Monthly Roundup: January 2026
What I Did
I might still be unemployed, but at least I've ticked off one of 2026's goals—getting a new pair of spectacles.
Started learning Lua (so many things I don't understand, but somehow I understand a bit, thanks to learning a little JavaScript a while ago). I really could've been a professional tech sis…
Blog Posts from Last Month
What I Read
The List of Suspicious Things, Jennie Godfrey
- The author tried to tackle too many themes and some characters weren't needed. The ending also pissed me off immensely. If you really want to read coming-of-age for girls, Jacqueline Wilson does it beautifully.
Vanguards Union, #1, 2:
If you didn't know, Nigeria has our own Captain America, in the form of Guardian Prime, by Comic Republic. We also have something like the Avengers, the Vanguards?
There are 9 issues of the Might of Guardian Prime before this series starts, but I just jumped straight into this one. It's not too hard to follow along, especially since I already know some of the characters from the chibi comedy comics, Hero Kekere.
Having one of the characters be a Tinubu descended from Efunroye Tinubu probably hasn't aged well, even if it's not clear whether the current president is her descendant. Given that Madam Tinubu was allegedly a slave trader, it's still not a great choice either way.
The art is not especially beautiful and the characters are indistinguishable from each other. Maybe that's why I love Mami Wata and the gods—even without much detailing, it's obvious who I'm looking at from their features and their clothes.
It is true that a prophet is not celebrated in his hometown, because I had to fight the urge to put down this series many times out of secondhand embarrassment. We must give Comic Republic grace, and not compare them to the already well-established Western/Japanese comic industry, even though that's hard to do.
Another issue with CR stuff is how short each issue is. Barely anything happens in one issue, even though one issue is about 24 pages. I don't read DC/Marvel comics, so I may be overestimating how long a regular superhero comic would be.
Props to them for having everything online for free—at least, I think they're still online. A recent visit to their site resulted in having to sign up (only with a Google account, for some reason) or log in to read comics.They're no longer free to read. Now you can only read the first three chapters of each comic for free before paying to view the rest. Huh. I'm suddenly grateful for my need to archive stuff for offline reading, because I have a bunch of their comics saved as pdfs (FOR PERSONAL USE O! I'M NOT SELLING OR REDISTRIBUTING ANYTHING PLSSS). Unfortunately I don't have all of the Hero Kekere series.
What I Played
I have a lot of games on my phone, but there are various reasons I don't want to play any of them. Emulating console games (Nintendo DS, SNES etc) allows me to have a wider library of games even with limited space, especially since older console games tend to be less than 300 MB, so I've been playing more emulated games.
- MySims: This is a truly cosy game. It ran glacially on my phone but is much faster on my laptop, so I'm enjoying it.
Ace Attorney Investigations - Miles Edgeworth: I have a love-hate relationship with visual novels. I know they're not all dating sims, but that's what comes to mind whenever I hear 'visual novel', even though I've played about 2 non-romance VNs. Ace Attorney is one of the most famous VNs, dealing more with investigations and solving cases (I think). Decided to pick it up and I'm having fun. This is the sixth game in the series but I'm not having any trouble understanding what's happening, although this might be due to having some knowledge of the characters already.
The Sims 2, The Sims 2 - Castaway: I've always wanted to try out The Sims 4, but the closest thing I've gotten to it is Virtual Families 2. The DS games are much more lightweight, and while I'm not getting the free-roam, free-building experience TS4 has, this is also still fun.
Hungry Cat Nonogram: As the name implies, it's a nonogram app with cats you can feed. It's nice to have a virtual cat in the corner of my screen while I solve the nonogram, even if the cat dozes off sometimes while I rack my brains.
What I Watched
Abbott Elementary, S1 & 2
Started Steven Universe but gave up quickly after three episodes.
insert deleted rant about the art style and steven being annoying and is the navel gem supposed to be funny?Samurai Jack: I'm rewatching this so I can catch up with the newer episodes, but I've only watched one episode so far.
Heat (1995): Note that the rest of this movie 'review' is just a rant about it. Skip to the TLDR section or the next bullet point if you don't want to read all that.
I added this to my watchlist because I wanted to see more heist movies and it was rated 8.something on IMDB. Unfortunately, like the original Mad Max movie, I have learned that just because something is highly acclaimed or people look back on it with fondness ≠ a good movie.
This movie was filled with a lot of unnecessary scenes and characters (it's 2 hours 50 mins long, for what?), and maybe it's just me but all the female characters in this movie (young and old) only exist as accessories for the men of this movie. They fit into neat boxes: daughter, wife, love interest, convenient plot device and I'm not interested in them one bit. To be fair, I'm not interested in any of these characters, man or woman.
Somehow the criminal mastermind is more likeable than the detective, who comes across as someone who feels he's doing such a service to humanity by confronting criminals everyday that he's earned the right to not be a good anything (husband, father, funny guy) but a good detective.
Even more embarrassing was the scene with the dead girl's mother crossing the yellow tape to see her daughter's corpse and Mr. Detective kept hugging her to calm her down. For some reason it worked instead of agitating her further. Dunno how believable it was but I had to skip forward, too embarrassed for everybody involved in that scene. He also does this hugging thing with his wife when their daughter is in the hospital.
