Terrible Book Club

Paris was on a walk in Minnesota last year and decided to look inside a Little Free Library on the road. Within it, she found Emblem: Unity, flipped it open to a random page, and knew the luck of Terriblo was with her that day.

Content Warnings: In addition to our usual barnyard language, this episode includes discussions around animal violence, parental abuse, bad mental health advice, and suicide.

Our Patron Lynn chose this book as their once-per-year reward! Check out our Patreon here to get this and other rewards for yourself.

No substantial Content Warnings this week - brief mentions of death and terrorist attacks/shootings, and discussion of an infamous scene from the movie Blue Velvet but otherwise you’ve got nothing but our usual barnyard language to be concerned about.

Armed with our own childhood experiences of playing Nintendo games and Super Mario, we felt plenty prepared to dive into Bob Chipman's Super Mario Bros 3: Brick by Brick. Part text walk-through, part memoir, and part video game history retrospective, this book tried to do too much in its 208 pages. The author should've committed to one of these paths in a shorter form or found a better way to weave all three into a much longer, much more detailed narrative.

Chipman misses the opportunity to connect with his audience by avoiding deeper discussions of his own life and feelings. Strangely, the few times he does get more personal, he directs that emotion towards Mario and Shigeru Miyamoto and the unrefined phrasing of these moments is often uncomfortable. Like many books we've read, this book is in desperate need of an editor who would likely have caught these things and prevented them (along with some other inappropriate comparisons, spelling, and formatting mistakes) from making it to print.

We take a break from Patron's Choice episodes this week to discuss HYDRATE RIGHT!: The Effective Way To Drink Water by Dr. Lesley Ike. Chris found this on a recent fateful dive into the “Short Reads” category on Amazon and, well...how could we pass this up?

Content Warnings: In addition to our usual barnyard language, this episode includes mildly gross body/medical talk.

For this week's Patron's Choice episode, we read RALPH 124C 41+: A Romance of the Year 2660 by Hugo Gernsback for our Patron Patricia. A guy in 1911 had a lot of cool technological ideas but unfortunately decided to publish them within a silly, pulpy hero's journey.

Content Warnings: In addition to our usual barnyard language, this episode includes discussion of kidnapping and mild violence.

Chris went on another deep dive into the “Short Reads” category on Amazon and found Dating & Crypto, a brand new self-help guide which promises to teach you how to use cryptocurrency to boost your dating game. Although we learned nothing useful about crypto or dating, we did learn that a side hustle making low-level e-books on Amazon for $9.99 might be worth pursuing.

Content Warnings: In addition to our usual barnyard language, today’s episode includes discussion of heteronormative dating stereotypes and the usual gendered weirdness that comes along with that.