Watching, Playing, Reading: Fall Edition + Update

Update:  I am writing.  Despite the election distracting me at the start of the month and a few "Stomach Days" here or there, I'm at about 10k output for the month.  Which isn't good, pre-2019 hell-life I would have been very disappointed in a month that only had 10k output, but it's a vast improvement on the miserable almost-suicidal numbers I've been producing for the last couple years.  Vast improvement!  There is hope!  20k December here we come?!?!  30k in our wildest dreams?  Please?  Please?

I am however still stuck in the Dinner Party That Will Not End.  The "novella" is no longer a "novella" or even a "tiny book" it's very much a decent sized baby boy.  Right now I'm introducing some new characters you've yet to meet that will add to the world's depth quite a lot, especially the Welf family tree.  Also as annoyed as I might be with the Dinner Party That Will Not End, Mama Welf has a pretty amazing origin story monologue .  I was super pumped when I wrote it, especially the way all the pieces of her past clicked together.  Moira von Welf isn't a fun character and I never expect her to be a fan favorite, but she makes every scene she's in better and that's a great feeling.

Also since I'm taking the time to flesh out some of the characters in this book, I'll have a much better feel for them once I get back to War to End All Wars.  If you look at FM6 and how it really expanded the world as a whole and the Mancy and the Divines, these two books I'm working on now and the couple "tiny books" that came before are doing the same for mancer society and the next generation.  While of course closing up the school story in style and moving us into our mad dash towards CHAOS CRAZY WORLD with the back half of the main series.

Chapter List for Vicky Book

One Does Not Just Drive to Welf Manor <---finished

A Boy is In My Room, Squee!!!  <----finished

Constructs:  The Next Generation <---finished

Hands Up!  Fashion Police! <---new chapter split due to size, finished

Consanguinity, What's the Worst that Could Happen? <---we are here

Winter Lovin' <---some of this is also written

The Battle for Tyson Bonnie

A New Challenger Appears!

Maximus Wrangling

Eureka, By Victoria Von Welf

==WATCHING==

QUEEN'S GAMBIT:  Watch this if you haven't already!  Very good, can't recommend it enough.  Girl orphan genius drug-addict becomes chess prodigy.  First half is better than the second half, but at 7 episodes it's a bingeable watch and it's a complete story, which is excellent.  Anya Taylor-Joy is going to be a very big deal in the years to come, no doubt about it.

TRIAL OF THE CHICAGO 7:  I'm a massive Aaron Sorkin fan, so...movie of the year?  Sure.  Especially since there's only been like a dozen movies out this year.  Regardless of that, this was the first movie this year where I watched it and went, "wow, that was good".  Followed by, "wow, I forgot what that felt like."  Cuz...the Sonic and Bad Boys 4 Life void has been pretty rough, hasn't it?

Great writing, great storytelling, improving directing.  Like I said, MASSIVE Sorkin fan.  Probably part of why I write so much fucking dialogue.  SOCIAL NETWORK, top 5 movie for the decade for me.  STEVE JOBS...the structure work in that movie and the idea to fit an entire life into 3 days, I geek out so hard when I watch it.  Plus the fact that I read the Issacson book its based on, 600 pages-ish? and reading that book I still could not tell you who Steve Jobs was.  Watching the movie?  You get exactly who he is, even if there's factual manipulation, it just boils him down to his essence.  SO GOOD.

RICK AND MORTY SEASON 4:  More Rick and Morty is great.  Also a huge fan of Dan Harmon.  Episode 6 is obviously the highlight, but...sometimes just laughing at dragon-sluts jokes is enough too!

