indigozeal | Entries tagged with tell me about it stud

There's a thread at the 1up forums now about indie games and whether they're more sizzle than steak, so to speak - whether too many of them rely too much on high concepts and fall through on execution. Considering my recent experience with The Last Door, I thought I'd make like many of the posters in the thread and take stock of my satisfaction with the indies I've played.

Genuinely enjoyed; these were great: The cooking sim Cook, Serve, Delicious is one of the best games I played in its year, an immensely satisfying combination of planning and quick-hit, fast-fingered gaming with excellent art & sound assets that provide crucial sensory accentuation to the experience. Ib, likewise, is a sweet, imaginative children's horror adventure with a great premise, lovable characters, memorable visuals, genuinely scary moments, and really player-friendly save placement and game length. Puzzle Quest's Bejeweled-RPG mashup was daft yet inspired and addictive, and the game had a good sense of humor. (I haven't beaten its final boss to this day, though.)
I'm getting conflicting info on whether Chime is an indie game - its studio has handled some bigger 360 titles and shovelware but seems to dabble in smaller titles - but it's a sleek & terrific music puzzler nonetheless.

Not entirely successful but interesting: Kentucky Route Zero's artsy ambition and tendency to heap too much on its plate get in the way of it telling its human stories, but it sure is striking visually. Planet Stronghold makes some goofy decisions in a sort-of misguided pursuit of being sexy, but its combat engine did some genuinely interesting & challenging new things, and I took a shine to some of its characters; I'll be playing the sequel. I remember Yume Nikki more fondly as time goes on; it's formulaic in how it's assembled in parts and often too incoherent even for dream logic, but it's unlike anything else out there - it's genuinely surreal. Palette needed some reworking of its script, but I liked the premise and the visuals of the amnesiac protagonist piecing together her shattered memories (with yet-unidentified figures sketched in silhouette like chalk outlines) and trying to string them back into the missing story of her life.
I admired Home's smart commentary on how player freedom often clashes with telling a narrative, even though I gather from other players' experience that some possible routes showcase this theme better than others.

OK: I was obsessed witih Terraria once I finally got around its ridiculous save-eating problem (in short: play it only through the Steam client; do not download it separately), but after I finished with the game, I didn't feel the slightest need to go back to it; it's utterly disposable. The Crooked Man lacks inspiration, though it has solid work put into it. Wizorb's OK if you're using a mouse and arrrgh otherwise. Five Days a Stranger has some good puzzles and Trilby's Notes some deft cutscene direction (and the origin of Slenderman, if you care about that), but I like them and their uglier aspects less as time goes on and I become better-acquainted with their superior inspirations.

Groundbreaking experiments that are important but flawed: Gone Home is an interesting, exhaustive study of how to tell a story through documents and environment, and I like the story - which has really resonated with a lot of people - but my overriding sentiment to the game is still "that was not worth twenty bucks." Dear Esther: that story is a big bunch of hooey, but it did demonstrate, as one GameSpot reviewer put it, how "video games allow for pacing and discovery that would be impossible to reproduce elsewhere" - and those are dang purty caves. I respect what Depression Quest is trying to do, and it's smart in how it plays with game conventions to reproduce the mindset of depression - but it falls down a good bit when it comes to addressing how to treat the illness (byproduct of the designer living in a land of unlimited healthcare, I suppose), and the ridiculously, unrealistically sunshiny best ending makes the whole game ring a bit false.

Didn't work: Neverending Nightmares and The Last Door. Also Desert Nightmare and The Longing Ribbon. All of these are horror games, and all of them share, in different ways, a fatal callousness toward their horrific events. Good horror demands empathy.
Sword & Sworcery is near-entirely a delivery system for geddit-geddit memey humor that's not up my alley. Lone Survivor is too busy trying to elbow the player in her ribs with unsubtle Silent Hill references to notice the gapingly stupid game-killing flaws in its designs; wish it hadn't taken me over three hours to do so.
Hello? Hell...o? assembled a slew of interesting story gimmicks and completely forgot to write a story worth telling with them.
(Continuing from a couple categories above: 7 Days a Stranger and 6 Days a Sacrifice are largely ecch.)

