Reevaluating Azeroth

by

Good Morning Folks! Hopefully, this morning’s post is going to be what I intended to write yesterday… a general rundown of my thoughts upon returning to World of Warcraft. I’ve been back I think four days now, and in that time I pushed through enough of Shadowlands to hit 60, and then immediately swapped over to Dragonflight. First I have to say that one of the best decisions that I made was accepting the Gear Upgrade that appears to be available for all of my old characters. This did a few things… firstly it made sure I had a vaguely competent item level for the content I was about to be starting. Secondly, it whisked away everything that was not absolutely needed from my inventory… mailed those items to me… and then made sure I had a good set of bags. Now on that last step… there seems to be no logic applied to that process because it removed much larger bags than the ones that it gave me so I had to fish those out of the mailbox.

This tells me that the WoW Team has done some research in what can make a player bounce from the game. For me… it is absolutely the sorry state of my bags when I last played the game. I’ve been gone from these characters for at least three years, and I have no clue at all what half of the stuff that was rotting in my inventory is even used for. Having all of that painlessly shoved into my mailbox… where I have over a hundred days to deal with it before caring… was the right choice. This allowed me to focus on what was good and interesting about the game and not on inventory management… the part of any game that I enjoy the least. Now there are folks who said not to take the gear upgrade, so maybe the shift between Shadowlands and Dragonflight is less valuable but for me… who last played the character I decided to play in Battle for Azeroth, and even then only half-assed it… it was very much a needed step.

Another thing that I have greatly enjoyed upon returning is the Dragonflight talent system. I admit I was a Talen Point system enjoyer, or at least I was prior to the great watering down of talents to a series of three choices… one of which was almost always the correct choice. The new system feels like I can more closely tailor a character to the way that I want to play it. For example, I loved Shield Charge during the short-lived Gladiator stance days of Warlords of Draenor, so I was super happy to see that I could in fact get that back and since I love charging all over the place it essentially gave me a second charge button. I love Paladin Shield Bounce for pulling mobs and Titanic Throw turns my existing Heroic Throw into something very similar where I lob five attacks at mobs in a cluster and can pull entire packs. Both of these are purely optional things and someone who doesn’t quite have the fondness for either can easily pick around them. The best part of all of this is how easy it is to change this up, because anytime I am sitting in a town I can fiddle with my talents to get rid of the things that didn’t work out the way I wanted them and try something new.

The big feature that everyone seems to be in love with is Dragonriding, and on some level, I agree with them. Having access to a flying mount on day one of a new expansion in World of Warcraft is pretty amazing. I love the customizability of the mount itself and being able to swap up the appearance as you find new unlocks out in the world. However the mechanics of Dragonriding itself… I am sorry folks but I am going to be that guy. Dragonriding is just a universally worse version of the Skyscale from Guild Wars 2… specifically, my key complaints are that it takes about three times too long to summon your mount and similarly takes about four times too long to regenerate stamina for doing things with it. I am so used to having almost instant mounts from Guild Wars 2 and the flight pattern of a Skyscale where you take a pause on a cliff for a few seconds and are back to where all of your stamina is regenerated again. Like it is a good system, and completely revolutionary for a game like World of Warcraft… but the Skyscale is still much better.

Another system that I find interesting upon coming back is the Trading Post and the World of Warcraft loyalty currency the Traders Tender aka colloquially “Tendies”. I was surprised at how shockingly easy it was to rack up a decent number of these while doing random stuff in the game. I am sure at some point I will have collected all of the low-hanging fruit but then having the ability to choose what I want to buy from the shop is also pretty great. I can see this as being anxiety-ridden for the “gotta catch em all” players out there… but for me, there are only a handful of items that I am actually interested in. I think a lot of the stuff on the store looks not great… but I am waffling on whether or not I need this giant shield with a scarab on it.

Shocking to no one… the first things that I went for are the mounts. I am by no means a completionist, but mounts are at least something I will enjoy using on all of my characters. I went for the cute copper scarab with pink wings as my first choice. It wiggles its butt while you run, which is adorable. It also gives me a Scarab that works outside of Ahn Qiraj which is sorta cool. I also picked up the other mount which is one of those giant Pterodactyls from BFA. The contents of the store rotates every 30 days, so that seems like enough time to gather up tenders to pick up the item you want. You also have the ability to save a single item that you are trying to save up for that will not rotate when the shop inventory does. All of this seems pretty cool for a loyalty system designed to make players log in and engage with the game every day.

