works of wanderlust

Category: reviews

I mostly write about things I like. If I haven’t written about it, maybe I just haven’t seen it… or maybe I didn’t like it.

  • media reviews: a lack of independence

    All work and no play make Brad a dull guy.

    I’ve been working on real projects, too, but I still find a lot of time to dabble in entertaining myself with no hidden agenda. This past month I’ve been stoking the seeds of rebellion and growing virtual canola, but not necessarily in that order.

    I’ve been enjoying…

    gaming: farming simulator 2025

    There are really only two types of games that exist. I mean, when you sit down and think about it—and believe me, I’ve done my share since trying to build a video game from scratch this year—but those two types of games fall basically into one of two core game mechanics: create chaos or create order. The create chaos games are simple: blow stuff up, fight, battle, knock down a wall of bricks with a little ball and on and on. The creating order games are pretty obvious, too: craft stuff, build structures, sort objects, organize those objects into neat rows. We could probably argue about the nuance of all things and that sometimes creating chaos is leading to order or vice versa, but hey, I’m trying to keep this simple. And all that said, what I can’t exactly tell you is when the first “farming” game came out because farming games (unlike this game I have been playing) are not necessarily about literally running farm.  Farming games are generally about creating order: taking a wild space and converting it into a resource-generating source.  Farming games can, yes, and often do replicate vegetable farming from reality, but too sometimes you are farming gold, or in-game energy, or dinosaur eggs, player experience points or maybe just maguffin-like doo-dahs that progress the game play, and many farming-type games use the abtraction of farming as a mechanic to create a need in the game to progress gameplay by forcing a labour-like management system of creating order out of the seeming nothingness of the game world. But Farming Simulator is literally what it says. It’s buying tractors, harvesting crops, and managing animals, all in a massive virtual space that looks like a slice of some agricultural landscape pulled from a film trope. And I’d be damned if I denied that driving a virtual tractor around gravel roads to pick up a load of wheat isn’t the coziest way to lose oneself in a few hours of meaningless order-creating video gaming. The 2025 version is probably my fourth or fifth official stab (not counting the mobile versions on my phone) at digging into this game, and really only the second one that stuck. The game is of such complexity that it is easy to get lost and eventually bored in the first layer—driving a tractor until you run out of things to tractor on—and just miss all the nuance offered at deeper levels. A thousand other reviews have already talked about the graphics and the mod base and the mechanics of the engine, so I will simply say that what is often overlooked—and probably what drives some suburban computer nerd to play games like this—is a kind of latent urgency in the genes of humanity that impels us to grow things, harvest food, and tame the land: it is like a survival instinct, almost, fulfilled by the simulator pretending to do work that is the foundation of human societies. Plus, who doesn’t like to drive a green tractor through the countryside?

    streaming: andor, season two

    There has been a meme floating around online that Andor has ruined Star Wars because it was just that good. And, frankly…I almost agree. The jibe goes something like this: watch Andor, then go back and watch the very first Star Wars film again, A New Hope. At the end when Luke Skywalker and Han Solo are getting kudos before the end credits roll, put yourself in the shoes of just one of those guys standing in the crowd some of whom were (now, according to canon) probably friends and at least coworkers with the characters of the new mini series. They had fought together, suffered together, built a rebellion through personal sacrifice for years…  and then one day some farm kid and a space trucker show up, luck out in a single battle and they get a parade, medals and literally all the glory. Oh, Luke, wipe that shit eating grin off your face. Don’t you understand the game you just stumbled into? Didn’t you watch Andor on Disney+ for fs sake? All joking aside, what makes this show so good and what I think a lot of people who like this series so much (but maybe aren’t fully able to articulate about it) see in it’s story is simple: real stakes. The whole point of the story arc that leads from the first scenes of Andor to the end of the Rogue One movie is that literally none of these people make it. The whole story is based on what is almost a throwaway line from that famous opening crawl of the original movie, that some rebel spies stole the plans for the death star, the plans that become the key the story in that same first film.  Some clever person said, hey, let’s tell that story because those guys did the real hero work and probably lost their lives to do it: stakes. Andor ignores the mysticism of the force and assumes that the regular suite of bad guys are busy somewhere else doing their bad guy shit and that the real fight is happening out of sight, in dark corners and that people who have been drawn into it because they are people who make good choices while still doing things objectively less good, are giving up everything to help everyone else for change they will never live to see: stakes. There can’t be a season three because what happens next is all the movies you love already and all these characters did that for the galaxy and the plot: stakes. Weight, purpose, and stakes. I haven’t had much good to say about Star Wars for a while, but if you are any kind of fan at all you need to watch Andor. 

