Words are inadequate

Anthony and Joe Russo (dirs.), Avengers: Endgame

My favourite line in Endgame is "I use the words you taught me. If they don't mean anything anymore, teach me others. Or let me be silent."

*checks notes*

Ahem.

I watched the first two Iron Men when the second one came out. I thought the first one was mediocre and the second terrible, and didn't bother to get invested in the MCU. I saw the Guardians movies with friends who were a lot more into it than me: I enjoyed the Gamora / Nebula backstory, but was sufficiently annoyed by Star-lord that I didn't really regret my choices to not dig deeper. On the other hand, Black Panther blew me away last year.

And over the last month or two Erin and I watched about half the MCU movies, which was an enjoyable way to spend a bunch of evenings. For the most part I found them ... much less dire than I'd been afraid. Even Age of Ultron and Civil War. And I quite enjoyed Captain Marvel, a few weekends ago. So I was reasonably psyched up for Endgame.

The neat thing is, this is about as close to a universal pop-culture phenomenon as we've had in the last ... decade, at least, probably much longer. Even the new Star Wars movies haven't brought out this much excitement and anticipation and shared "brb rewatching twenty movies before endgame". It's nice to feel like I'm engaging in something that tons of other folks are as well, and to get that little bit of joy when I see someone else noting that they're off to see Endgame.

( Spoilers follow )

A solid ending to a decade's worth of franchise. I'm curious to see where the MCU goes next.

They really should have had Luis from Ant-Man do a recap of the movies, though.

Also, the best superhero movie remains Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse.

"Blink" (Doctor Who S3E10), Steven Moffat

Sally's friend vanishes while they're exploring an abandoned house. It turns out she's vanished into the past, kidnapped by statues that move when you're not looking at them, and if Sally can't figure out what's going on with these weird DVD easter eggs she might be next.

Okay, so, I liked Blink less than most people seem to, and it took me a bit to work out why that was. The Weeping Angels are great: inventive and successfully creepy, and I love love love the bit where the TARDIS vanishes from around Sally and Larry, surrounded by Angels. Sally's a decent enough character, and while we don't see much Doctor or Martha what we get is perfectly fine.

My first thought was that it's a puzzle-box story, and that's just not what I'd expect to see from Doctor Who. But that's not really accurate: a lot of episodes have been "here's a weird thing, what's going on with it," layered throughout the story. It works well. But here I could see the gears moving, and that made the difference.

Specifically: I didn't ever get a sense that Sally and company were solving the thing, were figuring out what was going on. Instead they were just following a trail that had been laid down for them, by the Doctor and Martha, and by Kathy and Shipton. There wasn't any joy in the discovery. It was all "Oh, the police box. Oh, the list of DVDs. Oh, you know what I'm going to say. Oh, we shouldn't blink."

(It didn't help that Larry, Sally's most constant companion, is a slacker dude with no particularly redeeming features. That she takes his hand at the end of the episode is just insult to injury.)

Well-constructed, neat ideas, execution left me cold. If I hadn't seen other Who, if I hadn't known how much heart this show can have, I expect I'd have been more favourably disposed towards it. But it could have been that little bit better, and I would have liked it so much more.

Steven Brust, Vallista
Vlad Taltos #15

Wiseass ex-assassin offers to help out a very strange little girl and finds himself trapped in a very strange haunted house. Certain worldbuilding questions are answered in ways that make it look suspiciously like the author had them planned all along.

As has been the case since at least Athyra, and arguably since Teckla, Vlad books are mostly recognisably Vlad books but each one is doing something a little different. Which is neat; means that new ones feel familiar but not too same-y. It also means that occasionally they go pretty far afield into territory I'm less fond of. Athyra was one of those, at least up til my most recent reread. Vallista is another.

So: this is a ghost-story, and/or a haunted-house novel. (The chapter titles are all puns on famous ghost stories or haunted house stories, in addition to being relevant to the content of chapter in question.) As a Vlad novel this doesn't really work for me, possibly for the same reason that Dragon, as an in-the-army-now memoir, doesn't. That being: it's either the genre itself, or the way it's employed in the Vlad books, and I'm not sure which.

To the extent that there's a typical Vlad-novel structure: Vlad is presented with a problem; he flails around getting more information, often while trading snark with his friends; he eventually does something that brings a sort of resolution. I like this structure. It usually works for me. Vallista follows it, but not in a way that I enjoyed.

