Hey Folks! I appear to be on this short book kick right now. One of my goals for this year was to not have this massive gulf where I was not really reading anything. Essentially last year I went through this period from the launch of Dawntrail in the summer through to November where I was not consuming books at all. I am really happier when I am actively reading things, and as such one of my big focuses this year is to get back into the swing of things. After only reading a book or two a year for most of my life I have so much catching up to do and so many excellent series that I have never touched. I have this backlog in my head that I should probably document somewhere, but apparently right now I am going through a cycle of reading a bunch of short books.
Right now I am on this kick of tearing through the Martha Wells Murderbot Diaries series. I had to title this post “I Love Murderbot!” because there is this great quote on the cover of each of the books I have read so far and in truth I fully agree with that sentiment. I deeply relate to Murderbot and their outlook on the world. I really like protecting people… I play tanks in video games… but I also don’t really like being observed by other human beings. I get this is a weird take given that I devote tons of my life to actively blogging… but the secret there is that when I am writing these I am effectively talking to myself. This is my private journal and I am just letting you all read it. Anyways I am not sure how many of these books there are but I can already see that I am pretty much going to burn through all of them in a row. I do this occasionally with series, and that is one of the big benefits of being deeply late to the party.
I’ve also recently read through the first two books of the Sworn Soldier series by T. Kingfisher. The first book What Moves the Dead is essentially this delightful revisiting of Fall of the House of Usher featuring a retired sworn soldier Alex Easton and their assistant Angus. The first book is delightful, the second book What Feasts at Night was enjoyable, but not quite as much so. What Moves the Dead leans heavily on being a retread of a familiar story and gains a lot of ground from that. What I really enjoyed about both books however is the characters… specifically Ms Potter the Mycologist. I am pretty sure that my friend Ace recommended these books to me, but also so did Storygraph so I figured I should probably pay attention. Well worth your time and both are extremely short.
Another book I have finished since the start of the year is the third part of The Divide series from J.S. Dewes called The Relentless Legion. I feel like this book series is a relatively unknown gem. Legitimately I only read this because I was looking for something to check out from the library and this was a new release. Did you like playing Mass Effect as FemShep? Did you enjoy The Expanse or the aging Chris Carter series Space Above and Beyond? Legitimately pick this series up and give it a read because it is extremely good. The third book mostly wrapped everything up neatly, while leaving enough room to potentially have follow up books that expand this beyond a trilogy. It was a satisfying end, but also there are still a bunch more questions because there are longer tailed events that will eventually have to be dealt with.
I don’t always do a great job of sharing the books that I am reading on this blog. If you are so inclined and have an existing Fediverse/Mastodon/Pixelfed account you can follow my progress via my Bookwyrm account. Occasionally I give my thoughts about a book when I update my statuses in that application. I am also keeping Storygraph up to date mostly because I like its recommendation system. So if you are using that system already you can also follow my progress there. I am going to make an attempt to start logging recommendations in the “To Read” section of Storygraph because I have been bad about actually keeping track of that, and I don’t really love the Bookwyrm implementation.
All in all though the year is off to a good start book wise. Have you been reading anything good? Drop me a line below and I will pilfer your suggestions.
The post I Love Murderbot! appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks! I’ve not done as much navel gazing as I usually do around this time of the year. Normally I do these posts over the holiday break as filler to keep my blog active. This year however I just took most of that time off from blogging entirely. I think it was good for me to finally take a proper break. However this also means that you are probably going to get a spate of navel gazing posts now in January. During late 2022 and all of 2023 I was on a tear of consuming way more books than I have previously. Generally speaking in a given year I would normally read one or two books, but in 2023 I set a goal of 20 and made it through 52. As such I set the ambitious goal of 50 for 2024… and fell extremely short of it. Essentially I made it through 39 “books” though several of those were short stories and a few graphic novels.