  • book reviews: from a heat wave

    There is never a bad excuse to read, but hunkered in the cool basement to avoid the hot weather nursing a cold Coke and speed running some fanciful fiction is better than many. 

    I won’t tell you that there is either rhyme or reason to my recent picks besides that I’m on a bit of a first in, first out ebooks from the digital discount bin on the Kobo site or whatever pops up on my library holds list first. For example, I assume the original Jurassic Park book was on sale for a buck ninety nine a couple weeks ago because there is a new (eighth!?) movie in the franchise due in theatres imminently. The same reason that I bought a new Jurassic World game on Steam for less than a cup of coffee this past weekend. I’m just riding the shockwave of the cultural vibe, it seems. And I’m okay with that, too.

    These last couple weeks I’ve read:

    Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton

    I’d be lying if I said my first read of this book—way back in the early nineties—did not influence my choice of post-secondary education. I remember that our high school librarian who knew that our little group of nerd kids were ravenous readers showed up at the side of the table where we were playing cards one lunch and held out a copy of the book with its stark white and black dinosaur bones cover to the group and asked who wanted to be the first to read it. I accepted. The novel and subsequent movie sparked a kind of renaissance in the popularization of genetic engineering akin to a 90s version of the AI goldrush of 2025: everyone wanted a piece and every piece of media—magazines, television, and more—were telling kids that biology was the career of the future. A year or so later, having devoured the novel and the concept, I was enrolled in a science degree program and the rest is a sad trombone of personal history. I can’t recall having read the book since high school, but Jurassic Park is one of those things like Star Wars—there’s been so many sequels and video games and theme park rides transect my life that, first, it was hard to recall if the novel had been one of those and, second, the source material was almost underwhelming with respect to both the official and head canon that has emerged and swirled through the decades in between. The novel is a romp. And by far lighter and less dense than I remembered, like a Grisham novel with science-ish concepts. And that’s fine. Though reflecting on the direction this book sent my life spinning felt a bit like I’d been chased along the way by a Tyrannosaurus Rex to only find out later it was little more than film prop.

    Vacationland by John Hodgman

    Over a decade ago we went on a vacation cruise in the Caribbean. The Kid was young. We were young, too, but kind of in that middle demographic of not young enough to be cool but not old enough to be completely out of touch. I had been listening to a podcast by John Hodgman (about a week before we left for Florida departure) in which he was talking about suspiciously similar cruise he was about to embark as well. Sherlock I am not, but I nonetheless figured out that the cruise itinerary on which we were coincidentally booked was simultaneously hosting the JoCo Cruise, a fan convention at sea for which at least half or more of the passengers were attending. We were not attending. We were like vacationers who show up for a quiet vacation in middle of comiccon. We spent our weekend spotting C-list celebrities from our deck chairs and watching convention-goers enjoying a completely different week than the few hundred rest of us were having on a much more typical vacation. Yet, (tho I knew he was aboard) I had not spotted Mr. Hodgman. Was he actually on this boat? Was he hiding from Wil Wheaton? Had he tumbled overboard, martini in hand, and been lost at sea? The second-last night of the cruise the convention was hosting a big party on the Lido deck but, as they were setting up, us normies were still allowed up there and so the fam and I went for a soak in the hot tub before we got evicted to the buffet. It was then, sitting there in a whirlpool in my swim trunks, drinking a cocktail when I happened to look up. There standing on the deck at parade rest in bare feet and a tuxedo was the guy himself. Just standing there. Sound-checking or vibing or just being him weird self. Core memory. My Kid, aged six, did not care at all. But if you enjoy rambling anecdotal vacation stories like this, stories that touch on odd confluences of priviledge and ecclectic knowledge, Mr. Hodgman’s book may be right up your alley.

