I finished the Nona the Ninth audiobook this morning. It's the 3rd book in the Locked Tomb series by Tamsyn Muir.
The first book in the series was a riot, and the second was a thorough exercise in "what the fuck is even going on". This third book is essentially filler plus a whole lot of world building with a much smaller dash of "what the fuck is even going on".
It wasn't the bad kind of filler, though. More like custard in a doughnut -- good, fattening filler.
I got terribly attached to the characters, and the author continued to deliver hard with their brand of humour and writing. The entire series premise of necromancers in space is a wild ride, and reader (Moira Quirk) sells every line from every character perfectly. She and this series were seriously made for each other.
Between The Locked Tomb and The Murderbot Diaries I've been absolutely spoiled with high-caliber comedy Scifi audiobooks this year.
I went to a "celebration of life" for someone I grew up with this weekend. I wasn't terribly close with them, but
I was close to their friend groups in the past.
It was a really nice event -- even those grieving the hardest put on a smile and had fun
in honour of the deceased. Though they died far too young and I knew them only in highschool, it was warming
to see how much they had flourished into adulthood and hear how they had become such an important
figure in so many circles.
This person had been wise even in their youth. One of the few memories I recall of them is as a teenager, perhaps
of 14 or 15, when I found out that they "didn't like" me. At the time this was a shock -- as a confident teenager I was
convinced I was loved by all; if you've ever seen the cartoon "Recess", imagine the episode where TJ finds out
there's one student who doesn't like him and his distress about it.
Full of myself I eventually confronted them and demanded to know their reasoning. "You think you're better than everyone, and you're not" was
their answer, calm and clear and naked truth that I've recalled multiple times in my life even before their death. At 14 they were grounded
and wise as an owl. From the stories I heard, they never lost that. (We did reconcile our differences at some point and got along
very well in our remaining highschool years!)
In East of Eden, the author stated that the measure of a person's life is how people react to their death; if you die and nobody's happy about it,
you probably lived a decent life. If people are sad, it was probably a great one.
While the celebration was filled with laughter and smiles to honour the dead, everyone was sad -- even those of us who weren't close.
A fantastic life, then.
I accidentally purchased Cyberpunk 2077 and lost 35 hours of my life.
I'm honestly really impressed with the characters and stories in the game (and the graphics are neat!). I never finish sprawling ten-million-quest open-world games and don't expect to finish this one, but I've been having fun with it!
I've been playing as my new favorite RPG class: the One Punch Mage. A fists-only brawler that's subclassed in magic for the sole purpose of using disarm / disorient spells (or "quickhacks") to make punching people easier.
I watched The Banshees of Inisherin today and thoroughly enjoyed it. Not the most uplifting film, but a very well put-together dark slice-of-life with a vein of humour running through it.
It's about an irish man on a tiny island and his older best friend who suddenly and brutally ends the friendship to spend his remaining time on loftier goals (music) than talking to a "local dullard". Things naturally escalate from there.
Not the most riveting concept, but the movie does an excellent job with its storytelling and literary devices and filmography, as well as a good job capturing the pettiness and childishness than can poison relationships. It touches on a lot of other smaller topics but this was the big one for me.
It got me ruminating on a time I cut someone out of my life unexpectedly (to them). I don't regret removing them from my life, but I feel the way I did it -- unexpectedly and mercilessly with no discourse or recourse -- was unfair and childish on my part. In wanting to avoid difficult confrontation I not only burned the bridge but likely poisoned the water in the process.
In the film, proximity plays a large part in the characters' challenges -- being in a tiny village with a limited population makes it difficult to cut someone off or stay away from one another.
These days the whole world is a village, and I'm sure I'll eventually be forced to interact with this person again and it's going to be terrible and awkward on account of my past actions.
I guess that's the thing about burning bridges: it's only a mechanism to dissuade yourself from going backward. Nothing's preventing the poor bastards on the other side from building a boat and coming after you for messing up the village infrastructure and water supply.
I've just returned from a vacation with my partner and a friend to The East where we hoped to eat lobster and be merry.
While we did eat lobster, it was very expensive, and I came to the realization that lobster, no matter where you get it, is generally fairly fresh on account of being horribly boiled alive... so we probably could have just had lobster back home.
