blog by Tomas Sedovic
Tags: book, review 4/5 stars I ve been familiar with Mattie Lubchansky s distinctive drawing for a good while (RIP The Nib ) and was thrilled to discover she made a graphic novel. Simplicity is set in the outskirts of what used to be New York City turned into a walled off city state with oppressive "security", tracking and gig economy turned up to eleven. Beyond the walls is said to be dangerous…
Tags: book, review 5/5 stars I disliked Facebook for a really long time (not the service itself, but the company and what it was doing) so an insider story from someone who worked closely with all the execs that confirmed all my negative feelings is a classic case of confirmation bias. Take my opinion with a grain of salt. That said, Facebook/Meta is clearly a company who did (among some good) a…
Tags: video-game, review When the Double Exposure ending hinted at a new story, I didn t expect it to come out a year and a half later. That feels way too early in the videogame land and it made me a little worried. On the other hand, I could believe that this kind of game especially if it returns to existing places and characters could cut down on time and costs whilst still delivering a great…
Tags: video-game, retrospective I genuinely planned to not play anything big in 2025 Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 but then Expedition 33 came out of nowhere, blew everyone s mind and I gave it a go. It blew my mind too. It is a soulsborne and Final Fantasy hybrid with a very French personality and it just works really well. The thing that drew me in first was its music. You get a sense from the…
Tags: book, review 4/5 stars It s the mid eighties in England and Derek Reilly got swept up by the Satanic panic for running a D&D campaign. After it got cleared up, his mates were let go, but Derek remained incarcerated in Camp Sunshine a deprogramming place for cultists and other magic users. Magic is real and turns out Derek had a latent ability. A few decades pass and Derek, who s been running…
Tags: book, review 5/5 stars A wonderful end to the trilogy. The Martin Hench series revolves around the eponymous Marty, who s a forensic accountant. Tracking down money mainly money its owners want to hide. Going backwards, the first book (Red Team Blues) was about the "one last job" while this one sees Marty in his college years and early adulthood. He s hired by three religious leaders who…
Tags: book, review 4/5 stars I ve seen the movie as a teenager. Liked it, but had no intention of actually picking the book up once I ve learned of its existence. Two things changed: first, I d read and loved Pride and Prejudice (another book I never expected to pick up). And second, when Miles s fantastic review of Emma (spoilers!) implied that the Bridget Jones s diary is loosely based on Pride…
Tags: video-game, retrospective The theme of "Tomas has no time for games and especially no solid chunks thereof" unsurprisingly continued. But I did manage to find some time regardless. Telling Lies I have not actually played Telling Lies on account of it being essentially unplayable . However, I was invested in the characters and so I found an edit on youtube that played the videos side-by-side…
Tags: comic-book, review 5/5 stars I ve learned about this book by seeing a few comic strips shared on a social network. They were all one-page thing with sentences like: "I accidentally glued myself to an alligator" / "When you realise the bat you ve been radio tracking is actually the beep signal from the crosswalk " / "Suited up to approach an angry beehive. Trapped biting safari ants inside…
Tags: video-game, review As the name suggests, this is a sequel to a couple of games I would absolutely not expect anyone to make a sequel to anymore. I loved Baldur s Gate , but out of all the classic RPGs that could use a sequel, this (or the D&D ruleset) weren t anywhere near the top of my list. Hearing Larian was behind it made me hesitant. I ve played a decent chunk of Divinity: Original Sin…
Tags: video-game, review I had no idea what to expect. I mean, this is as direct a sequel to the original Life is Strange as you can get. A sequel to the game that essentially kickstarted a new genre half 3D adventure half visual novel (with a tiny bit of super janky puzzling on the side). Life is Strange: Double Exposure is the fourth (fifth if you count Before the Storm, sixth if you include…
Tags: comic-book, review 5/5 stars As the name might suggest, Bea Wolf is a comic book retelling of Beowulf, but with and for children. The warriors are rowdy (aka you know normal) children who built a tree house next to a fun-killing grouchy neighbour whose touch turns you into a disgusting teen or worse boring adult. The book is written by Zach Wienersmith, the author and illustrator behind the…
