In this casual co-op birdwatching game, you and up to 10 friends explore a nature preserve with the goal of photographing all the different kinds of birds.
The adventuring party converges on a Rock Pigeon This game really captures the ways in which birding is like Pokémon. (In fact, it's said to be particularly reminiscent of Pokémon Snap, but I haven't played that game so I couldn't tell you.) There are all these little creatures with funny names all over the place, and you've got to, well, catch 'em all. There are even shinies, which are sparkly rainbowy versions of a bird that make delightful UFO sounds when you get close to them.
Flock Around is usually on Steam for $4.99 USD but it's currently on sale for $3.99, and for the price it's absolutely worth it. I have played many games that offered a lot less fun for a lot more money!
This sequel to The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi picks up the story with kinda-ex-pirate Amina and her crew on a quest to track down a dangerous magical artifact for the peris (air spirits) with whom Amina struck a bargain in the first book. This time it's a spindle that can alter the threads of fate, said to be in the hands of a witch on an island in the Persian Gulf shrouded by supernatural seas, where ships run aground no matter how skilled the sailors are, and nobody ever comes back.
I loved the first book in this series so I was eagerly awaiting the sequel, and it didn't disappoint. It's another seafaring adventure, this time with a slightly darker tone. It's less episodic than the first book, mostly dealing with this island and the mystery of the witch, her origins, and the suspiciously idyllic society she's created around her with the descendants of shipwrecked sailors who are all so very happy here... but can't actually leave. It's also less of an ensemble piece, with most of Amina's crew sidelined for much of the story. Instead it focuses more tightly on Amina's complicated friendship with the prickly alchemist Dalila, who's only pretending to be seduced into the witch's inner circle so she can steal the spindle... right? There's also more development of Amina's relationship with her semi-estranged husband, who is not only a self-involved jerk and annoyingly hot, but also a literal chaos demon.
With all of these relationships, I really like how the bonds of magic intertwine with bonds of emotion. It's not just, oh, this magical effect is a metaphor for how the character is tempted into something that's not good for them. It's that magic is happening and mundane interpersonal and emotional stuff is also happening, and it feels really cohesive and convincing to me.
I did think there was a bit of a structural hiccup towards the end where the reader learns the truth of what's going on too early, making it feel like it takes too long for Amina to figure it out. But that's a minor issue in a book I otherwise totally enjoyed. I had to tear through it at breakneck speed because I couldn't renew it from the library (someone else was waiting) and that was not a hardship for me at all!
The mid-'90s Celtic music craze is more of a temporal quirk than a geographic one. I know the US had its own moment, with this also only being one part of a larger "world music" trend that I'm assuming had a lot to do with how CDs were changing the game, and I have younger Canadian friends who don't even remember that this was ever a thing. But the fact that a large area of Canada has heavily Scottish- and Irish-influenced regional identities where Celtic music already dominated meant that a substantial portion of mainstream Canadian hits and the general CBC soundtrack ended up falling into this category in the '90s, making household names of artists like Great Big Sea, The Rankin Family, Loreena McKennitt, Spirit of the West, Natalie MacMaster, Leahy, The Barra MacNeils, Lennie Gallant, Bruce Guthro, The Irish Descendants, and whoever else was going to be on Rita and Friends that week.
And of course there was Ashley MacIsaac, whose rendition of "Sleepy Maggie" with Mary Jane Lamond on vocals lurked just shy of the top 100 south of the border but was a top 20 hit for the better part of a year at home, resulting in a lot of decidedly non-Gaelic-speaking Canadian schoolchildren memorizing the lyrics phonetically and swapping urban legends about what secret and scandalous things they might mean.
Wrapping up Pride Month media, I played Citizen Sleeper, a sci-fi RPG by Gareth Damian Martin (they/he). Those of you who are Hugo voters may recall that the sequel is nominated for Best Game or Interactive Work this year, which is a pretty nice piece of recognition for a solo developer.
In this first game, you play as a cyborg who has escaped corporate slavery and found your way to an independent space station called the Eye. There you must navigate the competing factions that control different areas of the station (other refugees, gangs, merchants, trade unions, agricultural communes, digital beings inhabiting cyberspace...) and decide who to align yourself with. In addition to food, your body is also designed to need proprietary fuel manufactured by the corporation from which you're fleeing, so you'll quickly need to find allies and paid work. Of course, even if you manage to do that, the corporate overlords may not give up trying to reclaim their "property" so easily.
