davidgillon | Entries tagged with computer games

So if you'll recall the last point in our ongoing story of woe, my desktop/gaming computer had barfed over a Windows update, leaving me with a trashed C drive, though the D drive in the computer (mostly used for games) was fine.

I've since confirmed that the C drive is readable with an evaluation copy of disk recovery software. Some folders are trashed, but only non-essential ones. Its even possible those are deleted folders and I'd moved that stuff onto the D drive. And I may even have a licensed copy of the disk recovery software on a really old laptop that'll save me buying it again.

So that brings us to this weekend. I needed to set up to copy stuff off the trashed drive onto a new one. I have one drive enclosure to put C into, but needed another for the replacement, So I ordered an identical enclosure from Amazon and decided that the first thing I would do was check if there was space on the D drive for the recovered files - I still have to order the replacement drive, but an accessible copy of the files would be a useful first step.

So first thing to do is put the D drive in the new enclosure. And the buggering thing wouldn't open. It''s a sliding top - just like a big battery compartment - and on the one I have opens without much force. This one I couldn't budge, though my clear suspicion was that some of that stupid cling-filmy stuff they put on electronics goods to keep them shiny until opened had gotten stuck in the tracks, I was pushing, pulling and tugging at it for the better part of an hour, And I only finally got it open when I hammered a couple of jewelers screwdrivers into the barely perceptible gap and used them as levers to spring it free. Stupid cling-filmy stuff confirmed as the likely culprit.

So the open enclosure is sitting in my lap. I reach over, pick up the D drive, slide it into place, then reach out to put it down on my computer desk.

It's a left-handed reach to the only clear space. My left arm is the one with the neurological diagnosis of "something's clearly not right", and I've been pushing as hard as I can with that arm for the better part of an hour. Just as I get the enclosure up to the desk the muscles in my forearm start spasming, my arm starts twitching uncontrollably, and I rap the enclosure hard on the edge of the desk. Not once, but three times.

You can probably imagine my look of horror at what I'd just done,

*Headdesk* *Headdesk* *Headdesk*

I plugged it in, and nothing. Oh, shit. So I very carefully set it aside, and left it until yesterday when I'd finally gotten up the nerve to take a look at it. And it's pretty much confirmed, my D drive is dead, the computer recognises a drive has been plugged in, but says "please insert a drive" if you try and open it, The disk recovery software doesn't even get that far, it can't tell there's even a drive there.,

On the bright side, its only game stuff. On the dark side, it's every saved game from the last four years, tons of building in Ark and Valheim, dozens of hours of modding in other games.

Currently staring at my left arm thinking "You have betrayed me!"

Current Mood: Well, f**k

Recent Reading

The Burning Issue of the Day, T E Kinsey

Lady Hardcastle and Flo are called in when a Suffragette is accused of causing death by arson. The local Suffragettes are adamant she couldn't have done it. To complicate things, the dead man was a journalist, and his closest friend was the Bristol Post's society columnist, who has an unfortunate history with Lady H and Flo after the events of the previous book (A Picture of Murder). But the dead man left a notebook about his investigations and she's convinced he wasn't the random victim everyone is assuming. The problem is, the notebook's in code, and she doesn't know how to break it, but she does know a couple of retired spies. So arson in the streets soon escalates to corruption in high places, and Lady Hardcastle is uniquely suited to enraging self-important pompous oafs.

Death Beside the Seaside, T E Kinsey

Flo finally gets the holiday beside the sea she's been wanting ever since they moved to deepest Mummerset, even if it is just at Weston-Super-Mare. But taking the advice of friends means she and Lady Hardcastle are staying in a rather nice boutique hotel, with an interestingly varied set of residents: the Japanese diplomat, the Austro-Hungarian dandy, the Russian industrialist, the French naval architect, the wealthy American chaperoning her niece on a tour of Europe, and a charmingly batty British boffin who insists on telling them he's here for a secret conference. And didn't that man they just drove past look exactly like Lady H's brother Harry? (And with that set of characters aren't they missing an Italian and a German?)

