october

Books

To Be Taught, If Fortunate

This is one of the best sci-fi short novellas I’ve read in a while. It’s not quite hard SF, but I love all the little details. The characters are great, and just casually queer, and there’s just enough suspense to make it a real page-turner. A triumph.

The Guest Cat ***

Definitely cried reading this one. I’m a sucker for Japanese cat literature for sure.

Revenant Gun

The final book in the Ninefox trilogy, and definitely the horniest one. If you military guys, there’s probably some fun for you in here. For me though, this was a great conclusion to a often confusing and wild series. I still don’t understand all of the math, but I love the world. There were some really interesting character choices here, and even though I wish we’d seen more of Cheris and Jedao chatting, the bits we did get were rad. This series was fantastic overall.

Pattern Recognition

A reread of a favorite. I might or might not partially owe Cayce for a major style inspiration for my daily wardrobe. This story has a lot of artifacts of the early oughts, but most of it feels delightfully timeless.

Hollow Kingdom

Still not sure how i feel about this book. I think the idea of the book was better than the execution.

Movies

In the Shadow of the Moon

A mid-flight watch on my way to Tokyo. Pretty interesting, engaging flick that gets weird.

Parasite

There isn’t a lot I can say about this without spoiling the whole endeavor, but suffice it to say this movie is incredible. There’s so much going on in every shot, and the actors performances are incredible. This is a rare movie that just keeps building and building throughout. Truly one of the best directors working.

What We Do in the Shadows

A rewatch of an utter classic of mockumentary. So many quotable lines and absurdly delightful scenes. The last word in vampire media.

The Art of Self Defense

The dialog delivery was definitely from the Yorgos Lanthimos school of deadpan, and the general vibe was extremely absurdist. I loved this film. Quite a bit of this movie was unexpected, and had me cracking up. A genuinely odd delight.

The Day Shall Come

An utterly bizarre and fantastic satire about the very real lengths the state goes to in order to prop up folks with no real chance of committing “terrorist acts”. It’s worrying watching this interview to get more behind the scenes of this film. Morris makes seriously strange stuff, and this is no exception.

High Life

Space dads! I don’t know if this is a genre, but perhaps it should be since Interstellar, High Life, and Ad Astra all appear to answer: “what if dads, but in space”. However there was a lot of assault in this film… it’s largely about felons being jettisoned into space, and artificial insemination experiments, it turns out. If you like very grim space movies, this might be for you.

Promare

A wild visual ride with a rather bizarre (it’s Trigger, naturally) story of fire people and the folks who fight them. There’s mecha, tons of goofy jokes, and even though it felt a little long, it was fun.