The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas

The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

As I read this book, through all the thoughts it provoked and emotions it evoked, one stood out: perspective makes so much difference. The Hate U Give shares a perspective that everyone needs to understand.

Anyone who pays attention to recent books has heard of The Hate U Give since it's won numerous awards over the last year or so. That's how it got on my to-read list, and I can confidently say that Angie Thomas deserves every last one of those awards and more.

The Hate U Give tells the story of Starr, a black teenage girl who is witness to the shooting of her black friend by a white cop. It's fiction, but unfolds pretty much like innumerable real-world news stories. Media coverage slanted against the victim, police looking for excuses more than facts, district attorney unable or unwilling to push through indictments, violent protests in reaction...it's all happened in the news recently, repeatedly. What you don't see in the news is how it looks to a girl who lives in the world where the victim lived, who was there for the crime, and who lived through the aftermath. Thomas brings that perspective to life.

Beyond the commentary on current events, Thomas explores all kinds of aspects of Starr's life and that of her friends and family. Complicated family relationships, teenage angst over school and the opposite sex, living with gang violence, annoying younger siblings, fear of the police, sneaker fashion...everything from the profound to the banal is part of the story. It all works together to help the reader understand Starr's actions and feelings.

I'm a white man from the suburbs, with basically no common frame of reference with Starr. The Hate U Give let me see the world from her point of view. That kind of empathy isn't easy to create, and Thomas deserves a ton of credit for doing a masterful job at it.

Perhaps the hardest part of reading this book was seeing myself in the story. Starr's boyfriend Chris, who is white and comes from a privileged background, struggles to understand how she feels about all kinds of things, from food to the lack of justice for her friend. Some of that is the usual teenage battle-of-the-sexes confusion but much of it is his lack of knowledge about Starr's culture. I've been there. The media coverage focuses on the victim's drug connections, making it seem that he deserved his fate. I've been guilty of thinking that way when a similar news story comes to my attention. This kind of thing happened throughout the book, giving me reason to think about my own instinctive reactions and what bias they hold.

I said above that everyone needs to understand the perspective in this book. I'm glad that The Hate U Give is so popular, since that spreads its message more widely. I hope it reaches people who, like me, normally wouldn't think that this is their kind of story. Because empathy for the people outside of our own experience important to all of us.

True Places by Sonja Yoerg

True Places by Sonja Yoerg
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

True Places is a well-written novel of self discovery in a modern suburban American family. I'm just not the target audience.

I picked up True Places when Amazon gave us Prime members an opportunity to grab one of its best 2018 books. I knew going in that the contemporary fiction genre isn't exactly my style, but I like to branch out every once in a while and it fit nicely into a sort of book club I'm doing with some online friends.

The story in the novel revolves around Suzanne, a middle-aged suburban mother of two with what appears to be a perfect life; and Iris, a lost teenage girl who has lived her whole life off the grid. Suzanne's ideal life is only skin-deep, subordinating her own needs and desires to those of her family. Helping Iris is a catalyst that prompts Suzanne to examine her own life and begin to find her own place.

Yoerg does a fine job of implementing that summary. Her characters have depth, each with significant strengths and weaknesses. The writing style is easy to understand - I particularly like the use of short chapters, often changing from one viewpoint character to another, keeping the reader appraised of what's going on in the heads of each.

So why isn't this book for me? I found it to be formulaic and, well, kind of boring. The "mom who over-invests in family and has no self-worth of her own" isn't exactly a new character, nor is the idea of what is basically a mid-life crisis. Iris' situation is interesting at first, but rapidly turns into "wild girl gets civilized" without any significant surprises. Honestly, I was kind of hoping she'd do something completely crazy and unexpected just to spice things up. No such luck.

I still liked True Places, don't get me wrong...I'm not saying it's a bad book. It's a fine example of a contemporary novel that makes some pretty pointed commentary on the necessity of living your own life, rather than trying to build your life as nothing but support for others. But I've heard all that before, and the same story told again is still the same story, well-written or no.

The Dream: A Podcast about MLM

Multi-Level Marketing (MLM). Pyramid scheme. Independent sales associates and business owners. We've all heard of these "opportunities," often from someone offering to help you get involved. The Dream is a podcast series about shedding light on what's really going on in these systems.

Full disclosure right up front - I used to work for Amway, which is a multi-level marketing business. In the IT department, not the marketing part, but you can't work in any capacity at Amway without being aware of the business model. I'm pretty sure I signed something at some point that prevents me from talking about any details of how they operate, and I don't really want to do so anyway, but I can certainly talk about my own reactions and feelings as I learned how the business works. More on this later.

The Dream starts off in its first episode with an incredibly obvious scam. No product selling, no fig leaf of running a business. Just people paying money to attend feel-good "airplane" sessions, after which you could recruit more people to attend your own sessions where you are the "pilot." Straight up Ponzi scheme, which eventually collapsed as they all do.

Then the hosts move on to the real subject in later episodes - the more complex and nuanced businesses that add all the trappings of sales and marketing to the same basic idea. Buy in with time and/or money - usually lots of money - then recruit more people to do the same, who in turn do their own recruiting. The resulting structure is where you get the term pyramid scheme, though you really don't want to use that word around anyone involved in such a business. It's a running joke around town near the Amway headquarters that no one says "the P-word" and I suspect it's the same with all the big MLM companies.

I've made it through the first 7 episodes of the podcast (of 11, at the time I write this) and most of them spend a lot of time on the people at the bottom of the pile. The vast majority of folks who get involved, do the initial buy-in, and never go much further. Usually they can't get started on the recruiting part, which is the case when one of the producers joins an MLM business to try it out. Or maybe they do find some recruits, but find it hard to sustain the constant product sales flow - the subject of an interview with an ex-Mary Kay representative. Those people never make significant gains in the system, and often end up in quite a bit of debt from the attempt.

So why do people do it? The Dream talks about quite a few different reasons, from psychology to secrecy to intentionally misleading promises. The idea of a way to make it big appeals to people who don't have great financial prospects, and it doesn't have to be a sure thing. You only need to look at the success of lotteries for proof, so it's not much of a stretch to realize why the idea of recruiting and selling for big bucks is appealing. In some cases, the camaraderie and social aspect of the organization are more important than the financial rewards (Mary Kay is an example of this), at least until you start actually losing significant sums. The MLM companies generally are very secretive about their financials and the success rates, so it's easy to think that you have a good chance to succeed, in spite of the reality of huge failure rates for new recruits. And the marketing from those companies can be extremely misleading, and in fact the worst excesses are outlawed here in the USA. There were some big court battles in the 1970s, and one entire episode is devoted to how those took down some companies (Holiday Magic, Koscot Interplanetary) but left others standing (Amway).

The Dream is clearly well researched and the host and producers have done a lot of legwork, which I greatly appreciate. The execution isn't the greatest podcast I've ever heard - some of the musical scoring is pretty jarring, and host Jane Marie's style doesn't particularly appeal to me. But the content is well worth the occasional less-than-ideal section of listening.

Listening to this podcast has made me do some introspection on my own thinking back when I worked at Amway. I knew it was an MLM business, and that the business model was bad for the majority of people who got into it. I'd been approached myself several times for various similar "opportunities" and always turned it down, being a (mostly) logical and mathematical thinker. The numbers simply didn't add up. So why did I decide it was OK to work for the company, effectively enabling further expansion of a model I wouldn't get involved with for myself?

