spfestmod

In this sci-fi horror point-and-click from South African studio The Brotherhood, you play as a man who goes into stasis for a long space journey with his wife and daughter, then awakens, alone, on board a massive medical research vessel. The ship is barely functional and has been adrift for months, and the crew have all met grisly deaths. Exploring the bloodied corridors, evading the glitching security systems, and reading disturbing log entries among the remains of gruesome genetic experiments, you learn the story of what happened here, and whether there's any chance that your wife and daughter might still be alive.



Stasis seems heavily influenced by the cult classic horror game Sanitarium, both in its UI design and isometric perspective, and in its themes: gore, body horror, monstrous mutations, and sociopathic scientists putting their egos above people's lives. It also pulls in a lot of bog-standard sci-fi and action narrative beats, which made it feel derivative at times.

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Stasis is on Steam for $7.99 USD, but GOG currently has it on sale for $3.19.

There's a dense stand of trees behind our bird feeders, and I can tell fall is already winding down as more and more daylight gets through the half-bare branches. The cardinals have completed their molt and are now sleek and shiny again, while the goldfinches are losing their gold and taking their turn to look like ratty messes as they molt into winter plumage. A lot of the summer birds have migrated, and the year-rounders who are still here have to dig through a layer of fallen leaves to forage.

I did manage to get down to Boston for a couple of days despite the uncooperative weather, and looked again for the Saltmarsh Sparrow but still didn't see it. However! When I took a walk on the beach I got two other lifers! One was very easy: A row of four big American Oystercatchers foraging on the shore, unmistakable in their black and white plumage with long, bright orange bills. The other was trickier: I had to carefully examine the one suspiciously different-looking brownish sandpiper among all the other brownish sandpipers to convince myself that it really was a White-rumped Sandpiper, and I didn't just want it to be one. The white rump in flight and very long, elegant, tern-like wings helped, and when it vocalized the Merlin app agreed.

After I got home, I snagged another unexpected lifer while exploring a nearby trail I'd never checked out before. The trailhead sign warned that the bridge over the brook was washed out and that it "might" be possible to rock-hop across at your own risk. When I reached the rushing brook in the middle of the woods I definitely couldn't cross (maybe if I had better balance or if the rocks were less wet) but I didn't have to, because I spotted a couple of what I first thought were grackles foraging in the leaf litter on the other side. Through binoculars they were clearly Rusty Blackbirds, a species I'd been hoping to see for a while! It helped that I'd recently been looking at pictures of them in their winter plumage, rust-and-black with light eyebrows. (Not long after that, I saw and heard another one while walking a client's dog past a marshy area off the road, but the dog was too enthusiastic about walking to put up with me stopping to admire it for very long.)

This story cycle follows a Black lesbian vampire from her origins in 1850s Louisiana through the first couple of centuries of her immortality. She was an escapee from plantation slavery before coming under the protection of vampires who eventually brought her into the life, giving her a unique perspective on how Black American mortal life changes over the generations as we revisit her every few decades.

This book definitely won't work for people who hate "soft" vampires or are hoping for horror (which this isn't at all) but it did work for me! I really appreciated the thoughtfulness of the worldbuilding. The vampires who rescue Gilda have an ethical code in how they feed on mortals, not taking enough blood to kill, and using their psychic abilities to leave some comforting or empowering idea behind in the mortal's mind, making the interaction more symbiotic than predatory. Similarly, they only bring people into the life who are ready for the change. But not all vampires follow those rules. I liked how this didn't turn into a predictable war between "good" and "bad" vampires, but was more about how interpersonal conflict is handled in the context of an immortal family, where the people who piss you off and disrupt things aren't going to just conveniently go away.

I also enjoyed how Gilda wrestles with her friendships with mortals, knowing she will outlive them—unless she turns them, but when is that the right choice? She sees the consequences when other vampires turn people for selfish or impulsive reasons. And even after her mortal friends die, her memories of them stay with her and help shape the kind of vampire she is becoming. In some ways it's a coming of age story, as Gilda matures into an understanding of her responsibilities and the different kinds of intimacy that are available to her—in community with other vampires, with other queer people, and with other Black people as the world changes around them all.

