May 2018 – Page 2

Reading Challenge Interlude: The First 25 Books

May 25, 2018 by Grace

I started working my way through NPR’s list of the top 100 sci-fi and fantasy novels almost two years ago, in August 2016. Rendezvous with Rama represents the 25th book on the list, so I’m officially averaging a little bit faster than one book per month. I wanted to use this milestone to look back at what I’ve read so far and see how my personal rankings match up with the list.

I’ve been updating my spreadsheet every time I finish a book, and adjusting my rankings as I go. Goodreads also has a version of this list, with a different ranking order based on their users. I’ve included all three (NPR, Goodreads, my personal rank) because I think it is useful to see how they compare. I have some suspicions about how the demographic differences between Goodreads users and NPR survey respondents play out in the different rankings.

Since I’ve been updating my order as I go, it’s been interesting to see how things have shifted. For example, The Space Trilogy and The Xanth Series started at the bottom of the list and haven’t budged. Nothing since has been quite as bad as those two. Likewise, the Doomsday Book was my first 5-star review, and it has stayed at the top of my list until getting dethroned by Rendezvous with Rama, 20 books later. The amazing books and the truly awful books are all pretty easy to place. What is really difficult is sorting all the 3- and 4-star books. It is getting even harder as I finish more books and the less-memorable ones start getting fuzzier in my mind.

The lonely 1-star entry, C.S. Lewis’ Space Trilogy, earned that honor for being boring, preachy, and unoriginal. Also for being a product of its racist, misogynistic time. And if I’m being honest, because I just don’t like C.S. Lewis’ work. I would be surprised if anything displaces it for last place, but there’s still 75 more books ahead so I can’t be sure.

Among the 2-star books, Sunshine is the least bad since its main crime was that I really didn’t like it. The other two 2-star books are there because they are gross and awful and it makes me mad that anybody likes them enough for them to be on a “top-100” list.

The 3-star group is full of books that are either “fine, but just not my thing”, or “pretty good but with some sort of flaw that annoyed me”. The Illustrated Man earns the top spot in this group because it had so many interesting ideas. Lucifer’s Hammer ranks at the bottom because while it is well constructed, many parts just do not hold up well today.

There are more 4-star books on the list than any other group. It makes sense since every book on this list is supposed to be good. They are really hard to rank relative to each other because I enjoyed all of them in some way. I couldn’t really tell you why Caves of Steel is on the bottom, other than I liked all the others slightly more for one reason or other. It’s still a great book. The Mars Trilogy is at the top mostly because if I were just ranking the first book in the series it would be 5-stars, and in my head I’m comparing everything else to that.

All of the 5-star books are amazing and seriously you should go read them right now if you haven’t already. Rendezvous with Rama and the Doomsday Book would be completely tied if it weren’t for nostalgia pushing Rama ahead for me. All of the 5-star books are very different but they are all fantastic reads.

One change I am making going forward is to be more forgiving about quitting a book if it is just not working for me. Especially for the very long books, if I’m not engaged after 3-4 hours of reading I give myself permission to just stop. None of the books so far that started out poorly for me ended up being great by the end. At best they got a mixed review and 3 stars. Life is too short to force myself to power through when I could move on and discover a new favorite that much sooner.

I’m excited to keep moving forward with this project. There are so many books left to read, and I can’t wait to see how my rankings change with all the new additions. It is daunting to know that it will be years before I am done if I keep at least my current pace, but it’s also nice to think that I have 5 – 6 years worth of great books ahead!

QueenBee Error

May 25, 2018 by Belghast

Yesterday was one of those days. I started trying to leave work around 4:30 but as I was literally locking my machine… I had a person come into my office that needed to talk through a problem with me. Then at 4:50 when that person left… I was not fast enough and another slid in with similar things that needed to be talked through. Finally around 5:20 I was walking out the door, and got snagged by someone I passed in the hall to help deal with another problem. This all meant that I did not actually get out the door until roughly 6… which meant by the time I ran the errands I needed to and picked up meds for one of our animals from the vet I did not get home until after 7. By the time I dealt with watering flowers, feeding cats, changing the ferret playpen and then dealing with the dinner I had picked up on the way home… it was at a minimum 7:30 before I actually sat down in front of a machine and began the process of attempting to download Dauntless.

