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.

A Very ARPG Year

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Good Morning Friends! I spent a bit of time yesterday setting up my bookwyrm profile and loading the books that I have already read this year into it. So far I dig it. Unlike Good Reads it does appear to be an entirely manual process. This morning for example I updated my progress in The Exiled Fleet and it just required me to plug in a page number that I was sitting on. As a result, I am probably not really going to be updating progress that often and simply adding a book when I start reading it and then marking it as read, and writing some general comments about my experience. The other aspect of the tool that I want to explore a bit more is using it as a cache of books that I want to read. Libby does not exactly have the best discovery engine, so my goal is to use the “To Read” section as a sort of memory-jogging mechanism when I find I am looking for something new to consume.

What I had feared might happen… has happened. I am around 60% through The Exiled Fleet and my hold for the last Dresden novel has come open. Essentially as I understand it I have three days from the time of receiving the notice to claim it or else the book goes to the next person in line and I keep my “next in line” spot. My hope is that I can push through the novel I am currently reading in the next few days so that I can go ahead and claim my spot and go back to the gaming/audiobook nonsense that I enjoy so greatly. This is the part of the library system that I do not love… is the inherent pressure of trying to churn through something in a specific amount of time. As a result last night I spend most of the evening reading rather than gaming, which was its own sort of charming. My wife is admittedly a bit flabbergasted by this sudden transformation because reading all night is her jam, not necessarily mine.

That is not to say I am doing zero gaming. I am starting to poke my head back into Guild Wars 2 a bit, because I’ve been craving that sort of gameplay. I seem to be very much in this ARPG/Action MMO mindset right now and after coming from Path of Exile, I have to admit Lord of the Rings Online was a little slow for my tastes right now. I am easing back into Guild Wars 2 by spending some time doing the world boss train. I think ultimately however I will pick up and start working on the main/expansion stories with my Ranger. I am not sure what shifted mentally but I just started enjoying running around with my Ranger a bit more than I did my Necromancer.

I’ve also been playing a bit more Last Epoch and currently am really enjoying the Acolyte class which will eventually become a Necromancer. After decades of avoiding casters like the plague… which admittedly is probably a defunct saying given that we had a plague and no one avoided it… I actually find that I enjoy casters quite a bit these days. Most of the classes that I have played in Path of Exile ultimately end up being some sort of a caster given that melee is just not great there. While I enjoyed my Paladin character in Last Epoch, I think I am enjoying being a Necromancer a bit more. With the upcoming Multiplayer release, I figured it was time for me to finally get a character to the game’s endgame. I don’t think Last Epoch will be anywhere near as rich as Path of Exile but I am hoping it will be a better “with friends” experience.

I do not exactly feel great playing Blizzard games right now. I know that there have been significant changes inside of the company, but so long as Kotick still profits from it… I feel more than a little dirty spending time on those games. That said… I will be pausing my prohibition for a bit and diving into Diablo III Season 28 soon. It looks fucking amazing and this may be the last new season we get for a while, given that Diablo IV will be launching before we see another season. I figure a lot of the live team currently supporting Diablo III will end up getting transitioned. Mostly I am really interested in the Altar of rites which is a system where you sacrifice various things and get permanent account-wide buffs. Some of these give you significant amounts of power and others are just quality of life like the ability for your pets to pick up and salvage white, blue, and yellow items. I am deeply interested in this season, and in theory… once it has run its course I will have either Multiplayer in Last Epoch or another Path of Exile league to focus on.

Basically, it feels like this is going to be a very ARPG year for me. I knew at some point I would be playing Jedi Survivor but with it being bumped back by another month yesterday that gives me a bit more wiggle room to fully dive into this nonsense.

The Last Watch

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Over Christmas Break my wife discovered the Libby App, and as I wrote earlier this month it prompted us to get a library card for the first time in over a decade. I’ve always loved libraries, but they never really fit neatly into my adult life. Books are friends and bookstores are among the most friendly places I can think of to be in life. However I do not read anywhere near as often as I might like, and while I am well-read from a classical standpoint, I’ve done a pretty shit job of working books into my routines. Without really meaning it seems like “reading more” has become my New Year’s resolution. Since Christmas, I have consumed five books so far, and seem to show no signs of slowing. At this point, I’ve worked on catching up to the Dresden Files series and have finished off Skin Game, and Peace Talks, and am waiting on my hold to come open for Battle Grounds. After having it recommended so many times I have finished Gideon the Ninth and Harrow the Ninth and similarly wait for Nona the Ninth the latest book in that series to become available through my library hold.

