After watching another YouTube video with the full cinematics, I can tell you that I liked the story in Aliens: Dark Descent, but the same formula is starting to get old.

  You see, I loved the movies, I like the universe - especially if you consider Blade Runner as part of it, and I've also read a couple of books in the Alien universe and my impression is that with whatever you start with, even Prometheus and that crap, you will probably like it, too. However, you will start losing enjoyment as you go along, as almost every Alien story is exactly the same. You have to appreciate the Alien: Resurrection movie because, as weird and euro as it was, it felt different. I know it's an unpopular belief, but I really liked that film.

  Anyway, back to the game: aliens gets loose in a closed environment - even if it's big as a planet, there is no escape from it, and people try to survive, helped by marines and hindered by greedy psychopathic corporate shills. There, that's almost every Alien story. Sometimes they throw a Predator in there, for good measure, and lately they put Engineers in there, too, but the plot is the same. Dark Descent is no exception. There is a downed ship, some towns, a corporate tower, synths, automated turrets, APCs, marines, corporation stuff, Weyland Yutani and so on. The only difference might be the appearance of Cassandra, a woman that seems to be able to communicate telepathically with the aliens.

  Now, in the lore that is not movies, there is an extended version of the story described above where the aliens are not just mindless creatures, but somehow project this mental field that can sometimes attract some people to their side. There is also the royal jelly, a substance only the queen makes and that has great effects on humans as well. In the game there is no jelly and Cassandra's gift seems to be a genetic fluke. Whatever her abilities mean will have to wait for a sequel to the game.

  I can't say anything about the gameplay. Seemed to be mostly top down, like those cheap horror survival games that sometimes you play online, only slightly better. The cut scene animations, though, were pretty good and amounted to about two hours put together. It's funny when game companies just make full movies as an afterthought, to enhance the experience of the game proper.

  Now, about the story. There is this woman administrator in the corporation that sees aliens killing everybody and initializes the Cerberus protocol, which means satellites around the planet will stop anything from escaping, shooting everything down. Nothing in, nothing out. Even synths will make everything possible to enforce this. She ends up on a ship that gets almost shut down by the satellites, but it's a military vessel, so it survives reentry. It is her job (yours) to collaborate with the marines to save as many people as possible, get to the bottom of the mystery and, of course, live.

What would I change so that story feels fresh? Well, it's now canon that you have to have a sleazy corporate ass making everything harder. In fact, the main character of the game does start as one, only she's a good woman. I wouldn't do that. I would let the player decide the level of sleaziness and if they want to play it psycho or good guy or something in between. Basically Witcherize the game (talking about the game, not the books, where Geralt is a boyscout). Increase personal stakes, give her some competence other than "administrator" - which means she gets to move around talking to people all the time - and a secret to protect. Basically combine the main characters in the game: the admin, the father of Cassandra and the scientist.

  What if the main character is the mother of Cassandra? Maybe she's not her biological mother, to add some distance, so she could conceivably save her ass and sell her to the company. What if she is afraid something would come up and destroy her life, so she has incentives to leave everybody else behind, maybe even this Cassandra stuff. What is she is indebted to the company and she needs a way out, to add to the desperation? You could add a bit of romantic tension between the soldier and her, making an eventual death more meaningful. You could manipulate people, seduce them, intimidate them or even shoot them, kind of like Vampire: The Masquerade, adding to the agency of the player.

  Because in this game you only run a linear story. There are no alternative outcomes. You fail a mission, you die, and if you played the game already you know what's coming but you can't stop it. Just add a diversity of choice. And I know you will say that this would make the two hour cinematics be 10 hours. Not necessarily. Olden games managed to do wonders reusing parts of animations to construct multiple stories. The knowledge is there.

  Bottom line: a true Alien story, but bringing nothing new to the table. A linear gameplay, that provides little choice other than just go with the flow. The top-down thing makes it look like a rip-off of Starcraft playing the marines, so it didn't really captivate my imagination. A decent game, but nothing more.

  XCOM was one of my favorite games from when I was a kid. I didn't have the personal time resources to play XCOM2, though, and besides it felt quite different. You see, in the first game I liked collecting alien stuff and researching it. The tactics were fun, but I was all into the research tree. So I though, after playing the beginning of XCOM2 a few times then forgetting about it, how about I watch the entire storyline on YouTube, like a complete ass, and then comment on the game like I know what I am talking about?

