Booktalk

Yup Books and Games

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One of the challenges with this whole “goes super hard on books” pattern that I seem to be in, is that it does not exactly translate to an easy steady drip of content to write about. It feels really weird to sit down in the morning and essentially say “yup books”. From the standpoint of “talking about them when I’ve finished them” is great, but the whole me being in mid-flight thing is not exactly a delightful spectator sport. At this point, I am about half the way through Lies of Locke Lamora and it has grabbed me enough to make me want more. However, I also don’t really want to talk about the book as I am experiencing it, and rather will just batch up those thoughts once I have finished it.

One thing I did find out is that apparently there is an order of operations that must be maintained within Bookwyrm, and if you want a book to count towards your reading goals it has to hit the “read” shelf at some point. I ended up moving Nona the Ninth to my “Books of 2023” shelf and then “finished reading” and it completely skipped the goals queue. I had to do a bit of backpedaling and “finish” the book again to get it properly slotted as my 7th book of the year in my “20 books” goal. Other than that general weirdness, I am enjoying Bookwyrm quite a bit however I wish its federation worked a bit more as I was expecting. I thought maybe I would be able to follow my Bookwyrm account and then boost the comments that I leave when I finish a book. However while I am following myself, I never see any updates even when I drill down into the profile. A friend suggested that I check out Storygraph so I might dive into that at some point because it seems like it would potentially be a good recommendation engine.

I am trying to branch out a bit of late and do things that are not “Path of Exile Delve” while consuming an audiobook. So far doing events and map completion in Guild Wars 2 seems pretty drift compatible for the sort of interaction that I am looking for. Essentially an activity that flows nicely with listening to an audiobook needs to be one that is mechanically satisfying but asks nothing really of me to grasp narratively. Working on the main story or expansion quests doesn’t really fill this role, but all of the assorted drop-in group activity does beautifully. I’ve been trying to get into the habit of doing Tequatl at a minimum, and then knocking out my daily objectives and farming the three guild halls worth of resources as well as my home instance. For a long time, I have felt like I really wasn’t making much progress financially in the game, but there is a neat add-on for BlishHud that tracks “coin” earned during your session and it seems like every night I am clearing about 5 gold in an hours worth of time.

I’ve also been trying to ease back into playing Final Fantasy XIV more frequently. What I really need to do is get started on leveling my crafting or working on beast tribe quests again… but what I am actually doing is running retainer missions and fucking around liberally. One of the giant obstacles in front of me is the fact that I need to spend some serious time cleaning out my retainers and sorting out the gear that I actually might want to keep for cosmetic purposes from the dross that I should just turn in for company seals. I also noticed that apparently, I am no longer the highest possible rank in my grand company, so I guess I need to sort out how to change that. There are weird minion boxes that I cannot seem to purchase.

What I REALLY need to do is get into the Hunt Train nonsense, because they are super lucrative and also just enough activity to feel like I am doing something meaningful in the game. I have greatly enjoyed this activity in the past, and I need to probably ease back into doing it more often. It might even be a reasonable option for leveling alternate jobs. I only actually leveled Paladin to 90, but did manage to pull everything up to 80 before burning out in 2021. Hunt trains are a great way to get some gear to level those classes up easily as maxed Crystarium gear will pretty much hold you until you hit the level cap.

All of that said… I still actually am playing a lot of Path of Exile. I find the mechanical loop that I have fallen into deeply relaxing. I play the Summon Raging Spirits Necromancer until I fill up my sulfite and then play my Righteous Fire Juggernaut down in Delve until I run out of that resource again. I continue to periodically liquidate cool things I found down in the dark for profit and as a result, I have over 7000 Chaos Orbs and another 20 or so Divine Orbs. That is without me really going out of my way to do much other than these two activities, and passing up a ton of smaller trades because I am busy and don’t feel like stopping what I am doing for 5 chaos. I think more than anything I learned a lot about the trade economy in this league and feel like there will never be a point in future leagues where I struggle to gear myself.

