Books 2011: go down to the netherworld, plant grapes

Apparently, the key to being able to move the morning after two hours of jujutsu and an hour and a bit of climbing is to take two paracetamol and drink a glass of Bailey's before going to bed.

I'm still stiff, and I've had to slather my neck with some stuff that smells like horse liniment, but I don't actually hurt.


Books 2011: 24-29


24. Barbara Hamilton, A Marked Man.

Interesting historical murder mystery by Barbara Hambly's alter ego, featuring Abigail Adams, set in 1774 Boston. I enjoyed it, and I think it's very well done, but this is not one of the periods and regions of history that push my geek buttons.


25. Barbara Hambly, The Shirt on His Back

This is the tenth Benjamin January book, and it plucks January from 1830s New Orleans to help his friend Abishag Shaw find out who killed his brother in the Rocky Mountains. There is a nested thematic thing about vengeance going on here which is fascinating to see unfold, but all in all, without the complex atmosphere of New Orleans, this feels to me like one of the weaker January books. Still an excellent read, though.


26. Laura Anne Gilman, Pack of Lies.

I have a bad habit of coming to series out of order, and it continues here. This is the second book of a series. It's a perfectly cromulent crime story with magic and it's not the book's fault if I want more from crime stories than this is prepared to give. (I blame Criminal Minds and Shadow Unit, with all their sticky layered complexities.) Entertaining, but not particularly deep.


27. Kameron Hurley, God's War.

This is a tense, vicious, brutal book. Science fiction: an unforgiving desert planet, a very nasty war that's gone on for as long as anyone remembers, technology that runs on insects, a refreshingly Islamic-influenced socio-political frame, well-drawn characters, even if they do seem to be all anti-heroes.

Brilliant book, but do not read it to cheer yourself up. Because that's not going to happen.


non-fiction


28. Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. OUP, Oxford, 1999, with a note on the text by Deborah E. McDowell.

Interesting book. You can see it's working within the conventions of a genre even if you've no idea what the rest of that genre looks like, but it's quite fascinating both as literature and as insight into black American slavery of the 19th century.


29. Tim Blanning, The Pursuit of Glory: Europe 1648-1815. Penguin, London and New York, 2008. Part of the "Penguin History of Europe" series.

In paperback, this book is nearly 700 pages long. Its treatment of the so-called 'long eighteenth century', Europe between the execution of Charles I and the end of the Napoleon Wars (after which we are pretty much in the era of politics as played by the nation-state, not by dynasties), is not exhaustive: how could it be? But it is lucid and far-reaching, and Blanning, who is Professor of Modern European History at Cambridge, brings clarity and a certain wry touch to his analyses of the personalities and events of the period.

The book is divided thematically into four sections. Part One, "Life and Death," deals with the physical and economic world and its changes during the eighteenth century: transport and communication, trade and manufacturing, agriculture and education. Part Two, "Power," discusses elites, rulers, and the tension between stasis, reform and revolution. Part Three, "Religion and Culture," does exactly what it says on the tin, treating of developments in religious and high culture in the period, as well as introducing the tensions in philosophy and aesthetics between the 'culture of feeling' and the 'culture of reason.' Part Four, "War and Peace," gives a brief overview of military developments and events from the Peace of Westphalia to Waterloo.

The further "Suggested Reading" runs to ten pages, and throws up some interesting titles.

An interesting, readable, informative work. I recommend it, if the eighteenth century in Europe interests you at all.

Books 2011: go down to the netherworld, plant grapes

Apparently, the key to being able to move the morning after two hours of jujutsu and an hour and a bit of climbing is to take two paracetamol and drink a glass of Bailey's before going to bed.

I'm still stiff, and I've had to slather my neck with some stuff that smells like horse liniment, but I don't actually hurt.


Books 2011: 24-29


24. Barbara Hamilton, A Marked Man.

Interesting historical murder mystery by Barbara Hambly's alter ego, featuring Abigail Adams, set in 1774 Boston. I enjoyed it, and I think it's very well done, but this is not one of the periods and regions of history that push my geek buttons.


