#CyberMagic

[suxevil]

002 -Tech–Witchcraft- [V✎⁰.¹]

Welcome to the 𝕋𝕖𝕔𝕙𝕟𝕠-𝕊𝕡𝕚𝕣𝕚𝕥𝕦𝕒𝕝 𝔼𝕧𝕠𝕝𝕦𝕥𝕚𝕠𝕟 𝔾𝕒𝕞𝕖! This game invites you to explore the intersection of technology and spirituality in your life. Through a series of insightful card draws, you'll gain guidance on integrating these two realms, navigating your evolutionary path, and maintaining harmony amidst the complexities of modern existence. Are you ready to embark on this transformative journey?

[uinferno-art]

A couple years ago when I still had Adobe suite via my uni, I dicked around with illustrator to design logos for my Cyberpunk Mistborn fan project. Still really like these. Need to get around to finish that project. Especially with the Mistborn expansion for the RPG looming over the horizon.

[abookishidentity]

Books I recently checked out of the library

The Untold Story by Genevieve Cogman- I have to finish this series. I think its the last book? There doesn't seem to be anymore after this one so I have to finish the series. I want to know how it ends.

Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman- This book sounds incredibly fun. I just hope the tv show aspect of it isn't annoying. I forget how I found out about this book.

Cybermage by Saad Z. Hossain- I have never read this author before. This book says its funny so that's something to look forward to. It sounds interesting.

A Madness of Angels or The Resurrection of Matthew Swift by Kate Griffin- This is clearly urban fantasy. I mean the main character on the cover of the book has a kickass coat. Main characters of urban fantasy always have to have a kickass coat. Pretty sure this was recommended to me by goodreads.

Money saved: $83.99

[uinferno]

Back many years ago, for my Cyberpunk Mistborn campaign I was running for friends, I had a quest idea where a disease outbreak would occur, and the disease was given the name Hathsin. It's named that because one of its symptoms is it would induce a compulsion in the infected to scratch at their arms in a very similar manner to meth usage. As such there would be long scars and scabs down the infected's arms, very much like Kelsier and other prisoners of Hathsin.

Then COVID happened and the pandemic plot was shelved.

[eclipse83]

Do you think magic could mimic a virus? I'm wondering if technomagic, mathemagic or cybermagic can become the next hot topic, lol.

I don't see why not.

[citrus-cactus]

Thoughts from reading the Disney Adventures Gargoyles comics now that I’ve finally done that. Under the cut!

I’m doing this from memory a day later so I might have misremembered something but that’s ok let’s GO!

WOW so the comic “The Price” was based off of is right there! And it was about GOLIATH originally. Interesting stuff! The official Gargoyles team made it waaaaay better as an actual episode, but I appreciate being able to see the genesis of that idea! Love the original comics writer (Lee Nordling) being credited in the episode as well.

No Macbeth. At all. Boooooo. Or… maybe yay, I’m not sure XD

As a fandom, we DO NOT talk about the Cybermage enough. This, however, is for a very good reason. As a comics-only-promotional-tie-in-villain that’s uh… yup, that certainly is a choice. I hate him. Give him a backstory XD

Two of these stories seem to follow canon in that Broadway can’t read, or at least has trouble with it. I’m somewhat shocked by that level of attention to detail. Right on!

Did. Did the Trio kill, cook, and eat a whole-ass New York City sewer alligator??????? I have so many questions. Them sitting around their… sewer-campfire(?) was pretty cute though.

There was uhhhhhh… a second Halloween party on Nov. 1, 1995 due to the events in “Eye of the Beholder.” Sure XD

Tintin sighting!! :O

Pink Power Ranger mask XD

Oh, OF COURSE they did a nod to Hunchback of Notre Dame, lol. Good on them.

