After over two months of dealing with insurance adjusters, contractors, and project managers, our basement is finally ours again!

For those not in the know, back at the end of January a pipe burst in our down stairs living room and flooded half of the basement. We had to tear out all of the vinyl plank flooring as well as a good bit of the drywall two feet above the floor. We lost our new(ish) couch but mostly everything else we lost was just junk furniture from Facebook Marketplace purchases. We consider ourselves relatively lucky that I had water sensors set up.

Fast forward 9 weeks and the floor has been replaced, walls put back together and painted, a new couch has been purchased, as well as some other bit of furniture to tie the room back together. It was a painful stretch of time for the whole family, but despite us needing to pay a little bit out of pocket to supplement the insurance claim, I think we made out much further ahead of where we started.

Movies

Project Hail Mary - After constant nagging from friends and strangers alike I finally made it out to the theater to see the new Lord/Miller sci-fi adventure from Andy Weir, author of The Martian. I had read this book a couple years ago and was intrigued to see how it would translate onto the screen and was very pleased to see that the humor, intelligence, and optimism made it through unscathed. I do think it drags a bit at parts in the first half, but it’s extremely entertaining nonetheless. It’s also good to see a science fiction movie that’s not relentlessly dour and pessimistic.

My Neighbor Totoro - I guess I can officially mark this down as the first movie I watched with my son. He sat through the vast majority of the film without interruption, a feat that astounds me seeing as he’s not even two years old. The movie is essentially plot-less, which lends itself well to being ideal entertainment for toddlers, but it was also surprisingly scary for him at time, especially when Totoro roars and bares his teeth. Overall, I think he really enjoyed it. Look out for his letterboxd account, coming soon.

Hoppers - I’ll go out on a limb and say Hoppers is one of the best things Pixar has put out in years. It’s an original property with a pro-environmentalism message that’s darkly comedic and very shocking at times. A great deal of the jokes are likely going to go clear over the heads of most of Pixar’s usual audience, but it’s still cute and thrilling when it needs to be. I found myself reminded frequently of Pixar’s Seeing Red in its irreverence and jokes that seemed laser-targeted at millennial parents.

Books

North American Lake Monsters by Nathan Ballingrud - This is the second short story collection I have read by this author and fourth book of his overall and I have to say I think it may have been one of the most disappointing collections of stories I have ever read. The stories are described as a mix of horror and dark fantasy, but to be honest these elements are frequently barely at the edges of more mundane and dull narratives. There wasn’t a single story that stuck out to me at the time, nor is there one I can even recall in retrospect.

The Odds by Jeff Strand - This short novel follows Ethan, a man with a gambling addiction that finds himself in a death game of sorts when offered a 99% chance to win $10,000 in exchange for a 1% risk for his arm to be shattered. As you might guess, this quickly spirals out of control and Ethan finds himself in an ever-escalating game that threatens to envelop and ruin his life. The story progresses pretty much exactly as you would expect and nothing really ended up surprising me. The last few chapters try to dip harder into dark humor and satire, but it felt really out of place with the rest of the book and didn’t quite work for me.

A Man With One of Those Faces by Caimh McDonnell - I listened to this as a buddy read with my wife, looking for a light-hearted crime thriller and finding exactly that. This Irish mystery follows Paul, an every-man who spends his free time pretending to be the loved ones of dementia-addled senior citizens as a form a community service. When one of this “clients” attacks him and then dies, Paul is thrust into a mystery surrounding one of Ireland’s more notorious crimes. I thought this book was hilarious, only made better by the excellent narration by Morgan C Jones. I instantly wishlisted the other eight books in the “trilogy.”

Hollow by Brian Catling - This is a book that I picked up a long time ago and bounced off it due to its dense prose and archaic language. This time I was able to soldier ahead and really enjoy what it had to offer. Inspired by the arts of Hieronymus Bosch, the story weaves three tales in an alternate medieval Europe where the barrier between our world and hell is starting to diminish. I really enjoyed two of the three narratives this one offers, with the third feeling a bit tacked on and inconsequential to the events of the book. Nonetheless it was a grotesque blast to read.

You Invited It In by Sarah Jules - When a man who can commune with the dead goes after a phony psychic, he accidentally welcomes a malicious presence into his home. This was a very quick read for me and I’m not sure much of it stuck. There was nothing that I particularly disliked about it, but it evaporated from my mind the second I logged it as read.

Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng by Kylie Lee Baker - Rounding out the month, I just finished this one after I saw it pop up on a bunch of best-of lists for last year. Set during the early days of the pandemic, this novel follows Cora Zeng, a Chinese-American woman after the abrupt death of her sister at the hands of a serial killer targeting Asian-American women. It hit that metaphorical sweet spot by entwining a story about racially-motivated hate crimes, the COVID-19 pandemic, and restless spirits all together in a way that really worked for me. My only gripe is that the first half took a while to get going and felt very disjointed compared to the latter half where the mystery starts to come together.

Video Games

Vampire Crawlers - My sole digital obsession for the past couple weeks has been poncle’s follow-up to their genre-defining Vampire Survivors. This time, everything from that game has been retrofitted into a dungeon-crawler deck-builder format, down to the items, characters, locations and enemies. Compared to its predecessor, it’s a much more active game, requiring a little bit of thought when it comes to playing cards and racking up combos. Compared to other games of this ilk, I do think it’s a bit easy as I’ve almost unlocked everything a little more than a week after release. Thankfully, if the game is anything like Survivors, there will be plenty of updates and DLC to keep it rolling.

Board Games

Lightning Train - The only new board game I really got around to breaking out this month was Lightning Train, a route-crafting bag-builder designed by Paul Dennen and published by Dire Wolf. After roughly a 20-minute teach, the game played four of us in about two hours. I’d rank the complexity somewhere in the mid-heavy tier, akin to something like Great Western Trail or Lost Ruins of Arnak.

The main gist of the game revolves around players building train routes across a map of the United States, not dissimilar to something like Ticket to Ride. Rather than collecting sets to do so, however, players draw tiles from their own curated bags. In a fashion similar to deck-builder games like Dominion, tiles in your bag are used to perform actions or spend as currency to get more powerful tiles. From here, you use the tiles to lay down routes, build stations, and secure contracts to deliver goods from producer cities to stations with specific demands. The game ends when players complete a route from New York City to San Francisco or 12 rounds elapse, whatever happens first.

Having only one play under my belt, I’m not sure if I have fully formulated a definitive opinion yet, but I can say that there was certainly a point where everything began to click for me and I was really enjoying myself. The first few rounds were very slow and unproductive as we all got our bearings with the flow of the game, but towards the middle I could see the proverbial gears turning across everyone’s faces.

One of my favorite aspects that sets Lightning Train apart from other train games I’ve played is that routes from one city to another do not have to all be from the same player to be used for delivery. Players share in the points depending on how big of a presence they have in the deal, which creates and interesting balance between trying to keep a portion of the map to yourself or instead spreading yourself out in pockets around the board to hoover up a point or two off over other players’ ventures.

Setup and teardown were a bit of a weak point in the game, if I had to point to something I didn’t like. There’s a ton of tokens that have different functions and come into the game at different points, but they’re really difficult to tell apart at a glace. I will probably end up 3D printing a storage solution if I decide that this is going to be a game I keep for a long time.

At the beginning of the month I took my nephew to his (and my) first college basketball game. We saw UMBC beat out New Hampshire at the NCAA America East quarterfinals. UMBC would go on to take the division championship and earn a place in the Division I tournament.

Later in the month my wife and I took our son for a mini vacation up to Cape May and Wildwood, NJ. While the beachfront town was a bit deserted for the season, we had a great time visiting the Cape May County Zoo and riding the Cape May-Lewes Ferry on the way home.

Rec league volleyball has finally picked back up after the winter hiatus and it feels pretty good to be consistently active again. It’s not as intense a workout as I would hope it to be, but at least it’s something.

The basement is still under construction but the light at the end of the tunnel is starting to shine. This month has been a lot of fighting with insurance adjusters and dealing with contractors coming and going from my house. Hopefully we’ll be done and moving things back in before mid-April.

Movies

Train Dreams - I enjoyed this way more than I thought I would. It’s a relentlessly dour and bleak movie but the cinematography is breathtaking and made it well worth watching.

Redux Redux - This indie sci-fi thriller is about as indie as you can get. A mother of a murdered teen hops across dimensions to enact her revenge against the killer across many timelines. Never gets as interesting as the premise would insinuate and goes through the exact same beats as you would expect.

Undertone - A podcaster tending to her dying mother encounters strange audio files that may be more sinister than they first seem. Another big let down for me. I thought the build up to the mystery was engaging, but the payoff and final act went a bit too crazy and left me with more questions than answers.

F1 - Admittedly I only really half-watched this, but I thought it was incredibly dull and cliche. As a life-long fan of Brad Pitt, I thought this was the lowest-effort project I have ever seen him in and I am honestly astonished that it got so much Oscar buzz.

The Secret Agent - Way weirder than I would’ve ever expected this to be, and then I found out that it was from the same director as Bacarau. Honestly, without much investment in the historical side to this story, most of it fell completely flat for me. The quirkiness of some of the characters and side stories were the only remarkable parts.

Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die - I absolutely had a huge blast with this one despite it laying on the anti-AI and anti-social-media rhetoric a bit thick (although I don’t disagree with it). The first two-thirds were inventive and really fun, even if some of the vignettes felt a bit disconnected and out of place. The final act sagged a bit for me as well as it started to succumb to the same blockbuster climax we have seen in countless other sci-fi films.

TV

Neighbors (HBO Max) - I had high hopes for this one to scratch the itch left in the absence of John Wilson and Nathan Fielder. Most of the episodes boiled down to people squabbling over property lines and fences which got very repetitive. The best episodes were the first and last ones where they really highlight the batshit insane people that live in middle America.

Books

Nightwatching by Tracy Sierra - Buddy read with my wife. This was kind of an awful piece of trash that couldn’t decide if it wanted to have a twist or not. This was a master class in how to write an unlikable narrator.

You Weren’t Meant to Be Human by Andrew Joseph White - A disturbing piece of fiction about a trans man living in West Virginia where a portion of the population is bought into an alien hive-mind society. It’s gruesome, heart-breaking, and most importantly uses its themes and plot to highlight the loss of autonomy and individualism when it comes to reproductive and trans rights in current day America. I admired it for its message more than I actually enjoyed the act of reading it.

Coffin Moon by Keith Rosson - A Vietnam veteran bartender and his niece get embroiled in a vampire crime story in the 1970s. This was an absolute blast from beginning to end. As much as I think vampire stories are overdone at this point, I feel like this one does things right by kind of pushing the supernatural elements to the background in favor of a bloody revenge story. After this and Fever House, I am officially a huge fan of Rosson.

The Extraordinary Life of Sam Hell by Robert Dugoni - I bought this book thinking it to be a piece of genre fiction but later found out it was a rather straight-forward coming-of-age story about bullying and living your life in spite of negative people. I buddy read this with my wife and I think we both enjoyed it even if it wasn’t exactly thrilling or exciting. It’s just a well-written and mostly wholesome story.

