Last list! ICYMI: TV/Movies and Books.

1. The Last of Us

So I know I’m behind, but I JUST got a PS3 (I know, I know, not even a PS4, but I can’t afford next gen stuff). And I mostly got it for The Last of Us and even if every other game I played on it sucked (which they haven’t), it would still be worth it.

Father/daughter stories aren’t usually my thing, probably because it rarely rings true for me (look, I have issues), but this got me in a way few things can. I connect better with games than I do a lot of other mediums in part because I am thrust directly in the place of the protagonist, and this one left me frequently weepy. It has a tremendous amount of emotion, brought to life with excellent writing, extraordinary voice acting, and beautiful graphics.

Twenty years after the zombie apocalypse started and his young daughter died, Joel is tasked with smuggling a young girl Ellie to a group called the Fireflies. Ellie has survived a zombie bite somehow and humanity’s best shot at a cure.

The Last of Us has a lot in common with typical zombie media, including Humans Are Worse Than the Zombies, but that emotional core of Joel and Ellie bonding that really makes it stand out. I cheered for them, I cried for them, I screamed incoherently at the screen for them, I had to stop playing and take a chill pill because I was starting to get stressed out, and by the time Joel finds Ellie after she’s killed [spoiler, you know, in the restaurant that’s on fire] and reassures her with, “Oh, baby girl. It’s okay.” I just completely fucking lost it.

It’s about losing and finding family, about letting people in, about how grief can blind us. And Ellie is the true hero of the story, this badass fourteen-year-old girl who has had to grow up very quickly and sees things so much clearer than Joel (THAT ENDING, OMG). I can’t wait for the possibly-in-development-sequel even though I will probably need to start saving my pennies now for a PS4.

2. Rise of the Tomb Raider.

C’mon, you knew it would be here.

Flashback to early 2013. I eagerly bought the Tomb Raider reboot new, a few days after release, and was not prepared for the awesomeness. I finished it over a couple of days and immediately said WHERE IS THE NEXT ONE?? And lo, here it is.

RotTR is the perfect continuation of the previous game. It builds on the plot, on Lara’s character, on the in game skills, so it never feels like a rehash of the previous game, nor does it feel like an entirely new game either. It’s a true continuation: this is the Lara of the end of the last game, more confident, more capable, but still finding who she is.

It’s also visually stunning. The gameplay is varied, the world is dense with a lot to do (instead of just big for the sake of big), and I just adore everything about it.

It also brought us this glorious new video/theme song:

(I listen to it on repeat a lot when I need reminding to rise.)

There are extra game modes and you can unlock packs of “cards” that you can select from to affect your gameplay in these other modes. Among the new DLC releases is Endurance Mode where you’re stuck in the Siberian wilderness and have to keep warm/fed while finding artifacts.

In this mode, I almost died in the tutorial because I refused to kill any animals for food.

So it turns out that it’s really hard to play as a vegetarian. I eventually compromised with eating the meat of already dead animals and of animals that attack me, until I found the best card ever: gaining food by melee stealth kills of people. This means that when Lara is hungry, she can sneak up on people and kill them for food, which makes her a cannibal to me and it is my favourite thing ever.

ALSO: if you retain any doubt about Lara being ridiculously sexualized like in the old games…just know that yes, she has unlockable outfits in this one, and instead of bikinis SHE GETS MOTHERFUCKING ARMOUR. <3

I have played RotTR all the way through three times already. I also have the season’s pass and am awaiting the next DLC packs. In the meantime, I am obsessively refreshing for news of the third game in the rebooted series.

3. Life Is Strange

This supernatural teen thriller is in serialized format, following student Max Caulfield as she discovers she can rewind time after saving a girl from being shot.