Goliath slipping and tripping around like a comedy relief character while following Elisa around, like. That was pretty funny even if the conceit of the comic was Not Great. Goliath is not a stalker! I don’t think Bronx is destroying the clocktower by Being Puppy, either (but it’s kind of a cute assumption! “Hmm well we have this doglike character whose claws are stronger than stone and he DOES want to be comfy, so what does that look like?”). He would not do that, and Hudson would not help repair it XD

LEX AND HUDSON AT A BASEBALL GAME BY THEMSELVES AND THEN HUDSON BEING LIKE “LET ME SHOW YOU THIS COOL PLACE I KNOW ABOUT SO YOU KNOW I KNOW HOW TO HAVE FUN” and going to Coney Island. What a weird and wacky fever dream that was! I’m at least a little bit charmed by this being a Hudson and Lexington adventure, but also… WTF XD I think I feel sorry for that old man cosplaying as a wizard!

The blue rose one was kind of cool!! Broadway/Owen teamup like WHATTTTTTTTT!!!!!! Broadway doing some detectin’! SHERLOCK HOLMES BOOK AS PAYMENT OMGGGGGGG! Re: the Fealty Rose, I feel like this was either based off an episode of Aladdin, or the Aladdin episode I’m thinking of was based off of this XD

THE TERRIBLE HALLOWEEN COMIC I REMEMBER FROM TV GUIDE WHERE THEY MISCOLORED ANGELA AND OWEN LOOKS LIKE A DEMONIC HILLBILLY! I used to have these pages. I don’t anymore. Thanks for reminding me why I really don’t miss them. Genuinely there’s SO MUCH YIKES in this one though. Kids dressing as an in-universe hate group for fun, and it’s mentioned as a gag/throwaway line? Fox dressed as Disney’s Pocahontas? S&P was fine with that stuff in the nineties, huh? (it was a different time. I remember, I was there. Sorry) :(

Overall, this was a fun blast from the past though! I never actually subscribed to or bought a copy of Disney Adventures, so it was a peek into a world I only kind of knew about from standing in the grocery store check-out line with my mom. The art style was all over the place, but that’s to be expected with this sort of thing, and there were some panels and pages I really liked! Even if obviously, NOTHING is canon here XD

[shenzaibird-art]

"Told you I could do it, easy!"

Sam uses cybermagic to hack things, sometimes because he was dared to, sometimes for revenge, but almost always just because he has a lot of fun with it as well. (All those devices are specifically cybermagic computers btw, you can make spells and stuff in that!)

A pic I made last year but I hated it until I fixed it a couple months ago but never posted outside my site lol ("fixed" but I still don't like it 100% sadly)

[talenlee]

Game Pile: Girl By Moonlight

Watch this video on YouTube

Script and thumbnail below the fold!

Girl By Moonlight! The much-awaited magical-girl genre based Blades in the Dark variant from Evil Hat games, made by Andrew Gillis (and a bunch of other people, don’t forget them). You know Blades in the Dark? No? Well, there are a bunch of other videos I’ve done about the game system, even when talking about other systems. The super brisk description is that it’s a fail-forward, fiction-first open-sourceable TTRPG that’s really good at driving stories based on their genre markers and the way stories in its vibe feel, with really good systems for breaking some of the ‘rules’ of tabletop RPGs, most significantly in who determines how players do things, and whether the flow of time is linear.

And it’s not.

It’s about magical girls! What are magical girls? Well, sometimes they’re magical and sometimes they’re girls, but also they’re not necessarily either of those things, even if they are magical girls. A magical boy is still part of the magical girl genre, because genres are dumb. Magical girl shows have a super interesting long form lineage that reaches back, no jokes, to the 1960s American sitcom Bewitched, and well at least that’s what TV Tropes tells me and why would they lie? Anyway, the genre isn’t something built out of a single high concept, but rather lots of individual signifiers that show a relationship within a space, and oh boy, we’ll get to that later, because there are more magical girl shows than you think.

Girl By Moonlight stakes a claim on this front real fast, by using a genre system to describe the type of game you’re going to play. Sure, you can start with the classics of the genre, your Universes Steven and your Moons of Sailor, but there’s also a genre form for the Dark genre of Magical Girls, like… well, Puella Magica Madoka. But we’re not done there, with the addition of space-faring, mecha-based magical girl shows, where people have mecha powered by love and friendship. This is your Escaflowne style magical girl story, where your feelings can change reality. And then there’s door number four, where we get a mix of conspiracy and cybermagic. If you know Lain, or Paprika? Those kinds of magical girls.

