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.