Spectre Collie

I am a functional adult who totally understood Moxyland

A spoiler-filled dive back into Lauren Beukes’s Moxyland, to reassure myself that I got it

Every time I finish a work of art convinced that I understood what it meant, my brain spends the next few days furiously going back over it to make absolutely sure.

I suspect that Room 237 had a bigger impact on me than I’d originally thought. I’m still haunted, not by the ghosts of murdered Native Americans or the participants of a conspiracy to fake the moon landing, but by the image of people so confidently and forcefully asserting interpretations that were just batshit nonsense.

With Lauren Beukes’s excellent Moxyland, I’m wondering whether I put an overly simplistic and optimistic spin on a story that was intended just to feel like a brutal gut punch.

I don’t normally enjoy stories like this, so I’m not exactly sure how to interpret them. I don’t like dystopian (and especially post-apocalyptic) fiction, since the nihilism always feels like a pointless waste of time. I’m always left feeling like Ebenezer Scrooge, yelling at the Ghost of Christmas Future and asking what was the point in forcing me to see stuff that’s such a downer. And I don’t like stories with unlikeable protagonists, even when they’re trying to teach me something. I read slowly enough that it feels like having to spend too much time with people I hate.

So the question is: is Beukes deliberately manipulating the audience’s sympathies and empathy (and sense of morality), to leave us with the unspoken idea that even if it’s too late for these characters, it’s not to late for us, since we haven’t yet had the humanity crushed out of us?

Or did she simply write a book assuming it would be read by an audience of emotionally mature adults, so my belief that “I got it” is really nothing more than a sign that I’m not a sociopath?

One Thing I Like About Mickey 17

The science fiction comedy about an expendable space colonist and his clones feels like a smarter and subtler movie is running just below the surface.

Mickey 17 is masterfully made. Just in terms of production design and special effects alone: the scenes with Robert Pattinson interacting with his clone could’ve been the showpiece of a different movie, and they were done so seamlessly that it started to feel like it would’ve been cheaper and easier simply to invent an actual machine to print a duplicate of him.

And that’s before we see the Mickeys interacting with swarms of alien creatures — in a snowstorm! — and they all feel so present that I had to keep reminding myself that I was looking at special effects.

But it was overall too broad for me to really love it. It is completely and unapologetically a comedy, almost always avoiding the temptation to deviate into clever satire when a much bigger and more obvious gag is available.

I think Toni Collette is wonderful, but as with a lot of great actors, she clearly chose this project for the chance to let loose, have fun, and go completely over the top. Still, she gets a scene at the end in which she has to be menacingly evil instead of just cartoonishly evil, and it’s so effective that you understand how so few actors would’ve been able to make it work. Mark Ruffalo seems to be feeding off of her energy, and he somehow manages to make his performance in Poor Things feel like restrained naturalism.

A detail that’s a good example of how Mickey 17 is a smart movie playing things cartoonishly broad: the scenes of a new Mickey being printed, which happens a lot, as you might expect from the premise and the title. Each time, the body does a quick jerk back into the machine as it’s rolling out, keeping it from feeling like some miraculous wonder, and instead making it clear that it’s just another ultimately clumsy and analog piece of dehumanizing technology. I loved it as a wonderfully understated gag.

But as more and more Mickeys get printed, the crew becomes increasingly blasé about the whole process, so we see Mickey’s body unceremoniously dumped out of the machine until the techs can scramble to get the bed in place. In a later repeat of the same gag, no one even notices, and he just flops out of the machine naked onto the floor. It’s really the same idea as the small jerk of the print bed, but it’s played so broad that nobody could possibly miss it.

And throughout, it felt like there was a more clever and understated movie floating just below the surface of the cartoon. I suppose it’s a virtuoso piece of filmmaking simply because it still managed to play on my emotions even though it was a cartoon.

One thing I liked in particular was a scene early on, when we see Mickey’s love-at-first-sight introduction to security officer Nasha. Ruffalo’s character is on stage making a bombastic speech, and that’s all that we hear — we can see Mickey and Nasha meeting each other, and we can guess at what they’re thinking because of their facial expressions, but we can’t hear anything that’s being said.

