Category Archives: other peoples’ stuff

Book review: Kiss of Death by Rachel Caine

You had to know my next review was going to be for another Morganville Vampires book, and you probably shouldn’t be surprised that the next will be another. As a series, this has to be one of my favorites of all time, with vampires tat are morally ambiguous yet still committed to their methods of staying hidden from most humans. But Kiss of Death may be my least favorite book of the series for what I consider to be a couple of missteps. I’ll get to that soon.

This book opens with Claire and her friends being given passes to leave town and travel to Dallas, where Michael is scheduled to record tracks with a big-time studio. There’s a catch to this gift, not surprisingly, and the group must travel with Oliver acting as their escort. Oliver is riding along for other reasons, and soon everyone else is pulled into his plans when they all go horribly wrong.

What bothered me was what happens when Claire, Eve, Shane, and Michael roll into a little town looking for a place to eat. They are instantly set upon by the locals in what vaguely reminds me of a rehash of Deliverance. Continue reading


Book review: Fade Out by Rachel Caine

Last year I read the first six books in the Morganville Vampires series back to back, and this caused me to avoid reading book 7, Fade Out, for quite some time. Why? Because I got nothing else done during that six day period. I was even forgetting to eat. I wanted to hold off on reading the next until I had some free time and I was sure I didn’t have any other obligations. These precautions were perhaps a bit too overzealous because Fade Out is the first book in the series with some breathing room built in. This is not to say that nothing happens, but compared to the previous books, the pace here is practically a mosey.

After the conclusion of the war, the town is slowly recovering and rebuilding. Amalie is still in mourning, and she’s letting some vampires and humans get away with serious violations of the town’s rules without doing anything about it. Claire and Myrnin are being increasingly attacked by the computer Ada, but Myrnin is in denial about how far corrupted Ada’s personality is, and keeps assuring Claire that the situation is under control. This is a shared theme with both Amalie and Myrnin, as neither seems willing to admit they’re letting things slide that maybe they shouldn’t. Continue reading


Game review: Clicker Heroes for Steam

Last month, I was having some brain issues. Weather shifts and constant up and down cycling of the temperature made it hard for me to think, so much so that even playing a video game seemed beyond me. I stumbled across a story about Clicker Heroes on Eurogamer and after reading their take on it, I thought, Well here’s a game so simple, I won’t need to use my brain to play it. One month later, I find this to be mostly true, since I don’t have to play it at all. It plays itself, and I’m occasionally invited to add input before walking away again. But I did use some advanced math while watching it play itself, so it did at least get me to use my brain creatively.

If I had based my review on only the first 90 to 100 levels, it would have been far more positive because the initial pattern of monetary growth and buying upgrades was engaging enough, and the game is graphically charming. The music and sound effects…can be turned off, freeing me to put on my music and jam out to something less repetitive.

The game is simple in story and design. You are a wandering monster slayer who clicks on monsters to kill them. After you do this a few times, the eponymous heroes will notice your quest and join your party if you can afford to hire them. The first hero, Cid, only upgrades the amount of damage your clicks do, but after her, every new hero will bring their own amount of damage per second to the party, and once you’ve hired the first of many, Treebeast, you don’t ever have to click again. In fact, there’s absolutely no point to you doing it. Continue reading


Music: Faith No More

So, you may have noticed this already, but Faith No More just put out a new album, Sol Invictus, their first studio album in 20 years. This for me is a Very Big Deal, and I was eager to get it and find out if the band sounded as good as they did back in my teens. The first song on the album, Sol Invictus had me slightly worried that they’d gone all mellow and soft, but the rest of the album quickly eased those fears. Definitely worth a listen.
Check out Faith No More’s website at http://www.fnm.com/ to find links to the new album, check tour dates, and watch some videos.


Visual art: Stephanie Pui-Mun Law

Here’s another fine artist I follow on Facebook (this is a thing with me, stalking artists on Facebook), Stephanie Pui-Mun Law, whose work is intricate, often whimsical, and always fantastic. You can check out her portfolio at http://stephanielaw.shadowscapes.com/


Game review: Toren for PS4

After seeing several gushing reviews for Toren and its artful poetic aspirations, I decided to give it a try on the PS4. It’s only 9.99, so even if it turned out awful, I’m not out much money. It only took a few hours to play through, and for the most part, the game wasn’t bad. Unfortunately, it wasn’t all that good, either.

From the start, I felt hampered by the camera, which at times refused to move with my character even if I’d been back and forth the same way a few times and knew what to expect. I missed an early pathway because when I attempted to duck under a certain arch, I fell through the floor and hit a glitching loop where my character would haul herself up only to fall again. Bear in mind, there was no ledge she was hanging from. She was falling though a solid floor. I restarted the checkpoint and wandered aimlessly for half an hour before sorting out that yes, the spot I’d fallen through was the right way to go, and I wandered out and found a shrine. This led me to restart once I realized I’d seen two other shrines at the beginning and had missed part of the game walking by them. (Even with the restart, I think my total playing time from start to finish was maybe four hours, tops. This will not take up a whole lot of your time.)