The short answer is denial. I put aside the negatives and didn't think about what was happening to the "business owners" who bought in but never recouped their investment. I was certainly kept busy enough with the day-to-day of the job that it was easy not to look at the bigger picture. And the fact that incoming information almost entirely focused on the successes helped in this thought process. Just walking through the Amway headquarters, you see pictures of the successful owners, and employee newsletters and the like spotlighted those successes. On the rare occasions that I popped my head up from the minutia of my IT projects, it was easy to think only of the benefits accruing to the few, and not consider the masses that weren't making it big. And I'm confident that this is how the majority of people who work for these MLM companies think, having been there myself.

So why isn't the government stopping MLM businesses from taking advantage of people? Government regulation can help to curb the worst excesses, but it can't completely stamp out MLM, at least not if you want to maintain some kind of free market system. Plus you need a lot of political will to go after highly profitable businesses, and that's in pretty short supply. The business model is alive and well pretty much everywhere in the world, at varying levels of freedom in how they market the business. The biggest growth is in developing countries, where the promise of hitting it big is especially appealing, and government regulation is minimal anyhow.

So if not the government, is there a solution? I think the only real solution is getting people into an economic and social state where they don't need the MLM. The Dream makes it pretty clear that the vast majority of people who are recruited into the MLM business model do it because they feel like it's the best alternative available. If you can't get necessities like housing and food and education and health care, or if affording those necessities leaves you nothing for leisure or saving, then you're pretty susceptible to the siren song of owning a business that can really take off financially. Put people in a situation where they already have the means to live comfortably and safely, and you remove much of the appeal of the MLM model. Remove the appeal, and it collapses due to lack of new recruits.

We're nowhere near making that kind of just and equitable society available to everyone in the developed world, much less the billions of people in the still-developing economic areas. Which means that MLM companies will continue to exist, and those who recognize them for what they are need to educate others so they can avoid the pitfalls. That's what The Dream is doing, and I commend them for it.

The Jean le Flambeur trilogy by Hannu Rajaniemi

Fair warning: if you like to understand all the words and want to have a good idea of what's going on at all times when you read a novel, Hannu Rajaniemi may not be the author for you. But if you can put up with some uncertainty (actually, a ton of it) while the story unfolds, this trilogy has a lot of entertainment to share.

The Quantum Thief, The Fractal Prince, and The Casual Angel follow gentleman thief Jean le Flambeur through various adventures in a far-future solar system with wildly advanced quantum technology. People's minds are regularly electronically uploaded, duplicated, modified, stolen, and enslaved. Bodies can be changed with little more difficulty than changing one's clothes, as long as you can afford it. Various groups live in just about every part of the solar system, from the planets to asteroids to the Oort Cloud to moon-sized spaceships.

The books follow Jean and friends through adventures all over the Solar System, from Mars to Earth to Saturn and many points between. Jean is a self-described master thief, and so it's not surprising that a lot of the story revolves around pilfering stuff from under the noses of its owners. The larger plot involves the fate of society in the entire system, so it isn't just about stealing shiny objects, though there's plenty of that in service of the end goals. And there's no shortage of action along the way, either. Each of the books has multiple passages that read like descriptions of the craziest special effects in sci-fi movie battle scenes, and I mean that as a compliment...it's fun to envision actually seeing all of what Rajaniemi has written.

Through all this, Rajaniemi doesn't do a lot of hand-holding. New terms get thrown at the reader with minimal explanation. There's plenty of weird happenings that don't make sense until much later when the reader has more information. As I said earlier, you have to put up with quite a bit of uncertainty. But I felt that by the end of each book, Rajaniemi had done a reasonable job of clarifying what had happened and why.

As far as the science aspect of sci-fi goes, Rajaniemi has gone far enough out into the future that much of what he describes seems like magic. Clarke's third law applies here: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." There's a good amount of explanation scattered throughout the trilogy, much of it involving quantum effects or nanotech, which to my layperson's mind seems plausible. And Rajaniemi certainly does a fine job with the descriptions, unsurprising since he has a doctorate in physics. But it's so far ahead of anything that exists in today's world that there's really no way to know how feasible any of it is, so it's easiest to just suspend disbelief and accept the premise without worrying about how it works.

My favorite part of the world building isn't the technology anyhow, but rather the social orders. The Oubliette is a whole society built around taking privacy to the extreme. Innumerable mind-copies of a few original Founders created the Sobornost society made up almost entirely of themselves. The few who still live on Earth fight against corruption by rogue "wildcode" technology that tries to corrupt mind and body. And my personal favorite, the zoku collective that gamifies everything, using points and levels and "entanglement" bonding to both keep score and organize their efforts. Given the changes wrought by technology and shifting environments, I thought the social and political structures that Rajaniemi describes are plausible and certainly the ideas are thought-provoking.

If my previous warnings about complexity and uncertainty haven't turned you off already, then you're probably going to enjoy the trilogy. I certainly did.

Fear: Trump in the White House by Bob Woodward

Fear: Trump in the White House by Bob Woodward
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Bob Woodward is a reporter, and Fear reads very much like a very long newspaper story. Lots of quotes from individuals, paraphrasing where necessary, coming from "deep background interviews" or other published works. It's all in service of one thing, trying to make sense of the erratic first year of the Trump White House. (This is in contrast to Fire and Fury, the other major book thus far about the Trump White House, which I felt was much more of an entertainment work.)

There's not much in the way of consistent narrative in Fear, as it reports notable interactions between various actors in mostly chronological order. It jumps back and forth between issues as they were more or less important at the time. This can make it difficult to follow, but is necessary because Woodward is mostly aiming to describe President Trump's interactions with his staff and provide a glimpse into his state of mind, both which changed regularly as events progressed.

Largely this shows a negative picture of Trump, as a man who has little patience for the opinions of others, a very limited attention span, and a habitual liar. But it's not all negative. Woodward also shows the President's real sadness and anger over deaths in the Syrian civil war, for example, and how he did his best to console families of deceased service members. I was impressed with Woodward's work reporting the complexities of the President, allowing the reader to draw their own conclusions.

For me, that conclusion is that the Trump White House that Woodward describes largely revolved around people trying to keep their leader from doing real harm to himself or the country. Trump would propose action, like doing a personal interview with Robert Mueller on the Russia investigation or withdrawing from the South Korea-US trade agreement or imposing steel tariffs. Then the staff would frantically try to delay or water down those actions until the President either lost interest (usually) or could be convinced to take another course (rarely). Sometimes the staff was successful, sometimes not.

The book also painted several key White House figures in a different light than I'd seen before. The one that stood out most in my mind was Rob Porter, who resigned in disgrace after being accused of domestic violence. But before that, Porter had been a very important influence on President Trump, often moderating some of the more extreme actions that the President wanted to take. Another is Gary Cohn, a former Wall Street executive who was instrumental in pushing through the Republican tax cuts. The extensive efforts that Cohn went through to fight against Trump's anti-free-trade actions (tariffs, withdrawal from free trade treaties) are described in detail in Fear. I wouldn't say I have a better view of either man, as I still think both did some incredibly harmful things, but at least it's a more complete view of how much worse things could have been without their efforts.

I can't exactly say that I enjoyed Fear, because it's not an easy or uplifting read. But I certainly feel better informed.

My Squirrel Days by Ellie Kemper

My Squirrel Days by Ellie Kemper
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I know Ellie Kemper from her role as Kimmy in Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, which is hilarious and touching and ridiculous, often all at once. When I heard that she'd written a book (via an appearance on Wait Wait Don't Tell Me), I wanted to see if the book was as entertaining as her acting. Good news, it absolutely is.