I thought it was a fantastic way to suggest that it doesn’t matter what was being said. For key moments like that, we often don’t remember what we said, but we definitely remember how we felt. It seemed like such a poignant way to show a key memory for someone who is nothing except for his memories.

It also didn’t go in the direction that I’d expected it to go, which was a welcome surprise. But explaining exactly how requires spoilers. To sum up my review: I thought Mickey 17 was very, very good, and I just wish that it had allowed itself to be great.

Literacy 2025: Book 6: Moxyland

Lauren Beukes’s “post-cyberpunk” thriller about a society that crushes people with class division and convenience

Book
Moxyland by Lauren Beukes

Synopsis
Four people in their early 20s, all from disparate backgrounds and living in Cape Town in the near-futuristic dystopia of 2018, are trying to establish themselves in a society over-dependent on technology, with strict societal divisions between corporate employees and “civilians,” a government more beholden to the corporations than to its citizens, and an oppressive police force with ubiquitous shock devices and genetically modified police dogs. Their lives intersect in various ways until a catastrophic incident slams them together.

Notes
This was one of the first books that my now-husband recommended to me and loaned me his copy, not long after we started dating. I’m embarrassed that it’s taken me this long to read it! It’s darkly ironic that the main reason I never read it at the time was because it was a physical copy; I’d recently converted to reading ebooks exclusively because the digital version was so much more convenient.

The story is told in the first person of each of the four main characters — a photographer who’s agreed to have herself injected with nanotechnology that gives her a permanent, glowing tattoo of the logo of an energy drink; a spoiled live-streamer who’s become desensitized to everything except playing to his audience; a hot-tempered and naively idealistic activist; and a ruthless software engineer who was raised in a corporate-owned orphanage — and it gives each their own voice and their own perspective. But more significantly, it lets us become gradually aware of the self-delusions that each of them has been operating under, suppressing their own key desires — human connection, a sense of worth, social justice, or safety and stability — in an attempt just to survive.

As a result, Beukes accomplishes the remarkable feat of taking these characters that I so thoroughly disliked (or was frustrated by, in Kendra’s case) at the beginning, and making me sympathetic towards them by the end. I gradually began to appreciate how their flaws are the result of a society that’s stopped valuing them as human beings. I went from hating these characters and dreading having to read more about them, to being extremely invested in what happens to them and rushing through the entire last half of the book.

You could devote an entire essay just to exploring what Beukes does on a literary level, ignoring all of the themes about culture and technology and instead focusing on how she deftly intercuts between four somewhat-unreliable narrators in a long slow burn that builds to a horrific climax and a relentlessly desperate conclusion. All while establishing not only the world they live in, but the core of their characters.

I’ve got a big cultural blind spot when it comes to cyberpunk, since I made a half-effort to read Snow Crash when I was in my early twenties, immediately hated it and gave up, and pretty much ignored the genre outside of video games ever since. So I don’t know how this book would be classified exactly, and I feel unqualified to call it “post-cyberpunk.” But it feels less concerned with science fiction, and more as if it were written from within a society that had already embraced some of the main ideas of classic cyberpunk, and extrapolated from there. Of all the media that I’ve read and seen, it felt more similar in tone to the movie Her, and how it was not about the technology itself so much as how it affects us as people.

Beukes wrote an essay in 2018 that was included in the afterward of my copy of the book, in which she describes the “stem cells” of ideas that made it into Moxyland. She makes it explicit that the rigid stratification of her version of Cape Town isn’t a speculative invention, but is instead a reflection of the very real class divisions that still exist post-apartheid, the same structures but lightly modified to be along urban/rural and corporate/“civilian” lines instead of strictly race and ethnicity. She goes on to list all of the other news stories from the early 2000s that demonstrate how the most dystopian elements of the book were actually just short-term extrapolations from stuff that’s already happening.

And she has a great conclusion, mostly referencing the book’s version of cell phones as being more about punishment and control than about communication:

If we’re willing to trade away our rights for convenience, for the illusion of security, our very own bright and shiny dystopia is only ever one totalitarian government away.

