I have now finished reading the duology that began with Max in the House of Spies, in which a Kindertransport refugee with a dybbuk and a kobold on each shoulder wrangles his way into being sent back to Germany as a British spy.
The first book featured a lot of Ewen Montagu RPF, which was extremely fun and funny for me. The second book, Max in the Land of Lies, features a lot of Nazi and Nazi-adjacent RPF, which is obviously less fun and funny, though I still did have several moments where a character would appear on-page and I would exchange a sage nod with Adam Gidwitz: yes, I too have read all of Ben Macintyre's books about WWII espionage, and I do recognize Those Abwehr Guys Who Are Obsessed With British Culture, we both enjoy our little inside joke.
Our little inside jokes aside, I ended up feeling a sort of conflicted and contradictory way about both the book and the duology as a whole. It's very didactic -- it is shouting at you about its project at every turn -- but the project it's shouting about is 'the narrative is more nuanced and complex than you think!' On the one hand, people in Germany (many of them Based on Real People) who are involved in The Nazi Situation in various messy ways are constantly explaining the various messy ways that they are involved in The Nazi Situation to Max, a totally non-suspicious definitely not Jewish surprise twelve-year-old who's just appeared on the scene, at the absolute drop of a hat. It is somewhat hard to believe that Max is achieving these really spectacular espionage results when the only stat he ever rolls is 'knowledge: radio!' although his 'knowledge: radio!' number is really high.
ON the other hand, it is so easy and in vogue to come down in a place of 'Nazis: bad!' and so much more difficult and important to sit with the fact that believing in a monstrous ideology, participating in monstrous acts, does not prevent a person from being likeable, interesting or intelligent, and vice versa; that the line between Nazi Germany and, for example, colonial Great Britain is not so thick as one would like to believe; that people are never comfortably reducible to Monsters and Not Monsters. At root this is clearly Gidwitz's project and I have a lot of respect for it: this didactic book for children is more nuanced, complex and interesting than many books for adults I've read.
And then there's the dybbuk and the kobold. Throughout the second book they continue to function primarily as a stressed-out Statler and Waldorf, which I think is a bit of a waste of a dybbuk and a kobold. Also, at one point one of them says nostalgically "there were no Nazis in the fifteenth century" and while this IS technically true I DO think that there were other things going on in fifteenth century Germany that they probably also did not enjoy and at this point I WAS about to come down on "Adam Gidwitz probably should just not have included these guys in his children's spy story." But Then ( he did something very spoilery that I actually found profoundly interesting )
best part about silksong is that some redditor got so furious at people suggesting they reset their mental, take a breather, etc, that they felt compelled to draw this in what I can only assume was a state of blinding rage
Willow: Could you believe it? Right at the buzzer. Three points for the win.
Oz: It was intense.
Xander: Yeah, for a minute there I thought you were gonna make an expression.
Oz: Well, I felt one coming on, I won't lie.
1) Nothing like a Disney bundle price increase right on the heels of the Jimmy Kimmel fiasco. I wonder if they held off on the announcement until 24 hours after saying he'd return?
2) Having just watched the latest Death in Paradise spinoff, it struck me as curious that a successful show like Silent Witness has not done the same (though maybe it has? Anyone know?)
In a way though, it's like the show has had various spinoffs within the same show. ( Read more... )
3) It's fun to see how many people over time at Board Game Arena have recognized my Merlin icon. It's a little fannish high five.
4) Sister Boniface's episode of Doctor Who struck me as a sign of changing times. Twenty years ago the fan would have been the geekiest cast member, probably the reporter, but here various cast members are fans and it's mainly the tall, matinee idol detective.
5) Interesting to see how U.S. films are getting less viewing overseas, mainly due to China's restrictions on how many can be shown there. I thought this bit was interesting as well: "The the top French films released were all English-language movies co-produced with the UK among other countries, and did more business in the UK than in the US or China." I didn't realize France even made films in English.
I’m about to buy and read the crow plastic romantasy book
Help
Welcome to the fae future, where you can never use a vibrator again.
He recognized her as his ~mate~. She’s Australian, so she keeps casually calling him “mate” as he gets increasingly flustered.
I genuinely cannot tell if this book is terrible or brilliant.
I have many questions. For instance, if his job is to destroy plastic but he spends most of his time hunting monsters, does that mean the monsters are made of plastic? How does that work?
Indeed, Charles’ birthday was a high point of the year, a guaranteed day of fun for himself and Edwin. The fun always helped to push down the unvoiced emotions below: the loss, the unresolved pain of his death, the feelings of failure and inadequacy. Charles saw no reason why this state of affairs shouldn’t continue forever.
But then he turned fifty.
Or:
How a medieval poem changed Charles’ afterlife forever.
If you like Dead Boy Detectives and you feel like a big fic visiting every ship cliché (and with a ton of meta under the surface, of course), please check it out! ^_^
Watching playthroughs for Silent Hill f (I don’t think we know what the “f” stands for yet?) as streamers start posting them. I may not watch much further, I’m not sure, but at least I have a sense of the combat. I actually think I could manage it; it’s more the resource management system that I’d have to get used to. (Weapons BREAK? Rude.) In SH2, James is just out there with one (1) pipe (and three guns in his magic jacket) and no skills or buffs and you can deal with it, good luck, but I appreciate the simplicity. Man doesn’t even have a HEALTH BAR, much less a sanity gauge.
At this point I need to focus on getting the SH2 commentary done (if I could STOP GETTING SICK), but I could see getting SHf and Cronos if a deep discount comes around. Apparently I can’t ever just learn to game on something easy; that would be sensible.
from this article, which is well worth the read, if only for the fun of seeing zuck get dunked on
Let’s be clear, AI models are extremely good at the specific tasks they have been trained to do. It’s not just medicine and scientific research, a well-trained machine learning model now better at weather prediction (which is incredibly complicated and involves stupendous numbers of variables) than the gigantic supercomupters that are the current standard. If you have a single complex task with more variables than a human can effectively hold in their head, training a neural network is very likely a good answer, because what they do is basically produce results using weighted averages affected by a number of variables way beyond what humans can consciously track. The problem is that LLMs are not this.
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