Some Very Brief Capsule Reviews Of Stuff I Am Shoving In My Mindholes

HERE ARE SOME MEANINGLESS THOUGHTS. Reviews are of course in no way particularly valuable or impactful in that they do very little critical thinking or intellectual heavy lifting, but fuck it, here is my thoughtbarf anyway. *yarrrrrrfffggh*

Video games? I got both Starfield and Baldur’s Gate 3 (PS5 ed). Starfield is really pretty and, so far in the early game, spectacularly dull. Both Fallout and Skyrim start in a way that’s pretty compelling right out of the gate, whereas Starfield is like, “I dunno, I guess you’re mining shit,” and it feels hand-wavey. There’s actually a moment early on where you emerge from an airlock and the music swells and the light grows bright — echoes here of leaving one of the Fallout vaults — except then you just walk out onto some ugly-ass moon with some industrial video game shit around you. You expect it to be this beautiful galactic moment and it’s just chalky and bland. Which so far is my experience with the game. It probably gets better.

BG3 on the other hand is kind of the opposite. It’s colorful and kind of batshit right from the get-go, and I spent about mmm 47 hours on character creation alone. I’m not far in it, but I’m digging it. While I suspect the PC version is better, the PS5 is easily the best console RPG experience I’ve had yet in terms of that crunchy kind of dice-rolly goodness. It’s cool.

I’m watching Ahsoka. It is a show I am watching. (Honestly, it’s fine, I guess, but I love Rebels and I loved her character in the past and this just feels like it’s a paint-by-numbers ‘Star Wars’ show with a whole different character. Ahsoka isn’t the quixotic, slightly quirky non-Jedi that I remember and, honestly, that I adored — she’s now somehow the dour, grumpy ‘follow the Jedi rules’ Jedi, and shit makes little sense and there’s a lot of weird logic potholes I keep tripping into and, ennnh. Ennh. Ugh.)

I am LTTP, but loved Barbie. Obviously. I think it missed the mark in a few places — not even in the “overarching point” way just in a sort of plot-narrative-logic way, but it doesn’t matter, because I had a blast.

Deadloch. That is all. Just watch it. (Amazon Prime is where it lives.)

Just read a new Hailey Piper novel (All The Hearts You Eat) and whoa, wow, holy crap. It’s kind of one thing for a little while and then it turns into this whole other glorious monstrosity. And also about finished with Forgotten Sisters by Cynthia Pelayo which I’m also loving a lot — there’s some deep, dark poetry happening in her writing you need to witness. Also fascinated by how many horror novels out soon and recently have water as a focus. Piper’s All the Hearts and also No Gods for Drowning. Pelayo’s Forgotten Sisters, where the river plays a focus. Clay McLeod Chapman’s What Kind of Mother. Even Black River Orchard which, again, has a river focus, has a character who fears drowning. Just an interesting thing. Not sure what it means. Shades of anxiety over climate change? Or a deeper feeling of being overwhelmed and drowning in our own daily lives? Or is it just some weird cool psychic shit that happened to line up in our minds as we wrote these books and put them out into the world? Dunno, can’t say.

(Also: farmer’s market horror! Present in What Kind of Mother, plus Delilah Dawson’s Bloom, and also, Black River Orchard. I selfishly also note I’m getting to chat with the two of them at different events on my tour, which you can find details for here — Delilah is joining the Lehigh Valley date at The End bookstore. It will be a goddamn delight.)

Anyway. That’s it for now.

Here’s a shiny happy tour graphic, if you care to have it:

What are you digging these days? Or not digging? Whatever works. Pop into comments and Speak Your Words.