We, The Girls Who Did Not Make It by E.A. Petricone is a short story in Nightmare Magazine that I finished reading a bit ago but I feel like I got hit by a hammer.
It’s about the ghosts of girls killed by a serial killer. And I do like ghosts!
I read the ending first, to make sure I’d be okay after, but I didn’t expect how intense the overall story would be. Apparently I was just sitting there with huge wide eyes after.
It was very good but also I’m not sure I’m happy I read it.
So when this album came out all my friends were super excited about it and talked about how great it was but this was during my period of having no real access to music except what I paid for on itunes or heard on the radio, so it only occurred to me today that I could finally listen to it!
Unfortunately, as I suspected it would, it ran into the same problem I’ve had enjoying her music in the past which is I like music that if it was a line would go up and down in jagged lines and her music tended to be more of a straight line. Not as bad as Taylor Swift’s is for that, but enough that while I liked a lot of the songs, I was like ‘ah, well, so it goes’
I loved the song where she was basically describing dismantling a man for spare parts though.
Amazon Music likes to play God with me from time to time and it started throwing medieval covers of songs at me. The one I chose to listen to was a band called Bardcore with the album ‘Ye Olde Pop Gone Bardcore’ which was fun to pretend was being played by bards to my dragon warriors while I repeated the same three button pushes over and over on Flight Rising.
Other than that, it did not exactly speak to me. I really liked their cover of Bad Guy, but I did not enjoy their cover of WAP which was disappointing because I got all excited when that came up but it was just the same chord over and over. I guess the appeal of WAP is the singing, not the music.
Anyway, good for thematic fighting music which is a noble position in life.
I forgot about this! I think because I was up forty hours when I saw it and I might have been clinically dead?
So Night Vale did a zoom version of their 2015 live show The Investigators about a murder mystery in Night Vale. I don’t know if there’s still a moratorium on spoilers? I haven’t listened/interacted with it in literal years but I remember them asking nicely not to talk about what was inside at all at the time? So I guess I’ll obey that still just in case because even though I’m pretty sure this blog will never have readers, it’s a reasonable enough request.
Anyway, I watched with my mother (it was a pay what you want thing so we paid enough for two people) who I’d gone to previous live shows (including this one!) with.
There were some differences from the first time I’d seen it. All previous live shows I’d seen where in Minneapolis or Winnipeg and Mara Wilson never performed in them for whatever reason that’s her own business, so this was my first time seeing her as the Faceless Old Woman. I actually haven’t even heard the episodes where she plays that role either, so it was a nice surprise to finally hear what she was meant to sound like.
I’d also heard Eliza Rickman at all but one performance I’ve ever attended so that was surprisingly familiar. I like her music. She’s good as the Weather.
This was the first time I was able to actually see Cecil’s face clearly (I have what’s known as mole vision) and oh boy, does he have expressive eyes. It was a delight. I’m glad I watched just to see how he could make them just light up with demented glee.
Anyway, despite the fact I wanted to lay down and die for the entire performance, I really enjoyed it and I’m glad to finally get to add the category ‘live theatre’ to this blog.
I started reading this in 2020 and through no fault of its own, I sort of lost track of it (even if it was digital) between vignettes in the book. I like the contained stories. Jesus and Buddha go to the pool! Jesus and Buddha go to a festival! Jesus and Buddha do crafts!
It’s very good natured and hopefully the rest of the series is like that (I need to read it!) so I can safely use it as a starter rec to people. I’ve got friends who want to ‘read manga’ but it’s sort of like being told ‘I want to read books’ so I’m trying to assemble a list of good starting points for various genres. This would work well as a comedy one. Or a slice of life, in its own weird way.
Prooobably my favourite part was Buddha teaching Jesus how to swim and Jesus’ stigmata opening and then Jesus accidentally parting the pool. Or when Jesus read Buddha’s comic and thought it was so funny his thorn crown sprouted roses as a miracle from his joy. Or Buddha winning… a Buddha.
I have been reading this one for uh, a while now (and it turns out I had actually finished it once before back in 2014, thanks Goodreads) and I was disappointed to discover the last story I had left before finishing was the one about the boy who hits his sister who turns out to be a robot who decides instead of letting him go fuck himself to sacrifice her life/brain to become his robot car.
Anyway I apparently hadn’t forgotten THAT one. I did manage to totally forget the plot of Kino the Magician and ah, that was bleak.