This would be the primary issue with relying upon the public library system for your book consumption, that there will be periods of time when you are waiting around for the next book to become available. I’ve greatly enjoyed this little tradition that I have started and did not want to lose momentum, so this lead me to go fishing for the next book. Something you have to understand about my tendencies as a reader is that I generally find a book series that I enjoy… and then consume everything by that author. So my instinct is to focus fire a single series and see it until its conclusion, but as I said the hold queue doesn’t exactly make that viable. As a result, I started sifting around in the Libby App for books that were currently available and stumbled onto a recommendation engine of sorts (that admittedly I have never found again). It suggested that If I liked Harry Dresden and Harrowhark Nonagesemus then maybe I would like The Last Watch by J.S. Dewes.

I am not entirely certain WHY the recommendation engine picked this specific book, but I am glad that it did because I’ve enjoyed it and now the sequel that I started a few days ago. Effectively this book is deeply drift-compatible with Halo, ODST, and maybe bits and pieces of the Mass Effect universe specifically from the military aspect and maybe a little Enders Game. Effectively it is a military tale of a fish out of water who was forced into service to effectively dispose of him quietly. In this universe, humanity has fought a sort of forever war against an elder insectoid race called the Viators. It turns out humanity was extremely good at adapting their technology and using it against them. While at the time of the novel the last of the Viators are thought to be extinct… admittedly through a human-led xenocide.

Sentinel, Sentinel at the black,
Do not blink or turn your back,
You must stand ready to stem the tide,
Lest Viators come to cross the Divide.

Nursery Rhyme

On the edge of the known universe lies a gravitational anomaly known as “The Divide”. In this setting, the universe stopped expanding and settled onto fixed borders with this uncrossable boundary laying at the far edges. Urban legend states that the Viator feel arrived from the other side of it, and as a result, there lies situated in deep starless black space a fleet of abandoned battleships, each crewed by a branch of the service called the Sentinels. Effectively the Sentinels are like The Night’s Watch from Game of Thrones and are made up largely of folks who were drummed out of normal service for one reason or another. They are stranded at this post, on ancient space hulk relics that have had their FTL and Impulse drives disabled to effectively keep anyone from escaping.

The novel itself centers around two primary characters, and each chapter alternates perspectives between them as it weaves the story around the shifts in voice. First up is Cavlon Mercer, a literal corporate prince in line to take over the family business, but one that has embarrassed his grandfather to the point of being “disappeared”. Having no military experience, he is shuffled out of the core worlds and out onto this remote posting, where he has to figure out how to be a soldier in rapid succession. Then you have Adequin Rake an Excubitor and commanding officer of the SCL Argus, the vessel stranded as a floating fortress on the edge of The Divide. She was a war hero, a member of the Titans… something similar to the Spartans from Halo, and one who made a few decisions that she was being punished for by being marooned in this command.

I don’t really want to dive too deeply into the core story arc, because I found it interesting to see it unfold in front of me. The novel does not go in a direction you think it might but also carves out its own path that I found deeply compelling. It is admittedly a bit of a slow start because Cavlon is very unlikeable in that first chapter, and continues to largely be unlikeable for quite some time. By about chapter five or six, however, I was completely hooked and needed to know how things were going to shake out in the end. if anything I have said so far piqued your interest, then you might check this one out. Right now “The Divide” series is an unfinished story arc with two books currently available and a third on its way. There is a novel coming out in march that is disconnected from The Divide series called Rubicon which also sounds interesting.

Unfortunately, the Library system does not have the audiobook for the next part of this series, so I opted to read it the old-fashioned way. This is where my previous pattern of consumption breaks down a bit because I had been listening to Audiobooks while I played games as a comfy dual activity engaging different parts of my brain with each. Now that I am falling back to the text, however, I traditionally only read from the bed which means after a few nights I am on the ninth chapter. I read relatively slowly at least compared to my wife, so I’ve always felt pressure to be able to consume a book in the amount of time allowed by a library loan. I am equally hooked on this second book as I was on the first, so I might actually start choosing to read over playing a game in the evenings in order to speed up the consumption process. I would use GoodReads to track my progress, but since my wife is way more prolific than I am… and we use the same Amazon account… it is largely littered with her books.