I had every hope in the world of finally being able to try this game out, because while yes I played it briefly during Pax South… I knew nothing about how to play a Monster Hunter game at that point. It was my hope that given my indoctrination into the genre with Monster Hunter World, that the experience of playing Dauntless would be more enjoyable. The above screenshot represents the furthest I have made it into the game yet, and I don’t even know if there is additional patching that needs to happen once you actually successfully log in. When I finally made it in last night the game itself was in maintenance mode because I am guessing they did not have a very good launch day. Phoenix Labs can call yesterday the beginning of Open Beta, but if you have already publicly stated that there will be no wipes from this point onwards… then you have effectively launched your game.

Launches are extremely rough and it seems like everything was on fire last night for them as their status page denoted problems with almost every subsystem. This unfortunately does not give a whole lot of confidence given that one of the few takeaways I have heard over and over is that the game in general had “performance problems” in closed testing. Based on last night I am guessing it still technically has a lot of performance issues or more importantly scaling issues for the sort of sucker punch that is opening the floodgates to the unwashed masses like myself. The game seems interesting but I am not sure if it is going to get more than a passing curiousity from me since I already have Monster Hunter World, and could be devoting that time towards Generations for the upcoming Switch release of Generations Ultimate.

What I ended up playing instead is Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon which I got for free as a kickstarter backer of Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night. This game is essentially a prequel to Ritual of the Night as far as I can tell and lays some of the background for the setting. It also serves to be an amazing re-imagining of Castlevania III: Dracula’s Curse in that it allows you to swap between a cast of characters as you make your way through the game and find them. Right now it should be available on a wide variety of platforms in their E-Shop for roughly $10. I personally got my free copy on Steam and then turned around and immediately purchased it on the Switch as well. It is also available however on 3DS, PS4 and Xbox One so for the most part you can get it on any platform. The game very much has an authentic Nintendo 8-Bit era feel to it… right up until you reach the boss fights. The sprites that are moving around are way to large for the memory buffers of that era, but I am more than willing to suspend my disbelief and just go with it. I wish I had taken a better screenshot but this is of me playing the Zangetsu character just a little ways into act two. Well worth checking out if you were a fan of Castlevania at all.

Encampment

May 24, 2018 by Belghast

This is one of those mornings where you are going to have to suffer one of my dreams. I had a fairly weird one last night… or at least the last dream I dreamt of the evening was odd. I was at some sort of a video game convention along the lines of Pax… because really that is the only one I have first person experience of and as a result in my brain all video game conventions look a lot like Pax South. Pax has this whole bring your own computer area where folks do just that and set up camp for the weekend, and I believe that is one of the cardinal draws of places like Quake Con in Dallas… the promise of a giant LAN Party. In my dream this convention went a whole new step and sorta allowed people to set up camp for the week literally.

For whatever reason I was there with a mix of people from my work and people I know from the internet and a few people that I only recognize as faces I probably saw on youtube. We had commandeered one of the corners of a large building and literally had vehicles parked creating this box of sorts to denote the boundary of our camp like some sort of a protective wall. There was a space where the cars didn’t completely meet together in the middle and that is how we got in and out of the encampment. Inside the area we marked off were a bunch of sleeping options and a cluster of desks making a computer lab of sorts.

Some folks were sleeping in the backseat of vehicles, others in hammocks… a few people in a pickup bed… and a few more on the roof of the vehicles as well as a few traditional tents. Now mind you… this is inside of a convention center building with its high ceilings and soulless utilitarian walls. None of this makes any sense at all, especially the next bit. These are folks from my work… but none of them are aware of the whole “Belghast” thing and the blog or the podcast… yet I am trying to sneak time to cover the convention for said blog and podcast.