CROWN SEASON 4:  So...I hated Crown Season 3.  For one...it was a boring time period.  Also, sorry to the new cast, but the first cast was miles better.  Some of that is also the writing.  In the first couple seasons Queen Elizabeth is viewed as the protagonist of the story and now she's very much the antagonist to Charles and Dianna, so much so that it's the queen who is viewed as the biggest problem with forcing that relationship over the two people in the marriage, who granted don't come across too great either.  This season is an improvement over Season 3, since more interesting stuff is happening, but...still not as captivating as the first two.  Dianna was also weirdly portrayed as stuck as the same person for an entire decade.  I was only a kid, but I was around for late 80s Dianna, and she was massive in a way that's almost unthinkable today and she very much had agency in making herself into that superstar, where in the Crown she's stuck as that early 80s childish, naive Dianna.  Charles is such a insufferable jackass...like, the character makes Heinrich Welf seem oppressed and bearable.  That's pretty impressive!

PREMIER LEAGUE:  So, not everyone is as shitty as they were a couple months ago and yes, Liverpool has injuries, so who knows if they have what it takes to keep pace, but...they could.  Even with all the injuries they arguably had 5 players better than the best (Vardy) that Leicester fielded and Liverpool dominated.  But mostly, as the AMERICAN MEGA NEUTRAL...I believe in the Mourinho-sance, baby!  A storyline where both Man Utd AND Chelsea fans will have collective aneurysms?  Yes, please!

CHAMPIONS LEAGUE (RANT INCOMING):  Not watching it because fuck me is the CBS ALL ACCESS app total garbage!  I had it months ago to try to give the new Star Trek stuff a fair watch (Nope!) and I ordered it through Amazon Prime, but there's a way to link them so you can use the CBS app too.  Only when I re-subscribed for this soccer-ball go around the geniuses over there never seemed to bother considering the possibility that someone might do that and it's totally and completely fucked.  Nothing works at all.  I'm logged in, but I'm locked out.  And to make matters worse, you can't live steam CBS sports programs through Prime, you only get the replays and consider yourself lucky if those things go up only a day late.  IIRC, I was waiting on the Man Utd-PSG game for three fucking days, that's how bad it was.  And for my enlightened european readers, yeah, that's the only way you can see the games in the States.  On a fucking steaming service.  I mean sure, I pay for the sports package in my cable subscription, but why let them see them there when we can be massive greedy assholes?  We love being massive greedy assholes!

==PLAYING==

INDIVISIBLE:  So this is a great Indie game, very recommended.  It's a hand-drawn puzzle platformer minor Metroidvania with Paper Mario combat.  It's very beautiful at times.  Each new character is fun to see in action.  As far as the action goes, its much faster pace than Paper Mario and there are four controllable characters, each controlled with a specific button and the D-pad in combination.  I dug it.  The puzzle platformer stuff was less fun.  Not my jam.  And by the end you have so many different inputs you're using it's pretty chaotic.

The story is "girl and her friends save the world".  Also, like many stories with female leads, our main character is her biggest obstacle and causes all of her own misfortune...the side characters and the voice acting are the highlight in that area.  Got more than a few smiles out of me.

Best girl:  Razmi!

POKEMON SWORD:  How do people play these games every time they release another one?  Even with it being on console, even with the new Wild Area stuff, how is it still the same fucking game?  Beat for fucking beat!  I haven't played one since Black/White and still I was bored out of my mind within 5 hours.  I only bothered to finish it because I've never actually bothered to finish a Pokemon game before.  The new clothes in every city was actually the only highlight...how depressing is that?  Plus since I'd just played INDIVISIBLE the combat was even worse than it usually is, me sitting there wanting to Paper Mario the moves up.

There's no voice acting...it's 2020.  It came out last year.  It's one of the biggest franchises of all time.  It doesn't even have fucking voice acting.  I'm an adult staring at a scene and reading text in 2020.  And it's bland, lifeless, characterless text too!  If you have a 9-year-old and you want to give them baby's-first-rpg, fine, go for it, but never again for this old cranky bastard!

And there could be a killer game there too...party based Pokemon RPG to save the world, updated with characters and dialogue trees and choices to make, with a true open world?  Just money sitting on the table, Nintendo...

Best Boy:  Falinks!