Verdict
Brilliant and effective in ways that took me by surprise. The magic trick of the book — in that I didn’t even realize it was happening until it had already worked — is that Beukes avoids letting the book completely collapse into cynicism or nihilism. There is an undercurrent of compassion and sympathy, and we’re left with the idea that even if these characters have lost it, we haven’t.

I Was Wrong About the New Reeder

Silvio Rizzi’s redesign of his excellent RSS reader into a unified hub for the internet makes RSS feel relevant again

Earlier I mentioned that I was looking to the venerable RSS feed as a way to keep up with the internet without all the negatives of social media apps.

For a long time, I’ve been a huge fan of Silvio Rizzi’s Reeder app for the iPhone and especially the iPad. It’s so thoughtfully and artfully designed, with lots of attention devoted to choosing exactly the right colors and typography, that it actually seemed to elevate everything I read on it.¹

The original Reeder app has been rebranded as Reeder Classic, while the new version has been dramatically redesigned to support a much wider variety of feeds. In addition to the sites you follow via RSS, you can also add YouTube, Podcasts, Flickr photos, comic strips, and even Bluesky or Mastodon if that’s your thing.

I tried the new version and quickly bounced off of it. It (wisely) didn’t mess with anything that made the original so great for RSS, and I didn’t see the value of adding podcasts or YouTube, which I’m always going to prefer having in a dedicated app. I was happy to go back to the classic app — which is still a one-time charge, somehow — and read the web as Al Gore intended.

Since my current social media vacation has left me occasionally jonesing for an infinitely-scrolling list of new content to look at, I decided to try the new version of Reeder again and give it another chance to win me over.

1
Rizzi’s Mela app brings the same excellent design to a recipe manager.

The Kobo Libra Colour, or, In Praise of Increasingly Necessary Devices

First impressions of a new color e-ink ebook reader, along with an explanation of why I got it

Around four years ago, I bought a Kindle Oasis, refurbished, with ads, using store credit, and I still felt the need to write a blog post furiously justifying it. It’s darkly comic reading that post now, since while I was trying to get comfortable with being further entrenched in the Amazon ecosystem, I actually said that Amazon was one of the more benign of the tech giants!

But I was talking in terms of being consumer-friendly. And it more or less stands; you’ll have a hard time beating Amazon strictly in terms of convenience or cost. You just have to be willing to ignore all the shady stuff that they do to guarantee that convenience and undercut their competition.

That Kindle Oasis is still perfectly fine, and I still like it quite a bit. More than Amazon does, apparently, since they’ve discontinued the model. I still have enough unread books in my Kindle library, and it’s so straightforward to check out library books using Libby and read them on the device, that I could go for at least the rest of the year without having to buy anything else from Amazon.

But a Kindle, no matter how well it’s designed or how much it seems to be tailored to the reader, exists primarily to sell more Kindle books. So along with canceling my Prime account, it seemed like a good opportunity to make a clean break and upgrade my ebook reader to be free of Amazon completely.

I chose the Kobo Libra Colour (“colour” because Kobo is a Canadian company).

Literacy 2025: Book 5: Starter Villain

John Scalzi’s satire of billionaire tech bros as James Bond-style supervillains

(Cover image taken from the Tor/Forge Books blog, used without permission)

Book
Starter Villain by John Scalzi

Synopsis
Charlie Fitzer is a divorced former journalist who’s working as a substitute teacher in suburban Chicago, trying to figure out how to get back on his feet, when he gets news that his estranged uncle Jake — who’d become a billionaire in the parking garage business — has died. Charlie soon discovers that his uncle had not just left him with a simple inheritance, but with the responsibility of taking over the business: his real business, which was being a supervillain, complete with remote lair inside an active volcano.

Notes
I immediately put this book on the to-read list because of its outstanding cover and its clever premise. The next thing I knew, I was already a quarter of the way through it. It is a fun and engaging read, and it keeps you wanting to come back for the next chapter.

