Nona the Ninth

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AggroChat #421 – Morspoken

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Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen

We start off the show with a discussion that has been kicking around our list for a while, where Tam discusses the shared DNS of a Good Stealth Game and a Good Metroidvania.  From there Kodra has had time to play Forspoken and talks about his experiences after last week’s show.  We dive into a discussion about the news coming out that no one seems to be signing up for E3 and once again we question if there really is a place for that show in the public consciousness.  Lastly, we talk about some of the games that are supposed to be released this year and try and determine which we actually think are.

Topics Discussed

  • Shared DNA of Stealth games and Good Metroidvanias
  • More talk of Forspoken
  • Nobody is Going to E3
  • Games we doubt are releasing in 2023

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

You Waited Too Long

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I realize I talked a little bit about this yesterday, but I am pretty happy I went ahead and made the move to Gamepad.club. So far thanks to the amount of work that Gaz poured into making sure we had good federation, the experience has largely been uninterrupted. I still have access to the various hashtags that I had been following and am still seeing a similar volume of traffic coming from them. That is one of the sometimes gotchas from moving to a smaller instance, is that oftentimes hashtags don’t work quite as well. Generally speaking, the federation of a given instance is dictated by who the members of that instance follow. The more users on an instance, by nature the deeper the federation and the more successful things like hashtags become. I follow 814 accounts and as a result, my joining an instance adds those 814 connections. You can quickly imagine that mesh being extended for each person that joins a given instance.

Relays come into play to try and solve this problem. They end up granting servers access to everything being federated within a specific group, and by joining multiple relay networks you can artificially expand the reach of your server. So while you effectively live in a much smaller bubble, the local instance… you can still see topics actively being propagated amongst all of the instance servers in that network. When Gaz was setting up Gamepad.club he joined enough networks to create this effective mesh of 4000 or so servers that we were connected to. So while we have a fairly quiet local feed, the federated feed feels pretty much like it did when I was on Mstdn.social or Masto.ai.

So you are probably asking yourself if everything is effectively the same… why did I bother moving? The truth is there is no requirement to really move servers ever. Stux is great and the instances that he is responsible for mstdn.social, mastodon.coffee, and masto.ai are also pretty great. There is a thing that tends to happen when folks become active on the Fediverse. They discover the local feed and for a while it is exciting and new. The problem with a local feed on a giant server is that eventually it stops being exciting. Eventually, it becomes this dumping ground of too much chatter going on at once to ever hope to follow any of it. On a smaller server, the local feed often feels like going to the corner store and seeing a bunch of people you only sorta meet and are as we call it in rural america… “on waving terms” with. I wanted that back, and while Gamepad.club is pretty quiet and largely made up of people that I already follow, I am certain at some point in the future it will be that place for me.

Migration is also just part of life in the fediverse. It is largely considered a “feature” rather than a bug and it means that even thought right now Mastodon.social the flagship instance is being impacted by a round of denial of service attacks, the rest of the network continues to truck along fine largely oblivious. Legitimately had Gargon not said anything about it and it was boosted into my feed… I never would have known because it hasn’t been impacting any of the instances I have been involved with this week. I’ve migrated so many times at this point that while I end up putting it off usually… it is also a fairly painless occurrence and given how often it happens for various folks… it is just accepted at normal. I’ve talked about my long history of moves, but just to throw it all out there here is my history on Mastodon.

  • Mastodon.cloud – signed up for this not even having a clue that instances were unique things because like so many Twitter transplants I assumed it was a monolithic service.
  • Elekk.xyz – when I realized different instances had different purposes I joined the only “gaming” instance at that time.
  • Nineties.cafe – my friend Liore started an instance on Masto.host and I popped over because it was something led by someone I actually knew.
  • Elekk.xyz – back to Elekk when Nineties.cafe was shuttered for various sundry reasons.
  • MMORPG.social – migrated over to a new MMORPG-focused instance because why the heck not?
  • Elekk.xyz – back to Elekk when MMORPG.social was shuttered for various sundry reasons.
  • Mstdn.social – I joined this server because Elekk was under new management and had defederated from a bunch of instances that my friends were on, making it impossible to communicate with them anymore. Stux seemed like a nice admin.
  • Masto.ai – Mstdn.social was overwhelmed with new sign-ups, and Masto.ai was created as an overflow instance. A bunch of us longer-term Mstdn.social folks migrated to try and help ease the load.
  • Gamepad.club – My friend Gaz creates an instance and I once again throw my lot in with a smaller instance because while I am perfectly fine with Masto.ai I missed the smaller instance feel.

So in my five years on the Fediverse, I have migrated nine times, and each time had its own reason. The thing is… I could have stayed on Mastodon.cloud and never moved. Some people are going to want to plant their flag and never leave. Others like me, are going to flit around the fediverse between different environments at will. Truth be told… ALL of my accounts other than the two defunct instances are still active and I could migrate to ANY of them at will again in the future.

The scary thing at the moment is that those who failed to get off Twitter when the rest of us migrated… might have waited too long. On February 9th the Muskrat is shutting off free access to the Twitter API. As a pre-emptive strike, he shuttered access to the accounts that were being used to run all of the third-party Twitter clients. Most recently his gaze has turned to the API accounts being used to create helpful migration tools like Movetodon that allowed you to connect your Twitter account, and then allow you to follow those same people on Mastodon. As of this week, those accounts seem to have been flagged as violating Twitter rules and policies. So the easy migration period is over, from this point forward you are on your own.

Yesterday in the real world, my team spent the day gutting Twitter from our public-facing websites. Previously we had used the free Twitter API to cache copies of all of the tweets sent from our official accounts. We had them appearing in the sidebar, and the cached copies kept us from running into issues with connectivity and causing that UI element to “wig out”. However even our very meager access pattern would end up costing us over a thousand dollars a month. I figure soon over the coming weeks you are going to find all of the ways that you used to integrate Twitter with applications you enjoyed, similarly shuttering that functionality. That means more than likely all of those video game integrations like the one I have used the most to get screenshots off my Switch and PS4/PS5, will be shut down and non-functional.

Twitter didn’t die in the fiery cataclysm that some of us thought that it might. However, it still seems to be dying a slow rotting cancerous death as it loses functionality and as a result cultural importance. I popped over the other day to change out the mastodon information in my profile and found myself depressed at how different it feels. Sure there are folks who are still using it, but the quantity of activity is a pale comparison to what it once was. I miss a lot of people, for example, I miss seeing Liani’s posts filling up my feed, but I can’t support what is happening over there especially when there is a better option. February 9th is going to be a significant moment in this saga because it will be interesting to see how devoid of Twitter content a lot of sites suddenly end up being. I just have to hope that my paths will cross with the folks stranded on the sinking ship that is Twitter because the easy life rafts have already departed and they might have to dog paddle away on a door.

Anyways long twisting post later… Gamepad.club is great and I am glad I made my move. It is small and quiet, but sometimes I need that in life. If you don’t have a good mastodon home already, then I welcome you to check it out.

The Exiled Fleet

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

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

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

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

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

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

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