2025, Q1 - A Look Back at Warrior

I started watching things again, and while I don't feel like writing full essays on everything I watch - why will become clear as this goes on - I feel I should at least try to put my thoughts about them into words. My watching habits are perhaps a little unhealthy. I like having something playing on the side when I think, or when I don't. I'm not huge on playing Video Games either, so the things I do play are just as well playable without BGM. I know: the shame. This means that me watching something is not as much an expression of even a passing interest, as much as an acknowledgment that it exists. This will make up a lot of the Anime especially that will show up here, as 20-minute episodes happen to fit nicely into my daily routine of running from one task to the next. So without further ado, let's begin with what I watched in January.

"Ride the Cyclone" is a Cats-style indie-musical with a morbid bend and better production design than it has any business having. It's also got a lot of very catchy tunes. It's format - largely consisting of a series of Character songs - lends itself for very sleek direction, as it cuts around the fat with brief snippets of dialogue. I have a weakness for "dark circus music", so when I saw a YouTube documentary on this show by the ever-excellent "Wait In The Wings", I felt the need to track it down.

Even though, for pragmatic and planning reasons, I didn't feel like tracking down the soundtrack and I had only seen this once, I can still recall almost all the hooklines of the songs, which I think is a great indicator about their memorability. Narratively, it's also decently engaging despite its simplicity, and in high contrast to Cats, not openly nonsensical and without frankly cringeworthy source-material.

The mystery girl's lament is clearly designed to be a standout number, and as someone with the aforementioned "creepy circus" sensibilities, it's of course one of my favorite numbers, especially when combined with the haunting stage-work. A lot of that is especially in combination with the simple stage design, that allows very effective utilization of lack of light and empty space especially.

There have been so many TV series that were arguably mistreated, and I think it's safe to say, that Warrior is one of them. The first two seasons had set a very high bar for me, and though much of the content is perhaps minorly triggering to me, as a person with very few triggers, it addresses these topics with a tact that I don't usually see nor expect from media. The show setting in the US during its westward expansion, but focused in large parts in working class communities - opposing ones at that - is a rare perspective. It showcases solid political theory through its plot, and less through the vocabulary, and perhaps even on accident, specifically, worker solidarity (or rather the need for it) and intersectionality, the latter mostly in its treatment of its female characters. All that came as a surprise to me though, because I originally gave it a watch because of the action in the show, which has held a consistent standard into the third season. Someone with an appreciation for martial arts choreographies in movies is probably very easily impressed these days, seeing as most stuntwork in fight choreographies are somewhat lacking, so we're often stuck with what we can get, but especially for a streaming series, this is very much above par. The third season doesn't really see the protagonist Ah Sam in a duel like the previous two did (or at least not with a fighter of comparable ability), which I do miss in the season, but there were plenty fun action scenes nonetheless. I could probably write a full essay about the series, and perhaps even this last season, if I really tried, but since that's not what this is for, I'd like to just address the ending of the season, and with it, the series, as it's been axed somewhat unceremoniously. It fits neatly into the pattern the previous seasons had established, with all protagonists at the bottom of some crisis, larger than the last one. Of course, this being the ending of the story officially makes it a little more devastating than in the previous two cases, but it left off at an interesting place. I would have really liked to see a fourth season wrap up, considering it would have likely meant two new Tongs trying to rise to power while Chinatown was being squeezed by the US institutions with either propagandistic or labour interests, and this kind of faction-driven conflict appeals to me very strongly.

I've taken careful interest in Dropout content, ever since I saw the first season of Dimension 20 on my favourite YouTube derivative last year. That's why I watched the first season of Vic Michaelis' "Very Important People". I don't have any special love for improv comedy, though it's an art-form I very much enjoy when I notice how good the people involved are. Since the improv scene is somewhat difficult to access where I live (as in, I don't have the time to keep checking where things are happening, and then likely won't have the means to get home in time), my first real exposure to this form of comedy was the "Middleditch and Schwartz" Netflix series, great fun in its own right. I don't think "Very Important People" is quite at that level, but the follow-through is still at least middlingly entertaining most of the time. Part of it is that the costumes are sometimes too weird for my taste, and that the characters that are developed won't always lean into a style of humour I enjoy. When it works though, it works amazingly. I think Ally Beardsley's character is the right amount of weird and self-consistent for me to like in this sort of format, but then again their costume didn't immediately make it apparent what they were supposed to play. The short runtime of each episode definitely plays to the strength of the series, and so does Michaelis' delivery in the style of somebody just barely holding it together, which they also bring to other shows, like Game Changer. The runtime also makes the prospect of another season at least interesting to me, since the concept itself is interesting, and I'm sure the execution can only improve, now that they've probably had feedback on what the audience enjoyed the most.

