jducoeur

Just saw The Odyssey at the ART. (Later than usual for us: our usual preview showing got cancelled -- not sure what wasn't ready -- so we wound up with one of the main showings instead.)

Manages to be surprisingly faithful to the story from Homer (mostly modern dress but otherwise very much of the period) while being an absolutely savage look at the aftermath of war, and viewing all of it through a female lens. The only actress playing a single through-line part is Penelope, but the heart of the show is the three women playing the Chorus, the Fates, the voices in Odysseus' head, and three of the main other women in the story.

The author of the play (Kate Hamill) is one of those three -- she plays Circe and completely steals the show in the second act (this one is three hours and three acts with two intermissions -- unusually long for the ART), with a take on the character that is powerful, passionate, terrifying and blasphemous in equal measure. She's basically worth the price of admission on her own.

Odysseus, while still the central character and having the most stage time, manages to be a mix of toxic masculinity and self-pity, desperately seeking forgiveness for his war crimes in Troy. I wind up somewhat empathizing with him, but still agreeing with the women who all basically wind up going variations of, "Dude -- seriously? We're not here to forgive you. Get your shit together."

The writing is sharp and smart, and terribly funny at times despite being a tad bleak overall.

Not easy, but a very good show. Playing through this week -- worth seeing if you have a chance.

Another season, another new show at the ART. Tonight was a preview showing of Ayodele Casel's Diary of a Tap Dancer. It's worth talking about.

The show is intensely autobiographical: a memoir told on stage in the form of (mostly) monologue and dance, with a fine and diverse cast of performers backing her up. They fill in the roles of some of the important people in her life (most notably her mother), but the story is mostly narrative, starting from a young age.

The first act is mostly chronological, outlining and filling in what it was like growing up biracial, first in the Bronx and then exiled for years to Puerto Rico. Then the hunt to find the father she had never met, and finally the discovery of the movies of Ginger Rogers, and beginning to get a hint of her calling.

Act two continues in that vein, but begins to explore the history of tap, and her growing realization of how little she really knew about her own art form. Finally, there comes the dawning realization that, far from being a historical outlier as a black female tapper, she is instead following in a deep tradition -- a tradition that had been almost entirely erased from history, of the black women who had been major stars only fifty years before, and then deliberately forgotten.

Calling the last third of the show "impassioned" would be an understatement: it is a cry of sadness and anger about the women whose legacies were almost buried forever, and a fierce demand to remember them and the generation now rising.

It's as personal a show as I've seen, with a raw intensity at times that is almost hard to watch -- I have no clue how she can bare herself to such a degree night after night and then keep on dancing. But it's impossible to look away.

Obviously, this is a story that is deeply about racism and sexism, told not in facile metaphor or melodrama but simply in the facts of her own life and the history that she gradually learned.

And not to be overlooked: this is also about tap -- not so much the show-biz-smooth styles of Rogers and Astaire, but the from-the-soul expressions that became her obsession and her pride. There's a lot of truly great dance on stage here, telling the story just as much as the words are.

It runs through early January at the ART, and is well worth seeing. If you can make it, please take the opportunity.

Just finished A Psalm for the Wild-Built and A Prayer for the Crown-Shy, a pair of novellas by Becky Chambers (author of the Wayfarers series) that effectively form a novel.

On the one hand, it's even more of a plot-free travelogue than The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet. The story can be summarized as "Monk gets restless and heads into the woods. Monk meets Robot. Monk and Robot wind up on a long road trip."

But's also a profoundly beautiful, quiet story, about meaning and purpose and whether it even matters to have such things, or whether it's enough to just be.

Like all of Chambers' work, the story is notionally science-fiction, taking place on what is clearly a human colony world (a moon of a gas giant) in the fairly-distant future. But also like all of her work, the SF aspect is fairly irrelevant. This isn't about spaceships or battles with aliens; it's about exploring different ways of being. To no small degree, it's about positing a quieter, healthier way to arrange human society.

The story starts a couple hundred years after The Factory Age, which came to an end when the robots revealed that they'd become sentient somewhere along the line, and would like to opt out of the labors to which they had been put. Humanity apparently reacted to this with a questionably-plausible but refreshingly-sensible agreeableness, so the humans and robots agreed to split the world between them, and the humans would leave the robots in peace until the robots chose otherwise. In the wake of that, the humans realized that their society was built on sand, and needed a serious rethink.

Our first protagonist (and viewpoint character) is Sibling Dex, a Tea Monk who travels from village to village, serving tea to anyone who wants and listening to their troubles. Having found a streak of dissatisfaction in their own life, they impulsively strike out into the Wilderness, to go in search of a monastery that no one has visited in many years. (And get away from people for a while: Dex is a pretty serious introvert in a pretty people-oriented role.)

They are making their way along, when a robot comes up and greets them, the first contact in centuries, to ask the apparently-simple question, "What do you need?" The quest to wrestle with answers to that is one of the main axes on which the rest of the story turns.

The robot is Mosscap, and it is wonderfully not what you expect. It is both deeply naive about how the human world works, but insightful, fun, warm and friendly. It's impossible to read the story without concluding the Mosscap is a very good person, save that it is very insistent that it is not a person. (Which is why it is firm that Dex is "they" and Mosscap is "it".)

(Entirely tangential, but for those who get the reference: especially in the audiobook version, Mosscap both sounds and behaves exactly like Elsbeth Tascioni from the TV shows The Good Wife, The Good Fight, and Elsbeth. The combination of surface goofiness but underlying cleverness and wisdom, plus unexpected wonder in the little things, was a similarity that kept striking me again and again.)

The first book is mainly just the two of them, finishing out Dex' quest for the monastery and some hoped-for insights to be found there; the second is them wandering from village to village in the human side of the world, with Mosscap asking person after person "What do you need?" in an attempt to understand how humanity has fared over the past couple of centuries. There are no easy answers to be found for any of it, but the journey is an enlightening one for both of them.

The whole thing is refreshingly free of content warnings: while there are some tense moments, they're generally not of the traumatic sort. It's a tale of two people (Mosscap's denial aside) becoming close friends, exploring and learning along the way.

One particular detail that I noticed concerns gender. Not only does this story feature two firmly non-binary protagonists, it's conspicious that that doesn't stop Dex from having a romantic and sexual life -- and throughout, their biological sex doesn't come into it. It's not loudly disavowed (as one sometimes sees) or anything like that -- it just isn't relevant, and the story never mentions it.

(Even more than Murderbot, this makes it a bit problematic to translate this story to a visual medium. One of the delightful things about text is that this aspect can remain firmly ambiguous, and that's pretty clearly deliberate.)

The posited human society is fascinating to think about. I can poke holes in its economics, but it makes a compelling argument for a quieter and simpler life that allows a lot of the toxins to drain out of the world.

Summary: the two novellas together make a short novel -- if you can deal with a story that really isn't about plot, you should read it. If you liked Chamber's Wayfarers series, it's a must-read: it has many of the same good qualities, distilled down.

Time to bring The Review of Obscure Books out for once -- this one's definitely less-known. I picked up The Short While some time back (I probably backed the Kickstarter). I got around to finishing it tonight, so let's give it a look.

tl;dr -- quiet, personal-scale speculative fiction, less about the "science" and more about how people and cultures evolve. Not exactly gripping, but quite good.

This is a pretty big graphic novel, well over 400 pages, and doesn't follow simple conventions. It's not all comic-book style -- much of the book is more illustrated text, interspersed with straight-up comics, as fits the story of the moment.

It's very, very personal. It's the story of Paolo and Colin, who enjoy a sweet, loving relationship until the day that tears them apart, following their story both before and after.

It's set in the future, although how far isn't at all clear, nor very relevant. (I'd say at least fifty years, but beyond that it's hard to say.) Thirty years ago, the Administration, a somewhat brutal totalitarian regime, finally fell. Since then, people have been slowly figuring out how to put the pieces back together.

This isn't a "post-apocalyptic" story -- it's not interested in being anywhere near that melodramatic. It's clear that a lot of people have died, the weather isn't great, and the technical underpinnings of our current time have largely decayed, but it's by no means a hellscape. Folks are filling into the buildings that are left, and figuring out where to rebuild; they're repurposing the leftover tech, including taking old sexbots and putting them to better uses. Communities rise and fall, not because of cataclysmic drama but just because People.

That's the world that Paolo and Colin live in, and there's nothing all that weird or bad about it to them -- it's just life. The story is more about their relationship; both of them somewhat complicated men, but whose love works until trauma finally drives a wedge in between them.

The story is told quite elliptically, often taking a detour of a dozen pages to talk about their youths, or their parents' history, or their other lovers, or the backstory of the past decades. It's less like a carefully-constructed novel, more a story being told about some friends, filling in the relevant details as they come up.

It's a very good book. One of the pull quotes calls it a "thriller", and I don't agree -- while that key moment is a bit horrifying (and the trauma of it recurs through the story), this is a much more contemplative story than that word implies.

The world-building is fascinating -- really not very interested in fancy science, more about how people pull together and rebuild after things somewhat break down. The most interesting ideas are mainly about culture, reminding us of how complicated that always is, never falling into neat boxes. (Even the nasty Administration gets rather more nuanced as we learn more about it.)

It's a smart novel, and it expects a lot of the reader: there are a lot of characters and a lot of backstory, not all of it spelled out explicitly, but it makes sense as the story wends its way down the months and years.

Obviously, heavy on the queer content -- our protagonists are gay, and the majority of the other folks they spend time with are as well. That's not even remarkable here: queer phobias seem to have taken a back seat in this future culture.

The main content warning is for physical violence (the trauma at the center of the tale); there's also a bunch of implied horrors in the backstory, albeit mostly at a remove from our main characters. This is a world pulling itself together after some very bad times, but those times still resonate.

Overall, worth reading if you'd like something quiet and thoughtful -- notionally science fiction, but about the people far more than the gadgets.