Before you can say Punch-and-Judy guests are dropping like flies and the hotel manager is distraught, but he has a couple of retired spies on hand who happen to know the number of someone at the Foreign Office - Harry. So no sooner has someone dropped dead than a couple of likely lads from Special Branch are round the back of the hotel with a van, a a big bottle of cleaning fluid and an even bigger bag. It's rapidly clear that it's the Maltese Falcon scenario - hunt the maguffin with the last one standing the winner, but the entertainment's in the getting there - and for Lady H and Flo, this is entertaining.

(I liked the story, but there's some clear ret-conning of people's ages going on to set up Kinsey's new series - see below)

The Fatal Flying Affair, T E Kinsey

Lady Hardcastle and Flo have finally given in to Harry's nagging, and are now officially back with the Secret Service Bureau, or back with the Foreign Office at least as one of the reasons they retired in the first place is that the whole Great Game seemed to be being played for the private amusement of a bunch of amateurs, something the brand new Secret Service Bureau is supposed to fix. And as Harry points out, Europe seems headed for war, so getting back in the saddle is clearly the patriotic thing to do. That hasn't actually needed them to do anything so far, but now Harry has a job for them. An engineer at the Bristol Aircraft Company has fallen to his death when an experimental parachute failed. He was considered a national asset, and the parachute even more so. Worse, they know there's a spy in the company because they intercepted his last set of dispatches, but they killed the courier doing so and don't have any idea who his source was. Lady Hardcastle is a ditzy socialite with more money than she knows what to do with, and she has connections with the company via her good friends the Farley-Strouds. It's completely in character for her to waltz into the company offices proclaiming she wants to buy an aircraft and have her maid learn to fly it for her, giving them both an excuse to poke around under a few rocks and see what crawls out.

I liked this, even the aircraft details didn't annoy me - Kinsey notes his Bristol Aircraft Company isn't the historic Bristol Aircraft - but I have my concerns about putting Lady H and Flo back in the game. These are basically cozy mysteries (bar Flo's Tiny Welsh Ninja tendencies) and I'm not sure that set of conventions entirely fits within the espionage genre.

The Deadly Mystery of the Missing Diamonds, T E Kinsey

It's 1925 and the Dizzy Heights are making a name for themselves as a Jazz band on the London scene. At the core of the Dizzies are Ivor 'Skins' Maloney and Barty Dunn, drummer and bass player respectively, who've been friends since childhood. But when they go home after a show Dunn heads off to his landlady's in Wood Green with whatever girl he's picked up, but Skins goes home to a townhouse near the British Museum and his wife Ellie, an American heiress (and the niece in Death Beside the Seaside above - the retconning I mentioned was knocking a good decade off Skins and Dunn's age to barely 20 so that someone who'd made a pass at mid-30s Flo in 1910 could fall mutually head over heels in love with a 16yo heiress in 1911 without it being deeply creepy).

Current home for the Dizzies is the Aristippus Gentlemen's Club, aka Tipsy Harry's, where they have a residency on Friday nights, and have also just landed a midweek job sitting in as live music for a gentleman's dance class, there being a dance competition with another club in the offing. And that brings them to the attention of Superintendent Sunderland of Scotland Yard, who has history with Skins and Dunn, and could use a pair of eyes inside the club. Sunderland has been charged with tracking down a few very special deserters from the war, and he's had a tip one of them is a member of Tipsy Harry's. The problem is the only description of the man is he's 5' 7" with brown hair, which describes pretty much everyone at the club, and particularly the clique of overly-privileged buffoons who can hire not just a dance teacher, but an entire jazz band to teach the five of them to dance and who are Sunderland's prime suspects.

Advice from Sunderland, and from Flo's letters to Ellie, tell Skins and Dunn that the way to make progress is to get the buffoons talking about what they did in the war and to pick out the one with flaws in his background. But that's easier said that done as everyone seems to be afflicted with a dose of "The War? Rather not talk about it, old chap!". And then death reaches out to the Dizzies, and things get personal.

There's a noticeable change in style with this new series. Whereas the Lady Hardcastle books are written in first person by Flo, these are third person, and Skins and Dunn are a couple of lower class likely lads. Ellie, on the other hand, comes straight out of Lady Hardcastle's world, if an American-accented version, and bonded hard with Flo in the aftermath of Death Beside the Seaside.