Towards the end of the weekend one of the people that I don’t actually know who they are… but are apparently part of this madness finds out and keeps it on the down low for me. The convention eventually ends and and we have to start breaking camp… and the first thing to move are the vehicles. One of which apparently has lost a fuse of some sort and while they were able to get it out to the parking lot were not dead in the water. So the last thing I remember before waking up for the alarm this morning was sifting through piles of tech debris looking for a fuse.

None of it really makes sense but I think it hints at something weird about my life. I don’t tell anyone I know in my actual life about my online persona or any of the things I do with it. I am weirdly secretive about it because I am not really sure how “normal people” would react to such things. It is just weird to have this thing in my life that I don’t feel like i can really talk about to anyone except people I may never actually meet from the gaming/blogging community. There are a lot of things I have done or accomplished that I should feel proud about, but that I don’t really feel like I can… because I don’t think people would actually understand any of this.

I wonder how much of my anxiety and general dysfunction centers around the fact that I in essence have a secret life. I mean obviously I share it with my wife and she supports the nonsense that I do here… even if she does not fully understand it either. There is a general angst about being “found out” even though I really don’t have anything worth hiding. Everyone has a thing in their life that isn’t quite like what folks would expect. One of my co-workers is super into model trains… and somehow that feels way more normal than anything I do. I realize this is mostly an age thing and I grew up in a generation where gaming was an affliction to grow out of and not something to be embraced other than among your closest circle of friends in a dimly lit room somewhere.

This is an odd post, but it is the sort of things I have been mulling over in my head this morning.

Backyard and Banana

May 23, 2018 by Belghast

Last night was a pretty chill night and was spent either gaming or hanging out on the patio off our bedroom. Here is a photo from my chair as I waited to top off the pool and played Monster Hunter Generations. There was a nice breeze and it was making the wind chimes do all sorts of happy sounds. My wife was hanging beside me doing school work… because unfortunately it is both hobby and job rolled all in one. I love our backyard even though I don’t spend anywhere near as much time as she does out in it. Last night however was a perfect storm of overcast and cool which is about my sweet spot for outdoors. My eyes are super sensitive to light and there are times where while I am sitting in the shade… the world itself is just too bright for my tastes. The flowerbabies of course are doing okay still, and I need to wrap up this post soon so I can go out and give them all a drink.

As far as Monster Hunter Generations… I am largely playing it over 4 Ultimate because of the impending release of Generations Ultimate for the Switch. Monster Hunter is way too complicated a game for me to really enjoy playing it on a tiny screen with a thinkpad trackpoint nub serving as my second thumbstick. That said I do know that whatever effort I make is going to transfer over to the Switch so it feels like it is allowing me to have a bit of a headstart as it were. There are still three months until the release of Generations Ultimate and that gives me some time to casually work on leveling my Palicos and progressing through the quests to a point where I might not be completely on ground one at launch on August 28th. I am super looking forward to having a newish to me Monster Hunter experience to sink my teeth into… that I will be able to play on my 43 inch monitor upstairs.

The tail end of the evening I settled into playing some Iron Banner in Destiny 2 as I had not honestly played much of that since Curse of Osiris. I am nowhere near as good at Crucible as I once was because I am simply out of practice, but then again I never was terribly good in the first place. I did manage to turn in a couple of packages, one of which getting me the Auto Rifle that looks like Scathelocke. I am super pumped about it because firstly I love Auto Rifles and secondly… I had really wanted to try that weapon out and was afraid that I lost my chance when the season changed. There is another auto rifle available as faction rewards so I am wondering if I want to try grinding out 30 packages… and I pretty much figure the answer is no. I do however want the super high rate of fire weapon because it has auto loading holster and high impact rounds and seems like a much better version of Perseverance/Valakadyn… which are both weapons that I hated on the console but have come to enjoy with a mouse and keyboard.

I have significant problems with Destiny 2… but damn does that mechanical loop still feel fun.