Tags: video-game, review I absolutely adore Scarlet Hollow . A horror visual novel just teetering on the edge of being and RPG without actually crossing the line. Beautifully drawn, wonderfully written. But it s episodic and each episode is coming out wayyyyy too slowly. Slay the Princess is the project Abby Howard and Tony Howard-Arias built in the gaps between the Scarlet Hollow development. It…
Tags: comic-book, review 5/5 stars Spoilers for the previous books ofc. They know. Max, Chloe, Rachel and Tristan are finally on the same page. Rachel s of course perfectly zen about knowing there s a reality where she was gruesomely murdered. And likewise Chloe is totally chill with this not being her Max and there being another Chloe who has it far worse and was abandoned by the same Max twice .…
Tags: comic-book, review 5/5 stars Spoilers for the first book you ve been warned. So Chloe. And Rachel? The trio that never was together at last. And it starts really nicely Chloe and Rach dating, Rachel doing her insta influencer thing. Chloe working in a car shop and also building cool art out of scrap metal. And Max is trying to live a normal life. And failing hard. Because she s wracked with…
Tags: comic-book, review 5/5 stars Life is Strange is one of my favourite video games. Despite the flaws that even the remaster didn t fix, the tale of the time-rewinding Max and her sidekick best friend Chloe is something I think back to frequently and with fondness. I longed for more of their adventures. And yet, I was hesitant to read the comic. It was authored by different people and as Max…
Tags: book, review 4/5 stars The Bennet family has five daughters, all of them in a marrying age, so when a new, rich, polite and handsome neighbour appears, their mother immediately sets out to have one of them married off to Mr. Bingley. And when Bingley and his party arrive at the local ball, the eldest daughter Jane indeed gets closer to him with the feeling seeming very much mutual. What s…
Tags: book, review 3/5 stars I ve been meaning to pick up one of Mark Crislip s books for ages. As a regular reader of Science Based Medicine , his writing is informative as well as hilarious. An infection disease doctor with decades of practice and a sharp tongue what s not to like. So imagine my surprise when he started posting a bona fide work of fiction (within the medical field, but still) to…
Tags: book, review 5/5 stars This is the second in the Martin Hench trilogy, set roughly 20 years before the first book. Just like the first one, The Bezzle follows (several) financial crimes that Martin witnesses and/or investigates. But the main focus here is on the american prison situation and the enshittification that the tech used within goes through. And how that affects people on the…
Tags: book, review 5/5 stars I didn t necessarily feel The City We Became needed a sequel, but I grabbed it as soon as I could of course. And while the first book tied up most of the loose ends, the big one of course remained: what s going to happen to Staten Island under R lyeh s control? The white tentacles are less of a common occurrence, but the influence is undeniable. Political campaigns…
Tags: book, review 5/5 stars We didn t stop climate change in time. Epidemics of novel, deadly pathogens are a regular occurrence. So is wearing a mask due to nearby fores fires or toxic fumes. Cities need to be abandoned when they re no longer safe to live in. Everyone knows climate change is real even the Magas feel its effects. But despite being mostly a slowly dying relic of the past, they…
Tags: book, review 4/5 stars Season of Skulls is the third book in the Laundry Files spinoff New Management. Eve Starkey s worst nightmare becomes reality and she s in bigger trouble than at any point in the previous books, really. The only way out seems to be to travel the Dream Roads that lead to a fictional 1816 where she ends up in The Village - an open prison for occult practitioners captured…
Tags: video-game, retrospective Just like last year, it was really difficult to find solid chunks of time to dedicate to playing games. So, just like last year I ve focused on smaller games that I could finish quickly or pick up and drop any time. And just like last year, there was one massive exception albeit an unexpected one this time. With a couple of exceptions, everything I ve played was on…
Tags: book, review 5/5 star The City We Became is a Lovecraftian antiracist (and therefore anti-Lovecraft) urban fantasy about the city of New York becoming alive. The birthing process is never easy, but in this case it s particularly fraught. The city s main avatar is in deep recovery and five people awaken representing each of its boroughs: Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx and Staten…
Tags: book, review 4/5 stars This is a book about futurism, a genre that always seems to find me, but I never seek out specifically. I am deeply interested in science and technology, but I don t tend to find people speculating or trying to seriously predict things that interesting. It s so easy to get swept up with your own ideas and biases, miss crucial aspects that will render the prediction…
