The World of Insufficient Light

The Weird Accordion to Al by Nathan Rabin – An examination of each of Weird Al’s songs on all of his albums in order; which in practice means some combination of Al trivia, music trivia, random recollections by the author, and made-up nonsense masquerading as one of the other three. (Which, honestly, gets a bit repetitive over the course of the book, because there are only so many things to say and he wants to praise 90% of the songs.) An entertaining bit of nostalgia that reminded me that there are a lot of deep cuts I hadn’t listened to in years, but not actually recommended for anyone who isn’t already an Al superfan. (If you don’t know the songs already, the discussions of them often don’t make much sense.) It also reminded me how little time I spent on most of Straight Outta Lynwood and Alpocalypse compared to everything that came before them—despite ostensibly being musically stronger (and more popular), they were parodying an era of music I had less interest in. It’s interesting that while some of Al’s themes over 15 albums are obvious (food, TV), you don’t realize some of the others until they’re pointed out to you, like the juxtaposition of fond nostalgia and gory violence, or the love songs dominated by crazy stalkers. And there are very few songs that mock the original song or artist, though the handful there are were pretty popular and generally well-received. Al deserves and receives a lot of credit for an amazing career, performing skill, and creative output; but this book got repetitive in its attempts to be thorough and suffered for it.

Co-Intelligence: Living and Working With AI by Ethan Mollick - I read this for work; it’s written by a business school professor for a business school (or wanna-b-school) audience, which means he doesn’t actually understand the technical level of most things and instead takes a very “treat the symptoms” approach to dealing with AI. He wants to encourage you to try using it for everything on the hope that it’ll make some things easier/better; and he wants to encourage you to believe the illusion that AI is “intelligent” because that’ll make you use it more. (He’s in the group of people who get freaked out by how “human” AI can sound, despite clearly understanding that it sounds that way because it’s mimicking humans; and can turn on a dime from admitting that there’s no “there” there to treating it like an intern.) On one level, this is probably decent business advice, because the technology is going to keep coming whether we like it or not, so you might as well try to find ways to use it to make your life easier. On the other hand, most LLMs are resource-intensive plagiarism bots and none of them are actually intelligent, and encouraging anyone to think they can replace humans (which is what treating them like an “alien intelligence” does) is both bad for business and bad for society. Oh, and he has the delusion that companies care about their employees and will use AI to “assist” workers rather than cutting any and all of them as soon as AI can pretend to do their jobs, so there’s that.

The Birthday of the World and Other Stories by Ursula K. LeGuin – A collection of short stories set in her sci-fi “Hainverse;” most of them explorations of life on certain planets where conditions have driven human society to develop differently. Credit to her writing style that even the stories I thought were meandering and over-written I still cared enough about the characters that I stuck with them. (The woman had an understanding of people and an ability to present their rich inner lives that was light-years beyond any of her contemporaries.) It’s particularly interesting that on LeGuin’s worlds, it’s generally a (relatively minor-seeming) difference in biology (or even sociology) that drives the thought experiment rather than any technology. Two of the stories take place on O (where society is divided both by gender and by “moiety” and a marriage is four people) and they should be taught in schools as a deconstruction of the gender binary. Honestly, so much of what she wrote should be seminal texts on gender and sexuality, but we’re in a regressive swing where her acknowledgment that teenagers are sexual beings would get her tarred and feathered by the left; and the casual bisexuality (and often polyamory) in her works makes her terminally Woke. But I’m definitely getting my money’s worth out of this bundle of her books.

Warlock: The Pretension by M. Charles – The same guy who put out the Book of Spheres last year has put together an “in-universe” preview 666th edition of the Black Dog Games Mage-equivalent game Warlock: The Pretension, featuring the newest practitioners of Magicque and their factions for the modern era, including (serial-numbers-filed-off) Ghostbusters, Harry Potter wizards, Mortal Kombat characters, magical girls, and Juggalos. Rather than go super in-depth, it’s a series of previews of various books in the line, giving them the opportunity to skewer all the different factions. Then there’s the “in-universe” parody of the parody (Merlin: The Inception), just to make it more ridiculous. It does kinda lose the plot after a while (it gets up its own ass in a very appropriately pretentious way), though it circles back to a H.O.L. reference, which I can appreciate. If you don’t know Mage at all this won’t make much sense, but for those of us who played the game extensively in the 90s and also know the 20th Anniversary edition, it’s a hoot. And it’s peppered with “house ads” for other products. And the best actual rpg ideal to come out of the whole thing is that the Mummy-parody game line revolves around ancient aliens using their hypertechnology, which is absolutely brilliant.

