Some of My Favourite Media:
PETER
Welcome to my curator page!
While I spend most of my waking hours slaving away as an attorney for a large commercial law firm, I like to spend my free time escaping from reality in all sorts of stories and games – fantasy, sci-fi, horror, you name it. When I’m not reading, writing, or painting miniatures, I like to hit people (or more likely, get hit) with a sword.
In my speculative fiction, I like plot-heavy stories that still make you connect with the characters, and world building that is not just interesting and exotic, but that actually works on a historical, geographic, economic or scientific level. I like stories that put your brain to work. I’m a sucker for the classics and love to read older stuff to get an idea of how genres and tastes evolved over time. I like games that have a strong narrative element – even in board games, I like the ones that give you the feeling you’re setting up a colony on a distant planet over ones that may be more balanced but feel less alive.
Nowadays, what with my job and life in general getting in the way, I don’t spend nearly as much time gaming or reading as I used to, but I still listen to as many audiobooks as I can and I try to make time for everything else. But sometimes, everything that is out there that I would still like to see or read or play is overwhelming. If you feel the same, please look around! Your time is precious, and we all want to spend it on the very best the genre has to offer!
Realistic or grimdark settings
Characters getting punished for their mistakes
Tightly written plots and well-foreshadowed plot twists
When magic is a mystery (and you sometimes wonder whether it is magic at all)
When the story structure itself wows you
Realistic economic and geographical worldbuilding
Writers that trust their readers to figure it out by themselves and do not feel to need to explain every detail
When the stakes in a story grow beyond the point where it is relatable
Love triangles and sappy romance
Superheroes
When stories or games take way more time than they have any right to
Whiney main characters
Really competitive games
Poorly executed politics
Pet PeeveS
Historical inaccuracies in medieval fantasy settings (especially in combat)
Humanoid aliens in sci-fi
Characters inexplicably having really modern mindsets/sensibilities in settings where that makes no sense
Needlessly edgy characters in order to make things ‘dark’
The thing where the dainty woman always has to be the archer even though shooting a 100+ pound warbow takes far more strength than properly wielding a sword
Characters that do dumb stuff but get away with it
Writers coming up with a new name for their orc-race despite the fact that they are clearly just reskinned orcs
Fantasy names with a bunch of open vowels and unexplained ‘ä’s or ‘â’s
Recent Contributions
Review: The Bone Clocks – David Mitchell
Holly Sykes runs away from her parents to go live with her boyfriend, but that does not go as she expects. Hugo Lamb is a student at Cambridge, and an expert at cheating his friends. Ed Brubeck is a war correspondent who finds it impossible to settle down with is family in England. Crispin Hershey once wrote a good book and has been looking for that spark ever since. All of their stories are tied together by a secret war between two cults of psychic immortals.
Review: All That We See or Seem – Ken Liu
Julia Z is a privacy-minded young woman with a history. She is also a a hacker and really good at her job. When a man shows up at her doorstep to ask her help in finding his abducted wife, she is forced to leave her life of carefully constructed quiet obscurity behind her to find a dream-weaving artist that dreamt with the wrong man.
Review: The Island of Doctor Moreau – H.G. Wells
Edward Prendick is shipwrecked and ends up on an island where he is taken in by the famous Dr Moreau and his assistant Montgomery. Prendick soon finds the island is inhabited by a whole host of human-animal hybrids. Can it be that the famous physician Moreau built these creatures – and must Prendick fear that he will be the subject of Moreau’s next experiment?
Review: Sea of Tranquility – Emily St. John Mandel
An early 20th century minor noble is exiled to Canada for his progressive ideas. A woman in the 2020s is trying to find out what happend tot an old friend. A writer in the 2200s is struggling to balance family life with a book tour. A detective in the 2400s is trying to resolve an anomaly in time that ties their stories together.
Review: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep – Philip K. Dick
In a radioactive dust-covered, post-apocalyptic LA, Rick Deckard is a bounty hunter, charged with ‘retiring’ a series of androids, fake humans who are hiding in plain sight in society and who can only be found by testing them for their lack of innate empathy response. Deckard dreams of using the bounty money to replace his fake electric sheep with a real animal so he can demonstrate his own empathy to his neighbours. But these androids are of a new type – and Deckard must carefully control his own feelings toward these non-humans.