Oh! I forgot to mention:

The Comics Beat, which I now write for, just got its first ever Eisner Award nomination.

For my work at WWAC, I'm (technically) already an Eisner-winning comics writer, and now I (technically) might win it again. Nice!

Also, this past week there a huge social media crashout about Lee Lai's graphic novel Stone Fruit being mediocre and getting undue attention solely because of white guilt. Because my review of the book appears at the top of a Google search, I got a bunch of nasty mentions. I was busy disappearing into the woods, and I totally missed all of this. So much the better honestly.

Disappearing into the woods is great btw. Highly recommended.

Vermis is an illustrated strategy guide for a dark fantasy game that doesn’t exist. Plastiboo, the author and artist, has taken the concept of “fake strategy guide” and executed it with absolute sincerity and fidelity. Both the writing and the crusty “screenshots” have a pitch-perfect clarity of tone and style that invites immersion.

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Of all the books published by Hollow Press, Vermis remains my favorite. I’d recommend it especially to people who don’t want to play Dark Souls (or King’s Field) but are still curious about the atmosphere and flavor of this genre of games. It’s really something special.

I'm working on my essay about Crow Country, and I managed to depress the hell out of myself with this paragraph...

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...and I still think it's deeply upsetting how the United States went straight from "save the whales" to "murder the Muslims." This timeline is so fucked.

ETA: Colette Shade's Y2K: How the 2000s Became Everything is interesting, by the way. It's marketed as "a quirky and poignant memoir," but that's bullshit. The book is actually a critical media analysis with razor-sharp insight into American popular culture in the 1990s, and I really enjoyed reading it.

Umberto Eco wrote his 1980 novel The Name of the Rose as a play on semiotics staged by two antagonists, a detective searching for the meaning of signs and a blind theologian whose dogmatic faith lies in the mystery of symbols. As murders accumulate in an ancient abbey filled with forbidden books, the two men circle around one another, unable to communicate due to the innate emptiness of the abstract signifiers that pervade their discourse.

However, Eco subverts the thesis suggested by the closing line of the novel, that only the name of the rose will survive the rose itself, through the blunt signifier of the physicality teased by the erotic tension of Old Man Yaoi. In this paper I will

...I mean listen. The signifiers would be a lot less empty if those two old men kissed. I'm just saying.

This is a vent post, but I need to get something off my chest here so I can be normal elsewhere. Here goes:

Now that I'm updating my book review blog again, I'm starting to get all sorts of messages from people asking where they can find the books I review. I'm flattered, of course, but this is a bizarre question. Like idk, you can get books at the library? Amazon? Your local bookstore?

Sometimes people try to sneak in classist bullshit, like, Oh I wish I could read this book but I don't have the money to buy it. Then how about you spend five minutes on Reddit and learn how to pirate a digital edition?

I would understand if people were asking about books only published in Japan or Europe or India, or about books that are out of print, but it's always mass-market paperbacks.

Obviously I want to be friendly and supportive and helpful, but I'm having trouble understanding this type of inquiry. Presumably these people aren't getting in touch because they think I have some sort of special relationship with a book fairy who flutters in through my bedroom window and leaves books under my pillow while I sleep. So what is it that they're actually asking? Do they genuinely not know how to find or order books?

Any insight or advice is appreciated btw.

Legions of Pigs in the Early Medieval West
https://www.amazon.com/Legions-Early-Medieval-Agrarian-Studies/dp/0300246293/

From North Africa to the British Isles, pigs were a crucial part of agriculture and culture in the early medieval period. Jamie Kreiner examines how this ubiquitous species was integrated into early medieval ecologies and transformed the way that people thought about the world around them.

Kreiner tracks the interlocking relationships between pigs and humans by drawing on textual and visual evidence, bioarchaeology and settlement archaeology, and mammal biology. She shows how early medieval communities bent their own lives in order to accommodate these tricky animals—and how in the process they reconfigured their agrarian regimes, their fiscal policies, and their very identities.

Yes!!! Someone wrote a book just for me!

I've always been really curious about European history and culture, but I'm bored to tears by wars and kings. This is exactly the sort of scholarship I've been craving.

I'm writing an essay about Ender Lilies (my beloved) to pitch to Sidequest, and the point I'm trying to make about the game is that it does something really interesting with fungal horror, which is to suggest that there's no normative way to be human.

This is from the opening section of my essay:

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...I mean, I'm just saying. "Weird" nonbinary people who aren't interested in wearing sharply tailored military uniforms are no less deserving of dignity and respect. And also, as the world changes around us, is it really so horrific to develop radical new relationships with the environment?

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This artist is a legitimately good and kind person, and I am in platonic love with them and their work. Again, it's weird to summarize someone's career in 500 words, especially since the entirety of their work is online. I collected much more information than I've included here, and I think perhaps I might like to write a Wikipedia entry for this artist over the summer.

'All Horrid' – but not all German
https://blogs.bl.uk/european/2014/11/all-horrid-but-not-all-german.html

Apart from actual literary influences, the fact that 'Gothic' was still a synonym for 'Germanic' or 'Teutonic' was no doubt another factor in the identification of Germany with things gothic, as was the Germans' continued use of gothic type. [...] But perhaps another, although less easily demonstrable, explanation is that Germany simply lent itself more readily to gothic imagery in the popular imagination, with all the necessary forests, mountains and mediaeval buildings to furnish the scenery.

Picking apart literary history and references is something I love to do, but I'm also a big fan of Occam's razor. Perhaps it's not "easily demonstrable" (which is fair), but I assume that the literary genre about old castles in dark forests filled with wolves is associated with Germany is because Germany is in fact lousy with old castles in dark forests filled with wolves.

Anyway, the British Library article I linked to is about Jane Austen, but this post is about everyone in Bloodborne having a German or Alsatian (from the region of France on the border with Germany) name.

ETA: Okay I did more research and now I would very much like to visit Alsace.

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This is a mini-review that I wrote for WWAC but will not post, at least not in its current form:

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So I sympathize with Rui, whose every word is stolen from her by the men who conspire to confine her to a page of pulped paper. If she can’t speak in the language of the cultural elite, she’ll find another way of expressing herself, and the vast and mysterious array of life she produces is infinitely more vibrant than her husband’s formulaic literary fiction. Her husband has the privilege of publishing award-winning books made of dead wood, but she is the roots and the leaves and the flowers and the wind.

...I wrote this last night, and then this morning I got an email telling me that my application to the Philadelphia writer’s workshop was waitlisted. This is frustrating, obviously, to have the door closed in my face again. But then again, there’s a lot of space outside the house, and a lot more room to grow.