1.A Thief in the Night, by David Chandler. I read the first book in this series, Den of Thieves, years ago, but the plot of that book was so simple and straight-forward that it carried straight over to this one and the small scattered hints in this book was enough for me to remember the whole thing. My initial thoughts when I started to read this book was that it read like a D&D adventure and the characters were pretty straight-forward D&D stereotypes; the sweet but dense knight, the sly thief, the cunning dwarf, the wise magic apprentice, and the barbarian who solves everything with violence. But just like in the last book I fell in love with Malden and I discovered that every part of the book that was just Malden, Cythera and Slag were amazing, and every part of it involving Croy and Mörget a lot less so. It read like a D&D adventure all the way through, but when the mystery evolved just over halfway through the book (around 275 pages in) things started to get really interesting and I found the book hard to put down. It's a good many-layered mystery reaching through the ages and those are great. There were a few instances where I was just waiting for the characters to catch up, where I had figured out where the story was going and they didn't know yet, but I wasn't so much further ahead of the characters that it became annoying. They caught up pretty quickly. All in all I did enjoy this book and I will pick up the third part eventually.
2. Murder on the Orient Express, by Agatha Christie. This was an old Swedish translation that I got from my grandmother years ago. I really, really don't agree with the translation and half of the time I spent reading this was spent sighing in frustration at the translator's choice of words (and so many direct translations omg). The translation definitely lowers the overall grade of this book. When it comes to the plot I already knew it. I've seen several screen adaptations of this novel, the latest being the one starring Kenneth Branagh and Daisy Ridley. I still enjoy seeing the seemingly random clues come together and this book is probably the absolute best way to see the brilliance of Poirot's mind and Christie's pen. Who can pass up on a good whodunit story? :3
3. 2001: A Space Odyssey, by Arthur C. Clarke. This is a classic and a book I got from Blind Date. I saw the movie adaptation of this when I was around ten years old, and it was the strangest movie 10-year-old me had ever seen. I don't remember much of the movie, just the general dislike of too much weird, which put me off from reading the book. But when I got it from Blind Date I figured I might as well read it. And this book gave me the same feeling like Star Trek TOS and classic Doctor Who; gotta love the 1960's hope for the future! The book starts off with what's basically two prologues; one taking place in prehistoric times, and one taking place two years before the rest of the book. The connection between those two prologues and the rest of the story isn't immediately clear, but the pieces fit together perfectly as the story moves along. I love how the majority of the story is just basic space exploration (which features a renegade AI) before moving into a Lovecraftian Randolph Carter-esque ending. Did Bowman find the Silver Key somehere in the rings of Saturn? ;P From someone who isn't very much into sci-fi; I really liked this book (a lot more than I thought I would).
4. Classic Victorian & Edwardian Ghost Stories.
I love old-fashioned ghost stories and I'm happy to say that I had only read one of the tales included in this anthology before; The Tell-Tale Heart, by Edgar Allan Poe. I never pick this sort of book up to get scared, but mostly to enjoy the old-fashioned story-telling and hopefully to get a few chills. As expected the stories I did enjoy the most were the two by Charles Dickens and the two by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu; especially Narrative of a Ghost of Hand, which gave me such chills and stayed with me for a whole day. Man-Size in Marble by Edith Nesbit also gave me chills. Oscar Wilde's The Canterville Ghost was a wtf scenario, but was obviously meant as a comedy. The levity of this story was much appreciated after all the doom and gloom which had been the book up until this point. The last story was Laura by Saki. It was extremely short, but very strange, and I'm not sure what to make of it. These were the stories that stood out to me especially, but I feel like if I go to honorary mentions it will be the rest of the book, however The Spectre of Tappington gets a mention for having a pants-obsessed ghost; A School Story gets a mention for having a perfect dun-dun-DUUUUN movie-ending, and Eveline's Visitant gets a mention for being so heart-wrenchingly romantically told.