    I’m Starting to Worry About this Black Box of Doom by Jason Pargin

    My familiarity with the writings of Mr Pargin extends back to a fondness for the various essays and comedic observations he infrequently published pre-pandemic, and that twist through my complex relationship with the publication Cracked.  When a new article or guest podcast appearance bylined with his name on it I could always tell I would need to pay slighty more rigorous attention to the plot and his wry, pulse-on-the-zeitgeist observations which so parelleled a lot of familiar vibes I couldn’t always articulate on my own. There is, of course, always a danger in looking to a single source of understanding of anything, particularly in this vastly connected reality we share, but I will admit I felt a kind of abstract, quasi-celebrity kinship to this guy with whom I shared a kind of parallel upbringing and creative motiviation. That said, his resulted in a more successful (rightfully earned) outcome, and all of this background is relevant to the tone and substance of this latest of his novels, a standalone adventure-ish story that could easily be subtitled ”Or, why people on the internet are all nuts, you shouldn’t trust a word you read, and first thing’s first: take a deep breath and calm the fuck down!” Pargin has an acute sense of the moment in which we all live, and I suspect this is largely because he has spent enough mental processing cycles pondering the outrage engines and content factories to be a successful participant in the same if for no other or better reason than to promote his writing. That can’t help but leave a few scars on the soul of any author that surface in clever or disturbing ways through a thrillride of a novel that was hard to put down once I started reading.

  • book reviews: no rules

    Barely twenty four hours after I finished reading Dust (which I reviewed in a post now barely a day old) I finished yet another thick tome of a novel which I had been reading concurrently: the second book of the Hyperion Cantos.

    I don’t know exactly how thick. Digital books be bits.

    There are no rules about all this reading books and writing reviews, are there? If there are, I’m willfully ignoring them, going to read and post whatever I want. I mean, hell, I’m usually reading five or six books at any given time, random opportunity, and always depending on my mood. Sometimes I’m vibing for some soft nature comedy while other days I’m grooving on a juicy apocalyptic allegory.

    Similarly, there’s no rules that can’t say since I’m now apparently starting with a relatively clean slate with whatever novel I pick up later today, I can’t also clean off the ole review slate to go along with it. Thus, to round out the usual trio of reviews, I dug out a bonus pair of books that I had polished off and reviewed earlier in the year, pre this-blog-revival to add to the my list.

    The Taking by Dean Koontz

    If I asked an AI to write a paranormal thriller wrapped around a religious allegory and puffed up with so much flowery language that a poet would hold their hands up for a reprieve, there is a good chance the AI would spit out something very close to this book. I was feeling like I should do a survey. I have been writing a lot of paranormal science fiction lately, and like anyone who dabbles in anything it only makes sense to dip one’s toe into the pool of publicly available material that already exists in a category.  In researching the category of paranormal science fiction, I came up with Dean Koontz, so went to the used bookstore to hunt down a book or two. The story was something of a chaotic fever dream. The short chapters jumped from idea to idea, barely lingering on anything long enough to track the impact. Chekhov left a dozen guns at the scene and nary a one was fired. And the self-importance of humanity in the vastness of the universe that came gurgling out of these pages could only have been written by someone who was—wait for it—writing a science fiction take on the biblical flood. Zoinks! I should have seen that coming. Gah! I’m sure some people like this schlock but it wasn’t my jam.

    1Q84 by Haruki Murakami

    It had been a long time since I read 1Q84. And strictly speaking, I listened to it as a very excellent audiobook shortly after it came out fifteen years ago. I was a different person then, half my adulthood ago. I didn’t remember it. I mean, I thought I did. I thought I had an impression of the story, but I had convoluted bits of it in my mind and confused it with other things I must have read since or before or whenever. Murakami drops hints to his methodology in the story, and the surreality of the plot seems to sweep by and if you aren’t paying attention maybe you miss these things. I wrote a one pointthat this book seems like a descriptive stew pot with morsels of plot mixed in. It is, after all, as much a sensory experience reading this tome of an 1155 page novel as anything else. The author has one of his characters spend months reading slowly through Proust and reflecting on that experience, and I think that this book might be a kind of modern, surrealist response to Proust in some ways. (In fact, I reserved a copy of Proust from the library to poke my nose into that to see if I get the same vibe from weird translated French literature as I do from weird translated Japanese literature.) I don’t want to spoil the book by degorging the plot here though. It is a meditative slog through a closely parallel world from which the protagonists are seeking parallel escapes, each other, and understanding. And in all that, all those 1155 pages almost nothing happens and yet it is filled with life and action and heavy beats of human footsteps through time and reality. It’s worth your time to read this.