Someone You Can Build a Nest In by John Wiswell - A clever twist on a fantasy romance, as the main character is a shapeshifting, man-eating monster who falls in love with a human woman. It’s impressively lighthearted for the amount of death and violence that takes place, and while I saw most of the twists coming, it was generally by way of good foreshadowing rather than bad writing. I suspect there are bits in this that might squick some readers (among other things, the protagonist is constantly extremely aware of her organs and makes good use of her ability to eat people and then mimic them). But it ends happily and it’s something different and interesting in the queer fantasy romance genre.

Bury Your Gays by Chuck Tingle – Misha is a TV writer who gets commanded by the “suits” to kill off his two lesbian characters in his hit TV show. And then he starts getting stalked by characters from other horror films he’s written. This didn’t grab me the way Camp Damascus did; I kept drifting away to other books before I finally finished it. But I’ll give him credit that it’s clever and it really, genuinely understands modern AI and the way that modern corporations want to use it. (This is a sci-fi horror novel in the sense that it takes fears about modern society and potential technology and wraps them together into commentary. I think the only problem is that Tingle’s best character writing is autistic characters and Misha is nominally supposed to be neurotypical.)

This is a vertical Game Boy styled 3.5” screen device that we’ve seen plenty of before. It’s got USC-C charging and a headphone jack, two SD card slots (but you only need one), and a dedicated menu button. (And oddly, a downward-firing speaker. Not sure I’ve seen that before?) Side-by-side with a R36S, it’s a little bit heavier and feels a little sturdier, but has basically the same dimensions. It’s also running EmulationStation as the front-end, with a different default UI from an R36S, but similar results. (After tuning it to my preferences, I expect the experience to be very similar.)

( Read more... )

Overall: The big selling point here is that it’s better than the R36S at the same price point as the R36S. This is probably the best Tier 2 device at the $30 price point, so then it’s just whether you want to pay up for higher-end system performance or a different form-factor.

I thought that between the advances in retro handheld technology and the ridiculous tariff nonsense that I was done getting packages from China. Well, that lasted a couple of months, but then there was a sale and I figured I probably didn’t have a lot more chances, so I got three more handhelds, all around $30 after various discounts.

( Read more... )

Overall: What I’d really want to do—which I’m certain isn’t feasible—is take the internals from this and put them in the RG50XX, because that had half-decent (though still cheap, let’s be honest) build quality but was hobbled by terrible software, and this gives you access to all the software tools to make things playable but is one of the worst-built handhelds I’ve used. Honestly, most of the $10 Famiclone bootleg handhelds (…though not all) were more playable.

Superman & Lois (HBOMax, Season 4) – The last gasp of DC/CW shows. The network definitely didn’t want to give them this season and screwed them hard, but they pulled out a decent finale anyway. They only got 10 episodes, but the first two of this plot arc were last season when Lex Luthor got out of prison, created Doomsday, and sent him to kill Superman. This season danced carefully around the fact they could only use most of their former regulars for an episode or two (the Irons family, the Cushing family, and Sam Lane) by containing their plotlines to single episodes and giving them other places to be. Interestingly, it ended on a bunch of the same notes as Supergirl (Clark revealing his identity, a wedding, almost all of the supporting cast from previous seasons returning), but then dedicated the last third of the final episode to Clark and Lois’s post-series lives and eventual deaths. This show did a very good job presenting Clark and Lois as good parents and good people who generally made good choices but weren’t perfect; and presenting a Superman who was a genuinely solid interpretation of the character. And a Lex Luthor who genuinely deserved to be flung into orbit.

