Reading/Watching: April 2026

Alright, time for another check in on what I’ve been engaging with lately.

I do so hate the “consumption” metaphor for reading books, watching movies, playing games, etc. I understand the utility of it, but it does flatten things and makes the process feel more… flat. You consume to fill a hunger for something. There is only one way to interact with any piece of art or media and it is to take it and wring everything out of it. It’s also so… definitive, like are people really getting absolutely everything out of all the media they “consume”?

Engaging with art is such an specific and individual thing, it just feels off to me to analogize it that way. You can rewatch a movie or replay a game and get something completely different out of it, but you cannot “reconsume”.

A Drop of Corruption

Yes, I have already purchased and finished reading the sequel to The Tainted Cup! It was… pretty good, not as enthralling as the first one, but it definitely deepened the world. I felt like the mystery aspect was a bit weaker.

There’s a lot of playing around with genre conventions this time, not just mystery but fantasy too, since it takes place in a somewhat independent kingdom that is on the brink of being absorbed into the empire. Thus we get to play in some High Fantasy spaces and contrast it with the somewhat more restrained and grounded empire. But we also go to an even more extreme example of imperial bio-engineering, in this huge processing facility where they extract the blood from leviathans.

That part was probably my favorite, the whole place is like a combination of conventional building materials, the engineered plants the empire uses, and this weird giant moving plant thing that guards the whole thing. A melding of different materials as a metaphor for the empire as a whole, it isn’t just one thing but stronger and more horrifying because of how it melds things together.

The author is clearly trying his best to make the empire look good by juxtaposing it with this bog-standard Awful Feudal Kingdom, but it still leaves a lot of avenues for criticism open. I’m not gonna get into spoilers, but all of these accusations also read like confessions, is how I’ll put it.

Very excited to read the finale of the series in August. Pretty disappointed that it’s just a standard fantasy trilogy, honestly. A good detective series can run dozens of volumes, and I love Ana and Din. They’ve got legs, for sure.

I will raise two quibbles with the actual writing that I forgot to include in my other post:

• Ana’s swearing doesn’t feel like it fits the character. I’m certainly not scandalized by it or anything, but it strikes me as an off note sometimes, when she says like “this is a big fucking deal!” or whatever. It reads like an immature kid throwing around swears to try and offend people, rather than someone who doesn’t care about social mores. And not every time! Sometimes it perfectly fits the scene, but there are certain instances that grate on my nerves.
• The crime investigation department of the empire is called the Iudex. This is a latin word meaning “judge” and it is pronounced “you-dex”, but the author seemingly doesn’t know that because he insists on putting a fucking “an” in front of it! Completely wrong! The use of “an” is not about letters, it’s about vowel sounds! Aargh!! It literally happens less than five times across both books, but it drives me into a murderous rage every time.

Galaxy Express 999

The classic ’70s anime series, based on the manga by Leiji Matsumoto! I’ve been meaning to check this out for a while, I remember hearing that it was really good ages and ages ago, on some forum or another, which kind of stuck in my head.

This show is fucking buck wild, man. It’s a universe where you can hop on a train to go across the galaxy. It’s like a standard old timey steam train, that has magic future technology in it that lets it cross the void of space. It’s about a kid whose mother is murdered by some random assholes in cyborg bodies, and he is given a gun by some strange woman and told to go get revenge… which he does, immediately.

Then they go off on the eponymous train to reach the world where you can get a cyborg body for free and become ageless. Along the way they visit all kinds of wacky planets with weird gimmicks and get threatened by various people. The kid, Tetsuro, still carries a gun and kills people pretty often. So does Maetel, the mysterious and ethereal woman of the style that Leiji Matsumoto includes in all of his work.

There is very little plot, just the occasional two-parter. It runs over a hundred episodes, and I don’t think they reach the cyborg planet until the very end, it’s just a Planet of the Week affair.

Just to give you an example of what an average episode is like, here’s the premise of one I watched the other night. The Galaxy Express 999 stops on a planet where the passengers are warned not to get out because the wildlife is very dangerous. Nonetheless, Tetsuro and Maetel walk around outside a bit, but they get attacked by a strange armored insect, which pierces through Maetel’s torso. She needs a doctor, and there happens to be a famous one who lives on the planet.