I guess this movie was a big deal because Al Pacino and Robert De Niro played against each other in the lead roles but I have no idea who these men are besides having heard their names a few times. I don't care about them either, so without the hype of this the movie doesn't do well as a story or as a perforsmance. If you really want fiction about intelligent men going up against each other, read the Holmes books where Moriarty (and even Irene Adler, I guess) is involved. Much more chemistry than this.
I did like the look of it though. Very reminiscient of its time period. The soundtrack is also what you would expect, lots of guitars wailing. It's one of the only things I like about this movie.
There wasn't even a chase scene. All the chasing was on foot. Even more irritating was the gunfight and bullet peppering they were doing in broad daylight, with civilians around. The criminals clearly don't care but the police should know better. I guess if you asked the detective he'd say it's all for the greater good.
- Really though, where are the car chases? How did the criminal mastermind run to the airport on foot, at his age? Why does nobody drive instead of legging it?
"You can bang my wife if you want to but don't watch my TV!" Is this supposed to be an iconic line? Was it supposed to make us feel how manly and hardboiled he was? It just sounds ridiculous.
Moral Lessons:
As a woman, have your own money so that when your male-pattern-balding armed robber husband gets shot by the police and has to go on the run, you and your very cute baby can have a good life on your own without having to rely on your partner-in-adultery to take care of you.
As a woman, make sure you don't date a criminal. The money may be good initially (if there's even money), but it's not worth ruining your life and potentially going to prison for being an accessory.
As a manly man, if women are crying or being hysterical, hug them and turn them around, directing them away from their intended target, and watch them calm down. It's a manly magic.
TLDR: Cops vs smart robbers + a whole lot of unnecessary drama and scenes in between. Too long, and overhyped. Great OST though.
No Way Through: Funke Akindele is a driver for drug mules who has to spy on her boss for the NDLEA. I have no idea why Nollywood insists on copying Hollywood action movie shenanigans when it's completely unrealistic in our setting. No disbelief can be suspended when an NDLEA agent is moving like James Bond.
Now You See Me: Now You Don't: If you like the first movie just don't bother with both sequels. I want the time I spent watching this back. There were too many main characters for the paltry amount of magic done.
Fackham Hall: Started exceptionally well, but the humour dried up towards the end (the writers seem to love vulgar jokes but at some point doesn't it get tiring?). Some jokes might fly over your head if you don't know what they're referencing e.g. the Bechdel sisters always talking about men (referencing the Bechdel test1), Tolkien meeting Bill Bobaggins, all the anachronisms, but it was still funny. Even though I rated this a 6/10, I'm definitely going to rewatch this because I laughed so much at the start.
- I rewatched Epithet Erased—it's a low-budget TTRPG2 actual play web series (similar to Critical Role's Vox Machina, but without the animation of that series. seriously, don't expect much from this), in a world where some of the population have Epithets (powers, basically). I love the ending song, Great At Crime, but I can't objectively evaluate how good this show is because I have too pink of a filter for it. It's all free on YouTube though, if anyone's interested.
Interesting Links
Adding to the list of daily web games I infrequently play, here's Gisnep. It's similar to Hangman (or Hangaroo, if you ever played that). You simply fill in the letters of a quote. There's no punishment for failure, but the challenge, like Wordle, is to complete it in the fastest time possible.
Depending on what side of social media you're on, personal curriculums have been trending for a while. I don't think it's anything revolutionary, we've always had renaissance men and women, people with multiple interests, or polymaths. I guess it's simply presenting the idea of learning multiple things in a new way.
Learn how to make jollof rice, the scientific way: I've always had a lot of questions about why we do things the way we do them, irrespective of an ancestor whispering when to add spices or not. This was an interesting discovery.
This video will make you angry: It didn't make me angry, but that's what the creator is trying to say, with respect to ragebait and similar phenomena. I've always said to just waka pass instead of engaging with some posts on social media, but this video makes it a lot clearer.
You are Insignificant. That's a Good Thing.: This reminds me of the 'nanu of small' concept I read about in a children's book long ago. Can't remember the name, but yeah.
if you love it, download it: made even more relevant by my discovery that Comic Republic's comics are no longer completely free to read.
Other Stuff I'd Like to Share
LocalSend is much better for sharing files between devices (phone-to-phone, phone-to-computer) than KDEConnect. I'd have gotten rid of KDEConnect, but it has more functions than just sharing files (send my clipboard contents between devices, receive notifications from my phone on my laptop etc).
If you know highlife, you definitely know Chief Osita Osadebe. I now know he has a son, who's also doing highlife. Here's Okwy Osadebe singing Dozie Obodo (Ndi Ochichi).
Standard Ebooks offers legally free, public domain ebooks in a much more beautiful format than Project Gutenberg. If, like me, aesthetics matter a lot to you, check out the site.
From Wikipedia: "The Bechdel test asks whether a work of fiction features at least two women who have a conversation about something other than a man. It is named after Alison Bechdel, who credited her friend Liz Wallace and Virginia Woolf as its sources."↩
Stands for 'tabletop roleplaying game' (like Dungeons and Dragons).↩