The Great Album Project (2024-09-17)

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album cover for Same Eyes's album "parties to end" that shows a collage of photos including a city skyline, a radio tower, and a woman's face with another eye pasted over it

Inspired by the Aaron Giles page where he talks about ripping his entire cd collection, I have decided to listen to every record (and CDs and Bandcamp purchases) and give tiny blurbs on them. I’ll do these posts on a weekly basis so they won’t get overwhelming and people can just skip them. Collecting records for 15 years and marrying someone who also collects them means I have a pretty decently sized music collection in my basement, with a lot of records I haven’t heard in a long time or have never listened to. I can’t imagine this will be interesting to most people but it will be a lot of fun for me since I listen to a ton of music while programming or after work anyway. Plus maybe it will help people find new music to listen to. I actually already ripped all my CDs earlier this year so I’m not getting to those yet. Most of these reviews will have links to Bandcamp pages as well. I’m also working on a page where all of these reviews will be listed.

His Name is Alive: How Ghosts Affect Relations 1990-1993 (2024, Bandcamp)
This preorder actually arrived a bit early so I got to listen to it on vinyl before I can listen my download of it. An incredible box set containing 3 albums I love, along with some bonus tracks and booklet. The remasters sound fantastic and I can’t recommend these albums enough to people who are a fan of the dream pop/shoegaze sound that a lot of 4AD bands had at the time. It will never be weird to me that these albums were being recorded almost directly behind my childhood home while I was a kid. The main person behind this band, Warren Defever, apparently lived grew up here and then bought the home from his parents to use as a studio up until the mid 90s and I was just riding my bike by it every day. Weird! All 3 albums are great but I think my ranking of them is 1. Livonia 2. Mouth by Mouth 3. Home is in Your Head. Livonia is the first album released and named after the city where I grew up. It probably has the the most experimental sound, with the albums drifting to a more radio friendly sound with Mouth by Mouth sounding the most approachable to me.

Jean-Michel Jarre: Magnetic Fields (1981, YouTube)
I’m not an expert on him by any means and he definitely has more famous albums, but this is still a good one IMO. Just some nice electronic bleeps and bloops. It sounds more poppy and dance than I would expect from him, but again, I’ve only heard a tiny bit of his work (the Oxygene albums).

Love Spirals Downwards: Flux (1998, Bandcamp)
I feel like with the resurgence of Y2K nostalgia, especially among Gen Z folks, this seems like an album that they would be really into. This drum & bass and ambient album was released in 1998 but the version I listened to is the vinyl rerelease that came out in 2024. I think the rerelease sounds great. City Moon is the first song I heard by LSD so it will always have a soft spot for it, but I think all the songs on here are solid. To be honest, I don’t actually know the band’s discography that well outside of this and their compilation Temporal. I should probably listen to more of them since I like these two releases and have a lot of nostalgia for this era of music. I’m linking to the vinyl rerelease but there’s also a deluxe digital edition on Bandcamp that has a lot of bonus tracks. The vinyl release also features an essay and thoughts about the album too.

Mint Mile: The Bliss Point (2016, Bandcamp)
I believe this is the first EP by Tim Midyett’s band Mint Mile. Tim is more famous for being a member of Silkworm, but I really like this band too. This was not the first album I heard by them, but I think it’s a good intro for anyone curious. It’s just a very good and straightforward rock album consisting of 4 songs, maybe with the tiniest bit of a country sound in some songs

Same Eyes: “Parties to End” (2021, Bandcamp)
A synth pop/dark wave band from Ann Arbor, Michigan. I think it’s an enjoyable collection of songs if you’re a fan of 80s new wave bands. I hesitate to call it synth pop since it’s a little darker, but I think there’s also an element of cheese that makes me want to associate them with that genre too. Even though it’s clearly inspired by a lot of classic new wave/dark wave bands, I still think they have their own sound. It’s not like when a vaporwave band is just copying the same sounds as many other vaporwave bands and ends up sounding like “generic 80s synth song” (I know that’s not all vaporwave btw). Lots of Michigan connections with this album too. I discovered them through my local NPR station, local musician legend Fred Thomas helped record the album, and Warren Defever from local band His Name is Alive mastered the album at Third Man Records in Detroit

Blogging on the Phone

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People on the blogosphere right now are talking about how you should post on your blog through the phone. They’re even reblogging posts saying you should post from your phone. Well I’m here to draw the line in the sand and say I will NEVER post from my phone. In fact, maybe I’ll post exclusively from my desktop computer. I don’t care if this starts discourse, I will never use my cellular phone to make a blog post.

