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Things I have Been Putting in My Eyballs
Nov. 30th, 2023 07:20 pmIt's been a while since I posted one of these because my attention span is fucked, partly because of the hours I'm working and partly because of the perpetual mild illness I've had since early October and will probably have till March.
Books
Chain-Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwama Adjei-Brown - In a near future America prisoners fight to the death on a wildly popular reality television show for the distant prospect of freedom. Fucking ouch, man. It's queer, it's fascinating, it's heartbreaking, the worldbuilding is excellent. I really thought it was very good indeed. The only part of it I wasn't entirely sold on was the footnotes, like, it's an excellent book, the metaphor is very clear, it's the prison-industrial complex gone to not that much further than they already go extremes, I didn't need chunks of the Geneva Convention in the footnotes to get it. I mean, they just made Squid Game a real thing...
One of the most successful changes I've made this year has been to consume most of the non-fiction books I want to read on audio, but a pin got put in that for a couple of months because...well,I usually have a rule about not paying for podcasts because there are too many podcasts anyway, and also fuck you. But I've been listening to The Weekly Planet for, like, seven years, at which point it felt a little churlish to be going 'I will not give you twenty quid so that I can spend a few months listening to all the paywalled stuff.'
I also have a hard and fast 'one in, one out' rule about podcasts that are just two dudes talking, so every time someone recommends one I have to be like, sorry, unless one of those nice Australian lads turns out to be a monster you're out of luck.
Doppleganger: A Trip into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein - Despite the fact that I read No Logo as a teenager (well, I bought it and put it on a shelf) and I read The Beauty Myth (well, I bought it and put it on a shelf; I was an insufferable teenager) I was one of the people who a year or so ago went 'Oh, there are two of them. That makes more sense...' As someone who's lost/is losing someone I love (in my case, my dad) to conspiracy claptrap the concept of it as a mirror world managed to clarify something for me, because so often my dad will start to tell me something by saying 'You won't have heard about this on the mainstream media...' and half the time it'll be something so obviously untrue that it feels insulting to my own intelligence to google it to confirm it's nonsense, and half the time it'll be something that I do know about because it got days of blanket coverage on the regular news, but my dad didn't see that because he doesn't believe anything that doesn't come to him from a pro-Russia/anti-vaxx grifter with a Youtube channel.
The Other Pandemic: How Q-Anon Contaminated the World by James Ball - At least my dad's not a Q-Anon believer; thank heavens for small mercies and all that. I appreciated how the author traced Q-Anon through gamergate the incel movement; I do feel like society has never really recovered from not taking those seriously at the time. There was an article written this week about how Gen Z men and women are moving further and further apart politically and that having an effect on straight relationships and, like, yes, IT'S THE MISOGYNY, STUPID.
The author talks about how fact checking doesn't really work as a way to get people out of conspiratorial thinking (alas, in my experience that's true), how explaining how the algorithm is feeding them this stuff can help (the only thing I have had even limited success with), and ends with him saying something needs to be done to counter the rise of misinformation he doesn't know what. That's the 'could have been a blog post' bit of the book.
Number Go Up: Inside Crypto's Wild Rise and Staggering Fall by Zeke Faux - For a bunch of reasons that don't bear examining too closely, my closest irl friends are a trio of straight, middle-aged dads so obviously I've been in the minority when the topic of crypto has come up. A number of heated discussions in the pub have ended with me going '...I do understand, and it is that dumb.'
Zeke Faux is a Bloomberg reporter who started investigating crypto after a friend of his made a bunch of money on dodgecoin during the pandemic, and at one point he described it as 'Jay is Wrong and Zeke is right: the Book' and I very much enjoyed listening to it in the spirit of 'Cameron, Jim and Tommy are Wrong, and Gillian is Right.'
Telly
New TV has been the thing most noticeably affected by my attention span being fucked. Like, there have been full new seasons of The Wheel of Time, Gen V, and Loki since I last watched anything, and I have watched exactly zero of them. Okay, Wheel of Time was a victim of one of the lowkey worst things about the streaming era, where the new season of a show is two and half years after the last. I don't remember what happened on S1 of WoT, nor do I care enough to back and rewatch. Gen V was a victim of it being a spin-off that's apparently necessary to watch the next season of The Boys; how about we explain what I need to know in the show I'm actually watching, you know, like we used to. And it's not Loki's fault that it was the next thing on the schedule after the truly execrable Secret Invasion, but still.
I realise I sound a little 'old man yells at clouds about this, but no, it's the children who are wrong!
Star Trek: Lower Decks S4 - Moopsy! This started delightfully, as always. I wasn't mad keen on the finale, I think that perhaps Picard S3 has permanently soured me on going back to the TNG well. And, like, I didn't need a big emotional TNG tie in reason for why Mariner wanted to stay an ensign; she liked the lack of responsibility and oversight, and she has changed because of the friends she's made, that was all I needed.
