Featuring: Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Hey Folks! We start off the show with a bit of a reprisal from last week. Namely, Grace and Bel thought that all of the announcements at BlizzCon were universally good, but it seems that at least for some WoW Pundits they were a bit disappointed. Ash talks about the remake of Risk of Rain called Risk of Rain Returns and how it improves upon the original. We talk about the Blast from the Past League in Path of Exile and how Lake of Kalandra is getting a bit of a redemption arc. From there we talk some more about Cities Skylines 2 and Bel opines that he just really wants a prettier version of Simcity 2000. Tam talks a bit about BOKURA a multiplayer puzzle game where both players are seemingly wildly different things, but need to solve puzzles together. Bel talks a bit about the death of the Draft Booster and what the changes surrounding the “Play Booster” mean for Magic the Gathering. Finally, we wrap up with a few very short topics, and Bel talks about how good Bookshops & Bonedust the sequel to Legends & Lattes was.
Good Morning Friends! I am getting a bit late this morning because I have been off-watching the last of the Loki series. We have the day off from work, and I have a list of things I plan on doing today but have yet to start. One of these is breaking down the mountain of shipping boxes I have carelessly thrown in the garage, and I plan on doing so while listening to an audiobook to make the time pass more easily. Speaking of books… I wrapped up Bookshops and Bonedust by Travis Baldree. This book came out on the 7th and I think maybe this is the fastest I have ever consumed a book. There is just something cozy about the style of writing of these books and how easy it is to consume. Truth be told there is nothing terribly special about the setting of the books themselves because it is sort of this familiar fantasy setting that would blend cleanly with any D&D session.
What makes them special however is the love and attention paid to the characters. Legends and Lattes was probably my favorite book that I read this year because it created this tapestry of characters that now all have permanent homes in my heart. I can’t say that Bookshops and Bonedust is necessarily a better book, but it is still equally enjoyable. Where Legends starts at the end of Viv’s adventuring life… this book is set far earlier in the very beginning as she was earning her place in an Adventuring company and got knocked out of battle and forced to stay behind and heal. This is a book about becoming the Viv that we know in the first book, and some of the key moments that set her on a path to that eventual future. Above anything else though it is a book about falling in love with books… and the friends that you meet along the way that influence your tastes. I chiseled careful niches in my soul for a whole new cast of beloved characters, and I think you will as well.
I watched The Marvels, and I think this is probably going to be a bit of a divisive film. Let’s just get this out of the way… I loved it and I think it might be slingshotted into the pantheon of my favorite Marvel films. However, I think the hype being artificially manufactured related to this film is going to leave a lot of folks frustrated. The last trailer that was released makes it seem like this is the beginning of a brand new era for Marvel and that “everything changes”. On some level this is true… but on other levels, the film itself is a really good character-driven story about three generations of heroes at different steps in their journey. I feel like this is going to be a film that the folks like me who enjoyed Thor Ragnarok and Love and Thunder will greatly appreciate. I feel like the folks who trashed those films… will not and will probably be overly vocal about it.
Ms Marvel is one of my favorite characters in Marvel comics, and I loved the Disney Plus Mini-Series. This movie is more a direct sequel to that than anything else, and it does a fairly good job of wrapping up some loose ends surrounding Captain Marvel and Monica/Captain Rambeau. I feel like it also makes some effort to try and set up events for future movies to explore… with a post-credits scene that finally begins to make good on a whole slew of teasers that have been not so stealthily inserted into a lot of Marvel media of them finally making good on the Fox Studios acquisition. More than that however it lays further groundwork for the Young Avengers… a project I am entirely here for.
As stated in the first paragraph, I wrapped up the second season of Loki this morning. I really hate the Disney Plus standard now of airing shows at a fixed time, because it ultimately means I always watch something the day after it comes out. This season admittedly was a bit of a mess and I spent most of the episodes uncertain of what I thought about the journey we were taking. The art direction of Loki is phenomenal, as is honestly the acting… but the tale that was woven felt a bit unsteady at times. However I am happy to report that the series as a whole sticks the landing, and I think we will probably be closing out this chapter of the MCU and opening a brand new one thanks to this series.
I think that has been my frustration with Marvel over the last few outings… we’ve been on the cusp of something greater but never quite getting there. It is a series of media telling us that something is coming, but never quite stepping over the threshold and out into whatever this new reality is. Multiverse of Madness, Quantumania, The Marvels, and the Loki series… all have been playing around the periphery of things to come and I feel like finally we are beginning to get somewhere worth going. After a lot of floundering and a few just plain awful series like Secret Invasion, I am hoping that maybe just maybe Marvel is beginning to coalesce into something better.
All of that said… Loki as far as a standalone series goes… has enough internal continuity to be universally good for even someone who knows nothing about the Marvel Universe. I would legitimately recommend this series even if you have never darkened the door of any superhero properties. I am hoping however it leads to more interesting things that do finally begin to factor into the larger picture. I think it has to… there is no way this series and the others I mentioned before are not leading to a Multilateral war that will carry us forward into the second culmination event for the MCU.