Here is a picture of my cat

a photo of a cat looking up at you with big eyes and expecting a snack

Blog Roundup (2024-16-9)

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Inspired by this post (I know it mentions my blog but that’s not why I’m linking to it), I thought it would be fun to start doing regular roundups of blog and site posts that I enjoyed. I kinda did these before a while ago but I thought it would be good to do them again now that I’m following so many different blogs through my RSS feed now that Cohost is shutting down. Google search sucks now so the only way people can see cool stuff is from others sharing it. So if you enjoy these posts, subscribe to their RSS feeds through your reader of choice.

Eniko reflects on her history with the Ultima franchise and what it means to her on her personal blog.

The developer of classic Macintosh games like Glider and Glypha goes through his history of abandoned games.

I’ve enjoyed following along with David Lindsey Pittman’s blog updates on the development of Eldritch 2. I was a fan of the first game and this looks good too.

Renga in Blue is a blog devoted to attempting to play through every single adventure game in order of release. The most recent post about is about Dungeon Adventure (1982).

Thanks to Cohost, I’ve become aware of the concept of Rosting. They’re posts directly to the RSS feed, meaning they only show up in the feed of your reader and nowhere else. It’s a lot of fun whenever I see one popping into my feed, like it’s a post just for me. If you’d like to see some, consider subscriber to the inventor(?) of Rosting, Adam Ledoux’s (Bitsy creator) blog, and Nicky Flowers on your RSS feed.

Misty has a very good post about some fonts that were on a floppy disk.

Indie Tsushin has an interview with the developer of Missile Dancer 2.

Gretchen has a post about how the internet is getting worse. Maybe we can all work together to make it a little better and feel less small.

Books Read in August 2024

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Oops, a few days behind on this. I went a bit overboard reading in August and September is definitely slower. Almost all of these books were from my library since I wanted to keep participating in my summer reading program there, which is partially why my reading in September is slower. Also because my kids are back in school and all the Internet Archive discourse on Bluesky (not getting into it) was very annoying to me as well. Even the conversations around “real” libraries have been annoying and heavily focused on how libraries are good because they give authors money which, sure, that’s nice, but there’s lots of other reasons why they’re good.

This is How You Lose the Time War by Max Gladstone, Amal El-Mohtar – After hearing this books described as a modern classic in the last few years I finally read it. It’s really good! Not a whole lot to say past that but I recommend it if you like gay time travel stories.

1984 by George Orwell – It’s weird having an opinion on this book after reading it for the first time. I’ve seen it referenced billions of times and the influence that it had on pop culture that I mostly knew it all anyway. But I think it’s good?

Orbital by Samantha Harvey – I really liked this one. It’s just about the lives of people in the last days of the International Space Station before it’s decommissioned. I absolutely love sci-fi stories that feel like they are heavy on vibes and there aren’t explosions and punching and this one delivers since there’s not really a “plot.” The novella did well with critics but it explains why opinions on places like Storygraph are more divided.

Welcome to Wine: An Illustrated Guide to All You Really Need to Know by Madelyne Meyer – Yep lol, I just wanted to know more about wine. This was a good intro to that and not too long.

Red Rising by Pierce Brown – Apparently this is a massively popular series but I didn’t really care for it. Not “bad” but nothing exciting to me either.

Some Are Always Hungry by Jihyun Yun – Just a really good collection of poetry by a local author in Ann Arbor. I picked this one up about a year ago at Booksweet, which has now changed ownership but still seems very good.

Artificial Condition by Martha Wells – The second Murderbot novella. I’ve read this one before but just really like Murderbot and wanted to read it again. I think I’ve only read the first 3 books so I’m looking forward to getting to the new stories soon.

Captain Disaster: The Dark Side of the Moon by Dave Seaman – This is a short story novelization of his free point-and-click adventure, both are available on Itch. Fun, quick read. Most people should do novelizations of their games.

The Fireborne Blade by Charlotte Bond – Very enjoyable fantasy novella. The middle drags a bit and it spends time setting up more interesting things in the sequel book instead of doing it here, but I had fun reading it.

Venus in Furs by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch – Public domain read on my Kindle. I don’t know, shrug. I get why it’s important but don’t think I would recommend it to others.

