Tim Brannan

Fun and Informative. Want to pack our bags now!

Revisado: 08-18-23

For this review, I am considering both the Kindle e-book and the Audible audiobook versions.
If you were ever curious about the infamous Hedonism II resort in Negril, Jamaica, then Chris Santilli has you covered...or uncovered as the case may be. This book (320+ pages traditional paperback, nearly 11 hours audio) covers pretty much everything a Hedo virgin (and folks returning "home") need to know.
The guide is fun and easy to listen to/read, covering a wide variety of topics. In particular, the dos and don'ts of Jamaica's biggest clothing-optional resort.
There is an overview of the resort, it's features and attractions. A little bit of history on the resort and the current owner which I found interesting. Lots of great background on the various goings on there as well.
This 3rd Edition was current as of the end of 2018. Santilli paints such a vivid picture that I feel like I can picture the resort (at least) in my head. But I also know enough to know that what ever picture that is it doesn't come close to the reality. That would be the fault of the current reviewer and not of the author of the book.
Important things covered are some pragmatic ones. How much money to bring, how many clothes should you pack (her advice here is great!), and of course how to deal with the no-tipping policy while at the resort.
Other important topic include what the bars and restaurants are like (it is a vacation after all) and the various pools, hot-tubs, and spa areas.
No though goes to Hedonism II just for the bars and pools. Sandals next door can do that. You come here for the party atmosphere and the people.
Let me pause and make one clear that Santilli did a WONDERFUL job of and worth the price of the book alone. Hedonism II isn't just about the wild parties, nudity, or frequent open sex. Yes it is about those, but none of that happens without the key ingredient and that is the people. Santilli's message about how great the people are came through loud and clear and what has really sold me on the idea of going there. I have been to resorts in Jamaica. I was even married at one. But this book makes this place feel special.
Ebook perks: The e-book has full-color pictures of the resort and some guests, taken with permission. All of the websites are also hotlinked so you can check them out right away. Since this book was out near the end of 2018 some sites are down or gone; this is not unexpected. The author also has her own website with more up to date links and information.
Audiobook perks: The music at the end of sections does put you in an island mood (I had to pick up some Red Stipes for home after listening) and is not as bad as some music on audiobooks. The various and changing narrators also give the book the feel of "we are here for the people" vibe, with different voices chiming in and helping out with the various sidebars ("Tales from the Naked City"). Bonus the tree frogs, which are linked in the Kindle book, are played on the audiobook. Nice touch, really.
I grabbed this book because the author was so highly recommended to me and I can say that the recommendations actually fell a little short of how good this guide is.
While reading/listening, I went through various stages of "maybe we can go." to "no. there is no way we are going." to "well, maybe it is good." to finally "OMG, we need to pack now and get on a plane!"
Thank you, Chris Santilli, for such a delightful read! Can't wait to pack our bags.

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Excellent trip Through Three Centuries of Thought

Revisado: 08-13-20

A wonderfully detailed, but not overly so, of the major thinkers in philosophy in Europe and America.

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The Adventures of the British Teen-age Witch

Revisado: 10-15-19

Anita Thompson is a witch. Not an ancient, cantankerous witch (that would be her Gran) but a young witch ready to make her mark on the world. I just don't think the world, in this case, late 1960s England is ready for her.

"Anita" by Keith Roberts has been on my TBR pile for some time. The first edition of the book in the 1970s collected all the Anita stories that had appeared in the pages of Science Fantasy and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. She became the prototype for many teen witches to follow.

Anita is a thoroughly modern witch in a world of supermarkets, televisions, and sports cars. But she is still a witch and can whip up a spell-raising with the best, or worst, of them. But she is also generally a good girl who falls in love with whatever handsome boy or pretty girl (or mermaid) that crosses her path.

I picked up the most recent audiobook version from "Neil Gaiman Presents" with a wonderful introduction by Neil himself. I agree with him that Nicola Barber was a fantastic choice to give voice not only to Anita but her old Gran as well. It is a treat to hear her do Gran's voice.

