Count_Zero

Decent enough book. While each entry is fairly light, the size of the book prevents it from being particularly light reading. I do recommend the book though, as the games they've chosen for the list do fit.

The Mongolians are written in this book in a way that feels like it's consistent with the Wuxia novels that inspired the author, but also in ways that feels like they are ignoring internalized prejudices from those novels - the writers of those works had their own biases, possibly unexamined, about Mongolians as a people, or at least the history of those people, that put them into some of the same archetypes that white fantasy and science fiction writers are (justifiably) criticized for using when writing “Proud Warrior Race” characters and cultures.

It feels like the the author is reproducing those stereotypes from those works uncritically.

A decent adaptation of the first Vampire Hunter D novel, thought the art in this volume is very heavy on the lines, to enough of a degree that it disrupts the flow.

I enjoyed this volume well enough, though with the structure and events of the stories, I think I'll enjoy the anime more.

Bruce Sterling's seminal work “The Hacker Crackdown” is a tough act to follow, but Masters of Deception does a pretty good job of doing just that - by discussing the split between the Hacker group The Legion of Doom and The Masters of Deception - with a split over philosophy (among other things) - should Hackers be about elitism - whose Kung Fu is the strongest, or should it be about exploration and sharing knowledge, the original hacker spirit.