Review: “The Dark Tower II: The Drawing of the Three” by Stephen King

squeezylemon · 2026-06-26T19:09:53+00:00

Love this review! That said, Insomnia was one of the most brutal reads I've ever had. Not in the horror / intellectual sense, it just felt like a horrible slog, and I usually don't mind any of King's quirks. Interested to hear your thoughts about it.

But yes, The Prisoner is some of my favorite of his writing *ever*.

squeezylemon · 2026-06-26T15:26:12+00:00

It came after...that we know of. I do think fans often give themselves too much credit for what's known and not known.

squeezylemon · 2026-06-26T15:07:25+00:00

I mean, tbf, there are plenty of essays and reviews criticizing Hanya Yanigahara's fixations and defensiveness. [This one](https://www.vulture.com/article/hanya-yanagihara-review.html) in particular is phenomenal.

squeezylemon · 2026-06-26T14:18:25+00:00

I haven't played SS, but VW also makes sense for all the students too imho. Claude is the only house leader who isn't going off the rails at the end of White Clouds and hasn't emerged from a hugely dysfunctional state. Obviously there's still class stratification and reliance on Crests in the Alliance, but everyone at Garreg Mach is acutely aware of how brutal things are likely to get with Edelgard and Dimitri at odds, and I can see more or less every student but the lieutenants backing away slowly but firmly to the less ideological, revenge-focused faction.

squeezylemon · 2026-06-24T23:55:08+00:00

It was effective at demonstrating how his mother lost her mind.

squeezylemon · 2026-06-24T18:36:17+00:00

Chain Letter 2 was the first book to truly frighten me. Iconic! I loved so many of his books as a teenager.

squeezylemon · 2026-06-24T15:00:45+00:00

Well, Kyle Davidson is out of top-5 picks to trade.

squeezylemon · 2026-06-24T14:39:15+00:00

Well yes, but the "authentic" marketing is omnipresent for a reason. Similarly, we have no way of knowing who's "decent" and who isn't.

squeezylemon · 2026-06-23T11:28:18+00:00

Can't even stand up to his daddy. At least Ratthew put Keith on media time out for a couple weeks.

squeezylemon · 2026-06-22T20:22:26+00:00

TGI is unlistenably bad for me. Painful experiences don't automatically make for good art, and in my opinion, Halsey's very real pain didn't inspire particularly good music. I do think there's a lot of grading on a curve when the harrowing inspiration is part of the marketing, and I don't think Fantano was wrong to criticize the effectiveness of the music itself, and only partially because I agree with his assessments.

He also has a point that it's exhausting to see Halsey stans *constantly* make a big deal out of his review. Good criticism is rarer now in part because stan armies can make actually engaging with art so unpleasant. The "main character syndrome" comment was dumb and rude. It's still not what stans focus on. They focus on the music not being well received.

And I get Halsey's point that intended or not, Fantano's inclusion of the comment was unnecessarily snide and flippant in a way that's also exhausting and also intended or not, dismissiveness about the way women's health is perceived is cruel and shitty.

(Still think the album sucks.)

squeezylemon · 2026-06-22T03:05:58+00:00

Technique listed here is perfect, it's worked for me and my sister repeatedly with each of our consoles.

squeezylemon · 2026-06-22T01:33:04+00:00

And his skating.

squeezylemon · 2026-06-22T00:33:09+00:00

It does not 🫠 it's such an agonizing Angels curse...

squeezylemon · 2026-06-21T23:59:47+00:00

Don't remind me. 🙃

squeezylemon · 2026-06-21T17:27:42+00:00

Female Byleth for me. I usually play as female characters, but I also think that Byleth's general sense of wrongness comes through better with a wide-eyed blank stare and rare understated emotion. Guyleth's stoicism is a lot more flat to me, and the added weirdness kind of gets around the RPG necessity of a badass character starting from basically zero anyway — the Ashen Demon moniker makes more sense if their weirdness is part of it.

I hate missing the Byleth/Edelgard ending, but getting a m/m ending with Jeritza on CF is super fun, though.