"Poets of the Chinese Revolution" is decidedly not the type of book I usually read. Despite my weekly endeavor to put together something resembling a poem, it's not actually an art form that appeals to me in any significant way. Or perhaps I only understand the artistic appeal when the poem is performed. Perhaps it's like sheet music. I find the ability of spoken word musicians to come up with a verse on the spot genuinely impressive, for example, but I cringe every time I hear inverted syntax. As such, reading a commented poetry collection should seem a little out of step with my usual tastes. Truth be told, the attempt stems from the curiosity about art in socialist states, which is usually overtly coded as propaganda or counter-propaganda, rather than art for its own sake. Much of the commentary did highlight this relation of art to the revolutionary project, especially on its chapter on Mao. The poems themselves of course, are in Chinese, meaning I had to make do with the translation. Translating poetry seems like a thankless job to me. It immediately loses its form and with it, a lot of the subtextual construction, and the translator will have to strike a balance between preserving intent and creating a legible text. I certainly couldn't do it, let alone make the attempt between languages so different in form as Cantonese and English. I don't think I really learned anything about poetry reading the book, but I came across a couple of new forms of poetry, and got a sense about the ubiquity poetry held in that particular stretch of history.

"No Longer Allowed in Another World" was kind of a disappointment. I'm not sure why I would expect anything from a comedy Isekai, but something about centering a character clearly inspired by Dazai Osamu felt like it could be at least funny or even interesting. Isekai is not a genre I enjoy generally enjoy, but I still see a decent number of those shows in a year, since now and then there's art styles that really work for me, or there might be a concept fun enough to give he thing a spin. Since this is decidedly second-screen content, I usually finish a season, but will have to think on whether to pick up a second season, should it come around. I had read Dazai's seminal "No Longer Human", which besides its depressing content, I thought was a decent look at passivity. It is likely the one work that characterizes Dazai in popular culture today, so the morbidity of the character is often centered in these depictions. It makes figures inspired by Dazai a short-hand for the tortured artist, reflected through a specific cultural lens, which has been historically the more popular way to go about things in Japanese media. "No Longer Allowed in Another World" is very average apart from its protagonist though. Perhaps the best I can say for the series is, that its protagonist is not annoying to me, which is partially because he spends a significant time of the series being generally absent or detached from the events. It's mostly played for laughs, but the space it leaves is not utilized well. The world building and supporting cast are too boilerplate to capture attention for any amount of time, so all in all, the series delivers a whole lot of nothing.

Frank Herbert's "Dune" has so far escaped my reading on prestige. I'm not always in the mood for good, or even great things, and this seemed at the time like the only book in my collection I hadn't read. I would find a small stack a couple of weeks later, but by that time, I had been thoroughly absorbed into the story. It certainly makes a good case for its status as legendary science fiction, though I wouldn't mark the prose as notable as much as the subject matter. Dune reads to me primarily as a story about colonialism. Even if the plot might not center it directly, every facet of it is mired in the colonial relations between the Empire and the Fremen. Where it sets itself apart from the problematic white savior narratives notoriously pervasive in the pre-2000s, is the way it highlights the distance and co-reliance of Paul Atreides as he lives among the Fremen. It also does not shy away from depicting Paul's co-option of the Fremen faith and people to ultimately his own ends as a tyrannical act. This first novel then ends on a bitter note, as Paul cements his power in a system the only way it permits it, through the means of traditionalist hierarchy and oppression. Starkly in contrast to the way the Fremen seem to handle things among them, I might add. I found a version of the book that's fairly new and features simple cell-shaded art, so I think I might look for exactly this publication series if I want to look for any potential sequels.

