The trees are trying to kill me
M Night tried to warn us
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.