As I write this script, Girl By Moonlight is not out. Not out out. It’s out, in that if you go to backerkit and pledge to pay, you can get a pdf of its current state, and I think it’s a good deal. It’s a really high production value project as it is right now, at least by my standards. Consider all the time I spend reading indie TTRPGs off itch for this channel where I sometimes feel the need to bully a book for having a twenty page long index or having its character creation in the back half of the book. I recommend you check it out, if you are at all interested in Blades in the Dark hacks like Brinkwood and Scum and Villainy.

That opinion, however, is the opinion of someone who has a pretty healthy bookshelf – both digital and not – of RPGs I don’t ever expect to get to the table. I have no experience with putting Girl By Moonlight on the table, and I don’t intend to grab it because it’s a different lick of paint on a game I already know I like. There are plenty of those, and two of them at the top level of production, — Band of Blades and Thirsty Sword Lesbians — completely miss me because I don’t find the flavour of the narratives they offer interesting.

No, I want Girl By Moonlight for two important reasons:

I know a bunch of magical girls, and I hope they think it’s neat, and

It two-for-ones a problem I have with Blades in the Dark and neatly smacks out of the park the single biggest concern I have with the philosophical footing of a story ‘about Magical Girls,’ in how it handles Trauma.

Trauma in BITD

In the base game of Blades in the Dark, trauma conditions are a byproduct of accruing too much stress. When you take Trauma, you get one from the core list:

Cold: You’re not moved by emotional appeals or social bonds.

Haunted: You’re often lost in reverie, reliving past horrors, seeing things.

Obsessed: You’re enthralled by one thing: an activity, a person, an ideology.

Paranoid: You imagine danger everywhere; you can’t trust others.

Reckless: You have little regard for your own safety or best interests.

Soft: You lose your edge; you become sentimental, passive, gentle.

Unstable: Your emotional state is volatile. You can instantly rage, or fall into

despair, act impulsively, or freeze up.

Vicious: You seek out opportunities to hurt people, even for no good reason.

Now, these are all presented to you as trauma responses. So much so that if you play in a way that reflects your trauma, you get XP for it. These are incentivised choices for your character as responses to trauma, and uh…

like…

What if you were already haunted?

What if you already were a Leech with schizophrenia who heard voices, but was handling it? You didn’t get XP for behaving like you had schizophrenia, but if you do get it as a trauma and it starts causing problems for you, then you suddenly get XP for acting that way.

It’s not that Blades in the Dark doesn’t have room for someone who has these conditions to start with, but the only concern it has for people with these conditions are the ways they make you worse at your job, the way they represent a ticking clock on your overall lifespan. It’s not like these conditions can’t be traumagenic, either! But when the only presence of a thing in the game rules is explicitly as a traumagenic impediment that you’re meant to play up to emphasise the lack of time you have left, it does outline that in this space, if you want those conditions not as drawbacks like that, then you probably should have the drawbacks.

On the one hand I can understand entirely how Blades in the Dark got there. It seems at first like an interesting idea, where the experiences of failure and loss in this marginalised, oppressed state leaves you all broken up and shaken. Thing is, that’s a thing that you experience when you’re someone to whom these are externalities. They’re not lived experiences, so the idea of developing a new modality of living can feel as if it’s only something imposed. And vitally, because it’s meant to represent a depletion of a resource, these traumas can never be overcome or accommodated.

That’s a bummer! It’s not something I think of as a fundamental hard problem – no advocate for the rights of people with these conditions would ever dare to advocate for the position that nobody ever gains these conditions traumagenically. It’s entirely possible for your story to be one about absorbing these punishments, suffering and then deciding to tap out of the attempts to change your situation.

That doesn’t have to bring with it these trappings, this language and framing of these things as fundamentally unrecoverable losses of self. I mean, heck: The nature of Blades in the Dark, where three strikes and you’re out, indicates that about two thirds of the rogues you deal with are going to be people who have these conditions who get to be perfectly good experts at their job.

Anyway, so, I don’t like Trauma in Blades in the Dark.