Cannot play due to technical issues: I know Anna got critically drubbed, but I was intrigued by the setting - a dark but smallish and overgrown abandoned building located in a sunlit mountain range. I wanted to see if the designers could use this contrast of dark and light, and the overwhelming presence of nature, to their advantage. The camera just whips around at an utterly unplayable speed, though, and the frame rate is garbage. (My computer just might not be equipped to handle the game, though it's played seemingly more demanding games without a hitch.) I also downloaded the demo for Blueberry Garden a couple nights ago, but something about the character movement makes me nauseous. (I also can't figure out what the heck's going on in the game.)

Conclusions in this experiment:
- Indies are prone to trying too hard to be edgy or memey and thereby forgetting to be good. Horror titles are particularly susceptible to this.
- Many good indie titles, or at least good aspects of indie titles, are born out of coping with limitations (Gone Home: we don't have the budget to animate characters, so let's concentrate on telling a story through documents; Chime: we're blowing most of our budget on song licensing, so let's make sleekness a hallmark of our by-necessity streamlined interface & gameplay).
- The more ambitious and better-funded - or at least most expensive-looking - titles (Dear Esther, Kentucky Route Zero, Gone Home, Neverending Nightmares) often let their ambitions trip them up on the basics of either gameplay or storytelling.
- Across every category, in fact, there are mistakes made that wouldn't make it past the QA process of mainstream ventures (Terraria's lost saves; Lone Survivor's dead ends; Yume Nikki's...well, it's not a mistake, but I don't think anything in Yume Nikki would get through corporate).
- Not all of this experimentation pays off, at least in the game that introduced it, but it gets ideas into the market that wouldn't arrive there any other way. It's heartbreaking when great, original ideas don't deliver, but that's the nature of experimentation - not everything leaps into the marketplace fully-formed, golden & gleaming, like Athena out of Zeus's head.
- The variation in quality in a given gamer's indie game portfolio probably has a lot to do with buying habits, too. The minute barrier to entry presented by Steam-sale bargain prices and RPG Maker free-for-alls means that the average player is willing to take a good deal more risk and try stuff that wouldn't get by their purchase-vetting process normally. I didn't like Desert Nightmare at all, but I wouldn't have given it a second glance if it weren't free in the first place.
- Where indie games seem to succeed, mostly, is in introducing the market and audience to new ideas, which certainly isn't a bad thing. And, hey - at least in my experience, I've beaten Sturgeon's Law, at least. I can't say indie games are doing much worse than mainstream commercial titles for me this year (*coughcoughChronoCrossSeikenDensetsu3LegendofManacoughcough**).

My, those conclusions were original and illuminating! Most assuredly, they were worth all that rambling!
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I did the "celebrate Halloween all month long" thing for the first time last October. I'm a bit ambivalent about this relatively new practice: it's had the bonus of holding Christmas creep a bit at bay, but a month seems a bit too long to spend dwelling on the dark and dreary. But I enjoyed it! My celebrations were mainly limited to posting spooky material on Tumblr, reading a couple vampire novels, and playing horror games, but I think that's part of the formula for success - don't constantly steep yourself in horror; take it in doses over a period of time.

Oh, and I did carve a jack-o'-lantern. It doesn't seem like many people actually do that anymore; if the pumpkins are carved at all, it'll be with scenes and patterns from stencils, not the traditional faces. Most of the time, though, they'll just put a bunch of pumpkins around the outside of the house. Rainy Maine is quite productive when it comes to...well, produce, so pumpkins are plentiful and cheap, and many folks take the opportunity to support local farmers by being rather lavish with their decorating. (The Pine Tree State takes a similar tack with evergreen wreaths: one on every window, not just on the front door.) I think, though, there's a lot to be said for the old-school charm of a hand-carved jack-o'-lantern; it encapsulates the homemade feel of a holiday marked by parent-crafted costumes and kids going around their neighborhood door-to-door. (That image may be a little antiquated, but it still fits enough around here.)

