Words are inadequate

As alluded yesterday, there have been books.

What are you reading right now?

Finally getting back into the ebook of Moving Pictures. What I actually want to be reading is either The Ten Thousand Doors Of January (Harrow) or The Poppy War (Kuang), because I have fancy SubPress editions of both waiting for me. But I'm reluctant to take those to work with me, so they await a stretch of time when I'll be Not Working for a bit. Maybe this weekend.

Anyway, Moving Pictures is a bit of a slog, which surprises me. If you had told twelve-year-old me that there was a forty-plus-book fantasy series that was more like a bunch of interlocking serieses, as funny and readable as Douglas Adams but with actual plots, but the subseries I'd like least was the one about all the wizards, well. I would have thought you were entirely out to lunch.

What did you just finish reading?

Mm. First reread of Ann Leckie's Ancillary books. Still excellent. These prefigure Murderbot in some ways, which I had forgotten but which I greatly appreciate. Also the line "We're not cousins anymore" late in Ancillary Mercy remains the funniest line on the funniest page of anything I have read in quite some time. (I note with some excitement that Leckie has a new Radch book out next year, heavily featuring a Presger translator.)

Also read the first two of Walter Jon Williams's new space opera trilogy, sequel to his previous excellent Dread Empire's Fall trilogy. I outsource my commentary to paraphrasing Marissa Lingen, who said of the first "it's more of the same, space battles and space empire politics, it's still good but start with the first trilogy," and of the second "it's MORE OF THE SAME, stupid awful interpersonal stuff with the leads hooking up and breaking up, and i may be done with it now." I note that she hasn't reviewed the third, which came out a month or two ago.

And reread Gibson's The Peripheral and read Agency, which ... these are weird, but I like them. In both roughly the first third is sort of orientation, getting you used to the world(s) of the novel, and then most of the rest is ... nothing really happens, but you get a lot of nice character and worldbuilding and dialogue moments, and then in like the last thirty pages there is suddenly PLOT! and then it's over. Spook Country did this as well. It is very much not my normal reading mode. And Gibson's characters are... they're sort of emotionally muted, which contributes to the sense of not much really happening. I'm not describing this well at all. I think I liked them? Keeping them around, at the very least.

What do you think you'll read next?

Maybe 10K Doors or Poppy War. Maybe Provenance, the sequel to the Ancillary books. Maybe the third of WJW's space opera books, it's on the shelf and then I can be done with them. (They /are/ well-written and fast-paced and well-plotted, it's just the relationship between the two leads that grinds my teeth.) Maybe whatever the next Discworld is.

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And, from ironymaiden, the return of the Five Questions meme. Comment and ask and I'll ask you five questions of your own.

1. What has been the biggest surprise about life with Mr. Tuppert?

It's the sitting-on-shins thing. The way he's not hugely a People Cat is a bit of a surprise, and not being able to tempt him up onto the couch to sit next to me is a bit of a disappointment, but. Starting from the very first night he was here, when I get into bed he comes up on the bed with me, and he'll usually come up for a few scritches first. Then it's like a switch gets thrown in his tiny cat-brain, and he tries to position himself lengthwise on top of my shin, and kneads at the blanket and makes meowy-growly noises of discontent that he can't get situated comfortably there. This goes on for several minutes, usually until I shift a bit at the right time or in the right way to shake him out of it, and he'll either get comfortable on my feet or curl up next to them.

2. What did you think of the "bonus episode" of Sandman?

So, this is two questions, or maybe three. The "bonus episode" presentation in itself is kinda weird, though it makes sense: may as well at least try to tell the stories in something like the original order, and they want to seed 'Calliope' early to set up for the chain that leads to The Kindly Ones. So why not goose numbers with a bonus episode? Plus, they've already done the Hob Gadling story, and the Element Girl story is unfilmable without using DC's cosmos (and honestly skippable anyway), so why not give us all of Dream Country in its original place? Works for me.

'Dream of a Thousand Cats' was a basically perfect adaptation with a stellar voice cast. A+, no notes. The story itself is slight but fun.

I am perhaps overly sensitive to stories that revolve around sexual assault, so I hated 'Calliope' on my recent reread. I disliked it much less onscreen. And it's always nice to see Arthur Darvill getting work, and Derek Jacobi too.

