some reason or another, a practice that the story had already addressed in its first run, but seemingly persisted into the times past the founding of Republic City. In this story, it's the Earth Kingdom military that removes children from nomadic tribes to assimilate them into their own tradition under the guise of introducing them to civilized way of bending, healing, and so on, while the story shows at several points that their own ways function just as well, if not better in the environments they move in. It's very reminiscent of the way indigeneous children were stolen from their families in the Americas and Australia, to be educated in state-run schools that would ban the use of their languages and traditions. I'm personally on the fence about including these elements in the story. It makes sense that these practices wouldn't have left the setting, and it gives the world a depth that is unusual for stories like these. However, I feel a little torn about the third series' run heading toward a post-apocalyptic setting.

Purr Evil (2026) is a pile of 80s horror movie tropes rolled into a fairly modern emancipation story. It contains a satanic rock band, a demon summoning, a pastel goth, a witch, faked death, a global threat and the conflict is resolved by the power of believing in oneself. I was never really into this genre of movies, though since it's such a large of pop culture I've absorbed some of it through media osmosis alone. Given how soaked this story is in the trappings of the genre, I think it avoids the worst of the source material. It was also a refreshing read in that it was a very sincere story on its own. The end is perhaps a little abrupt and somewhat uncharacteristically chipper, but I didn't mind too much, since in total the story seemed a little inconsequential most of the way through.

My copy of Against Empire (1995) by Michael Parenti is a little bit faulty. Perhaps it's an unedited PDF draft, or conversion errors from .epub to .pdf, given the odd format it had, but it was fine. The work is structured approximately like Blackshirts and Reds was, which I found to be a pretty useful read. This, too, has some chapters that are very handy for future reference. It deals with the modern forms of empire, primarily in its military and economic aspects (that is, the material aspects), but also addresses some of the cultural trappings of the mindset it instills. I had the luxury not to have to study under the US education system, so the chapter on academia didn't feel too familiar to me, honestly. It did dampen my agreement with the work somewhat, mostly because the tone makes it feel a little too close to conspiracy theory for comfort. It is hence, a little bit held up by the details that I had read about previously, which also makes it a difficult recommendation. It certainly is effective, if taken at face value, but that would be true of almost any persuasive literature, and I've read a fair share of things that I had an immediate rejection reflex to, because of the factual errors, which perhaps is somewhat unhelpful. The works of Yuval Noah Harari come to mind. My worry would be a similar rejection reflex to readers of this work who weren't already strongly socialistically inclined.

I Hate Found Footage (2026) is a weird little production by a small indie team. I found the touch of the puppet characters a pretty good idea, especially, because it dulls the impact of otherwise very amateurish acting. It was the puppets that made me give this a watch in the first place, considering I don't usually watch a lot of horror movies. It's a found footage parody, of sorts that has perhaps two or three really funny moments, and the rest of it consists of somewhat earnest attempts at filling the usual formula. Once human actors get added it starts falling apart a little bit. It seems all in all like a nice bit of fun by an amateur team, which is nice to see, but it was somewhat of an accidental find, so I'm not sure how many of these I'll actually be able to see in the future.

Caffeinated (2026) is a documentary film about coffee. It feels a lot more like what I imagined classical documentaries feel like, with a lot of interview sections from people across the industry. It focuses primarily on south-east Asian and south American coffee farmers, while the rest of the industry is portrayed primarily as a global endeavor. I don't know if that is true, it was just interesting to note. I don't really drink coffee, so the social behavior around its consumption are decently removed from my own experience, but I can at least imagine them playing out as described in concept. I found it somewhat dry in places, because by style or voice it was really very run of the mill, about as pseudo-neutral as is probably possible within the medium. Perhaps I would have found it more interesting if it weren't discussing a topic I have only very mild interest in.

Family Time (2016) is very charming. It has surprisingly strong characterization, which is perhaps a byproduct of not needing to use predefined characters. It takes its sweet time to get going, but I didn't really mind, as I didn't think it hurt the pacing, strictly speaking. The story has a few very interesting twists and details, such as the bit with the bars, and the final detail, which I found only slightly odd. The story did tease a sequel in its last few pages, which I'll have to try and track down. The art style is somewhat inspired by manga, but then again a lot of modern graphics are. This one just stood out to m somewhat, because its character art was very visibly manga-inspired, while the backgrounds were often somewhat painterly. Not in an illustrative traditional sense, but rather in the sense of bright water colors. I think all in all, this was a pleasant surprise, and worth a read. Especially if the sequels turn out well.

Avatar Legends is an anthology of little side stories across the established universe and timeline. It's mostly lightweight, feel-good stories. On occasion, there's settings we've already seen, which are utilized in the way they were meant to be utilized during peacetime. As such, this book is mostly a companion piece of worldbuilding and to a slightly lesser extent, characterization. I've not spent enough time with most of the characters centered by this collection to have been particularly attached to them, so mostly it's sweet to see stories show everyday interactions in a world that doesn't need saving.

The Tunnel to Summer the Exit of Goodbyes (2023) movie adaptation made me notice that I might be aging out of the medium. It was fine, all in all, but I'm not sure I can still enjoy the particular dramatics of anime, even though I very much appreciate the medium. I just wish in this case that the dialogue were localized differently. It's a story about grief and about ambition, and both stories only very briefly intersect, just enough to entangle the lives of the protagonist irreversably. There's some very visually pretty moments that in a different story might have been more effective if I hadn't been distracted by the audio.

Somna (2024) is an interesting project with an execution I don't really vibe with. It's a work about the witch hunts in I think the settler Americas. It's a little difficult to tell, since the names strike me as somewhat Germanic, but nothing else gives me any indication that that is supposed to be the setting. In the end, the exact geography of the setting is ancillary to the core of the story. The reader may already be familiar with the stories surrounding witches, as well as modern interpretations and the trappings that come with those. The point of view is taken from the wife of a "witch-finder", who is only characterized as loyal and devout, but not as a particularly good husband. Her physical needs remain unsatisfied, and she is plagued by dreams in which she is tempted by a devilish figure who is never further specified, allthewhile the women around her are executed for allegations of witchcraft. There is a lot of erotic imagery in this work, especially in the dreams, which also shift into a soft, painterly style and is painted so the book has to be read as horizontal page spreads, while the waking world retains the more traditional comic book style. The art across both styles work really well, though I, as a reader, feel like the dreams took up a larger part of the work than they needed to, and considering most of the dreams contained significant amounts of nipple, it starts feeling somewhat gratuitous. If this is something that the reader can enjoy or ignore, then I suppose this is a soft recommendation, since the story brings its point across fairly well in the end, but I can imagine that the dream sequences turn distracting fairly quickly.

Marvel's Ravencroft (2020) run is very reminiscent of the whole Suicide Squad IP that DC had, at that point, been trying to introduce into wider mainstream culture for about 4 years at this point, and this read about as well as the movie went, which is to say, unoriginal and a little confused about what it's meant to be, and ultimately, it settles on being a setup to other stories in the setting. I'm not sure it's not the concept that's a problem. It's just not particularly interesting.

Verwurzelt im Land der Olivenbäume (2002) by Sumaya Farhat-Naser is a book I happened across at a free book exchange shelf near where I live. The collaboration between Palestinians and Israelis toward peace has always been overshadowed heavily by the conflict on their land. The book is written by a professsor for Botanics working out of Bir Zait, but also organising in the Jerusalem-Link, a women's organization seeking exchange between the two peoples from the position of the civilian population. It chronicles her experience working, some of the notable events she has been present for and it also sketches some of the daily occurrences unique to the geography for a Palestinian woman. This work is written in what I'd consider simple language, but conveys through it the deep humanity of the victims and often also of the perpetrators in the conflict. Many of the instigators that she describes knowing or having spoken to act from a human place, and while that doesn't excuse their actions, it starts making it more difficult to see them as anything other. That, perhaps, is the value in this book, apart from underlining a civialian effort for peaceful resolution, which, while I'm not currently in the position of believing in, is heartening to know of.

Yesterday's Tomorrow (2007) by Bini Adamczak is maybe best described as a lament for the failings of the Soviet revolutionary government. It's very overtly an anarchist critique on Soviet history, but it somewhat precludes much of the context that the Stalin years of the USSR existed within, and had to reckon with. There's some theory embedded in the text, but more emphasis is placed on the talking points that are, ultimately common criticisms of the institutions of the time. I can't claim to be as enamoured with the Stalin years in detail, but I suspect that is because I'm rarely enamoured with wartime governments. Stalin's Russia had many failings, but it's not to be understood as a utopia in any case, at least not in the mid-21st century. We have already profitted from its formation, suffered from its illegal dissolution and learned much more about humanity, intersectional struggle and a people's economics since. Adamczak spends much time lamenting the wrongful death of people under this revolutionary government. She opens on the consequences of the Molotov-Ribentrop pact, later she delivers a retelling of the massacre of the Kronstadt autonomous region, and while I technically understand her frustration and disgust with both, and even agree whole-heartedly that they were unnegotiably wrong, I also don't think it invalidated the projects as a whole, the way she seems to. My evidence for this is her final chapter on Revolution in which she establishes a version of dialectics of revolution, in which she claims that an earnest revolution must give way to counterrevolution simply, because it is new. I feel, this misses the point of revolution, im that revolution itself is not the end in itself. Revolution is a period of high stress for everyone, the apex of a struggle between two classes, that usually concludes in bloodshed. It is a tool to be believed in when all else has failed, aiming to establish a form of government that hopefully doesn't require one to be abolished by its own people, once it has ceased to be beneficial to the working class. There is a fundamental misunderstanding of Marxist theory, which is surprising to me, because the author seems well versed in the language and the history, at least moreso than I would expect from someone unaffiliated with a far left cadre. I've not read a lot of anarchists; four by number, without Adamczak; and this one seems to me the most easily misunderstood and coopted, even against the author's own interest.

Ghost Pepper Vol. 1 (2025), is again, Image Comics looking very interesting on the graphical side. It's set in what looks like a post-apocalyptic cyber-punk wasteland. It comes in pretty strong with a mystery hidden in the lore that is communicated to the reader in the form of a story in-universe, which introduces the overarching conflict, and a lot of the world building is very interesting. The pacing however, is perhaps a little slow in the first few issues. Considering how much of the story and settings are conveyed through the character interactions (I don't think there is any direct exposition), that is a little odd to me. If I were to think of it in TV show terms, it feels like the entire first Volume could maybe fill out two episodes, maybe even just one. As of writing, I've tracked down the second volume as well, which I'll look into as well, hoping that it speeds up a little.

Ghost Pepper Vol. 2 (2026) picks up considerably from the first volume. It introduces a lot more of the larger conflict, after giving the characters some stakes (or rather introducing them). What makes this perhaps as nice to look at is also the thing that holds it back a little story-telling wise. The issues have standard issue length, but the panels are often arranged like in Manga panels, which is to say that they take up a lot of space. Everybody familiar with reading mange might be aware that 20-page issue manga barely fit any plot into a chapter, so one might handle each chapter more like one or two scenes. In this case, though, the number of issues bundled into a volume might be significantly lower than they probably should for a satisfying reading experience. The second volume leaves off at a place that I would have thought an appropriate point to conclude a first volume in, if I'm honest, so perhaps all in all, it's probably best to read these two directly after one another, as if it were a single volume.

Pym and the Eternal Forest (2026) is a beautifully illustrated take on classic fairy tale tropes. I'm fairly sure some of the characters are also meant to be direct allusions to popular classic characters, but popular depictions of princess stories have started to blend together in my mind. This first volume sets up the main plot, nicely, but there's not otherwise much plot to chew on. However, stylewise, I think there's some fun choices. In general, the book looks like it pays direct homage to classic Disney movies, especially in the way the animals are drawn. It prominently features an Owl that gives me Winnie the Pooh vibes. I'm also a great fan of weird horses generally, so this book immediately got bonus points when it featured a horse that moves on its hind legs and wears pants.

The Mighty Nein: Origins (2026) is an origins compilation of the characters, meant to tie into the comic books to accompany the Critical Role serialization. It covers four of the characters. I picked it up, because it led with its best foot, I suppose, which is a beautifully illustrated version of the Jester origin. It's similar enough to its animated counterpart, and I couldn't say anything about the way it went down in the actual play series. Most of the ones featured here have made it into the animated series in some version, and I suppose they were done better there, than they were in comic book form, but I enjoyed letting each of the characters recalling their backstory with a different art style. The fact that this is something I find interesting is perhaps a sign that I'm not really acclimatized to the medium quite yet.

Some lessons, I don't seem to be able to learn. Spider Noir (2026) is the first Marvel joint I've seen in a while. Maybe I'll see the new Spider Man movie as well eventually, but that have to leave theaters first, and that will likely take a while, because I'm definitely not sitting in closed room with people who pay money to see those movies. Having Nic Cage play Ben O'Reilly in this version is an interesting choice. I think he voiced the guy in the Spiderverse movies, which might have helped the decision along, but it doesn't really seem like his kinda joint. Cage strikes me as a guy that really enjoys participating in weirder projects, and this is not one of them. There are moments where I wonder whether he had a hand in directing himself, such as the spider pose he goes into several times, when close to death. It's a very goofy contrast to the storyline that is mostly played straight. I can report that I generally enjoyed how the story played out in this one. It was designed, to be potentially canceled (Thanks, Amazon Prime), so it ends in a good space, which I much preferred to how they handled Into the Badlands for example. What was perhaps a little jarring to me is the casting which seems partially colourblind, and partially not. The racism of the time is addressed only very occasionally, and the crowds are uncharacteristically diverse. I don't mind that per se, but I'm never really sure in what version of the world these stories are meant to take place in, and it would have been nice to see the intersection of African-American workers in prohibition New York, or the Asian-American lounge singer, or the Latina secretary of an independent investigator. That might have given a number interesting implementation. I'm not so sure how to feel about this kind of thing in general. It's easy to sound like a right-wing nutjob addressing race in media, but an unreflected inclusion of these characters also doesn't sit right with me. At the same time, I understand that not every series can be Reservation Dogs. There's also some inconsistencies with Cage's investment, I feel, across the eight episodes of the shows. In some scenes, I feel he's giving it some effort, while some scenes I feel like he's drifting through the script a little bit. I would concede that not every scene in the series is interesting, especially during what I would tentatively call the first act, but considering he's an actor that often gives it his all, even though it's not really meant to be high art, that was somewhat surprising.

I read three volumes of the current Catwoman run. They loosely contain three storylines, with one being joined by a larger narrative that switches between the two. The character was always interesting to me in their role as an anti-hero that's not the usual version of antihero in superhero comics. I think the point that her primary interest is stealing valuables forces a writer to do something interesting, and it often places in positions where she's not the worst person in any given company. Unsurprisingly, then, in her own book we see her exactly in these situations: Among otherwise untouchable people, acting, because she's not the worst person in the room. It also paints a bleak picture of her world, which is probably part of the character, but leaves me feeling like the storylines are always a little bit unresolved.

Die: Loaded - Zero Sessions (2026) is the first six issues of the Kieron Gillen story and ends exactly at a point at which I would end a first volume of something that's ongoing. The story markets itself as a Jumanji-alike, but using D&D as a template. I have a decently long history with pen and paper games, and what's perhaps most interesting here is the way each of the players kinda reflect playstyles and to some extent players I've met before, and how there really isn't such a thing as a "good player" at a bad table. The world-building itself is rarely specific and when it is, it differentiates itself clearly from the D&D lore, which I'm more than fine with, considering I'm on the record several times with claiming that I dislike the D&D lore and world-building. I think as obvious as the pitch for the series is, it's a pretty good implementation from what I've seen. What I probably have to say at this point is, that the first act, which is essentially these first six issues, takes too long to get going, not dissimilar to every campaign I've ever played.

The sequel to The Devil Wears Prada (2006) came out sometimes this year, so I decided I'd just watch them back to back. I'm not particularly well-versed in fashion, at least not beyond the very slim margin of items I wear myself, and so I didn't really think it was for me, considering the way it's sold by fans. I'm also just not a person who can enjoy movies for the faces that appear in them, so the cast never convinced me to give it a try. In practice, the first in-depth exposure to the movie came through the excellent podcast Articles of Interest, which covered Miranda Priestly's contribution to fashion and fashion reporting earlier in the year, which, to me, was immediately more interesting to me. Once I was willing to approach the movie apart from the (admittedly very pretty) optics, I found myself enjoying it. Admittedly, some of the life-stuff depicted in the film does rub me the wrong way, but maybe that is a very modern disposition that conflicts with the standard expectations leveled at partner-relationships, which, as far as the time this was released in goes, is actually quite healthy, all things considered. Apart from that though, what I felt was refreshing was how tactile the way it was filmed felt. Over the past years most movies go are released with a polished, heavily touched-up in post visuals that make the world feel fake or empty somehow. This movie comes from a time when bird's eye had to be filmed with a helicopter, and somehow the reality of the shots, even on sets, feels like everything that the camera films is actually there. That also goes for the faces. I know the actors and actresses wear makeup, but they don't look airbrushed the way many films feel to me. That's probably primarily due to the lighting and not due to post-production touch-ups, but it's made me appreciate the way faces look when they're not overexposed. I think the shadows and the asymmetries make them interesting to look at, especially when I compare my engagement here with that that I manage to muster with most of the more modern production. I get that direct comparison here is inviting a self-selection bias just through the fact that whether this movie was made with audiences like me in mind, it's considered a classic, and I'm fairly sure most new releases I manage to catch won't be, but that doesn't change the fact that my interest for this movie was held primarily by the technical details of the production, whereas modern, often more expensive productions meant for the mainstream market I often don't even feel bad treating as audio material a lot of the time, because the occasional glance communicates its technical detail just as well. The second movie is a very different and very similar affair, and I'm not so sure either is a compliment, strictly speaking. It's very occupied with the troubles of the times. There are some directorial choices that are more in line with modern filmmaking sensibilities, which in turn do not at all agree with my taste coming off the first one. It's not a problem with this movie per se, I think, it's just something that stands out in contrast. I'm beginning to dislike the bokeh-effect that accompanies anything even approximating a close-up, and the muting of the audio for private conversations in otherwise noisy spaces more and more. At the same time, I understand that this is just what movies are like now, and I don't think expecting that this one bucks all norms is reasonable. It retains the rough shape of the first movie, though on a much larger scale, as is customary for revival movies, and it treats the magazine with the same reverence that the first did, though the signified of the fashion magazine is of course wildly different in an age where print media is being squeezed out of the mainstream and clothes as a medium of self-expression is falling victim to over-consumption. The fact that the movie suddenly has to move in a space where its primary subject of interest has been in steady decline for the over a decade means that it needs to suddenly concern itself with the money, many of which are visibly depicted as some flavour of idiot. I don't technically disagree, but it's always somewhat jarring to see hollywood do this, while it's still so vocally struggling with the trappings of wealth. A lot of people don't seem to have developed much in between movies, which, considering, it's been 20 years diegetically as well, is a little odd. Then again the first movie was clearly never meant to have a sequel, and most sequels of this kind face a version of this problem. It was an earnest movie, all in all, I suppose, but unsurprisingly, I think I might prefer the first one.