Strange Houses by Uketsu - The follow-up to Strange Pictures, which I read last year. Rather than being a collection of separate stories that eventually come together into a single narrative, this one is a single story throughout the span of the entire novel. I’d say it’s a weaker novel on every single front when compared to its predecessor: the pictures are less integral to the plot, the story itself is much more simple, and the exposition is way more blunt and spells things out a bit too succinctly.

A God in the Shed by J-F Dubeau - A small town in French Canada reckons with generations of mysteries surrounding a local serial killer and occult worship. Despite reading a lot of hate about this book, I liked this one much more than I expected to. It reminded me of a Lovecrafitian style take on something like the German show Dark. The final few dozen pages, however, really accelerated to an abrupt conclusion that seemed way to eager to set up a sequel rather than paying off in a satisfying way.

Video Games

Marathon - Even though I was a huge fan of the Destiny games, I wasn’t too excited for Bungie’s new extraction shooter on the lead-up to its launch. This all changed when I tried out the open server stress test last month and saw the depth there was to the story and lore surrounding the gameplay. I haven’t been able to put much time into it yet, and the little that I have has been met with a lot of dying at the hands of other players, but I surprisingly don’t feel too demotivated by it. Right now, my biggest qualm with the game is that it takes too long to get back into the action. Matchmaking queue times are way too long and really put damper on me wanting to pend a lot of time with the game.

Slay the Spire 2 - Speaking of spending a lot of time with a game, I have been devoting just about any and all free time I have to playing MegaCrit’s sequel to arguably the best deck-builder game of all time. StS2 is basically more of what made the first game great, this time with a really addictive progression system that makes the grind to unlock content a ton of fun. The game is in early access on PC, so things are a bit rough around the edges, but it’s not stopping me from playing run after run.

Board Games

Moon Colony Bloodbath - From the famed creator of Dominion comes a unique twist on the “engine-builder” genre of board game. Moon Colony Bloodbath pits players against one another as rival scientists trying to establish lunar bases and outlast one another when the inevitable robot uprising occurs. Players take simultaneous actions as the game progresses through an ever-expanding deck of event cards, constructing buildings, managing resources, and eventually deciding how to optimally throw their colonists to the proverbial robowolves.

I’ve played a handful of games of this one at this point and I can see how repeated plays mold your mind into better adapting to the chaos that this game entails. It’s probably the first game I’ve seen since Galaxy Trucker that is both an engine-builder and an engine-destroyer game. By that I mean that the first half of the game sees you managing money, food, and colonists to best make use of synergies and efficiencies while the back half sees you figuring out how to prioritize what buildings to scuttle and in what order to prolong your settlement. At times this can kind of seem like multi-player solitaire but there’s some fun player interaction when people start adding cards to the communal event deck. I recommend this as a fun and wacky light strategic game to hoot and holler over.

Hot Streak - Speaking of games to hoot and holler over, Hot Streak is a game whose manual positions it as a game about “betting, racing, and SCREAMING.” At its core, it’s a racing game where none of the players control any of the four racers but instead are betting on the outcome of three races. In another similarity with Moon Colony Bloodbath, Hot Streak sees players playing from a randomized and shared deck of cards that dictate what each racer will do and in what order. Every race players will each secretly add one card to the deck that will hopefully tip the odds in their favor, but as we quickly found out, nothing is a sure thing in this race.

While the randomness kind of throws most strategy out the window, this game is certainly more about the vibes. It’s encouraged that the player revealing cards from the deck put on an exuberant announcer voice and narrate the events of the game and the game can play in its entirety in about 30 minutes, so it’s more of a drinking game than anything else. Highly recommended to those who entertain larger groups and want maximize the ratio of entertainment to rules overhead.

As of the end of February, we have had our flooring completely torn up, holes cut in our drywall around the perimeter of the main room, and most of our personal effects either tossed out or put into storage. We’re currently waiting on insurance to approve the rebuild, and then we’ll start on scheduling a full remodel of our basement.

And to add to the shit pie we’ve been served, just days after this tragedy unfolded someone hit our car, causing for the entire passenger door needing to be replaced. Luckily the damage was paid for in full by the guy who hit us, we still have to deal with the inconvenience of losing our car for more than a week. We just can’t catch a break.

Movies

Die My Love - Another movie about the stresses of motherhood and marriage, but this time Jennifer Lawrence goes completely off the deep end (again). It’s kind of mean spirited and at times very uncomfortable to watch, but it was a decent sit.

Return to Silent Hill - As someone who has always loved the Silent Hill games, particularly a fondness for Silent Hill 2 after Bloober Team’s excellent remake last year, this movie was a complete pile of steaming excrement. I won’t even elaborate any further because there was nothing of value here at all.

Marty Supreme - Probably going to end up being my personal pick for best picture for 2025, even though I don’t think it has a shot in hell to win. It has all of the best manic and anxious energy of Uncut Gems but while being a bit more “fun”. Josh Safdie is excellent at painting entertaining portraits of absolute scumbags.

Nirvanna the band the show the movie - Hands down the most fun I’ve had at the movie theater in a long time. Before seeing this I was only partially familiar with the Nirvanna the band web series and TV show, but now I feel like I have to go back and consume it all. There are things in this movie that had to be done by actual magic or an ungodly amount of foresight.

28 Weeks Later: The Bone Temple - I had a lot of hope for this one coming off of the solid, but not mind-blowing 28 Years Later seeing that the story was going to move forward with Dr. Kelson and the gang of Jimmys. I think I came away entertained but kind of expecting more. For sure there are some great set piece scenes here, but I feel like it leaves the next movie in a strange place that I’m not really looking forward to.

Books

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke - A man trapped in an infinite labyrinth of halls ponders his existence after an unexpected visitor shows up. This started out as a buddy read with my wife, but the sheer obliqueness and weirdness put her off immediately. I was told it would be up my alley if I enjoyed The Library at Mount Char (which I do), and I totally see the comparison there, but this one didn’t hit as hard for me. I do like how the story starts out vague and deftly unravels and reveals itself as things move along, but ultimately it wasn’t a story I could really care about.

Root Rot by Saskia Nislow - A group of unnamed children come together for a family reunion at their grandfather’s house in the woods and weird things start to happen. I had no clue what was going on for the majority of this short novel and will probably have to reread it at some point. Narrative shifts between characters (or maybe it doesn’t?) and it’s really hard to keep track of the characters and what is going on. I got the impression that the ambiguity was a deliberate part of the story but it really hurt my brain.

Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman - After the world is flattened by an alien corporation, the survivors are thrown into an underground role-playing-game-inspired intergalactic game show to fight for their lives. This was my mindless entertainment slop read for the month and while it started out a little bit insufferable, I ended up getting on its wavelength by the end and kind of actually enjoying it. It’s definitely an uphill struggle trying to not roll my eyeballs out of my head at all of the shoehorned references, but it’s handled leagues better than something like Ready Player One. There are like 8 books in this series and while I’m not going to rush out to complete them, I might dip back in whenever I need to unwind a bit.

The Wingspan of Severed Hands by Joanna Koch - The fates of a teenage girl and a weapons director spiral together in a world succumbing to a cosmic madness. I thought for maybe the first third of this book that I had a handle on what was going on, but that was swiftly dashed away as this novella goes completely bonkers and incomprehensible. The prose is really well written but sometimes got in the way of my basic understanding of events and characters. I think I spent too much time this month reading extremely dense and difficult stories and my brain is just shot.

Games

ARC Raiders - I’ve been dumping a ton of hours into this extraction shooter that I started playing last month. I’ve been mostly playing alone, honing my understanding of the map layouts and loot routes while steadily growing my arsenal of weapons. A big update went out at the end of the month and added a few enemy types as well as a new weather event. As I near the level cap, I see myself backing off quite a bit, but I can totally seeing this as a game I come back to now and again as the devs put in more content.

Diablo II: Resurrected - Briefly, I checked out the new update that Blizzard put out for this 26 year old game. They added a new class, the Warlock, who kind of plays like a mix between a sorceress and necromancer. I started up a new ladder character for the season but really haven’t seen any new content other than this character.

Resident Evil: Requiem - I was so excited for this game that I actually took a vacation day at work to play. I’m maybe a third or half-way into the game and I’m absolutely loving it. The game is divided up between two characters: Claire, who is recommended to play in first-person perspective and plays more like the slow-burn puzzle-filled horror experience that the early Resident Evil games cultivated; and Leon, who in third-person is in more of an action-oriented game, blowing off heads and axing zombies in the face. I can’t wait to see how this story unfolds because I’m extremely interested in this new villain character, Dr. Victor Gideon.

Marathon (Server Slam) - I checked out this free weekend for Bungie’s new extraction shooter and left with kind of mixed feelings. I think the shooting feels great (as you would expect from the creators of Halo and Destiny) and the augment/weapons system shows promise, but the game’s art style and UI design feels a bit off-putting to me. Playing on console with a controller does not feel intuitive and sometimes I can’t even tell what I’m supposed to be looking at on screen. I’ll probably hold off a bit on buying into the full game when it comes out in March. If they can deliver a PvE experience on-par to Destiny’s dungeons and raids, I will consider signing up.

And then I developed dual sinus and eye infections.

And then a pipe in our basement wall froze and flooded our downstairs den.

GREAT START TO THE YEAR Y’ALL.

Movies

Bugonia - If you know me, you know I’m always showing up for the new Yorgos joint. I thought this was pretty alright, somewhere in the middle of the pack for Yorgy, only really memorable for a few key scenes and some good performances. The ending just didn’t sit right with me and can be interpreted to undo the message of the movie.

Avatar: Fire and Ash - A rehash of The Way of Water, which itself was kind of a rehash of the first one. Diminishing returns prevented me from liking this as much as I should’ve.

The Life of Chuck - Finally finished this after sitting on the first half for a few months. I appreciate it for what it is, but it feels too saccharine and life-affirming to really be my jam.

Eddington - Liked this a lot more than I was expecting to, despite being a difficult recommend to anyone I know. The experience of watching it is torturous, as is the experience of drawing breath these days, but I guess that’s what you go for in an Ari Aster movie.

28 Years Later - Rewatched this with the wife in preparation for THE BONE TEMPLE. It dragged a lot less on a second viewing but still stands out to me as being so unconventional for a director who’s now over 30 years into his career. Maybe Boyle still has the juice?

Send Help - Finally, Sam Raimi is back with an original horror movie and he hasn’t missed a beat. While this one is a bit more grounded and way less supernatural than your standard Raimi fare, it still has some gnarly stuff going on that really hearkens back to Drag Me to Hell.

Are you following me on Letterboxd?

Television

Pluribus - My wife and I finally plowed through the first season of Pluribus, the new show from Vince Gilligan, the creator of Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul. The majority of the season kind of left me a little bit cold and uninvested. It felt like things took a little too long to get going and then the ending didn’t exactly craving more. I’ll probably stick with it though.