Magical Girls And Me

There’s a phenomenon in magical girl discourse, and I say phenomenon because it’s a fancier way to say ‘stupid idea.’ And I want to make it clear here, audience of mine, that I am talking primarily about and to dudes, who want to talk about Magical Girls as a genre, and specifically about the concern, the struggle of being ‘taken seriously.’

This isn’t a story for everyone.

This is a story that maps out in my life.

Let me tell you about Magical Girls, as a fixture in my life.

The first experience I had with magical girls was on free-to-air TV in the 1990s, before school, when I could watch unsupervised in a room in a school building, waiting the two hours before the other students got there. There were two duelling shows, Cheez TV and Aggro’s Cartoon Connection. In any given bracket, you had to pick between which of these kids’ TV shows were going to put up, and there were clear winners and losers depending on the time.

I didn’t realise it at the time but I was becoming a big anime fan at this point. Particularly, the dubs of Teknoman (Tekkaman Blade) and Robotech (A bunch of shows, really) were screened this way, and I loved those shows. There was continuity, they had these building stories, I really liked them. And in this space, there was this show…

Sailor Moon.

Sailor Moon made me uncomfortable. I liked watching it, but also, I didn’t like how the voice acting felt. I remembered feeling a lot like there was something artificial or fake in the voices, the way they sped up talking in ways that didn’t seem right. I didn’t realise I was already noticing bad voice direction. But it was a show about cute girls and one of them was kinda dumb and I felt like I shouldn’t be watching it, because it was a show about cute girls and I liked that.

As a direct result of that – and being teased by other students who found out about me watching it, let’s not pretend I arrived at this conclusion entirely on my own – I watched Sailor Moon, but not much of it. I wasn’t here for a story about these girls who changed forms to reveal superpowers, I was busy watching much better, more interesting stuff like Transformers, and Power Rangers.

Hmm.

As I grew into an anime fan, as I watched more of it, I wound up watching very little Magic Girl stuff. What little stuff I saw tended to be something I avoided, and it was a thing over there. It was a show type that I didn’t engage with because they weren’t for me. They weren’t interesting. They didn’t have interesting things in them. I did watch Mahou Tsukai Tai, which is absolutely a magical girl show, but I did watch it because I was trying to impress a girl and then had a crush on a boy in it.

The genre? Nah. Didn’t do anything with it. It didn’t really exist. It was over there. It was girl stuff.

Madoka Arrives

Then I watched Madoka, and I want to say I had complex feelings on it. Because I didn’t really click with it, and I missed some important details (I didn’t see the ending and openings, which added information). I think I just didn’t like it very much, but then, I think to impress a girl, I tried to spend a lot of time thinking about it. But that meant I was positioned to see Madoka become A Subject, and a subject enjoyed by and extolled by a lot of people like me.

There was this particular form of discourse you’d get where dudes would talk about something in a general sense like they were experts, they’d even deliver their opinions with the cadence of a 4chan post, and people who didn’t recognise it, who thought of these opinions as serious, considered and almost from a sort of gutter expertise. It didn’t stand out unless you were steeped in those places to realise that most of what that voice meant was that the person had already laundered The Opinion back and forth enough to see if it was Adequately Acceptable to the hivemind of Default Boys.

And they thought Madoka was great.

Because Madoka was dark.

Because Madoka was a deconstruction of the magical girls genre.

It wasn’t bad, like other magical girl shows were. It was a real magical girl show. It had guns and it was cool and it was badass and the whole thing was all about sacrifice and trauma and to be fair, you have to have a very high IQ to understand Madoka. The yuri is extremely subtle, and without a solid grasp of time travel physics most of the narrative will go over a typical viewer’s head.

And I mean that made sense to me at the time. It’s a deconstruction, I told myself, that’s why it’s complicated, and then I said that aloud, and that seemed like a smart opinion to have. Hell if I know now, really, if I knew or thought that was true then. Because it’s not really a deconstruction if it’s just doing things other Magical Girls shows are doing, and I don’t know what other Magical Girl Shows are doing. I could tell that it was different, in some way to what I expected, and rather than examine that, or consider my expectations or my own ignorance, I asserted that this Magical Girl show was good because it was not a Magical Girl Show.

