New year same me; we're gonna be looking at a couple of books and some manga as well.

1984 – George Orwell

On our ride back from New York City, the boys and I listened to the 1984 audiobook. It is not good. I had read 1984 previously and really liked it. There is no issue with the book, and since everybody probably knows about it, I will here complain about the audiobook. This was an Audible exclusive, and a “big budget” audiobook, as much as you can make one. This means it was over-produced to the point of being distracting from the story. Almost all descriptions, whether it is of actions or of dialogues, are removed in favour of sound effects or acting. This makes it quite confusing, as you kinda have to guess what actually happens in the book from sound clues. The whole audiobook sounds like it wants to be a movie, but without visual (no, I do not picture anything while reading either) it is just a noisy mess. The addition of music to build suspense doesn't ameliorate the situation. Going back to the acting, the main character is played by Andrew Garfield. I am a certified Andrew Garfield hater. Nothing against the guy (lie), but he cannot voice-act to save his life. Please, I'm begging you, I need one sentence that is pronounced clearly. He physically cannot do that. He cannot utter a sentence that is not whispered, part of an exaggerated exhalation, without performative stammering or god forbid, all at the same time. The fact that the whole cast is acted by different people, and the descriptions bring removed, make it a bit hard to figure out who's speaking when it's tertiary characters. The voice acted sex scenes were also excruciatingly uncomfortable; some people of the printhouse would be able to enjoy them I'm sure, but not us four boys in a car, not even 1 feet apart — let alone 5.

Children of Time – Adrian Tchaikovsky

Also started listening to this book on the 9h-ish ride from New York City to Toronto, and unlike 1984, the audiobook was quite good. We didn't have a chance to go past Act 3, so I bought the book when I got home, as there were 29 holds on it at the library. This is how it goes:

The year is like 7000 and humans have conquered space. We have colonies on multiple planets and satellites of the solar system, we have also started terraforming. One of those terraforming project light years away is done and the next phase of the experiment is starting; trying to replicate evolution. Dr. Kern is sending down to this fresh planet some apes contaminated with a nanovirus supposed to accelerate their evolution — to a certain point. After this certain point is reached, humans will start colonising the planet, which will have been prepped for them by their new ape servants. Everything of course goes according to plan and nothing goes awry.

This was such a treat to read. The story is divided into three parts, and while some are more interesting than others initially, they soon converge and you get invested in all of them. I really liked how even if the story takes place over thousands of years and many generations you never get confused as the author has a great trick up his sleeve to keep things clear: he just reuses names and archetypes for generations. For instance, whether it's 200 years after the initial time of the book or 2000, across generations, the character named “Portia” is an adventurous soldier. This is some good-ass sci-fi, and really accessible too. No “he put the skalhad into the kjbfljba — held tightly against the gahdu with the use of some gahsywko from lkkoasl — so that the aljhbjhbsa condenser would allow him to go at JKH75N-pc/h, a speed never consocarded by any ahsdgaj of the himijahal — even those that had ahhsjdyw their hakd wieojf. The inhabitants of himijahal had ljbated the ljhbsjda after all, so there wasn't any chance the asdhuwj of the hadajkk would allow that”. Just some real sentences, with real words. Apart from the accessible writing, the premise is original and the story never gets predictable. The build-up is great and the pay-off is also well done; can't wait to read the second one (the two people before me on the library waiting list better hurry up before I track them down). The themes introduced and questions that the book raises are also compelling. It is neither a fantasy nor a war epic. There is a spaceship and science.

The Boy Who Cried Bear – Kelly Armstrong

For the synopsis, please refer to Elisa's Reading Roundup: Finding my Book Twin

I'm not sure if I'm getting extremely tired of the series, or if there is something wrong with the book, but I really disliked this one. It is my second least favourite one in the series. The “mystery” is really half-assed and hinges on too many people being oblivious or things just happening — my suspension of disbelief was completely broken many times. It was not engaging at all. To me, it seems that the author has lost all of her steam and is just going through the motions, as a lot of paragraphs felt like fillers and everything is extremely repetitive. The paragraphs where Casey is doing some deducting — which sum up to “the guy said that, but maybe he lied. But also maybe he didn't lie. But also he could have lied. But then he could have not lied. But there are also reason for him to lie...” over and over, were really frustrating to read. There was a ton of overexplaining for things that really did not need to be explained, us readers aren't *that* dense (I am but others aren't) The initial confusion of the wild man for a grizzly bear also makes no sense: people saw in broad daylight a figure wearing a bear fur rush past them on two feet and thought it was for sure a bear. But the figure was close enough for a kid to see the man's eyes and even see their colour. Then Dalton (who's an expert forest tracker), finds prints 'that matched a bear', but when it turns out the 'bear' was a human they're like: “actually those prints make sense if it was a big man”. Casey, Dalton and Anders not figuring out that Joe is the attacker, Joe, who says he was just attacked by the bear-skin man, who has a stab wound on the leg, who was the only one in the forest with them and next to Max — even after Max said that a guy without a bear skin, who was stabbed in the leg just attacked him 2min ago — is wild. I have no words. The dialog still felt really unnatural and the Anders and Yolanda board game interaction was also incredibly cringe.

Brave New World Revisited – Aldous Huxley

I swear, this is the last time I count this book in my readings, but I did read it again ok. The article for it has been resurrected, amended, edited, corrected, [insert word]ed, it's gonna be ready this month. Maybe I'll turn it into a presentation.

Selling Hitler – Robert Harris

In April 1983, a distinguished British historian, Hugh Redwald Trevor-Rover – First Baron Dacre of Glanton, gets an incredible call: Hitler's journals were found and the rights to them were to be sold at an auction. Although there were three reports — each from a different handwriting expert — as well as multiple historian assessments certifying that those were genuine, The Times would like him to investigate the diaries. He goes to Switzerland to see the journals in person, as well as the german journal selling them. All 58 volumes are there, with their provenance authenticated as well; the story investigated and verified. Trevor-Rover is not any old academic; in 1945, the British Security Services had asked him to find out what had happened to Hitler in his final hours; the myth that he was still alive — was living as a free man or had been captured, and anything in between — kept circulating. He successfully investigated Hitler's death, wrote The Last Days of Hitler, and afterwards became one of the foremost experts on Hitler and his entourage's writings — many times calling out fake ones. Well, after reading through a couple of volumes Hugh Redwald Trevor-Rover – First Baron Dacre of Glanton and former Regius Professor of History at Oxford is convinced that those are real. The news travels the world, and everyone wants a piece of the cake. Journals backstab each other, historians start feuding, it is chaos. An auction is quickly called in April of that year for the world rights to the books to be bought for 3.75 million dollars ($11.8M or CAD16.9M today). A truly incredible find, all this first-hand information, almost 40 years after the fact; a lot of events from the Second World War would have to be revised and recontextualised.

A couple of weeks after, the diaries were proven to be a grotesque forgery as the content made no sense, and the paper, glue and thread were all produced post-war. This book is about how this blatant swindle managed to go this far.

Readers might know that I usually dislike historical novels; I do not care for dates and places, and have a terrible memory of names and titles. I also don't know a ton about history, so events' significance often fly right over me. But this was so fun to read. While not as eccentric, I would say the book has strong William of Rubruck vibes. Someone is getting dunked on at all times, and you can feel the mischief in the air. The book spends about 300 pages building the stack of cards before it starts to fall down. And my god, is it entertaining. Just when you think that it's the end, something happens or someone says something and we're back. I loved how the forger never really did anything proactive, or actually never really did anything, and yet somehow everything just ended up working in the best possible way for him, even after he got caught. Apart from the fun part of the book, it was interesting to read about the reality of west germany after the war; journalists could just hit up some former big-shot SS general for an interview, and it was relatively easy to go to a party only to realise everyone there is a 'former' nazi. I had thought all those generals had been put behind bars, and that the 'former' nazis had at least the decency to deny they abhorrent beliefs in public.

HunterxHunter – Yoshihiro Togashi

Greed Island: Chapters 143 – 186

B-b-biscuit, is that you?

The Greed Island Arc is over, and I didn't mind it at all. I don't think the highs are as high as the highs of the Yorknew arc, but it is overall more consistent and good. I also like how for once you see Gon and Killua actually training, and not the joke we saw in the tower of doom arc where they just had to try for 5 min and they got it. I also particularly liked the end of the arc and the dodgeball “fight”. The fight with the Bomber was also interesting. It does feel like the manga is taking a completely different route from the premise, and hunters or doing typical hunter things don't matter at all anymore. I don't dislike it at all, but it is a big disconcerting, especially with my criticism of the earlier chapters — I don't feel like my complaints have been addressed but rather retconned. I am really looking forward to the next arc as if I remember correctly it is H's favourite one and Tetyana told me it was very weird, and weird is good.

Nen does do everything though I'm afraid.

Good start to the year, a good historical book, some great Sci-fi — probably already a contender for my favourite book of the year —, finished reading all the available books of the Rockton/Haven's Rock saga, re-re-reread a book, and I got back into HxH. Selling Hitler was also actually a book from my backlog: my dad had lent it to me all the way back in 2021. I will now finally be able to give it back, only 4 years late. That is of course, unless someone from the café wants to borrow it (it is very funny).

Thank you for reading my logorrhea Eddie

I wrote this guide for a friend looking to transition to UX design. It made me happy to write, so I'll leave it here for those interested. I did not proofread it and I don't care.

User experience (UX) design, put simply, is the act of forming tangible experiences that cause or assist a user to complete a certain action or feel a certain way.

The keyword here is “tangible experiences”: others can design experiences as well, sure, but it is our sole ability and responsibility to translate them to something tangible; to materialize them in front of a player. We do this by holding the player at the center of our work's universe, considering them and their needs as we form systems and interfaces to guide them to their 'physical' – or emotional – destination.

To create a good user experience is a learned skill, inevitably brimming of trial and error. After all, the nature of this kind of work is to begin by making mistakes. These mistakes are tested, these tests produce results, and these results allow us to distill our creations to the point where they execute our intention as perfectly as possible (because in a space like this, perfection is never achievable).

How do you begin thinking like an experience designer? What is design thinking? Unfortunately, it might be impossible to simply transform you into a designer in the short span of a few paragraphs. Still, I can try to help you take the first step.

This Is Probably How You Will Need to Design

Design Thinking / The Experience Goal

Consider something near you. I will consider the eight ounces of to-go drip coffee next to me that I've half finished in the span of thirty minutes. This cup of coffee is not one, but two cups stacked on top of each other, with a plastic lid on top. The coffee is warm.

Why did the barista give me two cups? You might think the answers to be obvious: one cup would be too thin and could potentially burn me; two cups helps insulate the coffee so that it stays warm longer. And yes, these are the only answers; I have no reason to obscure any more from you. But to think of something and break down why it was made the way it is... that is the first step of design thinking. Then we simply reverse it.

In the design process, we start with an objective, an experience goal. We want a cafe patron to be able to comfortably consume their coffee. Simple enough. From there, we consider our user's demographic and their needs.

Consider the User

The average human is simple. They often fail to think before acting; thus, they have the potential to burn themselves on the coffee. But, they don't want to burn themselves!

The average human is also easily irritated. If something they paid for doesn't work out the way they want, there's a high chance they will get upset. Hot coffee cooling down quickly might make them punch a hole in our thin little plaster walls.

Okay, so we've thought about our customer and assumed some things about them. These are not the only traits of a coffee drinker, of course; we don't know everything! We never know everything. If we are unsure of what we might have missed, we can research to discover more factors in our decision-making. We can place a little survey next to the register of the shop, asking our customers how we can improve their experience. We can make user researchers analyze that data and provide us with design directions to follow, because data analysis is not the meat of our job, and we can then make more improvements that soothe those new qualms of our users.

Subsequently, after research, we make some informed design decisions. What if we lined our hot drinks with an additional cup at minimal cost, to ensure customers don't get hurt and sue the shit out of our dinky little third-wave coffee shop? And hey, that second cup would work well to keep our coffee warm for longer! And why not wrap the cups with a little cardboard sleeve, because Janine-53-years-old-who-buys-a-latte-every-two-days said that cup was too damn hot?

Everything I've said above is hopefully not groundbreaking to you at all. I've used all this dramatic and serious language, and you're probably sitting there thinking, “this girl is full of shit, because all the stuff she's pointing out is blatantly obvious”. And that's right! I'm full of shit. However, what might not be as obvious to you is that most people never consciously consider the reasons why something is the way it is, because good design is invisible design. Good design shouldn't make anyone stop and think (undesirable unless intended), because if so, we've slowed down the user or marred their experience (undesirable unless intended), and that makes both user and designer sad. So, if you're sitting there thinking “this is obvious and I already knew it all”, then that probably means we've achieved our purpose. Probably.

User Flow

So we've decided that two cups would help Janine out, and an additional cardboard sleeve would really help Janine out. How do we get these items into Janine's hands, so that she doesn't complain about the temperature of her coffee?

To begin, we try developing a user flow. This is where you, the designer, detail the chain of actions, choices, and expectations you envision the user to execute – via our design – in order to meet our desired experience goal. Creating a user flow takes time and detail-oriented thinking, because the designer must consider every possible state in the process. Where do we start? What can we assume? What are the causes and effects of decisions? What are our expected failure points and how do we resolve them back into our desired course of action?

An example flow for the solutions to our hot coffee dilemma would look something like this:

When a designer puts a user flow together, the chain of events should not be confusing to any random passerby viewing the flow. The final iteration of a user flow, after any review and feedback, should not generate new, relevant what-ifs, because we should be confident that we are accounting for, to the best of our abilities, every relevant possible state, cause, decision, action, and effect.

The Tangible Translation: Wireframes and Mockups

Time for the fun part: transforming plans into real existence! The coffee allegory becomes kinda irrelevant here: in that situation, the plan would simply be something along the lines of:

• increase the regular order of cups
• train baristas to follow expected user flow
• profit

But in the world of digital user experience, we mainly work with screen interfaces. To start, we look at our design decisions and user flow, and we identify:

• main screens
• subcomponents (widgets, panels, etc.)
• states of said screens and subcomponents.

Once these aspects are laid out (you can write a list of them if that helps!), we get to work, translating and aggregating them into wireframes. Wireframes are low-fidelity visual series of mockups of what users could expect to see and interact with in our games or software. They look something like this:

Panels. Buttons. Text. Tabs. But just that. Wireframes present no consideration of visual style. The size of things in a wireframe is not even final. It is tempting to add some kind of visual treatment, especially if you come from an artistic background, but doing so can impede upon the distinction between wireframe and visual mockup. The designer's sole focus here is to present all information to the viewer and user in a way that is simple and sensible. Make their experience of using the software easy.

Note that though there is no visual style applied, certain items have darker and lighter shades or outlines. It is important for our fellow developers to be able to at least slightly understand the difference between a button, a panel, something interactive, and something not. Of course, you can supplement this visual discernment with captions or notes for those who need to reference your work.

In the wireframing process, you should continue to consider end users, but do not forget another crucial set of users: your development compatriots. Who are you showing this to? An engineer who will implement your work? A designer who isn't familiar with how you might lay things out? Try to build your wireframes in ways that align with how they might use or interpret your work.

I've been mentioning users nonstop here. To put it harshly, we user experience designers are simply... vessels of design. While working, we exist and interact with the world solely for the sake of the user experience. Everyone else's thoughts are our priority – though that does not mean you should not consider your own instincts! You are usually also a demographic of the user base. Still, a good designer will be able to separate their biases from the real needs of their users.

Anyways. States. I have given you three frames here, which are all states of the same parent screen. The frames' relationship here is represented by consistent elements among all the frames and the changes in between them. This is important for understanding how the user flow applies between screens and components. For the viewer's convenience, I usually like to provide a key of those components that might change in between screens, and I tend to label major screen states in large text.

This is about as far as I can take you when it comes to wireframe construction guidelines. The intricacies of visual software are things best explained by the countless YouTube tutorials at your fingertips; I highly recommend turning to those for knowledge on auto-layout and prototyping. Good luck!

Presentation and Feedback

Your wireframes are done and ready to be presented? Time for the feedback gauntlet.

Presenting your work to designers and other stakeholders (be it producers, engineers, or anyone, really) is daunting. In a review meeting, the average designer will link their Figma file, screenshare, and walk through every screen/state/design functionality for the audience to comment on and tear apart. Knowledge of your work and the ability to concisely explain it becomes crucial. Some things to keep in mind:

• Always understand the greater narrative of what you are trying to explain. You can easily and accidentally drift into granular detail, but your stakeholders are trying to understand how the feature works.

• More than often, if not every time: your audience will pose questions or mention things that you didn't expect, or maybe forgot to cover in your designs. If that's the case, try not to view this as a failure on your part; instead, think of it more as a new thing to solve collectively.

  • Remember, everything is WIP until it's approved. (Sometimes you can delegate questions to others based on the context! Sometimes you can also pose an idea on the spot and work it through, then mention you'll add that later.)

• Engineers don't hate you. (this is hard to remember in the moment)

• Butting heads with someone? Their feedback is valid, even if you don't think it is at first glance. As a UX designer, your duty is to listen and try to understand where they're coming from before making further statements. Ask them to explain themselves and focus on their reasoning in response to anything they say that seems outlandish. Maybe they actually see something you don't.

• Leave every feedback meeting with an explicit understanding of what to do next. Make changes? Send links to people? Keep track of it all.

That Was Quick

I have only some confidence that I've covered even the majority of what you might need to know as a designer. I don't know if I can handle writing more. The truth is, you – the new designer – will learn a lot of this the hard way, through trial and error, and by getting burned by your mistakes. That's okay! Making mistakes is normal, as we know by now; it's how you respond to them and change your behavior going forward that counts.

Being a designer is wonderfully rewarding. The moment you see people using and enjoying the thing you made, you remember why you did it all; why you almost cried that one night at your computer, why you shook from sheer caffeine intake the other day as you hastily labeled your work for the review in one hour. This thing was once a scant few thoughts in your head, and now it is everyone else's to admire and hate and laugh at and break and use.

We designers are but simple creatures who only want to make useful, beautiful, delightful things for others to use. We dream to make people's lives easier, to help them have fun, to make them feel. It is easy to forget in the forest of everyday labor why we committed to creative work in the first place... but without this, what else do we have? What could be greater than the joy of creation? Are we anything without that which we love the most?

No. We are not. Now go forth and become a workaholic.

December

This month I read 4 ebooks and 1 eaudiobook and 5 physical books from the Toronto Public Library, totaling to 10 books.

We Solve Murders by Richard Osman

Synopsis: Steve Wheeler’s world is small, but he likes it that way. He has a good routine going; he goes to the pub quiz, he sits on his favourite bench, he does a bit of low-stakes investigative work, and he chats with his daughter-in-law Amy. Amy Wheeler prefers life with a bit more adrenaline. She works for a private security firm, and she’s currently stationed on a private island, protecting the famous author Rosie D’Antonio (she’s not a day over 70). Rosie makes for excellent company, which is good because this job isn’t particularly interesting. That is, until the other security agent assigned to the detail attempts to kill Amy. Suddenly, she’s forced on the run (with Rosie and all of Rosie’s luggage), and it turns out that there’s a trail of bodies that all appear to lead to Amy. And when her boss at the private security firm goes dark, Amy’s forced to turn to the only person she can trust to solve this mystery: her father-in-law Steve.

My thoughts: When I heard that Richard Osman was pivoting away from his Thusday Murder Club series in order to start a new project, I was a little worried. But it turns out I had nothing to worry about. This has the same dry writing style that I adore from The Thursday Murder Club series, and although the characters aren’t quite as charming as a group of seniors, I still loved every minute of it. Readers will know that I’m not a fan of private investigators in crime fiction, but Steve and Amy together were both so competent that it was never an issue for me. It also had a really poignant message about grief, which is part of what makes these novels so much deeper and more enjoyable than your average crime novel. I can’t wait for whatever Osman releases next.

