The following story appeared to me, entirely formed, in a dream I had on the 3rd of May, 2026

That which I am about to now tell you occurred 50 years ago in the summer of 1926. I hope that you will show grace to an old man and not think too little of me, even though I may appear in this story a coward and a murderer. I reveal this to you in writing now, as I have neither the stomach to speak it to your face nor did I have it in me to reveal it earlier. I hope that as I lay dying, writing this to you will lift this burden on my conscience and I may die sanctified and worthy of heaven.

It was a balmy July day in Toronto when my friend and business partner Thomas informed me that he had purchased a cottage in a secluded area along the shore of lake Muskoka. Like so many others, we had made a killing betting on the Toronto Stock Exchange that year and Thomas was determined to enjoy that wealth while he had it. The cottage, he told me, was an old residence that the previous owner had inherited and wanted nothing to do with. The cottage – he was told – had become too remote on account of the nearby beach being removed from the restored route of the passenger ship RMS Segwun, and the new owner had no good memories of the place anyhow.

Thomas invited me up on account of my new Ford. He planned for us to have the car shipped up to Gravenhurst on a freight train as we arrived simultaneously by passenger car. We'd then drive it from the town into the bush, where he assured me dirt trails had been cleared, at which point we'd arrive at the cottage and spend a week there in relaxation. I assented to the plan as I was eager to both drive my new car and to spend a week away from the city.

It turned out getting the Ford on the train was expensive, but we had money to spend, and we rode the way up in first class. The train ride was pleasant, as the Northern Railway always was in those days, and we dined, smoked, and played cards with refined gentlemen all the way up to the lake. Disembarking, we bid farewell to our fellow riders, made empty promises to look them up on such and such day and have tea at such and such restaurant in Toronto, collected our vehicle, loaded it up at the general store, and puttered into the Muskoka woods.

It took several bug-bitten hours to arrive at the cottage, the Model T getting stuck in the trail multiple times and needing to be pushed. Nonetheless, we made it before night, and the cottage finally came into view as the sun was setting. The view in that moment of the orange and pink sky over the blue water was beautiful, and the cottage itself was a handsome cabin made of logs mortared together with a white infill of some kind. A wooden staircase wound down the face of a short cliff to a dock below, at which was tied up a pair of sport canoes. Eager to rest after a day of travel, we unloaded our supplies, supped, and laid down to sleep.

The first day was pleasant. Rashers for breakfast at dawn, a quick dive into the lake, and some fishing. We decided to canoe before lunch and explore the sheltered bay the cottage was nestled in. As we pulled the oars, we drifted along the base of the short granite cliff Thomas' cottage sat upon which slowly melted into a beach with a neglected dock jutting from it, presumably the old passenger harbour. Past this beach, on a wooden chair on another dock, sat a greying old man in a faded sack coat and a straw hat. As we cruised past, he hailed us. We manoeuvred ourselves with some effort until we were stopped a few yards from his chair.

We exchanged pleasantries, he asked us if we were the new owners of the Hamilton house – which Thomas confirmed – and he welcomed us. It turned out the old man lived here and had lived here for many decades, wifeless, he regretted to inform us, but financially secure from years spent as the operator of a successful general store during Gravenhurst's early tourism boom. He offered us home-made bread and jam, which we happily accepted before rowing onward. We lunched beneath a wind-swept pine on a small rocky island at the mouth of the bay, laughing at a funny joke that would take too long to explain here and would probably be not half as funny if you were not there in the moment. Sated and rested, we rowed home for some tea or coffee.

Late in the day, we were suddenly resolved to hike. Packing our satchels with snacks and some sketch-pads and pencils, we began to explore the forest. If you have never left Toronto, it may come as a surprise how rocky the terrain of Muskoka is. The lush pine forest is interrupted frequently by squat hills of granite. Marvelling at the natural beauty, we sketched whatever caught our fancy and pressed deeper and deeper into the woods.

As the sun sat fat and heavy in the evening sky, we came across an interesting sight. A large boulder had been pushed – or possibly pulled – along the side of a stone hill. We surmised that this pushing – or possibly this pulling – had occurred in the distant past, as the gouge left behind had been overgrown and worn nearly back to flatness. Curiousity overcame us, and we became determined to shift the rock and reveal what lay behind it. We managed it in short order, with an ingenious system involving a rope looped around tree branches and a fallen sapling as a lever, and the boulder slipped away from the mouth of a smooth granite cave.

How deep the cave went, we would never know, as at the mouth of this cave lay a large burlap sack. The sack smelled woody, like cedar or pine, and I felt no danger lay in opening it and seeing what treasures lay inside. As I undid the knot and pulled the sack open, I was at first unsure what it was. It was a dark hairy mass, and as my eyes adjusted to the light of the cave, I finally recognized what I was looking at. A person – a woman by the looks of it – had been stuffed in this sack decades ago and been mummified in the intervening years. I recognized her as a woman from the long hair and the dried out and tattered dress she was wearing. Her skin was dry and pulled tight over her bones and her eyes were empty sockets. The cause of the poor woman's death was obvious: a hole had been gashed in her head and her jaw shattered.

I yelped and leapt backwards from the sack, an action which toppled it over and spilled the skinny corpse out onto the floor of the cave. Thomas ran into the cave to see what was the matter and was clearly as shocked as I. For the first time in many years, I felt an incredible urge to pray. I fell to my knees, and prayed for the dead woman. I did not know why, but I felt that I had to beg God and the woman to forgive me for disturbing her rest. With my swift and panicked prayer complete, I heard a woman's sob from deep in the cave. That proved too much for me and I fled from the cursed hill. Thomas and I ran as hard and as long as we ever had. Streaked with sweat, panting and red, we returned to the cottage as the last light of day disappeared.

We debated and conferred on what to do. We were certain we could retrace our path back to the corpse in daylight, but certainly not at night. We also could not drive back to town in the countryside darkness without getting lost or stuck. Finally, a plan began to form. At dawn, we would pack our things, drive to town and inform the police. Then, we would take the earliest train back to Toronto and forget the whole affair. Satisfied that we had arrived at the just course of action, we resolved to sleep but quickly found that we could not bring ourselves to lay down. The lamps were left lit in and around the cottage and I paced nervously, unable to remove the image of the dead woman from my mind. Thomas sat at the parlour table, playing and replaying endless games of solitaire.

It was at around one o'clock in the morning when a loud knock was made on the door of the cottage. Thomas and I jumped, staring at each other wide eyed, for who could be calling at this hour? I called out a demand of identification and the reply was only a louder set of knocks. Thomas crept over to the kitchen and palmed an iron pan as I walked slowly over to the door. I opened it and shrieked, as I was met with the shattered and eyeless visage of the dead woman we had seen six hours earlier. I fell promptly on my rear, and Thomas rushed the mummy, swinging the pan down at her shoulder. The creature caught it, twisted it from his grasp, and threw it to the side, stepping over me and into the cottage, closing the door behind her as she did so with a shocking politeness.

I rose to my feet and Thomas and I stood on either sides of the dead woman, blanched and wide-eyed. She stared at neither of us, her gaze was instead out of the rear window of the cottage, towards the cliff and the bay below. All three of us were silent for a moment, Thomas and I transfixed with fear. The mummy swayed and finally rasped out a command:

Follow.

As if pulled along by string, Thomas and I obeyed. We walked behind her, out of the cottage, and around the lip of the cliff towards the beach. All the while, my mind screamed at my body to run. Run anywhere. But I could not do it. It was as if the creature had taken control of my body and I was just a passenger in it. Finally, we arrived at the door of the cottage of the old man we had seen earlier that day. The creature knocked on the door.

A few moments later, the door creaked open and the old man – bleary eyed and holding a lamp – appeared. He said nothing before his eyes widened and the mummy tackled him to the floor of his cabin. Astride him, she closed her hands around his throat and began to suffocate him. The man begged and pleaded for our help, but Thomas and I did nothing. Eventually, with the desperate strength of a man avoiding death, he leveraged the woman off of him and tried to rise. I do not know why, but I was suddenly blindly angry. Thomas and I fell on the man, beating him with our fists. He may have been strong enough to overcome a corpse, but the concerted effort of two athletic young men proved too much. The corpse joined us, and in short order the old man was dead.

Panting and red, our knuckles raw and bloody, Thomas and I stood up and stared at the scene of the crime we had just committed. I was overwhelmed with horror and guilt. My self pity was interrupted by the creature, who stood up, her shattered jaw hanging slack and her eyeless pits staring into my soul. A voice rumbled from within her for the second time that night.

Thank you.

And the corpse collapsed beside the old man, sighing as whatever supernatural force had animated it left.

Thomas and I have never spoken of the events of that night in the decades since. We returned to Toronto first thing the next morning and Thomas sold the cottage, never visiting it again. I imagine even now that the bones of the old man and the murdered mummy still lie next to each other on the floor of that decaying cottage. I do not feel guilty about the murder we committed. Paradoxically, it is that guiltlessness about which I feel the most guilty.

Regards.

Software Gripes

It's no secret that software sucks.

There's lots of amazing software, but the joyous experiences are a rarity compared to the onslaught of mediocre-to-actively-harmful shit we deal with because of bad software.

Jonathan Blow – Software is in decline

The apps we use every day have features we like taken away from us.

Our productivity software makes us its bitch while we wait for a loading spinner on a network request that's fetching the same data we loaded 3 seconds ago on a different page because the app couldn't be arsed to cache things. Naturally, the request takes 5+ seconds because fuck you.

We get a loading spinner if we are lucky.

Often, shit is just happening with zero indication about what is going on. It's not rare for me to press enter and then 60 seconds later I'm wishing I had the browser network tools open before I did so I could inspect what the fuck is happening because it's a 50/50 chance that the shitass server isn't responding, or a response was received and the fuckass website encountered a scripting error handling the response.

Games crashing while playing with friends and not being able to reconnect to the lobby despite the fact that reconnection logic is already implemented for ranked game modes.

Video games which have the option for secondary input mappings for some actions but not others. Not being able to bind mouse buttons to some actions.

Ready-up systems where you can't un-ready.

Hide-HUD modes where you are unable to perform some actions because apparently the functionality is tied to the visibility of the UI for some reason.

Driver issues where sharing your screen or high network traffic causes stutters.

I've adopted the habit of Ctrl+A,Ctrl+C to make a backup in my clipboard before submitting things because who knows if it's going to get blackhole'd instead of working properly.

GitHub hasn't had a green status month since this website started keeping track in 2022.

Davinci Resolve still doesn't support .mkv files in the year of the Lord, 2026.

---

Thankfully, AI is here to save us from ourselves.

A tireless slop companion paired with the indomitable human spirit can bring us closer to a state where shit just works.

Naturally, the path to doing so is by rewriting everything in Rust.

You want to build a voice transcription tool that runs on-device that you can share with your mom? Point the slop cannon at the problem and you get a single binary using native APIs for drawing to the screen and doing ML inference instead of sautéing your CPU cycles with Electron and PyTorch+CPU because even UV can't figure out how to consistently rehydrate a pyproject with CUDA support.

Python ML projects can be rewritten in Rust to sidestep entire categories of bullshit and I think that's beautiful.

Now, I find myself working on a terminal emulator/DAW/profiler/file explorer while the deadline for an anniversary gift for my parents looms.

In the next 10 days, I have the goal of preparing some scrapbook pages. As a subgoal of this project, I need to collect and curate photos that contain Mom&Dad to be used.

I have a backup of our family NAS which is in a propriety format which I was able to reverse engineer with AI. Now I have a ls, cd, copy REPL I can use to automate extracting small slices of the terrabytes of backed up content where if I was using the vendor's app I would be limited to extracting single files or entire directories with no in-between.

Part of the way I build software now involves using voice2text to dictate what I want to happen which is faster than typing things by hand, but sometimes comes at the cost of fidelity since I have more precision over the output text using a keyboard than I do my voice.

I want to rewrite my little python voice2text app to use the new shit I've made with Rust recently, but I got distracted building some bullshit when really I could just have the AI update my python app to add the sound cues I want while also adjusting the behaviour so it doesn't typewriter what I say into the wrong window.

Part of the skills for making software that I haven't properly grasped yet is the design phase. When it's possible to go from zero to working for any idea, project management 🤢 skills become important to ensure I'm prioritizing the right things that will help me meet my goals in time.

To collect the media of Mom&Dad that I want to use, I need to instruct the computer on how to filter from to ∩.

The NAS has photos and videos, and there's a bunch of existing libraries/architectures for doing person recognition, but it's also kind of a search and scheduling problem.

Because the backup is in a compressed format, any media previews or inference passes have to come after a mildly costly decompress step. If I'm writing the decompressed artifacts to disk so I can pass off work to other processes for the filtering, that is higher latency solution than if I were to keep things in-memory and either do the inference in the same process or use shared memory to reduce copying.

There's many heuristics that can help us determine if we should keep scanning sequentially versus jumping around while scanning for MomDad media. If we have identified a good candidate image from an event like a birthday party, then we can assign a DEI metric that prioritizes scanning other days so we get a variety of photos instead of spending time validating 1000 images from one day.

We have in our calendar important days like anniversaries that we can use to prioritize search as well.

Videos can also be analyzed, but they have a higher decompress time since the files are larger. If we own everything, we could decompress sparse chunks and find I-frames to run our image logic on.

If we consider the most involved scenario of me looking individually at each file on the NAS until I pick 100 to keep, then that is a top-K problem and a reranking problem. I have my own mental model of the file hierarchy on the NAS, and my ability to navigate things is currently limited by the vendor's crappy software and the current state of my REPL.

I could build a file browser interface that lets me preview the images and videos, where doing so has an asynchronous aspect that the preview can only be done after decompressing the selected file.

I could add a tagging mechanism that lets me attach metadata to the virtual paths to indicate which photos I consider candidates for including in the final result. Rather than an arbitrary key-value tag system, a fixed tag categorization like keep, reviewed, discard could be simpler.

Three windows. One for the file navigation ⸻ a primitive table view with a .. row for upwards navigation. One for the media preview of the selected item – mouse-based zoom+pan mechanisms One for the actions like mark-keep and mark-discard

We can design it as an event sourcing system. Instead of a mapping from file path -> set of tags[keep,viewed,discard] we can instead emit events like viewed-at, keep-clicked-at, discard-clicked-at, decompressed-to-at which would let us perform more detailed analysis like knowing what images we have looked at the most, knowing if we decompressed a file already, or finding controversial images where we have alternated between keeping and discarding.

The idea of event sourcing is something I haven't explored much but am increasingly eager to try. Hence, why I've been spending time building some kind of timeline-DAW instead of working more on file browsers.

It seems to me that time is one data type that unifies all data sources, so having robust mechanisms for interacting with time-aspected data is super important, but developing visual timeline editors will have to take a back seat while I do this other stuff I suppose.

We learn the general mannerisms of the user interfaces we are exposed to. The historical tools like the DOM for presenting information comes with implications that make things like multi-window applications a less trodden path.

So if I have a 3-window app where there's the file explorer, the preview image, and the action buttons, what if each button was its own window, letting the buttons be individually repositionable?

We can do snazzy things like draw one big window across all three monitors, controlling the hit-testing and transparency so that we have one OS window while we virtualize our own window management system.

Decomposing the problem into the core elements lets us imagine how it can be reshaped into completely new interfaces.

Given that agents are the new hotness, we could drop the file explorer window and instead have an agent be in control of which file is currently being previewed. Instead of buttons I click to present my feedback, I could hook the voice transcription up so that we have a feedback loop of the agent presenting a file to me, me making a comment on it, and the agent can manage the list of top-100 results.

One window for the preview, do we want a window to audit the voice transcription to see if there are any mistakes I should clarify? Do we want the agent to respond in text or use a text2speech program?

I have a GLaDOS speech synthesis module that is pretty low latency which could be fun. We could play back the synthesized voice at an accelerated rate to speed up the feedback loop.

There are so many building blocks and opportunities to do fun stuff, I am very excited by all of this.

Enunciating the problem and my proposed solutions is half the battle, then it's a matter of guiding the AI every couple minutes between me watching YouTube while it does the work.

Having full control of the OS with DirectX support means we can go crazy with the ideas using shaders and shit too which is cool.

Of the hard problems in computer science, my next step falls under “naming things”. I think it's time I started a new repo to build this out.

gh repo create TeamDman/Annicuration is probably a good way to start.

...Right after going to bed, waking up, wage slaving, and taking a nap/doomscrolling to reset a bit of the dread of it all. You know, the /ˈjuː.ʒ/.

March 2026

This month I read 12 ebooks from the Toronto Public Library.

The numbers as they stand, as of March 31st 2026:

Total Reading Goal: 28/100 (+12)

Canada Reads Shortlist: 5/5 (+3) – It's Different This Time by Joss Richards – Foe by Ian Reid – Searching for Terry Punchout by Tyler Hellard

Canada Reads Longlist: 5/10 (+3) – Heated Rivalry by Rachel Reid – Julie Chan is Dead by Liann Zhang – Everything is Fine Here by Iryn Tushabe

Nonfiction Goal: 2/12 (+1) – A City on Mars by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith

TPL Reading Challenge: 9/25 (+3) – Multiple Authors: A City on Mars – Small Town: Searching for Terry Punchout – Published in 2026: First Sign of Danger

Battle Ground by Jim Butcher

Synopsis:

Harry has faced terrible odds before. He has a long history of fighting enemies above his weight class. The Red Court of vampires. The fallen angels of the Order of the Blackened Denarius. The Outsiders.

But this time it’s different. A being more powerful and dangerous on an order of magnitude beyond what the world has seen in a millennium is coming. And she’s bringing an army. The Last Titan has declared war on the city of Chicago, and has come to subjugate humanity, obliterating any who stand in her way.

Harry’s mission is simple but impossible: Save the city by killing a Titan. And the attempt will change Harry’s life, Chicago, and the mortal world forever.

My thoughts:

I can’t believe I’m about to say this, but this might actually be the best Dresden Files book. 17 books in, we finally got a great one [a quick sidenote: I think it’s funny that as the books get more and more recent, Harry’s pop culture references also get more and more recent, which is weird since he hates technology and is super 80s core). On the surface, I shouldn’t have liked this book; it’s essentially all fighting scenes (which I don’t care for), and there’s a major character death (which I also hate). Bennet and I were listening to the audio book, and we had to stop and switch to regular books because the constant fight scenes in the audio were too hard to follow. But this entry felt more important than everything else. This wasn’t just some regular battle, this was a battle to save the mortals of Chicago, and humanity itself. Everyone was putting aside their differences and making sacrifices in order to band together to save the city. Harry also seems like he wants to do more. Hopefully that means he’ll pull a Baron Marcone and create an established organization or community, who he can protect. Like some of the more recent books, this book also felt like it was a part of something bigger than itself. Harry has now gained the Eye of Balor, a magical artefact powered by hate that can raze city blocks in the blink of an eye (pun intended). Queen Mab has made a curious remark about the possibility of [Harry] gaining immortality. By the end of next year, Listens-to-Wind has promised to explain what exactly are the implications of Harry being a starborn, and we’ve been introduced to at least two other characters that are starborns. Also in the next year, Harry will be wed to Lara Wraith, Queen of the White Court of Vampires, which will further strengthen the alliance between them and the Winter Court. We finally figured out why Thomas attempted to assassinate Etri in Peace Talks, and we’re peeling back a bit more of the puzzle about the Outsiders. In a way, the Dresden Files is starting to feel like a video game, where each book is a level with its own boss battle, and reveals a small piece of the overall picture.

[As a side note, Lara being Harry’s next romantic partner feels a bit strange, but he constantly sexualizes her [in large part because she derives her vampiric powers from sex instead of blood, etc], so maybe I’m being brainwashed. Because of the whole Thomas ordeal that mainly played out in Peace Talks, Harry and Lara have been teaming up a lot recently. Maybe this is okay? I’m also down for any combination that doesn’t have Harry dating Molly. I know she’s come of age and is now in her mid 20s, but he knew her well as a little kid, and that gives me the ick].

I want to dedicate this paragraph specifically to Karrin Murphy. Karrin, you deserved better than to die, and I cried a lot when you were killed. You were heroic to the very end. You deserved a lifetime of happiness with Harry and Maggie, and I’m mad that Jim Butcher never allowed you to have it. But I think it’s poetic that you died a warrior's death, that you sacrificed yourself, and that you’ll get to go to Valhalla with the Viking soldier Einherjaren that you spent so much time befriending and training with. You were my favourite character, and I will never forget you.

Rating: 5/5 stashes of weapons inside the Bean at the Art Institute of Chicago

It’s Different This Time by Joss Richard

Canada Reads 2026 Shortlist

Synopsis: Subject 74 Perry Street So begins the email that turns June Wood’s entire world on its head. Five years ago, she lived on Perry Street with her former best friend Adam Harper. But why is the management company reaching out to her about it now? Still smarting from the news of her hit TV show being canceled, June has nothing else to lose. She boards a plane from Los Angeles to New York City to find out more about the mysterious email and the promised opportunity it alludes to. It turns out that, thanks to an unbelievable legal loophole, if she and Adam can live together in the stunning West Village brownstone for a month, it’s theirs. Any true New Yorker knows you don’t pass up prime city real estate, and that fall in the city is magical—so what’s there to think about? And yet, though most things have changed in the time since they last spoke, one thing hasn’ June and Adam have unfinished business. They didn’t exactly end on good terms when they each went off to chase their dreams. Now, confronted with the consequences of their choices, they must navigate the minefield of their past the best way they know together. Every day they move closer to owning Perry Street reveals misunderstandings, long-term resentments, and long-buried feelings . . . which are suddenly feeling very, very not so buried. But they’ve already lost their friendship once before, devastating them both. Can they risk losing it again for something a little different this time?

My Thoughts: This is your goat, Canada Reads??? First of all, has almost nothing to do with Canada. The book is entirely set in the US, mainly New York but also Los Angeles. The two most overhyped cities in the US, btw, and it’s not even an interesting location. (Logically I understand that the specific reason it’s set in NYC is due to June’s career on Broadway, but there are other places you can live in and participate on Broadway, and there are other cities involved in the film and tv industry. June, the female main character, was born in Toronto, but leaves as soon as she can, never references Canada, living in Canada, being Canadian, Canadian culture, or anything at all. Not even an “I grew up watching hockey and going to Tim’s.” Literally nothing. This would be mildly annoying for a regular book, but I’m peeved that this was the romance novel selected for Canada Reads this year, considering the current political situation; I don’t understand why the selection committee is cozying up to the US for this. I find it incredibly disrespectful and of bad taste. Probably the worst part about this whole thing is that the book itself is SO MID. It’s not even that good. The romance scenes between June and Adam are not particularly great, and seem to be randomly sprinkled in. The eventual demise of their original relationship was due to a staggering miscommunication and general fumbling; not even due to an honest mistake, June literally got distracted by the possibility of giving her number to another guy, and this was supposedly enough to make her give up everything? Also, the names of the characters. Adam is fine; this is a real name for real people. In contrast, June feels saccharinely sweet, like it was specifically chosen to make sure that you knew this was going to be a grumpy x sunshine book. It makes me want to throw up. I also found it cloying how Les Mis/”On My Own” kept being referenced and sung over and over and over again. I get it. It’s her favourite song. Enough already.

