Eruditorum Press

Our Imposter Syndrome cancels out our Dunning-Kruger

Comics Reviews (September 30th, 2015)

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As always, from worst to best of what I bought.

Sandman Overture #6

Ultimately, this fails under the weight of five previous issues spent going “well, maybe it’s all going to come together in the end.” Which, obviously, you know better than, or at least I do. No, the truth is that there’s no good reason for this miniseries to exist. It served mainly to waste J.H. Williams’s talents for two years on a mediocre and uninspired book, the result of which ends up being some of the worst work of his career simply because, for all its formal brilliance, it’s a pain in the ass to tell what’s going on, and usually what’s going on wasn’t worth the effort. None of the crackle or energy of Sandman is present here; it’s just a tired exercise of checking some boxes and getting to the end of the plot. What an utter disappointment of a book.

Young Terrorists #1

Picked up off the rack because it was a light week, and because I was intrigued by a book blurbed by Laura Sneddon (a critic I have great regard for, but whose taste differs pretty sharply from mine) and Julian Darius (a critic I have literally no respect for whatsoever, but whose taste runs close to my own) that used the tagline “get radicalized.” It’s messy – an eighty page opening issue that luxuriates a bit too much. Artist Amancay Nahuelpan is working in that messy, scratchy style of Daniel Žeželj or Riccardo Burchielli, which trades a degree of clear storytelling for impact, and the premise feels ever so slightly tired. I don’t want to say there are too many books that are taking terrorism seriously as a tactic instead of treating it as something to reflexively demonize, because there aren’t, but this mostly just leaves me wishing Bendis and Maleev were putting Scarlet out on anything like a reasonable schedule.

Providence #5

I admit to having a terribly large amount of fun with all the St. Anselm’s segments, that being my wife’s alma mater. (She was particularly tickled that her school motto was proposed by a bunch of Necronomicon-obsessed occultists.) This is a weird and deliberately unsettled issue based around dreams and time breaking down, and I’m curious how the transition into “Herbert West: Reanimator” is going to work in terms of tone from this heavily dream-inflected issue (mixing mostly “Dreams in the Witch House” and “Color out of Space”). But, perhaps as expected, this is transitional. Although Moore is clearly having a lot of fun with characters getting to explain things in ways that go over poor Robert Black’s head. “I’m more of a revivalist” indeed. 

Mercury Heat #4

I wondered when this would pick up a bit. Gillen finally provides the exposition drop that the book proper had been lacking, and as a result Luiza’s character comes appreciably more into focus. It’s funny, the plot kicks into a properly functioning gear, and for the first time we get an issue where all the parts seem to be working together.…

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My Hamster is February (or Jack Thinks About ‘The Witch’s Familiar’)

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1. Nostradidn’tus

Okay, the first thing to say is that I was totally wrong about how Missy and Clara would survive. I expected some sort of reappearance of the Nethersphere, with Missy having herself uploaded and then redownloaded, and bringing Clara along for the ride. Far too overcomplicated for Steven ‘Mr Simplicitypants’ Moffat to use, it seems. Instead we got something far more straightforwards which, while uninteresting in itself, allowed Moffat to do a scene in which Missy and Clara have a conversation rather than needlessly overcomplicated, self-referential plot tricksiness. Yay, etc.

 

I was also wrong about what ‘The Witch’s Familiar’ would do with the trolley problem cliffhanger. I predicted that it would take up loads of our time rehashing the Series 8 obsession with the morality of killing via a reiteration of the contentless ethical dilemma from ‘Genesis of the Daleks’… which it didn’t do. Instead it pretty much blithely said something sensible, i.e. “Yeah, kill fascists if you have to, and don’t worry about it, I mean they started it. In fact, get the contents of the sewer – the rejected, disavowed, lowest of the low – to rise up and kill the fascist ruling class. That’ll be funny.”