Rating: 5/5 marriage bets that you are waiting to cash in on (for love)

Bad Men by Julie Mae Cohen

Synopsis: Saffy Huntley-Oliver is a socialite with a secret. No, it’s not that she’s having an affair, or that she’s addicted to drugs. It’s that for years, she’s been hunting and killing so-called “bad men;” rapists, abusers, corrupt politicians, and even her own step father (a child molester). And it’s made her pretty cynical about men in general; they all have secrets that make them bad men. Perhaps the only exception to that is Jonathan Desrosiers. He’s a beloved true crime podcaster that covers the cold cases, and his research actually helped solve a murder. Saffy can’t help it; she’s in love. Jonathan’s life is crumbling around him; his wife left him because he only ever focused on the podcast, and the next day a body is left on his doorstep, making him the prime suspect. He’s utterly miserable, but for Saffy, it’s the perfect opportunity. She engineers a couple of meet cutes with him, and suggests that the best way for Jonathan to clear his name is to solve the crime. Reluctantly, he agrees. Will Jonathan finally be able to prove his innocence? And, more importantly, will Saffy finally find the man of her dreams?

My Thoughts: I think this book would have been a disaster if it took itself very seriously. It billed itself as a feminist thriller, but I felt that the feminism was extremely surface level: an upper class white woman killing men that were abusing or harming other women. It wasn’t intersectional, and seemed a bit like a caricature of feminism. However, Saffy’s storyline was very fun and didn’t really take itself seriously, which made it work. It was especially funny to contrast Jonathan (completely stressed out because someone is stalking and poisoning his ex-wife, and he’s the main suspect) and Saffy (suspicious because she thinks that Jonathan is still in love with his ex-wife), but while still giving Saffy a lot of agency and importance even though her stakes were much lower.

Rating: 3/5 latex catsuits that are actually excellent forensic countermeasures

The Outlier by Elisabeth Eaves

Synopsis: Cate Winter is probably the most successful neuroscience ever. She and her team have developed a revolutionary treatment for Alzheimer's Disease, and her biotech company is about to be acquired for millions of dollars. You’d never suspect her darkest secret: that she’s a diagnosed psychopath. After a mysterious fire that killed her family, Cate was sent to the Cleckley Institute, an institution dedicated to the study and rehabilitation of child psychopaths. For Cate, it was a good childhood. She considered Dr M, the institute’s founder, as a surrogate father figure, and as an adult she’s become wildly successful. But Cate was an outlier among her classmates; by age 30, they had all been jailed, killed, or barely managing to earn a living. All except for Cate, and one other student. Armed with the knowledge that she’s not the only outlier, Cate becomes obsessed with finding him. But what happens if she’s finally met her match?

My thoughts: I think this book had an interesting premise, but overall was not very interesting. The other outlier (Hunter) eventually was revealed to be almost cartoonishly villainous. He literally had a tropical lair straight out of a James Bond novel, and his big invention had a water intake pump that doubled as a fish killing machine, which is how he eventually got caught. Hunter didn’t even have any issues with the fish, he just couldn’t be bothered to put in a grate or redesign the intake, or literally anything else.

Rating: 2/5 politicians that are promising to light up the night if they are elected

Emily Wilde’s Map of the Otherlands by Heather Fawcett (Emily Wilde #2)

Synopsis: After the success of her Encyclopaedia of Faeries, Emily Wilde is comfortable at Cambridge University. She’s currently working on her new project, a map-book of the faerie realms, and enjoying life with her co-author (and possible fiance) Wendell Bambleby. However, things might just collapse when her colleague Farris Rose accuses Wendell of violating academic integrity principles during the creation of her encyclopaedia. While it’s true that Wendell is actually a faerie and had indeed committed such violations for other scholarly works, there were absolutely zero violations in the creation of Emily’s encyclopaedia. Rose threatens to reveal his suspicions to Cambridge itself, which would be a disaster for Emily’s career. At the same time, Wendell is under threat. His faerie step-mother has sent assassins after him (and did manage to poison him), and he’s clearly no longer safe at Cambridge. The only solution is for the three of them (plus Emily’s niece Ariadne) to immediately travel to the Austrian alps. That way, Wendell can outrun his assassins, Emily can research her map-book and hopefully find a door to Wendell’s realm to find a cure for this poison, and Rose can supervise everything to make sure there’s no impropriety. But the Austrian Alps are inhospitable at the best of times, and especially during winter, surrounded by malicious folk. Will Emily and her crew survive the winter? And will they manage to rescue an esteemed researcher?

My Thoughts: My controversial opinion is that I don’t really like this series, even though everyone seems to rave about it. I listened to it as an audiobook and I did not like the narrator, but beyond that it just didn’t feel like a great book. It wasn’t necessarily bad, but it was definitely lacking something that I couldn’t quite put my finger on, and I didn’t find it particularly interesting. I’m also not a huge Emily x Wendell stan, so I wasn’t really impressed by the progression of their relationship in this book. I only read this sequel out of obligation to the first book, but I won’t be reading anything more in this series. I’m also annoyed that the book isn’t called “Emily Wilde’s Atlas of the Otherlands” because she’s working on a book of maps (aka an atlas), and not just a single map. The one thing that I did like was the Danielle de Grey storyline that continued from the previous book. However, the main charm of that storyline was when Emily detailed de Grey’s insane adventures in the footnotes of her diary, and that charm was lost when de Grey became a full character.

Rating: 3/5 tents that blend in perfectly into the surrounding grassy hillsides

The Queen’s Gambit by Walter Tevis

Synopsis: After her parents were killed in a car crash, eight-year-old Beth Harmon was sent to an orphanage. After weeks of observing the janitor play chess, he begrudgingly allowed her to play. It soon became obvious that Beth had more than just a knack for chess; she was one of the best players in Kentucky, if not the whole country. After her adoption, Beth started entering chess tournaments around the country and internationally, eventually supporting her adoptive mother. Throughout the novel, Beth struggles with her addiction to tranquilizers (which was caused by the orphanage staff intentionally drugging all of their charges), and her inability to connect with anyone or anything that is not chess.

My thoughts: I’ll be honest, this was not the kind of book that I like. I only read it because I was looking for a book to satisfy the last category for the 2024 TPL Reading Challenge (A book about games), and because I was getting served a lot of short-form video content about The Queen’s Gambit Netflix show (I’ve never seen it, but I figured if the show was so popular, it couldn’t be that bad). My advice to readers: don’t ever do that! As soon as I started reading it I knew it wasn’t for me, but it was too late to back out. I don’t think that I can declare it to be a bad book, but it was just not enjoyable to read. The whole tone of the book is incredibly dour and grey, and all of the characters’ interactions are mechanical (instead of emotional).

Rating: 2/5 Heists of the century (breaking into the orphanage head office and stealing 200 tranquilizer pills)

Full Speed to a Crash Landing by Beth Revis (Chaotic Orbits #1)

Synopsis: Ada Lamarr is out of options. Her spaceship has a massive hole in the side, and her oxygen tank is rapidly running dry. Unfortunately, her only hope of rescue is a government-run salvage ship, who are very reluctant to have her on board. They’re here on a classified mission to recover some high-value objects, and they certainly don’t want a loose cannon and illegal salvager like Ada to interfere with things. And Ada is fine with that. She’s more than happy to enjoy the abundant rations and luxurious (in comparison) accommodations on board, and to flirt shamelessly with Rian White, the government-representative in charge of the mission. But Ada and Rian each have secrets to hide, and it remains to be seen who is really manipulating whom.

My Thoughts: This was a short but fun sci fi novella. Readers will know that I’ve been hankering for a science fiction book that’s about science and spaceships (and not a fantasy or a war epic), and this really scratched the itch for me. I thought there was enough meat to the story that the author could have extended it into a full novel, so I’m glad that a sequel novella has been released. My most major complaint was that the name of the main character felt too obvious of a reference to two famous women in computer science (Ada Lovelace and Hedy Lamarr). They both definitely deserve to be memorialized, but it just felt like I was being smacked in the face (especially because it stuck out compared to all of the other character names).

Rating: 4/5 notoriously reliable jetpack booster engines that just happened to fritz out when you were at the bottom of a tall, tall cliff

The Power by Naomi Alderman

Synopsis: This work of narrative nonfiction attempts to chronicle the initial discovery and effects of the ritual power: the ability for women (first teenage girls, and then spreading to older women) to generate electrical shocks from their bodies. It follows four major figures; Roxy, the daughter of a gangster who takes over her father’s empire; Allie, who runs away from her abusive foster parents and accidentally starts a cult; and Margo, mayor of an American city who slowly rises through the ranks. The fourth character is the only man: Tunde, a Nigerian journalist who allegedly recorded accounts of women’s rises to power around the world (it is common knowledge that Tunde’s body of work was actually written and published by his friend and coworker Nina). It is an engaging but ultimately implausible version of events.

My thoughts: I tried to write my synopsis in the style of the prologue and epilogue of the book, which consists of Neil proposing his book concept to Naomi. After reading, Naomi comments that the book is “cute but unrealistic” for depicting a patriarchal society, and suggests that Neil publish under a woman’s name so that he is taken more seriously. In reality, I think this is a great book that is worth the hype, and it explores the concept of rape culture and the overall patriarchy by flipping the script and giving women the power to painfully shock anyone. I loved the alternate history aspect of it, and it reminds me how much I like epistolary-style books, where you have to figure out what’s going on from the letters, reports, and other messages exchanged between characters. I thought that Alderman pulled off the concept really well. In the moment, I was irrationally disappointed that the female characters were complex and often immoral, but I definitely think the book is better for it. A small detail that I really appreciated was that the tissues that generate the electricity in women are called Skeins (which is the name for a bundle of yarn or string, and fibre arts are often portrayed as women’s work).

4/5 packs of glitter smuggled through Eastern Europe on order to support the troops

Chosen Ones by Veronica Roth

Synopsis: Sloane, Matt, Ines, Albie, and Esther were the chosen ones. As teenagers, they used a collection of folklore artifacts and uncontrollable powers to save North America from the catastrophic disasters wrought by the Dark One. But that was 10 years ago. Now, they all cope in different ways, but none of them are really doing well. At the 10th Anniversary ceremony commemorating the defeat of the Dark One, Sloane, Matt and Esther are captured. They wake up in an alternate dimension of Earth. In this universe, magic is everywhere, but so are threats. The Dark One is still active, and the leadership of this alternate Earth have a proposal: if Matt, Sloane, and Esther defeat the Dark One for good, then they can go back to their Earth. Esther and Matt agree, but Sloane is unable to master the magic. More than that, she’s tired of being used.

My thoughts: I thought that this was a cool concept for a book, and the first two thirds were done very well. However, Roth really lost the plot for the last third of the book. I thought it was absolutely insane that the main villain’s justification for constantly destroying the world was because he was immortal and wanted to die. Besides being insane, she didn’t really flesh out the main villain enough, but rather dropped everything in at the end. I’m also bothered that she completely sidelined Ines’s character. Why bother writing in 5 teenagers who saved the world if you’re only ever going to discuss four of them?

Rating: 4/5 origami paper cranes from a deceased loved one that weren’t necessarily acquired legally

A Holly Jolly Diwali by Sonia Lalli

Synopsis: Niki Randhawa has always made the practical choice, especially because her sister Jasmine was always the wild card who was breaking their parent’s heart. But being practical isn’t easy; in order to build her career in data analytics she’s been worked to the bone, with no time to make friends or visit relatives in India. But when she suddenly gets laid off from her job, it forces her to make other plans. So, she flies to India to attend her best friend Diya’s wedding. While there, she meets a very interesting guy, Sam, and starts getting in touch with her Indian roots. But Niki and Sam live oceans apart. Could they ever make it work?

My thoughts: This was a pretty standard romance novel, and I wouldn’t say that any part of it stood out to me. I was specifically hoping that this book would be an alternative to the huge influx of Christmas novels, since it was a book about Diwali, but Diwali was barely in the book at all (despite the title). I understand that it made sense for Niki not to know a lot about the history of Diwali and thus have to ask around about its significance (especially for Sikhs), but it felt like way too much telling and not enough showing.

Rating: 3/5 group honeymoons to the most gorgeous beaches you’ve ever seen

The Matzah Ball by Jean Meltzer

Synopsis: Rachel Rubenstein-Goldblatt has two big secrets. Firstly, she has myalgic encephalomyelitis, aka chronic fatigue syndrome. And secondly, she (a good Jewish daughter) has made a career of writing Christmas Romance novels. What can you do? The girl just loves Christmas. But when she meets with her publishers, she’s handed a major problem: they don’t want any more Christmas novels. What they do want is a Hanukkah novel, but Rachel hates Hanukkah. Well, she doesn’t hate it, but it just doesn’t have the same magic and charm of Christmas. So the only way that she’ll ever get inspired to write her next novel (and keep her job) is if she can get tickets to the hottest Hanukkah event in New York: the Matzah Ball. She even has an in with the event planner (Jacob Greenberg), because they went to Jewish summer camp together (we’ll skip over the part where he broke her heart). But the only tickets left are for volunteers, meaning that Rachel will have to work for 7 days in order to earn her place at the ball. Will she be able to balance her chronic illness with her assignment? And how can she deal with her unrequited feelings for Jacob after all these years?

My thoughts: I’ve previously read another Jewish romance by this author (Kissing Kosher), and I have to say that I didn’t like The Matzah Ball as much. I wish that Rachel’s CFS had been more of a focal point for the book. In Kissing Kosher, the main character didn’t cure her chronic illness, but she learned how to cope a lot better, and that’s what I was hoping to see again. This time, the chronic illness was not nearly as prominent, and I think the book was a bit less interesting for it. Also, I hated how much Rachel was obsessed with Christmas. The scene where she spent $60 (that she can’t afford) to visit a mall Santa Claus for a makeshift therapy session (that the mall Santa despises), made me almost stop reading the book.

Rating: 3/5 giant menorahs that were delivered with much assembly required

I listened to a good chunk of music this year. Heres a quick little blurb about the albums, what I rated them, and what genre they are, alongside a couple of songs I liked from each one. This is limited to albums released this year, but in my life I did a lot of listening to older albums too, which made me take breaks in listening to new albums here and there.

My rating scale more or less looks like this:

0 – really bad: Approximately no redeeming qualities. 1 – not good: Overall an album I did not like. 2 – neutral: Completely fine, more or less inoffensive for the entire listen. Background music tier. 3 – has some songs I like: Most of the album is bad to inoffensive, but there are some great songs in there too. 4 – has a good chunk of songs I like: A solid amount of this music is stuff I like, there might be a couple of bad songs and more inoffensive songs, but at this point I would start saying the album was good. 5 – I like most of it: Broadly speaking this is where we get into albums that are full of great songs. It has its flaws for me, but there's a lot of good here. 6 – I like just about all of it: Just about every single song on here is great, though maybe there's some thematic inconsistencies, parts that are outdone by other parts, or something like that. This can also often mean this is as good as an album can be for what it is. A generic sounding trap album without much in terms of deeper themes can land here if every song is just great, despite the album lacking that something more to elevate it. 7 – I really like all of it: just a fantastic album from start to back. 8 – Everything here is compelling: Creative, exciting, interesting, complex, compelling. The best of the best, the type of shit I'd put on a satellite to send our best to the aliens.

SOTY: Song of the year, but really just a marker for some of the absolute best songs I listened to this year

Naturally it's my opinion, and my mood at the time of listening almost certainly has some impact. If something scores higher I'm more likely to know more about the album as I've likely listened to it more. Not only because I enjoy it more, thus making me more likely to listen to it, but also, I care to rate it more accurately when it's an album I respect. An album I don't respect isn't getting much listening time, and an album think has mostly bad songs I can just chuck in one of the two bad categories based on just how terrible it seemed in the moment. This didn't happen much last year, and no albums got a 0.

Note: One thing that absolutely kills me is when guys hate on female rappers by default, and its everywhere. The amount of guys I know that just happen to have every least favourite song on every album be one where a woman has a feature and hates on the woman in question without actually listening to any albums drives me insane. I have included a tag for Women in hip hop, which is the type of thing I usually wouldn't do, letting my reviews stand for themselves, but knowing the sheer amount of misogyny in rap and rap fans, I figure it's good to throw something out there. That being said, it has been a very interesting time for women in hip hop, because it seems like women make up the vast majority of new rap stars these days. The 2010s era has left a ton of men as the biggest selling acts, but since then, very few men have been able to come up in the same way. In their place, there are many women getting a ton of play. It's something I've been keeping an eye on as I broadly see the zeitgeist moving from rap to country. Also, more discourse these days seems to shut down men who don't like the female rappers pretty quickly. Maybe it's the world changing, or maybe it's just young fans of hip hop growing up. I sure as hell don't know, but I'm glad to finally see it.

Also note: I didn't proofread this at all.

My Story Got Stories – Bruiser Wolf: 4 (with love)

Old School hip hop / Rap

I first heard of Bruiser Wold through YBP from Danny Brown's album Quaranta. Bruiser completely captured my attention with his very specific modern yet somehow very old school hip hop flow, with one of my favourite lines “It's hard to fit in to the murder mitten like OJ's glove”. I heard his album was releasing soon, and put it in my calendar to check out as soon as possible. This album was a ton of fun, and even had me laughing out loud more than a couple times. Bruiser Wolf raps with so much energy, his delivery is constantly exciting, and the amount of quips and jokes through this album made it an absolute blast to listen to. I went to see a performance live, and it elevated the experience with how good a performer he is. He falls into my favourite category of rap these days which is old rappers who decided to have fun or do something interesting with their experience instead of falling off and getting angry.

Dope Boy

2 Bad

Silence is Loud – NIA Archives: 5

Jungle / Drum & Bass

This is another one I was really excited for. I found NIA Archive after looking for new jungle music visiting the hospital one day, and holy there's a lot of good music in here despite her being such a young artist. The music is fun, interesting, fast paced yet smooth, and really puts me in a good place. I also went to see this concert live and it was my first experience with dancing in maybe 10 years, which was fun. I loved this album and listened to it a ton, and it's still a go-to if I get the aux and want to play music no-one will recognize.

Cards On The Table SOTY

Forbidden Feelingz SOTY

American Dream – 21 Savage: 3

Trap / Rap

21 Savage is back with another album after Her Loss which was a collab album with drake. 21 has fallen into what I generally have as the peak of hip hop sales, blowing up in the mid 2010s and having major commercial success. It seems that the rappers around this time, including Drake, Future, Kendrick, Cole, Young Thug, Gunna, and Carti are the main hip hop artists who seem to be able to drive sales no matter what they do. Unfortunately for many of these artists, that has led to just doing the same thing with the same sound, just rehashing some slang and switching things up just enough to be different. 21 was interesting because despite being probably one of the most boring rappers, he kept evolving and switching up the scope and sound of his production just enough to keep him actually as one of the most interesting prospects. Unfortunately, I consider this album to be one of his 2 mis-steps into just doing something extremely basic for an album. It isn't bad, but most of it is just fairly background spare a few real highlights.

Redrum

Blue Lips – ScHoolboy Q: 5

Grimy / Rap

Schoolboy Q was a major name when Kendrick was blowing up alongside everyone in their label, Top Dawg Entertainment (TDE). He had some absolutely incredible, creative, and grimy music that I would comfortably say belongs in a list of all time classics. He decided to make a change and do some more personal music, but unfortunately ended up making an album in 2019 called Crash Talk that was very bland, and despite a few highlights, I thought fell completely flat, after which he disappeared for a long time. This album is an incredible return to form, where while it may not reach the all time music highs of Blank Face or Oxymoron, blends more creative music sounds, more grimy beats and flows, yet still retains more of the personal reality that I think he was trying to go for in Crash Talk.

Blueslides

Back n Love

Everybody Can't Go – Benny The Butcher: 3

Griselda / Rap

Benny The Butcher of Griselda was generally seen as the best and most hype more mainstream sounding of the group. It seems that with this album, there was a bigger rollout, different features from usual, and a big push to make it a more commercial breakout record. It was a solid enough album, but the lead single pushed the most was also one of my least enjoyed from the album and constantly shoved into my recommendations, which didn't help. That being said, it still had some solid highlights and Benny, while releasing something not as great as previous collab albums like, he still put out something solid enough.

