Moonshine Mansion

Blog Posts from Grace on Moonshine Mansion website.

June 2018 Gaming Goals

by

May has passed us by and I don’t feel like accomplished much of anything. Losing our air conditioning has really changed the amount of time I’m willing to spend locked in a tiny room with a heat-generating PC. But I did manage to meet some of my goals for the month despite the heat.

May Goals in review:

WoW: Keep playing in the M+ nonsense group. Nope. Between losing interest and the temperature in my office, I just couldn’t make it anymore. This makes me super sad.

Finish all the priest transmog sets up through the first tier of MoP. Done! I managed to get the LFR sets done for all of the Pandaria raids last month, in addition to finishing off all versions of the sets from the Terrace of Endless Spring / Heart of Fear tier.

Level the new mage to 75. Done! Switching from TBC to Wrath zones and throwing in a few dungeon runs to speed things up really saved my sanity.

Destiny 2: Check out the new expansion. Done! I played through the story on 2 characters but that’s as far as I got.

Stardew Valley: Try multiplayer. Not quite – I tried some of the other beta changes but not the multiplayer part.

June Goals:

WoW: Finish at least 2 more priest transmog sets. Soloing is getting harder as I keep creeping closer toward the current expansion, but I should still be able to finish off the MoP sets without help.

Level the new mage to 100. I’m being ambitious on this again because I finally got out of the TBC/Wrath stage and the leveling is going much faster again. I finished off May right around 84, and once I get to WoD it should go super fast.

Heroes of Hammerwatch: “Beat the game”. I put that in quotes because I’m excluding NG+ nonsense. This was our Aggrochat game of the month for May and I really enjoyed it. I think I made it to the last boss but haven’t beaten it yet. I want to do so before I move on to other things.

That’s it? Just a couple simple WoW goals and finishing one game I’m almost done anyway? Yep.

I’m in a real gaming lull right now. I just don’t feel very excited about games in general at the moment. Combine that with my lack of climate control and it is really hard to spend time in my office at all. Hopefully that will turn around in a couple weeks when our new system finally gets installed. In the meantime I’ll be chasing my simple WoW goals in very small doses, and focusing on my crafty projects instead. Downstairs in the basement, where it is nice and cool.

Reading Challenge Interlude: The First 25 Books

by

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.

Reading Challenge Interlude: The First 25 Books

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!

Reading Challenge #76: Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke

by

Welcome back for another reading challenge post. This time I got to read one of my all-time favorite books, so my review might be a little biased. It’s Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke, first published in 1973.

As I work my way through this reading list, every time I get to a book I have read before and remember enjoying I get a little worried. Will I still like it? Does it hold up well? Is this re-read going to make me hate something beloved from my childhood? Luckily for me this time, Rendezvous with Rama is just as amazing as I remembered.

Some books I enjoy because of the characters, others because of the intricate worldbuilding. Rendezvous with Rama I love because it is a beautiful thought experiment. The book is about humanity’s first encounter with aliens. Or rather, with an alien artifact. Dubbed “Rama”, a huge cylindrical spacecraft passes through the solar system, and there’s a rushed scramble to mobilize an expedition. The closest vessel gets conscripted for this task, and have to do their best to gather as much information about Rama as they can before it travels on its way past our sun.

Rama is a fascinating enigma. There’s no explanation of where it is from or why it came. When the expedition gets inside, there’s no reception waiting for them, just an inside-out world full of more questions. The place is so alien that when the explorers finally run into “creatures”, they aren’t even sure if they are animals or robots. Then, just as they finally discover a tantalizing archive of alien artifacts, they have to leave Rama or risk being carried too far away to return safely.

There’s a few moments of tension, with threats from people afraid that Rama might be a weapon, and from the spaceship itself. Mostly, however, the book is content to simply lay out the curiosities of the alien vessel for the reader to consider. It works because the idea of it is so intriguing. The biggest failing is that the characters are not very developed. The crew do their jobs with little conflict beyond good-natured competition over who gets to explore new things first. It’s honestly exactly what you would want from humanity’s first expedition to an alien artifact, even if it doesn’t make for dramatic reading.

The end leaves your head full of questions in the best possible way. Yes there are several sequels, although my understanding is they were mostly written by Gentry Lee with some input from Clarke. I remember enjoying them too, although I suspect they won’t stand up nearly so well to a re-read. For now I like the purity of Rendezvous with Rama. I truly can’t recommend this novel highly enough.

TL;DR: An alien spacecraft passes through our solar system, and leaves behind more questions than answers. One of my all-time favorite books.

Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke

Rating: 5/5 stars

Next up: The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson

Cheesy Achievement

by

There’s this long-term goal I’ve been working on for a while now. It started a bit by accident, then when I fully realized it was possible I started actively pursuing it. It is one of the Legion meta-achievements, and even rewards a fancy new mount for completing it! I’m talking about “Free for All, More for Me” PvP achieve. It requires you to do each of the four free-for-all PvP world quests in Legion 20 times each.

Cheesy AchievementIf you know me at all, you might guess that doing FFA PvP is near the bottom of my list of “things I want to do, ever”. It’s somewhere above “have spinal surgery” but still well below “clean the litter box when my cat is sick”. I dislike PvP, and those quests seem to bring out the worst in people. However, I have a backup plan. Many of the class halls have an option that lets you auto-complete one world quest ever 18 hours. I have alts of many classes. You might see where this is going.

I started out haphazardly completing these quests on multiple alts whenever I remembered to do it. Then I discovered that the achievement is not account-wide. That meant that doing 20 darkbrul arenas on my mage didn’t count toward the progress on my pally, who had completed more of the quests overall. Oh well. It didn’t make the process any more difficult, it just slowed me down some.

Cheesy Achievement

Anyway this week I finally completed it. Darkbrul was the one that took the longest, mostly because of the way the quest timing works out. That one is more likely to be up early in the morning in my time zone, rather than in the evenings when I usually play. It doesn’t help that the PvP quests get overwritten by the invasion events when they are up, which has also messed up the timing for me. Lately I’ve been checking the Legion app in the morning before work, and if it is up I’ll go complete it.

I have this weird sense of satisfaction about getting this achievement in this incredibly cheesy way. Take that, developers who tried to encourage world PvP! Now I can go back to using my free WQ completion for more useful things, like honor tokens and armor appearances I am still missing!