Booktalk

Alchemical Boy and Murder Puppet

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Good Morning Folks! Every so often I find myself lacking gaming content… and decide that it is going to be a book update day. Today is in fact one of those days. Over the last week and some change, I have consumed three books and started on a fourth, and am going to talk about them. First up we have Last First Snow by Max Gladstone, the fourth book in the Craft Sequence and chronologically the first. I have to admit… this book combined with the fact that my Library system does not have the other books available… has halted my momentum in this series. It isn’t so much that Last First Snow is a bad book, and more that it takes the least likable character from Two Serpents Rise and then writes an entire damned book about them. It is essentially a retelling of events that are hinted at during the second book in the Craft Sequence and the whole thing feels a bit superfluous.

Sure it shows us that Elayne Kevarian is maybe a far cooler person than we had realized up to this point… but also I was sort of already on that page and the Temoc is awful… which again I am already on that page. I feel like this is a “darling” that the author should have probably dragged out into the street and killed. In the grand sequence of events in this series… I am hoping this book matters more than I realize at the moment. It very much feels like Max Gladstone has a deeper attachment to Temoc than we their readers do… kinda like Metzen and Thrall. Maybe I am wrong… maybe this character is beloved by the fanbase as a whole… but I am sorta doubting that someone who is pro-blood-sacrifice and ritualized scaring of children is a champion of the people. This is going to be a speed bump to the series as a whole for me that I am going to have to get over.

I found myself in need of a palette cleanser after that book, so I ventured slightly to the side and picked up This is How You Lose the Time War which is a collaboration between Max Gladstone and Amal El-Mohtar. As suggested by my friend Thalen, this book is sort of this weird romp of taking the classic Mad Magazine Spy vs Spy characters… and then turning that into a Romeo and Juliet story arc. The story is presented in alternating excerpts about two characters… Red and Blue are on diametrically opposed sides of a time and reality-bending Cold War. The thrill of competition leads to begrudging respect which blossoms into a romance that could never be… were it not for the fact that the two of them are adept at making the impossible appear probable. It is a really short book, only 200ish pages and once you get indoctrinated into the speech patterns of the two characters time flies by. I highly suggest you pick this up and give it a spin because I found it delightful.

Similarly recommended, this time by my friend Ace/Grace… we have the book Space Opera which is also smallish in stature coming in around 300 pages. The tagline for this book compares it to what if Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy met Eurovision and quite honestly it is apt. A more brutalist interpretation is what if the Get Schwifty episode of Rick and Morty were played a bit more seriously and expanded into an entire story arc. It is the tale of washed-up glam rockers Decibel Jones and the Absolute Zeroes, and how they saved the earth from total annihilation at the hands of the great galactic civilizations. How does a civilization prove itself to be truly sentient? Through music of course. It was a fun ride that took a bit to get into, but once I was bought in… I was there happily until the conclusion. The only thing a bit distracting about the novel is it has a propensity for rapid-fire information dumping asides… but then again so did Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy so maybe that is just fit for form.

Now I am working my way through Middlegame which is in itself part of a larger series… that admittedly I am probably going to dive into as well. It also has this whole story-within-a-story thing going on… which has spun off into its own book series. I admit though… the first night that I started this book I struggled considerably because it spends a lot of time introducing you to some deeply unlikeable characters. Last night however I broke through the surface and met the adorable Roger and Dodger… two small genius potatoes that I want to protect with all my life. I am glad I suffered through a maniacal alchemy boy and his murder puppet in order to get to the good bits. It definitely feels like one of those novels where every statement is purposeful as we are carefully working our way toward some grand denouement. While I had wobbly legs for a bit… I am very much on board now and will see this through.

Finishing Middlegame will take me to 48 books this year and that seems like a reasonable number. Sure it would be nice to maybe push that to 50 for clean divisible by ten goodness… but I am finding myself craving some narrative gaming. A lot of this has been me listening to audiobooks while playing mechanically enjoyable games that don’t require the narrative centers of my brain. I think I want to spend some time before the close of the year visiting some of the wealth of games that came out in 2023. I feel like I want to start Baldur’s Gate 3 over from scratch, and maybe roll something that can talk to animals as I seem to have missed out on a major part of the game.

