Things I Am Consuming: 4.5.2025

It's the weekend, I've got no brilliant tech tutorials in my pocket and I have no particular desire to write about societal collapse for at least a little bit. So I'm just gonna write about some stuff I enjoyed this week. I've finally burned out on videogames for a bit after spending a few weeks housing my backlog of visual novels and I'm finally getting back on my book/show/movie shit. There appears to be a throughline of lore-heavy nerd escapism which frankly I deserve.

“Children are dying."
Lull nodded. "That's a succinct summary of humankind, I'd say. Who needs tomes and volumes of history? Children are dying. The injustices of the world hide in those three words.”

Malazan, Book of The Fallen

A friend told me I had to get 2 or 3 books into this series before I really started to "get it" and unfortunately he was right. Malazan is longer than the damn bible and over the past month I've gotten through 4 of its 10 books and about 3000 pages. Its worldbuilding is overwhelmingly confusing, it gets too grimdark for its own good, and Eriksen gets a little too cute with Marvelesque quipping sometimes (this is a bit of a pet peeve of mine, you just don't get to mix in Tolkeinesque seriousness with contemporary language. It ain't right). Despite or because of all of that I'm absolutely loving this series. Eriksen's primary concern is the meaninglessness and incomprehensibility of war. All the wheels within wheels and plans within plans boil down to dying kids. No one ever wins, not even the gods. If his goal was a compelling postmodern critique of epic fantasy he mostly succeeds: there's not much romanticizing going on here, and the parts of it that are neat and tidy feel necessary to keep the books compelling as stories. Erikson's nihilistic analysis of the things that make us fight and kill feel especially relevant as the US continues to plunge off of a cliff out of a lethal mix of boredom, anger, and stupidity. Again, I have plenty of quibbles, but it's rare that a fantasy book simultaneously feels this smart and this interesting. Artfully done all around. If you end up picking it up I highly recommend you get through at least Chain of Dogs before giving up - I went from ambivalent to fully bought in over the course of the last month.

Star Trek: Lower Decks

I haven't been watching much TV for the past year or so but I finally got back into the occasional binge watch in the past month and buddy TV's great these days. This show is a delight! It's funny, warm-hearted, and pokes fun at the source material while clearly still holding a deep love for it. Not on Galaxy Quest's level but a similar vibe. Unfortunately it has inspired me to go back to trying to watch all the 80s/90s Treks again so I will probably be buried in lore for the foreseeable future.

Trap

I guess this list went in order of smartest to stupidest. This is one of the most bizarre movies I've ever seen: not only is it largely Shyamalan using making a movie as an excuse to give his daughter Saleka a concert film, she also becomes a key part of the actual plot of the movie despite having functionally no acting ability. Like, honestly, good for M. Night: if I had a daughter and was in his shoes I'd do the same thing and Saleka is just talented enough for me to buy her as budget Taylor Swift or whatever but man you gotta recognize when you're out over your skis.

Josh Hartnett is doing his absolute best with what he's given as a sort of serial killer Bugs Bunny and there's a version of this movie that gives him a little more air and is a lot more enjoyable. This is definitely in "so bad it's good" territory and is so weird it's worth watching, but I do think there's a sort of Stockholm Syndrome going on with the portion of the Letterboxd crowd that loved this movie. People have gaslit themselves into thinking that just because a movie is weird or doing something different that makes it good. I understand the impulse and I certainly prefer freakazoid shit like Trap to the latest focus-tested slop from the same four decades-old IPs but you don't have to convince yourself it's genius! This is just freak shit and that's fine! There's a place for this kind of art and it's in front of very stoned teenagers going to indie theaters.