5. And Another Thing..., by Eoin Colfer. As far as I'm concerned Hitchhiker's Guide should've ended after the second book. Everything after that was a tedious chore of reading and unfortunately this wasn't any better. I went in expecting nothing, but against all better knowledge hoping for something good. I planned on giving this book 100 pages, but I couldn't even get to 70 before I gave up. Seventy pages and literally nothing had happened, except for some painfully forced tongue-in-cheek writing that mostly served to annoy me because it was so bad. ugh
I follow Netflix on Facebook and one point the trailer for this show came up on my feed. I thought it seemed interesting so gave it a go.
The show is Mexican and thus they speak Spanish. I don't speak Spanish (and I refuse to dub things) but slap some subtitles on there and no issue.
The show is obviously heavily inspired by Gossip Girls (and to some extent Pretty Little Liars, I think?), but it's less about the fancy upper-class privileged teenagers and more about the ordinary people. I was never a fan of Gossip Girl and while this show is inspired by it, it takes the premises somewhere completely different.
While it starts out as people dealing with having their secrets revealed and the aftermath of that, it soon becomes a sort of mystery/thriller as they try to figure out who the culprit is and why s/he did what s/he did.
I've read some complaints that the story continuity is slippery at best, but I didn't see that. To me everything that happened made perfect sense. But maybe you need to be a little bit broken to see it. If you have never struggled to fit in, then maybe this show isn't for you.
The season ends with something major happening and I really, really hope there'll be another season. I need closure!
Next up on my backlog was Deus Ex: Human Revolution. I've been curious about this game for some time and when I played it I liked it so much that I decided to get Mankind Divided as soon as I was done with Human Revolution.
Human Revolution was such an amazing introduction to the cyberpunk world of Deus Ex. I made sure to do all the sidequests to get as much out of the game as possible, and I loved everything about it until I was thrust into the DLC The Missing Link, midway through the game (Director's Cut does this apparantly) and for a second it seemed as if I had lost all my skill points. I was so pissed about this until some googling made it clear that you got them back in the end of the DLC. I would've played the DLC either way, but being thrust into it like that just made me hate it.
The environments of the game were amazing. I enjoyed running around in Detroit, but no place was as cool to explore as Hengsha. Adam didn't agree though, judging from his comment when you first approach the island. An island so crowded that they built a second floor... But it looks so cool *_*
The story featured several wtf moments, not the least the reveal about Eliza Cassan. The majorest (I made that a word, shush) reveal came just towards the end from Darrow himself. And in the end you have a choice to make how you want the story to end. Two choices if you didn't save Sarif and Taggart; four if you saved them.
I chose Darrow's ending, and lucky I did because Mankind Divided made it clear that that was the dev's canon ending.
While playing Human Revolution I didn't think much of it, but after finishing Mankind Divided I realised that I really missed the banter between Adam and Pritchard.
Mankind Divided was so much better than Human Revolution imho. It seemed more polished somehow. I put every effore into finding all the collectibles and doing all the sidequests while playing through this game
As much as I enjoyed Hengsha in Human Revolution, Prague was better in every way. So much to do, so many places to explore - I love it!
Mankind Divided had so many characters that I couldn't help but like. Delara was one. Koller another. Helle a third.
The story in Mankind Divided makes a lot of sense after what happened at the end of Human Revolution and the world has turned from a simple cyberpunk existance to a dystopian one. Especially if you're augmented. I really enjoyed running around the world trying to alleviate everybody's problems, while trying to take down a terrorist organisation and turn the world back to acceptance of augs.
The sidequests that had the biggest impact on me was The Harvester and The Last Harvest. While Human Revolution mostly made out augmentations to be this wonderful thing, Mankind Divided really took its time to show how they could definitely be dangerous and how scientific advancement isn't always done with good intentions.
After I finished Mankind Divided I felt sad that it was over. No new Deus Ex on the horizon. No more Adam. Tumblr fangirls had my back :3 All the edits on Tumblr are amazing.
