Month: August 2015

Categories
Review

The Astronaut Wives Club

Apparently I’m adding television shows to the things I review on here from time to time? What the heck, it’s still summer break, I’ve got time for it.
Anyhow, I just finished up the first season of The Astronaut Wives Club.1 The style kinda reminded me of Manhattan, with the following of a major historic event from a more personal standpoint, but Astronaut Wives captured my interest much better than Manhattan ever did. I really couldn’t say why, although it might have something to do with my slight obsession with the Cold War, rather than World War II.2
It’s a little bit hard to keep track of all the characters, at first – it starts off with the seven Mercury wives (and, to a lesser degree, their husbands) – and then adds the Gemini wives at some point. By the time Apollo rolls around, they aren’t really bothering to introduce the new set of astronauts and wives, they’re just accepting that it’s too many people.
That aside, though, the show is quite enjoyable. It’s historically accurate to a degree that I feel comfortable filing in moments of history that I learned from the show with the rest of my knowledge about the world, though I wouldn’t recommend it as a way to study for a test.3
The show is definitely predictable if you’re a history buff, but that is something that I am distinctly not, and the few specifics about the space program that I actually did remember, I managed to block out long enough that everything could be a surprise. That made a couple moments – one of which was one hell of a sucker-punch at the end of an episode – incredibly effective storytelling, and very emotionally charged at that.
Tl;dr: I enjoyed the show, and it’s worth taking the time to watch it once it pops up on Netflix.

  1. And I just now looked it up and saw that it was cancelled after one season, so apparently that should say ‘only season.’ Oh well. ↩
  2. What can I say, I’ve got a favorite historical period. ↩
  3. More because you won’t be getting tested on things like “who was cheating on who, and which wife was known for her baking prowess?” ↩
Categories
Review

War of the Fae, Book 1: The Changelings

I think this one was a ‘free on Amazon’ book that I picked up, and let me tell you, as a marketing effort, that worked. The book ends on a one-sentence plot-twist that acts as an incredibly effective cliffhanger, so props to the author for that.
As to the content, it’s a general fit in the young-adult-fantasy-adventure genre: kid runs away from home (though, admittedly, the reasoning for that is more ‘young adult’ than ‘young adult,’ a slight change that helped to hold my interest), gets involved in a weird situation, finds out magic is real, yadda yadda saves the day. There’s a bit of a ‘hunger games’ vibe to the weird situation, and the ‘magic’ bits are more hinted-at than outright-confirmed for a while.1
The book gets bonus points for a female protagonist, and since I’m now staring at the end-of-book about the author page and just now finding out that the author is a female2 it makes sense how well she was able to portray the female mind. As a dude, I am eternally doomed to be unable to understand the inner workings of the other gender, and I’ve come to terms with that.
On the other hand, it gets docked a few points for two issues: first, the occasional Mary Sue moments with the protagonist – there are three main male supporting characters, and between the three of them at least two are very clearly in love with her.3 More points were docked for the fact that the closest the book has to LGBTQ representation is comparing the motions of a vampire, actively killing someone, to “a gay teacher [the protagonist] had in tenth grade.” Look, I get that every Disney villain ever has been a hodgepodge of stereotypically-gay traits,4 but I’m still going to be disappointed when anyone else gives in to the trope.
Other than that, the only issue I had was a single recurring spelling error,5 and overall I enjoyed the book. It’s easily worth what I paid for it, and the fact that that was ‘nothing’ is how I’m going to justify buying the next book in the series.