3. What's your current favorite boardgame and why?

With the caveat that I've only played it once in the last year-plus, and that's not too likely to change before April: Sidereal Confluence. I doubt I can improve on what I wrote awhile ago:

SidCon is a trading game where the point isn't to make a few good (ie, lopsided-in-your-favour) trades, it's to make as many trades as possible. Everyone has a pile of Stuff, and everyone needs some Stuff to run their machines, but no one has the kinds of Stuff they need. So there's a mad flurry of exchanges and negotiations, and the more of those exchanges and negotiations you can be a part of the better off you are. Even if you're not technically "gaining" anything, you're getting more Stuff that you can actually use. Now add on to that what they call "variable player powers," where each player can break certain rules in certain extreme ways. The end result is an awful lot of busy chaotic noisy fun.

It is extremely interactive, it is surprisingly smooth-playing with low rules overhead despite the high emergent complexity, and it plays in under three hours. I adore it. I've only played with a full nine-player contingent once, and that was under highly nonoptimal conditions: multiple brand-new players that I had to hand-hold for the first couple of rounds, a loud room at a convention, a table setup that made it difficult for everyone to talk to everyone else. It was still a top boardgaming experience.

4. Still working through Discworld? What's your current favorite?

I am, but slowly. Partly I've been reading physical books instead of ebooks; partly I'm just finding Moving Pictures to be slower going. My favourite is definitely Pyramids, though I've a soft spot for Wyrd Sisters, and Mort is also wonderful.

5. What food of your childhood is unobtainable where you live now, and is that a good or bad thing?

Growing up an Army brat means I don't really have food 'of my childhood,' other than the stuff Mom made on the regular, and most if not all of that is replicable. Closest thing would be good Memphis-style barbecue, which we had whenever we went to see grandparents: both sets lived an hour and a half out of Memphis (different directions). That lack is unquestionably a Bad Thing. There's at least one okay barbecue joint in the Lower Mainland but it's not the same.

Hey look, Wednesday.

What are you reading now?

The Colour of Magic, just about halfway through. It is ... it's good but not great. Bits of it are quite funny but the whole doesn't hang together as well as I would like. More later.

I'm also savouring Sandman: Worlds' End, and I've a marker in Tessa Gratton's The Queens of Innis Lear ("King Lear by way of George R.R. Martin") and in Jessica Fern's Polysecure.

What did you just finish reading?

First reread of Charlie Stross's revamped Merchant Princes trilogy, about a family of worldwalkers. That is, I read the original first two when they came out and enjoyed them, and then stopped working at Waldenbooks and never picked up the rest. Then when he took the original six books and compressed them back into three like he'd originally planned, I bought them in ebook and read them on my iPad during a trip to Mexico. I'd intended to read the next trilogy as soon as it came out and, well, the last book is finally due out next month. So I may as well remind myself of what all went down.

They're interesting. The first one reads like "what if Zelazny's Amber, but for real?" which would be the part that hooked me initially. Then the next two veer increasingly into Bush-era technothriller territory, which also works for me.

They're hardly perfect. Characters do a lot of speculating at each other (okay, Miriam does a lot of speculating at other characters), which slows things down. And the pacing on the third book in particular is weird: a nuke goes off halfway through, and the second half of the book is ... well, cleanup and retreat. It didn't quite click for me, this time, is I guess what I'm saying.

But, again, they're interesting: they do conceptual things that I don't know that anyone else is even trying. I'm definitely looking to pick up the sequel trilogy in a month or so.

What do you think you'll read next?

"Next" feels like such a nebulous term. Probably The Light Fantastic, but possibly some other random ebook out of my collection. I seem to have acquired a bunch of them over the plague year.

Well this was a fun diversion. Via firecat:

Answer each category with a SONG TITLE. No repeats and don’t use the internet (it's tempting but try not to). Go with the first song that comes to mind, change my answers to your own (don't steal mine), and repost.