This version is based on the 1990 edition with edited text, mostly to bring the stories in line with each other, and adds a new story of Anita in the 1980s. It seems though, like many witches, Anita ages slower than humans.

The whole series is quite a treat and Anita is easily a likable character. She is sweet, fun and even she is not being particularly nice she is still fun. Don't get me wrong, these are not saccharine exploits of a teen girl who happens to have powers ala the first Sabrina the Teenage Witch series. The undertone is closer to Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, including Anita knowing her soul is already damned. In one story a girl Anita falls in love with kills herself over a boy so Anita animates the corpse and terrorizes the entire suburb that the girl was from.

The book is a forgotten gem really and I would have loved to have heard more exploits of Anita. Does she ever settle down (doubt it!), is she still working as a veterinary assistant to Dr. MacGregor? (I can see that). Did she ever have sex with Dr. MacGregor? (Hard to say!) and so on.

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For Aldis and the Queen!

Revisado: 03-05-19

The trouble with most "gamer fiction" is you can practically hear the dice being rolled in the background. Sometimes, and it doesn't matter how compelling the story, you can't bu help see or hear game terms being thrown about.

Thankfully that is NOT the issue here with Shadowtide: A Blue Rose Novel by Joseph D. Carriker, Jr.

Carriker gives us a story we can get into and characters we can care about, that is the job of all good storytellers; whether that medium is a novel, a play or a role-playing game. In this case, we get a good novel that preserves what we like or want from the RPG but still satisfies as a novel.

The story opens with the disappearance (likely murder) of two envoys from the Sovereign's Finest. The Sovereign is Queen Jaelin of Aldis and her envoys are tasked with helping out where they can and mostly fighting the forces of evil. The two envoys are tracking down a reported case of Shadow Sorcerery in the Veran Marsh east of Aldis. Shadow is more than just black magic, it is a taint of the unworldly, of the unnatural. Contrasts are turned up in Aldis, the evil are very evil and the good...well the good try to be very good, but as this book reminds us even the Envoys of the Queen, the very symbols of good, have to make hard choices.

The story begins with a trio of envoys. I would say "unlikely" but in truth the envoys are a varied lot. We have Soot who is a Rhy-Crow, or an intelligent crow with the abilities of an Adept. Morjin Brightstar, a lovable rogue and rake who works best alone, but is constantly falling love with whomever he meets. A note. Morjin is a character who in a lesser hand would have been VERY annoying. But Carriker invests a lot of attention and dare I say love into Morjin that you feel for the guy. He is a former Roamer, a nomadic culture similar to the Romany of our world, but he has been exiled from his clan. So it becomes easy to see how his happy-go-lucky, devil-may-care nature hides a profound sadness of what would be a good heart. Finally the last of our trio is Ydah (pronounced EE0dah). She is a Night person, or what might pass for a half-orc in other books. She is the fighter to Morjin's lover. She is also recovering from recent grief and hides her sadness behind a gruff exterior and a desire to beat the living crap out of people. Which she excels at.

The trio finds themselves in a hidden smuggler's town called Serpent's Haven. Where basically everyone is a criminal or descended from a criminal of some sort. Their mission here is to discover what happened to other envoys and figure out what the nature of the Shadow they were looking for.

I don't want to spoil the plot, but suffice to say it involves cults, crazed cultists, a Dark Fiend and the ever-present danger of Shadow to all that are around it, friend and foe alike.

Naturally, comparisons will be made to the Valdemar books by Mercedes Lackey, of which Blue Rose is inspired by, but those comparisons are mainly superficial here. Sure one can tell a "Valdemar" story with Blue Rose. One could also tell this story with Blue Rose. The differences to me lie at the heart of what Shadowtide and Blue Rose are really about. The characters of both the novel and game try to do Good with a capital G. But often the only choices they have are goods with a little g. They can't fix every problem. The difference I think then between a Blue Rose character and say a D&D character is that it is the good they can't do is what bothers the Blue Rose characters, and this makes them want to do and be better next time.