  1. Although, being a total mythology-and-legends nerd I picked up on it earlier than the average reader could really be expected to. I have a mental filter for these sorts of things, so it doesn’t interfere with my enjoyment of a book too much. ↩
  2. I think the ‘read every book on my Kindle’ thing I’m doing is going by author-alphabetical order, but I’m not actually looking at the names, so… ↩
  3. I’m not docking many points for that, though, because she’s the only girl in the group for most of the story, and I have a low opinion of the average man. ↩
  4. Hades, anyone? ↩
  5. ‘Break’: to separate. ‘Brake’: to stop. I don’t think the word ‘break’ is used anywhere in the book, but ‘brake’ shows up multiple times, and it’s spelled wrong each time. C’mon. ↩
Categories
Review

The Poison Eaters and Other Stories

Sometimes I like anthologies, and other times I don’t. My theory is that it depends on whether or not one story catches my attention more than the others – if there’s just the one, I want an entire book of that and the inclusion of the rest just strikes me as a sad second.
This was that other case, where all of them catch my attention almost equally, and I enjoy myself the whole way through.
There were a few short stories that I liked more than the others, but again, nothing that stood out too much.
A Reversal of Fortune was surprisingly hopeful, for the kind of tale it was.
The Night Market was a lot sweeter than I was expecting, and I’d read more of this sort of thing.
I took a bit of issue with The Dog King, but I think that was mostly because it reminded me of Teen Wolf for no good reason.
In Vodka Veritas was a wonderful little story, and I think I’d read a sequel, though I get the feeling the sequel wouldn’t be quite as happy as the work itself. An impressive amount of ‘coming of age’ story crammed into a small amount of space.
The Coat of Stars was my favorite of the anthology, though not easily. It fit nicely in with my knowledge of the fair folk, and the sort of sad-turned-happy story that catches nicely in the mind. I wound up wanting to write, not my own continuation of the story, but my own version of it- a different cast of characters, but a similar situation. It was lovely.
The Land of Heart’s Desire was my second favorite, though by a thin margin. I actually put down the book while I was reading this one and texted my friend1 that he needed to add the anthology to his list of books to read. It was sad and sweet, and it felt like there was a lot of backstory that I’m missing out on, to the point that when I’ve got internet again I’m going to look up Holly Black and see if she’s written more in that world.

And now? On to the next book. I’m working my way through the list, collecting a lot of sun while I read this weekend. I must say, a stack of books and a sunny beach is a great way to wrap up summer vacation- I highly recommend it.

  1. More laborious than it sounds, because as I’m writing this I’ve got cell service in the ‘I had to stand on top of a car to make a phone call’ range. ↩
Categories
Review

Eastern Standard Tribe

I finished reading Cory Doctorow’s Eastern Standard Tribe during my weekend camping trip – out in the desert, the river is great for swimming in once it warms up, but it takes until pretty deep into the day for it to be anything other than ‘borderline arctic’ temperatures, so I had plenty of time to read.
Anyhow, Eastern Standard Tribe. My favorite thing about Doctorow’s writing is how clearly he understands modern technology – there’s some nods to IRC in the book, and a lot of what I know about common cryptography I learned from his books.
EST has two plotlines going on at once, though both follow the same character, just at different times in his life. They’re separated by a few months, and the one in the ‘past’ runs faster than the ‘current’ one, catching up to where the one started by the end of the book.
I’m pretty happy with the plot of the book, actually – I still find the concept of the Tribes weird, but it got explained in a way that makes a lot of sense to me, so at least it didn’t stay confusing the whole time. The inclusion of all the user experience stuff was really interesting, and I quite enjoyed the MassPike music thing that wound up being a significant chunk of the plot.
It’s warming up enough that I’m going to get ready to head down to the water, so I’ll finish this up with yet another call to action: go read something Doctorow wrote. I don’t care if it’s Eastern Standard Tribe or not, but he’s a wonderful author, and everything he’s written is available for free on his website, craphound.com

