“Hello World” by Rose Sinclair and Alexandra Tauber

This is the most recent book from the Great Ace DigitalBook Box! It’s a neat one, this story’s about Scott a hacker who is looking for his sister. Thing is, she’s been taken by a company called UltSyn, who enlists humans only to wipe their memories and turn them into computers. In order to find out more about where his sibling went, he kidnaps one of these human computers (called HIDs) named Sonia. Sonia and Scott end up becoming friends, and then fall in love. They team up with another hacktivist group in their quest to take UltSyn down.

Now I didn’t love this book at first. I thought Scott was a bit of an asshole and didn’t really care for him, but Sonia was intriguing. So I kept reading, and as you learn more about Scott and his quest for his sister you learn to care more about him. By the end when it is revealed (very casually) that Scott is asexual, I was pretty happy with it. Asexuals are usually depicted as cold and calculating, but having an ace at the center of an action story was pretty cool. And letting us get to know him first was definitely a good call. He is also portrayed as a full character without his asexuality, there’s nothing really in the book to indicate his sexual orientation other than that is how he identifies. I quite liked this, since it meant that it wasn’t a big deal and it wasn’t the center of his character.

A major theme of the book is smashing binaries. Interestingly, there aren’t any prominent gender non-conforming characters, which I think would have been an excellent addition. It almost feels missing without it. But the main binary being addressed is that between human and machine. Sonia is referred to as a computer at first, but grows into her humanness as she regains more of her memories. A similar parallel happens with Scott, initially he seems distant but also grows into his emotions. He has a close relationship with the technology around him, his computer Hallie basically counts as a character, but his distinction as a human is also never really challenged. It’s a cool conceit for a book, but I would have liked to see these ideas played with more.

It is a neat book, some cool ideas and characters within it. Give it a read if you like action or science fiction, it’s sure to open some doors to ideas. I just wish that it stepped through the door a little further.

This Is Beautiful: Wherever I Go I Want to Leave

I posted about this band/project way back in October, but Love Fame Tragedy has finally released its first album! It's called "Wherever I Go I Want to Leave" and it is excellent.

Many of the songs were released in advance as hype got built up for the project in general, but over half of it is new stuff. My favorites of the new songs are probably "5150" and "Everything Affects Me Now." But honestly I'm just so happy to have new music to listen to.

Yo find that stuff on Spotify or wherever you listen (I personally ordered a CD I was so excited for this) and give it a listen because I'll be jamming all week.

Rewatching Steven Universe

I decided that for my next tv adventure I would rewatch "Steven Universe" which is a children's cartoon from Cartoon Network. It recently ended its run, although when I say that I am definitely including the movie and "Steven Universe Future" which was an epilogue season of sorts.

I've been meaning to rewatch this show for a while actually, when it was on air the episodes came out so sporadically that it was hard to keep track of what was happening sometimes. I was hoping that doing a rewatch all at once would help to connect some of the dots that I might have missed the first time around.

For those who might be unfamiliar with this show, "Steven Universe" is about a young boy, Steven, who's the son of a human and a gem from outer space. Basically the gems are a race of aliens that are humanoid in form, but their essence consists of a gem located somewhere on their body. This gem gives them special powers and abilities that humans don't have. The gems are ancient and historically have gone around and colonized different planets to mine them for more gems. But a rebel group on Earth called the Crystal Gems drove them off. Steven's mom was the leader of these gems, but she gave up her form to bring Steven into this world. The show follows Steven as he navigates these two parts of his identity.

First of all, rewatching it has been a pretty emotional experience for me. This show was my favorite for a while, and I got a lot of my friends into watching it as well. So it was pretty surreal to go back and relive those experiences again. I rarely rewatch tv shows since I don't watch much tv so just going back to the beginning was a time.

I also had forgotten just how weird the beginning was. There's an episode where parts of Steven's body become cats. Like lumps of cat all over his body. I vaguely remember my first time around thinking that was the strangest thing I've ever seen, but I had also forgotten completely about the Frybo episode where the mascot of a local french fry stand (called Frybo) comes to life. That was a time. And there's a crossover episode with "Uncle Grandpa" and I would LOVE to delete that episode from history it's so strange and out of place.