Jermanie's Graduation

Big Dog

No Quarter – Vino La Mano: 4

Griselda / Rap

This is a guy signed to Benny The Butcher's label who Benny has helped platform. While the album doesn't vary too much in sound or fully distinguish itself sonically, it is just really good and consistently so.

238 on Cal

All My Heart

We Don't Trust You – Future, Metro Boomin: 3

Trap / Rap

This album is a collab album between Future and Metro Boomin, which broadly means that it will sound good in the club, but generally not be for those searching for depth. The most notable part of this album for me was kicking off the Kendrick v Drake been with 'Like That', even if I think Kendrick doesn't even sound that great on it. The album doesn't really do that much to stand out, though Future and Metro being club hits guys were bound to make big club hits. Special shoutout to them both looking uncomfortable as hell posing on the album cover.

Type Shit

Like That

We Still Don't Trust You – Future, Metro Boomon: 3

Trap / Rap

Back to back huh, I have to listen to another pile of mainstream trap rap. Same things apply, it's all fine, but rarely stands out enough to really engage me. I did like this one more on release, but on re-listens it ended up coming around to about the same. Music I can put on in the background and the bass will sound good enough.

SFK – Conway The Machine: 2

Griselda / Rap

Oh Conway. This guy has easily the best and most intense raps of anyone on Griselda, but this one just didn't land at all for me. It seems that without doing collab albums with proficient producers, he really tends to underdo his beats. It is probably intended to give his lyrics more space, but I think he's better when he just has something that sounds better. It seems as he shifted away from straight rapping towards trying to make a label, his artists haven't thrived and neither has he. I'm hoping his next albums he can capture more of that lyrical charm he has had up to this point, because I felt like while this wasnt really bad, hearing one of the best rappers drop an album of bars that didn't land with beats that didn't stand out is tough.

Ninja Man

Please Don’t Cry – Rapsody: 5

Women in hip hop / Rap

Rapsody seems to carve herself out of this space, being a respected rapper's rapper, but at the same time, it does seem to carve her out of the mainstream. Laylas Wisdom had some immaculate highs, Eve was a good followup focused on female inspirations. This one turns to a more personal attempt, with the overarching story line of a therapy session, which seems to be becoming a common trend, but Rapsody is able to really navigate it with incredible rapping and personal storytelling. I know some people were not very into some of the more commercial angled hits, but I think they're fine, and it makes sense given her position in the industry.

Marlanna

Faith

RICHAXXHATIAN – Mach-Hommy: 8

AOTY / Rap

Well holy shit is this ever a step up. I have never heard beats like this before. I have never hear rapping like this before, and I've listened to like 6 Mach-Hommy albums. He was already an artist I loved, and I would chuck this into one of the greatest albums of all time territory. The lyrical chops in this are insane, and you have to pay attention because there are no published lyrics anywhere. I still find new things in this album and I've been listening to it since it came out. The production is also so different from just about anything out there, really taking on its own creative space blending styles of a few of my favourite producers to create something that is more than the sum of its parts. It is a hard listen because spare one song, it really isn't commercially viable at all, but god is it so worth it to get into. Watching some people talk about this has even changed much of my life philosophy, learning about Edouard Glissant and the right to opacity, saying that other cultures don't need to be understood or measured by colonial nations who will measure them in colonial ways and harm them (here I am giving it a rating), and similarly, you may wish for certain things not to be perceived, or only be perceived on your terms. Mach obscured his lyrics and identity, and I find it to be something that I respect and absolutely love about him. This album still gets frequent front to back listens from me, and I still love every single song.

#RICHAXXHATIAN SOTY

SUR LE PONT d'AVIGNON SOTY

Note: Almost every song on here I could probably put somewhere around SOTY

Marciology – Roc Marciano: 7

Coke Rap

Roc Marciano is an artist I truly respect for having his own style of rapping and his own style of production, and rapping over his own production. The benefit of this is it creates an incredibly distinct sound and style, but the downside is that it can get kind of same-y sometimes. When that happens, it really is just up to the straight quality to shine. This is probably the best work he has put out, and the quality really does shine. When I listened to this I really felt like I might be seeing an artist I already love hit their peak, and I hope he can maintain this or evolve in the future. I even bought a ticket off of Nana to go see it, but after some confusion and me accidentally seeming like I was trying to scam him, we decided to do something else instead.

Gold Crossbow

Killin Spree

Samurai – Lupe Fiasco: 6

Lyrical Rap

Lupe these days has been in the game for quite a while, and while not and old old head through his keeping it fresh, he's hit a definite older rap unc status. He has taken probably the best path from being a superstar to creating some insane creative highs, and now a lot of his rap is a lyrical exercise, all stages interesting. He is really aging gracefully and thriving in a lane that he defines for himself. This album is inspired by Amy Winehouse, and much of the lyrics draw symmetries between his life and career and Amy's, or Amy becoming a battle rapper. It really is creative, fun, and done delicately so to not be insensitive to the legacy of Amy Winehouse as many others could have easily done if attempting to do the same. It is a pretty easy listen, can be very engaging if you focus on the lyrics, and all around pleasure to listen to.

Samurai

Cake

Why Lawd? – Nx Worries: 5

RNB / Hip Hop

This is a collab between PAAK and Knxwledge, PAAK being huge and Knxwledge being a respected yet not massive producer who has an undeniable finesse to the samples and sound he uses. My expectations for this was a very nicely sampled sexy album, and that is what I got. Despite the amazing samples and undeniable synergy between the duo, I can't help but feel like it either needed to be just a bit shorter or a bit more sonically varied to keep it more interesting over the entire run time in the album. The songs are great, but there were times where I barely noticed that songs had changed, not in a creative transition way, but in a too many songs sounding too close kind of way.

MoveOn

Battlefield

King Of The Mischievous South Vol. 2 – Denzel Curry: 6

Southern Rap / Memphis Rap

Denzel Curry has really made a name for himself in being hard hitting, creative, and incredibly consistent. I remember after our house flooded, finally getting the sound system set back up, seeing this release, and getting instantly hit with banger after banger for all the work I'd completed. It was a great reward. Despite being an album of hard hitting bangers in a very mixtape-y way, there was definitely a charm and creativity that went into every one, with enough variation in samples and musicality to really distinguish the songs. Another great album in the long list of great albums from Denzel, and I'm excited to see where he goes next.

ULTRA SHXT

HOT ONE

Songs For Saints and Sinners – Killer Mike: 4

Southern Rap

Killer Mike returns after my last billion word music themed article where I did a whole background on my listening to music bringing me up to him dropping landlord bars. This seems like it's just a re-up, adding more to some of the songs on his last album, and having some new tracks. I've warmed up again to Mike after the landlord bars because the music was great and I'm a life enjoyer, but I'm still suspicious. Not bad, but it doesn't really have great legs as a standalone project. The highs are, still, insanely high in terms of flow, lyrics, and production.

Nobody Knows

SLUMMER 4 JUNKIES

Johann Sebastian Bachlava The Doctor – Action Bronson: 5

Goofy Ah White Boy / Rap

Action Bronson is always a funny character, and he seems to return to an old form for this album, with tracks that sound much closer to a fan favourite Mr Wonderful than his recent string of animal themed projects, one of which I loved, but one of which I thought just had some very high highlights. This is much more consistent with some incredible highs. Though he does seem to reuse some lyrics across songs, he is still incredibly charismatic, funny, and the production is just fantastic.

SALVAJE

DOCTOR SOTY

Across The Tracks – Boldy James, Conductor Williams: 6

Coke Rap

Boldy James is absolutely one of my favourites, dropping album after album I love for years at a rate unlike anyone else I know. Sure, the topics are always almost exactly the same. Sure, Boldy manages to never manage to hit more than a single note with his extremely detached sounding voice. Somehow, he still manages to come through with such creative stories and wordplay, doing collab albums with some of the best producers in the game to deliver a project that is way ahead of most, in my opinion. He still puts his son on for a mediocre verse though.

Terms and Conditions

St Juliana SOTY

The Death of Slim Shady – Eminem: 1

Rap, Old Coot, Fell off, edgy 50 year old

Eminem needs to figure his life out or just shut up already. In one interview he said all he does is sit and watch the news. We can tell. Go outside. I love old rappers who have something to say and appreciate the world around them and spit their wisdom and experience, yet this fucker who used to be so good is easily one of the worst rappers in the game right now. The beats are a bit better but fuck man it's not enough. Just listen to the JID verse that opens this song and turn it off when JID is done. Opening a song with “Fuck blind people” was kind of funny though.

FUEL

Antichrist Worst song of the year contender, and I will drop the lyrics of the first verse in a code block just to drive it home

Oh, shit, fuck  
Fuckin' PC police  
Fuck

Gen Z, here they come now (now), 'bout to unload rounds (brrt)  
Pronouns (shit), got me like, "Whoa now" (whoa)  
Homie, let's slow down (chill), no need to get so wound (man)  
Ready to throw down (yo), if I mispronounce (thee, them)  
Whoops (sorry), oh wow  
Got heterosexuals crammin' 'em down our throats now (he, she, they, them)  
Like I'm gettin' snow-plowed, my humor's too low-brow (yup)  
Yeah, so there's no doubt (nope), you 'bout to get grossed out (ugh)

But fuck it though, somebody needs to come and hit the reset button  
Back to 2003 'cause how did we get stuck in  
This woke BS? I'm tryna make it regress, fuck 'em

Just RE'd Up 3 – YG: 2

West Coast / 2000s

YG returns to his roots after a string of albums not getting the critical acclaim he once had. It sounds fairly well like his earlier mixtapes, but that style is kind of dated, and it is clear that his lyrical content sits somewhere between not evolving to devolving from his 2014-2016 My Krazy Life and Still Brazy highs.

Right Now

Summertime Butch – Benny The Butcher & Black Soprano Family: 5

Griselda / Rap

Benny The Butcher again, this time with in my opinion a little less aim for commercial success, which seems to help him with his creative choices on hooks and production. His rapping is solid, his coke bars land a little bit more again, and all around, I had a much better experience.

Summer '24

The Blue Building

brat – Charli xcx: 7

Hyperpop / EDM

I don't know as much pop as I do hip hop, so I can't talk so much about Charli's story on the way here. I wrote a review about this album with a lower score, but this list is mine and thus fairly dynamic as I go, and the quality of this album is not only unreal, but I found more in some of the tracks I wasn't as big a fan of, including going through like a third SOPHIE phase from listening to 'So I'. I still don't care for 'talk talk' or 'club classics' much, but I think it's pretty undeniable after listening to this album daily for months that it is just that good. Hard hitting, personal, fun, and just an adventure and experience to listen to.

B2b SOTY

365

Note: There are many songs here that I could have as SOTY contenders

No Hands – Joey Valence and Brae: 4 (with love)

Goody Ah White Boy / Alt Hip Hop

This one caught me off guard. I wasn't listening to too much music at the time and wanted to listen to something different, clicked on a Fantano great music, saw this, and ended up finding a rather refreshing listening experience. Packed with high energy bangers from guys that seem to just like having fun, what can I say, I had a lot of fun. It comes in, is fun, then goes. Funny punch lines, fun beats, and just enough creativity to stand out. I think it could have been slightly shorter, maybe leaving a few songs for a short re-up to keep the runtime a bit more concise and fresh, but who's to really complain about something fun. Super excited to see where these fellas go next.

BUSSIT

NO HANDS

Short n' Sweet – Sabrina Carpenter: 4

Pop

Sabrina Carpenter was really everywhere, she had a big year. I listened to the album and enjoyed it, every song was broadly really good, but I still ahve trouble telling you what half of them were. I feel like it was a little too same-y, but if this is what you want, it's probably really fucking good. For me, I felt I could just pick out my favourite 2 or 3 and readily ignore most of the rest without worrying about missing too much. Still, and enjoyable listen with some great catchy songs.

Taste

Espresso

GLORIOUS – GloRilla: 5

Memphis Rap / Women in hip hop

It was pretty undeniably Glorilla's year, she was on like a 2Chains 2012 type run where she has been everywhere putting out really high quality music and features left and right. This album is packed with bangers, attitude, songs for the girlies, and overall just great music from the south. I think I've written before that the south usually symbolizes a bunch of things not that I hate, but that I would generally find less appealing than other styles through lyrical and production choices, but the south has really been on top. GLO has been doing this exact thing, but it's been super exciting the whole time. I have found so much great music through following her features, and she's good enough that she might be able to evolve and put out more projects with some creative evolution, though only time will tell. Can't wait to hear more from her.

WATCHU KNO ABOUT ME SOTY

I LUV HER

Chromakopia – Tyler, The Creator: 5

Artsy Hip Hop

Tyler has had a very interesting career evolution and this is a new spin. His last album, Call Me If You Get Lost, was a return to rapping inspired by Westside Gunn after the one before, a very artsy Igor, which could hardly be called a rap album at all. I don't know how I can really box Tyler into genres, and I broadly like that about him. He's on his creative journey, and he's clearly very talented and creative. This new album seems to blend much of the artistic styling from Igor and blend it with the harder rapping, while bringing a new sound forward. I think it's a good album, and I think it has some really touching stories, and yes, that includes 'Judge Judy'. What I do find with the album is that it sometimes strikes me as being sonically in-between. At certain moments, hard hitting stuff seems to hold back to maintain the artsiness, and the artsiness seems to hold back a bit to accommodate the harder stuff. An example of this is that the emotional peaks are often immediately followed by a bar flexing. This might be a deliberate creative choice, deliberately putting up a wall at those intimate moments, but it still does do exactly that. Additionally, when Igor dropped I really felt like Tyler was the best music possible for someone going through a high school break-up, which I personally just didn't care for thematically. This album does deal with similar themes but does also deal with more hard hitting angles of it, like exes / flings dying. Maybe this slowly does indicate him moving towards a new phase. I think this album is good enough to put Tyler in a spot of being one of the most consistent and interesting musicians we have right now.

Rah Tah Tah

Tomorrow

Megan Act 2 – Megan Thee Stallion: 5

Note: This stands as a total review for both acts, I don't care to put the effort in to separate them

Southern Rap / Women in hip hop

I have really enjoyed Megan's music for quite a long time, first discovering her when she dropped 'Realer' in the lead-up to Fever, and that song stayed on repeat for a long time. She has continued to be a great rapper, and now seems to be in an era where shes starting to just go and do what she wants, with more releases coming as collabs with RM from South Korea, Spiritbox for a rap metal song, and using samples like 'Like a G6' for 'Like a Freak' and 'Goodies' by Ciara for 'Roc Steady'. It makes for an interesting and varied selection still based on her usual hard hitting raps that I know and love her for. I had a lot of fun with this album, and for being the length it is (because it is just 2 albums), I stayed way more entertained for the runtime than I expected.

Roc Steady

TYG

Alligator Bites Never Heal: Doechii: 4

Women in hip hop / Alt Rap

Doechii is interesting because all I know is that she apparently was a kind of tik tok / social media rapper, but I'm not plugged into that scene enough to know anything about it. All I know is that this is her breakout album and it's really impressive. I can see some of the roots in that I do find some of the songs to be a little sound-bitey and quirky, but still, her rapping is on point, it is fun, creative, and has the energy and confidence of someone that knows what they're doing. My only complaint is that through some of the quirkiness I find when I listen to one song I love it, but the album as a whole feels like it comes out as being a bit less than the sum of all its parts. She's still early in her career, though, and has a lot of time and clearly more than enough talent and creativity to evolve in whatever way she decides.

STANKA POOH

NISSAN ALTIMA

You Only Live 1nce – Freddie Gibbs: 4

Coke Rap

Freddie has had an interesting journey to get where he is, having multiple absolutely incredibly collab albums through Pinata, Alfredo, and Bandana. From here, he signed a label deal to expand on his image and started working with groups of producers, but it seems that when he gets to pick his own production, similar to Benny The Butcher, the result comes out as far less interesting. Soul Sold Separately still had some incredible peaks through songs like 'Dark Hearted' that just cut through to the soul as good as any coke rap song can, so I was interested in seeing what he would do with another album in the same vein, which came as a surprise drop. This one came out, named as a followup to his 2017 album You Only Live 2wice and was thematically overall very similar to Soul Sold Separately , but seemed to just miss out on the amount of highs. Freddie is still an incredible rapper and explores a lot of personal discovery and his interactions with fame, but he could have surely used some more interesting production to make the project as a while shine more.

Origami

On The Set

Soul Burger – Ab-Soul: 2

Hip Hop / Rap

I can't lie to you, I have listened to this album 3 times, and I always like it until I realize I can't remember a thing about it. Being anti-memetic surely isn't a good sign for an album, especially with its producer and feature list, but I at least know it has one song that has the same sample as 'How Much a Dollar Cost' by Kendrick Lamar (They are both from Top Dawg Entertainment) that is a really good listen.

Righteous Man

Still Praying – Westside Gunn: 6

Griselda / Coke Rap

Westside Gunn back at it again, one of the main 3 Griselda members and probably the one with the best connections and ear for beats, which he uses to his advantage by making albums that sound bright and luxurious, and he generally packs them with features to make up for some of his inconsistent rapping. This album does put him more center, but it is him doing what he does at his best. The beats are interesting, he raps well, and puts together a project that maintains being interesting the entire time. DJ Drama can shut up on all these album but I've gotten better at tuning it out.

Runway Pieces at the Last Supper

Still Praying <– Griselda Posse Cut

300 Worms – JAEGER: 4

IDK the genre mang

This was a fun one because despite having a solid handful of friends release music, this might be the most complete feeling album release. It's incredibly angsty and muddy, but hits a really nice spot and keeps its quality throughout the entire album. This was a really refreshing switchup and got me out of a rut where I was getting sick of listening to new albums for a bit, which was also a nice feeling. Seeing it live twice, it really changes the effect of listening to it, it gives the atmosphere much more air and lets you physically feel the music. For digital listening, I tend to like the songs that have more higher pitched melody.

300 Worms

Gut

GNX – Kendrick Lamar: 5

West Coast Hip Hop / Rap

Kendrick Lamar is back after the Drake Beef with a new surprise drop. Hearing the snippet at the start of the 'Not Like Us' music video had me really excited for a really west coast banger Kendrick album, because god that hook was stuck in my head. A song leaked (likely released to generate hype because samples couldn't clear or something) called 'Let The Party Die' and it was also incredible. The album came out and naturally took the world by storm. The album for me is a near perfect split down the middle between tracks that are absolutely incredible and tracks that left me wanting more for one reason or another, but we got some real west coast bangers from Kendrick which is an absolute blast. To me, the album feels much like a mixtape of Kendrick exploring west coast music, with 'Reincarnated' being a 2Pac song in flow and production and Hey Now being a clear Drakeo The Ruler type song. I think a lot of my opinion on this album will be dictated by how long it takes for him to drop another. This is an insane mixtape to tide fans over for another release, but if it is a full album that will take years to follow up on, I think I can say it was an inconsistent album.

Heart Part 6 SOTY

Reincarnated SOTY

The Bricktionary – Boldy James, Harry Fraud: 4

Coke Rap

Boldy back at it again, this time with an album that I didn't exactly feel at first. Part of the magic of Boldy is that he has these bright and elegant beats that contrast with his extremely low-key delivery, yet match his storytelling. This is an album that plays things slower, which can really make things seem like they slow to a crawl. Match that with how Harry Fraud is more trap inspired and can be inconsistent, and I was worried going in. Eventually hit it with a more out loud sound system and really got into it. Despite the slower pace, the beats are luxurious though a bit darker than usual, and spare a couple songs where Boldy seems like he's half asleep, it's another great joint.

Pressin' My Bunk

Fish Grease

Access All Areas – FLO: 6

Pop

I don't dive into pop much, but discovered this one because it had a Glorilla feature and decided to give it a spin. I got really into this one through the whole listen. These songs are slick, sexy, catchy and punchy in a way that got almost all of these songs stuck in my head at one point or another. I think some of the more hip hop inspired verses could use a little more work, and I'd say there are a couple songs where I would have made them bonus tracks or something to keep the specific feel of the album consistent through the entire record.

