Books

Post Series Sadness

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Good Morning Folks! I’ve been back in my happy place each evening of curling up on the sofa with my laptop and usually a cat and listening to an audiobook while I played copious amounts of Path of Exile. There is just something about having two different parts of me engaged at the same time that brings me joy. Mechanically I am happily grinding away at whatever objective I am focusing on in the ARPG, and then mentally I am having a story told to me. It brings me back to happier days as a kid of doodling while listening to storytime. Yesterday however was a bit of a sad day because I started the morning thinking that I would go home that night and start the next book in the Old Man’s War series by John Scalzi after finishing up the previous one Sunday night. Then I realized… I had no more books in that series. For whatever reason I was thinking that another “space opera” series by that author was connected.
That bummer moment however should not blunt the joy I felt consuming this series. Looking back at my Bookwyrm account, I started the first book on August 26th and wrapped up the last on September 17th. So that was most of a month of chilling out with an ARPG and a book and enjoying life. I guess really if you think about it there is a primary trilogy, a book that retells the last book in that series from a different perspective, and then two different anthologies fleshing out the world from a wide number of different but connected perspectives. Through all six books, a cohesive tale is told, even though no single book keeps the same central character throughout the entire story. This is legitimately my favorite part of the series. It is telling a story of a world more than it is telling a story of a single person, even though the same cast of characters keeps popping up regardless of the scenario.
In many ways, it reminds me of another obsession of mine from when I was a bit younger. I stumbled onto Santiago in a battered paperback form at a used bookstore in college and I mostly picked it up because I liked the cover and the “A Myth of the Far Future” tagline. To the best of my knowledge that “major motion picture” never happened. In truth, the novel was something like the 11th book in the “Birthright” series where Resnick created this entire universe out of disconnected novels. Each one focuses on a specific legend of the far frontier, so you might be hearing about a character in one book… and then pick up the next in the series and it is from their perspective. The thing is… Scalzi is just a better writer and gives his characters far more depth and personality. I didn’t particularly care about any of the characters from Santiago or any of the other dozen or so novels I read in that series, I cared about the world. With Old Man’s War, I feel like I have a personal relationship with each character that the story focuses on. Even when someone seems outwardly evil, you find out that maybe there is a bit more behind that story. There were several times in the story where an entire alien race was considered to be the villain… but we as the reader were given a viewpoint into one particular member of that race to help explain their actions. This elevates the storytelling past hero/villain iconography to something grounded in experience and emotion. My sadness when I realized I was out of books… comes from the fact that I wanted to know more about these rich characters.
Before this year I had never consumed anything by John Scalzi, I am taking a break from his work and diving into another author that I had never read anything from. I am not entirely certain why I chose Mistborn over any of the other series by Brandon Sanderson, but I did and started it last night. It took me a few chapters to switch gears from space opera to fantasy thieves but I think I am on board now. I know absolutely nothing about this series other than the name that kept popping up periodically in my timeline. So far it reminds me a little bit of Locke Lamora, but not enough to shape my opinion. There are already a few characters that I like, and a few others that I dislike but I feel like that is probably intentional. The mythology of the world seems rich, so I am probably going to enjoy it. That is very much a thing for me… I need thick worlds filled with cultures and symbology to keep me going. Anyways… time for me to wrap this up and move on with my day. If you have never read the Old Man’s War series by John Scalzi it is most definitely something that I would recommend. I am sure in another month’s time when I have consumed all of the books available in Mistborn series I will give you my opinions of that as well. The post Post Series Sadness appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Yup Books and Games