But past the first half of the first season, it actually comes into its own pretty quickly. I forgot how soon characters like Lapis and Peridot are introduced, probably because 10 minute episodes go really fast when you're binge watching.

Beyond that, it's really nice to see how all the relationships work in a more streamlined fashion. Peridot's arc I remember as being super annoying, but I had an appreciation for her the second time around. And the fandom has a tendency to hate on the episodes focusing on the townie human characters, but I liked seeing Lars and Sadie's growth over time. (I still can't stand Lars until the end but that's fine.)

The real highlight is appreciating how far ahead the writers were thinking with plot lines. Details from early episodes frequently pop up later. There's a secret that one of the characters is magically bound to not reveal, and every time it comes up you can see her in the background covering her mouth, starting from the second season or so onwards. Or the scar on Sadie's cheek in all the episodes after she fights a big magic fish that I didn't notice until recently. It's pretty incredible to spot these details once you know what's coming in the show.

I'm pretty grateful for this opportunity to go back to this show, since as I've talked about here, I rarely revisit media. It's something I probably should do more often, but it just takes up so much time. But I'm very glad I was able to do it with this show!

This Is Beautiful: Arcade Spirits

As I discussed last week, I've got this bundle of games that I've been going through and fortunately one of the first ones I picked up was "Arcade Spirits." This is a visual novel and a dating sim where you play as someone (completely customizable) who has had a string of bad luck and depression. Until they get a job working at an arcade that is. The job and the coworkers end up being exactly what they need, and you can choose to find romance along the way, or you can not! Either way.

What first drew me in when I popped the game open was the aesthetic. With a name like "Arcade Spirits," it does conjure up a specific vibe. The text boxes are neon, and the sound effects range from 8-bit to your in game phone yelling "Hey! Listen!" Many references to real life video games and pop culture. It's like Ready Player One but done right!

The best aspect of the game is probably the mechanics. It is basically a choose-your-own-adventure, but different personality traits are assigned to different responses. So the game is analyzing your choices as you go, and this impacts things like the final boss battle as well as what in-game characters you get along best with. It's a really cool idea for a visual novel, and makes it much more personal as well.

The story is wonderful, it's serious and hilarious and actually has themes in it?? A central idea is the balance of your dreams on one side, and the reality of the world in the other. Like one character says, "life is a series of trade offs" where you need to know when to compromise and when to stay true. And also, what you decide to compromise on is a better indicator of your character than whether or not you compromise. Which also speaks towards the game's mechanics. You have to choose which characters to spend time with, and what personality traits suit you best. You can't go for max stats for everything since you literally have to pick one!

Finally the characters are what really make the game. I think almost half of the ones you can romance are people of color, and since it's a dating sim, of course everyone's gay. There's even a character who's super endearing but unsure of her gender and who she is. Having unlocked all the endings, each of them are super compelling and very distinct. Having said that, I also found that the game did an excellent job of predicting who I would find most compelling through that personality analysis. I was primarily Kindly, and definitely matched the best with Naomi (basically the game version of me lol) and Percy (I want him to adopt me).

"Arcade Spirits" is pretty cheap on Steam, and I cannot recommend this enough. It is definitely one of the best visual novels that I have played, and I'm in a bit of a visual novel phase right now. Apparently there's a sequel in the works and I couldn't be more excited!

“White Fragility” by Robin Diangelo

So yes like every other white person have been reading this book. And I’m not totally sure what to say other than if you are white you do, in fact, need to read this and you need to hear what Diangelo has to say. I don’t really care whether you think this applies to you or not (actually if you resist I know it does for sure lol) you just need to read it.

There’s a number of other books that I’ve read on race and diversity, but this book articulates a number of concepts really clearly and succinctly. This makes it a pretty quick read, but I constantly was thinking “that’s such an important concept, I need to write it down or start taking notes.” Her discussion about how white supremacy has socialized white people to think that they don’t have race and that racists are fundamentally bad people is particularly excellent. And makes for a very compelling case why we ALL need to constantly work on ourselves.

