[Migrated, see pinned post] Casual Conversation

I finished Call for the Dead over the weekend and started The Black Company after seeing a bunch of comments about in a post. The writing is choppy, there's entirely too much literal quaking in their boots, and far too many tortured, menacing souls with good hearts... but the story is good enough and I bought an omnibus so I expect that I'll finish it.

I've also got The Worldbreaker Saga on hold. The writing is superb, the world building is amazingly novel, it's mercifully free of Idiot Plot... and I just can't bring myself to care about any of the characters. I have to force myself to read it, so I read other books between chapters. It's a real conundrum for me, because there's literally nothing in it that I object to; it's really technically excellent. I'm almost more interested in why I'm so apathetic about it.

After Black Company I'll probably go pick up the next Smiley novel from Le Carré. I'd been reading the later Karla novels out of order and hadn't read any of the early ones so I'm doing a methodical job this time.

On multi media, we're watching Murderbot, Andor (on recommendation, Apple's doing their Idiot Plot thing again and we may drop it if things don't get less stupid within the next couple of episodes), and I've got the 2011 Tinker Tailer Soldier Spy queued up. I generally watch the Buster Scruggs "episode" once a month or so; it's only 20 minutes, and I love it.

For games, I finished Factorio: Space Age a couple of months ago, and I fire it up a couple of times a week to make sure the factory always grows. Most recently I expanded the base on Aquilo, which is astonishingly tedious. It's a good sign I'm going about it the wrong way, so I may have to change tactics.

Lemmy consumes waaay too much time. I fired up my AP server node again after experimenting with it for several months half a year ago; I guess I have to accept I'm just not a microblog kind of guy. Otherwise, RSS feeds. I read a lot of technical specs and essays. One interesting monograph I've been working through is about an interlingua for computers. It's very dense.

I Roved Out is slowly progressing. I know it's supposed to be porn, but for a while the art and story was the prime motivator and it was so compelling despite so much porn content. The new book is, just, all porn, and I'm losing interest; I begin to wonder whether Alexis knows where it's going, because it feels as if he's padding. He's got a lot of stories to tie up, and none of them are making any real progress. I hope he gets back on track; maybe his metrics say the prurient content gets him more readers, but honestly I just want the story to continue. There's plenty of other sources of porn, but good, novel ideas are as rare as angel tears. Anyway, I visit that every couple of weeks to see what's new.

Also on the web comic front, I binged Three Panel Soul last week. I still haven't caught up to today (or the end?), but it's repeating itself more and more so I go back and read a few every couple of days but I'm not binging it anymore. SMBC, XKCD, Oglaf in feeds and as they're released.

For music, I'm a comfort eater. Most days I have Tomita or Jean Michel-Jarre on in the background, although about once a week I'll have an Otyken spasm and listen to that on repeat a few times.