As one would expect, Squirrel Days contains many anecdotes from Ellie's life and career. Unlike many similar books, this one tells you right up front (page 4!) that much of it may be made up. And I think this describes the tone of the book quite well. The author is an entertainer, knows how to amuse an audience, and is going to make that happen without letting small details like complete accuracy get in the way.

Which is not to say that the whole book is nothing but outrageous stories. Most of it is fairly normal life experience, from childhood antics to career decisions to friends and family. Which are generally described not just as what happened, but what Ellie had been thinking and hoping for and often utterly failed to achieve. Usually in extremely amusing fashion.

I'm sure that not everyone will love this book as much as I did, as I think you need the right sense of humor to be as entertained by it as I was. For your sake, I hope you have that, so you can have as much fun reading Squirrel Days as I did.

12 Monkeys (TV)

The Syfy time-traveling show 12 Monkeys wrapped up its four-season run earlier this year, so I decided now was a good time to check it out.

When it begins, 12 Monkeys is about a time traveler trying to stop a massive plague that kills the vast majority of humanity in the mid 21st century, and the 20th century actions that led to it. After about a season and a half, the scope expands to cover larger sections of history and the destruction of all time. It's all a bit over-the-top in terms of dramatics, but I thought it worked well for the most part, keeping the viewer interested as the stakes went higher.

The TV show is loosely based on the 12 Monkeys movie from 1995, but most of that relationship is in the initial setup and character names. Once the series gets going, and particularly after the first season, it bears little resemblance to what was in the movie. Not surprising, since they had a lot more hours to fill.

Time travel is always a difficult beast to pull off, but 12 Monkeys did a fine job of it. The ability to travel was limited by technical issues and potential for paradox, so the viewer could believe the difficulties that the characters were having couldn't simply be solved by going back a little further in time. And the limited information available after the plague made it more believable that it wasn't possible to easily eliminate the source of the problem. Later on, some of those limitations were removed, but by then the problems were greater and the enemy more capable. On the whole, I think 12 Monkeys pulls off the time-travel theme about as well as can be expected.

I enjoyed most of the characters in the show as well, although the leads were far from the best in my opinion. Both James Cole - handsome rogue from the future - and Cassandra Reilly - implausibly beautiful and brilliant doctor - felt too "TV perfect" for me to really have much empathy for them. Sure, they were in some crummy situations, but of course they always found a way out. But several of the supporting cast were great, in part because the characters actually had some believable flaws. By far the best character as far as I'm concerned, both in terms of acting and writing, was Jennifer Goines played by Emily Hampshire. She played the driven-insane-by-warped-time character perfectly, and the writers gave her some of the most hilarious and memorable moments in the series.

One of the most difficult things to do with any multi-season series is a really satisfying ending. On this score, I give 12 Monkeys high marks. The way that they wrapped up the plot was excellent, covering pretty much every major question that had been raised along the way. I'm sure there were a few minor things that didn't fit, but there wasn't anything that bothered me enough to matter. The ending for the characters was a bit too good to be true, but I really wasn't expecting anything else by that point.

All told, I'd recommend 12 Monkeys to science fiction fans. I'm not sure it'll draw in too many who aren't interested in the time travel premise, but it's a solid offering for those who are.

Why I'm Not Following the (American) Football Season

It's September, the time when a whole lot of people pay a lot of attention to what's happening on the gridiron. I've done that myself for many years, but I've decided this year it's time to finally put my time and money where my principles are.

I've got two major problems with the game of American football: the injuries it causes on the field, and the way the organizations treats their players off the field.

Head trauma caused by playing football is not news...it's been reported widely for years. (A quick search will turn up plenty of articles, but here's one for easy reference.) There was even a movie. It's a difficult condition to diagnose. Different people have widely varying reactions to blows to the head. What one person shrugs off might cause serious issues for another. Worse, the effects are often delayed, showing up days, weeks, or even years later. But what is known is this...repeated hits to the head are bad for anyone, and in at least some cases are known to cause serious problems.

At the professional level, the injury potential can be excused to some extent because the players are adults able to make their own decisions. Years ago, the players weren't informed and couldn't make that decision, but these days there's no excuse for any adult playing football to plead ignorance. Adults that want to take a risk for love of the game or for a big paycheck should be allowed to make that choice.

However, the vast majority of football players aren't professionals. They're high school kids and college students, mostly still minors. We restrict young people from doing potentially dangerous things all the time, and playing a game with a high likelihood of causing life-long health issues should be no exception. But we don't discourage it - we actually do the opposite in most communities, treating football games as social events and the players as heroes. I don't want to be part of the problem by participating in the sub-professional football ecosystem, even in a small way as a spectator.

My second concern comes in at the college and professional level. The organizations that run the game (NCAA and NFL) don't treat their players very well, even if you leave aside the injury concerns.

In the NCAA, huge sums of money go to schools and coaches while the players aren't paid. At the top schools, it's possible you could argue that scholarships and benefits make up for that (although I don't think that's nearly enough), but certainly at lower division schools that's not the case. Don't believe me? Ask Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. He played basketball rather than football, but the same arguments apply to both. Basketball and football account for the vast majority of the money in college sports. The "amateurism" doctrine in college sports needs to change, and until it does I don't want to spend any more of my time or money in support.

In the NFL, the majority of players don't have guaranteed contracts. If they get injured or just slow down a bit, they can be cut and the team owes them nothing. The average NFL career is less than 4 years, and most players won't make big money in that time. Enough to live on, certainly, but if they get a costly injury...very likely...that money won't last.

There's also been a lot of news in the last few years about NFL players protesting against treatment of people of color at the hands of the police. Some people have said they stopped watching football because those players were disrespectful of the United States. I don't agree with that at all, and fully support the right of the protesters. In fact, one of my reasons for not watching football is the opposite...I think the NFL owners have suppressed those protests. The obvious example is the way that Colin Kaepernick has been unable to find a team, but the NFL has tried to make rules limiting the ability to protest and individual owners have spoken out against it.

For all these reasons, I've decided it's time to make a clean break with football. It's impossible to completely avoid it...it's everywhere on the news and across the Internet...but I won't be spending time watching TV coverage, or spending any money on merchandise or attending games. One person won't make a difference, I know, but it feels like the right thing to do. If enough people eventually make the same decision, change may come.

GR Mini Maker Faire

The Grand Rapids Public Museum hosted the Grand Rapids Mini Maker Faire this weekend. Despite the "mini" description there was plenty to see, with a good-sized list of exhibitors spread out through the museum.

Exhibitors fell into roughly three categories at the faire: community organizations, crafters selling their goods, and food. I was familiar with a lot of the community exhibitors: our local public library system, various and sundry crafting organizations, the Grand Rapids Children's Museum, the Grand Rapids Police department, and so on. The commercial booths were a widely varied bunch - everything from 3D-printed toys to handbags to paintings to dolls. Good variety on the food, too, from a beer booth to bundt cakes to hot sauce to popsicles.

Most of the exhibitors had one kind of hands-on activity or another at their booth. Lots of families present, with kids of all ages trying out everything from build-your-own-floating-robot to woodcarving. Robotics and 3D-printers seemed to be the most common themes - several booths that had one or both. But there were plenty of more traditional exhibitors as well.

There were also a few vehicle displays, including a one-man submersible that looked incredibly cramped but awfully cool nonetheless. The Grand Valley State Solar Garden group was showing one of their vehicles, and one guy had an electric motorcycle. Pretty amazing some of the things that people put together in their hobby time.

