#its also a very emotional book i mostly look at it from an emotional perspective but ozian politics are very interesting

[szaryherbatnik]

People calling the wicked book traumatic, horrific or "straight up porn" is making me very upset because its none of those things. Since when is a political plotline traumatic.

And of course the book is not appropriate for children and theres heavy topics included in it that would make people uncomfortable. But telling everyone that its horrific and traumatizing is not the right direction????? Its fine to have boundaries and recognize that something isnt right for you but also lets not scare everyone. This is the type of behavior that leads to banning books. The fear of art is making me scared for the future. Its 2025 and i see more and more people being against any type of art thats challenging in any way. Smells like fascism which is already returning, even without this artistic narrative.

The least we can do is not making people fucking SCARED of books. Can we not let media literacy die completely. Can we engage with things that are out of our comfort zone or at the very fucking least not propagate fear.

[iasmelaion]

I have been afflicted with a terrible curse: tearing through a book series, and upon finishing, seeking out the fandom only to find that most of that fandom appears to be reading an entirely different series than I am, lol. I brought this on myself, to be clear. I think a big part of the mismatch is that it's a genre I'm not that familiar with and that I don't care about/for in and of itself, so I'm coming at it from a different perspective. Also, maybe I'm reading into things too much! But what can I say, a girl needs enrichment in her enclosure, and there's enough meat on this bone that I will be occupied for a while.

All of which is to say, I read through all seven books of the Dungeon Crawler Carl series that are out to date (thanks, free Kindle Unlimited subscription!), and now I have a lot of thoughts and no one who cares about them ;____; I played myself ;_______;

This series is such a hard sell in general, because on the surface it looks like male power fantasy garbage, it's litRPG, and there's a decent amount of mildly obnoxious dude humor at first. But a) it's only slightly male power fantasy garbage, b) it's not tedious litRPG and in fact the genre evolves and shifts into more straightforward SFF the further in you get, which is clever on a meta level and also a relief, c) to the extent it is litRPG, it mostly isn't boring and annoying about it (no stat nonsense for the sake of stat nonsense), d) the mildly obnoxious dude humor is often genuinely funny and to the extent it is obnoxious, there's some in-universe reasoning for that.

Anyway, the premise is as follows: Earth is suddenly and devastatingly mined for its natural resources by aliens. This results in the death of billions: everyone who was indoors is instantly killed. Anyone who was outside gets a chance to enter the "dungeon", which offers a chance for the remaining humans to compete for an alleged chance at freedom and sovereignty if they reach the bottom floor, but it's basically The Hunger Games: a propaganda exercise that's meant to earn money for the aliens running it as a game show, only this is a dungeon crawling RPG rather than a Hunger Games/Battle Royale situation. No one has ever reached the bottom floor. The best result most achieve is to reach the tenth floor, where they can take a deal for some variety of indentured servitude.

Enter Carl, our hero, a former (late 20s? early 30s? don't recall his age, but somewhere around there) Coast Guard technician who is outside when it all happens because he chased after his ex-girlfriend's cat, Princess Donut, a best in show tortie Persian cat. Carl and Donut enter the dungeon, Donut eats a magic treat and becomes a sapient talking cat, and the books follow their struggle to survive and fight back against the cruel and inhuman system they've found themselves in.

Tonally, the series is interesting in that it manages to balance a very bleak, dystopian premise with genuine hilarity and moments of legitimately heart-wrenching emotion. Also, this is not a "lone heroic super cool guy saves and fixes everything" kind of story. This series is interested in teamwork and community in dire circumstances, and the found family of it all is genuinely moving. As a whole, it's just bonkers entertaining. I love when I can tell the author is having a blast, and you can absolutely tell that Matt Dinniman is having an absolute blast.

Anyway, a list of things I enjoy about this series and/or a list of general thoughts, some of which include mild spoilers:

PRINCESS DONUT. i love her. this cat is amazing and hilarious. She's exactly like you'd imagine a prize-winning Persian cat named Princess Donut to be. also, to my delight, she gets to be a fully rounded character. like yes, she's hilarious and often comic relief, but she's also taken seriously, and Carl is absolutely Insane about this cat. He fuckin' loves this cat, and the cat loves him. Also, hilariously, she has higher stats than Carl at the beginning. (In fact, she mostly has higher stats than him throughout, so she's technically the party leader. Which is why their party is called the Royal Court of Princess Donut.)

Donut has A+++++ insulting skills. On multiple occasions, I have lol'd in horror and delight at her savagery. A favorite:

Rezan: Why does that cat always type in all caps?

Donut: WHY DIDN’T YOUR MOTHER DRIBBLE YOU BACK OUT ONTO THE TRUCK STOP BATHROOM FLOOR, REZAN?

lest this give you the wrong impression, Donut is a classy lady. She is a princess, after all. but also she is savage.

Carl! The books are mostly in first person POV, so we're in Carl's head for most of them, and he is a great example of an unreliable narrator. He'll seem fairly generic at first, but stick it out through, like, the first third of the first book and onward for the slow and steady reveal of his Tragic Backstory and also such exciting psychological and emotional issues as: Insane about Donut; claims he "doesn't like drama" while in actuality he is clearly Repressing Everything; secretly an idealist who wants to believe the best of people; deeply committed to protecting people; full of revolutionary, anti-capitalist, anti-authoritarian rage; holy abandonment issues batman; simply Does Not See It when various ladies basically throw themselves at him; generally Barely Holding It Together at all times.

people on reddit, mostly: Carl's stats!! blah blah blah power stuff. me: okay, but why is Carl Like This. let's deep discuss that. Also let Carl have a little breakdown. As a treat.

these books are so wildly, delightfully anti-capitalist, lol. I poked around Reddit and tumblr a bit, but didn't see anyone discussing this series' politics, but that aspect is super interesting to me. The series is very, very concerned with revolution and resistance and the form those things take when very few options are available to the oppressed, plus the ethics of revolutionary violence.

The dungeon AI! This thing is Way Too Online in a gross dudebro way, but frankly, it's still funny with it, and the evolution of the AI's character is fascinating. Also, I regret to inform you that I do find it extremely fucking funny that the AI has a thing for Carl and his feet. This is wholly hypocritical of me: if Carl was Carla, and the AI made the same comments, I'd have bounced. But what can I say, comedy is about subversion, I guess.

PREPOTENTE. MY PRECIOUS WEIRDO GOATMAN CHILD. Prepotente was a goat; upon entry into the dungeon and eating a magic pet treat, he becomes a goat man type thing, and he spends much of the series as one of the most dangerous and skilled dungeon crawlers, along with his "mother", the shepherdess Miriam Dom. he's a total fuckin weirdo who screams a lot for no reason and i love him. he better fucking survive the series, i swear to god.

one running theme of the series that I love so much is that Carl does not give up on people, and he does not write them off. He often runs into fellow crawlers who, if he was being bloodlessly practical about things, he should have bailed on. They're people who aren't prepared, who haven't leveled up enough, who aren't likely to survive much longer. But he doesn't abandon them, and he doesn't assume they can't get better. He sticks with them and helps them, and they help him. It's about found family ;____; they all love each other so much ;______;

MORDECAI!!! he's a changeling skyfowl and the team's game guide and later manager, and is a former crawler who took a deal. This is supposed to be his last season in the crawl, before he's free of his indentured servitude. he is Dad Shaped. automatic dad. there is in fact something quietly devastating about his Dad Shapedness.

There's a whole super interesting thing going on with the dungeon NPCs, and how we start out assuming most of them aren't "real". unsurprising spoiler alert: they may have been created by/for the dungeon, but many of them are very much real, and once they realize the position they've been put into, they're pissed.

i truly have no real idea where the series is going with its running theme about parents and children, and the protection or lack thereof of children. Our most heroic characters are consistently shown protecting and caring for the NPC children, even when it's at great cost to themselves.

everything to do with the Dungeon Anarchist's Cookbook, the secret book with writing from prior crawlers that Carl is given, makes me Emotional. I'm honestly shocked the whole Cookbook was never planned, and that it was a result of Patreon votes. It's hugely important in the seventh book, not so much on a plot level--I can see how Dinniman could have gotten to some of these same plot beats without it--but on an emotional and thematic one. There's something so affecting here about the continuity of resistance, of finding hope and strength in the people who came before you, of planting seeds you water with blood and that you may never get to harvest, and the sheer, furious love of the whole thing.

so apparently Dinniman is a pantser when it comes to writing. Clearly, he's having fun, and it's more or less working out so far, but it does make me concerned about his ability to stick the dismount. I saw in an AMA that he likened it to building a spaceship with legos versus building it with a plan, and that he has fun writing himself out of corners. That's all well and good, but some of the things I'm most interested in this series are the overarching themes, and it makes me wary of those themes not getting a proper payoff. I guess I should just enjoy the ride, and accept that there will almost certainly be many loose ends.

