Same here, nothing. Played through the Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney Trilogy (Steam version). Played them when they came out on the Nintendo DS and greatly enjoyed them once again.

So, here goes!

I just finished reading Herbert West–Reanimator, which consists of 6 chapters, that where published in 1922 in the publication "Home Brew". It is the first story to mention the Miskatonic University, which plays a greater role in the Cthulu stories.

"Reanimator" follows the doings of Herbert West and the unnamed narrator. West experiments with corpses and tries to reanimate them. However, his first attempts turn out to be unsuccesful.Through restless experiemtations West discovers that the bodies need to be fresh. Even the slightest signs of decay will make any attempt to revive a body unsuccesful. It also shows that each species needs a different serum. One serum that seems to work well on animals will have no effect on humans.

Over the course of the short stories, West dives deeper and deeper into his experiments, going so far as to steal corpses from a graveyard, and maybe even killing people himself (it's only hinted at by the narrator).

In the end, West is descended upon by his own creation and torn to pieces.

Lovecraft stated that he was unhappy with his work and only wrote it because he was paid $5 for each installment. On Wikipedia it says: "Lovecraft scholar S. T. Joshi claims that "Herbert West–Reanimator" is "universally acknowledged as Lovecraft's poorest work"."

There's also a movie series based on the stories. "Re-Animator", "Bride of Re-Animator" and "Beyond Re-Animator". If you are into trash movies, you might want to check them out.

Nothing trashy about the film, it's a genuinely great horror comedy. Stuart Gordon has a bunch of good Lovecraft adaptations under his belt, and Jeffrey Combs is great in everything.

Also has the advantage of not being preposterously racist like the short story. Even for the 1920s it's extreme.

Finished Stoner by John Williams. Surprisingly fun read, I burned through it in a week.

Also finished

Schoolgirl by Dazai Osamu, reads more like a diary than a short story.

Blue Bamboo by Dazai Osamu (a collection of short stores), a handful of stories from contemporary classical Japan. Lots of oldschool Nihon feels with a dash of the supernatural added in.

also finished Practical Blacksmithing, a collection compiled by M.T. Richardson. Great for learning a few things about blacksmithing, 1888AD style. Who knows, you could really use this book in the post-apocalypse world.

19. John Williams - Stoner

20. Kevin Smith - Tough Shit: Life Advice from a Fat, Lazy Slob Who Did Good

Stoner - Damn. I didn't expect this to be quite so depressing but I'm glad I went for it. Absolutely beautiful book and I'd rank it somewhere among my favourites. It's hard to articulate why when it seems so mundane and uneventful in hindsight, but the writing is fantastic and Williams has an incredible talent for blowing up small moments and is able to perfectly articulate a range of very specific, ephemeral moments. It feels massive in scale despite its microscopic focus on a tiny slice of the human experience. Absolutely flies by, too. Life's a bitch and then ya die, that's why we get high.

Tough Shit - Collection of anecdotes from across Kevin Smith's career as a filmmaker, with a few patches of self-help style philosophizing. Really loved this one, more than I expected, he's genuinely a very entertaining writer and its consistently funny. Easy recommendation if you like Kev Smith's films, or if you have any interest in the BTS of indie filmmaking. The stories toward the end are definitely less compelling than the earlier ones though.

Comics:

Paper Girls - vol. 3 + 4

Amazing Spider-Man (2018) - vol. 1

The Avengers (1963) - no. 1, 4, 59, 60, 83, 200, 213, 214, 221

Ms. Marvel (1979) - no. 1

Ms. Marvel (2015) - no. 1

Captain Marvel (2012) - no. 1 + 2

Captain Marvel (2014) - no. 1

The Death of Captain Marvel

Deadpool Kills the Marvel Universe

Overwatch - no. 1 - 4

That's somewhere around 700 pages total. I'll arbitrarily count this pile as two "books," I guess, bringing me up to 22.

The Death of Captain Marvel - (That's the original male Captain Marvel, not Carol Danvers). One of the most powerful heroes in the marvel universe, even carrying the marvel name. He's gotta have a badass death, right? Nah, instead he dies of cancer in a hospital bed. This was the first entry in the 'marvel graphic novel' line, a longer format intended for self contained and more mature stories. It's rough around the edges and a bit meandering, like it doesn't really know what to do with all the extra pages, but I thought the final few were really effective and creatively executed.