  So here is goes. I think one of the major things going against XCOM2 is its timing. XCOM was first released in 1994, when telling a story like this felt fresh and being able to play through it amazing. XCOM2 was released in 2016, 22 years later, with so much sci-fi content in the form of TV, movies and games having been released since. There were a bunch of TV series covering the alien invasion and resistance angle, all of them devolving into the lazy German vs French resistance with ray guns tropes, and having yet another thing like this wasn't awesome. Add to it that the mystery was already revealed and it would explain my lack of interest at least.

  Anyway, the story here is that 20 years later "the commander", meaning you, is rescued by the resistance from an alien device that was using him as a hub for tactical information. With your brilliant leadership, they can now fight against an enemy that has conquered the world and controls it via propaganda, empty promises and ultimately violence. Somehow, after full control over the planet for 20 years, the aliens still have a lot of trouble locating and fighting you.

  The tactical fighting and upgrade system was improved dramatically. It's so complex that... it bored me to death. Tactical games afficionados loved it, though, and for good reasons. You can do all kinds of things, based on the enemy, the team composition, the tech tree, etc. However the story felt lackluster to me. A new McGuffin every stage of the game and the ending... how do American stories end? You find the source and you blow it up!... did nothing for me. Really, it felt like they were rehashing the Falling Skies story, even the end scene.

  Bottom line: if you love turn based tactical games, this should be one of your favorites, but the story is simplistic and derivative.

  P.S. and if you're wondering why XCOM3 is not out there, it's because of Marvel.

  P.S.too - "so if you are so smart, how would you have written the story?".

  Well, I am no writer, but I can tell you something after decades of consuming popularized science and a lot of Dunning Kruger: any space conquering force would have two characteristics. First, they would have limited resources. Without some very cheap space travel option that seems unlikely, it should be very expensive to come to our planet. Second: it's so easy to destroy anything on Earth from space. It's ridiculously easy if you have mastered interstellar travel. So the story would have to take that into account. XCOM2 actually used that, with the discovery of the final McGuffin, to explain and then solve the game, but it was a lazy solution.

Here is my take: alien intervention is being suspected, so X-COM is created. They have to solve the mystery of what is going on, considering they are an organization working on a hunch. This is more like X-Files than X-Com. Then the aliens are not all powerful, they are a bridgehead force, if not fugitives or a small team stranded here. They may be not malevolent outside considering humans a bunch of stupid monkeys to be used to further their goals. And when people are stranded amongst aliens, they tend to be terrified and act more psychotically than normal. The advantage of this take is that you can play both sides. So this would be more of an adventure game than a tactical shooter, although the horror of fighting what you thought were aliens, but in fact were human and animal chimeras should be there.

For the sequel, continue from the last scene of the first, when you discover that the small force on Earth is actually a small tactical team that operates behind enemy lines. The alien ship and their main force is located on some large asteroid in the Asteroid Belt or maybe a moon of Jupiter. With their presence and their source location revealed, now humanity must race to build the infrastructure required to defend and attack in space, when at any moment the desperate aliens might throw an asteroid or two at us. This would be tactical, but also strategic. We switch from a mystery adventure to a tactical space exploration and warfare game, akin to The Expanse.

Bonus: the third part, a continuation of the second where you have discovered the aliens themselves, which you may have seen as desperate and sympathetic, were actually just another version of chimeras, made out of organic and machine parts by the real culprit, a semi-sentient machine intelligence that has the mission to explore, exploit and contain any threat to its original builders. Now the enemy is a bunch of von Neumann probes that have no qualms in capturing and using for parts any of their human prisoners or craft.

The whole idea of the series is not that some malevolent Elders want to rule the world, but that a very small and resource poor alien presence can wreak havoc and endanger our very existence. It's you who has all the resources and they have the technology and relentless cunning. The terror is just as for someone with cancer. Even when you get rid of it, you don't know for sure and must remain eternally vigilant. We are the sheep and they are the wolves in the night. In each of the games you can choose to play the humans or the aliens. DO NOT create the common enemy that we would join forces to defeat, a la Starcraft, it's not that kind of story, although you can play around with altered humans and manufactured alien forces that escape their control as a third wildcard faction. And of course, as any good game, the story would change based on your approach.

This would be it. It's not like my ideas are not derivative, but they would be more fun to play outside the tactical shooter, mystery adventure or space RTS mechanics. At least they would make a good YouTube cutscenes video.

  Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence is not so much a scientific book as an informed opinion piece. I kind of had different expectations for a book that starts with a chemical name for a neurotransmitter.  This book is about addiction, not dopamine per se. Anna Lembke is Chief of the Stanford Addiction Medicine Dual Diagnosis Clinic at Stanford University., so she knows what she's talking about.

  I am torn between me agreeing with most of what the book says and an instinctive dislike of the author. She came off to me as a conservative American prude, talking about the positive results of the Prohibition or prosocial shame and skewing statistics to make a point. But, really, when I try to pinpoint the things she said that I feel are completely wrong, there aren't many. She is just honest with herself and with the reader. Yes, she is appalled by the patient who builds machines to masturbate him and shares this online, but she doesn't lack the empathy required to help him. Yes, she does believe the Prohibition had positive effects, presenting statistics about it, but she's aware of the organized crime effect of it. Yes, she believes shame has a positive effect, but only in a community that also supports you and guides you to get out of the situation you're in.

  I guess my instinct is to reject any social solution to one's personal problems, so that might be it. I also have a rather addictive personality, so it might be a defensive reaction. So let's discuss the book, and not how the author felt to me.

  Starting with the end, here are the 10 steps that Lembke recommends for handling addiction, defined in the book as any behavior that causes harm to you or your group that you are having difficulty stopping:

1. The relentless pursuit of pleasure (and avoidance of pain) leads to pain. - this is something to take note of
2. Recovery begins with abstinence. - I partly agree with this
3. Abstinence resets the brain’s reward pathway and with it our capacity to take joy in simpler pleasures. - this is a reductive idea, contradicted by the book's thesis, since things to get addicted to are all around us and part of what is considered normal social life
4. Self-binding creates literal and metacognitive space between desire and consumption, a modern necessity in our dopamine-overloaded world. - self-binding is putting barriers between you and the thing that addicts you. - agreed.
5. Medications can restore homeostasis, but consider what we lose by medicating away our pain. - agreed.
6. Pressing on the pain side resets our balance to the side of pleasure. - I agree that facing your pain opens the door to more pleasure, but depends on the context.
7. Beware of getting addicted to pain. - this is another thing to take note of. Pain and pleasure are not antonyms inside the brain, they are closely related in a functional sense.
8. Radical honesty promotes awareness, enhances intimacy, and fosters a plenty mindset. - this is one of her central points in the book. I fully agree.
9. Prosocial shame affirms that we belong to the human tribe. - tribalism is something that automatically repels me.
10. Instead of running away from the world, we can find escape by immersing ourselves in it. - I am not doing that, and I should. However, going fully in the other extreme is probably worse.

And I agree with most of what she says. We live in times of abundance, where the next fix to escape reality is right around the corner. And doesn't it feel good? Apparently... not. People are more and more dissatisfied with their lives, even when those would have appeared miraculous even to people living in the '80s. It might not be hard drugs, but alcohol, maybe weed, maybe a video game or two, maybe romance novels, maybe TV series or news watching. The act of escaping reality makes us feel less real ourselves and that is what leads to that feeling of unmoored loss.

  However, I don't agree with everything. One of the things that bothered me from the beginning was the way she presented statistics. Comparing absolute values of population size today and in the 1980s completely ignored the global population nearly doubled since then. Also showing relative percentual statistics between the same kind of values means nothing. I can't imagine someone as mature and educated like the author could make these kinds of mistakes unknowingly.

  Then there is this idea of abstinence. I personally know what this is the method that works best against addiction, too, however it works best because it is the easiest. Just like I agree with her that our hysterical overprotection of children deprives them of skills they should have learned before they go into the world by themselves, using abstinence to evade addiction is also a type of escapism. An addict dreams of two things: the thing they are addicted to and living a normal life where they are not addicted. Well, being perfectly honest with yourself and others and going to meetings and relying on others to not relapse is all nice and good, but it's not a normal life. It's still the life of an addict. And while abstinence from hard opioid drugs is obviously a good idea, I don't know what to say about stuff like reading or watching movies. Start with abstinence, but that should be the first step only.

  As for the prosocial shame, I almost agree, because in principle having people to lovingly point out your mistakes and help you get out of them is a good thing, but I don't think that the social groups Lembke was thinking about are also what I would be willing to accept.

