This is the story about a rockstar wanting to marry a virtual Idol. More specifically, it’s the story of Chia, a member of the Lo/Rez-fanclub, and Colin, a data analyst with pattern recognition superpowers hired by the Lo/Rez security team, both (persons and groups) attempting to figure out what the hell is going on about those rumours.
The novel is a bit of a wild goose chase through Tokyo, with multiple other parties getting involved along the way.

I found it an enjoyable read, with maybe a bit of an anticlimatic ending (which, admittedly, still fits the story very well, it just felt a bit… “okay, and?”). Let’s see what Bridge III will bring, eventually.

I have no idea how to properly talk about this one.

It sure is a Jasper Fforde-book.
Okay. It is set in an alternative (and somewhat phantastical) Britain, and it follows the Literary Detective Thursday Next on her quest to secure both the Prose Portal, an invention that lets people enter books and other works of literature, and the original manuscript of Jane Eyre, which is in danger of being changed, and with it all subsequent prints, due to meddling by one Archeron Hades, the books antagonist. This sentence does not do any justice to what’s going on in this book.

One day I’d like to spend a day in Fforde’s brain, just to see how it looks in there, given the absolute phantastical stuff he puts to paper.

Okay, bear with me, this is a WILD one.
Snow Crash begins with the story of how our hero and protagonist Hiroaki Protagonist loses his job as a deliverator for the Nova Sicilia franchulate when he misjudges a shortcut through another franchulate (a franchised nation-state within the now-gone US) and only does not have to Very Finally Answer to Uncle Enzo, head of the Mafia franchising both Nova Silicia and the pizza delivery service in the country, because the other protagonist, a teenaged skateboard kourier by the nom-de-guerre of Y.T., takes over the last leg of the delivery, earning her A Certain Standing within the Mafia.

The worldbuilding only goes harder from thereon in, including a full-blown goggle-accessible Metaverse and a plot that moves into literally infectious thoughts and (presumably) heavily fictionalized Sumerian Cosmology.

del Toro’s take on a Kaiju-vs-Jaeger-movie (read: “del Toro’s take on Evangelion”) was an absolute insane joy to watch.
It has giant monsters, giant mechas piloted by pairs of pilots, giant monsters fistfighting with giant mechas, a properly weird couple of scientists, and so much excellence in filmmaking. It has also a whole bunch of Personal Drama(tm) fitting neatly into everything else, because balance is important.

Go watch, on the biggest screen you can find.

This absolutly wild ride of a self-styled goth rock opera was even more wild than I had remembered.

A world where you better stay on top the payments for your replacement organs, otherwise the repo man will come to take it back, where people are addicted to both cosmetic surgery and the extracted-from-the-dead painkiller drug commonly used in it and where the worlds leading megacorp is on the verge of collapse following the imminent death of its founder, and those are only three of many beats crammed into this thing.

The visuals are peak 2000s goth, backstory gets told in graphic-novel-interludes, the songs are mostly bangers… go watch this thing.

(cn: it is very b-movie-bloody.)