All About Ready Player One

A few days ago, a trailer and poster for Steven Spielberg's adaptation of Ernest Cline's Ready Player One came out, and everyone had a hearty chuckle at the protagonist's bizarrely elongated leg. But it also served as a launching-off point for a discussion on how bad the book is, with choice excerpts flying thick and fast across twitter.

This is kind of a strange situation, because when Ready Player One came out back in 2011 it was an instant hit among the online geek crowd, seemingly universally beloved. For years afterwards, it felt as though most people who read the book, liked it; even my own negative review was more muted than outright hostile. Then Ernest Cline released a follow-up that was pretty much universally panned, even by people who loved his first outing, and opinion on Ready Player One soured via that strange phenomenon of internet collective opinion-making that also turned The Phantom Menace from the most exciting movie in the world to the worst (and which now, oddly, seems to be in the middle of exonerating it again).

To be clear, I'm not suggesting that the twitter hive-mind is wrong on this one. I dipped back into Ready Player One and yes, it's bad. It's bad in all the ways I remember it being bad when I first read it, and it's also bad in ways that I somehow missed the first time around. Here, in bulleted list form, are the salient points you need to know so you don't have to bother reading the thing for yourself (spoilers, obviously):

1. Ready Player One takes place in the year 2044, but its teenage protagonists are all obsessed with pop culture from the 80s. Not only are they completely uninterested in whatever entertainment and commercial art is coming out in their own time (to the point where it seems as if there is none), it begins to feel as though all movies, games and music made after the mid-90s were somehow erased from history, barring a handful of exceptions like The Matrix. 
2. The book exists more or less entirely to deliver 80s references, which it does in the same manner as those pop-culture mash up t-shirts that have Deadpool cosplaying as Darth Vader or whatever. This is best demonstrated by the scene where the protagonist arrives at a virtual party in a flying DeLorean that has the Ghostbusters logo on the doors and also the KITT AI from Knight Rider (yes, of course he also has a lightsaber). The entire book is like this; it's not so much a celebration of old school geek culture as it is a regurgitation, the author constantly tapping the reader on the shoulder and asking "Hey, you know what this thing is, right? Right? You get the reference, right?"
3. All of the main characters are very clearly expressing Ernest Cline's own opinions, regardless of how little sense that makes. At one point, the main character laments that cereal manufacturers don't put toys in cereal boxes anymore, even though he has never personally experienced this and only knows about it from watching 80s cereal commercials--which is a thing that he does, for some reason.
4. There are two Japanese characters in the book. This sit in the traditional seiza position and talk about honour and their ancestors all the time. At first I thought they were meant to be roleplaying--they're as obsessed with old samurai movies as the American characters are with Ghostbusters and Star Wars--but they keep doing this even when they show up in the real world.
5. The book is extremely blatant wish-fulfillment. The main character goes on a quest to inherit the fortune of a vaguely Steve Jobs-esque tech mogul, which his trove of 80s knowledge (of course) allows him to do better than any of the millions of people competing with him for the prize. He shows up the rich corporate snobs trying to get the money ahead of the plucky nerds, gets a hot girlfriend, and becomes a multi-millionaire at the end of the book. Nothing ever seriously goes wrong for him. He spends a portion of the middle of the story struggling with depression and gains a large amount of weight, but manages to overcome both issues easily through the application of technology. At one point he sells himself into indentured servitude in order to access the evil corporate villain's headquarters; this plan goes off without a hitch, and presents absolutely zero tension at any point.
6. At one point, the main character discovers that his virtual best pal--who presented in cyberspace as a fit, white, straight dude--is actually an overweight black lesbian. As far as I can tell, this occurs solely to highlight what a totally woke and open-minded guy the protagonist is. Their relationship continues on with zero problems or conflict, and they have no trouble relating to each other in real life as well as they did online (after this twist, this character's role in the plot severely diminishes, which makes me suspect they were written into the book solely for this purpose).
7. At the end of the book, the characters all decide to leave the virtual world behind and embrace reality. This makes no sense. The near-future America they live in is a poverty-wracked hellhole, teetering on the brink of ecological collapse and ruled by all-powerful corporations. Cyberspace is the only way most people can get an education, socialize safely, express themselves or experience what it's like to live in a world that isn't a dystopian nightmare. There is zero actual reason for them to declare that actually it's bad and the real world is good, except that Ernest Cline thought these kinds of stories had to end with moral lessons about how the real world is superior to the digital one.
8. Actually wait, there is a reason for them to do that: they're now rich beyond their wildest dreams, so they can just buy their way past all the bad stuff that they were using cyberspace to escape from. This is not acknowledged at any point.

All that said, I will give the book credit for one thing: it has the characters become rich (even before winning the grand prize) and famous due to their exploits online and starting streaming web-channels that are watched by millions, which given that the book came out in 2011 is a pretty good prediction of the phenomeon of Twitch and Youtube celebrities (PewDiePie only hit a million subscribers in 2012, so Cline was pretty ahead of the curve with this).

The Crimes of Johnny Depp

Last year, I went to see Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them and ended up liking it a lot more than I thought I would, having not assumed that I was in the target audience for a Harry Potter prequel/spin-off. In fact, I liked it so much that I found myself pretty invested in the next movie in the planned five-part series.

Except there was a bit of a catch. See, Fantastic Beasts was based on a novelty in-universe tie-in book which was itself spun out of a textbook glancingly mentioned in the first Harry Potter novel (because Hollywood is a shining cauldron of pure, unfiltered creativity) and mostly told a self-contained story about a lovable buffoon chasing some monsters around New York. Then, right at the end, it turned into an epic Harry Potter prequel detailing a confrontation with an evil wizard that was discussed during the action of the main Harry Potter books. It did so by introducing this character, Gellert Grindelwald:

I want to assure you that this is the least ridiculous image of him I could find; in the actual movie, he looks even more like a boiled egg with a porcupine taped to it.

So that was kind of discouraging, especially since Grindelwald had been played (kind of) by Colin Farrell up until that point, who seemed way more like a proper villain and didn't look like a boiled egg. I was kind of hoping that J-Ro and the film's producers would quietly retcon this disastrous bit of character design for the sequel and just lock Farrell in for the next four movies. Alas, it was not to be: the second movie has been given a (incredibly stupid) title and a first image, which confirms that egg-Grindelwald is still part of the plan.

Now, back when the first movie came out, there was another reason why people were disgruntled with all of this: Grindelwald was played by Johnny Depp, whose then-estranged (now-former) wife Amber Heard claimed had beaten and abused her. At the time, this was met with the sort of reaction from the wider public that celebrity "scandals" usually were: a brief spike of outrage, and then almost everyone more or less forgot about it. Hell, I didn't even think to mention it in my review of the movie; one of my blog readers brought it to my attention.

