Reading Nick Ripatrazone’s piece in The Metropolitan Review made me feel like a bad critic. I like reviewing things - for fun, mostly. To get my thoughts down, to reflect. But is that interesting? Am I offering anything unique? Probably not. There’s an art to criticism, and it’s easy to forget that just having opinions isn’t the same as being insightful. “Criticism without flair is dull, and criticism without sensibility is useless.” ...
7/10 Erasure is a sharp novel about a Black academic and writer whose frustration about the commercial failure of his cerebral novels, and the publishing world’s hunger for “authentic” Black trauma narratives, leads him to pena satirical parody (“My Pafology”) under a pseudonym which, to his horror, becomes a runaway hit. The book is both a skewering of the literary industry and a meditation on identity, family, and artistic compromise. ...
7/10 There’s a solid game buried in Nightreign, and when you’re deep in it with friends over Discord, it can be a blast. The moment-to-moment gameplay is intense and satisfying: carving out a path, strategizing around the ring of fire, chasing resources and runes before the world collapses around you. That tension is where the game shines. But it’s also riddled with these strange, horrible oversights and design friction. Little things - like how the character select screen locks you in before you can tweak your relics - feel clumsy. The Shifting Earth events quickly turn into bland optimization chores that railroad you into paths and flatten a lot of the tension. ...