So! Astro Boy. Look at all that wacky art mixed with horrific narrative. I’m not gonna get into what happened during that dog story, but the sheer amount of bullshit the robots as a whole go through is very stressful to read. I guess when, in-universe, you’re either seen as a people or a chatty toaster.
Just a little too close to how we treat real people too.
That said, I plan to start Volume 2 pretty soon. I own the whole collection and by god, I am going to read it.
Flash Gordon… well. It’s engaging. It’s also, I shall describe it, as thus:
Every character is Lucy pulling the football on the other characters while playing Capture the Flag with Dale Arden as the flag.
As long as you get used to ‘well they are going to go about five feet before getting shot down’ every few minutes, it’s pretty fun!
I have more of this one to read but I do intend to finish it. I’ve already noticed the art is getting steadily better as I read through, so I’m excited to see what it’s like by the time I get to the end of the volume.
Prince Thun is my favourite character.
My least favourite character is the racism.
Okay, so backstory: I wrote to my local library telling them about how much I liked their selection of old comic strips and it ended in them ordering two books (Flash Gordon, Prince Valiant) at my request! So I was PRETTY EXCITED.
So Prince Valiant was the first one I read and it was BEAUTIFUL. The art was stunning! The narrative technique was pretty interesting too, it doesn’t have dialogue as such, it has explanations (usually at the bottom of) in the panels and sometimes it’ll tell you what they’re saying, but usually just a description of what they said.
Overall I really enjoyed it! There was a record scratch moment where I really do think Ilene would have disagreed that it was better she died horribly at sea so Arn and Valiant could be friends instead of killing eachother over her (at no point is it suggested they NOT kill eachother) but they seemed pretty okay with going ‘yeah! It’s what she would have wanted! BFFS 4 LYFE’
Me: 😐
There were some neat prehistoric style animals but apparently they will get phased out later on.
I enjoyed the panels where the artist made a point of drawing Prince Valiant’s beautiful lashes particularly. But the nature scenes, the epic architecture, and the battle of fifty vikings vs Prince Valiant was gorgeously done.
Okay so it turned out I’d skipped ahead by accident (Stone Queen comes before Bloody Mary!) so I went back and this is interesting! It’s way more fantasy than horror than the other ones.
Actually, I was so involved in the gameplay and figuring out where things go I didn’t even really dick around/take screencaps to make jokes about. I am pleased to see that my nephew Brandon is alive and well except for the mortal wounding but apparently I just didn’t see him again until now after I saved him from Volo(s?)!
What kind of auntie am I? Jeez. Luisa might be in another crystal ball and I didn’t even check on her. Is John Gray in a dungeon? Do I know? No. I failed them. I failed them all.
Anyway so Brandon’s performing a Snow White routine in a crystal coffin and I’ve got a little goblin servant now and I’ve been hanging out with trolls and ogres. The puzzles are relatively easy to solve but I keep missing items I’m meant to pick up, like I swear my eyes don’t register them until I hit the hint thing and it’s like ‘there was a coin there???’
The puzzles are relatively interesting. I like the story telling format that will come later in Bloody Mary and they’re not as frustrating/why? as in the first two. There was actually an interesting rpg style one. (For the record, I did skip to the end of that one but I played halfway through it but I’ve been having spacing out issues lately so I just moved along. I did like it though and in normal circumstances would have played to the end).
The plot is pretty strong in this game, focusing on a corrupt mayor and a strange girl beneath the earth. Name of this strange town where people are being turned to stone by the Stone Queen: Stoneville.
And I’m done! And I just realized I was supposed to do The Stone Queen! Not Bloody Mary! Heck!
I wish I’d managed to get a screencap of the multiple times I literally blew up a monster, or any of the times I used a chipmunk as my servant (at one point stranding him in an aquarium) but the time has passed. The moment has passed. We have to move on with our lives. The explosions were lovely.
This had a lot of really good spooky incidentals. I am hoping Stone Queen explains some of my ‘wait we’re doing this now?’ vis a vis the protagonist’s situation. I’m led to believe skipping an installment can cause that confusion.
Also, one of the games just isn’t available for purchase anymore so I’ll be having to face that reality eventually anyway. C’est la vie.
Also another bonus chapter giving closure. I appreciate those. Perhaps the REAL monster all along was classism!