The Packbats' Weblog

reacting to Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

Wed, 20 Dec 2023 14:06:09 GMT

Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell was published in 2004, and everyone seemed to be enraptured by it, and ... well, the name Packbat didn't exist until 2005, but someone who would take that name in a year read it and thought it was kind of adequate but not great. The worldbuilding was interesting, and this was a time where they didn't tend to give up on books, so they did read it through? But the whole thing felt to that reader like a plot summary - maybe somewhere else there was a version of this story that was enrapturing, but we were reading the TV Tropes recap page of that story, and it was just dry.

Except when it wasn't. Because sometimes Jonathan Strange would try something, or someone else would try something, and it was like being dropped into a story that was happening now, not in a summary. There was dialogue, conversation, perspective. It was suddenly and unquestionably alive, and whoever we remember being "I" then loved it.

Anyway, this year a friend of ours mentioned another book, Piranesi, said it was really good, and we'd been looking for an excuse to go to the library so we checked our library catalogue. And there was a book called "Piranesi" in the catalog, by the same Susanna Clarke, and it was the book our friend was talking about, so we thought, "Maybe Clarke's learned something. Bits of Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell were great, even if the book as a whole was a bit of a slog, so maybe this'll be better than that was."

If you liked Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, I apologize? We mean no offense, I know that two people reading the same book will have different opinions.

But Piranesi was terrific. It was alive, not in patches but from front to back. The fantastical was there - we were dropped into an endless house of statues, like Borges's Library of Babel for statues, with waves sweeping through its lower rooms and clouds through its upper - but the fantastical was seen through a perspective. We were dropped into the world of a person, a world he introduced us to and spoke eloquently about and cared about, and cared about in the specific way that he cared about it.

We picked up this book at about one in the afternoon from the library. By seven we were gushing about it in the DMs of our friend who recommended it. By nine-thirty we were through, and reeling.

We can talk about what happens if you like? There's some heavy stuff in there, so if you do want to read it, you might want to check first, see if it hits something that affects you strongly. We had to ask our friend for some content warnings, which it gave, and that was helpful, and assuming we get along we'll do the same for you if you ask ... but our friend also said the story benefits from reading with very little idea of what will happen, and the story does. It would perhaps be helpful if you came into it having heard of Battersea...? but even if you haven't, you'll likely figure things out quickly. The protagonist and narrator is not deceptive towards you or me.

It's currently four thirty in the morning, typing this. We'll go back to bed in a moment. But we couldn't lie just in bed waiting for all these thoughts to slip through our fingers into sleep.

And you don't have to read Piranesi by Susanna Clarke. It is just a book, two hundred and forty-five pages among uncountable billions, and you have other calls upon your time. But we have to gush about it for a minute, because we were hoping it would be alive and it was.

(We were also hoping it would last us longer than a day, but somehow I think we'll live.)

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"Displacement" by Kiku Hughes, quick review

Sun, 10 Sep 2023 21:46:58 GMT

Right off the bat, we're just going to link to Tamiko Nimuras's review on DiscoverNikkei.org, which is better informed than our opinion.

We were looking at the books available through OverDrive, a library digital lending service, when we saw Displacement by Kiku Hughes. Specifically, we recognized the art style - Kiku Hughes' guest comic about asexuality for Oh Joy Sex Toy was part of our journey to realizing we were ace - and we remembered thinking her comics were very good.

And Displacement was certainly good.

This is a comic about the internment of Japanese citizens in the United States of America during World War 2. It's a time travel story, but it is not about time travel, it's about history, and ignorance of it, and tangibilities of it, and aftereffects of it. And explicitly places this eighty-years-past atrocity in the context of more modern atrocities, and connects resistance to that to resistance to these.

It's historical fiction, first. And it uses the format well. It shows us insides of camps, in tangible details: smells, temperatures, censorship, propaganda, and resistance.

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"Trying Out Marriage With My Female Friend" reactions

Fri, 30 Dec 2022 02:48:38 GMT

Someone turned us on to Trying Out Marriage With My Female Friend by Usui Shio (aka Onna Tomodachi to Kekkon Shitemita) and it's extremely adorable!