The one negative to this year's event was the long line to get in, if you had to buy a ticket. I think they may have had some technical issues that resulted in a long wait for those of us who didn't buy tickets ahead of time. A fairly minor issue, though, and once I got inside it wasn't overly crowded at all. As a museum member I saved about eight bucks on the entry fee, which I immediately spent on beer...wait time forgiven.

If there's a Maker Faire near you, it's well worth taking a few hours to go check it out. Whether you're a crafter yourself or not, it's always interesting to see the huge variety of things that people are doing and making.

Orphan Black

The main thing I learned from watching Orphan Black is that Tatiana Maslany must be a serious workaholic. She deserves that Emmy and the other awards she's garnered from playing half the roles on the show.

Orphan Black is a contemporary science fiction thriller series based on the idea that a shadowy cabal is messing around with the human body. Clones, DNA manipulation, body modifications. Over the five seasons, the characters go from blissfully ignorant to deeply involved, one layer of evil masterminds after another.

This kind of sci-fi thriller isn't a new formula, of course, but it's a solid premise if executed well. Which Orphan Black is, especially in the first 3 seasons. There's plenty of intrigue and mystery with interesting characters. Anyone who's read some sci-fi in this genre won't be too surprised by the larger plot points - there were several "big reveal" points that I saw coming a mile away - but it's still a fun ride getting there. I wasn't as impressed with the last 2 seasons in terms of plot, largely because it's just hard to sustain the suspension of disbelief as the stakes keep going higher. Eventually you become kind of numb to the ever-escalating danger and crazy mad science.

But that's all right, because there are plenty of great characters to follow into those last couple of seasons: several clones, their various friends and family, recurring villains, and new bad guys showing up on a regular basis. It's not always clear which people fall into which category, either, which is great. Keeps things really interesting when you're aren't entirely sure who is on which side. And even among the main characters who are clearly working together, there's plenty of interpersonal tension and drama, largely driven by the fact that just about everyone is flawed in some way.

What makes Orphan Black really unique is how Tatiana Maslany plays all those clone roles. There are four primary recurring characters, and at least five others with lesser roles. Each is a separate character, with their own personalities and appearances (and accents, usually). I thought she did an excellent job of really giving each one a unique feel, so that the viewer really sees them as different people. It's especially impressive when she plays one clone trying to pretend to be a different one, looking uncomfortable and purposely not-quite-perfectly mimicking mannerisms.

I had a great time watching Orphan Black, even when the plot-lines got a bit hard to swallow in the later seasons. Still a great show that I'd recommend to anyone who likes the sci-fi thriller genre.

K Project (anime)

The K Project anime series has a promising premise and themes, but doesn't do a very good job of executing on that promise.

In the world of the K Project, superpowers have begun to manifest in a small portion of the population. Most of that power is concentrated in a few individuals known as Kings, with a larger number of lowered-powered individuals forming clans around the Kings. The effect is limited to a small portion of Japan (for reasons made clear as the series goes on). The first season of the series focused on a murder mystery that leads to a conflict between Kings, while the second season expands to a larger conflict between more Kings. There's also movie in between that fills in some gaps between the two seasons.

The problem with the K Project, in my opinion, is that it constantly undercuts its own story and themes. The logic behind the Kings alone is inconsistent and confusing. There's mention of seven Kings, but the story never tells us who they all are. Each King is associated with a color and theme (red for chaos, blue for order, etc) but some don't seem to have a theme (like the Gray King) and one has no color. Supposedly the death of a King leads to a new King being chosen, but sometimes that doesn't happen for no apparent reason (such as the Gold King). Each King has a giant "sword of Damocles" that sometimes hangs in the sky above, which are never explained except that we know it's bad if they fall. There are several flashbacks that fill in some of the history leading to the Kings, but they leave so much out that it feels like we're only given a few random glimpses.

It's not just the Kings, either. The visuals are beautiful and largely take the subject matter seriously, but occasionally veer off into ridiculous fan service territory with panty shots and bouncing cleavage.  Serious themes like abuse of power and order vs anarchy are raised in the story, but they're used only as excuses to get clans battling rather than explored as complex issues.

There are some manga serializations and novels that are set in the same world. It's possible that the missing bits that I've mentioned above can be found there. If that's the case, I think they really should have somehow tied that into the anime - a simple mention of the manga stories in a post-credits scene would have sufficed.

The K Project isn't a bad series, but it could be much better in so many ways. There are better things out there to watch.

The Americans (FX)

I'd considered starting The Americans a few different times over the last few years, but there was always something else available to watch. Figured I might as well just wait until the show finished its run, which happened earlier this year.

The Americans is a Cold War era spy thriller, set in the 1980s. A pair of Soviet agents comes to America under assumed identities in the 1960s and sets about living normal lives. By the 1980s when the first season starts, Phillip and Elizabeth Jennings have two kids and are basically indistinguishable from your average suburban couple. Using their travel agency jobs as cover, they perform various espionage missions right under the noses of American counterintelligence.

In addition to the deep-cover family, other characters in the espionage game fill out the cast. An FBI agent lives next door, there are various sources and informants, and several of the Soviet embassy staff become important figures. I enjoyed seeing focus on characters from both sides of the undercover conflict. As you'd expect, there's a high turnover rate...not a safe profession, the spy game.

Spy shenanigans take up about half the plot, and I found most of it to be well written. Sure, you have to suspend your disbelief about the premise of the super-deep-cover setup, and the main characters miraculously survive all kinds of danger on a weekly basis. But that's par for the course on almost any television series. A lot of the spy action is centered around development of personal relationships with individual sources, but there's also plenty of sneaking around and even a few gun battles and car chases.

The time period in the 1980s makes it easier to accept all the disguises and sneaking, although I suppose modern spy thrillers manage the same even in today's cameras-everywhere society. Each season has some kind of big theme for the spying, from stealth aircraft to improved food crops, drawn from the big stories of the time. It was fun to see how the writers worked with the time period, from those significant plot points down to minor references like classic video games.

The other half of the plot comes from all the emotional angst that you'd expect in this kind of situation. Who is sleeping with whom, what lies are being told, the stress of hiding activities from your family and friends, and so on. I found it all interesting at first, though eventually it starts to wear thin. I thought the writers did a pretty good job of showing how the stress of the spy lifestyle wears people down over time, but in so doing there's a ton of repetition.

After about three seasons, I was more than ready for the Jennings family to finally move on from spies to whatever was next, good or bad. I'd kind of hoped that would happen in the fourth or fifth season, but instead it just dragged on in more or less the same vein. Some significant changes did finally happen throughout the final sixth season, which was the best since the first in my opinion. The last episode leaves a lot of loose ends, but there was enough resolved to make it a good series finale.

I'm glad to have watched The Americans, though I think they let it go on too long. If they'd wrapped it up around 4 seasons, that would have been about perfect.

Macross Delta

Two and a half years ago, I watched a bunch of Macross shows (Plus, Seven, Zero, Frontier). Macross Delta came out shortly thereafter, which was the whole reason I'd watched the earlier ones, but I didn't have any way to (legally) see it and eventually I kind of forgot about it. Well, a friend finally got the series recently and I was able to watch it.

The first thing you noticed in Macross Delta is the two significant differences from other Macross series. Number one: Someone writing this series really likes the magical girl genre. There's a group of young women named Walküre that performs songs to combat enemies (this is standard Macross), who change outfits during songs and dance around the battlefield with some kind of rocket-dresses (this is definitely new). Think of the "magic" part as being singing and combat dancing, and this is pure magical girl style anime. Number two: The enemy sings too, and uses it as a mind control device. In prior series, the "magic" singing has always been the province of the good guys, using it to disrupt the enemy. Occasionally an enemy might convert a singer to their side (as in Frontier) but mostly it belongs firmly on the side of the hero(ine)s. This time, the enemies are on the offensive with their songs and our heroines are largely on the defensive.

