Caoimhe’s reviews

📺 Columbo S3 ★★★☆☆

2026-04-07T18:33:52+01:00

Mostly solid but some episodes dragged down by silly gimmicks like the tonally jarring use of Robby the Robot and his boy genius programmer or bringing in Johnny Cash to give a fairly mediocre performance.

📼 Furuhata Ninzaburō: The Resurrection Of Death ★★★★☆

2026-04-06T20:00:05+01:00

Very fun one even if quite contrived and the comic relief with Imaizumi is actually funny again!

📺 The Boys S4 ★★★☆☆

2026-04-05T16:13:17+01:00

I can understand why the writers would feel that dropping and and all subtlety, particularly in the political satire, is warranted right now, but the show has started to feel like a parody of itself as a result. I also think that if the show is going to make watching the spinoff crucial to following the plot (which I am told is even more true for the second series of Gen V) then it making fun of Marvel movie phases and crossovers starts to lose any and all bite. I did enjoy some of the sillier parts, such as the gang unloading into V’d-up chickens that are no-selling the entire thing, and there is still plenty else that I like, but I think that it is time for this show to wrap up. Hopefully the fifth series sticks the landing.

📔 The Secret Life of Cows ★☆☆☆☆

2026-04-04T11:59:44+01:00

Cows can be wise.

While I do not doubt that cows do have feelings, relationships, thoughts and inner lives the book contains a huge amount of projection, assumption and anthropomorphism. Looking past that it is largely a collection of inoffensive and cute stories about a multigenerational heard of cattle, highlighting their individual temperaments and approaches that still has tucked away a pervasive level of pseudoscience that I cannot abide.

There is some early references to trusting cows to seek out medicinal herbs to treat themselves, but it holds off until further into the book to start extolling the virtues of homeopathic treatments. Apparently that homeopathic practitioners give animals different treatment for the same illness based on temperament shows that they are treating the animals as individuals while conventional veterinary medicine using the same treatment for the same illness is inherently suspect. Towards the end the author makes a good point about how overuse of drugs keeps animals going in awful, factory farm conditions that are otherwise awful for their health (and which also breads antibiotic resistant bacterial strains) but then bafflingly seems to lay the blame for this on the medicine and not the factory farms! This is of course rounded out with some offhand vaccine skepticism for good measure.

🎮 One Potion Please! ★★★★☆

2026-04-01T12:16:08+01:00

Papers, Please as a lighthearted transformation kink game. You are a potion seller tasked with spiking the health potions of various dungeon crawling adventurers with various fetish transformation effects in order to impede their progress in the dungeon. Warriors get breast expansion potions to impede their sword swings, unless they are fighting beholders (which would get too distracted by their inflated tits to fight back any longer), while thieves get butt expansion potions such that the clap from their ass cheeks alerts nearby guards. A sentence which sums up the tone, humour, mechanics and process of playing the game quite well.

It does not take itself seriously, but every day new rules are added that the player must update their mental checklist and story events provide temporary twists on the potion formula (sometimes literally) and bespoke little adventure game puzzles to solve which offer some fun and inventive highlights to each day. Many of the rules interact with each other and have various exceptions to them, creating an engaging but not particularly taxing mental loop and I appreciated having something like that to occupy me recently when I was not feeling up to anything more mentally strenuous. Unlike Papers, Please there is usually no time pressure so you can consider your options carefully, and consequences for failure are generally a slapstick death followed by getting to immediately restart the day. The game will also offer to give you the solution to any puzzle that has caught you out. Some potions do get more developed rules for them than others, and one of the more layered ones has a facet of its instructions permanently circumvented by a later potion such that it becomes irrelevant for the rest of the game (but is never removed from the reminder tooltip) which I think is a shame.

The game in general is a bit jank and a more refined version would be nice, but it’s three quid at full price from a solo developer so I am willing to forgive a lot and grade it on a curve. Audio stands out as an area that could immediately use more attention. There’s no music and only minimal stock sound effects for everything else. A lot about its presentation and style reminds me of playing Newgrounds games of yore to the point where it throwing in a reference to Wayne Radio TV feels like an anachronism, but no this game is made in Godot, not Flash, and was released only a few months ago.

I don’t generally find the actual kink stuff particularly hot, but I do find it funny and charming. Kinks are somewhat inherently ridiculous and I appreciate the way it plays with them in silly ways while still trying to be sexy. Everything is kept quite lighthearted and the adventurers, who do get their own storylines and developing relationships as time goes on, are never traumatised by being repeatedly bimbofied, killed by slimes and revived back at the town square, but will just grumble about the impracticalities of trying to lug around breasts the size of beachballs as workplace annoyance—and of course many of them are simply into it anyway. The adventurers are, predictably, all women and the worldbuilding excuse offered for this¹ also offhandedly implies that a lot of them are probably trans, which I enjoy. Skee, a skeleton who takes on a more and more feminine appearance across the course of the game through the gathering powerful dark magical artefacts, also feels like a very trans character.