Currently Reading:

The Ides of April, Lindsey Davis

It's AD89 and Domitian is Emperor of Rome, which means death squads in the streets. Flavia Albia's life has already been quite interesting enough, thank you - orphaned as a babe in arms during the sack of Londinium during the Boudiccan Revolt, taken in by a family of shopkeepers, fled their care when it looked like they were weighing up how much she'd fetch at the slave auction, lived on the streets of Londinium as a near feral child, then adopted by a senator's daughter and her ne'er do well boytoy/private investigator/Imperial agent (aka Helena Justina and Marcus Didius Falco) and brought to Rome, grew to adulthood among the Didii, married, and widowed at 20 - and now at 28 she's looking to avoid the attention of the authorities (death squads!) while living a quietly satisfied life working out of Falco's old office in Fountains Court on the Aventine as possibly Rome's only delatrix - a female PI. The only thing missing from her life is a little male company, and her latest case may offer opportunities with an interestingly snide archivist.

Not that she actually wanted the case, Flavia initially took on an accidental death case because she was short of cash - child killed by builder's ox-cart with drunken driver - but on the wrong side, getting the owner of the building company, a thoroughly unpleasant woman, out of paying compensation. But then her client dropped dead, and her adult son is insisting she investigate that death instead. Flavia Albia's all for going through the motions on a sudden death with no suspicious circumstances, but then she learns that her client isn't the only sudden death, and the authorities really don't want anyone looking into it, and uncle Petro's not in charge of the local Vigiles cohort anymore so avoiding the attention of the authorities suddenly became much more difficult.

I used to read the Falco books and it's about time I gave these a try. Flavia Albia is clearly a chip off the streetwise and cynical Falco block, but with the additional concerns of being a woman in a very male-dominated world - concerns illustrated by her living arrangements. Everyone knows she lives at Fountains Court, but most people assume she lives in Falco's old one room office at the top of the building. A few know she actually has a room in a four room apartment on the ground floor otherwise occupied by a foreign family who don't speak Latin. But the only people who know that that second room is a decoy, and that she only ever goes into it to hop straight out of the window and along the alley to a hidden door with its own staircase up to her apartment on the second floor - the best one in the building - are Flavia and her landlords, aka Helena Justina and Falco.

Up Next:

I notice I'm two books behind in Patricia Brigg's Mercy Thompson series, and one in the spinoff Alpha and Omega series, I'm currently debating whether just to reread the last couple to get back to speed, or to go for a full re-read.

Currently Playing: Valheim

Valheim came out of pretty much nowhere, then it went into early access on Steam in early February and started selling a million copies a week. I resisted temptation for a couple of weeks, but it just looks too good. It's a fairly standard sandbox survival game, much like Ark or Conan, but here the background is Norse Mythology. You're a Viking who just died in battle, but Hugin explains the drinks party at Valhalla is going to have to be postponed, Odin has a job he needs doing. When he created the worlds there were some evil beings he couldn't deal with immediately, so he threw them onto a world of their own - Valheim. And now he wants you to take care of them, even if you have been dropped off in the wilderness by a giant raven with nothing but the rags on your back.

So it's straight into the standard survival sandbox grind - clearcut the woods to build somewhere to live, terrorise the wildlife with improvised weapons in order to turn said wildlife into components of better weapons, and eventually graduate to better tiers of materials - stone, bronze, iron etc. The complication being that to get access to the next tier you have to take out one of the bosses that Odin wants given a good seeing to. There's one boss per biome, and so far there are six biomes - meadows, dark forest, swamp, plains, mountains and ocean (I think) with an eventual nine planned.

So far so standard, but what makes Valheim stand out are the graphics and the map. The graphics look crude up close, textures are heavily pixelated, but get beyond a few metres and it starts to look gorgeous, and arcing overhead are the branches of Yggdrasil. They seem to have hit a near perfect balance point for showing large expanses of wilderness without requiring high-end graphics cards. The overall effect is a little like looking at a really detailed watercolour (IMO anyway). As for the world, what's startling there is the size. It's huge. I've been exploring for almost a month now, and covered a lot of territory, but zoom right out and that turns out to be maybe 5% of the equator - and just along the equator, I haven't really gone North or South. Such a big map is only possible because it's procedurally generated, and that allows the game to give every player a randomly generated individual world - though you can enter other random number generator seeds, and jump into a world with up to about 10 other players. To give an idea of scale, I was sailing around the island I started on for two hours real time on Monday, and I didn't cover more than a third of the coastline (possibly significantly less, there are several areas I haven't even started to explore).

