... wherein Peter posts a Weekly Media Update.
Books: How to Become the Dark Lord and Die Trying
Movies:
TV:
Courses: How Digital Technology Shapes Us
How to Become the Dark Lord and Die Trying by Django Wexler
This is the 2024 comic fantasy about Davi, a girl who is magically transported to a fantasy world where a human kingdom is threatened by a terrifying army of monsters, and she is the one foretold to save humanity. It turns out it's also a time-loop situation, so every time Davi dies, reality resets to her arrival.
Specifically, this book is about the 238ᵗʰ iteration of the loop ¹, where after a thousand-odd years of repeatedly failing to save humanity, Davi thinks, "Fuck these guys," and resolves to join the monsters and lead them to victory.
I mean, that's a hell of a pitch, right?
And the book delivers on the pitch: you get the chronicle of Davi very cleverly scheming and battling her way through monster society to get on the winning side of the coming war.
And honestly, it's easy to underestimate how hard it is to pull off that story. Specifically, it's hard for any writer, speculative or otherwise, to carry off "this character is a ridiculous genius". Davi is not established as the smartest girl who ever girled, but she has spent over one thousand years learning everything there is to know about combat strategies, palace intrigue, and this unique fantasy world she's been isekai'd into.
So now the author is in a bind: he has to make Davi smart.
Writers are bad at making characters smart. Typically, writers *don't* make characters smart: they make characters *right*. In Sherlock, the Great Detective looks at a cell phone, sees scratches on it, and concludes that its owner has Parkinson's disease. This is not a smart conclusion: there are literally infinite other explanations for 'phone scratches', most of them far more likely to be true, so making one wild guess with blustering confidence is, well, what stupid people do. But the screenwriters make Sherlock right: ah, indeed the phone's owner *does* have Parkinson's.
Most "genius" characters do stupid things, but turn out to be right about everything, and we-the-audience shrug and say, "fine, that works."
Mr. Wexler, on the other hand, has done such a phenomenal job of making Davi credibly smart that it almost works against him. There is no showy, Sherlockian flourish to, say, how Davi quietly outwits a leader to gain control of their army. You watch what she does, and you think, well yes, of *course*. You form an alliance with their enemy, take advantage of the unrest in the community, intimidate that one enforcer guy, and roll the dice. You forget that *you* wouldn't piece together that strategy - no, somebody who has spent a dozen human lifetimes taking over kingdoms as their day job would handle that.
And at every point, the success is not some perfect, flawless victory. Instead, you strongly see that it was a dice roll, it could have definitely gone another way, and Davi just gave herself the best odds she could. Ironically, these just-scraping-by successes make Davi look *smarter*, because you aren't sensing so much that the author is putting their thumb on the scale.
So: it's well-plotted. It's also funny.
There's a TikTok series I love of "Natasha Lyonne in ", speculating about planting a Lyonne-type character in various beloved franchises. And it's always comedy gold: you have a sardonic, modern, gleefully-raunchy person bouncing off some self-serious, traditional genre. Arguably there are real Natasha Lyonne roles that are part of this tradition: "Natasha Lyonne in Groundhog Day"; "Natasha Lyonne in Columbo".
You could argue that a lot of Bugs Bunny cartoons follow this same logic: drop Bugs into Wagnerian opera or Robin Hood, and watch him dryly crack wise about the stuffy types around him. In a way, you get to feel smart and witty because you, just by dint of a modern person, are not bound by all the hidebound genre conventions these fantasy characters have to abide by. ²
So functions most of Dark Lord... it's mostly a comedy about a wisecracking Gen-Z-er dealing with off-brand Game of Thrones characters. It gets endless comic mileage out of the mismatch.
And that's basically it. Set your expectations to that level.
I kept half-expecting the novel to go a bit deeper. The book definitely feels like it's gently interrogating the fantasy genre on a political level. It centers a person of color in one of those fantasy worlds that's clearly "medieval western Europe with the serial numbers filed off", and points out that this high-minded kingdom is invading, oppressing, and genociding all the "wild folk" that live along their border. "Are we the baddies?" is a sensible question inherent in much of modern fantasy, and so it is here.
