Author: Ryan

Book Review | Ablutions by Patrick DeWitt

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AblutionsCover

This past week I finished reading Ablutions, the first novel by Patrick DeWitt — published in 2009 — who is better known now for his award-winning novel The Sisters Brothers. Structurally, the novel is a collection of notes, anecdotes, and recollections of the nameless protagonist’s experience working as a bartender in a seedy Hollywood bar. The story explores many of the bar’s vagrant, down-and-out regulars and employees, as well as the protagonist’s own spiraling life centred on an excess of Irish whiskey and popping pills.Read More »

Video Game Review | Tormentum: Dark Sorrow

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TormentumTitle

I recently finished playing the horror point-and-click adventure game Tormentum: Dark Sorrow, released on Steam for personal computers and developed by OhNoo Studio. While I don’t typically want to be reviewing video games on this blog because I want things to be more story focused, I feel that the genre of this game is centred around story enough that I can justify a full review.Read More »

The Division of The Dark Knight Returns

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This post contains some spoilers for The Dark Knight Returns

BatmanHeader

This past week I finished watching part two the DC Comics animated release of Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, which adapted the comic book miniseries of the same name by Frank Miller and Klaus Janson released in 1986. Set in a dystopian near-future (relative to the 1980s) version of Gotham City, an aged Bruce Wayne (55 years old) returns to his role as Batman, after 10 years of absence, in an effort to quell a resurgence of violent crimes afflicting the city.Read More »

Book Review | Why I Hate Canadians by Will Ferguson

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Why I Hate Canadians

This past week I finished reading Why I Hate Canadians by Will Ferguson, a collection of essays and anecdotes published in 1997 about the author’s experiences as a Canadian, as well as Canadian culture and history more generally. As the title suggests, Ferguson takes a sarcastic and humorous approach, challenging a lot of the points we use to define ourselves as Canadians, often referencing history, contemporary culture, and politics. The print I read was the 10th anniversary edition, with a foreword from the author. It being nearly 20 years since the books original release, the foreword helped to but the book in context.Read More »

Nostalgia, Remakes, and the Female Ghostbusters

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While by this time it is rather old news, a little while ago the all-female cast of the new Ghostbusters remake was announced. In the places I frequent online I noticed a very common response — a lot of people seem to absolutely hate it. Many called it pandering, doomed it to fail, or otherwise complained about the “damage” they were doing to a beloved nostalgic film. While the kind of hate it has drawn has a range of implications, I think a lot of it boils down to the simple fact that most people hate change.Read More »

Book Review | Sarah Court by Craig Davidson

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SarahCourtSmall

This past week I finished reading my first novel of the year; Sarah Court by Craig Davidson. Published in 2010, the book is Davidson’s third novel — excluding those written under a pseudonym. The novel takes place in and around Niagara Falls, Ontario, following five families who all lived on the same block together — Sarah Court. Though not a collection of short stories, it is not a straightforward narrative either. The novel touches upon each family in sequence, never returning to each chapter’s narrator upon completion.Read More »

My Theory on Bioshock Infinite

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**Spoiler Warning for Bioshock Infinite**

Over the past couple of weeks I have been replaying the 2013 first-person shooter Bioshock Infinite on the Xbox 360. Though I have many thoughts related to this game that I want to flesh out more before writing about, I have a theory in relation to the world that the developer Irrational Games has created that I want to put out there, for the satisfaction of sharing if nothing else. I have not done any research into other people’s thoughts or official details on these aspects of the story, rather I want to share how I interpreted it myself when I first played it.Read More »