Categories
Playlist

Playlist of the Month: December 2014

Prepare yourselves for some Christmas music, folks, I’m writing up one of my older playlists.1 Without further ado, December 2014:
The Fault In Our Stars (MMXIV) – Troye Sivan
A Sky Full of Stars – Coldplay
Big Jet Plane – Angus & Julia Stone
Fast Car – Tracy Chapman
Your Hand In Mine – Explosions In The Sky
Running Up That Hill – Track & Field
Ignition – Casa Murilo
Ritual – Tunturia
Mary, Did You Know?2 – Pentatonix
Let It Go – Pentatonix
Final Masquerade – LINKIN PARK
Giving Up – HAERTS3
Safe & Sound (feat. The Civil Wars) – Taylor Swift4
Atlas – Coldplay
I Don’t Want To Change You – Damien Rice
Long Long Way – Damien Rice
The One Moment – OK Go
It Takes A Lot To Know A Man – Damien Rice
I’m Not Through – OK Go
Congratulations – Blue October/Imogen Heap
Look After You – The Fray
Abraham’s Daughter – Arcade Fire
Set The Fire To The Third Bar – Snow Patrol
Animal – XOV
Father, Sister – Blueneck
Scream My Name – Tove Lo
Kingdom (feat. Simon Le Bon) – Charli XCX
The Leap – Tinashé
Ladder Song – Lorde
Shut Up and Dance – WALK THE MOON
Man Of Lies – Blueneck
Oceans (Live At E-Werk, Cologne) – Coldplay
The Box – Damien Rice
Lost Souls – Raury
Flicker (Kanye West Rework) – Lorde
Let It Go – Saint Saviour
King Nine – Blueneck
Sirens – Blueneck5
Lesser Oceans – Fences
Yellow Flicker Beat – Lorde
All My Love (feat. Ariana Grande) – Major Lazer
Dead Air – CHVRCHES
O (Live At Royce Hall, Los Angeles) – Coldplay
Be the One – HAERTS
White Winter Hymnal – Pentatonix
Silent Night – Pentatonix6
Re-Remurdered (Blanck Mass Remix) – Mogwai
First Began – Beta Radio
Pyres of Varanasi – THIRTY SECONDS TO MARS
Hurricane – 30 Seconds to Mars7
Night of the Hunter – 30 Seconds to Mars
Vox Populi – 30 Seconds to Mars
Lake Song – The Decemberists8
God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen – Linfield College Concert Choir
Running Off The Gods9 – Fences
Adrift – Tarwater
Trusty And True – Damien Rice
Strong Hand – CHVRCHES
Unfair – The Neighbourhood
Under the Tide [Single Version] – CHVRCHES
Torn Apart, Pt II (Bastille Vs. Grades Vs. Lizzo)(Crossfaded Version) – Bastille
Silver – The Neighbourhood
Recover [KDA Remix] – CHVRCHES10
Cavalry Captain – The Decemberists
Another’s Arms (Live At the Beacon Theatre, New York) – Coldplay
Mutatis – Blueneck
Sunburns – Fences
The Days – Avicii
The Singer Addresses His Audience11 – The Decemberists
The Driver (Crossfaded Version) – Bastille
I Am Mine – Beta Radio
Teenage Exorcists12 – Mogwai
Bad_News (Bastille Vs. Mnek) (Crossfaded Version) – Bastille
Counting Out – Blueneck
The Lake – Fences
True Love (Live At the Enmore Theatre, Sydney) – Coldplay
The Lord is Out of Control (Nils Frahm Remix) – Mogwai
Axe To Grind (Bastille Vs. Tyde Vs. Rationale) (Crossfaded Version) – Bastille
Carolina Low – The Decemberists
Pretty Tough – Little Boots
Coconut Signal – Tarwater
Fall Into Your Arms (Bastille Vs. The Gemma Sharples Quartet) (Crossfaded Version) – Bastille
The Nights – Avicii
HMP Shaun William Ryder – Mogwai
Better Not Wake the Baby – The Decemberists
No Medicine For Regret (Pye Corner Audio Mix) – Mogwai
Baby, It’s Cold Outside – Linfield College Concert Choir
My Mountain Is Cold – Fences
What Child is This? – Linfield College Concert Choir
Miracles – Coldplay
Driving Home for Christmas – Blueneck13
Eric Colson – Totorro
White Christmas – Blueneck
2013 – Daniel Kim14
Plastic Covered Furniture – Have Mercy
Broken Fingers – Blueneck

And we’re done! Enjoy this oddly-depressing Christmas playlist!
I am bad at holidays.

