Good Morning Folks. I took yesterday off and while I had planned on writing a blog post.. one never actually happened. Instead you are getting the post that I probably would have written yesterday, a day late. This weekend I finished my consumption of the Dungeon Crawler Carl series… and I have to admit I am a bit sad that it is over. This has quite possibly been the book series that I least expected to get into… and then hungrily consumed as quickly as possible after getting into the first book. I admit the whole LitRPG genre never really appealed to me… why read about playing a game when I could just be playing a game? However it can create a really interesting backdrop to tell a well written tale against, as is evidenced by the fact I just spent thirty six days tearing through this series one after another.
The premise of the series is what if you took Duke Nukem… made him lovable… gave him a talking cat companion that is even more lovable… and tossed them both into a Smash TV style Dungeon Crawl where they have to kill their way to the bottom… or die permanently because the planet has been reclaimed for resources by an external galactic bureaucracy. That is one hell of a run-on sentence, but also is about as close as I can really come to explaining the appeal of this series. What this series has in spades is heart. It has so many well written characters that you fall in love with, and genuinely want to succeed and survive… but also know that the odds are stacked against them in spite of quite a bit of literal plot armor. Princess Donut the Queen Anne Chonk is quite possibly the best sidekick ever crafted, and to call her a sidekick though is a bit of a disservice to how much of the plot revolves around her learning how to “adult”. All of the characters show deep growth over the course of the series, and even ones that you kind of sort of loath when you first encounter them… become beloved friends several books in.
What the book series has in abundance though is meaningful payoffs. There have been so many times that a loose plot thread from book one… turns into some significant event later down the line. The dungeon crawl itself has a deeply rich lore surrounding it, and has clear rules that remain in place for the entire series. There are always several different plot threads going at once, and usually colliding in the major event of the individual book. What is really fun however is looking at the artwork for each of the volumes after having finished the book… because there are always so many different moments that suddenly make perfect sense. Sometimes a book series runs out of juice… but this one only seems to be getting better the longer it runs.
On the 16th I finished up This Inevitable Ruin, and it was probably the most epic of the entire series. Even before reading it… I sort of assumed that would be the case given the plot points that were sure to be involved in this single book. It was effectively the culmination of a major event that had bee discussed in every single book of the series, and the resolution was most definitely worth the wait. Carl is a bit of a fuck up at times… and a pure Agent of Chaos… but he is OUR Agent of Chaos. Donut is occasionally very self centered… as is the case with every cat ever to exist on this planet… but she is OUR precious princess. Like I see in her actions literally hundreds of things that my own Gracie, Mollie, and Josie end up doing every day. I feel about Donut the same way that I am certain dog lovers feel about Oberon in the Kevin Hearne books.
So here is the point where I suggest you listen to the Audiobooks instead of reading them. So much of my enjoyment of this series is I think in large part to how well they are acted out by the amazing Jeff Hays of Soundbooth Theater. I decided the embed this video as an example, because it does not really give anything away or steal from you any revelations from the series. God Dammit Donut is sort of the catch phrase for Carl specifically… but other characters occasionally say it as well in the series. So here is a delightful video of Jeff shifting between 14 characters uttering that phrase, and you can see how wildly different each character feels as result. What is often even more entertaining is the in universe advertisement for Soundbooth Theater at the end of every book. These feel like the mid credit scenes in a Marvel movie, because they often have some sort of payoff for the next book in the series… that just happens to take place out of the flow of the novel itself.
The problem with finishing an amazing series… is that I always end up wanting more of it… now. From what I understand more recently there has been a year lag between volumes of the Dungeon Crawler Carl series, and since this last volume came out in November, it means I am going to have a bit of a wait on my hands. One of the other books that has been advertised throughout the audio books for Dungeon Crawler Carl, is Kaiju: Battlefield Surgeon. I love Kaiju… and I enjoyed the DCC series… and with a preposterous name like that I figured surely I would love it. The weird thing about this book is that it feels like it comes from an earlier era in Matt Dinniman’s career… when he had not quite found his voice, or more so the voice of the Dungeon Crawler Carl series. Technically this was published after the popularity of the DCC series, but I kind of wonder if this was a side project that had been shelved for a bit.