I don't really know where I picked up David Runciman's How Democracy Ends (2018), and part of me wonders whether I would have bothered if I had had the opportunity to read some excerpts. It's a book published almost as if in direct reaction to the wave of political collapse that was 2016, which marked somewhat of a turning point for many of the center liberals that had, up to that point, carried significant faith in the institutions of their "democracies". That analysis like this comes from those that felt betrayed by their systems slowly failing around them should probably be unsurprising, but I still find it slightly worrying and aggravating to read the product of that realization. In fact, the two expressions that kept popping up in my mind while reading this were "coping" and "ill-informed". Both are probably uncharitable. The author has a political science background - a British one, for all it's worth, but at least he has one - and his reference seems I think limited by the long and problematic history that has birthed the anglophone political sphere. British and American politics forgets very frequently that politics looks different elsewhere, just as central European politics forgets frequently that politics looks different on other continents, and so on, and so on, all the way down the ladder of privilege. As such, the categories that Runciman works with are very monocultured, which heavily dulls the analysis. His core thesis is that 2016 could only happen because "Western Democracy (sic.)" was already in decline. He identifies the sources of this decline in the political and financial stratification that decoupled them from the democratic authority of the population, the "technological revolution" and the ghosts of alternative concepts of organizing society, such as technocracy and epistocracy, both of which I'm not at all familiar enough with to give a judgment of his reading on. What I can speak on is the way that in his analysis, "Western Democracy" seems to be especially removed from the surrounding global history, doubly so when it concerns its failings, many of which were brutal, bloody, and directly interfered with even Western Democratic conceits of democracy in other countries, while non-Western systems, which in essence are still democracies, even if the US/European political sphere doesn't get along with them as well as they do with their direct neighbours, are criticised for the same, then disqualified from the analysis on that merit. In fact, the analysis is so faulty, that a consistent application of either method somewhat invalidates the core statement in that if we were to treat all countries like he does the "Western Democracies", then Democracy ending. It's just ending in the West; and if we were to judge the "Western Democracies" like he does the rest of the world, democracy has already ended, or rather it never really had a chance to live an proliferate, and instead it gave way almost immediately to autocratic structures in business and politics. I, personally, tend toward a reading with less broad strokes. I'm on the record as favouring material action, often even over political ones. Democracies are systems in which the people drive these actions. The more they are designed for this process, the more democratic it is. It's not an on/off switch, as Runciman comes dangerously close to describing it as, but rather a principle of organizing society that can be implemented in countless ways. It's something to aspire to, obviously, but we've seen that democratic elements don't automatically make for a functioning society. The UK specifically has tried for a long, long time, and it's encountered many devastating setbacks on its way, none of which was directly caused or aided by the democratic factors of its society. 2016 just marked a decision where it went wrong for almost everybody in the country, similarly to the infamous leopard that was loosed into US politics the same year.

Snowblink (2025) depicts a sombre future in some French territory, along with a journey to the Arctic, the latter though only in short flashes that are publicized diegetically on a small media screen somewhere in the main setting. There is a distinct cyberpunk quality to the depicted present, but the focus is on a patchwork family consisting of a single mother with a grade-school age son and a neighbour that takes the role of partner and foster-father for the child. The mother begins the story with a diagnosis of Korsakoff-Syndrome, which she spends the book attempting to hide. It contains a lot of dramatic and quiet moments that seems to sketch a portrait of life in this kind of world, but the form of serialization is a little unclear to me as of yet. It's crushing, in the same way portrayals of people in these worlds, in these position often is, if we skip all the action that the genre is usually so rife with.

I finished the 2023 Kelly Thompson run of Birds of Prey, the first volume of which arguably got me into the medium properly. Maybe it was just a lucky pick, but this book succeeds in a way that many of these runs I've read so far don't. It's a book that makes me interested in characters that I didn't know of before. It's not difficult to like some of the core cast, even though none of them are the typical A-Listers, or at least more at the periphery of the wider mainstream than the household DC names. Barda, for example, is a character that I probably wouldn't be interested in, but the dynamic she has with Cassandra Cain made her much more compelling to me. The storylines also make sense considering the team-up and were fun to read. I couldn't tell why that was, but I think it helped that the art-styles were pleasing to the eye and there were no parts that jumped out as odd to me. I supposed I will have to start keeping an eye on Thompson's work, if ever I find a good system of filtering for authors in this medium.

There was a cast recording of Hadestown released recently, which I of course couldn't resist taking a look at, even though I'm hoping for a chance to see it live in Amsterdam next year. My curiosity about this show is a little odd, considering my usual tastes, because I was honestly a little perplexed when listening through the soundtrack. Musicals are a little odd as a medium, because there's no way to know, without trying it out, if you will gel with a production just by the music, which is a very valid way of interacting with the medium, and often enough, I find I can understand the emotional beats of a show by its full track list. Not just in cases like Les Miserables or Chess, where the track list is the entirety of the show, but also for productions like Heathers where that is not at all the case. That is usually, because most shows consist of music and dialogue. Hadestown is a little different, in that it consists of music and the stage. This, more than most shows, can't really be experienced in any way outside the show. Even this recording, I'm very certain is far from the optimal experience, obviously, but it can serve as a legible preview. Like the Hamilton recording there were a few shots that would have been impossible to see as an audience member, which I'm a little split on. I just don't understand what they add, and in context I find them a little distracting, but I suppose it's fine, as long as they're interspersed sparingly. One very specific gripe I had with this recording was the sound mixing. I don't know whether that was a choice made to drown out audience sound, but the band fader was being pushed up and down, which inherently sounds a little shit. There is just no good way to do that. Just leave it where it is, and mix the vocals in over it.

I read the first seven volumes of the current Poison Ivy run. I've always liked her as a character, because, especially in these modern iterations, she's right, but she's also heavily flawed, which makes her a very compelling character to see grow. Of many of the traditional Batman line-up her mission is definitely one of the most sensible ones overall, and her methods aren't half-bad either, nowadays. She has of course also benefitted heavily from the modernization of the industry, diversifying her as somebody who engages in "natural" relationship structures (that is less rigidly structured ones) but can also have a favourite person. It's made her very suited for a modern reading, in the age of climate change, and at least aesthetic anti-capitalism. The seventh volume also ends up in a really interesting place that I would love to see play out. I think I had pretty fortunate timing in picking up this book, because in the serialization, because unfortunately there were some significant low points in the story. It had a bad case of recurring villain syndrome, and in the fifth and sixth volume, the story turned into an idiot plot for a while. It could have been meant to play off the character flaws of the cast, but that didn't really come through too well to me, mostly because by that point they had had four full volumes of character development behind them.

The first volume of Kill 6 Billion Demons was a deeply confusing read to me, and I also had difficulties reading it on a 13" horizontal laptop screen. I had a slow day recently and managed to catch up with it (somewhere in the middle of Book 6), and on 28" monitor, this reads much better, and up to that point, I could let myself be immersed in the story. Reading it in such a short timeframe made me appreciate the artist's journey as a story-teller and an illustrator. They started out fairly strong in the first place, but where they ended up in the sixth book is amazing. What I appreciate most is how dense the storytelling is, even from the second or third book. The artist wastes almost no panel on anything that isn't worldbuilding or character development, and they know how to make things look cool, and hand-made. Their style is unlike anything I've ever really seen. They also succeed in something I otherwise rarely appreciate: Filling up the frame. Most of the frames are so busy and alive with the world. Nobody stands still, but often they stay in frame and do some fun little background thing that has nothing to do with what happens in the focus of the frame. That makes the world feel like a strange, vibrant place and kinda justifies waiting for the whole thing updating page by page.

Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca (1938) is about the most protracted and meticulous depiction of impostor syndrome I've read. I'm not usually a fan of settings like these: Affluent European countryside estates. This story, though, feels like it couldn't possibly be set anywhere else, and it works very, very well. Books like these are probably not generally written for me, since I think I'm a somewhat disaffected reader (or person in general), so having the book leave the impression it did surprised me. The last third of the book picks up even more, and it doesn't really stop until it gets to the end. I went in expecting to be perfectly satisfied with the read, but I think I might read it again on occasion, because it has a lot of layers. The narrator standpoint alone could be argued to shape the story heavily, if it's read as a first person account. I, personally, don't really think that's the case, simply by the narration style after the first few chapters, but considering how the book starts off, I understand the reading. It also manages to sketch interesting side characters with deep implied lives, which is something that comes around toward the end of the book. It's honestly really surprising, because for a while characters and names come and go with seemingly no real weight, and I had difficulties telling some of them apart. I think the final scene of the book also contributes heavily to the haunting impression it leaves, so I'll leave it unsaid.

Clara & The Devil (2026) by Olivie Blake and Little Chmura is a Faust-like set in modern day, with more modern sensibilities. It's illustrated like a liquid dream, very deliberately including only the parts we are meant to perceive. It's much more direct than it perhaps could have been. In its directness, it gets to the core of its characters without all the denial of diverging self-image, beyond the first chapter. I particularly like the use of colours. It's almost colour-splashes in many frames, against the washed out colours of everything we're not necessarily meant to focus on. It suffers from first Volume syndrome though, where the story doesn't get going before the first volume is over.

Black Jacket (2026) is a Blackjack roguelike about redepmtion and gambling addiction. It's a short game, relatively, and I'm not entirely sure whether that was meant to be that way, but I definitely didn't mind. The mechanics are more or less Blackjack with only one suit to start, and then the deck is built as one goes along the run. Each card can also be "awakened" to include some fun effect to hopefully get closer to 21, along with some items that also come with their effect. The primary restriction that is new from the traditional game are the tablet slots, which are by default limited to 5, and there's the "sleeve" to "cheat" with. The story follows a gambling addict in Limbo, trying to settle their debts with the most important people in their life, which are encountered as stage-end bosses. Their relationships are slowly revealed to the player as they win against these bosses. Now, I have a good amount of card counting experience, so I suspect that once I understood what cards there were in my and my opponent's hand, I got the hang of it relatively easily, which meant that the bosses got easier as I went along. It happens to agree with the storytelling, where eventually the people agree to leave Limbo with the player. Then there is a final "surprise" boss that got me thinking a little. The story is simple and told relatively simply as well, but I liked how it weaved into the mechanics, even if technically it made me feel bad playing it. It's perhaps also an indicator that this is the kind of game I might like more than the AAA stuff I tend to try and drop somewhere along the way.

Stokely Speaks (2007) is a collection of Kwame Ture's speeches during the latter time of his organizing work, one of which is a long address about Pan-Africanism, which is a theory I didn't really understand. The notion makes sense in hind-sight, but having it explained in a bite-sized initial concept made it a little more cogent. Ture pulls heavily from his contemporaries, some of which had already been murdered by the time the speeches were recorded. That gives I think a very tangible context of his work collected in this book. He worked in dark times for the movement, and of course said movement was still struggling against a lot of the contradictions that every such movement usually has.

Dark Deity II (2025) is a tactics RPG by Sword & Axe LLC. I started a playthrough in a hotel in Linz, waiting for a meeting, and at the time I thought it was fine and I had little drive to continue. However, at a similar point in time when I finished Black Jacket, I thought it would probably not be that much of an effort to finish this as well. I've played a few tactics games at this point and figuring out what to keep an eye out for wasn't difficult, once I got going. It's a pretty forgiving game on the difficulty setting I played on, and there is enough grinding opportunity that I was rarely underleveled. I really enjoy a class system, which was eventually what kept me going. I wanted to try all the classes and see how they worked on the field with one another. In the end, it was the rogue-alikes and mages that probably carried me through the playthrough. The story is simple, but there is a plot-point that I didn't think the story had in it. I think story-wise Black Jacket was more poignant to me, but it wasn't a terrible story, It's very regular fare for any piece of media in medieval fantasy settings and I do appreciate the opportunity to kill an emperor.

Nabokov's Favourite Word is Mauve (2017) by Ben Blatt is a collection of statistical analyses run on the Anglophone literary canon. It uses the similar analyses used to determine authorship of the anonymized Federalized Papers as a jumping off point to run interesting checks on texts of prolific writers, those books we regard as "classic literature", and fanfiction to collate answers to questions like whether authors stick to their own advice, whether one country's literature is louder than another, what an author's favourite spice is, and many more. It's not meaningfully shorter than other books I've been reading recently, but reading it was a breeze. There are a lot of graphs included that present the information pretty well at first glance, and Blatt includes which biases he controlled for while running the analyses. I think that it might even be a nice introduction to statistical analysis who is less used to reading scientific analyses.

The Once and Future Riot (2025) by Joe Sacco follows the American journalist trying to reconstruct the major beats of the Hindu-Muslim skirmishes in Uttar Pradesh, India. I happened to have visited similar places earlier in the year and the way the people spoke about Muslims struck me as notably crass. I should be used to Islamophobic rhetoric, living in Western Europe, where it's used to mobilize the disenfranchised and politically illiterate, but I've rarely heard it in so unsubtle a manner. I'm not religious, and I don't look visually like I'm Muslim, but considering the country that my papers attribute me to, it made me feel a little unsafe at the time, not the very least, because they didn't quite seem to believe me when I told them I've lived in Europe my whole life. It makes me wonder whether this is part of the spiel that foreigners get, in the way that every country has a shortlist of factoids to tell visitors from abroad that are a little wrong, but aligns the listener a little with the speaker. The India/Pakistani relationship has some similarities with the Israeli/Palestinian one, though perhaps lacking the clear cut question of occupation. And then the book turns into the steps that escalated the conflict, the events that led up to the tensions turning violent, the failures of the reconciliatory efforts. It lingers on the violence in the way accounts like these tend to do, but the tension's source is addressed through the lense of religious castes. It's probably not an entirely wrong account, but I would hope that there is more to it. I couldn't name it, but I also have very limited knowledge of the politics of the area.

Reading Naomi Klein's Battle for Paradise probably set me up for an experience like earlier this year, but for her seminal Shock Doctrine. I was in the mood for a short read, and this fit the bill nicely, which is why I picked it up. I don't really read blurbs anymore if I trust the author, so when I got a sense of the book's topic, which is the recovery of Puerto Rico after being hit by Hurricane Maria, and the struggle against capitalist vultures trying to hog all the infrastructure for themselves in the form of investment deals and buyouts. I noticed the considerable overlap with her Shock Doctrine thesis, and then the second to last chapter is exactly about the way Shock Doctrine method figures into the tension between corporations trying to monopolize systems in need of repair and the grass roots efforts that often struggle to come up with the material/capital required to do so in a timely manner.

I read Wiccan: Witches' Road (2026) mostly as a quick in-between. I found that comic books can serve as a quick distraction if I have twenty minutes or so and my brain is fried from other stuff for the day. This was one such read. I've been struggling to enjoy Marvel stories in these, but this one was pretty good. It's odd how much of a difference it makes for a character in these comics to have some object through which to express their magic, as well as the kind of spells that are done in this book. When I read a bunch of Scarlet Witch stories earlier in the year I found that its action was deeply illegible, so I probably should have expected something similar here. It never occurred to me, until I had to sit and reflect here. The art style does not qualitatively factor into the difference of legibility here, but the spells that are worked in this book have a folklore inspired effect, which meant that their effect could be observed first, before the consequences hit. I much preferred it this way. At the end of the book there was another short story featuring the Wanda/Vision family fighting several goofy Ultrons in a a one-off I have to assume was meant to be good fun. I guess stories like those are supposed to fill the same niche in the medium that slice of life stories have in others.

Somewhat predictably, I really liked Mulholland Dr. (2001). I think I recognize a few of the actors from Twin Peaks, which, to me, is a little nostalgic. Like the movies of this type, it's a little opaque, but I think there is a relatively straight-forward interpretation that emerges from everything that comes after the Silencio scene. Maybe, upon a rewatch I might feel compelled to write a full essay about it. I miss films that have enough ambiguity to write several thousand words about them. On the technical side though, it's very of its time and I felt some of the cuts a little rapid toward the beginning. The longer we get immersed in the mystery though, the better the cuts and the lighting become to me. I find Lynch's weird humour carrying the early movie when he's laying the pieces for the story proper. It's very informed by the look of film (i.e. perfectly made makeup and lighting) in the first of its half, which I initially thought was a distracting flaw, until the turning point very literally put its own material into perspective. The way in which the story spirals in on itself is very reminiscent of some of Twin Peaks' latter seasons, and it always appealed to me as a hint in these kinds of stories.

Fitting Indian (2025) is a story about generational trauma and belonging. Some of it feels slightly familiar to my own experience growing up with Asian parents, specifically the part where I would listen to my mom shout into the phone as part of a normal conversation. It's broadly relatable to a second generation immigrant, I think, in the way that race factors in most points in small, often predictable, but unavoidable ways. Still, this story doesn't strike me as about race, which I actually quite liked. Stigma about mental health is of course stronger in some communities than others, and the visuals sorts the people in the story clearly into their positions in families and societies, but it probably would have only required minor tweaks to the story to shift it into a race-blind (read: white) setting. The author mentions in the back of the book that it's a personal story, though not autobiographical, and I think that makes a lot of sense, because the chain of events seems subtly directed, with dialogue familiar from life, and less from media.

2026, Q2 - Finishing the Scarlet Witch Omnibus

The second season of Apothecary Diaries (Toho Animation, 2025) was everything I could have wanted from a second season. It had higher stakes and it seemed like a standalone arc at the beginning, before tying back interestingly into the first season. It also introduced (kinda) one of my favorite characters of the show, and the climax was very interesting the whole way through. And this is while I actually had a difficult time watching serialized media, due to external circumstances. I already had high expectations of it, which is why I picked that season of anime to watch from last season, and they were more or less met. I'd be very satisfied if this were the end of the story, but if it's not, I'm certainly happy to watch a third.

Tales of Mystery and Imagination is a post-humous anthology of the writings of Edgar Allen Poe. I found a pretty edition of it at an airport in Warsaw, and since I didn't have anything by Poe in my bookshelf yet, I decided it was worth the few Euro the price converted to. I had read some of the stories before, and had a vivid memory of them, I assume from another anthology I read during my library days. I don't quite like Poe's writing style, because it feels a smidge too expository to me, but as an early mystery writer, I suppose that's not too much of a dealbreaker. Often, the concepts he writes about are interesting to me, and they have become staples of the gothic horror genre for a reason. The Dupin Stories, I suppose, come to mind first and foremost, as they seem most apparently a precursor to the Holmes-alikes of the literature world. The plot in these stories has mostly already happened, because the plot consists wholly of the mystery to be solved. Dupin spends most of the story walking step by step through the mystery, that's already solved in his mind. It's, in a way, the conceptual opposite of modern detective stories in which the process of solving the mystery is often highly dynamic, but key information is witheld. Between the two, I, perhaps spuriously, somewhat prefer the latter, even if it defeats the point of a mystery story entirely, simply because it still has a hope of entertaining. None of this is the fault of Poe. The sensibilities of the time might have rendered this static presentation more entertaining than it is to today's audiences, which have internalized story structures, archetypes and plot staples to the point where they can tell when any one of them is overly present, or entirely absent. It just renders his stories as an appreciation of the old masters, rather than an entertaining read for its own sake.