Walk Like This

Caught Up SOTY

Trustworthy Interlude I generally don't include 3 but I wanted to include this as not a full song. Being a fella who's parents are divorced and has been cheated on this song really hits in an incredibly personal way. SOTY

Personification – Maxo Kream: 5

Southern Rap / The Guy Loves Being A Crip

Maxo has had a pretty interesting career to say the least with the cases and the like, but always emerges as a particularly interesting rapper with a big personality that always drops some quality music. He gets personal at times, then will say some of the most in your face hilarious criminal shit in the next song, but he always comes in with energy. He seems to just have a knack for it.

Cracc Era

Walk By Faith

Take Care – BigXThaPlug: 4

Texas Rap

I knew of BigX because he had a very distinct voice and some snippets that popped up in memes, and I rather enjoyed it. Voices that stand out in a good way are always good and refreshing. The production is upbeat and fun, as well as pretty distinct in a way that works well. I think that BigX is a solid rapper, but his lyrical content is pretty same-y, which doesn't help when the production, albeit fun, is the same. Song to song I really do feel like you can pick your favourite few and then not have to worry much about the rest. Only time will tell if he's able to evolve past this, because he does have a big wave right now and for his voice and attitude alone I know he can do more.

Law & Order

The Largest

---

Top Albums:

1. RICHAXXHATIAN – Mach-Hommy
2. brat – Charli xcx
3. Marciology – Roc Marciano
4. Across The Tracks – Boldy James, Conductor Williams
5. Access All Areas – FLO

Changes for next year

• Make a minimally more data entry focused outline
  • Allow sorting by date, score
  • I plan on using a Dataview plugin for this
• Keep track of best songs
  • I want to keep a list of all my favourite songs of the year
• Listen to more genres
  • Listening to new genres kept it exciting
  • I want to listen to more music that friends recommend too

I just smoked a bowl. On the TV, Doechii's Tiny Desk Concert plays. 2024 has been an incredible year for women in and around hip-hop. AmaaRae got featured in GQ, Elle, and Vulture magazines; Doechii is finally getting the attention she deserved after years of pushing it; Sexxy Red is reminding everyone about the thorough-line that connects the 5 tenets of hip-hop; and GloRilla dropped so much good music, her home city of Memphis, TN forgot all about her DUI arrest and awarded her the keys to the city. Matter of fact, I could probably write a whole paragraph on how 2024 was the year of GloRilla. She had a whole song go viral with a TikTok snippet. My dear reader, DJs downloaded a 45 second snippet off of TikTok and had crowds yelling out the lyrics at live shows, ALL BEFORE THE SONG OFFICIALLY DROPPED.

I have followed the rise of all these artists but I've been most impressed by the rise of Amaarae. Artists from Ghana barely make it to where she is but even less manage to stay in the limelight for as long as she has. Combined with truly incredible lyrics and production, I don't know if there are more than 5 artists from Ghana I like more than Amaarae. I can confidently say I've been listening to her music from the very beginning and she is undoubtedly a big influence in my music.

I started making music in the early 2010s (first with my best friend Henry Richardson, then in a band in high school and now solo). These years were a golden age for hip-hop in Ghana. The popularity of Twitter and widespread access to the internet gave rise to a burgeoning underground hip-hop scene made up of older teenagers and young adults. These artists took most of their inspiration from western acts as opposed to African musicians and as such the subject matter of the music shifted from light-hearted, folksy to something darker and metaphoric. There was definitely a downside to this, as most artists chose to abandon African ways storytelling tendencies entirely in favour of something that would appeal more to the big boys in Newark.

The scene was intricately tied to Twitter. The social media site blew up relatively early in Ghana (I created my account in August 2011) and the first few hundred users garnered thousands of followers quickly by doing regular Twitter shit: dunking on people. Maybe this is a symptom of my jealousy in how popular these accounts were, but some of these guys would talk such a big game on Twitter and I'd see them in church youth service acting all bashful and shit. No energy in the house of the Lord I guess.

My favourite artists from this era were a duo who went by Cruk'dStr8. They would collaborate with a range of artists in Ghana and the States and it was some of the best music I'd heard in a long long time. First making a name for themselves by dropping singles on Friday sampling popular songs (hip-hop fans might see the influence from Kanye West's GOOD Friday drops) and putting Ghanaian rappers on them. These drops were huge, and got 1000s of listens per post (if you don't get how big a deal this is, you just weren't there) and the group would the social media site to drop hints of an upcoming album.

My best friend, Henry, and I would listen to these drops religiously and I (admittedly) would bite from them here and there for our own little rap group in primary school: Royal Rappers. A lot of people are embarrassed by their rap stories in middle school, but not I. That shit was awesome. We started with just banging on desks with 5 or 6 people around and we ended with a performance in front of the whole school. Our first song, We Need A Beat, was so popular that it spawned another rap group in our class and they hit back with a diss, Beat Without A Bass. We were lucky the rapping was trash because their chorus was way better and title of the song alone almost cleared us... but this is a story for another time.

On February 2nd, 2013, Cruk'dStr8 dropped the album, Heliotrope. God. What a project. I didn't realize as an artist, you were allowed to do what they did on that album. Themes of travelling through Dante's inferno to find a missing piece of yourself, combined with production that was years ahead of what anyone else was attempting to do, and the bars. THE BARS. I am tempted to put some of my favourite lines here but I don't think it matters now. If you're curious here is a Genius link to all the album. I downloaded a copy of Heliotrope from DatPiff and I've had it on every hard drive I owned until last year, when I accidentally deleted my personal copy. Very few moments in my life have affected me on a personal level. Even to this day I get very sad thinking about it.

My dear reader, you might wonder why I don't just go to Spotify or Apple Music. Unfortunately Heliotrope, by Cruk'dStr8 is now lost media. The album has been scrubbed off the internet and now the only way to even know it existed at some point is Cruk'dStr8's Twitter page. I found a Hulkshare link (from a reply on that twitter page) but only 1 of the songs on there is actually playable (Dead Fantasy | Kizzy Kane). So the copy I deleted might have been the last copy. Like me, you might be wondering why the group would do this despite their success.

Well after Heliotrope, the group would go dark. Nothing to be heard from the core duo, but affiliated acts like Shabazz, Quesi B, and BrainyBeatz would keep going. By 2016 however, Cruk'dStr8 and affiliated acts would all stop making music. But in November 2017 I saw something strange. A new act from Ghana had dropped an incredible album and it was turning heads. I listened to it a few times and while the music was incredible I couldn't shake the feeling that I've heard this before. Now I have taken care to withhold the names of the core duo of Cruk'dStr8 , because maybe someone smarter than me would make the connection immediately. Their names were ERA and RAE.

Passionfruit Summers is the debut album from Ghanaian-American singer, songwriter Amaarae. If you knew about Cruk'dStr8 and Heliotrope, the sound is all there. Sonically it's extremely polished and the production quality was incredible. I couldn't believe it. One of my favourite Ghanaian musicians dropped a commercial tape, and its highly acclaimed! This album came with a new sounds and techniques that were slowly bubbling in the underground hip-hop and hip-life scene in Nigeria, a genre now known as alté. This was similar to what Cruk'dStr8 were doing a few years back but with a clear distinction and better execution. You see while Cruk'dStr8's sound was African inspired but clearly built on top off American hip-hop tendencies, alté music is built on top of hip-life tendencies with American style sprinkled here and there.

At this point I still had my copy of Heliotrope but I did a quick search online and that's when I realized it was all gone. As a matter of fact, Cruk'dStr8 is not mentioned anywhere by Amaarae as where she got her start. It's almost as if she doesn't want to be associated with that anymore. Few years ago, Moliy Music (co-writer and performer of Sad Girlz Luv Money) took to Twitter to accuse Amaarae of not sharing proceeds with her. This didn't seem to go anywhere and was forgotten about quickly, but I couldn't help but think of Cruk'dStr8 and ERA.

I've been keeping up with Amaarae partially because I want to see her rise to fame in first person but also I really want her to say something about Cruk'dStr8. Why delete the old music? What happened to ERA? What happened to Cruk'dStr8? I'm still not done looking for this tape. My plan is to reach out to former Cruk'dStr8 affiliates and hope they can send me a copy and/or explain what happened between 2014 and 2017.

Anyway here is a version of FunkyFlavaDopeShit posted on Quesi B's SoundCloud page: https://soundcloud.com/otis_7/crukdstr8-funkyflavadopeshit

Another late reading report, I'm starting to make it an habit. In my defence, I had no access to the internet for my laptop, so I couldn't have possibly released it sooner. The backlog is done, and I've released all the articles I wanted for the year. While I'm catching up on other things that had taken the backseat due to the backlog, it's also the holiday season, so I have more reading time overall. Unfortunately, I had to spend it reading the monstrosity below:

Manic Pixie e-girl – Nate Lemcke

I have so much to say about that book, but as it is part of the bookclub white elephant, I will refrain to speak until we get the presentation.

Drawing the Female Figure: A Guide for Manga, Hentai and Comic Book Artists – Hikaru Hayashi

Not that much to say about that book, as it's mostly pictures, and it's also part of the bookclub white elephant. So again, I will refrain to comment on it until we get the presentation. I can't wait to see Oncle's drawings.

La juste part (The fair share) – Patrick Turmel

Neat little book. The main thesis of the book is rebuking that the disparity of capital ownership is moral. It often uses a philosophical angle, and debunks some common arguments meant to oppose redistribution. It also shows that the redistribution is not only morally just, but also beneficial to a society as a whole.

I found the book interesting in its arguments, but thought it was a bit shy in its criticism of capitalism. It also chose to debunk/support arguments that were a bit too obvious and easy. Yeah, obviously redistribution would be beneficial to a society, rather than having a select few hoarding everything. Yeah, obviously having people who own everything is harmful to democracy. Don't get me wrong, the book is decent, but maybe my expectations were for it to go further than: it's bad to have a society where the overwhelming majority of people own nothing, and a couple of people own everything.

Wind and Truth – Brandon Sanderson

The GOAT is back with a new entry in the Stormlight Archives, and this is the last book of the first arc. I will not provide a synopsis here, because the other four books before this are all 1100+ pages, and it would actually make no sense to anyone that hasn't read those.

This is the longest book I have ever read, clocking at 1344 pages, and honestly it was almost great the whole way through. It slowed down a bit between pages 900-1000, but then we're back. I really liked the direction that my boy Brandon took a lot of the characters in story-wise, and I was hooked to most story lines. One issue that I had is that a lot of characters have had plot lines resolved in the previous books, so they only have one remaining internal conflict left here, and it really makes most of them a bit too one-dimensional and one-note. The themes are also very ham-fisted, which I didn't really like at all. The one things that really took me out of the book for a little bit was the whole mental illness language used in the book by the characters; the societies in the books have no concept of mental illness, and suddenly now everyone talks with IRL mental illness sensitivities, using therapy appropriate language. It's a bit jarring for some characters.

As usual, the book is divided in parts, and between those are sandwiched some interludes. For once, those were a pleasure to read (I had some trouble with them in the previous volumes). The story is great and the world build as usual first class. We finally get some answers on the big mystery of the universe, but at the same time still get more questions. It's just good, but my man Brandon really need more editors, this book could have been much better written, and easily 200, maybe 300, pages shorter. It's good, but could easily have been great with more effort from the author.

Murder at Haven's Rock – Kelley Armstrong

Back to the Rockton Series, after having last read it in September. For the synopsis, please refer to Elisa's Reading Roundup: Finding my Book Twin

We're back with Casey and Eric, in a new setting. Gotta be honest, I was kinda of a hater on this one. The formula is starting to show, and I don't like it. Casey and Dalton split up all the time, for Dalton to run into the forest cause his keen eye has caught something. He never catches anything (just like in the previous books), and by now they should have learned that something bad always happens when they split up. Another classic is Cassey (a god-damn great detective — or so I'm told by everyone in the book) never figures out who the bad guy/girl is until they are literally shooting at her or other people of the town at the end of the book. People behaving like robots, and unnatural dialogues are other classics that we can find here. Apart from that, the writing is still engaging, and fast-paced, not wasting our time. I do miss the town and its inhabitant, as they at least brought some interesting interludes between the investigations bouts. It's not bad by any means, it's entertaining as usual, but it's a bit too formulaic despite the change of setting. I hope for some more originality in the next book.

No manga this month, took a little break. But I still read a lot. A year of reading and I've got about 39 books and 667 manga chapters under my belt. Not too shabby. Apart from a couple of dishonourable mentions, especially the first book of this review, it has mostly been a blast. I feel like I am at a good reading equilibrium, between staying in my comfort zone, and being more adventurous with my readings. My backlog of books is as long as my arm, but I think I'll make a decent dent into it next year. I am in no rush. Happy New Year.

Thank you for reading my logorrhea Eddie

The Q3 version of this roundup was sitting in the archives and never got uploaded. As a (not-so) special treat, here is my round up for the entire second half of 2024. Please enjoy the read for the hater behaviour, but sadly I don't have any new winners to suggest this time around

Stats breakdown from July – December 2024

• Total books read: ~5
• Reading mediums: 4 audiobooks & 1 combination of physical & audiobook
• Time spent reading: ~24.5 hours

Books Read + Reviews

Call Me By Your Name by André Aciman Medium: audiobook

I usually write these once I finish the book but I need to note my thoughts right now as I finished the first third on the Via Rail to Montréal.

I – – Listen, I've seen the movie which gave me secondhand embarrassment then but uhh… The book is something else. Elio is horrendously HORRENDOUSLY down bad for Oliver. I'm listening to this on the train like 😶😳🫣 I may be able to make better sense of my thoughts later but

1. I'm astonished by everything Elio projects onto Oliver, like he is this master of social interactions and understanding others better than themselves. I guess this is maybe meant to be part of the perspective he would have as a 17-year old idolizing an older man but I think he's giving him entirely too much credit. He's literally just some guy.
2. Knowing that they get together later, the 17 vs 24 year old thing is extra EXTRA weird now that I myself am 24 (at time of writing). Oliver, he is literally a child. What the hell do you want with him? Leave him alone!!
3. Elio is actually unhinged and like past the point of usual yearning, agony & shame I would think.

Okay we're at the peach scene and it's so much more uncomfortable to listen to the book version 😖

My hold lapsed so I’m revisiting this again a month later to finish it. And I’m regretting it lol. More uncomfortable scenes and it's just getting a bit too pretentious for me.

Okay I powered through and finished it. I cannot in good conscience recommend this. Others may like it but I think I could have lived with just having seen the movie adaptation (which at least you get to see the beautiful Italian views and the great soundtrack). But I think Elio's inner monologue was just a bit too unhinged and pretentious to me.

Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro Medium: Audiobook

Hmm… I'm not really sure what to say about this one. I think it was meant to be a heartfelt story about AI but it felt kind of meandering at times and too vague about the setting and circumstances. I enjoyed the childlike, egoless perspective of the narrator but it did make the novel overall feel like it was written by an elementary school student. Am I saying it's bad? No. It literally won the Nobel Prize in Literature. Did I feel any type of way about it? Also no.

I think the points and takeaways of this book are not so profound, especially for it having been published in 2021. There was one point where I thought things were going to take an interesting turn but it didn't amount to much. Personally, I would skip this one.

I'm Glad My Mom Died by Jeanette McCurdy Medium: Audiobook

This memoir wasn't quite what I expected, which is neither good nor bad. Despite the initial press buzz on the cheeky book name, and the literal review on the book cover that this was “Impressively funny”, I did not find much humour in this book (not even the dark kind). More than anything, I felt sad and sorry for Jeanette McCurdy and the various things she went through (additional to the Nickelodeon/Dan Schneider stuff). If you are curious about reading this, I would consult the content warnings first. While I didn't find the content triggering, it definitely could be for some.

Obviously, it's a memoir about a very public life but I feel like the few press interviews I saw when it come out covered/spoiled the big events and themes of the book. For that reason, I'm not sure it's worth the read? Idk I feel conflicted. If you're curious to know the details, you could probably read an article instead. On the bright side, it was nice to hear that she and Miranda Cosgrove had an actual friendship for many years, even after iCarly ended.

The Assassination of Fred Hampton by Jeffrey Haas Medium: Audiobook

I was still kind of in a book slump when I was reading this but thankfully it was a welcome change. I appreciated being able to learn more about Fred Hampton, the Black Panthers and their ideology, the FBIs involvement in the assassination + their other attempts to dismantle or thwart the civil rights movement. I watched Judas and the Black Messiah (2021) in the midst of reading this and it helped me do a better job of organizing the different people involved. It got a bit overwhelming at times to manage all the names + legal events when listening via audiobook.

Additionally, I would have preferred if Jeff Haas centred himself less in the telling of these events. It was kinda whiplash-inducing when he would drop in some details about who he was dating at that time and just get back to talking about the court case.

Happy Place by Emily Henry Medium: Physical (Kaitlyn’s copy) + Audiobook

Although I finished this book at the end of the year, I started reading the copy Kaitlyn lent me back in April. Because I read it sporadically across the months, I don't have the clearest memory of everything. This was also the only true romance book I read in 2024.

I really loved the cozy vibes of the costal town setting and the friendship in this book. Emily Henry always excels in setting the vibe that way. In truth, I think I liked the friendships in this book quite a bit more than the romantic relationship between the main characters. The miscommunication trope was kind of annoying too and the reconciliation didn't come together in the best way in my opinion. But the friendships and the way certain characters talked about their upbringings resonated with me most. I also quite liked the passage where she describes the meditative process of pottery wheel throwing. All in all, a nice little read to close out the year.

And now... the Round Up to the Round Up!

My Top 3 Reads of the Year: Dune, Cultish, Everything I Know About Love

Dishonourable Mentions: Call Me By Your Name, Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead, Klara and The Sun + a handful of books I DNF'd

And as always, thanks for reading if you got this far!

This month I read 4 ebooks, 1 eaudiobook, and 1 physical book from the Toronto Public Library, totaling to 6 books.

Dishonourable Mentions

Blood Rubies by Mailan Doquang

Synopsis: Rune thought that this would be her biggest score yet: a bag of Charles Lemaire’s prized rubies. If she fenced it, the money would change her and Kit’s (her boyfriend) lives. But Kit’s younger sister Madee has gone missing, last seen in the slums of Bangkok. And Charles Lemaire is holding Kit hostage until Rune returns his rubies, which she lost while looking for Madee. Will Rune be able to rescue her friends, and herself? Or will she be forced to make an impossible decision?

My thoughts: Readers will know that I love a heist novel, but this one didn’t grab me at all. I didn’t find it engaging, nor were the characters that compelling, and the events of the book were starting to stress me out. So I didn’t feel the need to keep reading it.

You may like this book if: you, like Rune, are mixed race (she’s half American, half Thai)

And now for the Real Reviews:

Ruthless Vows by Rebecca Ross

Synopsis: It’s been two weeks since Roman and Iris were married at the front lines (the happiest day in Iris’ life). But it’s also been two weeks since the town was attacked, Iris was captured by her brother Forrest (MIA from Dacre’s army), and Roman’s presumed death. Iris has been forced to retreat back to Oath, and has continued writing articles for the Inkridden Tribune. The paper has asked for her and Attie to return to the front lines to continue their reporting. Meanwhile, Roman has been killed, captured, and brought back to life by Dacre and his forces. He doesn’t remember much of his past life, but he knows that he doesn’t trust Dacre. Will Iris and Roman ever survive this war and reunite?

My thoughts: I might have been influenced by reading some bad reviews of this book but I didn’t really like it that much. The first book in the series was driven primarily by Iris’ and Roman’s relationship, which kind of created rose-coloured glasses for the rest of the story. For this book didn’t have the same driving force, and was much more lackluster. I also listened to this book as an audiobook, and I definitely did not like either of the narrators. Usually this isn’t a problem for me, but their voices irritated me and their accents felt pretentious. To me, it definitely detracted from the story. But the main issue with this book isn’t really the presence of something bad, but more the absence of anything that was really good or interesting.