Something to wear: "Famous Blue Raincoat," Leonard Cohen
Something to drink: "Black Tea, Red Wine", Mouths of Babes
Place: "Still In Hollywood," Concrete Blonde
Food: "I Love Rocky Road," 'Weird' Al Yankovic
Animal: "Spider," They Might Be Giants
Color: "Paint It, Black," The Rolling Stones
Girl's Name: "Sister Ray," The Velvet Underground
Boy's Name: "Pablo Picasso," The Modern Lovers
Profession: "Acrobat," U2
Day of the Week: "Manic Monday," The Bangles
Vehicle: "Subway," Peter Murphy

Except for the first two, those are all songs I've known for at least twenty years. Guess that's what imprinted.

These days it somehow takes me a minute to summon up my birthplace, and when I do it always feels weird. "Oh, right, I guess I was born in Oklahoma. Huh." (Sill; lived there for the first nine months of my life before we moved to Broussard, Louisiana, which we also left before I was able to form memories.) I can still call up my father's Social Security number, though. At least I no longer get confused as to whether it's his or mine. Weird legacies of a military brat childhood.

Apparently sitting around waiting for work is not entirely unstressful. The VPN went down yesterday morning and didn't come back 'til sometime after two pm, on a day when I was meant to be sorting out the workload for the rest of the team. Couldn't really relax because I felt I had to keep checking every half hour or so to see if the VPN was back; couldn't do much because, well, no access to my machine. (For historical reasons involving the Horrible Awful IT Guy I don't have a work laptop, and instead remote-desktop into my work machine. This is as painfully slow as it sounds, but it does mean I only carry one computer when I travel.)

In general I disapprove strongly of how minor changes and setbacks are intensely disruptive to my ability to function, these days.

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I finally finished Counterpart a couple of weeks ago. Counterpart is two seasons' worth of Cold War spy show with a skiffy veneer. The conceit is that in 1987 a physics experiment in Berlin created a permanent crossing between our world and another one that was just like it, but of course they started diverging in tiny ways almost immediately, and then more so when a flu pandemic decimated one world's population in the 1990s. There's an air of paranoia and bureaucracy, low-tech spy stuff and moral grey areas, and some amazing character work by (among plenty of others) JK Simmons and Olivia Williams playing two different versions of themselves. It's very much my thing, despite being a little slow at times. The show ends... acceptably; you can tell they were hoping for a third season but didn't necessarily expect to get one.

I also binged the last season of The Good Place a week and a half ago. This show... this show. It is, I think, the second multi-season show I've seen (after Avatar) that had an entirely satisfactory ending. And yes, I cried quite a bit during the finale, but what do you expect when it's all about needing to leave the people you love. Really just fantastic work, all around.

Last spring Erin bailed on Moffatt Doctor Who midway through S5 (specifically, midway through "Vampires of Venice"). I've picked it back up this week. Matt Smith's Doctor is starting to grow on me, and I'm reminded that it took me about half a season to come round on Tennant as well. Amy Pond may be less aggravating than her original presentation as well. It's hard to say, because the Amy-and-Rory dynamic is so bloody annoying and awful, and the writers really don't have much respect for Rory. I shall grit my teeth and stick with it, and hope that either that improves, or/and the next Companion (Clara?) irritates me less.

UPDATE: Erin hopped back on board for "Vincent" and has continued. Amy-without-Rory was in fact less annoying, and Amy-and-Rory in general are less obnoxious in S6 when the writers start occasionally giving Rory something to do. Steven Moffatt unfortunately still Steven Moffatts the hell out of everything, to include River Song. "Let's Kill Hitler" was mostly hilarious, but the revelation that River's spent her whole life pursuing the Doctor... feh.

And there's a new season of Kipo (yay!), and I have all of Steven Universe which I am watching very slowly because at this point midway through S1 it's still too saccharine for my taste, and there's plenty of other stuff around too.

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And hey, it's Wednesday.

What are you reading right now?

Ancestral Night, by eBear. Big giant space opera, set in the same universe as the Jacob's Ladder books but several hundred years later. (Grail is summarized in passing in a couple of paragraphs on page 86.) It is slow going. Langorous, is I think the word. Lots of neat stuff, some high-tension scenes, and the pace just feels slow. I'm enjoying the ride quite a bit so far but it's a bit more effort to stick with than I had expected.