The trip was a bit different than our usual affair, and we relied heavily on serendipity -- we'd throw a marker onto the map for the day and just kinda wing the rest. We'd go to restaurants that looked interesting instead of using someone's blog recommendations, then ask people around us what was interesting or delicious nearby.
It was a fantastic and relaxing experience, with low expectations and high payoff.
At one point we discovered a wonderful bookstore that had excellent books as well as a wealth of stationary. I lost myself (and most of my money) for nearly a whole day just browsing and reading, with nowhere else we needed to be.
An interesting find was the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, which is a book of made-up words to describe very specific emotions that don't already have a word. The author posits that since emotions are difficult to talk about, we haven't made words for many of them even if many of us have similar experiences -- meanwhile we've got half a thousand ways to describe the color green.
I haven't read through the whole book yet, but an emotion hit me when I was sitting in the airport on the way home that I don't believe yet has a word:
The bittersweet feeling when you leave a loved place for what you expect will be the final time.
This could be the last time you look upon an empty apartment before locking the door and moving away, or driving out of a small town on the East Coast where you had a great time for a few days but nothing would likely compel you to ever return; there's just too much else in the world to see and do.
I could use a word for that. It was a nice vacation.
I finished the East of Eden audiobook today after several months of listening. It is officially the audiobook that has taken me the longest to get through ever -- I've been listening since around May. The book wasn't even that long, it just took a lot of time!
Usually with audiobooks I'll listen to them in the car or while doing household chores, but I found that despite East of Eden's slow pace I needed to pay my full attention or I'd miss the good stuff. That's because the good stuff in the book wasn't the plot, but the words themselves.
As an avid fantasy/scifi reader this is quite the opposite to my frequent experience of somewhat-mediocre-writing with grandiose plots and or world-building.
The words were wonderful. I found myself writing down and reflecting on several quotes and ideas the book examined, especially from the two primary philosophers in the book: Lee and Samuel Hamilton.
These two characters carried the book for me. They were cultivators of the other characters with their love and words. They were deep and complex and just so easy to love. The other characters all rich in detail and life in ways I've seldom seen in other stories. Every character, even minor ones, had love and pain and depth to them in ways that made them feel very human.
And that's what East of Eden is about: what it means to be human. It tells a story of the weaving lives of 3 generations and how their actions propagate through their children. How they're tested and punished and driven. Their joys, their suffering. It plays off of biblical themes unabashedly, and even though you can see each upcoming tragedy from miles away, you feel them when they hit.
I really loved this book. It re-phrased or re-examined many ideas I've seen before, but in new ways and with more empathy. I felt feelings, chuckled, shed tears, and got reminded that it can be good to take things slowly sometimes. Let them sink in and simmer and bask in the tiny unimportant details that make things real.
It was a treat that I hope to re-read at a much older age, when I'm sure I'll have many more sorrows and joys under my belt to resonate with.
Next up, lesbian necromancers in space!
Reflecting upon a couple of recent games I've played, I need to start paying more attention to how game designers manage to use battles as a mechanic for character- and world-building.
Undertale and Everhood both use battle themes and battle mechanics to help build character for their small casts. A memorable battle theme makes for a memorable battle after all, and because these games have interactive battles they're able to add unique or thematic components to battles that are in-line with their characters.
After the baseline mechanics are established, the designers can make interactions feel unique by tossing in changes to the formula. A character can be made to seem intense or goofy or strong or mysterious by having non-standard moves or gimmicks in-line with this personality trait.
I also saw in Live A Live how battle systems could be used to tell stories and world-build. By changing the formula just a bit, like giving your opponent the experience points when they're your disciple, the game subverts expectations in noticeable ways that build upon the game world.
This obviously comes at a cost -- per-enemy soundtracks or coding in completely different ways for a battle to behave are costly compared to just adding more dialogue, but I feel like a short game filled with unique content that uses it's own mechanics to tell stories is always going to be more interesting than a long game that just re-uses mechanics.
I'm sure everything in this post has been said a thousand times before. However, I'm really enjoying finding these things out for myself and learning new things as I play through my library.
Just finished Everhood, which I initially thought was
some kind of bootleg Undertale. And it totally was, but not in
a bad way.
