Pragmata (Xbox Series X)

I heard someone say this game would have felt at home on the Xbox 360. I must have been playing the wrong 360 games, because this felt fresh and new, and it clicked with me immensely. The combat is straightforward enough third-person action, but it takes on a different element when your robot partner is also manipulating enemies at the same time. This hacking is far more useful than the gun damage, so it winds up splitting the players attention in a neat way. Save for the final boss, I never found any combat encounters to be particularly difficult. This meant it was never a drag when entering into an arena between objectives, which is good since the puzzles and layout of the levels were also so enjoyable. If the combat didn't work, it would have ruined the pacing. Instead, I enjoyed it all the way through, exploring and fighting. The story worked enough, too, to make me believe what the characters had gone through. It doesn't necessarily need a sequel, but more people should play this one.

Good Boy (2025)

The first Spooktober watch of the year. This is a horror movie with one singular gimmick, but that gimmick really works. Generic supernatural entity affects a sick and dying man, but the sole character of any real focus is his dog. In fact, humans, or at least their faces, are mostly obscured the entire film. I was intrigued from the time I heard the premise, and it honestly delivered. The film is scary; the dog is cute. The scariness of the film is made all the better reading the making-of process after the fact. The dog’s behavior is impressive, but the behind-the-scenes make it sound like even getting 70 minutes was a miracle. I look forward to Indy’s long and meritorious acting career.

2312 – Kim Stanley Robinson

In science fiction, it’s easy to get lost in the unfamiliar, but what struck me in reading this novel was how much that was not the case. The story was completely set within our solar system, not venturing to other galaxies. Fine art and political superpowers were largely recognizable and not invented. The threat was AI and robotics, not some fantastical alien race. Even the mystery was being investigated by an inspector. The actual science fiction was engaging but not too dense. If we really are in the twilight of humanity (mostly kidding?) this was an excellent book to read for the end times.

The Prestige (2006)

For whatever reason, this was always the last Christopher Nolan film I hadn’t seen (until, now, The Odyssey), so I decided on a whim to change that. As his last film pre-Dark Knight, I was curious what kind of spectacle this would present. While I used to enjoy him a lot more, I am fairly hit-or-miss on Nolan these days. As a result, I will always sort of wonder how this would have affected me if I saw it as an impressionable teenager. Seeing it today, after two decades of Nolan twists and turns, this didn’t engage me as much as I suspect it would have then. I didn’t guess the twist—mostly for lack of trying, which is my default mode for mysteries—but I wasn’t all that impressed even when it all came together. Credit where it’s due, I am a sucker for asynchronous storytelling, and this film had that in spades. Also, my goodness, even having now seen this, I (like most people, if the internet is to be believed) will never be able to separate it in my head from the other magician mystery movie from the same year, Edward Norton’s vehicle The Illusionist. I had hoped seeing at least one of the two would clear that up in my mind but apparently not. That probably does a disservice in some direction, but I can’t tell which.

The Intentions of Thunder – Patricia Smith

I’m a bad English major, and I’m also a bad judge of poetry. Try as I might, the language regularly flies over my head. As such, unless I am particularly moved, I have a difficult time describing what is “good” versus what is not. On a technical level, I recognize this is beautiful collection of writing. It is a long, full collection, though the individual pieces are not dense and plodding. I found her sonnets to be the standout type of the form. Though I do not know background detail on the author, I appreciate it being a career retrospective. This is highlighted by all the different national and global events that influence the art throughout the course of the collection. I will also say, I got into the rhythm more than I typically do with poetry. While reading, I found myself imagining the lyricism of what some of these pieces would sound like when performed aloud. That alone tells me this was worth the time to read.