Tags: book, review 4/5 stars Just like in the first book, What If? 2 takes funny, clever and sometimes absolutely ridiculous questions and tries to answer them as accurately as possible from a scientific point of view. With humour. And references. It is a delight to read and while I m not sure I ve learned anything useful , I ve definitely learned a lot. Mainly how much blood one can drink before…
Tags: book, review 5/5 stars Red Team Blues is a short but fantastic ride from start to finish. Marty Hench, a 67 year old accountant who specialises in uncovering Silicon Valley fraud and financial shenanigans gets one last job before retiring. A job that will let him retire. It seems easy enough at first: find who stole cryptographic keys that would compromise a massive cryptocurrency network.…
Tags: video-game, retrospective Playing video games in 2022 has been really erratic. We ve had an infant and everything became unpredictable. There were times I could play for a few hours at a time. And then no games for a couple of months. Elden Ring I was quite excited about this. I ve always had a hard time to get into "true" open world games (such as Skyrim, Morrowind, Oblivion). They sounded…
Tags: book, review This review was originally posted at Goodreads and imported here later on with next to no spell/grammar checking. Warning : as of sometime in 2026, Goodreads hid all their "public" reviews behind a login wall. Fuck the enshittification of Goodreads, fuck Amazon and fuck that cuntiest of billionaires: Jeff Bezos. 5/5 stars I find cosmology and quantum mechanics absolutely…
Tags: book, review This review was originally posted at Goodreads and imported here later on with next to no spell/grammar checking. Warning : as of sometime in 2026, Goodreads hid all their "public" reviews behind a login wall. Fuck the enshittification of Goodreads, fuck Amazon and fuck that cuntiest of billionaires: Jeff Bezos. 5/5 stars We have a long history together, It and I. Released only…
Tags: book, review This review was originally posted at Goodreads and imported here later on with next to no spell/grammar checking. Warning : as of sometime in 2026, Goodreads hid all their "public" reviews behind a login wall. Fuck the enshittification of Goodreads, fuck Amazon and fuck that cuntiest of billionaires: Jeff Bezos. 4/5 stars I first read The Godfather when I was sixteen and it made…
Tags: book, review This review was originally posted at Goodreads and imported here later on with next to no spell/grammar checking. Warning : as of sometime in 2026, Goodreads hid all their "public" reviews behind a login wall. Fuck the enshittification of Goodreads, fuck Amazon and fuck that cuntiest of billionaires: Jeff Bezos. 5/5 stars How to be an Antiracist is a fantastic, clear, extremely…
Tags: book, review This review was originally posted at Goodreads and imported here later on with next to no spell/grammar checking. Warning : as of sometime in 2026, Goodreads hid all their "public" reviews behind a login wall. Fuck the enshittification of Goodreads, fuck Amazon and fuck that cuntiest of billionaires: Jeff Bezos. 4/5 stars Ooh, what a fascinating book this one. If you read the…
Tags: book, review This review was originally posted at Goodreads and imported here later on with next to no spell/grammar checking. Warning : as of sometime in 2026, Goodreads hid all their "public" reviews behind a login wall. Fuck the enshittification of Goodreads, fuck Amazon and fuck that cuntiest of billionaires: Jeff Bezos. 5/5 stars This is a book that seemingly everyone in my circle…
Tags: personal, health Obligatory Disclaimers This post discusses medical stuff. I’m not a doctor and I’m not your doctor. Nothing here is meant to be either giving or asking for medical advice. I find reading about other people’s accounts of their weird medical experiences fascinating. Maybe this will be interesting to you. Multiple Sclerosis (MS) Recap Multiple sclerosis is a chronic (i.e. you…
Tags: comic-book, review This review was originally posted at Goodreads and imported here later on with next to no spell/grammar checking. Warning : as of sometime in 2026, Goodreads hid all their "public" reviews behind a login wall. Fuck the enshittification of Goodreads, fuck Amazon and fuck that cuntiest of billionaires: Jeff Bezos. 2/5 stars For some reason, I thought From Hell was something…
Tags: video-game, retrospective You could call 2021 the Year of Mass Effect, but I ended up playing a good chunk of other games too. This dropped sharply in the fourth quarter due to us having a baby, but I still found the occasional half-hour. Mass Effect: Andromeda Started in December 2020, I ve finished the game in early 2021. I ve really enjoyed it despite some unpleasantness. It is a…