  Bottom line: something fell a bit off to me, a bit culty, in this book. I think I reacted to the overconfidence of how the author expresses her opinions. However the content is very informative and informed, while also reenforced by personal experience as a therapist. The book is also short, you can read it in a few hours, so I recommend it, but with a personal warning of caution.

  When I started reading Dragonsbane I expected something light, young adult, typical dragons and magic and heroic women. And it was, but it was more than that. Barbara Hambly adds a lot of depth to her world, her characters, imbuing them with meaning and subtly anchoring them in real life.

  For example, our hero isn't only a mage, but also a mother, maybe a reluctant one, someone who has to always choose between her craft and her love for family. I understand how a writer might feel like that and after reading the "light book about dragons and magic", so will you. Or how gnomes are being bullied and discriminated against, but it's not empty virtue signaling when the author explores how hidden power (normal power, not magic) is being used to influence people to do that, for nefarious reasons they are not even aware of. Characters who are weak find strength, characters who seem powerful reveal their inner weakness and in the end victory is brought not by magical power, but by knowing yourself and accepting it as it is: mature strength of character.

  Yet, all of this complexity is subtle. You don't have to pay attention to it. One can just read it as a typical magical dragon quest just as well. It's not one of those books that you can reread multiple times, but I appreciate that a kid might enjoy this just as much as an adult, for very different reasons.

  I liked the book, so I might read the sequel as well. Not the best book ever, but a very pleasant surprise.

  Hah, if I'd have looked at the cover I would have probably chosen to read something else. Something that Ann Leckie absolutely loved is definitely not for me. If books had gender, A Memory Called Empire would be 100% female, as it focuses primarily on social cues, personal feelings and attachments, romantic connections, poetry, connotations of every word said, yet everything is so naive in terms of power or violence or even sexuality, like a children's story. There is almost no mention of technology or space travel, people meet face to face all the time, touching each other for whatever reasons and feeling things, and it all happens in a bureaucratic empire where social expectations are high and complex. This could just as well have been set in the 18th century Earth with some little magic McGuffin instead of the tech one Arkady Martine used, and none would have been the wiser.

  The main character is an ambassador from a tiny space station republic to the large empire of the region, which dominates, technologically, militarily, economically and culturally. Everybody dreams to be part of the empire, while they are slowly being devoured by it. So, again, could be any historical era. The ambassador is greeted by someone from the empire who is attached to her as aide. Now, they almost immediately become fast friends, with some romantic tension between them. Imagine this happening: the Chinese ambassador to the US receives an American aide who immediately befriends and helps them reach their goals, sometimes in defiance of American protocols, culture or even authority.

  The book continues in the same vein, with a lot of cultural references that mean nothing to the story, but at least add to the world building. The magical tech that the station uses is an imago, a machine that records one's experiences and personality in a chip that can then be implanted in their successor, as an advisor. The empire could use it, but their morality and laws prohibit it. A lot of intrigue around this little device that any decent security service would find out everything about in days. There are some civil war ideas, some future alien invasion hints, but mainly it is an old fashioned PG13 whodunnit given a sci-fi veneer.

  Bottom line: I found it extremely boring, fell asleep numerous times and only finished it out of spite. It wasn't bad, for sure, but it was anathema to what I enjoy. If you're a typical sci-fi reading guy or if you tried Ann Leckie and found it ridiculous, maybe you should reconsider reading this.

 I don't know if I want to play it more, but I've had fun for a few hours playing Sail Forth, managing my fleet and talking to the weird characters of the game, while navigating by hand a small sea full of islands.

  You start off as a guy with a boat, you find other stranded people, you upgrade your boat, buy cannons, fight pirates, do errands, buy new boats, create a fleet and so on. It's really entertaining! Plus it's a relatively small game that requires no hardware resources to speak of. Recommended!

  Doors - Paradox is a game where you solve puzzle to open doors, but the doors only lead to other doors. The whole concept is rather ridiculous, but one can get into it if they want to waste some time.

  The thing that really pissed me off was the messages you receive in each puzzle, suggesting this is some inner search for meaning or some comatose dream state or something like that, only it doesn't bring anything at all to the game. It doesn't have a story plot that gets resolved somehow, it changes nothing for the game play, it's just another cliché that became popular in this kind of games and we can't get rid of it.

  The graphics are fun and I can't help but think that with a good design this could have been something special. Alas, the puzzles are either ridiculously easy or annoyingly time consuming, like sliding puzzles. It gets old really quick and there is no resolution or anything for the time you spent opening stupid doors. An opportunity missed.