Remember that "Best Graphic Novels of 2023" that put me on to Shubeik Lubeik? It also introduced me to Bea Wolf. (I'm now really wishing I'd kept the URL, because I probably should look up more books from it.)

tl;dr -- it's... let's say a full-length filk of Beowulf, about kids, candy, and the monster forcing them to grow up. It is glorious.

I mean, let's put it this way: when the pull quotes on the cover of a kids' book are from Lemony Snicket and Neil Gaiman, you know you've done something right. Let's talk about it.

If this was just a parody of Beowulf, it might be cute but nothing more. But this is way, way more ambitious.

This tells the story of Treeheart, mighty treehouse guided by a line of kid-kings, doling delicious treats to their followers in party, during the dark times when this high castle is besieged by Grindle, a grown-up whose touch confers age, turning kids into teenagers or (shudder) accountants. All seems lost until the arrival of the sea-warrior Bea Wolf and her band of fierce followers.

To give a sense of the book, here's a completely random page from Fitt 3, the moment when Mister Grindle slams through the door:

He shot his black shoe, shattering the door!
Sorrow came in tube socks, swan-white, knee-high!

Kids raised battle-gear, red balloons, ripe with water,
readying war shields, swamp-wet spitballs, acorns winter-hard.

It's all that great. Not only is it following the plot of Beowulf, beat by beat, it sounds like Beowulf. It's impossible to read the book without at least declaiming it softly under your breath, and it feels so good to do so. (I may have to bring it to Storytellers' Guild practice for a reading or two -- it's not period, but it feels period in a way that few SCA compositions achieve.)

Moreover, it's not just text. It's a big hardcover, not quite a comic book per se, but with each page richly illustrated by legendary French cartoonist Boulet, and the pictures capture the darkness, drama, and sheer wonderful silliness of the story, all at once.

(It's abridged, just going through the defeat of Grindle -- it alludes to Mother Grindle, but sensibly stops before going there.)

Really, it's not worth belaboring the point beyond saying: get a copy. If you are an SCA parent of small children, you must get a copy -- if I was the sort to have had kids, this is the book that I would want to be reading to and with them. It's fun, dramatic, and ever-so-relatable. (And even includes an afterword by the author, written largely for the kids, explaining what Beowulf is and the ways in which this text is and isn't faithful to the style of the original.)

Highest recommendation: while it's nowhere near as serious and real-world-related as the stuff I tend to favor, it's absolutely one of the best books I've read in the past few years, and I think it's going to shove a slightly-lesser work or two off of The Shelf.

(NB: this is about the real Avatar: The Last Airbender, not the recent remake that I haven't yet heard any good reason to watch.)

Just about a year ago, I finished watching She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, which is a fair candidate for my favorite animated series of all time. In the wake of that, I asked around about what to watch next, and one of my friends suggested, "Maybe Legend of Korra?"

I started watching that as my filler show (what I watch a few minutes at a time, to fill in the rest of my exercise time after the main show runs out -- that's currently Clone Wars). Around when I started getting into it, I finally realized that it's specifically a sequel to Avatar: The Last Airbender, but in for a penny, in for a pound: wouldn't be the first time I've watched stuff out of order.

So after watching my way through Korra and then Avatar, I finished the latter a few days ago. Time for a retrospective and review.

(Note: both shows are available on Netflix. You want the animated Avatar, not the live-action remake.)

tl;dr -- both excellent, but more different than I might have expected.

For those who, like me, have been living in a cave for the past decade, let's do an overview of the structure of both stories.

First up (both chronologically and in the order they came out) is Avatar.

The story is kinda-sorta high fantasy, but instead of being set in a fantasy version of medieval Europe, it's set in a fantasy version of 19th century Asia. The opening narration for each episode sums the setting up well, so let's just quote that:

"Water. Earth. Fire. Air. Long ago, the four nations lived together in harmony. Then, everything changed when the Fire Nation attacked. Only the Avatar, master of all four elements, could stop them, but when the world needed him most, he vanished. A hundred years passed and my brother and I discovered the new Avatar, an airbender named Aang. And although his airbending skills are great, he has a lot to learn before he's ready to save anyone. But I believe Aang can save the world."

In this world, each nation is built around one of the classical elements; among each nation, there are "benders" who command the powers of that element. (If you think super-powers, you're not far off.)

The nations aren't based directly on real ones, but the influences aren't subtle:

The Earth Kingdom is roughly Imperial China: huge, populous, notionally governed by a powerful Emperor but really run by a powerful and all-pervasive bureaucracy.
The Fire Nation resembles late Imperial Japan: aggressive in its conquests, much more technologically focused than the rest.
The Water Tribe are a bit less precise, but generally resemble northern indiginous peoples, leaning relatively peaceful, broken into smaller groupings that are happy to do their own thing.
And the Air Tribe are pretty clearly Buddhist monks, right down to the shaven heads and pacifist philosophies.

The Avatar can, in theory, command all four elements, as well as commune with the spirits and call on The Avatar State that pushes all of this to 11. But Aang is very young, and knows nothing of the other three elements.

The stucture is pure epic fantasy. Early in the story, it is made clear that there is a great doom coming to the land: at the end of the summer, the powers of the Firelord, who has already conquered much of the world, will be at their zenith, allowing him to rain death and destruction on everyone. It is up to Aang, Katara, Sokka (the latter two are the sister and brother who found Aang) and Toph (the rebellious daughter of rich Earth nobility, blind but preternaturally talented in earth-bending) -- a quartet of youngsters -- to figure out how to save the world before that happens.

Chasing them is Prince Zuko, the driven and more than slightly abused son of the Firelord, who is convinced that the only way to redeem his personal honor is to capture the Avatar for his father. He is by no means the only antagonist in the story, but he's the lead one for much of it.

The entire series (three seasons of about 20 episodes each) takes place over those months. Along the way, they make lots of allies, hatch plans, have some victories and a lot of defeats, learn a lot more about how the world works, and get a lot of character growth. It's no surprise that the story builds to a final showdown, in which they need to square off against the bad guys to save the world.

Legend of Korra is a sequel, but a fairly distant one -- set in the same world, but around 70 years later. Where Avatar's culture and tech level are vaguely 1860ish (with some vaguely steampunk touches), Korra's are vaguely 1920ish (with some vaguely steampunk touches).

The world has moved on, in many ways. It is largely at peace, but that doesn't mean all is happiness and light: there are lots of cultural and political discontents, and the series tends to center on those. The story largely takes place in Republic City, a new city built specifically as a crossroads and democratic neutral ground between the four traditional nations.

Korra is the next Avatar, born upon Aang's death, and is now somewhere around 17. As is the natural cycle, she was born a waterbender, and has some skill at the other disciplines but still needs to master airbending. She winds up at the Air Temple that is run by Aang's (now middle-aged) son, surrounded by the family that are still the last of the airbenders.

She begins to accumulate her own group of friends, all around her own age: the rising stars of sport bending Mako and Bolin, and industrialist heir (and no slouch in a fight) Asami.

Over the course of four seasons, they take on a series of challenges to the peaceful social order; along the way, they grow from teens into young adults, finding that those challenges are sometimes harder than the fights against the bad guys.

It's important to emphasize: for stories that are so closely related, these are very different series. I know a bunch of people who loved Avatar but hated Korra, and that's fair -- especially if you go in expecting a similar vibe, you're going to be disappointed. I liked both a lot, but it's worth talking about the differences.

First of all and most obvious, there's the age difference. Avatar's protagonists are young: I don't know the official ages, but I would place Toph, Aang, Katara and Sokka at roughly 12-15 respectively. They're kids who are starting to grow up and learning the hard basic lessons. It's a story of first love for several of them, and there's no small amount of pubescent awkwardness playing out here. But the story also has a real undercurrent of innocense as well, helped by that young idealism.

By contrast, Korra is a story of young adults finding their way in the world. All four are at the age where they are starting to deal with figuring out what they want to be when they grow up, and the story takes place over a much longer span -- several years, not just a few months. The relationships are complicated and messy: less first-kiss, more navigating one's first serious love triangle. There's a bit less innocense and somewhat more anger and frustration, broken trust and figuring out what they really care about in both friends and partners.

(Plus the one big content warning: there's a fairly serious PTSD story in the later part of the series, which makes for a distinctly darker shade than anything before then.)

Avatar's character arcs are simpler and more straightforward, due to the tightness of the story and the ages. And interestingly, the standout character from the whole double-series when it comes to arc is Prince Zuko: a bit older than the kids and deeply tortured, he's nowhere near as one-dimensional as most of the villains in Korra -- he's trying very hard to figure out who he is (as opposed to what everyone else wants him to be), and he turns out to be a major linchpin of the story.

Structurally, the stories are completely different. Avatar is one epic novel, taking place in a fairly short period of time, whereas each season of Korra is a distinct story, with its own beginning, middle and end.

One of the most interesting structural differences is in the nature of the enemy. Avatar's is pure epic fantasy: the Firelord is the Big Bad, who wants to conquer most of the world and burn the rest -- he's almost pure evil, a basic Sauron cognate.

What few people seem to notice about Korra, by contrast, is that it is a meditation on the nature of political power, greed and fanaticism:

Season one is dealing with what at least appears to be a classic proletarian revolution. (Which fits nicely with the 1920s-ish setting.)
Season two deals with what amounts to an eco-terrorist who wants to save the environment by conquering the world, and never mind how many people need to die.
Season three's antagonists are a quartet of high-powered benders who are fanatical anarchists, determined to bring down all government.
And finally, season four deals with the rise of a powerful and relatively sincere fascist force, led by a woman who believes that the only way the world can truly know peace is if everyone follows her orders.

That structure isn't belabored, but it's very clear once you notice it. It's intellectually pretty interesting, but doesn't ring quite as powerfully as the simpler fantasy of Avatar.

Korra is also somewhat more interested in taking its time exploring this world. Since it doesn't have a Big Bad lurking over her shoulder every minute the way Avatar does, rather more time is spent on both pure exploring of topics like what the Avatar is, the spirit realm that is alluded to in Avatar (and is far more central in Korra), and navigating the relationships between the characters. (Those don't always go in the obvious directions; personally, I really like the way the core relationships play out in the end.)