Current Mood: content
Current Location: Sitting in Yggdrasil's shade

Over the weekend my body decided to flip from awake until dawn, sleep past noon, to crash out mid evening, wake up hours pre-dawn. This isn't too unusual, it does it once or twice a year, but it takes a day or two getting used to.

But by Tuesday morning I'd sort of normalized around that, and woke up at 3:30 with more energy than usual. So I spent a couple of hours reading, and by six the sun was shining, there wasn't a cloud in the sky and I was thinking "really good day to get caught up on the housework". Then I stood up, and realised I still had Monday evening's backache - which isn't bad, cf being awake for several hours without realising, but it really doesn't like me being up and on my feet, or vertical above the waist in general. By my normal standards even that isn't too drastic, but it's just enough to tip me over into 'thanks, I think I'll not do that then". Four days later, backache's still here and we've had three gorgeous days (Wednesday was a washout) when I should have been tidying the house, catching up on washing, whatever, and even more rarely had the energy to do it, but couldn't. This is surprisingly frustrating given I'm normally glad of any excuse to avoid housework.

I've gotten some useful work done on one of my hobby projects that I can do flat on my back, but other than that it's been a week of playing computer games with the desk chair tipped right back. I actually missed the launch day for Extinction - the new Ark DLC, but that actually serendipitous as the hordes waiting for it to release were kept waiting until the wee small hours of the morning - not only was the release delayed, but so many people were trying to download Steam apparently crashed under the strain. So next day I was able to spend the afternoon watching various of Ark's more prominent players livestreaming their first experiences on the map and then try it myself in the evening. It's spectacular - think Walking With Dinosaurs meets The World With Out Us or Life After Man, but I'm actually not that excited about it as yet. I'll undoubtedly keep playing, but I'm much more excited about having relocated my base on Ark Ragnarok the day before. I've actually now got that where I mean to put it in the first place - I got confused and thought it was right next door to the place I spawned in, rather than on the other side of the map. I actually got myself eaten when trying to relocate, so cheated and made myself temporarily invincible until I'd gotten myself to where I wanted and gotten a base established. The game does actually have a Creative Mode built into single player that lets you do this, but I generally just use admin mode cheats. I think the difference is a lot of Ark can be quite claustrophobic - forests, jungles, caves, and now city streets, but I like the open country, and the place I've relocated myself to is basically moorland, in fact it's actually called the Highlands. Lots of exploring to be done next time I go back in.

Which would have been yesterday, but I'd promised myself I'd buy Jurassic World - Evolution the next time it was on offer, and yesterday it was on offer (I actually bought Extinction back in April, when i bought the Ark Season Pass, so that's not actually two computer games bought in a week, even if it is two acquired in two days). I spent a couple of hours playing last night and it's kind of fun - you're the manager of the new Jurassic World theme park, and get to build the park to your own specifications, while being nagged by the heads of science, entertainment, and (in)security, and advised by a sleazy PR guy, while Jeff Goldblum sits in the background running a constant "This is a bad idea, Life will fine a way" schtick. I'm not certain quite how many behaviours they have programmed into the dinosaurs, but it looks spectacular. In fact the dinosaurs look more realistic than the people and compare very favourably with what we've seen from the Walking With Dinosaurs etc show. They're quite a bit better than in Ark, which went more for sheer numbers of species than depth of modelling and animation. I haven't really done more than scratched the surface, but I think I'm going to enjoy it.

And the other thing I discovered this week is that David Weber has finally released the new Honor Harrington novel, a mere 5 years after the last in the series. I've read the Kindle sample, but I'm resisting buying it as it will probably devour a couple of days (Amazon say 900 pages, though I'm betting a couple of hundred of that is dramatis personae, which long since reached ridiculous lengths).