Harrow the Ninth

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Good Morning Friends! I opted to take yesterday off because for me it was a holiday and I was off work, and also I was feeling like complete shit. I am either fighting off allergies turned asthma attack, or I have picked up something… but for the latter, I’ve not really been around anyone to catch anything. Over the weekend I finished up my second book from the Libby App, and it was a wild ride. I think last I said I had started Skin Game by Jim Butcher, but I abruptly paused that because my library hold came up on the next novel in the Locked Tomb series. Harrow The Ninth was a hard book to get through, because it has you questioning the events of the first novel… which ended on a bit of a frustrating cliffhanger. During at least the first fourth of the novel, I was going back and forth about whether or not Tamsyn Muir had a fucking clue what they were doing with this story. Thankfully it paid off in the end and the story that was woven between the two tales is extremely good.

Essentially between the two novels, there is a character perspective shift, from the very likable Gideon Nav to the very unlikeable Harrowhark Nonagesimus. It feels like a massive “bait and switch” at the end of the first book and the beginning of the second book, which knocks the reader off balance. However, I would assume this was all on purpose to make you now start to deeply care about Harrow and move her from the Villain column more solidly into the hero column. Now I just want to read the next one the sequence, Nona the Ninth… but the Libby App tells me it is going to be about a six-week wait. Granted the last book told me it would be a four-week wait and that is why I had started Skin Game, but my hold suddenly came available after about a week. I figure I will finish Skin Game and evaluate where I am at that point, but I might end up just buying this next book so I can consume it faster.

In other random events this weekend, it appears that Tam and a few others have been screwing around in Lord of the Rings Online. I opted to go ahead and install the game and start a brand new character, a Guardian named Belglaive on Landroval. Immediately stepping into this game feels like I went back two decades in MMORPG design, which has its ups and downs. I opted to start the recently released new character starter experience, and honestly… I think I like the Shadows of Angmar option a bit better. This is really slow-paced and I feel like I am completely disconnected from the rest of the game at the moment. With the previous experience, I could at least rush to Bree and train professions, and I guess in theory I can probably do that now… but I am trying to follow the breadcrumbs that are laid out in front of me. All told though I am enjoying myself in what feels like an anachronistic jaunt into MMORPG gaming.

In Path of Exile, I spent a bit more money… swapped out some gems for Awakened versions, and got my flasks in order so that now I am much tankier even than I was before. Righteous Fire is still really bad at bossing, and as such, I have continued trying to tweak my Fire SRS Necromancer to set it up as my bossing character. In the grand scheme of things it works… most of the time. I did a Maven Invitation last night and wrecked it as the Necro, something that I would have struggled at length on the Juggernaut. I’ve done several invitations, but it just takes forever whereas on the Necro I kept a pretty good pace as the new bosses were being released. I could pour some more funds into the character and improve this I am certain. I think my short-term goal is to keep getting levels on the Juggernaut, and I would really love to hit level 100 this season.

I officially have more currency than I have ever had before in Path of Exile. That catch is it isn’t mine. Thalen lucked into an Unrequited Love card, that at the time was going for 18 Divine Orbs. However since he got it, and when he decided to have me sell it… the price dropped considerably. I originally priced it at 18, hoping the price would go back up but in the meantime, a number of 17 Divine cards have created this price barrier that I knew we would not be breaking anytime soon. I priced it at 16.5 Divines and within moments had sold it. Now I am essentially acting as a concierge broker and Thalen sends me a link to something he wants, and I attempt to acquire it for him. I’ve set aside all of his currency and my purchases from it in a stash tab to keep it separate from everything else. This also allows me to just ignore that tab when running Exilence to see if I have any other high-value items that I should be trying to sell.

I made a bit more progress in Grim Dawn on the Soldier/Oathkeeper combination and I have to say… I am not sure if I like the build at all. I am not really enjoying myself that much, so I might fall back on playing my original level 42 Warder character which is Soldier/Shaman. I also need to try some ranged and caster options because at the moment I am just not feeling the game. I feel way more squishy than I want to feel, so I either need to kill things much faster or have better layers of defense. Unfortunately, it is nowhere near as active of a community as say Path of Exile, and while there is a build guide website it is much harder to gauge how successful a given build is going to be. Admittedly that is my lack of knowledge of the game because I am sure if you are already well indoctrinated into Grim Dawn it would be fine.

Anyways I hope you all had a most excellent weekend, and now if I can just kick this crud life would be grand. As is often the case I have way too many gaming irons in the fire at the moment. It is a much better problem to have than languishing in that “nothing I want to play” feeling.