25. Barbara Hambly, The Shirt on His Back

This is the tenth Benjamin January book, and it plucks January from 1830s New Orleans to help his friend Abishag Shaw find out who killed his brother in the Rocky Mountains. There is a nested thematic thing about vengeance going on here which is fascinating to see unfold, but all in all, without the complex atmosphere of New Orleans, this feels to me like one of the weaker January books. Still an excellent read, though.


26. Laura Anne Gilman, Pack of Lies.

I have a bad habit of coming to series out of order, and it continues here. This is the second book of a series. It's a perfectly cromulent crime story with magic and it's not the book's fault if I want more from crime stories than this is prepared to give. (I blame Criminal Minds and Shadow Unit, with all their sticky layered complexities.) Entertaining, but not particularly deep.


27. Kameron Hurley, God's War.

This is a tense, vicious, brutal book. Science fiction: an unforgiving desert planet, a very nasty war that's gone on for as long as anyone remembers, technology that runs on insects, a refreshingly Islamic-influenced socio-political frame, well-drawn characters, even if they do seem to be all anti-heroes.

Brilliant book, but do not read it to cheer yourself up. Because that's not going to happen.


non-fiction


28. Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. OUP, Oxford, 1999, with a note on the text by Deborah E. McDowell.

Interesting book. You can see it's working within the conventions of a genre even if you've no idea what the rest of that genre looks like, but it's quite fascinating both as literature and as insight into black American slavery of the 19th century.


29. Tim Blanning, The Pursuit of Glory: Europe 1648-1815. Penguin, London and New York, 2008. Part of the "Penguin History of Europe" series.

In paperback, this book is nearly 700 pages long. Its treatment of the so-called 'long eighteenth century', Europe between the execution of Charles I and the end of the Napoleon Wars (after which we are pretty much in the era of politics as played by the nation-state, not by dynasties), is not exhaustive: how could it be? But it is lucid and far-reaching, and Blanning, who is Professor of Modern European History at Cambridge, brings clarity and a certain wry touch to his analyses of the personalities and events of the period.

The book is divided thematically into four sections. Part One, "Life and Death," deals with the physical and economic world and its changes during the eighteenth century: transport and communication, trade and manufacturing, agriculture and education. Part Two, "Power," discusses elites, rulers, and the tension between stasis, reform and revolution. Part Three, "Religion and Culture," does exactly what it says on the tin, treating of developments in religious and high culture in the period, as well as introducing the tensions in philosophy and aesthetics between the 'culture of feeling' and the 'culture of reason.' Part Four, "War and Peace," gives a brief overview of military developments and events from the Peace of Westphalia to Waterloo.

The further "Suggested Reading" runs to ten pages, and throws up some interesting titles.

An interesting, readable, informative work. I recommend it, if the eighteenth century in Europe interests you at all.

Dragon Age 2: some thoughts

I average something less than a videogame a year. Nearly always an rpg: I play for the story, and the replay value on the ones I finish tends to be high.

Anyway. I've been playing DA: Origins since December 2009, hooked from word one. (I've lost count of playthroughs, so they must be many.) So when DA:2 came out last Friday, I was very much there.

I'm now about eighteen or nineteen hours of gameplay in, at the start of Act 3. And... I'm not sure how I feel about it, yet.

Spoilers follow, if you're bothered.

What Bioware is doing with the frame story, attempting to tell a game that progresses through time instead of space? It's ambitious, I grant.

But frame stories are one of those things that either work really well or fail hideously. The frame of Mary Gentle's Ash: A Secret History works because the protagonist of the frame is also discovering and reinterpreting the events of the main story. The frame of The Princess Bride film doesn't work very well because it's not only completely unnecessary, it adds nothing to the experience of the film.

A frame can either be a complete story in itself which adds something to the experience of the main narrative, or it can be an attempt to manipulate the audience which, best case scenario, doesn't actively detract from the experience of the main narrative.