The Dragon Prince (Netflix, Season 7) – Aaravos was freed from his prison and able to enact his grand scheme for world destruction; but more importantly Callum and Reyla are finally a couple. The showrunners finally reach their actual intended length and conclusion with a season for each magic type; but the pacing for this show has consistently been an issue regardless of Netflix’s shenanigans. They spool out plot threads and then don’t follow them; they imply situations are going to be high-drama which then aren’t; and they’ve always been decent at writing entertaining individual scenes but pretty terrible about the connective tissue between them. This show was entertaining and the worldbuilding had a bunch of cute ideas, but it wanted to be Avatar and it never got there. And though this wraps up the main plot, it leaves enough hanging threads (Claudia is still out there, Aaravos can return in seven years) for a sequel series if they get another order. I’m frankly okay with just assuming that in seven years, Aaravos re-incorporates into the middle of a magical trap that Callum spent the interim setting up; and then the cast gets back inventing new pastries and discovering how many fingers half-elves will have.

What We Do in the Shadows (Hulu, Season 6) – As I noted in previous seasons, this show does best when it remembers to be an episodic sitcom and puts the vampires in wacky situations. We get a few more entertaining, wacky situations! This season got 11 episodes, with the last being the big finale that remembered that in order to be where they are and being doing what they’re doing…the vampires basically can’t change or grow. Or at least they always have to revert to status quo—they’re a sitcom family by nature and by supernatural curse. Guillermo has grown and his role with the vampires (and his life outside them) has changed and will continue to change; but if we checked back on the four vampires in 50 years they’d be running in the same circles and having the same arguments. (Which is the same message the movie managed in under two hours, it just took them six seasons to get there.)

Chance (2002 film) - In 2002, fresh out of Buffy, Amber Benson wrote, directed and starring in an indie film. It had an extremely limited release and I had forgotten all about it, but then spotted a link to where it had been uploaded to Youtube. It’s...not good. It’s random and extremely sophomoric; the kind of “elevated realism” slice-of-life drama, narrated by the main character directly to the audience, that gets written by many a 20-something. And as is common, it’s peppered with profanity and sexual material that’s clearly intended to be edgy. (I might alternately title it, “Clarissa Explains The Fuck Out Of It.”) Only, in this case, the 20-something in question had the ability to crowdfund the movie and get her moderately-famous friends (James Marsters and Andy Hallet, most notably) to co-star in it. But it was clearly made on a shoestring budget with basically no rehearsal. Even Benson’s line readings (of lines SHE WROTE) are awkward; it wasn’t a great script to begin with and the bad acting makes it worse. I think there’s an argument to be made that it was saying something about sexual politics in the 90s, but BOY that hasn’t aged well.

I’m going ahead with a cut for this, because it’s very long and includes commentary and spoilers for Star Trek: Discovery (Season 3), Star Trek: Picard (Seasons 1-2), and Star Trek: Lower Decks (Season 5).

( Read more... )

Overall: While it doesn’t match old Trek in tone and format, I have been enjoying new Trek, and I have three more seasons of various shows still to go. And I’ll probably rewatch more old Trek while I’m at it. It’s a good time for optimistic, competent, and collaborative sci-fi universes.

Breath of Fire 4 (PS1, Partial replay on Trimui Smart Pro) – I had forgotten how deeply this game had gotten into the minigame weeds. Like, BoF3 had a lot of them, but this one gives every area a random mini-task and each dungeon a wacky theme. It smooths over a bunch of the rough ends of the systems that were created for BoF3 (skill learning, masters, combos) but the dragon transformations are actively worse. It’s fascinating replaying it already knowing the twists, because there’s a lot of foreshadowing about Ryu, Fou-Lu, and Ershin’s natures and some creepy foreshadowing about Elina, too. I had made it through to Astana (the first city in the Empire, maybe a quarter through the game) when my SD card borked and I lost all my saves. I may restart; or I may re-read the Let’s Play.

Professor Layton and the Curious Village (DS, Replayed on DraStic on my tablet) – I last played this in 2009, and it’s actually the first game on my long-running spreadsheet of what I’ve played. Having played the entire rest of the series in the interim, they definitely streamlined it as it went on—this one has too many “know them or don’t” brainteasers and too many sliding-block puzzles, and the goddamn chocolate puzzle; and they got better about variety later. One the other hand, this game actually has a solid explanation why every person on the street wants you to solve a puzzle, when later games just kinda ran with the idea that people just did that as a form of greeting in this world. Also, for the record, DraStic on an 8” tablet is a fantastic way to play touchpad-only DS games.