As far as Dragonflight goes… I really enjoy the zones. The first zone while interesting is a bit of a wet blanket, but the second zone is very Nagrand-inspired which wins some big points for me personally. Nagrand in both forms was one of my favorite zones in the game. The third zone seems to be taking notes from Grizzly Hills in Northrend, which again… is a favorite zone of mine. I’ve found myself caring about the Dragonflights way more than I have since Wrath of the Lich King. There was a moment in WoW storytelling that bothered me more than any and really soured my interest in larger themes. We did so much work with the Dragonflights in Wrath, and then interacting with Alextrasza in Twilight Highland and her treating us as someone who has not already saved her bacon more than once… annoyed the fuck out of me and made me stop caring about dragons. Shadowlands restored a bit of that faith when Lady Vashj made specific references to me having killed her… and so far that same attention to detail seems to be carrying forward with Dragonflight.

I think more than anything though I am mechanically enjoying the Warrior. I’ve had the freedom through the talent system to tweak it and create some of my favorite features on the same character. I will always be a sword and board enthusiast and being able to feel powerful as a tanky character is great. I love charging into entire packs and slowly whittling them down with my PBAOE and Cone-based attacks. The other thing that I have found interesting is just how damned fast I am leveling. At this point, I am just about to hit 69, so I will be 70 WELL before I run out of content by a relatively huge margin. WoW has done this for a while but I appreciate that they have begun to focus on clearly outlining what are the main story quests and what are filler fluff… because as I go deeper into “overtime” I can see myself probably dropping some of the side quests to focus on the MSQ entirely. Though to be fair… the quirky side quests are often the best aspects of World of Warcraft.

All in all, I am enjoying myself quite a bit. I’ve not engaged with any other players in any fashion yet… but I figure at some point once I have finished leveling I might actually do that. One minor annoyance that I am dealing with is how limited the tradeskill system is in this game. I hate that harvesting abilities are not universal… which means that leveling trades on the character I happened to choose to play is a pain in the ass. Belghast as a raid leader and as a result I chose professions for reasons other than fun… I was an Engineer because at that time it gave me access to the best tanking helms in the game. I was an Enchanter because it was really handy to have your master looter be someone who could disenchant gear and then dump the materials into the bank. This means I am an engineer with no means of harvesting the materials that I need to level that profession. So that means if I care about professions I am going to have to level one of my other Alliance characters next that can then feed resources to this character. I just greatly prefer the Guild Wars 2 methodology of timed node spawns that everyone can harvest, and the ability for EVERY character to harvest EVERY resource.

I will say though that I find myself in a scenario where I have far fewer complaints about World of Warcraft than I have at any point in the past. Like that might not sound like a resounding positive but it really is. Hell, if you are curious go back and read any of my rants about this damned game from the past… almost all of those issues have been fixed. Faction no longer matters and everything is effectively cross realm… and with the upcoming systems with War Within everything is going to largely be account-based not locked to single characters. Talent points are interesting and character respecs are free and easy to do allowing you to try out some wild ideas and then shift back to something comfy if they don’t work out. Leveling is fast and painless and so far it seems like gearing might be as well… and the story appears to be improving greatly. So my greatest hits list of complaints are being narrowed down to… Tradeskills still suck and Dragonflight doesn’t feel as good as the system it copied. That is an overwhelming net positive for this game in my eyes, and it really is in a much better state than it has been at legitimately any other period in history.

It feels like the devs have listened to complaints and have pivoted really freaking hard to being far more pro-player than they used to be. I am on board. I am not sure how long I will actually play this time, but I am trying very hard to remove the bitterness that I have always had when discussing this game. I like it folks, and the team has done a really good job with it.

Returning to Old Haunts

by

This is one of the last screenshots that I took from World of Warcraft around the launch of the Shadowlands expansion. It is dated 12/9 of 2020 and represents the last time that I played World of Warcraft in either Retail or Classic varieties. It was shortly after this that I canceled my subscription and started the longest period of time I have ever not played WoW since the launch of the game. While I spent some time helping with the alpha testing of Dragonflight, I’ve been gone from the game for roughly three years and in that time a lot of things have changed. Honestly, I am not sure if it was the Shadowlands expansion, the game as a whole, or my general dissatisfaction with Blizzard as a company. So much came out to tarnish those memories I had built up over the first decade of Warcraft and I was not really certain I could ever get back to the state of joy that I found in the game in those heady days prior to the launch of Cataclysm.