There’s a wikipedia article on the genre of Magical Girl. The most recent show in that simplified list that I’ve seen is Madoka. The next most recent magical girl show I watched was My-HIME, and if you’d asked me if My-HIME was a magical girl show I would have laughed about how it obviously wasn’t. The girls have mecha and I like that show. Utena? A magical girl show? No it’s a psychological horror story that deconstructs the idea of the handsome prince narrative. Slayers? No, Slayers is a gag fantasy anime. They’re not Magical Girl shows, despite being very much about girls who are magical.

They’re…

they’re something else.

These definitional arguments are part of why I’m so dismissive of definitional arguments these days, by the way. That’s all we were doing. We were looking at media we liked and a label we didn’t like and tried to shoulder-charge our way around it so it doesn’t count as being a Magical Girl series. I tried at the time to argue that Magic Knights Rayearth didn’t count because the characters didn’t transform properly!

Point is, we could tell Madoka was different. We couldn’t tell why, but we could tell it was better, and we attributed the way that Madoka was better was the way it was serious, and that seriousness was expressed, very consistently, in that Madoka was traumatising. People acted out of trauma, trauma was inflicted, characters were trauma babies and even the ending showed that healing wasn’t possible – the only way to escape the trauma was to forget it ever happened. Isn’t that tragic and serious and, you know, good?

And this is the ‘stupid thing’ I wanted to talk about: That we legitimised interest in a show for and about girls only because of how we asserted its reliance on trauma. The concerns and interests of girls in other stories (which we also did not watch) were not important, because we did not value those stories, because, we said, they were not traumatic. Trauma gave us the edge to grip a hold of this work, and to treat it as important.

Total Eclipse Of The Arc

Girl By Moonlight doesn’t use the Trauma system.

It does use something a bit like it, but not really.

In Girl By Moonlight, instead of trauma breaking your character, you get instead a system called Eclipse. Eclipse is explicitly a phenomenon of the Magical Girl. It is a thing that happens to your magical girl characters, because they are magical girl characters, and they relate to your archetype, your place in the story.

Eclipse is there to generate the moments that fit your role in a story. Eclipse is a representation of struggling with inner turmoil under stress, it’s not explicitly linked to psychological trauma in the same way. It can be a mistaken impression, a belief formed out of seeing the wrong thing at the wrong time. In fact, the core expression of Eclipse by the rules text is that they are not about your brain doing you wrong, but rather, about responding to the way society demands you comply. Girl By Moonlight is a game in which your characters are taught to hate themselves by society.

And we live in one of those things.

Eclipse is also different from Trauma in that it presents an opportunity for someone to help grab you out of the condition. Players can spend energy and effort on keeping you from falling into Eclipse, and that has a low-key sneaky side effect of ensuring that most characters hover near the same amount of stress and the same proximity to Eclipse… which does mean you can have stories about a catastrophic sequence of failures or a story about people pulling each other back from the brink in a darkest hour.

That’s cool.

Conclusion

There’s more to the game book of course! It’s not as simple as just ‘Hey, it’s Blades in the Dark with one different system!’ The way that the group share a genre sheet, not a gang sheet, that signifies that the story centres around you, and you’re not one of a group of types? That’s great! Or the way that the Eclipse system stacks, and you can be Eclipsed in Eclipse and therefore, be lost. The archetypes are great too, with every character positioned to consider themselves and their alternative identity, as a creative act and if you know me, you know I love me some ‘heroic identity as a creative expression,’ gosh dang.

Girl By Moonlight is currently available on Backerkit, I like it, and I like some of the choices it’s making in its systems. I like what it’s thinking about and I like how it’s different from Blades in the Dark, which I also like. And even if you don’t check it out and find a new favourite game, consider what kind of things you’re assuming are necessary for a story to be worth respecting.

Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!

#GamePile #Games

[ac-liveblogs]

Negativity aside, what's ur favourite part of VRAINs so far? Mine is the hacking scenes, but I also genuinely love how nonsensical their view of the internet/modern technology is, like yeah, The Knights of Hanoi made a computer virus that can infect people's physical brains, sure! I mean, they're both viruses. It just makes sense! - spoken with genuine giddiness and joy.