The Celebrity Traitors UK - We’ve been fairly obsessed with The Traitors (the international versions more than the obnoxious US ones) and binged through an entire season of the first Celebrity season in the UK. If you haven’t checked this show out, it’s basically a reality game show version of the social deduction game Werewolf (or Mafia). I highly recommend it if you don’t mind slightly trashy reality TV.

The Chair Company - As a huge fan of I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson, and to a lesser degree his film Friendship, I feel like The Chair Company channeled the absurdity of the former into a narrative project much better than the latter. In stark contrast to Pluribus, the end of season one made me ravenous for more.

It: Welcome to Derry - Partially as background noise, I kind of drifted my way through the first season of this prequel to the Stephen King book (and recent movie series). I thought it was sufficiently disturbing with some really good elaboration on the backstories of character I would’ve honestly been fine without. But if nobody can stop the corporate machine from milking every drop out of an established IP, at least this time it was kind of worth my time.

Books

The Devils by Joe Abercrombie - Set in an alternate medieval past, a priest is put in charge of a group of outcasts (including a vampire, a werewolf, a cursed undying crusader, and a necromancer) as they escort an heir to a recently vacated throne from Rome to Troy. Just shy of 600 pages long, this took me over 3 months to finish. I actually really enjoyed it, it just lacked anything to make me want to binge read it. The characters are excellent and the writing is darkly comedic. I enjoyed it thoroughly and look forward to seeing what a sequel might involve.

The Last Days of Jack Sparks by Jason Arnopp - An epistolary novel documenting a journalist who, while setting out to disprove the existence of ghosts and the supernatural, goes and gets himself cursed/haunted. The writer’s tone and style really kept this one going for me. The protagonist is a huge asshole, but is still made to be at least somewhat sympathetic and relatable. There are some great, creepy moments spread throughout this novel that really do a good job at getting under your skin and replicate the feel of a found-footage horror movie. I highly recommend this to someone who enjoys their horror with a bit of dark humor.

Intercepts by T.J. Payne - The last book I finished this month was a somewhat pulpy and sloppily written sci-fi/horror story about clandestine government operation overseeing a program involving remote viewing via sensory deprivation. The main focus of the story is Joe, an overseeing manager at a facility that uses (and abuses) people in extreme sensory deprivation to “intercept” the thoughts and actions of targets around the world in the name of national security. When one of these “antennas” becomes aware of her surroundings, Joe’s life is suddenly thrown into a total nightmare. I thought this one had an interesting premise and some avenues to really say something poignant about the state of national security but ultimately just opted to focus on gore and shock value.

Board Games

Tag Team - a new game I received as a gift for Christmas and marks the first game to be added to the 2026 10x10 challenge. This one is a 1v1 fighting game simulator game that is pioneering the new genre of “auto-battler” games. In essence the game operates by both players have a deck of cards that represent their character’s sequence of attacks/techniques. After each round a new card is added to each deck, but the order of the cards remains static relative to each other. Adding new cards to the mix shifts play a bit from round to round, but the key is remembering what’s going on in your opponent’s deck so you can try to respond to and counter it.

I played a couple games with my wife and I’m still kind of on the fence about it. I actually love the “auto-battler” spin to it, but it feels like the player choice is minimized quite a bit as a result. I’m going to finish out my 10 plays of it and maybe it will all come together for me before the end.

The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring - Trick-Taking Game - Another Christmas gift, but this time it’s a cooperative trick-taking game with campaign elements. In this game you play a sequence of “chapters” which dictate which characters are in play as well as any modifiers that may change the course of play. The characters each have their own goals, like one character may need to win a certain number of hands by the end of the round, or another character must have one or more cards of a certain suit. It’s very similar to games like “The Crew” but with a splash of Lord of the Rings flavor. Speaking of flavor, I don’t think the theme really does anything for this game, but it’s neat to loosely follow along with the story.

Carcassonne - Brushed off this classic to play with the wife as part of the 10x10 challenge as well. It’s a great pick-up and play game that we can knock out in a half hour or less and I feel like has nearly endless replayability despite being quite a spartan design compared to modern games. And I found a really neat tower to 3D-print that holds and dispenses the tiles. Bonus!

Vidya Games

ARC Raiders - The new hotness double-A game from the creators of “The Finals” is a PvPvE game set in a world where humanity has been pushed underground by some murderous robot overlords. Players act as “raiders” who make short 30-minute-or-less runs to the surface to gather resources and junk while avoiding clankers and other player-controlled raiders out to jack your loot. I’ve had a good enough time with this so far, more often when I’m playing with friends. As a solo gamer, it can be quite frustrating to be playing well and then one misstep sends you crawling back empty-handed. I haven’t even had that many bad experiences with other players (although I definitely have had some), it’s just that the game feels very unforgiving and punishing in general. But despite this I keep coming back pretty much every night.

TR-49 - On the faintest of whims I decided to check out this new indie game that was on sale on Steam for about 6 bucks. It’s a story-driven game that places players at an old wartime code-breaking machine that has been repurposed to archive documents, and maybe something else? The gameplay consists of reading through these documents, trying to piece together names and creators while building out an index to keep track of it all. As I saw someone say online: it’s like rebuilding a wikipedia page with broken links. All the while you are in the middle of some kind of alternate-history resistance trying to prevent one particular book from falling into the wrong hands.

I completed this game in almost a single sitting, maybe over the course of 2-3 hours. I found it compulsively engaging albeit a bit frustrating at times as someone who sometimes likes to mash through dialogue. In the end I’m not 100% sure what exactly was going on, but I think I had fun doing it.

2025 in Movies

As expected, my first full year raising my little gremlin cut into my movie-watching time in a big way. Here are some stats for my year in summary:

Films watched: 63, 56 of which were new watches for me.

Hours spent watching: 110.5

Most watched actor: (4 way tie, 3 watches each) Josh Brolin, Julia Garner, Paul Walter Hauser, Ivy Wolk

Most watched director: (3 way tie, 2 each) Osgood Perkins, Chris Sanders, Steven Soderbergh

Favorite Films of the year (in alphabetical order)

2025 in Books

My reading goal for 2025 was to finish 26 books either read or listened, but to have at least 12 of them be eyeball-reading books. I finished out the year with 32 books read in total, with 19 of them meeting my eyeball goal.

Some of my highlights:

2025 in video games

I didn’t get a chance to play a lot of video games this past year, but when I did I had prolonged bouts of being addicted to them until I burnt myself out. The top three offenders here are:

BALL x PIT - a fun rogue-lite Breakout-like with base-building elements that has a very addicting gameplay loop that makes it very easy to play for hours on end.

Blue Prince - probably my favorite of the year, a really chill puzzle rogue-lite with more secrets and hidden objectives that made me feel like a genius when I figured something out on my own. The last time I felt like this was with 2016’s The Witness.

Hades II - I maybe like this more than its predecessor because it’s the same loop but with SO MUCH MORE.

Special shout out to the Switch 2 that was definitely my console of choice this year, but kind of lacked first party games right out of the gate. Donkey Kong Bananza was a minor distraction for a while, but I never actually finished it. I’m still waiting to hear more about The Duskbloods.

2025 in tabletop games

This past year marked the first for me to try a 10 x 10 challenge. The year started out strong, but in the end I failed to follow-through on both choosing 10 games, or finishing more than two of them.

Ticket to Ride: Legends of the West - we played through 10 (or maybe 11?) games of this 12-game campaign with my wife and nephew throughout the year. Although we didn’t finish the last game and tally up total scores, I’m pretty sure we unlocked everything there was to see. Perhaps I’ll do a full retrospective on the game once we finally close out the campaign.

The Castles of Burgundy - this is an oldie but a goodie that popped back up on my radar when I received the Special Edition early in the year. This was always one of my favorite games by one of my favorite designers, but the special edition really takes things to another level, turning it from just a game into a substantial investment into the hobby.

SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence - one of my new games for the year and while it’s a bit heavier than I’ve played lately, it was actually easier to pick up and teach. We played it for a few weeks back to back in my game group and it really clicked with me each time.

Shackleton Base - A very late addition to the collection, this one feels like the big brother to SETI and does the modular gameplay even better. I’ve only had one play under my belt so far, but this might be something I try to throw onto the 10 x 10 for the year.

Bomb Busters - this was a Christmas gift and I ended up playing with my wife and friends this past week for 6 games in a single session. I combines the co-op hidden information and communication of a game like Hanabi but fleshes it out with a campaign-like story and unlockables. I can’t wait to see what’s in these secret boxes…

2025 in new music

My wife and I treated ourselves to an early Christmas gift and purchased a Bambu Lab A1 mini 3D printer. And then after two weeks we were obsessed and ended up purchasing the upgraded model, the A1.

So far, we’ve printed objects ranging from extremely useful to utterly pointless but cool, nonetheless. My favorite print so far has been a drinking mug that holds one standard can of beverage but also doubles as a dice tower. I printed it in faux-wood filament and plan on painting the accents at some point.

My wife also designed some really cool bird drink coasters that I was able to turn into print models. I think her plan is going to be to sell them at local art markets, so follow her on Instagram if you want to find out how to get some.

What I watched

Frankenstein

Enjoyed this one quite a bit. The production design was tremendous, as should be expected from del Toro, but the way the story was presented and acted was a bit too over-the-top for me.

The Amateur

Please don’t make me look at Rami Malek for this long ever again.

The Toxic Avenger (remake/reboot)

The humor vacillated between some genuinely chuckle-worthy bits and some of the cringiest shit I’ve ever seen. Overall, a good time that is probably best enjoyed by a room packed with drunk people.

Shelby Oaks

The found-footage opening act was intriguing, if not a little bit hokey, but the back half is just boring and does absolutely nothing new or noteworthy. Total snoozer.

What I read

Strange Pictures by Uketsu

A very clever series of intertwining stories revolving around a series of drawings that ended up being more procedural thriller than horror. The way everything ended up tying together was extremely satisfying.

The Autumn Springs Retirement Home Massacre by Phillip Fracassi

People are dying at the old folks’ home! But these causes are anything but natural and are instead the work of a serial killer. It’s a pretty standard slasher flair with a unique perspective, but the ending was extremely unsatisfying.

The Divine Farce by Michael S. A. Graziano

Three people are forced to live together smashed into a concrete stall. My desire for answers faded as this one went on and by the end, I didn’t really care at all. It’s way more philosophical than this dummy can comprehend.

What I played

Quarriors

This is a dice-rolling game that I owned once-upon-a-time that I grew kind of disillusioned with and sold. Years later, my friend breaks it out at a game day and I think I’ve fallen back in like with it. The main gist of the game is that it’s a “bag builder” where you roll a personal stash of dice to accrue currency to purchase more dice and score points by sending them out into battle (and having them survive until your next turn).

The art is iffy and the game’s sense of humor is a bit on par with 2006 myspace, which is probably why I dropped it to begin with. Despite this, it’s kind of the perfect filler game where you just get to chuck a bunch of dice and cheer or sob according to the outcome. Good times, good times.

Brass: Birmingham

I’ve gone on record numerous times as saying that this is probably my favorite board game in my collection, but it had been maybe three or four years since I had last played it. Maybe I’m just easily influenced by BoardGameGeek having it at the top of the community’s list as well.

