Omnibus Update
Since Ada was born, I went slogging through House of Chains (a Steven Erikson novel). Great book, but it took me seven weeks to finish it. I started worrying that my book-reading mojo had tapered off with the birth of my kid, but then I looked back on that time period and realized I'd read two Scalzi novels in a day each, and then moved on to doing a Brust a day since as well. (Just finished the whole series to date.) Ok, so yeah. Erikson writes 100% pure unadulterated awesomesauce, but damn. His books take forever to work through. Long, complicated, and awesome. I'm currently working through about one per month.
Our one real trip since Ada was born was in October 2012 (she was only 2.5 months old at that point) to the Great Western War. I got to fight with the SCA heavies for the first time a war setting, and it was a total blast. Macy had a beautiful Hanfu that she wore when walking around camp. Allison, Katie, and Katie's friends all went with us too. Allison qualified for tournament archery, and I got to play the viola for Katie and her friends - mostly Irish music. (It was far more challenging playing the viola in the dark, after fighting all day, than I had thought it would be. But they were gracious.) Macy cooked a variety of delicious dishes when we were there - it was really quite nice being in a relatively cool, fly-free RV for the trip.
My viola studies are still going well, though my progress has slowed down since switching from twice a week to twice a month. Still, I like to think I'm still advancing a bit.
Our bookshelves have filled up once again, so ordered two more, and spent a couple days reorganizing our library and my office. Donated a couple boxes of books to the library, and let the redoubtable Book Nook used bookstore have a chance at them first. It looks a lot nicer now. My fencing and SCA gear is off the floor, and the boxes of stuff left over from the move (what? two years ago?) is finally getting unpacked and put away. Good times.
Looking at the books sitting around on the shelves, waiting to be filed, here's a comprehensive review of some of the books I finished in the last year, along with a couple video games:
Brandon Sanderson - Emperor's Soul, set in the world of Elantris. Good novella. A-. Also have Legion to read, another novella. Sanderson writes good short stories. Plus, he's a really nice guy. I ran into him again at Gencon this year, and he offered me a spot playing magic with him. Ended up sleeping instead, though. A Memory of Light was also awesome, with only a couple places where it felt cut too short. (Ironic, I know, for such a long book.)
Joe Abercrombie - Best Served Cold. Everything Ambercrombie has written I'd give a serious A to. His books are sort of a depressing commentary on human nature (imagine Gandalf with a massive grudge on his shoulder against Sauron, so big that he'd sacrifice everything in order to achieve victory, and you have an idea of Joe's characters), but really really good anyway.
John Scalzi - "The speaker for geeks". His bleeding heart sort of annoys me on his blog - his love letter from "a rapist" to the Republican Party was just appallingly horrible and in ill taste, for example - but he's a very solid writer of sci fi. With the exception of Zoe's Tale (which was just a repetition of an old novel, told from a new perspective), everything he has written has been B+ to A level. Redshirts (A) was a postmodern look at Star Trek. Fuzzy Nation (A) was a mix of lawyer adventure in outer space and eco-something or other. Android's Dream (B+)
Brent Weeks - I thought The Black Prism was one of the best fantasy books of 2010, and I'd almost say the same about The Blinding Knife, except the reveals aren't quite as dramatic, and the "Magic The Gathering"-like magic system in The Black Prism turned into Weeks playing MTG for the first time in real life, and then putting it into the second book. Which is pretty jarring, at least for someone like me that has played MTG a great deal. Solid A-.
Libiromancer: Jim Hines Libiromacer is another solid A-. It is riotously funny, and reads like nothing less than a love letter to fantasy nerds everywhere. The conceit is that you have these "Book Mages" that can pull out items from any book ever published. You need a lightsaber? Better have a copy of a Star Wars novel on hand, and so forth. The writing style isn't quite as advanced as a master's (like Sanderson, Weeks, or Scalzi), which is the only reason it isn't a solid A+. It is much much better than the Spellwright series by Blake Charlton that tries roughly the same conceit. Spellwright and its sequel were just painfully bad to read.
Year Zero: I read this right after Libiromancer, and have to say that while Libiromancer was funny, this book is really one of the most hysterical works ever written - at least, if you're like me, and follow the problems with Copyright Law. If you don't, it might miss its mark a little bit. The premise of Year Zero is that aliens have pirated Earth music (to them, our music sounds like sonic crack), and only later on realized they owed more in fines for piracy than the either GDP (GGP?) of the galaxy. So some aliens are trying to work for a compromise, others just want to blow up the Earth. Enter a lawyer with the same name as a Backstreet Boy, and hilarity ensues...
