I actually read things

[got_quiet]

The last few months have absolutely whizzed by. I feel like I need to commit to something that will make me feel like the time is being productively spent. Work has been pretty tiring lately, just because I have to spend a lot of time doing managerial and secretarial stuff instead of the more interesting and challenging industry level work that I'm in the business for. Hopefully that will change int he future. I want to get our junior employee to take on some of this paperwork stuff soon, I'm just not entirely convinced she won't mess things up in the beginning, as it usually takes 2 or 3 attempts before she actually listens to what I am telling her.

Books

 

Anyway, been reading a bit more. The last couple of books have been young adult, which go by fast but are a little popcorny. read Chaos on Catnet, which is a near future sci-fi book about AI and the high school kids they're friends with. It was an engaging enough story. I picked up Hero of Numbani from the library too, which I think was pointed at an even younger audience, since the main character is 14 in the book I think. It was also decent enough, but written for kids and not particularly complex. Efi was a nice character, and Orisa is an adorable innocent little mecha horse. I was hoping the library would have the Deadlock book too, but looks like they don't, and I don't spend money on Blizzard products anymore, so I guess I'm out of luck for that one.

Also read The City and The City by China Mieville. It was the first book of his I'd read, and I read it mainly because it so often came up as something similar to Disco Elysium. While I enjoyed the book quite a bit, and am always into good detective novels anyway, I didn't find any similarities to Disco Elysium whatsoever beyond the fact that the story was contained within a city, there was some novel worldbuilding, and the plot was centered around a murder. The tone of the two stories are completely different, the overarching themes weren't similar, and The City and the City didn't even have any actual paranormal elements in it. Closely read it's a bit of a weird bit of alternate psychology within an isolated geography, not an entire worldbuilding project the way Elysium is.

That said the book does stand on its own merits. It takes a convoluted premise and manages to maintain it through the whole plot, and centers the weirdness as a mechanism for pretty much all of its twists and turns. This isn't an easy feat. There's lots of opportunities for weird plotholes when you try to pull something like this off, but the story makes things a little easier on itself by basically just hyperfocusing on a single rule and extrapolating only as much as is needed to get the story through to the end. The detective in the story is a sympathetic guy, the sort of ideal detective that is kind of an anti-Harry in that respect. He has his shit together and isn't a fuckup and works within procedure as best as he possibly can while also being willing to push things when his sense of justice demands it. His fellow officers make for good foils, and the rest of the supporting cast are all human and have their various agendas that feel true and don't get run over in service to plot. While the humor isn't as constant and absurdist as in Disco there's still lighter moments here and there.

My friend has lent me Embassytown so I'm going to try that one next. This one seems to have something to do with language, so I'm keen to see where that goes.

 

Games

 

I've been playing a couple of new games recently. I'm always slow to adopt new games because I'm cheap, so lots of times I miss jumping into the trends while they're actually trending. For example my friends keep telling me to try Apex but I refuse. They've been playing a lot of Vermintide now and I refuse to join that too, but I have finally caved and bought Deeprock Galactic. It's a pretty casual game that's just a bunch of mining and some shooting combat. The higher difficulty levels can get hairy, but we have been playing on 3 and it's a nice way to pass time I guess. Mining is a satisfying activity, at the very least.

I've also started playing some Risk of Rain 1. I saw someone streaming 2 and asked about it, and my friends told me they preferred 1, so I thought eh, why not, and we started playing. I don't generally like rougelikes because I find that they tend to depend on being unfair in order to maintain their difficulty, but this isn't super bad. It's easy to get fucked by being immobile vs certain enemies though, and the last game I played they stuck the fucking port in the middle of a pool of lava so that was fun.

I'm still playing Overwatch, and watching every League game. The grand finals are in two weeks and I'm excited about it. I'm hoping that Washington gets kicked out with two fast losses because for some reason I have become so extremely salty about the way that franchise is so awful to watch for 3 and a half stages and then suddenly starts pulling shit out of its ass at the end of the season every year. Even though I like the roster I just can't stand the team overall. It's taken me 4 years but I've got myself a team that I anti-fan I guess. Among the remaining teams I don't know who to root for. I kind of want Dallas to take it, but I don't think they are near the favorites. They and Shanghai are both at risk after having an off stage. We've seen it many years that dominant teams in the first half don't survive through the end of the season, so imo the championship is up in the air right now. I'm heavily considering taking time off to watch, considering COVID cancelled my plans to visit family AGAIN when Delta started surging, meaning I have not had a break from work since December of 2019 and I'm starting to hit the end of my rope.

 

 

Comments

[autumndaze]

Ah I hope you get a break soon! I have some friends who are into "Overwatch" and they really loved "Hero of Numbani" and "Deadlock Rebels", so I've been meaning to read them. I think I have the first one already as an ebook, waiting, but I didn't pick up the second. I haven't decided if I will yet.

[got_quiet]

As far as Blizzard tie-in books go The Hero of Numbani was the best I've read. If you like simple and straightforward YA this is pretty much that.