Kavinay
A decent shift into a post-war continuity. I admit, I really dislike Figueroa's shift to Bayverse-style character designs, but he still does a better job with such translations than the movies ever did.
The series is a bit slow but issue 6 is a solid payoff that establishes a lot in terms of developing Bumblebee, Rodimus and Optimus. These “peace-time” changes in their thinking goes a long way towards developing the runs of Barber and Roberts to come down the road.
You go into the book thinking Erik Prince is Darth Vader.
He's not. He's more akin to Director Krennic: a manipulator of corrupt institutions that simply don't value life.
The real shock of Scahill's excellent coverage is just how banal the evil of the mercenary business is. Much like imperialist and colonial military dogma, the expansion of the private security contractors–mercenaries–boils down to exploitation and indifference. Exploitation of government policy to procure highly suspect security contracts and indifference towards the lives of the foreign populations affected by private militaries that are not beholden to account for war crimes.
I wanted to love this book. Daniel José Older's short story and narration was the standout for me in “A Certain Point of View” and I really hoped he could do a lot with Lando especially in this novel.
Unfortunately, Last Shot is okay to good, not great. While he Older had me at “Ewok Slicer” it just feels like the book dragged on throughout. You could almost ditch part I completely for example and give us even more Lando & L3. It takes a while but the plot does get going eventually and it's a nice smuggler anthology in a way.
One thing is clear though: Lando > Han in almost every respect. I think part of this is that canon really hems Han in now with both Solo and the OT+Force Awakens movies. Stuff happens to Han whereas Lando is still an intriguing mover and shaker who's allowed to develop outside movie canon. This may be what contributes to the sense of a lost opportunity to do even more with the two scoundrels than Older was allowed to.
As an aside, the audiobook itself is great. Three narrators, including Older himself and they all do a very good good job. I just love how you can practically feel Older grinning through the spoken word and it went a long way towards enjoying the overall story.
Points for weaving together many strands of the plotline.Unfortunately I wonder how much better then book and trilogy could have been idnit was less fractured.
I have to admit, the fawning over Stackpole's leading men bordered on disturbing, not just heavy-handed. A late forties Hanse Davion contemplating impregnaying his eighteen year old child bride is especially creepy.
My God.
Imagine there's a country out there that asserts it can assassinate it's own citizens based on executive power alone? Further, it can assassinate that citizen's children with impunity, even when that child is a citizen too.
That country is America. That executive wasn't just the Bush Administration or the current batshit one. No the President at the time was Barack Obama.
Scahill takes what might be merely an anti-state polemic in another journalist's hands and crafts an amazing collection of stories on the war on terror and all it's unintended consequences. This isn't a Bob Woodward special, but rather like Chomsky in the field with teeth. From the blowback of the US radicalizing allies and it's own citizens, to the sheer lack of concern for civilian casualties and the assumption that American black ops are unquestionable, Scahill just crushes any hope you can have in the competence of US anti-terrorism let alone the state's moral authority in that war.
The investigation behind the Gardez Massacre alone–a botched JSOC raid of innocent civilians which was then covered up via carving bullets out of butchered women–is stunning. https://theintercept.com/2016/06/01/pentagon-special-ops-killing-of-pregnant-afghan-women-was-appropriate-use-of-force/
The Raymond Davis “incident” reads like a John Le Carre novel except it exposes US officials for lacking the spymaster's knowing sense of moral ambiguity and humanity.
America's use and embrace of extrajudicial killing is pure nightmare fuel.
Out of 18 stories. 2 are worth your time: a surprisngly engaging one about a young Kerensky and the other a wonderful Joanna story from Robert Thurston.
Honestly, I just could not get into many of the other stories. I tried. They're just all over the place. Even Blaine Pardoe's bit about the final moments of the Fedcom Civil War... sigh. Just a disappointing collection when you consider how many pieces of sourcebook fluff work well.
Singer is a unicorn among philosophers: capable of writing coherently AND staking and supporting moral claims. There's really no else who can touch on topics like sex scandals and cheating in sports with the some analytical rigour and context as Singer does for his more notable work on the ethical treatment of animals.
You don't have to agree with his positions–meat, yum!–to appreciate that Singer's popular essays are the sort of thoughtful and contrarian writing that's ultimately worth your time compared to the partisan polemics or vacuous TED talks that usually stunt these topics.
Even if you don't take her positive argument, Feldman Barrett's deconstruction of an essentialist approach to emotions–a platonic ideal of emotions that are universally shared by every person and culture–is absolutely convincing. Mental states depicted as the result of a stochastic cascade of interactions in your body provide a far more useful picture of emotions than our relatively lazy narrative of emotions.
Where it falls apart is when the author ventures further afield from her expertise on distinguishing essentialism from more modern takes on emotion and begins applying this in real world examples. It's not so much that she's wrong about the importance of emotions to jurisprudence and so on, so much as its a case of not being an expert in those fields too. It's like having an expert fishing hook designer tell you how to fish. It seems like it would make sense to have a deep understanding of a part of the activity, but it really doesn't mean such an expert has the necessary contextual knowledge of the applied field to tell you anything profound.