"Bye Bye Earth" was mostly fine. It was perhaps a little bit mangled by jarring jumps in the timeline between episodes. As far as light novel plots go, it doesn't feel like anything special, in that it ranks just above Isekai in complexity, and while the aesthetics that Lidenfilms studio has chosen are perfectly fine, and at least consistent, it doesn't add any additional coherence to the specifics of the settings. I think in many cases, this should be the primary task for adaptation, especially in cases like this, where the world isn't just generic template fantasy. I can only imagine, that the light novel author neglected many visual descriptions, which I think is perfectly fine for the medium. Otherwise, the odd focus on both swords as a kind of "combat soul", and the approach to equate large-scale battles with orchestra performances might have given the visual design of the show more concrete pointers. The character work might have been reserved for a planned second season, seeing as much of the main cast is not especially noteworthy and experiences very standard development throughout the 10-episode run of the show, and those aforementioned time-jumps do absolutely terrible things for the character development of the secondary cast. An aspect I find very interesting though is the way the series handles Mermaids as creatures that reflect the desires of a chosen one. It makes them into automatically co-dependent creatures, but also able to change appearance and genders on a whim. It's not really comparable to any gender expression that exists out in the real world, and what this means is occasionally explored when the point of view of a Mermaid is taken on, usually for flashback purposes, but this externality feels like an interesting and notable one, and, in my opinion, calls for a Mermaid-focused spin-off.

I had started "Rokka no Yuusha" the previous year, because it had a really slow start, and I couldn't stand most of the characters. The visual design I found interesting enough though, to sit through it while doing something else. Sadly, the story proved it could be interesting just as the season ended. What started as a very standard Fantasy plot quickly evolved into what I can only describe as a "battle mystery" in which people who aren't entirely aware of each others' abilities and amount of knowledge try to sus out an impostor among them. In my mind, this series exists as a 12-episode proof of concept that would have become really good, once a second round kicked off, since now the rules for the mystery have been established. In general, mystery stories set in fantasy settings suffer heavily from the unclear-rules-problem in which it's not immediately apparent which features of the world can be included in the solutions of the mystery. It's different for other series like "Classroom of the Elite" where we know we can expect physics to work more or less as expected. As such, the sudden inclusion of thermodynamics felt a little out of pocket. Still, it would have set an interesting precedent, and subsequent arcs might have felt like longer versions of Danganronpa mysteries. It's greatest weakness might be its characters though, which make it genuinely difficult to care, which one might not make it, or be the impostor, doubly so, because the point-of-view character is one that I would have little issue with never seeing (and especially hearing) again.

Much has been said about "Look Back" already, by people more involved in the interesting this story exists within, but I still had a good time watching it. I of course was exposed to Fujimoto's work primarily by "Chainsaw Man", and hence I wasn't as surprised as I could have been by the turn this movie took at about the half-way point. That part didn't resonate as strongly with me though as the meditation on art, talent and most importantly validation that it presented in the first half. The second half feels very reminiscent of real-world events involving Kyoto Animation, which is the most jarring to someone aware of even just the outlines, and even the bittersweet ending didn't quite manage to take me back.

I especially like the way this movie works with sound and music. The dramatic and emotional scenes in the latter half are often almost entirely without music and minimal foley, which gives the scene time to breathe, especially when very little is happening. The scratchy, loose art style also does a lot to ground it, setting it apart from the usual smooth aesthetics that characterizes many anime and makes it otherwise easy enough to parse visually so that more interesting motions don't confuse the viewer. The visual stylings of the in-story manga "Shark Kick" is close enough to "Chainsaw Man" that I can't help but read the protagonist as an author-insert, which gives the story a lot more weight in context, which I'll have trouble ignoring. I'm not much or "Death of the Author" anyways, but I understand that just because I support and identify with Fujimoto's whole deal where he's a weird little art-freak winging it, and secretly hoping he's doing okay, doesn't make the movie better than it is. In terms of translating a manga though, I think this is a really good example in choosing how to translate scenes. This, too, could probably have an essay to itself, but I'll leave this as a strong recommendation and move on.