DA:2's frame is too manipulative to work for me. And it sits awkwardly, because as the player-character it is your decisions which are being recounted by someone else in the frame, and from the beginning, you have the sense that it can't end well. If things can end well, then the local kinder gentler version of the inquisition shouldn't be that interested in you.

I really don't like feeling as though I'm being set up for a sequel from the word go. It makes me irritated. And I find the inquisition's interest in the player-character (in the frame, as it is constructed) to be a lazy way of increasing in-game tension. The events of the main narrative should, dammit, have enough tension to carry themselves. If they don't? People, you are not writing your game right.

So much for the frame. The effect of telling a game through time means jumps of a year or three years at a time between sections of gameplay and main-event narrative. This worked reasonably well for me the first couple of times, because of the nature of the player-character's situation and the state of local power-politics. The third time - folks, you do not just defeat an invasion and kill off the local ruler and then jump forward in time three years with a, "Nothing much happened until some time later," for lo, this is not logic. It is rather irritating unlogic, in fact, and disinclines me to trust your ability to pull off meaningful choices in the remainder of the narrative.

Irritating, sure. But I'll give Bioware a pass on time-compression issues, because I think this might be one of the first times anyone's tried to pull off a videogame rpg set over the course of a decade. They'll improve with practice. (The frame story, I carry a grudge over. Because it could be so much better. And if not less blatantly manipulative, at least most interactively manipulative.)

Functional things which irritate me: the subtitles are bloody tiny (I play on the Xbox. Possibly this is a platform-related issue) and the menu-screen is squint-worthy and awkward compared to the intuitive tabs of DA:O. This is seriously annoying: half the time I don't know what I'm doing during levelling up because I can't see the icons properly.

So much for my cavills. I quite like the new combat mechanics, although they took a bit of getting used to. The fact that the player-character's decisions have consequences over time is quite wonderful, and adds greatly to the experience. The dialogue wheel is a definite improvement over bland old lists of conversation options.

The best thing about the game? The other party members, the flirting, and the random snark. Merrill, voiced by Eva Myles, is particularly hilarious but also moving. Conversations involving the pirate Isabella frequently go places... Yes, those places.

(An exemplar: "Men are only good for one thing. Women are good for six.")

It is trivially easy to wander around Kirkwall and environs with not a single male party member, without even noticing it, which is noteworthy in and of itself - I went half an hour with Aveline-the-tank, Merrill-the-mage, Isabella-the-pirate, and the player-character before I realised. At which point I sat back and said to myself, "Self, this is pretty damn unprecedented." (It's possible in DA:O, but not entirely natural, since unless you play the player-character as a tank, you kind of need one of the boys for that. Unless you have the Golem DLC. (And it was possible in Mass Effect 1, but there you only dragged around a party of three.))

I'm not saying DA:2's treatment of gender is above reproach. But Bioware has a track record of making me feel as though I'm being sold to, not past. And so far, DA:2 is not only good about putting women in the party, it also puts women in positions of power in the environment, as well. It's nice to see Knight-Commander Meredith breaking the old glass ceiling.

I'm pretty sure I'll have further thoughts when I actually finish the game (whenever I have, you know, time again), but for now, I've said my piece.

Dragon Age 2: some thoughts

I average something less than a videogame a year. Nearly always an rpg: I play for the story, and the replay value on the ones I finish tends to be high.

Anyway. I've been playing DA: Origins since December 2009, hooked from word one. (I've lost count of playthroughs, so they must be many.) So when DA:2 came out last Friday, I was very much there.

I'm now about eighteen or nineteen hours of gameplay in, at the start of Act 3. And... I'm not sure how I feel about it, yet.

Spoilers follow, if you're bothered.

What Bioware is doing with the frame story, attempting to tell a game that progresses through time instead of space? It's ambitious, I grant.

But frame stories are one of those things that either work really well or fail hideously. The frame of Mary Gentle's Ash: A Secret History works because the protagonist of the frame is also discovering and reinterpreting the events of the main story. The frame of The Princess Bride film doesn't work very well because it's not only completely unnecessary, it adds nothing to the experience of the film.