Beyond Blue has a short and silly story that has no consequences and leads nowhere, but the main point is that you can free dive in several ocean stages and look at and swim with realistic looking and swimming marine creatures, which is very relaxing, but gets old soon.

It's apparently inspired by Blue Planet II and partially financed by the BBC and OceanX, the Dalio brothers' "ocean exploration initiative".

I didn't really understand the point of the narrative, though. While it gets the main character where it needs to be to explore the ocean, there are at least two other characters that bring absolutely nothing to the game other than a waste of time and several subplots that end up nowhere than a footnote in a conversation.

I enjoyed the swimming around part, though. You can finish the story in a few hours and then you have the option to free dive in any of the stages of the game, tag animals and look at logs to learn about the ocean, which is pretty cool. But it gets boring quick if you don't already have an interest in oceanography.

  Awkward: The Science of Why We're Socially Awkward and Why That's Awesome started great! I mean, it immediately opened my eyes in terms of how to define awkwardness, why it's even relevant to other people and the reason they are keeping score. It then proceeded to give algorithmic solutions to blending in social situations even if you are awkward to begin with. Ty Tashiro even mentions that we have two relatively separate systems in our brains: the analytical and the social, and when you use one you inhibit the other. It made so much sense! I immediately started recommending the book, without having read it all.

  However the rest of the book was not as amazing, or at least this is how I felt. Instead it felt inconsistent, like a collection of separate materials that somehow were shoe stringed into a book. Still good, but compared to that stellar start, relatively weaker.

  There was one more thing that bothered me, probably saying more about me than about the book, but there were places where American liberal agenda seemed to infect the scientific discourse. I guess being an awkward individual who managed to become a relationship and social psychologist would adopt some of these concepts as a blending in mechanism, yet it felt a little jarring, like the author "sold out" accepting ideas that forcefully come with his acceptance in the crowd.

  It was funny to me that the metaphor (a very good one, it turned out) to describe how awkward people see the world compared to social ones was a Lion King Broadway play. No one watches those outside some population of the U.S., why would you use it as an example?

  Anyway, the idea is this: awkward people have more intense focus, but also a narrower one. They are compulsively attracted by specific things, ignoring everything else. Normal people just have a broader focus on everything, intuitively making connections between disparate signals, while for an awkward person it takes conscious effort to switch focus and combine things in their head. This leads to advantages and disadvantages, since they can focus on research, invention, refining of knowledge and so on, but they are "felt" by society at large as weird, because they miss social cues which determine social status and even interpersonal trust.

  An interesting question at the end was: if being awkward is something that makes one a social outcast, how come it was not eliminated by evolution. And the answer is that less social people are actually more free to explore the edges of human knowledge and behavior, thus fighting stagnation on the level of entire groups. Groups without their awkwards die off.

  I loved that a lot of vague social terms that we normally use were described and even defined analytically, complete with some ideas and concrete actions on how to reach specific goals. A lot of time when people analyze such psychological traits, they do it from the perspective of a normie. It was nice to get not only the definition, but also the theorems behind, so to speak. 

  Bottom line: I really recommend reading the beginning of the book. The rest you can consider optional, even if it's still very interesting and informative.

  I occasionally try to add to my list books that have won literary awards, so that maybe I start to get what writing masterpieces are about. Unfortunately, most of the time I get to read obtuse and pompous works which have reached the top due to some alignment of agenda or talking about something fashionable. I guess this is somewhere in between.

  The Essex Serpent is certainly not a bad book, but it is boring as fuck. Imagine a gothic novel set in the 19th century where the focus is a giant serpent somewhere in Essex. A science leaning recent widow (coming from an abusive relationship, no less) is fascinated by the possibility of this creature. Around her orbit a socialist maid and good friend, a handsome priest dedicated to his terminally ill wife and a talented but unattractive surgeon who has a crush on the widow. Women kind of win, men sort of lose, but with some dignity. That's it in a nutshell.

  Now imagine that at every turn of phrase, EVERYTHING is being taken into focus: what people have eaten, eating and what they thought about it, what people have said, felt, felt that someone else feels or thinks or about what they said, colors, smells, sounds, social norms, romantic tension, you name it, it's there.