On a meta level, I find it very funny and ironic that when I took a look at the reviews for the seventh book, I saw some people complaining about the absence of the more "entertainment" and "game" aspects of the series: no interviews with the outside, no "character sheets" for Carl, fewer big fights for Carl himself to take on, the AI taking on a more active 'deus-ex AI' role. Because in-universe, the dungeon crawl is no longer entertainment. At this point, the crawl has become an actual war, and the game genre it takes on--4x strategy--reflects that. Carl and the crawlers' choices have increasing ramifications outside the crawl, where actual war is breaking out at least in part as a result of their actions. The AI intervening more and more often to put its finger on the scale is part of the conflict; it's fighting this war as much as the other characters are, if with still inscrutable motivations.

This is in fact one of the central conflicts of the series: to what extent is this still a game? Has it ever only been a game? The crawlers and NPCs are in fact fighting for it to not be a game: they're saying "my life is real, my suffering is real, and if you won't acknowledge that, then you're coming in here with us to fight and die too. Not just a game anymore, is it?" And on another side of the conflict, you have the AI insisting that this stay a game, something with rules and a narrative and at least an attempt at fairness, however much the AI manipulates those things.

It seems like there's something of a genre shift going on with this series. As a reader who's not particularly interested in or invested in litRPG in and of itself, I'm fine with it shifting to being more straightforwardly SFF, and in fact, I think that's an interesting and fun choice on a meta level: the more the crawlers and the AI break and change the game, the more the genre of the series itself shifts.

[rinayeas]

puking out some mercs drawing hcs bc i have nowhere to put them mwak

Best artist to worst real quick: scout, medic, demo, spy, engie, sniper, pyro, heavy, and solly

Scout is self explanatory, he's loved drawing since he was very young and his love for comic books only served as fuel. Is the only one with a well developed, intentional style. That style obviously being 2004 cartoon network, sans the fact they live in the 70s

medic had to learn lots about drawing anatomy to make diagrams while he was in med school so he has an uncannily realistic style and is very good at portaits (skeleton portraits are also a specialty of his). He hasn't bothered to experiment with this skill surprisingly, he likes drawing things as he sees them

Demo and engie make their own schematics for their work so they got that down but engie doesn't have an artistic bone in his body sans playing guitar, he can draw a sentry and all its parts perfectly but still draws stick figures. Demo has dabbled in drawing and doodling on the corner of his schematics so he has a bit more range (more than he gives himself credit for)

Spy is crazy good at painting, his use of color is incredible and can capture light and moods perfectly. But he is absolutely fucking terrible at actually drawing things. His anatomy is all fucked up and he is REALLY bad at perspective. Insists that it's his artistic vision but on the inside he is fuming.

One time Scout gave him the idea to 'collab' and he begrudgingly accepted. But the end result of one of Scout's cartoons combined with his coloring made him a bit more emotional than he wanted to admit.

Sniper can only draw animals. He doesn't see the point in drawing but one time on a trip he saw a really cute dog and he hadn't bought a camera yet nor could he take it back home so he just drew it and showed it to his mom as soon as he got back. He got better over the years but doesn't know how to draw anything else

Pyro draws like a kid but they put the most passion and love to her drawings so they look particularly cute and colorful. He and scout have drawing sessions in the mess hall where whoever is in there w them chooses the theme and each of them draws their version, they surprisingly learn a lot from eachother.

Heavy is a man of words. Mostly because he loves them but also bc he finds drawing absurdly hard. Resorts to drawing stick figures all the time but he's very competent at making his point while using the bare minimum

Solly's drawing are just a mess of scribbles with the ocassional color, nobody knows if he's an abstract genius or just a terrible artist. Exclusively uses the american flag colors. One time Spy jokingly asked him why was he using the french flag colors and after choking the shit out of him Soldier stared at the wall for a good two hours in contemplation.

[beigetiger]

My brain is fucking overanalyzing a two-page phone call scene in Resurrection so now I’m just gonna spill my thoughts, probably pretty skin-deep analysis but I’m doing it anyway

Needless to say, spoilers ahead

This entire scene does a really good job highlighting how unbelievably not normal Skulduggery and Valkyrie are about each other, even after five years apart.

First off, the book never actually says who started the phone call, and the dialogue is vague enough that you can’t really guess. I actually really agree with this choice, because making it clear which person called the other could have made the weird dynamic going on in this book seem much more one-sided, as opposed to the mutual obsessiveness shown in this scene. The chapter shows nothing of the beforehand of the call (how Valkyrie got to the hospital, etc) and shows nothing of it afterwards, ending the chapter when the conversation seems to reach its natural conclusion and Valkyrie hangs up.

There’s also barely any description of the setting that Valkyrie is in. Valkyrie basically spends one or two sentences describing the clinic and stating that she’s in an empty room, and then that’s it. It doesn’t go into any sort of detail into where in the clinic she is or why she’s there, so the viewers have to guess. The scene also barely shows Valkyrie’s inner thoughts, so the scene is mostly just the dialogue between the two characters, which adds a feeling of objectivity and also makes the scene feel more closed-in, which is probably a good representation of what Valkyrie was feeling at the moment (due to the shock factor of abruptly losing someone and then talking to weird version of them a few hours later).

In fact, Valkyrie’s inner dialogue is mostly just used at the very start, where she mentally notes his voice. This on top of only starting off using pronouns instead of their names shows a repeated familiarity between the characters that immediately tells us who’s perspective we’re looking at, no names necessary. Showcasing the familiarity between the characters is also important to do here because they’ve recently been apart for five years and it’s reassuring to the audience to know that they’re still freakishly close.

Also, Valkyrie being so desperate to hear Skulduggery talk that she’s willing to sit there and listen to him talk about how he’s going to literally murder her. There is so much going on there, from Valkyrie’s current shitty mental state (it’s already shown in the book that she puts up with a lot of bullshit, this just adds to it) to her borderline denial that anything is wrong with her partner (like how in the next chapter she just repeats to herself that Skulduggery is fine and everything will be alright).

Skulduggery, of course, is calling her out by claiming that some part of her does understand the direness of the situation at hand, even if she doesn’t want to. He also does it in an almost taunting “there is nothing wrong with me, I’m not trying to fight this corruption at all way”, which MIGHT be true at that moment, or might be a bare-faced lie that he’s trying to make Valkyrie convinced of in order to also convince himself. After all, he does later manage to fight off Smoke’s corruption TWICE, and you cannot convince me that some part of him wasn’t trying to beforehand.

Adding to my previous point about the familiarity between the characters, Skulduggery is quite willingly (and gleefully) open to Valkyrie about his emotional state, how he’s coming to his current moral conclusions, how it feels from his perspective, and so on. While he’s definitely more generally emotionally open when he’s corrupted, he never quite goes into the same detail about it with other people as he happily gives to Valkyrie, which is a trend across the books (and again, reinforces to the audience that these two are still close).

He also acts incredibly exhilarated at Valkyrie’s knowledge of how his mind and motives work (as shown by “do you think I’m gonna kill your family”), since it shows him (as well as the audience) that Valkyrie still knows him really, really, well. It also adds a sort of serial killer vibe to the dynamic that makes it more interesting to consume for the readers.

And not really related to the scene, but the transitions between chapters in this book (including this particular chapter) are really smooth and make for some very funny moments, such as subtly calling the in-series stand-in for Trump an idiot, or talking about “the most beautiful woman in the world” only for the next chapter to immediately cut to talking about China. Also, the repeated chapter transitions between Sebastian and Omen were REALLY subtle foreshadowing for the twist in Until the End, which really shows how much Landry planned out phase 2 before writing it.

There are more words in here than there are in the actual chapter.

[beevean]

Honestly, as someone who wasn't a huge fan of Frontiers from a gameplay or story perspective, I couldn't help but feel alienated from the fanbase for a while. People seem to praise it up the ass, and I honestly don't see what their seeing in the game. And often times when you point out criticism, you get responses like "It's a step in the right direction, we should praise it" or "You're not a real Sonic fan if you don't like this"

Are you me? :^)

After all the shit we endured with IDW and its endless, vitriolic discourse about its writing and take on Sonic and Eggman and its "deep" morality (which stopped being deep once Flynn got tired of the discourse, then it became "a book for kids")... Frontiers broke me. Again, I must stress: it's not about the game, because I haven't played it and videos don't make it justice. I can believe it's a fun experience. But the writing is honestly '06 level of bad, mostly for how boring and pretentious the story is.

Where are all these deep, emotional character moments? Where are all these compelling character arcs (that are totally not rehashes of past games)? Where is Sage's depth? Why are we praising Eggman sitting on his ass for 90% of the game and then suddenly developing fatherly feelings when past games made clear that he's only proud of his creations when they make him look good and he's more than willing to abuse them for the slightest transgressions (which Sage has made)?

Then you add the forced references (some of them straight up wrong, like the Neo Metal one), the meta jokes, the completely unnecessary lore that to this day I still don't understand, the underwhelming villain, the wasted conflict of Sonic getting corrupted, the lackluster finale, and the fact that literally nothing happens - which would be fine if this game had a tone more like Heroes or Generations, which were aware that story was their lowest priority, but no, this game wants to be DEEP, a step in the right direction after the EVIL PONTAFF! (I still find very... unprofessional? that Flynn wrote a jab at Baldy McNosehair in one of the Egg Memos. It's not even the first time he does that, he also did it in IDW. I get it man, you think your writing is so much better, "thanks for putting the chili back on my dog" :^) )

So anyway. It got to the point where the praise genuinely made me feel like there was something wrong with me. I don't like IDW, I don't like Frontiers, now I don't see anything promising in Prime - am I a bad Sonic fan? Am I being stripped of something that gave me joy since I was 8? I had to distance myself. I had to keep my few friends close and think about the parts I still enjoy.