The major differences end there, and the similarities to other Macross series are legion. Young "play by my own rules" pilot gets co-opted into military organization, check. Pair of ace pilots on each side meeting in battle after battle, check. Love triangle with singer girl and military girl after hotshot pilot, check. Giant transforming battleship with aircraft carrier arms, check. Three female bridge crew and a gruff old captain, check. Refugees in space fleeing from enemy assault, check. And so on and so forth.

I enjoyed the development of the enemies from Windermere, which are revealed very early on after just a few episodes. It seemed to me that the writers put quite a bit more effort into humanizing this enemy than in most of the earlier series. We see the events that shaped the Windermere leadership's aggression as the series progresses, and time is spent to develop characters for several of the Windermere fighters. It reminded me a lot of the way that the original SDF Macross series handled the Zentradi.

Other character development was all right, but nothing special. I'd have liked to see more interaction between Windermere fighters and the Delta squad, which didn't really happen until very late in the series. Mikumo's fate was telegraphed so much that it seemed anticlimactic at the end. And the reveal of the identity of "Lady M" was wasted, in my opinion, coming as it did as an offhand comment in one of the final episodes. Surely they could have milked that for a scene or two!

I kept watching Macross Delta in the hope that there would be some kind of interesting twist that set it apart from what one would expect in a Macross series. But that never really materialized. Those two major differences that I pointed out at the beginning are great, but they're also just about the end of the deviations from standard Macross. By the time the final episode rolls around, it's not hard to predict how true love will save the day from some terrible fate. Which is fine and all, but so predictable that it feels a bit disappointing.

Senator Gary Peters Community Meeting in Grand Rapids

I've been to quite a few town hall discussions with my congressional representative, Justin Amash, several of which I've posted about here. But this was my first opportunity to hear from a senator, in this case Democrat Gary Peters. (My other senator, Debbie Stabenow, has not held any similar events in my area to the best of my knowledge.)

The meeting was held at the Gerald Ford Presidential Museum in downtown Grand Rapids. There's a nice auditorium there and it was mostly filled; a bit over 200 people would be my guess. I was a bit surprised that there weren't more folks, considering how rare it is for our senators to hold this kind of event.

The very first question set the tone for the meeting, when the question of supporting and co-sponsoring Bernie Sanders' Medicare-for-all bill was brought up. Senator Peters responded with a lot of talk about the Affordable Care Act: how he'd voted for it, the Republicans were doing their best to kill it, and he was fighting to keep as many benefits as possible. All of which may be true, but did not address the Medicare-for-all proposal and did not satisfy the crowd. Several more people followed up with health care questions, and several others just shouted repeatedly that the senator should be both fighting for the ACA and supporting the new proposal. Personally, I agree that change is needed, but shouting down your senator at an event isn't the way to change his mind.

The senator eventually moved on to other topics, trying to end the conversation by appealing for unity against what the Trump administration and the Republican party are doing. I'm not sure that went down well with most of the crowd. This experience made it pretty clear to me that the Democratic party has a long way to go if they're going to overcome the kind of divisions that hurt Hillary Clinton's campaign in 2016. Not a surprise, but still disappointing.

Other topics didn't get nearly as much time as health care, largely because the senator and his aides kept the meeting moving. The discussion did stay more civil, though. Here's a few of the topics:

• Supreme Court nomination: Senator Peters talked about pushing back against the Republican majority to delay any nomination until after the 2018 midterm elections (which is what the Republicans did back in 2016). His hopes appeared to be pinned on getting one or two Republicans to turn against any nominee that is put forward prior to the 2018 midterm elections. That seems unlikely to say the least. As far as I can tell, the only hope the Democrats have of blocking a nominee is to refuse to show up and thus deny the Senate a quorum, but that method wasn't mentioned.
• Border family separations: The lady who asked about this seemed woefully uninformed, as she thought there had been legislation passed to stop it (not true - it was an executive order) and for some reason thought that Education Secretary Betsy DeVos had something to do with the process. But the senator did a fine job in response of talking about what was actually happening, and what he's been doing. Which isn't a lot, since the Trump administration is in charge, but at least he's been able to have his office check in at the detention centers and push for basic improvements like letting parents talk with their children on a regular basis.
• Interactions with police: An ex-policeman asked what is being done about the fear that many people, particularly those of color, feel when interacting with police. Senator Peters brought up the National Criminal Justice Commission and their work with both police and civil rights organizations.
• Campaign finance: The senator said he is in favor of reform, particularly provisions requiring disclosure of "dark money" sources and finding a way to combat negative advertising.
• Affordable higher education: State-level funding is the primary source, but the senator did talk about expanding federal grants like the Pell Grant program. He also mentioned tying student load interest rates to federal bond rates.

Thank you, Senator Peters, for holding these community meeting events. I'd love to see them more often, from both of our senators.

Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood

Fullmetal Alchemist has been on my list of things to watch for a long time, because it's considered to be such a good series by most anime watchers. Turns out I am not most anime watchers.

There's two anime adaptations of the Fullmetal Alchemist manga. I chose the second, Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood, because some folks who had seen both told me that it was closer to the original material. I figured if I liked it, I could always watch the other one to see the differences.

The series starts off following two brothers, Ed and Al, who lost all or part of their bodies to an alchemical experiment. They're searching for a way to reverse the process and run into the usual assortment of roadblocks. It expands to include a huge cast of characters spread out over an entire country engaging in romance, politics, rebellion, pursuit of alchemical power at all costs, family arguments...a bit of everything.

I should say here that I understand why people like the Fullmetal Alchemist story. It's got drama and humor.  There's a character or two for everyone to like in the huge cast. It handles serious topics, such as ethnic genocide and dealing with lost loved ones. It builds up over 60+ episodes to a big final confrontation, exactly as you'd want to see from an epic fantasy storyline.

But...I just hated the style of the show. There's constant jokes about how short Ed is, along with various other recurring gags, which cease to be funny very quickly. Ed's awkward romance with a childhood friend is just painful to watch. Al has almost no personality of his own until very late in the series. The magic...er, alchemical...battles are incredibly cheesy. I'll give them one thing, at least the battles avoid the worst anime fighting trope of people screaming stupid fighting move names at one another. But I still couldn't really bring myself to care how over-the-top alchemical manipulation of rocks/fire/lightning/etc ended up knocking one person down. (Which is weird since I'm OK with cheesy battles in a lot of other series, but these just did nothing for me.) And worst of all, almost every episode has cartoon-style emotional explosions that take me out of any kind of narrative flow in those scenes.

So I just couldn't get into that good storyline because of the style. This is especially bad in the early going, the first 20 or so episodes, when the story is trying to build its foundations. It moves very slowly, the good and bad guys hardly ever meet one another, and the motivations of characters other than the brothers don't make much sense yet. So in that early going, you're left with mostly just the style...not good if you hate it.

I considered just stopping, but friends told me that it got better, so I persevered. And they were correct, because around the halfway point the story picks up significantly and is much more interesting. And yet, every time I started to get pulled into the story, some awful attempt at humor or annoyingly excessive battle sequence or character blowing their top in the middle of a conversation would show up and kill my interest. I did end up finishing the series, technically, but I was doing something else almost the entire time with the show just on in the background. I got the general gist of the story without focusing on every scene.

