Things consumed September 2017
Books:
A Seditious Affair by K J Charles: a BDSM m/m romance between a working class seditious printer and an uptight Tory gentleman. It was good for what it is, I think, but not quite what I was in the mood for somehow.
TV:
Wynonna Earp: Like Buffy but with grownups and undead (but not zombie!) cowboys instead of highschool and vampires. Except Buffy is more like Faith, Dawn is merged with Willow, and Spike and Angel are less annoying. Not as well made or witty as BTVS, it's a Scifi channel show and often feels frustratingly underbaked, like a script editor and a few more takes could have taken it from good to great. But if you can stand a bit of cheesy crapness the overall arcs and characters are really engaging, lots of women being kickass and having emotionally complex relationships (including super sweet canon f/f for the sister!) Also very enjoyable if you like watching attractive male and/or female brunettes be kickass while not overburdened with clothes :D I'm halfway through season 2 but cam says the rest of the season is is just as good. It's not always as progressive as it feels like it should be: it's mostly pretty feminist but the female villains are TERRIBLE, everyone but The One Black Guy is white and it 100% avoids discussing race issues even when they are REALLY relevant, disability only ever comes up as gross body horror or "trauma makes you broken" etc. But I still love it.
Castlevania: US made horror animation about vampires based on a video game. Didn't grab me.
Lego Elves: The Secrets of Elvendale: episode one wasn't bad for a cheesy little kids show about elves but...yeah. Animated by Studio Mir so it's pretty.
Jim Gaffingon: Beyond The Pale: a standup comedy set on Netflix. Relatively inoffensive and amusing.
Games:
Hiveswap: The Homestuck game! A really fun comedy scifi point and click game. A bit short and very obviously part one of a larger story, but still very enjoyable. Apparently still a lot of fun if you're not familiar with Homestuck.
Dr. Langeskov, The Tiger, and The Terribly Cursed Emerald: a short, free, funny walking sim type game about games. Made by the guy who made The Stanley Parable and one of the dudes from Friends at the Table. So short if I described it I'd spoil it, just go play it!
Subnautica (Windows only): A really enjoyable ocean exploration/survival game in early access. You've crash landed on an alien ocean planet and have to explore these AMAZINGLY GORGEOUS underwater alien environments to scan new life forms, find parts to expand your exploration capabilities, and solve mysteries related to the crash. It's still a bit buggy: I had to cheat in some blueprints the game should have given me but didn't. I am playing the mode with no need to eat, which cuts down on the "survival" aspect, there's also a creative mode. The further out biomes have some scary things that can kill you, right now I'm avoiding them to build up my equipment and methodically map out and scan the safer areas, time will tell if they make the game a bit too scary for me but for now it's really fun.
Dishonoured (Windows only): A first person stealth game set in a steampunky city based on 19th century London and Edinburgh, with rat filled sewers, disturbing inventions fuelled by whale oil, and loudspeakers telling citizens which districts have been lost to the plague. It reacts to the player's behaviour: You can either murder everyone in your path, and have the story become increasingly dark, or try and minimise casualties by using careful stealth. People kept saying such interesting things about the series that I decided to give the first game a shot since we own it. And it was very interesting! Immersive, inventive, and involving. But as expected, my attempts to be a stealthy pacifist lasted as long as it took for me to be surprised by a guard...and panic and shoot him...which attracted more guards, who I then also had to shoot...*sigh* I watched a Let's Play, but when I reached a note next to four corpses where a mother described watching her husband and children die of plague one by one I decided I was a bit too much of a sook even for that. I looked up plot summaries for all three games and might still watch Let's Plays for the next two, at least they don't have plague.
Watching the trailers for Dishonoured and Subnautica I was amused by the amount of first person violence given how much of my playing of both involves avoiding fights (with more success in Subnautica haha)
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