I still use Bookwyrm as my primary platform for keeping track of my reading, and when I logged in I was presented with my summary of 2024. If you are curious you can also still see 2023 for reference, and weirdly I did not read that many fewer pages this year. Part of this was of course that I dove much deeper into the world of Brandon Sanderson and his epic over-thousand-page tomes. What kept me from my goal is the fact that I essentially hit a gulf mid-year where I just stopped reading altogether until the tail end of the year. Had I kept up a consistent clip, there is no doubt I would have burned through those 50 books that I set as my goal for the year. For 2025 however, I set myself a bit more realistic goal and landed on 30.
Another tool that I started using more reliably was Storygraph. This was a suggestion from my friend Cuppy some time ago as a Goodreads alternative, and more than anything the feature that I like the most is its recommendation engine. While Bookwyrm is my primary tool, I am keeping Storygraph updated as well and then using their algorithm when I get stuck for something new to read. I don’t use any of these apps on my phone, but instead prefer the web application experience. My wife however has shifted to using Storygraph entirely and uses the app reliably to keep track of her own reading. Sometimes its suggestions are painfully obvious, but occasionally it chooses something that would not have normally piqued my interests.
For example a few of my favorite short books last year came from storygraph. I would say honestly that The Lost Girls was quite possibly my favorite book of the year, and I would not have been tipped off to it were it not for randomly searching its generated suggestions. It is so painfully “90s goth culture” and well worth the read and has a sort of Vampires meets Heathers vibe to it. Where Darkness Blooms is quite honestly not that dissimilar from a book I read in 2023 called Dark Harvest, but it still takes an interesting spin on the “small town has a dark secret” trope. It wasn’t necessarily the most amazing or original book I have ever read but it sure was a fun little read and I would recommend it to anyone just looking for something quick.
Another thing that I am proud of from last year is that I made my way through the entire Dark Tower series back to back at the beginning of the year. This is something I had always wanted to do, but struggled to get hooked into. I am not necessarily the biggest Stephen King fan, but now having finished this series I understand a bit more of the unvarnished admiration of this sequence. I think my favorite bit of this series is the language of the characters… specifically Roland. I admit I have said “thankee sai” more than a few times over the past year. Admittedly… now that I am indoctrinated into the shared universe of the Dark Tower, I have a not so insignificant desire to go back and read some of the other King books that are connected to it as well. If you believe the fans… essentially EVERYTHING King has ever written is connected to this one universe.
As far as 2025… I am off to a decent start so far. I just finished the two books in the Cerulean Sea series by TJ Klune and will absolutely read the next one whenever it comes out. These are very much “Wizarding World” but unapologetically queer. In fact the afterword of the second book essentially says as much and that their goal is to write queer stories that embrace everyone. Really well written. I think I like the first book a bit better than the second book, but mostly because the second takes a bit to get rolling and is a very different sort of tale. Essentially all of the books from this author are soft adds to my long list of “I should probably read this at some point”.
I’m not really sure where I am going from here. I did not start something new last night after finishing Somewhere Beyond the Sea. I checked into a few things but they were not available through any of my now four library cards. I’ve been hesitant to dive into another Sanderson epic, because I know those are such massive commitments. I want to read What Moves the Dead by T. Kingfisher so I might try and find a copy of that somewhere. I also want to dive into the Feed series by Seanan McGuire writing as Mira Grant, so that might be a thing I do. I’ve also read zero of the Murderbot books so that is a possibility as well. Maybe today I will decide where I am heading next so that I can go there tonight.`
The post Failed Goals: The Books of 2024 appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Folks… I have completely fallen off the wagon this year when it comes to books. I finished Apostles of Mercy in August and then just have not kept up with things. It really fell apart during my lead-up to Dawntrail in Final Fantasy XIV since my chosen vehicle for consuming books is playing an audiobook in the background while I grind away at an ARPG or similarly narratively vacant game. Playing anything with a lot of focused stories completely destroys my ability to listen to anything else of substance. Since I am back in Path of Exile for a bit, I really need to get plugged back in and consume literature again. I think my methodology of essentially chainsmoking Sanderson where I lit the next book off the dying embers of the previous, took a lot out of me. I would like to hit that goal of 50 books for the year, which means I need to get through 12 more books before 2025. I kind of doubt that is going to happen.