When I tested Dragonflight, I remember saying that the game felt better than it had during Shadowlands and that while I never got to see it start to finish… testing was divided up into little single-zone vertical slices without any music or cutscenes… that I thought it would be a much better World of Warcraft expansion than we had seen since Legion. The thing is… as good as it seemed it just was not enough to get me over the hump of angst that I felt towards Blizzard as a whole. I never would have played Diablo IV had someone not graciously gifted me a copy of that game, and my good friend Ace has still not played the game since its launch. I had said though that if Bobby Kotick finally left the company, I would take that as a sign to lay down my pitchfork and torch and give World of Warcraft a proper revisiting. I had heard enough from friends at the company that the culture did in fact seem to be changing bit by bit… but I wanted the figurehead gone as well before I would feel like maybe things COULD change permanently.

Bobby Kotick’s last day at ActiBlizz was the 29th, and on the 30th I was firing back up World of Warcraft. I took advantage of one of the bundles that purchased The War Within expansion and included a copy of Dragonflight as a result. Since I had been gone so long… I decided to give the game a shot with fresh eyes on my BC/Wrath raid main… the original Belghast, my Human Warrior on Argent Dawn US. This is still the character that I identify with the most in Warcraft and it seemed like the best option for a comeback. I’ve grown to love The Horde, but it never felt as true for me personally as playing the Alliance did. I love my Horde family however, and now that factions really do not matter in the least I figured it didn’t really matter which side of this server I played on… since Argent Dawn and Scryers are connected and all of my Alliance characters are on AD and all of my horde on Scryers.

House Stalwart is a guild in World of Warcraft that I founded with some friends on November 23rd, 2004. I will always regret the fact that our guild charter no longer says that date because I got hacked in the middle of Wrath of the Lich King and said hacker nuked the guild before transferring me off the server. I still think it was a personal attack, to be honest, but I have no clue who it might have been. While my time in Stalwart represented some of the best times I had in this game or in gaming in general… I also suffered quite possibly from the worst depression I have ever had while trying to lead this guild. I feel like I have been running away from it for years, scared to touch it for fear that it brought me back down to those deeply negative lows. While suffering… I made decisions that I am not proud of and struggled with the need for the guild to transform and change without me. The thing is… this group of folks never forgot who I was and even have this dumb note calling me out as “The Real GM”.

I need to forgive myself and realize that my downfall was not caused by the guild or any of the people in it… and that I have grown a lot since that time. I am hoping coming back and commiserating with the same folks will help to close those wounds a bit and maybe let them scab over. I apologize to Elnore, Rylacus, and Kylana for not always supporting them fully… and in the case of Elnore outright attacking her for the decisions she felt needed to be made. I should have fully supported your decisions when I stepped down, and been less of a flake when I picked up the mantle again during Pandaria. So similarly I apologize to Rylacus for unceremoniously dumping this mess in his lap. I apologize to Kylana for never really supporting him fully or telling him how much I appreciate the way he just ran with the guild and tried his best to keep the same sort of spirit. I also apologize to House Stalwart as a whole for never really being there for them even though they have offered me nothing but support through all of the bullshit phases that I have gone through over the years. They’ve always welcomed me back… even though there are I am certain a lot of people now who have zero clue who the hell I even am. I was always so careful to keep one foot out the door so I could run away again… and that was not cool.

This blog post has somewhat developed a life of its own. This happens sometimes when I start writing and is if nothing else proof that I really don’t script these ahead of time. I was going to talk about my adventures and instead, I have devoted this post to dealing with the anxiety and depression of the past. Talking about why I am enjoying Dragonflight and why I still really did not enjoy Shadowlands is a topic for another day. I hope you all had a great holiday break if you managed to get one. Today is my first day back so I need to wrap this up and actually start with some proper work. To any Stalwart folks that might be reading this… thanks for being chill and not overwhelming me as I start trying to figure out how the hell this game works. Huge thanks to Errya and Bleddwen for trying to welcome me back and letting me know that I was more than welcome to join in the activities. I appreciate you both greatly, but I am not quite there yet to where I can even think about doing any sort of activities, I might start joining yall on voice every now and then. I also appreciate Kylana for warning folks that I might be showing up once the deed was done, because that seems to have halted a lot of the “whoa, what the heck” moments.