Avengers 1963 - Very much enjoying this pile of bonkers nonsense, I'm mostly looking for the weirder issues. Favorite so far is #200 which features time travelling incest rape in the form of Ms. Marvel giving birth to a time god who impregnated her with himself, after brainwashing her, then she falls in love with him as a continued effect of the brainwashing. And the other avengers are on his side when they hear the backstory, they don't see anything wrong with this relationship. Thor conjures up a portal to the timeless realm so the still-brainwashed Marv can be with her son-husband in peace. The guy casually flip flops between calling her "mother" and "lover."

Shoutout also to #60, where Janet (the Wasp) takes advantage of Hank (Ant Man)'s violent psychotic break as a chance to get married before he recovers. She also uses her wedding day to prank the fuck out of all her friends - Hank takes on the persona of Yellowjacket, a masked vigilante who claims to have murdered Ant Man. Janet is the only one who realizes it's actually Hank behind the mask, and marries him without explaining it, so to everyone else it looks like she's abruptly proposed to her fiance's murderer. Because she's a sociopath I guess. She's even annoyed that the others aren't supportive.

Deadpool Kills the Marvel Universe - Bit self explanatory. Deadpool is dead set on wiping out every marvel character, both heroes and villains. It's too short to really get the mileage it deserves but its fun for what it is.

(Possible Stoner spoilers.)

I'll be honest it didn't even cross my mind that someone could parse universal acclaim as a negative thing. Can't say I agree with this assessment though, I agree that the art you'll probably connect most deeply with will be something specific to you and not for everyone, but I don't think I've ever seen mediocrity float to the top the way you're describing.

I mean yeah fair point. I definitely felt some frustration in Stoner's lack of assertiveness, most powerfully with Edith using Grace as a weapon, and that's amplified so much more with how Edith's meddling manifests in Grace's life later on. It's not just his own life he's sacrificing to apathy.

Can't say I'm that interested conceptually either, but that's not really what it's about is it? Even in the Walker chapters where the university setting is most heavily featured I never felt like that was the focus, or that it was getting bogged down in the setting.

Still mourning this series all these years later. The best example of something being a victim of its own success I've ever seen. Kamala was absolutely fantastic as a street level rookie hero figuring it out as she goes, then the book became a surprise hit so they strapped a rocket on her and positioned her as one of the faces of Marvel. Had her working with the Avengers and palling around with all the A-listers with no build up and it killed most of what made her interesting.

Then the book got bogged down in Civil War II (an event which derailed more than one series I was enjoying at the time) and I gave up on it altogether.

I keep losing track so Imma try a big list update like some other people do.

Hey did you know you can copy/paste from old posts and the new BBS will keep formatting and links and stuff??? So easy! Too bad list making is a pain in the ass because it starts every list at 1 and won't let you choose a different number.

January

1. Welcome to the Goddamn Icecube - Blair Braverman

February

2.  Lock In - John Scalzi.

3. Head On  - John Scalzi

March

4. The Android's Dream - John Scalzi

5. Leviathan Wakes (Expanse book 1) - James S A Corey

April

6. Caliban's War (the Expanse Book 2)  - James S. A. Corey

I'm only about 69% (nice) through Abaddon's Gate and I don't foresee finishing it in a fit of speed reading this evening so I'll stand at just +1 for April. I'm already halfway to my goal. Maybe I'll try to trudge through the rest of Dune some time this year. Still have some more of the Expanse left.

Maybe I'm just a big hipster. I look at the TV shows, for example, that have the big broad appeal and tons of critical praise, like Breaking Bad or Game of Thrones, and I enjoy them well enough, but I'd much rather have something polarising like a Part 8 from Twin Peaks: The Return than anything in those.

Yeah I'd have said he should put Edith through a table too, but powerbombing women through tables is Bubba Ray's thing and gimmick infringement is a dick move.

It's not just the university stuff, I've no real interest in failing marriages or a guy being sad about his crap life either. No criticism of the material, but given the option of something mundane written exceptionally or something weird or different written okay, I'll go for the odd stuff every time. Probably goes some way to explaining why I'm turned off by universal praise, actually.

I'm still working on Dance with Dragons, it's over 1000 pages and taking way longer than I'd like to finish.

I didnt even finish one book this month! better luck next time. I made it over 100 pages into stoner though. in an incredibly normal, old timey scholar wartime story type way it actually seems extremely bleak and dark underneath the surface and almost like a comedic foreshadowing of the nihilistic debt wasteland that we would see education rise to in modern times. also the intro to the book made it sound like stoner straight up rapes his wife when they conceive their child but as I read I realized there were behavioral and situational nuances that cleared up my first impression

At 4/30/19 09:00 PM, Jackho wrote:

This has always been one of my favorites. I don't care how dumb it is, I just enjoy it.