As far as Atlas progress goes in Path of Exile, I am up to 70 of 115 and have plenty of uncompleted maps to keep churning forward. I’ve still made almost zero progress on any further gearing goals, but am realizing that… honestly I don’t need it. This baseline version of the Righteous Fire Chieftain can absolutely complete the atlas and probably get my first two keystones without much issue. Given this is a limited event, in spirit if not necessarily in time constraints… means I am probably okay if I never get past the “starter” build. Optimization and climbing the ladder is really for a proper fresh league.
I specced out my second Atlas tree for Niko, Scarabs, Shrines, and Strongboxes and it also seems to have the side effect of producing a lot more raw map drops than my very focused Einhar, Beyond, and Ritual build did. I will probably run this for awhile alternating between mapping and delving until I finish out my atlas. Then once I have gotten through the t16 maps I will shift back over to the Einhar/Ritual build in a further attempt to farm one of the two things that can get me an easy Six-Link. I am fine operating in this Semi-SSF mode where I am mostly getting my own stuff. I am however selling a lot of things through the currency exchange to build up a stockpile of currency for when I decide I care about some of the upgrades.
Hoping this weekend to get back engaged in a book and go back to that normal mode of ARPG plus Audiobook. I am not entirely certain what path I am going to go down. I did pick up a copy of Play Nice: The Rise, Fall, and Future of Blizzard Entertainment, and I would like to make my way through that at some point. I am just not usually one for non-fiction so we will see how well that works. I also have a Cyberpunk 2077 novelization in my back pocket for when I want something that is not too bogged down. Then again I could dive into the next book in the Stormlight Archive series, but I also know that is going to be a major commitment timewise because once I start I am going to burn through it until I complete it.
Anyways. I hope you all have a delightful weekend. I will let you know Monday if I actually accomplished any of the things I hope to going into my weekend.
The post Failing Some Goals appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Friends. This morning’s post is going to be a bit meandering, but stick with me and I promise I will wrap things up into a point. One of the things that I have long lamented was the closing of Toys R Us. Sure it generally offered the highest possible price point you could pay for an item, but what I miss is the foundational memory that it provided for me growing up. Getting to go to Toys R Us was a big deal because it was this magical place that had every toy that you knew about and a lot more than you had likely ever seen before. It was an even bigger deal for me because I grew up in a tiny town with Walmart as the only retailer, which meant that I had to make a special trip to the “Big City” in order to go there. This also meant that generally speaking I was on my best behavior in the vague hopes that maybe just maybe my parents would let me go to the magical oasis of toys.
Another piece of this puzzle is that my wife and I have had this weird pipe dream for years. We always wanted to create a store that had a jumble of all of our interests. So there would be a section for used books, teacher stuff, video games, vintage toys, and tabletop games all rolled into a single store. The closest thing to this that really exists is Gardner’s Used Books here in the Tulsa area and I feel like it probably only really exists because it was run at a loss for decades as a bit of a tax dodge for a successful accountant. Now that it has been taken over by his daughter though, the place has even got better and probably actually properly is a successful business. There are tales of warehouses full of stock that he bought throughout the years that have never seen the light of day. Going to Gardner’s at least in some part harkens back to some of that magic of a Toys R Us trip because there are just so many interesting and unexpected things to see.
Because of these combined interests, one of the things that I really enjoy is what I collectively refer to as “Shop Tube”. There is a wide array of channels devoted to running a brick-and-mortar store, specifically in collectible spaces. They generally offer a behind-the-scenes day in the life of a store experience as folks bring in items to sell and they figure out how best to price them. Since my wife and I have never really prioritized our daydream of running that penultimate combo store idea we have… this gives me a bit of a way to live vicariously through the eyes of folks who did go down that road. I’ve talked before about Toy Federation which has become a Sunday morning ritual of watching their new video each week. I’ve also talked a bit about Retro Rick’s Game Point channel which is actually close enough to me to reasonably go there, and at some point, I probably will.