Fun little thing, very cheep, and the demo has more than half of the story mode in it if you want to try it for free.

Testicular torsion blast is the easiest spell in the world to learn and every level one goblin knows how to cast it. ↩

📕 Otherside Picnic, Vol. 5 ★★★☆☆

2026-03-29T14:21:30+01:00

Could I accept this much affection?

The first few stories in this series really made it seem like the Otherside both had far more people stumbling into it and dying all the time. They run into a lot of people early on and Toriko makes it sound like she found guns lying around all the time, but that has tapered off into more general weird events. Even Satsuki’s overarching presence has started to ease off to give the girls a break and the relationship develop a bit more and make the Otherside their own a bit.

It is also feels almost bizarre at this point to suddenly have characters openly and casually discussing the idea of women dating each other when the series has skirted around it for so long. But it is in service of continuing to push Sorawo to open herself up to these possibilities and allow herself to be loved. It is quite sweet, even if she can be frustrating.

Though I am sure that as soon as she does all of that danger and the weight of Toriko’s own personal history that have been pushed aside for the moment are going to come crashing down on the both of them.

📕 Otherside Picnic, Vol. 4 ★★★☆☆

2026-03-29T14:08:50+01:00

It always took me a lot of courage to go to the next step in this train of thought.

I didn’t intend to keep ploughing through these, but I was travelling again and had several hours to kill on trains. The development of the relationship between Toriko and Sorawo is very slow, but there is always some degree of forward momentum to it, in spite of Sorawo’s cluelessness. She is like a protagonist in a zombie movie where the world is the same as it is now except that none of the characters have ever heard of the concept of a zombie, except instead of zombies it’s lesbians—though she is the only person like this as everyone around the protagonists clearly think that they are already a couple. This volume does make it clear that that ignorance was somewhat willful; she is too scared to open herself up, even in her own internal monologue, to the possibility of someone loving her. Still, we asymptotically approach lesbianism.

And I know that tattoos are associated with the Yakuza in Japan but her being scared of Migiwa’s Mayan tattoo sleeve he probably just got while drunk on holiday in Central America is very funny.

🎮 Horse Magnifier ★★★★★

2026-03-28T17:15:00+00:00

Play it.

📕 Otherside Picnic, Vol. 3 ★★★☆☆

2026-03-25T15:23:48+00:00

Just how many underage girls has she laid her hands on?

I am surprised that the story seems to actually be angling Toriko as a victim of grooming and I am curious where it goes with that.

Very funny that the only thing physically wrong with Sorawo after so many supernatural near-death experiences is that her liver is not in great shape from going out and getting hammered to celebrate every time they survive a trip to the Otherside. She also seems to have some sort of medical condition that causes her mind to fail to comprehend the existence of lesbianism or any information pertaining to it and is too socially awkward to every ask anyone to clarify what they mean by anything.

I had was wondering why the translator decided to use both Luna and Runa for transliterating that character’s name and it looks like in the original novel her name was also written two ways depending how it’s being used, with Luna in the translation standing in for ｢ルナ｣ in katakana and Runa for ｢るな｣ in hiragana. I like to try and get an understanding of little translation tidbits like that even when I can’t read the original text at all. Language is fun!

📕 Otherside Picnic, Vol. 2 ★★★☆☆

2026-03-25T15:19:51+00:00

Alcohol is scary…

Whomst among us has not gotten so drunk that we blacked out and maxed out our credit card buying agricultural equipment?

The recaps in each story can feel a bit excessive sometimes for something that, as far as I know, wasn’t serialised on story-by-story basis. Could also do without the US marines field-modifying an armoured vehicle explicitly in line with IDF vehicles specifically designed to kill Palestinians in order to fight monsters which is a thing that actually happens in this book.

I enjoy Sorawo getting jealous without realising that that’s what’s happening and her hiding things from Toriko adds an interesting wrinkle to the relationship.

📕 Otherside Picnic, Vol. 1 ★★★☆☆

2026-03-24T21:24:30+00:00

They say that being accomplices is the closest kind of relationship in the world.

Quite funny to take Roadside Picnic but reinterpret the title to just be about it being nice to have a picnic in the Zone, as is the how it wears its inspiration on its sleeve with Sorawo and Toriko meeting a guy who is basically a S.T.A.L.K.E.R. stalker on their second outing.

The prose and dialogue are frequently awkward which I will put down mostly to translation problems, though I think that the descriptions are also very visually focused in a way that I think doesn’t use the advantages of prose as a medium.