But that was then. You might have noticed that things have changed in the last month and a half.

To say that Hollywood is cleaning house would be inaccurate (Brett Rattner doesn't seem to have suffered any consequences yet), but powerful, once-untouchable men are having their careers ended more or less overnight due to allegations of sexual abuse and harassment. This has even taken the form of a major role in a fully-shot movie being recast, something that would have seemed unthinkable before. And given the new climate, a lot of people are figuratively glancing at Depp's involvement in the Fantastic Beasts movies and saying "Nice franchise you've got there, be a shame if anything were to happen to it" while leaning against a doorframe and chewing a toothpick in a vaguely threatening manner.

On one hand, this makes perfect sense; most of the allegations against Weinstein, Spacey etc revolve around events from years or even decades ago, so if they should be held accountable for those actions then Depp absolutely should be as well for something he is alleged to have done last May. I think this is where the majority of the outrage stems from.

But on the flipside, after trawling the Harry Potter fandom circles a bit, I can't help but suspect that there's a significant portion of people calling for Depp's firing who don't actually care about his abuse, and just see a potential opportunity to boot him and his goofy-ass hair from the franchise going forward. Which, if true, would be terrible. I'm of the opinion that "fandom" as a capital-t Thing has a strong tendency to be really toxic and negative as an online social force, but co-opting a revolution in how we respond to sexual and physical abuse in the entertainment industry would be a new low.

As for my own opinion, I absolutely think that Warner should have ditched Depp when Heard's allegations first came to light, but that they are probably not going to. It would have been extremely easy to do before the first movie came out--Depp is in it for all of thirty seconds and his involvement had been kept secret until days before the movie came out--whereas his role in The Crimes of Grindelwald (ugh) is probably far more substantial. It's not too late, the movie is still a year away and probably has the vast majority of its post-production left, but I don't think they'll do it.

And because of that, I won't be paying to see the movie when it comes out. I'd encourage anyone reading this not to, either.

What I've been reading lately

I didn't read as many books over the last few months as I wanted to, but the ones I did read had maximum impact.

Darkmouth - Shane Hegarty

There seems to be a rash of prominent middle grade books by Irish authors recently, and Darkmouth is one of the more notable. It presents a fun universe and a protagonist you want to root for right off the bat, although it perhaps expects you to keep rooting for him a bit too long--I found Finn's constant treadmill of failure kind of repetitive after a while.

The Sympathizer -  Viet Thanh Nguyen

One of those rare literary novels with an ambitiously expansive scope--the kind that some critics might be tempted to describe as being about, like, humanity, man--that comes close to justifying the praise. Come for the writing, stay for the deliciously acerbic critique of American culture.

And he has another book out next year!

The official Ronan Wills Did Not Finish Pile for October 2017

I start a lot of books. I don't always finish them. Sometimes this is the book's fault, sometimes it's not (this is particularly true lately, as medical issues sometimes render me unable to read even if I want to). Here are the ones I didn't finish lately.

Alias Grace by Margeret Atwood

I got halfway through this, and then a certain other book we'll discuss below came along and demanded my attention. I definitely mean to go back to it.

A Place Called Perfect by Helena Duggan

I feel bad about this one, because it's another prominent middle grade debut by an Irish author, and I feel like I need to represent the home team. The premise was interesting, but the story was just a bit too meandering in the early going. I might give it another shot.

SPQR by Mary Beard

At the end of August, I was suddenly taken by a desire to read some Roman history, and this is the Roman history book nearly everyone recommends. Unfortunately, a rogue migraine swarm stopped me in my tracks a third of the way in.

In Progress: La Belle Sauvage by Phillip Pullman

I rushed out and got this as soon as the positive reviews hit, being something of a fan of the earlier His Dark Materials books. So far, it's not impressing me all that much, mainly due to flat characters and a story that takes its sweet time cohering into anything solid. From what I've read, the second half is distinctly more His Dark Materials-ey, so we'll see.

On my to-read list

Here's what I want to tackle next, on no particular timeline:

Nevermoor: The Trials of Morrigan Crow by Jessica Townsend

The Girl Who Drank The Moon by Kelly Barnhill

Winterglass by Benjanun Sriduangkaew

Every Heart a Doorway by Seanan McGuire

The Wizards of Once by Cressida Cowell

Dropbox's Baffling Visual Redesign

I know my blogging efforts have never been about digital or graphic design (insofar as they've ever been about any one topic for more than three weeks or so), but today I want to talk about a story that affects me personally.

I really like Dropbox. It's the one app that I feel actually improves my life in a measurable way. I genuinely think cloud storage is an epoch-making innovation, in that it was the first step towards completely doing away with static, hard media (and never mind that it's so legendarily insecure that I can't use it for any purpose at my IT security job). And now, after years of seeing the comforting blue box on my devices, they've gone and changed how it looks.

Now granted, the old Dropbox aesthetic was kind of aggressively uninteresting, sporting a blue and white look that resembled some sort of default template, but the new, overhauled appearance is baffling in a way that makes me wonder if it's some sort of elaborate trolling attempt. The icon is now enclosed in a circle, something I thought we had universally agreed to leave back in 2014 (you know, all the way back then), and sports a jarring purple and hypothermia-blue colour scheme.

But that's nothing compared to the website. Dear god, the website.

One one hand, I admire a company willing to break completely from the minimalist design language that the internet and tech world has been using since shortly after the turn of the century. There is something bold and even noble about untethering oneself from the shackles of convention, leaping headlong into the uncharted void.

On the other hand, this is what they came up with:

If you told me this was a screenshot of a website from 1998, I'd believe you. Hell, I'd buy that it was from 1988 if I didn't know that there weren't any websites back then. That font, those clashing colours, the...whatever is happening in that image, all combine to activate visual processing components in my brain that haven't fired since the Bondi Blue iMac was on sale. It looks like it came from an alternate timeline where we invented cloud storage in the 90s.

For a while, I've been musing on the fact that the current digital aesthetic will one day go out of fashion and seem ridiculous and quaint, just like the look and feel of products and the internet and advertising from the 90s and early 00s now seem embarrassing and baffling, and I've wondered what trends will be in place in ten years time. What will "modern" look like in 2028?

Apparently, it will look like 1998. Time is an Ouroboros, forever eating its own tail and returning to the ground state of existence, which is a print magazine ad for internet service providers back when 56k modems were the hot new thing.

Ronan's Spooky Mysteries: UFOs and alien abductions

Yes, that's right. I'm going to comprehensively debunk the entire phenomenon of UFOs and their associated activities, right here in this blog post. Hold on to something, here we go!

It's mostly just planes, and some nightmares.

Okay, let's get a little more in depth.

