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publishing companies will be like ~ooh this is a hardcover oooh it's so durable that will be $35~ and then you see the actual book and it's like. "perfect"-bound with endbands glued on crooked and a completely plain paper cover under the dust jacket. my dudes this shit is a mass market paperback with delusions of grandeur

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At your girl’s house telling her that sometimes things must be done not for the sake of building a resume but for the sake of keeping the heart soft and aglow

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1995 Chrono Trigger for Super Famicom Commercial

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In January ‘23, my wife was 5 months pregnant with our first child. Our daughter was beginning to kick a lot and my wife had the idea, “You know, she hears me talk all day long at work. Why don’t you read to us at night so she can hear your voice more?”

Redwall was the book I decided to read, and was the first book my daughter ever heard.

I had read most of the series when I was a preteen, since I was lucky enough to go to a grade school that had a library. Most of the books in that now-gone building were your standard middle grade fare: Roald Dahl, Judy Blume, Jack London, that kind of stuff. My school took part in that Pizza Hut BOOK IT! program, so we were incentivized to read and read often. Going through the stacks, 10 year-old me stumbled upon a whole shelf dedicated to this Brian Jacques guy. The cover was neat, too- a mouse? With a sword? “Heck yeah,” I thought. I read one, then another, then another. I ate a lot of pizza that year.

Redwall has become a touch point for so much fiction for a reason. The world is immediately appealing- here we have an abbey built with warm sandstone, populated with mice, badgers, squirrels, moles, etc. They have delicious feasts, talk of legends, have funny dialects, and are good to each other. Their world is then threatened by a horde of evil rats, and the ensuing story is the hero’s journey 101, but is executed wonderfully. There’s a history to Redwall Abbey, and you can feel the world’s promise of deeper lore simmering beneath the surface. Books meant for children aren’t typically this rich, and it’s no surprise Redwall spawned 20+ sequels.

One thing that should be mentioned is that this is story of a war, and that comes with a lot of death. Sometimes, that death is surprisingly violent! Jacques never lingers on it for long and the detail is left mostly up to the reader’s imagination, but for a ten year-old, it did teach me pretty early that violence can be both very cool and very, very awful.

I need to also mention the wonderful chapter head illustrations. More books should have these, in my opinion. Perfect tattoo fodder for, say, a couple looking to commemorate the first story that was read to their newborn daughter?

Speaking of, our daughter, Clover, was born May 2, 2023. Over the course of the last few months, we finished reading Matthias’ story of triumph over the horde of Cluny the Scourge. My wife & I were emotional over the ending, with our daughter cooing between us. Redwall has claimed a forever spot in our hearts.

We immediately started in on Mossflower, the sequel. Here’s to many, many more tales of heroic mice, dastardly villains, and food so delicious you can smell it off the page.

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These vibes are fantastic. More Delicious Dungeon in my TTRPGs please ❤️

This year I got to work on a tabletop RPG doing some MonHun inspired characters and it was a ton of fun ✨ The game revolves around the wilders, mutated rangers that try to stop the frenzy, a virus that makes monsters violent and self-destructive. Not only hunters but also chefs! WILDERFEAST is live on kickstarter right now, you can check all about it and support it here!

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Manhunt is a life-changer, the kind of book that shifts your insides around and makes room for itself. I finished it at 3am last night, and have been wandering around the house since. I feel hollowed out. I want to- need to- read it again. Christ.

This book has a ton of Content Warnings, some stemming from genre, most stemming from its premise and perspective. CW: transphobia, dead-naming, cannibalism, dysphoria, rape, implied incest, fatphobia, public execution, slavery, torture, body horror.

Disclaimer: I'm writing this review from my perspective as a man exploring their gender, folding in They/ Them pronouns with my He/ Him. While I have considered in myself whether or not I am a woman, I don't think I am. Do with that info what you will.

I found Manhunt on a recommendation shelf at my local bookstore- shout out to Eagle Eye Books in Decatur, GA- and its cover grabbed me instantly. It's a shocking image, blunt in its implication and color. It's a fitting one, too, echoing the words inside. You're going to get grabbed and the story isn't going to let go until the last.

You can get a synopsis for the thing anywhere, so no need here. Just know that Fran & Beth's story starts with the punchline- "What if being a man turned you into a rage zombie?"- and runs red with it. Being a trans woman is already goddam hard in the real world- now imagine people looking at you the same way people in zombie movies look at people who have been bit. It's a fantastic grounding device, with Felker-Martin using it as a jumping off point to point out how fucked transphobia can get.

Speaking of rage, this book is so full of anger and hatred, righteous and otherwise. It smacks you, not just inside the content but with its construction. Felker-Martin hates transphobes, trustfund child-adults, people who will put a hashtag on their twitter profile but never do anything. She never writes this out explicitly, but the way th`e story is told? Buddy, she makes that very clear.

The characters are deliciously complex. You start with easy sketches- the pretty one, the strong one, the fat one, the TERF, the trans man, etc- but you hop from perspective to perspective often enough that things begin to mold into a rich picture.

(If I have any criticism of the book at all, it's that, occasionally, we shift perspective so fast and often that timelines can get wobbly. I'll think it's only been a few hours in-story, but then a character will mention it's been a few weeks. It course corrects cleanly, though, and never became too much of an issue.)

One of the perspective characters- Ramona- is a part of The Legion, militarized TERFs who have taken over huge swaths of the US in name of eradicating "men wearing womanface." Thing is, Ramona has a thing for trans women. By day, she's an XX chromosome tattoo wearing Nazi, by night she's sleeping with a trans lover in a secret brothel. She hates her hypocrisy (so many of the characters ooze self-hatred), but she is so caught up in the fervor of her movement that she can't slow down.

These contradictions cover the whole cast. At times, I hated them. Others, I loved them. By the end, all I wanted to do is spend more time with them.

It's here I want to say- I love you, Beth. It's obvious that the author loves you, too. Not in the "here's-some-plot-armor" way, the book isn't cheap like that. The author writes Beth and all of the other trans characters with so much empathy, personal history, and heart, it's difficult not to see them as breathing, beautiful people.

When you have a book like this- one that moves at so much force- you worry that there isn't a way in hell that it will stick the ending. Happy to report that as much of a power-drill the last act is, I left the book satisfied. I, alone in my living room, warm forgotten beer on the coffee table, wife and daughter asleep in the next room, muttered, "Whoa," when I read the last paragraph.

So, yeah. Read Manhunt. It isn't for everyone. The best art never is. But if you allow yourself to be taken by it, hold on.

Nick <3