 

I thought we’d get loads of stuff about how the Doctor killed little Davros and that makes him a hypocrite, or didn’t kill little Davros and that makes him a hypocrite, or tried to kill Davros and in the process created Davros and that makes him a hypocrite… (and yawn because of course he’s a bit of a hypocrite, so what? Are we supposed to not be social actors because to get out there and do stuff means that we pretty much have to embrace a degree of ethical compromise? Fuck’s sake capitalist media, will you please stop flogging the dead horse of complicity in an attempt to paralyse people’s will to action?!?) …with the whole thing eventually side-stepped via a bit of narrative trickery which means the Doctor ultimately gets to not act either way, but without the redeeming virtue of ‘Genesis’, i.e. that the Doctor did reach a decision but was prevented from putting it into effect because of circumstances out of his control.

 

I also thought we might loads of soppy bollocks about the poor little Davros bonding with the Doctor, and feeling sad, and being a lonely scared child the Doctor bonds with, and all the usual attendent feels.

 

To Moffat’s credit, we didn’t get any of that. Though, sadly, he only dodges the soppy Doctor/Davros bonding session by making the whole thing incredibly brief and glib instead. Reminiscent of how the only way he seems able to avoid making Clara the butt of jokes about her appearance is to lock her in a Dalek casing for most of the episode.

 

 

2. Zombie Crap

 

I still love the handmines. I’m sorry, I’m still on about them. I was fascinated to learn from Jane (in her recent guest appearance on Pex Lives) that the handmines recall an ancient Middle Eastern symbol – the Hamsa – which brings protection against evil. …

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“Eternity waits”: Schisms

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The way I thought of time was I thought of it like a river. And so I thought of it as flowing toward its lowest level. And I thought of history as a river and Eternity as the ocean. So naturally history flows downhill to reach Eternity. I also like the fact that when the descent in elevation is rapid, the river runs faster, and when the landscape is almost flat, the river broadens out and meanders. So it was to preserve this idea of time as a fluid. The other reason is a mathematical reason. It has to do with the fact that if we have novelty moving downward, then the maximum of novelty is zero.”
-Terrence McKenna

Brannon Braga sells himself short when he describes “Schisms” as “just a garden-variety-UFO abduction episode”. Though only writing the teleplay, Braga’s signature stamp is unmistakably all over the place here, and it’s all for the better.

This isn’t the first time Star Trek has done missing time and alien abductions: The earliest I can remember is “The Mark of Gideon” in the Original Series, which was seeped in that imagery and iconography even if it wasn’t overtly about it. The Animated Series was similarly awash in all manner of 1970s New Age sci-fi spookiness. And actually describing “Schisms” that way similarly does it a disservice, Braga himself pointing out the story’s real appeal lies in the mystery underlying its initial acts. While its surrealism looks comparatively tame next to the sheer mind-breaking symbolic power of some forthcoming Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes (in particular, Braga’s forthcoming episodes) and it doesn’t help the big reveal is given away in the weekly syndication teaser trailer, “Schisms” remains unarguably compelling.

It also doesn’t help, sadly, that the aliens themselves are, shall we say, somewhat underwhelming as realised. Braga himself even describes them, rather bluntly as “fish monks” and complains, albeit correctly, that neither fish nor monks are scary. Their language of clicks, by contrast, is a testament to the kind of insane attention to detail that can go into shows like this: That’s not just random background noise, that’s an *actual fictional language of clicks* devised by producer Wendy Neuss and the sound team, and every sequence of clicks you hear has been painstakingly translated to Fish Monk from English. Yes, that’s *actual dialog* those dudes are speaking, and none of you would ever have picked up on that had I not told you.

One thing I do really like about the Fish Monks is their origin: A group of mysterious creatures from outside the normal space-time continuum who are trying to re-shape our universe for their own unclear motivations. They don’t just come from another universe, which would almost be blase in the kind of science fiction setting Star Trek: The Next Generation has, they come from an *entirely different* kind of space (in fact, if my understanding of how subspace works in Star Trek is correct, it’s literally a *liminal* space between).…

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Lost Exegesis (Pilot Part 1)

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Hello, I’m Jane, your stewardess for the Lost Exegesis, a flight of fancy that explores the esoteric mysteries of LOST, an American TV show that ran on ABC from 2004 until 2010. It’s a show that had a significant impact on TV at the time, and still does to an extent.

