Tea and rosemary cookies for the brain

World news is spiraling. Here’s a distracting post about movies. At least it’s something to break up the doomscrolling.

Dog Man: Cute and fun. I kept noting and appreciating the characteristic Dav Pilkey humor. (“Lil’ Petey is actually Petey’s son!…in a coincidence so obvious, it’s not really a coincidence.”) Not actually sure how to describe it, but the guy sure can write a line.

One of the subplots is about an evil psychokinetic cyborg fish, and I love that everyone just…calls him “psychokinetic.” It’s the one word that’s blatantly outside the target audience’s reading level. Nobody asks what it means. Nobody casually mentions the definition. You can figure it out from context, or you can look it up — and what a fun word to look up, you know?

Another subplot involves “evil” cat Petey, trying to raise his child clone Lil’ Petey. The kitten insists on seeing the good in Petey, who’s the classic “soft heart underneath, will team up with the heroes when given a chance” kind of antagonist. But there’s also a subplot where he eagerly tries to reconnect Petey with his deadbeat dad…who turns out not to be on a redemption arc, he just slums around the lair for a bit, then finally runs off with all Petey’s stuff.

Which leads to a scene where Petey tells the kitten “Kid, it’s not you. Some people just won’t change.” A rare message to see in a kids’ movie — characters who are estranged from a relative, especially a parent, almost always learn a lesson about how they were being too harsh and unfair — and a really nice one. Young viewers should get to hear that if you go on a Plucky Child Reconciliation Quest and don’t succeed, it’s not because you weren’t nice/forgiving/plucky/open-hearted enough to deserve it.

-
 

Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death: I heard about this movie when it was featured in This Movie Exists. Can’t top Moviebob’s summary: “a zero-budget spoof of jungle adventure movies that improbably crosses a legitimately insightful satire of late-1980s “battle of the sexes” culture-war politics with campy jungle-girl bikini babe action.”

I’ve seen the serious version of this movie on MST3K any number of times. The parody is amazing. Genuinely laugh-out-loud funny on a regular basis. The climactic battle in the village of the cannibal women is between two ethnographers, wielding swords (“I studied ancient weaponry at Berkeley”) and wearing slinky leaf mini-dresses, trading insults like “Your field methodology is sloppy!”

And most of it has aged shockingly well. If it had come out in 2025, as a period-piece satire of sexism in the 1980s, rather than a contemporary satire of sexism in the 1980s…it could’ve done basically all the same jokes.

(Honestly, the only bit I would change is, there’s an attempted sexual assault that goes down a little too casually. It’s clearly a bad thing, our protagonist stops it by showing up with a gun, it’s just portrayed more as “ugh, another of these sexist annoyances that pop up throughout the movie” than “narrowly-averted serious traumatic violence.”)

As of now, you can stream the Avocado Jungle on Tubi. Worth a watch.

I’ve had a streak of bad luck with “books I read based on recs, with premises that sound like I should be into them” lately. Have a paragraph of grumbling for each of those, then I’ll get around to a nice rec.

Silver Under Nightfall, by Rin Chupeco – Social-outcast vampire-hunter Remy has a sexy gothic monster-fighting mad-science adventure, which involves ending up in a throuple with a hot vampire couple. Pretty sure I got this off a “canon poly” reclist somewhere? I didn’t make it to the poly. Reviews say it’s Castlevania fanfic with the serial numbers filed off; maybe that’s the problem, that it’s written for a reader who has a pre-existing investment in [the character that became] Remy, so it didn’t manage to get me interested in him.

Metal from Heaven, by August Clarke – In a magic-touched version of the industrial revolution, Marney survives a massacre of striking workers including the rest of her family, gets picked up by a group of train robbers, and eventually agrees to pose as an aristocrat and seduce the industrial baron’s daughter as part of a complicated fake-marriage revenge scheme. I dropped it around the time when just starting to discuss maybe setting up the still-a-child Marney for a role in this scheme…and I looked at the timestamp on the audiobook, and this was 4 hours in. (Also: Marney had gotten one scene where she did a bit of the pseudo-magic she has for worldbuilding reasons, and I still hadn’t gotten to the point where it came up again.)

The Gracekeepers, by Kirsty Logan – In a world mostly covered by water, North is a performer on a boat-based traveling circus (her best friend is her partner, a dancing bear), and Callanish handles burials on a tiny island where she lives alone. Pretty sure I got this one off a “canon f/f” reclist, and again, it was a long ways into the book when I realized the f/f couple hadn’t even met yet, and I wasn’t invested enough in either of them as individuals to keep slogging onward to see if I liked the romance.

