My last 5 books: Thriller and adventure

1. Troubled Blood, by Robert Galbraith. This book was brilliant in so many ways. Exploring Strike's feelings for his family, but also for Robin, and Robin exploring her feelings towards her job, her future and for Strike, as well as dealing with a nasty divorce from Matthew. The agency is doing great and they're handed their first cold case: the disappearance of Margot Bamborough back in 1974. This book takes place in 2013-2014 and it's almost 40 years since she disappeared. Strike and Robin are given a year to try to find out what happened to Margot, and it becomes a case that has them delving deep into astrology and psychopathy, with lots of unsavoury men and women who aren't what they seem. There are so many plot points, so many side plots and all of them come together brilliantly in the end. It's extremely satisfying to see the author tie together everything in a way that makes complete sense. The only thing that brings the overall rating down is the fact that it sometimes gets a bit too preachy with the feminist stuff.

2. Varney the Vampire; or, The Feast of Blood, by James Malcolm Rymer. This is a compilation of a penny dreadful, so it's trash literature, but it's trash literature that has somehow lasted almost 200 years so that's got to count for something. This penny dreadful predates Dracula by half a century and I was so excited to get into another gothic vampire tale. But penny dreadful authors were paid by the word and damn it shows. After 210 pages I just couldn't anymore. In those 210 pages we've had the initial vampire attack and then just 200 pages of reiterated dialogue and back-and-forth actions that didn't lead anywhere. 200 pages in and we're still in the same situation we were 200 pages ago. And it isn't even halfway. As to not completely kill my reading mood I decided to DNF this and potentially come back to it at a later time. There are glimpses of a complicated and interesting character in Varney, but it's all so densely buried in all the useless dialogue and non-actions. The editor's footnotes in this edition are a highlight though, as it seems they might've been a bit passive-aggressive towards Rymer and the Victorian society overall. It's so frustrating because I can see there's a story underneath all the useless words, it just takes an age to get through all the words to find the story. 

3. The Ink Black Heart, by Robert Galbraith. These two characters has to be the slowest slow-burn in the history of slow-burns. I need them to stop being so goddamn polite and considerate and just talk to one another! The story in this one revolves around the dark side of fandom, and it's eerily accurate sometimes. Honestly, the most unbelievable thing is that Robin didn't know tumblr or Twitter before she started working on this case. It's 2015, she just turned 30, which makes her only five years older than me, she would've known about both of those sites. Or it's just implied she has spent the last 12 or so years living under a rock while social media evolved online. I get Strike not knowing, but not Robin. I had all sorts of theories throughout reading this as to who the killer was, and once or twice those theories touched upon the truth, but I could always find reasons why someone else was more probable. As someone who spends a great amount of time chatting online while staying mostly anonymous, this was a great and pretty chilling story. One of the best ones in the series!

4. The Time Traveler's Wife, by Audrey Niffenegger. A few years ago everybody talked about this book so I decided to read it. It started out interesting enough, but within 100 pages it was getting obvious that this was all there was to it. This is the story of their lives which are absolutely ordinary aside from the little thing that Henry is so-called chrono-impaired, meaning he sometimes just time travels for no reason at all. Sometimes just for minutes, sometimes for days. It never becomes a conflict and the only major issue it presents is that it makes it difficult for them to have a baby. Throughout the story there's this looming shadow of something that's going to happen when Henry is 43, but when it does happen it's completely underwhelming and I just face-palmed when I read it. It was a very disappointing end to an otherwise bland book. Not my thing.

5.Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief, by Rick Riordan. I've been meaning to read this series for years. I love Greek mythology. This book was just as fun as I expected, albeit a bit predictable. I didn't expect Percy to be twelve though, I thought he'd be at least fifteen, but it ended up not being such a big deal. Despite the book being a lot of me figuring things out way ahead of time and me just waiting for the characters to catch up, I had a lot of fun reading it and I'm excited to keep going with this series. Despite having heard of this series I knew nothing about it going in. I knew there was Greek mythology and that was about it, really. I figured out Percy's father long before the rest of the characters. I figured out who was going to betray Percy as soon as the Oracle told him the prophecy. I figured out who the ultimate bad guy was long before they started speculating, but it's a kids book so it was fine. I love all the characters and the story was fast-paced and fun. I'm into it. 