But the Exegesis isn’t going to be about charting any of that, or commenting on the value of individual episodes; we’ll not be diving into fan rankings, outside critical acclaim, comments from the showrunners, or how the show fit into the televisual landscape at the time. Rather, the primary focus will be on interpreting the text regarding the show’s esoteric elements (as you might have suspected, given I’m calling this an “exegesis”) through a thorough close reading. This will include an examination of the show’s intertextuality: if Watership Down shows up in the text, we’ll take a look at Watership Down.

Every few weeks or so we’ll examine one episode from the series, in order. With 121 episodes, we’ll be at this for quite a while. There’s no rush. We might even cover what we need to cover by the end of Season One, which is only 25 hours of TV.  So there’s that.

So, a note about the ground rules regarding these essays. Each one will be divided into two parts. The first part will examine the show as if we were watching it in the present tense, without reference to future episodes. In other words, no spoilers. The bottom line is, if you haven’t seen the whole show yet, you can follow along through the first half of each essay as the Exegesis unearths the buried treasures of the Island.

The second part will take a different approach – it will reexamine the episode with particular consideration for future events in the show, and testing various theories of the Exegesis along the way. It’s here that we’ll be looking at the show’s ancillary materials. This portion of each essay will begin with a picture of the standard LOST title card and a subtitle of “LOST Through the Looking Glass” to warn off anyone who doesn’t want to know what’s going to happen next.

Finally, the Comments section is not spoiler-free. Most people have already seen the show (it’s been around for quite a while now) and you’ve probably heard all about it anyways. Besides, I don’t want to be in the position of policing the comments. That said, I do ask that we try to stay focused on the episode at hand, a place to talk about the episode’s quality, other themes, whatever suits your fancy.

Okay, let’s go back!

 

Opening Eye

LOST begins with a starkly visual image, an Opening Eye. The eye is clearly reflective – we can see the trees and sky above. A man in a suit is lies on the ground in a bamboo jungle. He’s disoriented. He looks around, and sees a dog saunter by. He gets up, wincing, and is almost puzzled to find a small bottle of liquor in his pocket.…

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Technological Determinism (Star Fox)

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Quietly and behind the scenes, far from the watchful eyes of most of us, Nintendo was systematically fucking absolutely everything up. The long term result of this would eventually be the cataclysmic end of Nintendo’s dominance over the video game industry. The short term result was Star Fox.

The problems began, in many regards, in 1988 when Nintendo partnered with Sony to create an add-on for the SNES using the newly standardized CD-ROM format. This was by and large a defensive move – NEC had a CD-ROM expansion for the TurboGrafx-16 out in Japan in 1988, and it reached the US in 1990, becoming integrated in the standard release of the console in 1992. Work on a CD peripheral for the Genesis began almost as soon as the format was standardized, and saw Japanese release in late 1991, coming out in the US a year later and immediately attaining infamy due to having Night Trap as a launch title. And so Nintendo essentially had to follow suit.

The device was to be announced in the summer of 1991 at the Consumer Electronics Show in Chicago. But shortly before the announcement Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi got cold feet over the degree to which the deal with Sony would give them licensing control over the new CD format. Since control over the cartridge supply had been a key plank of Nintendo’s business model, especially in the US where the “Seal of Quality” was a rhetorical device to counter fears of an Atari-style crash, this was ultimately deemed unacceptable. And so Nintendo made an audacious move, quickly arranging a new deal with Phillips and announcing it at CES the day after Sony unveiled their “Play Station,” which would combine a SNES cartridge slot and a CD-ROM drive.