Rating: 2/5 found families that you gave up because you couldn’t get over yourself

A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through, by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith

TPL Reading Challenge: Multiple Authors

Synopsis: Earth is not well. The promise of starting life anew somewhere far, far away—no climate change, no war, no social media—beckons, and settling the stars finally seems within our grasp. Or is it? Critically acclaimed, bestselling authors Kelly and Zach Weinersmith set out to write the essential guide to a glorious future of space settlements, but after years of research, they aren’t so sure it’s a good idea. Space technologies and space business are progressing fast, but we lack the knowledge needed to have space kids, build space farms, and create space nations in a way that doesn’t spark conflict back home. In a world hurtling toward human expansion into space, A City on Mars investigates whether the dream of new worlds won’t create nightmares, both for settlers and the people they leave behind. In the process, the Weinersmiths answer every question about space you’ve ever wondered about, and many you’ve never considered:

Can you make babies in space? Should corporations govern space settlements? What about space war? Are we headed for a housing crisis on the Moon’s Peaks of Eternal Light—and what happens if you’re left in the Craters of Eternal Darkness? Why do astronauts love taco sauce? Speaking of meals, what’s the legal status of space cannibalism?

My Thoughts: I thought that this was overall a pretty interesting and well researched book. I thought it was specifically interesting that the authors chose to dedicate a lot of time to the ideas of international law in space, which I will admit hadn’t ever really crossed my mind. So, I appreciated that this inclusion made the book feel a lot more well rounded and realistic, even though I found the biological and sociological issues more interesting. I had mixed feelings on the cartoons that were sprinkled throughout each chapter. Most of them were charming and a nice break from the text, however, I thought the Astrid vignettes at the end of each chapter missed the mark, and this was emphasized by the fact that the book tended to focus a lot more on the Moon, instead of Mars.

Rating: 3/5 surprising amounts of references to Canada

Julie Chan is Dead by Liann Zhang

Canada Reads 2026 Longlist

Synopsis: Julie Chan, a supermarket cashier with nothing to lose, finds herself thrust into the glamorous yet perilous world of her late twin sister, Chloe VanHuusen, a popular influencer. Separated at a young age, the identical twins were polar opposites and rarely spoke, except for one viral video that Chloe initiated (Finding My Long-Lost Twin And Buying Her A House #EMOTIONAL). When Julie discovers Chloe’s lifeless body under mysterious circumstances, she seizes the chance to live the life she’s always envied. Transforming into Chloe is easier than expected. Julie effortlessly adopts Chloe’s luxurious influencer life, complete with designer clothes, a meticulous skincare routine, and millions of adoring followers. However, Julie soon realizes that Chloe’s seemingly picture-perfect life was anything but. Haunted by Chloe’s untimely death and struggling to fit into the privileged influencer circle, Julie faces mounting challenges during a weeklong island retreat with Chloe’s exclusive group of influencer friends. As events spiral out of control, Julie uncovers the sinister forces that may have led to her sister’s demise and realizes she might be the next target.

My thoughts: Once you realize that this book is completely insane it becomes a lot more enjoyable. Something like this would typically have been a large stumbling block for me in the past; I normally hate books that go completely off the rails, or feel super unrealistic. So it was actually extremely helpful when Kaitlyn described this book as being “campy,” because it is campy, and it is insane. I wouldn’t describe it as a breath of fresh air, but when compared to other books written about influencers, I think the insanity gave it more depth and substance. I thought the twin sisters in this book created a really interesting juxtaposition. Julie the cashier, who grew up poor and neglected, vs Chloe the influencer, who was adopted by a wealthy white couple. Typically, the author would typecast Julie as being hardworking, but struggling due to circumstances, while Chole would be selfish, greedy, and spoiled by her influencer wealth. However, it seemed like the roles were reversed. To me, Julie seemed greedy and unethical; as we found out more and more about Chloe, it seemed like she was just trapped and unhappy. Specifically, I think getting a glimpse of Julie’s ascent into fame/descent into madness made the book much more compelling than a regular (bland) protagonist whose main emotion is just confusion, trying to decipher the absolute madness going on. Julie definitely commits to the bit.

Rating: 4/5 baby mice… save them…

Foe by Iain Reid

Canada Reads Shortlist 2026

Synopsis:

Severe climate change has ravaged the country, leaving behind a charred wasteland. Junior and Henrietta live a comfortable if solitary life on one of the last remaining farms. Their private existence is disturbed the day a stranger comes to the door with alarming news.

Junior has been randomly selected to travel far away from the farm, but the most unusual part is that arrangements have already been made so that when he leaves, Henrietta won’t have a chance to miss him. She won’t be left alone—not even for a moment. Henrietta will have company. Familiar company.

Told in Reid’s sharp and evocative style, Foe examines the nature of domestic relationships, self-determination, and what it means to be (or not to be) a person. An eerily entrancing page-turner, it churns with unease and suspense from the first words to its shocking finale.

My thoughts: Everything I’ve seen describes this book as “HORROR” “THRILLER” “UNPUTDOWNABLE” “SUSPENSE” but I’m not sure that I agree, mainly because of the writing style. In the hands of a different writer, I think this would definitely been scary and suspenseful. However, Reid’s style came off to me as a lot more literary, and very emotionless; this made everything seem bland and only mildly unsettling. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Similarly, there was very little world-building, but I wouldn’t count it as a flaw. It created more of a fever-dream atmosphere, even though it was mostly dream, little fever. Even when the protagonist was agitated, the story still had a very slow vibe, as if it was moving through honey. Not everything needs to be heart-pounding and action-packed, but I still think that the story had potential to be more.

Rating: 3/5 beetles in the house, that you might want to squish, but conversely you might just want to observe their haunting beauty

Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy

Synopsis:

Dominic Salt and his three children are caretakers of Shearwater, a tiny weather-lashed island that is home to the world's largest seed bank. As Shearwater risks being lost to rising sea levels, the island's researchers have fled, and only the Salts remain.

Until, during the worst storm in living memory, a stranger washes ashore. The family nurse the woman, Rowan, back to strength, but it seems she isn't telling the whole truth about why she's there. And when Rowan stumbles upon sabotaged radios and a recently dug grave, she realises that she's not the only one on the island with a secret.

A novel of breathtaking twists, dizzying beauty and ferocious love, Wild Dark Shore is about the impossible choices we make to protect the people we love.

My Thoughts:

I’ve seen this book recommended in lots of places, but I was hesitant to pick it up because I wasn’t sure that I would like it. I feel like the Goodreads plot summary isn’t super fair; to me, the bulk of the book focuses on Rowan and the Salt Family, and how they’ve adapted to living on Shearwater Island. All of the characters are coping with a loss of some sort, and I would definitely characterize it more as literary than as a thriller. That’s not to say the book isn’t atmospheric and moody. The setting of Shearwater, an isolated island off the coast of Antarctica, is definitely a huge factor in making this a good book. There’s a large focus on all the amazing nature that’s available, especially the seals, whales, and albatrosses, but the research station and the seed vault also play a huge role in defining the setting. This book definitely focuses a lot on climate change; Rowan’s house was burned down by wildfires, and everyone on Shearwater is packing up because the island is slowly flooding as the sea levels rise. The ending was tragic but very moving, and it was a tense but fitting end to the story.

Rating: 4/5 broken hydrophones that you used to record whalesong with

Searching for Terry Punchout by Tyler Hellard

Canada Reads 2026 Shortlist TPL Reading Challenge: Small Town

Synopsis:

Adam Macallister's sportswriting career is about to end before it begins, but he's got one last shot—a Sports Illustrated profile about hockey's most notorious goon, the reclusive Terry Punchout—who also happens to be Adam's estranged father. Adam returns to Pennington, Nova Scotia, where Terry now lives in the local rink and drives the Zamboni. Going home means drinking with old friends, revisiting neglected relationships, and dealing with lingering feelings about his father and dead mother—and discovering that his friends and family are kinder and more complicated than he ever gave them credit for. Searching for Terry Punchout is a charming and funny tale of hockey, small-town Maritime life, and how, despite our best efforts, we just can't avoid turning into our parents.

My thoughts:

I think this is one of the better books selected for this year’s Canada Reads, but I came to that conclusion more through the process of elimination rather than a genuine affection for this book. I thought the book itself was a bit awkward and strange (but in a totally normal, small town way; not in a sci-fi or literary way), but the ending was rather sweet. Not to brag, but I feel like I have my life together at least a bit, so this book was really not for me. I also am pretty ambivalent towards hockey; I basically only watch Team Canada during Olympic Hockey, so I didn’t have any hockey nostalgia for this book.

Rating: 3/5 shitty poutines from the local rink’s concession stands

Heartwood by Amity Gage

Synopsis: In the heart of the Maine woods, an experienced Appalachian Trail hiker goes missing. She is forty-two-year-old Valerie Gillis, who has vanished 200 miles from her final destination. Alone in the wilderness, Valerie pours her thoughts into fractured, poetic letters to her mother as she battles the elements and struggles to keep hoping.

At the heart of the investigation is Beverly, the determined Maine State Game Warden tasked with finding Valerie, who leads the search on the ground. Meanwhile, Lena, a seventy-six-year-old birdwatcher in a Connecticut retirement community, becomes an unexpected armchair detective. Roving between these compelling narratives, a puzzle emerges, intensifying the frantic search, as Valerie’s disappearance may not be accidental.

My thoughts:

I initially picked this up because I thought it would be similar to God of the Woods by Liz Moore. Upon reflection, it’s not really all that similar. The main connection is really just a woman who has gone missing in the woods, and the investigation. God of the Woods was much more of a family saga, focusing on unravelling the mystery of what happened to Barbara and Bear. Heartwood is much more atmospheric, focusing a lot more on the beauty of the woods and the transformative nature of backcountry hiking. It also focuses a lot more on the search for Valerie, which comprises pretty much the entire book.

I wasn’t super satisfied with the pacing of Heartwood. I thought that Lena’s role would be overall at lot larger, but instead it felt like a single plot point that was being stretched out too much, and made me wonder why we were spending so much time with Lena in the first place. However, I was impressed with Lt. Beverly, and her determination to find the missing hiker. I wouldn’t characterize her as a detective, or this book as a police procedural; it was more about Lt. Beverly fighting a truly insurmountable challenge. I definitely had “Heart of the Woods” by Kacey Musgraves (a song, not a book) on repeat in my head the entire time reading, both because the titles are nearly identical, but also because the vibe of the song definitely matched the book.

Rating: 3/5 cozy clearings where you can lay down your head, and watch the rain drip into your water bottle

Everything is Fine Here by Iryn Tushabe

Canada Reads 2026 Longlist

Synopsis:

Eighteen-year-old Aine Kamara has been anticipating a reunion with her older sister, Mbabazi, for months. But when Mbabazi shows up with an unexpected guest, Aine must confront an old her beloved sister is gay in a country with tight anti-homosexuality laws.

Over a weekend at Aine’s all girls’ boarding school, sisterly bonds strengthen, and a new friendship emerges between Aine and her sister’s partner, Achen. Later, a sudden death in the family brings Achen to Mbabazi’s and Aine’s home village, resulting in tensions that put Mrs. Kamara’s Christian beliefs to the test. She issues an ultimatum, forcing Mbabazi to make a difficult choice, but Aine must too. Unable to convince Mama to reconsider, Aine runs away to Mbabazi’s and Achen’s home in Kampala. There she reconnects with Elia, the sophomore at Makerere University she’s had a crush on for a while.

Acclaimed writer Iryn Tushabe’s dazzling debut novel, Everything Is Fine Here, explores the choice Aine must make, and its inevitable and harrowing results.

My thoughts:

I actually forgot that I read this so I’m just going to do a very mini review. It was a fine book, not to my personal taste, but definitely not bad. I think it was a worthwhile inclusion in the Canada Reads Longlist because the book is set in Uganda, which is an underrepresented culture in the Canadian public consciousness (unlike the US), and one of the major characters spent time living and studying in Canada, which has mildly influenced their personality (unlike a certain romance book we won’t talk about any more).

Rating: 3/5 oversized suits that are your best outfit for any occasion

Heated Rivalry by Rachel Reid

Canada Reads 2026 Longlist

Synopsis:

Pro hockey star Shane Hollander isn’t just crazy talented, he’s got a spotless reputation. Hockey is his life. Now that he’s captain of the Montreal Voyageurs, he won’t let anything jeopardize that, especially the sexy Russian whose hard body keeps him awake at night.

Boston Bears captain Ilya Rozanov is everything Shane’s not. The self-proclaimed king of the ice, he’s as cocky as he is talented. No one can beat him—except Shane. They’ve made a career on their legendary rivalry, but when the skates come off, the heat between them is undeniable. When Ilya realizes he wants more than a few secret hookups, he knows he must walk away. The risk is too great.

As their attraction intensifies, they struggle to keep their relationship out of the public eye. If the truth comes out, it could ruin them both. But when their need for each other rivals their ambition on the ice, secrecy is no longer an option.

My thoughts:

To pretty much everyone’s surprise, I actually was impressed by Heated Rivalry. To be clear, I have not and will never watch the show, but I thought the book was pretty good. First things first, there is A LOT of sex. Like multiple times every chapter, a lot. But I feel like it makes sense in-universe. Shane and Ilya don’t have a normal relationship; they are either playing hockey/appearing at NHL events, or they are hooking up in secret. The only time they are able to interact in private is during a hookup session, and for the majority of the book, Shane and Ilya feel that the only relationship that they can have is just secret hookups, so I understand why there are so many hookup scenes. So I was pretty fine with it (as opposed to It’s Different This Time, which had much less inspired and more randomly inserted sex scenes, and those did not impress me). My only real problem with the sex scenes overall was that they started when Shane and Ilya were about 18 or 19 (ie, young enough that it gave me the ick to be reading them). The thing that I liked the most about Shane and Ilya’s relationship was the amount of yearning; both characters desperately want each other but they equally feel like they can’t be together, and I thought that this “equality” of thought was very compelling. (I’m gonna take another dig at It’s Different This Time, because that was a book where the characters definitely could be together if it weren’t for June fumbling everything for very little reason; that was very one-sided). It actually kind of reminded me of my own relationship. Readers will know that my fiancé Bennet and I spent the vast majority of our relationship as being long distance. I actually had to recalculated it for this article, but for the first 100 months of our relationship (which roughly matches up with when we moved in together in Toronto and then got engaged), we spent about 60 months of it being long distance between Toronto and Kingston/Ottawa. Those 60 months were hellish for me, and I thank my lucky stars every day that I know longer have to live my life counting the weeks until the next time I can see my boyfriend. During those 60 months, I felt a lot of longing and yearning, wishing that we could just be together, but knowing that we couldn’t, since we were attending universities in different cities. I’m not saying that being a cis-het white couple that is 3-5 hours drive apart is the same as being a queer couple in a hugely homophobic industry is the same thing, but I had a lot of empathy for Shane and Ilya’s predicament. Overall I was pleasantly surprised, and felt like this book had more depth than I was prepared to give it credit for.

Rating: 3/5 bottles of ginger ale that you stash in the fridge because you know it’s his favourite

First Sign of Danger by Kelley Armstrong (Haven’s Rock #4)

Synopsis: Detective Casey Duncan and her husband, Sheriff Eric Dalton, are entering a new chapter of life as parents to their six-month-old baby. Their family is hidden away in the sanctuary town of Haven's Rock where they can live safe and private lives. But when they encounter hikers too close to the borders of Haven's Rock, they realize they're in danger of being exposed.

When they find one of the hikers dead the next day, they realize that their paranoia was justified, but they're no closer to finding out who these people were and what they were doing in the vicinity of Haven's Rock. Only by tracing the hikers' movements, as well as examining the recent behavior of their closest neighbors, the workers of a secretive mining camp, will they be able to figure out where the threat is coming from and shut it down. Otherwise, the lives of everyone in Haven's Rock—and their safe, secure new existence—are at risk.

My Thoughts:

Another Haven’s Rock book has been released! As per usual, I really liked this book. Obviously it’s not the best series in the world, and Eddie has often named his complaints with this series and its prequel series. To me, the prose is so addicting that I feel like I’m inhaling it; the way that I might devour a piece of grocery-store sheet cake: it’s not the best, but I crave it much the same, and it also gives me an insane crash afterwards (holy run-on sentence). After finishing this book I definitely had a reading slump. Nothing felt enjoyable to read, and I felt listless and bored. (Not all the blame can be given to Kelley Armstrong, since I probably would have been feeling poorly without reading the book, but it was a factor just the same). I am a bit disappointed that there’s only going to be one more book in the series, but honestly it’s probably for the best.

New in this installment is how Casey and Eric are adapting to being new parents, and I found the support network of people willing to watch their baby while they were off investigating crimes to be very heartwarming. It was so picture perfect as to be a little saccharine, and it had me jealously wondering how they are going to cope when Rory stops being a loveable baby and grows up to become a tantrum-throwing toddler, or a sullen teenager. The murder plotline itself was fine, nothing to write home about in particular, but I really was interested in the overarching series details that were revealed (namely, the history of the neighbouring mining compound). This is getting similar to the Dresden Files where each book is just okay but they add up to something greater than themselves.

Rating: 4/5 boxes of obscure valuable coins

The Compound by Aisling Rawle

Synopsis: Lily—a bored, beautiful twentysomething—wakes up on a remote desert compound alongside nineteen other contestants on a popular reality TV show. To win, she must outlast her housemates while competing in challenges for luxury rewards, such as champagne and lipstick, and communal necessities to outfit their new home, like food, appliances, and a front door.

The cameras are catching all her angles, good and bad, but Lily has no desire to leave: Why would she, when the world outside is falling apart? As the competition intensifies, intimacy between the players deepens, and it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish between desire and desperation. When the producers raise the stakes, forcing contestants into upsetting, even dangerous situations, the line between playing the game and surviving it begins to blur. If Lily makes it to the end, she'll receive prizes beyond her wildest dreams—but what will she have to do to win?

Addictive and prescient, The Compound is an explosive debut from a major new voice in fiction and will linger in your mind long after the game ends.

My Thoughts: Readers will know that I am generally not a fan of reality TV, but I thought that this book was very compelling. Lily’s character felt very unique; not because she was extraordinary in some way, but because she was so ordinary. She wasn’t making big social moves to stay in the game, she wasn’t excellent at completing challenges, she wasn’t the most beautiful or the most well-like contestant. The main thing that set her apart was that she wanted to stay in the compound more than anyone, just because she didn’t want to go back to her shitty retail job in the disastrous society that is continually hinted at. The other contestants often have a desire to go home, but Lily never has that. She just wants to stay in this fabricated paradise even though she fully understands that it’s fabricated. She understands that she has to edit herself to be more palatable to viewers and sponsors (hiding her sexuality, etc), but as long as she continues to live in this mansion and receive gifts, she doesn’t really care. I also thought the hints at the overarching dystopia made the book compelling, especially the references to the outer desert that surrounds the compound.

Rating: 3/5 gold necklaces from Dior that go with any outfit and are real 24 karat gold that will never tarnish or lose luster. Thank you, Dior! I’ll be wearing it every day!!

Recently, I got around to setting up a little PC I bought off of Ebay for 200 bucks or so. It was bought with the intention of self-hosting a set of personal services to replace public mainstream ones I want to move away from. It took about a year for me to finally get around to plugging it in and delving into the rabbit hole of configuring it to my liking. The process of inching towards a setup that I am pleased with has been very satisfying (though perhaps to the detriment of my actual work). As of now I have Immich to replace Google Photos, which was the main starting point for this whole project. I have Copyparty to replace Google Drive as well. Sensing a trend here? Well, don’t, the third thing I wanted to replace was Spotify.

Spotify is known to have started out as an underhanded piracy platform and has since grown and flourished into a beautiful butterfly, leaving their piracy roots behind and adopting a wage slavery model instead! With the added cherry on top of major investments into the AI military complex, it really is a hard package to leave behind, isn’t it?

Where is one to go instead, then? Youtube music? Kinda, Youtube music isn’t too shabby. It does a far better job of recommending good music. Alongside lots of user-created mixes, it’s a decently compelling package. My problems with music streaming go deeper than that, though. I have very fond memories of getting my first iPhone at 13 years old and being really excited about downloading -Race Around The World- (a song from the game Castle Crashers) onto it and listening to the song anywhere I wanted. Now looking back on it, the Nokia 5300 XpressMusic that I left behind was probably a cooler phone. Though at the time, iPods and iPhones were basically the kings of mp3 players. I remember the Nokia’s UI being so slow and clunky, but the media buttons on the side were so sick, I didn’t care.

My main point about this isn’t really about the device but what’s on it. My excitement of playing this little rinky dink video game song on my phone was in large part that it was a niche personal choice that I got to revel in. Over the years of using Spotify, that feeling of developing a library for myself faded, as I constantly had to grapple with what is and isn’t available to stream on the platform. You might say, “Hey! Can’t you put your own local files into the Spotify app and play them alongside the rest of your music?” to which I say absolutely NOT.

Let me tell you about a little piece of software called foobar2000, one of the few golden rays of light in the world of cyberspace. Foobar2000 is fundamentally just a music player for local files, but it was a joy to use. You could configure the UI however you wanted, mess with the colour schemes, add plugins for extra functionality, and so much more that I didn’t even interface with. It was my main music player before I switched to Spotify. Most notably, however, there was a plugin somewhat aptly named “foo_input_spotify” which let you plug Spotify into the program and play tracks like they were songs on your computer. Had I shown someone else my music library, they wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between the Spotify songs and the Foobar ones just by looking at it.

In software development, there is a concept called the “first-class citizen,” which, to majorly abbreviate it, means that this aspect of code is capable of all the functions as any other chunk of code. This lack of differentiation between the Spotify tracks and local ones in foobar is kind of the same thing, those songs were essentially first-class citizens of my music player.

Eventually, Spotify updated their APIs, permanently breaking “foo_input_spotify” and leaving my once harmonious relationship between two music players in shambles. So how does Spotify handle the mirror scenario? By putting all of your local files in a playlist called “local files”… that’s it. No searching, no album view, just playlists, and you have to pick through them all to add them to your playlists. I also remember the sync being inconsistent, so it wouldn’t even send to my phone. Is that true? I don’t care, I am being a hater.

I decided to bite the bullet and leave my music files behind. Collecting cyber dust in my hard drives as I moved on from that personal era of music. A lot of that stuff was kinda juvenile anyways, I should be listening to “real” music by now (this was late high school). So I took what I could find on Spotify and started again from scratch.