Any unknown amount of time ago (okay not unknown, my profile says 8 months ago)… I set up a Bookwyrm profile so I am likely going to be using that for tracking my book consumption. For those who might be unaware, one of the many projects on the Fediverse that is not Mastodon is a Bookwyrm which serves as a federated alternative to something like Good Reads. You can follow Bookwyrm profiles just like you could any other federated account with an @username@instancename type structure. I am not sure if it will be a purely manual process or if there is a way to maybe have my Libby App update it. Whatever the case it is a thing I plan on sorting out today. I have no real long-term goals other than the chew through the backlog of things people have suggested to me over the years but I never quite got around to consuming.

The Gamepad Club

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Good Morning Friends! Surprised Josie is surprised that I am taking her photo. I figured since this is going to be a fairly light post this morning I would lead off with a cat photo and maybe even close with a cat photo. I’ve not really talked about it on my blog but late last year I was involved with the preparation and launch of a mastodon instance and said involvement went off the rails. As a result, I have not really had a default Mastodon instance to suggest to my friends. There are of course excellent sites run by Stux like Mastodon.coffee, Mstdn.social, and Masto.ai that I currently reside on, but there is just something different about having a nice focused local feed that you can rely on. Since most of my online interaction is with gaming-focused topics, it would be lovely to have a gaming-focused instance that did not have a shitbird for an administrator.

Back in 2019, during another wave of migrations from Twitter my friend Gazimoff founded MMORPG.social and it was a delightful place. You might know him better from his time spent writing for MMORPG.org or the ZAM Network… or even his intense involvement in the Wildstar community… or maybe the Mana Obscura blog. MMORPG.social was really cool but also of fairly limited focus… given that MMORPGs in general represent a pretty small slice of the total gaming public. Then there was the fact that a lot of lessons were learned in a rapid-fire succession about how best to build a Mastodon instance and be able to scale it with demand. While MMORPG.social was ultimately shuttered, lessons were learned about how to build a better community going forward and more than that how to make the entire site scale more sustainably.

Now we scan forward to yesterday when Gaz finally pulled back the curtain on his next venture. Gamepad.club is the result of that understanding gained back in 2019 and created to be a more general focus gaming instance rather than a niche devoted to MMORPGs. Essentially Gaz decided there was a need for a stable gaming-focused instance that could scale as needed and that had a steady hand. I am very happy to have an instance that I feel like I can wholeheartedly support and suggest to my friends. He is doing it right from the start and has signed on to the Mastodon Server Covenant that outlines some basic parameters for operating an instance. I’m not currently formally involved with the running of this instance in any way, because I decided it was probably best that I was not at least in the short term. I’m admittedly concerned that the vindictive admin of another gaming instance might take some sort of retaliatory action against Gamepad.club if I were.

I have however set up an account there and worked on my profile. I’ve not made the formal leap, but I am sure at some point in the coming weeks I will. I have a lot of faith in Gaz and the lessons that he learned while running MMORPG.social and how best to keep from running into any roadblocks with Gamepad.club. I think one of the huge benefits of the way it is configured is that it is not just another hosted instance on masto.host, and as a result, he can pivot and apply custom patches as needed rather than waiting for the entire hosted infrastructure to be updated at the same time. I plan on picking his brain on his experiences with Linode, because I have been deeply considering shifting all of my infrastructure to a self-managed cloud environment rather than the shared web hosting that I currently have.

I will close out this morning’s post with a picture of Josie and Gracie chilling on the sofa and actually getting along. Josie is not all that sure about her role as “Big Sister” and mostly gets annoyed by Gracie’s love and attention. Essentially my friends if you are looking for a more gaming-focused instance, then I highly suggest you check out Gamepad.club. It is still pretty small but I figure in the coming weeks it will grow into a lovely community, without any terribly onerous rules. Gaz is someone I trust and someone who has been a friend for years. I am very willing to put my faith in him when I migrate.