With all of that… I somehow managed to cobble together a blog post on a day when I was not feeling particularly like blogging. Sometimes in life, you just need to start writing and eventually, it will coalesce into something hopefully worth reading. That I guess is the benefit of Tales of the Aggronaut being a blog about “me”, and less about any one particular subject. Hopefully, yall are having a delightful week out there, and if so… I hope it keeps on that trajectory until the weekend. If you are not, I hope whatever stresses are haunting you, ease the fuck up.

Nona the Ninth

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Good Morning Friends! This is going to be another mostly-book post. Whether or I like it or not, my gaming blog has veered closer and closer to a book blog over the last few weeks. In truth Tales of the Aggronaut is not a gaming blog, but a “me” blog, and when my activities shift so does it. I tend to obsess about things and right now it seems that I am obsessing over having a library card and “renting” books, and using that to knock out a bunch of things that I have been meaning to read for years. At this point since Christmas I have finished seven books, and over the weekend I knocked out the latest book in the “Locked Tomb” series by Tamsyn Muir, meaning that I am completely caught up in that series.

If Gideon the Ninth was Deathmetal Hogwarts, and Harrow the Ninth was Necromantic Battlestar Galactica, then Nona the Ninth is Spycraft Mister Rogers Neighborhood. Each novel in the series has been wildly different in part because it gives you a window into a wildly different part of this universe. I’ve tried not to really talk about a lot of details in these posts because I do not want to dive down the rabbit hole of spoilers, but I feel like I need to at least talk a little bit about the setting. Effectively in this fictional universe overlayed on top of our own universe an event happened thousands of years in the past that caused the extinction of the human race. John Gaius, the Necrolord Prime… the God Emperor of the known universe… resurrected humanity and formed the Nine Houses each with their own necromantic traits to serve as his flock.

Gideon the Ninth is a novel that dives deep into the traditions and variations among the nine houses. It is a tale woven through a trial for those assembled to figure out the process of becoming Lyctors. The second novel, Harrow the Ninth, is centered around the truth behind the throne as “God” aka John Gaius struggles against a hidden conflict that none of the nine houses were even aware of. You get an understanding of what the ruling hierarchy of the necromantic empire looks like, and get to know several of the key players. Nona the Ninth however is a novel centered around the common folk, the humans that survived the extinction event and that continue to live in fear of the empire and the nine houses. It also centers around an organization called Blood of Eden, effectively terrorists or freedom fighters depending upon your perspective.

The perspective of the novel is that of Nona, a personality that is inhabiting the body of Harrowhark Nonagesimus and is effectively going through a rapid evolution from infancy to young adolescence. Nona loves everyone, especially dogs. Nona is innocent and childlike unlike the rather severe Harrow that we came to know from the other novels in this series. This leads to a very distorted lens that this story is told from the perspective of an extremely unreliable narrator. The constant thread between the last two novels is a constant grasping for what the fuck is actually going on, and if that is not something you can handle as the pieces slowly slide into place… then you maybe want to stop with the first novel. Each novel has a mystery to be pried loose from the background infrastructure and it leads to a very wobbly and disjointed way that the tale is told until everything eventually comes into focus.

At this point, I am hooked, and I am probably going to be reading these novels forever. Each novel effectively resolves a crescendo that leaves more questions unanswered than know. We will ultimately have to wait for the next novel in the series before those questions even begin to be answered. This was not a big deal when I knew there were novels waiting patiently on me to consume, but now that I am caught up it will probably be a more tangible frustration. The next book has a name… Alecto the Ninth has a targetted release date of sometime this year, so here is hoping that the wait will not be too long.

Following wrapping up Nona the Ninth, I have now dived into The Lies of Locke Lamora another novel that I had been meaning to read for a while. At first, I was not terribly certain what I thought of this story. I tend to not really go into the whole Thieves Guild thing other than maybe the Elder Scrolls games. Now that I am settling into the story I am definitely hooked for the moment, but uncertain if this will be a setting I return to enough to consume all of the available books in the series. It feels very like David Copperfield meets Dishonored at the moment, or at least the Camorr reminds me a bit of the setting of the second game. I originally set myself the goal of 20 books during this calendar year, but I might need to revise that up a bit given that we are just now in February and have already finished seven and am now about 20% or so into the eighth.

