Angevon

The guy who was my internet best friend has been arrested in real life, charged with heinous & unforgivable crimes. I know they always say "innocent until proven guilty" but the news articles I found sure make it sound like there's no doubt about his guilt. It's been a few weeks since I found out and I'm not ok. I don't go a day without thinking about it. Going back through all our convos we've had over the years and wondering if the red flags were always there and I was just willfully ignorant.

You might have known him, he was my fanfiction beta and helped coauthor some of my fics. I've gone and anonymized a bunch of my old smutty souyo fics because knowing his influence was there kinda makes me feel sick. I promise I won't delete them because I don't believe fic should be deleted. So, Anonymous for now. I'm not sure what to do about Nanakofic yet, or the Guns & Bunnies comic he guest wrote for Poring Pelters. If I continue Poring Pelters I guess I'll have to kill off his characters. Would be funny in a truly horrible way if this is what gets me to work on that again.

Anyway, I've always been a paranoid person & I'm vaguely worried he'll get out of jail sometime and come looking for me online. I already blocked him everywhere I could think to, but knowing the kind of person he is... 😰I'm considering going dark or maybe deleting this handle. But I've used it for like 20 years...

https://archiveofourown.org/works/71457551

Summary:

Souji, journalist for The Daily Bugle, brings his friend Yosuke to his apartment to help him finish a project for work. Hopefully Yosuke won't figure out that he's secretly the Black Cat!

Notes:

Wow, okay, this one was a doozy! I mean that in a good way, this book really hooked me.

Premise:

Lilith wakes up in a solitary confinement chamber with no knowledge of where she is or why. She’s being fed and cared for, but when she screams at the walls, no one responds.

Eventually her captors appear, and they are not human. 

It’s a story about coming to terms with the loss of the world as you knew it, and learning to live in a totally alien culture. It’s a very slow burn, but the writing is captivating and kept my attention to the end (unlike Uprooted tbh).

Fire Emblem: Engage went on sale for dirt cheap during the Christmas sales, and I've been craving a strategy game and thought, "Why not?"

Turned out to be a great idea! I absolutely love this game.

I can't defend its flaws--weak story, most characters are one-note/lack depth, some of the menu-ing is unintuitive, but overall I found it quite fun. The characters are all goofy and hard to take seriously, even when the story tries its hardest. When I was telling @herrdoktorat about it, he said "sometimes all we need is a crack fic" and that sums it up pretty well 😂

My last fire emblem before this was Fire Emblem Fates Birthright, which I never finished because it was so grindy I got burned out. First you had to raise ALL the supports for EVERYONE so they would have kids, and then do it all over again to raise the kids and their supports. Talk about snoozeville. I couldn't. Also, all that shipping was kinda... icky? But I'm apparently in the minority and that's what people mainly play these games for *shrug*

Which is part of why I liked Engage so much! There's still supports, but no shipping, just friends all around. And they made the supports much easier to raise via options at the base between battles. You don't have to glue 2 people together (although that does still help, of course).

All Systems Red by Martha Wells

Premise: 

A security unit that calls itself “Murderbot” has been assigned to a planetary exploration team. It doesn’t really care for the job or for the team. It would rather watch soap operas all day.

However, things go wrong on the mission and Murderbot is kinda forced out of its shell by the team. The team which, it turns out, it in fact does kind of care about (tsundere-bot?).

And that’s kind of it. A straight forward story about the humanization of something not quite human. 

I was looking for fantasy novels by female authors and came across Uprooted by Naomi Novik, and gave it a shot.

The protagonist is an ordinary woodcutter's daughter living in a tiny village at the edge of “the Wood.” A powerful wizard known as “the Dragon” rules these lands, and he lives in the nearby tower. To guarantee his protection, every ten years the villagers must offer him a girl of about 17 years of age to serve him in the tower. The girls are always changed from the experience--although they’re free at the end of the 10 years, they never feel at home with their families and usually end up moving far away.

The Dragon always takes a beautiful girl, so for all her life growing up, our protagonist has lived under the impression that her best friend will be taken. Her best friend is the epitome of perfection, compared to her, a country bumpkin who can hardly keep her clothes clean. 

Of course, Things happen and the Dragon chooses her instead.

Now, at this point, you think it’s going to be a kind of Beauty and the Beast story (or maybe Bumpkin and the Beast), and it kinda is and has that feel. It goes on like that for quite a while, with her being resentful about being cooped up in the tower, and the Dragon suffering her incompetence.

But then, the story takes a turn and doesn't return to that premise at all. It’s kinda disappointing…?

I’m not sure how to explain it. The writing is solid, everything is well described.

