space opera

Alchemical Boy and Murder Puppet

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Good Morning Folks! Every so often I find myself lacking gaming content… and decide that it is going to be a book update day. Today is in fact one of those days. Over the last week and some change, I have consumed three books and started on a fourth, and am going to talk about them. First up we have Last First Snow by Max Gladstone, the fourth book in the Craft Sequence and chronologically the first. I have to admit… this book combined with the fact that my Library system does not have the other books available… has halted my momentum in this series. It isn’t so much that Last First Snow is a bad book, and more that it takes the least likable character from Two Serpents Rise and then writes an entire damned book about them. It is essentially a retelling of events that are hinted at during the second book in the Craft Sequence and the whole thing feels a bit superfluous.

Sure it shows us that Elayne Kevarian is maybe a far cooler person than we had realized up to this point… but also I was sort of already on that page and the Temoc is awful… which again I am already on that page. I feel like this is a “darling” that the author should have probably dragged out into the street and killed. In the grand sequence of events in this series… I am hoping this book matters more than I realize at the moment. It very much feels like Max Gladstone has a deeper attachment to Temoc than we their readers do… kinda like Metzen and Thrall. Maybe I am wrong… maybe this character is beloved by the fanbase as a whole… but I am sorta doubting that someone who is pro-blood-sacrifice and ritualized scaring of children is a champion of the people. This is going to be a speed bump to the series as a whole for me that I am going to have to get over.

I found myself in need of a palette cleanser after that book, so I ventured slightly to the side and picked up This is How You Lose the Time War which is a collaboration between Max Gladstone and Amal El-Mohtar. As suggested by my friend Thalen, this book is sort of this weird romp of taking the classic Mad Magazine Spy vs Spy characters… and then turning that into a Romeo and Juliet story arc. The story is presented in alternating excerpts about two characters… Red and Blue are on diametrically opposed sides of a time and reality-bending Cold War. The thrill of competition leads to begrudging respect which blossoms into a romance that could never be… were it not for the fact that the two of them are adept at making the impossible appear probable. It is a really short book, only 200ish pages and once you get indoctrinated into the speech patterns of the two characters time flies by. I highly suggest you pick this up and give it a spin because I found it delightful.

Similarly recommended, this time by my friend Ace/Grace… we have the book Space Opera which is also smallish in stature coming in around 300 pages. The tagline for this book compares it to what if Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy met Eurovision and quite honestly it is apt. A more brutalist interpretation is what if the Get Schwifty episode of Rick and Morty were played a bit more seriously and expanded into an entire story arc. It is the tale of washed-up glam rockers Decibel Jones and the Absolute Zeroes, and how they saved the earth from total annihilation at the hands of the great galactic civilizations. How does a civilization prove itself to be truly sentient? Through music of course. It was a fun ride that took a bit to get into, but once I was bought in… I was there happily until the conclusion. The only thing a bit distracting about the novel is it has a propensity for rapid-fire information dumping asides… but then again so did Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy so maybe that is just fit for form.

Now I am working my way through Middlegame which is in itself part of a larger series… that admittedly I am probably going to dive into as well. It also has this whole story-within-a-story thing going on… which has spun off into its own book series. I admit though… the first night that I started this book I struggled considerably because it spends a lot of time introducing you to some deeply unlikeable characters. Last night however I broke through the surface and met the adorable Roger and Dodger… two small genius potatoes that I want to protect with all my life. I am glad I suffered through a maniacal alchemy boy and his murder puppet in order to get to the good bits. It definitely feels like one of those novels where every statement is purposeful as we are carefully working our way toward some grand denouement. While I had wobbly legs for a bit… I am very much on board now and will see this through.

Finishing Middlegame will take me to 48 books this year and that seems like a reasonable number. Sure it would be nice to maybe push that to 50 for clean divisible by ten goodness… but I am finding myself craving some narrative gaming. A lot of this has been me listening to audiobooks while playing mechanically enjoyable games that don’t require the narrative centers of my brain. I think I want to spend some time before the close of the year visiting some of the wealth of games that came out in 2023. I feel like I want to start Baldur’s Gate 3 over from scratch, and maybe roll something that can talk to animals as I seem to have missed out on a major part of the game.

Week In Gaming 11/29/2015

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Leak Testing

At this point it has been raining for roughly four days nonstop, and at the same time been hovering near freezing.  This has seriously harmed any desire I had to go out into the world and do anything.  As a result however we have a bunch of errands that we HAVE to do today, in order to return to being fully functional human beings in the real world.  I also cannot believe tomorrow… we have to go exist in the real world again.  This has been one of the most chill holiday weekends we have had in years, but then you realize… the reason why it is so chill.  The last decade has had a horrible cost on our combined families, and quite honestly… we just don’t have the people we used to.  We are doing good to get a single Thanksgiving or Christmas per side of the family, let alone the four or five that we used to have to hit when we first got married.  My mom used to say to us, that we would miss these family get togethers when they were gone… and she was absolutely right.  I miss the people… but I do not miss in any way the stress of feeling like we had to appease everyone.