Citizen Sleeper is on various platforms for $19.99 USD. It includes a free three-chapter DLC that doesn't make sense to play through until you've done most of everything else, but the game makes it very clear when you've found it and that you might not want to start it just yet.
In this steampunk alt-history novel, a group of Fabian Socialists and African-American missionaries become founders of a new nation in central Africa in the late 19th century. With a boost from talented inventors and new technologies (some plausible but a bit early, like airships, and some fanciful, like clockwork cyborg limbs) they're able to challenge oppressive Belgian rule in the region. This alters the course of history in a sprawling, decades-long narrative of international intrigue, featuring a huge cast of characters in a complex web of love and hate.
So, you know when a TV show gets canceled but they still have a few episodes left, or maybe they get a movie, and the writers do a speed-run of all the remaining unresolved plot threads, basically hitting the highlights, and you have to mentally fill in all the other stuff that would have happened if they'd been able to take their time? That's what reading this book is like. Shawl had enough ideas here to fill a series of six or seven books if they'd taken it at a leisurely pace, but instead it's all packed into 400 pages.
I'm not sure I'm exactly complaining, though? I don't think I'm quite the right audience for the material as presented (way too much romance and breakup drama, not enough speculative tech, disappointingly little followup on one character's intriguing steam engine kink) so if there were six or seven books, I doubt I would have read them all. A relatively quick overview of how it all plays out was enough to satisfy me. But on the other hand, if I'd been deeply invested and wanted to sink my teeth into every detail of the plot and the interpersonal stuff, I probably would have been disappointed, so I guess I'm not sure who the ideal reader for this is.
I have read a few of Shawl's short stories, and I'm starting to get the impression that they are not a writer who likes to go into intricate detail about things. I do think they have it all in their head, but it reads to me like they're more invested in writing the exciting, intense highlights than the in-between explainy parts. Which, honestly, I can relate to—I can find that stuff a slog to write, too! But even if it is in your head, it's not in the reader's head until you put it there.
There actually is a sequel, which at a peek sounds like it steers away from steampunk and leans more fantasy, which isn't necessarily what I would have expected (thought there are some magical elements here too). Either way, my interest level is probably closer to "read a detailed synopsis" than "actually read the book."
If you haven't seen today's post at dw_maintenance, the site is dealing with issues (read: a flood of garbage traffic by bots and scrapers) resulting in slowness for logged-out users, and possible slower responses in general. If you're experiencing this, it's best to stay logged in for reading the site, and to bookmark the login page if you have difficulties to get there.
Folks may have noticed that the site has been slow for logged-out users over the last while. This is partly because we separate traffic by logged-in, "logged out but have visited the site before", and "logged out, never visited the site before" and assign the fewest resources to the last category (because we're pretty confident the overwhelming majority of it is bot and scraper traffic, even if it's often impossible to say for sure). The flood of garbage traffic is a plague and a scourge the entire internet is dealing with, and it's hitting small sites the hardest as operators get better and better at cloaking their requests to look like real, authentic use. We long ago hit the point where adding more resources is a possible solution (because they just eat them up as soon as we do), and splitting traffic lets us keep the site usable for our actual users without wasting too much server power on garbage.
We've now, lucky us, reached the point where the "logged out, have never visited the site before" path is just flooded all the time, and the "logged out but have visited the site before" path is suffering some of the overflow. We've made some changes to the routing to try to improve things for logged out users who have visited the site before and keep it at "it may be a little bit slow, but at least it works" instead of "it keeps timing out", and we've seen some improvements, but if you're accustomed to browsing the site while logged out, I'm really sorry but it may continue to be a little miserable.
You will get the fastest page loads and the best performance by browsing the site logged in. If you are having trouble loading the front page to log in, bookmark the direct login page. We can't route the front page to the "more power" server pool, because it's a common target for garbage traffic, but we've switched /login over to "more power" and we'll try to keep it there as long as we can unless it starts getting slammed, too.
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dw_maintenance, the site is dealing with issues (read: a flood of garbage traffic by bots and scrapers) resulting in slowness for logged-out users, and possible slower responses in general. If you're experiencing this, it's best to stay logged in for reading the site, and to bookmark the login page if you have difficulties to get there. ![[staff profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user_staff.png)
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