The kicker for me was near the end of the book when Feldman Barrett refers to Steven Pinker's characteristic dismissal of politically correct objections to his statements about black poverty and related issues. It's just inane to say that such a statement makes relative sense within Pjnker's constructed reality–it falls into a rhetorical trap to leave context out of the issue and thereby throw a soft ball on anything that depends on history to make sense of (i.e. racism and most other social and institutional concerns that this research would apply to).
“Divide and rule,” “The Raj, “ “indentured servitude.” If you're of Indian descent, you've probably heard your older family mutter these words with disdain yet never really grasped the sheer horror of British terror that informed their disgust.
There is a rising tide of apologia for colonialism. The ilk of Niall Ferguson sincerely believe that it wasn't all that bad–and they'd be right if all you had to go on were their fantasies of colonial uplift. This is where Shashi Tharoor shines. He simply lays out the best possible excuses for defenders of Britain's treatment of India and then demolishes each nostalgic delusion with historical context, records and facts.
Ultimately, Tharoor's positive argument is pretty simple when you get past all the Imperial gloss: Indians were people. Their lives mattered just as much as yours and mine–but this could never be the case during British rule in India.
My only complaint is that there wasn't more nerdy analytic ideas that the authors got to try out. It really does make you realize though how much of modern team success is down to composition rather than tactics. Sure, aggregate managerial decisions could boost your WAR marginally, but really it's the ability to identify talent and roles (fireman) that makes such an immense difference compared to conventional wisdom.
This is an easy book to like. Schreier is a good writer and his access to key figures in the industry is exciting for a behind the scenes on big moments in gaming. Indeed, the first couple chapters he covers are interesting as broad surveys into the perils of game development such as scope creep, marketing and the crunch.
But the longer you go on, the more you get the sense that his attempts to cover the crunch and similar dysfunctions of project and business management in the industry are more an apologia for insiders with survivor bias than a critique of toxic work environments.
In that respect, I found myself getting more irritated as the case studies went on, since every developer's inevitable deadline push and 100hr work week just felt banal and awful rather than a triumph of creative passion. I'm not in game development (thank goodness!) and it's largely because the norms that go relatively unchallenged in this book work really well for select game devs with credibility and power, whereas the common employee is treated like garbage and told that this is for the great good. I doubt this was Schreier's intent, but the sum total of the book reads more like an attempt to spin complete management dysfunction as normal operating parameters.
I'm genuinely stunned at how good Greg Keyes is. He took a simple movie tie-in and actually made supporting characters more compelling than they would be in the subsequent movie.
He also found clever ways of giving us Kaiju vs Jaegar porn without positing a new breach. Really smart decisions to make a story that's interesting in it's own right, especially in regards to Jinhai's parents.
The only flaws are really beyond Keyes' control. The fate of Raleigh and what happens when you chuck a Kaiju into a volcano actually contradict Uprising. Not horribly so, but enough that you get the sense the Keyes did not benefit from a tight story group that would approve and endorse his take on canon.
It gets better when you get hints of Cybertron in Stormbringer. I feel bad for remembering the early “-ation” series by Furman as being dull. It's not and it's got it's own internal sensibility that makes the humans compelling–eventually.
The highlights for me though are really Spotlight:Kup and Ramjet. The Ramjet special is just really amusing, the Kup issue though, wow, Nick Roche is just really good at everything to do with the franchise.
The rest is okay, but pales in comparison to Roche's issue and the Barber, Roberts series that would come much later in the continuity.
Okarafor's issues, even the Venom one, are great. Had this been a 6 issue run where she could really craft a deep arc, I think it would have been a wonderful book. The “filler” Covington issues feel a bit like a corny Saturday morning cartoon in comparison.
I look foreward to Okorafor's next projects.
If you don't already love Kamau, you probably won't enjoy this book. It's rambling and generally all over the place–like an oral history of how Kamau got progressively more woke. But honestly, that's why the book makes sense. The essays interspersed throughout are just so fabulously on point such as this wonderful take on the importance of Apollo Creed:
In the 1970s, he was the rare Black character in the movie who was clearly way smarter than the lead white character in the movie.
NERD ALERT! T-85 X-wing with cloaking device. NERD ALERT!
It probably isn't until the final third of the novel that I started to enjoy Fry's adaptation of the film. Little things like filling in the last-ditch speeder plan on Krait (take out the cables used to tug the canon) are what make novelizations of the films' enjoyable.
My only wish is that there was more of this throughout the novel. Much like all the other post OT novels in the Disney era, the opportunity to flesh out canon is rarely taken up for fear of stepping on the toes of the next movie. Ironically, this wasn't the case during the prequel movie period when you actually had the sense that writers were given ancillary characters and topics to fully flesh out.
It's a shame that Fry didn't really get the leash removed as he probably could have done an even better job filling in the blanks for hardcore fans.
Everyone thinks The Watchmen or The Dark Knight Returns are subversive deconstructions of the superhero genre. Frankly, neither holds a candle to John Ridley's masterful approach to setting golden and now silver-age characters in a world that isn't colourblind. Stunning stuff, both for how topical it is in an era of racist pushback but also for how it inevitably calls out how comics are rarely ever “woke” in any meaningful sense.