  1. It’s an effort to build up a backlog of posts so that when I go on vacation somewhere without internet (presumably happening as you’re reading this post) this blog’ll still be updating. ↩
  2. One of my favorite Christmas songs, and one of my default songs for when I want something to sing. Throughout the year. I annoy my coworkers a lot. ↩
  3. Two ALL CAPS groups in a row! I like the all-lowercase crew from the internet better – facebook, twitter, tumblr, etc. ↩
  4. This song is my only concession to T-Swift’s unending fame. ↩
  5. Y’know, I distinctly remember playing some Blueneck on Family Christmas Day – held within a week of the actual Christmas Day – and being amused by the contrast between the downright dystopian sound of the music and the cheer going on around me. ↩
  6. All of the Pentatonix christmas music is incredible. ↩
  7. I choose to believe that the ’30 Seconds to Mars/THIRTY SECONDS TO MARS’ difference is just the least effective rebranding ever. ↩
  8. Don’t mind me, I’m just giggling about listening to The Decemberists in December. ↩
  9. I keep reading this as ‘running of the gods’ and imagining Zeus running around in Spain, occasionally turning into a bull just to confuse people. ↩
  10. For once I didn’t have to undo the autocorrect to CHURCHES ↩
  11. This song is delightfully meta. ↩
  12. … so, the Scooby-Doo gang? ↩
  13. This album makes for the most delightfully dejected-sounding Christmas music ever and I love it. ↩
  14. Pop Danthologies are wonderful, and all free on YouTube. ↩
Categories
Review

Mad Tinker's Daughter

I’m still going strong on the book-binge project, guys. It’s an excuse to sit around doing nothing but reading, how could I resist?1
Anyhow, today’s book was Mad Tinker’s Daughter, which I think was also one of those indie-book-bundle pickups.
Long story short, I loved it. The core concept is a little bit odd at first, but pretty easy to follow once you get into it: the twinborn. The story takes place across two worlds, and there are the occasional people who’re ‘twinborn’- born in both worlds, sharing the same appearance2 and a common mind. Some can occupy both bodies at once, others switch back and forth, running one body while the other sleeps.
The main character is the titular Mad Tinker’s Daughter, and a fierce tinker in her own right, inventing a magic-powered coilgun that she uses, within the first few pages, to crash something equivalent to a subway train. Full of police officers.
So, yes, she is a criminal, but in a system that’s hardly fair: the police officers are all a different species, the ruling caste of that world. Humankind occupy the same space that the african-american occupied prior to the Civil War: occasionally a freeman, but usually someone’s property.
It’s a mad romp through two different worlds, all of which are full of a lovely steampunk-adjacent aesthetic and enough of those lovely hints of ancient magic to keep me happy throughout. Sure, it’s the first book in the second trilogy set in these paired worlds, but I had fun trying to figure out what exactly was going on the whole time.
Anyhow, I’d recommend the book to anyone who’s got some spare time for reading. It definitely ends on a higher note than the last book I reviewed, though that’s all I’ll say for fear of giving away too many spoilers.
Go, read, enjoy! Literacy is never a bad thing, folks.

  1. I hope y’all don’t mind that my taste in books is almost entirely the action-adventure-fantasy-scifi blok; if you’re looking for more of the literature style, check out my friend’s blog. ↩
  2. And, presumably, parents. ↩
Categories
Review