The book also hints, in the barest shreds of details, at a story behind why Desi is trapped in this world and to what end. Then the book rather abruptly ends, because - surprise! - it's the first volume in a duology. Maybe that pays off later?
So it's a lighthearted romp that mostly thumbs its nose at serious-minded high fantasy, subtly working in some brilliant plotting along the way. It's a good time, especially if you don't expect it to go much past its premise.
How Digital Technology Shapes Us by Dr. Indre Viskontas
I went into this course thinking I might discontinue reviewing these recent audiocourses from the Teaching Company. ³ The recent courses feel like the same thing over and over again: a promising topic is hobbled by reading-off-the-teleprompter delivery. *shrug* Two-and-a-half stars.
And that judgment does hold true for Digital Technology, but I found myself with further opinions, so here I am writing about it.
The course is something of a grab-bag of self-contained lectures. Dr. Viskontas is a neuroscientist ⁴, and she starts the course firmly in neuroscientific territory: we're online all the time, and we're using smartphones all the time, what effect is this having on our brains? Then it veers away from that: how is scientific research changing because of technology? what is the blockchain for? will robots take our jobs?
Again, this is much more of an "anthology"-style course, as opposed to anything with a clear thesis or through-line.
And what about these more-or-less self-contained lectures?
Mainly I found myself thinking that maybe the Teaching Company is at its best with musty, traditional topics. This course tries to track the influence of up-to-the-minute technology, and it falls down in several ways. First, there isn't really a settled consensus for much of what she covers. Does media violence influence levels of aggression? Dr. Viskontas has to cover a very ambivalent discourse, where knowledgable people disagree, as opposed to a field which reached consensus on a topic years ago. We just haven't had enough time to study the issues, and there isn't enough historical distance to give us perspective.
Meanwhile, the course has lectures that speculate about the future; the course was published in 2020, ergo many of those takes have aged poorly. Almost all the AI-art examples are in composing classical music, which now feels quaint. There is (again) a long lecture about the bright future of the blockchain (touching on how useful that might be health-data security), which now feels pollyannaish and borderline offensive.
In a way, the course is done in by its own success: many of the topics Dr. Viskontas touched on have indeed become relevant and important four years later. But that means we're all very conversant with those topics, which means the lectures become very basic primers on subjects we already know.
Overall it's a rather dire picture. You can split the course into roughly two halves: a half about neuroscience, and a half about other topics. The neuroscience section is mostly "we don't have the evidence to answer these questions conclusively". The non-neuroscience topics are evenly split between "this topic ended up not mattering much, and it feels quaint and silly", and "this topic ended up being relevant, and this lecture is too basic to be useful".
And to be clear, that's no shade to Dr. Viskontas, who is doing the best one can do with "how digital technology shapes us". But if you're trying to do a full Teaching Company course about something so up-to-the-minute, this is what happens. The "highly-produced videocourse" format is not ideally suited to helping you understand what's going on today; it's best at presenting a thorough view of settled information that's more timeless.
And yes, the initial criticisms still hold: this is the phase where The Teaching Company makes their lecturers read pre-written copy precisely from their teleprompter (are they still doing that?), and it sucks the life out of the presentations.
I imagine next I'll opt for some older and dustier topic, with an older publication date.
For next week: nothing in the backlog! I'm currently reading a book about owls and a book about the Harvard Longitudinal Study. I'm listening to the Blank Check miniseries about David Lynch and an audiocourse about the Fibonacci sequence. I'm watching Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 and (re-)watching season 4 of Parks and Recreation.
____
¹ Give or take some number of un-tallied, very quick deaths.
² And surely you, as a modern person, are not bound by a bunch of *other* silly rules that you yourself are unaware of...
³ It continues to be deeply sastifying to *not* write "Wondrium" every time.