I am enjoying VRAINS, it's just... very messy. It feels like they only had vague ideas for some things and much stronger ideas for others - but I really like the strong ideas!

I loved Yusaku vs Revolver! I surprised myself with how much I enjoyed it, I'm engaged in their little subplot and I want to see where it goes. I like Yusaku as a character in general, I don't know what I expected from him but "this is a superhero story" wasn't it. Using 'internet avatars' as a stand-in for a superhero's secret identity is a great idea. I love superheroes, I'm immediately charmed by this kind of twist on them.

I also really like Ai. We haven't seen much of him, but he's such an ominous lil gremlin, isn't he? "Oh he's just a lil guy" > "...aaaand he ate someone" > "he's so goofy aw" > "AGAIN?!" Genuinely very curious what his deal is, as someone who's heard about the infamous season 3 and cannot wait. Also, I was delighted to learn "Ai Caramelldansen" was an actual animation in the actual show, I thought it was a gif someone made.

(i wuv him)

The use of technology/hacking in this show is nonsense, and I really like it. I've just been thinking of it as cybermagic (especially when Ai summons a Datastorm and Yusaku starts ripping monsters out of it). It's fun though, I do like it. Hanoi's virus affecting Aoi IRL was a neat idea too, and opens the door for some really interesting plot developments.

There's a lot of ideas in this show that are rotating in my head like crazy, and I don't know if they're gonna pull it off but I hope they do and if they don't... well, they'll still be living in my head rent-free.

[blackladisdestrcz]

CyberMage: Darklight Awakening | Cyberpunk 2044 | Review and Playthrough

[vylt-witch]

⌁ 〉〉 ┈ "VYBRANCY" OUT NOW ON ALL STREAMING PLATFORMS ┈ 〈〈 ⌁

Listen to "VYBRANCY" on your favourite platforms!

Purchase "VYBRANCY" on Bandcamp!

Inspired by the Cyberpunk: Edgerunners anime series, “VYBRANCY” is a fast-paced, action-packed synth metal track, chromed up full of addictive melodic synth hooks and rich, powerful electric guitar riffs that take influence from synthwave artists like Carpenter Brut, Perturbator and Dance With The Dead.

VYBRANCY was created as my submission for the Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty Growl.FM contest last year. Unfortunately, it did not win, but now I get to keep its publishing rights! :)

P.S. Fun fact! The background cityscape is an edited public domain image of my home country, Singapore!

⌁ 〉〉 ┈ ⸸ ⛧ ⛧ ⛧ ⸸ ┈ 〈〈 ⌁

【Credits】

Mastering done by Marc Matthews, big big thank you for all the help and advice!

Art by the incredibly talented John G Arts !! Background is an edited public domain image of my home, Singapore :) Cybermagic circles designed by me 💜💜

⌁ 〉〉 ┈ ⸸ ⛧ ⛧ ⛧ ⸸ ┈ 〈〈 ⌁

[uinferno-art]

Death in the Year 500

Cyberpunk Marsh. To be more incognito, I thought he'd wear a thick sweater and pair of aviators to hide spikes, plus grow out his hair to hide the tattoos (and spikes from the rear). Not seen easily because of the colors, but he's graying as he coasts along in his 50s because I think silver fox Marsh is what everyone deserves.

Tangent: ever since I saw Ben McSweeney's official portrait I can't not see Marsh as fucking yoked.

[abookishidentity]

Books read and finished in March 2025

-The Mortal Word by Genevieve Cogman- 4/5 stars. So dragons are the order and the fae are chaotic. I say it's pretty chaotic that each time a dragon gets pissy they end up affecting the world they are in and end up damaging it. 

Someone: You will be given a fae representative 

Me: It’s going to be silver. 

Irene: It’s going to be Lord Silver. 

Lord Silver: Hello there everyone! It’s me! 

Me: Of course 

Irene: Fucking of course! It’s not like I have other bullshit to worry about! 

