Dragon Age: Inquisition - Jaws of Hakkon DLC

Been really careful with spoilers. Written nothing that the trailer doesn't show/mention.

I was ridiculously excited for this DLC. Especially since it arrived completely out of the blue! The day before it was released it was announced by BioWare :P Turned out I was in for an agonising wait the day after. I had planned on playing it the entire day of release. I started getting discouraged around 3pm and looked around the Internet for anything close to a release time. Found a guy on a forum saying that stuff from BioWare usually was released around 9am L.A time. He was right. At exactly 5pm my local time the DLC popped up at Origin. I bought it and started playing it.

It was obviously a filler DLC, to keep the players busy while they're working for the big thing. (I'm still hoping for something similar to Witch Hunt, but concerning Solas, and I'm hoping for something like Awakening - a whole new campaign). But it was still great. I loved all the new fluff around Scout Harding and I loved the more in-depth history concerning the last Inquisitor. Also I loved the fact that the DLC included dealing with more Avvar (both friendly and hostile) and that the Skywatcher wasn't forgotten. Despite being such a small DLC (about 8 hours playtime, me thinks) there were some difficult choices to be made, especially concerning The Exile and Harding's Friend. The new area open for exploration was incredibly diverse and beautiful. I liked it a lot. The new Astrariums were a bit of a challenge, but I managed without any help. And there were yet more shards to pick up! But this time for a more immediate reward :P

I'm not fond of areas where the whole place is against you. Like in the old temple where the entire place was so cold that the place itself was an enemy. It kept me on the edge of my seat, though, because I was so scared of dying going through that place. Even more scared than fighting the actual end boss. The actual end boss was a bit of a disappointment tbh. It wasn't that hard. The surprise attack by five lvl 30 despair demons at a certain place was more of a challenge!

I really enjoyed the fact that there were some new war table missions to go with the new DLC and it was a lot of fun to play on my first character again.

Top 10 books from my childhood (or teen years) that I would love to revisit

I came into contact with this thingie via Ell's blog and then found out the source was from here. I was in a publisher's official book club thingie when I was little called Läslusen (rough translation is Book Worm). From this book club you could buy childrens and youth books at a discount and if you bought that month's chosen book you'd get a cool gift with it. Suffice to say I read a lot. By the time I was 11-12 the books from there were mostly too easy for me to read so I moved on to adult novels, but there are some books from there that remain vividly in my memory. A few of them still remain in my book shelf and it wouldn't surprise me if a bunch of them still remain in my parents' attic.

This is supposed to be a list of ten books, but I read a lot (I mean a lot) and this will be more like a list of ten authors that I loved. I used to live in the local library until I was about 14...

Here goes!

1. Enid Blyton. These books are old. Ms. Blyton's classic. My dad had a big collection of The Famous Five and I added to it myself. From The Famous Five I moved on to the Five Find-Outers series, The Secret Series, The Adventure Series... I found an Enid Blyton book and I devoured it.

The book covers I remember. Swedish version of each of the first books in each series: 1) Five on a treasure island, 2) Five Find-Outers Mystery of the burnt cottage 3) The Secret Island 4) The Island of Adventure

2. Eva Ibbotson. I think Dial-a-Ghost was the first one I read by her. Then came The Secret of Platform 13, Monster Mission, The Great Ghost Rescue, and Which Witch?. Monster Mission was my absolute favourite and some days I'm itching to buy them (I only borrowed them from the library at the time) and re-read them.

Swedish versions of 1) Dial-a-Ghost, 2) The Secret of Platform 13, 3) Monster Mission, 4) The Great Ghost Rescue, 5) Which Witch?

3. Francine Pascal. Or rather, Sweet Valley. This obsession started early, I remember reading those already in primary school. It started with Sweet Valley Kids, as I got older I turned to Sweet Valley Twins, and as I turned into a teenager I started reading Sweet Valley Junior High. That's where my attention veered towards fantasy and I never continued on with Sweet Valley High and Sweet Valley University.