The other thing that is awesome about this weekend… is it is essentially the first time in a month we have not had strange people banging on our house.  Wednesday day the contractors did the final walkaround, and there are still a few things… but for the most part we are done.  The dumpster has been removed from the driveway, and we can once again park our vehicles in our own damned driveway.  The positive about four days of nonstop rain is I feel like it has thoroughly leak tested the house.  All of the old leaks are gone, and thankfully thus far we have yet to find any “new” leaks.  I like the bedroom with the door in it, because it ends up getting a lot darker during the day which makes taking naps all the more enjoyable.  We still  need to weatherstrip around the edge of the door, but we can already tell that the siding and insulation have made the house significantly more temperature stable.  We set a temperature on the thermostat and the heater rarely kicks on to bring it up to temperature… whereas previously during the winter the heater would almost constantly run making my upstairs office unbearable.  Which means maybe just maybe… my office will be comfortable during the winter months, because last night when I had it shut off completely while podcasting I didn’t really get hot at all.

World of Warcraft

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This week for better or worse has been all about comfort gaming for me… and with that a return to the World of Warcraft.  At this point last week I was mostly fighting the desire to log in… and failing ultimately playing my sub level 20 characters for free.  This week I have dove head first into the timesink, and used my free boost to 100 to create a Tauren Paladin for the purpose of playing with my horde side friends.  I’ve not really played much horde since the early days of Warcraft, and the only time I had a at level cap character was during Wrath of the Lich King when I was raiding a bit with Batteries Not Included… the raid group that would ultimately form the majority of Facepull the horde guild I am in now.  I’ve always said at one point or another I would level another character so I could hang out with some of the excellent people on that side of the fence.  Now after doing so for just a little bit I am kinda kicking myself for not doing it sooner.  I’ve never bought into the Horde versus Alliance rhetoric… but it just feels like people are friendlier Horde side.

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There have been three separate occasions where I have been out in Tanaan Jungle, and got overwhelmed… only to find another Horde healer dropping down from above and healing me.  One of them I ended up thanking them and having a forty minute conversation about the various people we know from the early days of Argent Dawn.  It always felt like the Horde at least on Argent Dawn was more closely connected than the Alliance side… and I always assumed in part it was due to the fact that they were massively outnumbered.  With the grand merging of realms that feels less true, especially since we are in the same battle group as the Alea Iacta Est horde mega guild.  That said it does feel like people are more willing to help out other players, especially when you are running around as a giant cow.  There is a certain kinship that Tauren seem to have for their other “beefy brethren” as one of the folks that helped me out put it.  I still love my Ally characters, but for once I feel like I have a horde character that feels good and natural to me.  Maybe I see some race changes to Tauren in my future… because there is just something appealing to being an adorable lumbering bull.

EVE

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As a side project I have been playing some EVE on the free trial.  I was drafted as an EVE virgin, even though I played a bit during the alpha and beta tests eons ago.  My experience so far has not been without issues…  namely there is apparently a known bug that can happen during character creation.  When you are creating your character, you have to have a piece of clothing selected for every slot…  problem being as you can see on the right side bar there is no drop down for “Bottom”.  I did not find this out until I had already spent a significant amount of time sculpting my face.  I also thought it was a little odd that I only had one hairstyle, but I thought maybe that had something to do with the fact that I was a free account, and that when you purchased an account maybe it unlocked additional styles.  However after not being able to move forward I did some digging and this is a bug that has been regularly reported since around 2011.  Somewhat shocking that something like that has been allowed to stick around the game this long.

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On attempt number two of creating a character… I made sure that every drop down had something in it before really starting the process.  I ended up going in a completely different direction … namely my own take on Dave Lister from Red Dwarf.  Though I am sure no one would really notice that unless I specifically pointed it out.  I named my character “Bel Ghast” and set out into the world to see how the game had changed.  Ironically the game works pretty much exactly like I remembered it, but the big thing I did not remember was just how slow the pace is.  In many ways it reminds me of the original Everquest where every action has a certain amount of downtime in it.  I immediately fell back into my old habits, which were to upgrade my ship… to carry more ore… to allow me to save up money to buy more interesting things.  The problem being is I have hit the 5 hour wall that Tam has talked about… where you need to pour about ten more hours into the game before you can do anything interesting.  There is a place where the prices for the things you want jump from being 10k isk, to 500k isk… to 2.5m isk.  So now I am in this gulf where I am questioning my will to push through it.  Additionally I am struggling finding new areas to “hunt” in like the Rogue Cloning Facility.  I can oneshot pretty much every ship in that area, but feel like I need to find something bigger to test my weapons on, but not sure where to find it.