Speaking of characters, there is significant crossover between the two shows. Needless to say, most of the characters from Avatar who show up in Korra are much older now (and one of them is a little bit dead), and many of their kids are major players in the second series. Those continuity details generally work well, and the older versions of the characters are generally very plausible 80-something versions of the kids from the original.

By the numbers, Avatar is the better series. The structure is compact and well-designed, the writing is sharp and often very funny, especially in the smaller moments (I finally understand why "My cabbages!" is a meme), the contrast of light and dark crisp while still leaving a good deal of room for you not to be sure who is going to be on which side at the end.

By contrast, Korra is a messier story, probably intentionally. The tone tends a bit more somber, sometimes downright dark. It is joyfully asking "What might this world look like, 70 years on?" and does a great job of world-building on the details dropped in Avatar, but there are moments where the fan service is laid on a tad thick. (One of the weirdness of watching the series out of order was gradually realizing just how much of Korra is specifically name-dropping details from Avatar and carrying them forward -- generally logically, but it gets to be a bit much at times.) I like it quite a lot, but in many ways it feels more real than Avatar does, in ways both good and bad.

I do recommend both, but with the big caveat that it's entirely reasonable to like one a lot more than the other. They share a world, but neither a story nor a tone. Above all, if you watch through Avatar and then start on Korra (I don't recommend emulating me and watching them out of order -- it works, but makes more sense if you watch them chronologically), go in with the understanding that it really is rather different, and be prepared to think of it on its own terms.

And with that, I'll toss out the question again. I adored She-Ra, and liked both Avatar and Korra a lot. Recommendations of what to try next?

A while back, I was reading a "Best Graphic Novels of 2023" list somewhere. It was relatively international in its scope, and included a bunch of items that I hadn't seen before, so I picked a few that sounded good and ordered them.

I've been gradually reading Shubeik Lubeik for the past month or two, and wow -- yeah, definitely one of the best of the year. Let's talk about it a bit.

tl;dr -- technically urban fantasy, but far deeper than that term usually implies, telling three stories of modern life and wishes, from a firmly Egyptian POV.

Shubeik Lubeik translates as roughly "your wish is my command" -- it is the beginning of what a genie says when you open their bottle.

This story takes place in a world very much like our own, except that wishes are a thing. Known since antiquity, in the modern era they have been commercialized just like everything else. The best wish mines are largely in the Middle East; the refineries mostly in rich Western countries. (The metaphors here are 100% intentional, and very carefully designed.)

There are three broad categories of wish:

First-class wishes are rare, expensive, and tend to work well.
Second-class wishes are still pricey, although less outrageous, but you had better watch your wording, because there is often a catch.
Third-class wishes (aka "delesseps") are relatively cheap (they tend to come in cans, unlike the fine wine bottles of first-class), but quite likely to backfire unpleasantly on you. They are illegal in a growing number of countries.

The story centers on Shokry's kiosk. He is a friendly, pious man who has run this roadside kiosk for much of his life, selling magazines, beverages, and whatever else is within his scope and people want. And the bane of his life is a small suitcase, containing three first-class wishes.

He is trying to find someone, anyone, who will buy the wishes off of him, but nobody pays attention to his hand-scrawled sign advertising them. Finally, Hagga Shawqia, the older lady who is always hanging around the kiosk and chatting, gets her nephew to make a better sign to advertise them, and the story begins.

The book (which is mammoth -- over 500 large pages, so it's a weighty hardcover) consists of three primary stories, each providing a different lens on life.

First there is Aziza's story. Her husband always wanted a wish, to get a fancy new car. She sees Shokry's sign and buys the first bottle, not realizing the trouble she is letting herself in for.

Fancy wishes need to be properly licensed; being a law-abiding sort, she goes to do so. But no one believes that a common woman like herself could possibly have received such an expensive wish legitimately. So her life gradually falls apart, ground up by a rapacious bureaucracy that is more interested in the value of the wish than the needs of the woman who owns it.

This chapter is a pretty brutal look at the corruption and petty venality of the state, the challenges of being a proud woman who isn't willing to knuckle under to its demands, with the wish more as a symbol of her resistance than something she truly cares about.

Second is Nour -- a college student who is wealthy but depressed, slowly dropping into a downspiral. He is analytical in his outlook (this chapter is full of his charts of his moods and problems), but that does nothing to help him with the sense that he doesn't fit in, and that nobody really wants to be around him.

This chapter is a good examination of depression, taking place heavily in Nour's head (and charts), as he tries to figure out what to do with a first-class wish. Should he make himself smarter? Happier? (Wishes for happiness often don't really solve your problems.) In his bleaker moments, he wonders whether he should just wish he had never been born.

Finally, chapter three is Shokry's own story, explaining his history and how he inherited the wishes in the first place. He can't use them himself (he is a firm believer that wishes are haram, so no good Muslim can use them), so he has to sell them.

But his principles are challenged when Hagga Shawqia gets sick. He drives himself to distraction, torn between his need to help those around him and his belief that using the wish will send him to Hell. Along the way, there are arguments about what is and isn't haram, and the way that some of the rigid current restrictions seem to have arisen from colonialist greed.

In the end, we finally get Shawqia's own backstory, and her own reasons why she firmly doesn't want him to use the wish for her. It's the closest the story gets to actual fantasy, an illustration of the power of the first-class wish, and the consequences thereof.

Overall, it's a brilliant book. The three stories are distinct, but they're deeply related to each other, talking about big topics in microcosm. In-between, we get a bunch of the history and sociology of a world that is so very much like our own, where nothing is so sacred that it can't be commoditized.

The art is distinct, not much like either typical American or Japanese comics, but it is clean, clear, with strong intent and some clever bits of innovation. (Not least in the wishes themselves: genies manifest as Arabic text, ranging from elegant intricate calligraphy for the first-class to something not unlike advertising fonts for third.)

It's worth noting that, since this was originally written in Arabic (back in 2017), it reads back-to-front and right-to-left. I'm used to that from modern Manga, but I suspect it will take some adjusting for folks who haven't read graphic novels that way before. Egyptian culture and Islam are the substrate of the whole story, but there are helpful footnotes for the details you might not be familiar with.

Anyway -- highly recommended. It's a deep story and a fascinating one, and at $35 this big hardcover is downright cheap by graphic novel standards. If you like comics that are off the usual American beaten path, and make you think, you should absolutely check it out.

My morning-exercise watching for the past couple of weeks was the Netflix limited series Bodies, loosely based on the Si Spencer graphic novel of the same name. It's solidly good and not well-known, so worth an overview.

Mild spoilers for the first episode or so, but I'll avoid getting into any serious ones.

tl;dr -- four times, four detectives, one case that twines around all of them more intimately than they realize. Worth a watch.

The story features four London police detectives, in four different years, each a bit of an outlier in their own way:

In 1890, Alfred Hillinghead is a good upstanding family man, who is so deeply in the closet that he can't even see the door from where he is.
In 1941, Charles Whiteman is treated with some suspicion by the rest of the force, partly because they (correctly) suspect that he's on the take, but mostly because he is Jewish.
In 2023, we have Shahara Hasan. I will note that the series does not get into the modern-day tensions around being a female probably-Muslim woman of color on the force, but she's a bit busy being the most central character in the story.
In the crypto-fascist quasi-utopia of 2053, Iris Maplewood is (more or less) a true believer, whose spinal implants let her walk despite her family's genetic issues.

(There is one more central character, but even naming them would be a pretty major spoiler.)

The story starts on the day when each of them finds a body in Longharvest Lane, a back alley in London. The same body -- naked, with a strange tattoo on his wrist, shot through the eye.

I will note: this tale is less a whodunnit -- we eventually get to that, but it's not the heart of the story -- that it is "WTF is going on here?" The setup is fairly unsettling to each of them on their own, even before the historical parallels start to come to light and the over-arching plot reveals itself. These folks dig in deeply and do their research, and do gradually start to realize that something larger is going on.

It's not a major spoiler to say that there is some time-travel involved, because seriously: how could this story not involve time travel? But this isn't a Doctor Who tale with people zipping back and forth -- rather, it's a mystery with existential implications, playing out over the better part of two centuries, with the detectives slowly piecing things together from the shreds of information they have.

It starts out looking like this is going to be four parallel and very similar stories, but that's very much not the case. Each person's situation is very different, and how they relate to the situation is very different: each one turns out to be personally involved with the case. (This does eventually make sense, if you buy the premise of the story.)

The story is pretty tight. It's a complete one-and-done novel, starting out slow and mysterious in the first half and going to roller-coaster speed in the second. (There are a couple of cutesy WTF details at the very end, with hints that nothing is ever completely finished, but I don't think there's any likelihood of continuing: this story is done.)

It reminds me inescapably of Dark (which came out a few years ago), but it's a much more concise tale, and not as nihilistically bleak as Dark. It feels like it's going wind up similarly doomed somewhere around the sixth episode -- fortunately, it's an eight-episode story (about an hour each), and manages to pull out a largely satisfying conclusion.

The writing and acting are quite solid on all parts, and that helps underscore that this isn't simply one story being told four times: our protagonists are all very different, and each has their own story to tell here, whether it be Alfred finding love (and trying to keep that from destroying his life and family), Charles figuring out what he really cares about, or Iris slowly coming to understand the choices that her world was built upon. (Shahara kind of has the curse of the protagonist: she is so busy with plot that she has a bit less time for character-building than anybody else.)

Cinematography is important here, and well-done. The story bounces back and forth between times pretty freely, but each one looks slightly different, with 1890 told in slightly sepia shades and 1941 in blues that almost feel slightly black-and-white. You're pretty much never left scratching your head over when you are, and all four stories proceed forward linearly, so it's nowhere near as confusing as Dark sometimes was. (One of the later episodes ties the whole thing together -- by that point, you already have enough information to have pieced it together yourself, but it's a helpful confirmation of what's going on at the big-picture level.)