Final Fantasy: Dawn of Souls [HMSJayne Randomizer] (GBA, Played on Powkiddy V10) – I have vague recollections that HMSJayne used to be a full-featured randomizer; now it just produces preset seeds. Granted, they’re totally fun, as you automatically get the ship and “light a crystal” is one of the key items that gets randomized. The very last thing I got was the Crown (which doesn’t gate the Castle of Ordeals, thankfully), and Astos had the Excalibur…which I could also buy from the shop in Cornelia. Randomized runs of this version of FF1 only take 3-4 hours and are really a lot of fun.

Castlevania: Serenade Under the Moon [Aria of Sorrow hack] (GBA, Played on Powkiddy V10) – A hack that lets you play as Alucard and rearranges the castle to be closer to Symphony, this is significantly more difficult than Aria (or Symphony), adds a bunch of really annoying enemy encounters, and limits your available good weapons. (Though it does make the Luck Boost soul and Rare Ring really easy to find, so you can farm rare drops pretty early.) I thought the navigating through the castle was pretty reasonable until I hit a wall: I didn’t have swimming or Bat form and couldn’t figure out how to proceed, and eventually figured out that the game intended me to use slow-falling and jump-kicking to bounce off a truly egregious number of candles up a long tower (while avoiding random flying skeletons). Yeah, I used an infinite double-jumps code to cheat past that bullshit. There’s a mini “reverse castle” with no map where you have to hit three switches to unlock the final battle—actually, there’s an annoying number of switches that open faraway things and aren’t signposted in any way in the latter half of the game. Oh, and this was made by a Chinese hacker and the English translation is pretty dumb—Soma and “Dark Soma” are running around the castle and are apparently unrelated; and it’s really easy to trigger events out of order. There are some clever ideas here, but the difficulty increase is too much and the later sequence is too obtuse.

Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow Alter [hack] (GBA, Played on Powkiddy V10) – A more reasonable difficulty than Serenade but still a notch above the original game, this gets a lot of credit for both interesting ideas (the clock tower is frozen until you hit a switch to activate it, and that includes all the enemies) and not doing stupid things like requiring jump-kick climbing. There’s a bunch of back-and-forth you need to do to unlock everything, and an intensely difficult but optional Death Arena that includes a bunch of boss re-fights but rewards you with the Excalibur, the game’s new best weapon. And the Chaos Realm is on the main map, which I do also like. All in all, a faster and more reasonable play-through and a solid hack.

Soul Blazer [RandoBlazer Randomizer] (SNES, Played on Trimui Smart Pro) – This game actually scales better for randomizing than I realized (or maybe I’m just good at it), because I was on the ice slopes before I found my first set of armor and was still using the basic sword. I actually found all 8 emblems and the bell really early, but had no magic so the infinite gems were worthless. I also found the Super Bracelet really early, and that was a godsend. This randomizer is really clever in recognizing what does and doesn’t gate certain areas: There are obvious cases like Leo’s Brush and the GreenWood Leaves which gate off dungeon areas, but which parts of the islands the Bubble Armor does and doesn’t gate also clearly figure in. The leader of each town gates the next area, but what item they give you can also be randomized. And by forcing you to at least “dip” each area in order, you keep at a reasonably high character level so that you can manage enemies even without the optimal equipment for each area. (Also, I love that the dialogue was generally simplified and truncated with the assumption that you know what’s happening. And the summoning of the Pheonix became GRANDMA DANCE!)

Illusion of Gaia Retranslated (v1.1) (SNES, Played on Trimui Smart Pro) – A retranslation and “quality of life” patch, the former being something I have long felt this game needed. This also adds a sprint button and item stacking (though it doesn’t tell you how many items you have stacked). There are definitely rough edges—unfinished features, text boxes that don’t wrap properly—but it’s definitely a step up from vanilla in terms of the clarity of the translation. (And, of course, by the time I finished playing v1.1, v1.2 was already out. I’ll need to check back eventually.) This remains my least favorite of the trilogy, because the difficulty is uneven (and not really controllable) and the mythology is a bit nonsensical even with the retranslation; but it’s still a roller-coaster of interesting plot twists and clever gameplay and this is a step in the right direction for it.