Minor content warning for hospitalization (spoilers inside for those who wish to skip it)

In Chapter 7 ("It's alright, I can endure this"), Ruriko has pain of increasing intensity, which she downplays because she doesn't want to ruin Kurumi's day ... but this means that it is only when Kurumi gets home that she learns her wife is in the hospital. (This is thanks to the couple's mutual friend Kuroda, who realizes upon calling that Ruriko is very sick and takes her.)

Ruriko's pain turns out to be appendicitis - fortunately a minor case, but she has to be on antibiotics through an IV for three or four days, time which is skipped over fairly quickly. The main thing that occurs here is Kurumi being distressed that Ruriko didn't tell her ("that ... that makes it seem like we're nothing more than friends...") and telling Ruriko, "There's nothing more important to me than you, Ruriko" when explaining that Ruriko should have told her and it wouldn't've been a bother.

(Instead of being able to verbally acknowledge this, Ruriko notices Kurumi's wet hair and tells her that she shouldn't forget her umbrella - "I don't want you to catch a cold." Kurumi accepts this as just the kind of person Ruriko is.)

Ruriko is discharged on page 00074, near the end of Chapter 8 ("What's important to me").

(Also, content warning for food - it's a recurring thing throughout - and occasional alcohol.)

This is slice-of-life in the most lovingly mundane form: the protagonists navigate chores, purchases, and differing dispositions, and the feelings and questions that spill out from these day-to-day things.

...but they also deal quite directly with amatonormativity. Their marriage does not fit the cultural model of romance and sex that surrounds them, but it also does not fit the model of "just friends" that they initially assumed it would. They care quite intensely about each other, are desirous of each other's company, and do their best to support each other through struggles small and great. Their approach to the whole affair feels much in the vein of relationship anarchy: dissecting their feelings and making decisions based on what works for each of them, finding where their joys lie and celebrating that in the face of the obliviousness of others, and talking to each other.

I don't know if their relationship as of now is more queerplatonic or ace romantic, and I don't know if the author plans to remain in this space for the rest of the story's run or to portray its metamorphosis into something else. But I do know their relationship is healthy, and nuturing, and sweet.

It's currently serializing in Japanese - Chapter 22 came out this month, looks like.

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review: "Non-Player Character" by Veo Corva

Tue, 18 Jan 2022 23:44:50 GMT

"Non-Player Character" is a portal fantasy about an anxious neurodivergent person who is cajoled into joining their MMO friend's tabletop roleplaying group, and we kind of really love it? It is, like a lot of portal fantasies and adventure stories in general, very much about someone being pulled out of their familiar world, forced to deal with a new and terrifying situation, and discovering and developing new strengths in the course of rising to that challenge...

...and in this case, that actually starts before anyone is sucked into another dimension? Tar joining the Kin game is such a brave moment for them, and that ends up being enormously positive in their life before they and their group are handed a whole lot of magic and another entire world to try to navigate. It's a story about making friends, supporting each other, and saving people along the way.

It's also about disability and neurodivergence. It's about people having struggles because their brains and bodies can't do what needs doing on their own, and it's about people having friends who help them get through anyway. It's about having internalized negative stereotypes and being told how amazing they actually are. It's about finding ways to manage, no matter how weird.

It's about a group of marginalized queer people surviving and thriving. It's a kind of story we personally haven't read enough. We're glad we had a chance to read this one.

(p.s. In the course of writing "Non-Player Character", Corva accidentally wrote a sourcebook for Kin, the tabletop roleplaying game from the book, which we haven't yet played but could imagine ourselves running a game of. The flavor is very good, and we like how effectively it simplifies its mechanics by reusing systems.)

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Comments on a few tools.

Tue, 21 Jul 2020 22:16:54 GMT

Someone on the fediverse shared a link to everest pipkin's massive "Open source, experimental, and tiny tools roundup", and I decided to go down the list and talk about the ones we've touched.

Firstly, the ones we've actually tried to make something - or even succeeded at making something - with:

( Read more... )

Secondly, the ones we've looked at but never tried to create in:

( Read more... )

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"i'm sorry did you say street magic" is...

Mon, 15 Jun 2020 00:55:35 GMT

...a GMless tabletop roleplaying game on itch.io, included in the Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality (ending tomorrow from time of posting) and Tabletop Treehouse BLM Bundle 2 (ending in four days).

...about understanding cities not as maps, but as neighborhoods, points of interest within them, and people to be found at those points.