So the week's basically been goofing off, here's hoping next week is slightly more productive.

Current Mood: Lazy
Current Location: Inclined to play

Well, I finally submitted "The Art of Breathing" to Disabled People Destroy SF Monday evening. It was pretty much ready to go on Sunday, but computer issues, and a whole lot of submission anxiety, complicated the whole issue. I'm now noodling about with a non-fiction piece entitled "Why Helva is Bad for SF", and have until tomorrow to finish it if I want to submit if to the same destination. It's easy enough to show "The Ship Who Sang" is just plain bad about disability, despite being the book SF fans are likeliest to nominate as good about disability, but showing it's bad for the genre is a bit more difficult, and may require making the reader actually think.

It's snowing outside, and while I renamed 'the Beast from the East" as "the Pest headed West" based on yesterday's lack of performance, today actually is more convincing, with about 4" of snow on the ground. That's by far the most we've had this winter, but still falls short of its headline billing in my opinion. Of course it's still snowing, and has been almost constantly for about 16 hours, so there's time yet.

In Ark news, I pulled on my big girl panties (female character) and headed out for some exploration. My nervous foray onto the plateau at the top of the hill revealed it's actually Weathertop (yes, this is the official in-game name) and one of the few really safe areas. Looking north from the edge of Weathertop through my spyglass, I spotted a couple of Chalicotheriums, which very much remind me of the mecheiti in Cherryh's Foreigner books, though the most straightforward literary reference would be the actual chalicos used as riding beasts in Julian May's "Saga of the Exiles". I suspect I'll use Weathertop as a forward base from which to head north into the redwood forests, though I really want to tame a chalico so I can do that mounted. The dodos continue to be a nuisance and I'm massively expanding the pens so I can actually move around without being constantly blocked by dodos.

Speaking of Cherry's Foreigner books, I finished Deliverer last night. The blurb is oddly wrong, describing 8yo Cajeiri as "playing pranks and causing mischief". It's right that Cajeiri is bored, but what he is doing is far from playing pranks. He actually has a well-reasoned plan (for an 8yo who doesn't understand the security risks) for maximising his freedom and is pursuing it subtly. The closest he comes to a 'prank' is rudely yelling a question, and he understands exactly why it was wrong. The blurb is also completely wrong in categorising the threat to him as because he's spent two years living among humans. The threat is solely related to the fact he is Ilisidi's heir, the heir to Malguri, the Eastern fortress where the series first kicked into gear a decade or more ago. There are clearly threads left unexplained in the resolution, the Ship-Aijiin have got a huge explanation coming as to what they've been up to, with 'instrument packages' dropped all over the continent. but I think I'm actually going to go back and restart the series from Foreigner. I'd need to revisit the books to write the review I want to, and I know I missed some of the fundamental stuff feeding into the Destroyer/Pretender/Deliverer sequence, so rather than trying to find book 10, I'll restart from 1 and try to comment as I go.

Current Mood: Thermophilic
Current Location: Weathertop

I've spent a quite ridiculous amount of time playing Ark: Survival Evolved since installing it on Saturday. And I've now progressed from the sad status of two-legged dinosaur kibble through hunter-gathering and have reached the technological heights of farming. I'm not quite ready for actual veggie farming, so I've taken the easy option and started farming dodos.

The island where Ark takes place, particularly the beaches, is rife with dodos. They may be the basis of the food chain (I'm not sure quite how realistically modelled Ark's food chain is, as one of the notes from previous explorers you find from time to time pointed out, food chains where the carnivores outnumber the herbivores two to one just don't work under our rules of physics). You quickly come to understand why the actual dodo became extinct - you can hit them over the head and all they'll do is squawk piteously and try to waddle away, hit them a few more times and they fall over ready to be harvested.

The whole game works on a harvesting/crafting mechanic - gather wood, berries, flints, or bits of dead animal, and use them to build yourself a shelter, or better tools, or as your next meal - it's basically Bear Grylls in action. My initial home base was a thatched hut, then it became a thatched hut with a wooden panic room inside (that blasted dilophosaurus that killed me seconds into the game was a very persistent problem), and now it's a large wooden bungalow with a forge and the start of a farm. You can take it all the way up to SFnal hardware, but I'm far more interested in the lower tech survival option. In fact there's an official mod with precisely that function and I'll probably go that way if I restart.

