The World of Insufficient Light

In a post-apocalypse world where the environment has been ruined by “Black Edea”, a two-bit bounty hunter meets up with an autonomous golem and goes after a massive criminal organization for the bounty on their heads.

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Overall: Decent start but it fizzled out; there isn’t quite enough direction but there isn’t enough openness either. I’ve vaguely interested in where the plot goes and what Lock’s deal is, but not enough to sit through endless boring battles while searching for plot triggers.

During a recent trip to Japan, I got to browse through game stores in Akihabara in Tokyo, and while I didn’t buy Super Famicom carts or Final Fantasy orchestral CDs, I did pick up the Legend of Zelda Anniversary Edition Game and Watch for a very reasonable 5,000 Yen (roughly $30, less than half of what it goes for in the US). It’s got the original two NES Zelda games, Link’s Awakening, the original Game and Watch game, and a “display” clock mode.

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Overall: This is a cool keepsake device, not something I’ll actually use particularly heavily. But it is cool, nonetheless. And the box folds out into a little display stand!

When he’s killed in modern-day Japan, Shaw is reincarnated in a dead man’s body in a fantasy world, and is forced to learn the ins and outs of it very quickly. Fortunately, after a false start, he manages to meet up with a legendary hero and join a proper guild so he can conquer the Dungeon and defeat the Overlord.

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Overall: Middle-tier; eminently playable and with a perfectly cromulent plot that I suspect could have been something really clever with a better translation.

The Last Hour Between Worlds by Melissa Caruso - She was hoping for a pleasant night out away from her infant daughter; she got a life-or-death struggle between gods in a Groundhog Day loop. This is a high fantasy, deep-worldbuilding queer romance that’s really about debating going back to work after you have a baby.

Song of Spider-Man by Glen Berger - Glen Berger was the co-writer of the incredibly expensive Broadway hot mess “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark”, and I have to guess that at the end he made more money from this book than from the show. Bono and Edge come off well, as do the actors and production staff. The investors and producers don’t. And Julie Taymor…not so much. (He clearly tries to empathize with her, but the fact that no one told her “no” for virtually all of her involvement with the show was a lot of the problem.) Entertainingly, he seems a bit disappointed that the “2.0” version of the show that cut it down to a proper Broadway spectacle (which I saw; it was a hot mess but absolutely something that would draw the tourists) was actually reasonably well-received and ran for three years. This is an entertaining documentary of a car crash that’ll make you glad you weren’t there and also make you vaguely want to go listen to U2.

The Midnight Library by Matt Haig - This has a great concept, of a library where you can choose to slot into lives where you made different decisions. Unfortunately, Haig isn’t actually a great writer. Apparently the rest of his work is self-help books (and it shows), but also this felt like reading a middlegrade book. He doesn’t trust the reader with anything and spells it all out over and over in obvious ways. (There’s a film When We First Met that follows a similar premise of changing one decision to change the present, and despite it being a direct-to-streaming goofy comedy/romance it manages to be more subtle and measured than this book.) I’d love to see a variant on this idea from someone who actually wants to write spec fic, rather than Chicken Soup for the Dimensional Traveler’s Soul.

Earthbound (Boss fight Books) by Ken Baumann - Every now and again I wander back to the bundle of these books, which are an entertaining mix of history of the game and the author’s autobiography. In this case, Baumann is a former child actor best known for The Secret Life of the American Teenager, which means nothing to me on its own but makes for an interesting backdrop to his recollections of playing Earthbound with his older brother and how he felt re-experiencing it.

Startup Hell by Caitlin Rozakis - A junior marketer walks into her boss’s office and discovers her boss summoned a demon, but had a heart attack before managing to sell his soul and the demon is trapped there. Turns out he’s a just junior salesdemon and also very cute, so they juggle romance with trying to find someone else at a tech startup willing to sell their soul so he can make his quarterly projections (and not get eaten). Further complicating matters, our heroine’s mother is basically Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and perpetually disappointed by her daughter’s lack of magical aptitude. This is a musing on what it’s okay to want out of life, a new vision for why demons buy souls, and a scathing send-up of tech startup culture. Preorder it, read it, give it five stars.