I’m not that avid of a music listener despite what these 814 words so far may imply. I think if I compared the two periods of my personal music history, I would say I generally spent more time listening to stuff when I was using foobar than when I was using Spotify. I had access to pretty much everything on Spotify, but that also meant that I rarely found anything I genuinely enjoyed just through Spotify alone.

So that brings us to today, as I spec out this little personal music streaming setup on my not-new server computer, I decide to crack open that casket of .mp3s and .flacs. Dubbed “Old music”, these files had been carried with me between multiple hard drives and computers. What treasures lie within this vault of ones and zeroes?

Ah yes… well to set the stage a little bit, imagine you’re a young boy on the who doesn’t have a fully formed idea of what music he likes yet. Pretty much all he has to go on so far is “no lyrics”. Hey, game soundtracks don’t have lyrics, and they’re pretty enjoyable, so let's try to find more of that. Imagine this boy’s delight when he finds a website called “OCReMix” which hosts a massive community of artists that remix video game songs and post them there for free. Free is pretty good, that guy can’t afford to buy anything anyways. So the final result ends up being a massive chunk of video game remixes, a handful of actual OSTs, and then the odd smattering of whatever else he enjoyed that was also free to download. A notable absence is the Minecraft soundtrack, which was not downloaded but instead listened to on repeat on Bandcamp.

Notice there is no mention made of the music’s quality. With my older ears and matured taste, I can definitely say that there is a lot of variance. At the same time though, it’s pretty fun to just embrace some of the garbage anyways. In general most of the actual game OSTs hold up perfectly fine, there’s definitely a couple I still listened to up until now. The tracks that are on the lower end of the spectrum are what are best described as “Royalty Free Youtuber Outro” songs. Some of them are alright, but the few that are there just generally aren’t great. Not sure what I saw in them back then, I’m pretty sure I wasn’t huge on them at the time either. For the remixes? It’s mostly comprised of passionate amateur musicians, so while things aren’t very consistent, there is an earnestness to them that I find endearing. Plus, they have a nostalgic soft spot in my heart, cheesy as they may potentially be. That being said, there are definitely some nuggets, but I cannot be truly trusted as a source of information on this, so perhaps I will leave it up to you to decide.

• PROTO·DOME – Chef Kawasaki’s 16-Bit Jazz Orchestra
• XPRTNovice – Miles and Miles away (Esto Gaza)
• DDRKirby(ISQ) – Love Everlasting (Lonely Rolling Star)
• Ben Briggs – BITE(Ice Path)
• melody & Detective Tuesday – spirit of law

The best thing that’s come about from having set up this private spotify replacement is that I have had to more intimately seek out tracks, download them, and add them to my library like the good old days. In serendipitous accordance with doing things the old-fashioned way, I have made my way to a certain bird-themed peer-to-peer music sharing service. I had always lamented that I missed out on what must have been a magical time when Napster and Limewire were in their heyday, so I am glad I get to experience something that evokes a similar feeling.

Through this service, I have already discovered so many tracks that I love and would have never in a million years found through spotify. The shining star that ties my past and present selves is one of my favourite artists, Nujabes. I had discovered him a bit before switching to spotify and adored his jazz hip-hop style. Unfortunately, he passed away in 2010, and so we will never get another album from him again. What I personally hadn’t realised is that he released music under a different name in the past, “Hydeout Productions”. I had been living in ignorant bliss for all these years, and it wasn’t until I started using this music sharing service did I discover two whole albums he produced that I had never listened to before.

It was like getting a new album from him after all this time.

Obviously, these days my listening range is far broader, but it has been fun and rewarding going back through my own past and rediscovering the things that were always there. Thank you for reading my sleep-deprived rant. I'm gonna go listen to some shitty youtube outro songs now.

We ended at 19 books read last month, and I'm not gonna lie, I'm loosing steam a little. Also Slay The Spire 2 released in early access this month, and I might already have 75h hours in it. Those two statement are not linked in any way. Overall, I've not been into a really reading mood. Nevertheless, we carry on, even if slowly.

L'ordre du Discours – Michel Foucault

A transcription of Michel Foucault's (french philosopher) inaugural speech at the Collège de France on December 2nd 1970.

The main thesis of this work is that the production of the discourse in a society is controlled, selected, organised and redistributed to remove its power, its danger, and its material reality.

Many process, Foucault says, are used to this end.

External processes:

I – Prohibition: it's pretty self explanatory how prohibition limits discourse II – Sharing vs rejecting: Categorising discourse as being worthy or not of being shared. (in the speech Foucault refers to this process as the Discourse of the Madman) III – Truth and Falseness: Excluding discourse that are categorised as false, and putting the truth above all else in the discourse. Caring more about how something is said rather than what is said (think “Fallacy fallacy”)

Internal processes:

I – The commentary: distinction between the discourse that are legitimate and enduring in time (religious texts, law...) and the ones that are considered ephemeral. (gotta be honest I didn't really understand this one well)

II – The author: Used to credit/discredit a discourse, being allowed or not to produce a discourse on a topic or not. The presence or not of an known author changes how we perceive a discourse.

III – The discipline: categorising the discourse to a certain discipline limits what it can say, and how it can say it. A scientific paper in a botanical journal will be limited in what they can say about certain historical cultural norms and their impact on a specific species of plants. It also inscribes the discourse in a certain consensus, either forcing to explore a trendy topic or reject something out of fad.

Limiting the number of discourse havers:

By the processes in which the discourse is supposed to happen (written form, memorisation...), with arbitrary rules on how to discuss, what to discuss about, who can discuss about that and who can hear and relay this discourse (private debate salons...).

Last part I understood nothing, he talks about history and hegel, about reversing the trend, about his debt to another philosopher about genealogy. It like the last 10% of the book but I feel like it might have made more sense when he talked about it in class.

I wanted to do a little summary here to make sure I understood and remembered most of the book, as it wasn't the simplest to read. I neither have the time nor the will to do a fully fledged article. It says some interesting stuff, but there are some things in particular that I think are not as relevant, especially with the advent of the internet and the seemingly “infinite” amount of discourse (even if it is controlled and limited in pretty the same manner as described above in my opinion). It's an interesting concept, but not necessarily something that I'm interested in, so I probably won't be reading further about the subject for now.

Universal War One – Denis Bajram

(Volume 1 & 2 [out of 6])

At the end of the 21st century, humanity has conquered everything. There is one central government ruling the earth, and one central force, the United Earthes Force (UEF) defending the Earth and other human colonies like the moon and mars. The capital has also centralised, and only 9 companies in an alliance — les Compagnies Industrielles de Colonisation (CIC), remain to exploit resources. There are constant tensions between the central government and the CIC. One day, a wall of nothingness appears next to Saturn. Nobody knows what it is and how it came to be, and the UEF send the Purgatory Squadron to investigate. This squadron is composed of soldiers that had one choice after getting court martial — pay for their crimes or serve in the Purgatory Squadron. Could what the Purgatory Squadron discover next to Saturn lead to the first Universal War...

A classic of french BD, and sci-fi. The drawings and colour look good, but it is sometimes a bit complicated to follow the story/action. It is extremely fast paced. It does dive head first into “feelings”, which I can appreciate, as I'm not always a fan of more “inorganic” SF. Some interesting themes are starting to be discussed, I'll wait to see if the author did anything with them. Overall enjoying my read so far. It's really impressive that a single guys did everything, story, drawings, colours...

This doesn't count as a full book, it's only when I'll be done with it that I will. But since it technically came out in separate volumes it feels appropriate to include it here.

100 Easy Ukrainian Texts – Yuliia Pozniak

(Part 1 and 2)

Some of you knight know that I have been learning Ukrainian for a little bit, to be able to speak with my in-laws/Tetyana's extended family. I've started with the usual duolingo — it's not great and became even worse with all the AI garbage, then I got a couple of textbooks (neither were great). There are not a ton of resources to self-teach ukrainian, and it's also a very complex language — all the languages I had learnt before, english, italian... were coughing babies in comparison. So in September last year I got a teacher, and have been taking one to two 1h lessons per week. My ultimate goal is not only to be able to speak in ukrainian, but I want to be able to read books, and write stuff in ukrainian as well. I had asked my teacher what books he would recommend for me to start dipping my toes in ukrianian literature, and he literally told me that none of them are good, because there is no standard literary ukrainian, so everything is way too tough for me. He recommended to read ukrainian translations of english book, like 1984 which he was currently trying to read in english.

I thought it was fitting as 1984 is the first book I read in english, when I was around 16. So I picked up a copy of the Ukrainian translation and quickly realised that it would not happen, as the first sentence of the book spans a whole page. I therefore turned to much more approachable 100 Easy Ukrainian Texts.

I finished part 1, Я і моя родина (me and my family) and part 2 Мої речі (my things). Riveting stuff really. To give you idea, this is one of those texts:

Якось я загубив свій рюкзак. Я дуже засмутився, бо там були мої документи, ключі від квартири та гроші. Я пішов додому, а через кілька годин до мене прийшов молодий хлопець та повернув мій рюкзак. Він сказав, що знайшов його на автобусній зупинці. Я був йому дуже вдячний та запросив його попити зі мною кави. Ми познайомилися і виявилося, що ми сусіди. Тепер ми спілкуємося та часто ходимо разом в спортзал.

Basically this is saying “Once, I lost my backpack. I was upset because I had my IDs, keys and money in it. I went home and after a few hours, a guy came and gave me my bag. He said he had found it at the bus stop. I was very thankful and invited him for coffee. It turned out we were neighbours, we said we would go to the gym together.”

The text are your usual easy language textbook texts, but tbh I can't read anything more complicated and I even have a bit of trouble with the more advanced texts in this. This language is so hard, it feels like I've been learning it forever but I can still not say anything and barely understand stuff. We stubborn, we keep going though.

This doesn't count towards the book counter because it's one of my extra book, which wasn't part of the backlog.

La Maison des Mères – Frank Herbert

(Dune saga book 6)

More sex kung-fu, some Judaism, and somehow more questionable stuff, still peak. This is the last book of the Dune saga, and the last book Frank wrote before he died. It's an interesting conclusion to Dune, and I personally think that this was intended as the last book fr fr. I really don't believe in the “notes” for a seventh book that his son found (but nobody else has ever seen) that the son used to cash in on his father's work continue the series.

I'm satisfied, but I still have to think about it. I'll probably re-read the series in a couple of year.

Very meta ending

What Do Men Want – Nina Power

I picked up this book at Indigo while Tetyana was looking for her pick, ahead of the feminist theory night (to which we unfortunately ended up not being able to participate in). I didn't look up the author or the book, I just naively thought it could be interesting to get a feminist point of view on men. I should have done some research.

Within the first few pages of the introduction, Mme Power defends JK Rowling, Jordan Peterson, reveals herself as a terf and as someone who thinks there is a war on men and that anyways, on the topic of misogyny and violence towards women, it's only a very small amount of men that are part of the problem so it's not systemic. We're on page 6; it's gonna be a long read.

With this book coming out in 2022, it is incredible how much it got wrong. Early in the book, she kinda dismisses the idea of the patriarchy as a driving force of the unease around gender in modern society, and then goes on to showcase issues or phenomena and is always puzzled about where those came from/what causes that, and the answer is always the patriarchy. This goes on for almost everything in the book. She keeps dismissing the idea of systemic things by saying: “well this breaks down at the individual level, therefore it's not real/doesn't exist”

This book is not about men, it's not about desire (what men want), and its takes on masculinity is laughable. First of all, this book constantly confuses sex and gender, and therefore cannot say anything pertinent about either. Second, it mostly talks about cis men through their relationships with women, with an emphasis on sexual relationships with cis women and only cis women, i.e. this book is just super hetero-normative. This not only exclude the vast majority of the material reality of men, it also just excludes a bunch of men entirely.

The way the book talks about anything also sucks. The way she broaches any subject is “Conservative figure/MRA says [statement about men/women that is fucking stupid and not true]“. That's it, no analysis, no pushback, no fact-checking. She just parrots their point of views and then goes on to develop her own views using theirs as a foundation or launching pad, or even just ignoring everything (why bring it up at all then?). This book was such shit that I needed to exteriorise my frustration, and wrote notes as I read. Touching on this, I wrote : “>Bring up something potentially interesting to explore, does nothing with it or worse, quotes a chud and then moves on”. She literally cites Michel Houellebecq multiple times, one of our own (french) chuds, who not only is a misogynist, but also extremely islamophobic, and a defender of the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory.

Her views on sexuality are also catastrophic, I'll just leave you with two quotes: “There are plenty of people today ,[...], who understand that sex is a marketplace like everything else.” & “As we have seen, sex, like money and good looks, is not fairly distributed” — literally incel talking points.

She also brings up capitalism and consumerism at times, but only in passing, without tying it to anything she said, or without saying anything of substance with it. It's as if she was filling a “how to appear like I'm a lefty” checklist, but without understanding anything, or without wanting to alienate anyone who's not on the anti-capitalist train.

Her conclusion boils down to: “If we all ignored systemic issues and were nicer to each other on an individual level, everything would be better :D”.

This reminded me of both Kill all Normies and Brave New World Revisited, by Angela Nagle and Aldous Huxley respectively, Nina Power's british compatriots — I don't know what's in the water in the UK, but it's making everyone very complacent about harmful right-wing rhetoric.

This is not a feminist book about what men want, this is a masculinist book, clad in a mantle of pseudo-progressivism, pseudo-feminism and pseudo-critique of consumerism and capitalism not to be shot down on sight, peddling idiotic and regressive views on men, women, masculinity, and sexuality.

At the very least, it made me think about the concept of desire, and I feel like I would want to read more about it (although in this is book desire is taken to be exclusively sexual desire from men towards woman, which is wholly uninteresting as, imo, it is the most easily understandable in an almost instinctive manner).

That's it for this month, although I've fluffed up this article, I've actually done very little reading. And I was far from the 50 pages a day I need to finish this project. I'm at 22/60 books in the booklog, and at 6691/19886 pages — or 37% and 34% done respectively. A pretty slow month for reading, again, but c'est la vie.

Thank you for reading my logorrhea Eddie – Award winning author

February 2026

I'm still here! I've been pretty excited to keep reading and blogging for this month. This month I read 5 ebooks and 2 eaudiobooks from the Toronto Public Library, and 1 epub, totalling to 8 books.

The numbers as they stand, as of February 28th 2026

Total Reading Goal: 16/100 (+8)

Canada Reads Shortlist: 2/5 (+1) – I added A Minor Chorus by Billy-Ray Belcourt

Canada Reads Longlist: 2/10 (+1) – I added Restaurant Kid by Rachel Pham

Nonfiction Goal: 1/12 (+1) – Restaurant Kid again, since it's a memoir

TPL Reading Challenge: 6/25 (+2) – The Future of Another Timeline by Annalee Newitz, for the category “Dual Perspectives” – The God of the Woods by Liz Moore for the category “Family Saga”

The Names by Florence Knapp

Synopsis: In the wake of a catastrophic storm, Cora sets off with her nine-year-old daughter, Maia, to register her newborn son’s birth. Her husband, Gordon, a local doctor, respected in the community but a terrifying and abusive presence at home, intends for her to name the infant after him. But when the registrar asks what she’d like to call the child, Cora hesitates…

Spanning thirty-five years, what follows are three alternate and alternating versions of Cora’s and her young son’s lives, shaped by her choice of name: Gordon, chosen by his father; Julian, chosen by his mother Cora; and Bear, chosen by his sister Maia. In richly layered prose, The Names explores the painful ripple effects of domestic abuse, the messy ties of family, and the possibilities of autonomy and healing.

My thoughts: I thought this book would be dense and pretentious, but it was actually very beautiful and moving. It was so interesting to see how different characters and events shaped the son’s lives in different ways when he was Gordon vs Julian vs Bear. It’s not quite the same as nominative determinism, but it was immediately clear that the choice of name dramatically changed the son’s (and the whole family’s) lives. (I feel like this is a bit of a click-bait sentence; in actuality, the driving force behind the different lives is how the son’s name influences his abusive father’s reaction and resulting actions; whether he accepts the name Gordon, tolerates the name Julian, or completely rejects the name Bear). One thing that I was obsessed with at the beginning of the book was trying to determine which of the lives was the “best” life. Obviously, I figured, it had to be Bear’s life; his father was completely out of the picture, and he had a happy and idyllic childhood with his mother and sister and found family of neighbours. But as you go through the story, that’s obviously not the point. While all the lives end up being very different, they each have their share of happiness and hardships, and you can see that the son aches for the relationships that he has in other lives. In the end, it’s up to the reader to determine which life was truly the best one (I think I still stand by Bear, but there’s a lot more nuance now; his adult life suffers, and he ends up dying very young, but I still can’t get over the joy and community of the perfect childhood). This really was a hauntingly beautiful book, and I would definitely recommend it.

Rating: 4/5 simple pieces of silver jewellery, hand made by you for the woman you love

The Future of Another Timeline by Annalee Newitz

Synopsis: This book exists in a universe where time travel is a fact of life, made possible by a group of stone “machines” that have existed for tens of thousands of years. It’s in the popular culture, but mostly used by academics studying cultural geology, and can only be used to travel back in time from one’s current present. In 1992 CE, Beth is a high school in California, struggling with her difficult home life and unsure how she can continue to support her best friend Lizzie when Lizzie begins to travel down a dangerous path. In 2022 CE, Tess works as a cultural geologist during the day, traveling back in time to observe and document key moments in feminist movements. By night, she belongs to a group of activists known as the Daughters of Harriet; a group of women and non-binary people that are dedicated to changing the timeline by making “edits” in the past. When they discover a group of men known as the Comstockers (followers of Anthony Comstock, a pro-censorship, anti-women, anti-sex education activist of the early 20th century) are attempting to lock history into a decidedly misogynist edit, Tess and the DOH spring into action. But will it be enough?

My thoughts: This book is best described as “feminist queer punk rage against the machine” and honestly is not really my cup of tea. I listened to this book as an audiobook, and while I normally don’t have much criticism of the narrator, I really did not like Laura Nichol’s performance. No fault to her, but I thought her voice and overall mannerisms were super immature. I’m unsure if this was her first narration experience, but her performance felt very unpolished in a way that I’m having trouble articulating, but I feel like you would notice if I played you a sample of the audiobook. It permeated the novel and probably made me dislike the book more than if I had read it. However, I will say that it felt very punk, very true to the book, so maybe I just don’t like the book itself. Wherever I get into a situation like this, where I am disliking a very feminist book, I feel a bit guilty; is this book actually bad or am I personally just full of internalized misogyny? Did I not like this book because the feminine characters don’t subscribe to my ideas of femininity, or because the plot was not well thought out? I suspect it’s a little bit of both. Personally, I am not a very activist person; I am much more likely to go with the flow and tolerate the status quo instead of standing up for my personal beliefs; is that why I didn’t vibe with these womxn who are willing to go after what matters to them, even if they have to kill for it? Am I too afraid of breaking the rules to really appreciate what it means to kill a guy who is trying to rape your friend? I guess I don’t really know.

Rating: 2/5 tickets to a Grape Ape show

Shroud by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Synopsis: A commercial expedition to a distant star system discovers a pitch-black moon alive with radio activity. Its high-gravity, high-pressure, zero-oxygen environment is deadly to human life, but ripe for exploitation. They named it Shroud. Under no circumstances can a human survive Shroud’s inhospitable surface – but a catastrophic accident forces Juna Ceelander and Mai Ste Etienne to make an emergency landing in a barely adequate escape vehicle. Alone, and fighting for survival, the two women embark on a gruelling journey across land, sea and air in search of salvation. But as they travel, Juna and Mai begin to understand Shroud’s unnerving alien species. It also begins to understand them. If they escape Shroud, they’ll somehow have to explain the impossible and translate the incredible. That is, if they make it back at all . . .

My thoughts: The first part of this book was a lot of exposition setting up the space-faring hyper capitalist society. The second part of this book was unabashedly terrifying: the story of two women who are accidentally marooned on a strange moon, full of completely alien creatures. Shroud is completely deadly to humans, by virtue of a high pressure atmosphere that would crush you, a toxic atmosphere that would poison you, and a bonechilling temperature that would instantly freeze you. This book wasn’t intended to be a horror book, but it felt like I was reading one of those survival horror movies like The Shallows (2016) (the protagonist is trapped on a buoy trying to survive a great white shark attack) or Fall (2022) (the protagonists are trapped on the top of a 2000-foot radio tower when their only ladder breaks). Genuinely terrifying. As the book goes on it becomes less scary (at least to me) and more of a gruelling trek for survival. Juna and Mai have determined that the only way for them to possibly get off of Shroud is if they traverse the moon in order to reach the space elevator that was constructed on the polar opposite side of Shroud. It’s interspersed with chapters from the POV of the Shrouded, Juna’s name for the aliens that they first encounter. The Shrouded was a really interesting concept for an alien, and I thought those chapters were well done. I also thought that the juxtaposition between this literally “alien” form of life compared to the hypercaptialist megacorporation The Concern, who control all of the existing spacefaring human civilizations (here, everyone lives in a desperate attempt to be useful, knowing that if they don’t meet their quotas they’ll be unceremoniously returned to cryosleep, where they might languish for the rest of their lives). Tchaikovsky’s choice to have one of his protagonists be Juna, a jack of all trades, master of non, was also interesting. Her role aboard the spaceship was to be the social grease that kept the gears of her team running; resolving conflict and accommodating everyone. She acts as the social and moral support for Mai, the genius engineer who constructed the pod that is their only hope of survival. I appreciated that it never felt like Juna had no agency; even though she wasn’t doing the bulk of the engineering, she was definitely contributing to their overall survival, especially when you consider that the trek across Shroud took them weeks to complete. This overall feeling of agency was helped because both of the characters equally had little agency; when you’re trapped on an alien moon, you aren’t there to drive the plot forward in complicated ways; your job is to roll with the punches of an unfamiliar environment and hope that you simply don’t die. Overall, this was a really well done book, and I would definitely recommend to anyone who is looking for a sci fi saga.

Rating: 4/5 ambassadors that contain chemical messengers inside them (how was I supposed to know that you weren’t an ambassador)

The God of the Woods by Liz Moore

Synopsis: When Barbara Van Laar is discovered missing from her summer camp bunk one morning in August 1975, it triggers a panicked, terrified search. Losing a camper is a horrific tragedy under any circumstances, but Barbara isn’t just any camper; she’s the daughter of the wealthy family that owns the camp — as well as the opulent nearby estate and most of the land in sight. And this isn’t the first time a Van Laar child has disappeared in this region: Barbara’s older brother Bear also went missing fourteen years ago, never to be found. How could this have happened yet again? Out of this gripping beginning, Liz Moore weaves a richly textured drama, both emotionally nuanced and propelled by a double-barreled mystery. Chasing down the layered secrets of the Van Laar family and the community working in its shadow, Moore’s multi-threaded drama brings readers into the hearts of characters whose lives are forever changed by this eventful summer.

