Booktalk

The Last Watch

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Over Christmas Break my wife discovered the Libby App, and as I wrote earlier this month it prompted us to get a library card for the first time in over a decade. I’ve always loved libraries, but they never really fit neatly into my adult life. Books are friends and bookstores are among the most friendly places I can think of to be in life. However I do not read anywhere near as often as I might like, and while I am well-read from a classical standpoint, I’ve done a pretty shit job of working books into my routines. Without really meaning it seems like “reading more” has become my New Year’s resolution. Since Christmas, I have consumed five books so far, and seem to show no signs of slowing. At this point, I’ve worked on catching up to the Dresden Files series and have finished off Skin Game, and Peace Talks, and am waiting on my hold to come open for Battle Grounds. After having it recommended so many times I have finished Gideon the Ninth and Harrow the Ninth and similarly wait for Nona the Ninth the latest book in that series to become available through my library hold.

This would be the primary issue with relying upon the public library system for your book consumption, that there will be periods of time when you are waiting around for the next book to become available. I’ve greatly enjoyed this little tradition that I have started and did not want to lose momentum, so this lead me to go fishing for the next book. Something you have to understand about my tendencies as a reader is that I generally find a book series that I enjoy… and then consume everything by that author. So my instinct is to focus fire a single series and see it until its conclusion, but as I said the hold queue doesn’t exactly make that viable. As a result, I started sifting around in the Libby App for books that were currently available and stumbled onto a recommendation engine of sorts (that admittedly I have never found again). It suggested that If I liked Harry Dresden and Harrowhark Nonagesemus then maybe I would like The Last Watch by J.S. Dewes.

I am not entirely certain WHY the recommendation engine picked this specific book, but I am glad that it did because I’ve enjoyed it and now the sequel that I started a few days ago. Effectively this book is deeply drift-compatible with Halo, ODST, and maybe bits and pieces of the Mass Effect universe specifically from the military aspect and maybe a little Enders Game. Effectively it is a military tale of a fish out of water who was forced into service to effectively dispose of him quietly. In this universe, humanity has fought a sort of forever war against an elder insectoid race called the Viators. It turns out humanity was extremely good at adapting their technology and using it against them. While at the time of the novel the last of the Viators are thought to be extinct… admittedly through a human-led xenocide.

Sentinel, Sentinel at the black,
Do not blink or turn your back,
You must stand ready to stem the tide,
Lest Viators come to cross the Divide.

Nursery Rhyme

On the edge of the known universe lies a gravitational anomaly known as “The Divide”. In this setting, the universe stopped expanding and settled onto fixed borders with this uncrossable boundary laying at the far edges. Urban legend states that the Viator feel arrived from the other side of it, and as a result, there lies situated in deep starless black space a fleet of abandoned battleships, each crewed by a branch of the service called the Sentinels. Effectively the Sentinels are like The Night’s Watch from Game of Thrones and are made up largely of folks who were drummed out of normal service for one reason or another. They are stranded at this post, on ancient space hulk relics that have had their FTL and Impulse drives disabled to effectively keep anyone from escaping.

The novel itself centers around two primary characters, and each chapter alternates perspectives between them as it weaves the story around the shifts in voice. First up is Cavlon Mercer, a literal corporate prince in line to take over the family business, but one that has embarrassed his grandfather to the point of being “disappeared”. Having no military experience, he is shuffled out of the core worlds and out onto this remote posting, where he has to figure out how to be a soldier in rapid succession. Then you have Adequin Rake an Excubitor and commanding officer of the SCL Argus, the vessel stranded as a floating fortress on the edge of The Divide. She was a war hero, a member of the Titans… something similar to the Spartans from Halo, and one who made a few decisions that she was being punished for by being marooned in this command.

I don’t really want to dive too deeply into the core story arc, because I found it interesting to see it unfold in front of me. The novel does not go in a direction you think it might but also carves out its own path that I found deeply compelling. It is admittedly a bit of a slow start because Cavlon is very unlikeable in that first chapter, and continues to largely be unlikeable for quite some time. By about chapter five or six, however, I was completely hooked and needed to know how things were going to shake out in the end. if anything I have said so far piqued your interest, then you might check this one out. Right now “The Divide” series is an unfinished story arc with two books currently available and a third on its way. There is a novel coming out in march that is disconnected from The Divide series called Rubicon which also sounds interesting.

