Meant to have this done last week, but here we are. I also kept finding more to say. I need to find a way to trim these things down if I'm going to keep writing them, lol.

Things I've Watched:

Glass Onion
Not a ton to say that other people haven't said! But I enjoyed it! I have fun with twisty murder mystery stuff, and I love revenge. I especially love long-con revenge, and while this was more of a medium-con revenge, it was satisfying to me. The casting was excellent. The characters never quite felt all the way caricature-ish, while at the same time feeling *exactly* like That Person you totally know/know of. Lots of genuinely funny bits.
"Are you calling me dangerous?" killed me.

You
Been out for a while, and I think we watched a couple episodes of the first season before it was on Netflix. Alex had watched a bit more of it, but we started it over. (Good timing: didn't know the fourth season was starting up imminently.)

Season one definitely felt the strongest to me. The general tone and vibe shifted a bit in two, and even more so in three, and very much in four. Not to the point of being unenjoyable, but I liked season one's tone more than the subsequent ones. I thought the first season better conveyed the "hey, this is actually pretty fucked up" component better... in two and beyond it's there, but regarded in a more humorous way. (Though season one was *also* full of dark humor, and didn't treat itself completely seriously either, but it still came across very differently.)
I think the biggest difference is that in two and three they more openly acknowledge that the characters all know they're fucked up and they're doing bad things anyway, and their justifications are more transparently bad. Joe wasn't completely *unaware* in season one, but it kind of seemed like he really did feel like what he was doing was the justifiable, correct response... that murdering the people he thought were in his or Beck's way was *genuinely the correct choice*. 
In two there seems to be more awareness that it's probably not *good*, but he's going to do it anyway. (Though the vague "twist" with Love was pretty good.) The various subplots all came together reasonably well, also.

In three, they've kind of given up any pretense of "this is the correct way to deal with this" and have gone straight to "doing bad things on purpose"/"doing bad things because I'm mad at you." That's a very different tone than season one's. Three also seemed really meandering, with plotlines that seemed like they were going to be big deals (Love's mother's obsession with and kidnapping of their son!) that just kind of... petered out. Even some of the bigger series-wide themes, like Joe's repeated decision to get attached to and protect specific kids, seemed to fall apart? He likes Marienne's kid well enough, but she doesn't feature much. He has an arc about how he didn't expect a son and is struggling to bond with Henry and doesn't want to screw him up... but then that plot thread is literally functionally abandoned at the end of the season. The "suburbia is hell" themes and people being cattily-yet-politely awful to each other was good... but also a little one-note after a while. The picture-perfect mommy blogger with the secret kinky swinger blog (and Love being oblivious) was pretty rad, though.


Season four is okay so far, in the half of the season that's been released. Parts of it have been pretty good, and I genuinely like the way the titular "You" of the season is different. Previously it's been the object of his obsession-mistaken-for-love... this time the "You" he speaks to is an unknown (at least until the mid-season finale) person that's framing him/stalking him/taunting him.
The awful rich kids (adults, but all still very much trading on family success and titles) he's surrounded with are genuinely terrible, and that's fun enough. But... eh, the series seems to have kind of inadvertently (or maybe deliberately, idk) confirmed some of the shitty attitudes it was initially mocking? There's a bit at the start mocking the obnoxious rich crowd claiming that the rich are the REAL victims of hatred and such... only for it to turn out that yes, there's a serial killer targeting the wealthy because they're wealthy. They *are* the real victims! 

Joe briefly bonds with the guy who turns out to be this season's murderer over their shared bad childhoods... Kind of unintentional unfortunate implications there. Both feel on the outside due to their bad childhoods/difficult family lives, and their current placement within more affluent/respectable circles feels uncomfortable and conditional. That's a really genuine feeling, imo! But they're both also serial killers! Without any other prominent characters with that sort of background, it kind of carries a vibe of "if you have a truly shitty childhood, then you're going to kill people about it!" (To be fair, Love was also a murderer, and she came from a contrastingly affluent, if still unhappy, background.)

I feel like the first season was pretty good and well-contained. I know that after season two, the story has veered away from the books it was based on. Three and four have felt the weakest, or at the very least less cohesive. Some of the subplots have been stronger than others, but they haven't gelled as well as seasons one and two.
It feels like post-season-one, they may have also been reacting to the million thinkpieces about how terrible it was that people liked Joe so much because he was an objectively bad person. They didn't make him less likeable, just more self-aware. Idk, it's not terrible, but I enjoyed it when he was more fucked up, tbh.

Nope
This was a re-watch, and I still like it! I enjoy how many things in the first half get visually called back to for the second half. A popping balloon, the puff of powder... I still can't believe how many complaints I saw (to be fair, probably only three or four separate ones) saying that they didn't think the Gordy plotline made sense or had any bearing on the rest of the movie.
Lucky is the best.