Rating: 2/5 enchanted coffee shops, where your drink never gets cold

The Art Forger by B. A. Shapiro

Synopsis: After a scandal that rocked the Boston art world, no one is willing to give Claire Roth a chance. Despite her talent, the only work that she can get is painting reproductions of classic paintings. But suddenly, it seems as though her luck may have changed. Renowned gallerist Aiden Markel waltzes into her studio with a proposition: he’ll stage a show of Claire’s paintings at his gallery. All she has to do is paint a reproduction for him. It’s too tempting to refuse, so Claire agrees. But when she sees the painting that she’s supposed to reproduce, she’s shocked. It’s Edgar Degas’ After the Bath, which was famously stolen from the Isabella Steward Gardiner museum during a robbery in 1990. Claire should report this to the police, but Aiden assures her that the authorities will eventually be notified, once the reproduction is finished. However, Claire isn’t sure. As she falls in love with Aiden, she grows more and more paranoid that this After the Bath is also a reproduction, and that the original one must be somewhere else. And when Aiden is arrested on charges of art fraud, Claire panics, and starts desperately searching for the real version of After the Bath in order to exonerate Aiden. Will she like what she finds? Or is this an art mystery that is best left unsolved?

My thoughts: Overall I thought this book was pretty interesting. Probably its biggest feature was the window into Claire’s mind, where she constantly expresses her love for art and paintings. She’s absolutely transfixed by Degas’ works, and it’s really interesting to see all of the emotion that she feels. However, I was pretty shocked to see Aiden’s (and other’s) perspectives that collecting art was addicting, and that having the only copy of a certain work of art is so intoxicating that it would compel you to commit crimes. It’s the kind of language that I would more associate with addictions like drugs or gambling. As a final note, I was somewhat disappointed that After the Bath was not a real painting. Obviously, if the author is going to speculate about the personal relationships of the artist and his contemporaries, then it makes sense to invent a work of art to be discussed. But I can’t help feeling a bit disappointed that there weren’t more connections to existing works of art.

Rating: 3/5 secret rooms in the Gardner Museum that might just contain the answer we’ve been looking for

Ghost Story by Jim Butcher (Dresden Files #13)

Synopsis: Harry Dresden is dead. Or is he? After being shot in the chest, and falling into the icy waters of Lake Michigan, Harry wakes up in a strange place with a familiar face. It’s Ron Carmichael, a former CPD cop who was killed by a loup-garou in Fool Moon (see my June 2023 roundup). He leads Harry through the Between to a special office building, where Harry meets Jack Murphy (Karrin Murphy’s deceased father). Apparently, there was an irregularity with his death, Jack asks him to investigate his own murder, hinting that his loved ones may be killed if he doesn’t. Harry agrees, and finds himself thrust into a very different Chicago. In the real world, 6 months have passed since his death, and the city has fallen to pieces since it’s no longer under the protection of the White Council’s most notorious wizard. And to make matters worse, Harry is a ghost. He can’t interact with the mortal world, and he can’t perform magic. Will he really be able to solve his own murder and rescue his friends? Or is this really the end of Harry Dresden?

My thoughts: This book was really good, except for one major flaw (which I will discuss momentarily). I liked that Harry had to reflect on his actions that took place in the previous book, especially how he had harmed so many people in his quest to be chivalrous and “do the right thing.” I look forward to seeing how the ramifications of his actions play out in the future. I also liked how this book was drastically different from every other Dresden Files novel. Harry being a ghost severely limited his normal powers, and also showed Chicago from a really unique perspective. However, I thought that the Uriel/Kincaid plotline was really weak, which is a huge problem because it’s the whole reason that Harry became a ghost at all. It just feels like Jim Butcher had a cool concept for a book and had to shoehorn in a reason for it to have occurred. It’s not just that Harry was manipulated, but that the internal logic of the story didn’t really make a lot of sense. The resolution of that whole plotline was a big disappointment for me.

Rating: 4/5 empty graves that have been beautifully maintained for you for this whole time

March Roars by Maureen Jennings (Paradise Cafe Series #4)

Synopsis: Private Detective Charlotte Frayne has recently received a peculiar letter. After the well publicized arrest of two young Black boys for robbery, a woman at Toronto’s House of Industry (the poor house) claims that they are innocent. She says that she witnessed the true thieves (two White men) acting suspicious shortly after the robbery took place, and that she now fears for her own safety by reporting them. Charlotte is forced to interview this woman and try to piece together what exactly is going on.

My thoughts: This book was decent, although it felt somewhat superficial. Charlotte suddenly becomes aware of the struggles of Black Torontonians in the 1930s (some of whom she has been friends with for many years), but doesn’t really use her station to make a difference (besides freeing the two boys from prison). I also feel like this series lacks a “B” plot, where the relationships between the main cast of characters would usually develop. It’s supposed to revolve around the Paradise Cafe, but Charlotte rarely, if ever, appears there. We didn’t develop deeper relationships with anyone else at the cafe, nor really see what was happening there, and that’s a major reason why I felt that this book lacked substance.

Rating: 3/5 single, engraved cufflinks that were pawned by a mysterious woman with a secret identity

The Vortex: A True Story of History's Deadliest Storm, an Unspeakable War, and Liberation by Scott Carney and Jason Miklian

Synopsis: This book describes the lead up and the after effects of the Great Bhola Cyclone, which killed an estimated 500 000 people in the Bay of Bengal in November 1970. The cyclone can be considered the catalyst for the revolutionary movement (and brutal crackdown) that took place in East Pakistan, eventually leading to the formation of Bangladesh.

My thoughts: I thought this book was super interesting and really well written. Readers will know that I am a fan of narrative nonfiction, and I thought it was a great choice by the authors to bring parts of the true story to life. I know that not everything happened irl the way that it’s depicted in the books, but it was much more digestible for me (especially because I didn’t know anything about East Pakistan and the formation of Bangladesh before reading this book). I liked how the authors focused on several different perspectives in order to create a full picture of what was purportedly going on, and it was super impressive to see all the research that they had done.

Rating: 4/5 planned capital cities that were built ahead of schedule and under budget (but were unfortunately the only good thing that you ever accomplished).

Barcelona Red Metallic by Christine Cosack

Synopsis: The hit-and-run death of a small child in Oyster Hill, British Columbia shocks residents of the sleepy small town. The RCMP sends a team to investigate the accident site, and the only tangible clue they find is a fragment of Barcelona Red Metallic paint. Even after the initial investigation, the case stays with Luci Miller. But more than the family of the victim, the family of Jo Nelson (plus her son Oliver and grandson Nico) stays with Luci. Will she ever find out what happened on that fateful morning?

My thoughts: I found this book to be pretty different than other crime novels. The tone was very gentle but not cozy, which is a fine line to walk in mystery fiction. I also appreciated how the majority of the book was about Jo, and how she raised her chronically ill son (Oliver has cystic fibrosis). I also thought the ending was very unexpected (which isn’t generally great), but in a way that made sense with Jo’s character and the information that we already knew about her.

Rating: 4/5 paintings of lung-shaped lichens

Introduction

In his book on the subject, Cal Newport defines Digital Minimalism as “a philosophy of technology use in which you focus your online time on a small number of carefully selected and optimized activities that strongly support things you value, and then happily miss out on everything else” (Newport, 2019). The key principles of this approach are:

1. Value Alignment - appraising each technology you keep in your life based on its utility and alignment with your values. Ideally, only engaging with digital tools that meaningfully enhance your life.
2. Optimization - determining how you will use a particular technology (i.e. boundaries, limitations, etc).
3. Intentionality - prioritizing active and purposeful use of technology over passive content consumption.

To set yourself on the metaphorical road to recovery, Newport prescribes what he calls a Digital Declutter. It involves taking a 30-day break from all optional technologies to reset habits and gain clarity on how technology affects your life. This is not simply a “digital detox”, but a structured exercise to evaluate and rebuild your digital habits intentionally. The objective is not to reject technology outright but to reclaim autonomy and align digital usage with personal priorities.

1. Step Back: Identify and temporarily remove all optional technologies for 30 days. This might include social media, entertainment apps, and even certain communication tools, depending on your personal needs and goals.
2. Rewire: During the 30 days (and beyond), you also need to engage in some key practices & behaviours to bolster this exercise and enable it to be sustainable long-term.
   • Embrace Solitude - when you are spending time alone with your own mind, you are free from the input of others. As a result, you are then using this time for self-reflection or thinking through things. This boredom often leads to creativity.

   • Meaningful Connection/Conversation - prioritizing talking/calling and face-to-face connections with others as opposed to likes or comments on a social media platform.
     • Newport suggests creating or identifying “office hours” where you regularly open up time to connect with others. For example, taking advantage of the downtime in your daily commute and encouraging family & friends to call you during that time. Alternatively, having a routine where you’re always at a certain coffee shop at a certain time on a certain day of the week and friends can find you there (sound familiar? 😉).
   • High-Quality Leisure
     • Honing Your Craft - identifying a “craft” you want to get good at. You convert the time and energy spent on passive consumption to high-quality leisure that is ultimately more energizing and validating (ex. making something tangible with your hands). This doesn’t have to be an art-focused craft.

     • Super-Charged Socializing - participating in activities that require real-world, structured, social interactions where the structure takes the pressure off how you will socialize. My personal example would be my dance classes each week.
3. Reintroduce Selectively: After the declutter, carefully reintroduce only those technologies that add substantial value to your life and define clear boundaries for their use.

Methods

In July, I somewhat covertly underwent a digital declutter experiment of my own. I elected not to talk about exactly what I was doing in order to focus on the journey myself with no outside input. Additionally, I wanted to set up a sort of control and not have others act differently to accommodate my choice.

For context, I work a predominantly remote job in tech where I stare at a screen for roughly 8hrs a day. As a result, I am seldom compelled to then spend time on my personal laptop or watch TV after work. The little screen in my hand is another story, however. Naturally, my goals for this digital declutter were focused on my phone use. Truthfully, I should have done a better job noting down what I gave up as I cannot recall everything now months later. Regardless, my reflections will be on the key players and not the forgettable apps I removed.

Notable apps I had that I got rid of: YouTube, Facebook, Pinterest, Snapchat, TikTok

The boundaries I set around their use: When I occasionally needed to use the first three, I could access them through a web browser/on my laptop. The others were to remain off of my phone for the 30 days.

Results

During the duration of this experiment, some interesting results were observed. For starters, there were no logins to Pinterest the entire month, not even on my laptop! Facebook, however, was redownloaded a few times for dance-related communications that I would have otherwise missed as I do not have an Instagram account. In the spirit of full transparency, I did fall into scrolling a few times when I had it reinstalled for brief periods.

Regrettably, I wasn’t able to capture great stats on the results of this experiment. iPhone’s Screen Time tracker unfortunately has many blindspots when it comes to usage data that I did not realize until late in the game. Most notably, if you uninstall an application, the usage data related to it from previous weeks also gets wiped and provides an inaccurate record of how much time was spent on the app. Additionally, iPhone only stores the past month’s screen time. Thankfully I took some screenshots as I went. However, I was unable to compare my results to a broader time range to assess how much things had changed from my average behaviour in the past.

Putting the data tracking issues aside, I did observe a significant drop in daily screen time of about 34% in the first week. Additionally, the number of times I picked up my phone kept decreasing week over week. There was no discernable difference in sleep quality, duration, or schedule according to my Fitbit data. However, I did not set a boundary on before-bed phone usage during this experiment. While I wasn’t scrolling or watching content before bed, I had a lot of things to sort through or plan in July. I often needed to spend some time before bed looking things up (Chrome, Google Calendar, etc) to quell the swirling thoughts in my head so I could sleep.

Post 30-Day Declutter

I am pleased to share that most things have remained the same pertaining to my technology use, but there have definitely been pitfalls. I have not reinstalled YouTube, Pinterest, or Snapchat since. I have also taken additional measures on the phone browser version of YouTube (that I check at most once a month) to make it even less appealing and addicting. I have logged onto Pinterest via my laptop only a handful of times since then. Recently, I even deleted my Snapchat account entirely after months of not having been active on it.

I have, however, fallen victim to Facebook and TikTok scrolling syndrome several times since August when the digital declutter ended. I am in a cycle of reinstall and uninstall with these two apps, but I am at least curbing the habit by not having them on my phone the majority of the time. I’m planning to be better about it and set better boundaries and systems.

Discussion

Coming out of this experiment, there were a handful of personal positives and takeaways that stood out to me. Firstly, and most obviously, not being served up sludge content on an infinite scroll allowed me not to fall into a massive timesink. The few times I did get presented with it, I did not feel the same addictive pull and was able to resurface much quicker than I usually would. It was interesting to me how the urge to scroll was the strongest when I was looking for a coping mechanism. Some café users may recall that I suffered a serious burn on my leg in July. After the incident, I just wanted to scroll so that I could self-soothe and take my mind off the pain. It made me stop and reflect on how passive media consumption has become a normalized response to tune out unpleasant feelings or experiences, as well as the escapism of it all.

Secondly, this experiment affirmed that I don’t have to search or validate everything I am doing. Typically, I would have flocked to Pinterest to seek inspiration for my outfit when I was going to my first-ever Renaissance Faire; or to TikTok/YouTube to get some ideas on what to do for my travel plans that month. I got the chance to be more creative about how I approached situations like this, more confident in my own decisions without external input, and just more comfortable with the overall not-knowing as the Type A person I am. Also, it was just really humbling have to Google these things and then go watch a YouTube video at a maximum of 480p on my Chrome browser app. It made me question if it was even worth searching up.

The third, and also obvious but now affirmed takeaway, was that being unaware of all the new trends dulled the consumerist pull. It’s no surprise just how much product peddling happens on social platforms, especially Tiktok, but it’s easy to become desensitized to it with just how ubiquitous it is. When you distance yourself from it a bit, it’s also hard to fathom just how many content creators exist out there to post the same type of consumerist content in the name of selling an aesthetic or a lifestyle. Like surely we don’t need this many, and it’s all so pointless anyway...

Criticisms

While this has been an eye-opening experience and one I recommend to everyone, I have a few criticisms based on what I observed. Firstly, I did not feel as much creative or action-inspiring boredom from this declutter as when I have my Unplugged Days. Once a week for Unplugged Days, I put my phone in a drawer and work off a paper to-do list of things I want to get done that do not involve a phone or computer. Personally, I find that more effective because I am not aimlessly bored and I have structure through the menu of things I can do. In some measure, this does link back to what Newport says about having a game plan for the time that will be freed up.

Secondly, I observed that in my personal life, it’s easy to become disconnected to current events. I’m not really on social media and I am seldom tuning into TV or radio news. Not being constantly bombarded with news stories is better for your mental state overall, but it overlaps with the privilege to opt out of injustice happening in the world. As a result, you have to be more intentional to seek out (ideally quality) sources of information and ways of staying informed. This is an area that I’m still trying to sort out for myself.

Lastly, there is potential for isolating behaviours or narrowing of your social sphere. Newport shares in his book that most people cite a fear of being disconnected when removing optional social media from their lives. It’s a valid concern based on how our society has previously put these applications on a pedestal and made it seem like they are the pinnacle of connectivity. When you pull back the curtains, you see how shallow and superficial most of these friendships are. Speaking from the experience of not having most social media accounts for the last few years, it has created a funnel where only the most meaningful and quality friendships have remained active in my life. However, not being plugged into the digital realm where social interactions happen and plans are sometimes made can keep your social circle small and stagnant. To overcome this, there has to be more involved effort to seek out events or make new friends. This ultimately is a good behaviour to reinforce but it requires more will, planning, and intentionality to combat the various obstacles and deterrents.

Conclusion

In summation, I would recommend Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism and the 30-day Digital Declutter to any and all that are the slightest bit curious. I see it being more impactful and sustainable to do this declutter and boundary-setting around technology use, rather than going for more acute measures. I, myself, had considered getting a dumb phone and at this point, I don’t feel the need to do that so long as I work through what my technology use rules are and slowly work towards bringing my screen time down more. In preparation for 2025, I have been looking into how I can optimize my phone to help support these goals. I have linked a video on that, and some other resources that inspired this article in the section below.

References & Resources

• Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World by Cal Newport
• Video summary of some of the book: https://youtu.be/sJdZ7kmA2QQ?feature=shared
• Perks of Living w/o Social Media by Newport: https://youtu.be/m6AF_aFuD8w?feature=shared
• YT Video on how to make your smartphone into a dumbphone: https://youtu.be/7jVb1lLniEw?si=U02m8KRwUL-gVglS

I must apologise for the late (a whole week!) release of last month's reading. While they normally come out on the 5th of each month, I dropped quite the lengthy article earlier this month and needed a bit more time to finish this one. Without further ado, let's get into it:

Howling Dark – Christopher Ruocchio

You know what, I lied: I didn't actually finish this book in October, the last 80 pages plagued me all the way until mid-November. It was such a slog to read through. It's not bad, but it just really, really didn't click for me; I'd rather be reading the other Dune books (liem you know what to do, I'll even accept you moving to bluesky)

Mutual Aid – Dean Spades

That was a great little book. It introduces (in the sense “describes”) the concept of mutual aid and goes on to describe how a mutual aid group could work, and what the common issues with those groups are. It was a really interesting read, especially since it was so politically committed. While it doesn't go super far, some things that the book took as granted were just not the admitted reality of even many left leaning people. It was nice to just kinda be like: ok, that's the situation, where do we go from there.

Mutual aid is something that I found particularly interesting in “The Assassination of Fred Hampton[...]” which we read with the bookclub last month. Two great examples of mutual aid groups in this are the Black Panther breakfast program, which is also mentioned in “Mutual Aid”, and Jeff's law office (at some point in the office). People organically just coming together to make their neighbourhood or city a better place is something I found super cool. This is not to be confused with charities, or billionaire funded organisations. It's by the people, for the people, no strings attached.

Some aspects (and usual pitfalls) of mutual aid can also be applied in other situations, and in one chapter I was often drawing parallels between the organisation of the mutual aid group and that of my IT department.

Mutual aid is a cool concept, and its functioning is interesting to read here; don't hesitate to borrow my copy of the book.

Le droit de mentir (The right to lie) – Emmanuel Kant & Benjamin Constant

In 1785, Kant published Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten (Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals), in which — amongst other things — he touches on the illegitimacy of lying. In 1796 a quirked-up french swiss (then french) boy decides to critique Kant's position in his book Des réactions politiques (On political reactions). The next year, Kant replies in a text title Über ein vermeintes Recht aus Menschenliebe zu lügen (On a supposed right to tell lie). The biggest feud in philosophy ensues, which lasts until they duel each other, and also indirectly leads to the Franco-Prussian War (this is a complete lie).

This book only solidified my belief that the great writer of old are known for the idea within their work despite their shit writing. I am willing to give a pass to Kant, as german is pretty hard to translate so that's not on him — and my german is not good enough to actually read the original. But I'm sorry Benjamin, your writing is shit. A coma digression within a coma digression, within a coma digression...

Apart from that, the arguments are interesting and while I do not have a fully formed opinion on whether it is moral to lie or not, they did bring up some good points. One that I thousght made particularly good sense is that some people — by their actions or words — have broken the social contract and therefore do not have the right to the truth and are not entitled to the truth. Saying the truth to them is therefore no more a duty. This gets destroyed by Kant in his next essay, but the reasoning is still provocative.

Even if there is not apparent feud, it's still funny to see Kant trash talk Benjamin; Benjamin had not named Kant in his original reply, and only gave him the “a german philosopher” nickname — Kant goes hard on him for that.

Good little read.

Invisible Women – Caroline Criado-Perez

*trips, drops book which slide over to your feet, cover facing up* -Oops, I dropped my feminist literature, I'm so sorry about that _{(I'm 6'3” btw)} *bites lips*

For the synopsis, please refer to Elisa's Reading Roundup: Enjoying unemployment by binge-reading

This book is collection of anecdotes showcasing the lack of data we have about women specific issue, but also about the impact of universal issue on women. It is thankfully not a very dense, indigestible and rigorous text, and is overall well written. There are very clear divisions of topics in the chapters and parts, which make the book very easy to follow.

