30th January 1703

Hodor Hodor Hodor Hodor Hodor Hodor Hodor.

Geek Syndicate Review: House Of Penance #2

I took some time away from chronicling the new Game of Thrones season with a review of Tomasi and Betram's House of Penance #2. It's a title that is shaping up very nicely indeed. Check it out.

26th January, 1820

My review of "Book Of The Stranger" is up now at Geek Syndicate.

No Apologies For The Infinite Radness 1.1.12 - "Underneath The Weeping Willow" (Grandaddy)

A moment of rest amid the tears and histrionics. Music's Eye of Harmony, at least for me.

The stresses are still there, the endless underlying scratching at our brains, appearing here as the nervous jitter of the opening piano line that never actually goes away. But it's boxed in by the rest of the song, a gorgeous slow progression of warm chords and the warmest, prettiest vocal Jason Lytle has given us to date.  It's not exactly a happy song, but it is a hopeful one, about sleeping through the rough hours in a place you love until you wake up in a better mood. About letting your sadness quietly slide away to somewhere else. Sleep is the great healer, so long as you know you are sheltered. That you can be safe.

I bought "The Sophtware Slump" almost precisely 14 years ago, in the run up to the last exams I ever took. The capstone - or gravestone - for four years of my life. I was a fizzing mess, running on cola and coffee, snapping at everyone, trying to deal with a change in my medication that didn't so much improve my foul moods as concentrate them into shorter, more vicious bursts.  Every evening I would play this song as part of a ritual to at least try and stop bubbling over. The fact that after all that, every time I hear this song I still feel calm is astonishing. It's not that the song escaped being coloured by how I first encountered it - it might make me calm, but it's an exhausted calm, like the climb-down from an adrenaline high. But the accompanying manic sadness never surfaces, transmuted every time by what I'm hearing. Like the weeping willow herself, the song does all the crying for me.

And I can be happy again.

B side

11th December, 1936

My review of "Oathbreaker" (which I forgot to give a score to; let's say 3/5 again) is up now at Geek Syndicate.

Remember Tokyo: How Do You Measure A Year?

(Thanks to Sion for the photo)

A few hours later
Our birds are home and sulking
And I get called in.

"Can you explain this?"
Asks the PM, who I kept
Far out of the loop.

I take a long, deep breath.
"This about nicking POTUS?
Our role's off the books."

"Jakarta ran it,
Jakarta lost him to Seoul.
But we're in the clear."

"Sounds thrilling," he says.
"You must tell me more sometime.
"But what I meant was..."

He turns on the news.
"LIVE: Japan assassinates
US president."

Friday Talisman: Queenie

My camera phone refused to focus on this one, presumably because her hideous evilness was simply too much for it to bear. But is it really fair for the game to label her as "evil" in the first place? Can't nice people enjoy hanging out with spiders?  Spiders are awesome: they eat all the terrifying bugs that do so much to ruin life on this planet.  I think they'd do better in a democracy than a monarchy, but that's not really any of my business. As an ally of spiders, it is not my place to judge.