Things I've Played:

Nier: Replicant
We finished it! For real! I had a lot more thoughts about it!

AI: The Somnium Files - Nirvana Initiative
We barely started it - we got through what's functionally the prologue - it's pretty extended, but plays out before the opening credits, and that's where we ended.I had fun with AI: The Somnium Files, so I'm looking forward to this one. Aiba, my favorite little shrimp hamster eyeball! I love her! Apparently Taylor really ended up liking new character Ryuki (judging by his character utterly taking over their tumblr for a while), so looking forward to learning more about him, too. So far, we've got a similarly outlandish string of impossible serial murders (bodies sliced in half lengthwise on an atomic level! The second half of a body showing up years later than the first, but seeming to still be a recent death!) to investigate, so excited for more.

Things I've Read:

City of Saints and Madmen
I have not had as much time as I would like to read, which has been frustrating, though I'm very close to the end of this book!

Thoughts on the component parts:


"The Strange Case of X":
A novella taking note of a psychiatric patient who appears to be suffering from some sort of delusion.
This one is a bit interesting/weird, and it's hard to say just how without spoiling it. The main character, X, is being spoken to by a psychologist, who is determining whether he should remain institutionalized, or whether he is sane enough to go free. 

Spoilers:
The man insists that he is perfectly sane - that he recognizes now that he was a writer who completely made the city of Ambergris up, and realizes now that it's all an elaborate fiction that he constructed.
The twist is, maybe of course, that he is IN Ambergris, and it is his "delusions" of his life in our "real world" that are what has him confined.

The story does some interesting perspective shifts - the doctor who is seeing him switches between first and third person at times, and other times shifts to a script/dialogue format when he's "interrogating" the patient, seeming to signify how he is thinking about himself and how close to "X" he is at any given moment.

More spoilers in my thoughts on it:
I have sort of mixed feelings about the decision to treat Ambergris as an alternate universe that was somehow accessed by someone from our real world, vs. treating it completely like a third world fantasy/sci-fi/horror. I mean, it's the canon of the world, so it doesn't matter how I feel about it, lol. It also doesn't affect the ultimate feeling of the story being told as a weird collection of documents that are recording things about a world-that-isn't.

"The AppendiX":
This is the part that was mostly left out of my first copy! A set of shorter stories, set within an additional frame story that all of these were found as documents that had been in Patient "X"'s possession before he mysteriously vanished.

Feelings on the individual short stories:


"A Letter from Dr. V. to Dr. Simpkin":
A pretty entertaining intro to the section. Patient X has vanished, and Dr V. is sending on a collection of documents that were either confiscated from X or found in his room. The descriptions he gives of the various bits provide in-universe context for the pieces, and how Dr V. interprets them as connecting to X. Most of the segments are interspersed with snarky complaints about his lack of funding, and it was quite funny to me.

"X's Notes":
Notes left by X and transcribed by Dr. V. (who still inserts some additional requests for funding.) Speculating about the nature of the stories he's writing and reading.


"The Release of Belaqua":
I like this one's additional frame story - that in-universe it's credited to a famous writer who insists he never wrote it. (Which connects vaguely to X's other notes.)
A story of a missed connection of a sort, and of an actor known only for playing a character with a single line in a famous opera (though according to the frame story, the character also does not exist.)


"King Squid":
This one does something similar with the footnotes as the earlier "History of Ambergris" did. I think I like History better, but this one is also good, and also does go in a different direction. VanderMeer does a great job of very subtly introducing the idea that there's something "off" about the writer of this piece, which is presented as a zoological text about the King Squid. Much of it is similar snark and sniping at other researchers that the author feels have done poor research and such, but at some point there are enough metaphors about confinement and the like that I started to suspect the author was himself locked up in some way. A little farther in, yes, that is the case! Then in the various asides about his parents and his childhood it becomes clear that heh, there was something terrible that happened there. It did a great job of subtly revealing those things at the start, and later throwing them in somewhat unexpectedly to finally confirm what was going on.


"The Hoegbotton Family History":
Fairly short, but kind of nice to get this sort of context for the family's early history. This has been a prominent merchant family - mentioned in I think all of the other stories. Finding out why and how they first came to the city, and what their original specialties were, is a nice bit of context for everything else.