It’s just, when I’m starting to become invested in the budding relationship between these two characters, The Plot takes over and splits them apart. And then, I hate to say it, but the Dragon is totally sidelined. The characters all exist to serve this powerful plot, they’re kinda thrown at it, introduced and then killed for it. which, I mean, the overarching plot about the evil of the Wood was good, and solidly written, but… I kinda wanted something simpler…? 😂

Like, not everything has to be a sweeping, world shaking epic, sometimes it’s just a bumpkin girl who wants to bone the most powerful wizard in the land hahaha

After not reading much of anything last year, I'd like to get back into it this year.

I went to the movies recently, and the trailer for Mickey17 played before the main feature. The premise looked interesting, so I looked into it further and found it originated from a book. Figured it’s best to read the book before seeing the movie, so I did.

Mickey7 is a science fiction story about a guy named Mickey who is part of the crew of a colony ship that recently landed on the ice planet they intend to populate. His role with the crew is what they call an Expendable. His mind and body have been placed onto something like a backup server, so when he dies, the colony’s body tank can create a brand new copy of him that retains his personality and memories. As an Expendable, it’s his job to take on the suicide missions, such as repairing the ship’s radiation core, testing medicine & vaccines, and exploring the hostile new planet. 

As the title implies, this is the story of Mickey7, the seventh incarnation of the man who once was original flavor Mickey. The book starts with Mickey7 falling into a deep hole in the ice outside the colony dome. His companion on the expedition figures he’s going to die and leaves him there and returns to the dome without him. 

Only, Mickey7 doesn’t die, and makes his way back to the dome with the help of a creeper, one of the normally hostile creatures native to the planet. When he reaches his bunk, he finds Mickey8 already there and uh oh there are 2 Mickeys and that’s a huge no-no. Since neither of them wants to give up their life for the other, it falls on them to sneak around and hide the fact there are 2 of them from the rest of the colonists.

It sure sounds like there could be some fun close calls and goofy clone shenanigans as they try and escape discovery. However, the story is honestly (unfortunately?) not really about that. I’m not sure how to explain what it is actually about, but I’ll do my best. 

First, we should note that the story has a very casual tone. It’s told from Mickey7’s perspective, which is rather endearing. He’s a fun storyteller. Sometimes his vocabulary feels too big for the person he presents himself as, but it didn’t take me out of the story too much.

However, Mickey often stops the storytelling to give you backstory. These scene breaks are abrupt, to give it all a sense of realism since it’s mostly told in present tense. The thing is,, it’s also a bit jarring, as something dramatic will happen, but then Mickey will spend the next 10 pages explaining why what just happened is so important. Like when he found Mickey8, he had to stop and explain why multiples are universally hated.

In this way, it kind of reminds me of the book Reamde, which isn’t in any way related, but also had a focus on infodumping things that turned out to be only tangentially related to the story. At first I found these interruptions to the flow of the story annoying, but then I realized something:

The side stories are all way more interesting stories than Mickey’s. There’s a story about another colony where the colonists keep dying off due to unknown causes, and so the management decides to clone their Expendable to ridiculous levels until he’s the last one left. Would make for a great horror story!

And the story with an Elon Musk-like guy murdering people for the raw materials to clone himself and then taking over an entire planet with his clones. This could be a best selling novel of its own. 

And then there’s the briefly mentioned planet of sentient cephalopods—hello! Why isn’t this book about that??? 

Instead we get Mickey7 and his colony’s problems, all told kinda superficially since he doesn’t seem all that invested in anyone/anything there, even his girlfriend. In fact, Mickey7 spends most of time talking about food rations, with highly specific caloric intake energy values. Now that Mickey8 exists, he’s going to have to share his rations with him(self). And then the commander keeps cutting rations since the colony isn’t doing well and they’re running out and he also just doesn’t like Mickey. There’s so much focus on the (lack of) food, with characters being protective of their rations and complaining about them, but at the same time, it doesn’t actually go anywhere, so it feels extraneous. 

The story is also very… straight? There’s not a lot of sex or anything, but Mickey implies he’s slept around a lot, because as an Expendable he’s like forbidden fruit (I will relent and give a bonus point for him having a threesome with 8 at some point). But many plot points are caused by bog-standard relationship drama and jealousy, which is super boring.

Overall, I think the story would’ve benefitted from more focus and a slower burn. It didn’t feel rushed, exactly, but I didn’t have the time to connect with the characters. The disjointed nature of the storytelling probably didn’t help on this front. I think I’ll give it a solid “it was okay. Not great, but okay.”

Will I see the movie?