… unsuccessful!

I was really on things for the first two days, and was able to get most of the Terms and both of the Rippers fully done. Subsequently, I managed to piss away the next couple of days chorin’ and doing errands and made very little progress.

Then, I was lucky enough to be able to spend most of the weekend gaming, not painting. That’s objectively great but it didn’t help with the silly goal.

I was able to play some Alpha Strike on Saturday:

and Warhammer 10E Boarding Action on Sunday:

Monday and today were spend on the Tyranid grind… but I could tell I wasn’t going to get things completed before I went back to work on Wednesday.

That’s OK: if I’d been a bit more focused on Thursday or Friday, I think I might have managed it, but it wasn’t mean to be.

Test model done and satisfactory

Models basecoated.

Let’s rock.

I’ve got a week plus off, and obviously I need to spend that time poorly. So: I’ve built the Tyranid CP out of Leviathan and I’m gonna see if I can get it painted before I go back to work.

May was kind of a lost month for me: a lot of waiting for the end of the month to just get here already.

The Fisherman, John Langan

As I spent most of the month worrying about the mortality of my spouse, I gotta say: The Fisherman, which has men becoming widowers as as much of a recurring theme as it does angling, is probably the first time I’d have welcomed a Content Warning. Despite that, or perhaps because of it, the novel was a surprise and a delight. Spooky, evocative, creepy. Everything I could have hoped for it.

I’m a big sucker for when a nested story nests a story and so forth, and Langan gave me something nested five, six levels deep? It’s goofy, and I’m here for it.

Strongly, strongly recommended.

Perry Mason, S2

I just read that Perry Mason wasn’t picked up for a third season, which is a goddamned shame.

It’s truly one of the bleakest shows I’ve watched in recent memory. I think when we think of “Perry Mason” we’re supposed to think of the triumph of justice, but that’s not what this century’s adaptation gives us. It gives us abject poverty, corruption, and lawlessness. This season made Los Angeles feel like the only thing that distinguished LA from the Deadwood of the 2004 Deadwood show (one of my all time favorites) is that LA deludes itself that it’s something other than camp set up on someone else’s home, full of predators abusing everyone they can, including each other.

It’s excellent: even if this is all we get, it’s great.

Boltgun

Boltgun came out at the end of the month, and I haven’t had the chance to really wallow in it too much yet but boy does it feel perfect.

The gameplay is fast and fluid. The tone is flawless. The classic Doom vibe is so on-point.

I had high expectations for it and when, early in the game, you just drop several stories to land on a cultist, exploding him into cloud pixelated gore… I knew it was everything it could be.

Gotta finish these guys

(I failed to post one of things last month, so I’m gonna do it now and backdate it. Deal with it!)

The Suicide Motor Club, Christopher Buehlman

After March, I was very much on a Buehlman kick. At this point, I’ve read every novel he’s written and I’ll read anything new he puts out.

The Suicide Motor Club is pretty wild: not spooky and disconcerting like Between Two Fires or Those Across the River; it’s more of a World of Darkness fantasy… but that’s not a bad thing.

It’s got vampires, vampire hunters, nuns, and a loose connection to The Lesser Dead, which I also quite enjoyed.

How it Ends

I decided to go on a Netflix queue purge for a couple of weeks in March: just started at the back and either watched it immediately or removed it. And, if something sucked really badly, just drop it and move on. I’ve still, uh, got a ways to go, but I put a pretty significant dent in it.

I recommend doing this: these are things that I thought looked interesting enough to put in the queue but never interesting enough to actually watch, and although that meant I got a lot of duds I also got a lot of surprisingly watchable films. It also felt a lot like being a kid and just watching whatever mid-tier film cable TV was serving up that Saturday afternoon: rarely incredible but always good enough to keep watching it.

How it Ends, was stand out of these. It’s small film, about a guy and his father-in-law going from one place to the next while the world is in the process of ending. What that apocalypse is: never said, and that’s perfect… because it’s not about that. I don’t know what I expected from it, but it overdelivered.

The Diplomat

This went into the queue while I was doing that purge and I hit it pretty quickly. I was very frustrated by the season ending… it ends on a cliffhanger and the season doesn’t really have an arc that gets resolved, which is something too many shows do these days and I will not abide it!

But: what’s there is extremely compelling. I can’t think of the last show I was so eager to hurry up and get back to in the way I did The Diplomat.

I’m really looking forward to the next season: I just hope the show fucking goes somewhere with it.