In ebook, The Weight of the Stars by K. Ancrum, which I picked up because it was on e-sale. YA? Near-future, about a teenage girl who's trying to befriend another girl whose mother vanished on a space mission just after she was born. It feels rough: the prose, the plot, the characters, all aren't quite... believable, maybe. But it's interesting and it's got heart.

What did you just finish reading?

Network Effect by Martha Wells was everything I could possibly have hoped for in a novel-length Murderbot book, and then some. (Except for more Gurathin. I like Gurathin! I liked having someone around who didn't like Murderbot!) I especially loved new SecUnit "Three" and its completely different yet still wholly believable response to freedom. So many good things about this book. These books. So glad I picked up the first one.

What do you think you'll read next?

Well, I've got A Game Of You sitting on my coffee table, I'll read that at some point. Other than that I don't really know. I've got Suzanne Palmer's Finder and Arkady Martine's A Memory Called Empire remaining from the Great Space Opera Flood of 2019. And more ebooks than a stick can be shaken at, as well.

Via James Nicoll, my first ten tabletop RPGs in ten days, in the order in which I encountered them. Day nine: Unknown Armies.



I picked up the Unknown Armies corebook on a lark, because the back copy looked interesting and because it was published by Atlas, who also did Over the Edge. UA had a bunch of neat mechanical ideas: skills cap at your related stat, only four stats and design-your-own skills, percentile dice but if it's your 'obsession' skill you can flip the ones and tens. Combat was pretty dangerous: to take one example, knives always do a little bit of damage, even on a miss. ("You're wearing your best suit and I have a magic marker. Take the marker away from me without getting your suit messed up.")

More than the mechanics, though I loved UA for its atmosphere. Tynes and Stolze had as their explicit guiding principle "humans did it." No immortal vampires pulling strings, no shadowy cabal of mages: matter of fact, since magic in UA is a function of obsession, mages are more likely to be messed-up human beings incapable of controlling anything. John Constantine, not Stephen Strange.

In one of the later sourcebooks, they had what they called scenario seeds: a couple of pages describing the high points of a short campaign episode and how it might play out. I remember reading those and thinking "yes! Perfect! This is exactly the amount of detail I need to run a scenario."

I spent several years hanging out on the UA mailing list, which was pretty cool. People posted campaign stories ("one of my PCs is a fleshworker who got his hand cut off... but he retrieved it and did a major working, and now it's an artifact that responds to his commands") and weird things they encountered, and the designers got into the conversations as well. That was where I got into Warren Zevon (the first sourcebook was named "Lawyers, Guns & Money"), and where I met Gareth Hanranan, now a fantasy author and a game designer extraordinaire for Pelgrane.

Sadly UA, like OTE before it, fell victim to Emily's hatred of naming her own skills. I did get to run a couple of short scenarios, but never found a group who'd really get into the whole low-power street-magick vibe. One of these days, maybe.

Via James Nicoll, my first ten tabletop RPGs in ten days, in the order in which I encountered them. Day seven: GURPS.



GURPS wants to simulate everything, and I mean everything. Break it all down to character points spent and 3d6. I believe all the GURPS games I ever came close to being involved in have been some variety of fantasy, but I know there was at least one ongoing Space game at Tech while I was there, and there are GURPS sourcebooks covering just about any genre and setting you can imagine.

It will not surprise you to hear that I don't get on well with GURPS. I've played in several campaigns, and my sense during each has been that I spend half my time fighting against the system to do what I want to do. I know there are people who love it to death, who tell amazing stories using it, who can wield the system like a scalpel to carve a pitch-perfect and appropriate simulation. They aren't me.

This doesn't stop me from owning a couple of the sourcebooks, though. When they're not descending into number-crunching, they tend to be wonderfully deep dives on their subject matter.

RPGs day 5: Millennium's End v2.0

Via James Nicoll, my first ten tabletop RPGs in ten days, in the order in which I encountered them. Day 5: Millennium's End v2.0



Well, they can't all be winners.

Giao was looking for players, and I was overcome by the sudden wealth of gaming opportunities, so I said "sure". Not the wisest choice I ever made.

