Sickness, Smog, and Sweltering Heat

Lettuce be in peace

Sometimes a whole month ends up feeling like a complete wash. Normally, July is the month we celebrate my wife’s birthday and take a trip to the lake and spend some time outside. Our trip this year was postponed due to a brief bout of sickness in the family (not diarrhea-lettuce-related) and outside plans have been swapped for air-conditioned indoor time due to 100+ degree weather and air quality hampered by Canadian wildfires. I really can’t wait until Fall for things to cool off.

What I watched

Obsession (rewatch) - Still great. Watched this with my wife so we can share Nikki memes back and forth.

Nirvanna the show the band the movie (rewatch) - Still great. Watched this with my wife so we can share in the fantasy idea of “Toronto”.

The Sheep Detectives - Totally fine. Watched this with my wife because this is totally a “my wife” kind of movie (complimentary).

Ponyo - Once again, my son has proved that he can sit through an entire Ghibli movie and I don’t know if the praise deserves to be heaped upon him or Miyazaki-sama. This was also my first time seeing this one, and it might be top 5 Ghibli for me. Amazing art and not enough plot to bog it down.

Evil Dead Burn - I went into this thinking “at least I’ve never actively hated an Evil Dead movie before”. There’s a first time for everything, I guess. I hated every character in this movie yet I still didn’t feel the satisfaction of watching them die in gruesome ways. The post-reboot movies in this franchise have all felt super mean-spirited, but at least they’re wacky and playful in ways that make them fun. There is no fun to be had here. Just misery and bad acting.

Over Your Dead Body - I enjoyed this one quite a bit, although I felt like it was strongest when Jason Segel and Samara Weaving were playing off one another. Once the rest of the cast enters the picture things take a turn for the less interesting. Samara Weaving, in particular, made this whole movie worth watching, in my opinion.

What I read

Darker Days by Thomas Olde Heuvelt - In this most-recent translation of the Dutch author’s work, a quiet street in the Pacific Northwest harbors a dark secret that affords them great luck for 11 months of the year. However, every November they must contend with the dark price for their prosperity.

The novel takes place primarily during this titular period in November, we get to experience it over the course of two years. I was admittedly not feeling this at all for the first half, as it was a whole-lot of place-setting and exposition to get certain characters up to speed on the plot. However, events transpire at the mid-way point that really propel the second half of the book in a direction that I really enjoyed. Overall, I think this is my second-favorite Heuvelt novel after Hex.

It Rides a Pale Horse by Andy Marino - A sculptor is commissioned to recreate art described in an occult journal in exchange for his kidnapped sister.

I pretty much loved this book from cover to cover. It was a bit of a struggle for me to get into at first because of the dense language and art history the author infuses the work with, but the cosmic horror and dark humor flowing out of the book is beyond anything I’ve ever read. My only slight gripe is the inclusion of a few interstitial perspective-switching chapters that lean a little too hard into the humor and provide a bit of tonal whiplash that’s a bit hard to settle into.

Dead End Tunnel by Nick Roberts - After his friend goes missing in a nearby tunnel, a young boy and his family is targeted by a malicious entity.

I don’t think Nick Roberts is a good writer. His prose comes off akin to a Redditor who thinks he’s hot shit posting creepypasta, dropping superfluous popular culture references out here like he’s the Ernest Cline of horror. But does the book at least have an interesting hook? No, it’s Temu IT.

The Night Birds by Christopher Golden - A Texas Parks and Wildlife worker shelters his ex and a runaway with an infant aboard a permanently-moored centuries-old ship from a storm and a coven of witches.

This was a perfectly cromulent thriller that elevates a lackluster premise with an intriguing setting. Nothing to complain about but also nothing all that special. I finished it in less than a week.

Strange Buildings by Uketsu - The third entry in the Japanese YouTuber’s Strange series, this entry spins together a story of 11 peculiar architectural oddities that revolve around a cult and a construction company.

I really loved this book, probably more so than the Strange Pictures or Strange Houses. My only real complaint is how this one spends the final large chunk of the book just being a recap of the previous stories with the “solution” to the puzzle being laid out very matter-of-factly. But given the style of semi-epistolary novel, I’ll forgive it.

What I played

Ticket to Ride Legacy: Legends of the West - my wife, my nephew and I finally finished our 12-game campaign that spanned about a year and a half. I’ll probably end up doing a write-up about our experience, but my brief thoughts are they it was very enjoyable as an evolving experience from game to game. It definitely got a bit bloated with “mini-games” towards the mid-point of the campaign, but I felt like things tapered off quite well at the end.

Orloj: The Prague Astronomical Clock - I’ve only got one play of this under my belt, and we kind of messed up a semi-crucial rule, but I think I liked this. There’s definitely a lot going on, but it feels more cohesive than the average “point salad” Eurogame as the disparate pieces here play into one another in a way that make sense. I look forward to speaking more about it after more plays.

The Lost Ruins of Arnak - We finally got this one back to the table at my weekly meetup and my initial reaction is that I still love it, but maybe think it’s a game that has a lot to do but not enough time to accomplish it all. If you know me, you know I love deckbuilders, but I feel like that might actually be the weakest aspect of this game. The cards you can add to your deck feel bland in comparison to adventuring aspect of the game but at the same time they feel very powerful and proved to be instrumental in the strategy of the winner of our playthrough. I think it’ll still end up being a game I hold on to though because, even though I don’t think it’s as solid of a game as something like Dune: Imperium, but serves as a more thematic and introductory experience for newcomers to the genre.

Five Tribes: The Djinns of Naqala - Another relative “oldie” that came off the shelf in a 2-player game against my wife. While the game isn’t as strategically dense as something like The Castles of Burgundy or Viticulture, both games that I have gotten her to play and enjoy, the central Mancala-like mechanic was something she was completely unfamiliar with. I still think this game really shines as a 2-player game, but it didn’t feel like the game I fell in love with almost a decade ago. Certain strategies seem extremely overpowered without having any kind of check in place and swaths of the game were straight-up ignored as irrelevant for both of us. I’ll maybe give this a couple more tries, but right now I’m thinking it’s in danger of being culled…

dnup - A new card game designed by the same guy as Scout, one of my favorite card-shedding games, plays, as you might have guessed it, a lot like a variant of Scout. In this one, you’re still trying to play sets of cards and hope your opponents don’t one-up you, but this time when your play gets bounced back, it gets rotated 180-degrees in your hand to become a completely different set of cards. This one was a good, snappy play, but I don’t quite think it replaces, or even tops, Scout for me.

Got Five! - Deduction games are my bread and butter, and this one is probably the best example of a Clue-style game distilled down to its core puzzle that is easily set up and played within 20 minutes. In this game, each player has five numbers, one of each of the 5 colors, or suits, ranging from 1 to 60, faced away from you, and a dry-erase board to keep track of findings. Your job is to deduce what your numbers are before your opponents.

Each turn you flip over a numbered tile from the shared pool and ask a player to either place it sequentially within your lot or compare the number of pips on it to any one of your five. That’s it. With these two bits of information you eventually whittle down your possibilities, racing to be the first person to correctly name all five of your numbers. It’s fast, simple, and required just enough mental gymnastics to keep you thinking. It’s a huge recommend from me for gamers and non-gamers alike.