Beelzebub's library

For those of you who do not know, there is a webcomic series called “Deep Dark Fears”, where people submit anxieties they have or weird or traumatic ideas and fears that they had as children. It’s a great comic for anyone who has anxiety and invasive thoughts, and I used to especially love them because to me they embodied a mindset that I found it hard to come by.             I love the idea of paranoid delusion. I have loved it since 2014, when I would spend all day listening to creepy-pasta’s on YouTube, in the mostly empty apartment where my family was living at the time. I was already very misanthropic at the time and to me, this view of the world, as being uncertain and filled with dark things that we can’t notice, was very enticing.             I’m not as paranoid as I think I once was, but I still suffer from a lot of the same anxieties and issues and I feel this...

Authority is less engaging than Annihilation, but it has a better story.             Annihilation has a simple concept that provokes the imagination. Authority, perhaps by virtue of being a sequel, has the obligation of having a harder to explain the premise.             John Rodriguez, or Control, is the new director of Southern Reach, the organization which is in charge of monitoring and explaining Area X. The organization has decayed significantly since Area X popped into existence, setting the stage for an interesting setting along with posing some very cogent questions in this day and age. How do you solve a problem that no seems to care about? Should you even try?             Like Annihilation, this book brings up questions about climate change and humanity vs Nature and our own role in society and the role of...

“Leap days” by Ian Bennett and “Anya’s Ghost” by Vera Brosgol Since these two graphic novels are somewhat similar and neither is particularly long, I figured reviewing them together would make sense. Both take place in high school and they are both coming of age stories. They also both involve a high schooler befriending a supernatural force who allows them to cheat in school. LEAP DAYS We’ll start with Leap Days since it’s the relatively less emotionally charged of the two.             I was surprised by this book. When it opens, it’s pretty grim. Being more realistic, it depicts the crushing boredom of school and the frustration of a sense that you are wasting your time and not really learning anything. The protagonist’s name is Jake and he drifts through the day, unknown by everyone and uninterested in everything. The only thing that snaps him out of the malaise aside from eventually getting to go home and go to sl...

The Boomsday project is coming almost here so it only seems fitting to finally rank all the expansions and adventures. I couldn’t find any articles doing this, so I decided to do it myself. Of course, to preserve a sense of Hitchcockian suspense and to assure the most possibly clickbait article name, we’ll save the best for last. For reference, the Coolest Cards will be determined not by the most effective but the most fun and interesting. The Worst Cards will be determined by the OP or cards that I consider Toxic. And the Wasted potential category will refer to cards that could have been cool but were too underpowered to reach their full potential.  12. One Night in Karazhan: This adventure was simultaneously the easiest and the least creative. The cards that it brought in are hardly remembered either, with most of the legendaries being middle of the road at best and underpowered garbage at worst. The portal cards were alright but half of them cost too much for their ...

When this TV series first debuted, I found myself instantly disliking it, mostly because of the dialogue. I saw it weak from a story perspective, with a plot that was unfathomably drawn out and some very poor performances. My mother and some of my siblings binged the whole season, and I can to some extent understand why. The shows ability to be honest regarding how some people view sexual assault, rape, and suicide, was I think what drew attention in the first place.             Tha t said, and this is in no means an attack on those who enjoyed the first season or the second (which I refuse to watch, as there should never have been thirteen episodes of this show, let alone two seasons) it is a well-dressed piece of garbage.             The acting is not strong enough to carry the weight of the subjects, the leads are boring at best and aside from a couple moments, the villains are cartoonish. The p...

YA novel: Spy, m ystery, gothic fiction This review contains minor spoilers.  This book could have been what it bills itself as. It could have been a series of accounts regarding the titular character’s background, none of which is necessarily confirmed, with a lot of allusion to events referenced in A Series of Unfortunate Events and The Beatrice Letters (The latter of which I have not read, it’s possible that the thing I wanted was in there instead of here).             That’s not what this book is. In fact, after starting with some backstory on Lemony Snicket’s early childhood and induction into the VFD, the book quickly descends down rabbit hole after rabbit hole into a series of obscured and never totally explained mysteries that surround people tangentially related to him and the secret organization he is involved with. And that’s fine. Daniel Handler, the man behind the pseudonym, has made a point of not ans...

So, far, Witchwood has been interesting. It has shaken up the meta a lot more than I think Kobold and Catacombs did and possibly more than Knights of the Frozen Throne. In doing that, it seems to be sending Hearthstone down what I consider a dangerous path. Let’s start with the dungeon run mode though. I enjoyed this a lot. I’ve heard some people complaining about how less content came with it than there was with K&C, but I enjoyed the quality of the monster hunters and figuring out how each of them worked. It could be challenging, but rarely frustrating, and the fights were very stimulating once you decoded them. It also solved the problem of runs in K&C where you had no idea what the final boss might be, so you just had to kind of make the cheesiest deck you could, rather than know that if you picked out the right emblems, you would at least do well against that monster hunter's final boss. Hearthstone has created some surprisingly cool characters in its time and the on...

What is the coolest thing about Darkest Dungeon other than it’s expert splicing of pulp fantasy with Lovecraftian fiction and Jude Wayne’s glorious narration? The monsters! Or more specifically, the places where they come from! Warning! Lots and lots of spoilers for Darkest Dungeon and also an episode of the X-Files for some reason (but c'mon man, it was decades ago, get with it already) Rendered slightly less threatening by the weird collar thingy.  6. The Ruins You could probably predict this being the least scary. As the starting area, it is the least threatening. The enemies are pretty basic, the curios aren't very unsettling, and the background isn't very memorable. It might be noted that the place does manage to feel like the rubble of some terrible cataclysm. Stars: 2/5 Scariest enemy : The Necromancer. No further comment *shudders*. Serious Question: How does a zombie get drunk?? 5. The Cove The eldritch imagery on the Cover is pretty...