Anyhow, I decided to attempt that some holiday-post-a-day thing on Tumblr for December that I did for October, but it ain't goin' as well as before: while it was relatively easy to find spooky shots, I'm having a heck of a time finding Christmas (or even suitably winter-themed) shots from games. An unusual number of Japanese action & sci-fi games take place during Christmas (Spy Fiction, D2, Overblood 2, Blue Stinger, Raw Danger), perhaps owing to the influence of the Die Hard series - particularly in the 32-/64-bit eras, where many designers were heady on the newfound freedoms of 3D & the space afforded by CDs and set out to realize their interactive-movie dreams. I can't rely on those games exclusively, though, and I went through a lot of the obvious candidates for this post from a couple years ago. Here's hoping for some Christmas fanart in the tags I check.

(I tried searching DeviantArt for Christmas fanart for various titles, but save for a cute Terranigma piece and, of all things, a reenactment of the triple-dog-dare scene from A Christmas Story with Pyramid Head and Valtiel, I came up empty-handed. Also: I know that niche fetish art was always present on DeviantArt (obviously), but did the site just completely go down that hole recently, or what?)

In other Christmas news: since I don't have many people for whom to buy Christmas gifts this year, I've decided to participate in one of those programs where you buy presents for needy children from wishlists they've made. It's actually been pretty fun! One of the kids was fond of tractors and racecars, and I managed to find at the local farm-supply store a set of diecast race tractors. (This kid was also into what his list calls "MN-10 characters"; if anyone knows what this is, please weigh in.) Another kid I chose because he asked for a "boy dollhouse," and since I live in a rural area, no one else around here is going to fill this request, so I had to step up. Since he specified that it be a "boy" dollhouse, I assume he doesn't want a regular one, so I found this log cabin dollhouse online that I think'll fit the bill. Here's hoping he likes it! (And that it arrives on time.)

I'm less certain about how I handled shopping for the third child, a 4-year-old girl who "likes Frozen" and "loves pink and purple" (that being the entirety of her list). I got her a Frozen doll, then a pink penguin (to go with the theme, see), a pink & purple plush purse w/ballerina mouse attached, and a set of pink-and-purple costume tiaras. Beauty & dollies & not much doing. Hm. I'm limited by the very short list and also by what a 4-year-old can safely do - you can't give her much that's not a hazard at that age - and I imagine any girl whose defining interest is "loves pink & purple" is going to be a gender traditionalist, but...well, I'm still disappointed in myself for not finding a better solution.

I've spent a bit more than I intended for each kid; I'd see a pretty OK gift at one store, reason that I might not find anything better down the line, get it...and then, whaddaya know, find something better down the line (that I would also purchase). I'm also vaguely unsatisfied with this R/C car I got racecar kid...did anyone actually like R/C cars growing up? I had this Camaro that hung around a long time, but I didn't actually do much with it. It's the little car you control that goes around by itself, it looks neat, it should be awesome, yet you run it back and forth a few times, and that's all you can do with it. I had the foresight to get him a car that can be recharged via USB (I'll include a charger) so his parents won't have to spent big bucks on batteries, but, well.

I've gotten a couple gifts for myself recently: I bought the 20th anniversary Angelique artbook that was recently released and a fancy Sailor Saturn action figure from Figuarts. Naturally, given my luck, both came with imperfections: the figure's box is crushed on the bottom (which doesn't matter to the figure but drives me nuts reflexively), and the book somehow, be it in transit or right after I opened the package, got a stub on one of its corners that shows up on over 3/4 of the freaking pages. It's small and, due to the positioning of the images on the pages, affects (very minorly) only about three of them, but - daisies, can't I have anything nice?! The book's really beautiful, though. Yura Kairi's light colors and delicate line art are made for the printed page, and there are so many details that are lost in the electronic versions. Really recommended for any fan of the series.

Not sure about the Sailor Saturn figure, though. It has such huge, ugly marionette joints in the elbows! Judging from the photos, I don't think they show up on the outside of the elbow, only the inside, but I'm waiting till Christmas to open the package, so I'm not sure. The figure was on sale; I wouldn't have bought it otherwise. We'll see, I guess. Desperate suspense!
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But if my playthrough had poor pacing, then, well, I'm just emulating the game.( Cut )

LJ doesn't allow crossposting anymore, so this is a repost of the books I read for the 50bookchallenge community, with short linked reviews, bests & worsts, etc.

