#ifinished Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die. It starts electric and doesn’t quite stick the landing, but it has heart, energy, and great performances. I’ll be watching this one again.

Hear me out. DOOM: the Pitt.

#ifinished Project Hail Mary. We need more movies like this. Science, characters, real stakes, great vibes. Even faithful to the book. Respect.

#ifinished Cold Storage - fun, uncomplicated, unpretentious, just a straight blast with zero twists or surprises. Wouldn’t watch again, but enjoyed my time with it.

It’s a funny world. “Children’s movies” can mean anything from a Peppa Pig TV special to a 100 million dollar production of a beloved franchise with deep cultural resonance to people of all ages. Which of those were you referring to?

Easy with the judging there. I have it on well researched authority that being murdered by people in a bad mood for lack of cinnamon rolls is way worse for your health!

#ifinished Jimmy and Stiggs. I was going to tear into it for being boring and disrespectfully goofy. Then I watched the post credits interview with the guy who made it. A lot of soul went into this. Respect, even if I still won’t recommend it.

#ifinished Dust Bunny. Which is nothing like the blurb describes. It’s not horror and not action, though it has a monster and gunfights. This is a movie about how stylin’ Brian Fuller can be. While that’s very, very stylin’, and I enjoyed, I don’t know if I’d recommend to anyone but Fuller fans.

#ifinished Hoppers, proof that Pixar still has great storytelling chops. A fun movie, and the least predictable I’ve watched in a couple of years. Perfect if you’re sick of Zootopia-level tired emotional beats. Best alpha predator in any movie ever.

#ifinished One Battle After Another. It's no Magnolia, and to be honest, not as good as Sinners. But it still is magnificent, handling dark and heavy subject matter with fun, energy, and sexy badassery. Art, and technique, great characters. Just some silliness in the story. Respect, PTA, respect.

#ifinoshed Goat. Completely predictable arc. Endearing characters. Hella fresh camera angles, perspective switches, and environments. Great music. I know I shouldn’t say this, but I enjoyed it more than Zootopia 2.

#ifinished Shelby Oaks. Solid horror, interesting structure, plays to its strengths and ends just before it gets boring, which is its greatest accomplishment, since it doesn’t really scare that much.

#ifinoshed the Anaconda 2025 reboot. It was fun. I won’t watch it again. It’s stupid and had zero emotional resonance in any dimension, and the snake looked idiotically bad. But it did have a fun heart that kept beating just long enough and not one beat more. Perfect 3am after drinking movie.

#ifinished Tainted Grail: Fall of Avalon. The most Skyrim open world rpg I played since Skyrim. Glitchy and unbalanced, but FUN, filled with a living world to explore and mess up completely. Can’t wait to see what’s next from Awaken Realms

#ifinished Predator: Badlands. Exceptional action, fun, great characters. Gloriously stylish and stupid in equal measure. Pristine, twitch-free action. Recommended.

#ifinished Hell House LLC: Lineage. It’s a slow burn lore dump that demands you remember minor details of the previous four movies and gives you nothing in return. Weakest entry in the series.

#ifinished Deathstalker. It was stupid. Proudly, gloriously, monstrously stupid. On purpose, of course, to hide its tiny budget. Still, a couple of corners were too rough and the stop motion, low fps monsters a missed opportunity. Fun, but only once.

#ifinished Avatar: Fire and Ash. Zero character development, zero originality in the plot. That’s not why one watches Avatar. Pandora is magnificent, the three hours runtime feels like two, and the action is still pure, absolute Cameron. This is why we invented cinema.

#ifinished The Long Walk. Good movie, really powerful performances all around. Not much to the cinematography. I went in expecting to have all my warts cured, but it wasn’t up to its hype like that. Watch, don’t worship. Great Hamill.

#Ifinished Welcome to Derry season 1. After a strong, strong start that screamed "we're not doing another Losers' Club!" the show went on to do another Losers' Club. It completely lost its way in a weak "Black Spot" assault, and that zero-tension, toneless end chase. Still good fun, but not special.

I am a manly man. This is known. But as I look over my toiletries I notice with dismay that not only do I have toiletries, but that Allure Edition Blanche, Egoiste, and Bleu stare back at me. I'm a Chanel manly man. What does that mean?

#Iplayed Routine - on paper, perfect. Zero hand-holding, no HUD, thick atmosphere, great graphics, and an abandoned lunar colony. Killer robots! Deliberate and well authored... but so preoccupied with constantly reminding you of its authorship that it fell flat on the story and WHAM! factor.

f#Iinished Traumatika. Watchable, and admirable considering they definitely did not have a big budget. Unfortunately, there is no story to sink into, no characters to like... just 80 minutes of... stuff. Meh,

No one’s just “asking questions”. They’re trying to manipulate you, and think you are so stupid you won’t see it coming. It’s perfectly ok to head butt them.

Sounds came to him cotton-wooled. Something was spinning, possibly the ground or maybe his brain inside his skull. If only they could decide on a direction to spin in, then he could be steady on his feet again. He stammered, not because he was trying to say something and couldn’t, but because his mouth started moving and his lungs decided there should be air to go with them. He held his elbows and shivered. The world was twisting out of shape again, and Bobby was surprised to discover that he wasn’t breaking down completely. There was a strong possibility that his temper was in far shorter supply than his fortitude, because after the shaking and sobbing, he was now just mostly angry and wanted to break something. Anything, everything. Bobby was too exhausted to start running again. There was nowhere in his mind that he could hide any deeper, or further from reality. This was reality, and it was awful. Metal growls bounced around the corner. Of course, now that the world was going to hell again, the bikers had decided to put in another appearance. Bobby found himself not caring just how much it all sounded like a pack of metal wolves howling for blood. It was loud enough that Mrs Wong finally focused on something that wasn’t Bobby, just long enough to look over her shoulder to hiss at whatever was coming. By the time she’d focused on Bobby again, her resting smiley face was back in place. She crawled along the wall with splayed arms and legs just like the stuff from late night documentaries about forgotten caves. With a springy jump, she went from wall to sidewalk, landing right in front of him.