Almost every part of this went badly for Nintendo. Sony eventually repurposed their CD unit into the stand-alone Playstation, decisively winning the fifth generation of console. The Phillips device never materialized (and indeed Nintendo would not release an optical-disc system until 2001), but as a consequence of that deal Phillips was allowed to release a raft of shovelware featuring Nintendo properties for their moribund CDi system. And worse, the Super Nintendo had no upgrades that would allow it to compete with its rivals on technical grounds for the remainder of the 16-bit era.

The response to this state of affairs was the Super FX chip, designed by British developer Argonaut Games, who produced it to enable a Super Nintendo version of their acclaimed Starglider series. The chip was a cartridge-based auxiliary graphics processor for the Super Nintendo that dramatically increased its ability to handle 3D graphics.

Implicit in this is a vision of the future, namely that video games would someday be 3D. This is a significant change from how basically all games on the NES and, thus far, the SNES had worked. Those games had all been based on two-dimensional sprites. This was the technological innovation offered by Mode 7 at the SNES’s launch – a new set of ways of manipulating sprites that allowed for things like Super Mario Kart where the track was, in reality, a background layer being manipulated via Mode 7, with the actual cars just being sprites that were resized up and down to produce the illusion that the car was moving forward or background.…

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“And the greatest good is little enough”: Relics

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I’ll bet you all already know how I feel about “Relics”. There’s really no point in going on. You can all fill in the blanks yourselves. You’ve all heard this story before.

Do I remember it? Yeah, of course I do. It’s one of those episodes that comes right out screaming “I am iconic!” and practically *demands* to be remembered. The viewing I most vividly recall was not one at my parents’ house, which is the way most of my memories of Star Trek are, but at my grandparents’. I guess we had just driven in for a visit one night or something, they happened to be watching Star Trek: The Next Generation and this was the episode on that night. I can’t remember if this was the first time I’d seen it, but it was definitely the one I remember most clearly, because everyone in that house made a *really big huge deal* about how Scotty was in this one and that this was the episode where the two Generations came together. Which was weird considering “Unification” had already come out the year prior, as did Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. Maybe my family hadn’t seen those episodes and movie, but considering it was the media event of the year, I find that hard to believe. I mean even *I* had seen them, and I was years and years behind everyone else in everything.

I remember someone excitedly telling me how in this one shot the “new” Enterprise was flying alongside the “old” Enterprise. By this, they of course meant the part where the crew rescues the Jenolan. Which looks nothing whatsoever like the Original Series Enterprise in any way, shape or form. I hadn’t even seen the Original Series yet (except, again, for maybe “The Trouble with Tribbles” and “By Any Other Name” like a year or two prior) and even I knew that was utter bollocks. When I pointed out the ship in question didn’t seem to look a whole lot like Constitution-class as I understood it, I was told that was because it was upside-down, at which point I proceeded to drop the subject. Who knows, maybe it was and I just couldn’t tell because of how far away I was from the giant CRT TV in the hutch. I didn’t care enough to press the issue.

My relatives on this side of the family, my mother’s, had a bit of an inelegant relationship with my Star Trek fandom. While they were utterly supportive, incredibly generous and terribly well-meaning, they never quite seemed to grasp that I wasn’t a “Star Trek Fan” as much as I was a Star Trek: The Next Generation fan, inasmuch as that was the show that was on the air and that I watched every Wednesday or Friday or whatever: I watched TV casually at nights like ordinary people used to do back then, and while this was my favourite of the shows I watched at this age (at least of the big primetime dramas: Miami Vice has hung like a neon haze over my life and perspective forever, although I wouldn’t fully realise my love for it until later), it was, ultimately, still just another show.…

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Capitalist Pig

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Roasted pig’s head with barbeque sauce, raw vegetable salad, brioche bun, lime, and lettuce cup from the Greenhouse Tavern in Cleveland. ($52)

“All the pigs are all lined up. I give you all that you want. Take the skin and peel it back. Now doesn’t that make you feel better?” -Nine Inch Nails, “March of the Pigs”

There is something more than faintly reasonable about the droves of Tories attempting to spin the news that David Cameron fucked a pig with variations of “well who hasn’t?” After all, that’s basically why the story was so viscerally enticing – the fact that nearly everybody’s reaction to the news is complete credulity. Simply put, fucking a dead pig is the sort of thing you expect someone like David Cameron to do.