But I was looking for a fun, light read while travelling and it provided that quite well. Toriko and Sorawo are endearing and watching their relationship evolve is compelling, from Toriko calling Sorawo Twitter-brained on their first meeting to them looking out for each other as they become accomplices. Using actual modern ghost stories and having a bibliography that cites 2chan threads in very specific detail is also quite charming.

📺 Gen V S1 ★★☆☆☆

2026-03-24T20:50:27+00:00

Starts of fairly insufferable with the attempts at social media satire, finds its feet after a while, and then suddenly just swerves in the last few episodes to being much more of a direct extension of The Boys and throws out a lot of characterisation in favour of feeding into the political division plot of its parent show.

Speaking of The Boys, Edgar’s comments on Vought being a pharmaceutical company, not a superhero company was a good moment but becomes increasingly nonsensical as the show goes on and Vought starts seeming like it makes up half of the American economy. They own the television ecosystem, they own the news, they own their own university and it’s all centred on superheroes. Several supes also having children with the same powers as them also seems weird in light of how big of a deal Ryan was made out to be.

📕 The Gadfly ★★★★☆

2026-03-19T15:33:34+00:00

This is the body that was given for you⁠—look at it, torn and bleeding, throbbing still with the tortured life, quivering from the bitter death-agony; take it, Christians, and eat!

Came on my radar a couple of months ago when it was in the news as a book that Micheál Martin and Xi Jinping bonded over and sounded interesting. Compelling, tragic, quite racist in the middle, and ends with a fierce anti-Christian polemic that my inner ratheist is perhaps a tad too fond of. I particularly enjoyed Montanelli trying to pass on the choice of what is to be done to a condemned man to the man himself—as if it were a mercy—washing his hands of guilt and sin by refusing to face his own choice, and being told to fuck off and stop pretending that the hangman is the real victim of an execution.

📻 The Chaotix Casefiles ★★★☆☆

2026-03-18T15:14:32+00:00

Fun little thing. Vector the Crocodile doing noir detective voice is cute and nice to hear voices for characters who have never had them before.

🎮 Slay the Princess ★★★☆☆

2026-03-17T17:55:56+00:00

Honestly a bit disappointed. The game looks great, Jonathon Sims is great (I was a fan of The Magnus Archives¹), a lot of the horror is fun, but when I started looping I thought there would be a more of a puzzle element of trying to work out how to achieve various paths in order to work towards specific goals, but ended up just iterating through different branches of the decision tree as the ones I already did were pruned away and the metanarrative did not do much for me. There does seem to be an element of aiming for different meta endings through going through other combinations of paths in repeat playthroughs, but I can’t really be bothered to do all that again just for the sake of seeing more stuff for its own sake.

If you’re unfamiliar, The Magnus Archives is a podcast distributed by Rusty Quill dot com and licenced under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International licence, written and performed by Jonathan Sims. ↩

📼 Furuhata Ninzaburō: All By His Excellency’s Work ★★★☆☆

2026-03-15T12:44:59+00:00

Nice to have a break from the Flanderised caricature that Imaizumi has turned into over the course of show and have a special that is mostly, blessedly, free of bad comic relief. The data Jellyfin pulled for this episode titled it as The Spanish Embassy Murder despite it taking place in the Japanese embassy in a country that is not Spain.

🎥 Penda’s Fen ★★★☆☆

2026-03-15T12:40:11+00:00

King Penda or: How I Learned to Stop Torying and Love the Fen

🎥 Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood ★☆☆☆☆

2026-03-14T11:48:02+00:00

Happy Friday the 13th. Series still bad. See you in November.

📺 The Boys S3 ★★★★☆

2026-03-13T16:23:40+00:00

I am starting to think that there may be an element of political satire in this show.
The forced corporate nonsense continues to be very well done in so far as it causes my physical pain to watch.
The guy playing young Edgar has the unenviable task of trying to affect the mannerisms of Giancarlo Esposito but mostly just comes across like he’s playing a vulcan.
I think the general direction of tempting Huey with power leading him down the path of becoming more like Butcher is a good one but I am as frustrated as Annie is with it being done by making him suddenly much more insecure about his masculinity than he was at the start of the show. I quite liked that element of the relationship between the two of them.
Kimiko can do better than Frenchie.

🗨️ Sonic Racing: Crossworlds ★★☆☆☆

2026-03-13T16:20:00+00:00

It’s a promotional comic. It’s fine. I enjoyed Jet, Sonic and Shadow flirting.

🗨️ Comrade Girls, Shoot the Enemy, Vol. 2 ★★★☆☆

2026-03-09T18:45:00+00:00

My fucking god! These bitches gay! Good for them! Good for them.

