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.
Friends! I have completed my Atlas! I have essentially resorted to the behavior that I always end up resorting to, and purchased the last 5 unique maps from the trade market. There are two that are always grossly expensive because they unlock two exceptionally powerful meta-crafting recipes, so combined they were around 100 Chaos. The rest were dirt cheap in the 2-5 Chaos range, but having them done… means more to me than any currency that I had to spend to finish this off. I did manage to get all the way through the normal maps the “old fashioned way” which is either running adjacent maps and hoping for one to drop, or using the 3-to-1 Vendor recipe to try and convert three lower-tier maps into the one that I was missing from a higher tier. I think it took me a bit longer than usual, but this league did see me do a week one re-roll so that probably caused some manner of delay. I should probably keep track of when I accomplished various feats in a spreadsheet or something… so I can ponder them later.
My focus has very much shifted from mapping to Delving, and I am essentially only poking my head up above ground in order to regain Sulphite needed to keep diving deeper. I am essentially hovering around the 150 depth level… and quite honestly for me traditionally the 150-250 range seems to be the sweet spot. I cleared out four Delve Cities last night and fought a Lich boss in the Abyssal City biome. That one took me a bit by surprise and I forgot that I could not in fact stand in the laserbeam star thingy that they spread around the room. Truth be told… I find so few Liches as compared to Vaal and Primeval bosses that I am not near as seasoned at that fight. Doing the bosses in general feels like hopping back on a bike after a few years of not riding it… as the season goes on I get better but I am always a bit rusty at the start.
In other news, I started a third character for the league and am enamored with Lightning Tendrils. This is really cool ability and given that I can pretty much get through the campaign on ANYTHING… I’ve started choosing abilities that I have never used before to at least do the early levels. Lightning Tendrils is essentially a channeled frontal cone lightning attack that is shockingly powerful… pun intended. I’ve already transitioned to using Wintertide Brand, which is the halfway point before getting Storm Brand later… but I plan on keeping Lightning Tendrils as my burn spell to help out the brands a bit. I am sort of yoloing my way through a build while looking at what players are using in the endgame for Storm Brand through POE.Ninja. Essentially I filter out players with a Mageblood because while I am running Crimson Temple when possible, I have no illusions of ever actually having one of those. This is a bit of a redemption arc for the character I played during the Kalandra League, and I want to see what that build would look like knowing what I know now.
Lastly, I wrapped up Old Man’s War, and everyone who suggested I read this book… starting with my friend Vernie… was completely right and I did in fact love it. So much so that I pretty much finished it and then immediately started the second part of this series. This is pretty much my jam when it comes to science fiction, and made me realize how much I enjoyed this sort of genre in general. I also now understand why when I was reading The Last Watch by J.S. Dewes, a lot of the comments compared it to this book. Very similar genre, and if you like Old Man’s War then I highly suggest you check out that series as well. I’ve read the first two books and anxiously await the third one that I think is coming out at some point later this year. I’m about a fifth of the way through The Ghost Brigades and I figure I will be consuming it just as ravenously as I did Old Man’s War.
Now that I am getting back into the swing of things, I thought I would mention Bookwyrm again. Essentially it is a federated platform for tracking your reading, and if you are on the Fediverse/Mastodon you can follow my Bookwyrm account. I somewhat wish that a lot of these ancillary services like Bookwyrm, Pixelfed, Peertube, and even OwnCloud had the ability to have some sort of account hierarchy so that my Gamepad.Club accounts could use the services, but not have to maintain separate credentials. I get that it mostly defeats the point of how ActivityPub works, but it would be nice if there was some form of identity sharing between platforms. It used to bug me that people might reply back to me on one of these services that I don’t really use AS social media… but when I stopped caring about likes and boosts… it stopped bugging me very much. I guess the shift to Mastodon as my primary platform has come with it a shift away from caring about being seen… and more about the utility of what good these services bring to my own life.
Anyways, I hope you are having a most excellent week. We are nearing the end of Blaugust and I am preparing to do the likely all-day job of tallying all of the participants. Essentially expect my Friday post to land a bit later in the day than usual, because I will be scrambling to catalog the over hundred participants. I really should devise some sort of a self-reporting system, but that is perhaps a challenge for another year given that it is a bit late to shift gears this year.
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Good Morning Friends! Well, that was a bit of a whirlwind journey. Over the years I have always told myself that I am a slow reader and that I can’t consume books anywhere near as fast as my wife does. She will sit down on a good weekend day when we have nothing going on and might read three books in a single day. I started The Exiled Fleet, the second book in The Divide series on Sunday evening and wrapped it up last night before falling asleep. Granted two of those nights I stayed up until midnight reading, but still, four days for a book is a pretty good clip for me. I am beginning to think the whole “I read slowly” is another mental block much like the “I can’t do math” one that I struggled with for most of my life. This probably seems funny to a lot of people considering some of the nonsense spreadsheets that I occasionally break out when I do a deep dive into evaluating something. It is weird the baggage you carry around with you for decades, that ultimately turns out to be complete bullshit.