Initially I was surviving on cooked dodo (and coelocanth and trilobite), but you can also tame dinosaurs (and other creatures), and the dodo is supposed to be one of the easiest beasts to tame. Some beasts can be tamed just by feeding them, but the dodo is too stupid for that, so it's time to brute-force things, in this case by hitting it over the head with a blunt object until it falls over unconscious. Then you can stuff it full of berries and wait for it to wake up. As it surfaces from unconsciousness it will eat the berries, and when it wakes up you have a friend for life (though that life may be short-lived as it has, quite literally, the survival instincts of a dodo). This is how taming works for the majority of creatures on the island, but I have a sneaking suspicion it may be rather more fraught for cases along the lines of 'first subdue your T-rex'.

Once you've tamed your dinosaur (or oversized pigeon with the survival instincts of a tranquilized lemming) you can manipulate their behaviour in various ways, including one which is essentially 'mate now'. And that's where farming comes in. Intially I just tried having them follow me around, but when one of my first tames got into a squabble with a compsognathus (aka a compy, aka a 2-foot tall annoying little shit of a dinosaur) and lost, I realised that wasn't going to work, especially as the follow option doesn't initiate the mating behaviour. So I needed a farm, and now my nice little bungalow built around the banyan tree (poor initial site planning), has a dodo-coop tagged on the back. I've got about ten dodos in there (unfortunately rather too many males) and they spend most of their time wandering around with a little heart symbol over their heads meaning they're looking for lurve. And shortly after that you'll find a dodo egg on the floor (also dodo crap, which you can turn into fertiliser). You do also get fertilised eggs, but so far I've only found dead infants, apparently you need to pretty much feed newborns on the spot, as they're too stupid to feed themselves like the adults. If I get rid of most of the males, and add a few more females then I'll be pretty much self-sufficient food wise.

On reflection, tacking the coop on the back of the house was a bad idea, dodos gobble. Dodos in lurve gobble continuously. The other sound I'm having problems with is related to my infestation of triceratops (there are at least three around my little bay). All the larger creatures seem to have an earthshaking mechanic in your close proximity (I'm not a fan of camera wobble at the best of times), and that's got a very low-frequency sound coming out of the sub-woofer that quite literally makes me feel ill. I ended up building fences across the beach on both sides of my house in order to keep them far enough away I'm not bothered by that. I need to have a look and see if there is an option or mod that turns it off entirely. My next thing to try is probably taming one of the triceratops, I already have a triceratops saddle curtesy of the goodie-filled supply pods that drop out of the sky, but I suspect it isn't going to be quite as easy to knock unconscious as the dodo. Once I have a ride I'll be much better placed for wandering the jungle in safety, and having a pack mule will make gathering supplies for building much more efficient - I'm already using a raft to cut down back and forth journeying). Ultimately I can see this going two ways: a nice, calming game I can dip into whenever I want to, or so damned addictive I end up deleting it from my computer for my own good.

In other news, I've successfully recovered my desk chair, though I've yet to tidy up all of the corners as I ran out of glue. On the plus side it actually looks nearly as good as it did originally, which considering I ended up wrapping one sheet of faux-leather over a shape complex enough they used at least 9 pieces in the original is surprising. It'll look even better when finished. On the negative side I need to repair one of the arms - the cushioned pad has a wooden base with a metal nut glued to it, I overtightened the bolt and popped the nut off, so time to get the super-glue out. And the arms also turn out to have two subtly different length bolts to everything else on the chair, so that arm will have to remain sidelined while I go through the other dozen bolts one at a time to find where I used the longer ones in error.

I did a pub quiz with friends on Tuesday night, and we won handily. As someone stepped in whenever I tried to buy a round (and I'm reliant on other people for the getting, so poorly placed to argue), I ended the night £12:50 in profit. The others do that quiz regularly, and say it's usually not that much, they just had a particularly good turn out on Tuesday. I'm sort of stepping into a dead friend's shoes to bring their numbers up; I was invited to start doing it a couple of years ago and I did it a few times, but if we all happened to show up then there would be too many for a team and someone would have to be left out, so I decided to stop going. That's sadly no longer an issue. OTOH it was good to see everyone in happier circumstances (last time we met was the funeral) and I also bumped into my old German teacher, who I hadn't seen in ages, plus we won, of course.

