In 2021, one of my college friends died in childbirth. One came out as genderqueer. One (ex-friend) got convicted of soliciting sex from a minor and put on the sex offender registry. Three had babies; several others moved and a bunch changed jobs. And most of the rest kept on keeping on.

And that's a good metaphor for the year. A lot of big, ( Read more... )

The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North - If you enjoyed The Time Traveler’s Wife, you’ll absolutely enjoy this. I had to give a lot of thought to the way Harry and the other Orobourans experienced history: Basically, everyone’s lives line up into a single “iteration” of the universe, and the only thing that seems to change from ( Read more... )

Reverie: Sweet As Edition (Switch) - A retro Zelda-like that’s short and pretty decent. Not as good as Lenna’s Inception in terms of cleverness in the exploration, probably on par with Blossom Tales: The Sleeping King for in-dungeon puzzles. The hitboxes can be a little odd in places, which makes combat unnecessarily more difficult. I did like that ( Read more... )

You were born with a mysterious birthmark and spirited away from a kingdom that was destroyed by monsters. You grew up in a simple little village and accidentally discover your destiny as the Luminary during a local coming-of-age ritual. So begins a world-spanning quest guided by the floating tree Yggdrasil to defeat an evil Dark Lord who has ( Read more... )

Our favorite immortal asshole misfits are back to ask, “WHAT THE F#$%?” for a third go-round.

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Jefferson took another round of semi-retirement after the Markovian War ended and his best friend was killed. But crime in general (and Tobias Whale in particular) doesn’t take a break in Freeland.

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Brooklyn 99 (Hulu, Season 8) - This had to be a really, really hard year for sitcom writers doing “current-day” stuff. B99 does a one-year time skip that covers both Amy’s maternity leave and several waves of covid, with a throwaway line that “all first responders are vaccinated” so they only have to wear masks for flashbacks. Then we got several ( Read more... )

Facebook veered out of Korean breakfast sandwiches and street food into right-wing angry-making suggested posts for a while, and then they hit the news for destroying democracy again and suddenly I was back to cooking videos. One of the more popular sets to appear on my feed is Vincenzo’s Plate.

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It’s been a long and frustrating couple of months since the Ida flood and subsequent devastation of our ground level. (Which we call “the basement” but is not, by the official definition, a basement. You can walk out from that floor into the backyard, and a basement is, by definition, below the ground level on all four sides. This turned out to be ( Read more... )

I've been catalogue comic book characters who are "Doctor ___" and determining which ones of them actually have the right to use that title. You can find the thread on Talking Time at Get out of my operating room, MISTER Fate!