Unfortunately, the Library system does not have the audiobook for the next part of this series, so I opted to read it the old-fashioned way. This is where my previous pattern of consumption breaks down a bit because I had been listening to Audiobooks while I played games as a comfy dual activity engaging different parts of my brain with each. Now that I am falling back to the text, however, I traditionally only read from the bed which means after a few nights I am on the ninth chapter. I read relatively slowly at least compared to my wife, so I’ve always felt pressure to be able to consume a book in the amount of time allowed by a library loan. I am equally hooked on this second book as I was on the first, so I might actually start choosing to read over playing a game in the evenings in order to speed up the consumption process. I would use GoodReads to track my progress, but since my wife is way more prolific than I am… and we use the same Amazon account… it is largely littered with her books.

Any unknown amount of time ago (okay not unknown, my profile says 8 months ago)… I set up a Bookwyrm profile so I am likely going to be using that for tracking my book consumption. For those who might be unaware, one of the many projects on the Fediverse that is not Mastodon is a Bookwyrm which serves as a federated alternative to something like Good Reads. You can follow Bookwyrm profiles just like you could any other federated account with an @username@instancename type structure. I am not sure if it will be a purely manual process or if there is a way to maybe have my Libby App update it. Whatever the case it is a thing I plan on sorting out today. I have no real long-term goals other than the chew through the backlog of things people have suggested to me over the years but I never quite got around to consuming.

Forever Shifting Focus

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Good Morning Friends! Sometimes in my life, I fall into a virtuous pattern in life that makes me immensely happy. I am still deeply engaged in Path of Exile, but it is more than just that. Since coming back from the holiday break I have been spending my evenings futzing around in Delve while listening to an Audiobook. So many of the games that I play are mechanically enjoyable but not necessarily narratively engaging. So it has long been my habit to be doing two things at the same time. Often this is listening to a YouTube video, specifically a long-form pseudo-documentary but more recently it has been consuming books. I talked awhile back about the Libby App, and granting me easy access to digital books and in my specific case a trove of audiobooks.

Since starting this new trend I’ve consumed three books and am nearing the end of the fourth. So much of me wants to say “read” because that is normally how you talk about a book. I don’t have a great vernacular for audiobooks because “listening” to a book seems not quite right for the process. Essentially my focus is entirely on the book that is playing out in a wonderful radio play style audio drama, and the game itself is just something I am also doing with my time. Not listed above is Skin Game also in the Harry Dresden series, which I had purchased when it came out and had laying around. I never got around to catching up and am doing so now. I’ve got holds in place for the next Dresden novel Battleground as well as one for Nona the Ninth the next book in the Locked Tomb series. I am uncertain which one of those will land first but whatever the case I think I am enjoying this process I am engaged in.

I was talking about this last night over on Mastodon/Fediverse and my friend Victor chimed in that he did not understand how I could do this. I don’t necessarily understand either to be truthful. I’ve never really been able to do just one thing at a time. If I am watching television I am also playing a game on my laptop. If I am reading, I am also listening to music or something of the sort. Part of why I hate going to the theater is that I feel like I need to be doing something else while watching the Movie. It is like I need to be doing one thing that has my focus, and another thing that is consuming all of my fidgety energies. Even if it is just running around in circles, that second activity is almost always going to be a game. As a result the games that I play the most, tend to be the games that are most mechanically focused and less focused on narrative and story. Sure I will go on a kick of playing a bunch of narrative games in a row, but my more common happy place is to be playing a game that I have shifted to muscle memory while doing something else with my greater focus.

My happy place of late has been Delve, which is a game mode within Path of Exile where you go diving down tunnels looking for treasure as you move from node to node on an underground map. Last night I found this amazing cluster of cities including three boss nodes, two of which I completed before running out of sulfite. Instead of shifting over to my mapping/bossing character, I opted to start working on a Toxic Rain Raider which is intended to be the eventual replacement for the Trickster variant that I started a while back. In both cases though, these are things that I know extremely well and understand the patterns that I need to follow, and as such, I can shift my attention to something else like the book I was “reading”. This is unfortunately just how my brain processes data best. Growing up I used to doodle incessantly to the chagrin of my teachers… who did not understand that doodling was actually allowing me to consume the content more completely.

For me, if I am “only” listening or “only” watching… I tend to zone out and lose track of what I am doing. I get bored because I am not as engaged as I want to be. There are some activities that I can’t do at the same time. For example, if I am writing I can’t listen to anything with words… because my “word center” is having its attention split between actively writing and trying to understand the words. As a result for times when I need to focus on something that is text-based… I have a stock of orchestral soundtracks to listen to. Admittedly all of this as a side note, is why I greatly prefer “dubbed” Anime because I can’t read television at the same time I am playing a video game. I am not sure if anyone else is regularly doing two or three things at the same time, but it is the thing that works for me.

