Trapped Under Ice
A start to a hardcore winter. This is a big one.
The start of the year has flown by in the blink of an eye. A regional snowstorm dropped what some are saying (but I refuse to believe) was close to a foot of snow and a few inches of ice on us. After a couple of days digging one of our cars out, we’re still mostly boxed in but it has given me a good excuse to work from home.
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.
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.
Why don't we charge admission to the holy wall?