Media consumed March 2018
Games:
Code Realize: A great steampunk dating sim where a mysterious girl works together with, and falls in love with, fictional characters like Van Helsing and Dr Frankenstein (but the less you know about the actual books they come from the better). The protagonist is a weird crime against nature with poisonous blood and I love her. Has some well meaning but flawed explorations of genocide and war crimes and some VERY abusive family members, but I overall really enjoyed it.
Dragon Quest Builders: a cute, fun combination of RPG plot with a Minecraft like open world: lots of exploring, gathering, building and doing little quests for people. The first three chapters were great fun and then I got stuck on the boss at the end of chapter 3 and since Cam can't do it either may never get to see the fourth and final chapter :( It was still overall a lot of fun. Unlike a lot of exploration games, instead of being a colonisation plot it's a "rebuilding after someone else took over" plot, which was interesting, if inconsistently written (I do not recommend playing this game for the plot).
Sacramento: A tiny free walking sim, where you explore a strange place and nothing much happens. Was pretty but very slight, unless I missed something.
Books:
The Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation: A fantastic Chinese m/m fantasy novel about a brilliant but reckless necromancer who just wants to do what's right, and the quietly grumpy guy who keeps bailing him out of the corpse related jams that result. Thrilling, hilarious, compassionate, and wonderfully romantic. The sex scenes are a bit...BL, but I got used to them once I realised it's poorly negotiated but mutually enjoyed kink. I have mentioned this book before, but a complete translation is now available: Exiled Rebels has most of it, and this translator has the rest. Not all of the extras have been translated but from what I've seen they're mostly smut and fluff.
The Tea Master and the Detective by Aliette de Bodard : A great scifi version of Sherlock Holmes and Watson, set in a Chinese space empire, where "Watson" is a the sentient space ship The Shadow's Child, struggling with PTSD after her experiences in a recent war, and "Holmes" is the difficult and mysterious woman Long Chau, who hires The Shadow's Child to help find a dead body. Light but a lot of fun.
The Reader and Protagonist Definitely Have to Be in True Love: Another Chinese transmigration m/m novel. A modern deaf Chinese guy ends up in the world of a novel after inadvertently convincing the writer to horribly mistreat and corrupt the hero. He feels responsible and wants to fix things, and doesn't realise this is making the (ridiculously over-powered) hero fall in love with him. Very tropey and silly, but the Reader being deaf was handled in an interesting way: he has a hearing aid that runs out of batteries every day but resets by the next morning, along with the rest of his body, and it was treated a no more or less of a disability than being a regular human in a world of super-powered beings. The romance was nice enough as these things go. Once they got together I had a feeling it was about to descend into a lot of angst, so skipped forward to the end and it was one very long somewhat dubconny xeno sex scene, since the hero is part dragon, part angel, part demon etc. Take that as a rec or warning as suits you :)
TV:
Russian Doll: A fantastic time loop miniseries, with a delightfully awful female protagonist. A fun review that captures some of the appeal.
Ali Wong: Baby Cobra: Standup. Wasn't objectively bad, but got too gendered for me and made me dysphoric, so I stopped.
Movies:
Venom: An action/superhero movie about a reporter who gets tangled up, quite literally, with an alien symbiote. Fun, in a cheesy sort of way, though the race and gender politics were unfortunate.
Sing: A children's animated film about a singing competition. I enjoyed this to start with but the morally ambiguous protagonist annoyed me too much so I stopped.
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