Fallout: The Vault Dweller's Official Cookbook by Victoria Rosenthal

I am utterly unqualified to give any kind of judgement on this book, for a couple of reasons. First, it's a cookbook, and I do basically no cooking these days. (I was an OK bachelor cook, and a similarly OK make-the-basics-for-the-kids cook when they were young, but The Wife is the main cook in this house these days, and even the secondary cook is now my second child at this point - so any skills I did have are quite atrophied.)

Second, I didn't use the book for its intended purpose: I didn't cook from it. I didn't even read it word-for-word, though I'm not sure if anyone reads cookbooks that way. I did go through all of the pages, reading big chunks of it, to get the sense of what's in it, but that's not the same thing.

So: Fallout: The Vault Dweller's Official Cookbook. A line extension from the popular series of video games - which I've been playing a lot this past decade - published in 2018, presumably as part of the promotional campaign for Fallout 76, the most recent game.

It's structured like a normal cookbook, with sections on Basics, Appetizers, Soups and Stews, Sides, Mains, Dessert, and Drinks. All of the recipes are relatively normal food, generally with ingredients commonly available to North Americans and using American measurements, with "emendations" to the names of dishes and some of the ingredients to allow them to be adapted to the post-apocalyptic Fallout world. So, for example, the recipe for Mutant Mantis Marsala uses chicken in the real directions and has a note that Vault Dwellers should substitute a different meat in the blasted wasteland.

As I said, I haven't cooked from it. But it looks entirely usable - it's not a joke or a fake, it's a real cookbook with real recipes that uses Fallout names and tells the reader how to make dishes that look like food from the Fallout world. That includes a lot of the staples of the series - details on making Nuka-Cola syrup, for example, and then using that to make a range of branded drinks. Readers can also make their own Fancy Lads Snack Cakes, Deathclaw Wellingham, and InstaMash, plus lots of other things that are not as obviously "this thing from this game" but use the names of animals and NPCs in the games  to be "a dish that this person could plausibly have made."

I don't know that we will actually cook from this book. My Wife's leisure activities do not extend to that kind of video gaming, so I'm not expecting a big groundswell of interest (from me, either - I love to play Fallout games but I'm not sure that means I want to make my own Buffout and eat it). But it is fun and full of good pictures of the recipes: it's a great, very specific cookbook that could be used to make a very amusing feast for the right gathering, or just a few random recipes to throw into the mix for some family.

Hedra by Jesse Lonergan

My skills as a reviewer don't line up well with this book's strengths, so this may be a mess. I apologize up front.

Hedra is an Eisner Award-winning short wordless graphic novel by Jesse Lonergan from 2020, and I'm mostly a words person. It uses grids in a really interesting way, breaking up pages - especially at the beginning - into escalating arrays of little boxes, and masterfully leading the eye through complex layouts throughout its length. I usually write about what comics mean, but I don't think I can do that here - I'll have to instead just say what I see.

We open with a limited nuclear apocalypse - I say "limited" because we immediately see things rebuilding afterward. Some government builds a starship, and picks an astronaut to fly it. That is our main character: I assume her name is Hedra. (The title could mean something else, I suppose: maybe the name of the ship, of the other major character who shows up later, of the planet they investigate, or something even less likely. But let's assume it's our main character.)

She explores various worlds, presumably sending data back home. She's clearly diligent and good at her work. And then she sees a giant robot (this is my assumption - it's huge and humanoid and made of metal) flying through space, and follows it or coincidentally lands on the same planet next.

We see her exploring this world in more detail, and the giant robot doing the same, somewhere not too far away. We also see the planet's inhabitants, who are hostile to the giant robot. (I guess we're supposed to think of them as evil or enemies, but if a giant robot landed and started stomping around my planet, I don't think my response would be all that happy.) Hedra finds the robot, and helps him escape the locals. Both flee this planet.

Now, here's something I might have gotten wrong, or misunderstood. I thought the giant robot was roughly the same size as Hedra's ship - i.e., substantially larger than she is. But when they flee, they're the same size. Did one or the other of them change size through some skiffy mechanism? Or did I just misunderstand their initial encounter? (Is it just the locals who were tiny?)

Anyway, they fly off together, without Hedra's ship, off to the robot's home planet, where Hedra has a minor transformation of her own, and a substantial change in her mission going forward. We end with a very science-fictional iris-out.

Hedra is interesting and eye-catching and full of things to think about, told brilliantly through pure comics. I haven't seen Lonergan's comics since the very different (but also very good) All-Star a decade ago, but I'm glad to see he's still out there working, making great (and, I should mention, very Moebius-inspired) works like this one.

Portions for Foxes: Lissie

"Portions for Foxes" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song by a woman or a band led by a woman. See the introduction for more.

This week I have a big rocking song by a singer-songwriter who I was sure was going to be huge. (Shows what I know about public tastes and the music industry, I suppose. I still like my world better.)

I think I saw her performing this on TV - Craig Ferguson's late-night show, as I recall - and was so impressed I bought the record soon after. So it worked for me the way it was supposed to: maybe it did work pretty well. Maybe she's been bigger than I realized; I've already admitted I don't know much about the biz.

This is Lissie, with Shameless, a smart, rocking tune that was the lead single from her second album, back more than a decade ago.

I don't want to be famous
If I got to be shameless

This is a young person's song, ready to take on the world and tilt at windmills. It's not quite angry, but it's not happy with the world, and wants to make a difference, wants to change things. It the kind of song a young artist puts out to say "here I am, this is what I care about, this is what I wanna do - if you don't like it too bad." Lissie does all that really well here, and her energy and drive is inspiring.