The Brotherhood of Delinquents

I’m currently engaged in a project of binge-reading: it started when I found my Kindle1 in one of the innumerable boxes and started scrolling through it trying to pick a book to read. I realized that, much like my Steam library,2 it’s full of stuff that I’ve never even opened.
So I went through it, put every unread book in a new to-do list,3 and got down to reading.
Sunday morning, I finished reading The Brotherhood of Delinquents by Jefferson Smith. To be honest, I have no idea how this book wound up on my Kindle – according to the app on my phone, it’s a Document rather than a Book, so I suppose it was from an Indie Book Bundle kind of thing? I’m at a loss.
Anyhow, I enjoyed the book quite a lot. It’s the sort of book I used to read a lot as a kid – the protagonist is quite young, an apprentice, and it’s got the whole “uncovering something amazing” vibe that I adore.
But that wasn’t my favorite part of the book. No, that honor went easily to the amount of world-building that clearly went into this book. From the fantasy-standard slightly-off-norm names for things (‘Reeve’ as a sort of governor/elected-military-leader position, for example) to the amount of historical references present,4 an impressive amount of thought went into the background of the book.
There’s a specific part of world-building that the book pulled off masterfully, though: the ‘ancient magics/construction’ archetype. The entire book takes place in a single town, a massive Keep built to an exacting standard to defend a kingdom that wasn’t often described. It’s a leftover of an ancient war, one that was ended with colossal magic to the tune of “the wastelands start within sight of the Keep walls, and continue for god-alone-knows-how-far.” Clearly, things have just gone downhill since the days of yore, because there’s no mention of anyone creating new magic, and there are frequent descriptions of people moving away from the Keep, and the decrepit war-machines still sitting around.
To be honest, I can’t quite pin down why I thought this so resolutely throughout the book, but I was stuck on one concept: this whole thing is in the future. I have no idea if that’s what the author was going for, but every bit of magic present struck me as something that could be easily pulled off with sufficiently-advanced technology. Every time some magic was used, I started picking apart how I’d do it in a science-fiction environment, and it all made sense. The ancient mage was a technological wizard, my mind decided.
And that sort of thing makes me love a book. In the fifth5 Septimus Heap book, there’s a vague reference to some ‘ancient drawings’ that portray… the Apollo missions. It’s a moment where you go “oh, holy crap, that all makes sense,” and I just adore those moments. If ever I write some fantasy, you can just go ahead and assume it’s set in a distant future where someone got good enough with technology that they said “screw it” and turned the control interfaces into a system of magic.

Anyhow, I’m going off-course. I’m too easily distracted to be a book reviewer.
Final say: I enjoyed the book, and I’m hoping there’s a sequel out there.6 Go read it.

  1. It’d been missing for a while. Moving is fun! ↩
  2. Currently featuring in the area of 100 games that I’ve never played ↩
  3. Quick shoutout to Things, the task-management app I prefer on both my MacBook and iPhone. ↩
  4. I can’t tell if I enjoyed or was annoyed by the amount of references to a single mythical hero. Like, it was nice that it kept going back to a single name, it created a bit of recognition, but it got a little bit overplayed. Though, that could be my raised-in-the-TV-age sensibilities – the myths of my childhood are far more numerous than any medieval society would’ve had access to. ↩
  5. I think, it could be earlier or later in the series, I’ve got no idea. ↩
  6. We still don’t have internet at the new house, so I’m sitting here writing this in Ulysses, and I’ll upload it next time I’ve got WiFi. Hopefully I’ll remember to check for a sequel when I do that, but I definitely won’t remember to go back and update this post. ↩
Categories
Playlist