The time-travel model does not quite work logically. It's not bad as these things go, I'd say above-average, but there are some aspects that didn't quite work IMO. That's not a harsh criticism -- there are relatively few time-travel stories that are completely internally consistent -- but if such things matter to you, that's worth keeping in mind.

Content warnings for homophobia and anti-semitism, and moderate television violence -- nothing terribly gory, but folks do get shot and stabbed, and there's some blood. Also nudity and sexual situations: not a ton of that, but Alfred's sexuality is pretty central to his story. And some implied mistreatment of a child, not on camera but it's important backstory.

Overall, I liked it quite a bit. It starts as a "WTF?", becomes a mystery, and gradually shades into a thriller as everyone figures out at least their individual angles on what's going on and try to do something about it. It's highly character-driven throughout -- while the plot is a bit twisty, it's primarily about these people and their individual stories and motivations, wrapped in a science-fiction-tinged suspense story. Not at the "You must get Netflix in order to see this" level, but if you have the service, it's worth putting on your list.

Let's get something straight upfront: I kind of despise Peacock. We picked it up for the Olympics a while back, and their tech and polices were infuriatingly bad. They've improved somewhat, but I still find their UI sub-par, and their lineup mediocre. I can't really recommend subscribing.

That said, if you do happen to have Peacock (possibly in order to watch Poker Face, which is rather fun), it's worth giving Mrs. Davis a look.

tl;dr -- spectacularly weird, yet a coherent, well-told novel.

Let's get into it.

Our protagonist is Sister Simone, a horseback-riding nun with a passionate (and as we will gradually learn, well-earned) hatred of stage magicians. She is quietly living her life married to Jesus -- and occasionally saving people from magicians -- when she is forced into a conversation with Mrs. Davis.

This story takes place in a slightly-alternate modern day. It looks and feels a lot like our world, except that about ten years ago, the Algorithm -- aka Mrs. Davis -- came into everyone's lives. She knows everything about everybody, has your best interests at heart, and will (somewhat forcefully if need be) steer you in directions that will make you happier and healthier. (Yes, this is a serious, and unusually well-thought-out, examination of the implications of AI.)

Simone doesn't like her.

So when Mrs. Davis offers her a deal -- find and destroy the Holy Grail in return for one wish, up to and including telling Mrs. Davis to shut herself off -- there isn't much choice.

There ensues a show that is gloriously strange, but which manages to stay just on the side of having an entirely coherent -- indeed, fairly tight in retrospect -- plot. It's less like phantasmagorias such as Legion or The Prisoner, more like Watchmen or Lost. None of which is coincidental, since it is another series by Damon Lindelof, who thrives on weird-but-deep.

Along the way, we get to see Simone's history, her deeply fucked-up parents, her relationship with Jesus (including some exploration of polyamory for a bride of Christ), and the ways in which it is so very good and very bad (and sometimes extremely creepy) for society to actually have an omniscient mother figure. The religious parallels there are somewhat left to subtext, but they're very much there, and it's hard to say whether the series is rather blasphemous or deeply respectful of religion. (Possibly both.)

Overall, it's a better show than I was expecting -- not as all-around brilliant as Watchmen, but far tighter than Lost. Yes, they do nail the ending, and this is 100% a complete story in eight episodes, without cliffhangers or any obvious room for a sequel. (I greatly appreciate that: over time, I've come to love novels far more than serials.)

Betty Gilpin does a great job as Simone: so very, very messed up, but trying her damnedest to save the world even as she is stumbling around in the dark, trying to understand what is going on here.

The story is rich, complex, and wonderfully weird, ranging from the well-meaning (but full of toxic masculinity) resistance, to the secret order that has been protecting the Grail for centuries (Rule Number One: Do Not Sip!), to the annual competition to hold onto Excalibur the longest. There are a bunch of side-tracks, but all of them keep moving the plot along, and the final episode is actually a pretty powerful exploration of the fear of death and the meaning of life for most of our major characters.

So -- yeah. I can't recommend subscribing to Peacock in order to see Mrs. Davis. But it's well worth watching if you have the opportunity, and are willing to have your mind somewhat bent for eight hours....

Tonight's theater outing was to the ART's current show, Becoming a Man. It's an excellent one-act play; let's talk about it a little.

This memoir from P. Carl starts out when 50-ish Carl has finally finished transitioning. For the first time in his life, he feels comfortable in his own body, and he's on top of the world -- it's great. And then reality sets in.

This is not a story about headline-grabbing transphobia; indeed, while the word gets tossed around a bit, it's striking that the people around Carl are mostly pretty good about his transition. (Even his absolute waste of a father mostly just fails through constant deadnaming.)

The problem is in working his way through the effects on his relationships. Carl is overjoyed about finally getting to just be one of the guys, but his proudly lesbian wife is struggling with the question of whether he is still the person she married.

And the story doesn't shy away from this tension. The Polly-who-was is a major character, not just in the flashback scenes of Carl's history, but still very much in constant dialog (sometimes argument) with him in his head. Which isn't made any easier by the way that Carl, marinating in new boy-hormones, winds up expressing a somewhat unpleasant brew of insecurity and toxic masculinity.

After last month's Real Women Have Curves, this play is quiet, almost intimate in the way that it tells a span of Carl's life as he and those around him work their way through all this, figuring out the new shape of their lives. It's not always easy, but it's honest and free from melodrama, well acted and directed, and nicely thought-provoking.

It's currently in previews, and runs a few more weeks. Well worth watching if you have a chance.

This is the last night of my work onsite trip. So let's do something I do too rarely: sit down and diarize a bit.

This is going to be long and fairly unedited, but focusing on what I thought were the high points; hopefully it won't be interminable.

The context here is that I work for Slack, as a member of the Platform Team, specifically the "3p Integrations Core" sub-team, still mostly known as Troops. (Which was the small startup I had been working at, that got acquired something like 18 months ago.) At some point, I should talk a bit about what I do. But for purposes of this rambling entry, the important concepts are the Platform Team (something like a hundred people), the Troops Engineers (eight of us), and the Platform Integrations Team (Troops plus two other small teams).

In this age of being heavily remote (all-remote in the case of Troops), the Platform team has made the sensible decision that we should all get together in-person a couple of times a year, for a bit of communication and a lot of team-building.

(tl;dr -- this is actually a good deal of fun. I approve of doing this a few times a year.)

Hence, we were all summoned to Salesforce Tower in SF for the week. (Did you know that Salesforce owns Slack? I did not know that before we were acquired. Yes, Salesforce owns Slack.)

Monday was, y'know, mainly about the flying. But time zones are funny things, so despite taking off from Boston at 11am, I nonetheless landed in SF before 2pm. So there was a lot of time to kill.

I wound up staying at the Galleria Park Hotel, a nice older hotel that has been kept up generally well. My room is a tad small; OTOH, they provide bathrobes and umbrellas (the latter an absolute lifesaver this week -- see below), and every evening, when I walk into the hotel after work, they shove a complementary martini into my hand, so I have no complaints. For the Bostonians: the general vibe reminds me a good deal of the Park Plaza -- older, a bit idiosyncratic, but nice.

(Note that we weren't all staying at the same place: instead of having a hotel dictated to us, we're told to go into Concur (hack, ptui) and choose from the recommended list. I chose the Galleria Park; most of Troops landed on the Omni instead.)

In the early evening, my immediate team had a quick Slack chat: several of us had gotten in by then, all of us were jet-lagged, and looking for an early dinner. My teammate Frank, whose wife comes from Georgia (the country, not the state), had been extolling the virtues of Georgian food, so other-teammate Thor found the restaurant Georgian Cheese Boat, and half-a-dozen of us went there.

Mini-review: that's quite tasty! I haven't tried the cuisine before, but there were lots of high points, from an excellent lamb stew to good kebabs to the eponymous cheese boats. (Basically low bread bowls full of melted cheese, into which you stir an egg and a bit of butter.)

A high point was the Khinkali: vaguely mushroom-shaped dumplings with a thick doughy "stem" that you use to hold it while you eat the stuff-filled "cap". (Fortunately, Frank had clued us into the fact that it's a novice mistake to try to eat the stem, which is just a big wodge of solid dough and not cooked to the point of being good to eat.)

The restaurant was about half a mile from our hotels; I walked with everyone back to the Omni, and then decided I wanted some exercise, so I set myself a mission. I didn't have room for dessert immediately (see: Ozempic), but I wanted a cookie to have in my room to eat later. So I set out down to the Ferry Marketplace on the theory that a tourist area like that would surely have something like Insomia Cookies still open at 8pm.

There ensued what turned into a stubborn five-miles trek up the Embarcadero through Pier 27, then back down to Mission and along that, finding absolutely nothing of the sort. The Embarcadro and Financial Districts are dead after 6pm, to a degree that I find astonishing even by the standards of Boston's comparable district. So while it was great exercise, it was rather frustrating.

(The irony, and lesson in "no shit, just ask freaking directions", was discovering the next day that, two blocks from my hotel in the other direction, is... an Insomnia Cookies. Sigh.)

Tuesday was the first day of the onsite proper, starting with a surprisingly good catered breakfast for all of Platform, some assorted welcoming and speechification, lunch, and presentations on various topics. Since it was work stuff it's mostly proprietary, and wouldn't be interesting to y'all anyway.

For dinner, the entire Platform team went out to ChinaLive. I suspect that if you eat downstairs off the menu, it lives up to its stellar billing. As it was, it was… fine.

The problem is, we weren't doing a sit-down dinner: instead, we had a single big room upstairs, designed as a wander-around-and-mingle cocktail party with passed appetizery things. They were the sorts of items I like (potstickers, char siu pork buns, etc), and good enough, but nothing better than that – I've had far better interpretations of each item. Similarly, the cocktails at the open bar were perfectly competent, but not even remotely innovative or interesting, and the selection was tiny.

Combine that with the fact that it was brutally loud (see "100 people at a cocktail party"), and most of us in the Troops team fled as soon as we could politely do so.