A Thing Called Truth - Mag just had her life’s work stolen out from under her (and her marriage fell apart while she was working on it). Dorian watched her mom and brother die from a genetic disease that she may also have. They accidentally end up on a wacky road-trip together. This feels like it was intended to go for multiple volumes of them following Dorian’s brother’s travel wishlist and the ex-husband trying to track Mag down and maybe even some resolution to her life’s work getting stolen. Instead, it leans hard into the two of them falling in love and abruptly ends on that after one volume. Which isn’t bad, but there’s wasted potential here.

Black Cloak (volumes 1-2) – This is a delightful cross between fantasy and noir, with the hardboiled detective (who gets injured a lot) whose past comes back to her in the form of a murder linked directly into her personal history. Volume 1 wraps everything up well, it’s well-paced, the art is pretty, it’s genuinely good stuff. The second volume feels more like a sequel, jumping forward five years with a new mystery to solve; it links back to some things from the first volume and a lot of poor choices made in the interim; I don’t think it’s quite as strong but it’s still very good. This is solid and recommended.

Black Magick (volumes 1-3) – Another hardboiled magical detective, but this one is a modern day cop and secretly a witch, who’s being targeted by some sort of rival magical organization. (This is a world where wicca and pagan practices exist, but a small number of perpetually-reincarnated witches with real magical powers hide among them/society.) Good art, interesting story, some twists as it becomes clear who the antagonists are and what they want, BUT…it’s unfinished. And it’s not clear when and if it’ll ever be finished. I’d love to know what the demons really want and how Rowan is going to resolve the various conflicts in her life, but right now it’s just a frustrating cliffhanger.

Big Girls (volume 1) - A clever sci-fi story about some [technobabble] that causes some boys to grow up into kaiju but a smaller number of girls to just turn into giant women. So the “big girls” are used to defend the Preserve and the normal-sized humans against attacks. But plenty of people aren’t happy with the status quo and the sacrifices it entails, and maybe the “Jacks” aren’t as monstrous as they seem. There’s nothing groundbreaking here, but it’s a decent story.

Bolero – The tale of a bisexual disaster and the various people in her orbit as she screws up her life. This was particular interesting after reading The Midnight Library, because it has the same premise: A woman makes bad choices and falls into depression, but is given the opportunity to explore alternate universe versions based on making different choices. And just like that book…it squanders the opportunity to make good use of that premise. She speedruns through a bunch of worlds where she and her ex-girlfriend are knights or astronauts and ends up in one where she basically continues where she left off and tries to build something else; and then tears that all down because she doesn’t understand communicating with her partners. But it’s okay, because somehow her soul is healed through magical goddess dreams. Or something. Honestly, the conclusion didn’t make much sense and it squandered my goodwill by wasting the premise.

Coffin Bound (volume 1) – Do you like Grant Morrison’s strung-together weirdness books? This is very much in that vein, as Izzy finds out that there’s a contract on her life so she opts to go out and erase all traces of herself before she dies. The assassin is the “Earth-Eater” who really should be off fighting the Doom Patrol; she’s accompanied by a dude with a crow’s skeleton in a cage instead of a head; they run into strippers who take off their skin and a cult who steal body parts for their own use. The world is a nonsensical dreamscape and everything is plot-distance apart. It’s all a valuable lesson about how you can never fully erase your impact on the world. There’s a second volume of this, but no, I’ve had enough.

Crave - The new “Crave” app has suddenly appeared on everyone’s phones on a college campus, and it apparently gives you helpful instructions for all sorts of things you might crave (which, in practice, leads to lots of people banging). Except, of course, it’s actually using all of your data to manipulate you and everyone around you and it’s a secret project by rich people for nefarious purposes. So, y’know, extremely realistic but told with lots of kinky illustrations to make it more palatable. Barely counts as “science fiction,” at this point. Genuinely solid complete story in a single volume.

Family Tree (volume 1) - A Jeff Lemire story where people turn into trees rather than animals. I had read the first issue of this in some other bundle and bounced off of it. I made it through the whole first volume this time, but I don’t particularly care where it’s going.

Golden Rage (volume 1) - What if the Golden Girls, only they were trapped on a survivalist island? And instead of being funny, they were murderously violent? Well, over five issues we manage to go from “Lord of the Flies” to “Friendship is Magic” with only a little bit of stabbing, some weird funeral rituals, and two clowns. This is an amusing concept (with the sort of premise that falls apart if you shake it gently) but the execution is lackluster and it needs more Betty White to hold my attention.