Let me set the glitches aside and talk about the game’s premise. Set in a dark fantasy world, the people of this world got hooked on a nameless mage’s idea to build a tower to the heavens in order to summon the moon. Why? Uh…I’m not really clear on that part. Maybe they all got drunk and it just sounded like a good idea at the time. Anywho, it’s sort of a Tower of Babel story, but instead of angering God, these people pissed off the sun. Now under an eternal daytime, the mage’s pet dragon goes nuts and kills everyone. Why? Um…maybe the dragon got a sunburn and the mage ran out of aloe.

The mage opts to send “Moonchild” to face the dragon, and she dies horribly and reincarnates in a pool of blood at the base of the tower. This puts the world in a loop, and the only way to change this fate is to ascend the tower and slay the dragon. Continue reading


Book review: Charm by Cat Hellisen

Charm is a hard book for me to rate or review because I have a problem with the ending. That being the case, how do I talk about the problem without spoiling the whole thing? I guess I should give the basics and then talk about what I liked, and then carefully pick my way around the ending to avoid spoilers.

Charm is about a young woman named Irene, who grew up believing her mother Hestia was crazy, and that her madness eventually led to her committing suicide. Irene wears a charm that belonged to her mother, a ward against the evil eye that behaves in a strange way around certain people. Despite this unusual pendant, Irene doesn’t believe in magic, and she’s more worried that she has inherited her mother’s madness.

Irene has one lifelong friend, Rain, who she loves deeply, but who cannot love her back in the same way because he’s gay. Rain lives with his abusive mother Lily and is locked in a co-dependent cycle with her and Irene. Lily keeps Rain close and uses him to host her own pity party, while Irene enables his heavy drinking while jealously stalking him through his various romantic encounters. Dysfunctional is the order of the day for most of the characters in this story. Continue reading


Music: Vampire Weekend

Vampire Weekend is on my regular rotation of albums to write by, and if I had to pick a favorite among their three albums, I’d be hard-pressed to choose their first self-titled album or Contra. Their third album, Modern Vampires of the City, is also fantastic, but I haven’t had nearly as many listened to give it a fair chance just yet.

Their music is a fusion of styles, with a lot of their songs having great drum beats and synthesizer melodies, and quite a few have memorable guitar riffs as well. My favorite songs are Mansard Roof, Oxford Comma,Cousins, and Diplomat’s Son. If you visit their web site, you can find links to buy their albums and check out their latest videos.


A tale of two trailers…

Yesterday, my Facebook stream lit up with reactions to the new Jem and the Holograms trailer, and they were all bad. I read through an article about how awful it was and how it was angering fans of the show, and bracing myself for the worst, I took a look at it. And…I want to see the movie. Right off the bat, my first thought is how this is an origin movie for a series that started off without an origin. The series follows this group after their initial success, so they already have an established routine, and even an established rival. But you wouldn’t find any of that in their origin, if they’d had one, would you? Not really, no. So I’m ready to give the movie the benefit of the doubt. I may be wrong, and the film may suck and make me wish I hadn’t wasted my time or money on it. But based on this one short look, yeah, I’m intrigued.

I feel kind of alone on this, though, because the vast majority of coverage on the trailer is 100% “Ugh, really?” This reminds me once again on how often I end up being outside of the in-crowd when it comes to just about everything. This sucks because if I love something, it usually means it’s gonna die due to a lack of interest. Even when something I love has a big enough fan base to sustain it, ANY mention that I like these things instantly invites a flood of criticism and teasing. I must be stupid to like them, because the mainstream zeitgeist has classified them as pure shite.

The same thing has happened with the new Supergirl trailer. I found out about it from the collective groaning on social media, and I watched the trailer and got goosebumps. I want to see this show so, so bad. I can’t wait for a box set, I need it to come to Rai NOW. This is a thing I need in my life, and I haven’t felt that way about any superhero TV show since Smallville.

And yet, go look at io9 and Polygon marching lock-step in their hate for Supergirl, and for Jem. And the thing is, what’s the gist of all their hate? “This is not the way we wanted it to be!” Continue reading


Game review: Spooky’s House of Jump Scares for Steam

First I should give credit to Polygon and Griffin McElroy for bringing this game to my attention. Griffin’s been somewhat responsible for several of my purchases because his videos do what a lot of text articles and photos can’t; explain why these games are fun. (I also like his videos because he cusses almost as much as I do when I’m gaming. This makes me feel like we are kindred spirits.)

Spooky’s House of Jump Scares is on Steam’s Early Access, and it’s not finished yet. Some of you know my dislike of early access and may wonder why I got this anyway. I can explain in two words: it’s free.

The game is in a beta test phase and isn’t charging me money to help test it out. You know, like in the old days, before developers realized they could charge people 50 dollars to be a beta tester and never release an actual game. This, however is a classier model, giving me the game for free in exchange for me looking for bugs. And you know what? Aside from an occasional glitch where the textures to a wall might suddenly reveal the tunnel around the next corner, I didn’t see a whole lot of bugginess. For an early access game, this is pretty stable.

Spooky, the eponymous owner of this haunted house, appears at the start of the game challenging you to make it through 1,000 rooms to reach the end of her ghostly gauntlet. But as of this writing, there isn’t an end or 1,000 rooms. At room 754, the game stopped and told me that I’d reached the end of the available story, and that I could keep playing or stop there. I stopped there, but whenever this comes out with an update and a conclusion, I can see playing it again. I could even see it going into my rotation of games I pick up and play when I want to kill some time. Continue reading