So we walked back to the Omni, I dropped everyone else off, and decided that for tonight's exercise I should do the opposite of last night. Since I'd already explored the Embarcadero thoroughly, I would instead walk up California Street in the other direction. (This is where the SF locals go, "oh, dear".)

The thing is, "up California Street" turns out to be a very literal description. You walk up an extremely steep hill, get to the top – and find yourself confronted with another extremely steep hill in front of you. Repeat half a dozen times.

By the time I got to the Mark Hopkins International and decided that this time really, truly seemed to be the top, I finally went onto my phone, looked it up, discovered that I had just climbed Nob Hill the hard way, and was now about 300 feet higher than I had started.

So yeah – good, but somewhat unintentional, exercise.

—---

Wednesday was smaller-teams day. After another surprising good breakfast (I will credit Salesforce Tower: their catering staff know what they are doing), we broke out into more manageable groups. Troops was grouped with the "3p data" and "Built by Slack" teams (the latter having flown in all the way from India) for some presentations to help us get to know each others' projects better. And then it was time for the inevitable Mandatory Team-Building Fun.

I will confess, I was dreading this bit. Last May's version was fun but dangerous: a cocktail-making class that led to my first hangover since college. This time, we had been told that we were going to be taking an improv class, and a lot of us were not looking forward to that.

As it happens, I needn't have worried. The class was with Leela Improv, and was surprisingly fun. They emphasized upfront that "funny" was not the goal here – they were trying to teach folks to loosen up, turn off the inner critic, be spontaneous and just play for an hour or two.

So for example, there was the game "Whoosh, Bing, Pow". (Similar to this description, with slightly different details.) That's a good enough warmup that I may well steal it for LARP purposes. Or "I am a tree", which consists of people posing as various things and riffing off of the person before you. And a whole bunch of "Yes, and" exercises. Ephraim, from the 3p-data team, wound up working with me in describing a fictional trip to Disneyland, while three other folks got to play the slideshow of the events we were describing. At the end, all twenty of us formed a giant flying dragon, which then fought, ate, and pooped out my teammate Neil.

All in all, kind of weirdly fun – a more effective exercise in getting folks out of their mental ruts than I would have expected.

Dinner was an interesting challenge, in a couple of respects. Will, the Troops lead, had been assigned the task of finding somewhere to go for dinner. But he had a more modest budget than the night before, and the combined group had a lot of vegetarians. (Because India.) So he'd been tearing his hair out, eventually landing on wildseed, a vegan restaurant. Some folks were skeptical (Frank, our confirmed carnivore, especially so), but I was intrigued.

Also challenging was the weather. One of the folks at the front desk of the hotel informed me that we were in the middle of a "pineapple express", where weather coming in from both Hawaii and the northwest hits at once, resulting in wind and rain. Everyone agreed that the weather was horrible.

I, OTOH, looked at it, said "pshaw – compared to a proper Nor'easter this isn't so bad", and resolved to walk. (Yes, I like to walk, and was using this trip as an excuse to do a lot of it.) So I took one of the hotel umbrellas, and set out.

It was, in fact, no-kidding wet, and my shoes were pretty well soaked through by the time I got to the restaurant. (2.1 miles from the hotel.) And it turned out that the route to get there was via Union Street – which isn't quite as steep and tall as California Street, but only a bit less. (The folks who Uber'ed there described the drive as a terrifying experience.)

So everyone thought I was a bit nuts, but it was again great exercise, and I'd left myself enough time that I didn't need to rush, so it was actually kind of fun – I just had to repeat "I am not sugar, I do not melt" to myself every now and then.

The meal itself was arguably the high point of my trip – summary: wildseed is great, and you should go. It's the sort of place that clearly committed to being no-compromises great food, vegan or not, and the set menu that Will had chosen was fabulous. Highlights included wild mushroom zeppoli, light and flavorful, on an herb aioli. Jackfruit "sausage" pizza with calabrian chiles and horseradish to give it serious zing. Mushroom risotto with garlic confit and coconut parmesan. (I don't even know what that last one is, but it was good.) And a gluten-free pan chocolate chip cookie to finish it off.

On top of that, the cocktail menu was everything the previous night's hadn't been, full of creativity. I had something called "The Nutty Professor", the usual sort of nut-forward cocktail that is usually cloyingly sweet, but this was built on top of good nocino, with an amaro and an aperitivo providing balance and just a hint of bitterness, so you got nutty flavor instead of a face full of sugar. (Heck, they even had an amaro on the menu that I don't own – most bars can't claim that good a selection.)

So yeah – if you get a chance, go there. If it was local, wildseed would probably be on my favorite-restaurants list.

(And no, even I wasn't foolish enough to walk back 2.1 miles though that rain: it would have been courting blisters on my feet, and a non-trivial chance of slipping and hurting myself on that hill, given my no-longer-sober state, so I shared an Uber back to within a dozen blocks of my hotel.)

—---

Finally, today (Thursday) was relatively quiet. Closing ceremonies were pretty brief, just the presentation of the "Platinum Platypus Awards" (the Platypus is the mascot of the Platform team), after which I spent a few hours actually, y'know, working.

But since I had the evening to myself (I'm flying home tomorrow), I contacted my sister (who is local), and we decided to try doing dinner at hed verythai, a whopping half-block from my hotel.

It says something about a restaurant when you walk into a restaurant that's invisible down a back alley, at 6:15 on a rainy Thursday evening, and the place is already full. Fortunately, another party was finishing off, so the three of us had to wait less than ten minutes.

If you like Thai food, this gets a high recommendation. The style is sort of bento-box: you choose one of the set meals, each focused on a particular protein, and get served around five small bowls centered around that.

So for example, I went for the Pork Belly (because mmm, pork belly). Besides that central main (relatively thin, well-cooked sliced with an intensely savory dipping sauce), there was a papaya salad with a hard-to-describe but strong back-burn spice, a coconut-based soup (also with some kick), a side of eggplant and three different rices.

The only caveat was that service was slow: they were explicitly short-handed, and slammed with customers. But we weren't in a tearing hurry, and the food was well worth the leisurely pace.

So if you are in this area, and are looking for very good Thai food (with some real kick), check out hed verythai: it also goes on the "I wish this place was near to us" list.

—---

And tomorrow morning I head home. It's been a generally good time – not perfect, but any work trip that turns out three restaurants that I quite like is a good trip. (I'm bemused that the world-class Chinese was the only one that didn't impress me.)

I wound up on a whole pile of panels at Arisia (next weekend), and one of them is a "Nu Trek" panel, a retrospective on the five major series of the new era so far: Discovery, Picard, Lower Decks, Strange New Worlds, and Prodigy.

I'd watched all of the rest already (I've always been something of a Trekkie), but not Prodigy. It's a weird little series: produced for Nickolodeon, nominally a kids' show, and (inconveniently) not currently available on Paramount+. But I'm a stubborn completist, and if I'm going to be on that panel, I wanted to be well-informed. So I bit the bullet a few weeks ago, paid for the series via Amazon, and just finished watching it. Let's talk about it.

Summary: considerably better than the "kids' show" label would imply, and much better than I was expecting. Not the absolute best Trek, but far from the worst -- worth watching.

Mild spoilers for the general shape of the series ahead, but I'm going to avoid any big ones, especially for the back half of the story.

Setting expectations appropriately: this show is CGI-animated 20-odd-minute episodes. Quality is generally good, but not Pixar-grade. As usual, the aliens (most of the cast) are pretty convincing, the humans a little less so. But there's only one nominal human in the main cast, so that doesn't get in the way too badly.

The story starts far off the beaten path, not even in Star Trek's Alpha Quadrant -- far enough that few people have ever even heard of the Federation -- on a mining asteroid made up mainly of slave labor from dozens of different worlds. It is ruled by The Diviner, a mysterious and not-altogether-friendly figure, who is hunting something around the asteroid.

(An interesting and important twist: this isn't the Federation, and they don't have universal translators. The workers can only crudely communicate, which has helped keep them under the Diviner's thumb.)

Dal, an impulsive teen (and more or less the lead of the ensemble cast) accidentally stumbles across that "something": a prototype Federation starship named the Protostar, which has been lodged in the rock for some unknown number of years. He and a group of his fellow workers manage to steal the Protostar and escape, with the Diviner in hot pursuit.

The de facto crew of the Protostar are:

Dal: a hot-headed daredevil who just sort of decides that he is the Captain. (And spends much of the season discovering that this is much harder and less fun than it looks on the label.)
Zero: a Medusan who escaped from the Diviner and has been hunted by him for years. This is a deep cut from The Original Series -- Medusans are energy beings, and anyone who looks directly at one is driven mad, so Zero must always wear her homebrew metal pod in order to keep those around her safe.
Rok-Tahk: big, strong and apparently made of rocks -- imagine Marvel's Thing with the voice of an eight-year-old girl. She immediately gets assigned to be Security Officer, but there's a lot more to her than this.
Jankom Pog: a short Tellurite, the ship's Engineer, irascible and probably not quite as young as the rest.
Gwyn: the Diviner's daughter, who stows away aboard the ship, and is by no means a fast friend of the rest. Her story and arc are pretty central to the series.
Janeway: the ship's holographic training program for new cadets is based on Captain Janeway from Star Trek: Voyager (and yes, played by Kate Mulgrew). They spend a lot of effort early in the series keeping her convinced that they are Starfleet cadets, despite having almost no idea what that means.
Last but not least, Murf: a friendly, happy slime mold that can alter its shape arbitrarily and is, to a reasonable approximation, indestructible. (It is pretty ambiguous for a long time whether Murf is a crewmate, or the ship's pet.)

The series is built as two half-seasons.

The first half is all about fleeing from the Diviner, learning how the ship works and what this "Starfleet" thing is, and eventually taking control of their lives and dealing with the problem. Over the course of these first ten episodes, this group of strangers slowly figure out how to be both a crew and a found family. It's fairly episodic and predictable, and what you would expect from a good Nick series (eg, Avatar or Korra), but generally well-written and acted.