I don’t really want to turn this blog into a “book review” blog, but also as always, I have shared my life’s journey with you in whatever direction it takes. I’ve been using Bookwyrm lately to track my reading and this is my first five-star book on that app. The Last Watch was a good read, but it had quite a few rough edges. With The Exiled Fleet, J.S. Dewes takes the raw material of the first book and its characters and refines it into a much more enjoyable narrative experience. It is a novel less about the actions that are happening but about the challenges and growth that the cast of likable characters go through along the way. It excels at creating small tense vignettes that are set against the backdrop of a much larger intergalactic conflict. It feels for a long time like the characters are rolling a boulder up a hill, only to have it come crashing back down upon them… the stories that are woven in the moments of motion however are deeply compelling.
The reason why I burned through this book with such purpose, is that a few days into reading it… I was notified that my hold on Jim Butcher’s Battle Ground had come available from the library I am using to access the Libby App. I went to sleep last night happy in the knowledge that I could borrow that book with a clear mind and looked forward to consuming it. Then this morning… even more conflict arrived as I was pinged by the Libby App that much much longer waiting hold on Nona the Ninth, the next book in the Locked Tomb series had also come open. The queue for Battle Ground was relatively short, and there is an option in the Libby App to effectively let someone cut in line without losing your “first priority” spot in line. The queue of folks waiting on Nona the Ninth is still massive, and as a result, it felt the better call to accept the new option and wait for Battle Ground knowing that in theory, I should get it again before too much longer.
So I have my path set now, and I am looking forward to crawling into the book when I finish with work this evening. Since I am venturing forth once again into the realm of Audiobooks, that means I can play games while listening along to the story. So more likely than not I am going to be diving back into either Path of Exile or Last Epoch, which are mechanically interesting games but don’t require much in the way of narrative processing power. I could probably play Guild Wars 2 as well, but what I really want to do in that game is focus on more story… which conflicts with my ability to engage with an Audiobook. I’ve said it before, I don’t seem to have the ability to process two different sources of speech/text at the same time. If I am reading text, my brain stops listening to the incoming words from the audio.
In other news… I ripped the bandaid off. I had been planning on migrating this weekend to Gamepad.club, but after a conversation with a friend, it seemed silly that I was spending so much time hem hawing around. Why did I move? There really is no valid practical reason. One server is as good as any other server when it comes to bulk communication with your friends. However, I like the idea of being on a server that is run by someone I have a personal relationship with. Gaz is good people and we’ve known each other for ages at this point so I am happy to support his venture. It also keeps me from actually wanting to do the thing where I just run my own server. The local is pretty small, but it is extremely well federated at this point so hashtags work beautifully there thanks to him effectively being connected up with over 4000 other instances over a network of relays.
The other reason I had put things off a bit is I was honestly worried about what the long term ramifications for the instance would be if I was on it. I had fears that a very vindictive admin on a very specific gaming instance might take action to use my existence there to defederate from them. However I can no longer live my life tiptoeing around them, and just sorta have to do my own thing and hope things work out in the end. I still feel like it is only a matter of time before the current crop of moderators on that instance also find themselves excommunicated as it did for me, and my friend who stuck around after my shunning and had the exact same thing happen to them. Gaz assured me it was fine and that they would deal with the consequences of whatever happened so that finally gave me the push I needed to just do it.
Now I am looking forward to a weekend of gaming and audiobooks, and that sounds like as good of a thing as could possibly happen right now. I realize we have a few days until the weekend, but do you have any big plans? Drop me a note below.
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Over Christmas Break my wife discovered the Libby App, and as I wrote earlier this month it prompted us to get a library card for the first time in over a decade. I’ve always loved libraries, but they never really fit neatly into my adult life. Books are friends and bookstores are among the most friendly places I can think of to be in life. However I do not read anywhere near as often as I might like, and while I am well-read from a classical standpoint, I’ve done a pretty shit job of working books into my routines. Without really meaning it seems like “reading more” has become my New Year’s resolution. Since Christmas, I have consumed five books so far, and seem to show no signs of slowing. At this point, I’ve worked on catching up to the Dresden Files series and have finished off Skin Game, and Peace Talks, and am waiting on my hold to come open for Battle Grounds. After having it recommended so many times I have finished Gideon the Ninth and Harrow the Ninth and similarly wait for Nona the Ninth the latest book in that series to become available through my library hold.
