Ten Books Down

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Good Morning Friends! I’ve continued to keep busy with my whole consuming books nonsense and thought I would give some updates this morning. I’m feeling a little groggy this morning because I was up until well after midnight finishing up a book. I’ve also come to the realization that any concerns I had about being a slow reader were largely unwarranted. The speed at which I read seems to be directly related to my desire to read, and maybe the books that I felt like I was reading slowly… just gave me an insufficient drive to keep going. At this point, I am halfway through my 20 books this year goal that I set for myself, which makes me think I maybe need to re-evaluate that goal. I continue to greatly enjoy using the Bookwyrm website/app to track my progress.

I suppose I should have started things off with a Happy Valentine’s day greeting for those who are participating in it. My wife and I are a bit weird when it comes to holidays and our “valentines” activity is going to be on Friday when we both have the day off. It probably says a lot about us as people and as a couple that the chosen activity is going to be hitting up two libraries in nearby communities and getting additional library cards there. One of the neat things about the Libby app is that you can add multiple libraries, which effectively expands the pool of available books to check out. We are part of a massive regional library system already, but two larger communities in the nearby vicinity are not and have their own offerings. They charge a fee to get a library card if you are not from that community, but I am more than happy to support said library systems. So our Valentine’s gift to each other is to go sign up and get two more cards a piece, to theoretically mitigate the holds a little more easily.

Since I last gave a book update I have consumed three novels or more two novels and a novella. The first was The Lies of Locke Lamora and this is something that I had recommended to me numerous times over the years. At the beginning of the novel, I was not entirely certain I would enjoy it, because I don’t usually go in terribly well with the whole thieves guild thing. That said as the adventure unfolded before me, the more hooked I became with the fate of the Gentlemen Bastards. At its core, this is a grand heist novel… but instead of one single heist, it is made up of innumerable smaller outings culminating in one final major event. The flowing back and forth between the current time and past remembering was a bit jarring at times because you essentially needed to keep putting a mental bookmark where each timeframe left off. I figure I will give the next novel in this series a shot, but I expect it to play out in a more linear fashion since this LoLL served as a bit of an origin story as well as the tale of an epic heist.

Next up was Battle Ground, the latest novel in The Dresden Files series and in truth the second half of the novel Peace Talks. For as badly as I viewed Peace Talks, this novel was effectively the payoff, and given that they came out in the same year… my assumption is that a single larger work was crudely chopped in half and then released as individual books. Dresden is best when it is a small personal outing that is focused on a single “monster of the week”. This is the other sort of Dresden novel however that is focused on wide-sweeping cosmic forces… and as a result, it effectively becomes “Changes 2.0”. I won’t explain that further because I don’t want to spoil the flow of the series for anyone who is otherwise unindoctrinated but suffice it to say Changes was a novel that changed everything about the world, and Battle Ground similarly opens a brand new story arc. I enjoyed it quite a bit, but also I am looking forward to dropping down this hill into what seems to be more “Core Dresden” for lack of a better term for it.

Lastly is the novella that I read last night in a single sitting called The Law. This takes place directly after the events of Battle Ground, so I would highly suggest NOT reading it out of order if you have not fully caught up with the baseline novels. This story alone gives me a lot of hope for the sort of Dresden we might see in coming outings because it was effectively an old-school detective case file. It wasn’t exactly the best thing I have ever read but followed the case of someone down on their luck turning to Harry Dresden for help and him having to navigate the subtleties of the supernatural world for them. It makes me anxious for the release of the next proper novel because I think we are going to be entering a period of the sort of Dresden stories that I enjoy the most.

I have a number of holds on books that are not quite available yet, so I think I am going to roll into Heroic Hearts and keep with the Dresden theme for the moment. This anthology has another short story that is set after the events of Battle Ground, featuring the valiant fae Toot-Toot and Lacuna. Toot was one of the first characters you got introduced to in Storm Front, and he is still one of my favorites of the reoccurring cast. I fully expect this to largely be a comedic story because Toot has always at least somewhat served that role in Dresden. The little folk however have also shown that they can be mighty adversaries just due to the sheer number of them, so I expect a proper adventure as well. It should be a fun diversion until some of the more serious novels come off hold and become available.

I think more than anything I wish I had landed upon this pattern of interaction with books before now. I know I tend to be super into one thing for a period of time, but I am hoping that I can sustain this sort of thing because I am really enjoying myself.

Primalist is Strong

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Good Morning Folks! I spent a good chunk of this weekend playing some more of the Last Epoch Beta, largely because it is too much of a pain in the butt to switch back to the normal client on a whim. Entering the Beta required me to input a key and patch my client, which means I cannot easily play the normal game without reversing that process. I have to admit I vastly prefer when a game has a separate test client on Steam as New World did, but I am rolling with it for now. We talked about this game a bit on the podcast. Still, considering I had reached the beginnings of the endgame on the Necromancer, I opted to try out a few other classes rather than grind away and risk burning myself on the game before the multiplayer launch.