Have you seen "Bride", though? That is pure trash. Which is why it's so awesome.

Reanimator sure has it's share of Lovecraft's racism (one black guy is described as "looking like a monkey"), but it's relatively harmless compared to other works like "The Street" or "The Temple".

It's a touch more than looking like a monkey. As in much of Lovecraft's work there's a real sense of him trying to paint him as less than human.

"He was a loathsome, gorilla-like thing, with abnormally long arms which I could not help calling fore legs, and a face that conjured up thoughts of unspeakable Congo secrets and tom-tom poundings under an eerie moon. The body must have looked even worse in life--but the world holds many ugly things."

But yes, his work is riddled with it, and there's worse out there than Reanimator.

We're maybe conflating acclaim with popularity here, because both the old and new Twin Peaks are pretty much universally acclaimed, The Return is currently the highest rated thing in the entire letterboxd database. My favourite film is The End of Evangelion so I definitely appreciate something willing to alienate an audience, but even a show as nominally polarizing as that is extremely highly rated and popular enough on any site that lists it.

Also I was never that high on Breaking Bad but I think it was more out-there than you might be giving it credit for, it was full of weird moments and some fairly big subversions like the fly episode.

I do get what you're saying here but it's not like Stoner is in the same bin as Hunger Games (fans don't @ me) or Breaking Bad alongside something like BBT, ie things whose popularity greatly outmatch their quality or originality. Stoner doesn't seem like something that should ever appeal to a major audience and the fact it broke through, even so many years later, is a testament only to its quality.

I'd go with the exceptional, with the caveat that something really exceptional is much rarer than most people's scales would show. After a point I don't think a story premise counts for much, but obviously more novel ideas are welcome when most things are going to be just ok either way.

Is it worth getting into now? Of the random marvel issues I've read that series seemed promising. Since Marvel numbering is retarded I thought that (2015) issue was the first Kamala issue, when I was really looking for the 2013 one.

Just tattoo a tally onto your forehead so everyone can see how big your biblio-brain is getting.

This is a big suck. Tom hates book lists.

I'll maintain the size of any recent phone is more than enough and you'd be used to it within a few pages. I usually turn off wifi when I'm reading but I suppose not everyone can afford to be unplugged from the world for an extended time, responsibilities or w/e.

Looking at screens at night isn't good regardless but there's apps (I think the one I use is called twilight) that dim the screen far more than what's normally possible and can filter out blue light. There's the night mode on iOS now but I find the official versions of these apps are barely different from the standard.

Nothin' beats some tactility though. I can deal without them but it's a shame buttons are restricted to only the most over-expensive kindle in the current line up.

Gonna set a goal?

It's pretty heavy stuff and probably just gets bleaker from there, save for one stretch of bliss that's all the more powerful for all the bullshit around it, but I think it's a story of hope and solidarity against an unforgiving world rather than pure misery for its own sake.

I aggressively hate these 'intros' that just flaccidly summaries the entire fucking book you're about to read, sometimes quoting the best bits. I don't know if the same intro was in both our copies but the one in mine was especially worthless, very glad I didn't read it until after I finished the novel.

Any idea what the sequels are like?

How's the PC port? I'm not a mega fan of how SE remasters abandon the pixel art but these probably work nicer on PC than the usual console ports. Also Franziska is my waifu.

I do not :-(

To be fair that one's very much an experience from my own bubble. All my pals who are into Twin Peaks hated Part 8 and I just wished more of The Return was like that. As far as acclaim vs popularity goes, the stuff I'm talking about here tends to have both. It's the wide appeal that is key, something that ticks the boxes of both critics and the general public, not just one or the other.

Surely End of Eva is the opposite, an apology for getting too weird with the original ending. As great as it is I'd still take "Congratulations!" over it any day.

Yeah, it was a good show, better than most, but it never blew me away. Saying I'm turned off by universal praise might not have been the best way of phrasing it, maybe better to say it doesn't sway me towards something at all. I need some other hook to get me excited for something. Taking Stoner as an example, you've got a premise which actively puts me off it, and the universal praise does nothing to offset that because I don't put any real stock in it.

They're not the sort of stuff I'm talking about, like I've said above it's the kind of thing that appeals to everyone, the professional critics and the general public. Stoner having a topped out user review score on goodreads and universal praise from academia and the critical press is exactly the sort of thing I'm talking about.