1. Planet Narnia, Michael Ward: While Ward's thesis that each of the Narnia books purposefully reflects the medieval conception of one of the classical planets is intriguing, it's too hit-and-miss, too oddly structured, and way too riddled with apophenia to make its full impact.
2. "The Winter's Tale", Shakespeare: The next time someone tells you that "The Taming of the Shrew" was just meant ironically and was not intended as a straight take on his views of marriage, remind him that he wrote a play in which you're expected to root for a murderous king to get back the wife and child he tried, with precious little dramatic instigation, to put to death; also, that said play was thinly-drawn, tone-deaf, and dramatically lightweight.
3. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Vol. 1 (from A Study in Scarlet up to "The Adventure of the Second Stain"), Arthur Conan Doyle: What can I say that you haven't heard already.
4. Japanese Women: New Feminist Perspectives on the Past, Present, and Future, Kumiko Fujimura-Fanselow, Atsuko Kaneda, et al.: A much-needed and quite enlightening collection of viewpoints by native authors on various aspects of life for women in Japan; would that there were an modern version to shed light on the landscape 15 years later.
5. Alien Hand Syndrome, Alan Bellows et al.: Focuses a bit much on the more nauseating tales and doesn't entirely escape the curse of websites for bite-sized reading not translating quite well to print, but still lives up to its source's Damn Interesting moniker and is a good gift for that person who has everything (provided they can handle a bit of college humor).
6. Maskerade, Terry Pratchett: While the material about theater folk is only a little weaker than the author's usual fantasy-to-real-life satire, the book's kind of oddly morally tone-deaf for a Pratchett, and it has the A.I. problem of an ending that thinks it's jubilant but in reality is quite depressing.
7. Under the Sea-Wind, Rachel Carson: A lushly lyrical recounting of an ocean ecosystem through the eyes of a few of its residents, but the sheer thickness of the imagery and poetic prose makes it a bit inaccessible.
8. The Sea Around Us, Rachel Carson: Much of the geology is outdated, but it's intriguing to see here the origins of the pop science tome, clearly structured and with the basics of marine science well-communicated to the layman.
9. Anno Dracula, Kim Newman: "I got you two tickets to that thing you like!", the novel: you can't make a what-if-Dracula-won story out of nothing but pandering and paper-thin, too-clever-by-half references.
10. Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You, Sam Gosling: What promises to be a fun little lark on the things you can tell about a person from their home & office stuff delivers instead a very shallow overview of the Big Five OCEAN personality traits, with a kind of disturbing failure to grasp the concept of personal space.
11. Thunder Rides a Black Horse, Claire R. Farrer: An overview of the Apache "Changing Woman" ceremony that inspires more unease in me about the role of women in Apache culture than respect.
12. Jewels, Victoria Finlay: A history of a sampling of gemstones, explored through one globetrotting site per gem, that benefits from stronger structure and focus than the author's previous work.
13. Kappa, Ryuunosuke Akutagawa: I wish I had more than headscratching to report from this fanciful tale of an author who visits a society of these legendary Japanese creatures, but, welp.
14. An Upriver Passamaquoddy, Allen Sockabasin: Some interesting material about contemporary Passamaquoddy life, but the amateur writing from a Maine chief inspires a lot a questions it doesn't answer.
15. Watchmen, Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons: Yeah, it's as game-changing and deep as you've heard.
16. The Gift of Fear, Gavin de Becker: Fuck you.
17. The Edge of the Sea, Rachel Carson: This look at ocean ecosystems from Carson, lavishly illustrated with line art by Bob Hines, is perhaps the most conventional of her books on the ocean but still not a bad exploration.
18. Silent Spring, Rachel Carson: Still scary after all these years, and an excellent example of how to take a scientific argument to the public.
19. The Sense of Wonder, Rachel Carson: Short paean to the importance of natural exploration in a child's life; personal, graceful, and a poignant synthesis of beauty with fact.
20. The Mansion in the Mist, John Bellairs: A disappointing young-adult adventure that's more slight than spooky and doesn't due justice to its Edward Gorey cover or the unusual friendship between adventurous boy and tough elderly librarian that I found so charming in The Dark Secret of Weatherend.
21. I'll Be Seeing You, Mary Higgins Clark (abridged audiobook): You're at the hospital, and your own corpse comes in - and thus ends the intriguing material in this wasteful thriller, where no good hook is left unexplored and the heroine's sleuthing has completely no impact on the plot.
22. The Cereal Murders, Diane Mott Davidson: Remember, kids: you can watch movies, but for God's sake, don't think or talk about them: "That kind of smart attitude can lose you some friends."
23. Planet Google, Randall Stross: Uncritical puff piece on Google's self-stated quest to "organize the world's information" (including a lot of your own, whether you want it to or not) is more ominous than heartening, and the author's frequent late-'90's swipes at Microsoft do nothing to distract from the unease.
24. Telling Stories the Kiowa Way, Gus Palmer Jr.: Intriguing exploration of the nuances, interactivity, and untranscribabilty of Kiowa storytelling that's undone a great deal by petty small-mindedness.
