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Superhuman Industrial
The city of Middleport is a well-known hub for superheroes – not least of all because the Stormsign Initiative is based out of the Uptown Spire! It’s pretty cool, honestly, watching all these superheroes do their thing. And you might not be super-powered, but that doesn’t mean you can’t be a part of the action.
Lucky you, you’re an employee at Superhuman Industrial and Immaterial, Inc., a supercorp dealing with everything that goes into the production of being a superhero – from costume design to public opinion research, SIII does it all.
Type: solo RPG, 1d6. I haven’t played solo RPGs in ages, and I finally just bought dice and a set of cards, allowing me to start playing again. I decided to start exploring my new collection with Superhuman Industrial, which is played with 1d6 and something to record your story (in my case, a markdown…
Some people need killing: a memoir of murder in my country
Journalist Patricia Evangelista came of age in the aftermath of a street revolution that forged a new future for the Philippines. Three decades later, in the face of mounting inequality, the nation discovered the fragility of its democratic institutions under the regime of strongman Rodrigo Duterte.
Some People Need Killing is Evangelista’s meticulously reported and deeply human chronicle of the Philippines’ drug war. For six years, Evangelista chronicled the killings carried out by police and vigilantes in the name of Duterte’s war on drugs—a war that has led to the slaughter of thousands—immersing herself in the world of killers and survivors and capturing the atmosphere of fear created when an elected president decides that some lives are worth less than others.
Around the world: Philippines Are you wondering why I read a 500-page book on government-sanctioned murder in the Philippines? Me too. Here, Patricia Evangelista tells us about her story as a journalist covering crime scenes. She weaves it with President Rodrigo Duterte’s war on drugs. The man said a dealer or addict didn’t deserve to…
Enter Ghost
After years away from her family’s homeland, and reeling from a disastrous love affair, actress Sonia Nasir returns to Haifa to visit her older sister Haneen. While Haneen made a life here commuting to Tel Aviv to teach at the university, Sonia remained in London to focus on her acting career and now dissolute marriage. On her return, she finds her relationship to Palestine is fragile, both bone-deep and new.
When Sonia meets the charismatic and candid Mariam, a local director, she joins a production of Hamlet in the West Bank. Soon, Sonia is rehearsing Gertrude’s lines in classical Arabic with a dedicated group of men who, in spite of competing egos and priorities, all want to bring Shakespeare to that side of the wall. As opening night draws closer and the warring intensifies, it becomes clear just how many obstacles stand before the troupe. Amidst it all, the life Sonia once knew starts to give way to the daunting, exhilarating possibility of finding a new self in her ancestral home.
Around the world: Palestine I picked up this book in a bundle of many other books and I didn’t remember which. The cover of this novel is incredibly old-school, which only added to my confusion since I knew I had gotten mostly bundles from 2023 and 2024. It took me about three-quarters of the book…
Récap de juin 2024 / June 2024 in review
It’s been an intense month − again! The month included a lot of documentation triage, so more papers & blog posts links than usual. This trend should keep going for another ~8 months if I manage to keep this rhythm (which is unlikely). During the month of June, here’s some stuff that happened: I went…
yes to a happy internet
Jay has a recent post up called “Not The Sort Of Person I Want To Be Online“, and it strikes pretty close to home. It’s worth the click, in my opinion. It opens with:
It would be so so easy for me to open my blog editor every week and vent and rant about the state of the world. About how crazy…
Don’t forget the girl
Twelve years ago, 18-year-old University of Iowa freshman Abby Hartmann disappeared. Now, Jon Allan Blue, the serial killer suspected of her murder, is about to be executed. Abby’s best friends, Bree and Chelsea, watch as Abby’s memory is unearthed and overshadowed by Blue and his flashier crimes. The friends, estranged in the wake of Abby’s disappearance, and suffering from years of unvoiced resentments, must reunite when a high-profile podcast dedicates its next season to Blue’s murders.
True crime cares about every little detail. Except the victim and her loved ones. In this book, two women must decide if they want a famous true crime podcast to dissect the murder of their best friend, years ago. Are they ready to relive everything, hoping that a few sleuths will solve the mystery and…
clafoutis
A Dictator Calls
In June 1934, Stalin allegedly called Boris Pasternak and they spoke about the arrest of Osip Mandelstam. A telephone call from the dictator was not something necessarily relished, and in the complicated world of literary politics it would have provided opportunities for potential misunderstanding and profound trouble. But this was a call one could not ignore. Stalin wanted to know what Pasternak thought of the idea that Mandelstam had been arrested.
Ismail Kadare explores the afterlife of this phone call using accounts of witnesses, reporters, writers such as Isaiah Berlin and Anna Akhmatova, wives, mistresses, biographers, and even archivists of the KGB. The results offer a meditation on power and political structure, and how literature and authoritarianism construct themselves in plain sight of one another. Kadare’s reconstruction becomes a gripping mystery, as if true crime is being presented in mosaic.
In this book that, given its ratings on The Storygraph, was only appreciated by myself and the jury of the Booker Prize, Ismail Kadare takes a single story of a single, less than 3-minutes long, phone call between dictator Joseph Stalin and poet Boris Pasternak. What was said during this call? For all accounts, something…