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Subnautica

This falls into what I'm starting to recognise as a category, computer games that are incredibly beautiful in multiple ways, but I play for five minutes and decide I don't have time to play properly. You crashland on an ocean planet, and oh my gosh, the water is so WET it practically comes out of your monitor. And warm and clear and inviting, with tropical reefs stretching endlessly.

The actual game is a bit like minecraft, find the right materials to feed into an emergency fabber to make more complicated tools to get more useful materials and components, until you eventually repair a distress beacon. (I don't know if that's all or if there's also underwater aliens or whatever).

Avatar on Wii

Rachel bought some old-ish games and it's been lovely to have something fun but simple-ish we can play together occasionally. One person controlling and one person kibitzing works surprisingly well, a lot is "what now" where having the trigger finger isn't the important thing.

It looks great, very avatar-y. It's not set at any particular point in the chronology but has a feel of an avatar well-respected but also young and unpracticed well. And your abilities work like that too: you have quite powerful abilities but you have to unlock them by levelling up, and they have cooldowns, so you feel powerful, but also like you can only succeed by being skillful, which fits the tone very well.

I have a few quibbles. The wolves appear intelligent to manufacture, or at least habitually carry, headbands of +2 armor, and yet not intelligent enough to avoid spontaneously attacking the most powerful humanoid bender on the planet. The avatar indiscriminately slaughtering wolves and taking their stuff seems tonally inconsistent on multiple levels. But that's computer games.

Also, Zuko can jump down behind Kitara and grab her and she's suddenly unable to fight back? Why didn't he try that on all the OTHER waterbenders there?

Flintstones comic

So... there's a gritty flintstones reboot. Except it's not *very* gritty. Not like gratuitous gore. But it deals with consumerism. And colonialism. And PTSD. And so on. I've no idea how this came about, but it works really quite surprisingly well. A few panels are incredibly biting. I loved the animals-used-as-appliances talking to each other, and calling the pet dinosaur a traitor.

On other occasions, it does veer a bit puerile, making simplistic jokes and criticisms of modern life that aren't especially telling. But worth reading some of.

Irredeemable

About a superteam where the most powerful superman-like member goes rogue and starts killing people, and everyone else has to figure out what they can do from there.

The worldbuilding and characters are pretty good -- it feels really LIKE famous superteams, while all the individual members are not knock-offs of specific characters from a single team, but embodying the *sort* of iconic characters that usually exist.

It's mostly about the characters, and what they do and their relationships with each other. There are quite a lot of *further* story developments of one sort or another, it doesn't just dwell on the premise forever with nothing evolving.

I've some quibbles. Things would drag on a lot less if people stopped going back and forth on when to try to contain someone and when it was necessary to kill them. And it's not a *lot* of sexism, but there's some.

Good Dinosaur, Pixar Film

An alternate history where dinosaurs became farmers and ranchers and mammals mostly didn't. Arlo, a young apatosaurus is separated from his family farm, and journeys to find it again.

It was really beautiful. The water animation was amazing, it looked really wet. And the characters were very evocative, especially the little boy Spot.

I didn't really fall in love with it the way I have with most Pixar films. I'm not sure if that's because it's aimed at slightly younger people (though some bits are pretty scary), or because there's less to the overall story, or because I've got more jaded. Liv and the Osos enjoyed it.

It was very strange to see the humans apparently lacking language. The visual communication was really good, especially with Spot, but also with the other humans, and other dinosaur characters. But it's very strange to see a child portrayed like a dog, even a very beloved dog.

Tropic of Serpents, book by Marie Brenan

Sequel to Natural History of Dragons.

The future lady Trent this time journeys to alternate-world Africa (I think?) to study swamp dragons. In several ways, I enjoyed it more than the first one. With Isabella already established with a patron and a vocation to study dragons, we move straight to the difficulties of arranging the voyage and what happens there, with less agonising over whether she will do that at all.

Writing about colonial powers, even in an alternate world, is a very risky choice. The book does a good job of characterising the people she meets as people: the Moulish, sparsely populated in their deadly swamp, nestled between the newly expansionist Ikwunde, and Bayembe, forced to flirt between accepting alt-British help and joining the rapidly congealing Talu union. And not just presenting them as interchangeable non-English background. But none of the characters of any nationality have very memorable personality, her patron is almost the only character I can imagine vividly. And I can't pretend to know how the book would be received by someone who'd actually lived in a country visited by colonialism.

This is a mild spoiler, but I really expect everyone to know or not be going to read it by not, and I think in many ways it's as or more interesting if you haven't read the books. ( Read more... )