And Then There Were None

by Agatha Christie

You get to my age, and you appreciate a good murder mystery. And nobody does them better than Agatha Christie. I had And Then There Were None on my list for a while and my library pulled through for me. It's a pulpy mass market paperback, and I also read it in hybrid format between that and an .epub version from Internet Archive. I much prefer to read my books digitally now, since I can have it on in the middle of night in bed, without disturbing my family, but there's nothing like cozing up on the couch alone at night with a book.

And Then There Were None was originally titled "Ten Little N*
****s"
, after a minstrel song from 1896, then toned down to Ten Little Indians, and finally to its current title, the last line of the song. Aside from the original title, there is no abject racism. That's just what the song was at that time. Reading it was really fun. I found it hard to put down and every chapter had something new and exciting to happen. For a book with 10 "main" characters, I didn't really lose track of people or where everyone was at (and it also helped that they were getting offed 1 by 1!).

Cribbed from my Goodreads account:

Classic for a reason! Taut without being terse, suspenseful without being horrifying. A story of the one-by-one murder of 10 otherwise upstanding citizens, if not for the crime/s that they directly or indirectly committed.

The epilogue neatly explains the murders in a satisfying, unexpected way and worth a re-read. I read this in hybrid format, between an .epub version from the Internet archive and paperback. Would not recommend the Internet archive; it's riddled with formatting errors and typos.

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Batman Volume 10: Epilogue and Blanc (2023)

We here at chezkevin have always been a Batman comic book blog first, everything else second. So, today we conclude the 2011 "New 52" run of Batman and include a recent video game I finished.

Batman Volume 10: Epilogue
by Scott Snyder, Greg Capullo, James Tynion IV and more
collects BATMAN #51-52, BATMAN: FUTURES END #1, BATMAN ANNUAL #4 and a special preview of BATMAN: REBIRTH #1

These are mostly non-stories that wrap up the the series, putting a bow on the whole package. It's a collection of several standalone stories and tie-ins to other Batman events, much like Volume 6: Graveyard Shift.

  1. Remains: A Future's End tie-in, a heist story in which Batman risks his life for one last go, to steal a major component from Lexcorp for his clone machine (what clone machine? See Volume 9). There's some pithy dialogue from a hologram Lex as Bruce infiltrates the facility, and if it weren't for the cloning thing, would be a pretty good timeless Batstory.
  2. Madhouse: If it weren't for the whole losing-his-house thing, would be a pretty good timeless Batstory. In the aftermath of Superheavy, Bruce reclaims his Manor from the city, which somehow repurposed it to Arkham Asylum, but not before he has to kick out some of the inmates. It's a nice closed-door detective story that demonstrates how Batman is more than a suit: it's the man underneath. 

  3. Gotham Is: This is the "timeless" story you're looking for. This feels like a story that you could read at any point in the history of Batman. It's mainly centered around a journalist whose whole column is about how he takes reader suggestions for what "Gotham Is," a kind of collaboration between reader and writer about their shared city, in the midst of a city-wide blackout. Of course, Batman is on the case along with his extended family, and we visit a host of supervillains, including the Penguin, the inmates at the Asylum, and the Society of Owls underground, but they all admit that they weren't behind it. The twist is that it was just a freak natural occurrence that resolves by daybreak, giving us one last chance to tour the Gotham City of Snyder and Capullo. A solid slice-of-life Batstory.
  4. The List: A flashback story of Bruce's healing process as a child, into adulthood. He makes a checklist of things he needs to do in order to move on from his parents' death. It's a cutesy but very nice way to put a pin on the series: ending on issue #52 and checklist item #52: Remember that your parents will always be proud of you.
In the end, they did a great job of showing something new about Batman in an increasingly repetitive and derivative genre. They told us the whole time when they showed in the very first issue of Batman facing down another jailbreak of villains from Arkham Asylum, with a smile: Batman is hope. Batman is insanity. Batman is fighting a battle, knowing that it will never end, but knowing that the fighting itself is victory.

Blanc (2023)
by Gearbox Publishing, played on Nintendo Switch

I ran into this game last year and was easily taken by the charming, artsy style. It was recently on sale for $7.50, down from $14.99 and when my wife said she was willing to partake, it was a no-brainer for me.

We finished over the course of roughly 2 weeks in 30-minute play sessions, for about a total of 3 hours total playtime. It's quite a short game, but that might have been the only way we would have been able to digest it. Between putting the kids down for bed and various "me time" things, it wasn't always easy to get the two of us to sit down together and apply our brains at the end of the day.