Wavewalker: A Memoir of Breaking Free by Suzanne Heywood - The true story of a girl whose parents took her on a sailing journey around the world that was supposed to take a year and turned into a decade-long debacle. This should have been subtitled “My Parents Were F—ing Nuts.” The father was the real driving force in their terrible choices (he was a flighty, moody alcoholic with a flair for tax evasion), but the mother had her own set of bullshit (also an alcoholic, plus grossly selfish/entitled and deeply resentful of her daughter) and collectively they clearly got sick of being parents in favor of chasing this dream. I would never have read this if it was fiction; but the fact that the daughter wrote it and the forward talks about getting her brother’s recollections while she wrote it told me that everybody came out safely—though reading it, a lot of that was dumb luck. As it was, it was a fascinating look into people who made choices that I never would have. I was genuinely surprised in the afterword to learn that the parents stayed married and the daughter still spoke to them.

The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. LeGuin - A sci-fi tale about a man who realizes that his dreams rewrite reality and, in searching for a cure, happens on a doctor who tries to actively use them to change the world. I’ll admit, the ending surprised me by NOT being a standard sci-fi twist: All of the changes enacted by George’s dreams over the course of the story basically stack together to create the messed-up new world he lives in going forward. The fact that he doesn’t overwrite them all or write himself out or create the real world as we know it now is actually pretty unusual at this point. The aliens and their untranslatable knowledge of dreams feels like a hanging thread, and it’s never made clear how much “should” have happened versus was created by George. But the moral shines through (as with all the best classic sci-fi) that you need to work with the rest of the world to actually change it for the better, and accept that all actions have good and bad consequences.

The Third Gilmore Girl by Kelly Bishop - The memoirs of the woman most famous to my generation as Emily Gilmore, and most famous to an earlier generation for originating (and inspiring) Sheila in A Chorus Line. And in between, she’s lived an entertaining life. She gives a lot of gratitude and basically only has bad things to say about two people (her father and her ex-husband) and she is keenly aware that the Gilmore Girls fans want to be assured that cast all loved each other. I give a lot of credit to her ghostwriter because this nails her voice and feels like she dictated it.

Mislaid in Parts Half-Known by Seanan McGuire - Some of the Wayward Children books are standalones, focusing on one kid and the world they find their first Door to; and some revolve around the ongoing narrative and require knowledge of the greater continuity. This is very much the latter; perhaps the most so thus far. It’s a direct sequel to Lost in the Moment and Found, following Antsy’s time at the school and her return to the Store, along with continuing the narratives of several of the other characters. I think I like the standalones better; they tend to work as complete stories of their own where this feels more “interstitial”, like parts of it should have been a full and proper Antsy-focused sequel and parts are moving around the various chess pieces at the school to get them ready for the next book.

The Wedding People by Alison Espach – Hilarious and introspective, though it comes with a boatload of content warnings, as Phoebe goes through a very realistic “trauma conga line” (including parental death, miscarriage, infidelity, and pet death) before accidentally arriving in the middle of an insanely-elaborate wedding while intent on killing herself. But instead of doing that, her blunt honesty and no-fucks attitude leads her to accidentally end up in the confidences of all of the “wedding people,” who all turn out to be deep and multilayered and most of whom accidentally teach her valuable lessons about what she actually wants from life. Also, a car gets fucked. (Offstage, but the repercussions are hilarious.)

Legends of Localization: Undertale by Clyde Mandelin - Mandelin, aka “Tomato,” is a video game translator, and while he didn’t translate Undertale into Japanese, he knows a lot of the people involved and was able to get ahold of a lot of their notes and supplemental documents, and then dissect a lot of the choices made in localization and how Toby Fox’s original intent was brought as fully as possible into the Japanese version of the game. After the first two Legends of Localization discussed translating games from Japanese to English, a book on the reverse brought a new level of depth to the topic.