Partly this is, and I keep harping on this, the lack of secondary characters. I think more of it has to do with the nature of the flailing. The house Vlad and Devera are trapped in is weird, in lots of ways. Doors go to different places in the house, or outside it; members of the household are less than helpful in unexpected ways. I've run RPGs like this and enjoyed them; my players seem to have also enjoyed them; I think I'd enjoy playing in one. It's ... I was going to say "it's not a fun formula for a novel, for me," but no, Issola did something very similar, and I liked Issola quite a bit. So I guess it does go back to the lack of secondary characters. Loiosh helps but he's not quite enough on his own.

So: not a favourite but I'm glad I read it, and would happily reread. If you wanted more Devera: Vallista has more Devera than any book thus far, though not as much as you want. If you wanted more metaplot: Vallista has more metaplot than any book thus far except Jhereg or Issola, and even those are arguable. If you wanted to know what happens after Hawk ... hopefully that's coming soon.

The Great Big Dragaera Reread, part 5

VALLISTA HAS SHIPPED! *happydance* Guess I'll have to keep cracking on these. SUCH HARDSHIP.

It's interesting to move from "books I've reread so many times they're like old friends I've not seen in awhile" through "books I know pretty well and enjoy getting reacquainted with" and on into "books I like a lot but don't know as well as I could, or as I think I do."

( Klava, Dzur, Jhegaala, Iorich )

The Great Big Dragaera Reread, part 3

The Ace books have decidedly Aged Well, which is always a pleasant surprise. The treatement of Easterners feels remarkably relevant and contemporary (at least, so saith this white dude), and the sense of having wandered into someone's high-powered D&D game doesn't persist past Jhereg, or maybe Yendi. I'd definitely recommend them.

( Athyra, Orca, FHYA, Dragon )

The Great Big Dragarea Reread, part 1

I'm rereading all of Steven Brust's Dragaera books, more or less in publication order: fourteen mainline novels, five Paarfi romances, one side story, and three short stories.

Sparked by the impending release of Vallista and the realisation that I've not read the Ace volumes in, oh, probably not since Issola came out, despite having read them to exhaustion in the decade previous.

My mass-markets are packed up so I'm reading the Ace books in the SFBC collected editions. As far as I know the main changes are some terminology around pre-Empire sorcery ("raw chaos" to "raw amorphia" etc), and the removal of the Cycle poem at the front of Jhereg. I liked the poem, and it made the chapter headings make sense, but I seem to be in the minority.

---

( The Book of Jhereg )

Ken MacLeod, The Restoration Game

I've read two novels by Jon Courtenay Grimwood: Stamping Butterflies and, um, End Of The World Blues. I remember very little about Stamping Butterflies except that I enjoyed the writing and that at the end it pulled the "universe reset" / "erase the fact that the story occurred" trick, which (it turns out) really, really irritates me. End Of The World Blues didn't do that; instead, it set up an intriguing premise and then used that premise mostly to illuminate a single character's life and growth in the way that more literary novels often do.

Verdict: Grimwood writes well and succeeds admirably in what he sets out to do, and that goal does not line up at all with what I want out of a book. To quote James Nicoll, I don't mind hidden depths but I insist that there be a surface. Or, in this case, that the surface be integral to the story that's being told.

I mention Grimwood because The Restoration Game does something similar to those two books, but it works for me. I think.

This is not a spoiler: the opening scene of the novel involves space-cops discovering that some jerk has set up a computer running a simulation of a universe and all the life in it, including the sentient life. Said sentient life are scientifically advanced enough to start bumping up against the limits of the universe's physics engine. Creating such a simulation is a horrific crime against those sentients-- but the space cops may have an idea of how to fix things. And then much of the rest of the novel is a contemporaryish (set in 2008, written in 2010) spy thriller revolving around something strange that's going on near the border of Russia and Georgia.

I like spy thrillers, so I was predisposed to like this... but I also like weird worldhopping near-future cyberpunk, and End Of The World Blues left me cold. That said, Restoration Game wisely doesn't try to do anything clever with its frame story except use it as a) the Macguffin and b) closure. It's a spy thriller that peters out to a weirdly philosophical resolution. It's not even deus ex machina (dea in machina, rather, the goddess entering into the machine) because nothing gets solved by the arrival of God, they just talk for awhile. It's just ... what it is.

It helps, I think, that Restoration Game explicitly acknowledges its setup from the start. You know, unless you aren't paying any attention at all, that the world is "just" a simulation, though that doesn't make it any less real to anyone involved. It doesn't come as a surprise when the curtain gets tugged away and then pulled down altogether. It feels more like a natural conclusion. Everything drawn together.

I've been chewing on the question of whether I liked it for the past three days. I think that's a good sign.

J. Michael Straczynski (dev.), Babylon 5, most of.

General: Groundbreaking but flawed. Fatally hamstrung by attempts to tell a single story over five seasons through the loss of actors and network sabotage. (Full disclosure: I also despise bound book-fragments and have trouble reading individual issues of comic books rather than full storylines.) I don't regret having watched B5 but I doubt I'll go back to it.