There are some very good points in there, and for the most parts, the anecdotes are well chosen to illustrate and issue, without getting too into the weeds. We have a nice selection of topics from the workplace, home life, healthcare... One really good point that was made, and that I hadn't really thought about, is that by taking the average human and making decisions based on that, the result will usually leave women at a disadvantage. For instance, safe exposure to certain chemicals mostly depends on weight and metabolism, and taking the genderless average of both will make the maximum threshold safe for men, but still unsafe for women. Of the things that I would never have thought about, it's how the economy and it's design are favouring men and reinforcing the gender gap issue, especially when it comes to tax credits and monetary benefits. There are many anecdotes that are about things that I would not have though could afffect women in particular, because they seem completely unrelated.

With the book being written, or at least published in 2019, COVID is obviously absent from the topics here, and I would really have been curious about what a chapter of this book dedicated to it would have been like. There was not only a big healthcare issue with the covid crisis, but also a restructuring of society especially in the workplace, with the recrudescence of gig-work and work from home which I think would have been interesting topics.

Another one of my unmet expectations, and were the book could fall a bit short, is in the analysis of the anecdotes, which is usually very surface level, if there is one.

One thing I found odd were the citations. With a book this filled to the brim with info, there are many citations. While I liked that the citations were separated in chapters, the format of most of them really leaves to be desired; it's just urls. This made reading up on the topics I wanted to go deeper in extremely annoying — who enjoys typing a long url in the search bar? It also strange that those almost all directed to news articles, rather than the source that those news articles use.

As I've discussed, most of the anecdotes are relevant, but some feel a bit out of place in the book. Two in particular jump at me. One of the early one was about who Todd Howard, after showcasing the character creation menu in Fallout 4 during E3 2016 and pointing out that you could play as either a man or woman, decided to play as a man. I'm not too sure what the point being made is here but I found hilarious that it was included. Then some anecdote just might not have enough substance to warrant being included: I was particularly interested in the part where it states that VR headsets are not well suited for women, because men and women use/prefer different mechanisms to process depth — parallax for men and shape-from-shading for women — and VR priorities parallax. However, there were no citations in this book. When doing research, I could only find 3 papers related to the subject, all from long before modern VR was developed. None of those papers gave a definitive answer on whether men and women did use or even prefer different depth perception mechanism, as any results were not significant enough (high p value, extremely low sample size, issues with experiment design...). At least in this last case, that ties in with, and supports, the thesis of the book; there is clear a lack of data on how specific issues affect women. Not only that but there is a distinct lack of will to even attempt to gather data about women.

Hunter X Hunter – Yoshihiro Togashi

Chapters 95-140

We continue the story and I'm glad we depart from the collecting money avenue to just do shenanigans or go on adventure. I liked the Yorknew arc, but I'm not too sure about the isekai one yet.

Going back to my issues with the manga; the argument that people who are actually strong don't bother with the small fries make sense (see Harrison's post on the café), but the characterisation of the tower of doom and the hunter exam still aren't super consistent in my eyes. Tetyana started to watch the anime and I caught a couple of episodes with her — and while it isn't fair to judge the manga based on the anime — just as I remembered in the manga they made the hunters out to be a big deal. Naturally, one could trust the magaka when he says that the hunter exam is the hardest exam in the world, and that is actually matters in the power structure of the universe. But it really doesn't and some characters could eat that exam for breakfast, which feels like the rug has been pulled from under me.

The story is still interesting, my fear is growing that nen is basically like stands/hamon now and it can do pretty much everything. I will report back on what extent later. Nothing has yet topped the fight between Uvo and the Shadows, maybe because I was still under the impression that HxH was bad. The symphony to Chrollo (where the troupe goes on a rampage) was sick. I was midly underwhelmed with the fight between Chrollo and Killua's father+grandfather. They had made Killua's family to be so goated that I was expecting more. Although I cannot complain about them being the strongest people in town anymore; they are getting bodied by the weakest creature of Greed Island. While they are strong, they have no idea how to use their strength. I stopped right when the Bomber reveals his identity, I think it's about to get hype.

no way they got a _gargaydar as their first card!

Not too bad this month, and I also finished my backlog! While you might think this means more time for reading, the holiday season is upon us, which means less time overall. I will do my best, but also, I won't try too hard. Also a little change this month, I switched from Typora to Obsidian to write this. Having the rest of my monthly articles available with a click is really handy. But I like the focus that Typora provides, being so bare bones, so I will keep using it for standalone articles.

Thank you for reading my logorrhea Eddie

Hello, wildcats.

Using Google Takeout, you can export your Google data.

I use this specifically to export just my YouTube watch history.

I frequently find myself in situations where I am doing data science on my own activity history because some brainworm tells me “hey I'd like to revisit this thing I once visited” even though it was years ago and it will be a pain in the ass to find it again.

A screenshot of me, 6 years ago, posting on Discord a YouTube link to a video and lamenting that I cannot find another meme video which uses this video as source material – https://youtu.be/ZKxhI4I5kq8

To export your YouTube history as JSON, follow these steps.

1. Visit https://takeout.google.com/
2. Top right, profile switcher, switch to your brand account (my YouTube account is separate from my Google account)
3. Deselect all
4. Scroll to the bottom, YouTube > Enable
5. “Multiple formats” > switch to JSON
6. “All YouTube data included” > Deselect all, check history
7. Next step > File type=.zip, File size=50gb
8. Create export

Congrats. You now have, locally, slice of your watch history, instead of being beholden to the YouTube interface which is rarely sufficient for querying purposes.

What does the data look like?

{
  "header": "YouTube",
  "title": "Watched The monkey is furiously knocking at the door - Обезьяна неистово стучит в дверь - 猴子是疯狂地在敲门",
  "titleUrl": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v\u003d3-_OIDRL91c",
  "subtitles": [{
    "name": "Seen that! Видал, чо!",
    "url": "https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCnEelfUE8SE_rZtwaRzUzyQ"
  }],
  "time": "2020-04-19T03:08:27.981Z",
  "products": ["YouTube"],
  "activityControls": ["YouTube watch history"]
},
{
  "header": "YouTube",
  "title": "Watched https://www.youtube.com/watch?v\u003dnmcuoaqdJ9w",
  "titleUrl": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v\u003dnmcuoaqdJ9w",
  "time": "2020-04-17T18:22:47.173Z",
  "products": ["YouTube"],
  "activityControls": ["YouTube watch history"]
}

The URL and the timestamp are present. Great!

The video title is inconsistently present. Less great!

This helpful StackOverflow comment tells us that we can use the following YouTube endpoint to get some metadata

// https://www.youtube.com/oembed?url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nmcuoaqdJ9w
{
    "title": "Weird Al SHREDS!!!",
    "author_name": "alyankovic",
    "author_url": "https://www.youtube.com/@alyankovic",
    "type": "video",
    "height": 113,
    "width": 200,
    "version": "1.0",
    "provider_name": "YouTube",
    "provider_url": "https://www.youtube.com/",
    "thumbnail_height": 360,
    "thumbnail_width": 480,
    "thumbnail_url": "https://i.ytimg.com/vi/nmcuoaqdJ9w/hqdefault.jpg",
    "html": "<iframe width=\"200\" height=\"113\" src=\"https://www.youtube.com/embed/nmcuoaqdJ9w?feature=oembed%5C#34; frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen title=\"Weird Al SHREDS!!!\"></iframe>"
}

So I guess that would be a fairly straightforward way to enrich the data.

That's not what I'm deep in right now though.

The Takeout service responds in a matter of minutes when we have scoped the export to just our YouTube watch history and nothing else.

It is still a manual process and will quickly become outdated given that I frequently watch videos.

I find myself having multiple exports, each with a different slice of my history.

To free up disk space, is it truly safe to simply delete the oldest export?

Using ChatGPT (conversation link), I whipped up a quick validation program that takes the search and watch history json files from the latest export and an older export to check some assumptions.

1. The newest export MUST contain every entry in the older export.
2. The newest export MUST NOT contain an entry older than the newest entry in the older export which is not also present in the older export.

I didn't get to number 2 because number 1 was exceedingly disproven.

THERE IS MISSING DATA BETWEEN EXPORTS.

The exports are from 2024-10-30 and 2024-12-07.

Summary: 993 total missing entries in the Watch History file.
Summary: 42 total missing entries in the Search History file.

This is not surprising, just disappointing.

Thankfully, using ChatGPT I was able to build a tool to identify the problem quite easily.

Banana Loof – NSA Releases Internal 1982 Lecture by Computing Pioneer Rear Admiral Grace Hopper

00:08:30

“No work, no research has been done on the value of information. We've completely failed to look at it. And yet it's going to make a tremendous difference in how we run our computer systems of the future. Because if there are two things that are dead sure, I don't even have to call them predictions. One is that the amount of data and the amount of information will continue to increase, and it's more than linear. And the other is the demand for instant access to that information will increase, and those two are in conflict. We've got to know something about the value of the information being processed. Everybody wants their information online.”

I think about that video a lot.

My browser extension + local server tool, Onboarder, lets me take notes in a text area it adds below the video player. The notes then get synced to a plaintext file on the disk.

https://github.com/TeamDman/Onboarder

I can use ripgrep to search through my notes incredibly efficiently.

I also made a program that lets me easily capture my system audio output to a .wav file, toggled on and off by hitting enter in the terminal.

https://github.com/TeamDman/audio-capture.git

I also have WhisperX running, which can transcribe a 1 hour video in 1 minte with incredible fidelity.

https://github.com/TeamDman/voice2text

The process of finding that Grace Hopper video, capturing her saying that sentence, and transcribing it was a collaboration between several disjoint tools I have added to my arsenal.

We've all heard of Big Data.

I want my own Big Data that works for me.

Storage is cheap, and I want a copy of all my data so that when I say “computer, find me the meme from within the last 4 years matching XYZ criteria” it can do so.

The problem with building a grandiose system like this is not the work that it will take, but the charting of the course.

How do I want to structure the data so that all these tools can play nice together?

The answer is probably Postgres.

It has support for vector embeddings, json columns, and generally all the stuff I'd need to proceed.

However, not everything should/can live in the database.

I should probably get building, or at least go to bed lol

[Warning there are some tiny graphs here, you might want to read this article on a computer]

Recap

Quick recap for those who don't want to read/reread my previous article:

Humble Bundle was a subscription service that would give you a ton of games every month. I was subscribed for 26 months and acquired a lot of games through it. I would usually play a couple and then leave the rest to rot. In my steam library, comprising 435 games, I had 172 games I had never played. There was only one way I could get rid of those unplayed games; by playing them. At first, on a joint youtube channel with a bunch of friends — The Raddest Channel — I posted videos of me playing those games. But it just took too much effort, and I only played 15 games in the span of a year, not even giving some of them a fair chance. This was the Humble Purge: Act I.

Last year, after seeing two videos from Daryl Talks Games, where he details how he conquered his backlog, I set out to play all those games sitting untouched in my library. I gave myself a year to play 110 of them, the rest just being too poorly rated or of too little interest to me. I would give each game a fair chance, and play them for at least an hour before I could call quits. If I didn't enjoy the game after that, I wouldn't force myself and just let it go. I began, on December 3rd 2023. I would report my progress in a google sheet, with reviews for the games I played, how hyped I was to play them, and some other info. This was Humble Purge Act II.

In this article, I am to report my findings. Did I succeed? What was it like? Were there hardships? Am I fed up with video games forever? All will be answered below.

Setbacks

Let's first talk about the major setbacks that hindered this project. Can't have a good project without some setbacks. Since this project is extremely time intensive, and not much else, all the setbacks below just took some time away from playing the games in my backlog. In no particular order:

1: Marco

Ever since I moved away from Kingston, my best friend Marco and I took the habit of playing video games together a couple of times a week, sometimes every day of the week. It could be coop, multiplayer, it didn't really matter. We either played the games seriously, or used it as an excuse to catch up or hang out. I was not gonna stop playing video games with my best friend just for this project, even if they weren't the ones in my backlog. Sometimes we replayed games, spent 50h on a new game... I decided to add the new games I played with him, all from after Dec 2023, in my backlog — more about that in “My experience”.

_{Marco and me at my wedding (I am the one being carried)}

2: Trackmania

None of you will remember the Trackmania videos I uploaded to the Raddest Channel, but in those, I went through the campaign maps and got all the gold medals. For those unaware, Trackmania is a sorta arcady racing game, in the way that it is like you are controlling hot wheels. Everything is deterministic and the races can be quite spectacular, which makes the game particularly well suited for e-sport. This is how I originally discovered the franchise, through ZeratoR, a french streamer hosting often the biggest Trackmania events in Europe/the world. The newest instalment of the game made a resurgence on the intrawebs this summer and I got sucked into it. I just love this game, it is so addictive. I can easily play the same track for half an hour just to improve my time by 0.1s. I got really into it for the first three months, devoting almost 70h during that span. Fair to say it did impact this backlog a bit.

3: Got too busy at work

They had the audacity to make me work at work. I still can't believe it. I girlbossed a bit too close to the sun and I am now mostly responsible for a whole section of my department. This means that while at the beginning of the year I had time to play some games at work, it soon became impossible to do so, unless during periods of intense downtime, which became non-existent for me. Baring August, from April to the end of November, I could not play anything at work.

My experience:

The very beginning of the crusade against my backlog is described in the first article. I was very confident and eager to take on this project. I also didn't put too much pressure on myself, but since I was motivated and had so many games to choose from, I made great progress nonetheless. I mean, look at that commitment: 111h in December alone, I was on fire! To be fair, towards the middle of December it gets super, super slow at work, and I literally have nothing to do. Since I was only beginning to touch the backlog, I had so many games that were suitable for work that I just spent an hour or two a day playing while at the office. The same was true until about the last third of January, when work started to pick back up a bit. February is also a pretty quiet month, so the trend of me being able to play a lot continues. March is when it gets busy at work, and it shows. The graph is not 100% accurate, as I didn't log my playtime per game per month — I'm not a maniac. I just counted the playtime for a game for the month I started it. This generally works since I only played most games for a couple of days to around a week, but some I played over months/they overlap months, causing inaccuracies. I wanted to make the data analysis simple, so the only two games I've actually divided up per month are: Slay the Spire (the second time I played it, for an extra 34h, was between Aug/Sept) and Trackmania, that I've played for now 88h from June to November — counting it in one month would create a huge outlier. Anyways, as I was saying, my busyness at work is shown in the graph, with intensity ramping up from March to July, leading to August when I finally got a reprieve from work, followed by a vacation.

Before going any further, let's talk about the process, which was pretty straightforward. From my list, I would choose any game that catches my eye. Sometimes I would also check how long it was, and some other times I didn't care. Choosing games was more vibes-based rather than calculated. Usually, before the game had even started, I would have an idea of whether I would see it to the end, give up, or quit it after the required hour. Even if I wanted to play certain games initially, I had an intrinsic understanding of what I liked, and despite the vibes directing me to a specific game, if the gameplay didn't look like something I would enjoy, I would abandon them without remorse. I was wrong a couple of times, and the games that I misjudged were the source of my biggest disappointment — or the very opposite. In any case, there were still some games that required me to play them to be able to sort them in a category. Now apart from a couple of exceptions, after the first hour, it was clear which games I was gonna drop right away and which ones I would play until the end. When I got it wrong this time, it was usually because the games became ass nearing the end, and I therefore dropped them since I wasn't having fun anymore, when I thought I would finish the game for sure. There might be an article in the future about the biggest surprises, good and bad, of this Humble Purge (you best believe I'll milk this project for as many articles as I can). No matter my opinion of them, I would play the games seriously for an hour, without distraction, and just try to have fun. I wanted to maximise fun, so I didn't bother playing on the hardest difficulties or giving myself real challenges. Unless the game was more fun on higher difficulties — which happens — I was usually cruising on normal. Some games would enthrall me and I would play them for hours on end, others were more of a slow burner. A few even, despite my will to play them, could only be stomached for a half hour at a time. And then some were just complete ass, and I couldn't wait for that mandatory hour to be over. When I was done with a game, I would immediately write the review “à chaud” as we say in french (meaning off the cuff/in the heat of the moment). I had some trouble writing really meaningful reviews at first, but I got better as time went on. I think having written the reviews without having had the time to digest games was the right call, as they were more genuine this way. Because of this, we get some interesting quotes like:

“[...]Although kinda funny the first time I listened to it [the background music], pair an already overused lick with the repetitiveness of the music and you will want to kill yourself.[...]“

from my review of Wizards of Legend, which you will be surprised to learn was rated 8/10 despite the previous comment. Since I find it hard to be verbose about something good and am very eloquent about things I find bad, my style of review is usually “[one or two positive things followed by a very lengthy paragraph about everything wrong about the game] 9/10”

Let's come back to our chronological retelling of the project. I had just gotten some time off in August after an intense period of work, and I had put much energy into playing some games during this break. Around the beginning of September, I grew a tad tired and gave myself a break: two weeks or so of minimal gaming. That's where it started to go downhill. Coming back from my break, mid-September, I realised how many games I still had to play, and how little time I had left. My deadline was not the end of the year, but December 3rd. I basically had only two months to finish everything, and I still had about 25 games to go through. I had to start hustling. In the last two weeks of September, I played 8 games, for a total of 25.5h. And those were also not the games I was the most excited about, which I had already completed at the beginning of the backlog. And since my backlog was 110 games, finishing a game amounted to less than 1% of progress. This amount of time spent on those games, with this lack of meaningful progress, on top of a full-time job, the gym, other responsibilities... I got a mini burn-out from this and I was slowly losing hope in the project and myself. I even started to question the feasibility of it, or if I should just quit now; I had played about 85 games after all.

So I went back to the source, the videos that had inspired me to begin this project. Surely they would give me the strength to push through... They didn't. That's because those videos are a cautionary tale. It is impossible to finish your backlog, and putting a time limit on it is stupid. This is the message of Daryl Talks Games' second video. Although his backlog and mine are a bit different, the lesson should have stuck, but it just flew right over my head. I must have been blinded by confidence and enthusiasm when I first watched them. Watching those videos now after experiencing a backlog purge hits completely differently. I had misunderstood his videos completely, but no more. Taking in this lesson, I decided to start axing some games, and adding others. The games I know I would enjoy and want to 100% did not need to be on this list. Also added the games I played with Marco, because I did discover and play those games this year.

_{Thumbnail from Daryl Talks Games' videos, which inspired this project}

At first, the backlog allowed me to give up on games I didn't enjoy guilt free. But at about 85% completion of the project, the approaching deadline had the opposite effect, where I would feel guilty for spending too much time on a game, which is absolutely not the point of this Humble Purge. The point of this Humble Purge was to give the games I had in my library a chance and play cool games I didn't think I would like. Maybe also feel less guilty about the state of my gaming library.

With this new goal in mind, I continued my quest with renewed enthusiasm. If I didn't finish, it didn't matter. I could extend it to the end of the year; no one would hold me accountable anyways. I could also just remove some extra games, again, no one would hold me accountable. After my little reorganisation, the final number of games in the purge was still 110, the one I added from Marco balancing perfectly the ones I had removed. We were now in the middle of the first week of October. I only had to play 11 games over a bit less than 8 weeks (12 weeks if I extended it to the end of the year). Still challenging, but nothing too hard.

_{backlog spreadsheet around October}

The next week of October went fine, and I got through a couple of games. I then got the busiest and most stressful three weeks of the year and couldn't really play anything. It was a really fun cocktail of personal issues, travel, work, bank issues... Well, at least I can say I'm glad I sorted the whole “existential crisis over the backlog” out before that period. I would have 100% called it quits otherwise. In any case, just like any intense period, it came to pass. We were now in November, and I only had 6 games remaining. Granted, they were almost all 12h+ games, but even with only 3 weeks or so left in the project, I felt good. Again, I could add all the weeks of December to it anyways. I was so confident (and impatient) that I even started writing this and coding up the graphs (love you matplotlib <3). I was just enjoying my time with the project, which is exactly what I wanted.