That is certainly true for our trio of heroes here. Morjin feels bad about how treats certain people when he knows he has worked towards the greater good. Ydah feels bad about having to kill (and kill she does) cultists, but she needs to stop an even greater evil. Soot, well Soot has some problems all his own and shows us how dangerous the cult they are dealing with is.

In the end, the characters care about their actions. They care about how others see them as envoys and they care about how others are treated. They know there is injustice in the world, even Ydah mentions the stares she still gets in "enlightened Aldis", but they are working to make things a little bit better. Because they care they are not the "murder hobos" of other games or stories and we care more for them as well.

The book ends, but room for a sequel is left open. I certainly hope so. The characters are entertaining and the mystery they are delving into is a fascinating one. Kudos to Carriker for giving us characters whose motivations I believe and whose stories are compelling enough to make me want more.

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Great Collection.

Revisado: 09-30-18

Great collection of Lovecraft's stories with great background information. The big downside was the reader. He could not pronounce common words like "ancient" and "hideous" correctly. Very annoying.

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Suffer a witch to live.

Revisado: 04-06-18

Would you consider the audio edition of Crash Override to be better than the print version?
You get to hear the author's voice in her own voice. She knows when to laugh when to be serious and when to be sad. Nothing is insincere here.

Who was your favorite character and why?
NA, but Zoe the Unburnt has a good ring to it.

Which scene was your favorite?
When she was talking about her joy of discovering the internet and other weirdos like herself. She had found her tribe.

If you could give Crash Override a new subtitle, what would it be?
"I Survived the Biggest Witch-hunt on the Internet"

Any additional comments?
Great book with plenty of ups and downs. You would have to be an inhuman troll not to enjoy this.

This might seem like a stretch here but stay with me on this. I finished reading Zoë Quinn's Crash Override: How Gamergate (Nearly) Destroyed My Life, and How We Can Win the Fight Against Online Hate, and I am going to make the case this is a book about a modern witch and the witchhunt that came from it.

I want to get into the meat of the book, but let me address the parallels first.

Zoë Quinn began, like many historical witches, as a woman a bit marginalized from the world but found solace, comfort and even expertise in a traditionally "man's space". For the witches of old this was often medical knowledge in a world of male doctors or religious knowledge in a world of male clergy. In any case, she was a woman (or a girl really, she was not much older than my son when this all went down) against a patriarchy. Does that sound like a feminist theory to you? It is ONLY if never actually studied feminist theory or have ever used the word "feminazi" in anything other than a derisive tone. She was attacked and all but pilloried and burned at the stake. Though virtually speaking she was. She even describes the mob after her as a group of "inquisitors". The appropriate name really.

Actions speak louder than words and while I had heard and read the words of these internet inquisitors and gatekeepers of their "culture" I don't for a second believe them. Their claims can be easily dismissed and discarded. There were no witches on Pendle Hill in 1612. No devil in Loudun, France (1634). There was no devil in Salem (1692), no Satanic ritual abuse in the 1980s and no conspiracy in August 2014 to censor video games*. (yes there is more than this, but the trouble is sorting through a metric ton of shit to get to it. This is not the place to detail my last couple of years of "ritual filth" reading about this and going to where they "live".)

But like those times, facts do not matter once the mob smells blood in the water, or online. Quinn is a bit more understanding of her inquisitors, the ones that would see her dead for the audacity of being a woman. I do not extend to them the same benefit of the doubt; I have seen this play out too many times in the exact same way with nearly textbook results.

Zoë Quinn is a witch, an unburnt witch in fact (her nom de' net in fact), and like the best witches of old, her name and exploits will outlive her inquisitors and tormentors.

She spends the first half of her book recounting her love of video games, finding solace online with like-minded people and discovering that she too could build something or make something. There were many times I smiled or laughed out loud because I could relate to exactly to what she was doing and feeling. Then we get to that day in August of 2014 where the mob, spurred on by an abusive ex-boyfriend and some easily dismissed internet rumors decides to act.

I have seen online abuse first hand, I have also stood on the sidelines and watched it unfold like a spectator sport. So it was not without some personal horror that I listened to what she went through.