My thoughts: I picked up this book after Kaitlyn needed some motivation to finish her copy. Again, I was expecting it to be dense and pretentious, but I found it to be very readable. It’s a bit of a murder mystery, but not really. Instead of being mysterious, it’s about the lives of the characters who were present at the time of Barbara’s disappearance. There is a missing persons investigation, but the book doesn’t spend so much time on it that it really feels like a crime novel. Moore spends most of the time unravelling the lives of the different characters, most of which I found to be very compelling. I think that if I had picked up this book a few years ago, I probably would have found it to be boring, a “nothing ever happens book”, and would have been disappointed that it wasn’t actually a crime thriller. But at this time in my life, I enjoyed it and appreciated it for what it was. Maybe it means that I’m growing up.

Rating: 3/5 murals on bedroom walls, heartbreakingly covered up with garish pink paint

Restaurant Kid: A Memoir of Family and Belonging by Rachel Phan

Canada Reads 2026 Longlist

Synopsis: When she was three years old, Rachel Phan met her replacement. Instead of a new sibling, her parents’ time and attention were suddenly devoted entirely to their new family restaurant. For her parents—whose own families fled China during Japanese occupation and then survived bombs and starvation during the war in Vietnam—it was a dream come true. For Rachel, it was something quite different. Overnight, she became a restaurant kid, living on the periphery of her own family and trying her best to stay out of the way. In Restaurant Kid, Rachel seeks to examine the way her life has been shaped by the rigid boxes placed around her. She had to be a “good daughter,” never asking questions, always being grateful. She had to be a “real Canadian,” watching hockey and speaking English so flawlessly that her tongue has since forgotten how to contort around Cantonese tones. As the only Chinese girl at school, she had to alternate between being the sidekick, geek, or Asian fetish, depending on whose gaze was on her. Now, three decades after their restaurant first opened, Rachel's parents are cautiously talking about retirement. As an adult, Rachel’s “good daughter” role demands something new of her—and a chance to get to know her parents away from the restaurant.

My thoughts: As someone who grew up in a very diverse city, and came of age in the 2010s, it was shocking and horrifying to hear about the racism that the author experienced as a kid growing up in the 2000s in Essex county, Ontario. She grew up in a small town that was 95% white, and the behaviours of her classmates and peers felt cartoonishly racists (not to say that they didn’t happen, but to say that the early 2000s was apparently a gross time to be a POC). Although the book mainly covers the author’s childhood, she shared some parts of her current adulthood, and it was really gratifying to see that she was able to start dealing with some of the trauma she endured from her classmates, and also see her thrive in a community where she was able to stand up for herself.
Restaurant Kid was eye opening in a lot of ways, but one specific way that I wanted to touch on was how Rachel’s childhood differentiated from my own. Growing up in the 2000s as the youngest child, she had little to no parental oversight, and was apparently constantly drinking, smoking, and having sex. I was a super boring teenager with a lot of parental oversight, and I did none of those things. In particular, Rachel focuses a lot on her sexuality and sexual experiences as a tween and teen. This topic received a lot of “page time” but didn’t seem to have a similar outsized effect on the overall story of her life. It doesn’t lead into a journey of discovering her sexuality, it doesn’t lead to any kind of medical conditions, and it doesn’t seem to have that much of an effect on her adult dating life (which to me, someone who has no expertise in this area, seemed pretty normal for a young woman in the late 2010s and early 2020s) I’m wondering if the book could have been better balanced; I was specifically shocked at the relatively little time that Rachel spent discussing her depression and suicidal ideation; as someone who continues to struggle with depression ever since I was a teenager, this would have been one of the defining features if I ever wrote a memoire of my own childhood. But I guess this is a good reminder that Rachel and I had very different lives, and that my perspectives and norms are not actually that “normal.” On a final note, Rachel’s account of her trip to Vietnam with her parents did hit kind of different. She describes it as life changing experience, where she got to bond with her parents on a deeper level, and get to understand her own culture. My mom regularly tells stories about the time she took her mother (my grandmother) on a backpacking trip through Italy (Where my grandmother was born), and has mentioned how much she would like the two of us to take a similar mother-daughter trip together. Unfortunately, I don’t think that this is something I’ll be able to do, at least in the short term. I have too many other things that I’m saving up my money and my vacation time for (wedding, honeymoon, emergency fund, maybe a down payment for a condo). Up until recently, I also haven’t had any itch to travel, especially outside of Canada, which is unusual for a lot of my circle of acquaintances. It makes me wonder if I’m making the wrong choice, and ignoring my mom’s happiness in favour of my own, by not prioritizing this trip. Is this something that I will live to regret?

Rating: ⅗ orders of General Phan’s Shrimp

A Minor Chorus by Billy-Ray Belacourt

Canada Reads 2026 Shortlist

Synopsis: In Northern Alberta, a queer Indigenous doctoral student steps away from his dissertation to write a novel. He is adrift, caught between his childhood on the reservation and this new life of the urban intelligentsia. Billy-Ray Belcourt’s unnamed narrator chronicles a series of encounters: a heart-to-heart with fellow doctoral student River over the mounting pressure placed on marginalized scholars; a meeting with Michael, a closeted adult from his hometown whose vulnerability and loneliness punctuate the realities of queer life on the fringe. Amid these conversations, the narrator is haunted by memories of Jack, a cousin caught in the cycle of police violence, drugs, and survival. Jack’s life parallels the narrator’s own; the possibilities of escape and imprisonment are left to chance with colonialism stacking the odds. A Minor Chorus introduces the dazzling literary voice of a Lambda Literary Award winner and Canadian #1 national best-selling poet to the United States, shining much-needed light on the realities of Indigenous survival.

My thoughts: I definitely don’t think that this book is bad, but it just wasn’t for me. It’s one of the Canada Reads selection for this year, and probably not something that I would have read on my own; one of the reasons that I challenge myself to read the whole shortlist (and this year, the longlist too) is to broaden my horizons and pick up books I normally would not read. As a white, cishet, settler woman, I am obviously not the intended audience for a book written by a Two-Spirit Indigenous person, and that’s okay. Personally, I found the book a bit too abstract for my personal preferences, and it was very much a book where the characters think about things, rather than do things. It also felt very much like a book that was written by a writer, for writers, which was another reason why it missed the mark for me.

Rating: 2/5 theses that you want to drop in order to write a novel, which is basically your thesis

All of Us Murderers by KJ Charles

Synopsis: When Zeb Wyckham is summoned to a wealthy relative's remote Gothic manor, he is horrified to find all the people he least wants to see in the world: his estranged brother, his sneering cousin, and his bitter ex-lover Gideon Grey. Things couldn't possibly get worse.

Then the master of the house announces the true purpose of the gathering: he intends to leave the vast family fortune to whoever marries his young ward, setting off a violent scramble for her hand. Zeb wants no part of his greedy family―but when he tries to leave, the way is barred. The walls of Lackaday House are high, and the gates firmly locked. As the Dartmoor mists roll in, there's no way out. And something unnatural may be watching them from the house's shadowy depths…

Fear and paranoia ramping ever-higher, Zeb has nowhere to turn but to the man who once held his heart. As the gaslight flickers and terror takes hold, can two warring lovers reunite, uncover the murderous mysteries of Lackaday House―and live to tell the tale?

My thoughts: Overall I thought this was a pretty interesting book with an intriguing mystery. I commend the author for executing the mystery and the setting well; I think someone who was less skilled would have turned this into something a bit too ridiculous or fantastical. I think it’s because most things were grounded in reality, instead of in the supernatural. For example, the idea of a haunted mansion that you’re not allowed to leave could be over the top, but Lackaday House wasn’t really haunted, it was actually just really uncomfortable (physically, being cold, in disrepair, etc, but also emotionally, filled with hostile staff and overtly hostile other guests), and the reason that you couldn’t leave the grounds because the mist (a natural, common phenomenon) was so thick that it makes it treacherous to wander around, and also that the host specifically asked you to not leave, so you have to stay out of social obligation. I thought the cast of characters was pretty interesting; everyone felt strange but distinct. I specifically thought it was funny that the “token female” character, Elise, was surrounded by a group of ridiculous men. It felt very Almost Friday-core. For the main character Zeb, I thought he was really interesting to experience the story through. I liked his combination of relative sanity, but also getting a window into his ADHD, and what it would have looked like in a historical context (eg. fidgeting with prayer beads). I specifically liked the reveal that Zeb was a successful published author because it demonstrated ADHD as a strength, which I would have liked to see a bit more with regards to the main mystery of the book.

Rating: 4/5 rosary beads that you have to clack around just to focus on something

Finding Flora by Elinor Florence

Synopsis: In 1905, Scottish newcomer Flora Craigie jumps from a moving train to escape her abusive husband. Desperate to disappear, she claims a homestead near Alix, Alberta, determined to start a new life for herself. She finds that her nearest neighbours are also a Welsh widow with three children; two American women raising chickens; and a Métis woman who makes a living by breaking in wild horses.

While battling the harsh environment (and draconian local attitudes toward female farmers), the five women grapple with the differences of their backgrounds and the secrets each struggles to keep. When their homes are threatened with expropriation by the hostile federal Minister of the Interior, the women join forces to “fire the heather,” a Scottish term meaning raising a ruckus. And as the competition for land along the new Canadian Pacific railway line heats up, Flora’s violent husband closes in, and an unscrupulous land agent threatens the lives and livelihoods of the women just as they’re coming into their own.

My thoughts: I thought this book was a very cool slice of Canadian history. I was definitely soyfacing when historical figures like Irene Parlby (a member of the Famous Five and overall I really appreciated that it felt thoroughly Canadian. I thought Flora’s struggle as a single female homesteader in a new land was particularly poignant; it really underlined the immense struggle that newcomers and refugees can face across time and history. I loved the small community of women that Flora was able to build up, and I definitely loved that at the end she didn’t have to sacrifice her farm in order to find a husband (which I was definitely worried about, especially since villagers in the book constantly eschewed people who took a homestead, worked it, and then sold it just so that they could fund their move to somewhere else).

Rating: 3/5 barnraisers for a field that was mysteriously razed

We keep on keeping on this month, and going down the booklog list.

Godzilla on my mind – William Tsutsui

The café's #1 Godzilla addict fan reporting in.

This book is a sorta retrospective on the godzilla phenomenon from it's beginning in 1954 until 2004, when this book came out. It is to note that this was released before Toho's final Godzilla in the Millenium era, Gozilla: Final Wars from 2004, and Toho's subsequent putting of Godzilla under ice until 2016. It is also before any of the modern american Godzilla movies, although the first american godzilla, from 1998, had released by then. This also mostly talks about pre-internet stuff, and definitely pre modern internet (youtube wasn't even a thing in 2004).

It was a nice little read. The author is a historian so he does do a good job of putting together an interesting and structured essay about godzilla. Although it's nice to have the point of view of someone from that time, it is a double edge sword. We have a nice time-capsule of was Godzilla was in the late 80 to early 2000's, but at the same time, every reference is extremely dated to the point of irrelevance. And it's not even a thing of “Am I too french to understand any of this anglo-saxon/american bullshit?”, it's just stuff that is too specific to that period and that just didn't stand the test of time. Other than that, it was really nice to learn about all the copycats that godzilla had spawned, and all the weird shit that happened for the american distribution (and therefore most likely canadian as well) of godzilla movies. Like imagine hollywood execs saying that the cast of the movie is not white enough so the american audience won't care, and them filming sequences with an american cast to replace the ones in the original movie. Insane.

I must see more Godzilla movies.

Baptism of Fire – Andrzej Sapkowski

(Book 5 of the Witcher Series)

I hate the characterisation of Milva. The trope of womanly characters falling head over heels for Geralt right away for no reason continues with her, but it's also done super weirdly, like she's a strong independent woman but in her heart she's just a damsel who “needs” Geralt. Maybe it's the translation that imbues that weird vibe, but I was really not a fan. The other member of the hansa were cool, even if it did take me pretty much until the end of the book to appreciate cahir. Regis is the goat. The Ciri/Falka plotline felt a bit off at times. One book to go until the end of Geralt and Ciri's story.

Les hérétiques de Dune – Frank Herbert

(Dune saga book 5)

PEAK but also a tad weird

After the end of God Emperor of Dune, I didn't think Frank could make me super invested in another Dune plotline. I was wrong, I was hooked within the first 20 pages. Great new story, interesting characters... I liked the new 5000 years in the future (from the last novel) setting, all the new world building that we get drip by drip, but with enough mystery left out to keep everything engaging. And bro, they've been making duncans for literally 10 000 years at this point, what's up with him?

But it also gets a bit weird at the end, with sex kung-fu.

The Lady of the Lake – Andrzej Sapkowski

(Book 6 [and final book] of the Witcher Series)

I really didn't like the this final book of the witcher series. The plot both grinds to a halt and gets resolved in the same book, and none of the resolutions for any arcs are really satisfying. It really felt like the author was just done with this part of geralt's story and just rushed through everything to get to the end. The narrative device used for the first part of the book adds many, many pages of fluff. I can and do appreciate less conventional story telling mechanics, and even digressions, but not when this is the last book of your saga and none of the plot lines have been resolved or even developed fully.

We don't really do anything of substance with Geralt, we have none of Yennefer's POV, and only Ciri's story moves forward. Only 200 pages from the end of the book — and the end of Geralt's saga — we were so far away from any resolution from any of the plotlines introduced in the book, and there's six books worth of material and setup and stuff, that I started doubting that this was indeed the final book in the saga. But it is. In 200 pages, the author concludes the giant geopolitical intricate war/invasion plotline of the series, has the main characters take care of the first and second main bad guys, has the situation with the third bad guy (who was a complete mystery until then, but let's throw in some last minute exposition) resolve itself. Also, we kill off all the troupe's companions, “resolve” some of the main themes, have the main characters — which had been running after each other for the last three books— finally meet up, concludes the arc of those main characters. On top of that the author uses more than one extra narrative device that take more breathing room from the plot, and has almost none of the character arcs, and honestly nor the rest of the plotlines, resolve satisfyingly.

The series overall is good, and even this book, but it really needed a good book or two to really have stuff wrap up neatly. I will probably read the other Witcher books, that are all prequels/sidequels (since this books concludes the witcher saga quite unambiguously) because I think the universe is really cool.

Arthurian Tales mentioned.

Now that I've read the books though, I can ask, what the fuck were they doing with the show? Not only is the plot is completely different, and so are the characters, so much so that it's not even an adaptation of the witcher saga after season 1, but it's also complete ass.

Going through book series is the easiest part of the boocklog, but I feel like as soon as I have to decide what to read next and it's only standalone books, I'll be overcome with choice paralysis. Still, so far I'm at 18/60 books in the booklog, and at 5647/19886 pages — or 30% and 28% done respectively — so have have some margin to manoeuvre. Let's keep up the good work next month.

Thank you for reading my logorrhea Eddie – Award winning author

We are back with a new year, and new books. There's finally gonna be some more physical books as I have as a goal to go through everything that I have bought and not read yet, as I've mentioned in the previous monthly, I'm doing a sort of booklog. On the menu this month, a bunch of manga, and a decent amount of books.

Carmilla – Author

A classic vampire novella, predating Dracula by 25 years.

It was a nice little read. It could have been so much more, but it does some good things for what it is. I liked the lore of vampire that they established, that is not just derivative of Dracula (as it as written before). The predation relation of the vampire with the victim is more interesting here. The setting is kinda bland and too classic — a rich family in a manor with servants, with a doctor at their disposal and generally anything at their disposal. It was a bit repetitive at times. The story resolution happens kinda fast, but at least it's not wasting the readers time.

First book of the booklog read.

The Three Body Problem – Liu Cixin

Very enjoyable read. The story was very original, and the way the author incorporated the game into his story was cool. I think that was a really interesting and engaging way to introduced the three body problem and the trisolary civilisation. I had been talking to Shrey who remarked that the characters were a bit 1D (way to throw him under the bus), with only Wei Wenjie getting some love, but I think it's fine for that type of story. It was certainly a breath of fresh air after reading Katabasis — since I read the bookclub books on the train, it was nice not to have to pull up my phone every paragraph because something stupid or incoherent happened in the book. The characterisation of physics was generally alright, although the “physics doesn't exist” thing at the beginning made literally no sense. (shows bit of a misunderstanding of physics too, the most exciting time in physics is when measurements don't match expectations) The book quality kinda drops off a bit at the end, and I found the Trisolary POV we get from the other messages kinda incoherent. Thankfully we're saved with my favourite line in the book:

“YOU ARE BUGS“

how to – Randall Munroe

DNF

First DNF of the year, but to be fair, I stopped reading it around November last year, but kept lying to myself that I would “pick it back up again later”. The book is fine. The only reason that I stopped is it's like quirky science, with calculations and stuff that are supposed to wow people not very well versed in sciences, but are kinda all just very simple first year course “fun” problems. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that, it's engaging science vulgarisation, but I'm just really not the target audience. It's also a bit too “internet quirky” for me. The stick figure illustrations are a nice addition.

Au Coeur de la Forêt – Many Authors

Also a book of the booklog. A little collection of stories centred around the forest.

It was a really nice read, and also very french but in the real sense of the term, it felt very regular french life, not whatever parisian romantic fantasy people mean when saying french. It was also a nice little mix with a bunch of stuff, some more regular stuff, some SF, some more poetic stuff. Made me kinda yearn having a forest nearby, and not some shitty grove, and actual forest where you can explore and get lost in.

Fire Punch (Volume 1-8) – Fujimoto

From the booklog. The world is experiencing another ice age, and some people have powers. Agni his sister and the village are trying to survive.

PEAK. It's easily in my top 2 manga series ever. I had started reading it when it came out in France, around 2017, which also the time I set off to Canada. I therefore had the chance to buy the first 5 volumes and completely forgot about it afterwards, until I went back to France in 2023 and grabbed the rest.

While the first volume is maybe a bit immature in some aspects, the rest of the manga is absolutely fantastic. There is a ton going on at all time, the story never gets comfortable and always pivots in an interesting way. The drawings are awesome, the themes fantastic, and we even get trans representation, which is way ahead of its time when it was written. It's also nice and short, no dragging anything for the sake of making more money or whatever, my man had something to say, his art and story telling is focused, and he got what he needed to off his chest. Absolute masterpiece.

The Last Wish, Sword of Destiny, Blood of Elves, The Time of Contempt – Andrzej Sapkowski

(Book 1-4 of the Witcher Series)

All books from the booklog. It took me a while to get into the Witcher III (a video game), but once I did, I found the lore and setting very interesting. I then saw the first season of the show, which was alright. The later seasons were ass, and so I turned to the books. I had heard that the books were super sexist though so I was a bit apprehensive. For books that were written in the 80 and 90's in Poland, they could have been so much worse. I think the main complaints I would have is the very male gazey tone the books have, how a lot of women are described by their looks and have their degree of promiscuity be a character trait, when it is totally absent for men. I also find it a bit odd how every single hot lady is infatuated with Geralt at first sight, our main protagonist, even if he is described in the book as a bit repulsive due to the witcher mutations. Women are overall written as smart, powerful and competent in the book, but that doesn't absolve it of the aforementioned.

I do have to share something I read on the forums though: in the book, there is a part in which, after vigorous fighting, the seam of the dress of one of the womanly protagonist rips a bit, and you can see a bit of her “shapely breast”. One of the poster, to reinforce their point about the male gaze in the book, asked if you could imagine the same thing happening to Geralt and the writer saying that through the crack in his pants, his “pert penis” was revealed. The book would have been 100% better if stuff like that happened to the male characters too though.

Putting the books back in their historical and cultural context, and going beyond this more modern analysis, we have very good fantasy books. I was pleasantly surprised at how well the world and its political canvas are detailed, and how rich and “alive” a world is presented here. There are some very interesting themes of colonialism, neutrality and moralism, and our protagonist Geralt does engage with all of those, they are not just things happening in the background. I also liked that Geralt, although undeniably being very capable, also gets a lot of things wrong and we are shown a lot of vulnerable sides of him, he's not just “hard strong brooding man/killing machine with no emotion”. The first two books are a collection of novellas about Geralt, and the later are full length stories. I think the short stories do a great job introducing us the witcher and his world, and it is definitely necessary as without those, following all the political stuff in the later book would have been complicated (and frankly not that engaging). The novellas also allow the author to jump around the timeline, without needing to fill all the blanks. Very enjoyable so far, my only complaint would be that with the later books, we are kinda ditching the usual witcher-monster slaying aspect of the story, with all the investigating and lore that follows, which I quite enjoyed

So far I'm at 14/60 books in the booklog, and at 3259/19886 pages. I do not expect to keep up this pace as a bunch of books of this booklog are about philosophy or sociology, which are not as quickly readable (unless I just read the words without parsing through their meaning). In any case, I'll catch you next month.

Thank you for reading my logorrhea Eddie – Award winning author

Recent events have forced me to release this article, which was started (and abandoned) in November and was appropriately named “Kino(vember) Night in Kanada” That original article was born from my then recent acquisition of a 4k Blu-Ray player, and the start of a modest film collection. I had therefore watched a bunch of movies in November, and thought to make an article about that. Life caught up and I didn't have time to finish it. Now is the time though, with the remains of this article, and the subsequent review of Wake Up Dead Man, which we will talk about at the end of this article. So, we start with the original article, where I review movies I saw after I bought a physical copy of them.

Godzilla Minus One

I have seen this movie thrice now, and the more I watch it, the less I like it. I know it's a heresy in the Godzilla community to not like this movie, but it is what it is. The first time I saw it in the theatres, I already had given it a fairly positive albeit luke-warm review. With the novelty wearing out, it's just less appealing of a movie to me.

The acting's over the topness, is a bit more jarring with each rewatch, and some of the scenes are so dramatic and over the top that it stretches the limits of believability. The choppy pace is more visible and disruptive. The way godzilla moves is also super robotic which doesn't really makes sense with his design. Overall, I don't find this Godzilla (the monster) that internally consistent; why does it just go back to the sea after having destroy Ginza and come back? Why not just continue until all of Tokyo is rased?

Another fault in the movie, which is the movie actually is blameless about, is that it was released after Shin Godzilla. We had already seen a godzilla vs japan with Shin. The only differentiating part is the post-WWII setting, and I don't think they did anything super-duper interesting with that godzilla-wise. We need the new Toho Godzillas to fight other monsters, it's like half of the appeal of the Godzilla franchise. Godzilla Minus Zero (yes it's the official title of the sequel) better have another monster. We have not seen any takes from Toho on the classic Godzilla enemies since the release of Godzilla Final Wars in 2004!

On the character front, I wouldn't have minded a bit more character development, and more development in the characters' relationships.

Despite all of my complaining, it's still undeniably a good movie. The above is just the flaws that get exacerbated on multiple rewatches. All the good things I said about the movie in my previous review stand.