Harrow the Ninth

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Good Morning Friends! I opted to take yesterday off because for me it was a holiday and I was off work, and also I was feeling like complete shit. I am either fighting off allergies turned asthma attack, or I have picked up something… but for the latter, I’ve not really been around anyone to catch anything. Over the weekend I finished up my second book from the Libby App, and it was a wild ride. I think last I said I had started Skin Game by Jim Butcher, but I abruptly paused that because my library hold came up on the next novel in the Locked Tomb series. Harrow The Ninth was a hard book to get through, because it has you questioning the events of the first novel… which ended on a bit of a frustrating cliffhanger. During at least the first fourth of the novel, I was going back and forth about whether or not Tamsyn Muir had a fucking clue what they were doing with this story. Thankfully it paid off in the end and the story that was woven between the two tales is extremely good.

Essentially between the two novels, there is a character perspective shift, from the very likable Gideon Nav to the very unlikeable Harrowhark Nonagesimus. It feels like a massive “bait and switch” at the end of the first book and the beginning of the second book, which knocks the reader off balance. However, I would assume this was all on purpose to make you now start to deeply care about Harrow and move her from the Villain column more solidly into the hero column. Now I just want to read the next one the sequence, Nona the Ninth… but the Libby App tells me it is going to be about a six-week wait. Granted the last book told me it would be a four-week wait and that is why I had started Skin Game, but my hold suddenly came available after about a week. I figure I will finish Skin Game and evaluate where I am at that point, but I might end up just buying this next book so I can consume it faster.

In other random events this weekend, it appears that Tam and a few others have been screwing around in Lord of the Rings Online. I opted to go ahead and install the game and start a brand new character, a Guardian named Belglaive on Landroval. Immediately stepping into this game feels like I went back two decades in MMORPG design, which has its ups and downs. I opted to start the recently released new character starter experience, and honestly… I think I like the Shadows of Angmar option a bit better. This is really slow-paced and I feel like I am completely disconnected from the rest of the game at the moment. With the previous experience, I could at least rush to Bree and train professions, and I guess in theory I can probably do that now… but I am trying to follow the breadcrumbs that are laid out in front of me. All told though I am enjoying myself in what feels like an anachronistic jaunt into MMORPG gaming.

In Path of Exile, I spent a bit more money… swapped out some gems for Awakened versions, and got my flasks in order so that now I am much tankier even than I was before. Righteous Fire is still really bad at bossing, and as such, I have continued trying to tweak my Fire SRS Necromancer to set it up as my bossing character. In the grand scheme of things it works… most of the time. I did a Maven Invitation last night and wrecked it as the Necro, something that I would have struggled at length on the Juggernaut. I’ve done several invitations, but it just takes forever whereas on the Necro I kept a pretty good pace as the new bosses were being released. I could pour some more funds into the character and improve this I am certain. I think my short-term goal is to keep getting levels on the Juggernaut, and I would really love to hit level 100 this season.

I officially have more currency than I have ever had before in Path of Exile. That catch is it isn’t mine. Thalen lucked into an Unrequited Love card, that at the time was going for 18 Divine Orbs. However since he got it, and when he decided to have me sell it… the price dropped considerably. I originally priced it at 18, hoping the price would go back up but in the meantime, a number of 17 Divine cards have created this price barrier that I knew we would not be breaking anytime soon. I priced it at 16.5 Divines and within moments had sold it. Now I am essentially acting as a concierge broker and Thalen sends me a link to something he wants, and I attempt to acquire it for him. I’ve set aside all of his currency and my purchases from it in a stash tab to keep it separate from everything else. This also allows me to just ignore that tab when running Exilence to see if I have any other high-value items that I should be trying to sell.

I made a bit more progress in Grim Dawn on the Soldier/Oathkeeper combination and I have to say… I am not sure if I like the build at all. I am not really enjoying myself that much, so I might fall back on playing my original level 42 Warder character which is Soldier/Shaman. I also need to try some ranged and caster options because at the moment I am just not feeling the game. I feel way more squishy than I want to feel, so I either need to kill things much faster or have better layers of defense. Unfortunately, it is nowhere near as active of a community as say Path of Exile, and while there is a build guide website it is much harder to gauge how successful a given build is going to be. Admittedly that is my lack of knowledge of the game because I am sure if you are already well indoctrinated into Grim Dawn it would be fine.

