Sounds interesting. I'm going to check out that Nothing is True book. I haven't spent nearly enough time learning about contemporary Russia. And yea, the Rise and Fall is fascinating. He does a great job with putting you in the middle of the action at all times and laying out the stakes and players involved.

"Has perspiration odor taken you out of the swim? Ten-day Ubik deodorant spray or Ubik roll-on ends worry of offending, brings you back where the happening is. Safe when used as directed in a conscientious program of body hygiene."

Yea, agreed. His short stories are amazing and should be considered his main body of work. The books are interesting, at times amazing, and always messy. Often it feels like the books are a collection of short story ideas pasted together. The characters usually work through a series of plausible explanations for their…

"I aimed for the public's heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach." - Upton Sinclaire

The History of the Kings of Britain" by Geoffrey of Monmouth: An appropriate history book in this era of Alternative Facts. Written in 1136, it covers the early history of Britain, with a strong focus on the reign of Arthur. It’s totally unreliable and often demonstrably false, but it spins an entertaining tale, and…

Yea, it's like every new Nintendo console is bad news for Nintendo fans. Because we just want the games.

Yea, I'm at the endgame too. I appreciate how, for such a meandering book, the characters and themes all are pulling together in a way that feels both natural and satisfying.

Yea, there's always a feeling of inertia in picking up an old save for a Souls game. What was my build? Why was I using thing weapon? Where am I supposed to go again? If you're going to get back into it, it's better to do it for long stretches where you have lots of content to explore.

Yea, Mega Man is the perfect type of game for this. It's all so instinctual that you really don't need your thinking brain to engage at all.

Any amount of a baby crying is too much. I'm amazed by how much people just throw into movies and TV. Do they think we don't get enough of that in real life?

It's fantastic. As someone who has read my fair share of 19th century novels, I love how perfectly it manages to capture the amusing idiosyncrasies of the era's writing style, while also ironing our some of the rougher or more annoying quirks of some of that writing. I'm also extremely impressed with the book's depth…

Yea it's awesome. It's perfect for an audiobook, too, because its meandering style and slow pacing make it a good choice to turn on and enjoy while not being too worried if you missed crucial plot details. And yea, the tone is good for Dark Souls… although I can't shake the feeling that it would be perfect for…

Well, I've finally gathered together my motivations to try a SL1 run of Dark Souls. So far it's going well. The challenge is just about at the right level. It's definitely harder, but there are very few real frustration points. It helps, obviously, that I'm going into the experience expecting it to be challenging. To…

It still has the power to inspire, I think! There's something about badly written fantasy work that awakens the childish part of my brain that prefers the stories to happen more in my head than they do on screen / on the page.

Yea, there are some great games in that span, too. Castlevania IV and Dracula X are stone classics. But as to the spirit of the above comment, I would say that once Alucard appears in SOTN, the series was forever changed. Even the non-Alucard handheld games basically just crib off the same formula.

One of the things that's interesting about older games is that the plots are so spare that they allow plenty of room for interpretation. There's a lot more space for the player to make up their own stories, given the relative low levels of in-game plot development. This also allowed the developers a little more…

Curation is often the cure for what ails us in the information age.

Yes indeed. And I can have the satisfaction of considering my money to be a charitable donation to some struggling indie studio.

There's something about that holiday vibe that always convinces me to take a look at slower games, too. I played through Oxenfree and Firewatch as well, and then started putting in some time with Life is Strange. I think that it's just a time of year when the complexity of our interpersonal relationships get drawn…

Yea, this is totally a real problem with the whole emulation scene. The problem is that while you're playing a game you're constantly aware that there could be a game already in your collection that you like twice as much. As often happens, the niggling suspicion that you could be happier doing something else ruins…