Brian Behrend’s microblog
The first 10-15 minutes of this may be some of the worst acting I’ve ever seen and they somehow don’t bother to start bloodsporting until like 40 minutes in to a 90 minute movie.
The bit at the end where they claim Frank Dux did all these amazing things just screamed “lol, sure you did dude.” Went to Wikipedia and yep, shady as heck and likely mostly all made up including any military history.
Rating: 1.5 stars
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Restarted Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow today and made it back to same point I bounced off the first time.
Three chapters in and I really dislike the book up to this point. College Sadie and the terrible professor is sooooo dumb and his dialog and personality are so transparently awful. I can’t tell at this point if the author Zevin is this clueless about relationships or if Sadie is about to turn into a non awful character any minute.
It doesn’t help how bad the video game stuff is early.
Calling Street Fighter etc “martial arts games” made me cringe. This is also how I feel watching any baseball or football fiction. It must really be hard writing about nerdy details in a way that doesn’t alienate people not intimately familiar with the concepts.
Ooof. Wasn’t awful but was certainly stilted/poorly written in spots. Not nearly as interesting or in my wheelhouse as the Lincoln Child books I’ve been reading. (Ironically, I’ve been catching up with all these old Preston and Child books while I wait for the first Preston & Child book Relic to be available on Libby.)
I think the voices/accents the reader uses in the audiobook likely made it even worse, but even for a book from 20 years ago this was pretty culturally incompetent. And it saved some of the worst racism for a totally unnecessary final coda that doubled down on bigotry and some of the worst language yet.
I read Preston’s Tyrannosaur Canyon on vacation ages ago and liked it, so despite struggling with this one I’m still eager to reread that and check out the rest of the Wyman Ford books. Hopefully they’re a little more fun and a lot less dated in their perspective.
Rating: 2.5 stars
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📕 Buy The Codex on Amazon
Murder by Numbers, a Picross/Phoenix Wright mashup with a solid story and super fun characters, is currently the free game on the Epic Games Store and is def worth a download. I played it on Switch, but would also be great game for ROG Ally or Steam Deck (if you’ve got Epic on it).
A relatively thin personal memoir that tried too hard to be a business book and to cover every one of Fils-Aimé professional life events instead of going particularly deep on anything interesting. Considering the name, tagline, and cover art of the book more focus on Nintendo.
The behind the scenes moments with the late Satoru Iwata were the most interesting but Fils-Aimé memoir lacks much real introspection or insight into what was happening at Nintendo during his time there. 200 page book and only 7 pages or so are spent on the failure of the Wii U and the launch of the Switch.
He still seems just as proud of the Bigfoot Pizza as he does of his time at NOA, despite mentioning in the book that the pizza wasn’t very good and had to stop selling it relatively quickly because it was negatively impacting the overall sentiment of Pizza Hut’s pizza. But I guess it was a marketing success and that’s all he cares about?
I definitely already had opinions on hiring sales people as president/CEOs and nothing in this book really dissuaded me of that sentiment.
I only really know Reggie from his E3 stage presentations, and while this book makes him seem like a pretty decent person it also is written as if he thinks he is the smartest person ever and Nintendo would still be making the Ultra Hand and Love Testers if it wasn’t for him. I’m not sure if that’s really how he feels but the way the book is written frequently comes off that way.
I’m probably just not the target demographic for business dude memoirs and should be reading investigative journalism and history books instead of this.
While it would be more accurate, I guess “Wichita Artificial Water Feature We Turn Off When It’s Hot” is probably too long to be the name of a city.
Rudy’s has always been “just ok” but accessible barbecue, but whoever made the decision to replace Big Red with Pepsi products deserves to be kicked in the nuts.
Its totally reasonable that two bros or even three bros might want to start a pizza shop. Beyond that? Madness. But Daily Show writer Dan Amira used his newly found free time to find the restaurant with the highest number of brothers. “Maybe there is no upper limit to restaurant brothers. Maybe it’s infinite.” (via kottke)
First Jeremy Logan book where Jeremy Logan was actually the main character and so far the worst of the series. Both the general premise and the actual events in this book were the weakest so far (IMO), and even worse Logan himself is the least interesting main protagonist. There’s just not a lot of personality or backstory there despite the fact that he at least existed in two previous novels.
I’m flying through these audiobooks on Libby super fast so unless book 4 falls off a cliff I plan to keep going but hopefully the characters and mysteries of the next books in Child’s series are much stronger.
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I don’t know how old I was when I first saw this (or more accurately small parts of it) as a kid but to this day I remembered being totally terrified of Audrey II. Turns out still totally creeped out by it.
Finally decided to actually sit and watch it on Max after watching the really great Howard Ashman doc on Disney+. Music is great and so is Rick Moranis but man it is just so, so weird.
I don’t know what to call the style of humor from late 70s to 80s but “whatever fully weird Steve Martin thinks is funny” I just don’t personally find funny at all. (I like a lot of Steve Martin movies from this era just not when he goes full Steve Martin.)
Had hoped my musical loving kid would be into this but she’ll definitely think it’s too scary and “old”. Oh well. Glad I finally caught up with it.
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💿 Buy Little Shop of Horrors on Blu-ray