Woop woop! A Borderlands game that didn't take us a whole year to complete! xD We started playing this shortly before we both went on holiday and then we played it almost every day throughout our holiday.
I've heard from several people that this is the weakest Borderlands, but I actually really liked it. I really, really enjoyed playing Athena and I really, really liked seeing Jack's character development. Running around Elpis was a welcome change of scenery from being on Pandora (even though Toni kept saying how he missed Pandora).
Being a low-gravity zone ofc there were lots of jumping puzzles and as someone who's notoriously bad at jumping puzzles, this was probably the only negative for me about being on Elpis. We kept having to come back to the Veins of Helios for sidequests and I hated that place, because I kept falling off the platforms when trying to get from one place to another. It's my constant issue with jumping puzzles in any game; either I jump too far, way clear of the platform; or I don't even reach it.
Elpis was so beautiful and I was almost sad when we left the moon and returned to Helios to finally fight Zarpedon and find the Vault, but boy was it worth it. The Vault was amazing and the final boss fight against the Sentinel was so frickin epic. Probably the best boss fight in all of the Borderlands games so far.
Then we got to the DLCs. Since the Pre-Sequel only had one story DLC and the other two were arenas, we decided to only do the story DLC. Neither of us are big fans of arena challenges. So off we went to Claptrap's Claptastic Voyage, which was a really cool DLC. I did not expect to go inside Claptrap, but oh boy is that robot messed up! Also it might be our fault that Claptrap only listens to dubstep.
Claptastic Voyage was chuckfull of puns and we had so much fun with this DLC, until we got to the final boss. Seriously fuck Sh4dow-TP! And we have to fight him twice. Omggg -.-
I really loved the glitchy weapons that came with the Claptastic Voyage. I got one pretty early on and was then stuck on using a frickin amazing laser weapon. Because it was seriously amazing. The damage was through the roof and ate through even the shields of bosses so fast it was ridiculous. But because it was glitchy (intentionally) it sometimes got stuck on firing and I had to wait until I had to reload to get rid of the laser beam. But so worth it.
After we finished with Dirk Gently we decided we wanted something humorous so we went for Disenchantment. Same creator as Simpsons, but instead of just a bunch of stand-alone episodes this series actually has a story.
The first season is divided into two parts. The first part is a coming of age story, while the second story is a classic fantasy story arc of magic and villains. The second arc bleeds seamlessly into the first and the first arc is peppered with references of what's to come.
Elfo is a walking meme and Luci is the best part of the show. Gotta love Luci.
I finally got around to finish this game! I started it when it came out and had just finished the second episode when the whole mess with Telltale happened. For a while there it was completely unknown whether we'd get the last two episodes of Clemmy-Clem-Clem, but then Skybound stepped in like heroes and finished the game.
This game was so incredible. Little Clementine has grown so much since the first Walking Dead game and I really enjoyed the story of trying to parent AJ right while also dealing with teenage crap like romance and jealousy, while also dealing with the apocalypse. Loved it!
The last two episodes were a lot more actiony than I'm used to with Telltale (probably because Skybound did them, duh) with the added effect that there were scenes that were so effing hard for me because I can't frickin aim with a controller. I'll definitely replay this game on PC. Not just to make the experience smoother for me, but also because there are some choices I made on PS4 that I'll be very interested to know the result of the opposite choice for. And that's where PC comes in. I'm going to assume that aiming and shooting and faster reactions will come a lot more natural on PC.
K+m ftw. Only reason I play it first on PS4 is because Toni likes to watch :3
But yes, this was a worthy end to Clementine's story and I'm so happy with how it all turned out. Obviously I did make a lot of right decisions :)
Every single episode ended with a wtf wtf wtf reaction. So definitely a thumbs up from us!
The hyyyyyype! The hype was huge for this! Return to Skyrim! Vampire based story! I was in love from the moment it was announced!
I preordered the physical Collector's Edition in March. Then corona happened and it was delayed. I received my copy on May 27th, the day after release. Two days later I had finished the story and was running around doing side stuff, like finding collectables and treasure hunting.