Previous, slightly edited, review right after seeing it in the theatres in 2023:

Not quite sure if I would call it kino, but it's a good movie. However clumsy, Shin Godzilla still has more merit to the Toho kino crown.  This last movie however does not have to blush on the theme fronts, and addresses some pretty interesting ones, due to it being set right after WWII. Those themes are also pretty original — at least from a westoïd perspective. Acting is a bit over the tops as expected, but it's not so jarring that it takes you out of the plot. Speaking of plot, the human section is not only decent, but actually interesting, I was actually made to care about the different characters. I even managed to be fooled: the ultimate plot twist is setup in a really obvious manner and I saw it coming a mile away. Or did I? Well yes, but actually no. [SPOILER] The outcome is the same, but the process was different and much better for two character arcs. [SPOILER] On the monster side, we stick to the classics; simple but effective. Godzilla's design works, and his breath attack is fucking dope, it's honesty 90% as hype as that bomb in the star wars prequelle (yk what I'm talking about). Now on to the negative; CGI can be a bit hit or miss, I thought japan had caught up as I was pleasantly surprised with Shin Godzilla's offering. There was really only one scene where I was like “wow that's rough”. And although they are not awful, the water effects/interactions with Godzilla is nowhere near what we saw in the recent Godzilla vs King Kong, which water effect really impressed me at the time. [SPOILER] Finally, other than the ending, there is only one Godzilla mass destruction scene, which at the very least one too little. [SPOILER] Cinematography was good, but nothing spectacular jumped at me. The music is pretty good here, but it mostly sticks with the classic safe vibe for Godzilla tracks. No iconic “Who will know” or “Persecution of the Masses” here. Overall this movie does everything well, and even some things great. As far as Godzilla movies go, it's at the top of the basket for me.

Amadeus

I have seen this movie easily 20-30times, and two thirds of those were during one summer. When I was a kid, during the summer vacations, my family used to drive to the italian alps, and we would usually spend almost a month on top of one of the mountain there. Our time was mostly filled with hikes, at a rhythm of one every 2-3 days. There was no internet, and with this being in the german speaking part of the italian part of the alps (you've read this correctly), cable was all but understandable to us. Therefore, we would usually bring a DVD player and only a couple of DVDs, that we would watch on repeat for the month, to the delight of my parents, I'm sure. One summer, we brought Amadeus and Big Fish. We've watched both almost every day. I haven't really watched or thought about it since, easily 12-13 years ago, but when Nick mentioned it a couple month ago, my memories of it suddenly resurfaced.

This movie is absolutely goated. What a fine choice for us to have a hyperfixation on that summer. The music is just bangers after bangers after banger, the sets look awesome, the costumes look awesome. The performances are amazing and the story great. I loved Salieri, what a portrayal of the pure essence of a hater. I also loved how somehow he would get super lucky with stuff happening in the movie, and would immediately incorporate that lucky stuff in his despicable schemes.

If I had to find one fault with the movie and the 4k remaster, it's that the audio dynamics is too wide; if you turn up the volume to hear the dialogues, the music will be blasting, and if you turn down the volume because of the music, you will not hear any of the dialogues.

Bladerunner

I had watched Bladerunner once before, the director's cut, and I thought it was good. Upon rewatch while I appreciate how maybe ground-breaking it was at the time, I found it a bit timid. While the cinematography is great, in terms of story, it's actually pretty generic. It is also very dated. The very young 20 year old ending up with the 40 year old dude for ? reason. Don't forget the sexual assault and coercion scene. The dialogue also feels pretty dated, honestly everything that relates to characters interacting with each other or being on screen. It feels pretty jarring for a movie set in the distant future of *checks notes* the year 2019 to feel that old in this regard.

Loved the eye replicant effect, and the ending monologue. The themes are still relevant and fairly well explored. I do not understand the debate around Deckard being a replicant or not, and people acting as if Deckard not being a human ruins the movie. I went into the movie thinking Deckard was a replicant and I found nothing in my viewing that contradicted that. Also I find that Deckard being a replicant is better in terms of narrative than him being a human, as otherwise it such a generic message of “actually the robots are more human than the humans themselves!!1!!!!1!”.

Please crucify me now.

Bladerunner 2049

I'd tried to watch Bladerunner 2049 already and didn't even make it halfway through (to be fair it was in the plane a couple of years ago). I don't know what happened then, because this movie is awesome. I did get baited by the “of course the main character is the chosen one that everybody wants to get their hands on” and liked the switcheroo.

Colours and visuals, everything was great — Denis was really just getting his tools ready for Dune. There are so many interesting an beautiful shots. The themes are very interesting and I did love Ryan Gosling as the main protagonist. His relationship with his AI chatbot girl is very reminiscent of the movie “Her” (I've never seen it). I found his investigation more engaging and easier to follow that Deckard's. The only main negative point of the movie is that they dragged Harrison Ford from wherever he was to play in this movie, and he doesn't want to. Hell, even in the first one he looked like he didn't want to be there. Leave grandpa alone.

Shin Godzilla x2

“surprisingly engaging” – Elisa “oh, the SDF is still called the SDF?” – Bennet “damn, if I ever get a girlfriend that looks like her [talking about japanese lead actress], you know I'm compromised” – Spencer

I saw Shin Godzilla twice in November, first when I received the 4k blu-ray, and then 4 days later because Spencer wanted to see it, and so we watched it all together with Tetyana, Elisa, Bennet and Spencer.

I still loved it as much, it looks awesome although the VFX does look a bit rough until Godzilla gets to its fourth form. There's also a minor pacing issue with the movie, with the tension building all the way up and then releasing, but we still have a quarter of the movie left. Here's a professional rendition of the tension:

Bennet did point out something that is very apparent, but I had just glanced over during my viewing, which is the amount of SDF (the japanese army) dickriding. The movie showcase all the cool toys that the army has, they make plans to stop Godzilla and are disciplined, risk their lives... It is very obvious, but I think I missed it because I'm used to ignoring the amount of military propaganda in us movies, which is omnipresent.

The deleted scenes + outtakes were really cool to have, another win for the owners of physical media. I already talked about this movie in Kino Nights in/above Canada so I won't really say more.

Dune

Peak. Denis Villeneuve my goat. Looks awesome, sounds awesome.

This is the end of the previous article, and I didn't really watch any more movies (other than the Grinch which I had already seen a handful of times), but here they are:

Frankenstein

Designs and shit interesting, cinematography not super interesting, especially the lighting which I found bland. I don't think the story was an improvement on Mary Shelley's work which I had read recently. Dialogues were ok. The wolf scene was awesome on its own but is super inconsistent with the tone and vibe of the movie. Kinda disappointed overall

On to the main course:

Wake Up Dead Man

I had already said I liked glass onion better than knives out in a previous movie article Kino Nights in/above Canada. After seeing this, I just posted my ranking of the knives out movies, from my favourite to my least favourite. I didn't expect it to stir that many reactions. Here's a chronological retelling of the events that happened between the evening of Feb 2nd and the morning of Feb 3rd:

21:20:45 – I finish Wake Up Dead Man with Tetyana, I turn to her and tell her “it's my least favourite out of the three movies, like it's not bad, but I liked the others more”

21:26:18 – I make this post on the cafe, with my ranking of the Knives Out movies, from my favourite to least favourite:

21:41:46 – Kaitlyn reacts to the post and posts her own ranking:

22:04:29 – Alex replies to the original post with the correct ranking, so far none of the rankings are the same:

22:06:03 – Elisa reacts to the post and asks if we can't all agree that the movies are all good (I think we all agree about that, but we each have our favourite):

22:07:38 – Bennet Blanc sets up a trap, replying to Kaitlyn's comment:

22:20:38 – Kaitlyn adds some cheese to the trap by replying to Bennet Blanc's post:

23:39:19 – Nick reacts to the post and accuses my original post of being stinky “french cheese” bait (the fool, does he not know that a cheese's taste is inversely proportional to its stench?)

8:13:35 – Spencer reacts to the post

8:32:52 – Noah reacts and replies to the post with the sanest reply of all:

15:06:06 – Jaeg reacts and replies to the post also accusing it to be bait:

[in an american southern accent, with infinite drip] We now have all the pieces of the puzzle... but I do not know yet who they fit together... Actually, I don't think there's even a puzzle at all here, there's no mystery... or maybe, the mystery was the friends we lost along the way...

Are my preferences so abhorrent that the expression of my taste has to be “bait”? Also what does that mean, how can it be bait? What would I be baiting? For people to give me their ranking of favourite to least favourite Knives Out movies? oh no fostering conversation on the cafe. I'm crashing out rn, I'm a tax-paying card-carrying citizen of crashout city and I wear it on my sleeves. Was accusing me of bait a bait in itself? If so, I have pushed away the little stick holding the trap open, let the box fall and I'm comfy in my little wooden enclosure, delecting myself with 'stinky french' cheese.

Alrighty, dramatic crash out out of the way, I'll briefly explain why I like this movie less than the other entries in the franchise.

I thought the mystery was way less fun than the previous two movies and more random. The story was better in the beginning than both movies, but the way it's told less interesting than in the second movie. In terms of setting, I also found it less appealing than the second movie, but better than the first (the third and first are extremely similar to me). I thought the secondary characters were super underdeveloped here, where they had been pretty well fleshed out in the second movie after being inexistent in the first. The main “main characters” were really excellent here (the priest and monsignor) but I lament the fact that I cannot count Benoît Blanc amongst them. Benoît Blanc being less present and having little agency was something they had addressed in the second movie but they seem to have sinned again here. The main antagonist kinda sucks and her motivations also suck. The secondary antagonists also suck. The cinematography is good, more mature than first one and better than the second one. The costumes and outfits were way less fun here.

My vision of the Knives out movies is as good movies that are really fun, like Bullet Train which I found awesome (although the Knives Outs are definitely more restrained). I think this one took itself a bit too seriously, and could not have topped how fun the second one is. And this is why my favourite Knives Out Movie is the second one despite its ending, my second favourite the first one due to its charm, and my least favourite one this third one.

I hope you have had as much fun reading this crash out as I have had writing it. Please do remember that it's not that deep.

Thank you for reading my logorrhea Eddie – Award winning author

New year, new book review! I have to say that I’m continually impressed by Eddie for carrying the Reading Roundup torch, and this year I’d like to get back in touch with my roots. I will say that most of the synopses have been copied directly from Goodreads or other sources, with minimal changes by me. Yes, I’m a fraud. >.<

This month I read 5 ebooks and 1 eaudiobook from the library, and 2 epubs, totaling to 8 books.

The numbers as they stand as of January 2026:

Total Reading Goal: 8/100 Canada Reads: 1/5 (when the 2026 Canada reads were announced I was delighted to find out that I’ve actually already read one of them; you cannot imagine how smug I feel). Nonfiction Goal: 0/12 TPL Reading Challenge: ?/? [It hasn’t yet been announced]

Dishonourable Mentions:

Antimatter Blues by Edward Ashton (Mickey7 #2)

Synopsis: Summer has come to Niflheim. The lichens are growing, the six-winged bat-things are chirping, and much to his own surprise, Mickey Barnes is still alive―that last part thanks almost entirely to the fact that Commander Marshall believes that the colony’s creeper neighbors are holding an antimatter bomb, and that Mickey is the only one who’s keeping them from using it. Mickey’s just another colonist now. Instead of cleaning out the reactor core, he spends his time these days cleaning out the rabbit hutches. It’s not a bad life.

It’s not going to last.

It may be sunny now, but winter is coming. The antimatter that fuels the colony is running low, and Marshall wants his bomb back. If Mickey agrees to retrieve it, he’ll be giving up the only thing that’s kept his head off of the chopping block. If he refuses, he might doom the entire colony. Meanwhile, the creepers have their own worries, and they’re not going to surrender the bomb without getting something in return. Once again, Mickey finds the fate of two species resting in his hands. If something goes wrong this time, though, he won’t be coming back.

My thoughts: Because of the recently released movie, I read the first book in the series (Mickey7 aka Mickey17), and thought it was pretty okay, if rather short. So I picked up the next book to try it. Reader, I forgot how much Mickey’s life just sucks. He has no job, slashed rations, his boss hates him, his friends and girlfriend don’t particularly seem to like him, and he is perpetually on the verge of contractually-obligated death. Even worse, he’s not a particularly compelling character to read about. I won’t say that he has zero agency, but he doesn’t have all that much, and I just don’t find him a particularly enjoyable character to read about. Every year I try to give myself permission to DNF more books, and maybe this is the year I listen to myself.

You might like this book if: your life also sucks so much and you kind of also suck

The Real Reviews

People We Meet on Vacation by Emily Henry

Synopsis: “Poppy and Alex. Alex and Poppy. They have nothing in common. She's a wild child; he wears khakis. She has insatiable wanderlust; he prefers to stay home with a book. And somehow, ever since a fateful car share home from college many years ago, they are the very best of friends. For most of the year they live far apart—she's in New York City, and he's in their small hometown—but every summer, for a decade, they have taken one glorious week of vacation together.

Until two years ago, when they ruined everything. They haven't spoken since.

Poppy has everything she should want, but she's stuck in a rut. When someone asks when she was last truly happy, she knows, without a doubt, it was on that ill-fated, final trip with Alex. And so, she decides to convince her best friend to take one more vacation together—lay everything on the table, make it all right. Miraculously, he agrees.

Now she has a week to fix everything. If only she can get around the one big truth that has always stood quietly in the middle of their seemingly perfect relationship. What could possibly go wrong?”

My thoughts: Starting the year off strong! I have actually read this book before but it was before I started writing Reading Roundups or using Storygraph, so I’m not going to count it as a re-read. I also didn’t remember much about this book at all, so I kind of did feel like I was reading it for the first time. And I had to suffer through the whole movie, meaning that I’ve earned the right to include it on my list of the year. This book was both better and worse than I remembered. Better, because the friendship between Poppy and Alex had a solid foundation, and their friendship was very strong and full of yearning. Worse, because the third act conflict felt so shoehorned into the very end. Alex confronts Poppy about only being able to commit to him when they’re on vacation, and not willing to do so during real life. Because he said this right before he got on a plane (without Poppy) they immediately had to separate and were not really able to talk about this. I also think that Alex was kind of unfair, because at this point their issue was more that they would have been in a long distance relationship, instead of a relationship where one partner has commitment issues. I also think it was clear that Poppy was genuinely unhappy with her life and was looking to make a real change; she obviously was not attracted to Alex just because they were on vacation. Overall the book was charming, and I appreciated it.

Rating: 4/5 stone bear statues that cost $21 000 but really “speak to me”

Peace Talks (Dresden Files #16) by Jim Butcher

Synopsis: When the Supernatural nations of the world meet up to negotiate an end to ongoing hostilities, Harry Dresden, Chicago’s only professional wizard, joins the White Council’s security team to make sure the talks stay civil. But when his brother Thomas, a white court vampire, is caught trying to assassinate the leader of the Svartalves, Harry is torn between shifting alliances. If he doesn’t rescue Thomas, his brother will be rightfully executed. But if he does, he will have betrayed the Svartalves, whom he greatly depends on, and are fellow signatories of the Accords.

My thoughts: Another year, another book in the Dresden files. OG readers of this blog will remember when Bennet and I started reading this series back in 2023. 16 books later, and we are still not done. This book in particular was not one of my favourites. It wasn’t bad, per say, but it did have strong “nothing ever happens” energy. We didn’t even get to the actual peace talks, which ostensibly should be the most important part of the book, since it’s the literal title, because Harry was too busy faffing around and also dealing with Thomas. We don’t know why Thomas acted so out of character and attempted the assassination in the first place. When Thomas finally was rescued, the peace talks were just about to begin when they were completely interrupted by the titan Ethniu, who will destroy the entire city of Chicago if all of the Accord signatories don’t immediately ally with her. Obviously they don’t, and then everyone starts planning on how to save the city (which I will admit that I loved), and then the book ended. Even with all of my complaints, I think it’s really cool how at this point in the series, everything is about the long game. The entire plot of the previous book, Skin Game, was to acquire an artifact that will likely have critical importance for the next book, Battle Ground. I have already started to read Battle Ground, and I am somewhat enjoying it, but I will be glad when we have made it to the end of this marathon. An 18 book series (with more still to be published) is a challenge even for someone like your girl.

Rating: 4/5 bad cases of conjuritis (I thought only teenagers got conjuritis)

The Grimoire Grammar School Parent Teacher Association by Caitlyn Rozakis

Synopsis: When Vivian’s kindergartner, Aria, gets bitten by a werewolf, she is rapidly inducted into the hidden community of magical schools. Reeling from their sudden move, Vivian finds herself having to pick the right sacrificial dagger for Aria, keep stocked up on chew toys and play PTA politics with sirens and chthonic nymphs and people who literally can set her hair on fire.

As Vivian careens from hellhounds in the school corridors and demons at the talent show, she races to keep up with all the arcane secrets of her new society – shops only accessible by magic portal, the brutal Trials to enter high school, and the eternal inferno that is the parents’ WhatsApp group.

And looming over everything is a prophecy of doom that sounds suspiciously like it’s about Aria. Vivian might be facing the end of days, just as soon as she can get her daughter dressed and out of the door…

My thoughts: This was a cute book. I wouldn’t say that it was cozy, but it was certainly cozy-adjacent. Even though it’s set in a fantasy town, it’s mostly about Vivian’s struggles to solo parent her daughter (while her husband works long hours in the city) and adapt to the new society as a mortal who knows nothing about it. I think it could be a good metaphor for families that have children with disabilities, or immigrant ESL families, both of whom often struggle to navigate systems and new cultural norms. (It should be noted that the book is actually poking fun at exclusive private schools, and their overly-rigerous admission policies). Vivian and her husband were able to talk everything out at the end, which was good, and the overall story had a happy ending, which was great. I didn’t actually mind the toxic interpersonal dynamics of Vivian’s “friends” (whom she rightly later abandons), but the whole prophecy plotline felt so cliche, so I’m glad the book poked fun at the trope a bit.

Rating: 3/5 science fair projects that no one would rightly believe that a kindergartener could do by themselves.

The Running Man by Stephen King writing as Richard Bachman

Synopsis: It was the ultimate death game in a nightmare future America. The year is 2025 and reality TV has grown to the point where people are willing to wager their lives for a chance at a billion-dollar jackpot. Ben Richards is desperate—he needs money to treat his daughter’s illness. His last chance is entering a game show called The Running Man where the goal is to avoid capture by Hunters who are employed to kill him. Surviving this month-long chase is another issue when everyone else on the planet is watching—and willing to turn him in for the reward.

Each night all Americans tune in to watch. So far, the record for survival is only eight days. Can Ben Richards beat the brutal odds, beat the rigged game, beat the entire savage system? He’s betting his life that he can…

My thoughts: I thought this book was great. It was a dystopia that felt very possible, and the fact that it took place in 2025 had me a bit nervous. I initially picked this up because a movie adaptation was released recently, and I wanted to see what all of the fuss is about. I don’t think I will watch the movie because I’m not a fan of the plot changes that they made, since I actually really like how the book was structured, as well as how it ended quite poetically. Just another thing that is different in a post-9/11 world. A very gritty read, but I would recommend it.

Rating: 4/5 free-vees that are always on… because they’re free…

The Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu

Synopsis: This book defies description, so I won’t even try.

My thoughts: I already said this at book club. TLDR; I didn’t really like it, but if we had read it in the original Chinese it probably would have slapped at least a bit more.

Rating: 3/5 film photos with numbers counting down along the edges in a sinister way (this never comes up again btw)

The Oxford Soju Club by Jinwoo Park

Synopsis: When North Korean spymaster Doha Kim is mysteriously killed in Oxford, his protege, Yohan Kim, chases the only breadcrumb given to him in Doha’s last breath: “Soju Club, Dr. Ryu.” In the meantime, a Korean American CIA agent , Yunah Choi, races to salvage her investigation of the North Korean spy cell in the aftermath of the assassination. At the centre of it all is the Soju Club, the only Korean restaurant in Oxford, owned by Jihoon Lim, an immigrant from Seoul in search of a new life after suffering a tragedy. As different factions move in with their own agendas, their fates become entangled, resulting in a bitter struggle that will determine whose truth will triumph. Oxford Soju Club weaves a tale of how immigrants in the Korean diaspora are forced to create identities to survive, and how in the end, they must shed those masks and seek their true selves.

My thoughts: I thought this book was cool conceptually, but I found the pacing to be super weird. It felt like the book ended very abruptly, and I was expecting a lot more to happen. I appreciated how the author structured the chapters; each one was divided into three parts, and covered both the current action and a flashback scene for a specific character. Instead of being specifically named, the sections were called “The Northerner/The Southerner/The American” and then they later switch to “The Exiled/[two more things that I don’t remember ahhh]. It was a really cool exploration of Korean identity, and what it means to be Korean. Despite all of the action, I did find it to be a bit slow (I get that stuff was happening but I just wasn’t super engaged in it, if that makes sense).

Rating: 3/5 bottles of soju that have exactly seven shots, because you can’t ever evenly share it so you’ll always have to order another bottle

Original Sins by Erin Young (Riley Fisher #2)

Synopsis: It's a brutal winter in Des Moines, Iowa, and the city is gripped by fear. A serial attacker known as the Sin Eater is stalking women and has just struck again. It's a tough time and a tough place for Riley Fisher, a former small-town sergeant, to be reporting for duty as an FBI agent on her first assignment.

Teamed with a man she's not sure she can trust and struggling to prove herself – while fighting the pull of her old life and family dramas – Riley is tasked with investigating a vicious death threat against the newly elected female state governor. Gradually, she traces a disturbing connection between this case and the hunt for the Sin Eater. Through snow, ice, violence and lies, Riley Fisher is drawn towards a terrifying revelation.

My thoughts: I picked up this book because I was specifically looking for a dark, psychological thriller about serial killers. In effect, I wanted to read a book that felt exactly like an episode of Criminal Minds. Because of this specific craving, I just picked up the first book that really felt like it matched that vibe, meaning that I accidentally picked up the second book in a series. I ultimately decided not to pivot towards the first book just because it didn’t quite fit the bill, and I suspected I wouldn’t be interested enough to bother completing the series (I was right). Original Sins itself was okay, pretty decent for what I was looking for, but not something I would go back to again. It’s set during mid COVID which makes it feel pretty dated. A large part of the book was framed in terms of feminism/violence against women, and I won’t say that it was out of place or jarring, but it felt strange in a way that I can’t put my finger on. I did think that the serial killer POV was well done, because it still left surprises to uncover as the book went on.

Rating: 3/5 old fashioned hotel key tags that were deliberately planted at the scene of the crime…

The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi by Shannon Chakraborty

Synopsis: Amina al-Sirafi should be content. After a storied and scandalous career as one of the Indian Ocean’s most notorious pirates, she’s survived backstabbing rogues, vengeful merchant princes, several husbands, and one actual demon to retire peacefully with her family to a life of piety, motherhood, and absolutely nothing that hints of the supernatural.