25. Trial by Ice: The True Story of Murder and Survival on the 1871 Polaris Expedition, Richard Parry (unabridged audiobook): Tale of murder on an Arctic expedition and the calamitous fallout hundreds of miles from civilization takes a bit to get going but is utterly gripping when it does.
26. Postcards from Tomorrow Square: Reports from China, James Fallows: Surprising and illuminating in parts, I guess (at least the parts where the author isn't banging on about his Presidential speechwriting not being properly credited on Wikipedia), but I wish we weren't still relying on self-absorbed white dudes to tell us about the ~mysterious, unfathomable Orient.~
27. Sailing Alone Around the World, Joshua Slocum (unabridged audiobook): A surprisingly personal account of what it says on the tin, and chummy, sunny reader Nelson Runger takes much of the edge off the account's archaic qualities.
28. Travels with Charley, John Steinbeck (unabridged audiobook): John Steinbeck single-handedly wins the civil rights movement by mildly telling off a racist hitchhiker; also, the sky is falling because America is becoming too sanitized, part 1,000/infinity.
29. Under the Tuscan Sun, Frances Mayes: A tale of learning to live in the rhythms of nature that overflows with lush prose and is one of the most sheerly beautiful books I've read - and nothing like a rom-com.
30. When Things Fall Apart, Pema Chodron: Uncomfortably vindictive and enamored with suffering for a Buddhist work, particular for one supposedly about how to recover from grief and loss.
31. The Job, Douglas Kennedy (abridged audiobook): Would-be Grisham knockoff that forgets to have a plot until the book's three-quarters over, additionally hobbled by a protagonist with an extraordinarily bad sense of decision-making.
32. Glock: The Rise of America's Gun, Paul Barrett: Insightful enough in revealing how Glock leveraged a savvy PR strategy unique in the industry to market dominance, and provides a side of corporate intrigue that's satisfyingly venal and honorless, but too fanboyishly enamored with the raw power of firearms to tackle the big questions of gun ownership it unwisely decides to settle Once and for All.
33. Japanese Religious Traditions, Michiko Yusa: Slim but efficient primer on Japanese religion with enough flavor to bring the subject to life.
34. The Heart of the Buddha's Teaching, Thich Naht Hanh: Warm & heartfelt primer on Buddhism that's a bit overwhelmingly dense and might run down too many concepts too quickly for beginners.
35. The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, Nicholas Meyer: Killer premise - what if Dr. Watson had to use Sherlock Holmes' own tools of ratiocination against him to save him from cocaine addiction? - that tragically turns into the dreariest of self-insert fanfics a third of the way through.
36. Why We Make Mistakes, Joseph T. Hallinan: Attractive test layout; forgettable and unilluminating contents.
37. Imagine: How Creativity Works, Jonah Lehrer: Intriguing look at the factors that supposedly foster creativity through a handful of well-known case studies (Bob Dylan, Pixar); I don't agree with all of Lehrer's conclusions, but the material is fresh and genuinely challenging.
38. Flourish, Martin Seligman: I think Seligman's genuinely onto something in this enhortation for everyday proactivity in one's search for happiness, but his argument is weirdly childish and snake oil-slick at times.
39. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Vol. 2 (from The Hound of the Baskervilles to The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes), Arthur Conan Doyle: Yeah, there're still some classic tales here and The Hound of the Baskervilles ain't bad, but Doyle's quality control kind of wandered off for the last couple collections, didn't it.
40. The Dark Half, Stephen King: Ably written but far more ashcan than scary.
41. Round Ireland with a Fridge, Tony Hawks: Hey, sorry, I got drunk and passed out; was I supposed to do something interesting for this book I'm writing?
42. Bella Tuscany, Frances Mayes: Falls into the trap avoided by its predecessor Under the Tuscan Sun of being a celebration of wealth and privilege rather than a celebration of nature and country living.
43. Impaired, Gaia Faye: Post-bad-end Silent Hill 4 fic that suffers from an unsatisfactory finish and lack of agency for the protag but has admirable ambition and good character moments. (Note for this journal: As is addressed in the linked review: Yes, I'm including a book-long SH4 fic in my reading list. If The Gift of Fear gets on, there's no excuse for this not to get on, too.)
44. How the Irish Saved Civilization, Thomas Cahill: Infantilizes the Irish instead of lauding them, and is far more interested in the Romans and St. Patrick than its premise; poorly paced and disingenuously argued.
45. Nemesis, Agatha Christie: Meh Miss Marple missing memorable moments.
46. Worlds of Power: Castlevania II: Simon's Quest, F. X. Nine: Remember: "They are all Draculas."
47. Some Good Will Boys, G. W. Hinckley: Turn-of-the-century collection of supposedly true stories of orphans at a outdoors-camp-slash-reform-school that seems both suspiciously scripted and lacking in a coherent point.
48. Wooden Leg: A Warrior Who Fought Custer, Wooden Leg: Excellent first-hand account of the Battle of Little Big Horn and Cheyenne life before and after reservation internment, written by the eponymous warrior, from an eminently readable and relatable first-hand perspective.
49. Water Shows the Hidden Heart, Roma Ryan: Allegorical odyssey through the stages of grieving by Enya's lyricist that boasts some evocative imagery but is raw, self-indulgent, and, at points, shallow.
50. Alphonse Mucha: Masterworks, Rosalind Ormiston: Collection of Mucha art with a surprisingly lengthy biography and exegesis of his works that could've used a bit less repetition and more insight in the latter portion of the proceedings.