I hope you all had a great weekend and I wish you luck in the coming week. I am trying to sort out what exactly I want to do gaming-wise. I am still playing an awful lot of Path of Exile, but am also starting to slide back into some more Guild Wars 2 and Final Fantasy XIV. I also know that Season 28 of Diablo III is just around the corner and am planning on diving into that as well. Given that I have been on this Audiobook plus Mechanically Enjoyable Game kick, I am not really sure when I will return to narrative games again.

The Exiled Fleet

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Good Morning Friends! Well, that was a bit of a whirlwind journey. Over the years I have always told myself that I am a slow reader and that I can’t consume books anywhere near as fast as my wife does. She will sit down on a good weekend day when we have nothing going on and might read three books in a single day. I started The Exiled Fleet, the second book in The Divide series on Sunday evening and wrapped it up last night before falling asleep. Granted two of those nights I stayed up until midnight reading, but still, four days for a book is a pretty good clip for me. I am beginning to think the whole “I read slowly” is another mental block much like the “I can’t do math” one that I struggled with for most of my life. This probably seems funny to a lot of people considering some of the nonsense spreadsheets that I occasionally break out when I do a deep dive into evaluating something. It is weird the baggage you carry around with you for decades, that ultimately turns out to be complete bullshit.

I don’t really want to turn this blog into a “book review” blog, but also as always, I have shared my life’s journey with you in whatever direction it takes. I’ve been using Bookwyrm lately to track my reading and this is my first five-star book on that app. The Last Watch was a good read, but it had quite a few rough edges. With The Exiled Fleet, J.S. Dewes takes the raw material of the first book and its characters and refines it into a much more enjoyable narrative experience. It is a novel less about the actions that are happening but about the challenges and growth that the cast of likable characters go through along the way. It excels at creating small tense vignettes that are set against the backdrop of a much larger intergalactic conflict. It feels for a long time like the characters are rolling a boulder up a hill, only to have it come crashing back down upon them… the stories that are woven in the moments of motion however are deeply compelling.

The reason why I burned through this book with such purpose, is that a few days into reading it… I was notified that my hold on Jim Butcher’s Battle Ground had come available from the library I am using to access the Libby App. I went to sleep last night happy in the knowledge that I could borrow that book with a clear mind and looked forward to consuming it. Then this morning… even more conflict arrived as I was pinged by the Libby App that much much longer waiting hold on Nona the Ninth, the next book in the Locked Tomb series had also come open. The queue for Battle Ground was relatively short, and there is an option in the Libby App to effectively let someone cut in line without losing your “first priority” spot in line. The queue of folks waiting on Nona the Ninth is still massive, and as a result, it felt the better call to accept the new option and wait for Battle Ground knowing that in theory, I should get it again before too much longer.

So I have my path set now, and I am looking forward to crawling into the book when I finish with work this evening. Since I am venturing forth once again into the realm of Audiobooks, that means I can play games while listening along to the story. So more likely than not I am going to be diving back into either Path of Exile or Last Epoch, which are mechanically interesting games but don’t require much in the way of narrative processing power. I could probably play Guild Wars 2 as well, but what I really want to do in that game is focus on more story… which conflicts with my ability to engage with an Audiobook. I’ve said it before, I don’t seem to have the ability to process two different sources of speech/text at the same time. If I am reading text, my brain stops listening to the incoming words from the audio.

In other news… I ripped the bandaid off. I had been planning on migrating this weekend to Gamepad.club, but after a conversation with a friend, it seemed silly that I was spending so much time hem hawing around. Why did I move? There really is no valid practical reason. One server is as good as any other server when it comes to bulk communication with your friends. However, I like the idea of being on a server that is run by someone I have a personal relationship with. Gaz is good people and we’ve known each other for ages at this point so I am happy to support his venture. It also keeps me from actually wanting to do the thing where I just run my own server. The local is pretty small, but it is extremely well federated at this point so hashtags work beautifully there thanks to him effectively being connected up with over 4000 other instances over a network of relays.