There are many reasons for this. Plenty of people have written intelligently about the psychological basis for initiation rituals among posh male societies and the way in which the resultant mutual possession of blackmail material ensures loyalty. More broadly, the idea that posh people are in reality depraved dunces is more or less a standard assumption of British comedy. “They all secretly fuck pigs” is perhaps not something that had been widely uttered before the Daily Mail started serializing Ashcroft’s book, but the basic sentiment bordered on the universal.

Less discussed, however, is this: why a pig? Because the pig clearly matters. It would be an entirely different scandal – and one Cameron probably could not politically survive – if he’d fucked a dog or Boris Johnson. Even a sheep wouldn’t quite work – sheepfucking is firmly a poor person’s bestiality. No, it was clearly a pig or nothing.

It’s not that pigs are specifically a rich man’s animal. One can just as easily imagine a rural yokel fucking a pig as David Cameron; the only difference is that when a poor person fucks a pig it’s because they want to, whereas the rich only fuck pigs when they have to. But the fact that pigs traverse the class divide is much, though not all, of why David Cameron had to fuck one.

If one were to take a position of culinary technological determinism, the pig would have an almost causal relationship with European rural poverty. It reproduces quickly and grows to slaughtering weight equally quickly, making them an economical choice of animal. Unlike the Near East, where urban pigs served essentially as a sewage system, thus marking them as fundamentally unclean (and an entirely different vulgar metaphor), European pigs, due to the comparative excess of water and forestation, were historically well-raised while still being fairly cheap animals to keep. The pig is also a historically flexible animal, hence the French saying that you can use every part of the animal but the oink. But more important is why the entire pig is usable: pork is perfect for salting and smoking, and thus lends itself to preservation techniques for the winter.

But it’s here the class divide becomes important. Living high on the hog means more than just fucking one while coked up.…

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Weird Kitties Reviews, Batch Four (The Buried Giant, Woman at Exhibition, Empowered Volume 9)

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The Buried Giant, by Kazuo Ishiguro
Reviewed by Jack Graham
 
Eligible for Best Novel and available for purchase here.
 

Nobody expected Kazuo Ishiguro’s first novel in ten years to be a fantasy novel, but it is – complete with dragons, ogres, pixies, and spells. The novel is set in a mythic version of the British past, during an uneasy truce between Britons and Saxons, a few decades after the death of King Arthur. The setting and style both rely as much uponThe Sword in the Stone as on Chaucer or Geoffrey of Monmouth.

Ishiguro (probably still best known for The Remains of the Day) is one of those literary authors who experiments with genre fiction. His last novel, Never Let Me Go, was written like a conventional ‘realist’ literary novel, but the backdrop and plot of the story depended upon both the SF trope of cloning and the SF technique of discursive worldbuilding. Unlike most critics I found Never Let Me Go disappointing, at least as SF. The SF elements didn’t do much except introduce a rumination on cloning that struck me as something of a moralistic strawman, and a metaphor about the fleeting nature of human life – not to give too much away: the novel is about people who die young – which left you wondering why he didn’t just write about how old people feel like time has gone by too fast. Literary novelists often do this sort of thing when they adopt SF inflections (c.f. Margaret Atwood). They grab the power of the fantastic to provide metaphors, but in so doing they disrespect the categories of the fantastic by using them to say things they could just as easily say literally. The great power of the fantastic is not only that it comes loaded with meaning, but also that it allows for polysemy, for multiplicity and instability of interpretation.
 
The Buried Giant, unlike Never Let Me Go, has met a mixed reception from critics, but is far less guilty of this sort of thing. Generally, Ishiguro is happy to present the literal fantastic as meaning what is says it means, even if it isn’t spelled out. For instance, boatmen who take elderly couples across the water to magic islands are literally taking the dead to the next world. They’re not a redundant metaphor for death, they are just a description of death. The description of death is couched in mythical terms because the story occurs in a mythical version of history. Paradoxically, this literalism (i.e. the dragon is pretty much just a dragon) means that the book refuses to foreclose upon easy, straightforward meanings. Clearly the dragon means something, but we are not being instructed by the author in what this is. Apparently intelligent people have complained about this. I relished it.
 