The back half gets IMO altogether more interesting and fun, as the crew set their sights on going to the Federation and joining Starfleet. They discover the hard way that it is critically important that they not return to the Federation -- but that becomes much harder when the real Vice Admiral Janeway finds out that the Protostar (originally Captained by her friend Chakotay) has been sighted and goes after it.

Things accelerate from there, with the fate of the entire Federation in the balance and the crew of the Protostar at the heart of trying to save it. Suffice it to say, it becomes a really fine roller-coaster ride, and I wound up wrapped up enough that I just binged the final five episodes back-to-back, effectively a tight concluding two-hour movie.

Overall, it's solidly good Star Trek. Not as good as Strange New Worlds or the second half of Discovery (or of course Lower Decks, perhaps my favorite of all Trek series), but much better than much of Picard or the first half of Discovery. The plot generally makes sense, and while there is some serious Trekkian timey-wimey going on, it's nowhere near as silly as Trek often gets.

Individual episodes hit all the major Trek tropes, and generally do them well -- the first contact that goes horribly wrong, the holodeck episode, the time-travel story, and so on. (There is one gloriously funny episode about a second contact, "All the World's a Stage", showing nicely why getting first contact right is so terribly important.)

While the animation is only good-not-great by current standards, it's good enough, and the writing, direction and acting are all solid. It's very much a coming-of-age story for most of the crew, as they get to know each other and begin to figure out what they want to be. There are some excellent twists and growth experiences (suffice it to say, Rok-Tahk doesn't wind up the Security Officer): in sum, it's what you want from a good YA series.

It's true enough to Trek that I wouldn't show it to small kids -- there are certainly some scary moments -- but I'd say it's probably great for tweens on up. No major content warnings, except that one major character doesn't make it to the end.

To my surprise, I discovered when I went to write this that there is a season 2 coming: it was mostly in the can before Paramount+ cancelled the series, but Netflix has picked it up for next year, and they've apparently already started streaming season 1 in preparation for that.

That said, it's worth noting that this is a complete one-and-done story unto itself -- while it's easy to see the plot threads that they'll be exploring in season 2 (there are two major open threads, and I suspect they'll follow up both of them), this story comes to a very definitive and final climax, and ends well. So there's no reason to wait for season 2 -- I hope it will be as good as season 1, but it will be a new story with these characters, not the same tale.

So: yeah, worth a watch. Now that (according to JustWatch, at least) it's available on Netflix, I'd recommend it for any Trekkies who have that. It's good middle-of-the-road Trek, requiring relatively little grounding in the previous history of this universe (you learn about the Federation as the kids do, and Janeway is the only major crossover character), so it's even a pretty good introduction to this world.

Solid B+ work -- check it out!

This week is Kate's and my tenth anniversary, which are are spending in Barcelona -- a famously foodie city for a decidedly foodie couple. (We're taking two weeks in Spain, which is why this entry is initially locked, on the usual theory of "Don't tell the world that you're out of town". We did four nights in Madrid, then three in Valencia, and are finishing off with five in Barcelona, leaving the day after our anniversary.)

Tonight's dinner was Teatro, and while tonight isn't technically our anniversary, I'm content to call it our anniversary dinner, because that was just plain spectacular -- maybe one of the five best restaurants we've been to. I gather that it is the sequel to the similar (and famed) restaurant Tickets, which shut down due to the pandemic, and it's a worthy successor.

The gimmick of the place is that everything is a show. It's not that you watch a kitchen, it's that there are seven kitchens, and every seat faces one of them. We don't go to restaurants for their gimmicks, but it did make it fun.

More importantly, the food quality and service were both absolutely top-notch: excellent and quietly attentive respectively. (The definition of really great service is that you never really need to ask for anything -- someone just shows up next to you before you realize you need it.)

Most important, the menu is ferociously innovative, and pretty much everything works: clever and unusual combinations, with carefully-balanced flavors. For example, perhaps my favorite was the Eel and Fois Gras, both chopped into small cubelets, mixed with an excellent eel sauce, and served in somehow-hardened little vessels of sushi seaweed.

We went with the "surprise" menu, basically Chef's Choice -- a quick interview about allergies and dislikes, and then they just start shoving dishes at you at high speed. All were smallish (the only dish of any real size was the lamb tacos, near the end -- two small tacos each, with North African-spiced lamb, tiny bits of cauliflower, a red onion "pico" and a raita-like topping); most dishes were one bite. So it added up slowly, but we were well north of a dozen dishes (ETA: reviewing the receipt, we did 15 courses) before we declared defeat and told them to stop.

It's pricey, of course, but given the amount of food (and booze -- the cocktail menu is every bit as innovative and well-balanced as the food) it was entirely reasonable for a high-end restaurant, about the same as we were used to paying at Tasting Counter.

So anyway -- if you find yourself in Barcelona, and you like high-end food, do it. This one is best-of-the-best...

We continue to get to shows at the American Repertory Theater when we can, because they are usually intriguing and often great. Tonight was The Half-God of Rainfall, and it was no exception.

This isn't quite a play in the traditional sense; rather, it is an hour-and-a-half long poem, telling a story that is being enacted by the actors as they say it, describing their characters' actions more often than engaging in straightforward dialogue.

That sounds dry, but it's anything but -- this is a show that is extraordinarily physical, and not in a way that you will conventionally see on stage. And that's because the story is a delicious hybrid of traditions, slamming together Greek and Yoruba mythology to tell the story of Demi, son of Modupe (high priestess of the river goddess Osun) and Zeus. The tale has many of the elements of Greek tragedy, but told from the viewpoint of Yoruba storytelling, with choreography that is distinctly African in its influences.

Demi has powers over weather, making it rain whether he likes it or not. But what he really wants to do is play basketball, and his life is woven, semi-fictionally, into the history of the sport over half a dozen or so years, starting as a Nigerian boy who can't miss the shot, then escaping to the USA pro scene.

That said, you don't need to know or care much about the details of the sport -- for purposes of this story, it is a field of battle, the modern substitute for the shores of Troy. Primarily, this is about the gods meddling in the affairs of mortals, the Olympians clashing with the Orisha, while the mortals are mostly trying to get on with their lives.

A big, big content warning applies, and it comes from Demi's parentage. Like so many demigods, he is the son of Zeus and a mortal woman. And therefore, this is primarily a story about rape: its horror, its effects, and the rage it leaves behind. Zeus is very much the villain of this tale, and while a measure of justice is meted out in the end, it's a dark path getting there.

So while Demi is the title character of the story, Modupe is the real protagonist here IMO, and we see her from many sides, a powerful force of nature in her own right. Zeus' crime leaves her scarred, but by no means broken.

It's hard to say more without getting deep into spoilers, but suffice it to say, it's well worth seeing if you get a chance. It's playing at the ART for another couple of weeks; I sincerely hope that it will then go on to be seen elsewhere.

My most recent semi-binge (a few times a week, since this one requires more attention) has been the show Carnival Row, on Amazon Prime. (Two seasons, 18 episodes total. ETA: not animated - this one is live-action, with well-done SFX.)

tl;dr: solidly good Victorian-ish-era fantasy AU series, with intriguing characters, deep plots, a lot of suspense, and more to say than average.

Let's get into it. I'm going to largely avoid any major spoilers beyond things that come out in the first couple of episodes, and broad tropes and concepts that get addressed.

The high concept is that this takes place in what amounts to early 20th century Europe in an alternate world. All the names have been changed to give them freedom to tell the story they want, but the parallels are not subtle. (Eg, the primary state religion revolves around The Martyr, who clearly was hanged, but it's basically Christianity.)

The story mostly takes place in an (as far as I can tell) unnamed city that is the capital of The Burgue -- basically, London. They have been fighting a large-scale war (roughly WWI) against the forces of The Pact -- who are vaguely a mix of Imperial Germany and Russia. (There are strong echoes of each, in different ways.)

Their primary fight has been over the colonies, particularly Tirnanoc -- which is, of course, where the fae folk come from. There are a bunch of species of fae who show up, but we mainly see the Pix (fairies -- human-size but with fully functional wings) and the Puck (also humanoid but with horns and hooves). The fae species are collectively called "critch" by the humans; this is pretty clearly a universal racist slur, used ubiquitously by everyone including most of the fae themselves.

Seven years ago, the Pact took Tirnanoc, producing a long-term wave of fae refugees to the Burgue; the "Carnival Row" of the title is basically the fae ghetto, seen by the public mainly as a place of brothels and crime. (Although mostly, of course, actually made up of people just trying to get by.)

The plot is largely a story of three relationships.

The leads are Vignette and Philo.

She is a Pix who stayed behind after the fall of Tirnanoc, helping refugees flee the land. Our tale picks up when the Pact are finally taking the last scrap of land, and she herself is forced to flee for the Burgue.

He is a detective for the Burgish Police. He's a good cop, both in that he's smart enough to close more than his fair share of cases, and in that he tries to keep things from getting too bad for the fae. He has quite a number of his own secrets, which come out gradually over the course of the story. (He's not even aware of all of them at the beginning.)

Vignette and Philo were lovers, back when he was a soldier in Tirnanoc seven years ago. As far as she knew, he was killed back then; when she gets to the city and they are reunited, suffice it to say things do not go smoothly.

Their relationship is very, very complicated. They are very much in love with each other, but not only with each other (in particular, Vignette also has a deep relationship with her girlfriend from the homelands, Tourmaline), and there's a lot of frustration and resentment underneath it all. They are both people of passionate opinions and drive, and when they disagree (which is frequently), they wind up on opposing sides as often as the same ones.

Next are Jonah and Sophie. Jonah Breakspear is the son of the Chancellor -- more or less the elected Emperor of the Burgue, whose mandate is somewhat limited but whose power is considerable. Jonah is grown, but spoiled and bored: at the beginning of the story, he is basically a ne'er-do-well with a predilection for the brothels of Carnival Row, but prophesied for greatness someday.

Sophie Longerbane is the daughter of the leader of the opposition in Parliament, Chancellor Breakspear's chief rival. She is a young woman of considerable intelligence and even more ambition in a society that very much considers women to be wives and mothers, and not much else. She is brilliant, dangerous, and probably the least predictable of all the characters.