Hinges (volumes 1-3) - A fast read because the protagonist, Orio, is mostly silent. We watch her, a hinged living puppet, “awaken” in a clockwork city and be assigned an “Odd,” a strange animal companion that in her case is reminiscent of Stitch. She’s clearly an unusual type, and has to wrangle her way into being a “mender,” a job that she’s good at and is necessary but the system doesn’t want to assign her to. But that resolution lasts less than an issue and she ends up exiled from the city, meeting another exile and learning about “dismantelists” who want to take people apart and see how they work, and eventually returning to save the city from one. This was apparently originally a webcomic, and that makes a lot of sense given the weird pacing and changes in direction and tone. Reading this one page a week (or whatever the update schedule was) must have been excruciating. It’s very pretty and I’m glad the plot actually resolves everything it sets up; but this would have worked better as a tighter single volume.

I.D. – In a future where there’s space travel and colonies on other planets, a trio (an older writer, an ex-con, and a trans man) meet in a café to discuss the fact they’re all volunteering for an experiment to change their bodies via brain transplant. This is interrupted by a riot where a bunch of people around them are killed. Then we get the “science” of transplanting their brains (spider DNA and lasers). Then they hang out together some more. Then we fast-forward and the trans man has gone through with the switch, the ex-con has not, and they heard the writer died. They got to scatter the ashes of the trans man’s old body, and there’s a stinger that implies the writer did go through with the procedure successfully. I’m not sure quite why, but this feels like a Eurocomic to me. It’s all very “well, that happened” but makes no effort to actually tie together a narrative arc. (Or the plot holes, for that matter.) This feels like the author came up with a bunch of scenes that interested them (in a world they’d clearly given some thought to) but couldn’t actually put together a full story and instead we got this.

MOM: Mother of Madness – This is a vent-piece about a woman with emotion-based superpowers dealing with her deeply sexist workplace and the crushing realities of late-stage capitalism as a single mother. So she decides to use her powers to fight crime and stop a human-trafficking ring run by an evil billionaire! There are somewhat deeper statements about patriarchy and who benefits from it later in the book, but there is absolutely nothing subtle at any point. It’s a power fantasy, and I can’t fault that, even if I’m not the target audience.

Inkblot (volumes 1-2) – This is a case of world-builder’s disease disguised as a comic about a magic cat that gets accidentally summoned one day and goes gallivanting through the various parallel worlds ruled by the many siblings of a family of sorcerers. It’s a cool idea for a world setup (the family apparently discovered experience points and started killing monsters to get stronger; and had to spread out to different worlds once they ran out of things to kill), but there’s too little actual plot and too many characters, and the cat isn’t quite noteworthy or goofy enough to be the focal point. Also it annoyed me that it’s really unclear what the state of “Mother Earth” is during all of this, despite it appearing repeatedly. (The overall story gets a little more coherent in the second volume, but it’s also clearly intended to be a long ongoing that may or may not resolve anything.)

Lovesick – This was apparently written during a worst-parts-of-the-internet-fueled 2020 depression, and it shows. Domino is an internet performer who gets incels from her fanbase to volunteer for snuff films. And cannibalism, too! It’s torture-porn by and for traumatized people. Which has its place, I suppose, but I’m not recommending it.

Norroway (volumes 1-2) - A modernize, queer retelling of the folktale “The Black Bull of Norroway” mashed together with a few other folktale bits and giving most of the characters more depth and agency. (In both style and presentation I was reminded of Molly Knox Ostertag's The Witch Boy trilogy.) I haven’t been familiar with the original legend, but the lore they built around it is pretty impressive. Each volume manages to have a complete arc and this is one of the few comics from this bundle that I’d go out of my way to find more of (if they make it).

November (volumes 1-4) – Dee is approached by “Mister Mann” who offers her a job decoding a puzzle and broadcasting some numbers daily. Turns out that money doesn’t bring you happiness; the routine brings her misery until one day it changes and everything goes sideways. And her story is only one of many that are interwoven with each other on the night in November that things go sideways. This is by Matt Fraction, and while it might be a little too long and a little too fragmented, it does come together nicely.

Plutona – Middle school is hell, even when there are superheroes in the world. And superheroes like Plutona need to balance crimefighting with working a regular job and single parenthood...until a supervillian gets lucky and the middle-schoolers find her body in the woods. This was written by Jeff Lemire but was drawn by a competent artist; and it is dark. The initial tone does not telegraph where it’s going; and the shock (and relative suddenness) of the ending doesn’t actually help the story.