Wonka (2025) is a movie I feel conflicted about. I like movie musicals as a concept, as evidenced by the fact that I like musicals as a whole and everybody benefits from wirework that's not several meters in the air. Additionally, I didn't grow up with any nostalgia for the original Gene Wilder movie, nor do I harbor any special fondness for the Roald Dahl story, if only for the fact that I never really found his stories all that charming. Still, this iteration doesn't quite sit right with me. I became very aware of the trappings of the movie musical around the time La La Land came out, which I still love to this day, but it was also accompanied by The Greatest Showman which I suppose I feel similarly conflicted about. The latter I think is an apt comparison, because this newest Wonka iteration is at least slightly afflicted with the same weaknesses. I can ignore a weak plot if the music is good, and while the songs are nice enough, and at least more fitting in tone than the ones that featured in the vast majority of The Greatest Showman, I feel like there is a clash between the compository style of the original, music, which features in key moments, and the new additions. In that way it resembles slightly the Mary Poppins sequal that was swiftly forgotten upon release. The technical side of the music is executed fine enough, though the pitch correction was very present in some scenes, which is a shame, since as far as I can tell, all actors on screen are decent singers. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that they shot the scene with audio and maybe did rounds of ADR afterward, though it might have been easier to perform the dances on top of recording or a click track. As far as movie musicals go nowadays, it sits squarely in the middle of the lineup, I feel. Not a Tom Hooper monstrosity, not something that I absolutely needed to see.

The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, and Capitalism in 17th Century North America and the Caribbean (2017) by Gerald Horne tricked me somewhat with its cover. It felt so thoroughly like it belonged in the 90s that I was a little surprised to find it was so relatively recent. The book presents, essentially, a play by play of the relationship between the European settler-colonialism and the development and enshrinement of slavery as a pervasive institution. It covers the beginnings of slavery, rather than the end, which, now that I've read the book, I realize, is heavily abbreviated in regular education, even outside the US. It's slightly off-putting how much the legal insititution of slavery was a collaborative effort, even as the different European naval powers still waged wars against one another. It wasn't a very engaging read to me, but I think it was still a good use of my time to have read it, as I wasn't aware of the details of the early beginning of the category of "whiteness".

Scarlet Witch: The Omnibus Volume 2 made a lot more sense to me as a compilation than the first one did. I suspect that might be because the "secondary" character meant more to me immediately than Darcy did in the first volume, since she seemed like part of the setting initially and I wasn't so sure about how that was meant to function. That doesn't mean I really knew the character in question, it just registered more immediately. I had pretty large break reading comics in between reading this and the previous volume and while getting back into it was easy enough. I did find myself having trouble with some of the formatting of the pages, but that might have been the state I was in when picking it back up. I found the volumes of this run up to volume 5, so I'm going to try and finish them relatively quickly for now and then check into something else that's maybe a little more stylish.

There is no Antimemetics Division is an serialized collection of stories set in the SCP universe written between 2015 and 2020. I picked it up, because the title is striking. I've never had the time to get into serious SCP lore, but it's very much up my alley as a fan of stuff like Delta Green. The book reads initially like a vignette of stories centered on a Marie Quinn, the head of the Antimemetics Division within something called "The Organization". I'm sure it has its place in the lore, as I've the term thrown around, but I think the story works without knowing the full extent of the different organizations. Later on, the book evolves into a more concentrated story, with more of what I understand the classical trappings of the SCP lore to be, including involving civilians in the effects of the anomalies and plans specifically constructed to circumvent the highly specific ways these anomalies functions. The book reads relatively comfortably, as it's very contemporary, and the concepts that are introduced with each chapter keep things interesting.

Said On Opera (2024) is a collection of opera reviews by Edward Said, more known by his seminal work Orientalism, which I have not read yet, but plan to in the near future. It handles its subject matter like a review in an opera magazine might, assuming some knowledge of the specific text, which I don't really have. I'm passingly familiar with Fidelio and parts of Wagner's work, but since I don't really listen to music in my usual day to day, I have basically no familiarity with his Ring, because getting familiar with 60 hours of music, is a big ask. Still, he gives a sense of the perspective through his writings, finding some points of interest through which to interpret the work in such a way that a narrative emerges. I have to assume that Said has an intense appreciatiom for opera, being able to cite text from each of the pieces to support his interpretation, certainly more than I can honestly muster. I suppose I will actually read Orientalism if I want to know whether this was a good primer on his style of analysis.

Scarlet Witch: The Omnibus Volume 3 is the Pietro Volume in the collection, which, at this point in time means, that there is a fair amount of familial baggage. This is starting to read like a case study of "I don't understand X-Men lore" in that even though events that are relevant are shown in flashback, I'm fully lacking the context that would make those events make sense, and provide the full framework to deliver the emotional payoff that it was probably supposed to have. At least the plot in itself took a clear backseat to the emotional story between the siblings, so my reading experience didn't suffer from not knowing who the villain of the week was.

Scarlet Witch: The Omnibus Volume 4 is perhaps the most interesting of the volumes, if only because it deals directly with Wanda's past and relationship to it. It's got the most interesting art, as she moves through realms and deals with the giant eldritch horrors. It's also the first of these Omnibus volumes that has concept art pages that I find interesting, because of the inclusion of Lore. It also includes a few nice family moments toward the end that makes rounds off the story in a way that seems more cohesive than the previous volumes. I'm supposing that Wanda's reservations regarding the Dark Hold won't be resolved by this volume, nor should they be. There's been an undercurrent of superficiality in the writing of these volumes that has been bothering me, because it makes the struggles very "solvable" by way of magic, and such fundamental story conflicts are probably better served by longer storylines.

Ghost Spider: Broken Chords (2026) is one of the many multiverse storylines that the character seems to be irrevocably tied to. I've seen a lot of trade volumes for the character around, so I've become a little more familiar with the status quo that this character is associated with. It's very cozy, which meshes very well with the playful art styles these stories are usually illustrated in. Again, I'm not too familiar with all the ancillary characters in these, and I don't really understand the canon, without which the story isn't too interesting, it still managed to be a denser plot than the Scarlet Witch Omnibus Volumes, just because it wasn't so occupied with the action. I think that made it more of an enjoyable read, but I also just liked looking at the pages more, because the simple layout meshed well with the art style and it didn't take itself too seriously.

I caved and watched the fourth season of Make Some Noise, because I already enjoyed most of Game Changer, and I ran out on the back-log. I still think I enjoy the weirder aspects of Game Changer more than I do the relatively straight-forward improv, which makes my enjoyment mostly dependent on the contestants. It makes me notice something about improv that I wasn't aware of before, which is that I primarily enjoy improv when it's impressive on its face. Very few people make me enjoy their improv through their humour alone, and usually that is when it's chaotic and weird, as would be the case with Ally Beardsley or Vic Michaelis. As such, my favorites are bits that are either music related or make me genuinely envious of how well people can use language, as is usually the case for when Ross Bryant. Still, it'll hold me over fine until Game Changer is hopefully back.

Terrorbytes (2026) is a comic anthology in the vein of Black Mirror, i.e. techno-horror with a societal twist, which tends to miss more than it hits. The first volume opens on a framing device which is the most interesting aspect I've found story-wise so far. It ties in with one of the stories, less with the others, as it leads the reader through vignettes of highly individualized stories that often make allusions to timely figures, less so topics. I guess that's what I don't love about Black Mirror either. The stories are somewhat difficult to decouple from their aesthetics when presented so overtly as a criticism of a single person, when it might have been more effective when leveled against all participants of the system. Some stories feel like shaking their fists at the youths with their phones. I'm certainly no friend of social media, but the "App that kills" has been done to death - ironically - and feels spiritually too similar to the "Video Game that kills", doubtlessly a successor to the "Movie that kills" etc. It reads easily enough, and if the framing device manages to get more space in future volumes, it might be more charming than this first attempt has been.

Batman - The Brave and the Bold - Tomorrow's Heroes (2026) is surprisingly legible for a collection that iterates through so many characters in such a small number of pages. It definitely benefits from going through some of the most iconic DC character roster, so it wouldn't need as much characterization as it features, but as someone relatively unfamiliar, I appreciate it from a story-telling perspective. In a sense, the collection might well function as a primer on the characters in the current run of DC comics (or rather the previous, if I'm not mistaken). I also learned that I never need to see another Bat-Mite panel again in my life.

Marxist Modernism (2024) by Gillian Rose is a transcription of lectures to what sounds like a contemporary arts and history class. I wasn't sure what I was getting into when I started the book. It was a relatively quick read, and given that it was a transcription of the spoken words from what's essentially the present, it wasn't too difficult to digest. The editors made the effort to source the text before printing, which is much appreciated. It's probably not a great introduction to the Frankfurt school, nor would it be for Marxism as a school, but it serves as a good overview of the relationships between the different thinkers within and around the philosophical school. There's a lot of small details, especially what Rose describes as misconceptions, that are cleared up during the course of the lectures, which made for interesting little tid-bits, if one is already familiar with the writers in question. It's a bit like learning about Ghandi's favourite ice cream flavour: Humanizing, primarily, but really not so consequential for their work. I wouldn't recommend it as a primer for a reader trying to get a grasp of the fundamentals, but even as somebody entirely unfamiliar with the Neo-Marxist body of work, a sense of the main points of their analysis will likely remain.
I'm realizing that philosophical schools like these are a tricky subject to present. The primary value in texts like these is probably to make the reader aware that this school exists in the first place, since the work itself is reasonably modern and contemporary in style that just reading the fundamental texts might be easier than trying to pull a similar understanding from somebody who has done transitive work on the text.

Sosa's Epistemology is the first philosophy book from a tradition that I wasn't pretty familiar with before checking it out. I thought I managed pretty well when getting into the existentialists, so perhaps another school of philosophy might not be very difficult to decipher. I stand corrected now, partially because I suspect that the books I read before were never meant to serve as a text for philosophers to read. There is a cadence to philosophy books that make them a little difficult to read. It's the cadence that comes to mind when a philosopher is described as "verbose", or when they're accused of "twisting words". I was never a fan of this style of writing, but it is a decent choice, given the process of argumentation as it is constructed for philosophy. Sosa builds his argument detail by detail, extrapolating to the next form of "knowledge" or "skill" or "aptitude". It seems, to my sensibilities, a lot more rigorous than some of the philosophies of old that would have to fall back on some form of divinity, which made the argument a lot easier to understand, but just not as interesting as the ones that Sosa constructs. I have a sneaking suspicion that the style is making it a lot more difficult to understand the argument, and hence to find any steps of the arguments that might not be as airtight as they seem to me now, but I will just cut my losses on this read and hope that I'll get better at parsing these texts with practice.

Rubyfruit Jungle (1973) by Rita Mae Brown is one of the first lesbian novels in American literature. It's often described as partially autobiographical, but as I don't really understand what that means, I hesitate to say much about it. It follows a young woman, growing up as a confident lesbian (in that she is confident about her sexuality, but she also happens to be very forward in her character) trying to navigate a world in which all parts of her identity are used to discriminate. She's an ambitious biracial woman who can "pass" for white, and each of these aspects of her identity is eventually instrumental in breaking up her romantic relationships. The novel begins in the American south, during the protagonist's school days and slowly works its way into more affluent circles, mostly afforded to her through academic excellence. It comes together as the portrait of someone who knows what they want and is willing to do what it takes to get there while staying true to themselves. I found the many interpersonal relationships very engaging, especially toward the end of the book. Molly at that point has already chosen her way, and she has several opportunitues to reconnect with people with which she's parted on bad terms, or of which she seems to have had some unfulfilled expectation. Her first lover, her mother, a cousin she had been close with once, and she observes how time has changed them in a way it simply hasn't for herself. That, specifically might have been a product of poverty, but the difference is still jarring. It left me wondering whether all the other people she's met had the same downward trajectory while trying to fit somewhere that wouldn't take them otherwise.

Ghoul (2026) by Kasey Iris is a charming graphic novel about grief. It's drawn in a loose, crayon-y style that allows for a lot of creativity in terms of layout and lettering. A lot of the text is worked into elements of the background in a way I've not seen before - not that that means anything, I've not read a lot of graphic novels - and it allows for the reader to experience the visual and audio of the world in a simultaneity that's divorced from traditional paneling. There's generally not a lot of panels that come to mind when thinking back on the work. The story itself is a heartfelt story about a girl who moves into a neighborhood of immigrants with her Filipino family after losing her best friend to mental illness. It's immediately clear that this new neighborhood is a tightly knit community. Everyone uses their mother tongue with one another while never giving the translation, and it's still a functioning way of communication. I find it charming, and the mix between English and native languages feels very familiar as a second generation immigrant. The protagonist's grief leaves her vulnerable to the influence of a snake witch that can feed off the energy of people through butterflies, and uncovers a missing person's case. It's a simple story, but the presentation makes it an engaging read. It has a happy end, which feels appropriate.

Gotham City Sirens: Unfit For Orbit (2026) by Leah Williams is a heist gone wrong story featuring the core of the Sirens, which are Harley Quinn, Poison Ivy and Catwoman. The always gives way for fun story-telling, mainly because they're sympathetic characters that don't take themselves too seriously. There's the usual DC comics edge to the moment to moment action that the medium lends itself to, just by the options that emerge from its visual characteristics. I still struggle badly with placing it in the timeline, because it seems like this is the first job in a while, and meant as a sort of revival for the title, but every other Sirens book I read begins and ends in these states, so I'm not sure if that's just something that will come up when I don't read the week to week serializations.

Fathers and Sons (1862) by Ivan Turgenev read to me like a love story than the showcase of philosophy that it was probably meant to be, because, unfortunately for me, the central framework this book seeks to showcase is nihilism, which I have a history of misunderstanding and failing to apply correctly. As far as Russian literature goes, I found it a little more of a slog to read, because thematically I was just disengaged from the entire thing. I also had difficulties getting into the first few chapters, because Turgenev is a very visual writer, whereas I am almost entirely disconnected from descriptions of visuals, especially as it pertains people. None of this is Turgenev's fault. It's perhaps the most extreme divergence between a reader and a an author I've experienced. In typical Russian fashion, the people in the book use a lot of nicknames when they're familiar with one another, which would be fine if I understood how those tie back to the actual names. Once used to the quirks of those, the book picks up. My own reading experience was slightly hampered by the quality of the physical book I was using. It's the first time I read off a print on demand copy, that had the pages glued to the spine, so I had to strain to hold the book open the entire time. It bothers me in hindsight, because I bought the copy in a physical bookstore, so apparently now I have to start looking out for print on demand books in person as well. As such, my entire interaction with this work was somewhat unfavorable, at now fault of the author, which is all in all a bit unfortunate.

The Secret of Me (2025) was a slightly unusual watch on my part. I find it difficult to watch documentaries, especially ones that center social phenomena. Film-making has a way of framing people in a way that makes them characters, meant to either build sympathy or not. It's difficult to watch documentaries that communicate opinions I don't agree with, and watching ones that communicate opinions I do agree with isn't as interesting, beyond the filmmaking and the moment to moment details. This film follows an intersex person who has received "corrective genital surgery" (in quotes because of the circumstance in which it was performed, not the procedure in general) as an infant, a practice that is still alive for reasons that are beyond my understanding. It gives the historical background of the practice, while following their journey growing up, initially as a girl and young woman, then eventually reclaiming their gender identity with a more masculine presentation after a while of organising in the San Francisco queer community. The emotional focal point is the confrontation with the surgeon that performed the surgery, as well as decided that it would be necessary. It's a calm, well mannered affair, not the least, because I feel like Jim is a very good speaker. The style of the movie is initially a little heavy handed for my tastes. I'm already not too fond of film music tracks when they strike me as "emotional" (it's not a well defined category on my part) and especially hitting the viewer with it, before the topic has been established doesn't sit quite right with me. In other places the music seems like it's used better. There is an instance of a track that incorporates typewriter sounds, accompanying the media coverage of one of John Money's experiments, and in that instance I found the music carrying momentum. Once the film got going, I could get more into it. Does my heightened enjoyment make it a better documentary at those points? I'm not sure. I'm somewhat afraid that it doesn't, because I was primed to be sympathetic to the subjects of the centered persons in the film anyway.

Gangster Ass Barista (2019) by Pat Shand has a regular pitch surrounding a former criminal trying to leave the life and struggling with their past trying to pull them back. It seemed like a fun enough story by the covers, so I picked up the first volume's worth of issues. It's a short and comfortable read, and it's nice to see comics arising from an indie space as well, even though I felt like this book in particular could have benefitted significantly from coloured pages. The art style is an almost cartoonish black and white, with thick outlines and not a lot of grayscale, which makes everything look a little flat, and even though the perspective-work isn't wrong per se, it doesn't feel like the pages have a lot of depth. On personal grounds, I'm not a great fan of resolving any kind of plot with police, partially because of my own experience telling me that they're very bad at solving problems and very good at creating more problems, so seeing the approach in this book leaves me a little ambivalent, though I understand that it's one of the usual methods of the genre.

The Traveling Cat Chronicles (2012) by Hiro Aikawa is another in the series of books about cats written by a Japanese person, which I've taken to collecting. It's the story of a man recounting his life, while pretending to look for a new home for a cat he's adopted. The perspective shifts between that of the cat, the man, and flashbacks from the view of the people he's visiting on his quest to pass his cat on. It's a simple, but beautiful story, and potent enough to make me melancholic about the ending. It's a very beautiful story about the fleetingness of life and the way that different people see the world, and also the peculiar love between humans and cats, which almost made me cry.

The Power Fantasy (2024-2026) is a series by Kieron Gillen and published by Image comics, and it's very much made me pay attention to the publishing house in particular. It centers a small group of "Superpowers", who have, through their collaboration, and also individual potential to cause death and destruction, become a political body by themselves. The story delves into their personal history and failings, and the consequences on the people around them that are privy to less power than them. It's an interesting story, and it's beautifully illustrated. I don't want to speak too much on the plot, but what I can recommend this on is the way it blends different art styles, depending on where the scene is set. The art is very effective as well. When I contrast it to some of the depictions of superpowers from other works I read in this time around, this one communicates very succinctly what is supposed to happen, and I didn't even need the description of what they do. The way the characters interact with the use of the powers suffices. In the way, I suppose, the story works so well around it, because it's a story about people and power, and not really the intricacies of the superpowers in question. In the end of each issue there were a lot of covers that are similarly stylish like the covers of this run, which were a large factor in me picking up the issue, which kinda makes me want to check out other finished runs by this publisher.