If you’ve made it this far in the post thanks for reading, and thanks for always being here for me as well no matter what level of nonsense I am getting up to. If you are reading this and from Facepull my Horde home… I still love you all and I am certain my next character with be a Hordie. I just needed to stretch my legs this time on the original Belghast.

Games Played 2023 Edition

by

Good Morning Friends! It is that time of year when I drag out my spreadsheets and present an increasingly difficult-to-read picture of the games that I have played since 2012. I keep scaling down the browser zoom so that I can capture a screenshot representing the spreadsheet’s totality each year. What you are looking at is a representation of the games that I have played each month and I started this nonsense in 2013… but backfilled some information that I happened to have on hand for 2012. Essentially I am a fairly rabid screenshotter when it comes to video games, in large part because I need something to break up the massive chunks of prose that appear on my blog. So I have cataloged and kept careful tabs on the games that I play during a given year and stored them away in my “Gameshots” vault which as of the time of writing this post is roughly 550,000 files and roughly 180 Gigabytes worth of storage space. This “paper trail” gives me a fairly accurate accounting of what I happened to be playing during a given month, but does nothing to tell me exactly how much I played a given game.

For years I used a service called Raptr, and I always like looking back to see what all I had played in a given year and more importantly how many hours. When I started tracking this manually I decided that trying to determine an hour count was going to be a bit onerous, so instead I made do with a simple binary count of whether or not I played a game in a given month. The black squares that you see scattered across the above screenshot represent a macro that I run that shades in any square with the number 1 in it… I then tally in the final column giving me a total count of how many months I have played at least enough of a game to take screenshots. Patterns emerge where I have a handful of “forever games” that I return to over and over, and then a wide variety of games that I have played for a few months at a time. Since starting this process I have logged 396 games that I have played at the time of writing this post, but by this evening that number may be larger.

Exploring the Games Played in 2023

We will talk about specific trends a bit later, but I tend to have years where I play a wide variety of games and then years where I entrench more into “forever games”. This was absolutely a year for forever games, but I have to admit the data tells a few lies. For example, this would give you the impression that I played a lot of Final Fantasy XIV and Fallout 76… when in truth it was more a few hours each week poking my head in to check out things and do a few daily “chores”. Guild Wars 2 however gets an honest place at the top of this list because it has been my most reliable MMORPG since I finally reached a point of acceptance for the type of game it was trying to be rather than constantly attempting to push it into the World of Warcraft mold.

The game that I spent the most time playing this year however is Path of Exile. I stole this screenshot from my Steam Year in Review that shows I had a grand total of 1246 gameplay sessions with the longest streak being 71 days in a row that I played the game. This does not shock me in the least because I have over 2100 hours on record in Steam for this game. Granted there were several attempts at playing it made from 2014 onwards, but when it finally grabbed ahold of me in 2021 and 2022… I’ve never really let go of it. My happy place this year has been playing some Path of Exile while listening to an Audiobook, and as a result, I have wiled away many hours doing this sitting on the sofa with a cat beside me and another on my legs.

The one that surprised me the most is Wayfinder because I had not even really been tracking my play of this game until the Steam Year in Review happened. This was in large part due to the fact that I was under a pretty nasty NDA regarding my playtime and was following the rules… and not taking any screenshots. I participated in several months worth of playtests before the game “launched” or at least started charging exorbitant fees to keep testing it. It is a bit of a bummer honestly because I thought this game had a lot of promise, but what I played was not worthy of spending cash on yet and needed a heck of a lot more work before it was ready for primetime.

I am also surprised that I spent more time playing Diablo IV than I did Diablo III. Though to be fair… once I dove into Path of Exile head first… Diablo III took a backseat as my ARPG of choice. For Diablo IV… I just keep poking at its corpse trying to make it be a fun game. I will admit though that Season 2 was really fun until I got to level 70. I managed to grind my way up to 90 and then lost all interest in finishing the grind to 100. I think there is hope for this game, and the team seems to be making some fairly rapid changes… but cannot seem to turn fast enough to keep the players engaged fully. The best thing that ever happened to Path of Exile was the launch of Diablo IV full stop. I’ve seen more players discover POE than players who really seemed to love D4.

