Reborn and some gaming
Sep. 5th, 2024 08:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
got_quietRead Reborn by Seth Haddon over this weekend. It was alright. Big plus was it was adult fantasy. I think I liked Reforged better though. The story in this one was ok enough. It felt a little directionless in many parts, which seems to be a big pitfall for stories that involve exile or fugitives, but despite a lot of rushing back and forth I liked all the characters and there was still a decent sense of scale. Distances felt distant enough, communication across countries felt appropriately difficult. And I like the worldbuilding in this series. There are cultural clashes and interesting religious practices etc. Reborn does the same thing Reforged does where it dumps so much fantasy jargon at me in the first few chapters I don’t know if anything will ever make sense, but things settle down quickly enough and it’s all perfectly followable in the end.
In the time that I haven't been reading I've just been grinding LEZ, which was predicted. I used to play a ton of stepmania when I was younger, and had some tracks that I adored. They were all lost in one of my many computer moves in the following years, which is a shame because I can't remember what any of the tracks were called. But I'm very out of practice with this sort of thing, and haven't played any music in general many years, so my sense of timing really needs to be retrained. On top of that unlike stepmania LEZ doesn't give any visuals for off beat notes, so it's not as easy to eye the spacing in some points. The sort of music that people seem to like to use as tracks nowadays is also highly syncopated, so it's been a challenge, but playing just raw hit the button at the right time rhythm games does something good for my emotional state for some reason. I just like to grind them.
Playing LEZ did make me nostalgic for stepmania, so I went poking around to see if it was still available. It seems like it technically is. The last update was in 2023. But the forums are completely dead. The last community post was like 4 years ago. So likely most of the great tracks that I used to play are lost to the decay of the internet. That's a real shame.
One of my mutuals on HSR sent me a message for the first time since I started playing, and it was to gush about my Aventurine lol. He is a pretty boy, and also very stronk at E1S1. When his rerun comes around I may just try to get another Eidolon for him, because he's by far my strongest unit. I also got Gepard and Welt back to back just with raw standard tickets, which means I have all of the standard banner's men now! I still don't have Bronya or Himeko, and I don't know if I want to use my 300th free pick for them. On the one hand, that would probably be the meta play to get Bronya. On the other hand, men.
My biggest gripe was that I didn’t find the main pairing as interesting as in Reforged, and the quality of the writing on a line-by-line level is worse than I remember in Reforged. Radek and Izra fall in love because it’s fate. Izra is instantly obsessed with Radek and decides he’s in love basically at first sight. I am more of an enemies to lovers sort of guy so this did not really work for me. Radek is a little more resistant, but he’s still basically completely enchanted by Izra. That said there is at least a supporting cast of characters that keep things interesting, so I was able to take at least a little break from the lovesickness.
As for the writing, I don’t recall Reforged being quite this rough. I had another trip this weekend so I ended up rereading almost all of Reforged, and that confirmed my suspicion. In Reborn there are a few moments that just seem like an editing pass could have fixed an incorrect word or repeated sentence, but also, man do all the characters in this book like to behave in dramatic ways. People are collapsing to the floor, screaming in agony at every opportunity, just overall emoting in ways that were so constantly dialed up to 11 that I started to get a little numb to it all. I’m a visual reader. When the prose tells me something is happening, I see the scene in my head, and it was hard to do in this book because actions characters were taking didn’t have the best flow.
Even with those problems, the prose still remains readable and I got through the whole thing in two days. I’m not sure I would recommend Reborn to anyone but M/M fans for which destined lovers is a bulletproof trope, but at the same time, I’ve read a lot worse. I do wish I liked the main pairing more though, because with books like these the romance is to essential to be set aside.
As for the writing, I don’t recall Reforged being quite this rough. I had another trip this weekend so I ended up rereading almost all of Reforged, and that confirmed my suspicion. In Reborn there are a few moments that just seem like an editing pass could have fixed an incorrect word or repeated sentence, but also, man do all the characters in this book like to behave in dramatic ways. People are collapsing to the floor, screaming in agony at every opportunity, just overall emoting in ways that were so constantly dialed up to 11 that I started to get a little numb to it all. I’m a visual reader. When the prose tells me something is happening, I see the scene in my head, and it was hard to do in this book because actions characters were taking didn’t have the best flow.
Even with those problems, the prose still remains readable and I got through the whole thing in two days. I’m not sure I would recommend Reborn to anyone but M/M fans for which destined lovers is a bulletproof trope, but at the same time, I’ve read a lot worse. I do wish I liked the main pairing more though, because with books like these the romance is to essential to be set aside.
In the time that I haven't been reading I've just been grinding LEZ, which was predicted. I used to play a ton of stepmania when I was younger, and had some tracks that I adored. They were all lost in one of my many computer moves in the following years, which is a shame because I can't remember what any of the tracks were called. But I'm very out of practice with this sort of thing, and haven't played any music in general many years, so my sense of timing really needs to be retrained. On top of that unlike stepmania LEZ doesn't give any visuals for off beat notes, so it's not as easy to eye the spacing in some points. The sort of music that people seem to like to use as tracks nowadays is also highly syncopated, so it's been a challenge, but playing just raw hit the button at the right time rhythm games does something good for my emotional state for some reason. I just like to grind them.
Playing LEZ did make me nostalgic for stepmania, so I went poking around to see if it was still available. It seems like it technically is. The last update was in 2023. But the forums are completely dead. The last community post was like 4 years ago. So likely most of the great tracks that I used to play are lost to the decay of the internet. That's a real shame.
One of my mutuals on HSR sent me a message for the first time since I started playing, and it was to gush about my Aventurine lol. He is a pretty boy, and also very stronk at E1S1. When his rerun comes around I may just try to get another Eidolon for him, because he's by far my strongest unit. I also got Gepard and Welt back to back just with raw standard tickets, which means I have all of the standard banner's men now! I still don't have Bronya or Himeko, and I don't know if I want to use my 300th free pick for them. On the one hand, that would probably be the meta play to get Bronya. On the other hand, men.
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Date: 2024-09-06 03:52 am (UTC)