The "Mononoke" movie is absolutely gorgeous. I unfortunately don't have a copy of the series lying around, but I have to assume, the series matches the movie in its visuals. It's bumped the series up on my proverbial to-watch list, even though it being in a language I'm not fluent in will have it require my full attention. The story, I'm not too sure about though, admittedly, though I'm used to Anime movies being more like promotional material for the source material. In the case of Mononoke, this is perhaps a little complicated, seeing as it's a spin-off that's not immediately inferrable from the title, even if one speaks Japanese. There are Manga, which I'm assuming are also a spin-off, but having seen the movie, I think the animation is a very real draw, which I'm assuming will show up in form of perhaps a peculiar art style in the manga. I'm personally more easily wooed by good animation than I am by good art on a page, but that is just personal preference, and likely overexposure to A1-Animation.

I was initially torn on Dimension 20's "Never Stop Blowing Up" season. As far as actual play shows go, I think it's one of the better ones, because the story-telling is very tight and streamlined, but some of their concepts just fail to catch my attention. I usually give it two episodes or so, and decide whether I like the cast and direction of the story enough to continue. This "Never Stop Blowing Up" season utilizes the system of the same name, which seems relatively new on the scene, and geared heavily toward the action-movie feel of the early 90s. I personally don't have a nostalgia for those movies, but I still find myself with moderate interest. I find it difficult to articulate what I like about Dimension 20 in particular when it comes to actual play shows beyond the very vague, and this holds true for this season. It's probably mostly the interplay between cast members and GM, none of which approach the game with the intention to "win". Whether I like a season or not then is mostly a question of whether I like how the people in the cast interface with the setting, or whether I can get into the setting enough. I don't feel like it's a good metric, but since each episode of this show tends toward 2 hours, I reserve the right to drop things that don't entertain me enough.

This season though, very much plays to the strengths of this format, and perhaps the entirety of this show. Like most other seasons I really like it lays out the internal conflicts of the characters very early, almost entirely in the first episode, and covers the straightforward paths to resolving them with so much over the top fluff and action that you don't notice how easy the story is.

I had read a good portion of the "Dandadan" manga before, so I knew what I was in for, when I started the anime. The only reason I hadn't read further is because I've not been reading manga, in lieu of the books I have piling up on my living room table. I never really know up to which point an adaptation goes before I've finished it, but judging by previous experiences in this way, I was pretty sure it wasn't going to include stuff beyond the part I hadn't read. Still, sometimes you can tell from the opening that the animation that's coming is going to be really great. As an action series, of course those scenes are going to get the lion's share of amazing animation, but what I was very pleasantly surprised by was the fact that the humour given voice hits better for me than it did in the manga, just through timing and delivery. In exchange, it kind of loses the more honest emotional scenes, which were few and far between anyway. "Dandadan" is mostly a comedy and action series, and I didn't really come for the emotion anyway, so that's more than fine. Where the manga sets out to write interesting things, it does so competently, seeing as the main cast are at this point still unsure of how their powers work and whether there might be rules to the battle. Emblematic for this is perhaps the giant sumo-alien that they try to defeat by having it touch the ground with its hand, which would be a losing condition in the sport that alien is modelled after. I also appreciate, that that doesn't even remotely work, because there's really no reason why it would. At the same time, much of the show is based in the culture of urban legends to make the paranormal side just as ill-defined as the alien side of the premise. All in all, I'd be glad to see a second season of this, and when I get back to read manga, I'll likely try to catch up with this one.

"Bartender" is a show of the type to mythologize a profession. I have a particular weakness for shows that highlight passions for professions that tend to get overlooked for the flashier, more prominent ones. The visual design of this show is not too interesting, but as a person who sticks to longdrinks and cocktails when out on the town, I found some really interesting drinks in there. It's otherwise an easy and cozy watch, I wouldn't mind more of, if only because of the subject matter and my own passing interest in it.

I struggle to call "Beau is Afraid" a comedy. I could only ever pitch it as a comedy, centering a deeply tragic protagonist, whom I never learned to sympathized with. That might well be intentional, if the final scene of the movie is meant to literalize its thesis, but I don't think it's quite as simple. It's a very long movie, and at times I could really feel that length. The clearest example of this is an extended theater scene, that I found very tedious to get through, because the point of the scene was very clearly telegraphed, and I don't too much enjoy the type of theater that was performed. It seemed very "american high school play put on with one dress rehearsal and too little ambition". Beyond this, the movie comes with its own silent world-building. The title is apt for most of the movie, but the world he inhabits is very openly hostile, and not just toward him. There is of course "the scene" toward the end of the film, and I admire that this could refer to several scenes. More specifically, I'm thinking of one that required some effects work and pushed the movie firmly into surreality, including imagery I'm probably not going to forget for a long while. I think the movie might benefit from some editing, but I still ended up liking it. It's not necessarily one to watch with company though.