    Fall of Hyperion by Dan Simmons

    The sequel-slash-second book of the Hyperion Cantos takes off mere minutes after the first book ends, but is marked by a stylistic shift that would almost make them feel like completely different series if not for the rich characters we have been following. Where the opening novel is a book of “tales” and backstory as the key players make their way like set pieces to the larger game, this one is a more traditionally linear story jumping from and around the various perspectives of the original characters and a small cast of others as a complex galactic-scale mystery unfolds. Hyperion is a kind of cautionary tale about the yoke of technology around the neck of humanity, and the slow realization that the conveniences and advancements that have been offered by technological tools can often be mistaken for progress. Simmons, as much as he is an author of hard technological science fiction, might just have been waving a warning flag to a society on the cusp of an information age that was just arriving as these books were published. The highly advanced data networks and frightening artificial intelligences that are key players in the story have very clear and obvious analogs to our modern age, and in the context of a world shifting and changing under the influence of unrestrained social media and the exponential growth of systems that increasingly do our thinking and creative work for us is a message that Simmons was probably decades ahead of his time in offering.  I assume countless other science fiction authors have trod a similar path to shout an identical message into the void, and sadly it seems as though very few of us are listening.

  • book reviews: fathers day

    Coinicentally perhaps, all three of the last trio of otherwise-disconnected books I recently read had a thread of fatherhood-related importance running through them. 

    It was Father’s Day yesterday, and my last as the dad of a kid (because The Kid will be An Adult in a couple months) so while I’ll be a dad for the rest of my life my role is changing a little bit this year, and I’m not sure what that means yet. The fathers in each of these books were important narrative elements but each in a very different way, one a paragon, one a lunatic counter-example,  one a steady hand in a storm.

    Hyperion by Dan Simmons

    I have listened multiple times to the audio version of the entire Hyperion Cantos, a four book hard science fiction series set roughly six hundred years in the future in a society of humanity resettled onto hundreds of worlds interconnected by technologies, both alien and AI, that they don’t truly understand. This first book is a kind of Canterbury Tales story, a collection of backstory narratives told by a collection of pilgrims—one the aforementioned father travelling to complete his daughter’s journey—travelling towards certain doom towards the mysterious shrine of a threat that has defined each of their lives yet which is understood by none of them. The Shrike is a kind of technological demon of unknown origin, built by aliens or sent back from the future, with control over time and space and a merciless agenda the pilgrims can only speculate upon. I decided to read the text version of all four books after I obtained a complete ebook collection, and even though I’ve heard all four novels more than once I find I am reading more details on this pass though. The author incorporates as both a theme and a character throughout the novels a kind of embodied homage to poet John Keats who died tragically of tuberculosis in the early 1800s at the age of 25, and while visiting the Spanish Steps in Rome in 2023 I happened to see the commemotation of this marked upon his final home, if nothing else grounding this now-comfort read for me and urging repeated readings of this wonderful collection.

    The Mosquito Coast by Paul Theroux

    If you have seen the 1986 film adaptation of this book which stars Harrison Ford as a misunderstood inventor driven mad by his pursuit of a Swiss Familiy Robinson-like escape from america to the jungles of Honduras, you’ve been misled about the tone of this novel. The novel is decidedly darker, and whomever turned this into a PG-13 romping adventure into the wilds did the source material a deep disservice. The novel’s protagonist Allie Fox is witnessed through the eyes of his fourteen year old son-made-narrator who details with gaslit devotion the madness of his father as he rages against the world as he flees with narcissitic paranoia further and further off grid to escape the perception of modern society as a prison. In a modern parlance we would recongnize these sorts of men who rule their families with thinly disguised emotional abuse as fountains of toxic masculinity, ripe for the propagandas of the right wing sovereignty cults or the red pilled movements. Seen from the eyes of his son, the collapse of this man into destructive madness is simultaneously pitiable and fearsome even knowing what such men have done to our societies over the last couple decades when they don’t take flight from their own shadows. This book shook me.

