works of wanderlust

Category: screens & pages

When I watch or read or play something worth writing about, you may find those writings here.

  • media review: fallout

    Oh wow, I’m about a year late to the party but nothing says desperate for clicks like binge watching the latest streaming show and pumping out a ham-fisted review fifteen minutes later, huh?

    On the other hand, after my third playthrough of Fallout 4, dusting off the Fallout Shelter mini-game, and pondering if I would ever find anyone to play the Fallout TTRPG game I bought and for which I 3d-printed and painted a milkcrate full of minis, I finally settled into the couch to watch the streaming show starring Purnell and Goggins that debuted nearly a year ago now.

    If I still have to mention I am a bit of a Fallout fan here you haven’t been reading very carefully at all.

    And too, I’ll spare you the plot recap.

    There have been no shortage of universe-extending cross-over flicks and series this past decade or more. It used to be that video games were regarded as something of a culturally broke medium when it came to rich storytelling, so much so that I recall multiple times trying to justify playing them for story and citing the narrative complexity of titles like Final Fantasy VII and—um—maybe that was the only one there for a while. I’m sure there were more, but that was my go to. No, video games can tell complex stories and still be interesting as video games.

    Fallout, I do believe, started as a pretty bog standard franchise back in the first couple iterations, but the nuances of a retro-futuristic world of absurd atomic era fancies and frustrations was embraced with vigorous as more and better titles emerged. And some would argue with the release of Fallout 4 the series hit peak style, locking in a vibe and a backstory and a completeness of universe lore that exceeded even the higher bars for acheivement in this award category.

    I love Fallout. I will admit. The groove that it etches in your mind, a tragically optimistic juxtaposition of economic cynicism and techno-optimism. One is thrust into a world where war and corporate greed have been pushed to their very extremes, and where morality is blurred into a green and bloody smear as a result.

    It was with this sensibility locked into my skull that I pressed play on the television series. It had two jobs: mantain the vibe and tell an interesting story.

    A few minutes after I watched the end credits roll on the last episode of season one, I turned on my Playstation and loaded up Fallout 4. Again. The series had the energy of the game and I wanted to revisit the world, to spend a few more minutes poking around that crazy alternate universe. If that’s not a ringing endorsement of both, I don’t know what is.

  • book reviews: may the forth

    (…be with you!)

    It’s Star Wars day and I haven’t done much of anything intergalactic, but I have been doing a lot of reading lately.

    A lot of science fiction, too. So. Almost?

    Worse than my neglect of Star Wars, I checked out a bunch of library books and in such a flurry that a couple have expired before I even got part way through them. I could be here writing a bunch of different reviews if it were not for my distracted self bopping and hopping between titles, I guess.

    That said, the last couple weeks I’ve read:

    Axiom’s End by Lindsay Ellis

    I don’t know if you’d call Ms Ellis a film maker, reviewer, or an influencer, but it turns out that she’s a helluva author. I’ll be honest, I put this book on my list way back when the algorithm was dropping her video essays into my feed with more frequency and yet my lazy, distractible reading brain took over four years to clamber this clever first-encounter-kinda story to the top of my book stack. But the story sucked me in from the start when I finally started reading it, twisting through the tale of a young woman who finds herself at the centre of an alien government entanglement. It evoked emotions. And it left me adding the sequel to my reading list (though if I’m continuing the trend of being completely honest, it may take me another couple years to finally get around to that one.)

    I Want To Go Home by Gordon Korman

    And speaking of algorithms, whatever secret formula was recommending me digital titles in the Libby app connected to my library account must have pegged me as a middle aged Canadian and realized that I, like a million other Canadian kids who grew up in the 80s, lived on a steady diet of Korman’s goofy stories. I have a whole writer-origin story that revolves around this guy that I’ll happily share in detail to anyone who asks, and so by the way that algorithm might have been onto something. Yeah, this is a kids book and yeah it was a still a little corny like it was when I read it forty years ago, but there is something about the over-the-top silliness of a kid trying to escape sleepaway camp that evoked not only memories of my own childhood reading this same book until the pages were falling out, but the aching familiarity of a youth spent in scouts and church camps I would have fled were I more resourceful. A quick read, but I won’t begrudge the algorithm for taunting me with my lost youth.

    Wool by Hugh Howey

    A different sort of algorithm sucked us into watching the Apple TV adaptation of this decade old collection of linked dystopian science fiction novellas, more plainly called Silo. I had read Wool, the first in the trilogy that is the basis for Silo, waaaaaay back when it first came out and have been telling people to read it ever since. It’s a fantastic story, particularly if you like dark science fiction driven by strongly developed and complex characters. I had told all sorts of people to read it, but sadly I had never read it since. Nor had I read any of the sequels. Having finally caught up with the show, then, I loaded it up and decided to work my way through all three books. I finished Wool this very evening and was reminded of just how much I like this story. I mean, I may let it breath before I jump into book two, but like months. Only months. Not ten years this time, I promise.

  • book reviews: april flowers

    I just posted about my newfound enjoyment of walking and reading and so I figured now may be as good as time as any to start doing some light logging of the books I’ve been reading while out and about.

    Is it any surprise that two of those books are literally books about walking?

    How… um… on point.