⁴ ... and professional operatic soprano. One spends a good fraction of the course kind of astounded that this woman exists.
Movies:
TV:
Courses: How Digital Technology Shapes Us
How to Become the Dark Lord and Die Trying by Django Wexler
This is the 2024 comic fantasy about Davi, a girl who is magically transported to a fantasy world where a human kingdom is threatened by a terrifying army of monsters, and she is the one foretold to save humanity. It turns out it's also a time-loop situation, so every time Davi dies, reality resets to her arrival.
Specifically, this book is about the 238ᵗʰ iteration of the loop ¹, where after a thousand-odd years of repeatedly failing to save humanity, Davi thinks, "Fuck these guys," and resolves to join the monsters and lead them to victory.
I mean, that's a hell of a pitch, right?
And the book delivers on the pitch: you get the chronicle of Davi very cleverly scheming and battling her way through monster society to get on the winning side of the coming war.
And honestly, it's easy to underestimate how hard it is to pull off that story. Specifically, it's hard for any writer, speculative or otherwise, to carry off "this character is a ridiculous genius". Davi is not established as the smartest girl who ever girled, but she has spent over one thousand years learning everything there is to know about combat strategies, palace intrigue, and this unique fantasy world she's been isekai'd into.
So now the author is in a bind: he has to make Davi smart.
Writers are bad at making characters smart. Typically, writers *don't* make characters smart: they make characters *right*. In Sherlock, the Great Detective looks at a cell phone, sees scratches on it, and concludes that its owner has Parkinson's disease. This is not a smart conclusion: there are literally infinite other explanations for 'phone scratches', most of them far more likely to be true, so making one wild guess with blustering confidence is, well, what stupid people do. But the screenwriters make Sherlock right: ah, indeed the phone's owner *does* have Parkinson's.
Most "genius" characters do stupid things, but turn out to be right about everything, and we-the-audience shrug and say, "fine, that works."
Mr. Wexler, on the other hand, has done such a phenomenal job of making Davi credibly smart that it almost works against him. There is no showy, Sherlockian flourish to, say, how Davi quietly outwits a leader to gain control of their army. You watch what she does, and you think, well yes, of *course*. You form an alliance with their enemy, take advantage of the unrest in the community, intimidate that one enforcer guy, and roll the dice. You forget that *you* wouldn't piece together that strategy - no, somebody who has spent a dozen human lifetimes taking over kingdoms as their day job would handle that.
And at every point, the success is not some perfect, flawless victory. Instead, you strongly see that it was a dice roll, it could have definitely gone another way, and Davi just gave herself the best odds she could. Ironically, these just-scraping-by successes make Davi look *smarter*, because you aren't sensing so much that the author is putting their thumb on the scale.
So: it's well-plotted. It's also funny.
There's a TikTok series I love of "Natasha Lyonne in ", speculating about planting a Lyonne-type character in various beloved franchises. And it's always comedy gold: you have a sardonic, modern, gleefully-raunchy person bouncing off some self-serious, traditional genre. Arguably there are real Natasha Lyonne roles that are part of this tradition: "Natasha Lyonne in Groundhog Day"; "Natasha Lyonne in Columbo".
You could argue that a lot of Bugs Bunny cartoons follow this same logic: drop Bugs into Wagnerian opera or Robin Hood, and watch him dryly crack wise about the stuffy types around him. In a way, you get to feel smart and witty because you, just by dint of a modern person, are not bound by all the hidebound genre conventions these fantasy characters have to abide by. ²
So functions most of Dark Lord... it's mostly a comedy about a wisecracking Gen-Z-er dealing with off-brand Game of Thrones characters. It gets endless comic mileage out of the mismatch.
And that's basically it. Set your expectations to that level.
I kept half-expecting the novel to go a bit deeper. The book definitely feels like it's gently interrogating the fantasy genre on a political level. It centers a person of color in one of those fantasy worlds that's clearly "medieval western Europe with the serial numbers filed off", and points out that this high-minded kingdom is invading, oppressing, and genociding all the "wild folk" that live along their border. "Are we the baddies?" is a sensible question inherent in much of modern fantasy, and so it is here.