Best books this year:

1. Wooden Leg: A Warrior Who Fought Custer, Wooden Leg: I wish more history were this personal, readable, and plain-spoken. The everyman's view of events at Custer's Last Stand (and before, and after) really give you insight into how the decisions were made that led to the event - on both the Indian and the U.S. sides.
2. The Sense of Wonder, Rachel Carson: Beautiful marriage of both Carson's ability to make science approachable to the layman and her capacity to craft lyrical prose, coalescing into a short but extremely effective and poignant paean.
3. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Vol. 1 (from A Study in Scarlet up to "The Adventure of the Second Stain"), Arthur Conan Doyle: But you knew about this.
4. Watchmen, Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons: You knew about this, too.
5. Under the Tuscan Sun, Frances Mayes: Surprisingly rich and celebrant, with gorgeous prose; nothing like a rom-com. (But the sequel is problematic.)

Worst books:

1. The Gift of Fear, Gavin de Becker: Truly vile rape apologia under the guise of empowerment, prefaced with one of the most blatantly evil acts to which I've been witness in a book. I don't care how many friends or bloggers have recommended this book to you: stay far, far away.
2. Anno Dracula, Kim Newman: A thin and often howlingly dumb Mary Sue fanfic with the author trying his clumsy best to name-check every vampire and Victorian intellectual property in creation, to absolutely no positive effect.
3. How the Irish Saved Civilization, Thomas Cahill: Doesn't address its ostensible premise until 2/3 of the way through, and then dwells on it for only half a chapter; spends most of its length into detours on the author's pet subjects; fails to inform the reader on the big picture regarding ; insults the very people it was purported to honor. An example from several angles on how not to write history.