Recent reading: Cherryh's Destroyer, Pretender and (currently just getting started with), Deliverer, the third trilogy of the Foreigner series. Bren Cameron, aka the Lord of the Heavens, aka the Paidhi-Aiji (translator to the Aiji, and the one human truly fluent in Atevi), together with the aged Aiji-Dowager Ilisidi and her great grandson, completely seven, absolutely not eight year old Cajeiri (it's a numbers thing) return home to the Atevi homeworld after two years away to find there was a coup eight months ago, the shuttle fleet is grounded, the space-station surviving by a whisker and the Aiji (Cajeiri's father, Tabini) is missing, potentially dead. Cue Bren spending two books wondering 'Is it my fault? It's my fault, really, isn't it?'; tiny, frail Ilisidi turning into the force of nature that scared everyone so much she was twice passed-over for Aiji; Cajeiri having to show he has the stuff to be Aiji in his own right; and Bren's bodyguards Banichi and Jago metaphorically rubbing their hands together in glee that they're back to the kind of problems that they, as senior members of the Assassin's Guild, know exactly how to deal with.

Current Mood: Slightly Obsessed
Current Location: Footpaw Island
Current Music: Theme from Jurassic Park

Recently Read:

Velveteen vs The Seasons, Seanan McGuire

Surviving the previous two Velveteen books has left Velma Martinez, aka superhero Velveteen, seriously indebted to the anthropomorphic personifications of Winter, Spring, and Autumn, and it's time to pay up. Vel is committed to spend one season in the Seasonal Lands with each of the three seasons, and at the end choose whether to move to one permanently, becoming one of its personifications, or return to the Calendar lands (aka Earth).

Being in debt to Santa Claus may not sound too harsh, after all it's Santa, and one of Vel's best friends is his daughter Jackie. But the big man isn't the only power in Winter, there's Jack Frost and the Snow Queen, Jackie's true parents, and there are powers yet un-named, and the seasons have been putting on their best faces for Vel when she visits, Being tested by the seasons is an altogether harsher process. One she isn't guaranteed to survive.And if Vel makes it out of Winter, there's still Spring, the season of destructive rebirth, and Autumn, the season of Halloween, to face

Like McGuire's Indexing series, the Velveteen series is structured as a chain of linked short stories, each entitled 'Velveteen vs'. Threats this time include "Hypothermia", "Santa Claus", "Spring Cleaning", and "The Consequences of Her Actions" amongst others. Scattered in among them are a handful of "Velveteen Presents" chapters as the friends Vel left behind deal with the aftermath of bringing down The Super Patriots Inc.

The theme here really is the consequences of her actions, for both Vel and her friends. The Velveteen books have always been darker than they sound, but this time the gloves are off, and not everyone will make it to the end of the story.

Velveteen vs the Seasons has what looks like a rather gaudy cover at first, but it's worth a second look when you're done. I didn't realise it at first, but all four women are actually Vel.

Definitely one to pick up from the earlier books if you haven't read them, with the stories from Book 1, Velveteen Vs the Junior Super Patriots Inc available on Seanan's site. There's a note there saying the ebook versions of both it and Velveteen vs the Multiverse are out of print for contractual reasons :(

A Red Rose Chain, Seanan McGuire

The ninth Toby Day book opens with Toby reporting her latest bit of heroing to Good Queen Arden, newly restored to the throne of San Francisco's fae Kingdom of the Mists, only to be interrupted by having the body of Arden's chancellor, Madden, dumped on them. This isn't an assassination, Madden isn't dead, he's been elf-shot to sleep for 100 years, it's a declaration of war. A century ago, Mists, under the usurper queen Toby recently deposed, fought a war against the neighbouring Kingdom of Silences, won and installed a puppet monarch, Rhys. Now Rhys wants Mists restored to it's 'rightful' queen, or it's war.

