2025 Mid-year Media Log

Well, things have escalated quickly... I mean they're really getting out of hand here in the year of our lord 2025. One of my side-goals for the year was to try to remember the books I'd read, any video games I played, etc. I have more or less managed to do that, but not in any permanently organized place. So here, at the outset of July, is the Mid-year Log!

Books

Books I do have a reasonable handle on thanks to remembering a Goodreads account, long since dormant, but now active again! I've read 24 full books--not counting any of the many "chunks of books" I've read as part of research for other topics or planning TTRPG games.

Fiction

1. I read all five of the available Murderbot Diaries books by Martha Wells. These were tremendous sci-fi, in the best tradition of making a book that uses fictional science/speculation to provide a lens on our human selves. A+.
2. I read the first two Thursday Murder Club mysteries by Richard Osman. These are whodunnits in a classic mold but instead of a neurodivergent detective we have a collection of elderly pensioners at a retirement home driving the investigations. Delightful, and perhaps the closest thing we've got to a Brindlewood Bay novelization right now! A.
3. I re-read five books in the Anty Boisjoly mystery series, by P.J. Fitzsimmons. I continue to find these Wodehousian crime capers charming, easy, light reading--perfect for a 2025 that is anything but. The Tale of the Tenpenny Tontine remains my favorite, although The Case of the Case of Kilcladdich has grown on me the second time through. B+/A-.
4. I also read the first book in his spinoff series, the Quillfeather Mysteries, Hearty Haul at Hardy Hall, and enjoyed it, but perhaps not quite to the same extent. I have the followup on my nightstand pile, though. B.
5. I read the first book in Joe Abercrombie's new series The Devils and thoroughly enjoyed getting to return to Abercrombie's grimy brand of dark fantasy. I love this "through a looking-glass, grimy" vision of a Europe that wasn't quite, and am excited to see where it goes next (probably on a crusade!?). A.

Game books, so... in-between?

1. I am a massive Deathmatch Island fan, so I eagerly picked up Triangle Agency just as soon as I could get my hands on it. I have a more complete review in progress, but I do quite love this game and how it works in exploration of its overarching mystery plots through an evolving set of choose-your-own-adventure like rules. A+. I've been trying to find the right solution for a similar challenge in my long-delayed Impossible Landscapes / Delta Green project, so I might end up swiping this!
2. The Museum Heist, by Henry Lewis (et al.) – a fun "escape-room-in-a-book" where you're trying to crack the case of a museum heist by finding evidence, decrypting codes, etc. Fun, but one-shot. I loved the Usborne Puzzle Adventures books as a kid, and this reminded me of those. B.

Non-fiction

1. I read T. Harry Williams' biography Huey Long – one of the precious few (and perhaps only serious?) biographies of a practically forgotten seminal figure in US political history, one that we would do very well to remember today.
2. I read my first Max Hastings history: Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War, and I have to say I was a little disappointed in it. It's a very pro-Anglo, traditionalist account of the origins of the First World War--which I have, over the last decade, become something of a buff about--which mentions but makes little effort to engage with more recent appraisals such as Christopher Clark's The Sleepwalkers (which I do think is very strong). C.
3. Brian Merchant's Blood in the Machine: the Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech was way, way better than I thought it could be. Merchant skillfully lays out the largely forgotten history of the Luddites and their cause (sadly, all we really know of them today was written by their billionaire adversaries)--putting it in context as one of the origin stories of the labor movement and it's place in the enclosure movement, an early, large-scale fight-back against liberty and freedom from tyranny by the landed elites. A.
4. Related, Sohrab Amari's Tyranny, Inc.: How Private Power Crushed American Liberty and What To Do About It is a must-read for these dark days. Amari pulls an illustrative stunt several times in this work, telling a story of crushing authoritarianism as if it were taking place under Communism, or Iran, or Putin's Russia, but then revealing that it took place at an American business. One of the US' ongoing blindspots is the monotonic focus on restraining public power at the expense of allowing private power to dominate society. It is, in fact, one of the defining issues undermining and accelerating the collapse of the third American Republic. Essential reading. A.
5. Out of left field I was recommended The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire by William Dalrymple. I don't know a ton about Indian history and really only know the EIC indirectly. This book was seemingly made for me, though. I love telling action and character-forward historical stories, and boy howdy this book was jam-packed with material for a historical adventure hour talk! I've added "find out everything you can about Shah Alam and then tell this story" to my bucket list. A+.