Game completed: Assassin's Creed Mirage (+ the end of AC Valhalla)

This is like the fifth post of mine that's related to Valhalla... This game... it feels good to finally have completed it. 

After I finished with Starfield I decided to do the last few things of Valhalla before I started up Mirage. So I started out doing the last few Tombs of the Fallen and finished that little thing and then I dove into The Forgotten Saga, which is a roguelite and I'm not the biggest fan of those. But I gave it my best effort. I managed to get all the way to Nidhogg, the poison dragon, and the last boss before the last area and Hel herself. At that point I was breezing through everything up to Nidhogg, and he thoroughly put me in my place and told me to not think so highly of myself in the most detailed way possible - his adds beating me to a pulp while he solemnly watched. The fight was just a whole bunch of AoEs to dodge or I'd get a DoT (which stacked) and there were no healing items in the area - not equipped, not lying around, just nada. I was so done with The Forgotten Saga after that, and decided to just do The Last Chapter update and then move on to Mirage.

The Last Chapter was a nice little ending to Valhalla, which probably would have had a bigger impact if I hadn't played the base game in late 2020 when it was new, and barely remembered half the characters on the goodbye tour. The Basim stuff was a lot more interesting than Eivor's goodbye tour and half-assed footnote as to how she ended up in North America. The Basim stuff explains how he's still alive over 1000 years later and how they got their hands on his DNA so they could view his memories. It was a pretty decent connection/bridge over to Mirage.

I don't like sand. Every time a game asks me to play through a desert I'm instantly bored. Sand is just boring. I don't like it. And I knew the landscape of Mirage would bore me even before I went in, which was a contributing reason for why I shelved the game for two weeks before I finished it. 

That said I did enjoy the game overall. They were hitting people's nostalgia as hard as they could but implementing a lot of polished up mechanics from the earliest AC games. I hated pickpocketing in AC2, but in Mirage it was a lot of fun, especially Darvish's collectables. Being at Alamut made me half expect Altaïr to show up, except it would be a few more centuries before he's even around. That tutorial climbing scene with Basim is a direct translation of the tutorial climbing scene in the original Assassin's Creed with Altaïr :3 And those are just two examples, there are many more ways that Mirage attempts to throwback to the earliest games of the franchise. It's great fun. 

As always I made sure to get every single collectable and do every bit of side content and uncovering the entire map before I completed the story.

As for the story itself, I feel like it was pretty predictable. I had figured out Nehal's circumstances way before that reveal even came. The only thing I hadn't figured out was the purpose of the djinni and I was dreading it as a final boss of the game, instead... nothing. So that was a bit disappointing. I also feel like they established the characters of Roshan and Basim in the early stages of the story only to throw it all out in the end scenes and have them become complete stereotypical tropes, which kinda ruined the end a bit. And as much as the current time portions of any AC game kind of feels like filler, I did miss having it in Mirage. Even as filler it's an integral part of the games' universe. 

But all in all it was a good game and as much as I love massive open world RPGs it was nice to play something smaller for a change. 

And I forgot to take a single screenshot.

And young Basim just reminds me of Disney's Aladdin. 

Good Omens S02

I don't know why we didn't watch this season sooner considering we both loved the first season (which I know realise I never wrote a post about, oops). 

So the script for this season was allegedly based on an unfinished-but-practically-finished manuscript that Gaiman and Pratchett had written as a sequel to the novel.

I feel like the original will always be the best version in terms of sequels etc, but this season was really damn funny. Shax was great (who knew Rita Skeeter could be that funny?) Jon Hamm was fabulous as a confused and blundering dude and then as hopelessly in love. Every role I've seen of him he either plays stoically handsome or strong-but-sad (strong man refuses to accept he is currently broken, i.e. still stoic), so it was very nice to see him in something more comedic :3

New Beelzebub was better than old Beelzebub.

I did not like that ending T_T