Black Masters, by Johnson and Roark: I first came across this book when on a field study to historical sites in South Carolina around 2005, when we visited the house and grave of a guy named William Ellison (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Ellison) who was a former slave in SC that became a cotton gin engineer, and rode the cotton gin wave to owning his own business (including many slaves) and becoming one of the richest people in the state. Rags to riches in the extreme, it also digs into the issues of race and slavery in the antebellum South, and how the boundaries were not always as defined as we think they were. You were white if you held yourself out to be white, and nobody challenged you. If they did challenge you, all you had to do was show that the community treated you as if you were white, and they owed you a $500 fine. Ellison didn't hold himself out to be white, but he did get to sit in the white section of church, was good friends with a lot of white landowners in the area, and married his kids off to their kids. Fascinating story: A+. (I also recommend Black Slaveowners by Larry Koger for a more comprehensive study of black slave ownership in the south. In Charleston, they owned slaves at the same rates as whites.)
Jim Butcher: Well, everything by him. The Codex Alera series is over now, but it was wonderful (even with it running off the rails by the end), and the Dresden Files keep knocking them out of the park. A+
Red Cliff: Woo's recreation of the famous Three Kingdoms battle is a great Wuxia epic. (And it is epic - it's really, really long.) While not precisely true to the story, the characters, or the history of the battle, it's still a great yarn and enjoyable for any fan of the Wuxia genre, or Chinese history in general.
Video Games -
Diablo 3: Played it a fair bit with Ada sleeping on my chest when she was only a couple months old. I was very proud of how she could sleep peacefully through all the mayham coming out of my speakers. The game itself is utter crap, though. Fun enough and shallow enough for one playthrough, it forces you to repeat the game (with the same stupid story) *four times* to reach the real challenge: inferno mode. And then when you're there, it's really more about playing the Auction House game than the game itself. If you're good at making trades, you end up with gear that gives you an order of magnitude more survivability than what you'd get if you just played the game on your own. Blizzard fell on its face with this game, and it fell hard. I will never pre-order another Blizzard game - their reputation is ruined.
System Shock 2: In preparation for Bioshock Infinite coming out, I finally got around to beating System Shock 2. The neat thing was that it was re-released by Good Old Games, which made it playable on new systems. With a couple mods installed, it actually became a reasonably modern looking game, graphics wise. Gameplay-wise, well, it makes me miss 1999. Modern games all seem to take softballing to extremes. I didn't die once in Bioshock Infinite, but SS2 was... brutal. But never unfair. Great game, great story, and it tied in closer to Bioshock Infinite than I thought. Essentially (spoiler alert) Shodan is Elizabeth from an alternate reality. They both can warp in things from different parts of the multiverse, they both are imprisoned by inhuman jailors, they both have a love-hate relationship with the protagonist... it was only missing a lighthouse to make the analogy more clear.
Bioshock Infinite: Beautiful game. Absolutely stunning environment - at least early in the game. At about halfway in, it turns into yet another blood-soaked shooter, which was a bit of a disappointment. The light, sky, clouds, ziplines that you can travel around on, etc., all made for a wonderful backdrop against the plot of the game. Which, all critics aside, was brilliant, and perfect. Only downside was that the game was far too easy, and that it basically forced you to waste way too much of your time digging through trashcans looking for coins. If it had a cheat available to just give you some money, I'd replay it in a heartbeat on the most difficult setting (aptly called "1999 mode"), but as it is, thinking about having to look again under every bench and bush for a spare coin... yeah, the replay is never going to happen.
Blood Dragon: I bought this game by accident. Not because I didn't want it, or regret buying it, but because it is an Ubisoft game, and I have resisted buying Ubisoft games for many years down, as a protest against their draconian DRM. When I ran it and saw I needed to install their broken, unusable UPlay crap, I debated getting a refund. But, what the hell - so I played it anyway. It's a short game (Took me about 10 hours to get all achievements and beat it) but absolutely riotous. It takes all of the tropes from the 80s and mixes them together into one beautiful melange. Everything is spot-on perfect: the deliberately cheesy dialogue, the music that could have come straight out of Robocop or Terminator, the nonsensical plot. Everything. It's a perfect satire of the decade, and it's just about the right length - you can easily run a joke too far. But I found myself taking screenshot after screenshot of the various jokes in the game, because they're that good. It is also a good mix of linear story and sandbox gameplay, which I found very pleasantly surprising. A+
AOE II HD Edition: KJ and I went through our years living together playing AOE II, the best RTS ever made. It just got re-released with support for modern computers and modern networking, and it's still just as fun as it has ever been. The only trouble is calling it an "HD Edition". Just like with "Baldur's Gate HD", it's not actually _H_igh _D_efinition. The graphics are essentially unchanged, and still look pretty bad on modern systems. While I understand that they lost the original art assets so they couldn't remaster them (in both cases, I think), when I buy a game called a high-def upgrade, well, I expect exactly that.