Spider Noir: The Gwen Stacey Affair is an alternative universe retelling of the beginning of the Peter and Gwen storyline, but set in the 1950s. It's an aesthetic I enjoy, and the art carrying my enjoyment of that trade. I'm not sure what to think about the plot of the whole thing. I'm not so much bothered by the guns and the Nazis, but there's some significant gaslighting component present in the story that I don't think gets resolved by the end of it. It's certainly not the ending of the story, or the run, I'm sure it'll come up eventually, but as it ends, it looks like Peter gets off clean at the end of this particular book. I'm honestly not sure if that aspect was present in the original storyline, it might well have been, but I never read the original story. Considering it's a pretty recent revision, it could have been changed a little, perhaps, though I don't know whether there is any version of this particular drama I would have liked.

Phantom Road Volumes 1-3 (2025) is a Project Blue Book-esque supernatural mystery story, published again by Image Comics. The topic is not quite the stuff I'm usually interested in, but I thought I might give it a chance, as it was the only series with full volumes by the publisher I could find at the time. It's not a completed story yet, which is why I can't say much on the writing itself. It's a little reminiscent of the Umbrella Academy in tone, though without the superpowers (mostly), which is somewhat charming. Whatever praises I had for The Power Fantasy, I can repeat more or less here. The art is heavy on hatching, very stylized, and adds a lot to the story being told. It lends the grimy feeling to all the scenes that is such a staple for mid-west Americana. I'm not personally a huge fan of the aesthetic, but I can recognize when someone made the effort to embody it, and especially when the cast and story has as much mainstream appeal to probably function equally well without a clean execution of the as well. I'm hoping that they manage to tie up the story in another volume or two, because then it'll be a quick and engaging read.

Revolusi (2020) by David Van Reybrouck was an odd read for me. I more or less read it blind, not knowing anything about the author or the work beforehand. It is the first time in a while since I did that with a history book, and my feelings about it are mixed. On the one hand, it's clear that a lot of work went into assembling this book, there is a care for the subject matter on display, and the author's politics aren't entirely faulty. I also appreciate that there is no pretense about the neutrality of the work. Van Reybrouck states his opinion on the state of affairs explicitly on several occasions. The book aims to reassemble the history of Indonesia from the Dutch colonial era up to the after the successful decolonial struggle under Soekarno, using the accounts of people who witnessed it in person. The effort in otself is admirable, and it put Van Reybrouck in a tricky situation. While based in Belgium, he has Dutch roots, which places him in the position of writing about a country that was colonized by a country he has close ties to. Those ties also express themselves in the selection of sources. Because of how colonialism works, there is a relatively large Indonesian diaspora in the Netherlands and former Dutch colonies, who are often prone to romanticise the colonial periods. We dom't get much background on the sources individually, which is the way these things usually go, but begins to pose a problem when one notices how often the fact that they speak perfect Dutch, or have lived in Europe for several decades comes up in their descriptions. I don't think Van Reybrouck sought out these witnesses explicitly, I think his position as an author for decolonial history made people with a proximity to the topic gravitate toward him, and there is likely something of an implicit obligation to include them. He did include sources whom this doesn't apply to, so clearly he made an effort, but this heavy slant warps the narrative of this retelling somewhat.
Colonial history is impossible to divorce from violence, because of how central it is for its continuance. If I claim that the precise detail of the violence doesn't matter, that would be a little disingenuous. It very much mattered to the people who were there, but my particular interest is not with these details, but rather what the effect was within the relationship between the afflicted parties. To illustrate, use the popular example for Trotzki's assassination. Did it really matter that he was killed with an ice-pick, when we consider his relationship to the nationalist wing for the Bolshevik party, and his split with Stalin? Revolusi dwells a little too much on the ice-pick aspects of the eyewitness accounts for my tastes. This has a few benefits, in that it highlights forms of colonialist control that might be more easily overlooked. The use and rapid change of language as it went from Dutch control to Japanese control, and finally to that of the decolonial militias, for example is often an aspect in the snippets of eyewitness accounts. The levers of power, though, the ideologies at play and the greater analysis of the material approach are a little obscured by it, though. The methodology of the latter take a particularly bad hit, in my opinion. Van Reybrouck uses an analogy of a cruise ship, which is perhaps an attempt to do class analysis without using the vocabulary irreversibly tied to Marxism, but it tinges the analysis in a very Western, colonial hue. It manages to illustrate the differences of the material realities of the three decks, but loses the grasp on the interests that come with it, and painting them as spatially segregated gives the impression that interaction between such classes were sparse. It loses out on the roles of law enforcement, those that moved through the upper decks, invisible to those that live there, but make its luxury possible, rendering them impossible to a face-value read as they were to the colonial machine.
Similarly, the indigenous population of Indonesia takes a problematically passive role in the narrative. After the colonization by the Dutch, the people's consciousness seems almost as if in stasis until the Japanese occupation, and even then, their mist significant contribution seems to be their inaction against an invading force that until then had treated them better than their current colonial occupiers. The surface level argument paints this silent allyship as a result of some sort of race-based sympathy, but I wouldn't pay too much credit to that hypothesis. While perhaps that might have played a role on a political level, the indigenous population of Indonesia didn't have a central political body. The militarized portion of the population, subsumed into the colonial Dutch military at the time, might have been more prone to that rhetoric, but the primary difficulty in holding an occupation comes from the broader population. Van Reybrouck noted this, and the presence of Japanese immigrant even during times of Dutch occupation, as well as the positive relationship these populations had on native soil. The brutality of the Japanese occupation would express itself when the after a military victory over Dutch colonial forces was achieved. That probably shouldn't be counted as a propaganda victory of the Japanese over the Dutch, as the population on whose resistance the Dutch would have been reliant on was only exposed to it after the Dutch had left the country. The "mistake" was in conflating the local Japanese diaspora with the state they came from.
The decolonial struggle loses a lot of its meaning when reduced to the violence committed in its name. Van Reybrouck writes of a population "radicalized" by their Japanese occupiers against the Dutch and "Indo" (Dutch-Indonesian) population. That is a deeply flawed reading. By this point, the country has been in some sort of occupation for the entire lifetime of its majority population, certainly the young ones that are prone to militancy. Expecting them not to have learned the violence that had been directed against them is naive at best. This part of the history is probably harmed the most severely by the heavy Dutch slant in the selection of witnesses. If this violence is portrayed as senseless, the implication is that a continued (or returning) Dutch occupation, in which the native population is considered subhuman, would have been preferable, for an indeterminate amount of time, over the flash of the independence struggle. The collaborationism of Soekarno with the Japanese occupation here is almost incidental. That connection was predisposed for success, simply because it was the Japanese who originally pushed the Dutch out of the country, and it would be the Dutch who attempted to reclaim it after the defeat of the axis at the end of the second World War. Ideologically, I would have liked him to be a classical socialist as well, but that doesn't matter so much in the context of a decolonial struggle. Him and his cohorts were the ones who were available, and at the time, the Dutch were still struggling to reestablish their rule, even leaving the majority of its military operations to allied Gurkhas. The violence against Indos at the time is regretable, certainly, but not surprising. During Dutch colonial times they had been classed higher than the native population. This was a distinction that the colonizers had established, and their unwillingness to take care of a population they had uprooted from their environment through their colonial politics led to an unsurprising backlash that hit that population hard. At the same time, this violence was not what would move the Dutch to capitulate, but the military losses that mounted, often because they were heavily underfunded, as back home, the country was trying to rebuild from the war. In total, Revolusi paints the history of Indonesia as one of violence, flattening it by not going into the politics of the involved populations. I'm aware that this book is already a work of tremendous effort and I don't want to assume things about the author's worldview by reading just this work, but the understanding of the history, in my opinion suffers heavily from this indistinguished both-sidesing. Indonesia is still a heavily propagandized country and struggling against economic oppression to this day. I'm not convinced this book helps much. Do I still think the book is worth reading? It's certainly entertaining enough, and the voices of the people of the time are interesting. Perhaps if I had a better book to recommend, I would, and then it might even be a pretty good accompanying read. As it is, I'd recommend reading it with the trappings of colonial history in mind, perhaps only after reading things by the likes of Frantz Fanon first for an understanding of the mechanisms at play.

2026, Q1 - The Same Book Twice On Accident

I was lent a printed copy of _If I Must Die_ (2025) by Refaat Alareer around Christmas last year. At the time, I was still struggling my way through _Anti-Dühring_, so I only got around to actually opening it in the new year, but it was a quick read. Not an easy one, but linguistically not as challenging. I was already familiar with Alareer's work as an independent correspondent for the Electronic Intifada, and I was made aware of his murder by the occupation through those channels. As someone not particularly versed in poetry, I fear I can't make a coherent statement on the poems printed between the excerpts of his work here, but it gives a close, personal account of the conflict, which I assume would be quite effective in combatting propaganda. If I could, I would make it required reading, before making as much as a public statement on that prolonged human rights violation. 161. End the occupation.

The first volume of DC's _Creature Commando_ is not so different from the cartoon series that I stumbled over in the last quarter of last year. It has somewhat less heart, I feel, which I suppose isn't entirely its fault, since it's competing with James Gunn's writing. However, I want to put my finger on why I didn't enjoy it as much as its animated... cousin, I suppose. It features a new cast, which feels like it has somewhat less heart. Part of it is perhaps the tendency for comic books to lean on edgy dialogue to characterize, especially when dealing with anti-heroes. It's not in principle a problem to have a racist vampire - and I mean old-school racist - but flaws like these need to be addressed in a way that justifies the reader spending time with them. It's just the first volume, but some of these problems kinda just go away after a while. I never saw much of an arc in the characters to justify the point where they end up by the time the volume concludes. Having been conscious enough to understand the appeal of Suicide-Squad style setups by the time the first Movie came out, I fear that this title would have had to do a lot more in the way of writing, because the setup just doesn't have the novelty that the much less edgy comic-book landscape of yesteryear would have afforded it. Perhaps tie-ins with other parts of the shared universe might have helped put them into context.

_Swimming at Midnight_ (2025) by Valentina Grande is a graphic novel about belonging, and about how we're never quite done growing up. It tells a down to earth, perhaps even familiar story of women whose past standing up for the right things has cost them l, and who have now been settled mostly with the costs. It's a beautiful, if sobering read. The art feels reminiscent of cartoonists' drawings, and the colours are subtle, painterly, if at all present. Stories like these, that are simple in plot, but heavy and facetted in theme, don't often lend themselves to this medium naturally, but in this instance, it works. The work lives off the quiet, wordless moments, that would rarely even be written about, if this were prose. Looking up at a Halloween mask stuck in a tree, or even watching people swim, for instance. It gives the point of view character a melancholy, accentuated by the choice to include her neitral expression in the frame.

_This Soviet World_ ( ) by Anna-Louise Strong was an enlightening read. She makes a good case against the Great Man Theory of History by highlighting the actual processes that happened within the USSR. Her writing itself is perhaps a little prone to grandeur, considering her journalistic background, but it only really took me out of the read a couple of times. The way the work focuses on the common citizen takes away the weight of the admittedly many failures of the Soviet experiment and places them as the errors of a state trying to govern, and not as the malicious attempt of tyranny that it's often portayed as. I consider this a more healthy analysis of any state, not just the socialist ones.

_Menace of Our Times_ (2025) by Aaron J. Leonard is a detailed play by play of various American factions - some governmental, some not - chronicaling the attempts to weed out communists in North America. It feels comprehensive, though it's likely not, but the granularity of its sub-chaptering and the highly focused retelling of the aspect of the story each subchapter addresses makes it a good reference book. I didn't personally retain very many details of this book, but it's left me with impressions, enough to probably find my way back to it, if I need to look up something. The four rough categories it decomposes into are legislation, press, BoI operations and popular (as in emerging from the general population) fascism. They have been the classic parts of manufacturing consent for many other cases since then, but it's not often that, outside of the McCarthy years, the cruelty of this collaboration is highlighted beyond cases of "history's losers".

_The Killer_ (2023) starring Michael Fassbender is an adaptation of a graphic novel that I haven't read, and tonally follows the tradition of movies like _Drive_. It's not particularly plot-heavy, and provides a very dry outlook on the human condition. It's almost a miserable watch, since I don't really like the action much, which put movies like _Monkey Man_ into the enjoyable territory for me. What saved this one, is the genuine moments of humour in the performance. There's also a very stark difference between what the in-character narration describes as the central world-view of their protagonist, and what ends up happening. It kept me on my toes while watching what was essentially a scavenger hunt as a revenge movie. For those moments, the watch was entertaining enough. It's admittedly not a wordy movie, so it's very unsuited for second-screen watching. That's OK, just not what I was going for at the time.

_I Am Their Silence_ (2025) is a fun mystery graphic novel centering an erratic psychiatrist that gets very involved in the lives of her clients. One of her (former?) clients, who is several positions down the line to inherit the land of her family that has been rich off the production of premium brand champagne, invites her to a reading of the relevant will. There is a murder, of which she is the prime suspect, and her license to operate is temporarily revoked. It also turns out, over the course of the framing device, which takes place in a therapy session with what I assume is a court-appointed shrink. She also has a family history of bipolar disorder, and is advised by the women that raised her. It's overall a fun, if simple read. The protagonist is charismatic, and one of those chaos gremlin-types that personally appeal to me, up to the bisexual messiness and the inability to put up respect for authority figures. The art style is also very reflective of that fun tone, with exaggerated facial expression and vivid colours. There's a minimalism in the style, which is almost reminiscent of comics for a younger demographic. The shading is minimal, and there's a very traditional cartoon design aesthetics to some of the people in the work. It conveys movement really well, even if some of it is meant to be slinky or a little stilted. I've not seen this in a while, and it really does a lot for characterization.

_The Bad Guys 2_ (2025) is the sequel to the Dreamworks animation heist movie of 2022. I remember quite liking the first movie, on account of the animation style and my interest in heist stories in general. As far as sequels go, this one makes sense to do, and it builds heavily on the first movie. It's nice to see sequels that seem to acknowledge that they need some reason to exist. The general tone of the movie is a little less charming than the first one, at least to me, since they upped the scale of everything a little, and I find it's usually difficult to keep the laid-back tone while dealing with planetary threats. What worries me slightly is that it seems like they're gearing up to turning the movies into a franchise and I'm not so sure that's going to work for even another movie without turning very literally into _Cars 3_ (is that the one with the secret agents? I've not seen any beyond the first one).

Naomi Klein's _Hot Money_ (2014) is a fairly short collection of three essays centering the intersection between climate politics and capital influence. It's doesn't exactly live up to _Doppelganger_, which has started me on a search on Klein's works, but it's also not a fair comparison. It reads like a primer to the concept that capitalist climate politics will run into challenges built into the system itself, but also not necessarily advocating for politics that are radical enough to dispense with those challenges. I don't feel the need to make my own stance on the issue clear here, but suffice it to say, most essays (I think) are sourced from Klein's _This Will Change Everything_", which I'll read in the near future.

_Love Through a Prism_ (2025) was a different series than I thought it'd be. Anime is failing to capture as much of my attention these days as it once did, and in my younger years, I might have enjoyed it more as well. It's a love story cebtered around people attending an art school, but as is typical for the medium, it inspects many different themes on the side. I personally missed the insights into the artistic process that other works with similar premises could showcase, but in the end, it seems to be interested primarily with the relationship the discipline has with its artists. It becomes a split presence in the roles it fulfills in the characters' lives. It's aspiration, outlet, hobby, obsession, bonding medium and trauma, and I suppose in a way it makes sense to treat it as such. Through this treatment though, the series turns slightly into a less high-energy sports anime. It's not what I'm personally interested in, but it's an honest portrayal of the topic.

_DC's Finest: Catwoman - Vengeance and Vindication_'s first volume deeply confuses me. I had somewhat hoped that it would be something akin to the Hawkeye collection I read last quarter, but it's very much not. It seemingly goes through various iterations of the character across time, which is fine, but I really don't like any of them in this volume. Some of it - well, most of it, really - is the writing. It's just how DC comics were written at the time, I suppose, which to me is a little bit cringe, and a little too willing to partake in the insensitivities of the time. There's also no real through-line between the chapters, so it reads like an anthology, but I suspect that it will be a lot more legible for people that already know what happens before and after the issue printed in here. Perhaps it's because Catwoman is not as central a character as the hero whose story she's spawned from, meaning that perhaps she genuinely only shows up in peripheral issues to move one mcguffin from A to B. Also, I genuinely hope that these aren't the fan-favorite issues or storylines of the time, because it features genuinely the worst attempt at heavy stylization I've ever seen. I'm gonna try again with a trade book for this character, I'm sure, but I'm not going to check out the second volume.

_Olympos: Nullhunter_ (2025) is a retelling of the ancient Greek myth of Hercules, set in a cyberpunk, interstellar future. I get that there are many versions of the cyberpunk aesthetic that are decidedly maximalist, but this work envisions its environments in a level of detailed that to my eye is always a little uncomfortable. I'm not sure why, but most of its graphical presentation feels a little off, or at least not to my taste. Even in its maximalism, the aesthetic can appeal to me, as proven by the time I spent with Cyberpunk 2077, and the Shadowrun pen and paper. On the one hand, there is some very traditional cartoony character design touches to the visuals - exaggerated size in defining features, but simplified faces, which are somehow drawn with too much detail. I found it genuinely difficult to tell some of the characters apart sometimes, especially when they had similar hairstyles.

_Scarlet Witch: The Omnibus Volume 1_ is almost cozy in the way it's structured. I feel that it's probably not amazing story-telling to have a protagonist more than able to deal with any issues they encounter, but it works decently well with the monster of the week storytelling that this volume is structured around. I'd probably rank it solidly in the middle in terms of engagement. There were issues I found pretty boring, others that were interesting. I'm beginning to think that certain powers just don't lend themselves well to drawn choreography, especially when canonically it's just red energy doing stuff. The art style is modern and pleasant to the eye, much more so than the previous two comic books I read, but also not so expressive that I'm likely to remember it in the future. I'll read some more later down the line, but more because I thought it was passable.

Emma Goldman's autobiography _Living My Life_ is an account mostly of the struggles of anarchist organizing in the late nineteenth century, and into the early twentieth one, including a detailed evaluation of the early Soviet Union. It's not a difficult read on the surface, but it is a long one, even if I happened to come across a copy that had been truncated by about half its length. I found it more than lengthy enough though, fot now I will have to remain content with the fact that I missed a lot of the words that Goldman penned. My edition was a modest 1700 pages, and - coupled with the other book I picked out for myself - I decided I eventually to move on.

