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lydamorehouse Just two minutes ago, I finished reading a powerful webcomic recommended by bcholmes called O Human Star. I cried all the tears, the ugly ones and the happy ones. I can not recommend it enough.
In a sort of similar vein (at least in terms of a world where androids and humans co-exist), I finished listening to the audiobook of Klara and the Sun by Kazou Ishiguro. I can't say that I enjoyed Klara and the Sun because it's ultimately--in my opinion, anyway--a tragedy, I did find it very compelling all the way through. I'd read Ishiguro's previous novel, The Buried Giant, when it was up for the Mythopoeic Award (2016). Looking back at my review of that book, I can see that I had similar feelings about it. Ishiguro's narrative style is very dream-like in both of these books, though I was impressed in Klara and the Sun how he was able to tell the readers more than Klara herself always fully understood or grasped. That can be extremely tricky to pull off, and he does it masterfully here. As I told a friend, I liked this book right up to the very last line--and the last line didn't make me HATE the book, just feel deeply, DEEPLY sad.
Otherwise, I crammed in a couple of food-related manga ahead of tomorrow's OH-F*CK-O'CLOCK WorldCON panel "Let Them Eat! Food in Anime." Of them, I really loved all 70+ chapters of Wakako-Zake by Shinkyu Chie. (The link is to my review, but from there, if you like, you can find a copy of the manga.) It is impossible not to spoil this one because the entire manga is about a 28-year old woman who goes out to eat and enjoys her food (and whatever alcohol she pairs it with.) That's it. That's the entire manga. And, I would read 70 more chapter of it, if it were available. As part of all this prep, I also skimmed through the manga Tondemo Skill de Isekai Hourou Meshi / Campfire Cooking in Another World with my Absurd Skill by Eguchi Ren / Akagishi K, reminding myself as to why I loved the anime so much. I also ended up watching a few episodes of Food Wars! so I could reasonably understand what people were talking about, should it come up. I should probably re-read my review of Dungeon Meshi before tomorrow AM, too.
Unrelated, I also read the Japanese re-imagining of Batman manga called Batman: Justice Buster by by Shimizu Eiichi and Shimoguchi Tomohiro, (Again, all the links to the manga will take you to my review, but from there you can usually get to an online version of the manga.) I really loved what they did with the Joker in this series, honestly. If you are a Batman fan... well, it might drive you crazy? Or you might love it.
Over the weekend, I read a couple of cyberpunk short stories that were collected in The Big Book of Cyberpunk that I'm borrowing from a friend. I re-read James Tiptree, Jr.'s "The Girl Who Was Plugged In," and Pat Cadigan's "Pretty Boy Crossover."
Oh, and I listened to the first couple of episodes of the Call of Cthulhu Mystery Theater podcast and The-Channel-Show, since both of the producers of those shows will be part of the panel that I'll be moderating on Saturday. The first is a slightly scripted TTRPG podcast of a cast of characters playing Call of Cthulhu, the only TTRPG that I ever rage quit. It is one of those that is designed to end in a total party kill/deep insanity and I had spent way too much time building my character... and so I was deeply upset to be agoraphobic (and thus basically useless) after the first session. Unlike me, these actors are aware of what they're getting into, so it's more fun to listen to. The-Channel-Show is... deeply weird. The first few episodes, at any rate, are basically two people (AIs?) "channeling" the future of... some world? Possibly ours? Possibly not? But, it's very surreal and... yeah, not for me. But, weirdly, when I was on the how-to workshop for Glasgow WorldCON online stuff, the writer/producer person Dana Little was on the same call. She didn't put her camera on, but seeing her name come up was just sort of "Oh. There you are. I was just listening to you be VERY STRANGE. Hello," you know?
I think that's everything!
I should probably go organize myself for tomorrow, but what about you? Have you been reading anything good lately? Anything not so good?
bcholmes called O Human Star. I cried all the tears, the ugly ones and the happy ones. I can not recommend it enough. In a sort of similar vein (at least in terms of a world where androids and humans co-exist), I finished listening to the audiobook of Klara and the Sun by Kazou Ishiguro. I can't say that I enjoyed Klara and the Sun because it's ultimately--in my opinion, anyway--a tragedy, I did find it very compelling all the way through. I'd read Ishiguro's previous novel, The Buried Giant, when it was up for the Mythopoeic Award (2016). Looking back at my review of that book, I can see that I had similar feelings about it. Ishiguro's narrative style is very dream-like in both of these books, though I was impressed in Klara and the Sun how he was able to tell the readers more than Klara herself always fully understood or grasped. That can be extremely tricky to pull off, and he does it masterfully here. As I told a friend, I liked this book right up to the very last line--and the last line didn't make me HATE the book, just feel deeply, DEEPLY sad.
Otherwise, I crammed in a couple of food-related manga ahead of tomorrow's OH-F*CK-O'CLOCK WorldCON panel "Let Them Eat! Food in Anime." Of them, I really loved all 70+ chapters of Wakako-Zake by Shinkyu Chie. (The link is to my review, but from there, if you like, you can find a copy of the manga.) It is impossible not to spoil this one because the entire manga is about a 28-year old woman who goes out to eat and enjoys her food (and whatever alcohol she pairs it with.) That's it. That's the entire manga. And, I would read 70 more chapter of it, if it were available. As part of all this prep, I also skimmed through the manga Tondemo Skill de Isekai Hourou Meshi / Campfire Cooking in Another World with my Absurd Skill by Eguchi Ren / Akagishi K, reminding myself as to why I loved the anime so much. I also ended up watching a few episodes of Food Wars! so I could reasonably understand what people were talking about, should it come up. I should probably re-read my review of Dungeon Meshi before tomorrow AM, too.