The book is clearly about all sorts of things, some of them perennial Ishiguro obsessions. Old age, memory, failure of communication, wasted opportunity, and self-delusion, for example. At the heart of the novel is the question of memory, both personal and historical.
…

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The Witch’s Familiar Review

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That didn’t quite work for me, at least on a first viewing, although watching it again as I write this it improves. Much of that is, I think, being free from the weird vertigo of the fake cliffhanger. I have mixed views about deliberate misdirection via out-of-context flash forwards as a technique. Actually, that’s generous; I tend to think they’re a cheap trick (and am still known to grouse about the utterly shameless and unnecessary one in American Beauty). So in that regard I found the episode jarring.

It wasn’t even that I was particularly excited about the trolly problem the cliffhanger set up. That was only ever going to be interesting as a platform upon which to do something interesting. In that regard, if anything the opening, with Missy having Clara tied up and explaining a seemingly irrelevant plot point from a story we weren’t watching, is the best part. Certainly it never quite matches that giddy thrill again. And similarly, the Doctor rolling out in Davros’s chair to argue with the Daleks is great. But it’s also where the episode loses its tension.

Actually, between you and me, I suspect Moffat had trouble with the script. You can almost perfectly imagine him on some eventual DVD commentary during the “Doctor in Davros’s chair” bit admitting that he only wrote the scene because he realized he had written an episode that just dumped Peter Capaldi in a basement for forty-five minutes, and making fun of himself for the fact that it contributes absolutely nothing to the plot. Or at least I can, though maybe what this really reveals is that I’m the sort of person who writes imaginary Moffat commentary tracks in my head.

But the problem this script has isn’t the Doctor/Davros scenes, or at least, mostly isn’t. Indeed, on the rewatch those are what really sing. The detail of Davros being beside himself with joy at the news that the Doctor saved the Time Lords jumped out on the first pass, but only as part of a fairly tiresome “Davros pretends to be good” scene. On the second pass, it struck me as incredibly clever and interesting; a moment of genuine empathy from Davros, but one that’s carefully framed in terms of the nationalist and racist ideologies he espouses and represents. I buy that much more than the bullshit “the Doctor teaches child Davros about mercy and thus achieves some small ineffable victory in the form of incremental progress towards a less genocidal Dalek” note on which the episode ends, certainly.

No, the problem is ultimately that there’s not ninety minutes of story here, and the effort made joining the two halves up and structuring this as a season premiere detracts from the actually interesting bit. Or, rather, if there are ninety minutes of story the cliffhanger is in no way the halfway point of them. Certainly that’s what’s suggested by the weirdly rushed denouement, in which the Doctor, for no discernible reason beyond the fact that the episode is about fifteen minutes from the end, decides that instead of letting Davros die naturally he’ll walk into his trap.…

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Weird Kitties: Best Professional Artist Open Thread

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So I admit, this is a category I know basically nothing about. I mean, I assume it doesn’t generally go to comic artists, and so my instinct to nominate J.H. Williams III and Jamie McKelvie, though not unreasonable from any aesthetic perspective, is still out of keeping with social norms. Still, here’s the second most mindblowing moment of one of the best comics of the year, and a fantastic costume design to boot, and people can tell me what’s normal to nominate here. 

Looking at the people listed in the 2016 Hugo Wikia, I see Stephanie Hans, who’s doing the next issue of WicDiv, is there, so I can’t be too wrong-headed. Stephan Martinière’s work on the Three-Body Problem trilogy is pretty impressive too. Scanning quickly through the others, though, I’m finding this is a hard category for me. So yes, please someone have useful opinions.

Speaking of useful opinions, we could still use one or two more reviews for tomorrow. snowspinner at gmail. …

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