Essentially it is a very graphic bio-horror series about being trapped in a world of giant battling Kaiju and playing the support staff to keep them up and fighting. Have you ever dreamed about having an apartment in the bowel system of a giant monster? Oh yeah… me neither. It is most definitely interesting and I will have zero problem finishing it… but it is also just not really my jam. It makes me also think that maybe LitRPG is not really my genre. All of the game elements did not feel front and center in the Dungeon Crawler Carl series and instead it was more of a character driven tale. This very much feels like a book about a game, and the characters themselves seem paper thin so far. Maybe this will change over time… but so far none of the characters are particularly likeable… whereas I fell in love with Carl and Donut almost immediately. It is wild how much of a difference having POV characters that you care about makes for the reading experience.
If you have yet to be infected by the mind virus that is Dungeon Crawler Carl, I suggest you give it a shot. Matt Dinniman has a fancy new publisher and as a result all of the books are being released with more mass-market friendly covers and artwork. I think they all look pretty cool, but also do not have near the heart… nor the final payoff that the original artwork does. They do however make them look far less like graphic novels… which might have been a turn off for some readers. Whatever form you choose to consume them in… I suggest adding them to your list. Give it at least two books, because it is really in the second book that the series comes into its own. I am hooked and am probably going to be consuming these every single time a new one is released going forward. I will probably seek out another popular LitRPG book just to give the genre another chance… but I am not entirely certain reading about a game is really my jam and that DCC might have simply just been a brilliant outlier.
Good Morning Folks. One of the long running themes of this blog is how much I like the concept of reoccurring posts. Another running theme is how bad I am at actually following through with them. One of these series was “Regularly Playing” where in theory I update the sidebar of my blog with the current crops of games that I am playing on the regular that then show my account information when you mouse over them so folks can find me if they so choose. The general idea is that you have a list of games that you are likely to hear information about advertised on the front page… even though we all know that I tend to fixate on a single game for weeks at a time before jumping to the next one. However behind the scenes I am flipping back and forth between games as my mood hits me.
The core problem with this is… my updates in this series tend to happen way less often. The idea was to have a monthly roundup of things that I was playing but what it ends up being instead is a semi-yearly truing up of the sidebar. For example my last update in this series was June 27th of 2024… when I acted as though I would now make it a regularly feature of the blog again. We can all see that this did not happen. Before that the last update was during the great blur in October of 2022. This is funny given that at least part of my claim to fame is being a consistent blogger. Anyways… I am not making any false promises here but I did think it was far past time to crank out one of these posts and to more importantly update the damned sidebar.
Traditionally these posts have been broken down into four categories:
To Those Remaining – The games that I am still actively playing or at least expect to be playing within the month.
To The New and Returning – The games that I am either dusting off and revisiting or are brand new experiences that I am enjoying.
To Those Departing – The games that I am finally removing from the list for one reason or another.
Ships Passing in the Night – Games that I don’t expect to regularly play but I spent some time with over the month and enjoyed enough to talk about.
Some of these categories only really make sense if I am doing this on the regular, but we are going to attempt to make one of these happen regardless.
To Those Remaining
Diablo IV – PC
After being very frustrated with the launch state of Diablo IV in 2023, it has honestly turned in to a pretty decent game. This has more or less taken the place of Diablo III as being that short term game that I am happy to play for a week or two before finishing everything up that I want to finish and moving on with my life. It also has some of the easiest group game play out there, and while it lacks the depth of Path of Exile it is a fun time to be had with my friend Ace as we tackle the seasonal journey. I am not saying this is a phenomenal game, but it is far from “bad” at this point and is honestly pretty damned great if you are interested in some super chill ARPG fun. That is not to say that the game does not have problems… all of which can be chalked up to the shitty design practices of Blizzard. Ace and I have a joke about Blizzard design philosophy. They give you this super sweet kitten that is loving and adorable… but it has permanent explosive diarrhea. They have some really cool ideas, but they always come with some shitty downside to them.