As I said earlier, I tend to move in a rhythm where I have a year where I play a large variety of games… and then a year where I retreat into forever games. This was a retreating year which tells me that coming up in 2024 it will be a year where I catch up on all of the games that I missed while focusing on “comfort gaming”. I am sure at some point I will tire of Path of Exile, and one of the things that I am looking forward to spending a bit more time in is World of Warcraft. I had been hesitant to engage much with Blizzard games while Bobby Kotick was at the helm of ActiBlizz… but with him leaving the company and his official last day being yesterday… I am planning on diving into Dragonflight and giving that game a proper shot. I enjoyed the testing that I did of the game prior to the expansion launch, so I am looking forward to diving back into playing the ACTUAL Belghast character, my Human Warrior on Argent Dawn. I’ve been gone long enough that NONE of the Belghast’s on the WoW Armory are actually me anymore.

This is the point where I compare the top played games of 2023 to the top played games of 2022. Again there is some lying happening here specifically with Final Fantasy XIV and Fallout 76, so you can pretty much ignore those. I felt like I had to count them by the rules of this process but I have not spent a ton of time actually playing either of them… mostly doing “wizard chores”. Guild Wars 2 saw quite a bit more regular play with me pretty consistently spending several hours a week playing it. I got completely caught up with the expansions and started working on a second character that is now doing Secrets of the Obscure. Path of Exile absolutely saw a ton more play… Torchlight Infinite dropped to almost no play… and Destiny and Elder Scrolls Online left the list.

Diablo 3 and Diablo 4 both saw considerable play as did Last Epoch and Grim Dawn as I seem to be going through a heavy ARPG phase. Honkai Star Rail grabbed my heart for quite a bit but I have fallen off playing the game over the last several months. New World has continued to be a comfort game for me that I keep returning to, and there have been some truly shocking improvements in the game as a whole making it a really great experience. I had actually gotten back to playing some Final Fantasy XIV and had begun working a little each day to level new jobs having gotten five of them to 90. However, Affliction League in Path of Exile and our “Bel League” private league happened and completely threw me out of the rhythm of playing anything but it for a while.

Games Played Since the Start of this Project

This is the point where I attempt to tackle the totality of the list and make the massive grid of checkboxes make some semblance of sense. It is here that we can start to see some of the trends in how my gaming has changed over the years. I cut off this year at 14 months total played with a game, which makes the cut-off around EQ2 and Wildstar. Last year was the first year where Final Fantasy XIV took the lead spot away from World of Warcraft, and the thing is position on this list takes several years to shift as there are a lot of games that I played for a very long time that are still extremely entrenched in the list. For example, Rift has been a game I have not played in any form since October of 2018… but it still holds on tentatively to the sixth slot in the list. Given how much I have been enjoying Guild Wars 2 I fully expect by this time next year that Rift will have fallen to seventh and GW2 will have moved up to sixth.

Path of Exile is rapidly moving up the lower half of the list as is Fallout 76 and New World. Destiny sits high on the list but I am not playing the game at all and have not for this entire last year… so it will begin to sink down slowly. I am somewhat sad to say that I only played Elder Scrolls Online for a single month last year which means it is likely going to keep slipping down as well. It makes me happy that Everquest II holds a position on the list still since most of my time playing that game predates the start of this project. I’ve returned to it several times but I just can’t jive with its combat systems and as much as I want to love it… because I love the world and the way it was created… I just can’t go back. That is one thing I have noticed about myself is that I have a really hard time diving back into hotbar combat games. I greatly prefer the more action-oriented combat of Guild Wars 2 or New World, and I keep hoping someone will give me a new World of Warcraft or Everquest but with action combat.

This next chart shows only the games that I have played for at least six months. This really whittles down the massive list given that there really have only been so many “forever games” that end up holding my attention for the long haul. Rift had held as a bit of a rampart against the lower tier with a big drop off last year of 58 months for Rift and 30 months for its nearest competitor Guild Wars 2. However, that wall has fallen a bit with Guild Wars 2, New World, and Fallout 76 all starting to climb that slope. Considering that Path of Exile has now hit 24 months of play if it can hold my attention going into 2024 it will start to rapidly pass a number of games in the middle ground. There are a number of games on the list that are just not going to get any more progress… Dragalia Lost fore example was really strong for awhile but given that the game is now dead and closed… it will never gain more months. Similarly, Horizon Zero Dawn is a game that I have played multiple times… but is unlikely to really draw more attention. I know the story very well at this point so when the sequel comes out on PC it is very unlikely I will play through it again.

