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Pettson är helt sjukt bra ändå. Illustrationerna, såklart, men slås också av hur bra och konsekventa karaktärer Pettson och Findus är och hur fin texten är, ofta med subtila detaljer som lägger till sammanhang och karakterisering, utan att försvåra texten eller störa förståelsen av handlingen.

"Tysta satt de och såg sina spegelbilder i fönstret mot mörkret utanför. Det kan bli sådär tyst när nånting inte blir som man hade tänkt."

"Så mycket människor och så mycket prat hade det inte varit i gubbens kök sedan han fyllde sextio år och det var ett tag sen."

Fina målningar, cirkulära med blomster-ramar. Barn får lära sig ord som "stäva", bra till framtida högskoleprov!

[App version, read]
This product is designed spcecifically for digital online play. To get started, please read this 110 page PDF document. As we all know, reading long text documents with static layouts made with the limitations of printing in mind, is the superior way to absorb information and learn thing on an interactive digital device.

With this product (which, did I mention, is made specifically for online gaming?) the GM can easily keep track of everything... On PDFs that you can download online. But don't worry, they're form-fillable! Again, the absolute bleeding edge technology and premium UX for keeping track of things.

Also you need six-sided dice of two different colours. You know. For your ONLINE GAME.

This non-euclidian surrealist horror haunted funhouse dungeon crawl is an extremely strange product on so many levels. There are interesting ideas here, several cool-looking encounters, entities, and puzzles to frighten and entertain. But as a whole this scenario lacks direction and cohesion in both content and production, not really understanding what it wants to be in either department.

It claims to be a scenario built for online play, but displays a total cluelessness of what a good product for that entails. An app with hyperlinked, static pages (no search, no save-state (so you can't take notes or change anything inside the app, no keeping track of what has happened / been triggered etc.)) plus a truckload of PDFs is NOT it, that's for sure. Making it a module for the popular VTTs would have made very much more sense, for example.

It says it wants to be a psychological story with deep meaning and themes and some really scary and disturbing horror, but then it is also filled with so much... random, weird stuff, that it veers more into gonzo funhouse territory.

Another eyebrow-raising quirk is the insistence that you run this as an adventure in an ongoing campaign, in "any system". It provides the tools for converting characters into the bespoke "House system" for use here, and back again afterwards. OK, that takes care of the mechanical side of things, but what about the tone? And expectations? I can see this working perfectly well as a Call of Cthulhu scenario for example, but it encourages you to do this for any and all campaigns and systems. Run your D&D party of robot priests and turtlefolk troubadours into a haunted house psychological horror scenario set in modern day! For most D&D games, it doesn't sound like this would serve the tone of neither the regularly scheduled campaign, or the tone indended for the Darkest House, when a tortoise-man is using Vicious Mockery to insult to death the unspeakably terrifying personification of childhood trauma or whatnot.

But, if I'm sounding very negative now, it's because it's more interesting to talk about negative points than of decent and functioning points. Really, this isn't a terrible scenario. It's open, with lots of stuff to discover, and I'm sure playthroughs can turn out extremely different from each other. A lot of it is a problem of marketing, if it wasn't touted as "perfect for digital play", like 50% of my gripes would be gone and it wouldn't be any worse for it.

But I almost forgot, the most baffling thing of all...

Where the heck is the bathroom?

Neil Gaiman retells famous tales from Norse myth. The interpretations are accessible and straightforward, not archaic, but also not modernized to be anachronistic. Gaiman doesn't use an obscure word or complicated sentence structure when simple will do the trick. This simplicity and his laid-back reading voice evokes the atomsphere of stories told around a fire, from memory, like the originals would have been before Snorri Sturlasson and others wrote them down centuries down the line. The book is not long, 6½ hours for 15 stories. I wouldn't have minded a bit more details, depth, or unique interpretations, but this was good too. This is a great introduction, perhaps one of the best, for those not very familiar with the Nordic myths, and a good revisit for all already acquainted.

Audible Audio version read by Stephen Fry, great reading, good audio quality.

I might have liked Animal Farm slightly more. Quietly humorous while allegorizing very dark subject matter, and the ending, like the final few minutes, is fantastic. Sticks in your mind, that image. 1984 was, not that I was surprised, just very depressing. Especially when drawing parallels to current trends in the world. But, it also repeated itself quite a bit and the excerpt of the book-within-the-book seemed unnecessarily lenghty. Needless to say, both are important books that everyone should read and so on, and I'm glad to finally have done so.

After reading the first book I said to myself, might as well read the second one, it can't be any worse! And... actually, it couldn't. This book is better than the first one. But that doesn't mean it's good...

The predecessor was nigh unreadable due to the neverending avalanche of dull exposition and repetitiveness, problems which are fixed this time around as this follows immediately upon the first and thankfully assumes that the reader knows all relevant backstory by this point.

Unfortunately, this is the only thing that is fixed. The writing is still very bad. This time, we visit several different worlds and meet some new characters (thankfully not as many as in the first book), but the barren prose comes with almost no descriptions. If you hadn't seen these worlds and people on playing cards, would you get a feel for how Kaladesh looks different from Ravnica? Or Esper? Or how any of the characters look?

The book has eighty (!) chapters. It follows three main arcs plus a couple of side-plots, through super-short snippets of chapters, each one jumping to (ostensibly) another character's perspective. It's an obviously moviefied way of writing, that perhaps some authors can make work, but here it's needlessly hard to follow. "Wait, what is it this character was doing again?" Also, again, if you want the reader to feel like a movie is playing in their head while reading, you have to describe how stuff looks!

This novel focuses on slightly fewer characters from the last so you might think we could get some better characterization and development. But baffling plot twists, out-of-character, or plain dumb actions, and author-imposed spokes in their wheels make the characters suffer, and me with them. Shaggy dog stories where bad things happen to people can be valid, even great, but I don't get why this book about heroes in a teenagers' card game has to be such a downer and screw over most characters? Even to the point of regressing some characters back through years of previous character development.

And, as the last book in a (short) series, does it at least provide closure? Some plot threads are tied together, largely unsatisfactorily, some simply... dissolve, as if the author forgot them, and several new threads are created, many of which will probably never have their continuation see the light of day. Sigh.

So, it's not excruciating. Things happen in the book. It has, by certain definitions, characters and plot in it. It is possible to sit through this book. You shouldn't. But it is possible.