A frame can either be a complete story in itself which adds something to the experience of the main narrative, or it can be an attempt to manipulate the audience which, best case scenario, doesn't actively detract from the experience of the main narrative.

DA:2's frame is too manipulative to work for me. And it sits awkwardly, because as the player-character it is your decisions which are being recounted by someone else in the frame, and from the beginning, you have the sense that it can't end well. If things can end well, then the local kinder gentler version of the inquisition shouldn't be that interested in you.

I really don't like feeling as though I'm being set up for a sequel from the word go. It makes me irritated. And I find the inquisition's interest in the player-character (in the frame, as it is constructed) to be a lazy way of increasing in-game tension. The events of the main narrative should, dammit, have enough tension to carry themselves. If they don't? People, you are not writing your game right.

So much for the frame. The effect of telling a game through time means jumps of a year or three years at a time between sections of gameplay and main-event narrative. This worked reasonably well for me the first couple of times, because of the nature of the player-character's situation and the state of local power-politics. The third time - folks, you do not just defeat an invasion and kill off the local ruler and then jump forward in time three years with a, "Nothing much happened until some time later," for lo, this is not logic. It is rather irritating unlogic, in fact, and disinclines me to trust your ability to pull off meaningful choices in the remainder of the narrative.

Irritating, sure. But I'll give Bioware a pass on time-compression issues, because I think this might be one of the first times anyone's tried to pull off a videogame rpg set over the course of a decade. They'll improve with practice. (The frame story, I carry a grudge over. Because it could be so much better. And if not less blatantly manipulative, at least most interactively manipulative.)

Functional things which irritate me: the subtitles are bloody tiny (I play on the Xbox. Possibly this is a platform-related issue) and the menu-screen is squint-worthy and awkward compared to the intuitive tabs of DA:O. This is seriously annoying: half the time I don't know what I'm doing during levelling up because I can't see the icons properly.

So much for my cavills. I quite like the new combat mechanics, although they took a bit of getting used to. The fact that the player-character's decisions have consequences over time is quite wonderful, and adds greatly to the experience. The dialogue wheel is a definite improvement over bland old lists of conversation options.

The best thing about the game? The other party members, the flirting, and the random snark. Merrill, voiced by Eva Myles, is particularly hilarious but also moving. Conversations involving the pirate Isabella frequently go places... Yes, those places.

(An exemplar: "Men are only good for one thing. Women are good for six.")

It is trivially easy to wander around Kirkwall and environs with not a single male party member, without even noticing it, which is noteworthy in and of itself - I went half an hour with Aveline-the-tank, Merrill-the-mage, Isabella-the-pirate, and the player-character before I realised. At which point I sat back and said to myself, "Self, this is pretty damn unprecedented." (It's possible in DA:O, but not entirely natural, since unless you play the player-character as a tank, you kind of need one of the boys for that. Unless you have the Golem DLC. (And it was possible in Mass Effect 1, but there you only dragged around a party of three.))

I'm not saying DA:2's treatment of gender is above reproach. But Bioware has a track record of making me feel as though I'm being sold to, not past. And so far, DA:2 is not only good about putting women in the party, it also puts women in positions of power in the environment, as well. It's nice to see Knight-Commander Meredith breaking the old glass ceiling.

I'm pretty sure I'll have further thoughts when I actually finish the game (whenever I have, you know, time again), but for now, I've said my piece.

Ambitions

If I am very efficient, and get all my work done tomorrow, I can both watch Criminal Minds and read The White City on Saturday. Incentive!

(Also, there will be cake. The cake is not a lie.)

I was reasonably efficient today. But after four hours of Greek translations, there really isn't any brain left for doing thinking work.

Ambitions

If I am very efficient, and get all my work done tomorrow, I can both watch Criminal Minds and read The White City on Saturday. Incentive!

(Also, there will be cake. The cake is not a lie.)

I was reasonably efficient today. But after four hours of Greek translations, there really isn't any brain left for doing thinking work.