Against this backdrop of time travel and visions of an impending disaster, the game tackles bullying, rape culture, and other serious issues faced by kids. Occasionally the dialogue doesn’t quite hit the mark, but the voice acting is fabulous and the overall story is well done. The focus is on problem solving instead of punching things, which makes for a nice change of pace, and every action in the game has a consequence. At one point, only your observations in previous episodes will decide whether or not a character commits suicide; it’s an incredibly upsetting moment for a lot of gamers, which speaks to the storytelling power of this medium.

There are five episodes total, released last year about two months apart, and now the entire game is available. Admittedly, from the very first episode I was already certain who the killer was; by the second, I knew what the likely final choice Max would have to make. Even though I was right on both counts, I was still incredibly impressed that the writers had the ovaries to give the game the RIGHT ending instead of a traditional happy one, regardless of your character’s choice. It’s smart and thought-provoking and I’d love to see more people play it.

If you played LIS, please ping me and let me know what you thought–I’d love to discuss the ending choice with someone and why they went with what they did!

So that’s it for my lists. Tell me, what games did you play last year that you loved?

Once again, three things!

I also limited myself to books by people I don’t know, which was VERRA difficult because people I know wrote some great things this year. Interestingly, it also ended up being dude authors. Most years I honestly read more lady-written books by about 90% but last year I was into horror and these are the books that often popped up.

Anyway, here are some books.

1. Josh Malerman’s Bird Box

Technically I read this December 31 2014 but it ruined me for all other books for weeks afterward.

It is creepy as fuck. Hey, remember me, who can count on one hand all the movies/games/books that have scared her? This creeped me out. It’s very well crafted and atmospheric, and it has what I think a lot of modern horror is missing: the protagonist and therefore reader doesn’t see the monsters. Having that missing piece is likely to drive some people nuts but the reader’s imagination is much more terrifying than any description could be. I’ve devoured a lot horror books the past year, some really good ones, but Bird Box stuck with me for days and days.

To summarize….there are these creatures and if you look at them, you go insane. The story follows Malorie both in the past as the world descends into chaos and survival at all cost and the present a few years later when she takes her boy and girl away from the safety of their house in the hopes of finding other survivors. WHILE BLINDFOLDED. It’s chilling and dark and suspenseful, and part of me wants to read it again while part of me is like NO NO NO DO NOT DO THAT.

(Also, warning: some dogs die. It’s basically “off screen” since the protagonist has to be blindfolded all the time but if you’re sensitive to that, as I am, be forewarned.)

2. M.R. Carey’s The Girl with All the Gifts

Zombies! Apocalypse! Plucky survivors! Except…

Yeah, it’s one of those books that sounds like it’s going to go one way, and yet it doesn’t.

At the center of it all is Melanie, the titular girl with all the gifts, who is…special. Eat-your-brains special. But even among the eat-your-brains special, there’s something not quite right about her and the book spends the time figuring out why and what that means for humanity.

Why this book stuck with me was the ending and obviously I can’t spoil that. But it was a thoughtful message about humanity and hope and the world that felt very in line with one of my favourite movies, Cabin in the Woods, oddly.

3. Christopher Fowler’s Plastic

Picture Bridget Jones.

Now stick her in the middle of a crime novel.

That would give you an idea of this black comedy. June is a suburban housewife and shopaholic whose husband is cheating on her. When he decides to leave her and sell the house, June–with nowhere to go–ends up apartment-sitting.

It pretty much spirals downhill from there.

This is bound to be one of those divisive books–you either jive with the black humour and the character’s tangents or you don’t (and it’s okay if you don’t). For me, I can’t remember the last time I laughed so hard, and if you make me laugh, you’ve got me as a reader.

How the hell did I ever get here?

All I can think is that I must have fallen into a deep sleep the day I got married, like some character from a fairy tale, except Sleeping Beauty was out cold before she met her prince, and he fought a dragon and slashed his way through a forest of poisonous thorns to get to her, whereas Gordon just said ‘I suppose I should marry you if you’re not going to have a termination’, and instead of the Kiss of True Love bringing me to my senses it was his unrepentant affair with the bitch next door.