Not sure how I feel about the twist with Olga. Will see how it develops as they get into Stalingrad. I’m sure that’s going to go well.

🎭 The Four-Faced Liar ★★★☆☆

2026-03-09T18:40:00+00:00

Cute vignettes of life with a local flavour. Did feel like it was winding up at one point only to continue dragging out resolutions for what felt a tad too long.

📺 The Boys S2 ★★★☆☆

2026-03-02T18:25:48+00:00

The colour palette didn’t feel as overly washed out as in the first series (or maybe I am just getting used to it?). It does get a bit much with the nihilistic violence and misery but manages to pick up before the end. Stormfront was a good villain though in the end felt like a bit of an extended aside before focusing back Homelander again. I do enjoy the little asides back to The Deep every once in a while to see just how badly things are going for him today.

🎥 Tank Girl ★★★☆☆

2026-02-28T21:57:42+00:00

Meandering, disjointed and filled with unfunny one-liners but also just a silly, fun watch.

🎥 Death by Hanging ★★★☆☆

2026-02-24T22:13:07+00:00

I really enjoy how giddy and enthusiastic all these men are to act out their deeply racist ideas of what Koreans are like. They crave that barbarism and project that desire onto those they view as the Other and use that as justification for the cruelty that they can inflict.

🎥 Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion ★★★★☆

2026-02-19T07:43:32+00:00

A true believer in authoritarianism tries to prove that the system works. That it is just. That those who hold power are sincere in the promises of law and order, that those are not empty platitudes propping up thuggery and power. And he fails utterly.

🎮 Marionation Gear ★★★★☆

2026-02-15T20:57:46+00:00

Super fun little thing. Dozens of different mechs to pilot each with their own unique little toy control schemes on the touchscreen. Some more practical and straightforward, others more silly and gimmicky. Cars with a steering wheel and gear stick; missiles with their own multi-step launch sequences; a revolver where you have to load each individual bullet, pull back the firing pin, then pull the trigger; a steam-powered robot that is a beast in close combat but must be powered by pulling a lever to open the furnace doors, shoveling in coal, building steam pressure and then finally turning a valve to let the pressure out and power the arms (and don’t forget to close it again to build the pressure up for the next round).

Less endearingly the power creep throughout the game means that fun puppets you get early on are going to mostly stop being useful as you progress through the game and filling out your roster with upgraded versions takes a lot of replaying and grinding out levels, both to earn cash and also to get blueprints that drop randomly from specific missions. There’s also nothing in-game to indicate which missions provide which blueprints either so if you want something specific you’ll need to consult a guide. Late-game missions also become a chore with long slogs fighting waves of enemies that can, and often will, juggle you to death if they manage to knock you over once. And when there are too many robots in a level the frame rate really suffers. Even just trying to find where the next mission unlocked on the world map becomes a pain over time as it turns into a sprawling mess.

With regards to story, tone and presentation the game reminds me a bit of Advance Wars, with this seemingly quite small world culturally dominated by marionation gear¹—the game’s puppet mechs—the strongest of which of course end up piloted by a bunch of thirteen year olds to save the world from the horrors of traditional artisanal work being replaced by soulless automation and mechanised warfare.

The fan translation more literally translates the title of the game, 超操縦(Chōsōjū)メカ(Mecha)MG, as Super Control Mecha MG but I prefer to just call it Marionation Gear after the puppets. ↩

🎥 Conspiracy ★★★★☆

2026-02-15T15:36:58+00:00

Fantastic film. Harrowing to just watch the inevitable be laid out to these utterly contemptible men, squirming in discomfort not at what is being done but at how much they are being cut out of it. The ones so concerned about genocide being conducted unlawfully are possibly more contemptible than the ones straightforwardly excited to participate in mass murder.

🎥 Honey Don’t! ★★★☆☆

2026-02-14T16:43:11+00:00

Feels a bit more leering than Drive Away Dolls. Funny moment to moment but fails to sell the shaggy dog story with any kind of a punchline. The weird faux-period aspect of it is fascinating and I don’t know what they were going for with it. I didn’t even really notice people using smartphones when everything else was screaming retro. It took the MAGA sticker with the faux-period logo, a logo that I don’t think is actually used by anyone and was presumably designed for this film, to shock me into noticing the contradictions. In contrast the logo of the church felt like a more modern intrusion into the aesthetics of the film. I guess it’s one of those rundown cities that’s been left behind and slowly rotting away without hope of renewal, being preyed on by forces promising false hope. But it’s not like the film develops that idea much either.

🎥 Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives ★★☆☆☆

2026-02-13T19:28:50+00:00

At least this one has jokes.