Final Fantasy XIV – PC
Being brutally honest… were it not for the fact that I own a home on Cactuar… and extremely hard world to get housing on… and had lost said home from not logging in previously… I would likely not be actively playing Final Fantasy XIV. I am very much in the mindset of playing Final Fantasy XIV during an expansion… and then at the end of an expansion right before the release of the next expansion. The rest of the time I am just paying yearly rent for the privilege of home ownership. I know this is dumb, and I know that I should stop doing this… but I keep doing it anyway. I think my mind might just be broken when it comes to the traditional MMORPG gameplay model. I enjoy them when I enjoy them… but struggle each time to get reconnected and back into the normal rhythms of logging in daily and treating it as my only game. I also really hate gearing… which is weird given that used to be one of my favorite aspects of playing MMORPG expansions.
Guild Wars 2 – PC
Guild Wars 2 on the other hand… is designed in a way that makes me love it. It has way more of an ARPG design aesthetic and it is so easy to drop in and participate in some epic feeling content… and then tag out without letting anyone down. I love large world group content and I love doing things like WVW where I can just blend in with the crowd and not have to give a shit about human connections. For me it is largely a solo game… that just happens to have lots of friendly and helpful people also playing it. Everything about the design model for this game rewards players for doing the right thing and stopping to rez players or help them out. When you see other players doing something, it is always a positive and a force multiplier. The long tailed grinds also give you projects to focus on when you want to play more seriously. Right now with the way my mind works, this is hands down the best MMORPG.
Last Epoch – PC
Last Epoch is going to be the best ARPG on the market at some point. This is just a fact. It has the best class design, and the best itemization and crafting already. What it lacks is endgame content, but given how solid the foundation is it is only a matter of time before they gather up enough to make this game into a proper rival of Path of Exile. Ten years down the line we will be thinking about EHG and Last Epoch in the same manner that we do about GGG and Path of Exile. I am extremely excited for the upcoming Season 2 launch on April 2nd, and with it a focus on more endgame content as well as a bunch of interesting crafting options. It looks like this is going to be landing in a lull in other games, but I would give up a Path of Exile league start to play this next season. If you have read this blog for the last few years you would know what a bold statement that is for me, given that I practically play every single league and event that comes out for Path of Exile.
Path of Exile – PC
For years when someone has asked me what my favorite video game is, I have always answered Castlevania: Symphony of the Night without missing a beat. While I still love that game with all of my heart, I have to admit the true answer is Path of Exile. I started taking this game seriously in 2019 and since then it has effectively dominated this blog for months at a time. During that time I have dedicated over 250 posts to this game and will likely keep doing so each time new content releases. It is a very hard hill to crest, and getting engaged in the game is going to take a lot of effort and research… but once you finally reach a point of comfort with it the endgame potential is limitless. Each new league also radically shakes up the game and changes how you need to interact with the character building process. I’m easily over 4000 hours into the game… and still feel like a beginner at times. There are almost no games on the market with the level of depth that Path of Exile offers.
To The New and Returning
AFK Journey – Android
One of the things that I am trying to do with this post is be a bit more honest about the games that I am playing. I almost never talk about mobile games on this blog. I think the only ones that I have actually ever really talked about at length are Pokemon Go and Dragalia Lost… the later of which is no longer even in operation. I had more or less stopped playing mobile games because my old Razer Phone 2 was performing so poorly that it almost was not worth it. However when I swapped to my OnePlus 12R, it opened back up the world of mobile games and I started adding them into my pre-sleep rotation. Essentially every night for the last year I have played a little bit of AFK Journey and find it an extremely enjoyable daily activity. I am not a big spender when it comes to games like this, but I have given them a few bucks here or there namely if there is a cool looking costume on their $7 pseudo-battlepass system. Essentially I level up my characters and play a round of all of the various battle modes and whatever events happen to be going on and when sleep claims me put it away for another day.
Monster Hunter Wilds – PC
I know this game has only recently come out, but playing it has made me remember all of the things I loved about Monster Hunter Worlds and how much it dominated my life for a point in time. There are around 150 blog posts that I have made over my time playing that game, and I can already tell that this is going to be a regular rotation for me for awhile. At a minimum I want to get geared up so I can start participating in the event quests as they get released, because Monster Hunter games have some wild collabs and some interesting cosmetic gear to collect. Now that I am in High Rank I am getting back into the swing of finding my own fun in the game and setting my own goals rather than following the main story quest. This is honestly my preferred method of playing and I am glad I am past the forced section of the game. I’m just about to HR 20 and looking forward to collecting the REAL version of the Arkveld armor that I am wearing in the above image.