It's not the first time I took a "break" from Sonic - the period from 2013 to 2017 was... bad. But everyone else agreed that it was! That's the thing. It's one thing to disagree that SA2 is a masterpiece, because fine, whatever, you can't always agree with the majority. But when it comes to modern material, the majority is so vitriolic and nasty, and I can't deal with it anymore. I'll make my own fandom :\

[thedreadvampy]

Midcentury American novels update:

Finished Farenheit 451 on Thursday and it didn't hit me to the degree Catcher in the Rye did but I do completely get the sense of despair and the hunt for something to cling to. Umm also there's an actual nuclear apocalypse in this book which I. Did not know through my general cultural osmosis. And it made a lot of the stuff that initially read a bit as 'you can't say ANYTHING now cause of 50s Woke' less irritating in hindsight, cause the looming presence of nuclear war gives some real crunch to the overall theme of looking away from the discomfort of acknowledging what's wrong. Still not 100% comfortable with 'well we started burning books lest minorities become offended' as a midpoint comment but like I read this when I was 12 or 13 and very much came away with the sense that it was a shallow What If TV But Too Much kind of story that was very pleased with its own intellectualism. and I don't really think that's what it is I think it's a primal scream of WON'T ANYONE DO ANYTHING????? CAUSE I AM TOO SMALL AND TOO STUPID AND TOO COMPLICIT BUT NOBODY ELSE IS MOVING EITHER???? which you know. I can connect with at this time.

anyway then I reread One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest yesterday. That one I actually have read as an adult, like 10 years ago, and what I remembered mostly from it was the degree to which either the characters, the author, or both, truly despise women. On reread I don't think that's entirely fair, although it's hard to tell inside one character's very limited and metaphorical perspective - I don't think Ken Kesey hates women, I think that Candy and Sandy are relatively whole people and the other women in the story are avatars of the system abusing the men on the ward, so Chief Brogden sees them as such. Getting over the general 60s misogyny miasma, though, I really really liked it and stayed up very late last night finishing it, I think it has a lot of very coherent things to say about trauma, power and marginalisation and I think it's all a bit Foucault. It's odd that I remembered it as being very het-white-American-male in tone because this time around it felt very interested in how people are artificially marginalised in order to preserve power, and specifically in the violent assimilation of Indigenous communities, so I truly don't know why I went away last time feeling it was so tone-deaf. It's really good, is the thing.

(As a side note, cause Sam's copy is an 80s film tie in copy - there's no fucking way that film is good, right? Cause I actively cannot imagine how you would make a film adaptation of a book that exists so much in one mostly-silent character's head, kind of unmoored from time and moving between reality, metaphor and hallucinations, and with a fairly distant relationship to the literal events, and have it not be shit. Animation could maybe do it and you could potentially do it with a really good effects department to establish early on that this isn't a neutral, literal depiction, but even so it feels like doing this in a visual medium would undercut the fact that most of the book's story involves stuff that isn't really happening on a visual or audible level.

Like about a tenth of the text is Chief Brogden drawing connections, conclusions, describing the emotional and sensory experiences of things like dissociation, anxiety and electrocution, and generally explaining why the things that he and the other patients do that seem random make sense to him. And even with heavy voiceover it seems to me that a) a film would mostly be us watching mental patients act the way we expect mental patients to act, without the insight we get through his eyes, and b) it would inevitably need to be about what a guy McMurphy is, either positively or negatively, which to be entirely honest is kind of not what the book is about even though that's the plot of the book?)

The book isn't about McMurphy, it's about people realising they've not only had their agency taken away, but given it up themselves, and how they react to that and what it would mean to reclaim that. McMurphy's one of several people going through that arc, and he's going through it in an opposite direction to the people around him, but it's not more about him than about Chief Brogden or Billy or Harding or even Nurse Ratched. But I feel like because of how film language works, it would be very hard to make a film of One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest where McMurphy wasn't the main character. And he's not. Chief Bromden is the main character as well as the narrator - his life is defined by people collapsing under unbearable pressure and giving up their freedom and agency, which is how his tribe lost their land and how he lost his agency and his power of speech, and watching McMurphy force the people in power to subdue him by force rather than him caving in, the Chief makes actual choices about how he wants to respond to power that don't involve him falling out of reality or becoming invisible. and I think like halfway through I was like 'ehhh don't really get why Kesey went with a specifically Native protagonist' and by the back end of the book it is extremely clear to me why.

Cause his arc has a lot to do with the violence against indigenous communities and while I don't think that the book is primarily a metaphor, per se, because it very much is literally about institutionalisation and the stigmatisation of inconvenient Madness, I do think it's also saying things it wants us to apply to other relationships of power and assimilation, starting with the forced assimilation and land theft of Native Americans, and touching in on class, politics, race and sexuality more generally. Not much on gender, mind - I don't think that it does actually despise women, but it also isn't very interested in interrogating anything about them other than the impacts they have on men, which 🤷‍♀️ 60s innit.

idk I liked it a lot. I liked Farenheit 451 pretty well and better than I expected to, but Catcher and One Flew have both got me in this kind of rambly post-read mode where I'm just turning them over and over in my head to look at them, you know?

[galadhir]

So I bought the latest Murderbot book, System Collapse as soon as it came out, on both audiobook and ebook, and I have to say that I was ever so slightly disappointed. It is a really good example of a Murderbot novella, just like the other ones in the series, but my problem is that with it coming after Network Effect I was hoping for other things.

When Network Effect finished with ART excitedly cleaning its interior because Dr. Mensah would be coming aboard, I was excited to be able to read about ART and Mensah meeting and learning to appreciate each other.

When we got the blurb for System Collapse and it became obvious that SecUnit was having something of a breakdown due to accumulated trauma, while Barish Estranza was up to its corporate worst, I was excited at the thought that Three might have to take over some of SecUnit's more running-about-and-murdering-people duties, while SecUnit had to take the trauma treatment.

I wanted to see how the Preservation humans and ART's crew got along. Which I guess happened with Ratthi and Tarik. But I suppose I had got used to the extra space and slightly more leisurely pace of the novel, and was not prepared to go back to the tight focus of a novella.

This is all entirely my fault for having expectations, rather than just trying to enjoy what I got for its own sake. And in fact I remember feeling a little disappointed with Network Effect when that came out, while now it is my favourite in the series. So I'm sure after a few more reads and listens I will also learn to appreciate System Collapse for what it is, instead of what it isn't.

And let's face it, SecUnit was due a collapse! And now I'm eager to find out if Three gets a starship of its own with Holism. I like the fact that they are the serious non-fiction nerds of the series, while Perihelion and SecUnit are the sci-fi geeks. Bless!

~

Also I'm excited (and a little nervous) at the thought of a Murderbot TV series.

I'm excited because

you can do so much with a series in which a SecUnit is the pov character - think about how you could tell a story from the perspective of a being who is regularly experiencing life through security cameras and flying drones and

I'm not sure I can think of another series with a protag like SecUnit, who avoids eye contact, expresses emotional discomfort by turning and facing the wall, is extremely touch averse, and above all is agender and asexual and quite vocal about that.

When have we ever had a tv series where the main character's pronouns are 'it'? If they only keep that, the series will be revolutionary.

But I'm nervous because

Look at the guy they cast as SecUnit. Did he have to be so white? MB lives in a universe where most of the important characters are black or various shades of brown. It kind of defeats the importance of having so many important characters of colour if they're mostly there in order to be rescued by a white main character.

The show runners are both male. It would be so easy for a pair of straight cis male writers to ignore the widespread queerness of the setting and all the things most queer/non-neurotypical readers find so endearing about SecUnit and turn it into yet another male power fantasy where a heavily armed and deadly cyborg solves everyone's problems with ultra-violence.

It would be so easy for them to call SecUnit 'he' and churn out something like Robocop or Judge Dredd where the uncommunicative white guy with a heart of gold and a big gun gets to be the hero again. That would make it more marketable. It would make it more relatable to the straight cis white guys who make up the desired audience for SF shows (or so I've heard.) And it would take away from this agender asexual person someone who was very rare and precious to them.

Honestly listening to cis people talking about Murderbot is painful enough now when they must have read the book and they must have been bombarded for thousands of words with instances of it being called 'it' and insisting that gender was inapplicable to it and it found sex distasteful. Somehow even after all of that they will insist on calling it 'he' or 'she.' God knows how much worse it could get if the TV series did it too.

[scarlet--wiccan]

what did you think about issue #3 of Scarlet Witch?

I haven't really shared my thoughts on the the series yet, so I guess this is a good time to check in. Issue #3 definitely highlighted all of Scarlet Witch's strengths, but I think it also brought some of its weaknesses, and directions that I wouldn't personally choose, into focus.