I’ve got to admit I’m not the biggest fan of Scalzi’s books, mostly because it’s difficult to get lost in the book instead of hearing every observation and every line of dialogue in the same extremely-online writing voice. Here, the premise isn’t so much a parody of James Bond supervillainy as it is a satire of techbro billionaires and venture capitalists, so the more fantastic elements are tempered with the mundane, with an author more eager to take the piss out of the greedy elite than to indulge in escapist adventure. But there are definitely fantastic elements, which are easily the best part of the book.

My main criticism of the book is a vague spoiler: the protagonist doesn’t have enough agency. He spends the majority of the book going from location to location having things explained to him by characters he acknowledges are smarter or more accomplished than he is. He’s never given an opportunity to prove himself indispensable, so the story ends up feeling very passive.

Verdict
A quick, fun, and often clever read.

Literacy 2025: Book 4: Born to be Posthumous

Mark Dery’s comprehensive biography of the writer and artist Edward Gorey

Book
Born to be Posthumous: The Eccentric Genius and Mysterious Life of Edward Gorey by Mark Dery

Synopsis
A rigorously-researched and documented biography of writer and illustrator Edward Gorey, who was known for his macabre and darkly comic books, book covers, design of the animated introductory sequences for PBS’s Mystery! series, set and costume design for a Broadway production of Dracula, and as inspirational hero to weirdos everywhere.

Notes
It’s hard to imagine a more comprehensive biography than this book, as Dery establishes his bona fides in the introduction and then goes on to exhaustively cover every key event in Gorey’s life from birth to death, with extensive footnotes referencing personal interviews, letters, and excerpts from just about everything ever written about the man. It’s both an academic work of biography and of art criticism, as he gives an insightful synopsis of Gorey’s “little books,” occasionally offering a summation but often sticking to the author’s desire to leave plenty of room for ambiguity.

My main complaint is that it’s often tedious and dry reading, feeling more like an academic assignment instead of an attempt to bring a reclusive artist to life. But this is tempered as much as possible by personal accounts from friends and family, or by descriptions of Gorey’s works that show a thorough appreciation of how they work and why they resonate. It is undeniable that Dery gets Gorey. At least as much as is possible for anyone to.

But that leads to the other criticism that’s inherent to this book and its subject, which is that Gorey actively dismissed any attempts to define him or his work, and he insisted that the books, like himself, remain ambiguous. Dery not only acknowledges this dichotomy in the introduction, but he makes it a recurring theme of the entire book. He repeats Gorey’s quote “I’m neither one thing nor the other particularly.”

I have a couple of minor quibbles with the book, mainly that it, like its subject, is so entrenched in the New York art scene that it sometimes comes across as eye-rollingly pretentious. It left me with a sense of “never meet your heroes,” since I got the impression I’d probably have found Gorey insufferable if I’d met him in person.

And I think it leaned a little too heavily on the premise that Gorey’s repressed or denied homosexuality is evident in every aspect of his life and his work, even though Gorey himself refused to define himself as gay or straight. As Dery acknowledges, with a modern understanding of identity politics, gender, and sexuality, it’s likely that Gorey might’ve fit more closely with the identity of “asexual” (and homoromantic). Regardless, Dery does make a convincing case that camp and themes of sublimated homosexuality run throughout Gorey’s work, even if it still seems a bit reductive to me. I think I prefer the idea that Dery presents in the conclusion, which is that Gorey was so thoroughly queer throughout his life that he defied any attempts to put a label on any aspect of himself.

Personally, I can remember “discovering” Gorey’s work while digging through Oxford Books in Atlanta with my mother, and being immediately obsessed with the little books they had on display. They were already too expensive for me to buy them individually, but I did get a copy of Amphigorey that had an enormous impact on me. I’d forgotten exactly how much impact, until I was reading this biography and reminded of pages and images that stuck with me, even if I was never able to explain exactly why. I consider The Willowdale Handcar and the gleefully suggestive absurdity of The Curious Sofa as being as much a part of defining my sense of humor as Monty Python and Mystery Science Theater 3000 were.

Verdict
I can’t imagine a better biography of Edward Gorey in terms of showing a real insight into his work, the influences on his work, and as much of his personal life as he’d allow anyone to know. It’s not always fun to read, but it was fantastic for helping me better understand the “little books” that were so influential to me.

