Did I really do this much in May?

I didn't *feel* this busy...

May blew by in what felt like the blink of an eye, but as I take stock of the media I consumed I cannot believe how much I actually did.

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.

I found Friendship at times to be terrifyingly relatable.

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.