After so much infortune, my luck finally turned and I got sick, right before the Remembrance Day weekend, giving me me a 5-day weekend to finish some games. This was a blessing (apart from the being sick part) and I managed to reduce my backlog to 2 games. And we were barely halfway through November. A couple of days later I crossed off the penultimate game, actually finishing it. I took a few days off to start working on this article, play other stuff, read, touch grass, live life... I then embarked on my last game, which was supposed to be 30h, 52h with side content. That last game was Assassin's Creed Origins, which was ass. After valiantly suffering through it for 5h30, I abandoned it and was done with the backlog. This was kind of anti-climactic, I would have loved to finish the backlog on a banger, where I sit in front of the credits after beating the game thinking “damn...”. But no, the last game was just boring slop, and I ended the backlog on a random Sunday afternoon. It reminded me of finishing my degree during covid.

Final tally: 110 games played, 758h devoted to the project, starting on December 3rd 2023 and ending Nov 17th 2024, after exactly 350 days.

_{Red line is games to play to stay on track. I replayed Sekiro (I blame Spencer and Vivian) and played a ton of Trackmania (I blame myself) in July hence the little drop}

The Data

The Games

First, let's get to know the data. I'm not sure why I didn't write this part in my first article, but it is a blessing in hindsight, as I swapped out some games and added others in the end. I won't bore you with too many stats, but still, prepare to be bored. I hope you like graphs.

Let's start with game genre; there were many different genres in this backlog, and even trying to make the categories as broad as possible, a fifth of all games were not able to fit in any major categories. Genres such as: investigation, tower defence, fighting games, racing games, dating sim, city builder... each represented at most <4% of the backlog. We can look at the spread of categories below:

If I was to concoct the most average game out of all the ones I have played, it would be a game starting with an S, that came out in 2017, is an action game, has a steam note of 89% and a metacritic score of 79. It would take someone 12.5h to finish the main story and 22h to finish it with all the side content. Believe it or not — out of all the games that came out in 2017 — this matches Sniper Elite 4 the best, which I played, so I guess it wins the “most average game of this backlog” award. In general, I played games from 2002-2024, with a steam rating from 64-99%, and a metacritic score from 60-97. To finish their main stories, the games took between 30min-60h and if I wanted to do the side content on top, it could go from 30min-114h. While most game's side content only added a couple of hours, some doubled or even septupled the duration of a game, which is insane. We can see such examples in the graph below, which shows the time to completion in orange, and the time to also do the side content in blue for each game. One bar is one game:

In total, if I had actually played all these games to completion, it would have taken me 1445h (or two months and 5h nonstop) and 2511h (or 3 months 14 days and 5h nonstop) if I had done the side content too! We've talked about how much time I devoted to the project above, but we'll talk about the time devoted to each game later. The time needed to finish a game — according to HowLongToBeat — did vary a lot, and we can see the distribution below.

As we can see, thankfully, most of the games I had to play were less than 10h long, and even with side content barely made it past 15h. I'm not gonna dwell on this graph for too long; it is not that relevant, as this is not the time it took for me to play the games, only the time they were supposed to take. Other than this, the hype and initial ratings of games were already discussed in the first article; whether or not a game was in the backlog depended on them. Let's jump to the results to see how many games I actually finished, and how much time I spent on games in general.

The Results

Since it would have taken me 1445h to finish every game, and I completed the backlog after 758h, it is reasonable to assume that I did not finish every game. The states of games' completion were:

• Finished which means I finished the campaign, and maybe played the side content too
• Abandoned, which means I played for a couple of hours, maybe did some side content, and stopped playing
• 1h-ed, which means I only played the game for the minimum 1h before abandoning it. This also counts games that were played for 1.5h granted this represented less than 50% of the campaign's duration. Games which campaign could and were completed in an hour are of course counted in the Finished category.
• NA (Not Applicable) means that there is no campaign or story to be completed

As we can see, I still finished almost 44% of the games in this backlog, which amounts to 48 games and is no small feat if I do say so myself (and I do). This is the largest category here, by almost 15%. On the other side of the spectrum, there is only 23 games — or about 21% of the backlog — that I played only for the minimum required duration. It is to be noted that the NA games that I only played for 1h are only counted here, and therefore the NA slice of the pie should be counted as either abandoned or finished (whatever the definition of finished might be). Speaking of Abandoned, they only represent the second-largest part of the pie, 29% or 32 games. Those games could have too frustrating to finish, maybe the story became bad, maybe a new mechanic breaks the gameplay... In any case, they were good enough for me to play more than the required amount, but not good enough for me to see them through the end. I am especially proud of those first two stats, since having a backlog where I only play 1 hour of each game and then go on to the next would have been a shame. I was serious about this and finished almost half of all the games — if we discount the ones that were NA. I took the time to enjoy the games in this backlog, and we will see below how much time games took me:

Look at those graphs, the first being so detailed it's almost useless, and the second one so broad it also almost useless, yet both are saying the same thing. The worst of both worlds — true perfection. The top graph shows how many games were played for each playtime, in increments of 30min. For instance, we can see that 8 games had a total playtime of 6h. There is a major peak at 1h and some minor ones at 6h, 10h and 18h. The second graph shows percentage of games per playtime ranges. Almost all games — 95.5%— were played for 1h to 19h. As one might expect, the majority of the games were played between 1-3.5h. Still, almost half of all games were played for more than 4h and a quarter for 7h or more. Those graph show that I did take my time on the games that deserved it, as I had planned for this project. I will say it again: at the end of the day, the goal was just to play through the game I already own, and have fun with it. If only there was a way to quantify how much I enjoyed myself... oh yeah, more graphs baby:

After so many graphs, finally a nice Gaussian distribution. Here, we are shown how many games I rated a specific grade. As we can see, the games in this backlog were rated pretty highly. Again, that is to be expected as this backlog is composed of 110 games picked out from the cream of the crop of the 172 games I own and have never played. Now, this means nothing if I don't explain what my rating consists in.

• 0/10 would be a game that I could not derive any fun from
• 2/10 there is very little interesting and very little fun
• 5/10 is slop and adequate but no more in any category/has one category really holding it back
• 10/10 fulfills all of my expectation for various criteria, and also is a ton of fun
• 11/10 exceeds all expectation, messiah of the backlog

The ratings were only integers, with a couple of exceptions for games that were better than a 10, but not quite an 11. Also, Prey got a non-round rating. These are of course not objective ratings, but *my* ratings, which are heavily influenced by my tastes. If you are somehow deluding yourself into thinking those ratings might actually hold some weight other than the ranking of my taste, and need convincing that my rating scale is bad, please consider that I gave Mass Effect 2 and Dead Space 2 a 4/10 and Batman Arkham City a 5/10 while the Frog Detective Trilogy gets 10/10s across the board. The ratings are also not really internally consistent. Deal with it.

I was not a harsh critique in general, and my ratings are globally generous. While I might have gone off on some games in their review section, I'm sure they deserved it. Maybe I was set off by how wrong my expectations were. We'll see that right now with the next graph, comparing my “hype” to play the games, which I recorded before playing the games, with the ratings I gave after playing them:

Those graphs are the result of doing a simple subtraction between the hype and the rating. Any positive value means that I found the game to be better than I though, a negative value is the opposite. We see that a difference of 0, i.e. the hype being the same as the rating, is prevalent here by quite a huge margin. This is probably due to the anchoring effect — when it was time to grade the games, I probably looked at the hype and thought the number I previously gave the game made sense. The first graph shows that there is a skew towards the positive, which is great as this indicates that in general, I enjoyed the games better than I thought I would. This was a reoccurring theme during this backlog, and I originally thought I was a bit picky when it came to video games, but no. There are just some bangers out there that I just hadn't tried out.

Can't really tell a lot from the second graph, but I made it because it looks cool; each bar, either blue or red, represents a game. The average hype was a 6.53/10 and the average rating a 6.92/10. To recap, 31 games were below expectations, 29 met them, and 51 surpassed them. Of the games that exceeded expectation, some have cracked the top 3. We will take a look at them next.

Top 3 Best Games :

I've played so many games, it would be a shame not to talk about any here; this project was about them, after all. I will keep it to a short list, and only include good games, as I want to bring some positivity into this article. I also remember good games way better than the bad ones; those have been erased from my memory. In this article, which is already long enough, we'll only take a look at the top 5% of games.

Honourable Mentions

First, let's start with some honorable mentions, which are at the top end of my 10/10, in no particular order:

MOLEK-SYNTEZ a great puzzle game about fabricating molecules. It's not only about succeeding, but also efficiency and economy of movement.

SLAY THE SPIRE hands down the best rogue-like I've played. The card system works so well and there is just the right amount of content and challenge.

SUNDERED soft metroidvania that took me by surprise. It is peaceful and claustrophobic, beautiful and depressing. Visuals are incredible (and hand drawn!) and the atmosphere is truly unique.

STILL THERE not exactly a point and click (thank god) and not exactly a puzzle game. The story and twist are what caught me off-guard, because they're so great. Just the right length.

The Top 3

Those games are not at the top end of my 10/10 scale — they have exceeded it. They are the 11/10.

3 – Celeste

Celeste, developed by Maddy Makes Games, is a game that has been heavily hyped on the internets, and I was worried it would not live up to its name. I shouldn't have been, because despite my high expectations this game still managed to surprise me with how good it is. I am not an avid enjoyed of platformers, I don't dislike them either, but this one hits just right. The controls are very responsive, and the gameplay mechanics dialed in. It was a true pleasure to navigate the levels, and it was impossible to get frustrated — especially since the game autosaves each panel and the respawn is fast — and that's coming from the guy who died about 1530 times in his playthrough. The level design compliments the controls and game mechanics perfectly. I really liked how there was a new gameplay mechanic for each chapter, but that didn't carry on to the others. There was no need to remember many things at once, just the basics and the specific gameplay gimmick of the chapter. It also kept things fresh. The design theme changed with each chapter, adding to the novelty. But these are not just disjointed chapters, there is a global story which is intertwined in the platforming and progresses with each chapter. The story is great — with some originality and gravitas — the characters are endearing and the progression of the protagonist is interesting.

Coming back to the design, the graphics are great and all the little effects, particle effects... are a welcome addition that only made the experience better. But honestly what steals the show here is the music, it is just incredible, I loved it. Moving through the panels, with this ambience, the music, it was just awesome, the vibes were always immaculate. The game is also the perfect length, and with it being divided up in distinct chapters, I never got tired of playing.

Would I recommend this game to anyone? Pretty much. Unless your hand/eye coordination is atrocious, you should be able to enjoy this game. It is the most accessible one of this top 3, despite its difficulty being the second highest here. I'm not saying it is not challenging, it definitely is, but it is a challenge you can surely overcome.

2- Disco Elysium

Speaking of video games not being accessible, we have Disco Elysium from the now infamous ZA/UM. If you really don't like politics, sociology, philosophy and big-words in general, this game is not for you. If you don't like reading, this game is not for you. If you don't like classic RPGs without combat, this game is not for you. Otherwise, it's awesome. Liem strongly recommended this game to me, so I waited until I was on vacation to play it, to have time to be fully immersed.

While the gameplay is good, it is really the writing and the visuals that upstage everything. I already spoke about the visuals in my September Readings when I talked about the artbook of this game. I will expand about the writing and story here, if you want to read about and see the visuals, checkout the reading report. The world and story go hand in hand, and it's great. The world and universe are truly unique, and it sucks in a realistic way. Its inhabitants react to you in a believable manner, and you can actually influence things. There are many choices to be made here, and even the most inconsequential ones will have a dialog option associated to them down the line. While your character is a bit coo-coo and it makes sense for player to choose his opinions, the NPCs have their own dialog, consistent with their character experiences and beliefs. The characters are all great, especially your partner Kim Kitsuragi. Each one of the facets of your identity is also a character, and they are all unique and have very “colourful” personalities to say the least. The way you interact with the world is also through them, which makes the gameplay really interesting. That's the part that I like the most, the interaction between our character and himself and our character and Kim. While you as the player have no idea of what's going on most of the time, Kim is there to provide useful info and feedback, but he never holds your hand (if only...). Kim is the best sidekick I have ever seen in a video game, and actually feels like a companion rather than an NPC. Your identities are also here to give you feedback, that is tainted by what they are — for instance drama's observation might be a little more exciting than reality — and whether you can trust them or not (which is kinda trusting yourself) is for you to decide. Other than the writing, the voice acting, which was mostly added in the free final cut version, is phenomenal. Everything adds to the atmosphere, which is superb.

​

Finally, the writing for your character, your thoughts, your own dialog is so well done, and there was more than one occasion where I was laughing like and idiot at my screen. The story is half an investigation, and half a personal journey, and is coherent and original. I try to keep all of my reviews as spoiler free as I can, so there is not much more that I can say, other than: play it for yourself.

1- Darkwood

With Darkwood, from indie studio Acid Wizard, being my number one pick out of all 110 games I played this year, I didn't know how to approach its review. There is absolutely nothing I can say that would even approach giving you an idea of how incredible this game is. I played it all the way at the beginning of the backlog, in January, but it is still to this day always on my mind. It just stuck to me and is that memorable. This was the 11.5/10 game of the backlog, meaning I didn't know games could be that good.

It originally didn't dawn on me how good this game is, because I abandoned it after 2h. The game is divided into a night and day cycle, you forage and progress the story during the day, and at night, you try to survive. Those nights are the most stressful things I have ever experienced in a video game, and I've played a bunch of horror games. No cheap tricks here, due to intentional gameplay limitations — it's top down, you cannot see outside your cone of vision and your vision is only focused on where your cursor is — you'll be tensed up the whole night from being so on guard. You are confined to your hideout during the night, a dilapidated house full of unfixable holes which can be plugged with furniture, but enemies will push it out of the way to get in. You cannot survive without light and of course light attract enemies; they will get in or at least try to. When? Who knows, but you better be on high alert for all 5min of the night because you have very little health, and your weapon will break at some point. There are random events making the whole thing even more difficult and stressful because it wouldn't be fun otherwise. You also have limited lives before game over, except on the easiest difficulty. The sound design and ambience in general is so well done; before getting desensitised I felt like I was on the verge of an aneurysm every night. This is the reason I initially abandoned it — it was good, but it was so tense I forgot to breathe, waiting for the morning light. Yet despite this, after sleeping on it, I decided to push on. And I'm glad I did.

I loved the ambience, from the game design, the story, characters, the graphics, the music, sound design... everything is so alien but coherent. It is just a different experience. The gameplay loop is well oiled, but it is the story and atmosphere that really bring this game together. The setting is so simple in a way but original. I love that it doesn't hold your hand, so at some points in the very disjointed story you just stumble by accident on some stuff, and the progression just feels so organic. I will not speak anymore about this game, the only true way to really experience how great it is is to play it.

Aparte

This last part, the Top 3, used to lead straight to the conclusion. I had finished writing all of this article. I had done the graphs, inserted them, created the gifs that needed to be created... The first draft was 100% complete, and apart from checking for spelling mistakes or grammar errors, I could have published it. I was about to get a final word count and do some advertising on the café before releasing it. Someone had other plans for me, and the article could not be finished, not before I touched on what someone had released:

MOTHERFU-

Unbeknownst to me, Daryl Talks Games was also secretly doing a backlog this year and released a video about it. My project came about as a direct inspiration from his first two videos, I therefore cannot end this article without mentioning his third backlog one. Let's preface this conversation by saying that his video is great, as usual, and I would encourage you to check his work out. I'm actually not mad he put out his video, and it was really fun seeing the parallels between our projects. I was trying to complete my backlog learning from his mistakes, but then he was also playing though his backlog, learning from his mistakes! I especially liked that his video was really focused on games rather than his progress this time, it was a nice change. It is also interesting to see that we have reached the same conclusion in the end (see my conclusion); the “backlog” needs to be a dynamic list of games you play, and not just a list of games you are planning on playing. _{he's just like me fr fr}

Conclusion

What did I get out of it

First, having a year-long project is sick. I can't remember the last time I had a project like that, or if I ever had one. Devoting hours to it and progressing despite the hurdles, actually sticking to it, feels great. I am proud of myself for completing this project, especially since it was completely autonomous. Now, completing the project brought me pride, but did completing this backlog bring me anything? Not really. Playing the games brought me much joy, but at the end of the day, actually finishing this backlog didn't feel like anything. There are more games that didn't make the cut to this backlog, would finishing them bring me the joy completing this backlog was supposed to bring me? Probably not. Putting my steam library in order is nice, but I did that all the way at the beginning of the project. It will sound corny as shit, but it was about the journey, not the destination.

In the end, this backlog was not the backlog; there will always be more games to be added to a fabled backlog, that can't ever kept up with, as it is ever growing.

But what I did get out of this backlog is a rekindled love for video games. There is genuinely so much good stuff out there. You often hear takes about how today's games are ass, and gaming has gone to the shitter, but this is simply not true. Just of the games that came out this year, there is a plethora of amazing games or DLCs. And you don't need to play games from this year, you are allowed to pick a game from previous years and enjoy it in the year of our lord 2024. And you can also play games that are not AAAs; the overwhelming majority of games that I rated 9 or higher were indie games. For every decent triple AAA, there are at least 2 indie bangers that came out the same year. My point is: do not limit yourself in what you're allowing yourself to play, and you'll see that maybe gaming is still fun.

I've played more games, and also have spent more time playing games, than I ever have this year and I love video games more than ever.

What's left? What's next?

Will I ever have time to do something like that again? Will there ever be a “Nail in the coffin: Humble Purge Act III”? I am now at a relatively chill time in my life: I have a decently paying regular full-time job, and am married. I'm not a dad, building a business, performing in a band, studying... I have more time on my hands now than I will probably have in the coming years. I would love to do the Humble Purge Act III in a couple of years, where I go through the games that didn't make the cut for this year's backlog, but will I have time?

I want to enjoy being done backlog, and am not ready to go head first into a big project like that again. I want to take some time for myself, I want to read more, I want to cook more, I want to go to the gym and start playing bass again. No big project for next year, I will just be writing articles about this project, to better digest it. There is so much I've only barely touched on here that would deserve its own articles.

In any case, I will start journaling all the games I play next year. In substance, it will have just the same info that I recorded in the backlog — hype, time to beat, rating, review etc — but for games I pick up on the fly rather than for a list of games set in stone. This might actually be the better alternative to having a backlog. I will probably release some articles for it, maybe monthly in addition to my Monthly Readings or just do a quarterly article; I have time to figure it out. In the meantime, I hope you have enjoyed reading about my project, and as always:

Thanks for reading my logorrhea, Eddie

In recent years, I've become enamored with voluntary, participatory violence. Big talk for someone who spends eight hours a day on the computer, but hey – I'm a deep believer in self expression, and what greater form of expression is there than that performed by the body itself? (Similar arguments can be made for other forms of expression, of course. And that’s art!)

When I say that I've become enamored with “violence”, I mean, um, violence. The turbulent jostle of hundreds of bodies: all sweaty, though not all are sweating. The flight of elbows and full body tackles, executed in the name of mutual love. Love: love for the music of the moment, audible through decorations of SCREAMED OFF-TUNE LYRICS from the liquid crowd. Lyrics; coupled with pirouettes, line dancing, rowing, circles of running concertgoers, or maybe just a great amount of collision. When I say that I’ve become enamored with “violence”, I’m saying that I fucking love the mosh pit.

Pits are primal. In the anonymity of a crowd, I can let go of inhibition. I happily relinquish my identity, succumbing to the flow of others. As my neighbors jump and shove, the futility in any kind of resistance emerges. I revert to operating on half survival instinct, half pure electricity of the moment. Limbs revel; eyes open and close as the rest of this body collides with other bodies. A brawl between no opponents. Everybody wins.

At what other moments in life do you ever get to engage so freely in movement? Sports are limited by rules. Martial arts require control and refinement; dance can feel bound by social rules. Violent activity only surfaces in the everyday as remote situations of fear, anger, or extreme excitement; and how often does the average person experience these emotions? Not often. (Ideally.)

But in the pit, savagery is everywhere. And so the pit becomes a special place. A butcher's block, designed to reduce you to your animalism.

Animalism. Our roots. Each concert I attend convinces me that the most humanly valuable experiences are those that evoke any kind of animalistic primality out of us, because they are freeing.