Since the advent of flight technology, many people have reported sightings of unknown craft. Some people claim to have met the inhabitants of these vehicles, or to have been abducted by them. And yet, there's very little actual proof for any of it (note how the prevalence of purported UFO photos has gone down as everyone started carrying HD cameras with them at all times), and abductees stories usually vary widely on basic details like what the aliens look like and where they're from. Is it really possible that Earth is being regularly visited by hundreds of alien species, and yet no one has ever managed to take a clear, unambiguous photo of one of them or their vehicles? Or is something else going on?

Here's a list of mundane phenomenon which, taken together, I believe explain 99.9% of all UFO sightings and abduction stories (we'll get to that remaining 0.01% at the end).

1. Planes

No, really.

Airplanes, under certain conditions, can look remarkably like the classic disc-shaped UFO, especially if you don't leave close to an airport and aren't used to seeing them (it's notable that most UFO sightings occur in rural or wilderness areas).

I've personally witnessed this myself: during the day, a plane at certain angles can reflect sunlight in such a way that its shape is obscured, making it look like a metallic disk until it changes position. And at night, a banking plane's wing and tail lights can align in such a way that they look as if they're set on the top and bottom of a horizontally-oriented craft; this is especially true if the actual body of the plane isn't visible due to darkness. Planes flying through fog or clouds can take on the appearance of a "ball of light", as their front lights illuminate the moisture in the air and hide the light's actual source.

And wouldn't you know it, the three most commonly-reported types of UFOs are metallic disks, disks with blinking lights on the top and bottom, and balls of mysterious light.

2. Spooky spooky nightmares

But what about abduction stories, or stories where people claim to have had close encounters (of the third kind, even) with alien spacecraft? There's a good explanation for them, too.

If you dig deep into the annals of UFO lore, you'll start to notice commonalities between abduction experiences. They almost always occur at night, and are usually preceded by a) the abductee waking up in bed and realizing something spooky is happening or b) the abductee driving late at night and witnessing spookiness in their vicinity.

For the "wake up in bed" variety, the explanation is probably a phenomenon called hypnopompic hallucinations. This is a phenomenon where you essentially keep dreaming after waking up, causing brief, vivid hallucinations. It can often be accompanied by sleep paralysis, where the brain's mechanism to paralyze the body during sleep (which is a thing that apparently happens) doesn't shut off. Bouts of mysterious paralysis are another common feature of night-time abduction stories.

Hypnopompic hallucinations aren't indicative of wider psychological issues; a person can experience them without having any other form of hallucination, and they can be single occurrences, where a person suffers one, very vivid bout and then never has another occurrence again. Given all of that, it's easy to see why someone would take their vision at face value, especially if they're not aware of the phenomenon beforehand.

The "driving at night" abductions are a bit more interesting. These cases almost always happen when the person is driving alone, very late, on lonesome roads; they happen most often in America, and the person usually discovers after their experience that a chunk of time has passed that they can't account for--sometimes, much longer than the actual encounter seemed to take. They also often find themselves parked by the side of the road some distance from their last location, with no memory of how they got there.

So, try this on for size: our abductee is driving along a long, straight road (such as are found in many parts of the US) at night. They get sleepy and nod off without realizing it. While in this state, they either dream or hallucinate an encounter with a UFO. The car gradually rolls to a stop at the side of the road. Several hours later the abductee wakes up, having no clear idea of how they got where they are or how much time has passed, with muddled memories of seeing something strange in the sky or encountering inhuman beings.

The theory is that this sort of thing actually happens way more than anyone thinks, but most cases end with the driver crashing into something and dying; but under very particular circumstances, they survive the experience with a spooky story to tell.

But wait, you might be saying, what about all those really elaborate tales of people meeting friendly aliens and going for galactic road trips through space? They can't be explained as dreams or momentary hallucinations, can they? Well, ignoring the possibility that the abductee just made the whole thing up (an explanation that "UFO researchers" seem oddly oblivious to), many of these stories aren't actually part of the initial encounter, but are "recovered" later through techniques like hypnosis. 

I could go into a whole big digression here, but the long and short of it is that recovering suppressed memories via hypnosis (along with all other efforts at getting people to remember things they've supposedly forgotten) is extremely dubious. It's extremely easy for the examiner to influence the subject to create false memories, which can lead to all sorts of havoc (see the 1980s satanic panic, which was heavily fueled by this sort of thing).

Curiously, the subjects of these techniques often subconsciously reach for cultural or fictional imagery when creating their memories; in the Betty and Barney Hill case, the aliens they "remembered" encountering through hypnosis were found to have striking similarities to aliens from an episode of The Outer Limits that had aired a few months before their experience. The now-famous "grey" aliens appeared in Close Encounter of The Third Kind before anyone claimed to encounter them for real.

There's historical precedent for this. Before the advent of powered flight, and during a time when the word "invasion" in the west conjured images of foreign rather than interstellar invasion, people reported seeing advanced airships beyond the capability of current technology, piloted by odd foreigners in strange clothes. Before that, "abductions" were perpetrated by fairies or similar beings, or had religious connotations. 

It's interesting to speculate what form these experiences might take in the future, as UFOs and aliens slowly fall out of cultural cache. The "scary clown" thing from last year could give us a clue: in an internet-connected world, where it's easy for isolated incidences or hoaxes to be woven together into a larger narrative, will we start dreaming of sinister criminal conspiracies or shadowy forces lurking outside of the digital world?

Ronan's Spooky Mysteries: MH 370

AKA the one you've heard of before.

Malaysian Airlines flight 370 vanished on the 8th of March, 2014, en route to Beijing. Its disappearance triggered the largest search operation in aviation history. To date, only scattered fragments of the craft have been found, washed up on shores thousands of miles from its projected final location. The crash site has not been located, and now that the search has been called off, it's likely that it never will be.

The actual events leading up to the disappearance of MH 370 aren't particularly noteworthy (although as we'll see, there are a few Certified-Spooky™ details). The reason the case captured public attention is because it flies in the face of our perception of how the modern world works. The era of something the size of a passenger jet vanishing without a trace is supposed to be long over, ended by the advent of GPS satellites and wireless transponders. But MH 370 reminds us that the world is a big, big place, and even something as mighty and impressive as an airplane is really only an insignificant dot compared to the breadth and depth of the Pacific ocean.

Naturally, this has also led to a cloud of conspiracy theories of varying degrees of implausibility. Rather than focus on those (although if you want to, it's possible to truly go down the rabbit hole with this one), let's take a look at some of the more plausible scenarios for what could have happened to the flight.