The main impressions of Goldman's writings on her experience organizing obviously has the two different back drops of Euro/US political landscapes, which were hostile to her cause in most accounts, but her early life is also marked heavily by forming relationships that would last a lifetime. Often, tragically, not hers. The most impactful of these relationships is what would become a partnership with Alexander "Sasha" Berkman, whom I wasn't at all familiar with until reading this, and whose writings I might want to check out for myself on occasion. Her organizung efforts in the US certainly take up most of her life's time, and with what I think might be somewhat mixed results. However, looking into the index for chapters, the reader will find a 200-some page chapter, entirely focused on Goldman's experience after being deported from the US to the newly established Soviet Union. Arguably her writing and descriptions in this book reach a zenith here. Goldman is highly critical of the USSR, the Petro-Soviet's detachment from the proletariat, and the unchecked authority of the Cheka. I'd argue that the chapter might have been shortened if one wanted to be concise, but the descriptions stretching the wordcount give a very immersive view into the parts of the proletariat left behind by the revolution. Still, knowing how these things would be perceived and reproduced, Goldman did explicitly mention in a later chapter that her disappointment was in the state and the bourgeois reproduction of the ruling class that emerged from the Revolution, not with the revolution itself. I, personally feel a little torn over the account, since, while I don't suppose that the memoir captured any of the chapter incorrectly, I'm not so sure it paints a complete picture. It's certainly not Goldman's responsibility to do so, but I can see how anything on these topics could be used - and in fact was used, even during Goldman's life - for overt propaganda purposes. I probably wouldn't go so far as to call Goldman's expectations for the Soviet Union utopian, but considering the context of the previous tsarist state, from which the Bolshevik revolution emerged, and the fact that a project like this was being attempted by a vanguard of intellectuals with little to no experience in statecraft, I fail to muster the same disappointment in Lenin and his contemporaries. That's not to say I'm excited to read of their failings or am willing to dismiss them. Not unlike Goldman herself seemed to regard the US as overall not ready for sweeping social change, I find their failures lamentable, but not entirely surprising.

_This Changes Everything_ (2014) is arguably the Naomi Klein I should have read instead of _Hot Money_, mostly because the latter is fully contained in the former. It probably did something for me to skip all the chapters that already appeared in _Hot Money_, but I had just finished reading it not too many days prior, so I decided to truncate the otherwise slightly lengthy work to one of the size of my usual reads. It is fair to have published the pieces twice though, as through the surrounding chapters in _This Changes Everything_, the environmentalism does gain a more holistic understanding that wouldn't be complete without the capital-criticism that made up _Hot Money_. In essence the topic of environmentalism is broached through two main roads: anti-capitalism and decolonialism, each is fundamentally incomplete without the other. While Klein acknowledges this throughout several places in the book, the book aims to illustrate why a complete environmental protection policy requires a heavy focus on both. I feel I'm getting a sense of why Klein is such an interesting author. She manages to place anecdotes in places where they aren't counterproductive to the narrative or rhetorically inappropriate. Her experiences, while intensely personal, tie into a larger dataset that have effectively the same experience. Rhetorically, this is a very clever structure, and her execution of it is so effortless that it's not always apparent that this is what she's doing, until one tries deconstructing the argument.

The book is a somewhat bleaker read, because it deals much more heavily with the consequences that performative climate protection has had on disadvantaged populations, mostly in the Americas, but that makes the threat of exploiting the environment to its breaking point more material than might be initially apparent when the term "climate change" is used. Environmental protection policy touches on a lot more than just the changing of weather patterns or a year's average temperature, and we tend to forget that, not the least because often the most immediate and jarring consequences of policies like fracking and extraction of rare earths for profit or (over)production tend to hit completely people that have little voice in the debate. Cancers, hits to reproductive capabilities, generational ailments and a whole host of toxicities accompany what was deemed necessary for a colonial, capitalist system to thrive. The book doesn't provide a bottom up approach to the issue, and it doesn't have to. Arguably, if it did, it might have found less resonance, both with me, and with general audiences, but to a reader not immersed in actual "Blockadia" organising spaces, having the image of what climate protection is at the fronts of the actual oil drilling sites, is undeniably a powerful one. Whether it can convince those who don't really want to grapple with the issue, I couldn't tell. Part of me fears that it's too late for the centers of capital production, and indigenous groups have been successfully kept away from the nexus of power with impressive reliability. Perhaps it does require an organizing manual, once someone has figured out a way that works and isn't coopted by the alphabet boys given enough zeal and money.

2025, Q4 - Entertainment as Observed in a Stressful Quarter

2024's Nosferatu is a really interesting retelling of a classical vampire story. I've never seen the original Nosferatu movie, and there's some difference to Bram Stoker's Dracula, so I'm going to treat it as its own thing for now, though I should arguably take a look at the original at some point. Nosferatu's strength is primarily in its set design, and the performances. The directing, I'm sure is also good, but I don't recall any stand-out shots in cinematography, which is primarily how I notice that particular craft. The performances in the movie however are very good. The leads, played by Nicolas Hoult, Lily-Rose Depp and Bill Skarsgard all have a very convincing screen presence, even though Skarsgard's presence here seems somewhat routine for his filmography. What makeup they did for him, did obscure his face enough, so I had to look up the credits again to be sure. As far as the horror aspect is concerned, I feel that it's not the tensest horror film I've seen in recent years, but that makes it very palatable for non-horror fans, just looking for a nice period-drama.

2025's Novocain is a simple, fun action movie. It's premise could be reduced to a single sentence - and one that doesn't reference another movie. It's something I can appreciate. It follows an assistant manager of a bank with a genetic condition that prevents him from feeling pain, trying to rescue a love interest, kidnapped by bank robbers. Many plot beats are not particularly novel, but the movie is readily carried by the performances. There's something fun about watching someone stumbling through an action scene with the affect of someone unfamiliar with the setting, but detached, as if not worried about the damage they're doing to themselves. It's nothing I've not seen before at all, but it at least strikes me as an execution that has thought put into it.

Poor Things is likely still in many peoples' memories from last year. It's a beautifully shot movie, where each style decision has clearly readable intent behind it. It's also a bit awkward to talk about without making it sound creepier than it's depicted. It's subject matter is one that rightly is a little bit uncomfortable, just by the virtue of the fact that feminism can still be a contentious topic, depending on the time and the people one finds oneself in the company of. There are heavy class undertones in many of the later scenes of the movie as well, but they take a back-seat to the thesis. Most of the movie depicts a young woman experiencing the many ways she is objectified, without having the understanding to name the process or understand why it's wrong. Even into late stages of the movie, she is meant to have an adolescent mind - or brain, to essentialize the issue - and reacts in a childish way to these situations. In most cases, this childishness is characterized primarily through a sincerity that would have been filtered out of "polite society", which the protagonist finds herself contrasting against constantly. The set design is also easy to get lost in. There's a lot of odd machinery and heavily stylized architecture. There's also a use of colour that opens up as the protagonist gains the ability to move in a world of her own accord (though this doesn't innoculate her against manipulation), and the set design grows more grounded, as she grows up, and regards the world around her with less and less childish naivety.

Invisible Kitties by Yu Yoyo I picked up on vacation, to add to my ever-growing collection of books about cats written by Japanese authors, only to later discover that this is in fact a book about cats written by a Taiwanese author. There are also very tangible differences in style, when compared to I am a Cat or If Cats Disappeared From the World, linguistically, though I suspect that is less of a language characteristics, but rather something that emerges from the fact that Yoyo writes a lot of poetry. The edition that I own mentions her winning poetry prizes, and that explains a lot of the literary texture that this books is absolutely dripping in. It's not a difficult book to read, by any means. The text itself consists of two to four page vignettes that describes living with and around cats, but it approaches it with a sense of wonder that is almost child-like if only it weren't content to just sit and watch. It's genuinely cozy and heartwarming to read. At the same time, I probably couldn't even emulate the style of the prose that Yoyo puts to paper in what is otherwise an easy read. It's light, but leaves a very clear impression in a way that I suspect will stick with me for a while. I also want to mention that there's little doodles every other page that, while not technically impressive, so very well match the style of prose they accompany.

JoJo's Part 4 is significantly longer than the preceding parts, and it's mostly detached from Dio for once. While I felt like the Manga found its identity in Part 3, in Part 4 it begins experimenting with the formula. It's main antagonist, for all intents and purposes, does not have an overwhelmingly strong ability, when compared to the cast of protagonist. What sets him apart is arguably experience in the realm of stand battling, which consists mostly of finding novel ways to solve a problem. It made for a similarly entertaining read as Part 3, but I think that the extended length had the early chapters drag a bit on occasion. This part was also less focused on the titular JoJo in favor of highlighting an ensemble cast. Said JoJo is also notably more of a child, when compared to the Kintaro-esque hyper-masculine protagonists in the preceding parts. There's a really charming beginning of a family dynamic, now with three generations of JoJos around.

I picked up Black Bag (2025) on a whim, not knowing it was a Soderbergh joint. I've liked enough of his previous works that his name stood out to me in the credits, but evidently I've not liked any of it enough to pick up on his directorial style in any way. The story of Black Bag is relatively straight forward. It's a spy story with a clear-cut villain, who gets revealed at the end, and it somewhat invites following along with the story. Neither performance really stood out to me, and the cinematography was standard for this kind of story. It's perhaps even a little disappointing, considering the names attached to this project are all fairly big.

Red Valkyries is one of the more fun works I'm aware of within Kristen Ghodsee's bibliography. Ghodsee is a prolific historian specializing in Socialist history, and in this work she's done the newcomers to political theory a huge favor. I've heard recently that reading biographies or memoirs is a good way to get into reading history or theory, and in that vein, this book primarily presents a broad and brief overview of the lives of notable women in Soviet history. The way it's written makes it easy to continue ones own research into the stages of these women's lives to get more detail. There is some theory (or rather, reflection on praxis) at the end of the book, but the memorable entertainment value is definitely in the biographical sections. For those intimidated by Kapital and not up for any one of Lenin's works, this could be a neat starter into Socialism from an almost cultural perspective.

The Amateur (2025) is a movie in the tradition of the Jason Bourne franchise, with all its strengths and its trappings. Rami Malek has been somewhat unfortunate with roles in my opinion. He is clearly a very good actor, as evident in his early TV career, and even when the script is lacking, his performance is usually quite good. This film lands squarely in the middle ground as far as his scripts are concerned, but the style suits him.

I find detailed retellings of history interesting in my age. I know I didn't use to, perhaps mainly because the parts of history presented to me never had much of an angle that was directed for me. That's a story for another time. Either way, Catlick (2020) is a series of loosely connected snapshots of Atlanta's history as a southern US state, that I found thoroughly enjoyable. It tells stories that are often unconcluded at the time of recording and it features a bunch of characters that one could probably make a deep dive on alone. One of said stories ends in a Wafflehouse parking lot, which is demeaning in a way only the US can be, but as a whole, this series shows a rich history of Atlanta's Cabbagetown that, while not comprehensive is quite intriguing. As a fun little bonus, it also happens to include the historical roots of the word "Hustler", which happens to be one I'm not sure the people that use it nowadays would sign off on.

Better Man (2025) had been sold to me as a really great take on the modern Biopic. I really like the approach that this, and that Rocketman took, that is to say: Turn the movie into a musical by weaving the artist's music into the scenes. Better Man feels like a labour of love from everyone involved, and I think the piece by Patrick H. Willems probably addresses most of my thoughts on the film, so I would direct the reader there for a more detailed reading. I'm not personally a listener of Robbie Williams' music, nor was I every the intended audience for boy bands of the ninetees, up to the twenty-tens. Still, the story is told compellingly, and the choreography is fun in the setpieces. I think overall I still prefer Rocketman, because I gel better with the music, so its setpieces are overall a little more memorable. Still, arguably Better Man has the better climax with Let Me Entertain You.

The second season of Hazbin Hotel (2025) is a definitive upgrade over the first in terms of music. I'm not sure whether it's just had the time to develop the musical numbers more, or whether their composers have just improved so drastically in the year it's had, likely using Helluva Boss as an opportunity to practice. Maybe I'm predisposed toward 2000s Emo/Punk, which are genres that have clearly influenced this season's music, and I've obviously started loving the stage tunes more and more, as I have started participating more and more in that culture. Most of this season's tunes are very well written, if not always immaculately placed. On the other hand, the character writing is perhaps only tolerable, because it was a second season. I didn't really get a sense that most people had much of an arc, apart from Vox, and perhaps Charlie and Vaggi to a lesser extent. Most of the rest of the cast is mostly just along for the ride. That can be fine, knowing only that we will eventually return to the cast. What does worry me somewhat are the cases of Abel and the romance between Cherry and Pentious. The latter has its development happen mostly between seasons and is primarily present through a lovely ballad early in the season, and the former just kinda... happens in between verses of a song, I guess. Suffice to say that it could have used some more process. Vox on the other hand is the undisputed star of this season. He is compelling as a villain in a way that Adam didn't quite manage to be in the second season. His flaws are clearly signaled, and pay off entertainingly, and beyond that, his Leitmotif does a lot to drive things forward. I also like to think that his tendency to express himself in typical musical showtunes as an embodiment of his penchant for theatrics.

A Palace Near the Wind (2025) by Ai Jiang primarily caught my eye through its cover art. I can only encourage the reader to check it out. It's a lovely turqoise with golden embroidery and a style inspired by traditional east asian paintings. The story reads like a retelling of colonization by a technologically advanced faction, but it seems like it was probably meant to frame it as a nature vs. industry question. I can read the same melancholy from the prose that appears in translated poems by indigenous people. The book presents a world building in which the colonized people are inseparable from the earth they came from, in which they inhibit the characteristics of their chosen surroundings, which gives everything a touch of hyperreality. The story itself, I'm not sure I would have picked up if it were pitched to me directly, but I'm glad that I did. Maybe I'll take a look at future volumes once they come out.

Books like Hawkeye by Fraction & Aja (2021) are probably the only way I can really get into comics. It's a comprehensive story, likely stretched over several issues, and the story has an ending, albeit the typical open end that the medium requires for it to go onto different runs and whatever. I'm not personally very interested in Hawkeye as a character, nor Kate Bishop, who seems like a more charming Batman-like, along with all the different moral issues that come with the rich vigilante kind. What made me pick up this book specifically was that I heard it contained a chapter written entirely from the perspective of a dog. I loved the idea, and I also quite liked the execution. The overarching story of the thing is okay, I suppose, but perhaps I'm not entirely acclimatized to the medium yet. I find it somewhat hard to find the finer details in comic book writing, but I also feel like I'm not getting the entire picture. Part of it is that I have to live with the fact that everybody in that book is a preestablished character and not every story has the time to properly characterize them for every newcomer. I found, for example, Madame Masque somewhat difficult to wrap my head around, until fairly long into the volume, and I was never sure it was meant to be that way. Overall though, I had my fun reading it, especially for the art, and sometimes for the banter, though that, too, is something that I think will need some getting used to.

King of Spies (2025) written by Mark Millar and drawn by Mateo Scalera was not an enjoyable read. Honestly, I like checking out graphic novels, partially, because they're usually finished. I don't feel equipped to keep up with image comics, because of a weekly release that depicts a tiny fraction of a story, and because they don't have very well defined starting points. What can save the attempt is reading Omnibuses of finished runs, but whether I have the patience to track one down is a different question altogether. That being said, the names of the authors weren't attached in the file I read from, otherwise I might not have made the effort. As someone who doesn't really engage with video games a lot, and someone who has largely checked out of blockbuster movies, I've grown distant from the djingoist undertone of conservative Americana. This work, despite depicting an Englishman, is filled with it. It's probably what a loyal adaptation of James Bond might have been in the era of gritty remakes, and I firmly dislike it for it. I assume it was written to showcase the action scenes, but I find it difficult to enjoy those, if I can't bring myself to care about anyone on the page. What's tragic is that the art is kinda cool at times. Shame about the writing though.

Doppelganger (2023) was my first Naomi Klein book. Arguably, someone of my persuasion should have started with Shock Doctrine, but this one was the one that was available, due to being relatively recent. It's also very topical in the way that theory rarely is. At the same time, the book didn't exactly read like theory. I think most of it is that it was written recently, and is divorced largely from the pseudo-academic tone that plagues left-wing theory, often to its detriment. It made it a read that was still digestible on a commute at entirely too early times of the day. The book is a blend of contemporary culture, which seems so centered on preception and being perceived. What I find impressive about the work is that Klein manages to connect the all these things that have been christened as symptoms of the social media era as deciding factors in important developments made far before, and far beyond the social media realm. It's a deeply personal work, which I'm not used to for non-fiction. There's autobiographical sections that while certainly anecdotical, are haunting enough to embody the theses made in their respective chapters. If this is the standard of her writing, I will definitely have to go through her bibliography, perhaps in the next year, and the ability to weave analysis with compelling writing is something to aspire to.

Engels' Anti-Dühring (1887) is maybe the most difficult read I've had this quarter. It's several hundred pages of dense philosophical critique of a text I haven't read, and while I believe I have an approximate understanding of Dühring's philosophy now after having read it, I don't think it's an entirely fair picture. I find myself largely agreeing with Engels in other works of his, but that is far from a good reason to let this work alone shape my idea of Dühring's specific work. I do think that the critique leveled here is meant to address a kind of text though, not necessarily limited to Dühring's philosophy of a "universal scientific approach". Engels has created here a study in "scientific socialism" and has made a case that in scientific dialectics much of such a dogmatic appeal to pure logic can not survive a simple treatment under its own contradictions. I don't think it's a problem we've fully freed ourselves of. The standardized education system and stark stratification that is associated with elite institutions, the mathematical practice of arriving at complex statements from simple axioms has found itself often misused in settings were there simply speaking are no such axioms one could reasonably apply. It's a common malpractice in armchair philosophy and the base of a lot of pseudoscience. Is scientific socialism a good cure for this problem? I'm not sure. I think Engels certainly thinks so. The method that would later be formalized as dialectic materialism is supposed to directly explore the dynamics of contradictions in process and idea, but I find myself cautioning against universalism, lest one make the same mistakes that Engels spends just under 600 pages taking apart. A note on the writing style though. I've always thought of Engels as a fairly good author. He delivers ideas concisely and memorably, but this isn't so much the case here. I feel reminded of thr chapters in State and Revolution in which Lenin addresses Kautsky directly. It's an almost personal attack that is often difficult to parse without having the cited material available to reference. I think there's probably better ways for a modern reader to understand the ideas contained in this book, and perhaps there would have been a better way for Engels to present them even at the time, but seeing as Critique of Pure Reason for example was written with very similar trappings, I suspect this is more of a feature of the form, and I can only remedy my discomfort with it by reading more philosophy of the time.

Emma Goldman's Anarchism and Other Essays (1910) was my first Goldman, but not my first anarchist theory. As an avid reader of theory, I think that at this point I really do have developed preferences most of all. There is an abundance of anarchist poetry and written word that can be considered art, and the prose that Goldman writes her theses in are artistry in a way that I feel could be well enjoyable. My art-brain and my theory-brain don't really want to work together though, which makes these reads difficult for me. This collection of essays centers primarily the structures of family as they existed at the moment. The role of the woman in society was undergoing heavy change at the time, some attaining the right to work, to vote, the things now commonly considered integral parts of ones emancipation, but Goldman had already seen the issues inherent in such concessions coming, and points out the first self-replications of the structures that were being rejected in name, if not entirely in praxis. At this stage of the work, I find myself agreeing mostly with her observations, though not entirely with some of the references she chooses. There is also a much closer intertwining with art and theory, especially in the last essay, in which she reflects on the adolescence literature of her time and how it was beginning to struggle with the contradictions that had begun to rear their heads, partially under the banner of enlightenment thinking, partially as a reaction to it.

