In August of 2010, people finally got fed up with Caius Caligula telling them about all the books he read, so he repurposed what was an angry rant blog and started doing book reviews instead. Here he has continued, through Schedule Slip, a move to Tumblr, and a lack of anyone caring what was said, to review weird fiction books for anyone who would care to read. Recently, due to a habit of going to conventions and generally faffing about, Caius has added articles about the various places he goes to and faffs about, including an anime con and a book expo. He plans to do more of this sort of thing. The reviews are strange, normally starting with a "how I found this" anecdote, and Wall of Text usually applies. Now back and updating weekly on both sites.
Blog can be found here
, though that one is missing most of the "state of the blog" stuff. A more complete archive can be found here.
Geek Rage provides examples of:
- Aborted Arc: After the Schedule Slip, a lot of the "Next time" stuff kind of tended to get lost in the shuffle.
- Accentuate the Negative: Mostly inverted, with the exception of the review for The Magicians and Ghosts of Manhattan.
- Affectionate Parody: The colors used in his House of Leaves review.
- All Anime Is Naughty Tentacles: The blog's tagline reads "We are Cthulhu, You are Japan", referencing this and Kaiju
- The Artifact: The title of the blog is left over from its old days as a Rant Blog. Caius just never changed it.
- Catchphrase: "And then things get weird."
- Also: "Okay, the rundown is as follows."
- Caustic Critic: Inverted most times. He seems to enjoy almost every book he reads, with a few special cases, which he apologizes for.
- Color-Coded for Your Convenience: In the old days. Reviews were colored green, site stuff was colored red, and personal comments were neutral-colored.
- Cut His Heart Out with a Spoon: Threatens this on occasion. Notable is Rod Rees and George Mann
- Deadpan Snarker: Mostly in the footnotes, but the con accounts get a decent helping of this
- Footnote Fever: More and more common after May 2011, as there seem to be footnotes on every review. During his NekoCon 2012 article, he actually runs out of footnotes and starts using "^"
- Names to Run Away from Really Fast: The Most Esteemed and Nefarious Mr. Ellis, Destroyer of Worlds (Mr. Ellis for short)
- The Nicknamer: Become enough of a recurring character in his work, and he will probably nickname you something.
- Purple Prose: You can usually tell when a bad review is coming when the writing style shifts towards this
- Precision F-Strike: Once in every bad review. Lampshaded heavily.
- Running Gag: In his NYCC articles."Dicks."
- Considering how long he let the joke go during the last part of the article, could count as a Brick Joke
- Calling his friends "Greg", except for the regular characters seems to be an infrequent one.
- Self-Deprecation: Every time Caius does a video or a personal article, expect at least one crack about his weight, physical appearance, abhorrent personality, or lack of a social life.
- Shout-Out: The NekoCon 2012 title is one to Hunter S. Thompson
- Take That!: James Joyce, Ayn Rand, George Mann, Lev Grossman, Tumblr's formatting issues (said formatting issue jokes also doubling as Biting-the-Hand Humor).
- Viewers Are Geniuses: Tosses off obscure literary, philosophy, and film references almost once a review
- Wall of Text: Every review is a load of this.
