October 2024 recap

Private life

I’m finally moving into the new house in about a week or so. Just finishing up building the walk-in closet and after that my girlfriend, our dogs and I will be moving into the new house! Exciting times! I’ll be happy to have my own little room to myself again.

Apart from that I’ve been dabbling with Godot a bit recently. Currently remaking the classic breakout from scratch. Will probably try to add some twists to the game, to kind of learn the engine. I have that hunkering to make a game, but for now I’m keeping the scope intentionally small so I can finish this in a reasonable amount of time.

I’ve also started keeping track of my time with an app on my mobile. I’ll have graphs of that to share in next month’s recap.

Series

The OA

ONGOING

I love the weird titles. This one has such a great premise, all outlandish ideas are presented in a believable way. As a viewer I was still kind of thinking “sure, the writers are just using this as a Deus Ex Machina plot device”. But it still left me intrigued, we’re currently in season 2 where everything just got turned upside down. And I’m told the ending isn’t satisfactory as Netflix canceled the show.

Movies

Rebel Ridge

If you had given the script of this movie to any old director, this would have turned into a Hollywood action-packed movie. Instead Saulnier turned this into a story that never loses its suspense. You can feel the tension in the movie from the very first moment and it never lets up. I feel like the movie is a mirror being held up, showing what society can feel like for the black community.

It’s What’s Inside

I don’t know how we found this movie, but again, such a great premise! I won’t spoil anything, because I went into it not knowing what the movie was about and really enjoyed the discovery of the plot. The only thing I would say is that I would also be interested in watching a movie, that delved more into the psychology of what was happening in the movie.

It’s a difficult topic to pull off, cinematographically, that is. And I think it was well portrayed and very enjoyable.

Books

Since my last post in July I have actually started, read and finished a bunch of books. A lot of this was due to my trip to Canada, where I had plenty of time in the evenings to read. Something I’m more envious about now I’m back in Belgium, as I seem to not have as much free time to do that. I won’t be listing all the books I’ve read during that time, back you can check them out and my reviews over on my StoryGraph page.

The Algebraist, by Iain M. Banks

READING

Can’t say a whole lot about this book yet. It’s my read-before-bed book. And I haven’t been able to read a lot, usually falling asleep after finishing maybe one page.

Typeset in the Future, by Dave Addey

READING

This is the novelization of Dave Addey’s blog and it’s great. I’m loving every moment of the book, his attention to detail in every scene of the movies he talks about is extraordinary. For example, did you know that the keyboard during the self-destruct scene in Alien contains a lot of hints to buddhism? The amount of research that went into this is amazing. Hats off, tremendously entertaining!

Fairy Tale, by Stephen King

LISTENING

I still had an Audible credit lying around after my free Prime subscription for a month and decided to pick this book up. I have read The Dark Tower series in the past by Stephen King and haven’t really read a lot else by him. I’m not that into horror stories, on which he normally focuses. This is more of a fantasy book that’s grounded in reality. I’m about half-way through the book, the first part was pretty mundane plot-wise. I didn’t think I was going to enjoy it, but I kept wanting to go back and know what would happen next. Stephen King is a fantastic story teller and I’m interested where the story will go next.

Games

The Longest Journey

FINISHED

The Longest Journey, indeed. With a steep 20+ hours, I can’t remember the last time I spent this many hours in a point-and-click adventure game. It’s definitely above the curve. I think the story was great, any story that has a decent amount of worldbuilding will instantly suck me in. What I especially liked are the diary entries April writes during the game. Usually I just read those as a recap to know where I was in the story in between gaming sessions. But these entries felt so fresh. They give insights into how April thinks about situations that you might not have gotten if you just played the game. Every time the icon came up that a new diary page was available, I couldn’t wait to read her personal thoughts on the situation.

I’ll tell you what I could’ve done without, though. The needlessly long walks. Holy moly! Some screens take 10+ seconds to traverse, that actually don’t serve a purpose anymore after the initial setting of the scene. No more interactables on those screens, except for the person you have to go talk to all the way at the end. A double-click insta-traverse would have been very much welcome, and might have even shaved off an hour of game time.