PREACH IT, SISTER.

So there are my books, here were my movies/TV shows, and on Friday I’ll have games!

What books did you read in 2015 that stuck with you?

So a lot of people do their top reads/movies/whatever lists. And I was going to do these posts in December but didn’t get around to finishing them. We’re not even two weeks into 2016, though, so I still have time!

There’ll be three posts. Today is movies/TV shows. The next one is books on Wednesday. The last one is games on Friday. I’m picking three of each. It was really difficult to narrow things down but here we go. Part of what I looked at was the stuff that stayed with me for several months if not the whole year.

1. Sense8

I passed this by on Netflix a lot when it first showed up because the “poster” image was a dude with a gun, and it’s not that I don’t like dudes with guns, but it just seemed “meh”.  Finally I clicked over and decided to try because I knew part of it takes place in Nairobi and I have a WIP set there.

Oh. My. God.

I flew through the entire first season and thought about nothing but this show for weeks afterward. The characters stayed with me and I obsessively refreshed for news of a second season (WHICH IS HAPPENING, YAY).

Instead of summarizing, here, have the trailer:

It took me two episodes or so to really get into it, and I had no idea what was going on. It is not perfect, but from a writer standpoint I grew to have incredible appreciation for how this story was being told–it is not easy with a cast of eight characters who are the protagonists of all their own stories with their own ensembles around them. I can forgive a lot of initial confusion because of how goddamn hard that had to be to write, but ultimately it was pulled off beautifully.

The diversity of the cast is of course getting a lot of buzz, and rightly so. People who think calls for diversity is about checking off a box need to go sit in the corner now. In Sense8 we have pretty white cis hetero people, yes, but a Korean woman (who does kickboxing and somehow rose above a stereotype of Asian = martial arts), a lesbian trans woman (played by a trans actress instead of sticking a cis dude in a dress), an Indian woman, a Kenyan man, a gay Mexican man (and did I mention LOTS OF PRETTY BOYS KISSING), and also Naveen Andrews who I adore and will watch in anything and swoon every time. No one is just checking off boxes with this, and part of the reason it doesn’t feel like tokenism is because each of these characters is the center of their own story and there are lots of people of colour and sexual orientations.

The bloody brilliant thing about Sense8, though, is the overall theme of connection. How people who are very different can connect completely and totally, how our struggles can be shared. It’s beautiful and hopeful (and for me a sort of natural extension of In Your Eyes, which I’ve seen a bazillion times and adore), which is all too rare.

Also, this scene:

Also, it brought us this, which tops the Hannibal‘s “Wendigo Quintet” of o.O love scenes.

2. Jessica Jones

I feel like I have been waiting my whole life for Jessica Jones.

It struck me, while watching it, how much time I have always spent watching pop culture and mainstream media and looking for something, anything, that is feminist. “Hey, this movie has two women talking–feminism!” “Look, this TV show has a lady kicking ass and saving people–feminism!” Like, who here watched Silence of the Lambs and thought OMG look, a lady in a male-dominated field, battling sexism, and she gets to save the day–my hero(ine)! This fixes everything…oh no, wait, it doesn’t but still, GO CLARICE.

And then Jessica Jones comes along and this, THIS is what I have always wanted.

This is the rare thing that covers the aftermath of rape with the focus on the survivor, that explicitly condemns everything the perpetrator does without placing any blame on victims. Stalking and abusive boyfriends, coping with PTSD, ladies who get to do more than stand there and look pretty–all wrapped up in a Marvel superhero show.

It also helps tremendously that she’s a traditional “unlikable” heroine–prickly, snarky, all hard edges–who drinks a lot, and the show is dark and disturbing in all the right ways. BE STILL MY BEATING HEART, I COULD HAVE WRITTEN THIS MYSELF.