...a process of yes-and - of sharing and developing and enriching ideas.

...pulses of character and place - moss roads one traverses quietly so as not to break the concentration of wizards, a relay race of ropes for an elevator to climb on as it rises or sinks, the bench one sits on after walking for hours through a market.

...considerate of the emotional safety of those who wish to create their street magic.

...kind of beautiful.

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A Brief Love Letter to Michael Lewis's "Moneyball"

Sat, 28 Aug 2010 02:17:27 GMT

I wish this was a proper review, but the book came out a good seven years ago - long enough for this to be awfully old news regardless.

I. Love. Moneyball.

I would say this, if I were cynical and funny: Moneyball is, ironically enough, a story about how storytelling is deceptive. But it's not true. There is a hint of that feeling when I read it - the story is such a good story that I'd want to believe it if the entire book was lies from cover to cover, and the book does warn against dreaming and making up expectations based on merely what you see - but I would do Michael Lewis an injustice if I said that. The man worked his butt off getting it right, and that dedication shows.

What is the material? Well, Moneyball is, perhaps, the perfect underdog story: a story about a baseball team (the Oakland Athletics) with a financial payroll tinier than almost any other in a sport where the richest teams spend many multiples more than the poorest ... that sets out to win, with a determination and intelligence that is an inspiration to behold. Moneyball is also a layman's introduction to that intelligence which, long ignored by the very people who would most benefit from it, finally found its instantiation in the Oakland A's: sabermetrics. And Moneyball is a story of this intelligence on this team reaching out to rescue an oddball collection of underrated players and give them the chance to give a bloody eye to the entire baseball establishment that didn't see how good they were.

And it's a story of how such a thing should ever happen - how mistakes were made and perpetuated and compounded upon, and how the visions found when that fog of confusion was pierced could take so long and strange a journey to where they deserved to play out: on the diamond.

It's a business book, a sociology lesson, a baseball story, and a hell of a good read. A nearer approach to perfection in nonfiction is rarely seen.

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Sorcerer (1977) - Immediate Reactions

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 05:22:19 GMT

If I may venture a prediction: feech, you would not like this movie. Like in Duel, very little plot transpires in a given minute of Sorcerer - the chief part of the story can be summarized in a couple sentences, but it all takes two hours to play out.

What I found compelling, though, was this sense of characterization and atmosphere. The characters are all trapped, desperate and struggling, but trapped - by financial problems, legal problems, extralegal problems, and, for the four protagonists, in the end by the job that they have taken itself. What drives the film is this almost certainly fatal struggle to escape the terrible circumstances they have found themselves in.

Don't be fooled by the title: it is a remake of the 1953 French film Le salaire de la peur (English: The Wages Of Fear), and the "Sorcerer" is merely a truck. There is a sense of sorcery about it, perhaps, as one poorly-punctuated review on IMDB suggested, but it is the inimical spirit of bad luck, no agent who may be blamed.

I found the characters compelling, and the story tense. It is not a happy film, but a good one, I think.

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Whiteout Gaiden

Thu, 04 Mar 2010 01:40:47 GMT

What? I asked.

It's a Japanese word that means a story that plays with the same characters, but different, my brother told me. Ninja Gaiden was a retelling of the story of Ninja, but different.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is the difference between Whiteout (1998 comic) and Whiteout (2009 film). What killed the interest in this movie for the people who hated it was either (Theory 34) that Kate Beckinsdale's shower scene wasn't hot enough, or (Theory Changed) that it wasn't anything like the book. Both objections are correct ...

... but if the comic had never existed and the film had been simply written directly, it wouldn't have received anything like the opprobrium it is subject to. It's a thriller movie, set in Antartica, with a hot lead, lots of plot twists, good action scenes, kinda low-budget special effects but give them some credit, they work, and a satisfying ending. It's not a classic, it's not a tightly-written Chandleresque suspense novel with brilliantly stylized presentation, it's not forward thinking in any way - it's a popcorn movie, and a good one.

Whiteout Gaiden. Rating: 3 stars, buy cheap or rent.

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"The Wire", Season One

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 02:08:41 GMT

I mentioned picking up the complete first season of The Wire - finished that today.

I'll say this much: I wasn't disappointed. Glad I paid for that one.

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