Book Review: Lost Colony: The Untold Story of China's First Great Victory over the West By Tonio Andrade
Tonio Andrade tried to thread the needle between Historical Revisionists and the more traditional historical narratives in * Lost Colony: The Untold Story of China’s First Great Victory over the West*. Though I read a lot of nonfiction History, and listen to a fair bit of historical podcasts, I’m in it for the narrative. I couldn’t tell you . . .
Notes From The Toilet Paper Fort
We are awash in incompetence, avarice, and the worst sort of graft. Yet all of it packages in little containers of ego fed to our brain telling us we're the special ones. That's the two sentences that sum up the thousands of words that were going to go here that could describe just about every aspect of society right now. . . .
Book Review: Drowned City By Don Brown
I picked up Don Brown's Drowned City: Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans when I was in New Orleans as I always like to get a couple of books about the city I travel to for the shelves. (Nothing beats getting Douglas Coupland's City of Glass in Vancouver for combining my literary and travel interests, but that's another . . .
The Worst Game Show
Our ongoing game of Name That Apocalypse rolls into its pandemic phase. With the near shutdown of China and Italy cancelling Carnival come together into a full-blown panic. The market sell-off, CDC cuts, and old Mother-humper Mike Pence merge into a story that typifies a our society of stupidity moving at full speed.
The . . .
Book Review: Dead Astronauts By Jeff VanderMeer
My first crucial piece of advice about Jeff VanderMeer’s newest novel, *Dead Astronauts*is, you should get this book physically if you can. The cover design is gorgeous. The dust jacket is a glossy embossed rainbow, but beneath it, the book itself is embossed with blue foil writing excerpted from the book. Also, throughout the book, there are . . .
Worshiping The Future
This American Life replayed an episode about the founder of cryonics, and it’s a great exploration of how an inadvertent con was born. Two things stood out to me. First, it was how fake the whole thing was from the outside. The other was that it was apparent that everyone believed that the future would deliver a miracle cure for . . .
Book Review - Peter Cannon: Thunderbolt by Kieron Gillen and Caspar Wijngaard
Even though Peter Cannon/Thunderbolt was a standalone character, he’s likely more famous as the inspiration for Ozymandias in Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s Watchmen. A book so ubiquitous it almost defines superheroes despite not having a single character that’s a household name.
Of course, that’s because Moore and Gibbons’ seminal . . .