Playlist of the Month: July 2015

Alright, first time actually doing one of these when it’s timely, rather than catching up.
Airplanes And Airwaves – Aftermath
Big Jet Plane – Angus & Julia Stone
Cough Syrup – Young the Giant
Dream – Imagine Dragons
Hold My Hand – The Fray
Piss Crowns Are Trebled – Godspeed You! Black Emperor
Running Up That Hill – Track & Field
Sacrifice – Zella Day
Should Have Known Better – Sufjan Stevens
A Sky Full of Stars – Coldplay
Smoke And Mirrors – Imagine Dragons
All of You – Hinkstep
The Weight of Living – Logan Mays
England Skies – Shake Shake Go
Lanterns – Howie Day
Like a River – Will Young
All I Want – Kodaline
Everything’s A Ceiling – Death Cab for Cutie
A Heartbreak (Active Child Remix) – Angus & Julia Stone
St Jude – Florence + The Machine
Out of Mind – Magic Man
One Day – Kodaline
Fade – Logan Mays
Paris – Magic Man
Love Like This – Kodaline
The Soul Serene – Villagers
All Comes Down – Kodaline
Work for Me – Pfarmers
Chicagoland – Magic Man
Make Peace – Howie Day
Transatlanticism – Death Cab for Cutie
Soul Meets Body – Death Cab for Cutie
Little Wanderer – Death Cab for Cutie
It All Starts Here – Magic Man
Kingdom Hearts – Dearly Beloved1 – Vitamin String Quartet
Which Witch (Demo)2 – Florence + The Machine
High Hopes – Kodaline
Vetus Memoria – God Is An Astronaut
Make Up Your Mind – Florence + The Machine
no – Gordon’s Tsunami Week
The Game – Priest
Lets Meet In Our Dreams Tonight – The Best Pessimist
Close to Heaven – Breaking Benjamin
Pig Powder3 – God Is An Astronaut
The Fault In Our Stars (MMXIV) – Troye Sivan
Happy Little Pill – Troye Sivan
Fun – Troye Sivan
Slow Life – Of Monsters and Men4
Honey – Magic Man
What Kind Of Man – Florence + The Machine
Wolves Without Teeth5 – Of Monsters and Men
Black Water6 – Of Monsters and Men
Dark – Breaking Benjamin
Finem Solis – God Is An Astronaut
Third Eye – Florence + The Machine
particular7 – Gordon’s Tsunami Week
Dawn – Breaking Benjamin
Catherine – Magic Man
Thousand Eyes8 – Of Monsters and Men
Backyard – Of Monsters and Men
Talk – Kodaline
Texas – Magic Man
Pray – Kodaline
After The Fall – Kodaline
Apollo – Magic Man
Obscura Somnia9 – God Is An Astronaut
Thunderhearts – Cold War Kids
I Don’t Want To Change You – Damien Rice
The Lord is Out of Control (Nils Frahm Remix) – Mogwai
Shadow and a Dancer – The Fray
Same As You – The Fray

There we go folks, July all done. I’ve already started on my August list, don’t even worry.
Big winners this month – Florence + The Machine, Of Monsters and Men, Kodaline, and the genre of post-rock10 in general.
I’m hoping people enjoy some of the music off of these – ideally, someone finds some song that they really love by reading one of these lists, that’s basically my goal here.

  1. I just love the violin part in this, it’s so… sweet, I suppose? I don’t even know what exactly about it I love, it’s just wonderful. ↩
  2. The line “who’s a heretic now?” made me love this song. ↩
  3. One of two songs on this album with a name in English, and it’s… this. Post-Rock, man. ↩
  4. Of Monsters and Men is one of those bands that I discovered because one of my choir friends sang a song by them and I loved it. There’s at least two other bands like that on this list that I can think of – Coldplay and Kodaline. Oh, three: Death Cab for Cutie. ↩
  5. One of my top two songs off the new album. ↩
  6. There’s two versions of this song in the list and Shuffle keeps playing them back-to-back, but I don’t really notice and just think the song is, like, ten minutes long. ↩
  7. There was probably something clever with the order of songs and their one-word names, but iTunes just kinda threw the album in there in whatever order, so I didn’t get the joke. Welp. ↩
  8. My other ‘top 2’ song off the album. ↩
  9. My Latin (and my literary knowledge) isn’t quite good enough for me to say for sure that it’s ironic that this song is in my ‘sleep’ mix, but I think it might be. ↩
  10. I flip back and forth between ‘post-rock’ and ‘post rock’ in how I prefer this spelled, and every time I switch I go into my iTunes library and change every song I’ve got in the genre to my currently-preferred spelling. ↩