First of all, the artwork was the real star of this issue, and I have to say that Pichelli, D'Amico, and Wilson are doing amazing work. Going into this series, I was worried that the artistic sensibility was going to be a little too "superhero" for my taste, but this issue blew me away. Pichelli's fluid lines are complimented perfectly by the painterly, organic finish that D'Amico and Wilson bring to the colors and inks. This journey through the fantasy world of Subatomica was a great showcase, compared #1 and #2. I'm looking forward to seeing more of this vivid magic as we enter into the Bacchae storyline.

Composing an issue almost entirely out of montage can be tricky, but Orlando took advantage of the extra page space to tell a story while also delivering his thesis on Wanda's character. This issue nails down who Wanda is, where she's at, and what she wants moving forward. Orlando has really imbued her with grace and wisdom from all of her experiences, but he also allows her to be vulnerable, and arrive at these moments with a very human touch. I think that's important, and it's something I've been a little worried about, because it would be easy to overcorrect with Wanda and make her too infallible. I appreciate that she has really complex emotions and personal reactions, which is something I find missing in a lot of comics these days.

I've said it before, but Wanda's affinity for chosen family is a core aspect of her character, and I think it was smart to illustrate this with Viv and Lorna in the opening arc, because those two are the least obvious choices. Bringing Tommy or Billy in would be great, but it wouldn't necessarily allow Orlando to say anything new. I appreciate that Viv challenges Wanda and creates a sort of tension, just as much as I appreciate Lorna for accepting Wanda as a sister in a way that she hasn't done much before, showing that Wanda is more well supported now and her family is stronger than in has been in years.

Having said all of that, there are some things that I am struggling with.

As I've said, I don't love Orlando's approach to writing magic. Previous Scarlet Witch stories have made the effort to distinguish witchcraft from other forms of magic, and the current developments with Agatha are promising to expand its role in the Marvel world. So far, Orlando has ignored all of that, and is just defaulting to a very Doctor Strange sensibility-- mostly invocations of fictional entities and whimsically named artifacts. That's annoying, but I'm more frustrated by the lack of internal thought and effort behind Wanda's spellcasting. This is her book, and she's the POV character, so I think there needs to be more detail and intentionality with her powers.

I really liked the scene where Wanda and Lorna forge that sword together-- Wanda didn't just conjure a sword, there was thought and detail put into how it came together-- and I just wish we were seeing more of that.

Issue #3, for me, also called attention to the glaring lack of Romani perspective. I love the way Wanda and Pietro are being drawn, and I love the inclusion of cultural food in #2, but this is surface-level representation, and it's not enough to balance the decades of flawed material. Don't get me wrong, these changes are huge, and they're going to make a difference, and there's just no excuse at this point for the lack of Romani contributors. I literally know people who would take the offer, myself included.

Anyways, I was thinking about it a lot when Mardj was describing hte nomadic marauders that have invaded her home. I was uncomfortable with the language Orlando used in that scene, and I just don't think that very many Romani writers would choose to characterize a displaced people as unquestionably evil.

This lack of authenticity comes up a lot in Wanda's language, too. Orlando's research is still faulty at best, and again, there are a lot of people who could've been paid as a consultant. Mostly, though I'm just disappointed by the fact that Wanda is a small occult business owner, and there's been no acknowledgement of the complicated history Romani people have with magic/fortunetelling as businesses and cultural trade work-- or the very real discriminatory laws and policing of fortune teller businesses and "scam artists," which are designed to target and profile Romani families.

[lilareviewsbooks]

Dallergut Dream Department Store: 2.5/5

2.5/5 stars 243 pages contains: cozy vibes and dream magic!!

As some of you may know, I make the São Paulo – Boston trip quite frequently! I'm a college student in the US but live in Brazil, and so that makes for very long plane rides. We're talking 14 hours here. So, to keep sane, I usually download a couple books into my Kindle, pray they're interesting enough to keep me interested, buckle down, and read. 

I've just made the trek once more to spend the summer holidays at home, and I decided to download some books I'm reading for r/Fantasy's Bingo Challenge. One of them was The Dallergut Dream Department Store, by Lee Mi-ye, which clears my "alliterative title" square! Of course, because I can't make anything easy on myself, I read this Korean book in its French translation. Because of this, I feel like it's fully possible I didn't grasp the story in all of its complexity. I'm kind of bad at French. And I might have also been high on sleeping pills for half the book. So, take this review with a grain of salt.

In general, I thought this was a 2.5 star read. For me, that means it's decent. Like getting a C in school — you passed, but your work is far from stellar. What I did enjoy was the concept: the story follows Penny as she begins to work at a magical store people visit in their sleep, and where they "buy" their dreams for the night. And for the most part, the book is a world-building exercise in the concept of the store. It researches how every situation would work, from nightmares to people who day-dream, to animal dreams. Personally, I love a good deep dive into a world, so I was having fun, especially during the first half.

But after a while, it gets repetitive. The chapters are mostly loose stories that don't circle back to a particular theme or event. Penny is almost always there, though, I guess, but I'll get to my problems with Penny later. Although the stories are well-written, very easy to read and can sometimes be quite compelling, they don't make a novel when they're put together. They make up a collection of episodes with the same vague amalgamation of characters. The gimmick gets old pretty fast, and I was quickly looking for some emotional stakes, an overarching plot, anything. And although I am a fan of a good plotless, vibes-only fantasy, the lack of connection I felt with our main character and the fact that she and her friends do not change at all throughout the stories made it a very stale reading experience.

And Penny? Oh, Penny. My question became, quite simply, why are we following her? She's not a particularly interesting character, with no defining traits, nothing she needs or wants (besides working at the store, which she achieves in chapter 1)... Meanwhile, other characters in the novel have more personality, more interesting backgrounds, and they barely get to shine. They're buried behind an overabundance of Penny doing not much of anything, and being a self-insert/audience for Mr. Dallagoot's sermons. I kept wondering if it wouldn't be more interesting to follow any one of them. 

And I think Ms. Lee wondered this too, since she includes two epilogues which are, in my opinion, completely unnecessary, and are told entirely from the perspectives of two other characters. They just prove to the audience that Penny is a dreadful character by abandoning her at the end, leaving two random anecdotes about side-characters, which could've been anywhere in the book, to finish the novel off.

Although the vibes are good, the world is interesting and the book reads very cozy, there's a lot that you're left wanting, here. I think what this book needed was an editor, or a workshop session. It has so much potential, and if some crucial changes had been made, then I think Ms. Lee would have a wonderful final product on her hands.

[girlfriendsofthegalaxy]

tuesday again 1/17/23

this was written under some duress bc my cat refused the sacrificial animal cracker and wanted The Whole Box. no, these are mine, go eat your camel on the coffee table. i have always hated the "pet parent" stuff but mother DOES want a cocktail and some benzos, run along now

listening

peel me a grape, anita o'day's version. this popped up on a premade jazz standards spotify playlist

this is going to pop up on my spotify wrapped bc i am trying to memorize the lyrics, which include

Send out for scotch, boil me a crab Cut me a rose, make my tea with the petals Just hang around to pick up the tab Never out think me, just mink me Polar bear rug me, don't bug me New Thunderbird me, you heard me I'm getting hungry, peel me a grape

MWAH. love it. ideal.

-

reading

Dreamships by Melissa Scott. i don't like ragging on an alive, queer author, but this one did not grab me. let's talk about why!

the premise:

now, i'm not in the publishing industry. but maybe consider. if the jacket copy tells you "and this is the issue upon which the novel turns!" and then tells you the next two twists. maybe don't include that in the jacket copy. i have a bad habit of only reading the first half of jacket copy and didn't see this until i took these photos but i am retroactively annoyed on scott's behalf.

character work: i bought this bc i was very excited for a grouchy misanthropic lady pilot. reverdy jian isn't that. i still don’t know much about her from reading a third of the book. she is remarkably incurious and while this is an excellent trait if you are a freelancer or doing any sort of client work, it would have been nice to care about the protagonist of the book or feel like she has emotional or monetary stakes in taking/not taking this job.

pacing/structure: this book is like looking out over top of a layer of fog and i’m making it sound more exciting or appealing than it is. it’s very even in both pacing and emotion. the first hundred pages take places over about thirty six hours, bc there’s a rush pilot job, but it’s very laid back and relaxed. there’s no real sense of urgency or mystery, despite the author trying her hardest to set up a mystery about the almost complete lack of information about this ship. when the characters can’t find any info they just kind of shrug and move on. it’s also just a little obtuse, despite being very polished in all its tenses and word choices. i wonder if it maybe needed one more clarity pass. i had a lot of trouble figuring out who a whole extra character was bc there were too many men in one room.

where the pacing/structure/character work collide: this book reads like a travelogue, and i do not mean that as a compliment. again, we don't get much of reverdy's perspective--things simply happen to her or she sees things and just kind of absorbs them without much commentary. things happen one by one like beads on a string without really tying into a bigger picture of the city or her goals. the main premise (huge mostly underground city on a planet being stripmined) was not presented interestingly enough to make up for the lack of character work. for me. in my opinion. i'm not a writer (or at least not a serious/professional/one who puts a great deal of thought and planning into her writing)

i have a limited amount of time on this earth, i gave it a solid hundred pages, this does not earn a place on my shelf. back to the thrift store it goes. sorry ms scott i hope you're having a good day anyway

-

watching

still rewatching adventure time. s3 is full of solid bangers, i think this is the season i remember best bc it was one of the first Appointment Television things with my siblings the year we got cable. this is when they start drip-feeding you more of the stuff about the great mushroom war

i really really love when a post-post apoc setting thinks about the impact of a nuclear war on playground culture, like this hide and seek variant you see in s3e21:Marceline's Closet.