Dealing with Arden's initial panic requires Toby to get a little physical with her monarch, so when Arden needs a 'volunteer' for Ambassador to try and stop all this happening, guess who is first in line. Of course Toby isn't known for her diplomacy, she's much happier hitting things.

So it's Toby, her fiance Tybalt, King of Cats, her squire Quentin and her wierd sister May off to Silences. But with Silences slinging elf shot about, she needs an alchemist for her team, so poor chemistry professor Walter gets dragged out of his lab again. Only poor Walter turns out have been hiding things, such as being from Silences. He's not quite a hidden prince, but he's close.

Silences is a nightmare. Rhys isn't just a puppet of the usurper, he's a pure blood fanatic, and Toby isn't pure blood. She might be more fae than she started out, but she's still a part human changeling, with changeling vulnerabilities. Rhys's game isn't kill the ambassador, but nothing else is off the table (and in fact most of the attacks take place at table). And if the situation is bad for Toby, it's far worse for the changelings stuck permanently in Rhys's court.

There's no hope of bringing Rhys round, not when he's both fanatic and a puppet of the usurper, but Toby tries to stay on the diplomatic path, at least while the threats are directed solely at her. But when they stray to her friends and family the gloves come off, and this is a woman who has already brought one monarchy tumbling down. Her friends just wish she wouldn't bleed quite so much while she's doing it.

This is another solid entry in the series, there's not really any sense of where the series as a whole is going, but Toby is continuing to grow into her power, and there's a sense of every ball that's been tossed in the air still continuing on its arc. About the only thing missing this time is the Luidaeg, Toby's scary monster of an aunt, who only appears offscreen via a couple of telephone calls. But one thing is certain, the consequences of what happened in Silences are going to rattle through Mists too, and probably all of the fae kingdoms.

Red Rose Chain also has a cover that repays another look once finished. It's very subdued, but there's a wonderful amount of referencing to key elements of the story.

Up Next

Defying Doomsday, ed Tsana Dolichva and Holly Kench

An anthology of stories of disabled and chronically ill folk surviving doomsday. I've started with Corinne Duyvis' "And the Rest of Us Wait," with a teenaged Latvian one-time pop-idol and her family waiting out a comet impact in a Dutch public bunker, a situation complicated by her spina bifida. I love Iveta's voice, and Duyvis (who is autistic rather than physically disabled) seems to have done a good job of her research. Iveta and I seem to have roughly equivalent levels of mobility and it seems very well done to me.

Currently Playing

The Amazing Adventures of Van Helsing

Picked up in the Steam sale for £5.20, including all three DLC sets. I'd call this a Rogue-Like, I've also seen it called a Diablo-like, but I've never played Diablo. It's a RPG/shoot-em-up in which Van Helsing and his faithful companion Kristina (who's a ghost) are called to Borgovia, home of things that go bump in the night, which is suffering an outbreak of steampunk. The objective is basically kill anything that moves, while fulfilling various missions. Presentation is basically 3d isometric, but the 3d is somewhat wasted as you can't really see the detail that's there if you zoom in. It might be better on a large screen, I'm playing on my laptop at the minute, but there tends to be a lot on screen.

It's very frenetic, but if I can manage it with my dyspraxic coordination it should be accessible to most people. About the only problem with the game is that Katrina is very cliched. Expect to be annoyed.

If you're playing in Win 10 you need to kill one of the minor Windows services or it will crash after 15 minutes (you can google that on the Steam forums), but apart from that it seems pretty reliable.

I wouldn't have paid full price for it, but for a fiver it's good value.

ETA: Webcomics

I don't think I mentioned starting to follow Shattered Starlight, which is a new comic from Nicole Chartrand, who writes and draws Fey Winds, one of my favourite comics. Set in Montreal, it's only just taking shape, with a protagonist, Farah, who is a former magical girl, now all grown up (she's 28) and out of the defender of the earth thing. Unfortunately she has a temper, and her powers, and blasting her boss through a wall and four cubicles just got her reassigned to work at Cafe Le Dead End, which is as far as the story has gotten so far. The artwork is a real contrast to Fey Winds, which is full colour typical cartoon style, while Shattered Starlight is a detailed black and white style, though with occasional highlight tinting (mostly Farah's pink hair).