All Bobby wants is one direction.

I'm sorry for that joke. I was young and needed the Internet points. The Scion.

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Idue shouldered her way past Bobby and the girl. The shadow was nowhere to be seen, but then again, it usually wasn’t until it killed. “Beliar. A true lapdog to the end. These people are our guide and her bodyguard. You will take your toy soldiers and retreat, before I decide you are annoying me.” Beliar’s eyes twitched. Idue definitely couldn’t tell when she wasn’t liked. Not that tact and diplomacy would have served, here. The guy’s most mystical trait was how perfectly he conformed to the evil heel stereotype. He was enjoying his role this afternoon. “I have special dispensation for you, Idue. Your uncle really would like to have a word, and I’ve been authorized to bring you in… regardless.” He raised his hand, made a twisty gesture with his fingers, and brought his arm down quickly. Idue slammed Bobby into the nearest tree, out of the way so that she was the only one hit by the half dozen magic blasts that exploded from the nearby trees. She twitched, and fell, her hands before her face, clawing shut as she struggled to breathe. She curled up like a dying insect, and stopped moving. The pale girl was already sprinting for the treeline, whether to counter-attack from their cover or to disappear, Bobby didn’t care. She fell right by his feet. Immobilized by whatever those blows had been, the powerful glamours elves had evolved as defence mechanisms glitched out. For the first time, he saw her as she truly was. Idue shrank, and her skin turned green-grey. Her chin was pointier and her lips thin and bloodless. Her eyes were twice as wide and much more almond-shaped. Her hair, that glorious copper mane, was completely unchanged.

For you today, a gift of cryptic elven lore. The Scion

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On the third night, after thinking of the dragon wing pattern, he started tracing its shapes into his mind. He was sitting with his back against a tree’s massive roots that looked like a tangle of severed legs, with a small pile of rocks before him. He didn’t reach for any power yet, but just practiced forming the shapes. One layer of geometric designs on top the other, he imagined the two triangular shapes in great detail, picturing them as drawn by those lasers line from a disco, floating in the air just above the ground. As with the fire, the broken pattern was obvious, glaring, a rounding of the corner on the right wing. Unlike with the fire, this time he didn’t rush into anything stupid. Bobby held the shape in his mind, and twisted it just so, a little right, removing, reshaping, rearranging until the wing felt right. Complete. The last time, he’d nearly burned the gas stop down. Now, he didn’t reach as eagerly into his power. The magic was there, always there, like part of him was constantly raging against the world. Reaching in with both hands to pull it out had so far gone very, very wrong. All he had to do was breathe it in a little. The pile of rocks, a dozen all told, snapped into a single column, clacking against each other with a sound so sharp it echoed through the trees. Idue grinned happily and moved to pat him over the shoulder while Bobby held the tower of rocks in place, channelling the barest whisper of magic into the shape of wings, making the pattern hold the rocks in place in an impossible tower of mismatched shapes . “That’s amazing, Bobby. We may make a caster of you yet!” and promptly demanded he did it again, at least half a dozen times. Bobby couldn’t remember ever feeling happier.

I did a thing in this novel where magic is not a "system" like in a video game, but a raw quantum power of nature. It's much weirder than it sounds. Mess with it at your own risk. The Scion.

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Swear approved.

“Bobby, what’s going on? Are you OK, man?” Mike asked, a frowny expression on his face. Bobby understood his friend’s confusion, it wasn’t supposed to go this way. He was supposed to immediately spot the otherworldly nature of the pictures. They were supposed to spend a long chunk of the afternoon pouring over the images, oohing and aahing at each new detail they discovered. Bobby was aware of all this, but simply couldn’t make it real for Mike. His throughs swirled like a storm, each sharper and more painful than the last. He started feeling dizzy from it, like they had hollowed out his brain. It all burst out through his gut and rose to his throat, and was just about to spill out of his mouth and splash Mike with his insanity. Bobby felt light-headed, but not in a weird supernatural, secret-conversation way. He needed to vomit, to cry, to punch something. He needed to expel the things in his head. To exorcise the memory of what he’d seen during his episode yesterday. But he couldn’t, he was holding the evidence right in his hands He looked at Mike, and wasn’t even sure what his own face was doing but his friend’s frown had started morphing into alarm. The damn pictures were still in his hand. Flat rectangles like windows into a place he never wanted to see again. They were real, and made it impossible to ignore the truth of what he had seen. The world spun with each reminder that those weren’t random dogs. That wasn’t a random piece of some random park in a foreign city where they staged sick shit for entertainment. These were the dogs he had seen in his episode yesterday. That was the place with the big tree where the couple was holding their tryst right across from the bench where Bobby had been sitting when the world first went insane.

This one's from the early chapters, back when the scariest thing was just plain old insanity. The Scion.

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I suspect that if nudists fessed up to the real reason they choose the lifestyle (the savings on laundry and folding time) instead of their usual spiel (nature and stuff), they'd have a lot more adherents.