I really dug the last chapter though. This is when she goes over what we need to do after reading this book. Because that is where the real work begins, you cannot just read something and expect to become a perfect human overnight. Diangelo here tells us to think about what we can do about our own white fragility. Have we bothered educating ourselves on racism? Do we have diverse friends? Do we call out other white people when they do problematic things?

I also really appreciated how she added an anecdote about someone calling her out on a statement that she made and her reaction to the feedback. It not only gives a model for people to receive similar feedback, but demonstrates that even the author of this book has things to work on and strive towards. Becoming aware of the problem is step 1, the next (and hardest, and longest) step is to work on fixing the problem for the rest of our lives.

Being aware of our tendencies when it comes to race is a long and hard road. But it is one that we all must take. This book is a great first step if you need that extra nudge.

This Is Beautiful: Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality

So unfortunately my Switch gave up and died in the middle of last week lol. Of course this happens to me. But it's ok! My friend told me about itch.io's "Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality." This is a bundle of SO MANY great games that you could get access to! The link to this is here.

This is a really important cause, and you get a ton of stuff out of it. Of course every dollar counts when it comes to donating to important causes, but since they are way beyond their goal and I think there's more impactful ways to donate I'm going to focus on the games.

The thing about this bundle is that I found it at an A+ time because I needed something else to do. And there are SO MANY GAMES in this package! Many of these I would never have played otherwise. There's story driven games, adventure games, shooting games, puzzle games, dating games, just about anything you'd want to play. It's a really cool way to expose yourself to different forms of storytelling and different ways to game.

The bundle ended a while ago, but you can still search the games to find cool ones to buy. Not quite the same, but you should still support independent game makers.

“Sidekicks” by P.K. Gardner

This is the final book in the Enemies Trilogy (parts one and two here). I tried not to spoil things in the part two review, but I am just going to go for it here. So read the books if you have a stake in this, they aren’t very long, but you have been warned.

Walk a Mile ends with Alex Manners dying inside Malcolm Quick’s body. Mal is left stranded in Alex’s body with no way of getting his best friend or his original body back. Since then, Dodger (a psychic superhero) has been orchestrating a series of replacement Good Guy’s, to replace Alex. Mal is the obvious choice, but he refuses to take up the mantle that belonged to his friend. When Sidekicks begins, Cliff Awesome is the current Good Guy, with Ajax Gadzinski (son of Indestructoman) as his sidekick the Private.

This doesn’t last very long, Cliff gets murdered in a mugging gone wrong and a vacancy is left in the ranks of the supers. Ajax wants to quit out of self-preservation, and Mal is still in a depressive state after the loss of Alex. Meanwhile, Dodger has gone missing. Unbeknownst to the other supers, he’s somehow gotten himself trapped in a parallel universe. One where a lot of supers are still alive, and his counterpart is already dead. Alex killed him when he turned out to be a supervillain. Additionally, back in his home universe Mal swears that he’s been seeing Alex turn up out of nowhere. Mal starts trying to figure out a way to get his friend back, while Ajax seeks revenge for his. Clearly this is someone’s origin story in the works. But you’re left guessing as to whose it is until the end.

The beautiful thing about this entire series is that it all anchors on a friendship. The only couple that makes it through the book is Xavier and Kyle, also supers and enemies that decide to retire together. Mal and Alex’s relationship is reinforced time and time again by how the two meet in different universes but still feel the same connection.

Which only makes it sadder that Mal in the original universe is left alone, without an Alex. And what I really like about this book is that it isn’t about how Mal gets Alex back, it’s about how Mal learns to carry on without him. It’s really a fantastic story about coping with grief and loss. Mal learns to have faith in himself without needing his friend by his side.

Beyond that, it is also really nice to see Ajax take on a larger role. He’s been a minor character of each story, and it is great to see him also come into his own. Which makes this “origin story” thing work really well since it could just as easily apply to Ajax.

Finally I thought this was a really cool take on the “parallel universes” trope. Similar to Walk a Mile, P.K. takes a very common sci-fi trope and puts a unique twist on it. The result is familiar to fans of the genre, but also still engaging. Makes me wish that there was more to the series, but this is also a spectacular way to end it.

If you haven’t started the series yet, I really strongly recommend it. The first one is free on Kindle, and the rest are both so good they make the (rather cheap) price worth it. A great way to spend quarantine!