The CE was dope. I missed getting a book like I got from the other CE, but I really really like the coins so that almost made up for it. There are four coins and they each represent a chapter. The first coin has Vivec on one side and the hand for Morrowind on the back, the second coin has Ayrenn on one side and the Summerset bird on the back, the third coin has the khajiiti Mane on one side and the two moons on the back, and the fourth coin has Svargrim on one side and the wolf of Solitude on the back. Morrowind-Summerset-Elsweyr-Greymoor. The new statue looks really good next to my other three statues.
As per usual I read nothing about the chapter aside from the announcement. I watched no trailers and no streams that could spoil anything. But from the announcement and the vampire lord statue my mind immediately went to the Volkihar vampires and my original theory was that we'd meet Serana again and we'd be the ones to lock her inside the cave where she's found in Skyrim. Turns out that wasn't the case, but the story we got was still so good.
For some reason I didn't expect to see the Ravenwatch vampires again, so I was both surprised and happy when I ran into Fennorian, and then later when I met up with Gwendis for a side quest in Blackreach. House Ravenwatch is apparently very important to whatever is going on with the Ashen Lord and I bet we'll see more of them in the next to installments of the Dark Heart of Skyrim season. Does this mean that Verandis will come back?!?!?!?! Can we save him?!?!?!Darien came back, please let Verandis come back.
The introductory cinematic starts with a Skyrim joke as you literally wake up on a wagon and look around at your companions. I love how much Solitude looks like Solitude.
Blackreach was amazingly beautiful, and we got Falmer for the first time in ESO! :D I really, really hope we'll have more to do with the Falmer later, maybe another story of some amazingly untouched Snow Elves like in Dawnguard? That would be really cool.
The harrowstorms are amazing! They work like the anchors from the base gamne or the geysers in Summerset, except the harrowstorms are actually challenging and pretty effing hard to complete on your own. Both anchors and geysers are easily done alone, but harrowstorms and dragons not so much. The only annoying thing about harrowstorms is that they spawn randomly and don't go around in a circle like the anchors. This means that if you just have one left to do to complete the map you may have to end up waiting for a really long time. I spent over an hour waiting for my last one. For dailies it isn't so annoying, as an active harrowstorm easily can be seen from quite a distance and they usually take long enough to complete that you have time to run all the way over there and get at least one hit in.
And then we have the antiquities system, aka treasure hunting. It's a little mini puzzle game and I really enjoy it. First you have to complete the tutorial in Solitude and then you're on your own. Scry for antiquities by completing the puzzle (connect all the "swirls") and then run off to the area indicated on your map. In this area you have to find a pile of dirt. The Eye in mementos help point you in the right direction if you equip it on your quick slots. When you find it you have to dig, which is another little mini game. Both of these mini games get harder the higher your level gets and the higher the item level is (green is very easy, blue is a bit harder, purple even harder, yellow I haven't even got to yet). I very much enjoy going around all of Tamriel, to all of the zones, scrying and digging for treasure. It's so much fun! :D
The fact that Greymoor sparked so many fun times for me kind of made me dive headlong into ESO again, and I'm back to logging in every day. I even joined a guild. Let's see how long it will last this time :3
2. Murder on the Orient Express, by Agatha Christie. This was an old Swedish translation that I got from my grandmother years ago. I really, really don't agree with the translation and half of the time I spent reading this was spent sighing in frustration at the translator's choice of words (and so many direct translations omg). The translation definitely lowers the overall grade of this book. When it comes to the plot I already knew it. I've seen several screen adaptations of this novel, the latest being the one starring Kenneth Branagh and Daisy Ridley. I still enjoy seeing the seemingly random clues come together and this book is probably the absolute best way to see the brilliance of Poirot's mind and Christie's pen. Who can pass up on a good whodunit story? :3
4. Classic Victorian & Edwardian Ghost Stories.