Honestly, you have to have zero empathy not be moved here. Even IF (in all caps) she did the things she was accused of, it doesn't justify the violent outburst here. (seriously, what the fuck is wrong with you people?)

There is some repetition, but this is a memoir, not a research paper. It is told like a memoir, with the unedited bits of a person's messy life left in. And the author is quite upfront about that. In fact listening to it you get the feeling it could have been a "LiveJournal" post AND that is perfectly fine because that is the vibe the author wants. Listen to her words and what she wants, the book is the ultimate expression of that. It is also almost, but not quite, a requiem for a life lost. I can tell you, as a former QMHP, she sounds EXACTLY like people I used to counsel after they had dealt with something traumatic or after a significant period of depression. I do not doubt that these are the words from someone who has in my professional opinion "seen some shit".

The first half had me depressed and sad for this girl. But the second half made happy for the woman she has become and what she has been able to do. Sure, she can never get back that old life. In many ways, her tale is the same of that as someone that has suffered a traumatic disease or accident. In others, it is worse, because she knows if it were not for the actions of others she could go back to that old life and do the things she loved.

The last half of the book's title is "How We Can Win the Fight Against Online Hate" and she talks about what she has done and what she has been doing and freely admits that she is neither equipped or qualified to do the job that needs to be done. I hope she will excuse the Batman allusion here (she has a section "You are not Batman"), but she is the hero we need.

She is open about needing more non-CIS, non-white, non-male voices in this fight. Not that we don't need CIS hetro white males, it's just that people like that, like me, are a dime a dozen. We are. She is open and even empathizes with the mobs of inquisitors that were after her; not wanting them to be subject to same actions she faced. She is very cognizant (maybe painfully so) of the limitations of the tech companies and law enforcement.

To top it all off she built the Crash Override Network to help other victims of online abuse.

This alone is worthy of praise.

In the end, her advice is simple, be better to each other online and try to empathize with the human on the other side of the screen. She knows there is a lot of work to do and this only the start.

Final note. I listened to the audiobook version of this with Zoë Quinn reading it herself. I think that was a great choice for me, to hear her own words in her own voice, but also to get her to do it. She knew when to be funny and when to be sad more than some other narrator.

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esto le resultó útil a 4 personas

Horror story, but in real time.

Revisado: 01-17-18

Not sure how much is %100 true, but it tracks well with other things I have read since our national embarrassment began.

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More than a mediocre Witch!

Revisado: 07-15-17

Isabella Fox is a mediocre witch who has been run out of every town she has lived in. Till she spots an ad for a town that needs a witch to cast one spell a year. How could she possibly screw this one up? Join Isabella, her familiar Alice and strange outcast shifter Emily for three holiday tales of magic, mystery and mostly love.
This is the witchiest book I have read in a long time.

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Never break a promise to an animal.

Revisado: 02-06-17

What made the experience of listening to Wild Magic the most enjoyable?

I read this book a long time ago, but I don't think I finished it. Given the time I was in grad school and likely busy reading Vygotsky and Dewey too. Also, I remember the ending different. I picked up the Full Cast audio book of this and it was very pleased. It was like a mini performance. Some reviewers mentioned that keeping track of the character voices was tough, but I found it easy to be honest. I was not going to pick up the next three books, remembering that this one pretty self-contained, but now I am going to. I also enjoyed having Pierce as one of the narrators. It is nice to hear the definitive pronunciation of some of the names, even if they were sometimes very different than how I had read them!

What other book might you compare Wild Magic to and why?

The Valdemar books by Mercedes Lackey.

Which scene was your favorite?

I loved the part where Daine talks to the whales and the scenes immediately after that. We get a real feeling of how much she has grown by this point and just how scary powerful she could be.

Any additional comments?

I thought the Full Cast audio was great. Looking forward to the next three books.

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More adventures with the Mist-torn Witches

Revisado: 10-19-16

A curse has devastated the land and it is up to sisters Celebrate and Amiele to figure it out. This adventure takes them to confront the family they didn't know they had and uncover the price of all magic. Another great tale from Barb Hendee's world! it was just way too short! I never wanted it to end.

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