Movies
Like I said, Bottoms and The Marvels were both delightful. Ooh, this is a really good PJ/Hazel Bottoms fic about awkward first time gay sex. If anyone knows of any good Carol/Val fic, or one about Kamala processing her clearly baby queer feelings for Carol (oh captain, my captain) then do hit me up.
Video Games
I've been playing (a lot of) Baludur's Gate 3 but I got hit by that bug that broke the last act of the game, and instead of heeding the universe's sign to Go Outside my buddy Cam said he'd loan me his copy of Spider-Man 2. Actually, what he said was to come round and take whatever I wanted from his collection, and I almost took Cyberpunk 2077, but BG3 being so broken that I went to play Cyberpunk was maybe a little on the nose.
Spider-Man 2 - The 2018 Spider-Man blew my mind, partly because it was the first video game I'd played since 1993, and if you'd gone from Ecco the Dolphin to swinging around New York then your head would have exploded too. This one...wasn't quite as mind blowing. Partly, It's because I've pretty much played all these Playstation exclusives at this point and they're all pretty good, even Days Gone, a game I feel like I could do a pretty good tight five making fun of, admittedly to a very small and specific audience. So I had more quibbles with this one: the inclusion of the outer boroughs didn't work for me because web-swinging doesn't really work outside Manhattan, and the webwings were a compromise that made the traversal feel more like an Iron Man game than Spider-Man. The story was mostly Peter and Harry's, and that was all good except for the fact that Miles didn't feel particularly well integrated. There's a boss fight where you fight Harry/Venom as MJ, Miles and then Peter, and the Miles section didn't land at all because he and Harry have exchanged precisely one line in the entire game up to that point. Like, when you got Miles stuff to do it was some of the best parts of the game, it just didn't feel like it was part of the main story.
On the other hand, webswinging is never not cool, the MJ sections are actually fun now, the voice acting is all great, and the combat still makes you feel cool and powerful. Also, the game was finished, and I got to see the credits without the game freaking out and making me wait the better part of a month for a patch. Like, I'm loath to give points for that, but we are where we are.
Music
I don't normally talk about music in these posts, and nobody enjoys hearing about other people's Spotify Unwrapped, but I did have to laugh at my top 5.
1. Fuck Everything (Euringer)
2. Fuck You (Whiskey Shivers)
3. We Are Fucking Fucked (Muse)
4. I Hope You Die In a Fire (Grand Commander)
Now this list may lead you, and apparently the Spotify algorithm goblin, to believe I'm going through a thing, but my number five was the Finnish entry from this year's Eurovision, so I think I'm fine.
Books
Chain-Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwama Adjei-Brown - In a near future America prisoners fight to the death on a wildly popular reality television show for the distant prospect of freedom. Fucking ouch, man. It's queer, it's fascinating, it's heartbreaking, the worldbuilding is excellent. I really thought it was very good indeed. The only part of it I wasn't entirely sold on was the footnotes, like, it's an excellent book, the metaphor is very clear, it's the prison-industrial complex gone to not that much further than they already go extremes, I didn't need chunks of the Geneva Convention in the footnotes to get it. I mean, they just made Squid Game a real thing...
One of the most successful changes I've made this year has been to consume most of the non-fiction books I want to read on audio, but a pin got put in that for a couple of months because...well,I usually have a rule about not paying for podcasts because there are too many podcasts anyway, and also fuck you. But I've been listening to The Weekly Planet for, like, seven years, at which point it felt a little churlish to be going 'I will not give you twenty quid so that I can spend a few months listening to all the paywalled stuff.'
I also have a hard and fast 'one in, one out' rule about podcasts that are just two dudes talking, so every time someone recommends one I have to be like, sorry, unless one of those nice Australian lads turns out to be a monster you're out of luck.
Doppleganger: A Trip into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein - Despite the fact that I read No Logo as a teenager (well, I bought it and put it on a shelf) and I read The Beauty Myth (well, I bought it and put it on a shelf; I was an insufferable teenager) I was one of the people who a year or so ago went 'Oh, there are two of them. That makes more sense...' As someone who's lost/is losing someone I love (in my case, my dad) to conspiracy claptrap the concept of it as a mirror world managed to clarify something for me, because so often my dad will start to tell me something by saying 'You won't have heard about this on the mainstream media...' and half the time it'll be something so obviously untrue that it feels insulting to my own intelligence to google it to confirm it's nonsense, and half the time it'll be something that I do know about because it got days of blanket coverage on the regular news, but my dad didn't see that because he doesn't believe anything that doesn't come to him from a pro-Russia/anti-vaxx grifter with a Youtube channel.
The Other Pandemic: How Q-Anon Contaminated the World by James Ball - At least my dad's not a Q-Anon believer; thank heavens for small mercies and all that. I appreciated how the author traced Q-Anon through gamergate the incel movement; I do feel like society has never really recovered from not taking those seriously at the time. There was an article written this week about how Gen Z men and women are moving further and further apart politically and that having an effect on straight relationships and, like, yes, IT'S THE MISOGYNY, STUPID.