Path of Exile II – PC
I had so many hopes for Path of Exile II, and honestly… it satisfied almost none of them. I am not actively playing this game but I know with the impending release of 0.2.0 I will give it another spin to see how much I want to keep playing it for the long run. Recently returning to Path of Exile 1 though… has made me realize just how lacking Path of Exile II actually is. Right now there is a battle for the soul of this game happening and depending on how it goes… will ultimately determine if I write this off in the long run. Right now the core game feels like a sluggish mess for anyone not playing one of four builds that are actually functioning pretty well. Even those builds take specific gear and a lot of levels to really make them feel phenomenal. Grinding Gear Games needs to do some real soul searching with this one and determine what sort of game they want it to be. If it is a cumbersome souls-like experience, then I am out. If they improve the leveling experience, add some decent movement abilities, and fix the endgame… then maybe it is going to be a great experience. I am thankful however that they split this game from Path of Exile because at least that game is largely in a great state.
Pokemon Trading Card Game Pocket – Android
I will be honest. I am the wrong generation for Pokemon in general. I played Pokemon Blue a few years after it came out on a Gameboy emulator but did not play another game until Pokemon X and Y released. I watched my fair share of the Pokemon cartoon because it was playing while I was getting ready for work. I played some of the early WOTC version of the Pokemon TCG, but only because it was released by WOTC and briefly popular with the MTG community before the kiddies invaded the card shops. I am too old to really be in the core audience for Pokemon. However I do like opening card packs, and have a basic understanding of the card game mechanics. Essentially every night I open a few packs of cards as part of my nightly mobile gaming routine. I occasionally play some hands of the game against the NPC opponents. Calling this a game for me… is questionable. I am not going to spend money on virtual packs, but I do like opening virtual shiny cards every so often… but it will never mean quite as much as if something like this existed for Magic the Gathering that was mostly just a pack opening simulator. If Arena gave me two five card packs each day… I would probably be playing that.
To Those Departing
Diablo III – PC
This one hurts a little bit to admit, but I think I am mostly done with Diablo III. With the release of Diablo IV, this game went into true maintenance mode. There will be no new seasonal mechanics coming out, and since the launch of Diablo IV they have simply been rotating through previous seasons. Diablo IV is finally in a state where playing it mostly feels like playing a fancier version of Diablo III, and as such has completely replaced the niche that this game filled for me. Instead of Ace and I getting together for D3 season launches, it is now D4 seasons. This game will always hold a very special place in my heart, and I am sure every so often I will fire it up again just to revisit it… but there are just better ARPG experiences out there. I am sorry my old friend, but it is time we officially parted and I stop pretending that I am every going to truly play you with the same vigor again.
Fallout 76 – PC
I really love this game, but just have not really been in the mood to play it. I am not sure when I uninstalled it… but prior to that I was only logging in to collect daily freebies. I would absolutely play this again in the future, but never really got into the seasonal loop of this game. I also never leveled anything all the way to the upper levels to be able to participate in the “reindeer games”. I deeply respect the game that this has become, and were I playing on console I would probably be way more into it than I am. However given the choice between mindless grinding in Path of Exile and mindless leveling in Fallout 76… I just always chose Path of Exile. If I had a regular group of friends to play with, it would probably be different but this as a solo experience is not near as exciting. If the AggroChat crew started playing again I would likely happily reinstall and join in the nonsense.
World of Warcraft – PC
Like I said for Final Fantasy XIV… I am just not in the right mindset for playing MMORPGs these days. I enjoyed playing through Dragonflight, but it never really caught my attention as anything other than playing through the Main Story Quest. I loved Pandaria Remix, and when the next one of those type events drop I will probably be back immediately. I attempted to play War Within but never made it out of the first zone. I have all of the social reasons in the world to be playing this game as some of my oldest gaming friends are happily playing it… but for whatever reason it just doesn’t scratch the itch anymore. That is not to say that World of Warcraft is probably in the best state it has ever been since at least Legion, if not Wrath of the Lich King. It really is peak Warcraft, but I think I have just outgrown it. When I think fondly of this game I think about specific people and a specific point in time when it was the center of my world… not the actual game itself.