The Only Thing I Liked About The Monkey

The new horror movie based on a Stephen King short story reminded me of when I first read the story, and not in a good way. (Spoilers for the movie)

On this blog, I’ve pledged to elevate the stuff I enjoy and not spend any time writing about the stuff I don’t like. That’s not just part of the “Good Vibes Only” policy I’m more strictly observing since the 2024 election, but because a negative review is almost always worthless. Not only is our time better spent promoting the stuff we love, but it’s time wasted to dwell on the negatives. It won’t (and shouldn’t!) dissuade anyone who’s eager to enjoy something, and it won’t (and shouldn’t!) change the opinion of someone who’s already enjoyed it or disliked it.¹

I’ve worked on stuff that has been panned by reviewers, multiple times. And even after I got over the initial impulse to take it personally, I was left with a feeling of impotent frustration. You’re never going to like this, we’re never going to get anything out of the reviews, and it’s never going to change, so just move on, pal. There’s literally nothing to be gained by complaining about it over and over again.

So I’ll mention one thing that I genuinely liked about the new movie The Monkey, written and directed by Osgood Perkins based on a short story from Stephen King’s collection Skeleton Crew. There’s a scene where our young protagonist Hal is sitting in his bedroom, growing increasingly convinced that the toy monkey he found in his father’s belongings is somehow the cause of the horrible misfortune that’s started to befall his family and their acquaintances.

It’s a quiet scene, and when he looks up, there’s a sudden close-up shot of the monkey at the top of the dresser, with a jump-scare stinger of horror movie music as the frame is filled with the toy’s malevolent stare. Like the best moments in Longlegs, it’s horror movie artistry perfectly timed and executed, and it’s funny because it’s so discordant and such a non sequitur.

That’s also the last thing I liked about the movie², which I really, really disliked.

If anyone’s been looking forward to seeing the movie, but is on the fence, like I was, about how scary and gory it would be: I won’t (and shouldn’t!) dissuade you from seeing it. It’s not at all scary, and it quickly establishes itself as going for black comedy instead of unsettling horror, and it is not at all subtle. So there’s not even the drawn-out tension of the best moments in Final Destination, which it’s frequently compared to.

I’d also heard it compared to the Peter Jackson movie Dead Alive/Braindead, which is an over-the-top zombie movie.³ That worried me, because I have a fairly low tolerance for gore, and Dead Alive is one of the few movies that’s made me actually feel like I was going to throw up, even though it was clearly intended to be so over-the-top that it was funny. The Monkey is very bloody and gory, but it’s all done so cartoonishly that to me, at least, it neither registers as scary nor as nauseating. There’s one bloody death scene⁴ that seemed intended to be intense, but it’s not very gory. Most of the gore moments are done in quick succession as 5-10 second punchlines.

So that’s my review. Not my thing, but if an over-the-top horror comedy seems like your thing, and you’ve been wary because of word about the gore factor, be assured that it’ll probably be fine if you’ve been able to handle any recent horror comedy.

1
Also, tonight I’ve been reading some of my old posts where I just trashed a movie or TV show, and I invariably came across as a smug little shit.
2
Okay, I did like the detail that Elijah Wood’s loathsome parenting guru character was wearing some kind of sweatshirt with a flesh-colored stripe in the center that bizarrely and needlessly accentuated his nipples
3
If it doesn’t sound familiar, it’s the one where the priest shouts “I kick ass for the Lord!” and a pack of zombies are taken out by someone holding a power lawnmower like a shield.
4
With the kids’ mother.

Like the Before Times

My month-long experiment with a social media-free life

For the month of March, I’m trying an experiment where I’ve deleted all of the social media apps from my phone, and I’m pledging to stay off of them for the duration. (I have auto-posting set up from my blog to Mastodon and Bluesky, so that I don’t completely disappear from consciousness).

That means staying away from any platform I don’t “own”and treating the internet like it was 2006. I deactivated my Facebook account a while ago. So that left me with having to swear off Instagram, Mastodon, and Bluesky. Unlike 2006, I no longer use Flickr, and I don’t have the Straight Dope Message Board as an outlet, so the recreation of my pre-Twitter internet footprint won’t be entirely accurate. But I’m hoping it will be healthier.