Babel-17 by Samuel R. Delany – My first Delany book! Liked it but probably wouldn’t recommend the audiobook to others since I feel like you need to take your time with it and parts and possibly even reread things?

The Brides of High Hill by Nghi Vo – Another novella in the Singing Hills cycle. I’m glad I kept reading these. Wonderful series.

Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros – Good book. Don’t have a lot to say about this one. It’s not really the kind of book I would normally read but checked it out since it’s popular and was part of a recommendation post from my library. Won’t read the sequels but that doesn’t mean it’s bad.

Nothing But Blackened Teeth by Cassandra Khaw – It’s fine. I like Cass Khaw but this didn’t work as well for me like their other books. Even my review seemed to be more positive than most on Storygraph, but I didn’t think it was bad. I think a lot of people felt pulled in by the fantastic cover art. Like everyone says, the characters are just kinda annoying, but not in a way that’s interesting. Oh well. Go read their other stuff though!

Journey to the Center of the Earth by Jules Verne – I listened to the audiobook by Tim Curry and man, absolutely incredible. The story itself is good but Tim Curry really elevates everything.

Nine Princes in Amber by Roger Zelazny – My first Zelazny book and it won’t be the last. I actually started reading this because we were playing Chronomaster in Adventure Game Club, which he worked on, and I wanted to actually read one of his books. Good stuff.

Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne – I guess I am a big Jules Verne fan and I’m fully onboard with Captain Nemo’s bullshit.

Tom Baker at 80 – Ok lol, this is an audio release I bought from Big Finish about 10 years ago and I have the signed cd. I finally listened to it. It’s fine! It’s just a 2 hour long interview with Tom Baker and his career. He’s still working with Big Finish and doing more 4th Doctor stories to this day!

Into the Riverlands by Nghi Vo – There’s one more of these that I also read in September. Highly recommend the whole thing.

The Bad Beginning by Lemony Snicket – Listened to this because Tim Curry does the narration. He’s great, I thought the actual book was whatever and then I read the Wikipedia page for the author and he seems very annoying so I don’t think I’ll do the sequels.

Peter Pan by J.M. Barrie – Another story I listened to because of Tim Curry! He’s good in this and so is the story. It’s worth reading even if you’ve seen the Disney movie a bunch. It’s not drastically darker like some Disney source material is, but it is a little bit and it’s just interesting.

A Spell for Chameleon by Piers Anthony – Oof, OOF. I read this because I eventually wanted to play the adventure game by Legend and wanted some context. I’ve even been warned about this book before, the AV Club famously has a very negative review of the book. I should have listened. It’s so frustrating. There’s some really fun ideas in here but it’s so aggressively sexist. It really can’t stop itself from saying something awful every once in a while once you think the book stopped being sexist.

A Mastodon Test

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I just installed a new plug-in that should post this over to my Mastodon account here. Before this became self-hosted, the blog would post to its own account but I dropped that as soon as Automattic got into AI scraping crap. I also deleted my Tumblr soon after. Oh well, their loss. Apologies if you follow this through RSS and care about none of this!

What I’m Up To (2024-09-11)

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One of my favorite things about following personal blogs is just the regular check ins people do where they write about what has been happening. When Craig Maloney was with us, I enjoyed reading his regular check in posts and thought it would be fun to start writing them since this is my personal site and not a games blog, but it might also keep me accountable on projects I’m working on. But I’ll write about other things I’ve been watching/reading/playing and whatever else I’m up to. These might be on a weekly basis.

  • Speaking of projects, this is going to sound silly since I just said this is where I’ll blog about them, but I actually just put them all on hold for the moment. I might be getting some contract work soon and don’t want to get too invested in anything before I have to switch gears. I don’t really mind since I should be taking more time for myself to relax anyway. I’m pretty busy anyway since my kids just started school again and it takes a minute to get to the rhythm of that. There’s also just been a lot of other stress lately with things like the basement flooding and recovering from all of that, so it’s fine for me to just chill.
  • There’s also been the sadness of Cohost shutting down soon. I’m not really surprised about it but it’s still sad. I should probably do a larger post about that sometime since I feel like it deserves it. In the meantime, I started putting together a massive sheet of personal sites that users there have, as one of the possibly life rafts I guess? I’m going to try to make a blogroll or post with as many links as possible to other cohost folks with blogs/sites before the site shuts down posting. I’ve got some but if you’re reading this, were a user at Cohost, and want your site added, let me know! It’s definitely still a work in progress, I need to go through all the blog related tags and people I’m following, but if you want to see the current state, here you go: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1BCJ7PFpUEjaysOA4C77z9Ckdo0YbutPihTh7oimm2AA/edit?usp=sharing
  • It’s definitely not a replacement for Cohost or the future of the internet, but it is nice having more people to follow on the RSS feed reader and I think all the talk about having sites on Cohost has inspired more people to blog or start something.
  • Last night’s debate went better than expected, hooray!
  • I’ve been playing some random adventure games with the kids and they’re really into them. I always worried I’m trying to push anything on them, but they’ve been very excited to play Sam & Max and Frog Detective 2.
  • I also finally started playing Gubble 2 and it’s not as good as the first. I should probably do some full posts about Gubble at some point, since I don’t think my streams of that have been mentioned here.