The other reason I had put things off a bit is I was honestly worried about what the long term ramifications for the instance would be if I was on it. I had fears that a very vindictive admin on a very specific gaming instance might take action to use my existence there to defederate from them. However I can no longer live my life tiptoeing around them, and just sorta have to do my own thing and hope things work out in the end. I still feel like it is only a matter of time before the current crop of moderators on that instance also find themselves excommunicated as it did for me, and my friend who stuck around after my shunning and had the exact same thing happen to them. Gaz assured me it was fine and that they would deal with the consequences of whatever happened so that finally gave me the push I needed to just do it.

Now I am looking forward to a weekend of gaming and audiobooks, and that sounds like as good of a thing as could possibly happen right now. I realize we have a few days until the weekend, but do you have any big plans? Drop me a note below.

A Very ARPG Year

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Good Morning Friends! I spent a bit of time yesterday setting up my bookwyrm profile and loading the books that I have already read this year into it. So far I dig it. Unlike Good Reads it does appear to be an entirely manual process. This morning for example I updated my progress in The Exiled Fleet and it just required me to plug in a page number that I was sitting on. As a result, I am probably not really going to be updating progress that often and simply adding a book when I start reading it and then marking it as read, and writing some general comments about my experience. The other aspect of the tool that I want to explore a bit more is using it as a cache of books that I want to read. Libby does not exactly have the best discovery engine, so my goal is to use the “To Read” section as a sort of memory-jogging mechanism when I find I am looking for something new to consume.

What I had feared might happen… has happened. I am around 60% through The Exiled Fleet and my hold for the last Dresden novel has come open. Essentially as I understand it I have three days from the time of receiving the notice to claim it or else the book goes to the next person in line and I keep my “next in line” spot. My hope is that I can push through the novel I am currently reading in the next few days so that I can go ahead and claim my spot and go back to the gaming/audiobook nonsense that I enjoy so greatly. This is the part of the library system that I do not love… is the inherent pressure of trying to churn through something in a specific amount of time. As a result last night I spend most of the evening reading rather than gaming, which was its own sort of charming. My wife is admittedly a bit flabbergasted by this sudden transformation because reading all night is her jam, not necessarily mine.

That is not to say I am doing zero gaming. I am starting to poke my head back into Guild Wars 2 a bit, because I’ve been craving that sort of gameplay. I seem to be very much in this ARPG/Action MMO mindset right now and after coming from Path of Exile, I have to admit Lord of the Rings Online was a little slow for my tastes right now. I am easing back into Guild Wars 2 by spending some time doing the world boss train. I think ultimately however I will pick up and start working on the main/expansion stories with my Ranger. I am not sure what shifted mentally but I just started enjoying running around with my Ranger a bit more than I did my Necromancer.

I’ve also been playing a bit more Last Epoch and currently am really enjoying the Acolyte class which will eventually become a Necromancer. After decades of avoiding casters like the plague… which admittedly is probably a defunct saying given that we had a plague and no one avoided it… I actually find that I enjoy casters quite a bit these days. Most of the classes that I have played in Path of Exile ultimately end up being some sort of a caster given that melee is just not great there. While I enjoyed my Paladin character in Last Epoch, I think I am enjoying being a Necromancer a bit more. With the upcoming Multiplayer release, I figured it was time for me to finally get a character to the game’s endgame. I don’t think Last Epoch will be anywhere near as rich as Path of Exile but I am hoping it will be a better “with friends” experience.

I do not exactly feel great playing Blizzard games right now. I know that there have been significant changes inside of the company, but so long as Kotick still profits from it… I feel more than a little dirty spending time on those games. That said… I will be pausing my prohibition for a bit and diving into Diablo III Season 28 soon. It looks fucking amazing and this may be the last new season we get for a while, given that Diablo IV will be launching before we see another season. I figure a lot of the live team currently supporting Diablo III will end up getting transitioned. Mostly I am really interested in the Altar of rites which is a system where you sacrifice various things and get permanent account-wide buffs. Some of these give you significant amounts of power and others are just quality of life like the ability for your pets to pick up and salvage white, blue, and yellow items. I am deeply interested in this season, and in theory… once it has run its course I will have either Multiplayer in Last Epoch or another Path of Exile league to focus on.

Basically, it feels like this is going to be a very ARPG year for me. I knew at some point I would be playing Jedi Survivor but with it being bumped back by another month yesterday that gives me a bit more wiggle room to fully dive into this nonsense.