Secret Story of the Galaxy

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Secret Story of the Galaxy

This morning is one of those days.  I just literally got out of the bathroom where I held my hands under the tap to wash them… and then could not figure out why the tap was not turning on automatically.  Moments later I realized I was in fact at home… and that we don’t have the same sort of magical faucets that the rest of the world does.  This week has been a bit of a challenge because I am just straight up exhausted all of the time.  No amount of caffeine seems to be able to break me out of whatever haze I seem to be in.  It does not help that it has been cold and rainy…  in May.  By this time last year we already had the pool open and I had a yard full of flowers.  This year however it just hasn’t been warm enough for either, and the yard is so water logged that before long I will have a grand primal swamp.  My evenings have been spent watching various things on Netflix and working my way through the Agent storyline in Star Wars the Old Republic.

In a way I am glad that I left this storyline for the last, because it seems to be making a bunch of callbacks to the other stories that I never would have gotten had I not already played the other seven classes.  There are constantly folks being mentioned…. and I am like “I know that person” or in some cases “I killed that person in another life”.  For years I have thought that the Jedi Knight main story arc ultimately was the most “canon” of them all…  but in truth I feel like maybe Imperial Agent is also deeply canon because it shows the underside of the world and all of the pieces shifting slowly into place.  While Jedi Knight is the “big damned hero” tale, Agent seems to be the “truth” that happened while the hero tale was playing out.  The story behind the story is always interesting, and I continue to be intrigued at just how much I am getting into this.  I think it is a testament to just how good the game really is that it can plop me down in a role I would never actually play…. and make me love it.  I also deeply dig Kaliyo and my dark side murdery nature seems to play well to her brand of violent sarcasm.

Secret Story of the Galaxy

However after all of this skulking about and subterfuge… I am really looking forward to switching back to my Jedi Knight main and continuing through the rest of the story that I never got around to playing the last time.  When we played December 2015, I got caught up in the 12 times story bonus that allowed me to play through all of the classic stories without having to worry about any additional questing.  Once I finish the Agent that particular mission is complete, and it will allow me to pick back up where I left off… which is the beginning of the Shadow of Revan content.  I really want to see how that storyline goes, and I also want to see how exactly the transition to being “The Outlander” happens as well.  I love the original game, and in part I am wanting to see just how the game changes once it shifts to the Fallen Empire model.  I mean I realize I have plenty of boosts available and could just catapult a character to near maximum level.  However most of my enjoyment in SWTOR comes from actually playing through the content, much like the same is true with Elder Scrolls Online.  So while it feels like both games are taking forever…  I don’t really want to rob myself of the experience.

 

WoW?! Alt Overload

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If you had told me at the start of April that I would get heavily invested in WoW again that month I would probably have laughed at you. For better or worse I’ve gotten back in the habit of messing around in Azeroth. It turns out that lifting the pressure of trying to keep up has done absolute wonders for my enjoyment of the game. I’ve still been logging onto my main to do occasional world quests and each new piece of the class quest when they are available, but otherwise it is alt time all the time.

After leveling my pally I got my warlock up next. Leveling as affliction was incredibly easy, which is good because when I swapped to demonology for the weapon quest I was totally lost. I guess it has been a while since I spent any quality time with demo. Much like beast mastery hunters they seem to have put the focus on quantity of pets instead of quality, and I am not a fan. Once I hit 110 I struggled a bit more with soloing than I did on the pally, but I’m still pretty functional. The artifact knowledge 25 token that I can buy with resources from my main makes a huge difference, as does the cheap nethershard gear from the broken shore.

My plan is to at least finish the original class hall quest line with everybody, and make progress on the class quests for the mounts as much as I can. I’m prioritizing that on my monk, and waiting to see if there are any bottlenecks in terms of difficulty or resource requirements that will make it a waste of time on alts. I’m hoping I can get at least the priest and druid ones done if they’re reasonable.

Running the same four leveling zones over and over is starting to get a bit tiresome, so I’m not sure how many more alts I’ll get to 110 before I get sick of it. I still have a lot hordies sitting at 100 and in need of love*. If I’m still motivated to play but need a break from leveling in the broken isles I can always either work on professions (hahahahahaha no…professions in Legion are awful) or level something I don’t have near 100 yet horde side. Raiding is still firmly off the table for now, because I am enjoying not worrying about the pressure of learning the fights and showing up on a schedule.

I’m still slightly baffled at how much I’m enjoying being back, but that’s the allure of comfort gaming – it works best when I don’t think about it too much.

*My current roster on my primary Horde server (yes I have even more alts at 100 elsewhere, please send help) looks like this:
Priest 110
Pally 110
Warlock 110
Druid 103 (have 110 Alliance-side)
Mage 100 (have 110 Alliance-side)
Hunter 100 (have 110 Alliance-side)
Rogue 100
Shaman 100
DK 100
DH 98
Warrior <10
Monk <10 (110 main Alliance-side)

What would you level next?