Our one real trip since Ada was born was in October 2012 (she was only 2.5 months old at that point) to the Great Western War. I got to fight with the SCA heavies for the first time a war setting, and it was a total blast. Macy had a beautiful Hanfu that she wore when walking around camp. Allison, Katie, and Katie's friends all went with us too. Allison qualified for tournament archery, and I got to play the viola for Katie and her friends - mostly Irish music. (It was far more challenging playing the viola in the dark, after fighting all day, than I had thought it would be. But they were gracious.) Macy cooked a variety of delicious dishes when we were there - it was really quite nice being in a relatively cool, fly-free RV for the trip.
My viola studies are still going well, though my progress has slowed down since switching from twice a week to twice a month. Still, I like to think I'm still advancing a bit.
Our bookshelves have filled up once again, so ordered two more, and spent a couple days reorganizing our library and my office. Donated a couple boxes of books to the library, and let the redoubtable Book Nook used bookstore have a chance at them first. It looks a lot nicer now. My fencing and SCA gear is off the floor, and the boxes of stuff left over from the move (what? two years ago?) is finally getting unpacked and put away. Good times.
Looking at the books sitting around on the shelves, waiting to be filed, here's a comprehensive review of some of the books I finished in the last year, along with a couple video games:
Brandon Sanderson - Emperor's Soul, set in the world of Elantris. Good novella. A-. Also have Legion to read, another novella. Sanderson writes good short stories. Plus, he's a really nice guy. I ran into him again at Gencon this year, and he offered me a spot playing magic with him. Ended up sleeping instead, though. A Memory of Light was also awesome, with only a couple places where it felt cut too short. (Ironic, I know, for such a long book.)
Joe Abercrombie - Best Served Cold. Everything Ambercrombie has written I'd give a serious A to. His books are sort of a depressing commentary on human nature (imagine Gandalf with a massive grudge on his shoulder against Sauron, so big that he'd sacrifice everything in order to achieve victory, and you have an idea of Joe's characters), but really really good anyway.
John Scalzi - "The speaker for geeks". His bleeding heart sort of annoys me on his blog - his love letter from "a rapist" to the Republican Party was just appallingly horrible and in ill taste, for example - but he's a very solid writer of sci fi. With the exception of Zoe's Tale (which was just a repetition of an old novel, told from a new perspective), everything he has written has been B+ to A level. Redshirts (A) was a postmodern look at Star Trek. Fuzzy Nation (A) was a mix of lawyer adventure in outer space and eco-something or other. Android's Dream (B+)
Brent Weeks - I thought The Black Prism was one of the best fantasy books of 2010, and I'd almost say the same about The Blinding Knife, except the reveals aren't quite as dramatic, and the "Magic The Gathering"-like magic system in The Black Prism turned into Weeks playing MTG for the first time in real life, and then putting it into the second book. Which is pretty jarring, at least for someone like me that has played MTG a great deal. Solid A-.
Libiromancer: Jim Hines Libiromacer is another solid A-. It is riotously funny, and reads like nothing less than a love letter to fantasy nerds everywhere. The conceit is that you have these "Book Mages" that can pull out items from any book ever published. You need a lightsaber? Better have a copy of a Star Wars novel on hand, and so forth. The writing style isn't quite as advanced as a master's (like Sanderson, Weeks, or Scalzi), which is the only reason it isn't a solid A+. It is much much better than the Spellwright series by Blake Charlton that tries roughly the same conceit. Spellwright and its sequel were just painfully bad to read.
Year Zero: I read this right after Libiromancer, and have to say that while Libiromancer was funny, this book is really one of the most hysterical works ever written - at least, if you're like me, and follow the problems with Copyright Law. If you don't, it might miss its mark a little bit. The premise of Year Zero is that aliens have pirated Earth music (to them, our music sounds like sonic crack), and only later on realized they owed more in fines for piracy than the either GDP (GGP?) of the galaxy. So some aliens are trying to work for a compromise, others just want to blow up the Earth. Enter a lawyer with the same name as a Backstreet Boy, and hilarity ensues...
