Book Review – Designing and Prototyping Interfaces with Figma

Designing and Prototyping Interfaces with Figma: Elevate your design craft with UX/UI principles and create interactive prototypes by Fabio Staiano
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

If you’ve an interest in the title topic, this is a reasonably good place to get started. I found some of the prose excessive and confusing in places. Overall, however, the author supplies a comprehensive how-to for the app’s many features. Full disclosure: I skimmed two of the later chapters that covered topics I intend to neither use myself nor teach to my students.

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Book Review – Dark History of the Tudors

Dark History of the Tudors: Murder, Adultery, Incest, Witchcraft, Wars, Religious Persection, Piracy by Judith John
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This almost works as a light summer read about the Tudor dynasty. If you’ve seen The Tudors or maybe two or three movies on the topic, you won’t find a ton of new information here. But the prose is far from scholarly and the story keeps moving fairly well. Copious sidebars and illustrations help keep things from getting dull. My only big gripe is that this reads like a long Wikipedia entry, complete with choppy shifts back and forth in the timeline and oddly shifting points of view about who’s genuinely horrible and who’s simply misunderstood.

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Review – Candy Corn

Actual candy corn would have been scarier than this movie, though in fairness candy corn is scary stuff. The filmmakers here possess two undeniable talents: backwoods location scouting and stunt casting. Courtney “Malachi from Children of the Corn” Gains plays one of the leads, but P.J. Soles and Tony Todd seem more like maybe they were in Ohio for HorrorCon Toledo 2019 and accepted a few extra bucks to show their faces briefly on screen. Beyond familiar faces and abandoned buildings, there’s nothing to this dumb attempt at supernatural revenge. If you do opt to take this on, try counting the number of unique angles Gains employs when parking a police car. See if desperate

Review – The Sadness

This Taiwanese take on rage infection zombies introduces two new twists. The disease starts out as something straightforward – kinda Corona-esque – before mutating into a more apocalyptic form, and it leaves its victims’ brains intact but turns control over to the limbic system. So the monsters retain their ability to speak, use tools and otherwise function, but they can no longer control their violent and sexual urges. The result is what one might expect from a movie produced and partially starring folks from Taiwan’s sex work industry. It’s brutal stuff, but production values are high and the plot keeps itself moving. Mildly amusing

Review – Sputnik

At the outset I need to note the sheer awfulness of Amazon Prime’s excuse for dubbing. This was listed as “English dub,” which it definitely was not. However, when the audio description track was turned on, the description (including the dialogue) was in English. Which made for an odd way to watch a movie. Fortunately there wasn’t all that much movie to watch. The story – cosmonaut comes back from space possessed by an alien – functioned well enough for maybe the length of a Twilight Zone episode, and the rest of the running time was padded out with slow moments and illogical twists. But what else might one expect from Russian sci fi? See if desperate

Review – Monster Island

This movie needed way more Tina (for a better understanding of that joke, do a search for “Tina is king of monster island”). Two survivors from a torpedoed Japanese WW2 prison ship wind up stranded on a Pacific island with a monster. The result is the back half of Predator with the Creature from the Black Lagoon as the bad guy. The pace is inconsistent at best, but otherwise it’s a reasonably good monster movie. Mildly amusing

Review – Wicked

The Wizard of Oz gets a postmodern reimagining and a very expensive Hollywood makeover. If you’re a fan of Broadway musicals in general or this one in particular, I imagine this will meet your needs. Though I was impressed by the talent and effort that went into this lavish production, the plot still suffers from the same weaknesses as the source novel. Mildly amusing

Book Review – An Atlas of Extinct Countries

An Atlas of Extinct Countries by Gideon Defoe
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Gideon Defoe serves up quite a cross-section of the title topics. Now-vanished countries on the list range from tiny to huge and from those that lasted decades to some that barely lasted hours. They’re slightly more uniform in their causes of death, with most succumbing to imperialism in one form or another. As tragic as that sounds, Defoe employs enough sarcastic wit to either find or create some humor in even the worst of situations. Entries are also impressively uniform in length and level of detail. Though this is sort of a sideways approach to learning history, it worked well for me.

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Book Review – The World of Lore: Dreadful Places

The World of Lore: Dreadful Places by Aaron Mahnke
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The third volume of the World of Lore series runs the gamut on the title subject: places with dark pasts, places haunted by their dark pasts, and places haunted for no obvious reason. Aaron Mahnke remains informative and readable, though once again there’s a lot of well-trodden territory here.

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Review – Before Dawn

It’s interesting to see a story about ANZAC soldiers in World War One that doesn’t involve Gallipoli in any way. Instead this is a standard tale of life in the trenches of the western front, with impressive care taken to portray battlefield conditions as realistically as possible. Mildly amusing

Review – Journey’s End

R.C. Sherriff’s 1928 play gets a 2017 movie revival to reasonably good effect. The story is grim stuff, as one might expect for a tale set in the trenches of the western front during World War One. Likewise a lot of the despair is weakened slightly by having become cliché in the century since its origin. But it still retains a lot of its original power. Mildly amusing

Review – Aces High

Though I didn’t intend this at the outset, this turned out to be the first of two different adaptations of the same story that I watched back to back. This effort from 1976 relocates R.C. Sherriff’s World War One play from the trenches to the Royal Flying Corps, but otherwise the story remains largely the same. Malcolm McDowell stars as a cynical commander trying to manage naive rookies, a PTSD’d pilot and other woes amid the war’s blend of grim death and trivial melodrama. The movie is also notable for its impressive (however combat-unrealistic) aerial stunt work. Mildly amusing

Book Review – Quick and Simple Painting in Procreate

Quick & Simple Painting in Procreate: Achieve impressive results with speed on the iPad by 3dTotal Publishing
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Overall this is a good starting point for anyone who’s new to both digital illustration and Procreate. Except for the last one, all the tutorials are easy to follow. Even the confusing spots have good lessons to teach. To be sure, there are some devils in the details. I was particularly puzzled by the frequent use of the selection tool for drawing. This fails to take advantage of Procreate’s full range of options, and it produces results that – while not full-on Corel Draw – still aren’t the most visually appealing. But perhaps that’s part of the “quick and simple” thing. My only other gripe was that the Hoopla version was hard to read, a problem I’ve had with 3dTotal publications in the past. If you can get beyond that and are a member of the target audience, this book is worth your time.