"Code Geass - Roze of the Recapture" is one of the myriad Code Geass follow-ups that we're apparently now getting every other year. I hold the original in very high regard, even though its flaws are often very abundantly clear, and it's very much of its time. Still, subsequent installments of the series have never quite hit the same note for me that the original had, perhaps because the story implications aren't as heavy as they are in the original. This backdrop has returned in Roze of the Recapture, returning the setting to the pre-original status quo. It makes the conflict more tangible than those of other installments. I take some issue with it, because from a story-telling perspective, we've seen the downfall of an empire led by an uprising in one of its conclaves once before, and this could easily be a relevant part of this world's history, if only we could have seen how the empire reconstituted and what roles the established institutions - even the ones that were once the heroes of the story - either failed or contributed to this rebuilding of the empire. As it is, this is just Code Geass, but with effectively four characters, and fewer politics. Good enough to kill some time, because it's still one of the few shows that consistently makes mech-battles snappy and readable enough to be fun.

"House of Leaves" was a recommendation for non-ergodic literature, and it's certainly the most non-ergodic that I've read so far. It got easier to read further down the line though, as soon as I understood who was who and which set of footnote was written from whose perspective. Perhaps it's me being used to reading books with page-long footnotes. Once the formatting of the book started getting fully wild was also incidentally when the story started getting interesting to me. The accounts of the expeditions into the house were great suspense writing, and a welcome reprieve of what had been descriptions of relatively mundane events so far. The Navidson records are by far the most intriguing, and also have the most interesting additions in the appendix of the book - roughly 150 pages of first hand accounts, photographic material and sketches. At the other extreme, the pages inserted by Jonny are really just repetitive erotica with an undertone of depression, which is fine, but not my thing when it goes on for more than two pages at a time. It is, all in all, a simulation of a living document that is actively worked on and elaborated upon by parties of different dispositions toward the topic, and since the events centered in the story are technically of supernatural nature, the academic discussion that happen beyond the pages included in the book leak into the footnotes and appendices primarily. It's an interesting read, and perhaps at another time I'll look into more non-ergodic literature. I've heard 'S' might be up my alley.

"The Elusive Samurai" I remember being discussed with some division when it came out, even though I don't really understand why. On a visceral level, there might be a tonal imbalance, though I think that's just something one might want to expect given the subject matter. These kinds of tone shift have always been a strength of animation, in my opinion. Besides the sudden tone shifts that crop up every now and then, I think this series had a really good run, a worthwhile story, and characters that got decent development and were often entertaining enough even without it. I have enjoyed shows of this type in the past, namely the Arslan series that ended up petering out in a very unspectacular fashion, and I'm not opposed to watching someone attempt this kind of show again.

"Metallic Rouge" is one in a long line of entries that I wish were better. Original anime are a rare occurrence in general. Most anime are meant primarily as promotional material for the manga, and in many cases, the precedent is sensible. It's where the concept of filler arcs comes from. Most episodes of an anime condense five or more chapters, and actively airing shows will quickly catch up to the source material, especially since weekly releases are far from guaranteed for manga in the first place, which will puts the team and network before the decision to either introduce filler, or write an original ending. Neither is usually a popular decision. Original anime comes with none of that baggage. In theory, one could know exactly how many episodes were required to tell the story on wanted to tell, but in practice, it's always abundantly clear that the regular 12 episode run that those projects get are far from enough to scratch the world building. The story probably wouldn't have been great, even if it had gotten more time to develop, and what the show had time to establish in terms of world building felt weak either way. Every time I see an original project with some decent animation though, I hope it'll turn out better.