I saw the trailer for The Life of Chuck (2025) when I watched the Snail movie in theaters. It seemed like an interesting film, but upon watch, I suppose the trailer buried the lead somewhat. The second half of the film makes it a much more straight-forward watch, with the usual bits of Stephen King-ian's usual literary trappings. It's not immediately a horror story, despite the author of the short story the movie is based on, and I suppose it could be considered life-affirming, though I think that might be too grand a descriptor for the experience of watching the film. It is roughly structured like a short story, and leaves a lot open, which I really did miss in more recent screenwriting.

2025, Q3 - I Dropped A Book

"Across the Blocs" by Patrick Major is perhaps as close as one can get to applied Neo-Marxism. For someone who is at least sympathetic to the movement, I think it makes some interesting points, but symptomatically works primarily for application on a hyper-individualized level. The book is an inspection of fiction as propaganda, which can range from explicit allegory, over censorship by omission during the adaptation process, to the use of metatextual information.

"String" is a graphic novel by Paul Tobin, Carlos Javier Olivares, Sara Colella and Taylor Espocito of the supernatural investigation flavor. I've read the first volume, and it was, very much a first volume kind of experience. It provides strong characterization of the protagonist, and establishes the rules of the world - or at least of the portion that we get to see - and wraps up more or less neatly at the end. I don't begrudge first volumes for feeling like a pilot, because I imagine that they kind of are what pilots are for limited series, but I'd be willing to read further volumes of these eventually.

"The Wonderfully Weird World of Gumball" is a sequel season to a mixed media cartoon I've loved when it first came out. Perhaps it's because it's been the better part of ten years since the original run ended on Cartoon Network, but I find lacking some of the charm I remember. I'm sure some of it is due to its limited episode number, but while I like the Wattersons as an episode focus, this season was perhaps too much of a good thing, and I feel like much of the supporting cast was too ancillary for the majority of the season.

"White Nights" by Fyodor Dostoevsky is a short novella (I believe) about loneliness. Dostoevsky is an author who agrees with me in most literary aspects, but not so much in philosophy. The idea at the center of "White Nights" is, in a way, muddled for me as a statement about the intrinsicality of loneliness. He has put two socially inept people at the center of the story, which make it a difficult read. The literary subject especially seems to me like he would be an incel in modern times, not because of his inability to speak to women, but in the way the attempt this story chronicles smells like desperation. He does ingratiate himself toward the end, and the story ends on a bittersweet note. If I were more of a scholar on the author's worldview, I might be able to estimate whether I was meant to read this story as anything more than a romantic drama, or whether the narrator is meant to reflect on some aspect of the times he lived in.

"Memoirs of a Snail" is an Australian stop-motion animation that I saw in a charming little movie theater in a central European college town. The venue did perhaps skew it in my favor, even though I'm apparently reaching the age at which popcorn stops being an enjoyable snack. The movie itself is a fictional biography of an aspiring artist living through a turbulent youth in a growing Autralian metropole. It deals with the different ways of love, but doesn't make any broad statements about it, which is fine. Sometimes a portrait doesn't need to wax philosophical about its subject matter. It's overall a heartwarming story, but I was actually most impressed by the dark humor that was sprinkled between the scenes, stuff that can be found in the details of the frame, like the license plates of cars. These snapshots of indie animation makes me want to seek out movies like these more actively, though I still have to figure out how to do that.

"Tod in Venedig" or "Death in Venice" by Thomas Mann was not an easy read for me. It felt similarly sobering as did the "Luzhin Defense", though without the narrative arc that made it pick up toward the end. This seems really more of a portrait than a novel, though perhaps 'novella' better describes it. Perhaps I am just a little detached from the subject, that is the ennui of the mundane, and the sense that the problem is ones character and not the location one finds oneself in. It's a sentiment that has grown more present, though I wouldn't feel equipped to speak on its relevance, with the rise of travel culture especially among the young, which has invited ample criticism from generations with more experience, but likely a very similar history, if I were to hazard a guess. Part of the impression is Mann's dense writing of which I've been made aware by friends in the past, and didn't do the subject any favors. It is, at least good prose, I suppose, which is worth a lot these days.

"Something is Killing the Children" is a series of graphic novels by James Tynion VI and published by Boom! Studios. Series like these are very interesting to me from the world-building perspective, detailing a form of urban horror-fantasy not unlike early seasons of Supernatural, though a good deal more folksy. It's still running, and I read it by volume, so I don't know the full story yet, but so far the scope of each case is fairly limited, and the factions acting in the background are designed strikingly. It makes for a compelling read, and lends itself to a form of exposition only really available to a medium like comics. To this point, many details of the fundamental world building have been shown, but never directly explained, which I find interesting.

"The Sandman Season 2" is a follow-up to the first season of the Netflix Limited Series inspired by the Neil Gaiman novel. Suffice to say that I found a stat-less way to watch the property to avoid whatever fraction of a cent Gaiman would get from a regular Netflix watch. I like the world building of his novels, even though it's now somewhat tainted by its creator, and while I thought the first season had more interesting moments just through the graces of the length of the season, it sets up a very interesting potential third season that I would be interested in watching, but ambivalent about looking forward to.

"Jellyfish Can't Swim in the Night" is an original Anime that aired fairly recently. It centers art as a theme, though arguably it's a backdrop for a story about healing and the importance of a support network that understands the value of ones passions and ambitions. It's grounded, in the human element, if not in most aspects of the plot, which I think is fine. I tend to approach anime with a fairly large leeway for magical realism, seeing as it's typically one of the more trope-driven forms of media out there. The scene that makes me think the most is one of objective artistic failure though, which includes singing. It was barely listenable, which, I'd argue, was the point, and yet it was so sincere in its execution that it tugged on my heartstrings, not that that's terribly difficult to do. It's perhaps not central in anything but the specific plot-line it helped resolve, but I suspect I will remember the show for it.

"The Gorilla-God's Go-To Girl" is a charming, unambitious little series. Watching stories like these as a person with anti-establishmentarian values, knowing full well that it's not likely to get a second season to resolve the ideological tensions that are often part of settings like these. The story itself is mostly tensionless otherwise, which makes it comfortable second-screen content.

"Dinner Table Detectives" is another detective series with a different coat of paint. It's perhaps akin to Sherlock Holmes by way of Black Butler. It features a mystery over the course of three or four mysteries, but it gives enough time to lay out clues to the audience in ways that a good detective story is meant to. It doesn't feature the most interesting cases, and the character work takes a back seat to the formula, but that is fine, for a series I'm assuming will have a single twelve episode run and nothing beyond that.

The seventh season of Game Changer features two episodes in particular that I think were a highlight even across recent seasons. One of them is the series finale, which is traditionally a large send-off anyways, but this time is themed in a way that just happens to align strongly with my interest. The other one is the stand-up comedy one. It's really good, by the contestants alone, and the concept is also very funny in the way it escalates.

"The Drug and Other Stories" by Allister Crowley is the first book I dropped in a long while. It's already pretty long, and while I was aware of Crowley being regarded as a pretty terrible person, even by modern practicioners of magic, I was somewhat unprepared by how notably bad his writing is. It's not just that writing about magic is already a little nonsensical, especially if one is not emerged in the scene, which I am not, it's also that both the narrative and the prose is wildly oscillating between bad and mediocre. Having the motifs of the narrative veer off into explicity sexist and racist plot threads is perhaps saved by Crowley's inability to stay on topic. He's not a very descriptive writer either way, preferring to write through references to mythology I'm not too versed in, and - by what I'm assuming about the kind of person he was - might be wholly incorrect and read through the classic 1900s orientalist lens. It's probably an interesting document in the way that there's not a lot of popular writing of this kind readily accessible out there, but reading the entire collection for leisure is just not possible for me.

"The Spy Who Came In From The Cold" by Le Carre is one of those titles that get referenced a lot more than it gets read. I myself only stumbled across a copy of this book by chance, while browsing a local free book exchange shelf. It tells a realist spy story set in divided Germany during the Cold War. It certainly makes for a very interesting read, and the intuitive cultural understanding carries a good amount of the novel. For anyone picking up the book in modern days, I think it should be good to note that the depiction of the conflict is portrayed far less black and white than the works that would later borrow its aesthetics and title tend to. It makes me wonder what Le Carre's personal stance and history was toward the tension between the iron curtain. I'm probably going to take some time looking into him, and his other works.

"Ishura" could be an interesting story, but it takes its sweet time to get going. The entire season makes the same impression as the first episode of Fate/Zero. There is also a case that it benefits the worldbuilding. The worldbuilding is interesting - with one very frustrating exception that comes down to me not really liking the Isekai concept. What holds back this show, I'd argue, is its aesthetics. I'm not sure about the Manga, I'm assuming it doesn't have that same problem, but in the Anime, Ishura comes with a generic style, that has been adapted in almost all generic Isekai shows, and has come to imply a lot about the details of the world building. What's worse, is that Ishura sometimes leans into the implication, which slightly takes the edge off the creative and interesting choices it makes. There's a second season out, but I've gotten stuck somewhere in there, the same way I did for the first.

"Dungeon People" decidedly does not have the problem Ishura has. For one, it's beautifully animated. The style is soft and simple, occasionally interspersed with the Anime hyperviolence that one gets used to after a while. It doesn't really mean to tell a large overaching story, but focuses on the worldbuilding instead. It's perhaps a cozier version of Dungeon Meshi, but it very firmly has a place.

Another show that returned after a long period of radio silence is "Panty & Stocking". Studio Trigger's crude take on Western animation returns with the same out of pocket style that it became known for, and it also managed to expand its cast by some interesting choices. There was always a good amount of queer subtext to this show, though this time around it feels more deliberate. Did I enjoy it as much as I did the first run of the show? No, but then again I was maybe 14 when I watched the original. It's almost entirely "more of the same", and at least it's not terrible. For the show it was, I think, that's fine.

2025, Q2 - So Many Second Seasons

The first season of "Severance" is one in the long line of apple exclusives that in my mind is better than it has any right to be. It borrows the language of the corporate culture and strips away everything that would likely be brought to the office by the outside lives of the workers, non-diegetically by way of set design and diegetically through the Severance procedure. I find it heartening that it resonated so strongly, at least with media journalists and reviewing audiences, given its themes of workplace alienation. Seeing as I've never been part of a work-force outside of an economic recession and I've been exposed to counter-propaganda before the corpo-speak ever had the chance to take hold, I've never not been in agreement with the core messages of the show. It's perhaps not the subtlest show, whether it be in its messaging or it's methods of seeding future twists, but I've been growing to think that that's perhaps a good thing when making counter-hegemonic statements. The first season ends on an episode with many very interesting revelations, which while inevitable from the outset of the show, will likely make for a very second season, which at the point I started watching the show was already concluded.

I'm not sure where I first heard about the play "Waiting for Godot". It's been on my reading list for a while, but seeing as I don't read very many plays, it's always eluded me until I came across a used copy in French, German and English. It looks like it was a study copy, complete with earmarks and the occasional underline in pencil. Charming, in it's own way. The play itself is perhaps the most comical depiction of boredom I've read so far. Clearly, not many works focus primarily on boredom and what it does to those who are exposed to it beyond their resilience, so perhaps it doesn't have much competition. If I were forced to classify it, I'd file it under dark comedy, in the same way that many of Kafka's works fall under dark comedies in my mind, and yet while I understand how those same works of Kafka could be tragedies or dramas, or even thrillers, "Waiting for Godot" could really be nothing but a comedy. It is laced with uncomfortable cruelty and none of the characters depicted are consistent over the three days they convene and reconvene. It's not really a play where nothing happens, rather, the event that is expected to occur never comes around, which is perhaps even more telling than the odd behaviors that those waiting exhibit.

"Makeine" is a very cozy show. Slice of Life anime has changed since the days of Lucky Stars. It used to be a genre where structurally, very little happened, but now it's become kind of an excuse to side-step tropes that I'm often not fond of anyway. As such, I've started to grow fond of the genre, or perhaps it's better to say "the trappings" since the lines of genre have been failing very reliably as of late. "Makeine" starts with the template of what I'd call a "Rebound Romance", and it's nice that the questioning period of this genre is reduced. It's not cut short exactly, seeing as it runs over the entirety of the season. It rarely takes the focus for the main couple though, and whenever it does for other characters, it's resolved far more succinctly than it is usually. In a way, it solves a problem that doesn't really need to exist, I don't think in modern times many stories can justify stretching out a romance Fruits Basket style, and even with the relatively reduced standard 12-episode run-time, most stories could probably be told in about 4 standard-length episodes, if there's no outstanding features otherwise. The way "Makeine" approaches is problem is to actually fit those stories into 2-4 episodes and just having fun with the ones in between. Without wanting to make any statements on the writing, they easily circumvent those pacing problem and make watching it much easier.

"Very Important People Season 2" is a continuation of the improv comedy series, and I felt that it was an improvement over the first season. They kept the costumes more vague in comparison to the first run, and overall the guests had to lean into somewhat zanier characters. The haunted doll episode stands out as a personal favorite, I think because the narrative that emerged from it flowed very rapidly.

"Sasaki & Peeps" defies genre, but also adheres to it. It's perhaps spiritually related to "Re:Creators", in that almost all popular genres of the time factor heavily into plot points and aesthetics, and ultimately this gives it an odd sort of charm. It doesn't last terribly long, and perhaps it'd be good that it only had twelve episodes, as the many different plot threads didn't seem to be going anywhere. In a way, this series wrote itself into the exact opposite position as "Makeine" where it tried to adhere to all of the usual genre trappings, but for every genre. I don't mind the writing of experimental series becoming slightly schizophrenic, but it needs to keep its own pace. Case in point would probably be the "Marc" storyline, which feels the most like the standard Isekai plot wherein the protagonist finds a long and convoluted plan to avoid solving a problem with the obvious established methods. That is, to my mind the least interesting part of such series, especially if the premise of the series does not present any interesting challenges.

"Sakamoto Days" works for me, notably in ways that "One Punch Man" didn't. It's perhaps the setting that feels more coherent when the theme isn't all over the place in that way that superhero universes tend to become given enough time, and since the genre has a long history of one-upping itself "because I told you so"-style, "One Punch Man" lost me somewhere in the middle of it's second season. "Sakamoto Days" is the same series, if we're completely honest, just with a different coat of paint. It, too, is probably funnier in the manga. There's a lot of scenes that have somewhat distracting sound effects spliced into the audio, that are meant to indicate the chin-jiggles that the titular character experiences, but since this is an animation, and the director wisely decided against constant slow-motion to emphasis this admittedly not very funny joke, the joke doesn't even register as one, if one doesn't get annoyed by the sound-design. The manga probably has space for some bizarre face-shapes, which could land the joke significantly better. The story is comparable with its spiritual predecessors, which is to say: Nothing to write home about. Still, I was entertained fine, probably in the way that most viewers/readers of One Punch Man were entertained, if they didn't take issue with the setting it's found itself in.

"Zenshu" is one of those anime about anime - at least in a way. It's still the same flavour of heart-warming that such series usually are, especially because the execution is actually quite good. Not only is the animation quite beatiful the art direction distinguishes between elements of the "real" world and the drawn additions in a way that makes sense. Strikingly, it makes drawn scraggles appearing as an object in the world substantive enough to make sense in the moment, which is an indicator good animation direction. Apart from this, the themes of inspiration, artistic collaboration and the types of authorship are conveyed in the many visceral anxieties depicted in the latter scenes. There is something silly about the obsession that drives the process of creating something. It can come from things that aren't great, the artist in question might know they're not great, and list the flaws in loving detail and yet it tends to inspire to greater things. "Zenshu" takes exactly that aspect of the creation process and struggles with the authorship works that are created like that have, when fans of media start creating media.

It's probably clear why I even attempted watching "Reborn as a Vending Machine". It's such a silly premise, and I think these things make great second screen content. It features perhaps one of the worst animation I've seen in a while, with bland character designs. Considering I've been aware of the title for a while, I feel it could have gotten a bigger budget, but since the writing also became kind of lackluster as things went on, I'm guessing this might have been produced out of obligation. Japan of course has a special relationship to vending machines and with titles like these I'm usually most interested in the weird things they can showcase or odd methods to engineer themselves out of a problem. The fact that having the vending machine in question be generic vending machines most of the time sidesteps the interesting part quite effectively. If it had kept to the style of the oxygen vending machine, it might have kept my interested for longer.

"Arcane S2" is a continuation that I'm luke-warm about. I'm guessing it's better when the first season is more present in ones mind, but the depiction of power struggles following a power vacuum makes for a decently compelling story either way. The show is of course beautifully animated and there's several really breath-taking visuals that could easily be a desktop wallpaper. What it loses in comparison to the first season is the feeling of a living world that exists around the storylines we're supposed to follow. Some of this is down to taste, I suppose. The writing is arguably more efficient in this second season than in it was in the first, where not all characters had a real storyline to follow. This time around, each character has a very tight schedule of character development and revelations to check off before it culminates in a grand finale that wraps up most of these stories in an impressively satisfying manner. I'm entirely divorced from League of Legends (multiplayer games in general, actually. The idea makes me tired), so I'm enjoying this series entirely independently of its source material. Still, I'm finding myself ambivalent about the prospect of other Riot Games animation projects, because I suspect my interest will correlate directly with how much the central cast intrigues me.

"Axiom's End" is a book I picked up used, entirely out of curiosity, and because I was familiar with the author's other work. Lindsay Ellis is probably going to be one of those seminal figures in the history of the internet, if we give it time to settle and look past all the terrible billionaire-driven nonsense that we're stuck in at the minute. She's played with similar book concepts to "Axiom's End" earlier on in her career. I recall a series that showcased her developing a paranormal Cthulhu romance or somesuch, which I didn't quite get at the time. It's not the sort of literature I otherwise enjoy, and I found myself skimming through some parts of this book as well, I'm sure it's probably better than I found it, the concept just wasn't for me in the first place. There are two more installments in the series, which I'll likely pass on. If she decides to write another novel outside of the supernatural romance genre though, I'd be more than willing to try, seeing as the prose of the book was not the weakest part for me, a problem I otherwise find in many novels intended for a young-adult or even fantasy-reading audience.

I completed "JoJo's Bizarre Adventure Part 1" in chunks, read on and off over several weeks. 40-odd chapters of manga really aren't too difficult to read, and I'm pretty accustomed to reading manga on my phone as well. It's probably not doing the work in its entirety justice to read it from the very beginning, seeing as most of the context is easily gathered from later installments when the series has found its identity, but I would like to not have to google reading orders, if it can be avoided at all. The first part of this series is almost unrecognizable as the thing it would become in its later, and more acclaimed years. The art is a little wonkier, and the influences feel more akin to "Fist of the North Star", rather than whatever weirdness contemporary volumes pull from. It was a fine read overall, a little tedious at points, and I question the author's decision to lean so heavily on this one single antagonist, rather than pacing things out a bit, but I'll be willing to read further volumes, just to get to the parts that are considered iconic, eventually. I expect it to take a while though, because I'm allergic to hype, which this series radiates like nobody's business.