Millennium's End was a game of corporate espionage, written in the early nineties and set in 1999-2000. It was mostly notable for its incredibly detailed firefight rules, including transparent silhouettes so you could work out exactly where you'd been hit by gunfire. One of its most significant supplements was titled "Ultramodern Firearms." You really got a sense of what the designer considered important in game design, which was "how easily can you headshot guys from this range with this weapon."

The campaign petered out after four or five sessions, from a combination of clunky rules and players who were really, really bad at being spies. ("The bad guys got here before us and are in this building! Let's... slash their tires! That'll teach them!") I learned some valuable lessons, though, such as "I really don't get on well with rules-heavy systems" and "maybe take a look at the rulebook before agreeing to join a game."

Via James Nicoll, my first ten tabletop RPGs in ten days, in the order in which I encountered them.



I got into On the Edge in high school, when I was looking for a multiplayer CCG and the store was sold out of Jyhad, the horribly-named Vampire: The Masquerade game. On the Edge is set on a Mediterranean island that's home to every conspiracy you can imagine and a half dozen more. It's fun, and frequently quite funny as well. When I found out there was an RPG's worth of background source material, of course I snapped it up.

Over the Edge is a weird, weird game, which I guess is fitting given its origin as "Jonathan Tweet's weird-stuff homebrew." It's the first game I'd ever seen with "design your own skills," or with an explicitly and deliberately fuzzy resolution mechanic, or that treated psychic etc powers as just some things you can do, though probably not very well. It had some excellent GM advice along the lines of "you're all here to have fun, which might look different to different people," and it included a meta-campaign in which the characters can meet their players. I loved it.

I've never actually played OTE. I didn't even get a chance to run it until the late 2000s, mostly due to Emily's intense hatred of design-your-own-skills systems. But the "here's a WHOLE BUNCH of awesome stuff" design philosophy and the freeform approach to skills and conflict resolution has had an enormous impact on my own GMing style.

Via James Nicoll, my first ten tabletop RPGs in ten days, in the order in which I encountered them.



I came across the bright-red Middle-Earth Roleplaying boxed set sometime in late elementary school. It said "Tolkien" so of course I was interested.

Even at that age the spellcasting classes seemed like a poor fit for Tolkien's world, and the bestiary had delved rather deeply into the obscure corners of the mythos. (Hummerhorns and Fastitycelyn [sing. Fastitocalon] as creatures you might encounter. Yeesh.) And the idea of randomly rolling to see what various NPCs would do felt deeply off, and honestly I ended up just being overwhelmed by the sheer number of numbers you were expected to track.

I never actually played MERP. I mostly remember creating a bunch of characters, and laughing over the fumble tables ("Worst move seen in ages. -60 to activity due to a pulled groin. Foe is stunned two rounds laughing"). But I did appreciate that first-level characters had about as many hit points as tenth-level (the maximum). And it taught me useful vocabulary words like "melee."

"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals, and you know it." --Agent K

What are you currently reading?

Currently having a lot of trouble getting into Fonda Lee's Exo. I assume this is a temporary brain setback, since I adored her Jade City and Jade War, and even enjoyed Zeroboxer (MMA-in-space) pretty well. Might be the setup: the main character is a superpowered young member of the not-Gestapo for the aliens who've taken over Earth. He gets kidnapped by Earth-First-ers in short order and I expect he'll start sympathising with them pretty soon, but this is perhaps not the ideal read for me right after the Small Change books (see below).

What did you just finish reading?

First reread of Ha'penny and Half a Crown, Jo Walton's Small Change books 2 and 3. Farthing, the first, was very good and fairly grim. Ha'penny was quite good but even more grim. And Half a Crown... it's well-written, with an okay plot, and an ending that feels even more like a cop-out now than when I first read it a decade ago. Suspect these are not keepers: they read well but they don't really grab me, and my disappointment/irritation at Half a Crown taints my view of the whole set.

What do you think you'll read next?

Likely not Commonweal 5 as I seem to be on a print-books kick. Contenders include various space-opera from 2019, Gareth Hanrahan's The Shadow Saint which I've had kicking around since January, and maybe something YA and non-fascist.

Or I might do the comfort-read thing and pull out one of my multitude of RPG books that I've not yet read through.