The fact that "Naked Lunch" even made it into my viewing list perhaps characterizes my interests in movies very clearly. In truth, I'm a little torn about whether I like this movie or not. It seems to play with many different concepts, and doesn't really care to connect them too much beyond the vague subversion of some spy thriller. The genre itself is a little bit fraught, considering the most enduring franchise has been through a lot of rough patches and is still arguably the blueprint for newcomers to the scene. Naked Lunch is of course a little older than the modern spy thriller and so could make a case for having foreseen the genre stagnating. This aspect of the movie is mostly aesthetics though. While it does seem at the end to be reflecting the actual events that transpire in the story, the entire plot seems to be a cyclical depiction of a particular artistic process, fitting the trope of the suffering artist, complete with challenges to the sexual identity of a staunchly heteronormative ideologue, substance abuse problems and a "muse", which in the way they show up in most spy media, turns out to be replaceable by the point the process is completed, fridged to kick off the process in the first place. Movies about art are frequently at risk of being navel-gazey enough to turn me off, but when they work, they really work. "Naked Lunch" managed to hook me enough to make Cronenberg's effects work a part of a difficult narrative, rather than the center-piece, the way I expected it to become, so I'm very much inclined to recommend at least one watch.

"A Place Promised in Our Early Days" is Makoto Shinkai's directorial debut from all the way back in 2004. It stands in significant contrast to his more well-known works "Your Name" and "A Silent Voice" both of which I liked fine. "A Place Promised in Our Early Days" though, I felt fell flat in all the ways that his more acclaimed titles have managed to avoid. It's interesting to see all the pieces in a movie that would one day produce the highest-grossing anime movie internationally (at least until it was dethroned by a Demon-Slayer sequel, disappointingly), but the slice-of-life component was just decidedly too high in this one. Not that it busied itself with the usual trappings of the genre, it's really just a feeling that I get when I see anime adopt a certain tone. I think Shinkai's stories work best with a minimal amount of magical realism, and the setting of this film adds very little to the ideas in the story, and the other way round.

"Quality Assurance in Another World" is another Isekai, which means I only watched it because I worked from home that day and didn't want to do the sensory-deprivation thing. The Isekai gimmick this time saw a QA-Tester trapped in the game they were meant to be debugging. It's very much a setup that can be interesting, depending on the execution. It was, for all it's worth, good execution. Video games and their bugs - even post-release - are a frequent source of natural comedy. Entire YouTube careers have been built on this. This show understands this and plays with the bugs as sources of comedy, in a cultural, memetic way, and in a natural way, as well as solutions to problems that the protagonists would not be able to deal with otherwise. Though it's generally difficult for me to find my enthusiasm for Isekai these days, I wouldn't mind another season of this.

"The Penguin" is one in the line of gangster serials that managed to capture my attention. Generally, the genre and its aesthetics, as well as its story conventions have always been interesting to me, and as such it's not exactly surprising I liked this series, that was perhaps even an archetypical mob movie stretched over the span of eight episodes of pretty solid TV. At this point, my own stance on unions and locally organized structures contrasted against state institutions and especially those organizations that have grown too large to retain their beneficial functions, might slot in neatly with many of the classic plot beats and even rhetorical flourishes that gangsters have a history of using. If "The Penguin" had a theme, I'd say it was about soft power. The first sequence of the series somewhat states this as a thesis, even though it follows up that aspiration with a pretty definitive display of hard power, and immediately acknowledges that this was probably a mistake. The characters especially that are trying to claw their way to the top will do so using primarily soft power, and when they begin relying on their numbers or guns, they regularly lose control over their operation, or even the narrative. This version of the Penguin is perhaps characterized first and foremost by his solitude. His allies are the underdogs of the territories, when he works with the big players, they view him primarily as a pawn, or an unfortunate bed-fellow at best. What grants him his empire at the end of the series is a coordinated use of soft power, built in the background, and leveraged not by him, but in his name. I feel this concludes the story pretty well, but though I'm not entirely convinced the owners of the DC comics IP won't try to weave it back into future projects of theirs eventually.

"The Night Circus" has been on my reading list for a long while. It falls into the category of adult fiction that I find somewhat difficult to read, because to my mind it needed a brief moment to establish its characters in the occasionally very brief chapters, which makes them blend together into horrible amalgams. If I were better with names, perhaps this would have been less of a problem. Once this was sorted though, it told an interesting pastiche of self-actualization stories for people whose mentor figures all seem as unreliable and prone to mood-swings as the setting of a magical circus itself. The prose kept some distance from the inner lives of the characters that made me feel like more of a bystander, but I thought that was appropriate at the least. It gives effect to the moments in which the intense emotions of the characters are externalized through action.