HADES:  SUPERGIANT DOES IT AGAIN!  GAME OF THE YEAR!  Final Fantasy VII Remake came out this year.  Ghost of Tsushima came out this year, but Ghost of Tsushima, while top class and fuck me did I love 90% of that game, was not a perfect game.  It had flaws.  HADES is 99% perfect.  The only complaint I have is that some of the later unlocks takes so long to come about and maybe having to beat the game 10 times to get the full story is a little excessive, but I still enjoyed every run I made.

So this is the Hades/Persephone story from ancient greek mythology where you play as Zagreus, Hades' son, who is trying to repeatedly break out of the underworld and find mama.  Gameplay wise it is a roguelike ARPG.  Each 'run' takes about half an hour and you face a mix of enemies and receive various rewards and buffs along the way in the forms of Olympic Boons from your immortal cousins and uncles.  It's officially the best ARPG i've ever played.  It tops Diablo 2:  Lords of Destruction.  High praise, right?

Also the best game I've played since God of War in 2018.  In the top 5 for this generation with Witcher 3 and Horizon: Zero Dawn and Person 5.  It's so good.  Story, gameplay, roguelike elements, the randomness, the art, the music, it all meshes together, it's all top notch.

Just blown away!

Each run ends in inevitable death, but each run I got better.  My character leveled and got new weapons and new gods and allies showed themselves to help me, but I just plain got better at fighting through the waves of enemies.  All until the point where I finally kicked daddy's ass and got to send him back to the queue at the front of Underworld and it felt amazing to do so!  Also, every time you think you've seen everything, more stuff unlocks.  Another god appears.  You realize that you can get DUO boons that mix two gods powers.  Wait...is there an alternate leveling build?  When did that unlock!  A weapon gets an alternate style to use.  You finally see a Daedalus hammer upgrade that just randomly never came up before. 

My highest praise is to say this:  once I completed the story I started over from scratch to see how fast I could beat it without faffing about trying every new boon or weapon that came along.

I haven't done that with a game since Mass Effect 2.  That's the level we're talking here.  Maybe ARPGs aren't your think, they're not my thing either.  I played Torchlight 2.  I played through Diablo 3 once.  Not my thing.  But this worked for me so much!

Cannot recommend it enough.

Best boy:  Cerberus!

Best girl:  Dusa!

LUIGI'S MANSION 3:  Fuck this game.  Fuck everyone who gave it a good rating.  Fuck whoever decided to finally put it on sale and made me buy it.  Luigi handles like a three-wheeled oldsmobile and, frankly, that comparison is insulting to three-wheeled oldsmobiles.  If this game wasn't Nintendo or Mario related it would have been reamed by reviewers.  Yes, it has some charm and yes, it's cute, but...oh my god the controls!  And the fact you only have 6 different possible actions to take in any situation but there's only one puzzle answer combination so you have to do EXACTLY what the developers want you to do all the time and the boss battles only give you a total of 3 seconds to figure out what actions they want you to take.  It manages to be both mind-numbingly simple AND tendinous.  That's a gruesome mix!

And why does the ghost scientist sound like a randy ewok?  Why, Nintendo?  Why you got to put that image in my head?

DAYS GONE:  Only just started and I'm already tired of the zombies.  I hate zombies so much.  If this game was just post-apoc "Sons of Anarchy" I'd enjoy it so much more.  Even though motorcycles suck to control in videogames...always, without fail.  Motocycles and jetskiis.  Don't ever do them!  Unless you're Wave Race 64, cuz that was the shit.

==READING==

BATTLE GROUND:  I really shouldn't type this...you have rules to not comment on other writers for a reason, Richard...

Okay, so...I loved the previous half book (fuck you, greedy ass publishes just as bad as greedy ass CBS) because it was about conversations and characters and the few fights we saw were all based around how the characters were in conflict with each other.  This half...is what I feared it would be.  Big, loud, generic fights that...bleh.  There's some small bits with Mab that are good, but for the most part...am I old or something?  Is that what's happened?