But when she’s tracked down by the obscenely wealthy mother of a former crewman, she’s offered a job no bandit could refuse: retrieve her comrade’s kidnapped daughter for a kingly sum. The chance to have one last adventure with her crew, do right by an old friend, and win a fortune that will secure her family’s future forever? It seems like such an obvious choice that it must be God’s will.

Yet the deeper Amina dives, the more it becomes alarmingly clear there’s more to this job, and the girl’s disappearance, than she was led to believe. For there’s always risk in wanting to become a legend, to seize one last chance at glory, to savor just a bit more power…and the price might be your very soul.

My thoughts: I am definitely glad that I picked up this book. It was an epic pirate adventure tale, complete with fantasy and magical artifacts (but not in a way that felt forced). I think the setting and the placement of the book was really interesting: the characters travelled around the medieval Arabian sea, and stopped in a variety of countries, including Somalia and Yemen. The main character Amina al-Sirafi is a Yemeni Muslim, but the characters around her represent a huge swath of cultures and religions, and it made for a very rich setting. The book is also stylized as a scribe copying down Amina’s adventures as she was telling them, and the interactions between Amina and the scribe, as well as the scribe’s own interjections, were pretty funny. I think the author could have leaned on the scribe even a bit more. This book is long and it definitely feels long just because so much is happening; it was shocked when we had reached what seemed to be the main destination of the final climax and the book was barely 50% finished. The author seems to have set herself up for a quintology, although I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a paradigm change and the pacing ends up being very different. I will, however, definitely be looking out for book 2 when it drops later this spring.

Rating: 4/5 humanoid parrot creatures that are obsessed with order, law, and justice (in that order)

(2026 Preamble: I wrote a majority of this article almost exactly a year ago having been inspired by Eddie's Humble Purge series. It would've functioned as a video game version of the reading roundups people post. I kinda got stuck writing the last part of it for reasons that will hopefully become self evident, so it was left on the backburner for some time. Looking over it now I found it interesting as a time capsule of a fragment of where I was at back then. So I cleaned it up a little and added what could be construed as “author's commentary”. To differentiate between the old and new bits I will stylize my addendums in the same way as you are seeing this paragraph now.)

In light of Eddie's recent printhouse contribution I've been inspired to take a slightly more structured approach to which games I play. The most notable difference is jotting down my thoughts as soon as I finish one and cataloguing it somewhere. I've been doing this for the last few games I've played recently, and I figured it would also be fitting to write up my thoughts more clearly here for everyone to enjoy. I haven't played these games entirely in this month, but I have finished them all this month.

(Amusingly, while the article in question I was referencing is no longer recent, the current most recent Eddie article, “The Humble Purge Awards”, did also spurn me back to this unfinished article. Having held off on posting this for a while I can kind of write a dialogue with myself from last year. I didn't really end up keeping with the cataloguing habit, though I do still sort of have a backlog thingy floating in my notes. I am not adhering to it as much as I am just jotting things down so I can check them out later.)

Each of these function as sort of mini reviews. As much as I wish I could be as precise and eloquent as Jimmy McGee, I at least hope that they are interesting to read. The last time I did a big list of games type article I got the impression that it gets kinda grating after a while, so I've included links for you to jump to different sections. Feel free to break up reading this into little chunks.

(Something I touch on here that I think I still struggle with here is how I don't really have a lot of confidence in my writing. I compare myself to probably one of the best video game analysts I have ever seen and lament that my work will probably not match his quality. I think there's also an element of shame in the fact that I struggle to write at length on subjects that aren't video games, and my target of comparison here also does generally centre his work around the same topic. However, in his case he executes his ideas so well they often are profound in a way that applies to more than 'just video games'. Even a year later I don't think these feelings about myself have changed very much.)

Jump to section:

• Portal 2
• Portal Stories: Mel
• Felvidek
• Laika: Aged Through Blood
• Venba

Portal 2

You play as Chell, a woman trapped indefinitely inside a deep underground scientific facility known as “Aperture Science”. You're awakened by Wheatley, a stupid, British, spherical robot who presents himself as your only ticket to escape this withering and decaying complex. Armed with a gun that can create portals you might find a way out to your freedom.

One of the all time greats, played most of it through in 2016 but never rolled credits on it for some reason. There are many games I've started but never finished, but I felt as though this one was the worst offender. I'm glad I did get back to it though because despite over a decade of technological and artistic advancements in the games industry there still isn't anything quite like it.

To analyze each aspect of this game on its own would be doing a disservice. While each pillar of this game supports this experience very strongly, I truly believe the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. While I could talk at length about each part, the point that should not go overlooked is the writing. It's rare that a game has an actually engaging cast of characters, but it's clear that Valve stands head and shoulders above the competition in terms of writing dialogue that you actually want to listen to. They knew this very well, as more often than not your reward for completing a puzzle is getting to listen to the characters react either to you or the situation at hand. These exaggerated characters in this ridiculous story is truly a treat, and becomes the ribbon that ties every aspect of this game into a nice present.

🌔🌔🌔🌔🌔

(I don't think I have much more I want to add to many of these game reviews themselves. I haven't played any of these games again so the only thing that might change is just what I remember about them one year later. It's interesting that the first game on this list connects to the idea of returning to unfinished business. The parallel here is purely coincidental but kind of poetic the way that lined up.)

Portal Stories: Mel

As great as Portal 2 was, taking a massive break halfway into the game only to finish it years later left me wanting more. Not to fear however, as Portal 2 is also known for its fully featured community created mods which often act as substitute campaigns. With new sets of levels, sometimes new mechanics, new voice acted characters, and the best of them wrap it all in an original story to boot. All of this (usually) available at the price of free! The biggest challenge mods like these would face however is a comparison to the game they derive themselves from, can a mod truly match or surpass the base Portal 2 experience?

Not quite but it is shockingly close. As a community made mod available for free I will lightly acknowledge its shortcomings and celebrate its achievements. The art and music was very good, the portal gun redesign really sets it apart as its own experience while still maintaining the visual language cultivated in the original game, I especially like the little paperclip on one of the prongs.

I also quite enjoyed the levels. That being said, I came out of this mod with a much greater appreciation of Valve's game development philosophy of extremely thorough playtesting. The level of challenge was an upward slope, which in theory is what you want but in practice it becomes pretty grueling towards the end as you do several hard puzzles in succession. There was also a spot early on where you would get softlocked if you messed a puzzle up which was quite frustrating.

The story and voice acting was fine enough. I can't really blame them for not matching Valve's excellent writing team but credit where credit is due, I didn't hate it. I actually quite liked the new antagonist and especially the final boss fight against it. It was quite creative and was definitely more fun than Portal 1's boss fight.

Despite a couple rough patches, I still found myself repeatedly coming back to this mod, which is definitely an indication of its quality. Fundamentally it filled the exact niche I wanted it to, a little more Portal 2 for me to enjoy.

⚛️⚛️⚛️

(What's intriguing here is the way that Portal Mel stacks up against Portal 2 kinda mirrors how I stack up against my own standards in terms of writing. I acknowledge the shortcomings of the mod, but I also note that it isn't realistic to expect it to be a real competitor given the difference between all of Valve software, and a couple modders. I don't really show myself that same level of consideration it seems...)

Felvidek

You play as Pavol, an alcoholic knight in 15th Century Slovakia. Your drunk ass is dragged around by your local Catholic priest Matej as you both are tasked by the local lord to make sure the region is free from Ottoman presence. Hopefully on the way you find your wife who walked off at some point because you were drinking too much.

I often recommend games to another printhouse reader, some of them have managed to make their way to his personal favourites. It's not often that this goes the other way, but if any game deserves to be highlighted it's this one.

I'm not typically a fan of JRPGs, but I'm not completely averse to the genre. A couple of years ago I stumbled on a quirky, short little game called Hylics with a very unique presentation. While Felvidek bears many surface level similarities to Hylics, it doesn't feel like a hollow clone in the slightest. Visually the game does a lot with a little, the limited colour palette, chunky pixels and large sprites giving it this class textbook photocopy vibe. As well as the sporadic low poly cutscene really helps set the unique visual style that this game has.

Part of my enjoyment with the game definitely comes from its intentional deviations from what might be considered the “standard JRPG formula”. Felvidek does away with the typical experience grind found in most RPGs. Your equipment is what determines your strength, and there are only a handful of upgrades. This keeps the game moving through the entire runtime which was very enjoyable. Also unlike many JRPGs which frequently last for tens, if not hundreds of hours, Felvidek is only about 4 hours long. This refreshing brevity is great for getting a nice sampling of the experience without overstaying its welcome.

(I feel the need to note that the concept of 'gear based progression' is not particularly rare in RPGs. It certainly contributes to the short runtime of the game, but it isn't necessarily true to say this is the only game that does this. I am just not very familiar with the genre.)

The biggest strength of this game however is its tone. The world of Felvidek is rather bleak, but the acknowledgement of this is placid. The characters face horrors with a grim smile and a jovial joke, because what else is one to do when faced with things beyond their comprehension? Beneath the Shakespearian prose is a genuinely very funny game that speaks of tragedy and absurdity in the same breath. The scene that best illustrates this is when an otherworldly creature crawls in through Pavol's bedroom window, stirring him from his drunken slumber. His immediate response to seeing this monstrous thing standing over him... is to wordlessly throw the closest empty bottle he has at its head.

🌞🌞🌞🌞🌞

(Looking back on this now I think the parts of this game that still stick with me are the slivers of it that references parts of my heritage. There's one joke about how Orthodox priests are able to have wives and children, which I found funny as a Coptic Orthodox christian. There's another running joke about this 'qahwa' craze tearing through this little eastern European land. Something which I immediately clocked in as the Arabic word for 'coffee'. I'll talk more about this at the end, but I have some deep regrets about not tuning into this part of my life more over the last year.)

Laika: Aged Through Blood

(TW: Violence towards children)

You play as Laika, a coyote mother who roams the sandy wastelands on her bone motorcycle and a revolver at her side. When your daughter's best friend, Poochie, is brutally murdered and crucified by the encroaching Bird army, his father, Jakob embarks on a quest for vengeance in retribution for the death of his son. You chase after him because he took your revolver to do it. So begins the spiral of blood and pain as the increasingly militant birds attempt to wipe out you and your tiny band of mammalian survivors.

What first grabbed my attention about this game was its very slick presentation. The world of Laika is beautifully rendered in this dusty yet simultaneously vibrant art style. The lovingly hand-drawn vistas and fully animated characters all come together to form a visual repertoire that is both distinct and very well executed. Interspersed throughout the game are also brief fully animated cutscenes which serve to punctuate specific moments, typically at the end of boss fights. It's clear there has been a lot of thought and care put into the look of this game, and it shows, the aesthetic identity of this game is proudly announced to your eyes, and sticks in my brain.

One I got past the eye candy, the second most prominent aspect of this game is clear. Laika bills itself as a “motorvania” and that's a fairly accurate summarization of the gameplay. When watching trailers of this game I was brought back to playing Trials Evolution on my Xbox 360. What Laika does differently however, is lessen the physics sandbox aspect of a 2d motorbike game and add in a seasoning of twitch reaction gameplay by making it a shooter. The momentum needed to clear jumps coupled with the backflip mechanic that reloads your weapons creates a sandbox where these two disparate mechanics flow beautifully together.

That being said while the game certainly has its “motor” it is somewhat lacking in the “vania”. One would expect a large world to explore gated by progression checks that you would come back later to with enhanced mobility. A typical metroidvania will present walls you can't climb up, or gaps you can't jump across prompting you to come back later when you are stronger and see what you missed. While Laika does do this, there's really only two major gates you are presented with. You pass the first one fairly early in the game, and you pass the second one right before the end. So for roughly 80% of your time with it, you are getting around the same as you were before. Riding around on your motorbike is very enjoyable, so this isn't really the biggest knock against the experience. Though, it does feel like there's something missing when you're given a grappling hook and the only thing you ever use it for is to do a sidequest.

The elements of Laika range from exceptional to middling, but the single biggest detriment I can point to is the boss fights. Laika's combat is highly lethal for the most part, all regular enemies die in one hit, as does Laika herself. That being said, it is only natural for a big hulking enemy to not die in one shot from a pistol. However, these fights are also drawn out further with phases where you can't hit the boss at all. Sometimes this is in the form of a driving section, sometimes it's in the form of you just standing there waiting for the boss to show up again for you to attack them. These things on their own are fine, but in conjunction with the fact that one mistake always sends you back to the very beginning of the fight culminates into a battle that does not test your capabilities in any way other than your patience. I feel like on some level this was known to the developers because the very final boss fight of the game was my favourite largely because its one continuous, fluid battle.

Aside from my nitpicks, the game is really quite good. The soundtrack is another major highlight. The acoustic soundscape and soft vocals contribute heavily to the feeling of this melancholic wasteland. I have caught myself on several occasions humming the vocals from certain tracks like “Trust Them” and “My Destiny”. I've never heard of the artist before but Beícoli absolutely nailed it. I also quite liked the integration of the artist into the game world itself lends a more diegetic tone to the music in the game. Especially how you collect cassette tapes to expand the soundtrack as you play the game. In fact the in-world character that the artist embodies becomes a major thematic plot point in the story of the game.

Speaking of plot, the story of this game was quite shocking, in multiple interpretations of that word. For a game that revolves around cute anthropomorphic characters I was really caught off guard by how grim the story is. Your efforts consistently prove to be futile, and the war that you fight as a single soldier is only very temporarily successful. Moreover, the game also just has really shocking moments. The odd sidequest or story beat has the possibility of just being genuinely awful, but what is one to expect when the game starts the way it did.

I didn't expect to have said as much as I did about this game, but something like this prompts you to recall it in its entirety. I respect the developer's commitment to their artistic vision, but such specialization leaves it with more of a niche appeal. The game definitely isn't for everyone, but I can certainly say that there is nothing else like it.

🦴🦴🦴🦴

(One of my main nitpicks about Laika is that despite being a game where you drive a motorbike, your character's mobility doesn't shift from where it starts for a majority of your playtime. I kinda feel that stagnation in me, I am not really a goal oriented person, but it's hard to shake the feeling that I myself haven't shifted that far from last year. Stuck having done an extra year of a Master's degree. Stuck in Kingston. Stuck having failed to achieve one of the main goals I set for myself at the beginning...)

Venba

You play as Venba, a Tamil woman who moves to Toronto in an attempt to start a new life there with her husband. Follow along as she faces the challenges of immigrating to an unfamiliar place, raises a child and most of all, cooks dinner for her family every night.

Never before have I had a game so perfectly mirror back aspects of my life that even I wasn't fully aware of. While I have never been embarrassed to be Egyptian, I can certainly say that I've had to try and balance wanting to fit in versus connecting to my own culture. The biggest barriers I've faced in trying to find this balance, is my lack of ability to speak my mother tongue. It's no secret that Arabic is a very challenging language to learn, and I've always held onto a slight frustration with my parents for not raising me with the language. The beauty of this game is that you take the perspective from the mother in this dynamic, and it's given me a lot of sympathy for my own parents in the dilemmas that they faced.

Food is a wordless language, which allows it to be expressed and understood universally. Eating a meal from my heritage is like having a conversation with my ancestors. I take great delight in being afforded this opportunity where I otherwise fail with spoken words. I've clung to it as the strongest means of interfacing with my roots. Venba is a cooking game, but in the way that food forges interpersonal connections with friends and family.

(This was all I had written about Venba, not because I didn't have more to say but because I had a lot of difficulty trying to explain the deeply resonating experience of playing this game as a second generation immigrant living in Canada. I was also doubting if anything I would've said would've made sense from an outsider's perspective. Having finished the game I was left with an overwhelming need to attempt to properly connect to my culture and ancestry by trying to mend the bridge that was never properly built in the first place, learning the Arabic language. It was going to be my new year's resolution)

(I have never done a new year's resolution before, and as you might have gathered, it was not very successful. This, in and of itself, isn't particularly bad, but there is another major event that especially twists this knife in me. In my life I never got to meet my grandfathers, they passed before I had the chance. My only remaining grandparents have been my two grandmothers. They are lovely people, but I have always struggled connecting with them primarily due to the language barrier. As a result, I was never particularly close to them. So a secret wish of mine in this new year's resolution I set for myself was to leverage that newfound knowledge to get to know them a little better.)

(They both passed this year, one not long after the other...)

(...)

(I write this in the dwindling hours of Coptic Orthodox Christmas, another fun quirk of my background I hold dear. This was the first one my family has had without them around. I don't really miss them as much as I feel like I should. The unrealized potential of what my bonds to them could have been had I learned Arabic stings more than the actual bonds that I lost. That makes me feel kinda shitty, like I don't actually care for them or something...? I don't know, it's weird.)

(Am I even gonna post this? Or will this addendum be unfinished just like so much of this past year. This article, left to fester in my obsidian notes. Perhaps it will grow like a tumour as I add more to it year on year. Why write this flavoured up image of myself and post it for my friends anyways?? Why do anything at all???)

(Like... it's not like they couldn't speak any English, one of them was decently fluent in it. Is it really worth it to play up that aspect for the sake of dramatics, even if it isn't fully true? )

(I want to be better about finishing things, and maybe that starts here with this weird ass, slightly fictional, self indulgent article...)

(I still want to learn Arabic, if for no other reason than to strengthen the bonds I have with the people who share my culture. But I will have to learn to spend the rest of my life with the regret that I didn't do it soon enough to talk to my grandmothers in our mother tongue. So I will cherish the moments that I was fortunate to get, the broken english conversations, the odd secret 20 dollar bill unbeknownst to my parents and most importantly the delicious meals we got to share.)

I recently finished Clair Obscur: Expédition 33, and it being a very story rich and emotional game, I was very engaged in choosing the ending. After playing the game for 85h and being so engrossed by its intricate narrative, I needed a satisfying or at the very least compelling ending. And I was not disappointed, as there is so much to the ending, whether from a human, emotional or even philosophical point of view. The ending being a very personal thing, and the two choices being both kinda grey endings, without seemingly a clear good ending is what makes it so interesting and makes me and others think and discuss about it.

However, I forgot how much of a reach this game had, and how uncritically a lot of people go about appreciating some works.

This article obviously contains major spoilers so do not read it if you haven't played and finished Clair Obscur: Expédition 33 (thereinafter referred to as E33). And if you don't care about spoilers, I also forbid you from reading this article because it is a great game with a lot of soul, passion, rawness and vulnerability that you would be doing yourself a disservice not playing. This article will also make no sense if you haven't played an finished the game, and I will make no effort to clarify anything. I'm making this article for myself so really: don't read it.

Why this article

There are four things that made me want to write this article

• The conversation I had with my friend Marco about the game.

Marco and I played the game at about the same time, with him finishing it about a week before I did. Obviously as soon as I finished the game, we talked about it. The first question he asked was about what ending I had chosen, but the way he posed this question told me everything I needed to know. He said: “I hope you picked the only correct ending, right?”. You see, Marco in my eyes is, when it comes to art, a serial bad-takes-haver. And with his propensity to have some reddit-pilled takes as well, I knew not only what his preferred ending was, but also on what grounds he would oppose my decision. I am not on reddit or any social media anymore, but it is so easy to predict the takes that people will have on any piece of media that I responded: “I did choose the only right ending for me, but I don't think we agree on the right ending”. I was correct and so allegations of “being clinically insane”, “smoking crack” and other ad-hominem were thrown from both side, and we had a “healthy” albeit completely unproductive disagreement about the ending, before returning to our honour playthrough of Baldur's Gates 3 where we kidnap children and turn them into unpaid interns.

• The video from Daryl Talks Games

If you have read any of my articles about video games, it will come to no surprise to you that I enjoy the videos from Daryl Talks Games, whose one of my favourite and best video-essayist talking about video games on youtube, with Crimes New Roman. Well Daryl released a video about E33, titled “How Expedition 33 Exposes You”, and I completely disagreed with his characterisation of the world in E33, of the ending, but also of the people who choose the Maëlle ending and their reasons to do so. Honestly, even the rhetorical questions he posed in the video pissed me off. But he is not the only one to have a characterisations of the ending I disagree with...

• The way the game characterises the two endings

If you've finished the game (why would you still be reading this otherwise 🤨) and seen both ending, it is obvious that one is painted as the sad but right ending. Let me be clear, neither endings are portrayed as optimal or even good, but one is clearly softening the blows of its bad parts, while the second has its worst part emphasised. In the Verso ending, every person that Verso erased from the painting is sorta cool with being killed. Maëlle cries a bit but is comforted by Verso and goes in peace. Esquie and Monoko just hug Verso as he erases them without protesting. Sciel has a comforting hand contact with Verso as she withers away, with no protest. Sure, Lune stares at Verso with murder on her mind, but her only form of protest is to sit down. None of them fight, there are no cries, no tears, no rage. It's depicted as sad but necessary. He takes the little piece of (real) Verso's soul (a little boy) and walks into the sunset, setting it to rest. And in the epilogue, we see the Dessendre family around (real) Verso's headstone, finally dealing with the grief cause by his death, and begin to heal, it is a hopeful ending. Credits roll.

In the other hand in Maëlle's ending, as soon as she beats Verso, he collapses on the ground, repeating “Unpaint me, unpaint me, I don't want this life, I don't want this life”, begging to be killed, which is a heart wrenching moment. So super bad vibes here. When we get back to lumière, we have a super brief part where we see a couple of people that Maëlle saved from either Verso erasing them, or her father's previous mass murder. It's only a teeny tiny part of this ending, and straight away things start to feel weird, with Maëlle's smile being unnerving. Verso enters the frame, the picture goes black and white. He is a shell, Maëlle puppets him. Every movement he makes feels like he is dragging himself through life involuntarily. He sits down, his hands tremble. Jumpscare, Maëlle's eyes are fucked up. More depression. Credits roll.

The artistic direction for the endings is not equal, with one clearly being depicted as darker and more wrong. One is bittersweet and trying to make you feel good, the other unnerving and trying to guilt trip you. I disagree this that, even if the intent of the authors was to show us that the Verso ending is the good one, I disagree with this. I don't care what the authors intents were, they are dead and I am now the interpreter of their work.

• The online “discourse”

With the dichotomy of how I felt, and how Daryl, Marco, and the game were telling me I should feel, I thought I might have missed something, so I looked online in the forums and in the youtube comments to see what people's take were. I had forgotten how insanely stupid any form of conversation is on the internet. Everyone was using the most stupid analogies that don't even make sense but because everybody is using them then they feel they don't have to justify their repeated uses either; repeated ad-hominem attack towards people who chose a different ending; straw man; pseudo-realists that see the thing as it really is (right...); removing every single nuance from the topic; oversimplifying everything so much it looses all meaning and interest. It's a fucking cesspool and nobody is actually trying to have interesting conversation.