At its core, Brass (Birmingham flavor) is an economic route-building game where you create networks of material depots and factories. The game is built upon the crippling idea that resources are scarce, and you’ll likely never be able to do what you really want to do.

Resources you create are communal, and if someone is connected to your network, they’re free to use them as they wish. Thankfully, when one of your stashes are depleted, the depot flips and scores you points and/or income. It’s a bittersweet feeling when someone takes that last cube off of your iron works knowing that you get rewarded, but your plans to use that cube have been thwarted. It’s this interplay between players and resources that I think is at the core of my infatuation with this game.

What I listened to

Pretty much the same crap as last month.

One Battle After Another

If I had a nickel for every time this month I watched an uncharacteristically kinetic and thrilling movie based on a book, directed by an auteur filmmaker that came to prominence in the late-90s, early-00s, I would only have I’d have two nickels. Which isn’t a lot, but it’s weird that it happened twice.

In all seriousness though, this one was an absolute blast. Also a little bit terrifying how reflective it is of our current era despite being (loosely) based on a novel from 35 years ago. DiCaprio gives an all-timer performance, equally comedic and heartfelt while Penn’s Col. Lockjaw is up there as one of the most interesting, pathetic, and entertaining villains of recent memory.

The Ritual

This one was a rewatch for me, first time viewing since its release in 2017. It had been orbiting my thoughts for a while recently while I contemplate reading the Adam Nevill book it’s based on. This time around I felt the second half drags a lot less than I had remembered. The creature design is still top-notch and the effects have held up overall. All-in-all it’s a decent watch. Nothing super memorable outside of the creature.

Caught Stealing

The second in my aforementioned auteur-helmed novel-based thriller duology, this time directed by Darren Aronofsky. I found this one very entertaining if not a little slight and inconsequential compared to One Battle. Austin Butler further cements himself as a very charismatic leading man and the rotating cast of side-characters was continually surprising. This one is a high-recommend for something you can watch but not have to devote your full attention to (but doing so may be more rewarding).

What I read

The Handyman Method by Nick Cutter and Andrew F Sullivan

In this novel a family man’s life spirals into insanity and chaos as something in his new house compels him to… make home renovations? I fully understood that this was supposed to be a takedown of toxic masculinity and gender roles, but it was entirely too on the nose and obscene to be enjoyable. A lot of the text was downright cringe-worthy, and I really struggled to stick it out to slightly redeeming conclusion, but I don’t think I could recommend this to anyone.

Fever House by Keith Rosson

The lives of a former rock star, her son, and a mob enforcer intersect when the latter comes across a severed hand that seems to drive anyone in its vicinity into a murderous rage. In stark contrast to the previous novel, I absolutely loved Fever House and could not put it down. Without spoiling much, the novel starts in one place but ends up somewhere completely unexpected before the (strangely abrupt) ending. The writing is witty and darkly comedic and the central mystery is compelling and hints at some peripheral lore that I’m hoping gets expounded on in the follow-up The Devil By Name, which I plan on checking out soon.

What I played

Pokemon Legends: Z-A

It seems every time there is a new Pokemon release I’m there on release day with cash in hand despite me not having finished one of these games since maybe Diamond version back in high school. This time is no different as I decided to pick up this second game in the “Legends” line, the last of which I actually got within hours of the game before losing interest in.

The hallmark of the “Legends” games is that they eschew the normal gym progression system in favor of a more story-based approach. They also put an emphasis on exploration and in-world battles. Legends: Z-A takes it a step further this time and opts for (mostly) real-time combat instead of the turn-based combat that this franchise was founded on. And for the most part I think it feels really good, apart from a few strategies feeling left in the dust.

I’ve only put in about 10 hours so far but I’m enjoying this new combat system and the environment of Lumiose City despite it feeling a bit small. There’s still a ton of things to do and a plethora of side-quests to do outside of the main story. I am eager to see how far I can take it before I eventually lose interest for something else again.

BALL x PIT

This is my current obsession. BALL x PIT is a top-down vertically-scrolling shooter rogue-like/survivor-like with a bit of base-building mechanics. I checked this one’s demo out briefly during Summer Games Fest, and I enjoyed it for the most part, but it didn’t really get its hooks into me. This month it finally saw its full release and the second I saw it was only $15 and getting a free Switch 2 update, I pounced on it.

The objective of any given run is to make it through waves of enemies by shooting and bouncing balls, much like the classic game Breakout, and drafting said balls to have synergizing powers like poison, burn, or even chain-reaction lightning. After each run (win or lose) you return to your post-apocalyptic town to build structures that provide passive bonuses, resources, and even new characters for further runs. The gameplay loop is extremely satisfying. If you need further convincing, I’ll add that I got my wife into playing this and she too is addicted.

Absolum

Absolum is another run-based “rogue-like” game in the vein of BALL x PIT, Hades, or Dead Cells that puts user in a never-ending game loop that rewards the player with incremental improvements in order to do better each time. What sets this game apart from the others is that it is a take on the side-scrolling beat-em-up genre popular in arcades in the 90s like Streets of Rage or Golden Axe.

I admittedly haven’t put as much time into this one as I would’ve liked because BALL x PIT has filled this particular niche for me right now, but the little bit I’ve played was very slick and showed promise of quite a bit of depth. The art style is gorgeous and the story, or what I’ve seen of it thus far, is intriguing. I hope to get more into this after I wrap up playing in the ball pit.

October’s Playlist

This month I’m trying out something different with the What I’m Listening To section that I established last month. Please enjoy below a brief playlist of music that has caught my attention in the past few weeks.

Horror has always resonated with me above all other genres because, regardless of quality, a good horror film is almost always trying to do something different. This has led to a huge variety of subgenres that span between different audiences. As part of the free service I provide to you, my loyal followers, I am going to use this space to try to recommend a spooky movie for even the most discerning of viewers.

For those seeking an under-seen classic

The Blob (1988)

I’m leading off with what I would normally consider an all-time classic that very few people I’ve spoken to have ever seen. Chuck Russell’s 1988 remake of The Blob is a short, snappy, effects-driven monster movie that I can almost put on par with classics like The Thing. It’s a movie with very little downtime and makes for a fun and stomach-churning watch this Halloween.

Available on: Shudder, Rental

For those who fear their fellow man

Green Room (2015)

It’s a rather well-trodden cliche now that the scariest monster of all is man. This is immediately evident in Jeremy Saulnier’s Green Room, which pits a down-on-their-luck punk band against a venue full of white supremacists after they accidentally witness a murder. With its brutally realistic portrayal of violent crime coupled with the anxiety of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, this movie plays like a 90-minute panic attack.

Available on: Showtime, Kanopy, PlutoTV, Rental

For those seeking a real mind-f**k

Possessor (2020)

Science fiction is a genre that plays well with horror because it allows for things to get fantastical without being outright supernatural. Brandon Cronenberg (son of the body-horror legend David) made his sophomore feature in Possessor, the story of an assassin in a futuristic world where technology exists to inhabit other peoples’ bodies. This movie throws in some very trippy visuals in combination with some gut-wrenching violence and really challenges the viewer more than most mainstream horror can get away with.

Available on: Tubi TV, Kanopy, Rental

For those seeking something foreign

Exhuma (2024)

Different cultures have different societal fears and the horror films of said cultures tend to reflect that. Jang Jae-hyun’s Exhuma feels a little more western-inspired than most, but definitely relies on Korean customs and folklore to differentiate itself. The film follows a small group of paranormal investigators of a sort trying to dispel a curse on a newborn child. It’s a little bit on the lengthy side, but the slow-burn first half satisfyingly leads into an absolutely bonkers back half.

Available on: Shudder, Kanopy, Rental

For those seeking something off the beaten path

The Empty Man (2020)

The downside to having seen so many horror movies is that it takes a lot to genuinely surprise me. When David Prior’s The Empty Man hit theaters in December of 2020, nobody was planning on rushing out to the theaters for one reason or another. It wasn’t until later the following year that it would be dumped onto Video On Demand and largely overlooked by nearly everyone. It’s a shame because it very deftly and simultaneously juggles elements of cop procedural, urban legend, cult, and cosmic horror to form a mostly cohesive cerebral trip.

Available on: Hulu, Rental

For those who want to laugh

Deadstream (2022)

Comedy in a horror film is typically used to diffuse tension for a break in the action but can also be used to trick audiences into letting their guard down. Vanessa and Joseph Winter’s Deadstream is a comedic found-footage film that follows a disgraced streaming personality who attempts to gain back his following by streaming live from within a haunted house. Comedy is extremely subjective, but everyone I’ve shared this one with has absolutely loved it. Its humor is largely broad, but there are some genuinely gut-busting and gnarly, goopy and gory bits that I go back to over and over again.

Available on: Netflix, Shudder, Hoopla, Tubi TV, Rental

For the whole family (or scaredy-cats)

Coraline (2009)

My final recommendation acts as a catch-all for those who might not be up to the task of a fully-fledged horror movie. Henry Selick’s Coraline is a stop-motion animated film aimed at a younger audience but doesn’t necessarily shy away from being genuinely creepy. The sheer artistry on display is enough to capture the attention span of children while the darker themes and undertones keep the adults engaged. This should be a Halloween staple in mostly every household.

Available on: Tubi TV, Rental

At the beginning of the month I was notified that I had been laid off from my job. Maybe it was the anti-depressants I was taking, but I feel like I took the news pretty well, all things considered. I was coming up on my 5th anniversary of working for this particular company and had gone almost 2 years without a significant raise in pay and my team was bounced around to 3 different managers in as many years. I’m kind of glad to be moving on, but I can’t deny that the perks of working there will be missed.

Luckily after only 2 weeks of searching I have been offered an opportunity to return to my old position at a previous employer. I’ll be back in the company of familiar faces, in a setting that I worked in for 12 years prior. Fingers are crossed that things haven’t changed too much.

An Evening with David Byrne

This last weekend my wife and I took a trip down to The Anthem in Washington, DC to see David Byrne perform on his Who is the Sky? tour. We had pretty great seats up in a balcony box on the third floor with a great view of the stage.

His show was very unique in that his backing band (Ghost Train Orchestra) played a mobile arrangement with all members wirelessly dancing and playing along on stage. The stage was outfitted with an 180-degree backdrop that accompanied each song with neat artistic videos and scenes. He played a lot of Talking Heads songs, but I even enjoyed his solo stuff that I wasn’t familiar with. There was always something cool to look at even if the music wasn’t getting me.

What I watched

The Naked Gun

A comedic breath of fresh air that hearkens back to the days when broad comedies actually had jokes and gags. This Liam Neeson-headed reboot of the classic spoof series has more jokes per minute than physically possibly to perceive. Without a doubt this will end up on my best of the year list.

Kingdom of Heaven: Director’s Cut

This one has been on my bucket list to watch for several years now, but I never had the time to devote to the 3-hour epic tale of 12th century Jerusalem and the crusades. Honestly, I was a bit let down by this one because of how overstuffed and kind of hard to follow it was. At times I felt like the story would better be absorbed in print form.