Over the mountain, the ominous cloud Coming to cover the land in a shroud Hide in a bushel, a basement, a cave But when cloud comes a-huntin No one's a save… no, safe!

how i found this: this show ran from 2010-2018, and was absolutely impossible to escape as a cultural juggernaut, especially during the peak le epic bacon style times when i was in high school. it also had a limited series in 2020-2021 and a spinoff is supposed to happen next year, which i am cautiously optimistic about.

-

playing

there will be light spoilers for the first two acts of wolfenstein the new order, a game that came out in 2014. i do not feel the need to rot13 early spoilers for an nine year old game.

despite enjoying the soundtrack for many years, i have never previously made into the castle in the first level of wolfenstein: the new order bc i always got bored and wandered off irl. i do want to get to a part (again not sure which one) where it will let me dual wield shotguns. why can't i find a second shotgun. i'm out of the asylum, they made me give the chainsaw back, and im about to murk some 1960s fascists at this checkpoint. one of these fuckers better have another shotgun.

blazkowicz is an enormous slab of unseasoned american beef. this man is SO large holy shit. i wish i cared about this big man. something about a dead female love interest? this nurse i kidnapped is going catch a bad case of the plot and be dead at the end of this level i think.

as previously mentioned this game was released in 2014 and boy does it look it, right down to the stupid macho gamer difficulty and exit screens. it's a pretty competent shooter. do wish ppl would stop shooting at me for five seconds so i can wander around and read all the propaganda and signage. why put it all up if you don't want me to look at it????

this was recently free on the epic store and the soundtrack came up on my walk today, which made me go "let me try this again". stay tuned.

-

making

made some quiche and fucked it up in a different way from last jan's quiche fuckup. still looking for hearty vegetarian soups, made some soup, which is very good but very texture. aash-e jow, a persian rice/bean/lentil/barley soup, is a soup you gotta chew. "kay isn't that a stew-" no. come to my house and eat this soup and i will show you.

other notable notes: doesn't really taste like much which could be continuing post-covid weirdness, and i think i should at minimum triple the amount of spices. fuck of a lot of prep. lot of chopping. hands hurty. called for a bunch of things i do not normally keep as pantry staples. i think it would be far easier to buy a block of frozen chopped spinach and refloof it in a saucepan like i did for the quiche, but i had some arugula/spinach mix that was about to go.

the caramelized onions really make this soup imo but i do not always have the fortitude to caramelize onions. i don't think this soup will stay an acceptable texture when frozen, so next weekend i have to make another giant batch of the red lentil soup to freeze for lunches.

you're correct i really don't want to do dishes

[b-sai-des]

What to Take From Roger Waters' "Time" Redux

I’m a huge fan of Pink Floyd’s music and I love Dark Side of the Moon. It's a big year for the album, as a lot of people are celebrating its 50th anniversary this year. Pink Floyd released a remaster earlier this year, but Roger Waters (former Pink Floyd bassist and songwriter) has announced a "redux" of the original album as well, and not with the Pink Floyd members. I previously was not all that knowledgeable about the relationship between Roger Waters and the current members of the band. I had a general understanding of his role while in the band and knew that he and the band aren’t on the best of terms even now. I’ve also heard about his controversies regarding antisemitism and the Ukraine War. All this is to say that this made me very skeptical when I heard that about the redux. Is this really necessary, and is it motivated to be a sort of “fuck you” to David Gilmour and the others?

To Waters' credit, in his announcement he talked about how he wanted it to complement the original, not supersede it. He praised his work with his band members making the original, and said that he wants to gain something new from the concept and ideas of the original album. NME cited him saying in a press release that "...I started to consider what the wisdom of an 80-year-old could bring to a reimagined version." I was morbidly curious what this would be like, so I decided to take a look into the single for Waters’ version of “Time,” which he released last month. The original version of "Time" is one of my favorite songs of all time. I’ll admit that I went in cynical, but I tried to be open minded when I listened to this re-interpretation. Ultimately though I came out not too impressed, as the overall approach in this version seems to dampen its own potential to really distinguish itself from the original.

Here’s the new song: https://youtu.be/NcEHCVLMjAU?si=7uzb328PNX_du_OJ

In case you haven’t heard the original: https://youtu.be/Qr0-7Ds79zo?si=JJxUL7xPUMycPLuU

The main characteristic that many articles (like the NME one) have noted about the track is its atmospheric, low-key approach, drawing us in as we hear the straightforward spoken word introduction. “The voice had been there all along. Hidden in the stones in the rivers. Hidden in all the books. Hidden in plain sight. It was the voice of reason.” These new lyrics tie well into the theme of the song, time creeping up on you. It speaks to that new perspective, an older one who’s being reminded of the original’s message, truly closer to death. It’s quiet, just the deep piano and singular drum beat. Then comes in an acoustic guitar, piano and ambient synth. It elicits a more straightforwardly emotional tone, which I’m liking. The original version is more bombastic and it plays like a heightened version of the sadness that this song is trying to be more grounded in its focus on. The original felt elemental, primordial, speaking to eternal dread persisting infinitely, and this new version seems like it’s trying to make a more personal version of that.

Then the four drum beats together hit like how the original song did in its transition into the first verse. The bass and a slow drum beat are mostly all that’s accompanying the first verse, and there’s an occasional eerie piano that I really like. Low strings build up to the chorus, where the effect of double vocals on the production add the sense of a sober yet kind of hypnotic limp onwards. The words carry more weight with this, as if they’re echoing in the mind as time weighs down on you. The low strings are effective in emphasizing the sullenness. As the chorus ends and goes to the instrumental section, an organ and ambient high pitched synth of sorts joins in, and then another synth and strings add a level of contemplative sadness that’s unique. The organ seems to call back to the old times, it reminds me a bit of “House of the Rising Sun”.

But this instrumental section here doesn’t expand enough before returning to the next verse. When it went to the next verse, I didn’t feel the contrast that much, and it kind of blends together. The next verse’s more energetic violin feels out of place for the tone the song is trying to establish. I don’t want to suggest “what they should have done,” I’m not claiming any expertise, but as I kept re-listening to the track I felt myself wanting the instrumentals to build up more in some way. I like that they died down as Waters says “sinking,” emphasizing that word. At the same time, the music stays lower than the instrumental section for the rest of the song, so it feels like the build up from that instrumental section didn’t have a satisfying payoff. And when the strings and synth die down for the “Home again” verse, it doesn’t feel like there was a big enough contrast for that to have the seductive comfort that the original’s “Home again” had.

The goal of this redux seems to be staying low-key throughout, but that just feels like a detriment to the emotions this was trying to convey. One of the most impactful parts of the original song was whenever the big operatic vocals came in as the drum beat changed to a slower one. There, it felt like you were floating in slow motion, and the tragedy of time’s passing felt more impactful. That song feels dynamic in its different drum speeds and hard and soft parts. Despite being sung by an older man and with the same drum speed throughout emphasizing the hypnotic passage of time, the ambient instrumentals and strings of the new song feel constrained when they could have really had an emotional, raw sense of powerlessness. The vocals are kind of similar throughout as well. They work really well to convey the droning of time, especially the chorus with the double voice effect, but the “home again” ending portion feels too raspy and one-note, and Waters doesn’t seem to feel a particular sense of sadness here. Overall it feels kind of muddled and doesn’t hold your attention the way that Pink Floyd’s does. I don’t mean to judge the new version for having a different approach fundamentally to the old song. But, for me at least, one hits much harder emotionally than the other. Waters seemed to want to maintain the general polished-ness of the original as opposed to being more raw, but without the operatic grandeur that made the original’s pristineness work so well, I have to wonder what there is to gain.

I think my perspective on this might be colored by another re-imagining of another song by an older perspective – Johnny Cash’s world-weary reflective cover of the Nine Inch Nails’ “Hurt.” Cash completely recontextualized the lyrics there and still did so in a generally low-key manner. Both Pink Floyd’s Time and Nine-Inch Nails’ Hurt have the angst of a younger voice that’s struggling immensely in their lives, and Cash turns that into the looming dread of a man nearing death. The thing that makes Cash’s version so memorable is its emotional vulnerability in all aspects. When the chorus comes the instrumentals rise to a climax and match the  lyrics, fully articulating its sense of desperation. With Roger Waters' Time, the instrumentals never get their chance to fully express that same level of emotion. The same goes for Cash’s vocal performance – he feels like he’s about to break, with his voice faltering in the chorus as the piano, guitar, and bass reveal the anguish that his voice seems like it’s struggling to conceal. It leaves me with chills every time.