Rain - Another cute sci-fi/horror one-shot, following a young woman whose life is torn apart when crystal shards start raining and killing everyone in their path. Credit for having both a character arc and a reasonable explanation for what’s happening; though it very much follows a horror-movie arc in that regard.

SFSX (volume 1) - The Party has taken over and have imposed a fascist rain of “purity”, and it’s up to a small group of kinky queers to stop them. This is super-kinky wish-fulfillment disguised as politics; and while I can’t come down on anyone that hard for making it, it’s clear the author gets off on “striving against kinky torturers who pretend to be moral” even more than they get off on conventional kink—and that requires holes in the worldbuilding even the biggest dildo could fit through.

This also had the first 10 volumes of Saga, but I have physical copies of those. They’re very good. This had three volumes of Man-Eaters, but I read the first in a different bundle and thought it was a deeply confused polemic, which I didn’t like. I bounced off of Mirror and Fishflies. I may go back and give Paper Girls a try.

Overall: Black Cloak was particularly standout. November was interesting, as was Crave.

The crystals have lost their light and the elements have once again gone out of control. It’s up to four youths blessed by the crystals to restore balance to the world against the flood of darkness.

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Overall: This is much closer to the original NES game and in some ways a stronger port than the 3D remake was (though weaker in terms of story and characterization); honestly, they’re very different games. If you like the gameplay of the 2D era of Final Fantasy you might enjoy this more than the 3D remake.

Zidane and the theater troupe Tantalus are in Alexandria to perform the famous play, “I Want to Be Your Canary” and also kidnap Princess Garnet. This leads to war, adventures, black mages, found family, finding your roots but discovering they don’t define you, mental breakdowns, and plenty of moogles and chocobos. It’s a love letter to the Final Fantasy games that came before it.

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Overall: I loved this when it came out, but in retrospect it was hobbled by design decisions that were endemic at the time. If someone was playing through all of the FF games in order they’d get to this one and probably find the same joy I originally did, because it was a retrospective and a turning point in a lot of ways. The new Steam version is absolutely the way to play it; it loses nothing and adds convenience (and is prettier).

Irritatingly, Friday Afternoon Teas do offer steeping instructions for each tea on their website. These should really be printed on the packet, or failing that, included in the box on a card. Many of these teas wanted to be steeped at 185 degrees instead of boiling, and I had to look up individually which was which.

This box was blends nominally inspired by the show Our Flag Means Death. As with last time, I’ve ordered them from my favorite to my least favorite.

Stede’s Orange Marmalade - Black tea, orange peel, bergamot oil, natural vanilla flavoring, gold lustre dust. This one tastes good but smells amazing; Rebecca particularly liked it. (The lustre dust is entirely unnecessary.)

Queen of Hearts – Black tea, peppercorns, rose hip and rose petals. Black tea with a hint of rose and a tiny bit of pepper bite at the end. Nice.

Blackbeard’s Delicacies & Tealights – Black tea, sweet violet, natural vanilla flavoring, lustre dust. Probably a tie with the Queen of Hearts; the violet and vanilla are subtle but a nice addition to the tea.

Ooh, Daddy! - Black teas, cross sprinkles, spicy ginger, black peppercorn, butter rum flavoring. There’s a little bite from the ginger and pepper, but the butter rum just gets lost and the sprinkles continue to add nothing but ugly color.

I Could Be Family – Roasted green tea, cinnamon, allspice, clove, pineapple, allspice, vanilla, and blue sugar sprinkles. The smell is overwhelmed by “spicy cinnamon” and while the flavor is more subtle than you’d expect, most of the nuance is still lost to the spices. I don’t think the sprinkles are adding any value.

Moonglow – Heather flower, lemon myrtle, moon sprinkles, lavender, yarrow flower. Contains no tea, smells strongly like potpourri in the packet, but once steeped it’s…inoffensively lemon?

Stabbed By Jim - Green yaupon holly, yerba mate, annatto seed, orange peel, blood orange, shaved coconut, orange sprinkles, lime peel, natural coconut flavoring. (This one is noted on the website to be “hyper-caffeinated”, by which they mean 80 mg, twice the caffeine of the average black tea or still less than a weak cup of coffee.) The coconut and citrus contrast come through decently, but there are weird overtones and aftertastes that don’t really work for me.