One of the more popular theories is that the plane's captain, Zaharie Ahmad Shah, deliberately crashed it in an act of mass murder-suicide; this has unfortunately happened multiple times before, so the idea isn't far fetched. There's some circumstantial evidence to back the theory up, like the plane seemingly going off-course to swing by the island Shah lived on before heading out to the middle of the Indian ocean and details about his personal life that may have precipitated such a desperate act, but nothing truly concrete.

New York magazine got an intriguing scoop last year that many took as a smoking gun of Shah's guilt: a reconstructed flight path from his personal flight simulator that bears an uncanny similarity to MH 370's final flight, even including the odd north-west diversion toward his home island that the plane took on the night it vanished. But this might not be as telling as it appears. Shah is known to have made a lot of runs on the simulator; since we don't have precise details of the other simulated flight paths, it's entirely possible he ran dozens of flights over the Indian ocean just for the lulz, and whoever gave the magazine the information simply cherry-picked the one that most closely resembled MH 370's flight path. The actual investigators in the case also declared that nothing unusual was found in the simulator logs, which would seem to indicate that this route isn't as sinister in context as it seems.

Personally, the plane's odd behaviour during its final flight make me think more of a malfunction or crew incapacitation scenario than a pilot hijacking. If you were going to deliberately crash the plane, why not just do it shortly after take-off rather than leaving it to drift for hours over the ocean before running out of fuel? People have suggested that Shah didn't want the wreckage found, but if you're at the stage where taking hundreds of people down with you seems like a good idea, I'm not sure you'd be overly concerned with hiding the evidence afterwards.

Another plane actually managed to get in contact with MH 370 shortly after air traffic controllers realized something was wrong, but the captain reported only getting static and "mumbling sounds" in response. One of the suggested culprits for the disappearance is that the crew may have been rendered unconscious by a lack of pressure or oxygen for some reason, which would explain both this and the strange zig-zagging path the plane took before (apparently) heading off into the ocean in a straight line: perhaps Shah and his co-pilot were slowly being incapacitated in some way, tried to turn around and make an emergency landing, then either fell unconscious or died, leaving the plane to drift until it ran out of fuel. The image of a 777 full of unconscious people flying through the night is certainly eerie.

An intriguing story ran on the Daily Telegraph website three days after the disappearance, about a British woman who claimed to see a plane on fire in the approximate area that MH370 was thought to have flown through. Take it away:

I saw something that looked like a plane on fire,” she said. “Then I thought I must be mad. It caught my attention because I had never seen a plane with orange lights before so I wondered what they were… It looked longer than planes usually do. There was what appeared to be black smoke behind it."

“Since that’s not something you see every day, I questioned my mind. I was looking at what appeared to be an elongated plane glowing bright orange, with a trail of black smoke behind it. It did occur to me that it might be a meteorite . But I thought it was more likely that I was going insane.”

“There were two other planes well above it — moving the other way — at the time. They had normal navigation lights. I remember thinking that if it was a plane on fire that I was seeing, the other aircraft would report it.”

So, okay, that's not really very convincing, especially since it's the kind of story you could easily make up and no one would be able to prove you were lying (although the bit about the plane being "elongated" is the kind of weird detail that you wouldn't necessarily put into a total fabrication, which makes me think this woman did see something, even if it wasn't MH370). But it's a good example of how the case has taken on bone fida urban legend status.

Ultimately, the mystery of MH370 will continue until the wreckage is found--and with the GDP-smashing search having ended at the beginning of this year, that might never happen. There's a lot of ocean out there.

Ronan's Spooky Mysteries: Missing 411

If you go onto the weird part of Amazon, you'll find a large number of ostensibly non-fiction books predicated on the idea that people are disappearing in America's woods under mysterious and Certified-Spooky circumstances. My favourite example is the no-nonsense HUNTED IN THE WOODS, which features a scary clown.

By far the most famous brand in the hot-ticket People Vanishing In The Woods genre is the Missing 411 series, written and self-published by David Paulides. The books can be bought on the CanAM Missing Project website, which bills itself as "The first website dedicated to understanding the complexity and issues of searching, rescuing and investigating people missing in the wilds of north America." 

That description is sort of accurate, in the same way that a UFO research site could be billed as "dedicated to understanding the aerodynamics of various objects in flight." Paulides's basic thesis is that people are going missing in US and Canadian national parks and forests at an anomalous rate, often under unusual or mysterious circumstances, and that there's a pattern of similarity in these cases that becomes evident if you examine enough of them.

Actually buying the books was way more time and investment than I was willing to put into a single blog post, so I opted instead to watch the recently-released documentary and some of the podcast and radio interviews that are available on Youtube. I went into the movie with the expectation (reasonable, I think) that it would present the best evidence that Paulides could muster for his idea.

It...doesn't.

The movie focuses mainly on a single case, the disappearance of Deorr Kunz Jr in 2015, cutting away occasionally to five other cases from Paulides's research. Except for a few brief bits of audio from Paulides's radio interview, there's very little in the way of framing or cluing the view into what the overall point is meant to be, which makes me assume this is a project mainly aimed at pre-existing Missing 411 fans rather than a general audience; I can imagine someone watching the whole thing and not realizing it isn't just a documentary about normal missing person's cases.

A big part of the problem is that Paulides (who is mostly absent from the narration apart from the radio interviews) never actually suggests what he thinks is responsible for these mysterious vanishings. According to people who have delved more deeply into the David Paulides Extended Universe, this is par for the course; apparently he does have an idea in mind, but doesn't want to say what it is in public in case people ridicule him for it. Which is a novel approach for a paranormal investigator, I have to admit.

In fact, Paulides is often infuriatingly coy about what point he's actually trying to make, even in direct interviews. He runs--and sells his books through--a bigfoot research organization (which doesn't seem to be the overall solution to the big mystery, at least not in the majority of cases) and will sometimes teasingly emphasise the presence hair or signs of an animal attack, but without actually coming out and saying that he thinks a bigfoot was involved. The entire documentary takes this tone, so that you often have to puzzle through what it is the film is actually trying to claim.

There's a frustrating "just asking questions" aspect to the whole thing, where Paulides and his film-makers will let witnesses and people involved in the case come to the more out-there claims rather than just stating them for themselves.

And when you do parse those claims, most of them are underwhelming, as the "mysterious" aspects of the cases that are meant to point to this overarching mystery are pretty unconvincing. Early on, Paulides states in an interview that many of the disappearances he's looked into involve people with (in his words) "physical impairments or genetic deficiencies" and suggests that people with those traits are being "targeted". I can think of many reasons why people with certain disabilities would be more likely to go missing in difficult wilderness terrain, none of which involve them being snatched away by a supernatural force (or whatever Paulides thinks happened to them).