Anyways! I hope you all have a wonderful weekend. I highly recommend all three of the pieces of Media that I talked about this morning.
Morning Folks! I’ve been cycling through a lot of games lately… namely because I am in a bit of a holding pattern waiting for Friday’s Path of Exile event to begin. I’ve also been working through a number of books in audio form, which means I can’t really juggle story content while also listening and enjoying a book. As a result, I have been playing through a number of mechanically enjoyable games where I either don’t need to see the story… or I don’t really care about the story. I apologize to all of the narrative team that I am certain is doing some amazing work New World… but I really do not care about what is going on with the story of that game. For me it is a big fun sandboxy crafting MMORPG nonsense fest and as a result it has been in this limited rotation of games that I have been spending time playing. I realized this morning that I had not really talked much about it.
The first cool thing that I want to talk about is that the game has an extremely robust appearance system, where you can essentially take any item you loot and convert it into an item skin that you can then apply to items freely. While I had a pretty large collection of skins from various Twitch drops and a handful of store purchases… there is one appearance that I really wanted. I hate the highest tiers of the Syndicate armor, because it is just some boring assed robes. However, I loved the mid-tier design that was just a nice simple armor with a purple Syndicate tabard over it. I liked this vibe so much that even though it was not the gear that I was wearing at the time, I had Ammo draw my character wearing it when I added New World to the site masthead. I can now run around in the game with something pretty close to this appearance permanently.
The only negative of the system is that you pretty much have to buy these from the in-game shop. It is roughly $2.50 for a single transmog token, which then can be used to convert a single item into a skin. I vaguely remembered them talking about these dropping out in the world as well when the system was first introduced, but so far the only two tokens I have found came from the free track of the battle pass system. This means that If you really want to convert large swaths of items into appearances you are probably going to be shelling out $20 at a time to pick up 10 tokens at the cheapest conversion rate. I’ve not been running dungeons, so maybe they are dropping there and I have just not encountered them. That said I have even gone to some elite areas and looted a few of those chests and gotten bubkis.
I’ve played through most of the content in the new area, but the piece that I have been focused on lately is trying to get all of my gathering abilities up high enough to be able to partake in the new resource nodes when I find them. Essentially everything in the game has been raised a tier so that you can take your character up to level 65… you can also raise all of your professions by another 50 points. The combat leveling was super straightforward and I blew past those levels well before finishing the campaign. The profession leveling has bit considerably slower and I need to get everything up 5 points to 205 to harvest the new stuff. For example, the above screenshot shows some Mythril nodes that I was way too low level to harvest… which made me sad. Skinning of course levels super fast because it is fueled by murder, but I have been roaming around some of my old world haunts to push up the rest of the professions.
I really like the new weapon type that was added to the game and have mostly been running around with Flail and Greatsword. I can’t say it does anywhere near as much damage as Greatsword does, but it is still fairly fun. I seem to have a One Handed Weapon and Shield Fetish when it comes to combat in games, and the Flail of course just furthers that fantasy. I still need many levels with the weapon but I have taken it up to 14 and unlocked a lot of the goodness. I opted to go down the tanking tree which should shock zero people who have read this blog for any period of time. I might at some point respec and play around with the cleric tree though as supposedly it gives you some ranged attacks.
The biggest improvement that I have seen has been in itemization and loot drops. What I would have considered previously to be “great gear” has been dropping like candy. I’ve seen many in world legendary drops and a ton of “named” item drops that come with fixed stats. All of the gear that I had previously was taken up to at least level 600 when the patch dropped, and now I am very regularly seeing upwards of 680 gear dropping. A new Artifact rarity tier of gear was added to the game and I’ve managed to pick one piece up from completing steps in the campaign, and another piece because I happened upon a group of a dozen folks farming a boss. Any time you see a cluster like that you might as well stick around and farm too… which netted a light armor chest. I do not fully understand how artifact gear works, but it appears that it can be configured at least somewhat by the players.
I think my focus in the short term is going to be to push my trade skills up a bit so that I can start crafting some nice upgrades. When I last played the game I was capped on Armorcrafting, and I would like to get it up there again so that I can maybe craft some artifact gear. After that, I really want to push up Engineering so I can make a new set of harvesting tools. The prices on the market in the game are insane… and item level 700 gathering tools are around 30-100k gold which seems like complete and total nonsense. Since I enjoy the crafting system I might as well push my trades up and craft them myself and then sell the botched crafts.
I doubt that I will ever go back to playing New World as a mainline game, but I am enjoying poking at it from time to time. The community surrounding the game is still not really my crowd. It is entirely too PVP-focused and the player base tends to make some interesting decisions… like this mess of a house, I took a screenshot of this morning. I admit it sort of makes me wish there was a roleplaying server as those servers tend to just have a higher caliber of player when it comes to community interactions. While not a roleplayer myself in the game, I’ve always flocked to those servers as they seemed to be more my speed.
If you have New World in your game library, you might patch it up and give it a shot. The game has improved massively since launch and I have been enjoying myself.