Black Masters, by Johnson and Roark: I first came across this book when on a field study to historical sites in South Carolina around 2005, when we visited the house and grave of a guy named William Ellison (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Ellison) who was a former slave in SC that became a cotton gin engineer, and rode the cotton gin wave to owning his own business (including many slaves) and becoming one of the richest people in the state. Rags to riches in the extreme, it also digs into the issues of race and slavery in the antebellum South, and how the boundaries were not always as defined as we think they were. You were white if you held yourself out to be white, and nobody challenged you. If they did challenge you, all you had to do was show that the community treated you as if you were white, and they owed you a $500 fine. Ellison didn't hold himself out to be white, but he did get to sit in the white section of church, was good friends with a lot of white landowners in the area, and married his kids off to their kids. Fascinating story: A+. (I also recommend Black Slaveowners by Larry Koger for a more comprehensive study of black slave ownership in the south. In Charleston, they owned slaves at the same rates as whites.)
Jim Butcher: Well, everything by him. The Codex Alera series is over now, but it was wonderful (even with it running off the rails by the end), and the Dresden Files keep knocking them out of the park. A+
Red Cliff: Woo's recreation of the famous Three Kingdoms battle is a great Wuxia epic. (And it is epic - it's really, really long.) While not precisely true to the story, the characters, or the history of the battle, it's still a great yarn and enjoyable for any fan of the Wuxia genre, or Chinese history in general.
Video Games -
Diablo 3: Played it a fair bit with Ada sleeping on my chest when she was only a couple months old. I was very proud of how she could sleep peacefully through all the mayham coming out of my speakers. The game itself is utter crap, though. Fun enough and shallow enough for one playthrough, it forces you to repeat the game (with the same stupid story) *four times* to reach the real challenge: inferno mode. And then when you're there, it's really more about playing the Auction House game than the game itself. If you're good at making trades, you end up with gear that gives you an order of magnitude more survivability than what you'd get if you just played the game on your own. Blizzard fell on its face with this game, and it fell hard. I will never pre-order another Blizzard game - their reputation is ruined.
System Shock 2: In preparation for Bioshock Infinite coming out, I finally got around to beating System Shock 2. The neat thing was that it was re-released by Good Old Games, which made it playable on new systems. With a couple mods installed, it actually became a reasonably modern looking game, graphics wise. Gameplay-wise, well, it makes me miss 1999. Modern games all seem to take softballing to extremes. I didn't die once in Bioshock Infinite, but SS2 was... brutal. But never unfair. Great game, great story, and it tied in closer to Bioshock Infinite than I thought. Essentially (spoiler alert) Shodan is Elizabeth from an alternate reality. They both can warp in things from different parts of the multiverse, they both are imprisoned by inhuman jailors, they both have a love-hate relationship with the protagonist... it was only missing a lighthouse to make the analogy more clear.
Bioshock Infinite: Beautiful game. Absolutely stunning environment - at least early in the game. At about halfway in, it turns into yet another blood-soaked shooter, which was a bit of a disappointment. The light, sky, clouds, ziplines that you can travel around on, etc., all made for a wonderful backdrop against the plot of the game. Which, all critics aside, was brilliant, and perfect. Only downside was that the game was far too easy, and that it basically forced you to waste way too much of your time digging through trashcans looking for coins. If it had a cheat available to just give you some money, I'd replay it in a heartbeat on the most difficult setting (aptly called "1999 mode"), but as it is, thinking about having to look again under every bench and bush for a spare coin... yeah, the replay is never going to happen.
Blood Dragon: I bought this game by accident. Not because I didn't want it, or regret buying it, but because it is an Ubisoft game, and I have resisted buying Ubisoft games for many years down, as a protest against their draconian DRM. When I ran it and saw I needed to install their broken, unusable UPlay crap, I debated getting a refund. But, what the hell - so I played it anyway. It's a short game (Took me about 10 hours to get all achievements and beat it) but absolutely riotous. It takes all of the tropes from the 80s and mixes them together into one beautiful melange. Everything is spot-on perfect: the deliberately cheesy dialogue, the music that could have come straight out of Robocop or Terminator, the nonsensical plot. Everything. It's a perfect satire of the decade, and it's just about the right length - you can easily run a joke too far. But I found myself taking screenshot after screenshot of the various jokes in the game, because they're that good. It is also a good mix of linear story and sandbox gameplay, which I found very pleasantly surprising. A+
AOE II HD Edition: KJ and I went through our years living together playing AOE II, the best RTS ever made. It just got re-released with support for modern computers and modern networking, and it's still just as fun as it has ever been. The only trouble is calling it an "HD Edition". Just like with "Baldur's Gate HD", it's not actually _H_igh _D_efinition. The graphics are essentially unchanged, and still look pretty bad on modern systems. While I understand that they lost the original art assets so they couldn't remaster them (in both cases, I think), when I buy a game called a high-def upgrade, well, I expect exactly that.