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Book Review – Worst Laid Plans

Worst Laid Plans: An Anthology of Vacation Horror by Samantha Kolesnik
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Vacation horror indeed, not only thematically but also by challenge level. After trying to plunge into some other anthologies where the waters ran fast and deep, I was pleasantly to find these tales more like an easy wade. None of the entries here are likely to win literary awards, but just about all of them tell fun, spooky stories. Very welcome in mid July. As a quick side note, I find it odd that the author who wrote the introduction gave the book itself only four stars out of five, which I found odd.

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Review – Everybody Wins

Everybody should have won, given the reputations of the director, writer and cast. But nobody brings their A game. Arthur Miller’s script is particularly noteworthy for its awfulness. The dialogue left me wondering if the famous playwright had heard an actual conversation between human beings anytime since maybe the mid 1950s. I don’t even know where to begin with the plot and characters. It’s like he has no idea how to function in a medium that isn’t confined to a single location on a stage. And the end, well, wow. I won’t spoil it for you because if you sit through this whole thing the end will spoil itself. See if desperate

Book Review – The World of Lore: Wicked Mortals

The World of Lore: Wicked Mortals by Aaron Mahnke
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

For anyone new to the creepy corners of history, this is a good starting point. If you’ve spent a little more time with this kind of thing, names such as H.H. Holmes and Urban Grandier are naturally going to be familiar. But Aaron Mahnke has enough storytelling skills to keep things interesting even in well-trodden territory. I admit I wish he’d use the reveal (“and that man’s name was Abraham Lincoln” and the like) a little less often. And though this is purely personal, I don’t share the author’s fascination with spontaneous human combustion. Otherwise, however, this was a thoroughly enjoyable summer read.

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Review – Hide and Seek (2021)

If you’re going to tell a story that pits wealthy people against the poorest of the poor, maybe don’t make the rich folks the heroes. Or at least don’t cast Jonathan Rhys Meyers as the hero, leaving him to struggle against his American accent and his past performances as literal or figurative monsters in positions of power. Any chance that this might have recovered from its own premise is crushed when the plot pushes itself into that most terrible of thriller conundrums: is the villain exactly who we’ve suspected from the start, or is it someone completely out of left field? As there’s no good answer to that question, I won’t spoil things by ruining the reveal. But it really wasn’t worth it. See if desperate

Review – Nosferatu (2024)

Director Robert Eggers continues his career as the bizarro world Wes Anderson. His fanatical filtering (goth grey rather than plastic-lens pastels) and obsessive centering of nearly every shot dominate the appearance of this movie so much that they distract from the story and characters, not that the latter represented much competition. Every new entry in the Murnau sub-reddit gets duller and more pointless. If there’s another one – please let there not be another one – it probably won’t even have a vampire. Not that an otherwise-talented actor stomping around in a getup that makes him look like a Russian from a McCarthy-era propaganda cartoon is much of an excuse for a bloodsucking demon. See if desperate

Review – How to Kill Monsters

Humor and Lovecraft are never not going to be an awkward mix. Case in point here. Shambling horrors are inadvertently drawn to a British police station, where inept cops and random ne’er-do-wells battle to prevent the earth from getting sucked into a dimension of chaotic horror. See if desperate

Review – Howl (2015)

This is one of those movies that traps the protagonists in an enclosed space and then spends the bulk of its running time having them stubbornly refuse to either escape or successfully defend against attack. Usually this sort of thing involves zombies, but this time around it’s werewolves. So kinda Train to Busan only in the UK with lycanthropes. Occasional humor, occasional horror, but mostly just flailing. See if desperate

Review – Into the Abyss

If you sense that the earth is in imminent danger from a cosmic horror apocalypse, the first rule of survival is to make sure you aren’t in Argentina when it happens. Because apparently the end of the world there is going to be both catastrophic and really stupid. Thanks to the actor/director’s stubborn refusal to follow any kind of logic or plot structure, the movie depends entirely on the occasional appearances of monsters (occasionally good) and violent, nonsensical interactions between survivors (uniformly terrible). It’s hard to tell if this is deliberately awful or merely incompetent storytelling. Either way, it’s simply bad. Wish I’d skipped it

Book Review – The Complete Book of Calligraphy and Lettering

The Complete Book of Calligraphy & Lettering: A comprehensive guide to more than 100 traditional calligraphy and hand-lettering techniques by Cari Ferraro
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a good but somewhat uneven treatment of the title topic. It’s good because it provides well-written text (somewhat rare in art technique guides) to accompany the copious, useful illustrations. The uneven part mostly comes from the organization. For example, the “getting started” stuff doesn’t show up until more than 100 pages in. Some topics get much more thorough treatment than others. The chalk drawing section in particular struck me as too extensive compared to some of the considerations of other media. And every once in awhile the author will show something that she doesn’t explain. But if you’re interested in learning calligraphy, this is an effective place to start.

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