akawil

The Delicacy – The story opens in Scotland with Rowan and Tulip, the poor chicken-farming sons of a mother who wants desperately for them to suffer in poverty for her New Age principles. The boys receive an inheritance from their dead aunt and decide to move to London to to start a farm-to-table restaurant. The going is rough until they happen upon a new mushroom that customers go crazy for, then everything starts coming up Tulip and the success goes to his head, driving a wedge between him and his brother. But what is the secret of the amazing mushrooms? (Hint: It’s not a happy ending.)

Ballad for Sophie – Framed as an intern from Le Monde interviewing a reclusive former pianist, this goes through the life story of said pianist and his rivalry with Francois Samson; set to the backdrop of WW2 and the following decades. DuBois hated being a pianist and was pushed into it by his mother, by his agent, and by necessity; and he was always jealous of Samson’s magical talent. This has decent characterization, a cute twist, a just a little magic that might or might not be real. I enjoyed it.

Doughnuts and Doom - A cute little queer romance between an aspiring witch with performance anxiety and an aspiring rock star without an audience. Not a lot of depth, but cute.

In Perpetuity - A slow-moving story about the afterlife that details the drudgery of it, and the various criminal machinations that take place between life and death. It’s bizarrely anticlimactic, in that every one of the arcs and hooks ends abruptly with a “Oh, that part’s over now.” Maybe it’s symbolizing the randomness and suddenness of death? Or maybe it’s just not great writing. (Honestly, given the way the pacing and a bunch of the later bits play out, I feel like the writer was pantsing and just dropping things.)

Lost Dogs - A shaggy dog story by Jeff Lemire, about a giant of a man who goes to the big city with his wife and daughter and only finds fights, pain and suffering.

A Radical Shift of Gravity - Told in anachronic order, this is the story of one man’s life when the force of gravity sudden changed…but only on humans. It intersperses pieces of his life from before the shift, after the second shift that broke down society, and finally to his explorations as an old man when time stopped holding on to humanity as well; and tries to tie together the changes to the world with the evolution of his relationship with his daughter. It’s an interesting idea but I’m not sure how well it works, especially since it tries to scatter in science (from people who in-story are supposed to know what they’re talking about) and the science is nonsense.

In Utero - 12 years ago, a mysterious giant explosion rocked the city. Now, a girl gets dropped off at a cheap holiday camp in a closed shopping mall and makes a new friend…who reveals the monsters behind the explosion. It’s interesting how much this story is just causal about a dragon with psychic powers and I wonder if that’s just coming from a more eastern perspective—that’s not a combination you see much in western dragons. Credit to this that it’s a kids adventure (with the tropes common to that—no children are harmed), but the adults are experiencing it as a horror movie and authority figures and parents are shown reacting (and panicking) appropriately as they get appropriate information.

Loved and Lost: A Relationship Trilogy – Slice of life comics, based loosely on reality, in no particular order, about a man’s relationships (including lots of sex) circa 2001. (Honestly, they should have been in a particular order. There’s no benefit to putting the comic where her cat likes him 40 pages before the comic where she introduces her cats. It just feels sloppy.) I will give him credit for being ridiculously honest; this may be the most realistic depiction of “idiot 20something romance” I’ve seen on paper, especially since he does nothing to disguise the parts where he’s a needy and judgmental jerk. Looking back to the same time period, I can see some “I’m in this picture and don’t like it.”

Lisa Cheese and Ghost Guitar (Book 1): Attack of the Snack – A wacky comic starring a unicorn cyborg who wants to be a folk musician but ends up in a battle between rival ninjas. I feel like there’s some “Ren and Stimpy” DNA in this; it’s that kind of random wackiness where you lose track of what’s going on and just kinda go along for the ride. (What was up with the broccoli monster? I could never figure out whose side it was actually supposed to be on.)

Funny Things: A Comic Strip Biography of Charles M. Schulz – A biography of “Sparky” Schulz in the style of a collection of Peanuts comics. I think the major problem here is that it’s too long and doesn’t have quite enough jokes that aren’t just, “We referenced some classic Peanuts strips.” (My standup teacher calls that “laughter of recognition” and thinks it’s the weakest form of joke.) Schulz lived an interesting life and clearly wrestled with various mental health issues during it, but this spends too much time being repetitive about them and not getting into tangential things it alludes to (like his children being sent off to private school; or his heart attack, which only gets mentioned when he has a stroke 20 years later). I think the author got so engrossed in Schultz’s life he forgot that his readers wouldn’t have read all the supporting material before picking up this book.