  I cannot believe many writers would have the talent to write like Sarah Perry, but I feel there are even more who wouldn't ever want to. You have to dedicate attention and effort to dig out the meaning of every sentence and then have the memory and fortitude to weave that meaning into the story that you think the author is trying to tell. There is a saying you shouldn't walk faster than what is needed to look around, but there is a difference between looking around and combing the plane of experience for every single thing. 

  Personally, I gave up after a quarter of the book, when I realized I didn't care about the characters, the world, the time or even the giant creature. This is categorized as fiction, but it's just a slightly dramatic historical tale that just happens to not be about people who have actually existed, although it is inspired by true events.

  Imagine a Western with guns and outlaws and the like, but the world feels like in the times of the Roman Empire, there is magic and technology (fueled by magic) as well as characters that without being exactly the same, are clearly inspired by dwarves and dark elves.

  The Incorruptibles is seen through the eyes of a dwarf. He and his gun slinging human partner partner are caught in the machinations of rich and powerful Ruman nobles while being attacked by dark elf-like creatures. The story is dark and while it provides a kind of happy ending, it's a gritty tale.

  I've previously read a two novellas anthology from John Hornor Jacobs and I felt a similar vibe there: he draws inspiration from history and the worlds and characters of other writers and make them his own, blending them with a lot of creativity. However, the stories are a bit slow and not always enjoyable. They are gripping, though.

  I don't know what to feel about this series. I liked the book and it could be considered stand-alone, but it opened a lot of avenues for new stories and there was a lot of foreshadowing and world building, so it does feel a little incomplete without the rest of the (hi)story. However, I am not sure I want to invest in it, although I am tempted.

  Bottom line: a gritty magical Western hybrid. It was good.

  David Brin was 30 when he published Sundiver in 1980, but the book, his first, feels much older, almost van Vogtian. The writing style and subject matter further strengthen the feeling. Imagine a bunch of humans and aliens in the future, diving into the Sun to communicate with a newly discovered race of intelligent beings there. A tree alien, an uplifted chimp and others are part of the expedition.

  All the tropes of sci-fi pulp are there: a youngish protagonist of the same age as the author, romance, mystery and its deductive solving as well as its revealing in elaborate group discussions, the belief in the power of meditation and trance to improve the mind, people having Erich von Däniken as the prophet of the origin of the human race, lasers, fist fights, hints of colonialism, and so on and so on. The book is very entertaining, but it's spectacularly outdated. I guess the lasers and the Däniken references place it after 1960, but ignoring that, one could believe it was written in the '40s.

  There are some ingenious ideas in the book, though. In this universe, intelligence is believed to never have been evolved by itself, instead "patron races" uplift existing native animals to intelligence, generating a complex web of patrons and clients. Not humans, though. They have been partially uplifted then left to their own devices, thus placing them in a dubious middle of the hierarchy, while kept away from the somewhat monolithic culture of the galaxy. Humans are both exotic and quaint, ignorant and arrogant, daring to know things they figured out for themselves rather than spoon fed by "the Library".

   I don't think I will read more of this series, but I might read more from Brin, whenever I feel the need to go classical without diving into a time compression bubble.

  Unique visuals, inspired by Japanese theater, tell the story of a hunter of demons, or mononoke. It's not action as it is basically a procedural, where the hunter needs to determine the root cause of the appearance of the demons. A bit too drawn out, but very nice otherwise. The weird graphics, the sounds, the weird symbolism all work together to build an unsettling feeling that evokes the supernatural without ever trying to fully explain it.

  Mononoke has twelve 20 minute episodes, where a story is told in two or three episodes at a time. It is a spinoff of Ayakashi: Samurai Horror Tales, by the same studio, that I have not watched. I just rewatched the Mononoke series - of which I remembered nothing - because Netflix just released a film called Mononoke - Phantom in the Rain (or Paper Umbrella?) and I wanted to know the context.

  The plot is as follows: an elfish looking person carrying a mysterious sword and advertising himself as a Medicine Seller is always in situations were mononoke appear. These are like ghosts "supernatural disease" created by the intertwining of the fates of people or whatever. There is a catch, though. The sword can only be drawn when the Form, Truth and Regret are known: the true shape of the demon, its physical manifestation and its spiritual manifestation. In other words, one cannot vanquish a demon without understanding it completely. Pretty therapeutic.

  In the entire series we don't learn who the mysterious hunter is. The stories, though, happen in different historical eras, thus implying he is not human.

