Today is May 1, which is not only Labour day across much of the world but also the first day in the fantasy blog event Wyrd & Wonder! It's great fun, that one, and I thought I'd pitch in with a post that would put FEAR back into everyone's fantastical Wyrdness and Wonderness! https://youtu.be/oC58_iV7lWw Inscryption... Continue Reading →
SPOILERS FOR GIDEON THE NINTH BELOW. Something about the absolute animosity between Gideon Nav and Harrowhark Nonagesimus lets you know…these two crazy kids love each other to death. That something isn’t the vague, zeitgeisty knowledge I had about the novel before ever picking it up (thanks, blogosphere!); nor was it an errant turn left down... Continue Reading →
Rather than review a classic that has been spoken about time and again, I thought I'd share with you a response paper I wrote for my class in Victorian Literature a few weeks ago - let me know if you'd like to see more pieces like this on the blog! In Villette (1853), Charlotte Brontë... Continue Reading →
There's something delectably fun about a villain that's perfectly defined by their name, especially when that name is a monosyllabic nouns like "Pride" or "Sin" or "Ruin". Everything's on the label - you can be comfortable in your expectations as to the goals they'll pursue but how they get there is anybody's guess! It's also... Continue Reading →
I have passing knowledge of Alexis Kennedy, one of the two leaders at the head of game developer Weather Factory (the other being Lottie Bevan). I've spent several hours with Cultist Simulator, a game thoroughly disquieting and altogether too complex for me to get after three failed attempts. I've also heard enough about Fallen London... Continue Reading →
|| Next I've written about the first volume of DIE (the comic book) here. After five years of D&D, experimenting with Kieron Gillen’s DIE RPG ruleset this past summer was a revelation. Dungeons and Dragons is largely reactive, in the sense that the Dungeon Master(DM) offers a playground, more or less directed, within which the... Continue Reading →
Hiya folks! I recently finished Guerrilla Games' Horizon Zero Dawn on PC and I've been thinking about how the context of secondary information in it shifts as you play - in this video essay, I look to the ways in which Guerrilla's writing team has managed to craft one of the finest stories in gaming.... Continue Reading →
Over the last ten months, I've began to look to Rachel Cusk's work with a reverence bordering on religious fervour. Her Outline trilogy* is revelatory, and does what few novels ever manage - it updates character, changes the narrator's role to little more than a lens to look through. Further, it sacrifices that central individuality... Continue Reading →
The lights blinked twice and went out. I strapped the safety belt on, conscious of the blinking lights, conscious, too, of the cry of the toddler several rows back. A long flight, with no end in sight. Next to me on the plane sat my creative writing instructor, a woman roughly the age of my... Continue Reading →
I'm making a point of examining the great surviving tragedies of Ancient Greece. The time was right, I knew, when a Signet Classics edition of Euripides: Ten Plays looked at me invitingly from a shelf in the Sofia Airport bookstore this January. It's a wonderful pocket edition, and it set me back by three euro.... Continue Reading →
The Grimoire Reliquary 