-The Secret Chapter by Genevieve Cogman- 3/5 stars. This one didn’t hit as much for me. Maybe I don’t really care for the heist trope? This one felt like a James Bond movie mixed with a heist movie. Perhaps I don’t heists because nothing goes to plan and I like plans sticking tight. I didn’t like that Irene woke up in Mr Nemo’s lair again in a bikini and a fucking collar. Fucking gross. It was badass of her that she could only use written language so she carved her arm up to get blood so she can write commands in the library language on the collar. Another thing that I didn’t like was that Indigo was portrayed as bad. Her motivations were justified to me. Dragons shouldn’t rule everything and shouldn’t control everything. 

-The Dark Archive by Genevieve Cogman- 5/5 stars. I loved this one. Best one in the series so far. I have a separate post for this one so I’m not going to go into detail here. 

-Machinehood by S.B Divya- 3/5 stars. Sometimes science fiction books feel very modern when you read them. The science fiction elements were interesting; they just felt like something we are currently seeing. This is the point of science fiction but I want to read things that I never read about. I know terrorism and terrorist groups aren’t supposed to make much sense with their ideals and such but the one in this book didn’t make sense to me. Also, I feel like the leader gave up too easily. I don’t know. At least it didn’t end with complete genocide. 

-Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow- 3/5 stars. This was a short read. It’s always interesting when death doesn’t really exist anymore in the world. People can die, it's just they make backups of themselves and then that backup goes into a new body. People can essentially live forever that way but are they really themselves at that point? It really has a ship of theseus vibe to it. Anyway, the main character gets a little caught up in something and is essentially losing it. I wonder what would have happened if he just fucked his best friend named Dan and called it a day. It’s clear that these two men care for each other. It’s weird that when you essentially can live out several lifetimes, the age difference between people can become worse. Sure they may look the same age but one person could be a century older but in a different body. It’s fucking weird. Main character leaves Disney world with Dan at the end so at least there’s that. I wish we got more of the world aside from Disney World. I’m not sure if it was open like it is now and they were trying to make the park more tech heavy? 

-The Untold Story by Genevieve Cogman- 5/5 stars. This book was pretty good as well. I can respect a series for ending. Pretty decent ending. Or at least, a stopping point. I wouldn’t know where it would go from here as she has found out her parents, and how who was really controlling the library. Three powerful entities controlling everything through their library brands. I was quite shocked when Irene’s was burned off. But I guess it came back at the end? If she could say things in the language then I guess it was back? Anyway, I was convinced that Brandamant was her birth mother. I was wrong. I thought her being at the heart of the library was pretty cool. Like I said, a pretty good stopping point. A good series to read. I am really glad I read it. I love the relationship between Irene, Kai and Vale. They make a pretty good team. And they all care about each other. My last remaining thoughts are that its always entertaining when the chapter takes place in Kai’s perspective. He doesn’t have as much experience as Irene so his solving problem skills are different. It’s quite amusing to read when he is in charge. He is so broody and angsty with Irene. It’s quite nice when he is with different people. Hilarity ensues. Also another remaining thought is this: Do all the people who live in the worlds, who are not part of the fae or dragons, know there are many different worlds? I’m going to say no.I don’t really remember Vale’s introduction to all of it is.  

-Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman- 4/5 stars. This book is pretty good. There are a few lines here and there that made me think the book was written in 2016 or something. It makes Carl/the author sound homophobic or something. There are some problematic lines in this book but it’s not as prominent as other books I have read. This book reminds me of some aspects of The Hunger Games. The tv show aspect was not as annoying as I thought. It was Hunger Games like. This book is quite dark and haunting if you stop and think about it. Thinking about all the people who died, thinking about all the disenfranchised people who might have wandered into the dungeon by mistake, and thinking about all the people who lost their families in the dungeon. I would imagine it would not go easy on you if you were a small child or the elderly or disabled in any way. The book is quite detailed and it makes me think how long it took the author to come up with each thing. I didn’t realize this was a series until I hit half way through the book and they completed the first level. I am intrigued enough to keep going but the local libraries around me don’t have the whole series and I am not going to buy books unless I have to. Donut is amazing and the fact she was given the power of speech is great. Donut and Carl make a good team. Carl is going to have so much PTSD. The utter bullshit is real. 