Johnny Cash's "Hurt" cover: https://youtu.be/8AHCfZTRGiI?si=c67jhF_ZRAIN_F4B

"Hurt" by Nine Inch Nails: https://youtu.be/42V6ho11NSw?si=JOlWcZ7usUkXtgQi

I don’t mean to say that Waters’ “Time” is devoid of emotion or meaning. The general approach is interesting in fact, giving a more reflective, sullen tone. The thing though is that this feels really held back in its efforts to be so calm. I may be wrong or incorrectly judging the intentions and what Waters and the other musicians are doing here, and I am definitely projecting my own desires of what I would want from a "Time" re-imagining. Far Out Magazine said this of the track: "Waters’ version of ‘Time’ is slower, less intense, and more directly introspective than its predecessor. Waters sings the song in a low hum rather than the impassioned belting that David Gilmour brought to the song’s verses or the delicate whisper that Richard Wright brought to its choruses." I personally feel like that passion replaced with quiet introspection in turn has come at the cost of some of the track's emotional impact, at least for me personally.

Thank you so much for taking the time to read this! Let me know what you think about the “Time” redux. I’m open to different perspectives!

[treesap-blogs]

“Hunted By The Sky” by Tanaz Bhathena review! Yippee!

(Buckle up guys, this is 2 of 3 of the reviews going up today because I’ve been doing a lot of reading in order to clear my reading queue before reading a book I’m looking forward to :D! You’ll find out what it is eventually, it’ll be easy to tell.)

Hello, Tumblrians! I’ve been trying to get out as many reviews as I can this week! This was a book I read after being in a bit of a reading slump, as I’d put Zorro: A Novel by Isabel Allende on my reading queue(I was hyperfixated on the franchise for a month or so, fun times), only to be bored by the execution of its plot and sufficiently icked out by how it struggled to handle its subject matter(dated 2000’s writing for the win)! Eufgh. So I decided to come back around to this book, to have some actually good writing to cleanse my palette a bit! Got me out of my reading slump, thanks Tanaz Bhathena, and I burned through the last 110 pages or so in a matter of 2 days.

To be honest, the thing that most intrigued me in the premise was being able to have a vengeful female lead as our protagonist (or rather, one of them, does Cavas count as a protagonist too?), a liking that’s probably due in part to Iron Widow, along with it having a setting I typically haven’t read about but adds an interesting layer of culture to the narrative and characters! Similarly to When The Angels Left The Old Country, actually, this book felt very culturally rich! It takes place in Medieval India, and integrates its Indian (Hindi, particularly) aspects into the story seamlessly, from the locations the characters visit to the clothing they wear and the food they eat. (With the fantastical elements, it also takes inspiration from Persian mythology because of Bhathena’s heritage.) And, like When The Angels, it had a glossary on the last few pages for defining some of the terms, including ones with specific context inside of Ambar/Svapnalok! Some of those were more or less defined in the text, others weren’t, it helped to have an aid as someone who’s outside of that culture.

My main complaint that I have, though, is that aside from the representation it felt like a pretty generic plot? Sure, I love to read some fantasy, and I also love myself a vengeful female lead, but there were a lot of things in here I’d read in other stories. The prophecies(and how a main character is directly linked to one, resulting in being powerful magically), being endangered because of magical powers, instalove romance(which I was mostly indifferent to), etc. But, I could tell there was a lot of thought put into the world itself. Like the inclusion of different creatures, places and stuff, even if a lot of the scenes played out with them were similar to other media. We got a lot of details about its history, especially with how prominent classism issues were in the story, and, surprisingly, it didn’t feel like the author was patronizing her readers in how she fleshed the fantasy elements out. It is infodump-y for half of the first part, though. (This book’s divided into sections, I believe there’s about four, with the last one being only one chapter.)

(Also, the mammoth fight was so stupid🧍)

I also feel like this book should’ve been listed as a romance too, it’s definitely a romance fantasy because Gul and Cavas’ relationship is not a sideplot by any means! I kinda wanted to just read more about Gul’s revenge, harnessing her powers, that kind of thing, but, again, I was impartial to the romance. Although instalove isn’t my thing, and this wasn’t a relationship that had me “squee”ing(presumably because enemies to lovers has been ruined for me, peep the DNI criteria in my bio), they had some enjoyable banter. (And personally I don’t mind it giving some kind of emotional stake or our lead someone to fight for. This is just personal preference, rather than formal review writing haha.) Also, I like Dual POV! I was glad to read a story in first person where both perspectives felt unique, not just based on basic personality traits but also backgrounds! Socioeconomic classes are a crucial part of this book (as you could..probably tell lol), and the characters’ different backgrounds greatly influenced their perspectives. It was interesting to read about, and it felt like the perspective changes weren’t just for convenience but also because it was most necessary to know either Gul or Cavas’ insight at the time.

Also! Forgot the name of the group of women that trained/raised Gul, but they were pretty badass and were overall interesting! Glad they got to return for the climax and ending. 

Final verdict: Plot didn’t stand out a ton to me when I was actually reading it, but the execution was solid and the characters worked. Romance wasn’t totally my thing, although I can see how it could be that for other readers, and because a) this book got my attention, b) Bhathena has an interesting writing style? Like, I felt totally immersed, I could tell she had a good grasp on her craft even if judging by the reviews fantasy wasn’t a genre she’d written in before, c) I’m a completionist at heart, I’ll be reading the second book. It does look like a duology, though, which is something that bums me out because I don’t like the pacing done with them :(. (Peep my Dragon’s Promise review.)

Book rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️½/5 stars! 

Paz, signing off!

(Book trigger/content warnings: murder of parents, chronically ill parent, sexual slavery, animal cruelty, blood and violence, classism and discrimination.)

(Thanks Simant on Goodreads for the concise list of CWs/TWs!)

[thebeardedsir]

This is a great way to talk about the current state of AI. That being said, it does generate a bit of an itch I’m trying to scratch about the ongoing argument about sentience wrt AI

My current model for consciousness is pretty heavily influenced by John Searle’s (the progenitor of the original Chinese Room thought experiment) Biological Naturalism theory. The short version is our brain makes the chemical happenings of experience, which cause the higher order functions of consciousness. I’m massively simplifying here but I recommend looking into consciousness theory yourself as it’s a fascinating topic. Suffice it to say that Searle’s model is a bit like saying “it’s dualism but the mind part of the mind-body relationship is all subjective experience, no supernatural substance.” Which I realize isn’t much of a distinction to atheists like myself.

The big issue is that the “mind stuff” (thoughts, pain, dreams, sensation, etc) aren’t something we can measure. We can only look at the chemical components of them in the brain. The subjective remains subjective. My model for this comes down to that a certain level/type of complexity ultimately leads to subjectivity. There are lots of complex brain systems that individually account for the existence of the “experiential stuff”. There are areas of the brain that contain our ability to process language, to generate emotions, to process sensory data and turn it into “experiential stuff” (phenomena, in the literature). But we simply have no way to identify what is “causing” subjectivity. Radical skeptics have gone as far as saying that a collective singular conscious experience isn’t actually real. We’re not going to get into that but I have always found those arguments very interesting.

So what we have is a machine in our heads (and potentially throughout our bodies, like the nerve bundle in the abdomen that accounts for “gut feelings”) that interprets data. The original Chinese experiment is an argument about what makes consciousness different from simple calculation. If a man in a box is fed Chinese characters, and has a book that tells him what the next character in the sequence will be, he then can spit out the answer to any question given in Chinese. But the man doesn’t know Chinese. That’s the conclusion of the original experiment. What the experiment doesn’t address is that while the man inside the box doesn’t know Chinese, it’s obvious to anyone interacting with the box that the box itself does know Chinese. The system that understands Chinese is bigger than just the brain in the man’s head. It also contains the tools needed to generate appropriate answers to the questions asked.

When you ask someone if they understand something, you’re looking for whether or not they can operate with the necessary knowledge required by a certain standard. That standard fluctuates based on need, but we are always going to be talking about understanding from a behavioralist perspective. Talking about “consciousness” beyond that is simply speculative. We cannot measure subjectivity. For all intents and purposes it is irrelevant.

When we look at this new Chinese experiment from this perspective it is a little harder to parse, but mostly because the model for the system here includes some aspect of the computer the man is using to give his answers. The feedback generated by the computer is part of the overall system at work in generating a “correct” response to the question asked. The man operating the computer does not understand Chinese, but the system of computer and man does. This holds true for Chat-GPT and other AI machines. I imagine anyone without a computer science degree would have a difficult time explaining exactly what the AI is doing to decide what answers are correct and what answers are incorrect, but that mechanism is part of its overall system. It is still, as a system, capable of responding to questions functionally. A behavioralist (like someone who’s model for consciousness is based on the turing test) would have no problem stating that this system is conscious.