The Long Walk

Finally, the long-awaited adaptation of my favorite novel is here, and it (mostly) didn’t disappoint! The strongest point here is the casting, which nailed the troupe of boys perfectly. No notes at all on that (specifically going to praise Cooper Hoffman, David Jonsson, and Charlie Plummer). My only rub is that they needlessly changed the ending, which is arguably my favorite part of the novel, and undercut a main character’s entire development.

Dangerous Animals

A serial killer abducts and feeds his victims to sharks. Jai Courtney absolutely holds this entire movie on his back and it’s actually a pretty goofy and entertaining watch. It takes some pretty stupid turns, but it’s half-winking at the camera most of the time so I give it a pass.

The Fantastic Four: First Steps

What a huge let-down for me. I was eagerly awaiting the Fantastic Four’s entrance into the MCU because of the numerous times it had been botched in the past, but what I got was a very benign and uninteresting take that I honestly may have liked even less than the 2015 Josh Trank attempt. The casting just felt very flat and uncharismatic and the story beats felt chopped and screwed to the point where the first third felt like a recap of movies we never got.

What I played

Hollow Knight: Silksong

I only got a few hours to put into this before my Game Pass subscription ran out, but yeah it felt like a slightly more (fr)agile Hollow Knight. I never got too far in the original game because I was really bad at it and pretty much the same thing happened here. Maybe one day I’ll pick it up on a sale on Switch and play it all the way through.

Silent Hill f

I think I’m about halfway through the game at this point. From reviews that I’ve seen, there is supposed to be a pretty substantial change in the narrative coming up, but I don’t think I’ve hit it yet. I can see peoples’ issues with the increased focus on combat this time around, but it’s also not bothering me too much. I care more about the puzzles, which are satisfyingly creepy. Still not entirely sure what is going on in the story though.

Hades II

The same day that Silent Hill f dropped, Hades II had its soft-launch on the Switch. I had already purchased this on PC in early access, but I enjoyed the first game on Switch so much that I figured I’d pick it up there as well. It feels great and looks surprisingly awesome on the Switch 2. Along with my new dbrand Killswitch case/grips this is the perfect handheld game to play right now.

Some new music that got me through the month

Pile - Sunshine and Balance Beams

Dance Gavin Dance - Pantheon

Between the Buried and Me - The Blue Nowhere

Nine Inch Nails - TRON: Ares Soundtrack

To start off the month, my wife and I attended Merriweather Post Pavillion to see King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard on their Phantom Island orchestral tour, supported by Sarah Hicks and the National Symphony Orchestra. There was no opener, but KGLW played two sets: first, the entirety of their new orchestral album Phantom Island; and second, a set of older songs reworked to include the orchestra.

This was my second time seeing them perform live, and while I had a good time, I think I preferred them playing a more traditional set like they did in DC, back in 2022. I am admittedly not a huge fan of their newest album, but the second set made up of mostly longer, jammier bangers really saved the show for me. My wife also snagged us some sweet t-shirts from the ridiculous merch line.

Movies

Together - As a result of supernatural forces, a couple in a faltering relationship begin to get closer than they ever expected. I really dug this one. It has some really gnarly body horror as well as some really effective but not overblown world-building and lore-crafting. The only thing that kept me from truly loving it was literally the last shot of the movie.

Weapons - After the mysterious disappearance of nearly an entire class of elementary-schoolers, a small town reckons with the fallout of the tragedy. This will probably end up being my favorite movie of the year. I loved how it balanced an actually gripping mystery with pitch-perfect dark humor.

Drop - A woman’s first date becomes a nightmare when she is air-dropped messages from an unknown stalker asking her to murder her date. This was a mostly inoffensive but bland thriller that would’ve benefited from a lot more humor, which is what I would expect from Christopher Landon (Happy Death Day, Freaky) anyway.

Final Destination: Bloodlines - A new installment in the horror franchise that bends the mythology in a new wider-scoped direction. I was hoping to like this one more than I did. The deaths are mostly really great, but I felt like this one takes too long to get going and starts nodding off when it has to stop to consider the plot. So, basically the same as most of the other FD movies.

Tornado - A Japanese immigrant in 1790s Scotland takes revenge on the bandits that upended her life. Setting aside the unique setting, this was one of the most paint-by-numbers revenge thrillers I have ever seen. Everything builds up to a last act confrontation that failed to do anything for me at all.

Games

Wandering Towers - In this memory game, players race to move all of their wizards into Ravenskeep tower first. This game is played on a circular ring board with 3-dimensional towers that can be moved and stacked. Players play cards to move both their wizards and these towers clockwise around the board, potentially landing towers on top of other wizards, imprisoning them beneath.

This game seems very family-oriented at first glance, and for the most part it is, but it also quickly becomes very cutthroat as wizards quickly get stuck between tower levels and you struggle to keep track of where everyone is. This also frequently makes the game absolutely hilarious as sometimes peoples’ memory isn’t as good as they think it is.

My only qualm comes from a bit of a breakdown towards the end of the game. A secondary goal for victory is to fill up potions that you have (and can also spend on extra actions) by imprisoning wizards under towers. The problem is, once you have all of your wizards in Ravenskeep, if you don’t have all of your potions filled it becomes very tedious to spend your time trying to capture wizards. The cards in your hand that can only move wizards become useless, and the only consolation is in the ability to discard you whole hand to only move a single tower one space for your entire turn! This extra goal feels very tacked on and I would’ve preferred it if just getting your wizards to the end was the only aim of the game.

The game plays pretty quickly in only 30-45 minutes and seems to benefit from higher player counts. This will probably stay in my collection for a while as it kind of carves out a niche that none of my other games do.

SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence - This GIGANTIC euro-style game tasks players with launching space probes and analyzing deep-space signals in an effort to find signs of alien life. Over the course of 2+ hours you will try to optimize your game-play to spend your resources efficiently and out-play your opponents to find traces of alien life first.

The game primarily concerns itself with finding “traces” which can be done in three ways: launching probes and landing them on planets in the solar system, scanning deep-space signals and collecting the majority of data from given sector, and analyzing said data. You can also purchase technologies that make your actions more powerful and/or efficient. These techs very satisfyingly socket into your player board in way that makes me say “ooh yeah that’s nice”.

Because of the breadth of ways to score points in this game, it kind of feels like a mishmash of other types of games thrown into one. It’s certainly an engine-building game where you’re trying to line up combos and synergies, but it’s also an area control game in the segment where you’re vying for majority stake in scanned signals. And this is before I even mention anything about the aliens!

Every game has two randomly selected (and hidden) alien lifeforms out of a possible five that reveal themselves after enough traces are collected. These aliens are additionally “mini-games” of their own that alter the rules of the game and introduce more end-game ways to rack up points. In the game that I played, we had a race of bug-like aliens that added a pick-up-and-deliver-style mechanic to the game and another race with an asteroid that essentially becomes a new planet to land on and scan.

Overall, I really enjoyed this game and look forward to playing it again. It looks very daunting from all of the options of things you can do on a given turn, but it quickly becomes very clear what you can and can’t do, and paths to get points are laid out reasonably clearly. There are also multi-purpose cards that on their own are pretty powerful, but can also be discarded for a nudge in resources to get you out of a bind.

This year felt like it was easier to find books to match the themes. In general they seem to promote inclusivity for minority authors as well as some fun categories related to the school.

A book published the year UMBC opened (1966)…

Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes

A man with reduced mental capacity undergoes an experimental process to become a genius. I’m really glad that this challenge got me to read this sci-fi classic because it’s really well written and sheds a light on how we treated mentally handicapped people 60 years ago (and to a degree still today). The first-person perspective of Charlie Gordon was really effective for me at illustrating the gradual internal changes he was experiencing.

A book with UMBC colors on the cover (black and gold)…

Mongrels by Stephen Graham Jones

A young boy travels the American south with his werewolf aunt and uncle as he awaits the day he will finally transform himself. This was without a question my favorite Stephen Graham Jones novel so far. I loved the way that it kind of meanders without a plot, instead using vignettes to highlight aspects of this world’s werewolf lore. I’m not typically a fan of werewolf media, but this really struck a chord with me.

A book recommended by UMBC alum, staff, faculty, or student…

Assembly by Natasha Brown

A well-to-do British Black woman reflects on the myriad of microaggressions and social trespasses she experiences while she also contemplates her future. It’s easy (and maybe a bit reductive) for me to say that this one felt too obvious and didn’t really feel like it was saying anything new or groundbreaking. I was waiting for the other shoe to drop, but then it just kind of ended on a flat note. Luckily it was a very short read.

A book set in my home state (Maryland)…

The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris

A rookie FBI agent/student enlists the help of notorious serial killer and cannibal Hannibal Lecter to catch another killer who skins his victims. Being a huge fan of the movie I couldn’t help but notice how incredibly faithful it was in adapting this novel. It goes to show that if the source material is excellent you can pretty much use it as text for an adaptation.

A banned book…

American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis

An NYC yuppie navigates upper class society while also moonlighting as a sadist and serial killer. This one deviates a little bit between source material and adaptation, but still has that darkly comedic sensibility. I actually enjoyed the tonal whiplash from some of the funniest writing I’ve read leading straight into bar-none the most graphic and disturbing filth ever put to page.

A book by an author of color or featuring a main character of color…

The Unworthy by Augustina Bazterrica

A woman living in a post-apocalyptic convent begins to question the nature of her surroundings and even her own past. I enjoyed this one for its simplicity and for how quick a read it was. The story is structured through the protagonist’s journal entries, which make very little effort to ease you into the world. This made it a little difficult to start but later makes it very satisfying to chip away at the history of this world.

A book by an LGBTQ+ author or featuring a LGBTQ+ main character…

We Used to Live Here by Marcus Kliewer

After a woman is visited by a man and his family that claims to be the previous resident of the house she is renovating, things get weird when circumstances prevent them from leaving. This one was a real page-turner for me because it really gets into the premise quickly and keeps the twists coming one after another. Unfortunately it lost steam for me towards the end when the answers proved to be less interesting than the questions.

A book by an author with a disability or featuring a main character with a disability…

Nestlings by Nat Cassidy

A newly-handicapped mother starts experiencing weird happenings surrounding her infant daughter after her family moves into an ancient high-rise apartment complex. I had to slog though this story early on in the summer as nothing about it really compelled me to read more. Eventually as the mystery unravels towards the end I was starting to enjoy where it was going, but by then it was too little, too late.

Reader’s choice…

When the Wolf Comes Home by Nat Cassidy

A young woman takes in a runaway boy with terrifying powers who is being hunted by something that he claims is his father. I thought this was an absolute blast from start to finish. Not only is it a terrific meditation on how fear can consume and rule your life, but its breakneck pacing and brutal set pieces made it an incredibly quick read.

For my wife’s birthday this year we planned a trip to the beaches of Delaware. We stayed two nights in Rehoboth Beach and two nights with my aunt and uncle in Milton, DE.

On the first day we made the surprisingly short trip straight to Rehoboth Beach but took a last minute detour to Dewey Beach to kill some time before our hotel room was ready.

