quick media update
I finished Non-Player Character by Veo Corva and loved it. If you're looking for a fun lighthearted isekai fantasy novel with some cool unique world-building and a cast of diverse, realistic and relatable characters, I recommend it. You can grab a free community copy at the author's itch.io page. They use extra funds from people who pay above the suggested amount to make free copies available, which I appreciated, because it's a lot easier to take a chance on something by an author I'm not familiar with if I don't have to pay up-front. I bought a copy plus tipped enough to cover another community copy to pay it forward. 🌕
I watched a brand new movie, which is something I rarely do. It's called Spin Me Round. The Red Letter Media folks reviewed it and it seemed like my kind of comedy. It's on one of the zillion little streaming services no one has because there's too many of them, so I found it on my new movie haunt, gomovies.sx (⚠️ engage content blockers! ⚠️) This is the first thing I've ever seen with Alison Brie, who I now know is a true American treasure. The movie's getting lousy reviews, and I don't really know why. I guess critics these days hate fun. Anyway, fuck 'em, I'm giving it a 🌕 too
I'm getting bored with Breath of Fire. I have five party members now, the maximum party size is four, and the battles have only gotten more tedious. In many ways, it's the same problem I ran into with Lufia 2 and Golden Sun; the addition of more party members made battles take longer without making them more interesting. They're throwing more and tougher monsters at me, but I still basically just do melee attacks with my 3 bruisers and use a damage-dealing magic item with my healer in every single battle. Heal up as needed. I've been using Mrbl3s like they're back in style, which makes the boss battles take forever, because I'm under-leveled for them. Not so much that they become a challenge, because there are no tactics that help, it's just a slow, unfun DPS race that I eventually win because I have healing magic. I'm keeping this one at 🌗 and I might downgrade it to 🌑, if I even finish it. Part of me just wants to skip to BoF2. I don't know if this one has much charm left.
The Avalanches came out with a new album in 2020?? This is a bonkers discovery to me, because I was so excited about Wildflower (🌕) prior to its release in 2016, and it lived up to the hype. But that was around the time I left twitter, and between that and disabling youtube recommendations, there was no media through which I could've algorithmically learned about it. This isn't a bad thing; I still enjoy it just as much now as I would've then, and I'm not losing anything by coming to it late, it's just a curious effect of how I consume media now. Organic discovery only. Anyway, I haven't listened to it enough to give it a proper rating, but I like it. I don't think I like it as much as their first two albums, but that could just be anti-recency bias. I need to spend more time with it. You can listen on youtube.
I started listening to Reply All on inbtwn's recommendation! It's good! I listened to the most famous episode, The Case of the Missing Hit, on someone else's suggestion back in 2020. I liked it, but podcasts didn't factor heavily into my daily routine then, so I let it slip from my mind. I appreciate inbtwn jogging my memory. I've only listened to the first few episodes, so no rating yet, but it has a nice deep backlog I'm excited to dive into 🦝