Booknotes: March 2024
Books I read, and a brief note on what I thought about each of them. Might include other media, too.
Booknotes: February 2024
Books I read, and a brief note on what I thought about each of them. Might include other media, too.
Booknotes: January 2024
Books I read this month, and a brief note on what I thought about each of them.
2023 in Review: A Few of My Favorite Things
2023 was a pretty good year for my personal relationship with immersive media, though. I enjoyed a range of new-to-me books, games, movies, and TV, while also uncharacteristically diving back into some old faves when I needed a bit of comfort food.
Is Football Manager the Greatest RPG Ever? (tldr: YES!)
No two games of Football Manager are ever alike, and the “true ending” is largely up to you. If you like multiple overlapping systems with a depth and complexity that can’t easily be min-maxed, Football Manager’s got that in spades. Praise RNGesus!
In Praise of Virtual “Work” (aka Football Manager)
Some people play games to relax, to escape the tedium and/or stress of their jobs, to challenge their reflexes — physical and mental. Football Manager is a bizarre combination of both, which really should not be appealing at all. It can be stressful and tedious, while also challenging your mental abilities because, at the end of the day, it’s a glorified spreadsheet with multiple pivot tables — and I love it so much, it’s taken me a week to stop playing it long enough to write this post about it!
OH, SNAP! My Games of the Year for 2022
I’m rarely playing the newest releases so most annual lists don’t often reflect my favorites, but thanks to Game Pass, my 2022 playlist included a broader range of new (and new-to-me) games than usual, including several I probably wouldn’t have played otherwise. After all of the above, it might be surprising that Marvel Snap isn’t at the top of my list, but as much fun as it is, Citizen Sleeper was better in different ways.
Five Things: September 15, 2022
Five things for September 15, 2022. That’s it! That’s the excerpt.
My Favorite Movies of 2018
2018 was a pretty terrible year by many measures, but it was a damn good year for movies. While big budget sequels of varying quality continued to dominate the box office, there was still room in theaters for new and original stories to stand out while streaming options give them a shot at reaching the wider audiences they deserve—including me, in a couple of cases. My top 10 favorites (plus 4 honorable mentions) were unexpectedly tough to sort out, but they represent a more varied list than I would have initially guessed at the beginning of the year.
Unpacking Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between The World and Me
Between The World and Me, is one of the most important books to be published this decade, surely, possibly even this young century. In context of the long list of tragic events of the past few years (from Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, and Sandra Bland, to Ferguson, Baltimore, and Charleston), it is timely, but that’s the easy part. It’s the combination of Coates’ framing (a letter to his son) and his raw, unapologetic tone (no white gaze-y appeasement here) that makes it stand out as a singular work that has drawn deserved comparisons to James Baldwin.