"Hundreds of Beavers" is a Looney Toons cartoon come to life, but using entirely practical visuals. Every animal is a guy (I suspect the same guy) in a costume, the minute there's more than two or three of them on screen, the crowd in composited in the charming low-fi style of early movies, and not a single word is spoken. Sung, sure, but not spoken. It's only technically a musical, I promise. It's not terribly profound, but I love it all the same, for the love of film-making that is on display here. It feels like a labour of love for cinema and animation, and I think this might be one of those movies I could play on loop.

Most things I could say about "Invincible Season 1" have been said by other people before me. It's an engaging story told using the tropes and inversions of the comic superheroes. I'm not too well versed in the history of comic books, so I don't know whether the idea of an "evil superman" was already played out by the way the source material came around. I imagine so, it's perhaps one of the first ideas one might think of, when the sincerely of such a figure has worn off. The hype around Invincible seems to have died down, even as it's still ongoing, which somewhat allows me to enjoy it more than had I started on it earlier. It does seem like the first Season exists mostly as a setup for a more interesting story. The underworld seems to continue on its own story, while the overarching conflict between the protagonist and their father looms large, after the explosions of violence that Omniman's appearances have now started to exhibit regularly. I'm guessing that the next two seasons at least will have enough material to keep me interested, especially if they can balance some of the plots going on well against said overarching story.

"Cherry Magic" is the kind of tame that only things meant for TV broadcast can be these days. It's a cute story, surprisingly explicit at times (and I'm not entirely sure whether I really like that for this), and it affords all of its characters a lot of grace. It's a fairly regular feel-good romance, if it weren't for the BL aspect of it, which I imagine is meant to be its main selling point. I found myself watching it with half an eye for most of its runtime. Slowly, there are more BL and GL shows released in anime. I'm not sure why, but more released Yuri shows have settings offering something beyond the romance aspect. I'm hoping the BL department can catch up on that. What "Cherry Magic" does offer is that it's explicit in its same-sex romance, something few Yuri shows have managed to do. I remember it being a big deal that a Yuri protagonist explicitly described herself as gay. "Cherry Magic" includes a tasteful sex scene. If this is where we need to start to embrace romance and interpersonal relationships in a more adult and authentic way, sign me up.

"Lisa Frankenstein" could be a cult classic in the making, maybe in the same spirit as "The Cabin in the Woods", though for 80s teen movies and monster romances. It features many updates to the genre-specific tropes that I personally enjoy, mostly because I don't really have the nostalgia for the movies this is homaging, and find their tropes exhausting. The protagonist's father has remarried after the traumatic murder of her mother, and while her new stepmother genuinely dislikes her, her adoptive sister, while a little self-centered and proudly not too bright, is trying to support her in her own way. She makes her mistakes, one ultimately very traumatic for her as well, but even in the end, their relationship remains intact, in an odd, kind of intangible way, if only due to the circumstances of the final scenes. Even though I don't have the nostalgia for it, I really like the resurgence of genre fiction, even driven by small studios and creators from the independent sphere. It gives me the chance to develop said missing nostalgia on my own, somewhat by proxy, but seeing as most of them have their second, third or fourth chances to reconcile with their shortcomings and adapt to modern audiences, I expect fun things at least, if not great ones.

"Make Something Up" is a collection of short stories, that feels like a book collage, if you've read other stories by Chuck Palahniuk. It's very relieving to see great writers recycle ideas between formats. It's like getting a brief glance at their development process. I've found snippets of "Fight Club" and "Invisible Monsters" in there, and I'm sure had I read more of his work, I would have found those too. I also think I can see him experimenting and developing his style. It's mostly fixed at the point where those short stories were finalized, I guess, but his quirks are more glaring occasionally. I think it's okay to describe them this way, they feel designed that way on purpose. It also makes me feel vindicated for writing short stories for a very similar purpose.

"Ameku M.D." is the kind of show I have a particular weakness for, that is detective shows pretending that they're some other kind of other show. In this case, it's a medical drama. In a way, the two genres are already very closely related. Most medical dramas will approach the topic of an episode as a detective story. Having this group of medical professionals deal directly with murder cases makes things a little easier to grasp in my opinion. I don't have a cache of medical jargon ready to make accurate predictions, but having seen the series, I feel smart being able to make a vague guess at the nature of medical failure on screen. I did find the first of the two larger cases to be a little drab, though that might have been due to the repeating teaser of the mystery for the length of its runtime. The evolution of more personally involved cases and complex, cases within cases are quite well done though, so the format is at least future-proof. It's unfortunately not a very strong character showcase, but empirically, those are the easier aspects of a show to fix.

"The Silt Verses" has absolutely amazing world building. Not many podcasts will make it into this format, mostly because they have the tendency to not end, this however, felt like a limited series with three seasons that ended very definitively. Not everything is resolved from a plot perspective, but it feels like the end of the line for the cast. I can only recommend giving this a listen for people who like urban horror fantasy settings and character dramas. The production value is also nothing to scoff at, often feeling like movie foaly, and dispensing with the narrator that might recap the grander, difficult to vocalize scenes.

"Welcome Home Franklin" I watched mostly because I have a long-standing love of the Peanuts that I'm sure I won't shake with time. It's also nice to see the gang animated in the classic 2D style again. The previous 3D iteration was also fine, but I never quite got used to it. I'm vaguely aware of the progressive step that Franklin's inclusion in the gang was at the time, but I've never managed to track down those volumes of the comic, mostly because I heavily favour the dogs, and sometimes struggle to keep up with all the shenanigans that the rest of the cast are up to. As an animated show, I prefer the kids, mostly because they can form words, and I don't always have the energy for the "Hundreds of Beavers" treatment.

"Invincible: Atom Eve" is a standard spin-off treatment of a side character that will take up a larger part in upcoming segments of a story. It's at least interesting to watch a different kind of person go through a similar process as the principal protagonist went through, and I always liked how the specific way that people came up is bound into their civilian identity, so if the world building is solid and non-standard, I'm open to knowing a couple of backstories.

I did not expect to finish "Manufacturing Consent", as quickly as I did once I committed to reading it during a relatively busy three-week vacation, partially because I did not catch that in true Leftwing Lit fashion, about a third of my copy was Appendices and Sources, and partially because trying to parse Chomsky's dense run-on sentences consisting mostly of words I would have thesaurus'd in order to include them in any of my own sentences on the slim screen of a Sony Xperia 10 III is as reliable a way as any to tire oneself out on screen-time. However, once it got going, which it did around the part it tackled the media treatment of the South American Sandinista elections, I found it engaging enough to power through with increasing speed. It was recommended to me as one of the essential works to build an understanding around media and propaganda, and it does not make the mistake (which I have done) to attempt to fix the inherent entanglement of the two. Instead, its proposed propaganda model, I believe, will prove a useful tool to just about anyone when trying to check contemporary reporting of complicated issues, even before vetting sources on their own, which is frankly an unreasonable ask for a working population under capitalism anyway.

I picked up "Our Architecture" by Tajuddin Rasdi in a Kinokuniya while on vacation, where I my little designer-enthusiast heart was joyously overwhelmed to discover a design section that took up about half a floor. While this has started me on a journey to find a similar store in the city I live, so far without any luck, the books I took from there also gave me some minor insight into contemporary Malayan culture by way of architecture. The author seems to me, upon cursory online-searches, one of these intellectuals, who have graduated from an expert in one field into interdisciplinary cultural-political speaker. He is, however, a Doctor of Islamic Architecture, which means that at least in this, his understanding of the matter is greater than mine. While he doesn't state this directly in any of the essays featuring in this brief collection, there seems to be a lacking sense of cultural identity in designing space. The author underlines this lack as a characteristically Malayan problem, though I suspect this might be a generally non-American problem. At the same time, the solution of this problem doesn't seem to be "merely" preservation of traditional buildings and spaces, as this is the approach chosen by many central- and western European countries. Perhaps he sees the particular trappings of that approach as incompatible with the progress of rapidly developing nations. He instead advocates for mindful inclusion of the traditional solutions to architectural and spatial design problems, which will "automatically" retain some distinct aesthetic identity.

Where "Our Architecture" I bought, because it was light and small, "Librorum Ridiculorum" was just kinda weird. Reading it is a very different experience from reading theory of any kind, and it never meant to. It showcases some odd books along with the notes used to categorize them. It's light entertainment, and I can imagine the kind of person who will make it part of their mission to track down one or two of those titles out of morbid curiosity. I think the way it's structured, invites viewing this book as a catalogue, and as someone who was never too sure about whether they liked books like the Guiness Book of World Records, the appeal is somewhat lost on me, though I'm unsure whether more information on the books featured would help its case in a measureable capacity.

2025, Q1 - A Look Back at Warrior

I started watching things again, and while I don't feel like writing full essays on everything I watch - why will become clear as this goes on - I feel I should at least try to put my thoughts about them into words. My watching habits are perhaps a little unhealthy. I like having something playing on the side when I think, or when I don't. I'm not huge on playing Video Games either, so the things I do play are just as well playable without BGM. I know: the shame. This means that me watching something is not as much an expression of even a passing interest, as much as an acknowledgment that it exists. This will make up a lot of the Anime especially that will show up here, as 20-minute episodes happen to fit nicely into my daily routine of running from one task to the next. So without further ado, let's begin with what I watched in January.

"Ride the Cyclone" is a Cats-style indie-musical with a morbid bend and better production design than it has any business having. It's also got a lot of very catchy tunes. It's format - largely consisting of a series of Character songs - lends itself for very sleek direction, as it cuts around the fat with brief snippets of dialogue. I have a weakness for "dark circus music", so when I saw a YouTube documentary on this show by the ever-excellent "Wait In The Wings", I felt the need to track it down.

Even though, for pragmatic and planning reasons, I didn't feel like tracking down the soundtrack and I had only seen this once, I can still recall almost all the hooklines of the songs, which I think is a great indicator about their memorability. Narratively, it's also decently engaging despite its simplicity, and in high contrast to Cats, not openly nonsensical and without frankly cringeworthy source-material.

The mystery girl's lament is clearly designed to be a standout number, and as someone with the aforementioned "creepy circus" sensibilities, it's of course one of my favorite numbers, especially when combined with the haunting stage-work. A lot of that is especially in combination with the simple stage design, that allows very effective utilization of lack of light and empty space especially.

There have been so many TV series that were arguably mistreated, and I think it's safe to say, that Warrior is one of them. The first two seasons had set a very high bar for me, and though much of the content is perhaps minorly triggering to me, as a person with very few triggers, it addresses these topics with a tact that I don't usually see nor expect from media. The show setting in the US during its westward expansion, but focused in large parts in working class communities - opposing ones at that - is a rare perspective. It showcases solid political theory through its plot, and less through the vocabulary, and perhaps even on accident, specifically, worker solidarity (or rather the need for it) and intersectionality, the latter mostly in its treatment of its female characters. All that came as a surprise to me though, because I originally gave it a watch because of the action in the show, which has held a consistent standard into the third season. Someone with an appreciation for martial arts choreographies in movies is probably very easily impressed these days, seeing as most stuntwork in fight choreographies are somewhat lacking, so we're often stuck with what we can get, but especially for a streaming series, this is very much above par. The third season doesn't really see the protagonist Ah Sam in a duel like the previous two did (or at least not with a fighter of comparable ability), which I do miss in the season, but there were plenty fun action scenes nonetheless. I could probably write a full essay about the series, and perhaps even this last season, if I really tried, but since that's not what this is for, I'd like to just address the ending of the season, and with it, the series, as it's been axed somewhat unceremoniously. It fits neatly into the pattern the previous seasons had established, with all protagonists at the bottom of some crisis, larger than the last one. Of course, this being the ending of the story officially makes it a little more devastating than in the previous two cases, but it left off at an interesting place. I would have really liked to see a fourth season wrap up, considering it would have likely meant two new Tongs trying to rise to power while Chinatown was being squeezed by the US institutions with either propagandistic or labour interests, and this kind of faction-driven conflict appeals to me very strongly.

I've taken careful interest in Dropout content, ever since I saw the first season of Dimension 20 on my favourite YouTube derivative last year. That's why I watched the first season of Vic Michaelis' "Very Important People". I don't have any special love for improv comedy, though it's an art-form I very much enjoy when I notice how good the people involved are. Since the improv scene is somewhat difficult to access where I live (as in, I don't have the time to keep checking where things are happening, and then likely won't have the means to get home in time), my first real exposure to this form of comedy was the "Middleditch and Schwartz" Netflix series, great fun in its own right. I don't think "Very Important People" is quite at that level, but the follow-through is still at least middlingly entertaining most of the time. Part of it is that the costumes are sometimes too weird for my taste, and that the characters that are developed won't always lean into a style of humour I enjoy. When it works though, it works amazingly. I think Ally Beardsley's character is the right amount of weird and self-consistent for me to like in this sort of format, but then again their costume didn't immediately make it apparent what they were supposed to play. The short runtime of each episode definitely plays to the strength of the series, and so does Michaelis' delivery in the style of somebody just barely holding it together, which they also bring to other shows, like Game Changer. The runtime also makes the prospect of another season at least interesting to me, since the concept itself is interesting, and I'm sure the execution can only improve, now that they've probably had feedback on what the audience enjoyed the most.

"Poets of the Chinese Revolution" is decidedly not the type of book I usually read. Despite my weekly endeavor to put together something resembling a poem, it's not actually an art form that appeals to me in any significant way. Or perhaps I only understand the artistic appeal when the poem is performed. Perhaps it's like sheet music. I find the ability of spoken word musicians to come up with a verse on the spot genuinely impressive, for example, but I cringe every time I hear inverted syntax. As such, reading a commented poetry collection should seem a little out of step with my usual tastes. Truth be told, the attempt stems from the curiosity about art in socialist states, which is usually overtly coded as propaganda or counter-propaganda, rather than art for its own sake. Much of the commentary did highlight this relation of art to the revolutionary project, especially on its chapter on Mao. The poems themselves of course, are in Chinese, meaning I had to make do with the translation. Translating poetry seems like a thankless job to me. It immediately loses its form and with it, a lot of the subtextual construction, and the translator will have to strike a balance between preserving intent and creating a legible text. I certainly couldn't do it, let alone make the attempt between languages so different in form as Cantonese and English. I don't think I really learned anything about poetry reading the book, but I came across a couple of new forms of poetry, and got a sense about the ubiquity poetry held in that particular stretch of history.

"No Longer Allowed in Another World" was kind of a disappointment. I'm not sure why I would expect anything from a comedy Isekai, but something about centering a character clearly inspired by Dazai Osamu felt like it could be at least funny or even interesting. Isekai is not a genre I enjoy generally enjoy, but I still see a decent number of those shows in a year, since now and then there's art styles that really work for me, or there might be a concept fun enough to give he thing a spin. Since this is decidedly second-screen content, I usually finish a season, but will have to think on whether to pick up a second season, should it come around. I had read Dazai's seminal "No Longer Human", which besides its depressing content, I thought was a decent look at passivity. It is likely the one work that characterizes Dazai in popular culture today, so the morbidity of the character is often centered in these depictions. It makes figures inspired by Dazai a short-hand for the tortured artist, reflected through a specific cultural lens, which has been historically the more popular way to go about things in Japanese media. "No Longer Allowed in Another World" is very average apart from its protagonist though. Perhaps the best I can say for the series is, that its protagonist is not annoying to me, which is partially because he spends a significant time of the series being generally absent or detached from the events. It's mostly played for laughs, but the space it leaves is not utilized well. The world building and supporting cast are too boilerplate to capture attention for any amount of time, so all in all, the series delivers a whole lot of nothing.

Frank Herbert's "Dune" has so far escaped my reading on prestige. I'm not always in the mood for good, or even great things, and this seemed at the time like the only book in my collection I hadn't read. I would find a small stack a couple of weeks later, but by that time, I had been thoroughly absorbed into the story. It certainly makes a good case for its status as legendary science fiction, though I wouldn't mark the prose as notable as much as the subject matter. Dune reads to me primarily as a story about colonialism. Even if the plot might not center it directly, every facet of it is mired in the colonial relations between the Empire and the Fremen. Where it sets itself apart from the problematic white savior narratives notoriously pervasive in the pre-2000s, is the way it highlights the distance and co-reliance of Paul Atreides as he lives among the Fremen. It also does not shy away from depicting Paul's co-option of the Fremen faith and people to ultimately his own ends as a tyrannical act. This first novel then ends on a bitter note, as Paul cements his power in a system the only way it permits it, through the means of traditionalist hierarchy and oppression. Starkly in contrast to the way the Fremen seem to handle things among them, I might add. I found a version of the book that's fairly new and features simple cell-shaded art, so I think I might look for exactly this publication series if I want to look for any potential sequels.

"Bye Bye Earth" was mostly fine. It was perhaps a little bit mangled by jarring jumps in the timeline between episodes. As far as light novel plots go, it doesn't feel like anything special, in that it ranks just above Isekai in complexity, and while the aesthetics that Lidenfilms studio has chosen are perfectly fine, and at least consistent, it doesn't add any additional coherence to the specifics of the settings. I think in many cases, this should be the primary task for adaptation, especially in cases like this, where the world isn't just generic template fantasy. I can only imagine, that the light novel author neglected many visual descriptions, which I think is perfectly fine for the medium. Otherwise, the odd focus on both swords as a kind of "combat soul", and the approach to equate large-scale battles with orchestra performances might have given the visual design of the show more concrete pointers. The character work might have been reserved for a planned second season, seeing as much of the main cast is not especially noteworthy and experiences very standard development throughout the 10-episode run of the show, and those aforementioned time-jumps do absolutely terrible things for the character development of the secondary cast. An aspect I find very interesting though is the way the series handles Mermaids as creatures that reflect the desires of a chosen one. It makes them into automatically co-dependent creatures, but also able to change appearance and genders on a whim. It's not really comparable to any gender expression that exists out in the real world, and what this means is occasionally explored when the point of view of a Mermaid is taken on, usually for flashback purposes, but this externality feels like an interesting and notable one, and, in my opinion, calls for a Mermaid-focused spin-off.