Mexican Chocolate Mate (Bonus tea) – I think I just don’t like yerba mate? This mostly tastes like cinnamon tea, with that weird yerba mate aftertaste. The chocolate doesn’t particularly come through.

In general, I was unimpressed with the lustre dust (I don’t need sparkly bits in my tea) and I don’t think sprinkles actually added anything to any of these, even any real sweetness. But they’re good at making black tea blends, especially when they focus on one or two primary flavors.

This year I logged 42 games played, 29 of which were new and 13 of which were replays. I logged 534 hours of gameplay, even more than last year, which probably goes a ways towards explaining why I read less and watched less TV this year. (I also didn’t do anything new for Talking Time, though I added a bunch of update reviews of emulator handhelds.)

Everafter Falls, at 55 hours, was my most-played game; and the combined six games in the Cozy Farming Sim genre also won for most logged hours. Roots of Pacha, Fields of Mistria, and Littlewood also met or beat the 30-hour mark. Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake was the only other game to crack 30 hours, but I had 9 games total break the 20-hour mark.

I did have a pretty decent balance genre-wise, though, with classic rpgs, metroidvanias, 2D zeldalikes, action rpgs, gimmick rpgs, a few puzzle adventure games, some puzzle/casual games, a 4X game, and a dating sim. Of the new games, 25 were on Steam, 1 was on GOG Galaxy, and 3 were on the Switch. Of the replays, there were 6 SNES, 3 GBA, 1 GBC, 1 Android, and 2 Steam games.

In terms of handhelds, the logged playthroughs rotated through the Powkiddy V10, R36S, and Trimui Smart Pro; and by the end of the year I was trying to focus more on the Odin Pro and the Ampown MagicX. I also used the GB300 and Miyoo A30 for casual “ten minutes at a time” puzzle games and the like, mostly on the subway or before bed. My Android tablet, as usual, was mostly used for Gems of War but also a full replay of Gemcrafter: Puzzle Journey.

I’m changing the way I manage my backlog, because I’ve started to lose the distinction between games I “officially” added versus ones that I’m not expecting to fully play. There are 210 games listed on my backlog as of this writing, though only 43 of them are ones I expect to give the full time towards unless I really like them. As it stands, on paper I removed 9 games from my backlog but really I basically broke even on the year.

ARR played a lot of Geometry Dash on his tablet this year; also more Bloons TD6. He played lots of Detrarune on Steam (and also some Celeste and Element TD 2) and did a bunch of Pokemon and Zelda replays on the Switch. He noodled around with GameCube Zelda games on my Retroid Pocket 5 but didn’t go crazy with them. (He and I are collectively applying the 5-game rule to the Switch 2; we may more may not get one in 2026 depending on what comes out.)

Tentative plans for 2026 include: Finally clearing the last few GameCube games on my backlog using the Odin Pro; and replaying some DS games on the Ampown MagicX. I may try to do a grander backlog cull of console games or I may try and cull bundles of Steam games, depending on my mood.

I did a big wave of puzzles in the spring, then had a big gap in the summer, but then blasted through basically a puzzle a week in October and November. Not coincidentally, my TV-watching was much more concentrated to those times, also.

We did a whopping sixteen 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzles: Toy Shop, 7 Evil Exes from Scott Pilgrim, The Best Places in America, I Love Gum, Breakfast Table, I Love Baking, Blue Ribbon County Fair, Toy Stamps, CTY 2024, I Love Music, Saturday Morning Cartoons, Make Mine Marvel, Blow Pops, Love Is Everywhere, Welcome Fall, NYC Street. We also did one 1,500-piece jigsaw puzzle: Home in the Ocean; and we did two 500-piece jigsaw puzzles: Inside the Museum: The Met, and Sewing Box. And I did the two 240-piece Pizza puzzles. (I also helped do one at in a convention games room, but I didn’t record the title.)

Call that 20 “real” jigsaw puzzles, which is a pretty high count. I’ve got five on the shelf and three more my dad is bringing over, so I suspect it’ll once again come in waves along with how big my TV backlog gets.

I only did 3 Paint-By-Stickers, one from Kaleidoscope Sticker Mosaics and 2 from Paint-by-Sticker Flowers. I kinda wish I could have brought those to choir rehearsals; they’re a great thing to occupy my hands and I still have plenty left to do.