That night we celebrated my wife’s birthday with a reservation to the sushi restaurant Saketumi. I didn’t think I’d need the reservation, but the place was packed and the food was delicious!

The next day we got up early and went straight to Rehoboth Beach proper. We spent the morning at the beach and had lunch at a pretty decent fish and chips shop on the boardwalk. We then returned to the hotel to freshen up and have a bit of quiet time.

After showers we decided to brave the 98-degree-plus heat and play a round of mini golf. Following that we had dinner at a pizza and craft beer place and returned to the Rehoboth boardwalk to check out Funland, their amusement park. My nephew and I braved the Haunted Mansion (which was kind of lame, but still better than Ocean City, MD).

On the third morning we packed up and checked out of the hotel, heading today to Cape Henelopen State Park for the third unique beach of the trip. Overall this may have been my favorite beach we went to. They had excellent bathrooms and changing rooms/showers. The beach was a more gradual slope into the water and the waves weren’t super strong. The only drawback was, and this was true of all of the beaches this week, that there were jellyfish creeping up on us. My wife and nephew even caught part of one. Ouch!

Later that day we arrived in Milton, DE at my uncle’s place. We basically spent the rest of the day settling in and chillin’ with the fam. My nephew even picked up a bicycle and finally learned how to ride without training wheels! Way to go Jace!!

The next day the weather was pretty cruddy, but we still got to check out the Dogfish Head brewery. It’s a very hip and stylish hangout spot with a really extensive gift shop. We sampled some beers in a flight and then bought a whole bucket of beers and got to take the bucket home! It’s currently one of my son’s favorite toys.

After our lunch outing at the brewery we came home and wasted some time watching TV while my uncle drove back into MD to pick up CRABS FOR DINNER! The feast was delicious and made me proud to be a Marylander. It was the perfect way to end the mini-vacay, for the next morning we packed up shop and headed home.

Movies

Thunderbolts* - I finally watched this when it came to Disney+. It was a perfectly fine distraction with just enough fun, laughs, and heart.

The Phoenician Scheme - Watched this half-distractedly with the wife and mostly enjoyed it, but I think I’ll need to sit down and watch it again to understand wtf was going on.

Superman - Excellent superhero movie that brings back the comic book sentiment of just being a good time without too much baggage. David Corinswet nails it as Superman, but Nicholas Hoult is a pitch-perfect whiny and petty Lex Luthor.

The King Tide - This one was an indie blind watch for me. It follows a small isolated Newfoundland island community that enters a civil war of sorts concerning a baby girl with mystical powers that washes ashore. It’s played very realistically and understated, but was a bit too slow to unravel.

The Rule of Jenny Pen - Quite possibly one of the most bizarre relatively mainstream movies I’ve ever seen. John Lithgow and his creepy hand puppet terrorize Geoffery Rush and other residents at an assisted living facility. Things start off extremely unsettling and disturbing but end up spinning wheels as the movie peters out. I wish I liked this one more than I did because John Lithgow gives one of the most sinister villain performances of his career.

TV

King of the Hill - With the reboot on the horizon, my wife and I have been powering through the original run of the show. We’re currently on season 3 and almost every episode is great in one way or another. RIP Jonathan Joss and Chuck Mangione.

City the Animation - From the creators of one of my favorite comedy anime Nichijou comes another show in the same slice-of-life vein. I’m three episodes in and it’s enjoyable but hasn’t hit the same heights as its predecessor, mostly due to the lack of memorable and relatable characters.

Vidyagames

Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3+4 - This one is a blast from my past and a no-brainer for my Switch 2. I’ve already plowed through the THPS3 campaign and am now making my way through THPS4 and the nostalgia waves are taking me out. The updated soundtrack rocks too, with added music from King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard, Mastodon, and Turnstile.

Donkey Kong Bananza - Mario Kart World aside, this is the game that is going to sell a whole lot of Switch 2’s. It’s basically a spiritual successor to Super Mario Odyssey in that it’s a collect-a-thon of a bunch of “banandium gems” akin to the Mario’s moons. Almost everything is completely destructible (up to a point), which activates some kind of latent mild OCD in my brain, causing me to waste unfathomable amounts of time crushing everything to smithereens.

Tabletop

So Clover - This is a cooperative word game that I played a few times this month. Each player gets a set of ring-shaped cards that fit onto a clover-shaped board so that 4 sets of two word pairs are formed (picture provided to make up for my inability to articulate what this game is).

Each player then secretly thinks of a word that can be associated with each of these pairs and then removes and mixes up all of the word cards in secret. It is then the rest of the team’s job to take and rotate/affix the ring cards back on the board so that each handwritten word is matched up with its associated word pair. The more successfully this can be done for each player, the higher the cooperative score.

I found this game pretty good for a quick chuckle as you try to get inside the headspace of your friends and see how it is their connect their dots. It kind of fills the same place as something like Just One or a reverse, cooperative Codenames.

River Valley Glassworks - I picked up the deluxe edition of this game at my local store because of the neat components and cute art style. The game here basically consists of set collection and drafting reminiscent of but much more thematic than Azul. Players gather river stones of varying colors and shapes and deposit them in a storage grid that later dictates your score. In essence, you want to gather many different stones in different colors, but not so many as you run out of board space (either too many colors, or too many of the same color). Which stones you can collect are dictated by the shape of the stones in your pan, but it’s the color that ultimately matters for scoring.

When I first started playing this I was immediately let down in a “that’s it?” kind of way. But as the game neared to a close I started to see glimpses of the strategy and how to manipulate the board to maximize your score. As I mentioned at the start, this game is basically 90% similar to Azul, but likely gets a slight edge for newer players due to its theme and approachability. As for actual game mechanics and strategy, I would probably recommend Azul instead.

Cities - I’ll briefly mention this here because we finally completely one of the games on our 10 x 10 challenge (which I talked about in my first Substack blog post). Finishing the 10 plays for Cities basically came down to mad dash because both me and my wife were utterly tired of playing this game. It played decently enough at 2 players, but the variety of strategy from game to game just was not there. And it typically took about as long to set up for a new round as it did to play said round, which was grating to say the least. This game is definitely going in my SELL pile.

This is the first (and only) time me (36), my wife (36), my son (1), and my nephew’s (9) ages will all be perfect squares! This is the only time that will ever happen! Math!

To celebrate all of the Gemini birthdays in the family, we took our traditional yearly trip down to the in-laws’ lake house in southern Virginia. The weather was pretty much perfect; not too hot, but warm enough to swim. My son got his first taste of open water and absolutely loved it! It’s such a relief to see that he’s not terrified of swimming (floating). Here he is hanging out with his best friend and cousin.

And more to say on the fatherhood front: my boy is walking! About two or three weeks after his first birthday he made the leap from crusing across the walls and furniture to walking unassisted! It’s cliché to say, but they really do grow up too fast. Where did my little worm go?

Movies

• Blue Ruin - A man at the bottom of a personal spiral digs himself deeper into trouble after planning an act of vengeance against someone from his past. Forgive me if I’m prone to hyperbole, but this is one of the most realistically tense and compelling thrillers of the past 20 years. Everyone knows that some kind of happy chemical is released in your brain when you watch someone who is really good at their job. What this movie makes you realize it that something just as potent happens when you watch someone fumble miserably, completely out of their depth. That’s exactly happens here and Macon Blair sells it in such a sincere and compelling manner without tipping into comedy or farce. It’s just kind of sad and a bit endearing in the best way possible.

• 28 Years Later - Nearly three decades after a virus ravages Europe, a father and son struggle to survive on an isolated island in Britain. I was not prepared for where this movie would go and I have to say I’m excited to see where this new trilogy of films is taking us. There was a point towards the middle of the film where I started to feel like I had been poisoned or drugged but a final act Ralph Fiennes brought everything back around. And I’m not even going to touch on that insane final scene.

Books

• Assembly by Natasha Brown - A woman takes stock of the subtle and overt prejudices in her life as she grapples with a medical diagnosis. This was a recommendation from a friend that I used to satisfy one of the requirements for the UMBC Summer Reading challenge. It was a very short read, which I count as one of the only things I enjoyed about it (sorry!). To me, it really struck a “yeah, I get it” nerve pretty early on and continued to repeat pretty much the same refrain throughout the entire length. I was expecting there to be something more, but then it just ends.

• We Used to Live Here by Marcus Kliewer - A woman’s life is completely upended after a man claiming to be one of the previous inhabitants of her house shows up on her doorstep. Yet another Summer Reading Challenge novel, but this one I actually really enjoyed. It starts off rather benign and just slightly unsettling but ramps up at a good pace over the course of the novel. I wasn’t a total fan of where the story ended up, but the main bulk of the novel was sufficently nightmarish.

Games

So… despite my ambivalence earlier this year, I ended up buying a Switch 2. I was able to just walk into a Gamestop on the morning it was released and purchase one with zero resistance. This is just who I am. I make rash decisions and spend the rest of my life trying to justify that I did the right thing. To keep things brief: this is what the first iteration of the Switch should’ve been. More comfortable in handheld mode, overall performance more in line with what I expect from a modern console, and an actually usable social platform.

There’s not many games for this yet, but I’ve been playing:

• Mario Kart World - I was kind of poo-pooing the open-world aspects of this game when it was first announced, but it’s actually exactly what Mario Kart needs. With the addition of some new advance mobility techniques, exploring is something I never thought I’d want to do in a racing game, but here we are.

• Pokemon Violet - I bounced off this game HARD when it first came out. I don’t think I put more than 5 hours into it, to be honest. Now that it actually runs and doesn’t look like it’s being played on a Samsung refrigerator door, I’m using it as one of my “chill out” games. Who knows if I’ll even finish it. I don’t think I’ve completed a Pokemon game since Gold version.

• Slay the Spire - keeping with the theme of older games that I’ve been revisiting, I’ve got myself back into a roguelite mood after Steam Next Fest. I jumped back into what may consider one of the best deckbuilder games and realized how horrible I am at strategy.

• Lies of P - Now that the Overture DLC is out, I picked this one up on a Playstation sale. I made it about 75% through when it was free to play on Xbox Game Pass, but now that they have introduced difficulty settings, I can whimper my way through on easy mode like the weakling I am. I still love this game and consider it probably the best soulslike game not made by FromSoft. The gothic Victorian Pinnochio theme scratches that itch that has been plaguing me since Bloodborne.

• Death Stranding - Another game I bounced off of when it came out but decided to revisit it in a different light. This time, I’m about caught up to where I was on my first playthough, but now I’m actually paying attention to the story a bit more closely. Despite (or maybe because of) all of its weird Kojima-isms, everything is gelling for me this time and I’m almost ready to call it a masterpiece.

Death Howl

developed by The Outer Zone, published by 11 bit studios

Death Howl is sold as a souls-like turn-based deckbuilder game that fashions itself as a dark fantasy version of Slay the Spire meets Into the Breach. The demo sets up the story of Ro, a scandinavian mother in 6000 BCE who journeys into the spirit world to recover the soul of her dead child. While there are light exploration elements, the core of the game is a grid-based combat system that revolves around a deck of cards representing offensive and defensive actions. Combat here is super unforgiving and punishing but feels very rewarding as winning matches yields materials to build new cards for your deck.