A lot of the movie is like this. The fact that search and rescue dogs sometimes tried to follow branching trails or led searchers to dead ends is treated as suspicious, even though dogs are known to not be 100% reliable. The remains of very young children are found far from their last known whereabouts and at high elevations, which is flatly stated (again, by interview subjects and not the film-makers themselves; they're just asking the questions, remember) to be completely impossible, which I'm not sure I buy. Elsewhere, remains are said to have been found in places that had already been searched multiple times. I'm really not sure how you can verify that searchers definitely looked in that one particular spot, especially in dense forest (to say nothing of the possibility of animals moving the bodies).

And then we come to Deorr Kunz Jr, the centerpiece of the documentary. The choice to make this particular case the main focus is odd, because it seems increasingly likely that Kunz's parents are responsible for his disappearance; two separate private investigators hired by them to look into the case turned on them and came to the conclusion that they were involved, and the police have named them as persons of interest. The documentary dutifully goes through the facts of the case, including all of the details that make the parents look suspicious as hell, and then at the last minute has to try and exonerate them since that's not the conclusion Paulides wants us to come to.

It's a shame, because the documentary is for the most part well-produced and professional-looking--this isn't some slapdash project that comes off like it was made by cranks to push their pet conspiracy theory--and it gives a good overview of the Deorr Kunz disappearance, a case that seems like it's going to go down in the true-crime annals once all the facts shake out and the dust settles. It would have been nice if the film-makers had waited for that to happen and then applied their obvious documentary-making chops to the subject without Paulides's "research" getting in the way, but they clearly had other priorities.

Ronan's Spooky Mysteries: Henry McCabe and the Smiley Face Killer

On the 8th of September, 2015, 32 year old Henry McCabe went missing after spending the night drinking with two friends. His body was found in a nearby lake, and it was determined that he had drowned, probably as a result of being inebriated.

However, the police noted some odd inconsistencies in the the testimony of his friend William Kennedy, who claimed to have dropped McCabe off at a gas station and who was the last person to see him alive. The discrepancies weren't serious enough to get Kennedy arrested for murder (McCabe's death is still considered an accident), but questions remain about what exactly happened that night.

Oh also, McCabe made a totally spooky phone call to his wife shortly before he died. Yeah, it's another one of those.

The call (which I can't seem to find in its entirety online) consists of McCabe screaming, moaning, and making odd gurgling sounds; the audio is choppy and distorted, and at times you can hear what sounds like growling, and other animalistic noises. Naturally, this led to speculation that McCabe had been attacked by something; if you search around for information about this topic, you'll find a lot of stuff from someone named Dave Paulides hinting at the possibility that he was killed by a bigfoot, or possibly multiple bigfeet (keep that name in mind for the next post).

This idea, along with more believable theories about McCabe being murdered by Kennedy or someone else, face the signficant problem that his body didn't have any defensive wounds or other signs of trauma that you'd expect after a life or death struggle. But at the same time, something clearly happened to the guy, and we've got audio of him screaming in terror right before he died. 

I don't have any theories about what that might have been (although I will say that the sounds on the call seem in line with a disoriented and drunk person who's just fallen into cold water and can't get out), but I wanted to use this case as a lead-in to a wider subject. I think some of the interest in McCabe's death stems not just from the mysterious call but an unwillingness to believe the mundane explanation. The lake McCabe was found in was miles away from any place he would have gone to that late at night and not easily accessible, so how did he end up in the water?

Those questions are often asked about unexplained deaths in water. America in particular seems to be plagued by cases of people (usually young, college-aged men) disappearing and then turning up dead in water with no convincing explanation of how they got there, and at least two former detectives believe that not all of them are accidents. Enter: the smiley face killer theory.

The idea is that there are tons of cases of young men dying in water near conspicuously-placed smiley face graffiti, which are actually the work of a serial killer or killers. Before we get any further, I should say up front that this is almost certainly not true--it's been debunked by everyone from criminal profilers to the FBI, the "evidence" seems like nothing but confirmation bias (drownings and smiley face graffiti are very common; it's only natural that they'd overlap from time to time) and the sheer breadth and number of supposed victims would require a vast network of killers who somehow manage to pull off their murders without leaving a trace of evidence.

But the existence of the theory, and its widespread popularity, speaks to something in the human psyche, a need to draw connections between isolated data points and an unwillingness to believe in random coincidence. In the drowning cases factored into the smiley face killer theory, there's a conspicuous gap in time between the person last being seen at a party or a bar, and their body being discovered in water. When the human mind is presented with white space like this, it immediately tries to fill it in, and thus we get a conspiracy theory.

Ronan's Spooky Mysteries: The Disappearance of Brandon Lawson

Unsolved missing people cases can be vexing for armchair detectives (and anguishing for relatives) because most of them have a distinct lack of clues. In case after case, the same pattern plays out: the person in question vanishes, no evidence of foul play is ever discovered, there was nothing anomalous about their activities prior to the disappearance to explain what happened to them, and no trace of them is ever seen again.

And then there's cases like this, where we have an abundance of clues indicating that something extremely bad happened, but it only deepens the mystery.

On the 8th of August, 2013, then-26 year old Brandon Lawson had an argument with his girlfriend and set off near midnight to drive to his father's house in Texas. Forty-five minutes later, he called his brother to say that he was out of gas and parked on the side of the road. His brother and his brother's girlfriend set off with a gas canister to bail him out.

Unknown to either of them, while they were en route Lawson made a 911 call, and this is where the real mystery starts. Lawson is extremely difficult to make out on the recording of the call--even the 911 dispatcher is having trouble understanding him--but he's obviously in a great deal of distress and asks for the police to come immediately.

This is significant, because Lawson had a warrant for his arrest at the time and seems to have been making some effort to evade the police (when his brother later couldn't find him, he apparently assumed initially that he had moved away from the road for this very reason). The fact that he urgently requested police seems to indicate that he was in an extremely dire situation, potentially one of mortal peril.

The police and Lawson's would-be rescuers arrived at the same time and found Lawson's truck parked somewhat haphazardly. His keys, phone and wallet were missing. Lawson's brother called him again; Lawson answered and said that he was ten minutes up the road and bleeding before the call abruptly cut out. He was never seen or heard from again.

Naturally, a great deal of the amateur sleuthing around this case has gone into decoding the 911 call. Due to a combination of poor audio quality, Brandon's obvious panic and his heavy Texan accent, it's extremely difficult to make out what he's saying, and there are dozens of interpretations. Somewhat unbelievably, the points where the recording are the most garbled appear to be the moments where he's giving the most pertinent information about what the hell is going on. For example, you can pretty easily hear him saying "I'm in the middle of a field" and "my truck broke down", but in between the words are too muddled to make out clearly.