The book also hints, in the barest shreds of details, at a story behind why Desi is trapped in this world and to what end. Then the book rather abruptly ends, because - surprise! - it's the first volume in a duology. Maybe that pays off later?
So it's a lighthearted romp that mostly thumbs its nose at serious-minded high fantasy, subtly working in some brilliant plotting along the way. It's a good time, especially if you don't expect it to go much past its premise.
How Digital Technology Shapes Us by Dr. Indre Viskontas
I went into this course thinking I might discontinue reviewing these recent audiocourses from the Teaching Company. ³ The recent courses feel like the same thing over and over again: a promising topic is hobbled by reading-off-the-teleprompter delivery. *shrug* Two-and-a-half stars.
And that judgment does hold true for Digital Technology, but I found myself with further opinions, so here I am writing about it.
The course is something of a grab-bag of self-contained lectures. Dr. Viskontas is a neuroscientist ⁴, and she starts the course firmly in neuroscientific territory: we're online all the time, and we're using smartphones all the time, what effect is this having on our brains? Then it veers away from that: how is scientific research changing because of technology? what is the blockchain for? will robots take our jobs?
Again, this is much more of an "anthology"-style course, as opposed to anything with a clear thesis or through-line.
And what about these more-or-less self-contained lectures?
Mainly I found myself thinking that maybe the Teaching Company is at its best with musty, traditional topics. This course tries to track the influence of up-to-the-minute technology, and it falls down in several ways. First, there isn't really a settled consensus for much of what she covers. Does media violence influence levels of aggression? Dr. Viskontas has to cover a very ambivalent discourse, where knowledgable people disagree, as opposed to a field which reached consensus on a topic years ago. We just haven't had enough time to study the issues, and there isn't enough historical distance to give us perspective.
Meanwhile, the course has lectures that speculate about the future; the course was published in 2020, ergo many of those takes have aged poorly. Almost all the AI-art examples are in composing classical music, which now feels quaint. There is (again) a long lecture about the bright future of the blockchain (touching on how useful that might be health-data security), which now feels pollyannaish and borderline offensive.
In a way, the course is done in by its own success: many of the topics Dr. Viskontas touched on have indeed become relevant and important four years later. But that means we're all very conversant with those topics, which means the lectures become very basic primers on subjects we already know.
Overall it's a rather dire picture. You can split the course into roughly two halves: a half about neuroscience, and a half about other topics. The neuroscience section is mostly "we don't have the evidence to answer these questions conclusively". The non-neuroscience topics are evenly split between "this topic ended up not mattering much, and it feels quaint and silly", and "this topic ended up being relevant, and this lecture is too basic to be useful".
And to be clear, that's no shade to Dr. Viskontas, who is doing the best one can do with "how digital technology shapes us". But if you're trying to do a full Teaching Company course about something so up-to-the-minute, this is what happens. The "highly-produced videocourse" format is not ideally suited to helping you understand what's going on today; it's best at presenting a thorough view of settled information that's more timeless.
And yes, the initial criticisms still hold: this is the phase where The Teaching Company makes their lecturers read pre-written copy precisely from their teleprompter (are they still doing that?), and it sucks the life out of the presentations.
I imagine next I'll opt for some older and dustier topic, with an older publication date.
For next week: nothing in the backlog! I'm currently reading a book about owls and a book about the Harvard Longitudinal Study. I'm listening to the Blank Check miniseries about David Lynch and an audiocourse about the Fibonacci sequence. I'm watching Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 and (re-)watching season 4 of Parks and Recreation.
____
¹ Give or take some number of un-tallied, very quick deaths.
² And surely you, as a modern person, are not bound by a bunch of *other* silly rules that you yourself are unaware of...
³ It continues to be deeply sastifying to *not* write "Wondrium" every time.
⁴ ... and professional operatic soprano. One spends a good fraction of the course kind of astounded that this woman exists.