Similar graphics, tone, themes, and gameplay -- but honestly
I had a great time with Everhood. It may have leaned a little
hard on its inspiration, but it pulls it off very well.
The game manages to capture the same goofy charms, and present
you with fun, hilarious, lovable characters in a world that,
while small, feels put-together. It isn't by any means
a cheap knockoff.
The battle system is fantastic. Here the game takes the idea
of boss-specific theme songs and runs with it. every
fight (or at least each character) has its own song, and the
battles themselves are super-fun rhythm-based affairs.
This made each battle special, and since lots of character only have a couple lines
it's a kind of way to add more depth to their tiny personalities.
Many of the battles even had special gimmicks that kept things
fresh, and at some points they added new mechanics to make
replaying fights worthwhile (and part of the story).
It didn't have quite the same impact as Undertale, and while
it did make me feel things, those things weren't nearly as
intense nor as well-defined as what Undertale delivered.
If you enjoyed one you'll likely enjoy the other, and it's well
worth the low price and time-investment.
I unboxed my new Steamdeck over the weekend. It's a very cool device, though it is host to several rough edges.
That's part of the charm, however. It isn't a polished walled-garden console, but a fully functioning Linux PC in a hand-held form factor -- for that I am willing to make many concessions!
With my newfound ability to play shiny AAA super-graphics games on a handheld device I dove into... The Excavation of Hobb's Barrow, an indie pixel-art point-and-click adventure (akin to the Monkey Island games).
The game was good! It's certainly not the deepest game or the best ending, but the whole game is voiced, the puzzles were reasonable, the pacing wasn't horrible, and I was rarely lost for long. It scratched an itch I didn't realize I had!
Back to the deck -- besides playing steam games it has the ability to drop into a full-blown KDE desktop and mess around. I understand that there's some default limitations and a read-only root filesystem but that's not impeding anything I'd want to do on this kind of device, and unlocking it is only a single command.
Besides doing the expected "play the games in my library", I've managed to:
- SSH into my dev box (bluetooth keyboard had zero issues)
- Install Chiaki to use the steamdeck for PS4 remote play (works better than the Vita!)
- Have my brother share his very large steam library with me, allowing access to his games if he's not online
- Install and configure a GBA emulator
All this is stuff I could just do on a Linux laptop, but besides the SSH bit I usually wouldn't since I'm not a fan of laptop / desk gaming. I can certainly say I'm a fan of this device, however!
Beat Live A Live on the weekend and I'm still processing whether
or not I enjoyed it.
On one hand most of the 7 (8) scenarios you play through -- each of which
is essentially an intro chapter or side-mission from a traditional JRPG --
aren't very good. The "near future" was a notable dud with lots of
needless backtracking and awful pacing. Some use fun gimmicks, but
none really lasts long enough or is good enough to stand out from a
gameplay or story perspective.
On the other hand somehow the game pulled through in the final chapter,
wherein (spoilers) you get to pick your favorite protagonist and lead
a party of other protagonists to defeat the final boss.
Where I frequently found myself annoyed or rushing through the individual
character chapters, I thoroughly enjoyed the grinding and character-specific
dungeons and secret bosses of the final chapter. I had a tonne of fun
finding the other characters and trying different ones out as a party member.
Despite none of the characters having much depth, and generally having
at most lukewarm feelings toward any of them, I found myself super
invested in them during this last chapter. There was barely any dialogue
between characters but it was almost as if there was implicit dialogue through
the silly dungeons and stupid bosses and the skills and items unlocked
through the process. They felt like a team, and playing as my
chosen protagonist they began to feel like a real protagonist.
After the credits finished rolling I found myself smiling, having truly
enjoyed the final battle and epilogue sequence. I still can't tell for sure,
however, if that one awesome last chapter was worth trudging through 8
chapters of mostly-bland trope-filled JRPG-ness.
I am curious, however, about the secret sauce. Why did that last
chapter work so well? I feel like there's a valuable nugget in there I've
not yet puzzled out!
I also want to identify a really cool thing the game did which was to tell
stories through the RPG mechanics. In one chapter you gain skills by
letting enemies use them on you. In another chapter you fight your disciples
and they get the experience at the end of the battles. Some battles
were presented more like puzzles than battles! They definitely explored
their battle system thoroughly in this one, which I can appreciate!