  I can't say the anime is perfect, though. Scenes seem to be drawn out, kind of like Japanese theater itself where they move, say something very slowly, then everything stops, then they do it again. Maybe that would have been fine if not for unexplainable moments of verbosity when, after an episode and a half of saying a few words syllable by syllable, the hunter was suddenly dumping pages of wiki lore before doing anything. But I liked it and maybe the film will be more refined. Just have to see.

  It's not that Titanium Noir is a bad book, but it's the same tired cliché of the cynical private investigator trying to unravel a simple murder that turns out to be a global conspiracy that makes the reader think of social issues. The sci-fi is almost incidental, so I kind of listened to a third of the book, then fell asleep and woke up close to the end and I didn't find anything exciting in it. A disappointment from something that has such a cool title and intriguing cover.

  Nick Harkaway is the son of John le Carré and he mostly writes fantasy, apparently, but in this he went a bit, just a tiny bit, towards science fiction. Not enough to induce me to finish the book, unfortunately.

  Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup is a book worth of a political thriller miniseries, only too real. It shows the 10+ years history of Theranos, a "unicorn company" formed only on personal charisma and lies and which reached a top valuation of ten billion American dollars at its peak. Billions, with a B! It also shows how that can happen within the American economic, political and social system, which - if you ask me - is much more damning and interesting than the exposure of Elisabeth Holmes and her cronies.

  John Carreyrou also had the faith, training and backing of a powerful journalistic entity just to be able to bring this to public attention, something to be considered in this climate of journalistic consolidation into partisan corporations that care nothing for the truth. It would have been so easy for this to have continued for years, unchecked and uncheckable, if it weren't for this tiny detail.

  To boot, this book will be extremely triggering to anyone working in a corporate environment, especially Americans. Let's play some corporate bingo: sociopath CEO claiming their vision is paramount to anything and anyone, older generation Indian management that feels the lives of employees belong to the company, paranoid NDA backed culture where people just disappear without any mention to the remaining employees, totalitarian control of data, communication and the general narrative, backed by law firms hired on millions of dollars to intimidate anyone who might challenge it, inner-circle privileges given to loyal individuals, university dropout visionaries that consider any technical hurdle something to be solved by lowly multiple PhD holding peons and not something that can hold them back, even if they themselves are technical imbeciles, yes-men culture where dissent or even mere criticism is considered treason, to be punished by immediate termination, public humiliation and legal action. The list can go on...

  I can't recommend this book enough. It's not entertaining in any meaningful way, instead it's terrifying. Imagine being in a situation where you have the knowledge, the certainty, the moral high ground, the awareness of your absolute right in a matter, only to give it all away because someone with a lot of money sics a law firm on you. Imagine bullying at every level once you have haphazardly signed some documents that you assumed were standard corporate operating practice, but instead signed your soul to the company. Imagine trying to tell people that something is terribly wrong, only to be met with dismissive comments on your character and expertise, just because someone believes in a PowerPoint presentation more than in any deity and because you are not part of the in-group.

  But one thing that the book did not discuss, although it implied heavily through out its length, is how can something like this happen. How is it possible that somehow law can be corrupted to stop people from reporting unlawful acts? How can a company be created and thrive and be financed by people on promises alone, while heavily educated and well informed naysayers can be summarily dismissed at any moment and their input suppressed? In fact, this is a direct and informed criticism of the way American society works at the higher levels. Theranos was a symptom that, unchecked, led to Trumpism. There are direct parallels between the mindset of the management in this 2010 company and the political system taking over in the 2020s, with mindless loyal cronies being hired for all of the critical jobs on a wave of populist faith.

  Even more spooky is the strong desire people felt for this book be a hit-job, to have the young female charismatic Elisabeth entrepreneur somehow be the victim of the male dominated system, the disgruntled employees, the Svengali 20 years older lover and irate Indian bully, the vengeful journalist, all working together to stop her from playing her fantasy of becoming the next Steve Jobs. You can imagine a Scooby Doo moment where she could have just made everything work out if it weren't for the pesky kids. But the truth documented in this book shows that, while certainly some sort of victim, Holmes was a mentally deranged individual who still managed to play the entire world and reach wealth and prestige even some nations in the world only dream of.

  Bottom line: you have to read this book, even if it's very long, terrifying, frustrating and its "happy ending" only demonstrates that you have to make a LOT of mistakes for justice to happen when you have enough money and political backing.