I think what is probably more telling though is the “Streak” chart. This shows the longest number of months unbroken that I have played a game. Destiny still holds the top of this chart but there are several other games that are starting to chip away at its lead now that I have effectively stopped playing it. Specifically, Final Fantasy XIV will absolutely topple it next year and take the top position with Diablo III probably also eclipsing it pending I play a similar amount next year as I did this past year. I think what is more telling though is how quickly Path of Exile has climbed the list from being only at 7 months unbroken last year at this time to 19 months. New World is holding pretty strong with 24, but it is very unlikely that I will ever hit a streak like that again with the game. Dragalia Lost like I said above is a dead game so it will sit there much like Rift… waiting for someone to push it down the list. There is no way that Guild Wars 2 does not move up in the list and will honestly probably be sitting up around Destiny by this time next year.

Another Year Down

More than anything… this was the year of books for me and they were more of my focus than necessarily the games that I happened to be playing. As far as games go… it was the year of the Righteous Fire Juggernaut as I played one as my main character in Sanctum, Crucible, and Ancestor leagues in Path of Exile… and now mourn the death of the character in Affliction. Right now I am trying to find a character that I enjoy even half as much as I did the RF Juggernaut. Currently, I am working on an RF Chieftain… but there is no way it is ever going to feel as tanky and comfy as the Juggeranut did. I am hoping maybe we see some changes that make the class viable again.

I’ve said this numerous times, but I would really like to get back into doing things as a group. I’ve been a solo-only murder hobo for far too long, and I would like to get back to doing things with other players. I am not even sure if that is a Guild Wars 2 thing or a Final Fantasy XIV thing… or even maybe a World of Warcraft thing. I am not sure I ever want to get back to playing on a hard schedule and the raiding life… but I would like to actually do things with someone other than myself going into the new year. I have a catmander tag… I just need to get over my anxiety and start using it. That wall of anxiety has been what has been holding me back from doing things with strangers for years and I am getting somewhat sick of it.

To be fair… group with other players was a goal from last year as well. I did at least finish up my Skyscale which was a goal I talked about last year so there is that. I am not sure what the next year is going to hold and as a result, I am hesitant to make too many predictions. It was a hard year for reasons that were not necessarily manifest in this blog or the games that I played. So next year I really want to work on myself a bit. I’ve still not really recovered from the massive changes we all went through at the start of the pandemic… and I feel like I need to do some drastic things in order to carve myself out a new “normal” or at least one that I am willing to accept. I’ve become a bit of a hermit and I need to change that because I have effectively given up doing a lot of things that used to bring me joy.

I hope you all have a wonderful 2024, and I am sure I will keep this tradition going for at least one more year… so I will see you next December to see what fate has in store for me. Thanks as always for reading my nonsense and if you have made it this far I love you all.

A Year of Books

by

I realize I have not written much over the break, and in part, it is due to the fact that I have come down with some random unnamable illness and part because I just needed to vegetate for a while. Now I find myself barreling towards the end of the calendar year and am in that “reviewing” type mode. One of the biggest changes that 2023 brought on is the fact that I read more books this year than I have ever read in a single year… or honestly over the course of several years. While I love books and love everything that there is about a bookstore… specifically the smell of moldering print… I was pretty reliably a “two to five books per year” type person. When something really caught my fancy I would grind through all of the books available in a specific series, but for the most part I picked at books rather than devoured them. My wife was the opposite… and all the time I spent playing the latest MMORPG or ARPG she was curled up on the sofa shotgunning books directly into her brain one after another.

What changed you might ask? Well, this transformation was in large part due to a little thing called the Libby App. It isn’t like my wife and I have not had library cards before… we both spent a large chunk of our adolescence in libraries as they were generally safe places for nerds kind. It was around this time last year that we got our first of many new library cards, and around this time I connected it to the Libby App for the first time. Over the years I have transitioned from reading physical books to reading almost entirely digital books for sheer convenience, and about a decade ago I tried this whole nonsense and found the entire process of getting ebooks from the library to be immensely fiddly. It left a sour taste in my mouth, but apparently, Libby formerly known as Overdrive has come along and smoothed out the rough bits allowing you to link your library card and have it automagically integrate with your eBook reader of choice.