Three of the Swedish books I had. 1) Sweet Valley Kids, 2) Sweet Valley Twins, 3) Sweet Valley Junior High, which was renamed into Jessica & Elisabeth in Swedish for some reason.

4. Maj Bylock. She's a Swedish author and I fell in love with one particular series of hers. It's about a witch, not the Harry Potter kind, but the historical kind, the one talking with spirits and who knows specific things about herbs and lore. But since it's a historical series it takes place in the sort of Sweden that prosecuted witches and so she has to hide her powers and knowledge. As the series progress her son takes over as the protagonist and he faces the same problems as her. Except that he's male and witches were typically women... Anyway, I never finished this series because my local library never had the last three books :( I'm interested in starting over actually. Might do that at some point.

Parts 1-4: loosely translated as The Witch Test, The Witch's Daughter, The Witch Boy, The Witch Gold

5. Celia Rees. The Cunning Man was the book that made me fall in love with this author back when I was about 12. Then came Witch Child and Sorceress and The Bailey Game. I loved the way all her books where slightly horror, but not really so it gave me that pleasant creepy feeling. I've probably re-read The Cunning Man about 10 times and it's still in my book shelf.

Swedish covers of 1) The Cunning Man, 2) Witch Child, 3) Sorceress, 4) The Bailey Game

6. Edith Nesbit. Another classic. I can't remember if I read The House of Arden or The Wonderful Garden first, but I remember loving them both. Those two were followed by The Magic City and The Enchanted Castle. I still remember all four vividly and those four books should be in my book shelf. I need to buy them. Nesbit was one of my earliest stops as I was slowly trying to find my way through the fantasy genre. Despite reading new translations they had kept the language old-fashioned in the versions I read and I remember appreciating that even at the age of 12.

Swedish versions of 1) The House of Arden, 2) The Wonderfal Garden, 3) The Magic City, 4) The Enchanted Castle

7. Allan Frewin Jones. I remember reading anthologies of Swedish ghost stories that I borrowed from the library back when I was 9 or 10. Then I came across The Plague Pit by Allan Frewin Jones when I was about 11. We had just talked about the Black Death in school and I was intrigued to find a modern horror story about a medieval disease. I borrowed it and later bought it. Last time I read it I was in my mid-teens and it still gave me some of my most unpleasant associations a book has ever done. You know the part where you actually travel into the story... I loved that it could scare me. The Plague Pit along with The Wicker Man that I bought and read afterwards are still in my book shelf and I've re-read them both lots of times.

My versions of 1) The Plague Pit, and 2) The Wicker Man

8. Lynne Ewing. I came across this series of hers when I was about 13 - The Daughters of the Moon. I immediately fell in love with it. But after the sixth book it took so long until the seventh came around. I don't know if they stopped translating them or what, but I lost interest. Now that I'm remembering them I'm feeling slightly nostalgic and I might want to check that series out again. I can't even remember what it was about, just that I loved it and I thought the covers were cool and the girls had awesome names.

The Swedish versions I owned: 1) Goddess of the Night, 2) Into the Cold Fire, 3) Night Shade, 4) The Secret Scroll, 5) The Sacrifice, 6) The Lost One

9. Margit Sandemo. I read her most popular series, The Legend of the Ice People, when I was 14, although the series is adult literature and contained a whole lot of sex. I loved this series to bits. It's still in my parents' attic and I would love to bring it home with me at some point and just re-read all 47 books. It still happens that I think back to that series and miss some of the characters. I was so stuck in that for such a long time, I can't seem to completely let go of it :P

Volumes 1, 11 and 29: loosely translated as 1) Spellbound, 2) Blood feud, 3) Lucifer's love

10. Michael Coleman. Or rather Internet Detectives. I came across this series in the youth section of the local library and thought it looked cool with all those little chat windows inside the book. I think I only ever read four (possibly five) of the books in this series (and not in order) because those were all the library had. It never occurred to me to buy them. I'm not sure I want to today. I'm scared I'll find out it hasn't aged well (not that it's very old it's just that the Internet has evolved a lot in the past 15 years).