Wrapping Up
I would love to tell you that it won’t be another year before I sit down to write one of these posts. I am still very much an ARPG gamer and will probably continue to cycle through whatever active season/league happens to be going in between Diablo IV, Last Epoch, Path of Exile, and Path of Exile II. I also find myself with way more affinity for games that are ARPG-adjacent like Guild Wars 2 and now Monster Hunter Wilds. The drop in nature and largely single player focuses progression really hits the spot for me, and will probably continuing doing so for a long while. I marvel that there was an era when I used to raid three or four nights each week and arranged my schedule happily around the schedules of others. I miss playing with other people regularly, but I think I might just be too far gone to ever adapt to doing it again. I am an old gamer that has become very set in my ways at this point.
I hope you all are having a great week and have a good weekend ahead of you. For me… I plan on spending most of it in Monster Hunter Wilds and hope to catch up with some of my friends and do some hunts together.
Hey Folks! I appear to be on this short book kick right now. One of my goals for this year was to not have this massive gulf where I was not really reading anything. Essentially last year I went through this period from the launch of Dawntrail in the summer through to November where I was not consuming books at all. I am really happier when I am actively reading things, and as such one of my big focuses this year is to get back into the swing of things. After only reading a book or two a year for most of my life I have so much catching up to do and so many excellent series that I have never touched. I have this backlog in my head that I should probably document somewhere, but apparently right now I am going through a cycle of reading a bunch of short books.
Right now I am on this kick of tearing through the Martha Wells Murderbot Diaries series. I had to title this post “I Love Murderbot!” because there is this great quote on the cover of each of the books I have read so far and in truth I fully agree with that sentiment. I deeply relate to Murderbot and their outlook on the world. I really like protecting people… I play tanks in video games… but I also don’t really like being observed by other human beings. I get this is a weird take given that I devote tons of my life to actively blogging… but the secret there is that when I am writing these I am effectively talking to myself. This is my private journal and I am just letting you all read it. Anyways I am not sure how many of these books there are but I can already see that I am pretty much going to burn through all of them in a row. I do this occasionally with series, and that is one of the big benefits of being deeply late to the party.
I’ve also recently read through the first two books of the Sworn Soldier series by T. Kingfisher. The first book What Moves the Dead is essentially this delightful revisiting of Fall of the House of Usher featuring a retired sworn soldier Alex Easton and their assistant Angus. The first book is delightful, the second book What Feasts at Night was enjoyable, but not quite as much so. What Moves the Dead leans heavily on being a retread of a familiar story and gains a lot of ground from that. What I really enjoyed about both books however is the characters… specifically Ms Potter the Mycologist. I am pretty sure that my friend Ace recommended these books to me, but also so did Storygraph so I figured I should probably pay attention. Well worth your time and both are extremely short.
Another book I have finished since the start of the year is the third part of The Divide series from J.S. Dewes called The Relentless Legion. I feel like this book series is a relatively unknown gem. Legitimately I only read this because I was looking for something to check out from the library and this was a new release. Did you like playing Mass Effect as FemShep? Did you enjoy The Expanse or the aging Chris Carter series Space Above and Beyond? Legitimately pick this series up and give it a read because it is extremely good. The third book mostly wrapped everything up neatly, while leaving enough room to potentially have follow up books that expand this beyond a trilogy. It was a satisfying end, but also there are still a bunch more questions because there are longer tailed events that will eventually have to be dealt with.
I don’t always do a great job of sharing the books that I am reading on this blog. If you are so inclined and have an existing Fediverse/Mastodon/Pixelfed account you can follow my progress via my Bookwyrm account. Occasionally I give my thoughts about a book when I update my statuses in that application. I am also keeping Storygraph up to date mostly because I like its recommendation system. So if you are using that system already you can also follow my progress there. I am going to make an attempt to start logging recommendations in the “To Read” section of Storygraph because I have been bad about actually keeping track of that, and I don’t really love the Bookwyrm implementation.
All in all though the year is off to a good start book wise. Have you been reading anything good? Drop me a line below and I will pilfer your suggestions.