As for the game itself: there are ten chapters, never really marked or called out during play. The screen itself is very minimal and there are no "HUD" aspects you'd expect in a "traditional" game, ie, a map a health bar, progress bar, and so on. This really emphasizes the background itself, and it's gorgeous. For some reason I have an affinity for black and white: our dog is black and white, our sheets are black and white, and the sheer visual imagery of the game is in black and white. I found myself taking screencaps every now and then; it was such a beautiful game.

The "game-y" aspects of it come in when your characters are able to do certain actions, ie, jog, slide down a snow-covered hill, jump to a certain terrain or help a character or call for help. Other specific puzzles come into play when you need to interact with other characters in the game: IE, providing a windshield from the snowstorm so that little ducklings can get to their mother duck. There are various NPCs in the game, and it's a little heartbreaking how some of them conclude (spoiler: the ducklings AND the baby goats get pissed at you after they miss a jump and that's just the end of your relationships!)

The mechanics are not always smooth. Sometimes you have to be in just the right position to get the right prompt, and there was a variety of puzzles that were difficult not because they were a puzzle, but because the mechanics of the game just prevented you from seeing the puzzle itself. This is the largest failure of the game, buttressed by just utterly gorgeous hand-drawn views.

Blanc isn't a perfect game, but it doesn't need to be. I got my money's worth and in this case the style really was the substance. The lack of "game-y" aspects lifted a barrier for my wife to play, and it was fun to figure out puzzles together, and occasionally, just roll down a hill and take in the views.

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Chezkevin vs. Prose: Strange New Worlds

Hold up a minute, when was I a prose reviewer? Who's taken over this blog? Wotta revolting development!

Anyways, last year (2023) I ran a book club and it was pretty fun. The goal was to, every month run a book discussion and we did pretty well thanks to online, remote tools that were honed during the dark times, the COVID times. My wife was a great backup as somebody that could attend a discussion, and she did a lot of heavy lifting as she had a couple of friends who were wonderfully consistent month-to-month. The hardest part was figuring out a meeting date that worked for everybody involved, and by the end of the year it was only a couple other readers left and me. December was a sheer loss due to all the family time involved, but we made out pretty well if you ask me.


I'm not running it again this year -- too much going on to be honest, but I still like reading, and darn it I still need someplace to shove my opinions. So, hi :)

The Big Sleep
by Raymond Chandler

I've had this hardboiled detective book sitting in my Kindle library for years now, and finally I can say that I've read it. I really enjoy the style of noir, and many sources point to Raymond Chandler as a major influence for the genre. They don't disappoint here. The prose is a joy to read and immerses you in the gritty world of Phillip Marlowe's 1930s Los Angeles. Marlowe stands alone not exactly as a hero, but a person who's just out to do a decent job for what decent people are left in the world. The story begins with him meeting an old, wealthy retired war general who's being blackmailed for nude photos of one of his two adult daughters. The story turns into a murder mystery that's solved within the first half, along with a subplot that resurfaces to conclude the final half of the book.

Suffice to say, the plot kind of goes everywhere. There's a gay lover subplot. An illegal porn pamphlet racket. A casino scene. Over the course of my two week reading of this, I lost track of a lot of the characters and had to re-read to catch myself up again on who some of the characters were. New characters show up even near the end of the novel, and it's my opinion that this book isn't really sold on its plot. Rather, it stands out for the style, that of a dry-witted, imperfect protagonist trying to survive in an imperfect world. It's refreshing to see the sardonic humor of a person that knows the world isn't a great place. Here's a dialogue between one of the daughters VIvian, after Marlowe saves her from a mugging after a whirlwind casino run for Vivian.
“Meet Mr. Larry Cobb,” Vivian said. “Mister Cobb—Mister Marlowe.”
I grunted.
“Mr. Cobb was my escort,” she said. “Such a nice escort, Mr. Cobb. So attentive. You should see him sober. I should see him sober. Somebody should see him sober. I mean, just for the record. So it could become a part of history, that brief flashing moment, soon buried in time, but never forgotten—when Larry Cobb was sober.”
“Yeah,” I said.
Worth reading, but not more than that. Here's some more highlights from my Goodreads account: https://www.goodreads.com/notes/13160296-the-big-sleep-farewell-my-lovely/6308154-kevin?ref=h_cr