Indie Game Roundup (Sept. 9, 2024)

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I think I’ve developed a pretty good method of doing these weekly now. Still have a massive backlog of games I want to talk about because people keep making cool stuff but it’s much more fun for me to do these little batches. Once in a while someone will be confused about the formatting of these posts (very understandable!), I generally bold the title of the game and then put a link to the game in ( ), usually to Itch.io and/or Steam.

If you recently released something that you want included, always feel free to send me an email, message me on social media (see About page), or just reply to this post with a link to your thing to let me know it’s out.

Banky’s Newborn Baby (Itch.io link) is a very good interactive poem thing made in Twine.

A few years ago I made a goofy little indie ttrpg name generator (Itch.io link) just as a fun little project to poke at for a couple of days. A whole dang game jam just wrapped up (Itch.io) where people made games using it. I had nothing to do with it but it makes me so happy that people actually made cool stuff using my thing.

A new Indiepocalypse (Itch.io) is out! As usually, there’s a lot of cool games in this monthly anthology zine.

view from a space ship cockpit and lasers are firing at a ship
Liberation

Liberation (Steam/Itch.io) is definitely not new and came out a year ago, but it’s new to me! I just picked it up as part of the Steam space exploration fest or whatever it’s called. I often get frustrated with finding the space sim that’s right for me, since I usually don’t want a pure level based arcade sim but also don’t want anything complex like the X series either, but I love this. There’s nothing wrong with arcade games or incredibly complex space sims, but they’re usually not for me. This feels to strike a nice balance and has a lot of character. I’m not sure how I found out about this one but it’s the most British game I’ve ever played, so I assume a British person in their 40s-50s posted about it since it’s strongly inspired by Elite and shows like Blake’s 7, The Tripods, Space:1999, Star Cops, Judge Dredd and Doctor Who. I’ve never seen Blake’s before and should probably watch it.

screenshot of green,brown, and grey hex tiles showing hills and mountains, and a map of all the titles in the lower right corner
Nikhil Murthy’s Syphilisation

Nikhil Murthy’s Syphilisation (Steam) is a postcolonial 4X game where you play a student doing a group report on Gandhi, Churchill and the Raj. I ran into some bugs when I streamed the game but I still love it. It’s doing so much that I haven’t seen in other 4X games and really think more people should check it out. This article on Unwinnable about the game is also very good.

This came out a year ago and I’ve posted about it before but Incubus – A Ghost Hunter’s Tale (Steam) is a fun adventure game I’ve been revisiting since it’s getting closer to Halloween. I’ve always enjoyed the developer’s other games like the Dark Fall series and this one is also a neat ghost hunting adventure.

Kickstarters/Crowdfunding:

Netcrawl is now crowdfunding. It already hit it’s goal but I think it looks like a neat cyberpunk ttrpg.

Self Promo Zone

Thank you for reading these! Consider supporting my work on Ko-fi so I can buy more games/maintain site costs, checking out my games on Itch.io, following me on Twitch where I will do streams of random indie games, checking out previous indie game roundups, or just by sharing these posts. An anthology I helped organize also came out this summer on Steam and Itch.io

I’ve also started an irc channel for indie and alt games/gamedev talk at AfterNET at #AltGames. If you do not have an IRC client or don’t feel like messing around with that stuff, you can easily join through the browser here. Consider giving it a try! No registration required!

