Tech: Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 review

Ever since I saw the previews for Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, I knew it would be a game to watch. After all, how many stylish, mid-budget JRPGs do you see nowadays? And how many are debut titles from a small French developer?

Clair Obscur's plot is part Final Fantasy X, part Logan's Run: every year, the godlike Paintress paints an ever-decreasing number on a distant skyscraper-sized Monolith, and everyone who is that age or older gets erased, Thanos-style. Every year, Expeditions are sent to the Monolith to defeat the Paintress and end the cycle, but none have ever succeeded...or even returned alive.  You are the latest group to attempt the impossible - Expedition 33.

It's a wonderful setup for an adventure, and Clair Obscur delivers, sending the titular Expedition through surreal landscapes full of nightmarish enemies straight out of a FromSoftware title. You'll combat them in old-school JRPG fashion (a line of your characters standing across a line of enemies, with everyone taking turns whacking each other), except that you can, and frequently must, dodge and parry enemy attacks in real-time (this is not a game for people who hate QTEs).

That would be reason enough to play the game, but Clair Obscur is also unique in that it is not Japanese, but French - very French. The game employs a Belle Époque aesthetic that is rarely seen in video games, and an awesome soundtrack from Lorien Testard, featuring (French) singer Alice Duport-Percier:

Downsides? Well, while Clair Obscur's core gameplay is quite fun, that's all there is; there are no puzzles or minigames to break up the cycle of dungeon running, combat, and cutscenes.  Overall, though, this was a great game, and an easy recommendation for anyone who grew up in the glory days of the JRPG.

Rating: 90/100

Movies: Sinners

Sinners is director Ryan Coogler's first film not based on either real events (Fruitvale Station) or existing IP (Creed, Black Panther). I liked the movie overall, and it almost pains me to embed the trailer, since the less you know about it going in, the better:

Sinners has the same basic premise as one of my favorite flicks, From Dusk till Dawn, though Coogler is not (yet) as good an action director as Robert Rodriguez, or as good a screenwriter as Quentin Tarantino.  In both films, two criminal brothers (played by Michael B. Jordan) spend a night in a club besieged by vampires - bullets don't do much, but stakes and sunlight seem to work. Can they survive until dawn?

It's a great premise, but Sinners takes a long time to get going, and lacks the pacing, tension, and go-for-broke insanity of Rodriguez and Tarantino's classic. The cast is uniformly excellent, but they just don't have interesting things to do, aside from the musical numbers.

Musical numbers?! Yup, the trailer omits how critically important music is to the story, specifically old-school Delta blues and (amazingly) Irish folk songs. One of the main characters is played by newcomer Miles Caton, and the movie's worth watching for his musical performance alone:

Rating: 7/10

Guns: Advantage Arms .22 GLOCK Conversion Kit review - Training Day

Introduction

Nowadays, Glock makes a .22 LR handgun (the G44), but for many decades, if you wanted rimfire practice with the Glock platform, you had to make do with conversion kits made by third parties.  One of the best of the bunch is the subject of today's review, the Advantage Arms .22 kit, which are still sold from their website for under $300 shipped (more if you need an optic cut).

Consisting of a conversion slide and a magazine, the Advantage Arms kit is a piece of cake to install (just field strip and switch out the slide/mag - no other parts have to be swapped), and it promises to give you inexpensive practice with .22 rimfire ammunition.  But does it?

First Impressions

Advantage Arms has been making conversions since 1997, so their Glock kit is a pretty mature product. I ordered one for the Gen 4 G19, and I found the overall fit and finish to be fairly decent - nothing "garage table gunsmith" about it. Sadly, the kit comes with just one magazine, but it does ship in a padded soft case that you can take to the range.

In a world where Glock makes a dedicated .22 pistol, is there any reason to use a kit like the Advantage Arms? Well, a conversion still allows you to take advantage of any work you've done to your centerfire frame, such as grip stippling, extended controls, flared magwells, and trigger jobs (within reason - aftermarket triggers may not work with the kit).  In my view, that's a lot simpler and cheaper than trying to modify a Glock 44 to be comparable to your carry gun.

Range Report

I have a specific progression I use when instructing a new or occasional shooter.  I first start them off with a Ring's Bluegun version of a GLOCK 19 to teach the Four Rules, grip, and sight alignment/sight picture (this part is actually best done off the firing line, away from any noise).  Then, when it's time to shoot, I hand them a G19 equipped with the Advantage Arms kit, which allows them to practice loading and trigger control without much recoil.  Finally, once they are comfortable and putting out good groups on target, I put on the 9mm G19 slide and have them go to work.

At the range, I found the conversion kit was mostly reliable, though it had its fair share of malfunctions (it's the nature of the beast when it comes to .22s).  Advantage Arms "highly recommend[s] Remington 'Golden Bullets' for everyday plinking and CCI MiniMags or Federal Automatch for better accuracy," and I found that advice to be generally correct, though the AutoMatch ran poorly in my particular kit and gun.  Here are some representative groups:

Winchester M-22 at 15 yards:

Federal bulk pack .22 at 10 yards

CCI Stingers at 15 yards:

Winchester bulk pack at 15 yards (this ammo did not run well):

Remington Golden Bullets at 15 yards - as Advantage Arms promised, reliability was good:

Federal AutoMatch at 15 yards - decent groups, bad reliability:

Conclusion

It's important to keep your expectations in check with an aftermarket .22 conversion, especially when the underlying 9mm pistol (a Gen 4 Glock) isn't exactly known for its accuracy. The Advantage Arms is not something I would use to hunt small game or shoot a target match unless I had no other options - it's just not accurate enough.  Nor would I ever use one for self-defense - setting aside the fact that it's a rimfire, it's not even as reliable as other .22s.  However, as a training aid, the Advantage Arms is a good kit and worth the money.

Tech: Shokz OpenRun Pro 2 headphones

The marathon has come and gone, but I'm still running for fun, and the best headphones I've found for the job are the Shokz OpenRun Pro 2s:

They're "hybrid" headphones - a combination of the bone conduction technology that Shokz is famous for, plus more conventional air conduction drivers that direct sound into your ears the old-fashioned way. That makes the OpenRun Pro 2s sound noticeably better than old Shokz models, yet they still allow you to hear everything around you...the rustle of trees in the wind, the roar of a crowd near the finish line, and (most importantly) that garbage truck coming up behind you.

Downsides? The sound quality still isn't as good as a traditional set of headphones, and yet the OpenRun Pro 2s are quite expensive - around $150.  If you just need something for working out inside, you can find better-sounding earbuds for a fraction of that cost.  However, after using these for hundreds and hundreds of miles of outdoor running, in all weather conditions, I do think they are worth the money.

Food: Tokyo Milk Cheese Factory cookies

Growing up in an Asian family means trying a lot of unique foods, like these cookies from Tokyo Milk Cheese Factory:

A friend of ours brought some home from Japan, and I tried the "Strawberry & Marscapone" flavor. They tasted...interesting.  Like eating a Captain's Wafer cheese cracker, but with a sweeter, more delicate flavor. It's not something I would ever seek out, but they were inoffensive enough, and made for a good after-dinner treat.

Music: Ralph Don't Tell

For this April 1st, a funny but poignant rendering of one of my favorite songs, "Tess Don't Tell":

Adam Schlesinger (October 31, 1967 – April 1, 2020)

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.