"The Cage":
I already talked about this short story, and how much I enjoyed it! Much more of a straightforward horror short story about a mysterious Thing that haunts and hunts the protagonist. This was the one story from this section that was included in my anthology version of the trilogy, so I'd already read it, but was happy to read it again in this version.
Two things:
I did actually like one thing about its positioning in the anthology right after "The History of Ambergris"... because there's a section in the history that talks about a specific creature, which is also described in the Cage, and I liked that it was fresh enough in my mind to definitely remember that and make the connection.
But in the context of "The AppendiX", "The Cage" is presented as a piece of in-universe fiction, albeit one that X should not have had a copy of (as it's credited to a famous in-universe author as a story he has yet to publish.) I am EXTRA salty about the abridged version of the book that I'd accidentally started reading, because ALL of that context has been removed. There is zero indication that it's supposed to be an in-universe fiction; other things, like the "History" guidebook *is* marked as being an in-universe written work, but this is not. It's not that it markedly changes how the whole story comes across or anything, but it does change aspects of my interpretation. The connections I as a reader make between it and the other stories is different if it's being portrayed as a potentially objective account vs. an in-universe work of fiction. (And I guess that can get real meta about "it's all fiction, what does it matter if there's an extra layer of a fictional author in addition" but... it matters to me, dammit!)


"In the Hours After Death":
Cordyceps fungal infection before Last of Us made it cool. (Yikes.) Another piece that's presented as an in-universe short story, this one was pretty creepy. (It being cordyceps is never directly stated, but that's my interpretation of what's going on.)


"The Man Who Had No Eyes" (encrypted):
This is the encrypted short story (or at least the last part of it is encrypted)... but as far as I could tell, I don't think I CAN decrypt it with my version of the book. I tried to find a definite answer on how the cypher worked, so I could test it out and see if it worked, but I couldn't find an answer. I know it uses the first four stories as its key (and I read a really interesting interview with VanderMeer about the process of encrypting it, and how he selected specific instances of the words he wanted in order to add layers of meaning based on the original context the word was found in.) I'd *like* to have done the decryption myself! But if it's a page number/word number reference, the solution definitely doesn't match up to my book... but I could also just not be attempting it correctly.
Either way, I cheated and read someone else's decryption. Creepy story, nicely meta creepy unreality type ending to the encrypted bits.


"The Exchange":
Also feels like a bit of a classic horror story. The illustrations add to it. I like the additional annotations "left by X" on each page, chronicling the already-hinted at animosity between the author and illustrator who had often been forced to work together.


"Learning to Leave the Flesh":
This one is a bit of an oddity to me. There are parts of it that make the story feel nicely circular as the final real "story" in the book, because there are aspects of it that strongly remind me of "Dradin, In Love". Different character with a different arc, but also repeated things: locations, the purchase of the same book as a gift for a woman, a character writing in an office, the presence of dwarfs... main character seems like kind of a dick... But it also feels like it's set in a slightly more modern time period than the rest of the stories, which all feel ahistorical, but more based around a turn of the century*ish* time period - existent but rare motorcars, phonographs, etc. -  while this story feels later in the timeline - the protag has a television, and cars seem more ubiquitous. It's also, other than X's story, the only one that has direct references to "earth stuff". French loanwords, The Rosetta Stone, and such, which took me by surprise, ha.


"The Ambergris Glossary":
Not quite all the way through this final section, but again, full of historical tidbits and snarky asides, and occasional obvious contradictions. I like it! I appreciate a few kind of humorous bits, like the "Festival of the Freshwater Squid, The" entry being SO SHORT and passive. "Occasionally led to untoward incidents" is a hell of a way to say "Ends in a full-on Purge-style meltdown of society" lol.

What Manner of Man
When Dracula Daily was a prominent thing, one of the other subscriptions that someone had been advertising was for an original (queer) vampire story that they wanted to serialize in a similar way, and that has started. It's so far shared a prologue and the first two chapters. It's not a lot to go on yet, but I'm liking it! It's epistolary, shared as letters and journal entries, set in 1950 about a priest who is sent to a remote island, theoretically to perform an exorcism. He has yet to meet his supposed host who for *some mysterious reason* failed to meet him when his boat docked.
You can subscribe here if you're interested!

A Desolation Called Peace
Only a few more chapters (and I think I want to try and reread them before Taylor and I get together again. Through no fault of theirs or of the book, I started to doze off.)
These books are so damn heavy on THEMES. THEMES, I TELL YOU.
Lots about identity and individuality vs collective thought. (Through varying sci-fi premises, there are multiple ways in which an individual may not be the ONLY set of thoughts a person has.) In a broader sense, the idea of being the heir to something, and how the expectations placed on the previous holder of a position or title reflect on those farther down the line. The use of language. The multiple types of colonization that goes on - the taking over of other cultures and identities, and either destroying them or assimilating them. There's a monstrous, unknown species that is literally devouring the ships and people it encounters... which is positioned with the way the empire metaphorically and culturally devours the other societies it encounters. There's also a LOT of political shit going down, like damn.