The Archive Undying, by Emma Mieko Candon – Something something giant robots. I didn’t remember the plot of this one at all, just my general impression of “maybe I would have an easier time following this if I was more into giant robots as a trope.” Then I looked at the Goodreads reviews to refresh my memory…and, oh, they’re full of comments like “while Emma Mieko Candon may have known exactly what it was she was writing about, she neglected to make it clear enough in the text for the reader to get any sort of handle on the worldbuilding” and “There is a fine line between a book being confusing and it being nonsense with pretty writing.” So apparently it’s just Like That.

Dreamships, by Melissa Scott – In a 1990s idea of the future where “put on your VR headset and get high for a few hours” is how you do the equivalent of searching the internet, a space pilot/cyberpunk hacker gets hired to find a high-powered corporate’s missing-and-supposedly-dead brother. Picked this up because I wanted more Melissa Scott after reading Shadow Man. The main character here does her own version of “immersing you in the day-to-day life of her sci-fi job on an alien planet with weird future tech,” and I did like that part. But my attention still wandered before they got around to starting the spaceship mission.

Salvation Day, by Kali Wallace – Group of rebels try to break into a spaceship that was abandoned and condemned after a virus killed everyone on board. As I’m sure nobody could have predicted, this blows up in their face! I genuinely don’t remember anything about this one — it was for a book club that I didn’t make it to, so I might have just procrastinated long enough to miss the meeting, and then decided to let the checkout lapse. If you’ve read it and think I should give it another shot, let me know.

Alien Clay, by Adrian Tchaikovsky – A fascist crackdown on Earth involves shipping off the undesirables, including our political-activist professor narrator, to work on exploring/mining/conquering alien planets. I still have this one checked out right now, so there’s a chance I’ll listen more? The whole “alien sci-fi version of trying to survive a fascist labor camp” premise is working really well. On the other hand, it’s like looking at a cool painting of an alien landscape. It’s really neat to look at, I’m glad I took the time to check it out, but I’m not feeling enthusiastic about staring at it for another 11 hours, you know?

—

Will Save The Galaxy For Food by Yahtzee Croshaw – This is the good one!

Read it all, enjoyed it, went on to also plow through the sequel, Will Destroy The Galaxy For Cash. (There’s a third installment, Will Leave The Galaxy For Good, but right now it looks like it’s only available on Audible. Not even in print anywhere yet, there’s just an audiobook.)

It has a very “what if Discworld but for sci-fi” premise. There was a Golden Age of Star Piloting, where everyone was having Flash Gordon adventures, liberating alien species from supervillains with robot armies, falling in love with alien princesses, men were Real Men/women were Real Women/small blue furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were Real Small Blue Furry Creatures From Alpha Centauri — you get the picture. Then space-travel tech improved enough to make them obsolete, and now our hero is one of many ex-star-pilots who hang around the lunar spaceport, leveraging their personal tales of adventure to run petty scams on tourists.

Until our guy gets hired to pose as Jacques McKeown, basically Space Gilderoy Lockhart, a novelist who ripped off all the star pilots’ life stories for his bestselling novel series. All to impress one of McKeown’s biggest fans, the overenthusiastic teen son of a terrifying interplanetary crime lord. Shenanigans ensue. Half the cast are running some kind of scam/con, and most are constantly flailing to keep it from blowing up in their faces. The second book has our hero (getting roped into) reprising his Jacques McKeown role to appear at a fan convention, as a cover for a heist, with a crew that includes his former nemesis who’s now in an ex-supervillain support group.

It’s consistently low-key funny. It hits that classic Pratchett/Adams balance of “this is ridiculously absurd and over-the-top, but also, a perfectly on-point insight into how people work.” Star-pilot swearing is based on math terms. Along with the novelized version of the Golden Age of Star Pilots, we run into the theme-park version of the Golden Age, and then the cargo-cult version of the Golden Age. The plot regularly turns on our hero’s spaceship being rigged-up with some workaround born of a lot of knowledge, creativity, and motivation, but very little money. His blaster has a setting with the handmade label “Solve All Immediate Problems.”

My one “oof, too bad about that” feeling is that the cast is pretty skewed towards dudes. And more so in the second book than the first. The women do feel like real characters, they’re as unique and well-developed as the guys are, it’s just noticeable that there’s not as many. (No queer content, either, but there’s very little straight content and it’s mostly in the background, so I didn’t mind as much.)

It’s good, it’s funny, highly recommend that you check out the first two, and I’ll get my hands on the threequel eventually.