Tags: gamedev, project, update I m delighted to announce that Dose Response is coming to Steam! Compared to the currently-available 1.0 version, the new release will feature Actual Graphics™, music & sound effects, improved UI and a full mouse support. I don t know when the game will be released. I d love to do it this year, but between work, personal life and having a one-month-old baby, it is…
Tags: video-game, review I was quite curious where the third ( or fourth ) Life is Strange game would go given the differences between the first two games. The first one being a high-school drama where your protagonist has time rewind powers. The second one being a desperate trip across the US where the protagonist s brother has the power to make a huge mess (via telekinesis and otherwise). While…
Tags: video-game, review Mass Effect 2 is a complicated game. Improved in may ways over the first one, but also made massive steps back where it hurt. Unfortunately, the issues are of the kind the remaster can t fix. I ve had fun and it s a good game but it s nowhere near the absolute awe that Mass Effect 1 instilled in me and I ve felt a lot of frustration and disappointment. Spoilers ahead.…
Tags: book, review This review was originally posted at Goodreads and imported here later on with next to no spell/grammar checking. Warning : as of sometime in 2026, Goodreads hid all their "public" reviews behind a login wall. Fuck the enshittification of Goodreads, fuck Amazon and fuck that cuntiest of billionaires: Jeff Bezos. 5/5 stars Turns out, I ve never written the review for one of my…
Tags: video-game, review Mass Effect came out some 13 years ago and until now, I ve only played it once back then. It wasn t the best game I ve ever played, but for about the week after I ve finished it, I felt it was. I ve had wonderful memories of the game and I didn t want to see them tarnished. But it was also a game I was frequently comparing others (include the later ones in the series) to.…
Tags: book, review This review was originally posted at Goodreads and imported here later on with next to no spell/grammar checking. Warning : as of sometime in 2026, Goodreads hid all their "public" reviews behind a login wall. Fuck the enshittification of Goodreads, fuck Amazon and fuck that cuntiest of billionaires: Jeff Bezos. 5/5 stars Oh my goodness, this was such an awesome surprise. I ve…
Tags: book, review This review was originally posted at Goodreads and imported here later on with next to no spell/grammar checking. Warning : as of sometime in 2026, Goodreads hid all their "public" reviews behind a login wall. Fuck the enshittification of Goodreads, fuck Amazon and fuck that cuntiest of billionaires: Jeff Bezos. 4/5 stars The title of this book says it all. It is Cory Doctorow s…
Tags: comic-book, review This review was originally posted at Goodreads and imported here later on with next to no spell/grammar checking. Warning : as of sometime in 2026, Goodreads hid all their "public" reviews behind a login wall. Fuck the enshittification of Goodreads, fuck Amazon and fuck that cuntiest of billionaires: Jeff Bezos. 5/5 stars No one chooses to be a refugee, to leave their…
Tags: comic-book, review, manga This review was originally posted at Goodreads and imported here later on with next to no spell/grammar checking. Warning : as of sometime in 2026, Goodreads hid all their "public" reviews behind a login wall. Fuck the enshittification of Goodreads, fuck Amazon and fuck that cuntiest of billionaires: Jeff Bezos. 4/5 stars Kurosaki Ichigo is a fifteen-year-old boy…
Tags: book, review This review was originally posted at Goodreads and imported here later on with next to no spell/grammar checking. Warning : as of sometime in 2026, Goodreads hid all their "public" reviews behind a login wall. Fuck the enshittification of Goodreads, fuck Amazon and fuck that cuntiest of billionaires: Jeff Bezos. 5/5 stars Masha is a security contractor who helps to enable mass…
Tags: video-game, review It is impossible for me to write about Andromeda without expanding on the Mass Effect trilogy . But since this is technically a review for Andromeda, that s where all the screenshots come from. Mass Effect Trilogy 2007 was a time I ve been seriously feeling a drought of good RPGs. Diablo-likes and Bethesda-likes were not for me (and even if they were, Fallout 3 was not out…
Tags: gamedev, project, update The r/roguelikedev subreddit community hosts a yearly January event where authors talk about the last year in development and look ahead. This is my post ( originally on Reddit ) . Dose Response Dose Response is an open world roguelike where you re an addict. You re wandering around, desperately looking for the next fix, having to avoid the dangers surrounding you.…
Tags: book, review, science This review was originally posted at Goodreads and imported here later on with next to no spell/grammar checking. Warning : as of sometime in 2026, Goodreads hid all their "public" reviews behind a login wall. Fuck the enshittification of Goodreads, fuck Amazon and fuck that cuntiest of billionaires: Jeff Bezos. 5/5 stars How to Argue With a Racist is an excellent book…