Listening to the call myself, it sounds to me like he's saying something like "a scraper(?) just pushing guys over." "Scraper" obviously doesn't make sense, and I'm pretty sure I'm mishearing that word, but it's been suggested that "pushing guys over" means that Lawson witnessed people being killed by whoever or whatever this "scraper" is. At times in the call it sounds like he's implying there's someone else with him (people have speculated that he may even be talking to someone else at one point), and he seems to state that he "ran into them." The dispatcher takes this to mean that he hit someone with his car, but as there was no sign of this at the scene, it's widely believed that Lawson meant he came upon someone unexpectedly, which led to his current predicament. 

Given all of that, the most plausible scenario I can come up with is that Brandon ran out of gas, got out of his truck for whatever reason (possibly to avoid police by hiding away from the road), wandered into some kind of violent altercation, and was abducted or killed by someone trying to shut him up. This would explain why he suddenly stopped talking at the end of the call--he may have been trying to hide from someone.

Granted, searches of the area didn't reveal obvious signs of violence, but the "field" he mentions was apparently a vast hunting area; if he was running from something (he's pretty clearly out of breath), at night, in terror, it's very possible he ended up getting much further from the road than either he or anyone else realized.

But if he did stumble onto something he shouldn't have, what was it? A No Country For Old Men style drug deal gone wrong? 

There's a slightly more sinister theory doing the rounds. Remember that word I said sounded like "scraper"? Other people hear it as "strooper" or "staper" and have speculated that this was a garbled version of "state trooper" (I've seen people confidently declare that staper is common Texas slang for State Trooper, only for other people presumably from the state to insist that they've never head the word in their lives, so I don't know). Could that explain why the police never managed to find a body despite extensively searching the area Brandon was thought to last be in? Did he come across a police shooting?

A slightly more plausible idea is that Brandon saw someone he thought was a state trooper (or someone else encountered someone they thought was a state trooper--it's difficult to tell at times if he's talking about something that happened to him, or something that he witnessed happening to someone else) but was actually...I don't know. A member of a drug cartel? A serial killer? Someone in the grip of a really bad case of road rage?

Or maybe he's actually saying "sniper." It could be sniper. Or maybe not. It's kind of infuriating that this entire mystery potentially boils down to the interpretation of a single word.

The bottom line is that there's only so much information you can glean from a recording like this, and eventually you just end up investigating the back of your own mind. People have claimed to hear all sorts of stuff on the call that I can't hear, including gunshots and second voices. If no one has managed to work out what the hell the guy is saying after four years of continuous scrutiny, I don't think we're ever going to. At this point, the only way anyone solves this case is by finding Brandon Lawson, alive or dead.

For what it's worth, my personal feeling is that the guy is dead. One popular theory is that he ran away to escape his legal troubles, but if you were going to disappear specifically to avoid police attention, then making a panicked 911 call in the middle of the night where you beg for the police to come to your aid seems like a strange way to kick it off.

Believe it or not, this isn't the only case involving an indecipherable phone call. We're going to look at another one in our next post--one that will lead us down a rabbit hole of mysterious deaths and disappearances.

Ronan's Spooky Mysteries: The Flannan Isles Lighthouse

It's the spooky time of year again, which usually means horror movies, horror games, and other scary media. But this year, I've decided to do something a little different.

I've always been a huge fan of unsolved mysteries and unexplained phenomena. As a child, I used to devour books about ghosts and UFOs. I now consider myself a skeptic (but not the gross Reddit kind) and don't believe that concrete evidence for any paranormal occurrence has ever been found, and my interest has shifted to more earthly mysteries like missing persons and unsolved murders.

Over the course of October, I'm going to share some of my favourite mysteries with y'all, and have a go at coming up with plausible explanations. Join in in the comments!

Our first mystery is the disappearance of the Flannan Isles lighthouse keepers. In 1900, the captain of a ship approaching the outer reaches of the Scottish Hebrides noticed that the lightouse on the remote island of Eilean Mor was unlit. An investigation discovered that the three-man crew was nowhere to be found, and that there was a high concentration of weird clues inside: half-eaten food suggested that the men had abandoned their posts in a hurry, the clock was mysteriously stopped, and the logbook was full of spooky nonsense about the keepers acting strangely, and ended with the eerie phrase "God is over all."

The biggest puzzle of all came from the weather, and the lighthouse keepers' odd discrepancies in recording it. There had been a bad storm on the day of the last log entry, but the logbook stated that the weather was clear. The keepers had recorded a storm, but they claimed it had taken place days earlier, during a time when the weather was known to have been calm. Oh snap! Did they phase into another dimension or something? Were they all high as kites and lost track of the date?

Actually, the explanation is a lot simpler: most of what I just wrote is total BS.

The Flannan Isles light house mystery is a great example of how a spooky story can be embellished over the years. The detail about the uneaten food came from a poem about the disappearance, and was almost certainly influenced by the Mary Celeste case, where a half-eaten meal was discovered on board. The logbook didn't have anything strange in it. The clock was stopped because it was a 19th century design that needed to be wound periodically.

In fact, the first person on the scene noted that everything inside was perfectly tidy and normal, save for two details: a single oilskin coat hanging next to the door and an overturned chair, both of which seem to indicate that one of the keepers had left in a hurry while the other two were outside (the lighthouse was never meant to be left unmanned under any circumstances).

So what happened? The most plausible theory is that two of the keepers were out at the cliff-side hauling supplies up from a storage area when the third spotted a rogue wave approaching and rushed out to warn them; all three of them were then swept away, and their bodies never found. Rogue waves can be extremely unpredictable and dangerous, and the very same part of the island that the accident is speculated to have taken place on was badly damaged by something in the preceding days--possible another rogue wave.

Granted, there is a problem with this theory: the front door and gate of the lighthouse were both locked, and it seems unlikely that someone rushing out to save his colleagues from mortal peril, in such a panic that he didn't stop to put on his raincoat even though there was a storm raging outside, would take the time to lock up on his way out. The combination of the locked doors and the oilskin are the kind of tantalizing detail that give mysteries like this legs, as it's hard to envision a scenario that explains both of them neatly.

What's your take on this? Can you come up with a plausible story?

My review of the first 40 minutes of IT

I tried to see IT last night, and had to leave after about forty minutes. Not because the clown was too spooky, but because of migraines. The human brain: sometimes it sucks.

So here's a review of that first portion of the film, and why I didn't like it very much.

Before we start, I should mention that I have never read the Stephen King novel (King being best--or possibly only--enjoyed in very small doses), nor have I watched the miniseries that a lot of people seem to remember fondly, so I really walked into this with no expectations or preconceptions beyond a desire for scary clown antics. And the movie delivered those, just not in the way I was hoping for.