Video Games

I've felt like a bit of an stranger to the video game world over the past several years. It is difficult, as I grow older, to feel like the time investment they regularly demand is worth it. There's a voice in my head that pipes up saying "are you sure this is actually fun? It's not feeling fun?" all too regularly. But! As a birthday present to myself, I bought a Steam Deck, and it has been a revelation. Steam is full of smaller, indie titles, with a lower time commitment and a lower cost to entry, and it is fueling something of a renaissance for me. Here's what I've played this year, all on the deck:

1. Grundislav Games' Rosewater, an old-school pixelart point-and-click adventure game in a wild-west that wasn't quite. Just the right length, and it's really cool to see how even such an old-school "Adventure Game" game can introduce new mechanics, such as the extended travel montage of Act 2. B+.
2. Murders on the Yangtze River, by OMEGAMES studio. The first Chinese game I've ever played, and quite a refreshing take on the investigative/murder mystery genre. Stunning watercolor backdrops and lots of historical context for China undergoing occupation and industrial revolution, and a quite enjoyable Detective Game mechanic, a modified version of Ace Attorney. A.
3. Blue Prince, by Dogubomb. A critical darling, and it's easy to understand why. An almost perfect blend of Myst-like sequential discovery puzzles, mysterious and melancholic backstory exploration, and a tile-laying drafting game. You kind of have to choose your own commitment level, as the game continues to provide you with deeper and deeper layers to explore, but there are also numerous satisfying offramps, one of which I took. What a game. A+.
4. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, by Sandfall Interactive. "What if a well-funded French startup studio made a JRPG?" Well, you'd get the other critical darling of the year, a big, beautiful, messy, sprawling, creative twist on the JRPG formula. I don't really like JRPGs, but I appreciated the updates and innovations to the core mechanics here, and the post-Lovecraftian world is stunningly imagined and hauntingly realized both visually and sonically. Giving it an A- because I thought it overstayed it's welcome a little bit, but... see above.
5. Inkle's Expelled!, a followup to their delightfully wicked Overboard!, sees you trying to maneuver a young woman at an elite boarding school through a thorny situation involving a prefect falling out of a priceless stained glass window. The school is full of secrets and I really love how these "reverse whodunnits" unfold—they're mystery-solving games, but the mystery is "how to get away with it" and the games continually up the ante. Charming. A.
6. And just under the time limit, I finished Citizen Sleeper by Jump Over the Age. It is a sci-fi narrative RPG that takes mechanical inspiration from the tabletop RPG phenom Blades in the Dark and weaves a satisfying and emotional cyberpunk-in-space story around it. Eminently worth the slim amount of time and money it demands of the player. Pretty heartwarming and well pulled off. B+.
   
   I have to say, between Blue Prince's drafting-with-overarching-metaplot-discovery, Citizen Sleeper's FitD inspired clock and action die mechanics, and Inkle's "Ink" narrative engine I am feeling inspired to create games in a way I don't know if I have been in a decade or more.

Music

I remain very much into KPop this year, although I've been drifting back into more traditional hip-hop some over the summer as well. Additionally, whenever I am at work or working creatively I am listening to a mix channel with lofi jazz or electronic beats: Cozy Jazz Cafe, Obsidian Soundfields, Chill Music Lab, and others. Too much to mention everything here, so I'll just say "I'm re-appreciating Run the Jewels" and mention a few standout KPop notes:

KPop releases of the year, in no order

1. Ok, I lied: I'm going to list what will probably be the Album of the Year first. It's Jennie's debut solo album Ruby. The last of the Blackpink quartet to release her album, but the wait was very much worth it, she showed off her range and versatility, delivering aggressive hip-hop such as Like Jennie, XtraL, and with the IE alongside lighthearted and breezy gems such as Love Hangover and warm, rich, sultry R&B such as Damn Right and Seoul City. The hit ratio is sky-high. A+.
2. My Eyes Open VVide, MEOVV's debut EP, has never been out of rotation either. This is the strongest KPop debut I have ever heard (not saying too much, only been listening for ~3 years); there are no skips and every song stands out in some way, allowing this rookie group to flex their talent in new ways from the World Cup soundtrack-worthy "Hands Up", the nostalgic pop of "Drop Top", to the 90s talkbox inspired "Lit Right Now" or the heartachey ballad of "Toxic". A+.
3. A side-note: ITZY's "Girls Will Be Girls" — I am not normally much of an ITZY fan – but I loved the more driving sound on this track. The rest of the album didn't do anything for me, though. An A for this one song
4. Lisa's Alter Ego is a bit of a mixed bag. There are some real standouts for me on the album (Rockstar, Born Again, FUTW) but also a lot of tracks that don't do anything for me. The highs here are as high as anything anyone is making, and there are way more hits here than the average KPop release, but I still somehow wanted more FUTWs and Born Agains. B as a whole, with many S-tier songs.
5. The KPop Demon Hunters movie OST is full of bangers--perhaps no surprise, as I learned that Teddy and his TheBlackLabel crew were heavily involved creatively. Standouts for me: Golden and How It's Done – both sound like tracks that could be in the Blackpink discography!
6. I'd be remiss not to mention TheBlackLabel's other rookie group, ALLDAY PROJECT, that rarest of birds in KPop: a co-ed crew. They're substantially more aggressively hip-hop than MEOVV, but both fit really well together. Both debut tracks are really solid, and the co-ed theme might rejuvenate an industry that seems a little stuck or overworked outside some of the smaller labels like TBL.