Suffice it to say, Jonah and Sophie eventually wind up entangled in an incredibly complex, deeply fraught relationship, which really hits its stride in season two. There is absolutely nothing sweet about it (neither of them are exactly nice people), but it is suspenseful, even thrillingly so sometimes, as they find themselves in a chess game of passion, ambition, and power.

Finally, there is the story of Isobel and Agreus.

Isobel Spurnrose is a young aristocrat in her early 20s. She lives with her brother Ezra, who has just managed to lose much of the family fortune on a bad business investment. She is utterly sheltered and spoiled, casually racist in the most upper-crust kind of way. (Critch can be perfectly fine people, so long as they know their place.)

Her life is upended when Agreus Astrayon moves into the empty mansion next door. He is something unheard-of: a wealthy Puck. She is completely scandalized in a "what will my friends think?" kind of way, but then happens upon a plan -- in exchange for him investing some of his vast self-made wealth in her brother's ventures, she will introduce him to polite society. Suffice it to say, sparks eventually fly.

I was rather surprised to find that, by the middle of season two, Isobel actually wound up my favorite character in the show. Since she starts off as such an entitled brat, she has that much more room to grow, and she gets a lot of arc over the course of the story, gradually gaining in strength and self-awareness even as she loses the biases she grew up with. This doesn't come easily (or voluntarily -- she and Agreus go through some serious tribulations), but it's a fascinating examination of someone growing through adversity.

Their relationship is genuinely sweet. It doesn't go by any means simply -- they are breaking some serious societal taboos, and Ezra is much more seriously racist than she is -- but this just keeps drawing them closer together as each other's rocks in the storm.

As mentioned above, the story has a lot to say.

Sexism is a consistent through-line. About half the cast are women, and Burgish society has a decidedly old-fashioned view there. Isobel and Sophie both start the story very much trapped in their societal roles, and much of their arcs are about breaking out of that. (While it isn't called out, Pix society doesn't appear to have such an issue -- while Vignette has her own problems, agency mostly isn't one of them once she finds her feet in the Burgue.)

Classism is subtler, but deeply woven into the story. The Burgue is capitalist in the finest red-in-tooth-and-claw tradition, and the lower classes of society (especially the fae) are treated like dirt. But while the story doesn't have any fondness there, suffice it to say we eventually get to see another society that is very much early 20th century communist, and it is horribly realistic about just how totalitarian that can get. So by and large, this story is perfectly happy to indict the monstrousness of both extremes, especially as pursued in the early 20th century.

But of course, racism is the heart and soul of this story. The use of the fae as a metaphor allows the show to be unsparing to a degree that many shows aren't willing to go. Burgish society at its best is casually racist; at its worst, cruelly so. Yes, they're been fighting to "save" Tirnanoc, but in the most colonialist sense. The story is rich in parallels with the real world, from the way that the fae races are used as cheap labor to the plundering of their cultural artifacts to show in Burgish museums.

On the content warning front, obviously all of the above: in particular, the racism is metaphorical but unsubtle, and central to the story.

Both seasons involve rather grisly serial murders. The serious on-screen violence is infrequent but sometimes fairly gory when it happens. There is necromantic magic, and pretty horrifying monsters involved with the story; they are mainly Macguffins and plot hooks (the story itself is mostly interpersonal), but when the guignol hits, it's fairly grand. And there is a non-trivial amount of realistic petty violence throughout the story, particularly from the Burgish police.

(There's also a moderate amount of sex and nudity, but not tons: roughly the same level as Bridgerton.)

I will caveat that I'm not quite done with the series yet -- I have two episodes to go, but I'm getting this written while I have a free hour. So I don't know with confidence whether they stick the landing. But the pacing is right for a reasonably good finish. It feels to me like the series was originally planned to run slightly longer -- the back half of the second season moves pretty fast -- but they took the time they had and used it well.

So overall, a solid novel crossing a bunch of genres and tropes. Not high art, but rather better than I had expected -- this one's flown a bit too much under the radar. It's confident in both its fantasy world and its alternate history, while being extremely conscious of real-world history and the parallels being drawn. If the above sounds intriguing to you, I suspect you'll like it.

I haven't been posting much here -- I confess, Mastodon microblogging suits me awfully well -- but I shouldn't let this one pass without a brief mention. A few weeks ago, I finished watching She-Ra.

tl;dr -- a milestone in modern animation, far better than even my highest hopes. Watch it.

At the beginning of the story, our lead -- Adora -- is a loyal footsoldier for The Horde. She's strong, smart, talented, and meant for great things in Lord Hordak's army of (cough) bringing peace to the world.

Then one day, she and her best friend Catra are playing hookie out in the Forbidden Forest (NB: the series is sci-fi-ish, but with strong fantasy influences), when she comes across a sword, and is essentially claimed by it, becoming the incarnation of the legendary warrior She-Ra. She winds up meeting the people of the Rebellion, figures out that maybe Hordak isn't the good guy, and the story starts in earnest.

So far, so pablum, and hence I wasn't expecting much. But the execution is glorious.

To begin with, while the story looks like it's going to be episodic and trite, it's anything but. The first season hits most of the expected notes -- introducing all of the main cast, one character per episode, fighting the Horde, crossing paths with Catra (who is rising in Hordak's ranks), winning some and losing some.

But as it goes along, you begin to glimpse the epic hiding underneath the episodes. More than anything I can think of since Babylon 5, every detail at the beginning is just setting the stage for a large, well-crafted, tightly-plotted four-or-five season saga.

("Four-or-five"? Technically they claim that it's five seasons, but that's nonsense -- it's clear that it's four seasons, with an unintended pandemic break in the middle of what would have been season 2. All in all it's 52 episodes, in 13-ep seasons, and tells a clear story with a beginning, middle, and end.)

The writing is sharp and smart, the characters diverse and wonderful. This story isn't just queer-friendly, it's Queer Dammit, with the tense relationship between Adora and Catra at its heart. But it goes way beyond them, whether it be Bow's two dads, delightfully neurodiverse mad scientist Entrapta (who, along with her prehensile hair, are probably my favorite character of the show) or sweet Scorpia, who is well aware that she is the tank in this story while still being the femmeyest member of the cast.

And nobody is just their label: all the main characters (and there are a bunch) are well-rounded, complex, and well-acted.

That extends to the villains as well. With a single (specifically sociopathic) exception, all of the main bad guys are richly motivated, and have significant character arc.

Nor is it just a kids' story -- while there is a powerful joy to the whole thing, make no mistake: things get steadily darker as it goes along, and the last season is downright scary in places. (Specific CW for extremely creepy mind control, beyond the usual cartoon violence.) There are great examples and messages here for the kids, but keep that in mind when deciding about appropriate ages.

But above all, it is a deep, lush, beautifully crafted saga. I'm slightly abashed to say that it took me about 3/4 of the way through before I had the epiphany, "Wait a minute -- this is the bloody monomyth!" (When I finished the series, one of my friends pointed me to a paper arguing exactly that: that this is the Campbellian monomyth, deliberately recontextualized through a queer lens. It works, and works well.)

All of which boils down to: no kidding, certainly on my list of 50 favorite shows of all time, maybe even top 25. It's great, well worth watching, and ever more compelling as it goes -- despite my best efforts to slow down and savor it, I largely binged the last season. If you haven't seen it, and you have access to Netflix, it gets my highest recommendation.

Much of my TV watching happens in the morning, as I do my morning run on the elliptical. I tend to pick a standard-length episode of something, set the machine to 45 minutes, and go. But that tends to leave a few minutes at the end, so I always like to have a series going that I'm watching in small chunks of 3-5 minutes at a time, after the theoretically-but-not-actually 45-minute episode ends.

Last year, that filler series was the anime Sword Art Online. I finished it a couple of months ago, and have been meaning to write a review ever since, but I kept putting it off, because I can't put it into the "recommended" or "disrecommended" buckets. Instead, this one is Complicated.

tl;dr -- I recommend (with reservations) the first two seasons, and then recommend that you stop, put down the remote, and walk away.

Let's get into the details. Mild but necessary structural spoilers here, about the overall shape of the series. Buckle up -- this one's long. ( Four complicated seasons of distinctly different stories )

So like I said: complicated. I recommend the first two seasons with reservations; I do not recommend the second two seasons. I do recommend the GGO spin-off (if you can find it -- I'm not sure whether it is currently available in the US), and it may be worth watching just book 4, Mother's Rosario, on its own.

Just finished (like, a minute ago) the Netflix adaptation of the graphic novel Locke & Key. So it's time for a quick review. (No big spoilers.)

tl;dr -- solidly good adaptation. Not slavishly faithful to the original, but it gets the themes and characters right, and is a satisfying story unto itself.

Background: the original Locke & Key was a fairly substantial series, written by Joe Hill (Stephen King's son) and illustrated by Gabriel Rodriguez. It ran for 37 issues, and was collected into six volumes. There have also been some followup stories since it ended, but the main series constitutes a complete novel unto itself, with a proper beginning, middle, and end.

The Netflix TV series ran for three seasons, totaling 28 episodes. I'll be doing a little compare-and-contrast, but mostly focus on the TV version here. I do recommend the comic -- it's a great story, which leans a bit more into the horror aspect than the TV show -- but they're not quite the same. Season 1 of the TV show broadly follows the lines of the comic, but things gradually diverge from there, and Season 3 is very much its own thing.

As we start the story, the Locke family is broken. The father of the family, Rendell Locke, has been brutally and pointlessly murdered, and the family is bereft. Needing a change of scenery, Nina (the mother) decides to move the family to Rendell's home town of Matheson, MA. (Lovecraft, MA in the original comic, which was a little unsubtle; IMO changing that was probably wise.) They move into the family homestead of Keyhouse, a sprawling Victorian mansion. (Which is apparently at least 250 years old, but let's not quibble about the architectural anachronisms.) Along with her come eldest son Tyler (16, I think?), daughter Kinsey (15) and 12-ish Bode.