One of the most important lessons that we learned was that different Library systems have different licenses for ebooks and audiobooks. So by going to some nearby communities, we were able to pick up library cards from three different systems… in our state, there is only one other major system and we hope to road trip to get a library card with it soon as well. Between these three systems, it has given us a broad reach of titles and the ability to mitigate some of the hold queues in favor of the shortest. Of the fifty-one books that I have consumed this year, I would say probably 10 were reading the books… and the majority were books that I consumed in audiobook form. My happy place is grinding away in an MMORPG or ARPG while listening to a book and I can legitimately do this for hours at a time.

When it comes to buying audiobooks… I’ve landed on a site called AudioBooksNow. Audible mostly feels like a monopoly and it is way the hell too expensive for most things. Sure Audible has a whole subscription service that supposedly gives you access to lots of content for one “low low price” but I have yet to find a single thing on it that I wanted to read when I wanted to read it. To be fair… we’ve had the same problem with Kindle Unlimited as a concept. I have no clue how this site charges so much less, but I am not going to ask too many questions because based on my research ahead of time they do in fact seem legitimate and well-reviewed. I think at this point I have bought four books and the majority of those were brand new releases that had 40 or so week hold backlogs in the library system. The majority of everything I have consumed comes from three of the four major library systems in my state.

I’ve been using Bookwyrm.social to track my progress this year. Honestly, I am really happy that I had the foresight to set up an account and start using it at the beginning of last year. Since every service seems to have a “year in review” functionality, I should not be shocked that Bookwyrm recently patched one in. If you are so inclined you can check out my year in review here. Largely at the beginning of last year, I set a target of 20 books, and last of last night I finished my 51st for the year blowing that goal out of the water significantly. I think I will probably set forty books as my goal for 2024 because while I am not from the tribe of “line must always go up”, I do think that maybe twenty was a bit low. I started my first book of the year on December 26th and it took me until January 8th to finish it. These days it takes me around two days per book pending I don’t get terribly derailed.

I would say probably my favorite books of the year are the “Viv” series from Travis Baldree first Legends and Lattes technically released last year, and then Bookshops and Bonedust which came out in November of this year. One of the things that I am learning about myself as I venture forth into books that are recommended to me by friends… is that I seem to really care about the characters more than the setting or the story. I love all of the characters in these books and would fight to protect them all. Mostly they arrived at the right time for me when I had just finished what I would term a “heavy read” and were lite and fun entertainment. I’ve tried to hold specific books in reserve like Scalzi’s Starter Villain for example as something that I knew I would enjoy as something I could effortlessly dive into after finishing more serious fare.

I think the book series that I am the most conflicted over is “The Craft Sequence” by Max Gladstone. I enjoyed the totality of this series… but I gotta say that there were some weak spots. You can tell that the entire sequence was planned ahead of time as the first several books introduce you to characters in almost “stand-alone” stories, that eventually weave their way back into the main story arc of the world with book four… which is technically chronologically the first book… and book five which brings everything together. Book six… feels like it should be starting a new sequence but just lands somewhat flat serving mostly as a way of giving a complete story arc to one of the main characters from book three. Three Parts Dead was phenomenal… Four Roads Cross… also phenomenal. Two Serpents Rise and Full Fathom Five were a bit middling… and then Last First Snow and Ruin of Angels I appreciate for the pieces of story that they give… but I didn’t super enjoy large chunks of both books. There is a new series centered on the best character… Tara Abernathy… and I am certain that before 2024 is up I will have given it a shot. Mostly I find myself conflicted because while I enjoyed myself, I am not entirely certain I would recommend the series heavily to others.

As we enter the next year… the book that I am probably looking forward to the most is Alecto the Ninth. This is the fourth part of quite possibly the strangest book series I have ever read The Locked Tomb. Every book has been wildly different than the previous books and I am mostly on board just to see where the hell this is going to go in the end. I am also really looking forward to The Relentless Legion by J.S. Dewes the third book in The Divide Series but there is no real tentative information on when it might drop. Another book series that I am anxiously waiting on is Apostles of Mercy the third book in the Noumena series by Lindsay Ellis which got delayed from a late 2023 release to a mid-2024 one. This similarly is a series that has had high points and low points but I am very much here for the journey. I’ve very recently become obsessed with the Alchemical Journeys series by Seanan McGuire and will be looking forward to reading Tidal Creatures when it also drops in mid-2024. I am also interested in whatever the next book in the Dresden Files series ends up being, but I gotta say after 17 books it does not feel anywhere near as fresh as it once did.

As I look forward to 2024, I am looking forward to as many adventures in books as I had this year. What books are you yourself looking forward to? Drop me a line below.