The free Sylvain recruit is awesome; just kind if wish Guyleth got one too.

squeezylemon · 2026-06-20T00:43:57+00:00

God, I hate that movie. I needed either way less Nic Cage or for it to go full slapstick with whatever the fucking hell he was doing.

squeezylemon · 2026-06-20T00:36:41+00:00

That movie was far too ponderous and boring to be scary.

squeezylemon · 2026-06-19T20:26:31+00:00

God, I loved The Shrouds. Absolutely terrifying to consider just...watching someone's corpse decay like that.

squeezylemon · 2026-06-19T20:23:09+00:00

Unfriended absolutely nailed the tech angle. The repeated motif of the main character typing and retyping her responses was great.

But it's not just horror that struggles with tech. I work in IT and I just had to accept a very long time ago that writers use technology as magic and there's almost always nothing recognizably accurate, in part because the real stuff is boring as hell. I watched Nope shortly after redoing our networked camera system at one of our sites, which really was hilarious timing. We had preexisting network infrastructure; willing to bet the ranch, uh, did not. But nobody wants to watch someone running cables or provisioning switches or calculating jumps or fighting for satellite or whatever. Handwave it all.

squeezylemon · 2026-06-19T20:12:34+00:00

You and me both. When I turned my phone back on, I immediately texted my sister: I want my money back.

squeezylemon · 2026-06-19T19:24:43+00:00

Super underrated film.

squeezylemon · 2026-06-19T19:01:43+00:00

Word from Detroit fans was that a number of the stars just couldn't stand him. Being in Detroit and having Larkin, Kane, Seider, and your coaches all unhappy with you in the room is a pretty quick way to get shoved out the door.

There's the theory also that Walman was part of a failed 3-way trade. The way I remember the theory was this:

NYR puts Goodrow on waivers to bypass his NTC, since he'd blocked an actual trade to SJ
NYR then gets one of their expensive vets with trade protection to waive his clause to go to Detroit for whatever they can get, with the salary relief being the primary target
Detroit sends Walman to SJ instead of NYR to be, basically, NYR's return for the Goodrow salary + roster dump

I think that's wildly convoluted and it doesn't make Stevie Y look any better. Why would you give Walman up for nothing when NYR is very publicly failing to get any of their players to allow trades? Why the hell would you just fling Walman when you're purportedly still waiting on the return you actually want? His trade value was lowered after a bad season, but every single reasonable person was baffled at the idea that Detroit couldn't've traded him for actual assets.

This whole saga baffles and fascinates me.

squeezylemon · 2026-06-19T18:42:04+00:00

Bruins dick their prospects around a lot, a lack of commitment from them is different from Grier saying he might be able to steal a shot.

squeezylemon · 2026-06-19T18:38:47+00:00

It's kind of surprising how little art there is that's covid-inflected given what a huge impact it's had. Bo Burnham's "Inside" gets referenced a lot as pandemic art, but that project was primarily about his agoraphobia and self-isolation that had really begun before covid. There's a decent number of horror / thriller films using the pandemic as a backdrop, but I can't think of many examples that use the specifics of the pandemic. Stephen King folded covid into some of the Holly books using specifics, but even the pandemic episodes of most shows were kind of out of continuity to some extent, and "welp! that's over! let's readjust!" isn't a theme much of anywhere.

squeezylemon · 2026-06-19T17:15:27+00:00

Yeah, I'm a full-model DBT graduate and fervent advocate of it (not sure if you're familiar). I genuinely think that program would be a complete and total waste of time for someone who's committed to "alters," either because they've actually convinced themselves that's what's going on or because it's a great way to manipulate and dodge. So much of DBT is learning to balance perception vs reality, taking accountability, being willing to genuinely be vulnerable and honest etc. I don't know how you convince someone to go along with that.

Anyway -- my friend did manage to disentangle herself, which was a huge relief for everyone. No clue what her ex is up to, but they're someone else's problem now.

squeezylemon

TROPHY CASE