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One of the challenges with this whole “goes super hard on books” pattern that I seem to be in, is that it does not exactly translate to an easy steady drip of content to write about. It feels really weird to sit down in the morning and essentially say “yup books”. From the standpoint of “talking about them when I’ve finished them” is great, but the whole me being in mid-flight thing is not exactly a delightful spectator sport. At this point, I am about half the way through Lies of Locke Lamora and it has grabbed me enough to make me want more. However, I also don’t really want to talk about the book as I am experiencing it, and rather will just batch up those thoughts once I have finished it. One thing I did find out is that apparently there is an order of operations that must be maintained within Bookwyrm, and if you want a book to count towards your reading goals it has to hit the “read” shelf at some point. I ended up moving Nona the Ninth to my “Books of 2023” shelf and then “finished reading” and it completely skipped the goals queue. I had to do a bit of backpedaling and “finish” the book again to get it properly slotted as my 7th book of the year in my “20 books” goal. Other than that general weirdness, I am enjoying Bookwyrm quite a bit however I wish its federation worked a bit more as I was expecting. I thought maybe I would be able to follow my Bookwyrm account and then boost the comments that I leave when I finish a book. However while I am following myself, I never see any updates even when I drill down into the profile. A friend suggested that I check out Storygraph so I might dive into that at some point because it seems like it would potentially be a good recommendation engine.
I am trying to branch out a bit of late and do things that are not “Path of Exile Delve” while consuming an audiobook. So far doing events and map completion in Guild Wars 2 seems pretty drift compatible for the sort of interaction that I am looking for. Essentially an activity that flows nicely with listening to an audiobook needs to be one that is mechanically satisfying but asks nothing really of me to grasp narratively. Working on the main story or expansion quests doesn’t really fill this role, but all of the assorted drop-in group activity does beautifully. I’ve been trying to get into the habit of doing Tequatl at a minimum, and then knocking out my daily objectives and farming the three guild halls worth of resources as well as my home instance. For a long time, I have felt like I really wasn’t making much progress financially in the game, but there is a neat add-on for BlishHud that tracks “coin” earned during your session and it seems like every night I am clearing about 5 gold in an hours worth of time.
I’ve also been trying to ease back into playing Final Fantasy XIV more frequently. What I really need to do is get started on leveling my crafting or working on beast tribe quests again… but what I am actually doing is running retainer missions and fucking around liberally. One of the giant obstacles in front of me is the fact that I need to spend some serious time cleaning out my retainers and sorting out the gear that I actually might want to keep for cosmetic purposes from the dross that I should just turn in for company seals. I also noticed that apparently, I am no longer the highest possible rank in my grand company, so I guess I need to sort out how to change that. There are weird minion boxes that I cannot seem to purchase.
What I REALLY need to do is get into the Hunt Train nonsense, because they are super lucrative and also just enough activity to feel like I am doing something meaningful in the game. I have greatly enjoyed this activity in the past, and I need to probably ease back into doing it more often. It might even be a reasonable option for leveling alternate jobs. I only actually leveled Paladin to 90, but did manage to pull everything up to 80 before burning out in 2021. Hunt trains are a great way to get some gear to level those classes up easily as maxed Crystarium gear will pretty much hold you until you hit the level cap.
All of that said… I still actually am playing a lot of Path of Exile. I find the mechanical loop that I have fallen into deeply relaxing. I play the Summon Raging Spirits Necromancer until I fill up my sulfite and then play my Righteous Fire Juggernaut down in Delve until I run out of that resource again. I continue to periodically liquidate cool things I found down in the dark for profit and as a result, I have over 7000 Chaos Orbs and another 20 or so Divine Orbs. That is without me really going out of my way to do much other than these two activities, and passing up a ton of smaller trades because I am busy and don’t feel like stopping what I am doing for 5 chaos. I think more than anything I learned a lot about the trade economy in this league and feel like there will never be a point in future leagues where I struggle to gear myself. With all of that… I somehow managed to cobble together a blog post on a day when I was not feeling particularly like blogging. Sometimes in life, you just need to start writing and eventually, it will coalesce into something hopefully worth reading. That I guess is the benefit of Tales of the Aggronaut being a blog about “me”, and less about any one particular subject. Hopefully, yall are having a delightful week out there, and if so… I hope it keeps on that trajectory until the weekend. If you are not, I hope whatever stresses are haunting you, ease the fuck up. The post Yup Books and Games appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Gracie update

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I’ll be writing my monthly gaming goals post in a day or so, but I wanted to give a more general update since it has been a bit since my last post. Real life has been interfering with my gaming time quite a bit for the past few weeks. On top of that, my interest in games has dropped sharply, other than for mobile games. The combination means I don’t have a ton to talk about here.