"Nexus" gave me a lot of Gell-Mann whiplash. As a now frequent reader of non-fiction, one should think I would grow used to the authors of books getting details slightly wrong in ways that probably don't matter to the argument, but the entire experience of reading this book made me wish there was a version without the examples. I'm aware the examples are what make about a quarter of books of this style, especially if it's not one of those books that work with diagrams of simulations or even the actual model implementation of a scientific thesis, but the amount that newspaper columns for example were sourced landed somewhere between distracting and aggravating, especially if there are peer-reviewed publications on those same topics widely sourced in other works. Far be it from me to assume any ill intent - in fact, I'm sure the author referenced material they were already familiar with at the time of writing, which is a testament to either great archiving skills or an outstanding memory on their part. In general, the attempt to analyse system failings as requiring changes in a system is refreshing from a liberal standpoint, which might otherwise have suggested to replace bad actors with better actors, but a lot of the analysis falls short in the "why" category. In general I would even fall in line with the criticisms the author levels against large centralized information systems. They advocate for open and transparent information systems with the option to block decisions made on solely on the dataset available within it, which I find is perhaps the only ethical way forward, seeing as we have a proven racial bias in all so far published AI models, for example, and the option to take away the tech-bros' shiny new toy until they've proven they know they won't primarily use it to kill people seems next to impossible. It makes me curious to find a book with equivalent topic selection with a more concise and focused approach though, as I suspect that it might be less painful for me to read.

"The End of Policing" should be required reading for police- and prison-abolitionists. While works by Angela Y. Davis might perhaps build a complete philosophical framework to support their thesis, this book has the great strength of being constructed like a reference book. It tackles ten of the most common uses cited for the necessity of police and deconstructs them using empirical data and small didactic thought exercises in the span of perhaps 20 pages. This makes it an easy start to prepare or refresh for a specific facet of how and why the concept of policing might be entirely outmoded at this stage of civilization. I see myself returning to this book for this purpose a lot in the future.

"Say Nothing" was a stark reminder that I don't understand the Irish liberation struggle. It follows primarily two sisters who join the armed struggle under the IRA in occupied north Ireland. The way the story is told is very interesting to me, because of the elements that seem like they clash in thesis. The framing device for the story is an interview project recording retellings of IRA operations from members that would otherwise take those secrets to the grave. This framing device keeps reminding the viewer that apparently the IRA was primarily lies and skulduggery, but the entire series begins with a nod toward the necessity of armed struggle. I'm not sure what the story is actually advocating then, seeing as peaceful protest was correctly depicted as largely inconsequential to legislature, as well as associated with significant personal risk, and if it denounces the IRA for harming primarily civilians of their own community, that leaves the correct path of action the one where they plant car bombs in London. While I don't necessarily disagree with this, I'm not sure this was intentional.

Then there is the matter of the reformation of the IRA into what is the modern political Sinn Feinn party. The series depicts this as a betrayal to the cause, which I'm not prepared to speak on, as this is a stretch of history I'm not familiar with, but speaking from past struggles of similar character, having a political vanguard for the civilians who are either unable or unwilling to participate in the armed struggle is a key tool to minimize civilian casualties. The devil is in the details however, and there are very likely things that should have been handled differently. Perhaps the series will stand in a different light, when I've read up on my homework first.

"Limits To Growth" is probably the closest one can get to reading an educational textbook without committing to it. It's structured not unlike a simulation paper, which I happen to read semi-regularly, so I'm used to looking at graphs between paragraphs. The topic of applied climate science I'm not directly familiar with, but having been audience to a talk of someone who worked on a very similar project as they one underlying this book's analysis, the methodology at least seems familiar and, nore importantly, easily communicable. It outlines nicely the science around climate change, and the politics recommended to slow or even reverse it, placing it in the long line of scientific findings that technically provides the data and reasoning to set the correct goals and make actionable legislation pitches, but goes ignored by the decision makers.

It is, admittedly, a dry read. It features many bullet point lists, and even more diagrams, which also aren't ordered in a way that makes it very easy to find them again to reference them, so the reader who enjoys it for its literary merits will likely have specific tastes that don't entirely overlap with mine.