Am I not talking about politics? I’m not. Is that insane given I live in Minnesota. It is. Is it even crazier to avoid it if I have relatives in the tear gas zone, patrolling, blowing whistles, and people I know protesting at the community events and fundraisers for those afraid to leave their homes, and my anger about feds murdering a member of my community runs deep? You can go find my socials – you’ll figure out my take there. I’ll try not to make my blog posts an ongoing rant.
Pooteewheet and I started Split Fiction, the video game, the day before yesterday. For anyone not familiar, it made a lot of top 10 games lists for 2025 and topped a lot of coop games because you’re literally playing as a team where sometimes you have to coordinate actions to keep moving forward through the story line. It’s a good test of patience in your marriage. Beautiful game – pretty much a puzzle, but with a bit of minor skirmishing built in. So far. We’re still in the first chapter. I did find us a second Steam-capable controller to play, so we’ve moved from the old Xbox which we used forever to me moving my laptop to the HDMI cable + big television in the living room. It’s nice not to have to upgrade my gaming console and be able to play a lot more fine-grained games and strategy games using my mouse out there. Much better view.
Recently finished the book Polybius, which is an internet urban legend. There’s a whole area dedicated to the game on the internet and there’s a movie with an episode in it that derives from the urban legend, but gives it a demonic twist instead of a strictly government/MKULTRA bent (aside that IS politics; it’s extremely irritating to read a book at the moment about the government trying to incite riots in the general population for the purposes of being able to put them down).
This is my review for Storygraph: I almost DNF-ed even close to the end. I agree with most of the other reviews here that call the characters flat, the story and perspectives disjointed, et al. And I swear he [the author] doesn't understand the teenage mind very well - they weren't particularly believable. IMO, I think you could just as well watch 2010's "The Crazies" and get a better, but same bones, tale. I was also a little struck about his throw-away reference near the end of using images to hack minds - any image, not just a video console - and either not seeming to understand the origins of that idea or not willing to credit the origin in any way. If you look up David Langford's Basilisks on Wikipedia, you can get a pretty detailed history that includes not only Langford's Hugo-winning "Different Kinds of Darkness" but a lineage of other authors/works that built on the idea. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Langford#Basilisks
Not in my review, but I’d add… You’d be better off reading any Stephen King novel. One good thing about Polybius is it gives you an idea of exactly how good King is at using his characters to drive a story and how much he shows and surfaces through their actions, rather than talking about them and having them tell why they’re doing something.
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