    Dust by Hugh Howey

    I did it. I sunk my teeth into the final book of the Silo trilogy and read the conclusion to this dystopic tale of society’s collapse at the hands of madness and righteousness. Even more than the previous two volumes Howey seems to lean into the misguided evils of people who blindly believe in things: their own infallibility, patriotic furvor, religious ideologies, among other subtler concepts. All of this emerges from the narrative web that Howey wove with the rich collection of characters and stories that only just started to interconnect even as the second book concluded. In the third and final installment the disparate storytelling becomes an obvious whole as the plot bounces between the characters and their chances of fortune that have led them on a plot-based collision course with each other and the ultimate conclusion of the story. The author isn’t shy about raising the stakes with any and every chapter, beloved characters meeting fatal fates with a regularity that would make Game of Thrones readers blush, but the harsh reality at the end of the world is that between desperation and ignorance is the rawness of survival against the odds. I wonder how the mini-series that prompted me to dig deeper into the orginal novels will handle it all.

  • media: andor, season one

    Oh, just what the internet ordered: some more commentary on Star Wars.

    To be honest, my relationship with this franchise is certifiably bipolar. Up, down, deep, shallow, love it, hate it, roll my eyes at the wonderful blur of a galaxy far, far away. I mean, if there was some kind of independent adjudication of fan-ness in the Star Wars media landscape I wouldn’t be anywhere near the top, but I’d probably have a ranking.

    I am told in a tale perhaps apocryphal, that I attended a screening of the original in 1977 at a drive in movie theatre, asleep as an infant in the back of the car.

    I have watched the films, read the books, played the games, absorbed the lore, studied the history, run the themed race, ridden the rides, toured the studio, bought the merch, and drank the star wars kool-aid in big gulps.

    But ever since Disney bought the whole thing… I get it. You’ve heard this story before. Everyone complains: Disney borked it, right? Yeah… no… maybe… kinda… sorta… what does that even mean?

    I remember walking through the queue to Star Tours in Disneyland last summer and feeling this sense of vague disconcert. There was this sense that as fun as the ride was, as immersive as the queue was built, that there was a vibe that whoever had built this thing, well, they just didn’t get it.

    Here’s my point and I’ll move onto the review: you’re in the queue to Star Tours, boarding a fictional vacation trip, and one of the destinations advertised is Tatooine. This is the case because you’re supposed to be excited about visiting something from the universe of Star Wars, but if you were in the world of Star Wars, as a character with agency and thought and free will, you would avoid Tatooine at all costs. It is a truck stop in a backwater in the middle of lawless nowhere. You would never in a million years book a vacation there. That’s the whole point. It’s like seeing an advertisement for the industrial area behind the airport suggesting you could go visit the shitty bar by the gas station and bet on the dog fights in the back alley. Why the hell, in universe, would there be a tourist cruise headed there?

    Because. Simply. Tatooine is intellectual property and most people legitimately don’t look beyond the “gee whiz I saw that on thuh teevee…” so it sells just fine in Disneyland.

    And that vibe is where my frustration with modern Disney-owned Star Wars has tended to exist for the last few years: it’s all just intellectual property being shuffled into disconcerting new recipes that make no real sense and have no real sense of the stakes of this universe. It’s all pretty much been a low-thought, gee whiz theme park ride, particularly a lot of the new limited run series on Disney Plus.

    In other words, it took a great deal of contrary information suggesting that Andor was something that rose above this dreck, or at least aspired to lift itself out of the gee whiz-ness of the intellectual property churn factory built by Disney over the last decade to make me want to actually commit about ten hours to watch it.

    But we did.

    We finished watching the first season this past weekend… and I will suggest that if nothing else it has tried and almost certainly done a reasonably good job of building something fresh from the universe, adding to the story rather than blithely churning intellectual property and recycling the old pulp of the films. Sure, it leverages and contributes to the structure of the broader story, but it risked something bigger, created stakes, incited emotion and felt more real than the manufactured backstories that have populated my overpriced streaming subscription lately. It wasn’t perfect. There was some inconsistencies and a few tourist glances towards Star Wars Land TM. Yet, it was compelling and we wanted to keep watching, to see what happened, and you started to care about all the characters, even some of the terrible evil ones. No, not perfect, but pretty good.

    And if nothing else, it hardly ever felt like a sightseeing tourist vacation to a truck stop by the airport.