My Mastodon account isn’t owned by evil people (as far as I’m aware), and I’ve also curated my Bluesky Feed to the point that it’s about as benign as I can get it. But I’ve become increasingly convinced that “Stop doomscrolling” isn’t enough. I feel like the whole Twitter model is toxic. At least for me; your mileage may vary.

In my experience, any app that presents an infinite list of updated content is inherently built around the idea of engagement, not information/enlightenment/social interaction. Even if there’s not an algorithm pushing users in ways that benefit the platform instead of the users themselves, it’s still at its core taking away from our ability to be present.

Years ago, I could already tell that my brain had been rewired into the Twitter mindset, since I had been almost subconsciously re-formatting my idle thoughts to be suitable for that audience. And my most toxic relationship with social media has probably been with Instagram, if I’m being honest. It’s great that it’s encouraged me to take more photos to remember important moments. It’s not great that I’m often not present in those moments, because I’m already thinking of how I’m going to caption them to present them to other people.

I’ve noticed that even this blog has altered the way that I experience things. I started using the “One Thing I Like” format in an effort to get me to focus, to write shorter posts, and to acknowledge that art is complex and open to multiple interpretations. But now it’s backfired somewhat, since I go into a movie or TV show looking for the one thing I’m going to call out.

Even without any higher-minded goals of changing how I interact with art and entertainment, I’m simply hoping that the experiment gives me more free time. I often find myself complaining that I don’t have time for anything anymore, even while I’m well aware of losing 30 minutes to an hour here and there, just idly scrolling through feeds.

The other thing I’m trying to address is the feeling that my brain stopped working correctly at some point in the last two years, feeling as if the gears have gotten gunked up and slowly ground to a halt. It’s been difficult to concentrate on anything, and I’ve missed the self-imposed deadline on my Playdate game by over a year.

One of the things I’ve started doing to re-frame and re-focus my idle time is to get back on AMC’s “A-List” subscription program. I’ve tried it before and failed to get my money’s worth, but at this point, individual tickets have gotten so expensive that a single IMAX screening is the cost of a month’s subscription. It makes sense in the weird dream logic of late-stage capitalism, I guess?

In any case, the appeal of going to movies more often isn’t simply that it’s a reminder of the Before Times, when I felt more cultured. It’s also simply to force me out of the house and force me to focus on something other than my phone for at least an hour and a half.

The other big resolution is to focus on more constructive reading. Always have at least one book in progress, and any time I would’ve been scrolling through the apps, read a few chapters of a book instead. I’ve invested in a Kobo ereader in the hopes I can get more literate without giving any more money to Jeff Bezos.

It’s also a great opportunity to get back into RSS feeds. I haven’t been able to get comfortable with the new version of the Reeder app, but the previous is still available as “Reeder Classic,” and it’s excellent. More people are getting back to blogging on their own sites, and I’m pledging to try harder to be part of a community, promoting blogs I find interesting.

One more weird thing I’m trying: writing these blog posts longhand on the aforementioned iPad mini. The idea here is, again, to be more present — slowing down to think about what I’m writing, instead of letting my fingers type so fast that I’m well into a paragraph before realizing I’ve lost my train of thought. Plus it feels more like keeping a journal than writing articles for an audience. (Sometimes I read posts from several years ago and I have absolutely no idea what the hell I was talking about, because I was either trying to be circumspect or I was actively avoiding spoilers, as if I had a huge audience).

That experiment is ongoing; my first couple of attempts with Apple Notes had all kinds of difficulty converting to text, and they also burned up half the iPad’s battery for some reason. This post is my first attempt using Goodnotes, so if it’s even more filled with gibberish than my usual, that’s my excuse.

If nothing else, it lets me enjoy the romantic image of a man writing thoughtfully into his cherished, time-worn notebook. Suck it, Atrus!