    A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson

    I’ve never actually read a Bryson book. I think it must be the kind of thing that appeals to middle aged folks who find themselves compelled to read travel stories from their aging counterparts. Or maybe that’s just what I am now and I’m projecting. Whatever. I’ve seen his books all over and had this kind of edging towards curiosity about them, but—well—I had other stuff to read first, y’know. But then the digital library recommended this one and I bit. Bryson has a vibe, I’ll give him that. He’s a storyteller and can turn a months long hike through the wilderness into a compelling dramatic narrative of a frustrating bro relationship. I could feel the pain of the walk, but also the pain of tolerating someone who is glumming on your good time. I got it. I soaked it in. I read the thing in three days. I’m not ready to hike the trail, but I definitely felt like going for a long walk alone afterwards.

    The Witcher: Blood of Elves by Andrzei Sapkowski

    To be completely fair, I’ve been trying to read this book for at least two years. I bought the box set on a boxing day sale in like, I wanna say 2023–but I’m pretty sure it was 2022. I was into the game on my playstation for a while and the lore struck me as wild, so, ka-ching. It’s been sitting on my nightstand with a bookmark one chapter in for all that time, always somewhere about third or fourth in the stack. Always. But it was available to borrow immediately from the public library as an ebook the day I unwrapped the new Kobo from its box and so it was pretty much the first book I loaded onto the device. I mean, sure, paper copy… but I actually read the digital one. That said, it took me until about half way through to really get into it. There was so much damned lore and backstory that I was trying to piece it altogether in my head for a lot of the opening chapters. Somehow it’s written both simply while tying itself in knots. I liked it in the end, but that first bit was a slog to be honest.

    In Praise of Paths by Torbjorn Ekelund

    Ok, so as far as philosophical essays on the joy of travelling through space and time while on foot goes, this is the book they could sell at Ikea and it would fit right in on any of the Kallax or Lack shelves. Yeah. Right. I know. Norway is not Sweden, but the vibe from those Scandanavian countries is all mashed together in my head and sometimes I feel like I was born in the wrong place. I like Ikea and I like this book and the ideas is spurred to life in my head. It made me yearn for that last bit of icy snow to melt from the paths around here so that I could get back out on the trails and go for a stupidly long walk. Long walks were on my bucket list for when I took my career break and sometimes while I’ve been out wandering I do feel like I’m wasting time when I should be sitting at a desk writing something or coding something, so getting a swift kick in the reminder that sometimes the walk is the whole point made this a worthwhile read.

  • $3 Book Club: Old Books, Old Ideas

    I’ve been reading.

    If you’ve been reading this blog you may recall that my 2023 plan to dig into some vintage science fiction was something I coined the three buck book club, and was the result of some thrifty used book shopping and a notion that half-a-century old science fiction might be worth a second read.

    Or in my case, a first read.

    I wasn’t particularly wrong.

    And my reading has introduced me to a small stack of novels that (chosen by literal chance and randomness) I would never have encountered in any mainstream way.

    Great.

    But it has also introduced a new problem.

    Old books are full of old ideas.

    I guess I knew this, but I didn’t think it would punch me in the gut so firmly as it has.

    I’m on my second novel of the project and so far I’m two for two on some very misogynistic protagonist characters and a solid one hundred percent for some cringe-worthy bits of colonial-bent racism.

    These books are products of their time.

    But their time in the past had a few ideas that are probably — certainly — not worth dragging into the present.

    Sunlight in Cleansing

    Thus, I find my role here a little muddled.

    At one end I could turn this into a kind of, to borrow a politically charged idea, “woke witch hunt” against decades-gone authors who had the misfortune to be randomly plucked from used-bookstore obscurity by some guy looking for something cheap to read.

    On the other end, I (as a middle-aged Caucasian man in a position of privilege) could articulate that perhaps it isn’t my place to talk and write about that particular aspect of these books and focus on the stories they tell.

    And yet…

    An yet there is a tangled mess here that isn’t so easy to unravel.

    I tend to think that discussion and education are pretty good solvents for bad ideas.

    I can’t undo what these folks thought, believed or wrote. I can’t change the fact that uncountable numbers of cornball science fiction books still exist on shelves around the world filled with deeply rooted concepts that today would bin those stories before they made it past an agent. I can’t change any of that.

    I can acknowledge it. I can call it out. I can make sure that as I pry open their dusty covers and look for the bits of vintage treasure inside that I also try to make sure everyone understands that there is some rot in there too.

    Inevitably someone else is going to find copy of these books, and if they are anything like me google the title and read or watch what comes up. And there on the screen is my article, my video…

    What would you want them to know?

  • adventure dog adventure

    This may seem a bit silly, but I started editing together little one minute videos of my dog and posting them on Youtube.

    We go for a long walk, explore some trails, capture some 4k footage on my phone or go pro camera.

    I have a couple of these that I did with my last dog but I regret not taking more video of her when she was still around.

    The thing is, people seem to like them.

    Most videos I post get a few dozen views from friends or family.

    These have crept into the 1000s.

    Such as, our adventure walk through the snowy local river valley:

    Or, the new one I posted earlier today about a wandering adventure through some local suburban trails:

    I know she’s cute, but the interest has caught me off guard a little bit.

    … in a good way, of course!

    Check them out and tell me what you think. Cute dogs are an easy sell online? Or are people suddenly vibing for some dog-meets-world video fun?