First and foremost, this year I watched a lot of Star Trek! I watched 24 seasons of various shows and 11 movies; and 7 of those seasons of TV were Star Trek. (That’s first two seasons of Strange New Worlds, two seasons of Lower Decks, and re-watching the first three seasons of The Next Generation for the first time in decades.)

Other things that stood out included:

Cartoons: Delicious In Dungeon was a surprise fun anime crossing a D&D pastiche with a ridiculous cooking show pastiche. My Adventures With Superman remained cute; Harley Quinn remained funny; The Dragon Prince could have ended but still has to stretch out for one more season.

Superheroes: The second season of Loki was solid and Agatha All Along with finally a worthy sequel to WandaVision; but Secret Invasion was forgettable. Doom Patrol and Umbrella Academy both ended well. Marvel’s Legion was weird but interesting, at least for a little while.

Comedy: We Might Regret This had an interesting concept but the writer/producer/lead character was too close to it. Girls5Eva was fun and I may watch other seasons. What We Do in the Shadows had a solid season 5 but I think the fact that it’s ending doesn’t upset me much. Liberty Cabbage, by the folks who made The Gamers, was an attempt at geeky sketch comedy that only somewhat worked.

Sci-Fi/Fantasy: I actually quite liked the live-action Avatar: The Last Airbender and thought 3 Body Problem was decently adapted as well. And, y’know, I watched so much Star Trek and really enjoyed pretty much all of it.

2025 will see the end of The Dragon Prince, What We Do in the Shadows, and Superman & Lois. And I’m already watching more Star Trek: In addition to everything I’m rewatching, there’s three more seasons of Discovery we haven’t watched and the final season of Lower Decks.

(ARR mostly watched the entirety of both the new Garfield show and the 90s Garfield and Friends on repeat.)

I read 28 prose books this year, nominally in-line with the last couple, though six of them were RPG rulebooks, as I finally got through the stack of Kickstarter books I’d been backing for several years. That total breaks down into 6 Kindle books, 2 Kobo books, 7 other eBooks, and 13 physical books.

Genres were all over the place; after RPG rulebooks I had sci-fi, fantasy, a couple of memoirs, some non-fiction, some self-help, some comedy, and a horror novel. Orson Scott Card was actually my most-read author as I read four books from the bundle of his Enderverse stuff. My only runners-up where two Terry Pratchett novels and the two Patrick Thomas Dear Cthulhu books.

Recommendations: My love of time travel is evident as I recommend All Our Wrong Todays by Elan Mastai and How to Become the Dark Lord and Die Trying by Django Wexler. Camp Damascus by Chuck Tingle is fascinating by being both a solid horror story (for people who aren’t that into horror) and also the most autistic book I’ve ever read. And, of course, New York Times Bestseller Dreadful by Caitlin Rozakis, on the extremely odd chance you’re reading this and haven’t read it yet.

On the comics front, I made massive progress on my backlog of Humble Bundles by finishing eight of them: Escape Ordinary with Vault Comics, Winter Horror by Image Comics, Incal to Twilight Man by Humanoids, Spice Up Your Love Life, Neil Gaiman Dark Horse Collection, Jimmy Palmiotti and Friends, Image Comics in the 10s, and Dynamite 20th Anniversary. That was 149 trade paperbacks worth of posted reviews in 2024, plus five more from unfinished bundles, or approximately 770 pamphlets worth. Which also explains why I went through most of the first half of the year without reading prose books.

Going into 2025, I have a new stack of recently-acquired books on the dresser; I still have a couple of Humble Bundles I haven’t gotten to; and I have yet to do my complete read-through of The Books of Magic.

Clearly inspired by the success of Stardew Valley, this is a farming sim with heavy rpg elements and Zeldalike combat. You move to the new town (a medieval fantasy pastiche) and start your new job, which defaults to farmer but you can also start as a crafter, rancher, warrior, etc. rather than learning those skills as you go. You do farm chores, explore the surrounding dangerous areas, meet all the townsfolk and run errands for them; you know, the usual.

( Read more... )

Overall: If you want more Stardew Valley-like experience, this delivers it solidly.