Overall, I think my problems with social media platforms stem from assuming that we were all observing the same social contract. Yes, they tend to be exploitative, and they have customers generating content that profits the
companies with little compensation for the customers themselves. But I always felt that that was built into the figurative contract that you sign onto when you start using these platforms. Acknowledge that they’re extracting time and attention and effort from you, but also acknowledge how you benefit from it. And the moment it ever gets to the point where you feel like the platform isn’t benefitting you any more, hit the bricks!

What’s happened to me is that I’ve let myself get so dependent on them as social and creative outlets (and, let’s be honest, easy ways to procrastinate) that by the time I noticed that the terms of the “contract” had changed, and I was no longer getting enough value from them to be worth the psychic damage, it was already too late.

So stay tuned for updates on my progress, likely in the form of a lot of barely-intelligible blog posts!

Literacy 2025: Book 3: A Man Lay Dead

Ngaio Marsh’s surprisingly modern entry into detective fiction

Book
A Man Lay Dead by Ngaio Marsh

Series
First book in the Roderick Alleyn series of detective stories

Synopsis
A wealthy Englishman has assembled a group of friends and associates to his mansion in the countryside for a party in which they’ll all take part in a mock murder. When someone takes advantage of the game to actually murder one of the guests with a ceremonial Mongolian dagger, it falls to Detective Chief-Inspector Roderick Alleyn of Scotland Yard to sort through the personal motives of the guests and the crime’s ties to a Russian secret society.

Notes
While I’ve been reading and re-reading a lot of Agatha Christie mysteries lately, I keep hearing the name Ngaio Marsh mentioned as one of Christie’s contemporaries. I was completely unfamiliar with her work, so I started with her first detective novel.

The Wikipedia entry mentions that Marsh was unhappy with her first novel as being implausible and shallow, but there’s a lot to like here. It’s odd reading it in 2025, though: it feels simultaneously modern and impenetrably of its time. I frequently found myself with no idea what was going on, because the idioms and the very behavior of the characters seemed so foreign to me. Not just as an American born 40 years after the book was published, but as somebody who’s always assumed I have a rough idea of how human beings act.

These characters alternate between being earnest and melodramatic (which I’d expected) and being bafflingly arch. They’re often casually cruel or rude to each other, and I felt like an alien trying to figure out if they were being wry or sincere. It seemed like the book was too modern. As a result, I was even less equipped to solve the mystery, since I was too baffled by the basics of what was actually happen to also be looking for obscure clues.

My other big criticism of this book is that it felt self-aware to the point of self-consciousness; characters frequently commented on the events as being well-worn tropes of detective stories, as if Marsh were a little too eager to establish to readers that she was in on the joke. All that said, I still enjoyed it a lot.

Verdict
Surprisingly modern, at times to a fault, but fun and engaging. It feels more sophisticated than what I’m used to for the genre, at least in its writing if not its central mystery. This is my first exposure to a book written by someone considered to be a master of the genre, so I’m looking forward to reading more of Marsh’s detective stories.

One Thing I Love About Paddington in Peru

I adored the third installment in the Paddington movies, where everyone seems to be so happy to be there that the joy is contagious

I haven’t yet seen either of the first two Paddington movies, although they’re high on my to-watch list since they seem to be universally beloved. The beginning of Paddington in Peru, the third installment, didn’t just quickly get me up to speed. It welcomed me into the family with a huge smile and a hug.

The entire movie is filled with so much unrestrained joy, and I hadn’t appreciated how much I needed that until I found myself at the end, sobbing in the theater from sheer happiness.

Early in the movie, there’s a scene in which Paddington receives his British passport in the mail, and a semicircle of British character actors are all around to congratulate him and to give him a gift. It’s immediately obvious that they’re characters from the earlier films, returning for a brief cameo. It also seemed obvious to me that they were all delighted to be there, and they were eager to come back. Their smiles all radiated a sense of joy and kindness that was contagious. It was impossible not to smile back. I don’t know these characters’ names, but I already consider them my friends.

In the same batch of introductory scenes, we see Paddington’s host father Mr Brown at his job in London. He’s delivering a presentation to his new boss, who is explicitly described as American, and who’s played by Haley Atwell.¹ Again, I got the sense that she’d jumped at the chance to appear in the movie, doing an accent, just so she could be part of something so delightful.