Both ending can be argued for. I can see anyone with a sane mind choosing one ending over an other. Exploring how people reach the conclusion that they'd rather choose one ending over another is interesting and worthwhile. Trying to portray one as the only someone should choose, and doing armchair psychology on why people who chose X ending actually are immature and if they were more intelligent they would choose the other is stupid and utterly uninteresting.

Making my case

The main deciding factor — that I actually saw very little people talk about — for choosing an ending over an other, is the metaphysical question: “Are the people in the canvas real beings?”.

There is no objective answer to this, and therefore, there is no objective “correct” ending in E33. So, now that we are done stating the obvious, we can get to the interesting part, exploring why I chose one ending over the other.

• I believe the people of the canvas are real

The not-so-hidden central question of the game. The people of the painting/their ancestors were created by the painters. We were shown that they are sentient, can feel and decide for themselves. They do no abide by a set of instructions, an algorithm or anything, as far as we know in the game, everything stems from just regular human biology/a simulation of it. They can be born and reproduce without their/their ancestor's makers intervention, and it doesn't matter if their/their ancestor's maker is dead, they keep on living. They can even affect “real” people in physical ways, like when the mostly painted crew took out Aline and then Renoir, forcing them out of the canvas, or when when painted Verso defeated Maëlle and forced her out of the canvas. They have their own thoughts, fears, aspirations, feelings... This for me would be the description of a real being. That the painters hold the power of live and death over them, or have something akin to reality altering powers in their world (the canvas) doesn't change anything. That the painters can evolve in their own world and also into the canvas doesn't change anything.

The choice then becomes: kill everything and everyone in the canvas to prevent Aline and Alicia from escaping into the canvas to grief, or let the canvas be and Alicia stay for as long as she wants.

I want to talk about perspectives a bit. Even from a bird's eye view I consider the people of the canvas to be real people, let's step into the shoes of the people in the story. I would get the argument that from Renoir, Cléa, Alicia... any of the painters' perspective, the inhabitants of the canvas are not on equal footing and their lives are not comparable to the life of one of the member of the Dessendre family. I understand Renoir's point of view, he'd rather sacrifice everything and everyone in the canvas not to — in his point of view — lose his wife and child. Shifting perspective, the inhabitants of the canvas feel that they are real. They feel themselves and their world as real, the canvas is their reality. It's just that there's another universe outside of their own that also exists. But they would absolutely not want to be erased just because of some discord in the family of their creators in that other universe. I think if we had the gestral, the inhabitants of Lumière and other sentient being take a vote, they would choose not to be erased.

Which brings us to You the player, are you a inhabitant of the canvas, or are you one of the gods of this world? Is it legitimate for you to associate with the Dessendre family? You start in control of Gustave, a painted person, and inhabitant of Lumière and the canvas. You gather another companion, Lune, as a painted person and can switch who you control between the two. Then you get Maëlle, a member of the Dessendre family who lived her live thinking she was a painted person. She is kinda of the bridge between both worlds, the Lisan al-Gaib if you will. The rest of the members of your party afterwards are only painted people. Verso being a painted person, not a god of this world, who was painted to be the dead son of the Dessendre family. It is the portrait of a dead man, but still a painted person. You start the story as an Expeditioner. The frame of reference shift toward the end when you see things more through the eyes of Verso and the narrative focuses more on the Dessendres, but you are still not a god. The only person that has any legitimacy and moral ground destroying the canvas that you can put yourself into as the player is Alicia, and she is the one trying to save it. Verso has no legitimacy destroying it and is just a class traitor. So from a perspective point of view, as a player, you are either a painted person wanting this world to endure, a painter trying to save this world, or painted person trying to end your world. As a player you are therefore not legitimate think of the people of the canvas as not real and disposable, and to destroy the canvas.

• Destroying the canvas is entirely unnecessary

Why is the solution destroying the canvas? The Dessendre dealing with their shit in a healthier way and leaving the canvas and its inhabitants alone is a much better solution. But we are forced to make a choice “life keeps forcing cruel choices”. The fairest choice is Maëlle ending — letting the canvas live, saving the people in it from their previous eradication and having Alicia living in it. How is it the responsibility of the people of the painting that their gods cannot grieve properly? How are they responsible for anything that happens outside of the painting? Why should they have to sacrifice themselves for the possibility of maybe having the Dessendre family dealing with grief a bit better? It does not concern them, they and the player are entirely valid in fighting for their survival. On the other hand, do the painters not have a responsibility towards their creation? They created sentient beings that feel and think and have been hurting them for decades. Using them and deciding to erase them once they become inconvenient is unbecoming. The painters are unworthy of the powers they wield. Destroying the canvas is almost nonsensical. It will not bring Verso back, Aline is already out of it, and there is no indication that Alicia is going to grieve in the same way as her mother, and even if she did, so what? Is she not allowed to choose for herself?

Those are the main crux of my argument. There are some little things here and there that I could talk about, and some of it is just debunking so claims made by the Verso-choosers but I don't think it's that interesting to explore. As you can see there's a big philosophical and even political dimension to explore with the ending of E33. What I've written above is the divagations of someone who care way too much about the ending of a video game. It's not really well put together, but I needed to get it out. This really more of a “I get myself and it's not really the point for anyone else to understand me” kind of article, I ripped that shit in a couple days and there is not going to be a second draft. This is definitely more of a going back to my rambling roots. This entire article was also an excuse to be able to use the word “thereinafter”.

Me getting so invested in a video game should be a testament to how good or at least interesting it is. But you should already know about it since if you've read this article you should have played it. If you have played E33 and would like to discuss the ending I would be more than glad to.

Thank you for reading my logorrhea Eddie – Award winning author

I completely forgot to write about my readings in November and December, so I guess we'll merge both article and fly through everything. Also I got my Storygraph wrap-up now, so I'll share it as well.

Let the Old Dreams Die – John Ajvide Lindqvist

Collections of short stories from the guy who wrote “Let the Right One in” that I read in October. Very good, I think he's a very good writer and the way that in a few paragraphs he can already transpose the state of mind of his characters is very impressive. Some very good stories, some that are just alright, but overall they're original.

Lip des Héros Ordinaires – Laurent Galandon (script), Damien Vidal (drawing)

There is a bunch of history here (this in non-fiction). Lip was a french company that manufactured watches, and that was gigantic at a a time, producing millions of watches per year. They were a staple of the watch world in those days. They were the sole importer of some big brands like Breitling, Universal Genève and Blancpain in France, and as part of that deal also got to put their names in the dial. All of this to say they were a very big deal, and taking some business away from the Swiss, who have a huge stake in the watch business. Lip was acquired by Ébauche SA, a swiss company, that secretly decided to destroy it from the inside, to get rid of competition. Slowly but surely the business died, but as soon at it reached the layoffs stage, corporate had to fight with the workers' union, and couldn't just sack everybody without notice. During this battle, the employees discovered some documents revealing the scheme from Ébauche SA, and decided to fight back, occupying the factory, sending off the current inventory of watches to be hidden in a monastery, and building watches without supervision, with the little guys running everything, completely autonomously. Their slogan was “On fabrique, on vend, on se paie” (We're crafting, we're selling, we're paying ourselves). The workers were effectively owning the means of production. This was a first in France, and the capitalist state was not a big fan. The CRS (the police squadron that the french government sends to beat up civilians keep the peace during protests, even to this day) were sent to push the worker out of the factory, using violence. Using a combo of night operation, false fire alarm, cutting the power and rushing in, they were successful. But the workers had hidden the stock of 25 000 watches that was in the factory, and were continuing to produce off-site after this, so this was not the end.

All of this and more is told through BD format, through to the “resolution” of the conflict. It looks good, it's interesting.

Artificial Condition + Rogue Protocol + Exit Strategy- Martha Wells

Book 2, 3 and 4 of the Murderbot Diaries. Still very good.

Frankenstein – Mary Shelley

Very good, and fairly accessible for a classic. I'm always a sucker for unreliable narrator and my boy Victor Frankenstein is one. The way he portrays himself as the perfect romantical hero when he's a piece of shit who won't take responsibility for his creation is always flabbergasting. It was so funny how sick he got all the time. *mosquito passes wind next to victor* “Heaven's I am getting sick, I will be bedridden for the next 6 months” There is a lot to unpack and think about.

A Winter's Promise + The Missing of Clairedelune + The Memory of Babel – Christel Dabos

Book 1, 2 and 3 of The Mirror Visitor Series. It's originally a french series that I have read multiple times, but I brought the first book to the white elephant exchange and as most of the people participating didn't speak french, I had to get the english translation. Obviously, I had to re-read it first, this time in english. I think the french version slaps harder. During my re-read I also found more flaws in the book, but I still love them.

Le joueur d'échec + Lettre d'une inconnue – Stefan Zweig

Two short stories from one of my sister's favourite author. The first one was very good, but where it supposed to be dramatic, the situation is so funny to look at from an outsider perspective that I don't think I got the feeling of dread and despair that the author intended. The second short story was a bit yucky and too repetitive.

I can't choose a favourite book this year, but my unsorted top 3 would be:

• Let the Right One In
• Fire and Blood
• The Remains of the Days

And my favourite BD would be L'Aigle sans Orteils. Let's take a look at the storygraph stuff.

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Story Graph

Storygraph does all the data analysis for me, so I just have to steal the graphs from the app, what a delight.

Storygraph isn't super accurate in the number of books read so here's a more precise breakdown:

• Mangas: 60
• Books: 44
• BDs: 9
• Anthologies: 5
• Comics Compendium: 3

Here's the breakdown per month:

I do plan maybe balancing the books I read in french or english a bit better, and maybe adding some more languages next year. But I have another book related project from next year...

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2026 Booklog

I will be joining the challenge that our Glorious Leader has set for himself, of going through all the books/pdfs that he has amassed without reading. Obviously, I will not be going through his unread books, but through mine. Whenever I visit France, I love getting classics of french literature/philosophy/whatever which are way more affordable, and since I got an e-reader, I've been going a bit hard on the pirating. I have a pretty extensive booklog, that I've compiled here: google sheet. I'm not sure which rules our Dear Leader is imposing himself, but for my part, I will have the following:

• Read at least the first 50 pages/20% of the book, whichever is the shortest, before DNFing
• Be only allowed to DNF 10% of the list (6 books)
• Only allow myself to pickup something as a treat that's not on the list every 5 books from the list read
• Concerning the rule above, gifted, bookclub and group read books don't count as treats. As well, if the first book of a series is in the list, I am allowed to read the rest of the series without having them counts as treat books.
• Grant myself two red buttons which allow me to delete an epub instead of reading it.

That should cover it. My plan right now is to go through the low hanging fruits, and then just go based on vibes. See you next month.

Thank you for reading my logorrhea Eddie – Award winning author

Recently, Canada has seemingly had a bit of an issue when it comes to our institutions and their ability to get the results they want. Economic productivity is reportedly low, which, avoiding the fact that productivity is a dubious measure in itself, has become a big talking point. This is what people are blaming for stagnant wages. Many cities have also seemingly been unable to develop anything substantially new. Until extremely recently, two weeks ago as of writing this, Toronto managed to develop and grow for 23 years, increasing its population from ~4.5 million to ~6.5 million, all while reducing the amount of subways it had. This involved closing the line 3 after a derailment in 2023, after running on out-of-date hardware for some 15 years. The Eglinton Crosstown has been under construction for 15 years, and the Finch West Extension finally opened to poor results (the trains run slower than the buses they replaced and costing in at only $3.7 BILLION) in late 2025.

The government seems to be attempting to solve this apparent complete failure of results in one way: by stripping regulations and workers’ rights. More sacrifice from the workers for maybe potentially some later gain and a few more jobs. In Ontario, Carney and Ford are teaming up to ensure that select private companies will be able to ignore laws and regulations to develop faster and hopefully get us on track to where we “should” be in their eyes. Don’t worry about climate change; we plan to miss all our goals. Don’t worry about the environment or homes of endangered species; it can be clear-cut to make a toxic dumping ground. Don’t worry about workers' rights; we need more profit.

This is one attempt to solve the issue, one that is distinctly pro-capital and big business. If you are big enough (with a successful enough lobby to get a contract), you can get selected to break the rules set out for everyone. If some people get to break the rules, what is the point of having universal rules? All this is to say that the democratic process is changing. In this case, they are becoming less “of the people”. This is the state merging with corporations, the economic model that defines fascism, employed by liberals during crises in order to maintain capitalism.

This is being done to “cut through bureaucratic bloat and red tape”. The idea is that the process holds back our development: that skipping it and developing without feedback would be better for the people no longer involved in the process. In times like these, we need to make “touch choices” to “get what needs to be done, done.” People often seem to ignore that giving a bourgeois state unchecked power just means you will get forced into bourgeois results! This talk of these tough choices, however, seems to skip over something completely: If the process is broken, and we need to allow specific companies to ignore regulations and processes to get anything done, why are we not directly addressing and evolving the process? While the real answer sits somewhere around protecting profits, we should still look into how the process works and what something else could look like if we want to have even a hope of implementing something better in the future.

I am going to approach this through a very narrow lens: my discussions in the process of the bike lanes on Sloane, as well as other recent discussions I have had to use as examples.

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As a Toronto waste yute, witnessing our development is pretty crushing. The economy seems bad for workers, who struggle to live comfortably and are constantly told to sacrifice for the greater good. This greater good seems to never materialize, or if it does, is so loaded with half measures or absolute failure that you wonder why it was even done in the first place. Recently, I have been attending meetings related to bike lane development on Sloane Avenue, and watching this process and talking to the people has given me a little insight into how this comes to be.

First, I will start with a discussion I had many months ago that prompted an article that got lost in the sauce and didn’t make it out of the sticks: I was talking with a health and safety consultant at work. She mentioned how long it took her to get to our meeting, as is a usual conversation in Toronto. I gave the usual platitudes about “yeah, traffic, amirite!” She asked about my travel and how I find getting around these days. I said I have an electric bike, so I can zip around all the way downtown without any lights or anything. It’s quick, convenient, and consistent, which I like. This comes at the cost of winter inconvenience and some places being dangerous due to a lack of infrastructure. She generally just gave me a remark of disapproval about bikes and said she’s a car person, so we should avoid the topic. It was a bit strange. Later, she also said she was really against working from home and thinks people need to get back into the office. I also found this particularly strange. To summarize: she hates traffic, but wants more people moving around all the time, and wants less alternative transportation. She hates traffic, but the result of each thing she wants is more traffic.

On to the bike lanes meeting on Sloane. Unfortunately, I had an event at the same time as the initial proposal, but I was able to make it to the consultation, where people could give feedback. For reference, the road is full of potholes, extremely wide, and frankly, about as falling apart as a road can be in a city. It is up for redevelopment, so it will be redone completely, no matter what. The question is how it will be redone. Currently, the road has one lane of traffic each way, some parking in certain spots, and a bus. The plan would add separated bike lanes, keep all lanes of traffic, keep all parking, and keep the bus with approximately the same stops. This was all laid out wonderfully on some big maps that made the redevelopment easy to see in its totality. People in the community had complained about the safety of the street (especially at the elementary school), the speed of cars on the road, and people on scooters zipping around everywhere with no regard for the rules of the road.

All of these are addressed in the plan. The bike lanes would help kids bike to school safely, reducing traffic and also offering a safer drop-off zone for the buses. Narrowing of lanes would help reduce the speed of cars, and having a bike lane would get non-car methods of transportation off the roads. It also brings the road up to date with what has been successful all around the world. All this while not reducing any car lanes, and maintaining all the parking that was there before. People must have loved that their issues were addressed and engaged with the plan to pick up on specific details and see how it all works, right?

Well, not at all. Instead, the consultation was packed full of people yelling at random school staffers, people who could barely walk, talking about how “as an avid cyclist” they “just don’t think it’s right”, and asking for the entire development to be called off. This would mean instead of losing nothing, improving the street, and having all their problems addressed, they would rather the road remain full of potholes. These are the NIMBYs, and we know these types. They preach that every development is a disaster, fight against it any way they know how, and if the development gets through. None of their fears ever materialize, but they WILL keep on fighting.

I spoke to my councillor about these people, right at a time where most working people could discuss things: his office discussion event at 9:00 AM on a Monday.

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It’s easy to say something like “Democracy could be good, but the people are stupid” or “we need a strong leader to make decisions for us”, or even just say that “we just need someone to finally force some change through for this one”. It’s also easy to say “we just need to overthrow capitalism and have a real, equitable world”. I think these are easy cop outs to actually addressing a problem. The first calls for outcomes in a way that is not equitable, which will only serve to ensure that non-equitable outcomes can’t be punished. In the second, ok, so what will that process look like?

Here, I will outline a process different from the one we have that addresses the key flaw: people seek both means and outcomes that are contradictory. This guarantees poor outcomes. There are two goals in a new system: Better outcomes and a means that aims to ensure outcomes are equitable. I don’t see them as contradictory.

One thing our system does extremely poorly is guarantee quality outcomes. Decisions are made, they are abject failures, and we follow them up by making the same (or worse) decisions. Projects are completed, fail to do what they are designed to do (or even make the problem worse), and the same decisions get made for the next project. This is a symptom of some of those means issues. People who do not understand the problem are a part of how we decide to solve the problem. Traffic? Add more lanes. More lanes didn’t solve traffic? Clearly not enough lanes, add more. Some solutions make sense if you think about it for a couple of minutes, but the world is pretty complicated, and often these “intuitive” solutions simply do not work.

This could be replaced with a process. People are asked about what outcomes they want for a specific project. Meetings are held, and a broader consensus is made on where priorities are and what metrics would be primary indicators of success (other metrics would obviously still be tracked). From here, experts in the subject field (city planners, etc) create a plan that addresses those issues, execute the plan, and after varying amounts of time, take surveys about the results of the plan according to metrics. Surveys can also include perceptions of the plan and non-specific community satisfaction. The results of these surveys are relayed back to education on city planning, where researchers would adjust models based on the new feedback. Changes would be made, more projects would be done, more priorities and metrics would be set, more plans executed, more input would be cycled back, etc.

Projects could get a certain number of “marks” based on the successes and shortcomings of the plans. Sections of the plan deemed successful could be positive marks on the record of planners who supported it. Sections riddled with issues or receiving negative feedback could be negative marks on the record of planners who supported it. Plan proposals that do not receive support mean that planners do not have faith that they will achieve desirable outcomes, and the plan should likely be redeveloped. Positive and negative reviews for planners would be based on broader trend lines. One plan gone wrong for one reason or another should not harm a planner’s career, but rather consistent failure to achieve desirable results should make them revisit what we know works.

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1. A scope or plan for the project is laid out (similar to now)
2. Get community input
   1. Decide priorities
   2. Decide focus metrics
3. Create a plan that accomplishes what the community wants
   1. Note: You could get community feedback for small changes here, but the larger core of the plan must stay the same
4. Execute the plan
5. Survey results at different intervals after completion (including shorter and longer term)
   1. Measure target metrics and other surrounding metrics
   2. Survey perceptions on the planning and execution of the plan
   3. Gather subjective input on the results of the plan
   4. Gather broader input on quality of life
6. Use the results of the plans to update models and education for future planning
7. Based on results:
   1. Good results can be positive marks on the planner’s record
   2. negative results can be marks against
      1. too many marks against and education must be redone for a period of time, where the person can not create or execute more plans until they are re-certified

What is the result? Here is what I have broadly broken down for city planners:

• City planners would be able to execute plans based on what people want.
• Plan execution could be uninterrupted and decisive.
• People who do not understand city planning are not able to destroy quality plans.
• City planners would be focused on making projects that benefit the communities they work for.
• City planners who consistently do projects that communities don’t like get removed from the pool of selectable city planners.
• City planners are kept up to date on the latest, and consistently successful city planners don’t need to worry about that since they’re successful anyway.
• City planners are given tools to re-entry if it is their passion, but they didn’t quite land their first shot.

This model could similarly be applied to other fields, like economics.

1. Economists make predictions and prescribe policy on a region (differing regions may have different policies enacted at the same time)
2. Goals and metrics are defined and agreed upon
3. Policy is enacted, and results are monitored
4. Surveys are done, metrics are collected, input is received, and quality of life input is received
5. According to these, policies are measured against each other
6. Bad outcomes are deemed failures, good policies are assessed, changes made, models updated, and the process begins again

Economists who prescribe bad policy for the majority get filtered out, two separate good policies can be assessed for their benefits, and economies are made better gradually for the majority. People get input and the results they want, while getting rid of the part where they can demand results, then destroy their own results by being insufferable. Plans can be executed faster with less interference at every step.

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Since this is almost certainly not going to become our real policy, and is mostly just me creatively complaining, I don’t want to get too into the weeds, but it is necessary to address potential shortcomings of the system as outlined. Some of these may happen, some may not, some are the same as now, and some aren’t even actual problems of the system at all. It’s a necessary step and worth thinking about potential problems as an exercise, dialectics or whatnot, but I’m not here making hundred-page bills, I’m here making something I hope my friends will like reading.

Pigeon Holes and Risk Aversion

This policy rewards doing something that people will receive well, and broadly moves forward in a kind of alpha-beta testing strategy on the academic side of things. This could lead people down a specific “branch” of policy prescription that is good, but another branch is better. People may not want to take risks and try something new because this one is ol’ reliable, or ol’ reliable may continue to be used even after structural progression beyond its ideal use case.

I always tell people you can’t let perfection get in the way of something good. Right now, we will consistently do things that are actively bad for the majority. The new system is thus an improvement. Additionally, if there is a new consensus amongst the studied planners, they can agree to execute the plan and check the results, potentially dedicating money to re-developing to the “main” branch of ideas if it does not work out. One plan does not dictate the career trajectory of the planners; it’s about trends and consistency. If something is tried and fails, a regression to something tried and true is not necessarily a bad feature. I like some experimentation in my life, but consistency is also healthy.

Selection Process

Who gets to go to the meetings where goals and concerns are voiced? This is a problem now and would probably also be a problem in the new system, and I don’t think it can be truly solved. It is the contradiction between freedom and domination. Give people freedom of choice to show up, and they can freely choose not to.

Broadly, handle it as it should be handled now. Flyers sent out the the community, have different meetings at different times of different days spread out over a month or so, get feedback, and move on. People can show up if they care, or not if they don’t care about this specific thing. Allow them to write in, send an email, or do a digital survey. Someone could live 2 blocks from a road being redeveloped and never take that road, making them also not helpful if they do show up to the meeting under any mandatory jury-duty-like condition.

NIMBYs / Loud Minorities

What about groups of people who absolutely love showing up and hating on plans? I believe this new strategy is actually better than now for a couple of reasons.

Firstly, many of these people know the outcomes they want, but just hate it when things actually happen around them. They want better traffic flow while having safer and better designed entries and exits for school traffic. The problem is that when they see what that looks like, they hate it when it looks different from what they know. Here, they can say what they want, have it built into the plan, but be removed from the process until it is done.