I really liked the art style, that I could only describe as grotesque pixel art reminiscent of Blasphemous, one of my favorite indie games of recent years. However, the combat’s difficulty really put me off playing more of this. I will probably wait to hear what more people say about it before considering getting the full game later this year.

Insider Trading

developed and published by Naiive

With the smash-hit success of Balatro last year, it’s no wonder that a few copycat games are starting to show up. Insider Trading is yet another rogue-like deckbuilder that tasks you with manipulating the stock market to hit weekly monitary goals. Each of the 5 days of a given week you are dealt a “hand” of stock moves that will trigger at the end of the day, moving prices up and down according to rules of each move. You can spend tokens to manipulate the order of these moves to put yourself in a better position to gain a profit. Between each day you can also spend these tokens for permanent enhancements that change the way moves interact with one another, optimizing your loadout.

While I appreciate developers trying to cash in on the success of the simplicity of Balatro, I don’t really think that the idea of the stock market really lends itself to this kind of gameplay. It was fun for a few minutes, but I don’t see the final product being something I might invest in.

IRONHIVE

developed by Wondernaut Studio, published by CRITICAL REFLEX

Another deckbuilder! This time it’s a city-building resource-management game that appoints you as the leader of a post-apocalyptic colony, building your city from the ground up while trying to keep four different factions of colonists in check with one another. You can also send your workers out on expeditions to scout new land or plunder dungeons for riches, at the risk of losing them forever.

I really did not gel with this game at all. The nebulous goals of building up your empire felt unrewarding and the scarcity of resources and workers felt like an artificial limit put on an otherwise easily obtainable goal. I’ll probably never pick this one up again.

No, I’m not a Human

developed by Trioskaz, published by CRITICAL REFLEX

Not a deckbuilder or roguelike! Instead, this game is a horror survival visual novel with interrogation and investigative aspects. You play as a normal guy, confined to his house at the end of the world as the sun begins to scorch all of humankind of out existence and murderous underground “visitors” emerge. At night you interrogate guests through your front door, deciding based on clues whether or not you let them seek refuge in your house or shy them away as threats. During the day you can interact with those you let inside and examine them closer to determine if they are friend or foe.

A genre of game I have to admit I’ve never gotten into is the visual novel. To me, it always seemed like a minimally interactive way to experience a story in a medium that differentiates itself through interactivity. I didn’t know that’s what I was getting myself into when I booted this game up, and I was mildly surprised that there was more game here than I expected, but not as much as I wanted. I found this game incredibly aimless and confusing at best. I felt like nothing I did had any consequence (or maybe I was accidentally making the correct choices?). I’ll probably end up just watching a Let’s Play youtube video on this one if it ends up generating any buzz.

Ratatan

developed by TVT Co Ltd and Ratata Arts, published by Game Source Entertainment

Ratatan is a sequel of sorts to the Patapon series of rhythm adventure games that started out on the Playstation Portable. Even though I owned a PSP, this game went completely under my radar, despite me also having a significant interest in rhythm games. In this game you accrue little “ratatan” critters that follow you and react to your commands to the beat of music. I have never played a Pikmin game, but I imagine this game shares a lot of DNA with those games, except with music being a key component.

I kind of hated this game, probably due in part to me playing it with a mouse and keyboard. The rhythm aspect seems to barely matter and my commands sometimes didn’t even work the way I intended them to. There’s a good chance I just wasn’t playing it right, but the tutorial hardly did anything to set me on the right path.

In the month where my son celebrated his first birthday I somehow managed to watch eight movies, the overwhelming majority of were released this year. Thanks to my amazing wife, I managed to make it out to the theater three times. I took a step back in my video game consumption and only really played a single game over the course of a single week and only played a handful of board games. I finished two books, which isn’t too bad for me, but will need to be beefed up as I enter June and the UMBC Summer Reading Challenge looms.

Movies

Black Bag - Married couple secret agents put their loyalties to the test when one is suspected of betraying their country. Basically a talkier and (somehow) sexier version of Mr and Mrs Smith that felt a bit too slick and smoothed out for my liking.

The Luckiest Man in America - Based on the true story of the man who cracked the code to the game show Press Your Luck. Many don’t know this about me, but I was practically addicted to retro Game Shows when I was a kid, so I already knew of the story this was based on. They had a sufficiently entertaining take on what happened, but I felt the embellishments they did make took away from everything I thought was great.

Sinners - Twin gangsters in the 1930s south have their plans to open a social club upended by an unlikely threat. I loved the prolonged setup and character establishment in the first half of this, but the action-packed last act kind of felt rushed and a bit unsatisfying.

Aniara - A colony ship on the way to Mars is knocked off course with no hope for rescue. This was basically misery porn as you sit and watch a generation succumb to a purposeless existence.

Friendship - A man’s life goes off the rails after he tries to make friends with a new neighbor. This is literally just a feature-length episode of I Think You Should Leave and I had no problem with that whatsoever. It’s hilarious in the most awkward and cringeworthy way possible and just a tad bit scary.

A Minecraft Movie - Watched this with my 9 year old nephew and he loved it. Honestly, not half as bad as I was expecting. It’s a child with ADHD’s dream, but I admit I laughed at least a half dozen times.

Novocaine - A man who feels no pain tries to get his coworker back from bank robbers. This was perfectly fine and just entertaining enough. It’s at its best when finding funny and inventive ways to injure Jack Quaid.

Bring Her Back - After the death of their father, a brother and sister go to live with a weird new foster mother and strange, mute foster brother. This was a huge bummer of a movie that worked really well for me because of the core performances. Just like Talk to Me, this one has some really gnarly gore that did a really good job at getting me to squirm in my seat.

Video Games

Dredge - You play as a fisherman in this Lovecraft-inspired fishing game that has you searching for relics during the daytime and dodging supernatural threats after the sun goes down. I had started playing this one a couple years ago and really enjoyed it until I had to return it to the library. Now that it’s on PS+, I picked it back up and started a whole new file, completing the main objective of the game in somewhere around 10-15 hours. I really liked the reflex-based fishing minigame and exploring the open seas, finding all sorts of side quests and strange oddities. It was a bit frustrating that the controls are deliberately floaty (to mimic trying to steer a boat) and I smashed my hull into rocks on more than a dozen occasions because of them. Ultimately it was a fun little distraction that I wish was actually a bit longer with more to do.

Board Games

Ticket To Ride: Legends of the West - I have been playing through this campaign-based board game for a few months now with my wife and nephew and I have to say it’s been a blast. We’re about halfway through the 12-game campaign and each game has been building on the previous ones in a delightful way. Ticket to Ride is a basic set collection and route-building game, but this version adds a bevy of new mechanics (of which I will not speak about here for fear of spoiling the surprises) that really spice up the gameplay. I look forward to the next games I play and see who ends up winning the campaign!

The Search for Planet X - I finally got to revisit this game that I’ve had a for a few years now and really wanted to play again. This game is a logic-based deduction puzzle that has you racing against fellow astronomers in locating the titular planet using sets of criteria that you uncover with the help of a mobile app. Along with games like Cryptid and Treasure Island, this genre of game is among my favorite, despite kind of feeling like multiplayer solitaire.

Scoville 2nd Edition - This game about breeding and selling hot peppers has been on my white whale list since the first edition came out a decade ago, so naturally I was elated when I saw this 2nd edition sitting on the shelf at my local game store. I only have one game under my belt, and I’m not sure 2-player is the best way to experience it, but the tactile feel of inserting peppers into the recessed field board and walking your farmer through the rows was extremely satisfying to me. It remains to be seen if I really like the way in which you actually vie for points in this game as it kind of feel like multiple methods of doing the same thing (selling peppers vs cooking chili). Only time will tell, but I feel like I will try to get a few more plays in before I really make any firm judgements.

Books

The Third Rule of Time Travel - A widowed scientist explores the limitations of her newly-developed method for revisiting the past. I was really excited for this one as it’s the first sci-fi novel by Philip Fracassi, one of my favorite horror novelists right now. Unfortunately, I found this novel excruciatingly bland and quite a pain to finish. In an effort to differentiate it from other fantastical approaches to time travel, Fracassi tries to take a more grounded, and therefore unexciting, approach to the topic and fuses the story with the true horror of trying to manage a project’s budget under private funding. I was hoping it would be worth finishing, but the ending just felt like a retread of a twist I had already seen several times in other media.

Pines - A secret service agent finds himself stuck in a strange town in Idaho while looking for colleagues that previously went missing there. I listened to the audiobook of this inaugural novel of Blake Crouch’s Wayward Pines series (that you might recognize as the Fox television adaptation starring Matt Dillon). I went into this expecting Twin Peaks and came away with more shades of Lost meets A Quiet Place. I was enjoying the mystery until a last act info dump that over-explains way too much of what is going on in way too succinct a manner.

Mickey 17

The only movie I managed to catch this month was Bong Joon-ho’s Mickey 17. After Bong won the Best Picture Oscar for Parasite, it feels like the whole film world was holding its collective breath waiting for what he would do next. What we ended up with was something very in-line with the rest of his filmography: a sci-fi sociopolitical satire that, despite some excellent moments, comes off as a bit unfocused and overstuffed.

The film follows Mickey Barnes, a man on the run from debtors, looking to escape the planet via any means possible. This leads him to accepting a job as an Expendable, a research test subject thrown into fatal situations only to have his consciousness re-uploaded into a clone of himself. These glimpses of his jobs and subsequent deaths are where the movie really shines for me, by and large due to the central performances by Robert Pattinson. Unfortunately the back half of the movie becomes less concerned with this aspect of the plot and instead focuses more on much less interesting conflicts. Mickey 17 was a movie I was really looking forward to loving but ended up only mildly enjoying.

The Queen by Nick Cutter

One of the books that I finished this month was the newest novel by horror pseudonym Nick Cutter (alter-ego of Canadian author Craig Davidson). Cutter’s work is mostly marked by gruesome body horror and elements of twisted science fiction concepts. His novels The Troop and The Deep rank among some of my favorite books, so I was excited to dig into this one.

Without getting too much into where this one goes, the story follows Margaret, a high school girl whose best friend Charity has been missing for a few weeks. The plot is set in motion when she receives a new iPhone with text messaged instructions, seemingly from Charity. From here Margaret embarks on a journey across town, unraveling the mystery of what exactly is going on with Charity.

In terms of stomach-churning gore and violence, The Queen definitely falls in step with the rest of Cutter’s work. Ultimately I don’t think it really holds together as well as something like The Troop due to a lack of interesting characters and an ending that just kind of fizzles out. The novel also starts in the middle of the climax and then back-pedals to fill out the context, which kind of deflated the last act for me. I did however enjoy the main ‘antagonist’ and his backstory involving the death of a family member that is both gruesome and surprisingly well-written. That chapter could’ve served as its own standalone story.

