Sports: George Foreman (1949-2025)

I've only ever talked about "Big" George Foreman on the blog in connection with his famous electric grills, but after hearing the news of his passing, it must also be pointed out that he was a tremendous fighter:

Books: Babel: Around the World in Twenty Languages

 

It's been three years since I started learning Vietnamese, but it's been slow going.  That's mostly because I'm learning it by myself, but also partly because my native English is linguistically less related to Vietnamese than it is to, say, Spanish or German. All those languages, and the other top 20 most popular languages in the world, are profiled by author Gaston Dorren in Babel: Around the World in Twenty Languages.

The book starts out with Tiếng Việt, the 20th most spoken language, and runs all the way to English, the world's most spoken language (I'm somewhat heartened by the fact that Dorren, a polyglot with the benefit of people to talk to and a visit to Vietnam, still has trouble learning the language). Along the way, there is a lot of insight into how language reflects (and sometimes drives) wars, trade, and other interactions between different people. It's an easy read and a fun book for anyone learning a foreign language.

Tech: V Rising review

Survival crafting video games are a dime a dozen these days, but my friend and I really liked our time with V Rising, developed by Stunlock Studios:

In V Rising, you play as vampires seeking to re-take your lands from pesky humans. At first, you're relatively fragile, but you gain new recipes as you defeat and drink blood from enemies, which then allows you to craft better gear, which in turn allows you to kill stronger foes.  It's a straightforward and satisfying loop that's a lot of fun due to the variety of abilities at your disposal.  Almost every enemy attack can be dodged, countered, or avoided in some way, placing more emphasis on player skill than raw stats.

The game's most unique aspect is the day/night cycle.  By day (which takes up about a third of the real-world playtime), you have to stay indoors or in the shadows, otherwise you get roasted by the sun. This adds a fun wrinkle to travel and combat...if you get into a fight too close to the dawn, you'll be dodging sunlight in addition to the enemy's attacks, which can make for some hairy encounters.

There are some puzzling omissions, both in terms of quality-of-life features (you can't craft from storage, which is really annoying in 2025) and game mechanics (despite an elaborate crafting system that allows you to create multilevel castle lairs, there are no base defense mechanics whatsoever). Still, very few games meld survival with ARPG fun like V Rising, so it's an easy recommendation.

Rating: 90/100

Books: Hum

Most of the novels my local book club picks are light historical or mainstream fiction (think Oprah's Book Club), but every once in a while, I throw the group a curveball and recommend something in the sci-fi, fantasy, or horror genres. That's how we came to read Hum, a dystopian sci-fi novel by Helen Phillips.

Hum is a fable about May, a young mother living in a not-too-distant future where AI, surveillance, and global warming have rendered most people into economically insecure gig workers trapped in polluted gray cities. Struggling to make ends meet, May gets paid to undergo adversarial camouflage cosmetic surgery, designed to spoof the omnipresent facial recognition sensors.  With the money, she splurges on a vacation to a botanical garden with her kids.  Things, as you might guess, go awry.

There's a number of thought-provoking issues in Hum - how people interact with AI, the dehumanizing effects of social media, and the thirst for an authentic experience in a world of artifice. On the downside, the story is pretty simple, the characters are shallow, and readers might be left hanging by the novel's ambiguous ending.

Movies: The Brutalist

Adrien Brody recently won the Best Actor Oscar for his performance in The Brutalist - was it deserved?

Mostly, I think it was. Brody is a fine actor who has worked in a wide variety of films (everything from twee Wes Anderson comedies to genre flicks like King Kong and Predators), and he gets to display the full range of human emotion in The Brutalist's exorbitant 3-1/2 hour runtime: embarrassment, inspiration, despair, relief, with a little drug addiction thrown in, too.  If the other nominated performances this year were entrées, Brody's turn as fictional Hungarian architect László Tóth is a full-course dinner.

However, Brody's work (alongside the always-interesting Guy Pearce) isn't enough to elevate The Brutalist's lackluster story. The film is simply a mess...you can see where Brady Corbet gestures at a Godfather II-style immigrant epic, but he lacks the writing and editing chops to tell an interesting story. The final 30 minutes, including a ham-handed epilogue taking place decades after the main plot, is a case study in how not to end a film (if you need an on-screen character to deliver a literal lecture on the symbolism in the movie, you've failed as a director).

Rating: 5/10