Indie Game Roundup (Sept. 2, 2024)

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Todaybor Day is Labor Day! It looks like I managed to do these two weeks in a row. I’m still getting caught up on my backlog of games to talk about but if you recently released something that you want included, always feel free to send me an email, message me on social media (see About page), or just reply to this post with a link to your thing to let me know it’s out.

drawing of a shoe and watering pail pouring water on it
Five Years Old Memories

Five Years Old Memories (Steam): A short game collecting interactive animations and featuring interviews with the developer’s friends of their memories of when they were five years old. I saw a review discussing how the game was influenced by 90s multimedia cd-roms and yes, absolutely, it rules and I love seeing people being inspired by this era of software. It’s about 30 minutes long for a playthrough and only $3.

gif of a first person view of a canoe going down a lake
Wherever You Hike

Wherever You Hike (Itch.io): A short walking game made in 10 weeks by a team of two where you just walk and canoe in a relaxing area until you feel satisfied. It’s just a nice, relaxing space to spend a few minutes and is Pay-What-You-Want.

view from inside a cockpit with a lot of controls to interact with
Armored Shell Nightjar

ARMORED SHELL NIGHTJAR (Itch.io): Created for MechJam V by Warkus and Modus Interactive (two folks from the HauntedPS1 community), it’s a Getting Over It-like where you navigate intentionally awkward controls inside a mech to climb up a tower. I’m awful at these types of games but it’s very good.

first person view of a grainy view of two doors in a dungeon
Chalicebound

Chalicebound (Itch.io): Another game by Warkus, this is a short demo inspired by the classic adventure game Shadowgate. I always get excited when new games are inspired by the classic MacVenture series (Shadowgate, Uninvited, Deja Vu 1 and 2) and this one is great and creepy. It’s just a demo but I hope we get a longer, commercial game someday.

Nightmare SuperHighway

Nightmare SuperHighway (Itch.io): It’s another “Walking Sim” (I’m fine with the term!) where you explore a series of creepy spaces. I just walking around well-crafted spaces and this is one of those!

isometric view of a dungeon with an adventurer and chicken
Roguecraft

Roguecraft (Itch.io): Roguecraft is a brand-new roguelike for the Amiga inspired by Lovecraft. I haven’t played this one yet but hell yes, new Amiga games. I’m also a big fan of the publisher, Thalamus, and there’s a boxed copy of the game as well if you want to get a new physical copy of an Amiga game in the year 2024.

an adventurer standing in a village next to a large castle
Erenshor

Erenshor (Steam): Erenshor is a single player rpg strongly inspired by late 90s/early 00s MMORPGs and emulates how those games played. It only has a demo out right now and I haven’t played it yet, but I’ve been watching BogusMeatFactory play this on Twitch and it seems like a lovely rpg that I’ll have to play someday.

Other People Talking About Indies

A new Indie Tsushin (website) came out today! It’s great, like they always are!

Self Promo Zone

Thank you for reading these! Consider supporting my work on Ko-fi so I can buy more games/maintain site costs, checking out my games on Itch.io, following me on Twitch where I will do more streams of these short indies, checking out previous indie game roundups, or just by sharing these posts. An anthology I helped organize also came out this summer on Steam and Itch.io

Indie Game Roundup (August 26, 2024)

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It has been way too long since I’ve done one of these so I’ll probably start doing a series of shorter ones on a weekly basis until I get caught up with everything that I thought was really cool. I’ve just been too busy to do bigger posts like I was doing before but still want a place to log everything I like.

a purple woman named Cyan saying "we woke up somewhere new again..."

The big one has been the Locally Sourced Anthology I: A Space Atlas, a collection of 8 short games by various developers in Michigan with an outer space theme. I’m very proud to have helped with this anthology and I’m hoping to do more of them in the future. Do I get to put something I worked on in my “cool indie games” blog posts? Sure, why not.

Kitsune Tails has been a really nice platformer in the spirit of Super Mario Bros. 3. It’s challenging but the game has some nice options for people like me who aren’t as good at platformers.

A yellow smiley face in a maze of 3D red bricks

This new interactive liminal-space horror essay about technocapitalism and individuality sounds very cool, and of course, I get very excited about anything referencing Windows 95 screensavers.

top down view of soldiers in a hallway in a very blue screen. Text saying you must rescue hostages.
Screenshot from Star Combat

Star Combat: Cadre Class is a new turn-based strategy game for DOS. I got to play an earlier version of the game and it’s great.