I had started "Rokka no Yuusha" the previous year, because it had a really slow start, and I couldn't stand most of the characters. The visual design I found interesting enough though, to sit through it while doing something else. Sadly, the story proved it could be interesting just as the season ended. What started as a very standard Fantasy plot quickly evolved into what I can only describe as a "battle mystery" in which people who aren't entirely aware of each others' abilities and amount of knowledge try to sus out an impostor among them. In my mind, this series exists as a 12-episode proof of concept that would have become really good, once a second round kicked off, since now the rules for the mystery have been established. In general, mystery stories set in fantasy settings suffer heavily from the unclear-rules-problem in which it's not immediately apparent which features of the world can be included in the solutions of the mystery. It's different for other series like "Classroom of the Elite" where we know we can expect physics to work more or less as expected. As such, the sudden inclusion of thermodynamics felt a little out of pocket. Still, it would have set an interesting precedent, and subsequent arcs might have felt like longer versions of Danganronpa mysteries. It's greatest weakness might be its characters though, which make it genuinely difficult to care, which one might not make it, or be the impostor, doubly so, because the point-of-view character is one that I would have little issue with never seeing (and especially hearing) again.

Much has been said about "Look Back" already, by people more involved in the interesting this story exists within, but I still had a good time watching it. I of course was exposed to Fujimoto's work primarily by "Chainsaw Man", and hence I wasn't as surprised as I could have been by the turn this movie took at about the half-way point. That part didn't resonate as strongly with me though as the meditation on art, talent and most importantly validation that it presented in the first half. The second half feels very reminiscent of real-world events involving Kyoto Animation, which is the most jarring to someone aware of even just the outlines, and even the bittersweet ending didn't quite manage to take me back.

I especially like the way this movie works with sound and music. The dramatic and emotional scenes in the latter half are often almost entirely without music and minimal foley, which gives the scene time to breathe, especially when very little is happening. The scratchy, loose art style also does a lot to ground it, setting it apart from the usual smooth aesthetics that characterizes many anime and makes it otherwise easy enough to parse visually so that more interesting motions don't confuse the viewer. The visual stylings of the in-story manga "Shark Kick" is close enough to "Chainsaw Man" that I can't help but read the protagonist as an author-insert, which gives the story a lot more weight in context, which I'll have trouble ignoring. I'm not much or "Death of the Author" anyways, but I understand that just because I support and identify with Fujimoto's whole deal where he's a weird little art-freak winging it, and secretly hoping he's doing okay, doesn't make the movie better than it is. In terms of translating a manga though, I think this is a really good example in choosing how to translate scenes. This, too, could probably have an essay to itself, but I'll leave this as a strong recommendation and move on.

The "Mononoke" movie is absolutely gorgeous. I unfortunately don't have a copy of the series lying around, but I have to assume, the series matches the movie in its visuals. It's bumped the series up on my proverbial to-watch list, even though it being in a language I'm not fluent in will have it require my full attention. The story, I'm not too sure about though, admittedly, though I'm used to Anime movies being more like promotional material for the source material. In the case of Mononoke, this is perhaps a little complicated, seeing as it's a spin-off that's not immediately inferrable from the title, even if one speaks Japanese. There are Manga, which I'm assuming are also a spin-off, but having seen the movie, I think the animation is a very real draw, which I'm assuming will show up in form of perhaps a peculiar art style in the manga. I'm personally more easily wooed by good animation than I am by good art on a page, but that is just personal preference, and likely overexposure to A1-Animation.

I was initially torn on Dimension 20's "Never Stop Blowing Up" season. As far as actual play shows go, I think it's one of the better ones, because the story-telling is very tight and streamlined, but some of their concepts just fail to catch my attention. I usually give it two episodes or so, and decide whether I like the cast and direction of the story enough to continue. This "Never Stop Blowing Up" season utilizes the system of the same name, which seems relatively new on the scene, and geared heavily toward the action-movie feel of the early 90s. I personally don't have a nostalgia for those movies, but I still find myself with moderate interest. I find it difficult to articulate what I like about Dimension 20 in particular when it comes to actual play shows beyond the very vague, and this holds true for this season. It's probably mostly the interplay between cast members and GM, none of which approach the game with the intention to "win". Whether I like a season or not then is mostly a question of whether I like how the people in the cast interface with the setting, or whether I can get into the setting enough. I don't feel like it's a good metric, but since each episode of this show tends toward 2 hours, I reserve the right to drop things that don't entertain me enough.

This season though, very much plays to the strengths of this format, and perhaps the entirety of this show. Like most other seasons I really like it lays out the internal conflicts of the characters very early, almost entirely in the first episode, and covers the straightforward paths to resolving them with so much over the top fluff and action that you don't notice how easy the story is.

I had read a good portion of the "Dandadan" manga before, so I knew what I was in for, when I started the anime. The only reason I hadn't read further is because I've not been reading manga, in lieu of the books I have piling up on my living room table. I never really know up to which point an adaptation goes before I've finished it, but judging by previous experiences in this way, I was pretty sure it wasn't going to include stuff beyond the part I hadn't read. Still, sometimes you can tell from the opening that the animation that's coming is going to be really great. As an action series, of course those scenes are going to get the lion's share of amazing animation, but what I was very pleasantly surprised by was the fact that the humour given voice hits better for me than it did in the manga, just through timing and delivery. In exchange, it kind of loses the more honest emotional scenes, which were few and far between anyway. "Dandadan" is mostly a comedy and action series, and I didn't really come for the emotion anyway, so that's more than fine. Where the manga sets out to write interesting things, it does so competently, seeing as the main cast are at this point still unsure of how their powers work and whether there might be rules to the battle. Emblematic for this is perhaps the giant sumo-alien that they try to defeat by having it touch the ground with its hand, which would be a losing condition in the sport that alien is modelled after. I also appreciate, that that doesn't even remotely work, because there's really no reason why it would. At the same time, much of the show is based in the culture of urban legends to make the paranormal side just as ill-defined as the alien side of the premise. All in all, I'd be glad to see a second season of this, and when I get back to read manga, I'll likely try to catch up with this one.

"Bartender" is a show of the type to mythologize a profession. I have a particular weakness for shows that highlight passions for professions that tend to get overlooked for the flashier, more prominent ones. The visual design of this show is not too interesting, but as a person who sticks to longdrinks and cocktails when out on the town, I found some really interesting drinks in there. It's otherwise an easy and cozy watch, I wouldn't mind more of, if only because of the subject matter and my own passing interest in it.

I struggle to call "Beau is Afraid" a comedy. I could only ever pitch it as a comedy, centering a deeply tragic protagonist, whom I never learned to sympathized with. That might well be intentional, if the final scene of the movie is meant to literalize its thesis, but I don't think it's quite as simple. It's a very long movie, and at times I could really feel that length. The clearest example of this is an extended theater scene, that I found very tedious to get through, because the point of the scene was very clearly telegraphed, and I don't too much enjoy the type of theater that was performed. It seemed very "american high school play put on with one dress rehearsal and too little ambition". Beyond this, the movie comes with its own silent world-building. The title is apt for most of the movie, but the world he inhabits is very openly hostile, and not just toward him. There is of course "the scene" toward the end of the film, and I admire that this could refer to several scenes. More specifically, I'm thinking of one that required some effects work and pushed the movie firmly into surreality, including imagery I'm probably not going to forget for a long while. I think the movie might benefit from some editing, but I still ended up liking it. It's not necessarily one to watch with company though.

"Code Geass - Roze of the Recapture" is one of the myriad Code Geass follow-ups that we're apparently now getting every other year. I hold the original in very high regard, even though its flaws are often very abundantly clear, and it's very much of its time. Still, subsequent installments of the series have never quite hit the same note for me that the original had, perhaps because the story implications aren't as heavy as they are in the original. This backdrop has returned in Roze of the Recapture, returning the setting to the pre-original status quo. It makes the conflict more tangible than those of other installments. I take some issue with it, because from a story-telling perspective, we've seen the downfall of an empire led by an uprising in one of its conclaves once before, and this could easily be a relevant part of this world's history, if only we could have seen how the empire reconstituted and what roles the established institutions - even the ones that were once the heroes of the story - either failed or contributed to this rebuilding of the empire. As it is, this is just Code Geass, but with effectively four characters, and fewer politics. Good enough to kill some time, because it's still one of the few shows that consistently makes mech-battles snappy and readable enough to be fun.

"House of Leaves" was a recommendation for non-ergodic literature, and it's certainly the most non-ergodic that I've read so far. It got easier to read further down the line though, as soon as I understood who was who and which set of footnote was written from whose perspective. Perhaps it's me being used to reading books with page-long footnotes. Once the formatting of the book started getting fully wild was also incidentally when the story started getting interesting to me. The accounts of the expeditions into the house were great suspense writing, and a welcome reprieve of what had been descriptions of relatively mundane events so far. The Navidson records are by far the most intriguing, and also have the most interesting additions in the appendix of the book - roughly 150 pages of first hand accounts, photographic material and sketches. At the other extreme, the pages inserted by Jonny are really just repetitive erotica with an undertone of depression, which is fine, but not my thing when it goes on for more than two pages at a time. It is, all in all, a simulation of a living document that is actively worked on and elaborated upon by parties of different dispositions toward the topic, and since the events centered in the story are technically of supernatural nature, the academic discussion that happen beyond the pages included in the book leak into the footnotes and appendices primarily. It's an interesting read, and perhaps at another time I'll look into more non-ergodic literature. I've heard 'S' might be up my alley.

"The Elusive Samurai" I remember being discussed with some division when it came out, even though I don't really understand why. On a visceral level, there might be a tonal imbalance, though I think that's just something one might want to expect given the subject matter. These kinds of tone shift have always been a strength of animation, in my opinion. Besides the sudden tone shifts that crop up every now and then, I think this series had a really good run, a worthwhile story, and characters that got decent development and were often entertaining enough even without it. I have enjoyed shows of this type in the past, namely the Arslan series that ended up petering out in a very unspectacular fashion, and I'm not opposed to watching someone attempt this kind of show again.

"Metallic Rouge" is one in a long line of entries that I wish were better. Original anime are a rare occurrence in general. Most anime are meant primarily as promotional material for the manga, and in many cases, the precedent is sensible. It's where the concept of filler arcs comes from. Most episodes of an anime condense five or more chapters, and actively airing shows will quickly catch up to the source material, especially since weekly releases are far from guaranteed for manga in the first place, which will puts the team and network before the decision to either introduce filler, or write an original ending. Neither is usually a popular decision. Original anime comes with none of that baggage. In theory, one could know exactly how many episodes were required to tell the story on wanted to tell, but in practice, it's always abundantly clear that the regular 12 episode run that those projects get are far from enough to scratch the world building. The story probably wouldn't have been great, even if it had gotten more time to develop, and what the show had time to establish in terms of world building felt weak either way. Every time I see an original project with some decent animation though, I hope it'll turn out better.

The fact that "Naked Lunch" even made it into my viewing list perhaps characterizes my interests in movies very clearly. In truth, I'm a little torn about whether I like this movie or not. It seems to play with many different concepts, and doesn't really care to connect them too much beyond the vague subversion of some spy thriller. The genre itself is a little bit fraught, considering the most enduring franchise has been through a lot of rough patches and is still arguably the blueprint for newcomers to the scene. Naked Lunch is of course a little older than the modern spy thriller and so could make a case for having foreseen the genre stagnating. This aspect of the movie is mostly aesthetics though. While it does seem at the end to be reflecting the actual events that transpire in the story, the entire plot seems to be a cyclical depiction of a particular artistic process, fitting the trope of the suffering artist, complete with challenges to the sexual identity of a staunchly heteronormative ideologue, substance abuse problems and a "muse", which in the way they show up in most spy media, turns out to be replaceable by the point the process is completed, fridged to kick off the process in the first place. Movies about art are frequently at risk of being navel-gazey enough to turn me off, but when they work, they really work. "Naked Lunch" managed to hook me enough to make Cronenberg's effects work a part of a difficult narrative, rather than the center-piece, the way I expected it to become, so I'm very much inclined to recommend at least one watch.

"A Place Promised in Our Early Days" is Makoto Shinkai's directorial debut from all the way back in 2004. It stands in significant contrast to his more well-known works "Your Name" and "A Silent Voice" both of which I liked fine. "A Place Promised in Our Early Days" though, I felt fell flat in all the ways that his more acclaimed titles have managed to avoid. It's interesting to see all the pieces in a movie that would one day produce the highest-grossing anime movie internationally (at least until it was dethroned by a Demon-Slayer sequel, disappointingly), but the slice-of-life component was just decidedly too high in this one. Not that it busied itself with the usual trappings of the genre, it's really just a feeling that I get when I see anime adopt a certain tone. I think Shinkai's stories work best with a minimal amount of magical realism, and the setting of this film adds very little to the ideas in the story, and the other way round.

"Quality Assurance in Another World" is another Isekai, which means I only watched it because I worked from home that day and didn't want to do the sensory-deprivation thing. The Isekai gimmick this time saw a QA-Tester trapped in the game they were meant to be debugging. It's very much a setup that can be interesting, depending on the execution. It was, for all it's worth, good execution. Video games and their bugs - even post-release - are a frequent source of natural comedy. Entire YouTube careers have been built on this. This show understands this and plays with the bugs as sources of comedy, in a cultural, memetic way, and in a natural way, as well as solutions to problems that the protagonists would not be able to deal with otherwise. Though it's generally difficult for me to find my enthusiasm for Isekai these days, I wouldn't mind another season of this.

"The Penguin" is one in the line of gangster serials that managed to capture my attention. Generally, the genre and its aesthetics, as well as its story conventions have always been interesting to me, and as such it's not exactly surprising I liked this series, that was perhaps even an archetypical mob movie stretched over the span of eight episodes of pretty solid TV. At this point, my own stance on unions and locally organized structures contrasted against state institutions and especially those organizations that have grown too large to retain their beneficial functions, might slot in neatly with many of the classic plot beats and even rhetorical flourishes that gangsters have a history of using. If "The Penguin" had a theme, I'd say it was about soft power. The first sequence of the series somewhat states this as a thesis, even though it follows up that aspiration with a pretty definitive display of hard power, and immediately acknowledges that this was probably a mistake. The characters especially that are trying to claw their way to the top will do so using primarily soft power, and when they begin relying on their numbers or guns, they regularly lose control over their operation, or even the narrative. This version of the Penguin is perhaps characterized first and foremost by his solitude. His allies are the underdogs of the territories, when he works with the big players, they view him primarily as a pawn, or an unfortunate bed-fellow at best. What grants him his empire at the end of the series is a coordinated use of soft power, built in the background, and leveraged not by him, but in his name. I feel this concludes the story pretty well, but though I'm not entirely convinced the owners of the DC comics IP won't try to weave it back into future projects of theirs eventually.

"The Night Circus" has been on my reading list for a long while. It falls into the category of adult fiction that I find somewhat difficult to read, because to my mind it needed a brief moment to establish its characters in the occasionally very brief chapters, which makes them blend together into horrible amalgams. If I were better with names, perhaps this would have been less of a problem. Once this was sorted though, it told an interesting pastiche of self-actualization stories for people whose mentor figures all seem as unreliable and prone to mood-swings as the setting of a magical circus itself. The prose kept some distance from the inner lives of the characters that made me feel like more of a bystander, but I thought that was appropriate at the least. It gives effect to the moments in which the intense emotions of the characters are externalized through action.

"Nexus" gave me a lot of Gell-Mann whiplash. As a now frequent reader of non-fiction, one should think I would grow used to the authors of books getting details slightly wrong in ways that probably don't matter to the argument, but the entire experience of reading this book made me wish there was a version without the examples. I'm aware the examples are what make about a quarter of books of this style, especially if it's not one of those books that work with diagrams of simulations or even the actual model implementation of a scientific thesis, but the amount that newspaper columns for example were sourced landed somewhere between distracting and aggravating, especially if there are peer-reviewed publications on those same topics widely sourced in other works. Far be it from me to assume any ill intent - in fact, I'm sure the author referenced material they were already familiar with at the time of writing, which is a testament to either great archiving skills or an outstanding memory on their part. In general, the attempt to analyse system failings as requiring changes in a system is refreshing from a liberal standpoint, which might otherwise have suggested to replace bad actors with better actors, but a lot of the analysis falls short in the "why" category. In general I would even fall in line with the criticisms the author levels against large centralized information systems. They advocate for open and transparent information systems with the option to block decisions made on solely on the dataset available within it, which I find is perhaps the only ethical way forward, seeing as we have a proven racial bias in all so far published AI models, for example, and the option to take away the tech-bros' shiny new toy until they've proven they know they won't primarily use it to kill people seems next to impossible. It makes me curious to find a book with equivalent topic selection with a more concise and focused approach though, as I suspect that it might be less painful for me to read.

"The End of Policing" should be required reading for police- and prison-abolitionists. While works by Angela Y. Davis might perhaps build a complete philosophical framework to support their thesis, this book has the great strength of being constructed like a reference book. It tackles ten of the most common uses cited for the necessity of police and deconstructs them using empirical data and small didactic thought exercises in the span of perhaps 20 pages. This makes it an easy start to prepare or refresh for a specific facet of how and why the concept of policing might be entirely outmoded at this stage of civilization. I see myself returning to this book for this purpose a lot in the future.

"Say Nothing" was a stark reminder that I don't understand the Irish liberation struggle. It follows primarily two sisters who join the armed struggle under the IRA in occupied north Ireland. The way the story is told is very interesting to me, because of the elements that seem like they clash in thesis. The framing device for the story is an interview project recording retellings of IRA operations from members that would otherwise take those secrets to the grave. This framing device keeps reminding the viewer that apparently the IRA was primarily lies and skulduggery, but the entire series begins with a nod toward the necessity of armed struggle. I'm not sure what the story is actually advocating then, seeing as peaceful protest was correctly depicted as largely inconsequential to legislature, as well as associated with significant personal risk, and if it denounces the IRA for harming primarily civilians of their own community, that leaves the correct path of action the one where they plant car bombs in London. While I don't necessarily disagree with this, I'm not sure this was intentional.

Then there is the matter of the reformation of the IRA into what is the modern political Sinn Feinn party. The series depicts this as a betrayal to the cause, which I'm not prepared to speak on, as this is a stretch of history I'm not familiar with, but speaking from past struggles of similar character, having a political vanguard for the civilians who are either unable or unwilling to participate in the armed struggle is a key tool to minimize civilian casualties. The devil is in the details however, and there are very likely things that should have been handled differently. Perhaps the series will stand in a different light, when I've read up on my homework first.

"Limits To Growth" is probably the closest one can get to reading an educational textbook without committing to it. It's structured not unlike a simulation paper, which I happen to read semi-regularly, so I'm used to looking at graphs between paragraphs. The topic of applied climate science I'm not directly familiar with, but having been audience to a talk of someone who worked on a very similar project as they one underlying this book's analysis, the methodology at least seems familiar and, nore importantly, easily communicable. It outlines nicely the science around climate change, and the politics recommended to slow or even reverse it, placing it in the long line of scientific findings that technically provides the data and reasoning to set the correct goals and make actionable legislation pitches, but goes ignored by the decision makers.

It is, admittedly, a dry read. It features many bullet point lists, and even more diagrams, which also aren't ordered in a way that makes it very easy to find them again to reference them, so the reader who enjoys it for its literary merits will likely have specific tastes that don't entirely overlap with mine.

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