Midnight Riot
Jul. 27th, 2023 08:44 pmI just finished reading Midnight Riot a couple days ago. It's a brisk and humorous little police caper where our hero, a fresh newbie on the London police force, happens to tumble into the supernatural crimes unit (population 1, well, 2 now) after interviewing a ghost as a witness to a gruesome murder. The book is part chasing down the culprit in a series of spontaneous and brutal crimes, learning to negotiate fantasy politics between the spirits of the Thames, learning about magic, and feeling respectfully horny towards the women in his life. There's also a good deal of wry humor, particularly in the way Peter describes the world around him and the odd predicaments he finds himself in. I would say the good-natured tone of the book, and the fun narration carry the plot, which is fine and interesting, but maybe not robust enough to feel like a really good detective novel.
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I finished watching the three part Overwatch shorts and am unimpressed. There wasn't anything there in terms of narrative oomph, and the lore introduced is just begging to be picked apart. Why was Liao only able to make one intelligence, and why'd it have to die to spread consciousness to all the omnics? It's just makes no sense out side of handwavy magic-tech convenience. The general lameness of the writing was to be expected, as it was on par with pretty much everything else that's come out for Overwatch, though I still feel compelled to keep half an eye on it. I still haven't read the Reaper short story to completion, nor the one for Baptiste though, cause I just feel sad about them. I read the Orisa book a while back and felt that a children's book like that was as sophisticated as the writers could get.
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The one thing I'm following that had an update I did enjoy was Nu:Carnival lol. The last event was for summer, and had a nice long story plus included a rhythm game. The game is not particularly well optimized so I have ignore the music to get the timings right but I still enjoyed it. It's also sort of lucky that I don't pull for Edmond, Dante, or Kuya, so I got a big chunk of time to start stocking up contracts for the next event.