May 2026

May was a tough month for free-time! Blame my late post in part on the fact that the book I was reading was very long and I didn’t really finish it until mid-June.

The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch

Locke Lamora is a poor orphan in the island city of Camorr who gets brought into a small community of pickpockets until the combination of his natural gifts and his reckless enthusiasm for thievery forces the Fagin-like overseer of the orphans to choose between having Locke killed or selling him to the quirky blind priest who runs a secretive group of elite thieves known as the Gentlemen Bastards. The book ping-pongs between Locke’s latest scheme as the leader of the Gentlemen Bastards, an outrageous con targeting one of the city’s most prominent noble families, and Locke’s upbringing and indoctrination into the Gentlemen Bastards, as he’s given missions and training all over the world picking up all manner of skills and knowledge for the purpose of better deceiving everyone he meets. The parts of the story dealing with Locke’s past help develop the world and Locke’s bond to his fellow thieves, while the present day story follows Locke’s complex and daring con as he finds himself challenged by Camorr’s most ruthless secret police as well as upheaval in the politics of the criminal underworld. Locke is always scheming to stay one step ahead of everyone, but, despite his immense talent, he soon learns he has taken on more of a challenge than he bargained for.

I’d heard good things about The Lies of Locke Lamora years and years ago — Goodreads says I added this to my “to-read” list in July of 2014 and a gmail receipt says I bought it in 2017 — but it wasn’t until a few weeks back I finally decided to start it. I loved this book. It’s a great big world, very lightly fantasy - there’s one character who has access to some type of magic, and there are some vague references to an earlier race of people who built some kinds of structures that outlived them - but otherwise it feels like a traditional medieval European setting, with a lot of the names having an Italian feel. The alternating storylines could be slightly tricky to follow at times, and I wonder how this book would’ve worked with a more straightforward narrative structure, but it didn’t take too long before each time we shifted forward or back I was upset to be leaving one era but excited to get back to the other.

Locke and his fellow thieves and con artists were a fun crew to follow, and their schemes were clever and amusing. Despite the medieval fantasy-ish setting, one of the comparisons I kept thinking of was Sneakers, one of my favorite movies, an early 1990s technothriller about a team of computer hackers/con artists. As in Sneakers, I really grew to love the team and their roles and the various tricks they had up their sleeves, though this crew faces much greater adversity and things do get pretty dark. But it’s a lot of fun following the action as Locke and his compatriots use wigs and costumes and intercepted intelligence and observational skills and sheer audacity to try to secure a fortune from one of the wealthiest families in Camorr.

It is quite a long book - around 800 pages - and it took me quite a while, but it was a fun read with lots of twists and turns, well worth my time. There are two more books in this series, though I’ve heard mixed opinions on whether they are sold but not quite as amazing or are actually kind of disappointing. In any case, I had a great time reading this one and can definitely recommend it.

Mixtape by Beethoven & Dinosaur

Mixtape is set in northern California in a vague concept of the 1990s. It follows three friends — artsy music obsessive Stacy Rockford, preppy jock overachiever-turned-rebel Cassandra Morino, and sensitive goofball stoner Van Slater — who have just graduated high school and are looking forward to a long-planned road trip when Stacy announces she’s bailing on their plan because she is instead flying to New York City to meet her business and creative idol in the hopes of jumpstarting her dream career as a music supervisor for film and television. Stacy sets her life to a personal soundtrack, constantly wearing headphones and announcing the perfect song for each moment.

You control Stacy and her friends as they prepare for one last party on the night before Stacy leaves Cassandra and Van behind for the summer, if not longer. As you go from location to location — hanging out before the party, finding party supplies, figuring out how you might acquire some beer, trying to escape the attention of skeptical parents — the friends chat and goof around and eventually trigger a gameplay sequence, sometimes set in the present, sometimes reliving a memory, and always tightly choreographed to music from a long list of bands that a music aficionado in the ‘90s might have been into, including Smashing Pumpkins, Silverchair, The Cure, Devo, Iggy Pop, and more. Each gameplay sequence is something new, simple tasks and objectives that you generally can’t fail.

I was interested in this game when I saw it announced both because I liked what I heard of the soundtrack, and because I had enjoyed the developer’s previous game, The Artful Escape. That game was about a young man eager to make his mark in the world of music while somehow also being abducted by aliens (?), and basically making giant low-gravity leaps through the air while shredding infinite guitar solos with just a few button presses. Nothing about it was challenging, and it definitely went too long, but I enjoyed it because they just really nailed that one mechanic of taking a flying leap through the air and mashing out varying button sequences to wail on a screaming psychedelic guitar solo over with just enough control over the notes to make you feel super cool. The question for me about Mixtape was whether the story itself would be more engaging than the amusing but silly story of The Artful Escape, and whether they could find more than one cool thing to let you do. Turns out, they totally nailed it on both parts.

The story in Mixtape is still pretty low stakes: though there’s a lot of friend drama happening, ultimately you’re just trying to meet up with your friends at a party. But through use of flashbacks and through dialogue you exchange while exploring environments, you get a great sense of these kids and their relationships to each other, and I ultimately really loved these characters. They are deeply flawed — Stacy in particular is a pretentious know-it-all who insufferably narrates trivia about the bands whose song she is introducing as she tells you how perfectly they capture the moment she is experiencing or remembering — but in a way that is entirely recognizable to anyone who has ever been a teenager. Each of these kids think they are very deep, very smart, and are dealing with very important problems, and they could not be more wrong about any of those things. But that’s what makes them all kind of lovable, even if you wish they would shut up sometimes. Nothing that happens in the story is a surprise, but it is engaging and easily pulled me through from start to finish as I wanted to learn more about these characters.

The part of the game where you play it, however, is what really surprised me about Mixtape. None of the gameplay sequences are especially complicated — you take batting practice at a softball stadium; you skateboard down a steep hill; you TP an annoying teacher’s house; you try to pour the perfect slurpee; you relive Stacy’s first kiss by controlling each tongue separately with a joystick in a grotesque close-up recreation of awkward teenage fumbling. But each of these short, unfailable sequences really nails some subtle controls to make it feel just right. I must’ve thrown 100 rolls of toilet paper over the obnoxious teacher’s home, because it just felt good to aim your throw, set the strength, and watch a giant spinning roll of toilet paper arc through the sky. I replayed the batting practice sequence multiple times because hey, who doesn’t like hitting dingers? And, as silly as it is, I immediately got the appeal of layering your slurpee into your cup juuust right.

Mixtape is a fun few hours of teenage nostalgia, pretty good music, and neat little gaming mechanics, I’m glad I played it.

That’s all I have to say for May! Busy month.