The author talks about how fact checking doesn't really work as a way to get people out of conspiratorial thinking (alas, in my experience that's true), how explaining how the algorithm is feeding them this stuff can help (the only thing I have had even limited success with), and ends with him saying something needs to be done to counter the rise of misinformation he doesn't know what. That's the 'could have been a blog post' bit of the book.
Number Go Up: Inside Crypto's Wild Rise and Staggering Fall by Zeke Faux - For a bunch of reasons that don't bear examining too closely, my closest irl friends are a trio of straight, middle-aged dads so obviously I've been in the minority when the topic of crypto has come up. A number of heated discussions in the pub have ended with me going '...I do understand, and it is that dumb.'
Zeke Faux is a Bloomberg reporter who started investigating crypto after a friend of his made a bunch of money on dodgecoin during the pandemic, and at one point he described it as 'Jay is Wrong and Zeke is right: the Book' and I very much enjoyed listening to it in the spirit of 'Cameron, Jim and Tommy are Wrong, and Gillian is Right.'
Telly
New TV has been the thing most noticeably affected by my attention span being fucked. Like, there have been full new seasons of The Wheel of Time, Gen V, and Loki since I last watched anything, and I have watched exactly zero of them. Okay, Wheel of Time was a victim of one of the lowkey worst things about the streaming era, where the new season of a show is two and half years after the last. I don't remember what happened on S1 of WoT, nor do I care enough to back and rewatch. Gen V was a victim of it being a spin-off that's apparently necessary to watch the next season of The Boys; how about we explain what I need to know in the show I'm actually watching, you know, like we used to. And it's not Loki's fault that it was the next thing on the schedule after the truly execrable Secret Invasion, but still.
I realise I sound a little 'old man yells at clouds about this, but no, it's the children who are wrong!
Star Trek: Lower Decks S4 - Moopsy! This started delightfully, as always. I wasn't mad keen on the finale, I think that perhaps Picard S3 has permanently soured me on going back to the TNG well. And, like, I didn't need a big emotional TNG tie in reason for why Mariner wanted to stay an ensign; she liked the lack of responsibility and oversight, and she has changed because of the friends she's made, that was all I needed.
Movies
Like I said, Bottoms and The Marvels were both delightful. Ooh, this is a really good PJ/Hazel Bottoms fic about awkward first time gay sex. If anyone knows of any good Carol/Val fic, or one about Kamala processing her clearly baby queer feelings for Carol (oh captain, my captain) then do hit me up.
Video Games
I've been playing (a lot of) Baludur's Gate 3 but I got hit by that bug that broke the last act of the game, and instead of heeding the universe's sign to Go Outside my buddy Cam said he'd loan me his copy of Spider-Man 2. Actually, what he said was to come round and take whatever I wanted from his collection, and I almost took Cyberpunk 2077, but BG3 being so broken that I went to play Cyberpunk was maybe a little on the nose.
Spider-Man 2 - The 2018 Spider-Man blew my mind, partly because it was the first video game I'd played since 1993, and if you'd gone from Ecco the Dolphin to swinging around New York then your head would have exploded too. This one...wasn't quite as mind blowing. Partly, It's because I've pretty much played all these Playstation exclusives at this point and they're all pretty good, even Days Gone, a game I feel like I could do a pretty good tight five making fun of, admittedly to a very small and specific audience. So I had more quibbles with this one: the inclusion of the outer boroughs didn't work for me because web-swinging doesn't really work outside Manhattan, and the webwings were a compromise that made the traversal feel more like an Iron Man game than Spider-Man. The story was mostly Peter and Harry's, and that was all good except for the fact that Miles didn't feel particularly well integrated. There's a boss fight where you fight Harry/Venom as MJ, Miles and then Peter, and the Miles section didn't land at all because he and Harry have exchanged precisely one line in the entire game up to that point. Like, when you got Miles stuff to do it was some of the best parts of the game, it just didn't feel like it was part of the main story.
On the other hand, webswinging is never not cool, the MJ sections are actually fun now, the voice acting is all great, and the combat still makes you feel cool and powerful. Also, the game was finished, and I got to see the credits without the game freaking out and making me wait the better part of a month for a patch. Like, I'm loath to give points for that, but we are where we are.
Music
I don't normally talk about music in these posts, and nobody enjoys hearing about other people's Spotify Unwrapped, but I did have to laugh at my top 5.
1. Fuck Everything (Euringer)
2. Fuck You (Whiskey Shivers)
3. We Are Fucking Fucked (Muse)
4. I Hope You Die In a Fire (Grand Commander)
Now this list may lead you, and apparently the Spotify algorithm goblin, to believe I'm going through a thing, but my number five was the Finnish entry from this year's Eurovision, so I think I'm fine.