We still don’t have a way to measure subjective experience. That isn’t going to change. By its very nature it resists objective measures. As a result we need to start looking at machine models with sufficient complexity as being conscious merely by nature of that complexity and their ability to interact with us in the same way that a conscious being might. These entities already exist, and they are only going to get more complex and better at imitating human interaction. We need to start treating them as conscious beings and start dealing with those implications now, because dealing with them any other way is operating on the assumption that there is something essential about the human animal that makes us different from every other complex system. It’s ascientific and it will not serve us well.

chinese room 2

So there’s this guy, right? He sits in a room by himself, with a computer and a keyboard full of Chinese characters. He doesn’t know Chinese, though, in fact he doesn’t even realise that Chinese is a language. He just thinks it’s a bunch of odd symbols. Anyway, the computer prints out a paragraph of Chinese, and he thinks, whoa, cool shapes. And then a message is displayed on the computer monitor: which character comes next?

This guy has no idea how the hell he’s meant to know that, so he just presses a random character on the keyboard. And then the computer goes BZZZT, wrong! The correct character was THIS one, and it flashes a character on the screen. And the guy thinks, augh, dammit! I hope I get it right next time. And sure enough, computer prints out another paragraph of Chinese, and then it asks the guy, what comes next?

He guesses again, and he gets it wrong again, and he goes augh again, and this carries on for a while. But eventually, he presses the button and it goes DING! You got it right this time! And he is so happy, you have no idea. This is the best day of his life. He is going to do everything in his power to make that machine go DING again. So he starts paying attention. He looks at the paragraph of Chinese printed out by the machine, and cross-compares it against all the other paragraphs he’s gotten. And, recall, this guy doesn’t even know that this is a language, it’s just a sequence of weird symbols to him. But it’s a sequence that forms patterns. He notices that if a particular symbol is displayed, then the next symbol is more likely to be this one. He notices some symbols are more common in general. Bit by bit, he starts to draw statistical inferences about the symbols, he analyses the printouts every way he can, he writes extensive notes to himself on how to recognise the patterns.

Over time, his guesses begin to get more and more accurate. He hears those lovely DING sounds that indicate his prediction was correct more and more often, and he manages to use that to condition his instincts better and better, picking up on cues consciously and subconsciously to get better and better at pressing the right button on the keyboard. Eventually, his accuracy is like 70% or something – pretty damn good for a guy who doesn’t even know Chinese is a language.

* * *

One day, something odd happens.

He gets a printout, the machine asks what character comes next, and he presses a button on the keyboard and– silence. No sound at all. Instead, the machine prints out the exact same sequence again, but with one small change. The character he input on the keyboard has been added to the end of the sequence.

Which character comes next?

This weirds the guy out, but he thinks, well. This is clearly a test of my prediction abilities. So I’m not going to treat this printout any differently to any other printout made by the machine – shit, I’ll pretend that last printout I got? Never even happened. I’m just going to keep acting like this is a normal day on the job, and I’m going to predict the next symbol in this sequence as if it was one of the thousands of printouts I’ve seen before. And that’s what he does! He presses what symbol comes next, and then another printout comes out with that symbol added to the end, and then he presses what he thinks will be the next symbol in that sequence. And then, eventually, he thinks, “hm. I don’t think there’s any symbol after this one. I think this is the end of the sequence.” And so he presses the “END” button on his keyboard, and sits back, satisfied.

Unbeknownst to him, the sequence of characters he input wasn’t just some meaningless string of symbols. See, the printouts he was getting, they were all always grammatically correct Chinese. And that first printout he’d gotten that day in particular? It was a question: “How do I open a door.” The string of characters he had just input, what he had determined to be the most likely string of symbols to come next, formed a comprehensible response that read, “You turn the handle and push”.

* * *

One day you decide to visit this guy’s office. You’ve heard he’s learning Chinese, and for whatever reason you decide to test his progress. So you ask him, “Hey, which character means dog?”

He looks at you like you’ve got two heads. You may as well have asked him which of his shoes means “dog”, or which of the hairs on the back of his arm. There’s no connection in his mind at all between language and his little symbol prediction game, indeed, he thinks of it as an advanced form of mathematics rather than anything to do with linguistics. He hadn’t even conceived of the idea that what he was doing could be considered a kind of communication any more than algebra is. He says to you, “Buddy, they’re just funny symbols. No need to get all philosophical about it.”

Suddenly, another printout comes out of the machine. He stares at it, puzzles over it, but you can tell he doesn’t know what it says. You do, though. You’re fluent in the language. You can see that it says the words, “Do you actually speak Chinese, or are you just a guy in a room doing statistics and shit?”

The guy leans over to you, and says confidently, “I know it looks like a jumble of completely random characters. But it’s actually a very sophisticated mathematical sequence,” and then he presses a button on the keyboard. And another, and another, and another, and slowly but surely he composes a sequence of characters that, unbeknownst to him, reads “Yes, I know Chinese fluently! If I didn’t I would not be able to speak with you.”

That is how ChatGPT works.

[gigismodernlife]

2023: Finally the End of the Covid Era; Surpassing the Aftermath

For me (and I’m sure many can relate) this year sure feels like reaching the end of a series of very overwhelming chapters in a book that put life into perspective but ultimately redeemed itself by giving the reader a glimpse of hope. I like the way Chad simplified it: “2020:covid 2021:covid 2022:covid ending 2023:covid aftermath, this year was weird, besides the Economy still sucking, 2024 should be a good year” The impact of the last four years was seriously hard on me, as it was for many others. After a lot of reflection, I can say that the best thing to come out of it for me was helping me open my eyes and see things clearly through my glass lenses lol. Some call it a Spiritual Awakening, an Epiphany, "finding yourself" or "Accepting God into your life" I've discovered that in its essence it is all very similar. To each their own, as long as whatever they believe in leads them to do good in the world. For me, I am mostly subscribing to Modern Christianity, the one that accepts all people, but I am also hungry for knowledge and still absorb other things too. Jay Shetty and Joe Dispenza have some great YouTube interviewers that people of my generation like. Anyway, the lyrics from Amazing Grace "I once, was lost, but now, i'm found, was blind, but now I see" have never rang more true. And, I cant forget to mention that I also met the true love of my life and got engaged. Look who's not dying alone after all lol! 

So, I had forgotten, but I wrote a Blog, I think it was at the end of 2020 called "Developing Depression During A Global Pandemic & Black Lives Matter Movement" I doubt anyone has ever read it but its there if anyone wants to read it. For those who arent familiar, depression can be situational or a chemical imbalance in the brain. Some people with depression experience it every few years, some completely overcome it, and others sadly never overcome it. Mine tends to be situational. Im assuming I get depressed because I am a highly sensitive, emotional and empathetic person. I realized all of this because I fell so deep into depression this last time that I became desperate enough to finally try medication, which I tend to avoid. It was a nightmare to say the least, I am personally better without medication, but I know it works for some people. The point is, I don't think I have a serious chemical imbalance, I just have trouble handling some hard situations that life has thrown at me, and based on my history, I have gotten much better at recognizing when I feel it and I can thankfully help myself out of it. This time though, I did'nt even remember how I had overcome depression in the past because from October of 2022 to about September of 2023 I was depressed AGAIN and much worse this time. If I would have gone back and read that blog I wrote, I really could have helped myself. I sincerely hate to say this, especially because I had already learned that money does not buy happiness, but the truth is, I messed up and I should've believed in myself more. My biggest fear was losing my income and having to go back home to San Diego after I worked so hard to branch out of there. I was so loyal to this job because I reached middle class financial independence working there but NONE OF THAT MATTERS! It's all a social construct. Middle class doesn't even mean much anymore these days, specifically in this economy (I'll write more about that another time). I should've quit my job so long ago, I tried, but the fear consumed me, as if it was worth the suffering, but it definitely was not. I mean, I ended up being affected by one of many mass lay offs across the country anyway, so I don't necessarily think I am a failure by any means, I learned a lot there, but it was definitely not the company for someone like me. That is life, and most people don't stick to one single job their entire life anymore. All of my worst fears ended up happening. I lost my job, I went back home to San Diego, which for me, holds some very bad memories. It didnt even end up being a bad thing, I ended up re-building my relationship with my family, I took a real estate course, I made memories with my nieces. It felt like God just helped me pick up my broken pieces and now I am whole again. I also set the right intention for my relationship and luckily now I have a Fiance and we are happier than ever in Oregon! I had been operating in constant fear and anxiety of becoming poor or homeless, I am so sorry to myself for doing that, I did not deserve that and neither did my cats. So basically, this year was about forgiving myself, TRULY forgiving myself. 

It's my first Christmas here in Oregon. Im sitting here in my pajamas, looking out the window at trees, surrounded by a cloudy sky, the temperature is in the high 40 degrees. I can't help but cry happy tears and reflect on life (I cry a lot, not just when I'm sad, but when im overwhelmingly happy too lol). My new boss called a few hours into the shift yesterday. No questions about performance, just a simple "Everyone go home! Spend Christmas Eve with your families" what a culture shock. At my old job, I hardly took days off. I asked to leave "on time" instead of staying later to make my flight to New Mexico at 8pm on Christmas Eve to be with family. I felt full of guilt and shame being asked about my performance, as if they needed to know whether or not I deserved to not stay later. I couldn't even enjoy it fully, because I was stressed that I did'nt do well enough. I am so glad those days are over. Today I really get to relax, and enjoy life. Everything is actually going to be okay.

