Comics

• Void Rivals by Image comics. This comic book series is set in the transformers universe? I didn't have high expectations going into it, but I was pleasantly surprised by the writing and artwork.
• Beneath the Trees Where Nobody Sees (IDW)- written by Patrick Horvath. Story about a psychopath in an anthropomorphic small town.
• Faster Jesse Lonergan - This one is all art and style.
• Fishtown - a non-linear story about the murder of a teenager by his friends. I thought it was well done.

Books

• Catharine Arnold - Globe Life in Shakespeare's London. This is a slightly fanciful description of London during Shakespeare's rise as a playwright and actor. There's still enough meat to make a recommendation if you're interested in this sort of thing.
• Wyrd Sisters - Terry Pratchett. This is my fourth or fifth reading. The book becomes a little threadbare near the crux of the story, but it's still entertaining.

• The Mammoth Book of the Adventures of Professor Moriarty - Maxim Jakubowski. The stories are short, and I would often finish 2-3 before falling asleep each night. The quality varies, but a many are as good as the originals.

A Masterpiece in Disarray: David Lynch’s Dune—An Oral History - Max Evry. I stand by the somewhat facetious claim that Lynch's dune is my favorite movie of all time. I'm sad we never got to see Lynch's cut. He had 4-5 hours of footage and Dino cut it down to 90 minutes, so theaters could show it more times in a day. Dino cut so much it stopped making sense. Then, to try to fix this they added an introduction by the princess, and all the characters got internal monologues. When this still failed to help they sent pamphlets to movie theaters with a glossary of terms. It was Dino's decision to add the terrible scene at the end where Paul makes it rain.

Lynch was working on story boards for the follow-up movies. As someone said in the book, "Why don't they just give David money?". I agree, we should have given David more money. There have been various fan edits of Dune over the years. The Dune 1984 Alternative Edition Redux doesn't make it any more comprehensible, but it removes some of Dino's bad additions. * You Suck - Christopher Moore. I picked this book out of the discarded book bin at the NOLS campus in Baja before our flight home and finished it before we landed in Monterey. I laughed more than a few times, but the humor began to grow stale near the end.

Music

• TRIPTYKON - The Prolonging
• Michel Guy Bowman Vampire State
• Betty White Shoorah! Shoorah!
• Depeche Mode People are Good - thinking about this a lot recently
• Eartha Kitt Angelitos Negros - I was wondering why she was famous
• Giogio Gaber O Bella Ciao
• Kendrick Lamar Not Like Us
• Hurray for the Riff Raff Buffalo - this may be too catchy. I tend to get burned out on these songs
• Willie Nelson Graceland
• Carolina Chocolate Drops Hit em up style
• Devo Blockhead
• Dead Kennedys - California Über Alles
• The macarons project too sweet
• TV on the radio trouble - another I've been thinking about a lot
• Yoshis island

Video

• Count Magnus - This is an MR James story - part of the BBC's ghost story for Christmas series.

• At Midnight I'll take Your Soul - In October I saw a variety of screenshots from this movie and decided to check it out. It is advertised as Brazil's first horror movie and a cult classic. It is definitely something to see. The director (and protagonist) sold everything he owned to produce this film and fills it with enough ham to choke an elephant. In the movie he comes across as a skinny nerd with poor hygiene who bullies the entire town. You can watch a low quality version of this whole movie on youtube if you want to get the gist.
• Mars Express this is an animated French film about corporate crime in the mars colony in the 23rd century. Think a more coherent ghost in the shell.
• Spine Chillers These are more absorbing and interesting to me than most television dramas which is why it's so depressing they only made a dozen or so. One evening we watched one of these (The Yellow Cat) followed by the 2020 adaptation of Jane Austin's Emma. Both plays had a literary basis and had been adapted for the screen, but I found video of an actor reading a story to the camera 10x more compelling than Emma despite Austin's prose and The Yellow Cat's questionable plot.

Today we have more fine literature than I could consume in a lifetime. You could produce this show for almost no money.

Games

Elden Ring

I enjoyed this game so much more after I started over with a new character. It's beautiful and the characters, variety, design, and animation is amazing. It may be an illusion caused by the difficulty, but it seems much larger than Skyrim. When every encounter can kill you in seconds, you tend to explore very carefully.

I don't consider gaming a core part of my identity. I don't have the best reflexes and I prefer to play games in casual mode. Elden Ring doesn't have a causal mode. I selected my first character based on an online suggestion that a magic using astrologer was the best character for people new the series. This was a mistake. As a glass cannon with a limited pool of magic I died hundreds of times. I gave up at the second big boss (out of a dozen? Twenty? This game is huge) after dying 50-60 times. After each death it would send me back to my save point. It took about a minute to run from the save point back to try the fight again and this gets pretty tedious after 59 failures.