So all of this said… when the YouTube algorithm started suggesting to me this new channel with a weird name, I was primed to click through and see what it was about. Essentially it is a Toy, Video Game, and Children’s Clothing store located in Jasper Indiana, and the channel is devoted to the process of standing up this store and then annexing the other part of the building to expand the business and the assorted growing pains that come with that. What is so cool about the store is that it is purposefully built to be a spectacle giving kids that magical experience of roaming through a place with seemingly endless possibilities. The name is explained… but also does not really matter because it is extremely memorable.
The channel is most often presented through the narration of Dallas the owner and his co-owner girlfriend, and the cast of characters that work at the store. What is so cool about this experience is that it is targeted specifically towards trying some interesting things out. For example, there is a giant bin of Mr/Mrs Potato dolls and parts and kids can effectively build their own custom-made ultimate version to buy. There is a Lego table with cups letting you fill up whatever parts you want to then purchase. There is a free make-your-own bracelet table with tons of assorted beds dumped into a big bin with pipe cleaners letting kids have a little arts and crafts activity for free as part of the total experience. Everything is bright and colorful and specifically designed in a way to be at the eye level for the target demographic… kids… or adults who are kids at heart.
The thing is this channel and store go much further than just a YouTube thing, but are attempting to be a force of interesting activities in their small community. On September 13th they held a Mario Kart Tournament and gave away store credit to the winners. The channel showed off the behind-the-scenes process of getting ready for the event and trying to figure out how to make a very cool and memorable trophy for the winners. It was just generally fun to watch a bunch of kids and a few adults having a blast playing Mario Kart. There are future plans to do something totally different and hold a Hot Wheel race throughout the store as their next big event. It feels like they are genuinely trying to create interesting memories for the kids who frequent the shop, and I am here for it. Like I said before… that is the big thing that the death of Toys R Us robbed us of, is those deep foundational memories from childhood.
Right now the channel is honestly sort of criminally underrated. It only has around 2200 subscribers but is doing some really interesting things. They recently started a live Saturday show from the store and Dallas has wired up a few cameras so that they can swap between the podcasting area in the Video Game store and behind the counter in the Clothing/Toy side of the store. What is sort of infectious is the generally chaotic energy of the store owner which has deep “big kid” vibes to it. More important than that though is that the employees seem genuinely happy there. There are often asides in the videos where one of them has been roaming around with a go-pro and just yammering unscripted about whatever is on their mind. A good number of retail store channels are very clearly staged and at least loosely scripted, and this just has more of a “giving a toddler your camera” vibe.
Dallas aka the face of the Duck Duck Blue channel had/has another channel with nine years worth of content called Tendo’s Trash. Once I started watching the Duck Duck Blue videos, the algorithm of course started recommending various videos from that channel. It was way more focused on Thrift Shopping, Garage Sales, and hitting up the Goodwill Bins to find deals to ultimately then flip on eBay or stock an Antique Mall Booth. It has the same chaos goblin vibes that Duck Duck Blue has but is a bit less focused. However, it also gives a bit of a behind-the-behind-the-scenes view of all of the events that led up to the grand opening of the store. There are over nine hundred videos on that channel dating back nine years, so I doubt I will be getting through all of them, but it has been interesting seeing the process that they went through to stock the store almost entirely through aggressively seeking out garage and estate sales.
If you are a child of the 80s/90s and have deep foundational memories centered around visits to the toy store… then you might legitimately dig all of this. I am legitimately hoping that five years from now we don’t find out that Tendo was a milkshake duck, but so far he seems like a genuinely good dude with a good heart.
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