What a whirl wind, this Covid Era was. The world was sick with Covid then the nice media outlets helped spread the encouragement of thanking your “Essential Workers” but really, a lot of the big companies approached it wrong and many of these workers mental health started to deteriorate from being overworked. Followed by consistent mass layoffs, even when profits were higher than usual. Then of course other media outlets spread nothing but fear. Oh! AND then we got frustrated because we got to see how other countries were smarter and more caring about the stimulus packages for their people. I realized that some other countries have a leadership team that relates more to their people and in tough times can show how they genuinely they care about their well being, rather than profit. (It's funny to me how this parallels my experience with Corporate America). I think many people realized that our country is not just physically sick, it's actually mentally struggling. Thank goodness for Millenials and Gen Z who started making mindfulness become what we call viral, or popular or "Woke". This is how many of us got back to religion, or even if they are not part of a religion, they still see things much more clearly and want to do better for themselves and make the world a better place. I still choose to believe that the majority of people are good, even though I've experienced some awful people in my lifetime.

For me, things are finally okay now, physically and emotionally. Im living a humble life, learning and growing and surrounded by much nicer people now, I mean this in the nicest way, but it feels almost shocking that here, people have morals, and they care about women being treated, "special" for lack of a better word. L.A. was definitely not my home and I hope it will never be again. Here, I see forests and mountains everywhere I look, I get greeted by cute squirrels outside all of the time, and lastly the rivers and lakes are beautiful. Even my cats are showing significant signs of healthier and happier lives. Im in the outskirts, but Downtown Portland is beautiful too. It is small compared to L.A. and San Diego, but exceptionally clean and pretty, friendliness is everywhere. The best part is that it has preserved some really nice historical buildings. It holds the largest book store in the world! It feels a little like a ghost town because the riots during the Black Lives Matter movement drove out a lot of businesses, therefore there are a lot of empty places, but none the less, it is a very nice experience to walk through it. Homelessness is also an issue here just like it is in California. The people out here though, the majority all seem so nice, it gives off a small town feel where everyone is just trying to live their best life and spread positive vibes. It's not about the car you drive, the way you dress, the neighborhood you live in, they just want to be good people, and honestly, they are some of the most good looking people I've come across. They're not rushing from place to place because "time is money" its just simple and chill. I haven't experienced the angry honking, or rude interactions I am used to. Im just minding my own business, smiling at everyone and taking it all in. I love it here.

I think I feel what a lot of immigrants feel when they first come to America, except I just didn't leave the country, I only migrated to another state. I feel like a kid experiencing life for the first time. The excitement, the knowledge I am consuming, the culture shocks in the most positive way. Im just open minded and learning and growing and appreciating every moment with my whole heart. It feels like God gave me a warm hug this year. He not only helped me out of depression, he helped me see that I have a bigger purpose, and helped me find a state that suits me and my personality better. Thank You infinitely to God and to Oregon for welcoming me.

[lizardgimpking]

Book Review: The Lamplighters (Emma Stonex).

Sometimes, you just buy a book because the cover is cool, y’know? This one immediately grabbed my attention last year because of its distinct looking cover-art, and that, paired with its promise of a lighthouse based mystery thriller meant when I saw it for sale in a charity shop a month or so ago, I just knew I had to give it a go. And...well...uhh...it’s okay? Hm.

Told from multiple perspectives across two periods of time, ‘The Lamplighters’ chronicles the mysterious disappearance of three lighthouse keepers in the early 70s, and then follows the wives/lovers they left behind as they’re interviewed by an author about it in the 90s. The way the book sets itself up, you feel like it’s going to be a investigation based thriller where the author tries to piece together the truth behind the seemingly impossible nature of the men’s disappearance. Ultimately though, the direction it take is far slower and unfocused than that, for better in small parts and for worse in others. It’s better in the sense that it really captures the mood and atmosphere of living in the isolating and sea-swept environment of a lighthouse, and indeed living in the isolating and melancholy aftermath of a great loss. If there’s one thing this book does really well, it’s that it really soaks every page with the vibes of its central location, and all the romantic imagery and inner-darkness that comes with it. If you’re a fan of that often quite brutal but all the same still alluring nautical atmosphere, this is gonna be a book that really hooks you in with its strong imagery. I did find myself less enamoured with a lot of the rest of the book, mind. The way in which it tells its story, jumping back and forth between two timelines, with multiple character perspectives in both, but only really giving you some sense of a revelation right at the very end? It can prove a little tedious. Rather than being an intriguing mystery or a slowburn thriller, this is mostly just a mood-piece that dangles an opening intrigue at you and then proceeds to do very little with it, beyond explore the emotional ramifications in increasingly unoriginal ways. Maybe it’s to do with expectations, but given a quote on the back of the book calls it ‘Thrilling’, maybe it’s more that it was mis-sold.

This is more of a pet peeve (And maybe a spoiler as to the direction the book takes so maybe skip this paragraph if you intend to read it), but mystery novels that tease larger, possibly even supernatural concepts at play and then take a long time to reveal something far less interesting fob me off quite a bit. I’ve read a few books of this nature, which tease ghosts and entities at work, only to then ignore that in favour of a more mundane conclusion, and whilst this particular one delivers a little of what could be considered a wider scope, it ultimately chose to underwhelm in its main revelation. At least in my opinion. Also, there’s a narrative thread which teases a lot of potentials and then the book’s conclusion ultimately completely ignores it...and I really don’t like that kinda SHIT. Misdirection perhaps, but it doesn’t work in a book that’s so slow and so lacking in interesting revelations throughout.

I didn’t hate ‘The Lamplighters’, but it did disappoint me. There’s some great atmosphere and imagery to be had throughout its reasonably short read, but it over-promises and under-delivers, and along the way tells a rather straight forward story in a protracted and convoluted nature. If you go into this just looking for a moody slowburn mystery, with melancholy romance and darkness to spare? You’ll probably enjoy it quite a bit. I was looking for something more intriguing, especially given that striking cover and promises of thrills, and ultimately...whilst not dreadful by any means, I didn’t come out of it fully satisfied. Ah well!   

Read it or Leave it : Unsure. Reading Next (Ender’s Game by Some Twat *Won’t be Reviewed*)

[theship-thewalrus]

For the event!!

'This belonged to my mother- etc etc' with Tywin please???

No worries if not <3

Hi Hi!! Thank you so much for the request :) I hope you enjoy it and it is what you were looking for <3

tywin lannister x female! reader

pretty much the ask!! also this is for the 100 follower event

word count: 616 words reading time: about 4 minutes warnings: none prompt: ❛ this belonged to my mother i want you to have it ❜

Tywin was not known to be one to give you many, believing his words and actions are enough to show his affection. Yet on very special occasions, your husband gave you a small gift. Mostly jewels, necklaces or rings, to help show your wealth, help solidify in others mine the power you held over them. As you were to their equal but their better.

Your name day was fast approaching, something Tywin made sure to never forget. It was one of the occasions you were ever given a gift, something to commemorate your time in this world. But the man needs to give you something of meaning, of importance. As you have all the jewels, necklaces and rings a woman could ask for. You had many horses and dresses, many hair pieces and shoes. What was there to give a woman who has it all?

Sitting by the window of your room with a book in hand, you took little notice of who entered. Too engrossed by the words on a page to simply look up and greet someone. Only when a hand lays on your shoulder you are pulled from your thoughts. Your head turns before your eyes as you try to finish the page before committing to talking to the person. Finally, your eyes land on your husband, Tywin, the man standing tall and proud above you.

A small smile forms on your face, it was only a few moons before your name day. But your husband always gave you a gift beforehand and by the hand behind his back you guessed he came bearing gifts. Your husband knew you were an observant and logically person, making it hard to hide things from you at times. Though over the years he had grown good at it when he needed to.

"It is such a lovely day and yet you are chained to this room," Tywin says with some jest, looking down at you. Shrugging your shoulders you mark the page in your book before closing it, giving the man your full attention. Something which made the smile on his face grow slightly. In the privacy of your company, Tywin allowed some of his walls to lower, to show some emotions to you.

"There will be more lovely days to come. No issue if I spend a single one in my room," you say with a small smile, eyes moving to look out the window. "I believe you have brought me something, less you simply enjoy having your hand behind your back." Tywin laughs slightly, enjoying your forward nature. You were never one to dance around your points, seeing through others' flowery words and identifying underlying points.

"Also so perspective, my dear. But I yield, this is for you." Taking his hand from behind his back you look back over to him, wondering what the gift could possibly be. In his open palm sat a small ring, a gold band, in craved with the Lannister house word, a ruby sat in the centre. It was an elegant ring, something you had not seen before. For a moment you thought that maybe he had made it recently, something just for you. Yet the ring seemed worn despite its perfections.

"What a lovely ring." You hum, taking it from his open palm and inspecting it. "This belonged to my mother I want you to have it," Tywin's voice broke you from concentration on the ring, making your eyes drift to him. A large smile on your face, as well as his.

Gifts were never something you sort out, nor Tywin frequently gave. But when gifts were exchanged they were meaningful to each of them.