And speaking of delightful, there’s also Olivia Colman playing a singing nun at a home for retired bears who’s not at all suspicious. She never seems to be trying to steal the scene, yet she always does, proving once again that she’s one of the best living actors. With just a subtle shift in facial expression, she can take the attention from an entire pack of CG bears doing physical comedy.

My overriding sense from the movie was that everyone involved was delighted to be there, and they’d all jumped at the opportunity to come back for the third movie. So I was surprised to learn afterwards that the director of the first two hadn’t returned, and more surprisingly, that the character of Mrs Brown had been recast from Sally Hawkins to Emily Mortimer. Surprising because that character is the emotional core of the movie, and Mortimer seemed as if she’d always been there. Considering how quickly I started thinking of Paddington as a real bear instead of a computer-generated creation, I probably shouldn’t be so surprised that good actors are good at acting.

It’s such a needlessly beautiful movie, as well, with animated sequences going into Mrs Brown’s paintings, a cross-section of the house illustrating her anxiety over becoming an empty nester, and later, a series of period flashbacks showing the adventures of Antonio Banderas’s ancestors (each played by Banderas). It struck me as such a joyful expression of artistry that it made me even more disappointed that this has become the outlier, and the standard for family movies is to throw as many Hollywood movie stars into the cast as possible to disguise the fact that they’re completely soulless. During the depressing parade of trailers before Paddington in Peru, I saw one for The Smurfs that felt as if an icy spectral hand had reached out of the screen and wrapped around my heart. Then the trailer for the Minecraft movie felt like the hand squeezing.

Whether Paddington in Peru adequately captured the magic of the previous movies, I can’t say. But it’s also irrelevant, because I was completely delighted by all of it. There’s such a sense of kindness throughout that might seem overly juvenile in its pure simplicity, but is in vanishingly short supply since so many of us seem to have forgotten it.

1
Who I learned later is of dual British and American citizenship, so maybe her casting isn’t as odd as I’d originally thought.

The Morrison Game Factory

A fun and engaging story-based puzzle box from PostCurious

Recently, my husband and I finally cracked open a game I had gotten a couple of months ago from a Kickstarter campaign. It was The Morrison Game Factory, a “puzzletale” from PostCurious, designed by Lauren Bello.¹

The format is essentially an escape room in a box, although it feels more hand-crafted and personalized than any of the mass market versions of those that I’ve tried. This doesn’t feel like a game that you’d find at Target (complimentary).

Which is too bad, since it feels like it’d actually be a good fit for Target. It’s engaging and accessible, and I’d rate the puzzles as being at “advanced beginner” difficulty. Nothing had us completely stumped, but we definitely didn’t breeze through everything, either.

A couple of the puzzle solutions led to really cool and satisfying “aha!” moments. I’ve gotten a little jaded about the puzzles in these types of experiences, but there was at least one here that had a payoff not quite like anything I’d seen before.

The game requires a desktop (or iPad, which we used) web browser with an internet connection. And it’s not just for verifying solutions; it’s a key part of how you play the game. I’d estimate that it took us about two hours to play.

The premise of The Morrison Game Factory is that you’ve received a package from an “urban explorer” who’s found something mysterious inside an abandoned board game factory. They’ve sent the material to you because they’re not so great at puzzles.

The story that follows is engaging and extremely charming. I have to say that I don’t love the branding of “puzzletale,” but I’ll begrudgingly admit that it fits perfectly here. The experience is extremely well-balanced, where the story and the puzzles complement each other instead of making the other feel superfluous

The only other experience I’ve tried from PostCurious is The Emerald Flame, an excellent collection of puzzles about alchemists and secret societies. That game also has a story running through it, but I believe it’s more puzzle-focused, and the puzzles are both more complex and more esoteric. To anyone who’s planning on playing both -and I strongly recommend both – then I’d start with The Morrison Game Factory.

1
Apologies for the typo in her name on earlier drafts; I’ve been experimenting with writing blog posts longhand, and the character recognition still isn’t 100% accurate.