There are fight scenes I enjoy and have enjoyed.  The Mountain vs Red Viper in ASOS is top class and what I'm always looking for in a fight scene.  Two characters perfectly capable of winning, back and forth, massively high stakes for characters we relate to AND huge political implications as well.  There's also the "power up" battle moments that still get me pumped up.  Dumai Wells in Wheel of Time, still a great example.  Kaladin at the end of The Way of Kings, a dozen battles over the course of Malazan, etc. 

But these grinding chapter after chapter action scenes just bore the shit out of me these days.  It's also not like Harry Dresden has this amazing and complex fight style where he's pulling off all these interesting counters and imaginative uses of magic.  He has three moves.  One of them is to hit things with a stick really hard.

1.  Set it on fire or freeze it!

2.  Is it still alive?  HIT IT WITH A STICK!

3.  ???

4.  Profit!

And that's probably what 3/4ths of what Battle Ground is.  It also doesn't help that outside of those grinding action chapters, which also I would not be surprised if they were increased in size and number to justify the book split, but original point of this disaster of a sentence:  I thought the choices Butcher made outside of those scenes were...not so hot.

One, he kills a character and just kind of discards and then replaces them by the end of the novel in a way that's just...very rough.  Even icky.  Granted the character in question did not fit the power levels the story is at now, but...that was cold, bro!  Colder than Mab's evil, darkness-spewing sexy killer fairy va-jay-jay!  And then the way the replacement comes in at the very end and who that replacement is...that's sketchy.  Granted it's got a lot to resolve in the next novel, so there's a chance, but...them threads are already frayed, lot of work left to tie it all together.

Two, another underpowered character gets a sudden surprising power increase in a way that...was also very raw.  Needed, probably, since Harry could use some more rivals that actually have a connection to him and aren't some random super god that's never been mentioned before.  But also...oh, okay, so they're now a badass demon wizard...totally in character, mind you!  And needed!  But, where was the build up?  Even Butters becoming the Jewish Jedi had build up.

But mostly...just too much fighting.  The days of Drizzt killing a hundred orcs making me jazzed are long over.  And caveat on all this:  I am not a perfect writer pretending I don't have mistakes or moments that I didn't quite earn in my own works and that's usually why I politely keep my mouth shut as to not be a complete hypocrite.  My fight scenes are not the best part of my own work either, fucking guilty!  Also I know I'm basically in the middle of splitting FM7 into multiple books, so...yes, I know.  I also know my books are getting larger and larger and who the fuck do I think I am?  I'm both working on it and failing miserable at it at the same time, cuz I AM A HYPOCRIT.  This is why you should shut up, Richard!

To recap:  RR is an old man now who doesn't like hundreds of pages where people hit things with sticks and he really wishes he could have read the one book version of this story.  A whole book built around peace talks between dozens of supernatural factions with barely any fighting sounds like a wonderful time to him! 

THE PATH BETWEEN THE SEAS:  One of the must read novels about the Panama Canal's construction.  As I've said before, when I start getting into a writing frame of mind, reading fiction can get hard for me, so this has been my jam for the last month.

RHYTHMS OF WAR BY BRANDON SANDERSON:  It's on my kindle...so...that's the thing.  I think I need to reread OATHKEEPER.  All I remember about it is that it wasn't as good as the second book, which wasn't as good as the first book.  I hope this one is great.  I've been reading Sanderson since Elantris came out 15 years ago and at this point I've very much noticed the trend that his first book in a series is always the best its going to be.  Then things...decline.  And decline.  And decline.  Usually he writes trilogies, so you're always getting that new first book or short story with the amazing world-building that makes you shake your head in envy, but with Stormlight being a 10 book series...well, it's going to be a new challenge for him.

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Given the length of this, I think it's fair to say:  see ya all next year!  Send me good vibes to keep the writing flowing!  Don't get the Rona over the holidays, you dingus!