I also don't know where to rank this, but though I don't feel When Things Fall Apart was written necessarily with malice in mind, it came across to me as a singularly nasty book, obsessed with demeaning the individual and with the only answer to suffering being more suffering. It's not Gift of Fear-level bad, certainly, but it was Up There in my list of unpleasant reading experiences.

Pleasant Surprises: Japanese Women was a much-needed exploration of right from the horses' mouths; would that there was a up-to-date version. Jewels had a few ugly moments but found its author more aware, on point, and genuinely informative than in her initial outing. Trial by Ice was a gripping and well-spun narrative of survival in the face of sabotage by human pettiness and stupidity.

Disappointments: Planet Narnia has an interesting theory but needs a better-organized, less apophenic author to argue it. Masquerade lacks confidence in its lead character and as a result finds its way to an unsatisfying ending. The Mansion in the Mist was a sedate letdown after reading its predecessor, a spooky kids' adventure hinged on an intriguing friendship.
Single biggest disappointment: The Seven-Per-Cent Solution had a smashing premise explored really well for the first third of the book, then was tossed aside for derivative self-insert fanfic that existed to debase the character of Sherlock Holmes. WTF, man.

Weird: Water Shows the Hidden Heart, with a lyricist trying to make a novel wholly out of imagery. An intriguing concept, but not one this particular author could sustain at full length, and the book as a whole seemed vanity-press raw. Kappa, for being Kappa.

Best quotes: When we confronted with life's difficulties, let us remember the immortal words of Worlds of Power: Castlevania II: Simon's Quest: "They are all Draculas."

Milestones: Finally read a Stephen King book; read through Sherlock Holmes. Finished the 50-book challenge, yay!

Dismal Percentages: Books by female authors: 18/50, or 36%. Books by nonwhite authors: 7/50, or 14%.
Number of times I was actively disappointed in a book: 27/50, or 54%.

I translated a bit of promo text for a iPhone game for a recent job. The clients contacted me for revisions, taking issue with the use of the word "dominoes." They wanted all instances of the word replaced with "domino," which was, they asserted, the proper plural. The singular form of the word, I was informed, was "monomino."
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I wanted to like Monster House, and I mean, it's not bad - it's an all right film with a few smart lines, a premise that appeals to your inner child detective, and, in the first half, a good feel for a suburban neighborhood - but it's straining at the edges of its cheap CG (particularly with whatever eerily accurate facial expression-capturing software they used), and jokewise, I wish they'd gone for the broad and obvious a bit less often. In other words, it's more a kid's film and less a true family film that can be enjoyed by all members of the household.
Incidentally, I rented Monster House at the local video store, and between the depressing prevalence of straight-to-DVD turkeys and the forced chit-chat with antipathic neighbors, this was the visit where I learned that Netflix and Amazon are the video outlets for me. And full-screen? Really?

Angelique: Love Call, meanwhile, is the point where I discovered Hideyuki Tanaka was never going to do it as Clavis for me. We all know about the lack of Shiozawa Clavis's sarcastic edge, but there's a core of...fragility? sensitivity? just plain soul? that's also lost. Tanaka's deep in timbre, but he's flat and innocuous, almost grandfatherly - he reminds me of Victor more than anyone. He also has no chemistry with Lumiale whatsoever.
Anyhow: the rest of the drama is the usual Trois-and-on candy fluff where the Guardians have to pretend that the slightest of disturbances constitute the gravest of crises (here: the Guardians vacation on an island during a shooting-star festival - but what will happen when Limoges & Rosalia decide they want to come along?!?), and I lost my patience a little bit into the second half. The songs, save for "Force of Passion," are passable "meh" (the lack of effort in the Ernst-Mel collaboration is particularly frustrating, given Morikawa's voice and the cuteness of the characters' interactions in drama tracks elsewere). The real attraction here, oddly, is the LoveLove tracks, which were recorded using a 3-D microphone and, if you wear headphones, sound spookily like the characters are moving about while talking to you in your very room. So if you've come across any "AAAH OSCAR IN MY EAR GET HIM OUT" tracks in your downloading adventures, this album is from where they come.