Good Morning Folks! I’ve been working through the Craft Sequence series by Max Gladstone. The problem is I have no clue why I even know this series of books exists. Generally speaking, I can usually pin down a recommendation to a specific friend or group of friends who have been actively reading a given book. For this one however I am at a bit of a loss, but at some point over the last few months I added this to my “Want to Read” queue in Bookwyrm. I love Bookwyrm and for anyone who does not know what that is… it is essentially something akin to Goodreads but that exists as part of the ActivityPub “Fediverse” and federates freely with Mastodon. You could in theory use it as your primary Fediverse account, but I tend to treat it as a separate thing and then boost my activity there to my main account. I wish there was a way to formally link a Bookwyrm account to a Mastodon account, but in spite of that issue, it still works extremely well. I’ve been using it to track my progress with the various books I have read this year.
The Craft Sequence as a whole piqued my interest when I heard it referenced as another “Urban Fantasy” setting. The thing is… this is a wildly different flavor of Urban Fantasy than something like Dresden Files. In the Dresdenverse there is a veil between the true world and the world that the common folks understand, and it is maintained to keep both sides safe. In the Craft Sequence, it is a fully fantasy world that just happens to have evolved to modern levels of civilization. The thing is though… you don’t necessarily get this feeling in full effect until you get past the first book. Reading Three Parts Dead, it feels like you are reading any other fantasy novel save for the fact that it has a lot more modern language. It is a tale of necromancy and gods… and the legal contracts that bind them to their followers and what happens when a god dies. I loved the character of Tara Abernathy… a young associate at the Craft firm of Kelethres, Albrecht, and Ao on her very first project for that group. I described the feeling to a friend like “What if Hermione was a Necromancer and got kicked out of Hogwarts”.
The second novel Two Serpents Rise takes place with a completely different set of characters in a different kingdom. This is the point where I realized we were building a universe more than we were going to be getting serialized content focused on a single group of characters. This novel was deeply interesting because it focused more on the ramifications of an event that took place 50 years before the events of these novels. Craft practitioners and the Gods went to war… and the Gods lost. Two Serpents Rise is set in a pseudo-mesoamerican-inspired culture where 50 years ago… human sacrifice and the worship of the gods… were outlawed. There is an older generation that feels like this was not a good idea and as a result, the city has been in a bit of a cold war with the theists ever since. Your primary point of view on this situation is from Caleb Altemoc who works as a Risk Manager for Red King Consolidated and is attempting to make sure that city services are not negatively impacted. I did not think this book was nearly as dynamic as Three Parts Dead, but I still found it enjoyable.
Last night I finished Full Fathom Five, the third book in this sequence and this is the point when the methodology of this series is starting to pay off. Once again we are focused on a completely different setting, this time the Island kingdom of Kavekana. This is a place that lost all of its Gods during the God War and instead figured out how to create pseudo-gods in the form of “Idols” which are used as essentially savings accounts for storing “souls” as part of the banking industry of the magical world. This gives the island significantly more power than they have any right to, which places it on a precarious balance between assorted Military powers… but its Financial clout keeps them from being invaded. Your point of view character is Priestess Kai who works for the group that shapes the idols and worships them in order to imbue them with something resembling life to keep the financial transactions safe and secure. There is however a plot in the works to destabilize the entire system and a few characters that we met in book one and book two as minor side characters shift to the focus in this book.
I have to say so far… Full Fathom Five was my favorite of the Craft Sequence to date. Like I said we are beginning to finally see the payoff from all the work building this world and setting up its political and theistic structures. I think going forward the plots will begin to interweave a bit more as the entire sequence of books is likely leading to some crescendo. This is very much a series of books that has been constructed with a plan and I am exceptionally interested in seeing where that plan is going. I’ve tried not to read up too much on this series but it seems like Chronologically Book Two takes place before the events of Book Three… and then Book 4 is technically the beginning of the series. There are apparently Six books in the main sequence and then two additional books that begin another series that is connected to the first six. I think at this point I am bought in and will be reading through these until I reach the end.
It has been a bit of a wild ride for me when it comes to books and reading. Generally speaking, I tend to only read a few books in a given year, but as of last night, I had completed forty-three and will likely close out the year around forty-five. I’ve had a blast and in part, all of this was prompted by my wife and I finally renewing our Library cards last December in order to take advantage of the easy book checkout process brought on with the LibbyApp. We both have three different library cards connected to that system now each with their own slightly different collections of what we have access to. It does however make me a little frustrated that I did not do this sooner given how much I have thrived while reading all of these books.
Right now I am taking a bit of a break from the Craft Sequence as the second “Viv” book by Travis Baldree was released yesterday. I did not realize this was going to be a prequel and would technically be book zero in this series. Legends and Lattes is probably my favorite book that I read this year, and it was such a cozy and comfortable setting to spend some time in. I fell in love with all of the characters, and so far Bookshops and Bonedust seems every bit as delightful as the first book did. I’ve only put in about a half dozen chapters but I will be burning through this one over the next few days.
What are your favorite books that you have read this year? What series should I check out? Drop me a line below.