WoW?! Alt Overload

Netflix and Turtle

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Yesterday when I wrote my post I was deeply looking forward to the Tuesday night FFXIV shenanigans.  However as the day went on things went sideways.  Its not so much that a sequence of bad events happened…  but more a sequence of events that robbed me of every single “spoon” I had to give.  I am very much a person who recharges my batteries by milling around by myself doing piddly things.  Each social engagement, even if it is just saying good morning to the security guard on my way in the building…  consumes a bit of energy that I have stored up in reserve.  Now that I am in management… it feels like those batteries deplete all too quickly flitting between meetings and making sure my team is taken care of.  One might question if management is really a great choice, but in truth it is one of those things that just sort of happened over time. I never set out to lead a guild, it just was something that I did because it needed to happen.  Similarly I fell into my current position because it just needed to happened, and the alternative was to hope someone else did it.

As a result I came home last night, cooked some dinner… and by the time I had cleaned and sat down on the couch I completely lost sync with time as a construct.  So at 8:30 I found myself apologizing to the FFXIV crew for needing some “turtle time” where I pull my head into my shell and pretend the world doesn’t exist.  I feel like this has to suck to experience from the other side of the equation, because I don’t always know when it is going to hit or what the ramifications are going to be.  All I know is when it does I just cannot deal with communicating with other people.  I have friends who experience the same sort of thing, and it is at least comforting that I am not the only person who goes through it every so often.  The only problem is the more I do it… the harder it is to break out of the cycle.  It reminds me in the days of this blog before I went on the whole crusade of regular posting.  The longer I went between posts… the harder it was to make the next one because it felt like this invisible audience was somehow expecting me to poop sheer brilliance out on the page every time I posted anything.  Similarly it feels like each time I withdraw, I have to psyche myself up to be some sort of rockstar version of myself to make up for the fact that I was in hiding.  I mean I know that is not actually the case, but it is super hard to explain that to anxiety brain.

What did I do instead last night?  Well I spent some quality time with Netflix… and tried to chill out and remember that everything is okay.  Over the last couple days I have watched the first episode of American Gods…  which makes me realize how damned long it has been since I read that book.  Things felt familiar in a fuzzy melange of the details I sort of remember about the book, so I guess that is a good thing.  I also watched Maria Bamford’s Old Baby…  which was delightfully bizarre.  I mean I suggest it, but you need to go in expecting it to not really be like any other comedy special you have ever seen.  I watched a handful of episodes of Dear White People, which I really enjoyed on a bunch of different levels.  Finally I finished the night watching the three available episodes of Handmaid’s Tale that were on Hulu.  The last one I am not sure if you can actually enjoy… because it is fucking disturbing.  I am hooked but on a stomach turning level…  I mean for whatever reason I never read the novel, and I think I probably should.  Probably not the best thing for an anxiety riddled mind, but I am glad that I watched it.

 

Book Challenge #92: Sunshine by Robin McKinley

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Surprise! We’ve reached reading challenge time again already! We’re up to #92, Sunshine by Robin McKinley. It’s one of the more recently published novels on the list, from 2003. This one left me confused on a couple fronts, not the least of which was how the hell it ended up on this list.

When I started reading this book I was a bit surprised it was on this “best of” list. For the most part it looks like not a lot of “horror” or horror-adjacent novels made it. The usual vampire novel suspects like Dracula or anything by Anne Rice are nowhere to be found. I do enjoy some urban fantasy so I don’t object to the genre being represented, but I could definitely think of some better choices than this one.

The novel follows Rae, aka “Sunshine”, a coffeeshop baker with a family history of magic who very quickly gets tangled up with vampires. The world building here is a bit different from the norm in urban fantasy, since “Others”, the catch-all term for demons, angels, weres, vampires, etc., are all out in the open and well known to exist and participate in society. The world is in the aftermath of a large-scale magical war, so there is also a small post-apocalypse element too.

Sunshine has magical powers but she had been largely ignoring them because she didn’t need them in her day to day life. When she gets abducted by vampires at the start of the book she’s forced to use them or end up dead. The blurbs I read about this book described it as a fresh spin on the genre but it didn’t feel that way to me. Perhaps if I had read it when it was released I’d feel differently. The story is pretty straightforward. Girl gets abducted by vampires, rediscovers her latent magical powers, reluctantly teams up with a mysterious vampire who doesn’t want to drink her blood for some reason, ~obligatory vampire-human sexual tension~, something something the human and the good vampire triumph over the evil vampires. There’s nothing horrible here, but nothing exciting or new either.

The biggest things which made it hard for me to enjoy this book were the point of view and style. We get the constant internal monologue thing which is so common, but every once in a while there’s a weird fourth-wall breaking moment thrown in too. It is definitely a style thing that didn’t work for me. Some of my favorite urban fantasy novels are my favorites because I enjoy the main character’s personality and point of view, but that was not the case here. I get the reluctant heroine thing, but it wasn’t fun reading an entire book where the main character is constantly complaining that they wish they were anywhere else. By the end I was wishing that too.

If I was feeling a bit more charitable I would give this one a 3/5, because it really is not in the same class of terrible as A Spell for Chameleon. It would make a fine throwaway beach novel. However I do think it was below average, so I can’t quite bring myself to give it an average rating. If I could assign half points this one would be a 2.5/5. Not awful but not really good either.

TL;DR:  Middling to below-average vampire novel.

Sunshine by Robin McKinley

Rating: 2/5 stars

Verdict: If you love the southern vampire (True Blood) books you might find something to like here, otherwise this one is a safe skip.

Next up: The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury


Book Challenge #92: Sunshine by Robin McKinley