The game drops you into a strange mythology with baffling terminology. You start with a Furlcalling finger remedy, gold-pickled fowl foots, memory of grace, and a flask of crimson tears. Your inventory includes rune arcs, starlight shards, reusable cracked pots, ashes of war, perfume bottles (as weapons), and bell bearings. An NPC offered to hug me and then gave me Baldachins blessing which, for a long time I thought was a status effect, but which is actually an item that has lowered my HP by 5%. Later in the game after 20 tries, I managed to defeat a difficult boss and noticed coffin in the corner. Approaching it, I was offered the option to climb inside and take a nap, then it played a cutscene showing the coffin flying to the top of a waterfall on a string of magical symbols. You speak to a creature known as the two fingers which is interpreted by a withered crone with empty eye sockets.

The game keeps the line between single and multiplayer gameplay deliberately fuzzy. The ground was littered with bloodstains showing places where other players have died, and white sigils offering cryptic advice. The sigils were written by other players using a deliberately limited vocabulary, which makes them feel cryptic and alien. Also, because they are written by the general public, they're often misleading or crude.

Other players can spontaneously join your game and kill you (though I'm not sure if these are always controlled by other people), and you can invite other people to help you fight.

Most creatures in the game are deliberately designed with crazy flowing cloaks and chains, so parts of their model continue to move after the character has stopped. The designers call it secondary movement, and it's meant to make it more difficult to visually parse the creatures you're fighting. Each monster in the game has a complicated move-set which needs to be understood and responded to within particular animation frames to avoid their attacks. I've heard Elden Ring accurately described as Dance, Dance Revolution the RPG.

Check out these fights with Margit and Godrick. Be sure to stick with the Godrick video until 2:30 when he enters his second phase.

The size and weirdness of the setting, the number of unique monsters (lists online have it at 120 creatures in the base game), and the difficulty, makes you slow down and appreciate the work that went into it. I kind of want to start over with a different character, but it is a huge time sink and I'm not sure if I have the patience, time, and skill to enjoy it any better a third time around.

Cairn

Cairn (the full game will be released in 2025, but you can play the free demo on steam) is a rock climbing game which somehow manages to capture the feeling of actual rock climbing. The game doesn't play a soundtrack or artificial sounds, only the sound of the wind, your labored breathing, and the slap and scrape of your hands and feet on the wall. It also eschews a stamina bar and other visual indicators, opting instead to have your character grunt and breath harder, slip on the rock, and start trembling when they're getting tired. Playing the game is as meditative as actual climbing. You spend your time carefully positioning your hands and feet and pushing your luck before attaching a safety line.

Moonring

This is a free, turn-based RPG by the co-creator of the fable series for the xbox. For a free game it's surprisingly deep. This has been my steam deck go to for a few minutes each night before bed for the last several weeks.

Shadows of Doubt

This game is so buggy it's hard to recommend, but the developer is still releasing updates and the premise has tremendous potential. You play as a detective in a living city solving crimes by collecting clues, breaking and entering, taking fingerprints, and interviewing people. The people have jobs and places where they live, and they seem to commit crimes organically.

You will hear about a murder and race to the crime scene to collect evidence before the cops arrive, then stake out suspects, disable security systems, hack into their computers, crack their safes, take fingerprints, bribe witnesses, and crawl through vents to gather enough to turn in a case for a reward. The game takes it's time. You might want to follow a suspect to see where they work but if it's 6pm you'll have to find some place to sit down and wait for them to get up and go to work in the morning.

Unfortunately the game is pretty buggy. In my last case I arrived at the murder scene and caught the perpetrator leaving the apartment while the police were inside investigating the scene. I gave chase and caught him, and he told me his name, but before I could handcuff him he took off running, eventually drifting through the floor.

In another case I called a phone number to accept a job and was told to go to a phone booth on a street at 16:06. It was 16:06 already, and it took me a few minutes to find the street on the map. As I was running up to the booth it said 'job failed' but when I picked up the phone to call the number again someone answered and started giving me the job information. I was told there was a suitcase nearby, but I couldn't find it, so I reloaded from quicksave and tried again. This time I got a different prompt to complete the job and the suitcase was right there.

Citizens are trigger-happy. I visited a suspect's laboratory and accidentally stepped a few inches through the doorway. All the office workers instantly started screaming, everyone drew guns, and started blasting away.

As you collect clues you put them onto a cork board connected with multicolored strings. It's a nice effect and generally useful. I'm hoping they clean up the bugs. It seems every time I play a scenario I encounter a few game breaking issues. It's so bad it's hard to know if you aren't making any progress because you've followed the wrong clues or because the game is broken.

Peglin

Peglin is a pachinko roguelike. I've been playing this for a year or so and the devs keep expanding upon this simple template. It's easy to jump in and there are enough game-changing modifiers it's always fresh. The gameplay is simple, but you get wacky combinations often enough it remains entertaining.