This series just fell flat for me. I suspect if I'd seen this back when it first aired almost 10 years ago, I might have felt differently, because I wouldn't have seen a whole lot of other anime with more palatable styles. But my tastes today just don't line up with what Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood has to offer.

Border Family Separation Needs to Stop

The biggest story in the news recently has been the United States government's policy of separating children of illegal immigrants from their parents. It's a terrible situation on a whole host of levels, it's completely unnecessary, and the President needs to make it stop.

Children and parents are separated in this country for all kinds of reasons. Some are legit, such as abuse, and that's as it should be. Others are financial, such as when a parent is arrested for a crime (whether guilty or not) and can't afford bail. It's been going on for a long time, and we mostly don't notice because the people it happens to aren't in our daily lives. But we're noticing when hundreds or thousands of children are being taken away at the border, and that's by design.

The Trump administration made a specific change to enforcement to enact this separation. As far as I can tell (not a lawyer but I've read opinions by those who are), it's perfectly legal because the actual laws don't say exactly how illegal immigrants should be detained. By the same token, when President Trump says the Democrats or Congress created laws that are causing this situation, that's a lie. There's discretion for the administration to go either way on this, and they're using it.

One argument being put forward is that this is a necessary policy to slow illegal immigration, but that's false. We've managed to deal with illegal immigration for decades without taking this particular step, and the illegal population has been stable or declining since before President Obama took office in 2009. It's not necessary to cause the kind of harm that is being done to these families if your goal is to reduce illegal immigration, as we've been doing for years. On the other hand, if your goal is to break up families for political purposes, then the policy makes sense.

Why do this now? There's a lot of speculation about that. Personally, I subscribe to the idea that Trump is making one of his standard negotiation moves. He says or does something incendiary, gets a lot of people all riled up, then offers to stop if they'll give him something he wants. In this case, that's asking Congress for "tremendous security" on the border...read that as funding for his wall and putting even tighter restrictions on legal immigration. The President wants a big uproar over this issue, and he's getting it.

This is not new. The administration tried the same thing six months ago. Back then Trump was threatening to remove protections for DACA recipients, and demanding more or less the same things in order to keep those young people safe from deportation. There was enough push-back that Trump didn't get what he wanted then, and so the administration decided to try again with a different kind of incendiary action.

I know people who don't think this is a bad thing. "People who can't obey the laws and enter the country legally deserve whatever treatment they get." "We need to make the results of illegal immigration harsh enough to make people stop coming." I understand those arguments, and even sympathize to some extent.

But...you need to draw a line somewhere. If there's no line, we'd just kill everyone trying to enter the country, and pretty much everyone agrees that would be morally reprehensible. The impact on these kids from this experience is going to last for years, and it's completely avoidable. Using those kids' pain to advance a political agenda is well on the wrong side of the moral line, and it needs to stop.

The President can stop this inhumane and unnecessary policy of family separation any time he likes. Don't believe it when he or anyone else tells you otherwise. Make your voice heard on this issue however you can, whether that be through posts like this one, calls to your representatives, protests, or whatever else works for you. And consider making your voice heard where it matters most...when you next vote.

Update June 21: So the President has indeed done what many have been calling for and stopped the family separations at the border. (Despite his repeated claims that Congress had to do it.) This doesn't fix the damage already done, but at least it's a step in the right direction.

The Moon Etherium by L. Rowyn

The Moon Etherium by L. Rowyn
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The world of The Moon Etherium is a complex magical dimension, inhabited by immortal fey. They gather around sources of aether, which powers their magical abilities, forming societies called etheriums. The Sun and Moon Etheriums are rivals, but similar in that their immortal populations pass the time in complex social and political intrigues.

The story primarily follows Miro of the Sun Etherium and Ardent of the Moon Etherium. This unlikely pair comes together in an effort to rescue Miro's father from slavery, and prevent massive magical destruction in the process. Romance, betrayal, intrigue, political upheaval...all kinds of havoc results before all is resolved.

The Moon Etherium is reasonably well written, but in my opinion it suffers from poor pacing and is overly complex. The first three-quarters of the book contains a lot of world description, various kinds of magical and social maneuverings, and budding romance. The explanation of all the magical wardings and spells and such is particularly long and detailed. I was getting pretty bored, to be honest, until I reached the last quarter of the book. At that point, events move much more quickly as the flow of the story changes...change of viewpoint characters, much less personal relationship development, lots of world-shaking political developments.

For fast readers who don't mind that the story takes quite a while to develop, The Moon Etherium is an interesting read. I think it could benefit from more aggressive editing, but it's still an enjoyable story.

Solo: A Star Wars Story

Solo: A Star Wars Story is a decent movie. Not a great one, as I suspect many fans were hoping; and not a terrible one, as much of the Internet would have you believe.

Solo is an origin story for Han Solo, that lovable rogue from the original Star Wars films. Starting from his lowly origins as a orphaned urchin on Corellia, Han talks and fights his way into and out of any number of improbable situations on his way to becoming the smuggler we know. Along the way we see him meet Chewbacca and Lando Calrissian, and of course find the Millennium Falcon.

I went into this expecting to see how Han met Chewie, and maybe some other stuff. Which is pretty much exactly what I got out of it. Just about everything involving Chewie was great...I particularly liked that he rescued another Wookie at one point...and the rest of the movie was decent, but nothing spectacular. They filled in a few gaps (like what exactly the Kessel Run was) and expanded on the smuggler's underworld that Han inhabits. Sure, there were some silly bits (like making the marauders into a proto-Rebellion) but I'm used to that with Star Wars. (Midichlorians, anyone?)

I didn't think any of the actors did an exceptional job, but none of them were terrible either. Donald Glover was the best of the bunch as Lando, but his role was too minor to really stand out. Alden Ehrenreich is no Harrison Ford, but that would be true of just about anybody, and I thought his Han was solid but not particularly noteworthy. Neither Woody Harrelson nor Emelia Clarke impressed me much with their performances, but it's not like they were terrible. Just kinda mediocre.

The writers clearly tried to interject some social commentary into the film, most notably with Lando's droid L3-37 (oh, haha, what a clever name) agitating for droid rights. Which, in my opinion, fell completely flat because they couldn't decide whether it should be a serious issue or comic relief. Going back and forth between the two failed miserably.

There's been a ton of angst all over the Internet about how Solo had a poor performance at the box office. I doubt Disney is losing much sleep over that, because they're still going to make millions overall (merchandise, DVD sales, etc). And even if they do lose some money on this one, the Star Wars franchise isn't in danger any time soon.

For Star Wars fans, it's worth seeing Solo for a bit more story about characters that you already know. You'll likely have a good time watching, but I doubt you'll find much that stands out.

Grimoire of Zero

I'm not entirely sure why Grimoire of Zero was a fun watch, but I sure did enjoy it.

Grimoire of Zero is a very familiar story. It's a medieval world where magic is real, and our heroes are a mercenary fighter and a witch. They should be enemies, but find a way to work together. There's a girl disguised as a boy, witch hunts by ignorant/frightened people, and an evil mastermind. About all that makes this setup different from a thousand others is that the fighter is a beastman, but really any kind of defect/failing that made him a bit of an outcast from society would have worked just as well. And to be fair, the story in the last couple of episodes does veer a bit off the "defeat the evil mastermind" track.

Usually I don't really enjoy shows/books/etc that are very predictable or derivative. But something makes Grimoire of Zero work for me. I think most of it is the relationship between the main characters. It progresses from mutual suspicion to a business arrangement to respect to real friendship (with bumps along the way, of course). That relationship progression is still very predictable, but it's handled nicely and both parties are likable.