The book was originally published in 1991 with seven stories, but I read the 2016 "expanded" edition which adds one more story, taking the narrative to the year 2050. I found the new story didn't mesh as well with the original seven, going in a more sci-fi direction and pitting humans and vampires against each other as wealthy humans find ways to exploit the gift of immortality. I think the book makes the most sense reading the 1991 material as a complete work, and the final story as a bonus take-it-or-leave-it. Gomez has also written several other stories in this universe that have been published as stand-alones (which is how I found out about her, when we read one at book club). I would be interested to check out more of them; I'm especially intrigued by Caramelle & Carmilla which juxtaposes a new story with the O.G. lesbian vampire novella.

This cosmic horror game from Turkish studio Zoetrope Interactive (since renamed Stormling Studios) is based on Lovecraft's novella At the Mountains of Madness, which I haven't read, so I don't know how close the adaptation is.



The game starts with you awakening in an Antarctic base, suffering from amnesia. The base seems deserted, but as you explore you find strange machinery, notes, and other clues that suggest that the researchers have found evidence of an extremely ancient pre-human civilization, and have been conducting bizarre neurological experiments—and, given your amnesia and periodic hallucinations, it seems you're probably one of the guinea pigs. But where is everyone? And what will you find if you venture into the ruins below the ice?

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Conarium is on Steam for $19.99 USD, but GOG currently has it on sale for $3.59 USD.

Tech note: I did run into a known issue where the game crashes shortly after launch due to an incompatibility with newer Intel processors. I fixed it by creating a .bat file in the same folder as Conarium.exe with the following body:

set OPENSSL_ia32cap=:~0x20000000
Conarium.exe

Then launch the game using the .bat file instead of the regular shortcut. The downside to this is that achievements may not trigger when the game is launched this way, but at least it runs.

This is a novel about a kid named Victor Frankenstein who has neither the ability to foresee the consequences of his actions, nor any sense that he should take steps to try to mitigate those consequences once he knows they're happening. What he does have is an INFINITE capacity for self-pity, the lengthy expression of which I believe takes up the greatest part of the page count of the book. He explicitly believes that his life is harder and his suffering greater than anyone else's in the world, even though 100% of his problems are his own fault.

The narrative opens with a framing story (only the first of many in this Russian nesting doll of a book) about a guy called Walton who undertakes a sea voyage to the North Pole. In the form of letters to his sister, we get a pretty substantial and detailed account of Walton's life and how his father forbade him to go to sea but he did it anyway, and all the people he's sailed with and his reasons for going to the Arctic, and how his biggest problem in life is that he doesn't have any close friends, even though he apparently tells his sister everything.

Just as the reader is beginning to wonder if they opened the wrong file on Project Gutenberg, Walton spots an inhumanly large figure traveling by sled across the ice in the distance, and shortly after that he encounters Victor Frankenstein also traveling on the ice, nearly dead from exhaustion. Walton takes Victor on board and instantly falls in love with him, finding him divinely beautiful and obviously the one true friend he's been waiting for all his life. (It is soon apparent that Walton's problem is less that he's socially isolated and more that he's a horrible judge of character.) Learning of Walton's goal of reaching the North Pole and investigating why the compass points there, Victor gets very upset and warns that the search for scientific knowledge can have terrible consequences, and proceeds to tell Walton his entire life story.

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I think the key to Victor Frankenstein's character is when he mentions late in the book that he always felt destined for greatness. The book is a very accurate portrayal of a man who feels entitled to a great destiny, makes wildly reckless choices on that basis, and then screws everyone over by running away from the consequences and playing the victim instead of taking any responsibility. We can all think of men like this, which is what makes the book such an infuriating read. As the meme goes: ignorance is thinking that Frankenstein is the monster, knowledge is realizing that Frankenstein is the scientist, and wisdom is knowing that Frankenstein is indeed the monster.

Frankenstein is in the public domain, so you can read it on Project Gutenberg if you like. Note that there are two versions of the book, the original 1818 edition and a substantially revised 1831 edition. I read the 1831 version because it's what the library had, but you can also read and compare both versions on a handy site called Frankendiff.