As a further sign of my growth as a human being… I opted to give the finger-wiggliest of classes a shot. Mage is actually pretty fun and I leaned in heavily to the lightning bolt that you start the game with. After a good number of upgrades I eventually wound up with a fairly wicked chain lightning attack and arced from enemy to enemy across the field. My core problem with the class however is that at least out of the box it felt exceptionally squishy. I’m wondering if some of the subclasses fix this, but it felt like I needed to zip around the field kiting mobs to keep from getting overwhelmed. I mean that is fine given that is how I expect a pure spellcaster-type class to feel, but it also wasn’t necessarily my jam.

The Primalist however was absolutely my sort of gameplay. What I found in this class is the Diablo III Barbarian-style gameplay that I had been missing with the Sentinel. Essentially I built into a design that focused on dual-wielding axes and running around with a retinue of animal friends. I focused my points on Leap and Swipe giving me good movement around the battle and a powerful area of effect main attack that causes lightning to course through the attackers and spawns little claw totems for added damage. Combine that with some heavy health regen on hit and kill and my Raptor, Wolf, and Crow dealing additional damage along with me make it seem like an extremely strong pure melee option.

Helping this build are some neat uniques that I picked up along the way. First up is a pair of axes called Taste of Blood that makes it so that I cause bleeding on my targets and then additional hits cause those bleeds to tick down even faster. Then there is the chest I found last night called the Doublet of Onos Tull, which gives my minions a chance to create bleeds and increases the duration of those bleeds. These combine to make it so that I am dealing a lot of damage over time to my targets which really helps to whittle down boss encounters. Uniques in Last Epoch often seem to have way less of a downside than I am used to from Path of Exile.

I have to admit the Primalist is giving the Necromancer a serious run for its money when it comes to what I want to play when the multiplayer patch goes live. For the moment I have specialized on Beastmaster, but I could see serious reasons for going druid eventually since that is the mastery path that gives you access to the Werebear. For the moment however, I am more than happy to run around with my pack of animal companions while shredding things with a big cleaving attack. Rift had a warrior pet class that involved running around with a giant cat pet while decimating things with a two-hander and honestly… that is the feeling I am getting for this character so far.

March 9th can’t get here soon enough when I can sorta take off the training wheels and pour some serious focus into this game. It is impressive how far this game has come since the first few times I played it and ultimately turned my nose up in disgust. What I saw of the endgame systems over the weekend, makes me think that this will be capable of holding my attention for awhile.

AggroChat #422 – Excuse to Kill Dinosaurs

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

Hey Folks! This week Bel has been playing Last Epoch quite a bit of late and has roped both Grace and Tam into it.  We talk a bit about how the game has improved over time and how it compares to Diablo III and Path of Exile.  From there Thalen and Tam talk a bit about their further experiences with Lord of the Rings Online.  Kodra talks about his adventures in watching a live stage production of Bluey, and we talk a bit about the show in general.  Tam shares his thoughts on Hi-Fi Rush and dives into a topic about the oddities of Steam Deck Compatibility.

Topics Discussed:

  • Last Epoch
    • Multiplayer Beta
    • Class Design
    • Comparisons with other ARPGs
  • Lord of the Rings Online
  • Bluey Big Play
    • The show in general
  • Hi-Fi Rush
  • Steam Deck Incompatibilities

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Compartmentalism and Media

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This is going to be a bit of a charged topic that I tackle this morning. It is not going to be for everyone, but it is still something I feel like I need to talk about. Normally I break up my posts with a bunch of colorful screenshots and images, but due to the gravity of this topic, I am going to forgo that. Apologies for the “walls of unbroken text” that is to follow.

I am an aging geek and grew up during the 80s and 90s as a result many of the things that I still love to this day are deeply tainted by issues with either the subject matter itself or the person who created it. For example, I grew up loving the Cosby Show and Fat Albert was deeply foundational media for me. I remember listening to Bill Cosby comedy tapes and even to this day I still have to stop myself from quoting random shit from all of those. Bill Cosby is a fucking monster, and aging in many ways is learning just how wrong you were about the people you thought were cool growing up. I have friends who can lop off the limb that was the love of whatever the thing was, and move on with their lives. I’ve never been able to do this, however, I also don’t want to support the thing anymore and end up holding all of these thoughts in a complex mental tapestry.

One of my favorite novels of all time is Santiago by Mike Resnick. It is this great wild west in outer space read that predates Firefly popularizing that sort of setting. Resnick has some serious problems and maybe is not something that I really want to support any more. However, it does not stop me from loving Santiago and the shared universe that he created of outer space nonsense and fables. Similarly, Orson Scott Card is pretty fucking awful, and not the sort of person that I want to be supporting either. That does not stop the fact that Enders Game and the sequence of novels that followed it were deeply foundational to my young science fiction reader brain. Then there is my love of the Cthulhu mythos and having to contend with the fact that H.P. Lovecraft and his extremely disturbing views are embedded directly in that setting.