Swedish versions of 1) Net Bandits, 2) Escape Key, 3) Cyber Feud, 4) System Crash

And there we have it. My childhood in books. I can't remember not reading. I can't remember not being interested in books and the written word. As a bonus I'll give you this picture:

This is me. 8 months old and inspecting the book shelf in the guest room. I was doing it already in 1991! ;)

Getting back to reading

It took a while for me to start reading again this year. Between Christmas and mid-February I read nothing at all. But now I'm back in action!

I started this year with Half a King by Joe Abercrombie. I'm a big fan of Abercrombie's dark and twisted adult fantasy, and I was really excited to read the first book in his youth fantasy trilogy. It didn't disappoint. Like most his other books (Red Country being the only exception where I could see through the whole plot) I didn't expect a lot of the twists and turns, the least expected one was probably the final revelation which was very nicely hidden. I liked all the characters and unlike some authors of youth fiction who make their characters very plain and simple because their audience is young, the characters of Half a King were all very layered. The only problem I have with this book is that it seemed so finished in the end and I'm not sure how he's going to turn this into a trilogy. Still, I'm looking forward to reading the next one!

Next up was American Gods by Neil Gaiman. I hadn't read this one yet although it's considered one of his most important works. In general I liked it, but there were so many sub-plots that I lost track of some of them during the course of the book. I'm not even sure if all the sub-plots were resolved by the end. However, I did like Shadow as a character and I did not expect the revelation in the end. I also read the short story Monarch of the Glen, which was included in the end of my edition of American Gods. I had previously read it in either Fragile Things or Smoke & Mirrors (I tend to mix those two up), but it made a lot more sense now after I had read the main story ;) I think I'm seeing hints towards more stories with Shadow as the main protagonist and I'm looking forward to reading more Shadow. I also need to include my favourite quote from this book. I don't know why it's my favourite but there's something about it that I find strangely beautiful. But it's also ridiculously long.

"I can believe things that are true and I can believe things that aren't true and I can believe things nobody knows if they're true or not. I can believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and Marilyn Monroe and the Beatles and Elvis and Mister Ed. Listen - I believe that people are perfectible, that knowledge is infinite, that the world is run by secret banking cartels and is visited by aliens on a regular basis, nice ones that look like wrinkedly lemurs and bad ones who mutilate cattle and want our water and our women. I believe that the future rocks and I believe that one day White Buffalo woman is going to come back and kick everyone's ass. I believe that all men are just overgrown boys with deep problems communicating and that the decline in good sex in America is coincident with the decline in Drive-In Movie theatres from state to state. I believe that all politicians are unprinicpled crooks and I still believe they are better than the alternative. I believe that California is going to sink into the sea when the big one comes, while Florida is going to dissolve into madness and alligators and toxic waste. I believe that antibacterial soap is destroying our resistance to dirt and disease so that one day we'll all be wiped out by the common cold like the Martians in War of the Worlds. I believe that the greatest poets of the last century were Edith Sitwell and Don Marquis, that jade is dried dragon sperm, and that thousands of years ago in a former life I was a one-armed Siberian Shaman. I believe that Mankind's destiny lies in the stars. I believe that candy really did taste better when I was a kid, that it's aerodynamically impossible for a bumblebee to fly, that light is a wave and a particle, that there's a cat in a box somewhere who's alive and dead at the same time (although if they don't ever open the box to feed it it'll eventually just be two different kinds of dead), and that there are stars in the universe billions of years older than the universe itself. I believe in a personal god who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal god who set the universe in motion and went off to hang with her girlfriends and doesn't even know I'm alive. I believe in an empty and godless universe of causal chaos, background noise and sheer blind luck. I believe that anyone who claims to know what's going on will lie about the little things too. I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies. I believe in a woman's right to choose, a baby's right  to live, that while all human life is sacred there's nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system. I believe that life is a game, life is a cruel joke and that life is what happens when you're alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it."