Super Trash Clash – Dul’s well-meaning mother buys her the video game “Super Trash Clash,” which is hard and terrible. She trades it away, but regrets it because it was a gift and goes on a wild chase to try to retrieve it. This is a story of numbers-filed-off Super Nintendo nostalgia; it’s short and cute.

Space Junk - In a sci-fi situation that wouldn’t be believable 20 years ago but makes perfect sense in our Dumbest Timeline, we see a colony of feral teenagers living on a mining colony that’s closing up, because the adults were all sent ahead to the next planet without them and they’re expected to follow. And we’re focused on broken teenagers who are angling to stay behind on the planet, when the only mechanisms to make them go are peer pressure and a useless therapist. And in the middle of this is the mystery of moving space junk. On one hand, this tells a story; on the other it doesn’t actually explain anything. (On the gripping hand, most of the plot holes can be explained by, “The system is really, really stupid and probably makes money from somebody on a different planet via fraud.”)

Radical: My Year with a Socialist Senator – A comic artist embedded herself with a newly-elected NY state senator and catalogued her experiences. (Though to some degree, it feels like she wanted to do this with AOC and got the next best thing—she’s very explicit about wanting to write about “the movement” rather than the person, and acknowledges that she’s leaving out all sorts of details.) It’s interesting to see how the sausage is made, though like anyone, she has her biases about the process and the people. It’s particularly interesting that this was 2018-2019, so the tail end of the first Trump regime and just before covid hit. And boy, it is NOT flattering to Cuomo.

League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Volume III: Century – Alan Moore is back on his bullshit, with the League (mostly Mina, Alan and Orlando) dealing with a cult trying to birth a “moonchild” and usher in a new age over of the course of the 20th century. (And it leaps right over Mina apparently running a group of superheroes in the 60s.) The initial concept of the LXG was cool and I remember really liking the first volume, but Moore moved over to increasingly obscure characters and increasingly obtuse plots. Well, until we time-jump to 2009 and learn that Harry Potter is the antichrist and they call in Mary Poppins (who might be God) to stop him and then jet off with a former Bond girl.

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Vol IV: The Tempest – Then we pick up with Mina and Orlando getting eternal youth for said Bond girl and a geriatric Sir James himself pursuing them. Interspersed with that, we finally learn about the hero team Mina managed in the 60s. Again, the combination of obscure references and then needing to file the trademarks off often makes it hard to tell what he’s referencing. And then the world ends and Alan Moore disappears up his own ass in an ouroboros of referentiality. This needed a heavier hand to edit it down to a reasonable number of plots and characters so that something of actual note happened to anyone you cared about; as opposed to a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it scene for a hundred characters you barely remember.

Mary Tyler MooreHawk was a Tom Swift pastiche starring a girl with mickey mouse hair. It’s…honestly really overdone? Also it’s done in a “zine” style with the comics interspersed with fake magazine pages and prose pieces. I couldn’t get into it. This also had a couple of other random Alan Moore works, including From Hell, which I gave up on in an earlier bundle, and The Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic, which is a tome of hermetic high magic that I just cannot handle. I also skipped Nemo: River of Ghosts.

Overall: I don’t think anything leapt out at me as amazing, but there was a lot of decent stuff; entertaining but forgettable reads.

I’ve previously reviewed the R36S and the R36H, low-end handhelds sold under a variety of brand names (BOYHOM is a popular one). Like Anbernic’s RGXX series, there are a number of variations that are all basically just external hardware differences; they’re all running the same ArcOs in the same internals. These all use the RK3128 chip, usually 1 gig of RAM, and whatever battery gets them 4-5 hours of playtime. They play up to PS1 just fine and are usually loaded with N64, NDS and PSP games that they can, at best, do a mediocre job with. And they have a full Retroarch menu so you can use cheats and fast-forward and edit all of your inputs and filters and things. And they all run $30-50 on AliExpress, depending on sales and taxes.

( Read more... )

Overall: For PS1 and earlier systems, this is a perfectly cromulent device. For not much more money (especially in this era of randomized tariffs), the Anbernic RG40XX-H is this but better.