Paranormal Activity 3: My audience liked this well enough, and I can see from where the enthusiastic reviews are coming - a lot more happens in this installment, that's for sure. We seem, though, to have lost the idea of staring at the mundane until we notice the something out of whack that's been staring us in the face - the casual, unassuming presence of evil; now, we're just watching typical horror setpieces through home video, and even though there were several bits that were perfectly creepy individually, the aggregate just seemed like goofy overload after a while. The initial installment had its problems, but when they at last arrived, the moments of violence had real impact after all the quiet that had come before. Another problem: the seams are showing in some of the performances and the directing (read: it seems stagey).
Also, those beds at the end. Those were Bert & Ernie's beds, man. And why was the purported '80's babysitter dressing like Sandy from Grease?

A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper is one of those books that'll never be read by those who most need it: it uses the accessible tool of the newspaper to teach statistics and how to apply them to make sound decisions and process information in everyday life. An excellent concept for a book, and a breezy read - the book is segmented like a newspaper (world news first, then the local section, sports, and special interest), and each chapter, centered around one faux headline and a single statistical principle it illustrates, lasts only two to four pages. The author delves a bit more into stuff like combinatorics and calculus than he perhaps should for a general audience, though, and his personal prejudices and blind spots bring it down - no, John Allen Paulos, I don't think extended consideration of a hypothetical future where every human pregnancy resulted in 50 embryos would end the abortion debate. (Also, it could use an update providing more background on some of the mid-'90's stories it cites for those not offhandedly familiar with, say, who Lani Guinier was.)

You may have heard tales of Opinion Outpost hooking up SomethingAwful members with $70 survey panels, but they are not going to come true for you if you are not an 18- to 35-year-old male, sorry. (Not even dreams of occasional $5 Amazon gift cards are gonna come true.) I know; I'm not going to get rich filling out surveys. I can't believe it, either.

I certainly see enough icons & avatars from Homestuck in my forum travels, and the comic's simple, clean clip-art style and gimmick of being "played" like a text-parser adventure game would certainly seem to account for a great deal of its popularity. The game's opening act, though (about a PC game in beta that seems to be destroying the world), is a heckuva slog to get through, bloated with a lot of internetty Extruded Humor Substitute (the hero's into Matthew McConaghey films; his dad's obsessed with painting harlequins, etc.). After several hundred pages (!), once there's finally substantial plot progression, the author instead skips ahead a few hundred years to an apparent postapocalypse, then jumps around between a couple shrouded protagonists there, then jumps back to a girl who apparently is the same age as the hero but is communicating with an older version of him, all while juggling three different simultaneous-kinda perspectives in the apparent present, and... There seems to be a possibly intriguing story here, but danged if the comic's ever gonna get to it.

This may be a stupid thing to rate, but I had recent occasion to try the Peach & Granola Sundae from Burger King, and oh my goodness - what have they done to these peaches? Instead of the canned-in-heavy-syrup slices I was expecting, there's this Pixy Stixish jell-o jam glop that tastes like no fruit from any loving god. I'm cheap and weak-willed and will normally finish any sweet in front of me given enough time but I couldn't finish this.

While we're on the subject of orange food, though - the first question a bag of Gimbal's Harvest Mix jellybeans might prompt is: did they nail the Pumpkin Pie bean? Well..sorry, no. It's an honorable attempt - you get a good deal of pumpkin pie spice in one bite - but there's none of the fruit there, and it tastes more like marshmallow than pastry (kinda redundant when there's already a Roasted Marshmallow in the mix). Gimbal's is particularly strong with their fruit juice flavors (pick up their Cherry Lovers mix if you get a chance), so I don't mind their stretching the fall motif to include the ("Harvest") Berry and ("Goblin") Fruit Punch flavors, and they know how to do Peach, at least - plus, their Red Delicious even has a waxy appleness to it (even if Harvest Spice just tastes like a slightly spicy Chuckles). Perhaps not worth searching hither and yon, but a nice slight change of pace for autumn candy.
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