Gradually, they begin to stumble upon the family secret: the keys. The house is full of keys that whisper to the kids, especially to Bode. Each key is unique, and each possesses its own distinct magic. One lets you go anywhere; another lets you walk into someone's head and see their memories. One commands fire; one opens the mysterious doorway in the cave deep beneath Keyhouse. But only the kids can perceive the magic -- anyone over 18 can't truly see it, and can't retain memory of it.

(Okay, mostly. Suffice it to say, almost everything I am saying here comes with caveats. This series involves a lot of magic, and very little is hard-and-fast.)

The history of the keys, the house, and the family slowly unspool, mainly over the course of Season 1 but details continue to emerge throughout. (As do ever-more keys.) Suffice it to say, while the TV series is less a horror story than the original, there are still demons and death involved, woven in amongst the kids exploring their magical toys.

I won't get too deeply into the plot, noting that the first two seasons mostly resolve, but each leaves a big problem in its wake. You do have to watch all three seasons to get a complete story. That's generally fine -- there's a little bit of Netflix middle-of-the-season sag here and there, but it never drags terribly.

I did find myself caring about the characters. Nina is far more important in the show than I remember her being in the comic -- she is a recovering alcoholic, and her brushes with magic, which she is unable to remember if she is sober, do nothing to help with her mental state.

She and the kids all get pretty strong arcs; in general, this is a more honest and realistic coming-of-age story than the comic is, with Tyler graduating and trying to figure out his life, Kinsey dealing with relationships (both good and bad), and Bode learning that magic doesn't solve every problem. But I found Nina's arc the most relatable, slowly dragging herself away from tragedy, reconnecting with her kids, and making a new life.

The production isn't remarkable, but solidly good -- I never found myself complaining about the writing, acting or production values. They use enough CGI to make the magic feel real, but understand that basic practical effects are often the best option when they suffice.

There are no major content warnings -- which on the one hand means they play it a little safe, but also means that I think it's probably fine for older kids. There's some violence (and, y'know, evil demons), but by the standards of modern TV it's pretty middle-of-the-road.

And yes -- the series ends, pretty conclusively. The ending is quite different from that of the comic (the story has gone in very different directions by that point), but IMO is quite a bit stronger because it is more character-focused.

So overall, recommended. Not a work of art, but a good solid watch that pays off well.

So, there's this genre of comics that I traditionally call "whiny autobiography". It's an author dissecting their own recent life in detail, not just "warts and all", but obsessively focusing on those warts. I tend to think of it having seriously kicked into gear somewhere around the late 80s or early 90s, with a bunch of B&W author/artists doing it, especially the trio of Canadian bros: Chester Brown, (to a lesser degree) Seth, and the self-indulgent master of the form, Joe Matt.

Frankly, while it was interesting for a bit, it got annoying before terribly long. There's a lot of parading around going, "Look how awful I am!", with little sense that the author has learned anything, and precious little artistry.

This buildup is intentional contrast. Having just finished It's Lonely at the Center of the Earth: An auto-bio-graphical novel by Zoe Thorogood, it technically falls into this category. It's limited-timespan B&W author-artist autobiography, with the author very much self-absorbed by her depression. (CW for suicidal ideation)

But it also makes its forebears look even weaker by comparison, because this is a bloody damned work of art.

tl;dr -- buy it.

Without getting too deeply into the story, Thorogood is a young comics creator, who broke at least someone big a couple of years ago with the graphic novel The Impending Blindness of Billie Scott. Then COVID hit, leaving her somewhat isolated (like so many of us), which did nothing for her depressive tendencies. So in order to do something, in the middle of 2021 she decided to spend the next six months just rendering her life in comics. (I gather this was done somewhat as it was happening, but clearly not day-by-day -- there are some very clear chapters here.)

What could be downright turgid in lesser hands winds up absolutely fascinating. As she goes through major ups and downs (including no small amount of self-sabotage), she takes the opportunities to wander off into digressions about her life and upbringing. The result is that the story is never slow, even when the days are passing with no real events aside from some page-by-page toe-tapping as she waits for upcoming planned events and excursions.

And the thing is, it is a story. Frankly, I can't even figure out how closely to realtime she was drawing this, because it ebbs and flows very much like a good novel, foreshadowing and all.

And the art is just glorious. She wanders freely between styles ranging from basically stick figures to near-realism, page-to-page (and sometimes within a single panel) for expressive effect: she has many different ways in which she renders herself, each with different emotional connotations. (Indeed, she has several different versions of herself, each drawn differently, occasionally arguing.)

Lurking behind it all is the personification of her depression, sometimes just along for the ride, sometimes looming so large it consumes the page. This is a very internal story, but she uses the graphic form brilliantly to render all of that emotion to the page.

Most often it's done semi-realistic (several characters are consistently drawn semi-anthropomorphically), in more or less standard panels, but occasionally you turn the page and boom -- there's a full or double-page spread that just punches you in the face. I would say the page turns here are more effective than anything else I've seen short of The Sculptor (Scott McCloud's masterpiece).

Perhaps most astonishingly, after all that -- the self-imposed timeline, the emotional roller coaster -- against all odds, the story actually manages to end with an epiphany that is beautiful, appropriate, and if not exactly sunny, at least hopeful.

Put it all together, and I'm just floored. She's young -- still in her mid-20s -- and this is a graphic novel that I would stack with the masterworks of many of the greats.

Indeed, I am going to stack it with them: this is going on The Shelf -- the three-foot span at the top of my graphic novel bookcase, reserved for the absolute creme de la creme of the medium. It says a lot that, toward the end, I was doling the book out a few pages at a time, because I didn't want to get to the end.

So like I said -- this is one worth seeking out, unreservedly recommended.

(And as for myself, I finally tracked down The Impending Blindness of Billie Scott, which I had missed the first time around, and will be reading that next.)

During the holiday break, I'm catching up on some of the graphic novels I have in electronic form. In particular, I'm working on some of the stuff I got in the enormous pile of queer comics I got from Humble Bundle a while back. (One of those "donate $30, get 50 graphic novels" deals.)

Not everything in the pile is great (for no obvious reason, it seems to include almost every Archie Comic that includes Kevin Keller, of whom I approve in principle but I just don't like Archie that much), but most is quite good.

An honorable mention goes to The Backstagers, which is fun and silly -- an exploration of the weird magical world behind the high school curtains, full of corridors and strange lands, where the actors never go but the backstage crew must explore and know in order to produce just the right shade of paint on demand.

(Not a full review because the bundle only included v1, and Boom Studios' website is currently down for maintenance, so I have to wait before getting the other three books.)

But two books so far are both complete and worth a clear recommendation, so a couple of short reviews...

First up is Girl Haven, by Lilah Sturges, Meaghan Carter, and Joamette Gil.

Ash is a lonely kid, whose mother disappeared three years ago, still desperately trying to hold on to the hope that she might return someday. Having just made a few new friends, Ash shows them her writing and art studio, largely untouched since that day, and they accidentally discover that the imaginary world that she was always describing in her work is all too real.

Koretris is a land of magic, full of talking animals and a fight between light and darkness. It is also only open to girls -- so how exactly was a boy like Ash allowed in?

This is very much a story about gender identity, as Ash wrestles with the hope that maybe this world is confirming something, but it isn't quite that simple -- instead of saying what to believe, it is more forcing Ash to make a choice.

It's well-written, and I'd say well-suited to younger teens: there is some darkness to the tale, but it's generally a positive story about growth and self-discovery, very strongly advocating the notion that you should decide your identity for yourself. Recommended -- in particular, parents should give it a look.

On the flip side is the rather darker and much funnier Camp Spirit, by Axelle Lenoir.

I first encountered Lenoir with her fabulously weird quasi-autobiography Secret Passages earlier this year. That is the tale of her younger childhood, starting to come to terms with the idea that she might be a little different from other people, her parent were aliens, and that she has an interdimensional doppelganger -- you know, little-kid stuff like that.

Camp Spirit is a somewhat more straightforward novel, but still has much of the same flavor. Elodie is 17, and absolutely despising the fact that her mother has ordered her to earn some money for college by spending six weeks as a camp counselor.

Much of the story is a fairly classic coming-of-age yarn, with scenes that would be all too familiar to many of us who were shy kids at summer camp (from the horror of camp toilets to the unbearable embarrassment of communal showers), livened with humor that grows as the story goes along. Elodie is given the problem cabin: a collection of absolutely uncontrollable red-haired girls -- watching her gradually learn how to harness and weaponize them is nastily fun. And she spends a good deal of time trying to navigate her own feelings about "little miss perfect", her friend Catherine.

But there's also a weirder level: the awkward-to-the-point-of-creepy Camp Chief; the camp songs (which are all Satanic heavy metal tunes); the legend of the local woods (which tells the tale of the good and wicked spirits that inhabit them); and of course that mysterious blue glow in the forest every night.

Suffice it to say, this is not a horror story, but it's often a fairly eerie one with some fantastical elements, as Elodie gets more and more determined to figure out what is up with this place.

Over the span of this six weeks, Elodie grows up a lot, going from sullen teenager at the beginning to significantly more self-possessed young woman by the end. That progression is well-rendered and reasonably believable; moreover, the story is an excellent ride.

Highly recommended -- it's a good book, a bit offbeat, and suitable for older teens as well as adults.

(no subject)

Review: _Diary of a Tap Dancer_

Review: Monk and Robot

Review: _The Short While_

Review: _Bea Wolf_

Review: _Avatar_ and _Korra_

Review: _Shubeik Lubeik_

Review: _Bodies_

Review: _Mrs. Davis_

Mini-Review: _Becoming a Man_

Wandering (so much wandering) around San Francisco

Review: _Star Trek: Prodigy_

Teatro

Review: _The Half-God of Rainfall_

Review: Carnival Row

Mini-review: _She-Ra and the Princesses of Power_

Review: _Sword Art Online_

Review: _Locke & Key_ (TV)

Review: _It's Lonely at the Center of the Earth_

A few graphic novels

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