Tetsuro encounters a mysterious man covered head-to-toe in armor plates. It transpires that this is the son of the doctor, and one of the last two living humans on the planet. Tetsuro eventually reaches the doctor, but he’s too old and decrepit to help. The man is trying to murder Tetsuro as a “sacrifice” to help the planet. We learn that the people of this planet were so distressed by animals suffering and dying that they covered every single one of them in indestructible armor! Thus, everything sickened and died because it could no longer eat. The doctor dies, his son tries to kill Tetsuro, but is reduced to ash by Maetel’s more powerful ray gun. Maetel is totally fine, healed by mysterious means back on the train.

Every episode is like this. Some insane scifi premise that barely makes sense, a lot of violence, often very sympathetic “villains” who suffer for their own actions. It’s a lot of fun! And it’s just totally free on tubi, so go check it out.

The Frangipani Tree Mystery

I’m in a mystery mood! Only about halfway through this one, but I’m enjoying it a lot.

This is the first in a ten-book series (so far) of mysteries by Singaporean author and playwright Ovidia Yu. They are, naturally, set in Singapore and star a young girl named Su Lin, from a Chinese family, in the tumultuous ’30s and ’40s. This series was recommended to me by a friend (hi megs!) who read a later book in the series set during the Japanese occupation, but this first one is when Singapore was still under British control, in 1936.

The mystery is very intriguing, but there’s a certain tone and like… problem solving nature to this book that I’m really enjoying. Su Lin is not just an anachronistic independent lady detective in 1930s Singapore. Hell, she’s a teenager and trying to avoid being married off to one of her uncle’s employees at the start of the book. She kind of stumbles into being involved in the investigation of the titular murder, and I get the sense that this is how these books works: a murder happens and part of the narrative puzzle to be solved is “how does Su Lin get involved/stay involved in this?”

The tone of the writing is really fun. It’s very… direct and matter-of-fact, first person and putting all of the POV character’s biases on the table. It’s clearly written as if in retrospect, Moby Dick style, with asides like “years later I would realize that [x]”.

Race is hugely important in this society, as well as religion and culture, being a meeting point of many different factors. The natives, the Chinese immigrants, the British and other Europeans, all have their own ways of doing things and thinking about the world. Su Lin has to speak four languages this book to work at all, so she can interact with various characters of different backgrounds.

Her perspective is fascinating and engaging, right from the get-go. She’s very smart and very aware of her precise position in the world, but wants something different from what everyone else wants for her. It’s a classic setup, and I’m very excited to read more, and make my way through this whole series!

Witness

Continuing on with the Peter Weird miniseries on Blank Check, I watched Witness on Friday. It was really good, I’ve liked it more the more I think about it, one of those kinds of movies.

This is a case where I think watching all of Peter Weir’s Australian movies ahead of time opens up a different dimension of this one. It’s more similar to Picnic and Hanging Rock or The Last Wave than you’d think at first blush. His mastery of long, quiet sequences conveying information about setting and character really stand out.

That said, this is also way more of a conventional movie than anything he’s made before. Hollywood really forced him to be more normal, haha.

It’s also like… a movie for adults, in a way that we just don’t get these days. It’s all about people solving problems and reacting to their emotions in a way that feels very grounded and reasonable. I truly believe that the lack of movies like this in the modern day is not entirely based on audience preference, but rather industry consolidation and newly expanded markets meaning that movie studios are inctivized to seek only the biggest possible paydays.

It impoverishes all our cultures, all over the world, really. Why make something specific to any one area of the globe when you could make something fantastical and showy that appeals to everyone all at once? And I say that as someone who loves fantastical and showy movies!

Eh, it’s an old complaint at this point, but still worth making.

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Ahhh, a nice crop of things to read and watch recently. Also been continuing my reading of Fellowship of the Ring, almost at the end of it, gonna start in on Two Towers soon. And I’m still watching TNG, trading off with Galaxy Express, depending on what specific tone of serialized space adventures I’m in the mood for.

On the games front, I started playing Octopath 0 recently. I’m too early to pass judgment, but thus far I am not super impressed. You can still feel the gacha game in it.

Work has been a bit stressful lately, but it’s getting better. There’s a new manager who’s still learning the ropes, which is an odd thing. He’s ostensibly in charge, but still doesn’t know how things work, y’know? My years-long project is finally coming to an end soon… I’m happy and sad about it. Excited to move on to other things, but it’s also been a lot of fun to figure out.

Until next time, shipmates!