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Batman Volumes 8 & 9: Superheavy & Bloom

By Scott Snyder, Greg Capullo and more
Collects Batman # 41-45 and DC Sneak Peek: Batman #1, and collects Batman #'s 46-50, and a story from Detective Comics #27



The Batman is dead. Long live the Batman! After the presumed death of the Batman in a cave collapse (and a totally unrelated disappearance of Gotham City philanthropist Bruce Wayne), we have a new Batman program supported by the "Powers" Corporation, in cooperation with the Gotham City Police Department.
Enter: the Batman, a semi-autonomous mech piloted by former Gotham City Police Commissioner. and funded by the Powers corp. This decision was pretty controversial for Batfans at the time, and the comic goes through some hoops to explain the jump (3 months, lasik, former marine training),but honestly there are more farfetched things that we believe and read in comics. Dick had a turn. Azrael had a turn. Why not Gordon?


Snyder has never shied away from Gotham City as a character and that shines here. Jim Gordon has spent his life and his work on the streets, and Volume 8 leverages that, highlighting a variety of street-level crime, focusing on the unique neighborhoods of Gotham City and the crime unique to each neighborhood. But now, the mobs have been enhanced by a radioactive sunflower seed granting superpowers. Every Batman has brought something unique to the table and that's what Gordon does here: he's the one that locked these criminals away and now they're becoming supercriminals.

It wouldn't be a Snyder story if Batman didn't get to the bottom of these seeds, and here's what's at the bottom: Mr. Bloom, an socio-econo-eco-terrorist who's "seeding" Gotham citizens for a social uprising. In the midst of all this, there's a Bruce Wayne subplot: discovered naked in the night by Alfred, he's born anew (perhaps due to the Lazarus pits found in the cave system from Endgame), with a fresh body free of scars and without any memories of his crimefighting alter-ego. This is the Bruce that was never haunted by the Batman.

It's an interesting take for the storyarc, but it doesn't last as long as it could have in order to really tell a whole story. There's also a new Robin that all comes to a head in the climax of the story. However, there's only so many times you can tell the same story but with a few tweaks, and that's the same story here: supervillain threatens the whole city in a catastrophic event, and then Batman steps up to save the day. Add a dash of Gotham City pride and you've got a Scott Snyder special. The Riddler had Zero Year. The Joker had Death of the Family and Endgame. The Owls had a Court and then a City. Mr. Bloom has these two volumes, with a subtheme of police brutality and social justice.


BONUS:

Some sweet Batmobiles for the Batmech of Gotham City:


The batlocomotive? Batloco?

For the man who thought of everything...a memory transplanter: a way for Bruce Wayne to learn who he is, every time there is a new Bruce Wayne. Side effects may include: BRAINDEATHBRAINDEATHBRAINDEATH.

Follow along for more New 52 Batman:

Unless I Stuck by Ya

9/19/23

Today E gave me a paper with sunflower stickers on it. I don't even think he made it, but he found it and he chose to give it to me. "Daddy these sunflowers are for you."

I don't think he meant much by it, but we sing the Post Malone song "Sunflower" together. It brings back memories of the week of his birth. The sleep-deprived drives I made back and forth between home and the hospital, and the new CD I got for the Spider-Verse soundtrack. 

"Then you're left in the dust / Unless I stuck by ya
You're the sunflower / I think your love would be too much."

He took this mundane thing and it just meant so much to me. It was a song unique to our relationship as father and son, and he acknowledged it. He heard it. It was his expression of love.


10/23/23

This morning E freaked out when the automatic timer on his sound machine turned off. I waffle between this setting so much, but he's going through a hard time and he's terrified of his room. In Encanto, they show the walls of the house cracking all the time due to the magic, and I think that's what he's afraid of when he stares at the walls in his room. It's terrifying, and it was no help when his soudn machine turned off of its own accord today.

He came to our room screaming and we talked to him. Eventually he let on that it was his sound machine and I felt so bad. I escorted him back to his room, and showed him that the machine can still turn on and off like normal. I disabled the automatic timer at 7AM. I made such a mistake that I decided to stay in his room for the morning. His mom was getting up now so she could take care of them after I spent the morning with them. E needed a positive experience in his room.

We took his Yoshi stuffie and played bedtime with it. We fed it dinner, gave it a bath, brushed his teeth and helped him go to bed. He needed it today.

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