Speaking of DOS games, the most recent DOS Games Jam wrapped up and there’s a lot of new DOS games there as well.

two women in a cabin and a text parser saying "Talk to Kimi"

Also inspired by DOS games, The Crimson Diamond is a brand new adventure game that is strongly inspired by Sierra’s The Colonel’s Bequest. It’s been in development for a while and I’m so happy to see it come out and doing well.

person walking in the woods next to a pond and a text parser saying "Pick berry"

There’s also another adventure game inspired by Sierra’s 80s adventure games. The Tachyon Dreams Anthology is a collection of 3 sci-fi adventure games that use a parser but are a bit more player friendly than those classic adventures were.

Other people talking about indie games:

Tony Warriner, of Broken Sword/Beneath a Steel Sky adventure game fame, has started doing a regular indie games blog and it’s really cool

Self-Promo Zone

Already did self promo at the beginning but I have an irc channel for indie and alt games/gamedev talk at AfterNET at #AltGames. If you do not have an IRC client or don’t feel like messing around with that stuff, you can easily join through the browser here. I’ll never be able to get people to drop Discord for IRC, but I personally prefer it. I don’t feel like I have to follow along with every single conversation and I’m not getting pinged all the time by notifications or the “Everyone” tag. Consider giving it a try! No registration required!

Also consider following me on Twitch!

Books Read in July 2024

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I guess I should post on here more. I’ve been pretty busy pretty busy this summer but here’s what I read this last month. You can always follow me on Storygraph

Ariol – A Beautiful Cow: This was a collection of comics that one of my kids picked from the library. It was fine! I never heard of it before

Dragonflight: My first Anne McCaffrey book! I thought it was ok but suffered from some very boring stretches but it has some neat concepts and I liked the ending. I will read more by her at some point in the future.

Exhibit by R.O. Kwon: Big fan of this writer. Didn’t enjoy it as much as The Incendiaries but still thought it was very good. The marketing for the book was very odd to me because it felt like it was hyping it up as an erotic and fun novel and that’s really not what the focus was. Not a criticism of the book at all, just weird that the marketing chose to go with that.

Kindred: My first Octavia E. Butler book! Nothing really insightful to say about this one. Yep, it’s a great book and I’ll need to read more by her. By knowing what the book was about in advance, I sorta expected it to be kind of a slog but nope. It felt like a quick read to me.

The Long Game: My first Ann Leckie story. This is another one of the short sci-fi stories that is available as part of Amazon Prime so I read it. I don’t really remember anything about it and my storygraph says I gave it 3 stars so I guess I thought it was just fine. I’ll read more by Ann because I know this isn’t really representative of her writing and to be honest, I’ve kinda felt “it’s fine” has been the case with all of the stories in this Kindle series.

The Stars Too Fondly: Really fun sci-fi, gay romance novel by Emily Hamilton. I don’t really know if I had seen people discussing it on Bluesky (where I now follow a ton of writers) before grabbing it from my library, but I’m glad I did.

Servant Mage: Meh. Fantasy novella that still felt kinda boring in the middle and I didn’t really find the characters to be too interesting.

Yours Cruelly, Elvira: My Wild Life as the Mistress of the Dark: This is the autobiography by Cassandra Peterson, the actress who plays Elvira. I would have a hard time recommending it to people who don’t know who she is, but I really liked it. Went with the audiobook for this one, which I think was the right choice. I think it’s neat my library had it.

In the House of Aryaman, a Lonely Signal Burns: My first Elizabeth Bear book. To be honest, I have already sorta forgotten what it was about and had given it 3/5 on Storygraph, which usually means I thought it was fine but not memorable. I had checked it out just because it was something I could listen to for free as part of my Audible trial. I’ll read more by her though. I thought it was neat that the main character wasn’t white, it was a perfectly fine detective story, and I was kind of in a weird mood when I listened to it anyway.

The Y in Life: This was a self-published novel by a local author that I checked out from the library because I enjoyed the author’s blog posts about local bookstores and soccer team. It’s a weird one that’s kind of a mess and way too long but I still enjoyed it? Maybe I like when an author knows they are probably just writing one book and just put everything in there. Maybe I should read more self-published books even if they’re messy?

When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain: I really liked the previous book in this world, The Empress of Salt and Fortune, but didn’t click as much with this. But it’s short, everyone else seemed to like it more than me, and I still didn’t even think it was bad, just not great like the first book. Still might read more in the series though since they’re standalone novellas set in the same world.