Good Morning Folks! I’ve not done as much navel gazing as I usually do around this time of the year. Normally I do these posts over the holiday break as filler to keep my blog active. This year however I just took most of that time off from blogging entirely. I think it was good for me to finally take a proper break. However this also means that you are probably going to get a spate of navel gazing posts now in January. During late 2022 and all of 2023 I was on a tear of consuming way more books than I have previously. Generally speaking in a given year I would normally read one or two books, but in 2023 I set a goal of 20 and made it through 52. As such I set the ambitious goal of 50 for 2024… and fell extremely short of it. Essentially I made it through 39 “books” though several of those were short stories and a few graphic novels.
I still use Bookwyrm as my primary platform for keeping track of my reading, and when I logged in I was presented with my summary of 2024. If you are curious you can also still see 2023 for reference, and weirdly I did not read that many fewer pages this year. Part of this was of course that I dove much deeper into the world of Brandon Sanderson and his epic over-thousand-page tomes. What kept me from my goal is the fact that I essentially hit a gulf mid-year where I just stopped reading altogether until the tail end of the year. Had I kept up a consistent clip, there is no doubt I would have burned through those 50 books that I set as my goal for the year. For 2025 however, I set myself a bit more realistic goal and landed on 30.
Another tool that I started using more reliably was Storygraph. This was a suggestion from my friend Cuppy some time ago as a Goodreads alternative, and more than anything the feature that I like the most is its recommendation engine. While Bookwyrm is my primary tool, I am keeping Storygraph updated as well and then using their algorithm when I get stuck for something new to read. I don’t use any of these apps on my phone, but instead prefer the web application experience. My wife however has shifted to using Storygraph entirely and uses the app reliably to keep track of her own reading. Sometimes its suggestions are painfully obvious, but occasionally it chooses something that would not have normally piqued my interests.
For example a few of my favorite short books last year came from storygraph. I would say honestly that The Lost Girls was quite possibly my favorite book of the year, and I would not have been tipped off to it were it not for randomly searching its generated suggestions. It is so painfully “90s goth culture” and well worth the read and has a sort of Vampires meets Heathers vibe to it. Where Darkness Blooms is quite honestly not that dissimilar from a book I read in 2023 called Dark Harvest, but it still takes an interesting spin on the “small town has a dark secret” trope. It wasn’t necessarily the most amazing or original book I have ever read but it sure was a fun little read and I would recommend it to anyone just looking for something quick.
Another thing that I am proud of from last year is that I made my way through the entire Dark Tower series back to back at the beginning of the year. This is something I had always wanted to do, but struggled to get hooked into. I am not necessarily the biggest Stephen King fan, but now having finished this series I understand a bit more of the unvarnished admiration of this sequence. I think my favorite bit of this series is the language of the characters… specifically Roland. I admit I have said “thankee sai” more than a few times over the past year. Admittedly… now that I am indoctrinated into the shared universe of the Dark Tower, I have a not so insignificant desire to go back and read some of the other King books that are connected to it as well. If you believe the fans… essentially EVERYTHING King has ever written is connected to this one universe.
As far as 2025… I am off to a decent start so far. I just finished the two books in the Cerulean Sea series by TJ Klune and will absolutely read the next one whenever it comes out. These are very much “Wizarding World” but unapologetically queer. In fact the afterword of the second book essentially says as much and that their goal is to write queer stories that embrace everyone. Really well written. I think I like the first book a bit better than the second book, but mostly because the second takes a bit to get rolling and is a very different sort of tale. Essentially all of the books from this author are soft adds to my long list of “I should probably read this at some point”.
I’m not really sure where I am going from here. I did not start something new last night after finishing Somewhere Beyond the Sea. I checked into a few things but they were not available through any of my now four library cards. I’ve been hesitant to dive into another Sanderson epic, because I know those are such massive commitments. I want to read What Moves the Dead by T. Kingfisher so I might try and find a copy of that somewhere. I also want to dive into the Feed series by Seanan McGuire writing as Mira Grant, so that might be a thing I do. I’ve also read zero of the Murderbot books so that is a possibility as well. Maybe today I will decide where I am heading next so that I can go there tonight.`