Interestingly, in November after it debuted, and more and more people were watching it, I noticed a trend on Twitter with a lot of male viewers complaining about the serialized nature and they had all these criticisms, and I realized for once…I am not objective. At all. With the exception of a some lack of intersectionality of the show’s feminism, I can’t honestly get critical about it. I can’t tell you anything about the structure or the pacing, I don’t know if the heavily serialization works or not, or anything else. THAT is how much it means to me to see something like this reflected on TV. I don’t know or care if anything is technically wrong with it; all I know is that survivors say to other survivors “this is not your fault” and I can’t think of anything more important.

This is a show where one of the characteristics of the villain is that he tells random women to smile. If you don’t get the power in that, this is probably not a show for you.

Also, if Luke Cage is just thirteen episodes of Mike Colter rolling his eyes and punching people, I AM THERE.

3. Mad Max: Fury Road

Fury Road shouldn’t work on paper. Like, there’s a car chase, and then another car chase, and then talking, and then another car chase, and stuff explodes and there’s a guy with a guitar and nothing is explained and I DO NOT CARE.

It works incredibly well, held together (for me) by the heart of the piece: that women are not things and that we can’t run away to a better world, but have to work together to improve this one.

Also, SHOOTING and CAR CHASES and EXPLOSIONS. <3

I have nothing else intelligent to add except for flailing excitedly and happy sighing; there are a million other thinkpieces out there about it and you can go read those.

It also resulted in my favourite mashup since Hannibal Development:

So those are my movies/TV shows for 2015. Next up will be three books that stayed with me.

What stuff did you watch this year that stayed with you?

So I…still have a website, I guess?

Some days I have spikes that suggest attacks, but so far so good. I’m hoping to enable my shop again next week and see what that does to CPU usage. My apologies to any potential readers in Russia, Serbia, Hungary, and China, but I now have challenges on visitors from all those countries via Cloudflare. I’m not sure that I’ve ever had legit traffic from those countries and it’s not worth risking my site.

Happy Whatever-You-Celebrate today/this time of year. I’m a godless heathen but call it Christmas anyway. Christmas Eve I finished writing a long-ish short story (first writing I’ve done in months and it did me a world of good) by the light of my Christmas tree while watching Dirty Dancing. One of the perks of living alone is that you can happily recite the dialogue ten seconds before the characters without driving anyone else nuts. Today was brunch with Mum, Die Hard, Gremlins, and making treats to bring to see family tomorrow.

My eldest cat is…not well. I strongly suspected an oral tumor but we’ve been trying him on antibiotics in case it’s an abscess. There hasn’t been a change, though, so the likelihood is that I’m right and it’s a fast-growing malignant tumor. He’s nearly eighteen and there’s nothing to be done now except ensure he’s comfortable and pain-free as long as possible.

I expected to be worrying a lot but I think after this past year, I’m just…done. I have no space left in my stress compartment. I live in a state of high anxiety anyway–one can’t help it when freelancing and writing pays the bills–so I’ve accepted his poor health quite well, all things considering. I feed him every time he yowls for food and he drapes over my chest at night when I’m reading, happy as can be.

To quote a movie that no one seemed to like but me, a thing isn’t beautiful because it lasts. Hopefully he has a few months left before his bad days outnumber the good, and for now at least he’s happy.

That’ll mean more vet bills to pay as well. I’ll be out of the office until the middle of next week, so anyone ordering any services (which I highly encourage), please have patience.

There is a temporary sale on my stuff over at Payhip–buy ANY of my ebooks direct and you can get 20% off with the coupon code xmas2015 at checkout. The coupon is good until January 2. All common ebook formats are available–epub works with Kobo and Nook while mobi works with Kindle. You’ll find them all right here.

This is currently the only place you find 9 Crimes and Damaged: A Zara Lain Novella. EU countries can shop at Payhip as VAT is automatically collected. You can pay by PayPal or credit card. Readers get to save money and I don’t have to wait two to four months to get paid.

I have a post about stuff I dug this year probably going up next week, and otherwise I’ll see you in the New Year (hopefully with news).