This would be the primary issue with relying upon the public library system for your book consumption, that there will be periods of time when you are waiting around for the next book to become available. I’ve greatly enjoyed this little tradition that I have started and did not want to lose momentum, so this lead me to go fishing for the next book. Something you have to understand about my tendencies as a reader is that I generally find a book series that I enjoy… and then consume everything by that author. So my instinct is to focus fire a single series and see it until its conclusion, but as I said the hold queue doesn’t exactly make that viable. As a result, I started sifting around in the Libby App for books that were currently available and stumbled onto a recommendation engine of sorts (that admittedly I have never found again). It suggested that If I liked Harry Dresden and Harrowhark Nonagesemus then maybe I would like The Last Watch by J.S. Dewes.
I am not entirely certain WHY the recommendation engine picked this specific book, but I am glad that it did because I’ve enjoyed it and now the sequel that I started a few days ago. Effectively this book is deeply drift-compatible with Halo, ODST, and maybe bits and pieces of the Mass Effect universe specifically from the military aspect and maybe a little Enders Game. Effectively it is a military tale of a fish out of water who was forced into service to effectively dispose of him quietly. In this universe, humanity has fought a sort of forever war against an elder insectoid race called the Viators. It turns out humanity was extremely good at adapting their technology and using it against them. While at the time of the novel the last of the Viators are thought to be extinct… admittedly through a human-led xenocide.
Sentinel, Sentinel at the black, Do not blink or turn your back, You must stand ready to stem the tide, Lest Viators come to cross the Divide.
Nursery Rhyme
On the edge of the known universe lies a gravitational anomaly known as “The Divide”. In this setting, the universe stopped expanding and settled onto fixed borders with this uncrossable boundary laying at the far edges. Urban legend states that the Viator feel arrived from the other side of it, and as a result, there lies situated in deep starless black space a fleet of abandoned battleships, each crewed by a branch of the service called the Sentinels. Effectively the Sentinels are like The Night’s Watch from Game of Thrones and are made up largely of folks who were drummed out of normal service for one reason or another. They are stranded at this post, on ancient space hulk relics that have had their FTL and Impulse drives disabled to effectively keep anyone from escaping.
The novel itself centers around two primary characters, and each chapter alternates perspectives between them as it weaves the story around the shifts in voice. First up is Cavlon Mercer, a literal corporate prince in line to take over the family business, but one that has embarrassed his grandfather to the point of being “disappeared”. Having no military experience, he is shuffled out of the core worlds and out onto this remote posting, where he has to figure out how to be a soldier in rapid succession. Then you have Adequin Rake an Excubitor and commanding officer of the SCL Argus, the vessel stranded as a floating fortress on the edge of The Divide. She was a war hero, a member of the Titans… something similar to the Spartans from Halo, and one who made a few decisions that she was being punished for by being marooned in this command.
I don’t really want to dive too deeply into the core story arc, because I found it interesting to see it unfold in front of me. The novel does not go in a direction you think it might but also carves out its own path that I found deeply compelling. It is admittedly a bit of a slow start because Cavlon is very unlikeable in that first chapter, and continues to largely be unlikeable for quite some time. By about chapter five or six, however, I was completely hooked and needed to know how things were going to shake out in the end. if anything I have said so far piqued your interest, then you might check this one out. Right now “The Divide” series is an unfinished story arc with two books currently available and a third on its way. There is a novel coming out in march that is disconnected from The Divide series called Rubicon which also sounds interesting.
Unfortunately, the Library system does not have the audiobook for the next part of this series, so I opted to read it the old-fashioned way. This is where my previous pattern of consumption breaks down a bit because I had been listening to Audiobooks while I played games as a comfy dual activity engaging different parts of my brain with each. Now that I am falling back to the text, however, I traditionally only read from the bed which means after a few nights I am on the ninth chapter. I read relatively slowly at least compared to my wife, so I’ve always felt pressure to be able to consume a book in the amount of time allowed by a library loan. I am equally hooked on this second book as I was on the first, so I might actually start choosing to read over playing a game in the evenings in order to speed up the consumption process. I would use GoodReads to track my progress, but since my wife is way more prolific than I am… and we use the same Amazon account… it is largely littered with her books.
Any unknown amount of time ago (okay not unknown, my profile says 8 months ago)… I set up a Bookwyrm profile so I am likely going to be using that for tracking my book consumption. For those who might be unaware, one of the many projects on the Fediverse that is not Mastodon is a Bookwyrm which serves as a federated alternative to something like Good Reads. You can follow Bookwyrm profiles just like you could any other federated account with an @username@instancename type structure. I am not sure if it will be a purely manual process or if there is a way to maybe have my Libby App update it. Whatever the case it is a thing I plan on sorting out today. I have no real long-term goals other than the chew through the backlog of things people have suggested to me over the years but I never quite got around to consuming.
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