It's obviously just something personal to me, but unless it's in a particular niche I adore (I'll take as many folk horror stories as you can give me) I really struggle if media isn't offering something I've not seen before. Films I can usually get away with, but with something like a book or TV show where there's more time investment I find it very difficult to get invested if it's not doing something new or different.

I wasn't clear on the years either and assumed you'd just started with her first series. The one you've read is actually where I'd recommend stopping. Not a masterpiece or anything, but that original run is very solid. The second one goes off the rails very quickly.

As far as whether it's worth getting into now goes, I can't really say. I haven't kept up with it since Civil War 2 in 2016, so don't know much about what state the series is in now, other than it's just gotten a new #1 and creative team, and Kamala has a new costume which looks pretty great.

I haven't even seen Twin Peaks, came close recently but the length of the pilot always puts me off and I'm more interested in Return than the OG.

Now that I'm thinking about it it's probably relatively rare for something to only have one or the other, maybe increasingly so?

It wasn't an apology - there's a staggering amount of contradictory misinformation about what the creators of EoE were intending, but if it were an apology it's a clear failure. All it does is nestle the ideas of the TV ending in some crushingly bleak context, gets even more abstract in its second half and then hits with an absolute bitch-slap of an ending. Another very common myth is that EoE was intended as a 'fuck you' to audiences who disliked the latter parts of the show, and many if not most seem to come out thinking that sounds about right, most viewers literally don't know what's happening for much of the film.

No way, I think the film is way ballsier, the visuals are still on another level to anything else I've seen and it bookends the series so nicely. I think EoE alone is what elevated NGE from a really good anime to one of my favourite things ever.

Anime might be the best medium for what you're talking about, more than any other art form I find it's the slightly inaccessible and forgotten stuff that's worth watching and the big acclaimed shows every season just aren't worth the time investment at all. Even something as massive as Ghost in the Shell I thought was just okay, but its obtuse as fuck, lower-rated, uglier and barely discussed sequel blew me away.

The two things I named have that mass appeal on both ends, just thought they were better examples of things with such wide appeal they become ultimately boring next to less successful stuff. When we're talking absolute tops though, the highest ratings in a database, I actually don't think it's possible for something bland to get on that level, there's a limit on how high something will hit if it takes no risks at all, even on an aggregate.

Also Game of Thrones is a snore but I chalked that up to fantasy as a whole being pretty boring and, ironically, unimaginative to me.

I'm the same, only I'd place Stoner easily inside the 'different' camp. That premise alone wouldn't hook me, but the premise + its publishing history + a scale breaking average score definitely piqued my interest and made it look unique. I'll probably try any game or film based on reputation alone but with books and TV I have to be pickier, esp when you have to get pretty deep before you can judge them.

Season 1 is fantastic, 2 is a rollercoaster with some great stuff and some fucking dire, almost unwatchable filler, but ends on an high note with one of the best episodes of TV ever made. The film, which comes after season 2, is also incredible.

The Return has ruined TV for me because it's on such another level that it's screwed the curve. I can't stop comparing other shows to it, and everything comes up lacking. It's just phenomenal, an utterly spellbinding experience unlike anything else I've ever seen

You don't often see a huge disparity, but you'll often see mildly to moderately positive critical reception attached to overwhelming public adoration. MCU is the obvious example.

I'll defer to you on the details, I've only seen the show and film once years and years ago, just remember enjoying the finale itself more. Might give it a rewatch once it's on Netflix.

Eh, I'm not a big anime guy in general so couldn't say. Gurren Lagann is the only one that ever really clicked for me. Have enjoyed other stuff but that's the only one I've found myself coming back to.

I enjoyed the books well enough but the show stripped all the stuff I actually liked (the great world building where it weaves history and prophecy in with the story at hand) and boiled it down to the most bare bones version of the story possible.

Fair enough, different strokes and all that. You're intrigued by literary classics with depth and nuance, I'm intrigued by books with pictures of angry snakes on the cover. I think we both know who is the real paragon of taste here.

Do you guys do a yearly goal here? I've already read two since that last post and have started two others.

LITFAM UPDATE: MAYDAY LATE EDITION

Top Readers

1. @TopazAzul (7)
2. @Absurd-Ditties + @Alias (5)

How goes thy bibliotic quests? Average progress is currently around 30%, but there's still enough time in the year for most of us to make it.