-CyberMage by Saad Z. Hossain- 3/5 stars. This book had some cool story building. The stuff with the nanotech and AI gods running shit was cool. The main character was a 15-16 year old boy who was a hacker, was clearly spoiled by his parents, and hardly spent time outside of virtual reality. So naturally he is a bit insufferable and feels like he could be an incel. But I can’t completely hate him as he is 15-16 and he has time to grow. Besides I’m sure the events that happened to him in this book humbled him. Something that is weird is that he is emancipated from his parents and yet he still lived with them? He had a pygmy elephant which I found endearing. I hope it survived at the end. The only reason he started going to public school was because of a girl who didn’t even like him. And naturally the boy she had something with was a bully who would beat the main character up. It’s all fucked. The fat shaming of the main character was terribly annoying.  I’m just glad we also followed a different character who was a golem and chopped people’s heads off. That was much more interesting. 

-The Madness of Angels by Kate Griffin- 4/5 stars. Ahh another urban fantasy series I want to read and yet the rest of the books aren’t at the library. Oh well. This is a pretty great book. Kind of long though. Should have been like 100 pages less. Anyway, Matthew Swift is an interesting urban fantasy protagonist. For a good while I had no idea what he was and the book wasn’t exactly giving me the answers. He is a sorcerer but he has the “blue electric angels” living inside him. That’s pretty damn interesting. First book plus a resurrection means we don’t know for sure if he is acting like himself or it was the angels. He sometimes says “We” and sometimes he says “I” I guess it really depends on who’s talking. The electric angels make him sound quite innocent and naive about the world. Almost childish in a way. Anyway, this book is about revenge and he gets his revenge. Although I hate that a woman is mentioned throughout the book, we get some backstory of her and the main character and then she is fucking killed. I feel there might be hypocrisy in this book. Matthew is like “how dare you want to call the electric angels” and yet he called them when he was dying? Also did it take them two years for resurrect him or did the woman who died live for two years, decided that everything is bullshit and then resurrected him? He seems pretty pissed that he was resurrected. Anyway, despite all that, the book was pretty damn great. It was quite descriptive and flowery with its language which I was actually into. 

-The Last Hour Between Worlds by Melissa Caruso- 4.5/5 stars. This book was pretty damn great. I love the time loop aspect of it all. It must be pretty traumatizing to see people die in every loop and then seeing them again alive in the next one. The main character is pretty cool and so is her love interest. The main character can side step which is pretty fucking neat. It’s basically going into an in between place while everything else is frozen and popping up where she needs to go. I think I read something like that in an urban fantasy book. The main reason she learned side stepped is that she was constantly trying to find her childhood friend. That whole thing is amazing especially when there is a reveal about it. Interesting first book of a series. Her life before this book sounded quite interesting. But it’s pretty fascinating how much she takes her life seriously because she has a baby. This book has an interesting world and interesting characters. Sort of reminds me of The Invisible Library world. Overall a pretty great book.

[uinferno]

Btw if you've been paying any attention to me and noticed a minor uptick in me posting about my Cyberpunk Mistborn AU (both here or elsewhere), Brandon revealing there is going to be 5 Eras psychically activated it. I didn't even see that live stream nor was I aware of it when I started back up, but the time frame alignment is suspicious so I'm going to accept that my subconscious realized it's now or never with this AU I've been futzing with for over 6 years now.

[cbmnet]

#DemonLord2099 #AnimeMojo

[the-blog-of-gog]

He returns—a shadowed figure woven in light, reborn from the depths of the Omniverum’s arcane weave.

Months drifted in the chasm of elsewhere, where reality blurred, a cosmic hum tangled in his soul, grinding against the grain of his being until all splintered and reformed. Through the maelstrom, he walked, unbound and stripped to the quick, his essence scattering across realms, a fractal spark caught in the circuits of what-was and what-will-be....

#returning #rebirth #transformation #magick #technomancy #neotechnomagick #magus #technopagan #cybermage

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