Review

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/8431120674 Nintendo Lionizing, Not Nintendo History I went in hoping for a book about Nintendo: the odd card-game origins, the people who made its hits, the design choices, the institutional habits that let it keep winning. What I got, at least in the opening chapters, felt closer to a long YouTube documentary by someone who loves the subject a little too much. The tone is admiring where it should be more skeptical. Nintendo is good at many things, but not everything it touches is “just right.” ...

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/7579089709 Perception warped, weaponized, what? There Is No Antimemetics Division is better read while half-broken. Grab a few beers, smoke a joint, or try while falling asleep and it starts cheating like Ubik: the boundary between the book’s ideas and your own short-term memory gets thin enough that the whole thing becomes cognitive sabotage. The monster is all around us, or it is us, or that distinction was never stable to begin with. Maybe these days I’m just in an AI-pill-fever-dream… but in waking the fabric of humanity is being rewritten by a collective runaway experiment, and maybe not for the better. qntm provides prose for that feeling. What is it we sense but cannot see, contribute but cannot escape? This is not a riddle to be solved, it is a feeling to be experienced. What were we talking about again? I didn’t read this book, you didn’t read this review, reality is a lie.

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/8515496283 Always Dying, Always Growing “The clock is always ticking and the money is always running out.” Schreier’s thesis arrives not as revelation but as the persistent background hum of an industry that has spent fifty years dying without ever actually dying. In 1979, my father found his entrepreneurial break running Space Invaders in a mobile arcade with McKay Shows around Canada and the inland northwest. Electronic games were new and finicky, so he would use using nail files to keep the leads on the circuit boards connected and dust free. People lined up out the door and it was a gangbuster year. But after 1980, business never looked like that again. Supply caught up to demand, and arcades were one of first casualties of change in gaming. ...

Special Sauce, No Recipe Play Nice is a history of ascent and decay. It explains how Blizzard rose, it’s absorption across many corporate overlords, and it’s perceived decline. It does not say much about what Blizzard might become next, a disappointing if understandable omission. The central question is whether Blizzard was built on genius or luck. Luck can explain one success. It cannot easily explain Warcraft, StarCraft, Diablo, World of Warcraft, and Overwatch. That run suggests a studio with unusual judgment. In that sense Blizzard resembles Pixar: not just one triumph, but repeated hits that imply a real internal standard. The problem, as usual, is that the rewards did not flow evenly. Investors and execs captured far more of the upside than the labor that made the games, staff and leadership turned over. ...

Nothing todo About Nothing I’m comfortable with ambiguity, and enjoy it as a closer lens to reality than most literature dares provide. But rarely do I get through a book and feel… nothing. Like passing a rock on the highway. Sometimes I dream that I am walking down a street in Beirut, somewhere unfamiliar, maybe in the southern suburbs. Not especially beautiful, but not ugly either. Just there. Maybe this is a reflection of the ambivalence I have towards the Israeli-Arab conflict. But that is the rhythm this book left me with: walking around, no answers, and no motivation to go looking for them. ...

Not Ready to Leave the Tea Table It is a shame this is where the audiobooks end. Nineteen books in, this series has managed a rare shift. At the start, I suspect many readers were hanging on to see what would happen with the kyo. By the time we return fully to atevi politics, that thread matters less. The court, the family ties, the rituals, and the slow movements around the throne have become the real draw. ...

Grind, Ship, Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. This is a book of narrative, not of analysis. Diablo, Destiny, orcs, trolls, studios, founders, launches. A studio has an idea. Nobody believes in it. The team works absurdly hard, burns cash, gets the software into shape, nearly runs out of money, then ships and succeeds. 10 games, 10 arcs, no conclusions. That arc is not false. It is just overused. Essentially each chapter is the hero’s journey of video games, told in such a way as to be consumable to those of us more used to playing games from the lens of a consumer. The result is readable, but narrow. He gives the stories their drama, yet the harder and more revealing questions often sit off to the side. He treats the structural hardship of running a studio almost as an afterthought. That leaves the book tilted toward survival stories and away from the graveyard that gives those stories meaning. ...

While the prose is not spectacular, the ideas are. While many people seem to be annoyed by the overly visual and geometric descriptions, I found them interesting if vague. Unfortunately Bear didn’t seem to be in his element when describing politics, personal relations, or heaven forbid, sex. None of this got in the way, and in the end the exponential nature of the plot made it more than worth reading.

First In, is a first person account of the events between the 19th of September until the 10th of November, told mainly from the perspective of Gary Schroen, leader of the JAWBREAKER CIA squad sent to establish relations with the Northern Alliance in the Panjshir Valley, near the stalemated frontlines of the Taliban. Despite being the lead of US forces in Afghanistan (a 7 man crew), his account is very low to the ground, recounting the incessant problems of Diarrhea and relations and the daily interactions with Northern Alliance leaders. The details make the story, such as taking naps on boxes holding $10 million in cash or the simple pleasure of Starbucks coffee brewed in the field. ...

I enjoy James Bond films, and while awaiting the debut of Quantum of Solace, found From Russia with Love on the shelves of Kelly’s lake cabin I picked it up, curious to see how Ian Fleming’s character compared to those of the films. One look at the book and it is clear that Ian Flemings novels opposite to the political-military thrillers like Hunt For Red October and the book is marketed as a mystery. Yet the book contains no enigma- the Soviet plot to kill Bond is revealed in the exposition. Perhaps I’m expecting too much out of the 180 or so pages, and it may be that Bond without action scenes is an impossible sell for me. But I found the book underwhelming . The characters other than Kerim are nearly one dimensional, and after the exposition few even get the chance to show personality. The plot seems basic and there is little satisfaction in the way that Bond triumphs over his enemies. Worse, the book is full of the worst offenses era, full of Communist stereotypes, mysoginy, Eurocentrism and homophobia. Perhaps the elements that were once exciting, such as the 4 day ride on the Orient Express now seem banal in a world where Istanbul-London can be little more than a day trip. Whatever the reason, I highly doubt I will ever ponder any element in this book, save when I see the next movie and sigh in relief that I didn’t have to read the book.