S1: Occasionally cringe-inducing, but decent. I'm enjoying Sinclair, and the Sinclair/Ivanova/Garibaldi triangle. G'kar is a jerk and Londo is mostly kinda sympathetic. Delenn needs more to do. Vir and Lennier are great. Needs more Kosh, and more Morden.

S2: Sheridan feels like a nonentity; half his appearances make more sense if I think of them as written for Sinclair's background instead, and the other half lack personality. Londo's transformation to jerk is complete and I find myself sympathising with G'kar. Needs more Kosh, and more Morden.

S3: Looks like Londo will suffer no consequences for committing fucking GENOCIDE at the end of last season. On the bright side, Sheridan developed a personality! Also the return of Sinclair, who... I can understand why the actor had to be replaced. On balance this is probably my favorite season. Needs more K-- DAMMIT.

S4: Meh. The conclusion of the Shadow War feels rushed. The quick and easy resolution of the civil war even more so. I cannot believe that the people of Earth just said "Oh, we've been duped into believing the xenophobic crap Clark was selling us, our bad" and embraced Sheridan with open arms. I also disapprove strongly of G'kar suffering for Londo's sins.

S5: No Ivanova. No real point to the story. We abandoned ship not quite halfway through. I've been meaning to at least watch the Neil Gaiman episode and the closer for over a year now and haven't managed to work up the desire.

(Currently watching Futurama, which holds up surprisingly well.)

Hadean Lands, Andrew Plotkin

Not quite four years ago I backed my second-ever Kickstarter project[1]. I'd known Zarf in passing for about a decade at that point, and known of his work for, mm, twenty-some years. Throwing money at him so he'd a) make another big game and b) create tools so that other people could make similar games was kind of a no-brainer.

He'd planned on having the game done in a year, maybe a little more.

It shipped a couple of days ago.

I meant to post this yesterday morning, when it was live. I am afraid I was distracted by a formula for an alchemical fungicide, and then by my inexplicable failure to create a resonant oculus ("an exceptional tool for observing unseen influences"). So: I am pleased to report that it has been entirely worth the wait.

The plot: you're an ensign on His Majesty's Marcher (an alchemical starship) The Unanswerable Retort. Something has gone horribly wrong, and it appears to be up to you to figure out how to put it right.

This is an old-school text adventure. You type commands (GO NORTH, GET COIN, UNLOCK OAK DOOR WITH RUSTY KEY) and the game carries them out. It includes a tutorial for brand-new players. I cannot speak to the tutorial as I haven't played it; been too busy diving in.

The game's puzzly, but not impossibly so. The structure I've seen thus far:

• First, a basic puzzle-type task, which serves as a tutorial for 'how to do alchemy.'
  
• Then, a locked door that can be opened by creative application of the previous.
  
• The game then opens up a few more areas, and gives you a few more keys, to doors that have to be opened in order.
  
• The last of those doors leads to an area roughly the size of the entire area you've previously seen, with a number of things to do and a locked door at the far end.
  
• Once you've puzzled out how to open that door, you have free access to most of the rest of the map.
  
• At this point the game becomes a firehose of information: alchemical formulae, ingredients, concepts, and the trick becomes sorting and managing all this information. That's where I am.

All this ought to be overwhelming and tedious. It's not, because Zarf has implemented shortcuts. You have to do a ritual, or solve a puzzle or unlock a door, by hand once. After that you can just PERFORM TARNISH CLEANSING RITUAL or UNLOCK DOOR and the game gathers the ingredients or key and goes through the necessary steps. In addition, if you can't remember where you saw or left something, you can RECALL CONVEX LENS and the game will tell you "You left that in the Opticks Lab."

Not to mention that the prose is first-rate. "You smell copal incense, machine oil, rosemary, alcohol, and blood. Creaking, bending steel beams... no, that's not an odor. Why did you think the bulkheads were crumpling in on you? What would that even smell like?"

Hadean Lands is available for iOS in a native app, or Android and PC/OSX/Linux through a (free) interpreter. I believe it will set you back about five bucks.

So:

If you have fond recollections of the old Infocom games: buy this.

If you enjoy throwing yourself against locked doors and attempting to concoct and (mis)use strange formulae: buy this.

If you snickered at an alchemical starship named 'The Unanswerable Retort': buy this.

It's good.

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[1] My first-ever backed Kickstarter project has yet to deliver, because the creator turned out to be a flake. In retrospect this should have been obvious at the time. Supposedly the writing is done and it's in layout now. I believe the traditional next step is to whine that there are no more funds left to print or ship the book.