Unrelated, I also read the Japanese re-imagining of Batman manga called Batman: Justice Buster by by Shimizu Eiichi and Shimoguchi Tomohiro, (Again, all the links to the manga will take you to my review, but from there you can usually get to an online version of the manga.) I really loved what they did with the Joker in this series, honestly. If you are a Batman fan... well, it might drive you crazy? Or you might love it.
Over the weekend, I read a couple of cyberpunk short stories that were collected in The Big Book of Cyberpunk that I'm borrowing from a friend. I re-read James Tiptree, Jr.'s "The Girl Who Was Plugged In," and Pat Cadigan's "Pretty Boy Crossover."
Oh, and I listened to the first couple of episodes of the Call of Cthulhu Mystery Theater podcast and The-Channel-Show, since both of the producers of those shows will be part of the panel that I'll be moderating on Saturday. The first is a slightly scripted TTRPG podcast of a cast of characters playing Call of Cthulhu, the only TTRPG that I ever rage quit. It is one of those that is designed to end in a total party kill/deep insanity and I had spent way too much time building my character... and so I was deeply upset to be agoraphobic (and thus basically useless) after the first session. Unlike me, these actors are aware of what they're getting into, so it's more fun to listen to. The-Channel-Show is... deeply weird. The first few episodes, at any rate, are basically two people (AIs?) "channeling" the future of... some world? Possibly ours? Possibly not? But, it's very surreal and... yeah, not for me. But, weirdly, when I was on the how-to workshop for Glasgow WorldCON online stuff, the writer/producer person Dana Little was on the same call. She didn't put her camera on, but seeing her name come up was just sort of "Oh. There you are. I was just listening to you be VERY STRANGE. Hello," you know?
I think that's everything!
I should probably go organize myself for tomorrow, but what about you? Have you been reading anything good lately? Anything not so good?
no subject
Date: 2024-08-08 04:24 am (UTC)(And, no lie, the last Batman manga I encountered in my library was one where Batman is a baby and the Joker is raising him. Actually, I have no idea why I didn't immediately check that one out. Lol.)
no subject
Date: 2024-08-09 01:01 pm (UTC)The comic is usually more slice of life than anything else. (The basic tone is closer to "Catfishing on Catnet" than "Ghost in the Shell," although GitS's chatty tachikomas would fit right in in "Questionable Content" 's version of Northampton--see below.) But as time went on, the creator added more and more robot characters, and robots and AIs have become more central to some of the storylines. Actually, a better word for the genre the series has wound up belonging to might be "robot pals," to use the term one of the contributors to the Lady Business blog came up with (in relation to something else, not "Questionable Content").
The original protagonist was a guy named Marten who shared an apartment in Northampton (a mildly SF-ified version of the real-life college town) with his roommate Faye and an obnoxious (initially miniature) robot named Pintsize who does virtually nothing but make dirty jokes and sexually harass other characters.
Pintsize was the only significant robot character in the series for quite a while. Then, several years ago, Faye got fired from her job as the snarkiest barista at a local coffee shop called Coffee of Doom and wound up working at what turned out to be a rather shady robot repair shop instead. There she met and, after a while, became friends with the other non-shady employee, a seven-foot-tall former combat robot named Bubbles. The two of them figured out that their robot boss was using the shop as a front for illegal activities, and played a significant role in exposing this and getting the boss arrested. (There are robot police--one of the current characters, Roko, started out as a robot police detective--and even a special kind of robot jail in this scenario.)
With the shady repair shop now out of business, Faye and Bubbles decided to start up a robot repair shop of their own to take its place. Somewhere along the way, they fell in love, and Bubbles wound up moving into Faye's room in the apartment Faye still shares with Marten.
In the current storyline, Marten, Bubbles, and Pintsize have taken Moray, a cheerfully naive robot composed of some sort of semi-organic slime, and Liz, a maladjusted teenage girl genius scientist (who are both visiting from the offshore AI-run think tank where Marten's current girlfriend Clare has been offered a job), to Asimov, Northampton's robot nightclub. Moray goes around introducing herself to literally everybody in the club and happily reports that so far nobody has called her a freaky slime monster. (Presumably this had actually happened at some point during her brief previous off-panel experience of being detained by the U.S. government when she tried to enter the country.) Meanwhile, Liz is disappointed to discover that most of the "sinful, sordid activity" she was hoping to witness is taking place in the cloud, and therefore invisible to humans. Then security spots Pintsize (who had been upgraded to a larger, more humanoid robot body a year or so earlier) and comes to throw him out, since he'd been banned for ordering a hundred pizzas to be delivered to the club on a previous visit.
no subject
Date: 2024-08-09 01:17 pm (UTC)I also forgot to mention that some of the human characters in the series are bionic. Both of Liz's arms are bionic (although this was only specifically mentioned pretty recently), and Clare's twin brother has a bionic hand.
no subject
Date: 2024-08-09 06:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-08-09 01:52 pm (UTC)I'm in the last stages of reading Hitler in Los Angeles, about the efforts of volunteers (both Jewish and non) to monitor and control Nazi activity in the run-up to WWII. I think it was Naomi who recommended it, so you may already be familiar. It's very readable, especially for a nonfiction book. Also scary, since it was a bit of history I'd been essentially unfamiliar with and it's very clear how much of a bullet (or bomb) was dodged.
no subject
Date: 2024-08-09 06:45 pm (UTC)Your other book sounds fascinating!