It also helps that Grimoire of Zero is well produced, with good artwork and voice acting. And there's very little fluff - at only twelve episodes, there's not a lot of room for anything that isn't part of the main story. There's some minor digressions in the usual anime way - jokes about food, annoying middle-school-level sexual innuendo - but they're short. I'm fairly sure I'd have liked it much less if there had been lots of filler, but keeping the storyline moving meant I didn't have time to lose interest.

If you like the sword-and-sorcery anime genre, it's worth giving Grimoire of Zero a try.

Representative Amash Town Hall (May 2018)

My congressional representative Justin Amash held a town hall meeting in Caledonia at the high school just after Memorial Day. Nice location choice, since it's about a 4 minute drive from home for me.

As always, I appreciate Amash's willingness to hold these public town hall meetings. So many politicians just don't bother, and it doesn't seem to matter much since they keep getting re-elected anyway. Amash conducts his business professionally and in a courteous manner, so no matter how much I may disagree with some of his positions, I respect how he carries out his responsibilities.

The meeting started with the congressman talking about how the legislative process is broken. This isn't new...he's been making the same points in one form or another since I started attending these things several years ago. The short version is that party leadership (both Republican and Democrat) controls the process of writing and amending legislation so tightly that rank-and-file representatives have no real control over what is brought up for votes. That means compromise legislation that might actually be able to pass is never created (via the amendment process) and/or brought to the floor for a vote. Most representatives go along with this because the party leaders control a lot of their election campaign funding, plus it means they don't have to go on the record on controversial issues.

I don't disagree with this assessment, but I feel like Amash is preaching to the choir. We're the district that elected a guy who bucks the system. (Well, not me personally, I didn't vote for him. But the district did.) Telling us about it doesn't help much. What he needs to be doing is using his platform as a member of Congress to reach a national audience, if he really believes that going back to a more open legislative process is a key component to improving how Congress works. Convince voters in other districts to get after their representatives about joining Amash in making changes.

After that came the Q&A session, which was scheduled for about 40 minutes but lasted more like 90. That's pretty common for Amash, in my experience, and very much not what you see from other politicians. He seems to genuinely want to hear from as many constituents as possible. A lot of the questions were about current news items and he didn't say anything really unexpected. Yes, Mueller should finish his investigation into Russia and the 2016 presidential election; no, immigrant children should not be separated from their parents at the border; yes, we should hold our leaders to a standard of telling the truth. He was careful not to call out President Trump directly on any of these things, but otherwise it was fairly standard stuff like you might read in any news story.

One question that was a bit different brought up Amash's vote for the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act back in December 2017. In his response, Amash claimed that the tax cuts were progressive, moving the tax burden toward wealthier Americans. I have no idea what he's referring to. A quick web search will give you any number of opposite assertions, including this one from the Tax Policy Center. And if you add in the corporate tax cuts, which mostly benefit the wealthier folks that can afford to own those companies, it's even more tilted to favor the wealthy. I don't know if Amash was confused, misinformed, or what...I choose to believe he wasn't intentionally lying since he's not done so in other areas to the best of my knowledge.

It's good to hear directly from my representative, even if the answers aren't always exactly what you'd want to hear. It would be nice if my Senators and state legislators would do the same someday.

A Handmaid's Tale (season one)

There's a great movie or 3-4 hour mini-series in the first season of A Handmaid's Tale. Unfortunately it's spread out over about 10 hours of excruciating repetition.

The series takes place in an alternate timeline where world-wide fertility rates have been falling for many years, and finally reached crisis levels in the present day. A group calling itself the Sons of Jacob takes over the continental United States and turns it into a military state called Gilead, where women have no rights except through their male relatives. Fertile women are singled out and made into "handmaids" who are assigned to Gilead leaders to bear their children.

The story follows a woman named June who attempts to escape to Canada with her husband and daughter, but fails and is captured. Her daughter is taken away and June is assigned to Gilead Commander Waterford as a handmaid named Offred. The series splits time following June and the other handmaids in their lives in Boston, and flashing back to how things changed from the world we know to this dystopia.

I enjoyed the first couple of episodes of A Handmaid's Tale. It takes some time to figure out the world that they've built, and for June's terrible situation to really sink in. But then it's pretty much just more of the same. Hours of filling in details about the past which were already implied by prior flashbacks, conflicts between June and Mrs. Waterford, handmaids attempting rebellion and being caught, and so on. You might get 5-10 minutes of actual new information in each episode. The rest is largely just emotional manipulation...sex, oppression, fear, and occasional glimpses of kindness...so the viewer feels like something is happening when it's really just the same stuff over and over. We got all that already, thanks, it's not necessary to beat us over the head with it.

Oh, there are twists, but they're incredibly obvious. I suppose this is technically spoiler territory, but was anyone really surprised that June ends up sleeping with the household driver? Or that one of the handmaids, after giving birth in her assigned household, goes crazy when they take her away to a different household? Or that her husband who was conveniently off-screen when June heard shots that "killed" him turns out to be alive in Canada?

I suspect a lot of the reason that A Handmaid's Tale was received so well is the social commentary. The entire premise is based on misogyny and the twisting of religion to justify it. It doesn't take a lot of imagination to draw a line from the present day to the events in the alternate timeline shown in the series. But to my mind, the fact that the series says some good things doesn't excuse the fact that it gets repetitive and boring.

There's a second season of A Handmaid's Tale being released gradually on Hulu, but I can't say I'm particularly enthusiastic about it. Maybe someday I'll consider finishing it, but I suspect I'll end up just reading the summaries and saving myself a few hours.

NBC's Timeless

There were quite a few time travel shows that popped up 2-3 years ago. I've written about DC's Legends of Tomorrow on the CW (which has improved greatly since a weak season 1) and Netflix's Travelers. Frequency on the CW was pretty good, but only lasted one season. And on NBC, we have Timeless.

The world of Timeless: Time travel has been invented with the backing of deep pockets from a shadowy organization called Rittenhouse. They want to use the time ship to entrench their own positions and mold society to their ideals, which needless to say aren't progressive or friendly to anyone outside their group. A small team of uncorrupted government agents and civilians use a prototype time ship to thwart those schemes.

Like most shows based on time travel, you can't think too deeply about the premise of Timeless. The only real restriction is that you can't travel to place where you already exist, and there's ways around that (like recruiting others). The show establishes pretty early that changes made in the past do affect the future, so you have to ignore the fact that it would be incredibly easy to make a mistake that would wipe out your desired result, the development of time travel, or even all life on Earth. So watching Timeless definitely requires you to turn off the bit of your brain that tries to make sense of the whole time travel aspect.

Once you've got that suspension of disbelief going, Timeless is a lot of fun. I like pretty much all the characters, particularly Jiya and Rufus since they're nerds like me. (Younger and smarter and better looking, but then, who on TV isn't?) There's a decent amount of family and interpersonal drama that for the most part doesn't detract from the overall storyline, and in fact usually plays into it. Nice to have writers that make an effort to integrate the emotional drama, not just tossing it in on the side.

But my favorite part of Timeless is the historical characters. Pretty much every week, the crew goes to a different part of history and meets one or more pivotal persons. There's plenty of the usual suspects: the Alamo with Bowie and Crockett, Bonnie and Clyde, the revolutionary war with Benedict Arnold and George Washington, Al Capone and Eliot Ness in Chicago, etc. But some of the best stories are with lesser known characters, like Katherine Johnson at NASA (better known now after Hidden Figures) or blues musician Robert Johnson. Timeless does a fine job of bringing these characters to life, generally with a minimum of deviation from what we know from history. (The Smithsonian does a weekly blog post checking the facts.)