Anyways I hope you all had a most excellent weekend, and now if I can just kick this crud life would be grand. As is often the case I have way too many gaming irons in the fire at the moment. It is a much better problem to have than languishing in that “nothing I want to play” feeling.

The Libby App

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Generally speaking, I figure I am probably the last to learn about most things. This morning’s blog post is going to be one of those situations. I am assuming that all of you have already had experiences with the Libby app, but on the off chance that even one of you has not… I am going to devote a blog post to it. This next part is going to be extremely embarrassing considering that one of my oldest, longest, and “bestest” friends is a Librarian… but I’ve not had an active Library card for a few decades. As much as I love Libraries and as much time as I spent in them growing up… as an adult, they have just not been a huge part of my life. I read so slowly that the constant pressure of feeling like I have a deadline looming over my head means that in most cases I just bought books outright rather than borrowed them. Recently I discovered something called the Libby app and it has changed how I have thought about our wonderful Library system.

For those unfamiliar, it essentially acts as a glue between the physical library presence and digital services. You can log in with your Library card/Account and effectively gain access to all of the digital books and audiobooks that your library has on offer. You can configure it to connect to your Kindle account and download it directly to your e-Reader and then it also facilitates the check-in process when you are finished and removes the book from your devices. All of this honestly seems like magic and it interoperates seamlessly between a Web Client, your dedicated devices, mobile phones, and tablets. You can be consuming the same item on all of those and it will helpfully leap you forward to where you last left off, which admittedly is a huge deal for me because I often start something on my desktop and then continue it on my phone.

What I love the most however is that it grants me access to a large library full of audiobooks. I am not sure what it is exactly about the audiobook experience that I love so much. I can remember as a kid loving story time and listening attentively as teachers read to me in class. My wife cannot handle audiobooks, but she is very much NOT an auditory learner but for me… I love throwing one on while I am doing something else. This week I’ve been listening to Gideon The Ninth while playing Path of Exile because I have more or less committed the game to muscle memory and can devote my processing resources to consuming the book. So I have been shifting back and forth between listening to it while working during the day and listening to it while playing at night, all without the app really missing a beat.

One of the things that are somewhat cool is the fact that you can in theory be connected to multiple library systems at the same time. I am extremely lucky in that the Tulsa City-County Library system is vast and expands out into many of the communities surrounding the greater metro area. However, I noticed that Bartlesville a larger town nearby also supports the Libby app under their digital services, which means, in theory, I could go there and get a library card and then effectively merge the reach of both library systems together. Again I am going to assume that I am the last to know any of this, but like I said at the beginning of the post I figured it was cool enough that I would devote a blog post to talking about it just in case someone else out there was a similar late bloomer. It seems silly but this has very much revitalized how I consume books and made me want to consume more of them.

As far as Gideon the Ninth, I kinda love it so far. I am not even sure how I would describe it to someone else, but a Dune meets a Death Metal Harry Potter sort of sprung to mind. While I would never give a dime to anything that might benefit the horrible Terfmaster general that is J.K. Rowling, I cannot discount how important the Harry Potter series was to me and how it still sorta colors how I view other media at times. Gideon The Ninth is set in this weird timeline where death magic and all of its many forms effectively dictate society. I am sure I will talk about it more at length as I continue down the series but since I missed the boat when it was all the rage among my Twitter friends I am catching up. I had mentally put a pin in the title thinking that I would enjoy it and am now just experiencing it. I tend to consume series more than individual books. For example, I have been absolutely ravenous when a new Dresden novel comes out. Another book that I have pinned in my memory is The Lies of Locke Lamora, which I will probably start on once I have consumed everything in this series available.

Audio books just fit my life more easily than reading does, which makes me a little sad to be honest. I’ve never been one to choose reading over something else. That is my wife and she will happily sit in the living room and consume a stack of books in a single weekend. Me, I tend to pick at them like leftovers slowly and over time… and usually before going to sleep which means I maybe get a chapter read before sleep claims me. Audiobooks however I can easily listen to while playing one of my “forever games” like Path of Exile that does not require a lot of higher level processing from me and is more mechanical reflex and repetition than anything else. My goal for this new year is to consume more books in this manner. Since I know I have a ton of avid readers in among my followers knowing that I am greatly enjoying Gideon The Ninth and that I love Dune, Dresden, the Witcher series, and a lot of 70s/80s science fiction… feel free to give me some more modern suggestions to throw in my list to consume.