I do not live freely. I find that I have walked much of life guided by inhibitions and fears of mistakes, harm, and pain. Worried of displeasing others, I would constantly prune my behavior and words, holing myself further into a tunnel of a character to meet some sort of model me that never needed to exist. In my day-to-day life, this causes suffering. I wish to live authentically.

In the pit, though, nobody cares about whether or not I am seemingly intelligent, charming, agreeable, insightful, or me. I can let go and be, and I do so knowing everyone around me will accept me with unconditional love. At the end of the day, that’s the pit. A rippling body of love.

I recently found myself at an IDLES show, an elbow slamming into my chin as I tried to sing the same song as my unintentional assailant. As the welcome impact subsided, I noticed the joy around me, and realized that I desperately wanted this same relentless harmony in my everyday life. I want to show myself and be accepted for that, leaving no room for hesitance towards pain. I want the me in the pit to be outside of the pit too. I want her to be unafraid as she collides with others and as others clash with her.

I want to love freely. After all, what else do I have?

October

This month I read 5 ebooks and 3 physical books from the Toronto Public Library, and 1 audiobook, totaling to 8 books.

Horrorstor

Synopsis: Everyone knows Orsk, your friendly nordic furniture store. But at the Orsk Cuyahoga store, weird things have been happening overnight. Mirrors are breaking, furniture is getting stained with unspeakable substances. Store Manager Basil thinks that vandals must be breaking into the store at night, and recruits Amy and Ruth Anne to work and overnight shift with him to see if they can catch the vandals before Pat from the regional office arrives the next morning. Ruth Anne is delighted to help out; she’s been working for Orsk for her whole career, and lives and breathes it. Amy, on the other hand, is not so happy about it. But Basil has offered to pay overtime and approve her transfer to the Youngstown store, so it’s an offer that she can’t really refuse. Will this unlikely group of employees survive their night in the store? Or will this job kill them all?

My thoughts: I thought this was a pretty well done horror satire about working for a corporation. The author really leaned in to the Ikea aesthetic, and each chapter started with an entry for a piece of furniture in the Orsk catalogue. Major spoilers ahead, but the store was actually built on the site of a destroyed panopticon prison, and was haunted by the prison warden that was obsessed with the idea that hard labour cures all ills. And still, the actual villain ended up being the Orsk corporate office. If you are employed, this book will make you want to quit your job. I did genuinely find the book very unsettling (readers will know that I don’t even really like horror media, so I probably shouldn’t have read this at all). Something else I appreciated was that Amy actually showed a lot of character development. Some of this was definitely because she started out as a shitty person, but I still give the author credit for actually having her meaningfully change.

Rating: 4/5 stylish BODAVEST chairs, that will confine the penitent and oppose the agitated movement of blood towards the brain, forcing the subject into a state of total immobility, conducive to self-reflection and free of stressful outside stimuli

Changes by Jim Butcher (Dresden Files #12)

Synopsis: Harry Dresden’s life has changed forever in an instance. His ex-girlfriend and half-vampire Susan Rodriguez has come back into his life after years apart, and she has two devastating pieces of news. Firstly, she and Harry have a child together. A daughter, who’s name is Maggie (after Harry’s mom). (Concealing this fact alone is enough to make Harry rage with anger.) And secondly, Maggie has been kidnapped by Dutches Ariana Ortega of the Red Court of Vampires, and will be used as a blood sacrifice if Harry and Susan can’t rescue her in time. Now, Harry is apoplectic. Even though he’s just now learned of her existence, Harry is determined to save Maggie’s life. It will take every single favour, ally, artifact, and ounce of luck that he can get his hands on. But is he prepared to pay the price?

My thoughts: I think “Changes” is an extremely accurate title to describe this book. Even the fact that it’s one word, compared to every other two-word title, helps to set it apart from the rest of the series. Over the course of this book, Harry loses everything. His car is destroyed, his apartment and laboratory burned down, and he breaks his back (rendering him paralyzed). He is in a truly desperate situation, and sacrifices everything in order to even have a chance at saving Maggie. Karrin Murphy also loses her job for good, finally severing her link to the Chicago Police Department, and I’m very curious as to where she’ll go now. There are also a lot of consequences to his actions, most of which are not even fully realized until the next book. The one exception to this was the magic wayfinding stone that Harry received as a belated gift from his mother, which helps him navigate passages in the Way and effectively allows him to arrive anywhere. It’s described as being very dangerous, and that Harry has to accept all of the risks if he chooses to accept it, although none of the risks ever materialize in this book or the next one.

Rating: 4/5 dream teams known simply as “the eebs”

Sweet Sweet Revenge LTD by Jonas Jonasson

Synopsis: Victor Alderheim cares only about one thing. Not his wife, Jenny, from whom he swindled millions of dollars and her family’s art gallery. Not his teenaged son, Kevin, whom he abandoned in the middle of the Kenyan savannah. He only cares about his gallery, and making sure that the right kind of art (realism) gets featured there. But after growing into a mostly-fledged Masaai warrior, Kevin returns to Stockholm and crosses paths with Jenny. After discovering that they’ve both been wronged by the same man, they become fast friends. They desperately want to take revenge on Victor, but how can they with only 20 kroner to their names? Luckily, they run into Hugo, adman and CEO of Sweet Sweet Revenge LTD, a boutique firm that promises to ruin lives for the right price. And to top it all off, Kevin’s adopted father, full-fledged Masaai warrior Ole Mbatian leaves Keny for the first time ever in search of his son. Will this dubious quartet pull off SSR LTD’s biggest job yet? Or will it end up exploding in their faces.

My thoughts: The events of the book were extremely goofy and silly, but the dry/dark comedy writing style helped a bit to tamp down everything so that it didn’t feel too obnoxious. Even still, it was definitely a lot to take in. I think I would have enjoyed it more if my sense of humor was a bit more open and accepting. By far the best character was Ole Mbatian, who was funny and charmingly optimistic. Victor, on the other hand, was cartoonishly evil in a boring way. Overall this book is definitely difficult to describe, and I would encourage readers to try it for themselves to really get a sense of what the heck is going on.

Rating: 3/5 salmon pate sandwiches that are honestly worth any deal you could make with the devil

A Gentleman and a Thief: The Daring Jewel Heists of a Jazz Age Rogue by Dean Jobb

Synopsis: In the 1920s and 30s, one of the greatest jewel thieves in American history was on the loose. He captured the imaginations of thousands all while he snuck into mansions and estates, prowling around silently, and making off with thousands of dollars worth of gold and jewelry. His name was Arthur Barry, and he was the best of the best. When he was finally captured after being set up by his partner in crime, he immediately confessed so that his wife, Anna Blake, would not go to prison. And when Anna Blake was dying, he broke out of prison so that they could spend their last years together.

My thoughts: Readers will know that I love a heist, and I thought this book was a fascinating look into Arthur Barry’s life and crimes. It’s a work of narrative nonfiction, so it was extremely easy to read, while still being packed full of accurate historical detail. I thought it was really well researched and put together, and would definitely highly recommend it to anyone who’s into true crime but wants something a little lighter.

Rating: 5/5 strings of rose pearls that scratch your teeth and are worth millions of dollars

Anxious People by Fredrik Backman

Synopsis: After attempting to rob a cashless bank days before Christmas, the robber flees into an empty apartment to hide from police. Except, it’s not empty: a real estate agent is showing the property to 8 prospective buyers. There’s Ro and Julia, a young couple who are nervous about becoming first time moms. Zara, a wealthy bank manager who tours apartments to see how the middle class live. Anna-Lena and Roger, an older couple who flip apartments and are very competitive, and Lennert, an actor who Anna-Lena has hired to bring down the property’s value. And Estelle, whose husband is just parking the car and will be here momentarily. They (plus the real estate agent) have all been taken hostage by the bank robber, who is trying desperately to figure out their next move. On the other side of the door are two police officers, reluctant father and son team Jim and Jack, who are out of their depth and struggling to keep the situation from spiraling out of control. But is that what’s really going on?

My thoughts: I hate to admit it but I did read this book because I saw it all over the internet. It was a booktok darling, but I do think that it was worth the hype. I still went into it pretty blind, but it was not the thriller I was expecting. Instead it was like sitting in a very good therapist’s office; cozy and comfortable, emotional, probing, and soul-searching. And eventually, after peeling back the layers, you finally discover what’s really going on. The book has a big focus on anxiety, depression, and loneliness, but there was still enough going on to drive the plot forward without getting bogged down. I also liked that the unreliable narrator wasn’t crazy or trying to protect themselves, but was instead misconstruing things to protect someone else, which I found new and interesting. Similarly, I liked that the book unraveled a mystery (how the bank robber escaped) that wasn’t a murder. Overall, I think that this is what I was hoping for when I read Sweet Sweet Revenge LTD, but Anxious People actually accomplished it.

Rating: ⅘ dead bodies filled with so much gin and tonic that you don’t dare cremate them (although that doesn’t mean they didn’t have good advice to offer)

The Assassination of Fred Hampton: How the FBI and the Chicago Police Murdered a Black Panther by Jeffery Haas

Synopsis: In 1969, Fred Hampton was a revolutionary leader, and Chairman of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party. At only 21 years old, the FBI considered him a major threat and started surveilling and discrediting both Hampton and the Black Panthers as part of their COINTELPRO operation. On December 4th, 1969, the Chicago Police, working in tandem with the FBI, raided Fred’s home and shot him while he was drugged and unconscious in bed. The book is written by Fred’s lawyer Jeffery Haas, and chronicles his 12-year journey with the People’s Law Office in an attempt to gain justice for Fred’s family and the other survivors of the raid.

My thoughts: This book was really comprehensive and well written, and painted a pretty horrifying picture of how Black people were treated by police and the justice system both in the 1960s and today. Judge Sam Perry was particularly egregious, constantly ruling against Haas even when it was nonsensical to do so, and actively impairing their progress and ability to try the case. It was also insane that despite these giant court cases, and the settlements that the families eventually got, that the FBI and the Chicago Police still basically got away with murder. The only real consequence that any of the defendants ever experienced was not getting re-elected, which is overall very minor compared to how Fred was brutally murdered. He didn’t love long enough to see the birth of his son, and without him, the Black Panther movement crumbled. If Fred hadn’t been assassinated (especially at such a young age), I think that the future would have been noticeably different with him in it. I’m really glad that I got to read this with our book club, because it helped me engage with the text on a deeper level, and notice things that I had previously missed.

Rating: 4/5 perfect homecooked meals by Iberia Hampton

Eight Perfect Murders by Peter Swanson

Synopsis: Malcolm Kershaw owns a mysteries-only bookstore in Boston. Years ago, when he was just starting out, he wrote a blog post about eight perfect murders in crime fiction. It was just a little something for the bookstore’s blog, hoping that it was help increase sales. But now, years later, FBI Agent Gwen Mulvey thinks that someone is using that article as inspiration to commit a series of perfect murders in real life. She’s determined to get Malcolm, the resident subject-matter expert for crime fiction, to advise her in order to catch the murderer. Malcolm reluctantly agrees, but when the victims seem to be getting closer and closer to his personal life, it seems that he may be in way over his head. [The Eight Perfect Murders are: The Red House, Malice Aforethought, the ABC Murders, Double Indemnity, Strangers on a Train, The Drowner, Deathtrap, and The Secret History]

My thoughts: I feel like the concept for this book was really cool, but the execution was not great. I was not at all convinced that the unsolved murders were connected to each other or the eight perfect murders for the first third of the book, which is definitely too long. I would have preferred the irl murders to be a lot closer to their fictional counterparts. I also was pretty doubtful when Mal started getting paranoid that the murderer was coming after him/his loved ones. Not everything has to revolve around him (although he actually did end up being the center of everything, for an unexpected reason). My final problem (readers will know that’s an allusion to a Sherlock Holmes story) with Mal was when he revealed that he might have done some things in a dream/suppressed his memory of doing them. I think the allusion to The Murder of Roger Ackroyd was cool, but c’mon, you can’t just say “i thought i was dreaming but turns out it happened irl” and expect to get away with it. There are plenty of other ways to conceal something from the reader without being so outlandish (like, for example, just lying). The Gwen plotline felt super rushed. I thought that her suspension from active FBI service would actually go somewhere but she just was sidelined until the end of the book, when Mal confessed everything to her over a phone call. He claims that this would be enough evidence to prove to the FBI that her theory was right, but an unrecorded phone call would prove absolutely nothing and only serve to be for dramatic effect.

Rating: 3/5 pet cats that you adopted from the scene of the crime

The Stars Too Fondly by Emily Hamilton

Synopsis: In the year 2041, humanity’s last hope was a spaceship called the Providence I. It was manned by the world’s best, with a goal of flying out to Proxima Century B and starting a new civilization on a goldilocks planet. Cleo grew up obsessed with the Providence mission, especially Captain Wilhelmina (Billie) Lucas. But on the day of the launch, the moment that the dark matter engines were powered up, the entire crew simply vanished. Humanity never recovered, and the Providence remained on Earth. Now, in 2061, an adult Cleo and her friends are determined to explore the Providence and see if they can solve the mystery of the crew’s disappearance. But while on board, they accidentally power on the engines, and get launched into space. They’re trapped on the ship, with only a hologram of Captain Lucas to guide them. Can they figure out what happened to the old crew? And what will happen when they start reacting strangely to the dark matter engines?

My thoughts: despite this being intended as an adult sci-fi novel, it was incredibly YA-core. The writing style and the actions of the characters felt pretty immature, considering that Cleo and her friends were supposed to be 29 years old. The voice of the novel also felt very targeted to a teen audience, and I was genuinely confused as to what age group the book was really written for. It was also not very science-y for a science fiction book, and I usually read sci-fi books because I am craving some hard science. I don’t think that just any book set in space/on a spaceship should get to call itself science fiction without actually embodying the principles of science fiction. This book ended up being more a teen romance between Cleo and the hologram of Billie. I thought it was a little odd that there was basically a love triangle between Cleo and holo Billie and real Billie (each Billie thought that Cleo would choose the other Billie over her). I’m glad that it was resolved, but at the same time felt that it was resolved a little too neatly.

Rating: 3/5 3D printers that can cook up (literally) whatever your heart desires.

What We See When We Read by Peter Mendelsund

Synopsis: In this book, Peter Mendelsund explores what we see when we read, and our misconceptions about our own minds’ eye.

My thoughts: I’ve been on an odyssey to read this book for seven months. As readers will know, I am hypophantasic, and rarely, if ever imagine things in my head when I read. (For those asking, yes, I just focus on the words, and the descriptions of what’s going on are more than enough for me.) I thought it would be interesting to understand how other people experience reading, so I figured this book would be perfect. The book itself played around with a lot of images, and interesting layouts for text. However, I really struggled with this book. The main thesis was that the images we imagine are made up, and often extrapolated from few details in the text. Mendelsund treated this like it was a revolutionary observation, but to me it seems pretty obvious? If something is not being exhaustively described, but you imagine it fully, then you have to be making up some of it in order to get a complete picture. He acted as though this was a controversial statement that would upset readers if pointed out to them. I also found Mendelsund was very prescriptive, eventually to the point of irritation. He didn’t really leave room for any interpretations or experiences other than his own. I also found the tone overall to be pretty pretentious. So no, I did not enjoy this book, and I’m perfectly happy to live in my words-only, pictureless world.

Rating: 2/5 mental images of Anna Karenina (even though you don’t actually know what she looks like)

I WAS SO BUSY THIS MONTH AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

The Assassination of Fred Hampton – Jeffrey Haas

I was not expecting the angle to be: following the lawyer trying to bring justice to the murderers. I was kinda puzzled when Fred Hampton was killed, and we were only 10% though the book. Despite my surprise, this was a very effective way to show how the system was stacked against black people, and people trying to even nudge the racial status quo in the US.

Man, it was so depressing to see what the FBI and police got away with. Every time I thought it couldn't get worse, it just got worse. In the end, even if Jeff and associates won the case, it barely made a difference after almost a decade and a half.

The book was well written, but there were some times when the author was just name-dropping for 4 pages, and then acronym dropping... Not the most riveting, but you gotta put the context somewhere. I am incredibly ignorant about the justice system in the US, but it looks like an absolute joke. How in the hell do judges have so much power?!

It's also wild to see how different people/society was back then, and it only amplifies the common modern adage: “Nothing ever fucking happens [anymore]“.

Howling Dark – Christopher Ruocchio

My man Hadrian has had a lot of stuff happening to him. He and his pals are looking for something, but everyone in the empire knows this thing as a myth. Will he manage to find his holy-grail or will finding it even help him at all?

I still can't get into it. I have started this book and then let it sit on my nightstand for two weeks, without ever wanting to pick it back up. I know that means I should probably give up, but the story is good, it just doesn't click. We still have the Dune easter eggs, which are everything but subtle, like the adage from his mentor: Fear is the mind killer a poison. All of my praise from book 1 stand here.

Hunter X Hunter – Yoshihiro Togashi

Chapter 51 – 95

All of my objections and criticism should be void/resolved with those chapters according to the Hunter fans. Let's review a tldr from my criticism of chapters 1-50:

• Killua and Gon are unnecessarily strong, and we don't know who or why. It makes it boring.
• Secondary/tertiary characters are here only to marvel at their strength.
• Some situations make no sense and are only there to showcase how strong Gon and Killua are.
• World building is completely destroyed just to show how strong and special those two kids are (the hardest exam know to man: it feels easy to two 11 years old, they even find it boring. The tower of doom and death, where only the strongest of the strongest come to duke it out: Killua climbed it when he was 6 years old.)

Does what happens in chapters 51-95 confirm the points above?

Point 1 and 4: Gon heals life-threatening injuries in one month, when the doc said it would take 4. Gon and Killua learn Gyo (a technique that takes years to master and yadi yadi yada) in less than a day. Killua can withstand one million volts. Killua has survived life-threatening situations since he was 3. I think my arguments still stand.

Point 2: We are introduced to more people, that actually matter in the story, and while there are still people on there to marvel at the kids' strength, we have other interesting characters (both protagonists and antagonists). This argument is invalidated

Point 3: There is nothing that I can remember that is even 10% as stupid as the weight incremented doors this time, so I'll say the argument is invalidated.

Half of my critiques of chapters 1-50 are thankfully not valid here, but my main complaints, point 1 and 4 still are. We will talk about it more later.

Some random notes: wtf, aura and nen is recorded by camera and computer code?! I hope it doesn't become like Hamon and stands in JoJo part 3 where, they could do everything. York New... really? Kurapika is a dude?! Wait, unlike One Piece, it actually gets good?!

You've heard correctly ladies and gentlemen, it gets good. When the POV shifted to Kurapika, I thought I was in for a snoozefest. She He barely had any development, and his red eyes just looked so gimmicky, like it was only there to get all the kids to think he's cool. I was thoroughly mistaken. Even the artstyle kinda changes and we get some great looking panels. The character building of the troupe and the fucking fight against the mafia's “super-strong” goons were awesome. We finally get characters that are stronger than the two 11-year-olds we've been following. And when it's time for Kurapika to fight the super strong guy, he prevails, but not because he's naturally gifted, or because he went to the locker room for 5min to practice and master a technique that takes 6 decades to even grasp. No, he's strong to begin with, but he would have gotten steam rolled, if not for the super particular technique with a specific sets of condition that would literally kill him if he misused it. Now that is an interesting protagonist, he's OP but only under a certain set of circumstances, namely against the troupe. Kurapika made it even clearer how flawed the kids' writing is.

I don't understand why the kids are made out to be so strong, even when it doesn't matter. And then why they have to be so nonchalant about the literal godly feat they perform. And why the hardest/strongest [insert event/person] known to man is beaten easily by a 6-year-old or 11 years old that are just naturally gifted, with minimal training — it just completely ruins the immersion and worldbuilding. What's the point? Why do the kids need to be so god-damn strong for no reason, they could have had a flaw or just be toned down, and the story would have been the same (but better imo). Technically, there are still about 25 chapters I need to read through that will completely alleviate my criticism (I hope).

PS: Announcing you got a kid in your manga; based.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

Thanks for reading my logorrhea, Eddie