@SevenSeize and @Absurd-Ditties are about to do it. @Zymbot @Phobotech @Rigoesbueno @Dean @Feenix17 and @masheenh3ad need to get their shit together. And where the heck did @stafffighter go?

All mistakes are probably my fault, I admit it.

(Book of the month should be announced in a day or two)

@Abbyka @Absurd-Ditties @Alias @animasouloss @Asandir @Boss @Dancing-Ducki @Dean @Feenix17 @Fro @Ganon-Dorf @GallowJolt @Haggard @IrishGun @Jackho @Kiwi @Malachy @man-cruss @masheenH3ad @Peregrinus @Phobotech @Rigoesbueno @SevenSeize @stafffighter @ThatOne05 @TheReviewTrickster

@TopazAzul @tyler2513 @Yomuchan @ZJ @Zymbot @RoboSeven

Sorry! Sorry...shit's been crazy busy with me lately, I haven't forgotten about this obligation.

Update pending.

All you need to know about his racial views is written down in "On the Creation of N..." (nope, not gonna write this word here):

One always has to keep this in mind when reading his work. I can appreciate his horror stories and the impact of his work on the horror genre, sometimes his blatant racism is really hard to stomach.

Yeah, I can still enjoy his work, but I'm glad I'm not a bigger fan of his than I am as that might make it harder to reconcile. Lovecraft himself named Algernon Blackwood, Arthur Machen, M.R. James and Lord Dunsany as the greatest horror writers of his own time, and I'm inclined to agree with him, as I'd much rather read any of them than this own work. James in particular is probably my all time favourite.

Book of the month for May is The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. Voted the best book of the 20th century in France. I hadn't heard of it but apparently this is one of the defining pieces of French literature and one of the most enduringly successful books ever published. It's also short as hecc and has an all-ages demographic so y'all should breeze through it in a minute.

@Abbyka @Absurd-Ditties @Alias @animasouloss @Asandir @Boss @Dancing-Ducki @Dean @Feenix17 @Fro @Ganon-Dorf @GallowJolt @Haggard @IrishGun @Jackho @Kiwi @Malachy @man-cruss @masheenH3ad @Peregrinus @Phobotech @Rigoesbueno @SevenSeize @stafffighter @ThatOne05 @TheReviewTrickster

@TopazAzul @tyler2513 @Yomuchan @ZJ @Zymbot @RoboSeven

I avoided bringing up the MCU since I'm a medium-rare fan of it. Surprisingly enough many of the recent films have a higher critic score than an audience one, at least on RT. For the most part these films have gotten better over time so it's fair enough that the critic consensus has risen, but multiple times now the critics have painted a new entry as a total stand out masterpiece while the fans just think it's another solid entry and nothing relatively remarkable.

The film is almost exactly what the final two episodes were intended to be, but had to be dropped due to budgetary constraints and so they tried to convey the same ideas as best they could with no budget. The unexpected success of the show allowed them to to do what they originally intended through the film.

People like to over-interpret the film as a reaction to the TV ending but most of the film was written first, there's even glimpses of the film storyboard in the TV episodes, and reaction to the TV ending wasn't as overwhelmingly negative as people tend to paint it either. Also Anno and the other main players were proud of the TV ending and don't consider one more valid than the other.

They're going to re-dub it too (hilariously, many from the original cast auditioned but none of them got it). This is one show where I highly recommend watching it subbed regardless of one's usual preference, there's a massive amount of nuance and quiet desperation in the Japanese cast that I don't trust american voice actors to capture.

If it's anything like the old dub a lot of the depth will be lost and a couple scenes either completely misinterpreted or purposely played for laughs. Yanks don't seem to understand isolation.

Yeah that's the idea, set a goal and I'll @ you each month to post your progress, represented in these posts. You can also forego a goal if you don't want the pressure and just tally the books as you read them, as Asandir is currently doing.

Ah, that's a shame. I read that last year. It's required school reading here. How have you not heard of it? It's fantastic, really. I can give you a review right now. It's written, yes, as a children's book, and it's very child-like in its writing and story, but that's the point. Viewing the world from the point of a child. I guess it's a bit cliched, the message being "adults are boring" basically, but it's also a fairly deep metaphor and analysis of an existential nature, if you can believe that. People slave away doing things that mean nothing and are slaves to their own habits. Every person is on their own asteroid, telling themselves they have power because they carry out some task. It's a very opinionated book, so you could love it or hate it, but I personally found it to be a fairly modern message, despite the book being written in 1942 and aimed at children.

Now, I've summarizedly reviewed a book of the month, what do I get?