I wish I could pin down why WoW went south so fast for me this expansion. I was skeptical going into BfA because I didn’t love the core theme, but the Horde-side leveling content really won me over. I had a blast through leveling, and was having fun doing dungeons with friends. I’m not sure what killed the fun fastest – the stress of healing M+, the boring re-hash of world quests, or the failure of islands and warfronts to remotely live up to the hype we were sold. I still have a week or two left on my subscription but nothing is motivating me to even log in. The most WoW I’ve played in weeks was to finally run Dragon Soul for the last time on my rogue to get her legendary daggers. Yes, old content from Cata is more appealing that the current expansion endgame right now.

Coupled with the disappointment of WoW is the wet blanket that Blizz has thrown over my hype for the Diablo franchise. With the coveted post-opening-ceremonies timeslot at Blizzcon, lots of people were hopeful for a Diablo 4 announcement this year. Sadly Blizz has already warned us to tone done our expectations. I’m still hopeful that we’re getting some kind of new content for Diablo, even if it is just another character pack for D3 like the necromancer. I’m perfectly happy to keep throwing money at the game to keep development chugging forward if they at least keep giving me something new to be interested in once in a while.

Meanwhile I’ve been mostly poking at Dragalia Lost, which I can do while chilling out on the sofa and watching TV. It’s a nice change from being isolated up in my office all the time. I’ve also been reading for fun instead of chewing through my reading challenge list. I re-read all of the October Daye books by Seanan McGuire to prepare for book 12’s release (spoiler: I liked it). Now I’m re-reading The Traitor Baru Cormorant by Seth Dickinson since the sequel to that comes out today. The Traitor Baru Cormorant was the only book I’ve read in the last 10 years or so that I was so engrossed by that I immediately started re-reading it the minute I finished it for the first time. I’m hoping the sequel lives up to it.

Gracie update

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I’ll be writing my monthly gaming goals post in a day or so, but I wanted to give a more general update since it has been a bit since my last post. Real life has been interfering with my gaming time quite a bit for the past few weeks. On top of that, my interest in games has dropped sharply, other than for mobile games. The combination means I don’t have a ton to talk about here. I wish I could pin down why WoW went south so fast for me this expansion. I was skeptical going into BfA because I didn’t love the core theme, but the Horde-side leveling content really won me over. I had a blast through leveling, and was having fun doing dungeons with friends. I’m not sure what killed the fun fastest – the stress of healing M+, the boring re-hash of world quests, or the failure of islands and warfronts to remotely live up to the hype we were sold. I still have a week or two left on my subscription but nothing is motivating me to even log in. The most WoW I’ve played in weeks was to finally run Dragon Soul for the last time on my rogue to get her legendary daggers. Yes, old content from Cata is more appealing that the current expansion endgame right now. Coupled with the disappointment of WoW is the wet blanket that Blizz has thrown over my hype for the Diablo franchise. With the coveted post-opening-ceremonies timeslot at Blizzcon, lots of people were hopeful for a Diablo 4 announcement this year. Sadly Blizz has already warned us to tone done our expectations. I’m still hopeful that we’re getting some kind of new content for Diablo, even if it is just another character pack for D3 like the necromancer. I’m perfectly happy to keep throwing money at the game to keep development chugging forward if they at least keep giving me something new to be interested in once in a while. Meanwhile I’ve been mostly poking at Dragalia Lost, which I can do while chilling out on the sofa and watching TV. It’s a nice change from being isolated up in my office all the time. I’ve also been reading for fun instead of chewing through my reading challenge list. I re-read all of the October Daye books by Seanan McGuire to prepare for book 12’s release (spoiler: I liked it). Now I’m re-reading The Traitor Baru Cormorant by Seth Dickinson since the sequel to that comes out today. The Traitor Baru Cormorant was the only book I’ve read in the last 10 years or so that I was so engrossed by that I immediately started re-reading it the minute I finished it for the first time. I’m hoping the sequel lives up to it.