I'm kind of a giant snob when it comes to horror movies, in that I think the vast majority of mainstream wide-release horror movies totally suck and aren't scary, mostly due to a reliance on jump scares over genuine fear. IT doesn't seem like it falls into that trap, but it's lacking in subtlety in a whole other way.

The part of the movie I saw repeats the same basic format over and over again: there's a scene with the characters hanging out or investigating something, a kid wanders off into an isolated area, they're confronted by a kind of goofy looking monster, then Pennywise runs at them going ARGLEBARGLEBARGLE. Then there's another bit where the characters hang out, then another arglebargle scene, and then another hanging out bit, and then...

It's a very strange structure, like being on a roller coaster that's composed of nothing but an endless sequence of climbs and drops, spaced out so you can always tell exactly when the next one is coming. The movie seems less interested in genuinely scaring its audience than in triggering an adrenaline rush, the "scare" scenes all being accompanied by a deafening score and intense imagery (note that I said "intense" and not "scary" or "disturbing").

The shame of it is that the movie does pull out a few moments of really great, subtle creepiness, as in this scene highlighted by Birth.Movies.Death. The opening encounter between Georgie and Pennywise is also played fairly low-key, at least until Pennywise activates his Monster Mouth and bites the kid's arm off.

Actually, that moment kind of encapsulates everything I didn't like about the movie. The scene ends on a shot of blood running down a storm drain, which I found way creepier and more affecting than the arm biting; I'm willing to bet the entire scene would have turned out much more memorable if you never saw what happened, and just heard Georgie's screams followed by that last, chilling shot.

But no, the movie wants to be VISCERAL and R-RATED and make audiences go BOY HOWDY THAT SURE WAS SCARY GOSH DARN IT (the audience turns into cowboys for some reason). 

Still, I'm glad it's doing gangbusters at the box office. For all its apparent flaws (and I am cognizant of the fact that I'm judging it based on a third of its running time), it's still an ambitious, relatively high-budget horror movie that was clearly created with a lot more care than your average disposable Halloween fodder. Given how trend-based Hollywood is, maybe it will be the impetus for studios to start putting more effort into horror movies from now on. 

Game of Thrones season 7 (contd)

It's time for some Very Important opinions on Game of Thrones' just-concluded seventh season, with full spoilers.

In my last GoT post, I talked about how the show was gradually moving away from being the dark, gritty deconstruction of epic fantasy is started as and toward just being plain epic fantasy. With this most recent episode, that transformation is fully complete.

All of the surviving characters have developed inch-think plot armour, half of them have supernatural powers or near-superhuman combat abilities, there's magic destinies and secret birthrights left and right, and the bad guy is flying around on a zombie dragon that shoots nuclear Godzilla laser-breath. If you mildly toned down the amount of boobs and swearing, you could easily pass this off as an adaptation of a YA novel.

Not that all of this is necessarily a bad thing--because sometimes you've had enough pointless death and misery and just want to see attractive heroes fight scary monster villains with their magic swords--but it does mean that the entire story's priorities are now suspect. Case in point: Jon Snow.

I knew there was something up with Sir Gormsalot as far back as the second season, because he kept making decisions that should have gotten him killed if the same rules that governed everyone else were applied to him (and they did, but then he came back to life). Things got more suspect when the story kept rewarding him despite his being a total dingus: first he became commander of the Night's Watch despite looking about nineteen at the very most, then he was crowned King in the North even though he nearly got all of his friends and allies killed, and now it turns out he's the rightful heir to the Iron Throne and probably the literal Chosen One (and got to sail to the bone zone with Daenerys Targeryan).

Strip away all the surrounding grimdark, and you're left with an absolutely bog-standard fantasy yarn about a mildly downtrodden (but still extremely privileged) youth who rises from a lowly position in life, proves himself, discovers his secret destiny and saves the world while having sex with an attractive woman (who...is actually his aunt, but let's ignore that for now). Unless this is all setup for a spectacularly cruel twist where Jon gets stabbed in the forehead in the first episode of season eight, it feels like a massive betrayal of the show's core principles.

Except it's not, because it turns out all of that grittiness and deconstruction baloney was a smokescreen. This is where the story was always heading: cool, dashing heroes fighting epic battles against zombie laser-dragons. 

I for one fully embrace the cheese, and plan to plunge headfirst into the stupidity come season eight.

In which the NYT bestseller list is corrupted

If you're not clued into the nebulous realm of Book Twitter, you probably missed the fact that there's a bit of a to-do going on at the moment. Specifically, there's been speculation that a debut author might have essentially bought her way into the New York Times bestseller list, possibly as part of some sort of weird effort to bolster a fledgling acting career.

You can read the basic summary here, although more details are coming to light seemingly by the hour*. As ever in cases like this, I'm leery of the possibility of false or incorrect information, but it sounds like there are enough people who know what they're talking about raising a small thicket of red flags in this particular case.

Regardless of what's really going on, it's a good illustration of how strange the mechanics of publishing can be. You sometimes see people asserting that the entire industry is corrupt from top to bottom, a place where influence and "platform" trump merit, success depends solely on who you know, and there's no chance for a genuinely good author to rise to the top if they don't have the right connections. I think that's demonstrably untrue, but at the same time you have to keep in mind that what seems from the outside like a monolithic machine is actually a bunch of discrete entities working at different purposes and goals; if you were inclined to view the NYT list as some sort of sanctioned authority filtering the collective will of everyone involved in book publishing (which is a mindset I see fairly often in writing circles), this should thoroughly refute that idea.

The other reason this case got so much attention is that the book in question is poised to end The Hate U Give's 25-week run on top of the YA bestseller list; Angie Thomas's book is apparently brilliant, timely and eminently worthy of its success (I haven't read it yet), whereas Handbook for Mortals is...

Now I know what I need to write if I want to hit* the NYT Bestsellers list.

On it.

*buy my way to pic.twitter.com/83uGo5ZMdW

— Kosoko Jackson (@KosokoJackson) August 24, 2017

...seemingly not any of those things.

I think I'm going to go buy a copy of The Hate U Give as soon as I finish what I'm currently reading.

*As of literally twenty minutes ago, it seems that the NYT has revised its list to remove Handbook For Mortals, restoring The Hate U Give to its number one spot. YA readers and authors do not fuck around, apparently.

The Long Dark

My video game options have been severely limited over the last seven months by medical issues that make it hard to concentrate on anything with too much difficulty or complexity (or story), so I've been gravitating towards games that don't ask a lot of the player in terms of mechanics. In practice this means I've been playing a lot of games where you walk around and look at things and/or where you walk around and collect things.