The second season wrapped up recently, with a cliffhanger that shows that the writers are ready to go for season 3. Hopefully NBC lets them keep going, or someone else picks it up.

In This Moment and Halestorm at the Deltaplex in Grand Rapids

Stitched Up Heart, New Year's Day, In This Moment, and Halestorm...four female-fronted rock/metal bands on the same night at a venue close to home. Not an opportunity I was going to pass up.

The Deltaplex here in the Grand Rapids area is basically a gymnasium with some warehouse-like open space next to it. It generally hosts basketball games for the Grand Rapids Drive and merchandise shows, so it's not exactly built as a concert venue. I was pleasantly surprised that the acoustics weren't terrible, though it still wasn't nearly as good as a place like 20 Monroe Live that's built for concerts.

Probably just as well that they booked the Deltaplex, though, because they had a good-sized crowd. It wasn't completely sold out, but still, it would have been a tight fit in a smaller venue. And there were a lot of women in attendance. Most rock/metal shows are slanted toward men by 2:1 or more, but in this case it was even, or possibly tilted a bit the other way. It was great to see that many women out in support of this all-female-fronted lineup.

I was a little late getting out to the show, plus there was some confusion over the process for getting my ticket redeemed (had to go to the box office since I bought it through Groupon), so I ended up missing all but about half of the last song from Stitched Up Heart. But I heard the complete sets for the other three acts. Logistically, the only real complaint I had was the same I have at almost every show with multiple openers...it takes forever to switch sets. Ended up with more than an hour and a half wait time by the end of the night.

Both New Year's Day and Halestorm were great, though neither are on my usual playlists so I only knew a few songs during their sets. Since New Year's Day was on early, they had a bit less crowd energy to work with, but I thought they did a fine job with stage presence and I enjoyed their set. And Halestorm really knows their way around a stage, which makes sense after 20 years. Particularly the Hale siblings (front-woman Lzzy and drummer Arejay), both of whom took some solo time as well as playing with the band.

For me, though, In This Moment was the highlight of the show. Which was initially because I knew their work best going in, but the stage show certainly cemented that feeling for me. Several big video screens were right behind the band, and lead singer Maria Brink was dancing as much as singing, usually with one or two other dancers alongside (including New Year's Day lead singer Ash Costello on one song). This was a kind of interpretive dance that went along with the music, not the over-sexualized twerking that passes for dancing in much of today's popular music. They didn't stint on props either - several costume changes, some kind of glowing ball thing, a sort of pulpit on one song, and they even launched a bunch of balloons in the audience near the end of the set. Good set list, too - I liked Big Bad Wolf in particular, but they hit most of their most popular songs.

I'd love to see more tours like this one, focused on bands with female members. Judging from the turnout for this one, there's certainly a market for it. Count me in for the next one!

Stories: The Path of Destinies

This game has a great story and I really enjoyed seeing it unfold. Wish I could say the same about the combat gameplay.

Stories: The Path of Destinies takes place in a world populated by animals, in Aesop's Fables style. You play as Reynardo the fox, fighting against an evil Emperor (who is a toad) on the side of rebels against his army of ravens. It's a swashbuckling setting where Reynardo fights with magic swords in settings ranging from forests to mountains to leaping across the decks of battling airships.

It doesn't take long to get through the story...once. Reynardo has many choices to make as he heads towards a confrontation with the Emperor. Inevitably, the fox falls in the final confrontation. At which point he wakes up, back at the beginning, but with the knowledge he gained in his earlier failure. Each failure teaches our hero one of four truths, and once he knows them all, he can navigate towards a successful ending.

The story is told largely through a narrator, who not only tells you what's happening along the way, but also comments on how you go about your business. It reminds me a lot of Bastion. For example, if you're destroying barrels and crates, expect some snarky remarks about how destructive you are. And of course he has something to say when you die.

Which happens a lot, at least if you're as bad at these kind of games as I am. The combat expects you to fight a bunch of enemies at once, reacting quickly to impending attacks with blocking and using special moves against specific enemies. My twitch-reaction is awful, and it doesn't help that attacking with Reynardo's sword locks you into an animation, so you can't move until it's done. Also, you can't do the special moves at all times...I'd hit the dash button to get away from an explosion, for instance, and Reynardo would just stand there and die even if I had the stamina necessary for the skill. I did OK through the early game, but around the time I found the second truth, battles became a real pain.

It doesn't help that it's very difficult to heal Reynardo. There's a health-stealing sword, but you can't use it much before running out of energy. Occasionally you can find health in the environment, but you have to waste time breaking crates and such. That takes forever due to the aforementioned attack animation lock...move to a crate, break it, wait for Reynardo to finish his follow-through, pick up loot, repeat. It's tedious enough that I gave up after the first couple of levels and just waded into battle without full health. Which means that I died even more, of course. Fortunately you revive at the start of the battle and can retry it as many times as needed, but each time you start at half health, not full. During the entire second half of the game, I don't think I ever had more than half health.

The game is also very slow to start up. I've got plenty of computing power that runs most games easily, but this one took several minutes to load and switch between areas. I assume that's a result of the cross-platform nature of the programming, since the game was released for both Windows and PS4. It's a minor thing, but annoying. Add to that the fact that there's no way to skip the narration at the start of each area, even if you've heard it several times before, and the wait time before actually playing gets pretty tedious.

I really liked the concept behind Stories: The Path of Destinies, with the different ways that Reynardo's story could unfold. If it wasn't such a pain to actually play the game, I'd probably have seen more of those different stories. As it is, one time through was enough.

Princess Principal

Cold War-style spy adventures set in a steampunk world is a fine background, if not one that you'd expect from the title of Princess Principal.

The princess in the title is one of a group of five teenage girls who act as spies in London, which is a divided city much like real-world Cold War-era Berlin. She's fourth in line to the throne of one side, the Kingdom of Albion, but acting in cooperation with intelligence operatives of the other side, the Commonwealth of Albion.

The steampunk part of the setting comes from a substance called Cavorite, used to construct airships and generally used in miraculous machines. Including one that allows one of the girls to fly and do various other amazing feats. The world at large is at early 20th century levels of technology and culture, but those Cavorite-based machines are highly advanced. All of it is beautifully drawn - the artwork is top-notch, whether drawing steampunk tech or the rest of the world.

Once you get past the usual suspension-of-disbelief about very young characters doing all these crazy things (which is necessary to almost all anime series and almost second nature for me by now), the overall story and individual episode plots in Princess Principal hang together pretty well. I like the world design, and I found the world-building history aspects interesting. Each episode generally follows a single spy mission, always going wrong in some way, as one would expect from this type of premise.

Chronology in the series is a bit odd, with the timeline jumping around with each episode. First you see a mission with all five girls, then we jump back and see how four of them first met, then a few more missions, before finally meeting the fifth member. And so on, until the last few episodes finally wrap things up in order.

For such a short series (twelve episodes), the character design is very good. Each of the five girls has some time devoted to their individual stories. Character growth is a bit odd because of the jumps back and forth in time across the episodes, but you can definitely see changes as time progresses. And of course the story of the princess and her closest friends is a big part of the overall storyline.

I greatly enjoyed Princess Principal and wish it had been longer. I see they're planning a film series next year, which I'll definitely be looking for.