Nestlings by Nat Cassidy

The second book I finished this month I actually listened to as an audiobook. Nat Cassidy is an author that has been on my radar for a bit, but until now I hadn’t checked out any of his work. Although I wasn’t 100% sold on Nestlings I think there was enough there for me to seek out what else he has to offer.

Nestlings follows Ana and Reid, new parents to a soon-to-be one-year-old daughter Charlie. Ana is also newly wheelchair-bound after a birth-related injury to her spine. The story picks up with the couple winning a lottery to move into The Deptford, a prestigious apartment building in New York City that is home to many powerful and influential characters. Very soon after moving in, strange occurrences involving their daughter begin to unsettle the family as the sinister history of the building and its residents is uncovered.

I’m just going to bury the lede with this one because my lack of enjoyment pretty much boiled down to one thing: I don’t typically enjoy vampire stories and this one doesn’t really do anything new with the subgenre. The reveal is teased out for entirely too long and once all is revealed it basically makes a full sprint for the ending. A big theme with the book seems to be roles to be played in a relationship and the stress it puts on a family but I don’t think the ending really brought any meaningful conclusion to any of that.

Blue Prince

Blue Prince is an adventure/puzzle game with roguelite elements that revolves around you as the inheritor of your uncle’s estate. This is no ordinary manor, however, as each day the rooms need to be built out one-by-one in an effort to reach the final ‘Room 46’ at the back of the house. You need to collect keys to unlock doors, gems to draft unusual rooms with special quirks, and hope that everything will line up in a way that doesn’t leave you in a dead end. And you have to do all of this while managing the number of rooms you enter, for if you run out of ‘steps’ you have to sleep and start the whole process over. Think: Myst meets House of Leaves.

For everything I explain about this game there is at least 10 other hidden mechanics and puzzles to solve lurking just beneath the surface. It only took me about 20 runs to finally reach the ‘end’ of the game, but in doing so a dozen more questions and objectives revealed themselves. This game has basically been my obsession for the last two weeks as I’ve consumed pretty much everything I can about it (while trying not to completely spoil myself).

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33

In between runs of Blue Prince I’ve also been checking out the new JRPG from French developer Sandfall Interactive (so does that make this an FRPG?). Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 takes place in a fantasy version of this world where the population is gradually culled by a mysterious being known as The Paintress. She has painted a giant countdown timer and, for the past 67 years, kills everyone that is that many years old. Each year an expedition consisting of those who are destined to die next are sent off to attempt to kill her and put an end to the countdown.

While the premise is intriguing and is honestly done quite well, with enough humor to signify that it doesn’t really take itself too seriously, the real reason I haven’t been able to put this down is the combat system. Expedition 33 hearkens back to the days of my childhood with turn-based combat rather than the ARPG real-time combat that has been increasingly popular lately. On top of that is the quick-time event system that underscores all attacking and defending. If you have good enough reflexes you don’t even have to take damage in this game (that I know of) and that kind of blows my mind.

To make matters even better, each character has their own mechanics that feel wholly distinct from one another. I have a legitimately hard time choosing how to build out my party because each play style is immensely appealing to me.

I’ve just now arrived at “Act II” of the game which presented me with quite the twist in plot development, so I’m more eager than ever to find out what’s going to happen next.

General specs

• 7.9” 1080p LED screen, 120 Hz HDR

• Up to 4K resolution with HDR in docked mode

• Magnetic JoyCon controllers with improved shoulder buttons and sticks (still not Hall-effect)

• “Mouse controls” another gimmicky way to use the JoyCons like a mouse peripheral

• Noise-cancelling microphone, sturdier stand, and an addition USB-C port

• 256 GB internal storage with expansion via microSD Express memory cards

• $450 USD or $500 USD bundle with Mario Kart World

• Releasing June 5th 2025

GameChat

• Nintendo is FINALLY joining the 21st century and integrating a voice and video chat system into the Switch 2

• External camera peripheral is required for video chat, but voice chat will be picked up from the on-console microphone

• You can also livestream your gameplay to a GameChat room, but the demos that Nintendo showed off looked very choppy and low quality

GameShare

• Kind of piggybacking on the previous week’s Nintendo stream, they announced that the Switch and Switch 2 will be implementing a digital content transference system to loan out digital copies of games to Nintendo family members

• You can also link up to two Switch/Switch 2 consoles and share games freely between them as if they were on a physical cartridge

• This week they went a step further and demoed the ability to have multiple consoles play multiplayer games with only one device actually owning the game

Mario Kart World

• Open world installment to the racing series

• 24-player races with an emphasis on race courses being connected to one another

• The gameplay seemed to expand on previous games with rail grinding and wall hopping

• You can get it bundled with the console for $500 USD or pay a ridiculous $80 for it standalone. It remains to be seen if they can justify this hike in price

Kirby Air Riders

• I never played Kirby Air Ride so this one is a bit of an unknown quantity for me. I’m just a little baffled that Nintendo is releasing two racing games so close to one another

Donkey Kong Bananza

• It looks like Donkey Kong is the next character to get the Super Mario Odyssey treatment. His design has been been cartoon-ified a bit and it seems that Diddy Kong has been replaced by a rock

• Looks like the selling point here is deformable and destructible terrain where you can mine for collectibles and resources

• I grew up as a huge fan of Donkey Kong 64, so I am a bit disappointed that it doesn’t seem to be following much in that style of game

Nintendo Switch Welcome Tour

• A “game” that explores and demos the features of the Switch 2

• Inexplicably a paid game and not bundled with every console

Drag x Drive

• This generation’s ARMS that highlights mouse controls with wheelchair basketball gameplay

• I feel like this is going to be real awkward to play unless you play sitting at a table or desk. Pass

Switch 2 Edition Games

A few Switch games were announced to have enhanced versions for the Switch 2. You can either buy these outright or upgrade the Switch versions for a price

• Super Mario Party Jamboree

• Breath of the Wild / Tears of the Kingdom

• Kirby and the Forgotten Land

• Metroid Prime 4: Beyond

• Pokemon Legends: Z-A

3rd Party Games

The bulk of the show was a rapid-fire sound-off of third party publishers and announcements of new games and ports of previously released games. The showstopper for me was the announcement that FromSoftware has been working on an entirely new IP exclusively for the Switch 2 called The Duskbloods. I’ll probably end up making a whole separate post about this game because FromSoft director Hidetaka Miyazaki answered a bunch of questions in another interview. Here are a handful of other games that perked up my ears:

• Elden Ring: Tarnished Edition

• Hades 2 (Console exclusive)

• Hollow Knight: Silksong

• Enter the Gungeon 2

• Nintendo GameCube Virtual Console

• A new James Bond game

Bottom Line

I guess the elephant lurking over in the corner of the room, as many know by now, is the global economy and how this is going to affect pricing and availability. $500 for a bundle with Mario Kart World is right on the line for me in terms of how much I would be willing to spend. After Nintendo decided to delay preorders from April 9th to a later date, I started to seriously look inwardly and weigh how much getting one of these at launch really means to me.

The decision I have ultimately come to is that unless a preorder and some extra cash easily falls into my lap, I’m probably going to wait until at least later in the year to seek one of these out. After all, the huge seller here is The Duskbloods and that’s not coming out until sometime next year…

Movies

I’ve only watched 18 movies so far this year, which is really pitiful given my history. I’m not going to prattle on about everything, but here are the ones of note:

• A Different Man - surprisingly funny and reaffirmed my appreciation of Sebastian Stan.

• Presence - the first movie I saw in theaters this year and a huge disappointment. The only thing worse than the acting was how unremarkable the story was.

• Conclave - Might’ve been my pick for Best Picture this year. I am a sucker for dialogue-driven single-location (mostly) thrillers.

• Companion - another dark comedy that was a blast to see in theaters. I don’t think it left much lasting impact, but I had fun in the moment.

• The Monkey - kind of all over the place and really pushed the envelope on how stupid it could be, but also satisfied me in a way I acknowledge it won’t for others.

TV

• Finished my watch/rewatch of 30 Rock with my wife. Probably the best track record for a comedy show I’ve ever seen. The only episodes I actively disliked were the live ones.

• We also binged Severance season 1 and watched season 2 week to week. My wife might be starting to fall off, but I’m fully on-board. I am a huge sucker for a mystery box show and I’m enjoying prowling reddit for theories (they’re always wrong).

Books

I’m 8 books into my 24 book goal for the year. Here are the standouts so far:

• Mean Spirited by Nick Roberts (audiobook) - A unique take on a haunting story where it’s not a place or thing that is cursed, but a pet. This one was delightfully gruesome, although it resolves itself in kind of a lackluster way.

• The September House by Carissa Orlando - a darkly comedic haunted house story that actually nails being about something in the end. Kind of takes the piss out of all of those “horror as a metaphor for grief” elevated horror stories.

• Devolution by Max Brooks (audiobook) - A top notch full-cast presentation about a pack of sasquatches attacking a sustainable community in the wake of a volcano eruption. Surprisingly gory, but took a loooooong time to get going.

Games

I’ve started a “10 x 10” challenge for board games this year. For those unfamiliar, this is when you commit yourself to playing 10 different games at least 10 times over the course of the year. We’re 1/4 through the year at this point so I’m a little behind at only a total of 19 games played, but my hope is we’ll make it up over the summer.

• Cities - a pretty brisk tile-placing and city-building game. Playing this one over and over is starting to highlight some flaws in strategy variability as time goes on. I’ll probably end up getting rid of this at the end of the challenge.

• Ticket to Ride: Legends of the West - we’re playing this legacy campaign train game with my nephew as an introduction to more strategic games. Every time we play this I’m itching to set it back up and play the next game, but I am limited to his availability.

• Castles of Burgundy - I picked up the super-duper elite special edition recently and we’ve been knocking out games every other week with friends. This has always been one of my favorite euro games and having big chunky plastic tiles and 3D castle minis fills me with joy.

As far as video games go, I’ve been filling little gaps in my time playing Marvel Rivals and Monster Hunter Wilds lately. I’ve also got my wife addicted to Balatro so I have also been doing that on the FOUR DIFFERENT PLATFORMS I OWN THE GAME ON. I haven’t felt the compulsion to really sink a lot of hours into any games yet this year, but maybe that will change.

My intention was to keep a semi-regular log of things I have watched and played as both a record to myself, and as well as maybe something others may be interested in reading. Even before becoming a father I frequently got stuck trying to piece my thoughts together into a coherent medium-length-form post, so things kind of just fell by the wayside until the rare occasion when the mood struck me to write. And now my son is here my brain is basically hot mush.

My hope is that with Substack I can try to alleviate some of the pressure that I place on myself to dive deeper into my thoughts and scrutinize what I’m really trying to say. Instead I am going to take more of a thought-vomit approach and just focus primarily on getting something on the page, no matter how scatterbrained and incomplete it may be.

I don’t think I’m going to try to monetize this at all, unless things really take off. This is just going to be an exercise for myself for consistency and maybe start some discussions along the way. I’ll post about books I’ve read, movies and TV I have watched, and games I have played (both video and analog). I might also sprinkle in some talk about what’s going on in my life if I feel so inclined. Every and anything is subject to change.

So let’s see how this goes…

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