psocoptera

A story that I was recced that didn't make it into my 2022 recs: Lena, by qntm/Sam Hughes, about human uploading.

Google translation of the second Xin Weimu story from the packet, 明天就出发. About 9700 words.

Content notes: this is a Holocaust story and involves Nazis. Also I'm not sure if it's the POV or Google Translate being unfortunate but there was a word choice in the translation that I found antisemitic and really took me aback.

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Nope, 2022 movie. I really liked this - smart and gripping and original. The first of Peele's movies I've watched without reading a synopsis first, and it was just fine for my level of horror-aversion. Reminded me of Green Knight in some ways, tonally and in some of the use of imagery, although Nope is definitely more coherent/traditional in how everything eventually adds up where Green Knight was more surreal.

I suppose I can rank Hugo movies now, behind the cut. ( Read more... )

I also watched Hidden Blade, 2023, which I had failed to see in the theater, which turned out to be just as well, since by renting it streaming I was able to watch it once through, read some stuff, go back, watch most of it again, read some more stuff, and watch some scenes an additional one or more times. I mean, I really liked it, but the combination of nonlinear storytelling and my own illiteracy made it a challenge! For context, this is a Chinese spy movie about Chinese resistance to the Japanese occupation. My relevant history classes were a long time ago, and while I remembered the basics about the Communists, Nationalists, and Japanese, I had definitely forgotten most of the specific names, years, cities/regions, and progression of events that get referred to, and I never had the visual literacy to, like, quickly recognize uniforms. And my monolingual ears don't even pick up the difference between Chinese and Japanese (really different languages!) unless I'm paying very close attention (definitely not on a first pass while reading subtitles), let alone the differences between Mandarin/Cantonese/Shanghainese (much less different, to my untrained ears, at least), so, all of the information and characterization being conveyed by language choices was flattened in the English subtitles. (I suppose really good subtitling could have used different colors or fonts or italics or something...)

Anyways, I found the whole process of figuring it out and then catching new details on the second or third watch very satisfying, and this is very much a movie about gorgeous people wearing gorgeous 40s costumes having psychological drama at each other (punctuated by occasional violence and war atrocities), so it was also a treat just to spend more time looking at them, even if I wasn't also looking at the complicated and subtle things people were doing with their facial expressions. It is definitely from the Chinese Communist perspective in the way that many American spy thrillers are from the American perspective - the Communists are the heroes here - which I thought was interesting (I'm not sure I've ever watched a spy movie where the leads weren't American or British? maybe I'm forgetting something?) but might be off-putting if you don't want to compartmentalize it from the wider context of shitty things the CCP has done (the same way you might compartmentalize an American spy thriller from the shitty things the US has done). For me, I already agreed with the POV of this movie that the Japanese invasion was horrific and the Chinese were the right side of that situation, and I don't really feel strongly about Communists vs Nationalists but was willing to go along with "these characters believe that what they're doing is right and necessary and given the information they have in this time period that's a reasonable belief". (Interestingly, the movie (at least from what I could tell) mostly stuck to saying critical things about the Nationalists rather than positive things about the Communists - I guess it would be fraught and complicated to have characters, like, talking up Mao, but slamming Chiang Kai-shek isn't going to wade into any contemporary muddy waters.) I definitely don't have the literacy to think in any serious way about where the characters might be in 10 or 20 years, re the famine and Cultural Revolution and all that. I bet there's some fascinating fic out there in Chinese...

Avatar the Way of Water. Watched for Hugo purposes. Definitely would not recommend unless you have some sort of reason like that. My god was that movie long.

The Bruising of Qilwa, Naseem Jamnia, 2022 novel or possibly novella, I've seen it categorized as both. Second-world medical fantasy in a Persian-inspired world where a healer tries to understand a mysterious disease. There were a bunch of interesting elements here, but I also found it hard to follow in spots, and the pacing a little jerky. I could tell that Jamnia had tried really hard to translate their speculative immunology magic back into generic "ordinary" language - now that I think about it it's possible that there are no medical/body terms derived from Latin in here, which would be a neat trick if true, a sort of low-key "uncleftish beholding". On the other hand, there were parts that ended up reading kind of like "upgoer 5" writing, where I could tell that there was a familiar and interesting concept there right on the other side of this frustrating obscuring language. I've occasionally tried playing some language games like that in my own writing, on a much smaller scale, and I think they can be more fun for the writer than the reader. I was hoping that the author's notes might have Jamnia's modern-language elevator pitch for the story (( Read more... )) but no luck. But it's still interesting. I would only recommend it to people who have a pretty high tolerance for sometimes gory medical/body descriptions, but I'll be curious to see their next book, so, call that a mixed rec?

The Unbalancing, R.B. Lemberg, 2022 novel. I had loved the previous longer Birdverse work, The Four Profound Weaves, but this one didn't really click for me. Maybe it didn't help to have just read books by Scalzi and Wells, like, they are both such story-on-rails writers, where you are just constantly carried forward, and in comparison, Lemberg is like... sitting there handing you random puzzle pieces. Why does this scene come after that one? Why does this *sentence* come after that one? Why did that character do that, in reaction to that thing? I could, eventually, see (some of) what they were trying to do, and there was some neat stuff in there! But the way that stuff was put together and paced sold it short. (I do wish I was living in the alternate universe where people were as excited about their ichidi variations as they were about their Hogwarts houses, though. I mean, I guess anyone can have a Hogwarts house and most people would not be ichidi. But still.)

Illuminations, T Kingfisher, 2022 middlegrade novel. This was cute and clever and fun. Definitely younger than some of her stuff where she was like "this is middlegrade, right?". Spoiler: ( Read more... )

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever at home, finally. They did such a good job with it, I really liked the choice to make it Shuri's movie (and Letitia Wright really carried it) and they made such good choices about how they used Boseman footage. And it just continues to blow me away how these movies have more depth and substance than anything else in the MCU, which, like, I don't need or expect every Marvel movie to do that, I like them when they're just fun too, but it's impressive to be reminded that they can.

Across the Spiderverse IN THE THEATER, which I haven't done since February 2020, but this was clearly the movie to make an exception for. (Plus the small theater at Fresh Pond is only 50 people max capacity, and wastewater rates look low right now.) And it was just astonishingly good! Like, every scene, they were just like, how can we make this striking? how can we make this excellent? how can we push this? A bit more behind the cut: ( Read more... )

Legends & Lattes: A Novel of High Fantasy and Low Stakes, Travis Baldree, 2022 novel. Orc warrior decides to retire and open a coffee shop, slowly assembles quest party of various other people with something to contribute, the real treasure was the friends we made along the way. Extremely cozy, to the extent that it didn't entirely work for me - I'm still not sure how things worked out at the end except that the plot demanded they just had to, so they did - but enjoyable, and a fast read. And the cover is perfect, like, picture a Xanth cover from the 80s, only it's cute f/f D&D monster ladies. Apparently it was Kindle Direct self-published and then Seanan McGuire recced it on Twitter, having noticed it because of the cover, and Tor picked it up, so, like, I don't know if Baldree commissioned the cover from Carson Lowmiller or what, but damn, talk about a good investment. I hope Lowmiller and the cover win some industry recognition (and more work for Lowmiller, if that's something wanted).

Also I have now read all six of the Nebula nominees for best novel! I'm not a Nebula voter, but here's how I would rank them: ( Read more... )

Everybody on the spreadsheet is good but I'm nominating Alyssa Winans, Geneva Bowers, Kuri Huang, Paul Lewin, and Sija Hong and calling it a day.