Right now, these people are given opportunities to change plans at several steps. By removing them from the steps where they are most destructive, they are not able to jam up the entire process forever. Their initial inputs are received, then a real plan is executed, and the new strategy stops them from creating infinite half measures or bad decisions that cause end-result failue.

Metrics Becoming Targets

This could actually become a problem in this system, but it is also a problem of our current system, where we can’t even meet metrics in the first place. Given metrics and planners with careers on the line, what stops these planners from optimising around certain metrics?

My main counters to this are having the community have input on success metrics as well as having a secondary and differently “weighted” subjective feedback attached. Having community input on metrics stops the process from getting completely focused on having one metric dictate everything, even if it doesn’t necessarily help people (think GDP). Having the subjective feedback helps with trying to figure out what new metrics or adverse effects may be present that aren’t represented using the currently measured metrics.

What if people think certain metrics will have certain impacts on them that don’t actually happen (think GDP)? Having room for more than one metric is my main attempt at resolving this.

What if metrics are broadly at odds with each other (Think right now with house prices vs home values)? Which will take priority in success metrics? I think part of the process here is that it would be harder to develop into these places in the big picture, but frankly, this is a tough spot off the dome that would require professionals from several areas to address. Luckily, this system allows that, unlike the current one, where the bourgeois interest is always taken.

Mass Insistence On Bad Decisions

What happens if everyone in the system for one reason or another wants decisions with bad outcomes, from the planners to the people being consulted in the process? Not only does this happen all the time right now, but metrics and subjective experience would show this over time, and the planning decisions would be culled, as it forces learning from the evidence rather than just vibes or promises.

If only the planners insist on bad plans, the poor results would force them back to school so much that they would lose representation in the moment and also not be able to sustain themselves because they would now only be spending half their career getting re-certified.

The people can’t really insist on bad plans in this system.

Existential Shocks

What happens if something, like a pandemic response, means the plans don’t really get a fair shot? In these cases, surely, good plans would receive negative feedback. Board reviews could be done to account for this, which would then in turn open up more opportunity for more bad plans to get away with sticking around for longer, but existential shocks I see as a real potential shortcoming. It is also a shortcoming for most systems like this, including ours today. I think doing planner reviews as a trend line and not a “three strikes” or “one bad plan and done” helps people get through shocks, and having short as well as long-term measuring of outcomes makes it more likely that a shock and recovery are both accounted for at some point in the review cycle.

Cross Contamination

What if other plans cross-contaminate and muddle feedback, or if two otherwise good plans happen to not blend well together? I would have to assume that under this system, cross-contamination would be near constant. I think this is mostly a problem of thinking of this system as a one-off, isolated event. If the system were working on a larger scale for a consistent amount of time, good and bad plans would be selected for and against, and cross contamination for different projects would be something planners would be constantly studying and building in as the process continues to evolve. Thinking once again in branches, there may be a branch that is optimal in one scenario, but another branch that tends to work better in another. The point is that people who study and understand this are part of the selection process.

Keeping Communities Unique

First, I would just like to state out front that I think if people had communities that improved over time in favour of their best interest, people would probably care less about their specific neighbourhood being “unique”. I think if there were a system that people could trust, a lot of attitudes would change over time. I do think having different communities is cool. Aesthetics could easily be made part of this process, for example, a development near brick works could be specifically mandated to need to have exposed brick integrated into its style. Generally speaking, there is also subjective feedback. If planners want more positive feedback, the feel of the community is something they would want to preserve and have people be proud of to appeal to residents of the area.

Do It In Another Community

What of things that are broadly seen as negative, like a homeless shelter that people may not like, but needs to happen? Right now, we simply struggle to get these things done anywhere at all. If development were done in favour of the majority of people, these types of developments of last resort would likely need to happen less often.

Alas, it may still need to happen. Under this system, for starters, it would actually happen, as the community would just give overall feedback on how it would be brought about and how to make sure it goes well, not destroy the entire plan.

For reviews, some development may just be fundamentally deeply unpopular. In this case, good planners may need to be assigned to make it simply have as many upsides with as few downsides as possible, or it could be made a smaller part of a larger development to offset it. I would call this a definite weak point of the process, but it is a definite weak point of our current process as well.

---

Some of the astute among you may have noticed that I have re-invented democratic central planning in one form or another. This brings me to a brief discussion I want to include about reform and revolution, as well as organic marxism and process thinking.

For reform and revolution, we often joke about the concept of “voting your way to a revolution”; We have a bourgeois state, and as such, the bourgeois state will not ever concede the ability for voters to vote for a proletarian state. Then comes the alternative: do a revolution. There will be chaos, and in the midst of all the chaos, your ideology will win and rise. This is also funny, because people think their ideology will rise from the ashes, when the reality is that my ideology will rise from the ashes. I think many people who want revolution don’t necessarily express themselves well on what revolution actually looks like and how it could be done on a global scale.

The focus of my fascination with post-capitalism and bringing about new systems is found on a few fronts. One of these is likely sourced in my influence from Mark Fisher: making other systems tangible. I want to imagine new systems, outline them and some of their processes, think of where they might succeed and what shortcomings they may suffer from. This leads to others. What systems, if put in place, may mimic or mirror our current system in surface-level function, yet inevitably lead to changes compatible with post-capitalist or socialist desires? If you were to do a revolution (whatever that entails), what systems could you put in place to ensure progress towards your goals while making compromises to either reduce the likelihood of a successful reactionary counter-revolution or the necessity of having to rebuild an entire modern economy from scratch in one day, all while not getting conquered?

Compromise is necessary one way or another, but you don’t have to compromise on everything. This system I focused on is mostly through the lens of making it so that bike lanes are actually installed, but I did outline briefly how the exact same system could be used for economic planning. This economic planning is separate from and replaces bourgeois economic planning, but in terms of people’s interaction with it, the changes are nearly invisible. Bourgeois economic planning is able to assign austerity over and over, implementing a neoliberal model that doesn’t even succeed in its own internal logic. This planning, seemingly very similar, necessitates positive outcomes as reported from the majority, so things like austerity cease to be a feasible policy prescription.

I remember speaking to Bennet a while back. We were talking about systems like worker co-ops and their shortcomings, as well as my defence of them despite historic criticism. My defence of worker co-ops stems from a simple principle: they are incredibly easy to imagine for your average person, they offer more agency for your average person, and if everything was suddenly a worker coop, why would people decide to bring back private ownership? The decision to bring back private ownership stands only to make people lose agency for no gain. Socialist structures like worker co-ops, which are market companies owned by workers, have been measured as more efficient than private ownership with better outcomes, so they suddenly become possible under democratic planning like this. If this worker co-op replacing private ownership scenario were to happen, you would eliminate private ownership of the means of production. From there begins work on what comes next. There are still criticisms to be had by all means, but they allow the opportunity for further changes impossible under the current system.

Systems like these are alternatives to capitalist forms without thinking of alternatives to capitalism as “giant government no freedom” that permeates the discourse so much. The system of planning outlined above is familiar; it resembles the process people know. Hell, it could even be implemented under capitalism without drawing too much attention. It may also offer better results in the way people seem to currently desire and not be restricted to bourgeois outcomes. Instead of having a government pick corporations as big winners, it rather promotes outcomes that support the masses.

When the ruling class tell us that we need to strip away workers’ rights, environmental protections, and indigenous sovereignty to get things done, it isn’t because they want to get things done. It is because they want to strip away workers’ rights, environmental protections, and indigenous sovereignty. Other options are easy to imagine and available. They simply prefer fascism because it’s good for their material interests. Don’t fall for it.

Thanks for joining me on this exercise.

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Sankofa say look to the past to find our wisdom replenish as intuition There's growing pains and I know that's nothing that you don’t know If we only knew our mistakes then I’d kick us in the ass

---

Oncle

System Erasure is a tiny game development studio based in Finland. The only two members of the team have so far managed to create two staggeringly different entries into their repertoire. The first is the high octane shoot-em-up 'ZeroRanger' where the player is tasked with being the sole defender of earth against an overwhelming alien fleet. The second being the far more subdued sokoban (block pushing) puzzler where the player delves deeper and deeper into a cryptic labyrinth in search of something at the bottom. While on the surface these two experiences seem to hold little in common with the other, astute individuals will notice peculiar details amongst the sparse store pages of both of their games. What kind of shoot-em-up would include “mystery” as one of the major selling points of the game? Why does the seemingly medieval fantasy presentation of Void Stranger's trailer contain a cutaway of what seems to be a mech? Indeed, there is more to investigate on those fronts but I will not discuss these things in depth. Instead, the spotlight will be on the major thematic connection that underpins both games regardless of gameplay or setting. Both of System Erasure's games want you to give up and succumb to despair.

Games that want you to stop playing

spoilers for “Spec Ops: The Line” and “Undertale”

The concept of a game that presents a narrative which brings to attention the player's active participation isn't unique. These games are often dubbed as 'meta' though it isn't necessarily a prerequisite for that kind of storytelling. What likely comes to mind for many would be the final boss of Undertale's appropriately named “genocide route”. Over the course of repeated thrashings the final boss in question takes time to explain that in order to stop you they must present an insurmountable challenge to get you to lose interest and quit. Presenting an in-universe justification for the unexpected jump in difficulty inflicted on the player. This is framed as an act of heroism on behalf of the boss, as in this scenario the player is quite clearly made out to be the villain.

Alternatively, one could look at “Spec Ops: The Line” where a generic third person military shooter centres around a main character who's singular obsession with an end goal is used as a justification for more and more reprehensible actions. This goes to a point in which the game begins to call you out in the loading screens asking if you “feel like a hero yet?”. This is a compelling narrative, and I can attest to feeling like a terrible person in being complicit to the events of the games through my shared drive to see the game to its end. Perhaps in retrospect the best choice would have been to stop playing, upon having realized my motivations were corrupt.

What makes System Erasure's games noteworthy (besides the excellent game design, art, music etc.) is that they flip this script on its head. Instead of critiquing a player's decent into darkness they instead pose a debilitating threat which the player is then invited to overcome. It instead becomes a trial of triumph in the face of adversity, every setback designed to shatter your resolve, every barrier broken begets an even greater challenge. At times it feels the game is laughing at you, relishing in your seemingly futile efforts to summit the ever growing mountain climb set before you. All this in service of the hope that you, the player, decide to end it all and move onto something else.

DO: 1. NOT 2. GIVE 3. UP.

In this framing it is plain to see why these experiences can be unpalatable to many. However this scaffolding is the bones with which System Erasure fleshes out a narrative that makes these games compelling. The depths of despair that the player may find themselves in percolates into the vessel they inhabit. The personal journey one takes when attempting one of these games becomes as much a part of the story as the textual content itself.

To that end, the successes and failures the player experiences also become the character's shared milestones. Ultimately the fate of the character and the overall story is left in the hands of the player guiding them. Should the proverbial suffering become too much to bear and the player unwittingly provides a silent and unspoken “no” to the video game mantra of “do you wish to continue?”, this too reflects on the story being told. With the game having been dropped what remains is a tale of a valiant challenger tackling the adversity they face head-on and failing, left to the whims of the forces that opposed them. This is by all means a “bad ending” and it all takes place with barely a single dialogue option.

If you reverse this outlook however, you instead get a tale that is electrifying. Despite their better judgement, despite all the slings and blows, the player steels their resolve and carries onward. Stoking the flames of determination as it lights the way to the shores of victory. Their human spirit remaining indomitable as they persevere to reach what can only be described as nirvana. This is the story that System Erasure seeks to craft with their players.

It is with absolute certainty that I say that System Erasure delivers some of the most exhilarating rewards in the medium for the players that commit to sticking with their experiences. The satisfaction coming in part from the sheer difficulty that the players faced matched with the elation that the journey is over. The bizarre form of Stockholm syndrome could be easily dismissed as self fulfilling if not for the absolute grandeur and spectacle of these climactic endings. So bombastic are these conclusions that it almost becomes an experience in ascending to the divine, shedding your mortal shell to comet through the stars.

Story of a Sojourner

It's unlikely that the player's path to that aforementioned state will be direct. In my personal experiences with both ZeroRanger and Void Stranger there were periods of committed progress and then there were long stretches where I would put the game down. In a normal scenario I would probably have left these games behind me, making peace with however deep I got into them. However I found it uniquely difficult to fully drop these games, burdened with the lingering feeling of unfinished business. In service of advocating for these games I believe it is necessary to discuss my personal experiences with them.

In the case of ZeroRanger, without tipping the game's hand too heavily, there is a major point in the story in which the player chooses to risk everything to continue. Ultimately, it is unlikely the player will be successful on their first attempt, and so must undertake the process of retrying after their failure. In a game in which you are facing a constant onslaught of enemies and bosses, this moment functions as a particularly deep gut punch to your progress. This is softened by the fact that every attempt is accompanied by knowledge gained which can then be applied to further attempts. Repetition breeds mastery, fuelled by the player's self confidence and willingness to persevere.

I would occasionally have bursts of playtime interspersed with long periods of doing something else. With each spat of commitment to the game I slowly circled towards the gravitational well that is the game's conclusion. While I may have been orbiting this game for years, I was inching closer and closer to my final goal. Until one humble evening I booted the game after another long period of downtime with no preconceptions or desires for any particular result. I played, and played, and found myself doing better than I had ever done before. Before I know it, I faced that final barrier once more, and choose to push onwards. At this point I've become so well acquainted with the game that even if I lost here it barely constitutes as a setback. Risking everything, I keep moving forwards, my little virtual spaceship has been shed and my very ego is laid bare. My screen dances with colours and lights, and I find myself dancing with them. I've been here before, but this virtual dance partner previously had me stumbling over my feet and leaving me in the dust. This time, however, it's like I have known these motions my whole life. Step, step, twirl, I trip. My heart is beginning to race, I just have to keep it together for a little longer. I move on instinct, and worry how long I can keep this going for. Just as I was about to give out, and get sent back to that familiar starting position I open my eyes to see something I hadn't seen before. I realize I made it through, I have actually felled this beast. I would've screamed for joy but... it was 1 in the morning.

In the case of Void Stranger, instead of the high octane action of its older sibling, you are instead subjected to the mental strain of a gauntlet of puzzles. However despite the completely different setting the same rule applies here as it did in ZeroRanger, that being “knowledge is power”. In playing this game I assembled a board of notes that would grow alongside the things that I learned. Despite that, I ran out of steam my first time in. It wasn't until another person encouraged me to continue trying several months down the line that I picked the game back up and made some major revelations which completely changed the game, that I was sure to have seen everything the game had to offer. Only to face walls so impenetrable that despite all my notes and deranged reasonings I could not find a way to continue, so I stopped again.

It wasn't until this summer, roughly a year later that I happened to stumble on my notes for Void Stranger, idly thinking “ah yes I would like to finish this game sometime”. As I peered once more upon my scribblings I began to notice some connections that I hadn't noticed all those months ago. I began rearranging these pieces I had collected. Next I realized I was staring at this shape I've assembled in my notes, the culmination of all of my efforts. I had finally made what might just be the proverbial key to this locked door that prevented my progress. There was no other choice but to open this game once more, and see if it fits... click!

You can probably figure out the rest.

Embrace the void

It would be pertinent to add one final note to this discussion. While these games are quite challenging, they are by no means miserable experiences. On the contrary, I consider these to be some of the best games I have ever played. I would hope that in reading this dissection you might wish to investigate these games yourself. Much like how someone else helped give me a little boost when I was playing Void Stranger, I would be more than willing to give tips and guidance for either of these games. More than anything, if you do decide to dive into these experiences then...

May you attain enlightenment

One year since the end of the Humble Purge, my backlog slaying endeavour of 2024. I have chronicled this project in two previous articles (Clearing the backlog: Humble Purge Act II & Cleared the backlog?: Humble Purge Act II) as well as a bonus article (The Humble Purge Awards). In those, I said I would keep posting about the games I play in 2025 in the form of a journal. Today as I write these word it's December 31st 2025, and I need to haul ass. Just like last year, I recorded all the info about the games I played in a google sheet, which you can peruse at your leisure. Note that I finished my backlog project last year around the end of November, so the 2025 Journal encompasses all the games played between Nov 23rd 2024 and Dec 31st 2025.

What the backlog was this year

As stated in my previous articles, this year the “backlog” was more of a gaming journal. I didn't have any set games to play, or any amount of games to play, I was free to pick whatever. That is a very different vibe from last year, where I just had a list of games to complete by the end of the year. I was kinda lost at the beginning, so I just ended up playing the cheapest games of my steam wishlist. This was still not the way to go, as I would still feel a bit disconnected from the games I played, and couldn't get in the right mindset to enjoy myself. I was more going through the motion than actively participating in the games.

Choosing games from my wishlist was not the Humble Purge, but it was still not an organic way to go about having fun. It still felt like a work project. Thankfully, it took me less than a month to realise this, and I went for a completely vibes based approach to playing games after. Instead of picking games that had been on my wishlist for god knows how long, I let myself be influenced.

I played the hip games of the moments, or whatever my friends were playing. Throughout December and January I played Inscryption, Balatro, replayed Dark Souls III, my favourite game ever. I also played a shit ton of Street Fighter 6, my very first* fighting game. I was planning to make an article about it and stuff, but while I did write 5500 word, I lost interest in the game in May and didn't want to edit all that. If you are really interested, please find my unedited and unfinished article here: *link.

So this is what the backlog was this year, a journal of games I play on the fly. Sure, there's some stuff that I picked up from my wishlist, and some from the rejected games of the Humble purge, but overall, it was just stuff that caught my eye in the moment. It was still the same process to play them, I log everything into a google sheet, and play each game for a minimum of an hour before giving up if they are not to my taste.

_{my steam wishlist, there's like 55 games on there}

The games

The final tally for the Humble Purge, or the games I played last year, was 110 games played for a total duration of 758h. This year, I played 55 games for a total of 805h. _{this is a stream of consciousness-ish article because I have not time to write anything else} 805h?! How the fuck is that possible! I mean sure, this time around I logged games that I played throughout the end of November and December 2024 but that's only an extra 1.25 month. 805h! What the hell?! I wasn't even trying hard this year! Am I a no-life? There's no way I played dozens of more hours of video games this year than last year, when my whole year last year was dedicated to the backlog. 805h! When did I have time to play all these games?

Let's look at the data to figure it out:

November and December do add about 110 hours, but still. It looks like February — which is not yet busy at work — and July — when I was on vacation — were the months I played the most, accounting for about 30% of my playtime. Honestly, apart from those, I don't feel like I spent that much time on video games this year. And I played so little games, how is it that I played half as many games, but ended up playing for longer than last year?

Alrighty, my 5 most played games account for ~50% of all my playtime last year, and my top 10 for over two thirds. I did get a bit obsessed with Street Fighter 6 at the beginning of the year, and then I got Slay the Spire on my phone and played on the can, and then you do need about 90h to get a proper playthrough of Elden Ring with the Shadow of the Erdtree DLC, and then well, you need to take your time with Silksong, and the new hard mode came out for Ready or Not so I had to play as well... I do start to get how I got to 805h this year. So did I really play games for for that long?

This graph shows for how long I've played each games. Every duration past 7h has grown compared to last year. This year I played almost half of all games for more than 7h and a third for more than 10h. I spent so much more time on each game in general, so that must mean I had more fun. I also introduced a new rating system this year, where instead of rating everything out of 10, some games are rated out of their scope. This is because making a flawless game is more impressive for a massive game of the proportions of Elden Ring, than one of the scale of King of the Bridges. Therefore the bigger games are rated out of 10, and the smaller ones out of less than 10. A flawless big game will be a 10/10, a flawless small game a 4/4 for example. This makes it super annoying to make graphs, so I have to put everything back to 10/10 to do it 🙃.

I was expecting way stronger results here. While the average is 7.26/10, which is higher than last year's 6.92/10, it's nowhere near high enough as this year I replayed some of my favourite games, and only picked games I thought I would enjoy. More on that in the The Journal is in need of improvements. Hype is not really super relevant this year, as I had not set games to play, and I just picked stuff based on a whim. But now the question is, did the game genre distribution change from last year since I could pickup whatever I wanted?

Some games were counted twice because they fit in two categories, like Balatro and Slay the Spire, which both fit in “Card” and “Roguelike” equally. Since I had half as many games this year, I have a bit less categories, and they are all represented on the graph. I merged “Action” into “Shooter” and “RPG” because all the action games I played this year actually fit either categories. No adventure games this year, which is a more generic genre. I consolidated the more thinking games that aren't puzzles into “Strategy”, and voilà. Overall, the top genres are pretty similar, except for “Point-and-clicks” which I just didn't play as I discovered I really hated them last year. Proportionally, way more Fighting games this year, more RPGs, Roguelikes, Puzzles and Platformers, the first being a genre I discovered this year, and the the last for genres I love. There was only one Metroidvania in 2025, which is something I'll have to remediate as it is one of my favourite genre.

I don't think it really matters that much if I finished games or not this year, but in any case, here's the breakdown: Of all 55 games I played, 35 could be finished (e.g. you can't “finish” a purely multiplayer game). Of those, I completed 24, played 8 for more than an hour before giving up, and abandoned 3 after only 1h. I finished about 69% (nice) of the games I set out to play this year, which is more than last year, but that's not surprising.

The Journal is in need of improvements

I already talked about what went sort of askew at the beginning of the year, but the way I corrected it was not satisfactory to me. First, choosing games on a whim led me to buy games on sale that I wanted to play, but then not playing them because by the time I got to them, there was something else that caught my eye. I have now created another backlog. Second, there is something I lost by not having a list of games to play, I'm just not challenging my tastes or being very adventurous. There are many games from the backlog last year that I would never in a million year have picked but that ended up being amazing experiences. With the way I chose my games this year, I was only playing stuff I expected to enjoy, and therefore set myself up for disappointment. Last year, there were not high expectations for a lot of games, and that lead the good surprise to become greater. I did play a couple of games from the rejected list of last year's backlog, and came out with a great surprise, which was Basement. With an original hype of 5/10 and a steam score of 77%, I would not have played this game, and yet it garnered a 7/8 rating after I played it.

Going back to Daryl Talks Games videos, which inspired the Humble Purge, I think I should do something similar to what he did — have a mini list of game to play throughout the year, like one a month or so, and then continue playing things on a whim.

_{thumbnails of Daryl's four backlog videos}

Guess I need another backlog project

As I've said above, I have acquired some games during steam sales that I haven't touched, an unforgivable offense that will need to be addressed. Therefore, my mini list of games that I have to play next year is gonna be those 12 games. One per month is honestly not that bad. I had done a Games Backlog project, followed by a Games Journal project, and I now realise that the optimal way to go about this is to have a bit of both, a Backlog Journal Fusion. And as usual, if I had just listened to Daryl's videos more carefully I would have seen that earlier. So that's what I'm gonna do next year if I have time. (Let's not kid ourselves, I will have time). See you next year,

Thank you for reading my logorrhea Eddie – Award winning author