My entire childhood when taken out of context is littered with moments that just no longer work or synchronize with my core beliefs. So many movies that I still hold close to my heart have deeply sexist, homophobic, or straight-up racist undertones that exist in the background. God forbid we go outside of my generation and start exploring the black-and-white era of film and the many issues with the themes and assumptions those films contain. I miss being able to feel pure joy about the things that I love, but that is also part of growing up and realizing that almost everything that you once cared about is tarnished in some way.

I think there are essentially three ways to handle this conundrum. The first is to say you don’t give a shit and keep on consuming and ultimately funding the problem. The second is to completely wall yourself off from anything that has issues and exorcise those things from your life. The third path tends to be the one that I travel down. It is to appreciate the good of the thing, while also understanding the harm that it has caused and do your best to not actively support it. The third path is a bit hard to walk at times and often means you are going to stumble along the way but that you are still striving to “do no harm”. It is important that we understand and accept the problems with the things that we love, but I feel like it isn’t necessary to stop loving them.

Now we zoom forward to the situation we find ourselves in, where J.K. Rowling is an awful human being that does real and tangible harm to my friends. However I still very much love Harry Potter and that setting and the novels are wrapped up in so many personal memories. I joined the series a bit late and the very first-midnight release that I remember attending was for Goblet of Fire. After that, it became a thing that both my wife and her sister that is no longer with us shared together. With Goblet of Fire we tried to share one novel between the three of us, and by the time Order of the Phoenix came out we were buying three copies so we could all start reading at midnight. I’ve got quite a bit of Harry Potter kitsch laying around the house that was accumulated over the years.

However, once the great unmasking of J.K. Rowling as the “serious villain that she is” happened, I stopped buying anything Harry Potter related. I shifted into the same mode that I have been with other problematic creators. I might purchase a book at a Thrift store where a charity is profiting from that sale, but would never purchase a new copy of anything from retail because I did not want to actively be supporting them. There are also times when piracy is the only ethical form of consumption, so that is also absolutely not off the table either. Whatever the case I did not want to be funding the creation of products and therefore lining the pockets of the creator who has shown themselves to not be worthy of our adoration. I am by no means perfect in walking this line, but I am going to do my best because, at the end of the day, it is more about my own belief structure than some performative action.

I will admit, in another time and another sequence of events I would absolutely be playing Hogwarts Legacy. Everything I have seen about it in passing looks like it is a really fun game. However, I am not going to be playing it because I do not want to be supporting the monster that is ultimately getting large licensing payments as a result of it. I get that there are good people who created that game, and spent loving care placing those assets and writing those quests, but it is all too murky for me to be able to sift that from the fact that a bad person is directly benefiting from the licensing agreements. Moreso it is that those royalty payments will likely directly support causes that seek to do harm to my friends that are transitioning. This is a very real concern for me specifically as I live in a state that is actively attempting to outlaw the existence of transfolk, so it is not exactly a hyperbolic dog whistle where I stand.

I will not be playing Hogwarts Legacy, and I firmly believe that you should not either. Will I cut you out of my life if you do? No, because it is not for me to decide your actions. I will however be disappointed in you. Ultimately your actions have to come down to your own personal beliefs and your own conscience. If you can keep actively supporting folks who do harm in the world, then that is on you and not on me. I’m never going to personally attack you over your actions, but I will remember them. Essentially every friendship you have is a weighing of the good attributes with the bad ones. There are times when you have a realization that a person is doing more harm than they are good, and ultimately cut them out of your life. I have lots of family members that I still love dearly, but that have unfortunate traits. My Grandmother was pretty fucking racist, but I still loved her with all of my heart.

When someone says that they don’t want to have to care about “politics”, what they are really saying is that they don’t want to be judged for their actions and I am sorry… but we are all judged for our actions. No one gets a free pass, and just because something has no personal impact on you… does not mean that the action has no impact at all. If you are going to play Hogwarts Legacy, I would ask that you at least wait to purchase your copy until you can get one secondhand so you are at least diminishing the harm you are causing. I still do truly love Harry Potter and the story that I fell in love with all those years ago, but I’ve made the conscious decision to stop supporting it. I still own the novels and the movies from the “before I knew she was awful” times and even some Lego sets that I might one day get around to putting together, but I won’t be consuming anything new that gets released.

I feel like I want to do as little harm as I can while I am on this planet. There are absolutely ways in which I am failing miserably at that. I know that and I own that… but I can give up playing this one game. I care about the safety of my trans friends more than I care about this one thing.