Then I moved on to more recent Gaiman publishings: First up was The Sleeper and the Spindle, which I absolutely adored. Snow White saving Sleeping Beauty instead of some handsome prince. The beautiful illustrations by Chris Riddell made everything even more fabulous. Then there was the nice twist in the end that took me by surprise. You think you know these fairy tales? Not when Gaiman's the story-teller.

Second of recent Gaiman publishings was Trigger Warning. He's amazing at writing short stories and Trigger Warning did not disappoint although I had previously read both The Truth is a Cave in the Black Mountains and The Sleeper and the Spindle. My favourite stories in this collection were the curious The Thing About Cassandra, the sci-fi Orange, the odd but strangely satisfying A Calendar of Tales, the Sherlock Holmes story The Case of Death and Honey, the horror stories Click-Clack the Rattlebag and Feminine Endings, as well as the latest American Gods' Shadow story Black Dog. I honestly thought that his Doctor Who story Nothing O'Clock would be amongst my favourites since I love Doctor Who and I've loved the two episodes he's written, but no. I liked it but I didn't love it. Could it have something to do with 11 not being exactly my favourite?

From today I'm reading The Silkworm by Robert Galbraith a.k.a J.K. Rowling. I've only read 100 pages so far, but it already seems more interesting than the last one!

Digimon!

I've always loved both Digimon and Pokémon, but for two completely different reasons. I love Pokémon because of the merch and the games. I love Digimon because of the show. The Pokémon anime is great, but it's always the same. Ash doesn't age and it's always him and Pikachu battling, trying to become the best and as far as I know that hasn't happened yet (although the show's been on for 18 years). With Digimon it's different. The characters have depth. They have strengths and flaws and they develop throughout the show. The group keeps splitting up so the characters can learn more about themselves and then rejoin when their personal journey is over. You can see the progress they make and it's an amazing adventure just to watch the show.

I'm currently working on rewatching Pokémon, Sailor Moon and Digimon. This is the first time I watch the shows since I was 9 years old and Digimon is still my favourite. Like with Sailor Moon I watch Digimon in original Japanese and to be blunt - both the English and Swedish dubs can get out of here. They are nothing compared to the awesomeness that's the Japanese original. To begin with the English opening sucks, and if possible the Swedish opening that I grew up with sucks even worse. The Japanese opening is glorious.

English | Swedish | Japanese

Just like when I grew up Sora is my favourite character and Tailmon/Gatomon is my favourite Digimon. Although I really do like Patamon as well, but that may just be because he resembles a rabbit. A flying rabbit :3 On top of the awesome intro, the awesome character developments and awesome story of Digimon there's also the awesome song played when the Digimon digivolve and fight. Honestly, I was waving my arms around and lip-syncing to it like a crazy person during every single episode. So here are two videos with that song: One where it's subbed, because the lyrics are amazing, and one where it's during digivolution and preparation for the final battle. You gotta love it, people!

The song with subs | Preparations for final battle. The sound is a little off and there are no subs so if you want to skip to the digivolution it starts at 2:00

Then there are the names. Like some digimon names are changed. I can understand some of those changes. I can definitely understand why some of the characters' names are changed as well:

Taichi - Tai

Yamato - Matt

Sora - Sora

Jyou - Joe

Mimi - Mimi

Koushirou - Izzy

Takeru - T.K.

Hikari - Kari

So I can understand how most of those changes happened. But how the hell did Koushirou become Izzy? O_o

I'm also shipping Taichi with Sora, and if the movie Our War Games is any indication then that ship is very canon. But I also can't help creating headcanons for some of the Digimon. Like I can totally see Devimon, LadyDevimon and PicoDevimon/DemiDevimon as a family. 

Devimon and LadyDevimon

And I can also see Angemon and Angewomon as a couple. Is that just me?

Angewomon and Angemon

I'm really looking forward to continue watching this show. And I even have a brand new show to wait for: Digimon Adventure Tri is coming out this year! :D