Enter The Long Dark, a sandbox survival game that recently left early access. The premise is that a mysterious electromagnetic storm disables all of humanity's technology, instantly plunging the world into a "quiet apocalypse". Your character had the misfortune to be flying over the northern Canadian wilderness when this happened, and now you've got to survive for as long as you can by scavenging abandoned human habitations and bending the hostile landscape and wildlife to your will. Hunger, thirst, exhaustion and temperature all have to be carefully managed, and death is permanent.

There's also a recently-included episodic story, but I've only tried out the survival mode so far. Unfortunately, anything higher than the lowest difficulty setting proved too taxing for me at the moment, so I'm probably not getting the experience the developers intended. Playing on "Pilgrim" mode tones down the survival mechanics to the point where they're not particularly challenging, but preserves them just enough so that they become a nuisance. Playing like this, the game also throws so many items at you that managing your rapidly-expanding inventory becomes a bigger hurdle than surviving the elements.

But I recognize that this is a particular quirk of my personal experience. Even with those caveats, the game has a lot to offer, including some beautiful stylized vistas (as seen in the gallery below) and a lot of atmosphere. The way electric lights flicker weakly to life whenever the aurora appears overhead is a nice touch, both lending a bit of creepiness to interior locations and giving the whole game the kind of mournful quality that a lot of post-apocalyptic stories reach for but never quite achieve. In that respect, The Long Dark reminded me a lot of Cormac McCarthy's The Road despite deliberately not featuring any of the brutality and cruelty of that story (which perhaps suggests that The Road's many imitators were missing the point).

Fault Lines

Earthquakes occur along tectonic fault lines, places where sections of the Earth's crust collide. The pressure builds up slowly, sometimes over decades or even centuries, before releasing in a violent moment of destruction. Some seismically active areas lie on the intersection of multiple fault lines--multiple sources of stress, all converging.

Looking at world events at the moment, it's hard not to see the fault lines combining and intersecting, the pressure building and building, slowly, inescapably. The ongoing disaster that is Donald Trump's presidency; North Korea's increasing belligerence; China's stated willingness to go to war with the US if the situation on the Korean peninsula erupts in the wrong way; and now a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville that seems to have earned endorsement-by-silence from the government. 

North Korea seems the most likely to slip, and it's easy to imagine how the seismic shock could trigger the other fault lines.

Trump over-reacts to an apparent threat by North Korea and retaliates, reversing the erosion of his support and emboldening the wave of white supremacy sweeping across America. 

Trump's ego and desperation to pander to his most extreme supporters causes him to strike first, triggering a war with China. 

North Korea launches a successful missile attack on the US; the resulting surge in nationalism and xenophobia is seized on by the Trump administration in order to facilitate the slide into autocracy that so many of his followers seem to want.

(Astute readers will notice that there's a common factor in all of these scenarios)

Whenever you study the outbreak of war or similarly catastrophic events, you're looking for the fault lines, the places where the pressure builds. It's only in hindsight that you recognize the moment when the earthquake became inevitable, and the only question is exactly which fault line slipped first.

Have we reached that point yet?

I don't know. But then, I wouldn't. We'll just have to wait until the shaking starts.

Food I've eaten: broccoli and grilled chicken rice bowl

I recently made a commitment to start eating healthier so I don't die in my 50s, and I've discovered that real food tastes good. Stop me if I'm going too fast here.

I mean, don't get me wrong, I'll still eat the heck out of a pizza or a wide variety of fried foods, but I also like vegetables and grilled meat. For example: did you know that grilled chicken is great? It retains way more of the juice compared to oven baking, and as such tastes absolutely delicious. I realize I'm a bit late on the uptake here, but you should try it if all of your previous chicken experience has involved either breadcrumbs or the dry, leathery texture of a cooked shoe.

Game of Thrones season 7

We're four episodes into Game of Thrones' truncated penultimate season, and I'm Not Entirely Pleased.

On one hand, plot points that the show has been teasing since literally the first episode have finally happened--Dany is finally in Westeros with her dragons--which is undeniably exciting. But the episodes released so far have also been strangely flat and lifeless, featuring unusually poor dialogue and acting (I suspect the latter is a consequence of the former).

The battle scenes are a prime example of why this season isn't really doing it for me. Game of Thrones has come to be known for big, expensive battle sequences that far outstrip anything else on TV in terms of budget and production value, the standout being last season's "Battle of The Bastards". 

That scene was the culmination of a two-season-long standoff with the show's most loathsome villain, and a major turning point in the saga of the Stark family that began all the way back in episode one. Given how brutal Game of Thrones can be, you knew* there was a very real chance that the Starks would lose and we'd have to watch Ramsay Bolton butcher a bunch of our favourite characters for shock value.

*(Okay, in hindsight it's obvious that wasn't going to happen, but the show did a good job of making it seem like it might)

By contrast, the two big battles this season (and given how expensive these sequences must have been, I seriously doubt there's another one coming) have been random, fairly low-stakes clashes. One major character momentarily seemed to be in danger; the cliffhanger ending implied that another one is in mortal peril. He's probably not, since at this point the cast has been whittled down to characters who obviously have a role to play in the climax of the series and/or are walking plot triggers that have yet to go off.

That's the thing, over the last season or so Game of Thrones has quietly ceased being a dark, grounded story where there are no heroes and villains and anyone can die at any time, and has become the kind of fantasy story its source material was meant to be a refutation of: a low-stakes action-adventure romp featuring near-superhuman badasses who can't die before their story reaches a suitably dramatic moment.

At this point, I'm just left wondering what the endgame is. Do out heroes defeat the white walkers? I'm not sure how satisfying I'd actually find that. People have floated the possibility of a bleak ending where all the bickering over power finally comes back to bite Westeros in the ass, everyone dies, and our last shot is the Night's King ascending the steps to the Iron Throne. The internet would have the biggest meltdown in history, but I'm kind of hoping that's where we leave off.

Books I Read In July

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness - Arundhati Roy

A third of a great novel. I was head over heels for this at the start, but it begins to feel like several stories chopped up and sandwiched together, complete with wildly varying tones and writing styles.

Roy's writing is still powerful and eloquent, but the plot doesn't hold together.

 

The Underground Railroad - Colson Whitehead

Magical-realist history as polemic. I don't need to tell you how timely the story is, but you should know that it's both devastating and captivating. The kind of book where you can't stop turning the pages, even if part of you doesn't want to find out what happens next.

The Essex Serpent - Sarah Perry

Light, bright historical fiction in the mode of Jane Austen (with a possibly-imaginary river serpent). It's cosy and entertaining and the writing is lovely, but you'll see most of the story beats coming a mile off.

 

The Holocaust - Laurence Rees

Rees delivers both an informative oversight and a compelling new investigation of the Holocaust. This book should be your go-to if you want answers to questions about how and why it happened, and the nature of the Nazi leadership's involvement. 

Includes bonus unsettling parallels to current political discourse.