A friend on a certain Discord server shared with me a mod that puts Kamen Rider into Skyrim, and so I realized if I wanted to have a “You Had Me At HENSHIN!” gif I was going to have to make it myself, so I did:
Now I’m sharing it for everyone in the world to use, meaning me.
“What’s the mod?,” you might be rightly asking. I have no idea. I don’t play Skyrim…but I do adore some Kamen Rider.
Look, I am generally a fan of the recent Dragon Quest VII: Reimagined even with the cutting of content and sometimes oversimplifying a few things. I like the improvement of character stories. I like the voice acting. I like the art. I like most of the pacing.
BUT, this took a stupidly long time to do…
To put this in perspective, I beat the game somewhere around the 60-70 hour mark. The rest has been grinding up stats and unlocking achievements. There is something like 10-11 hours of just playing for the achievement I’m about to rant about in this post.
Most of the achievements are precisely the sort of things you like to see for videogame achievements. Fight a certain number of fights. Get a certain amount of gold. Reach a few storyline checkpoints. Even some trickier stuff, like having to compete against some fairly difficult bosses. At least of a “standard hard difficulty” in the aspect of needing to grind quite a bit and trying out new strategies to be strong enough to do it without really good RNG.
Only the true boss of the entire damned game is not that, it’s a stupid match game called Lucky Panel where you flip over tiles and match items and some items have some chance of ranking up and if you get lucky you might rank something up to max before the final round and get a chest and then get a shot at a few really rare items.
And the sadistic game designers made it so that there are several items that are not only locked to the panel with no other way to get them but locked to the most RNG of RNG luck. Chests are already slightly rare due to the “early max rank” condition in a game where you have to also use some luck | strategy | skill just to keep playing – or, in various ways, cheat – AND then some of those items [such as the liquid metal gear] is very rare even by chest standards.
What this means is that folks are reporting 10-15+ hours of post-game content dedicated entirely to getting those rare-rare items from panels. And some are actively encouraging stuff like screen captures if not outright cheat-ware to help.
Sure, we only need to do play Lucky Panel if we want to get all the achievements, but I detest content like this where you have to play against highly complex dice rolls. Where people who luck might get those items in a dozen plays while folks like me have to play the match game…wait, let me see.
188 games. Siggghhhhhhhh. It’s the return of gacha trauma.
Anyhow, after said 188 games, I finally got this…
Which unlocked the Heroic Hoarder achievement and that unlocked the final “get all the other achievements” achievement. My word. I have no idea, going by the top screenshot, about that poor 0.3% who managed to get through the stupid Panel grind without getting everything else which generally pales in comparison.
While there are a handful of text/translation errors and other things I would prioritize fixing, at this point one of my big wish list items for this game if they could go back and tweak it would be to allow some items like rare monster hearts that increased the number of misses or improved the luck on the panels or something like that.
OR, make it so that every item can be gotten, somehow, outside of it and leave the Lucky Panel as less a requirement and more a fun way to just score a few duplicates of rare items if people are so inclined.
I have a half-dozen links/notes saved for blog posts from this past week. Which is likely a sign that those half-dozen things will not be posted. Because that is the way of blogs like these: you either strike when the rod is too hot for common sense to stop you or you do not strike at all
And because I have spent the last week in a lot of pain.
Pain comes in shades.
I post this with the caveat that I am not trying to one-up or out-suffer anyone. Trust me, as much as you can trust me, that I appreciate that pain is personal in the way that tastes in food or enjoyment of art is personal. There are recipes. There are genres. But right there, where the spark exists between the “I” which is you and me and each of us individually and the It, the object or concept in question, there is that personal relationship between your I and its It.
When you hurt long enough, people are apt to give you advice which is to say people are apt to tell you about their pain. Their suffering. Their shades. Their tastes. We are lonely. It is in our nature to talk. Bless us, one and all.
Sometimes, maybe most times, we mean well, but we are idiots. Because all we do is shout the name of our own personal pain over and over and over again. Into the void. Into the sky. Into the gray.
I am sorry that you hurt, Space Pilgrims, I truly am.
But this is my blog, so it is my time to shout. I am not speaking for you. I am not even speaking for myself, because the me in this much pain is probably not really me. Whether a half-truth or a desperate plea, I hold to that. I will continue to hold to that.
In 2022, when I fell while hiking and tore the ligaments | muscles | nerves in my leg so badly that I still do not walk like a real boy these four years later: that should have been the worst pain I ever experienced. It maybe was. I do not know. I told the people at the scene that it was a 6 or 7 on the out-of-10 scale, maybe an 8. A doctor later told me that it was a 10. Thing is, I do not recall that pain. I recall the fear. I recall the months of healing. I recall the falling down. I recall the long void that followed.
The pain I better remember is the pain much like the pain I have right now: the revolt of my body against itself as the genetic lottery awards me an autoimmune disfunction which fills my vessels and my veins and throat and my joints and my bones with inflammation.
The shades of this particular flavor of pains goes like this:
First, there is the idea of pain. A twinge. A whisper. A voice hiding behind a corner which is down the hall.
Then, there is the greeting. The laughter. The introduction. Hello, my name is…
Then, there is the romance. The dance. The twirling with pain down the path under the trees and up the hill. Waking up and having your pain there in the bed beside you. The pain strips naked and crawls into the shower with you. It shares meals with you. It stands with you and walks with you and it listens to you tell stories about itself.
Then, there comes the shade I fear the most. There comes the moment on the edge of a pit where you wonder for a second if you and the pain are just different names for the same thing.
This is the moment of exhaustion.
The reason the pain no longer crawls into the shower with you is because you no longer feel able to take a shower. You do not wake up beside pain because your dreams were pain. So much so for a moment upon waking you think you might be better, only to realize you are worse.
Where you press your hand against your back because making it hurt there means it hurts less elsewhere and you can breathe for a moment without wondering why you can you feel each and every breath. Where you watch TV or read books and every word and every scene is being told to you by the pain and it speaks with broken spiral teeth and a throat of bark and and bone and feathers.
Then, comes the shade I do not fear so much, though it is possibly worse. That point past the exhaustion. There are no words or quaint ideas about that point. Deconstruction. The silence that was never silent in the moment but is after because part of us is lost there on that shore. We forget the sound of the waves and later wonder from where did the salt and grit come. Memory lapses and a sense of loss.
Then, the lucky of us…we wake up one morning and we’re still exhausted but we can walk again. We can shower again. We can drop something on the floor and pick it back up again. Maybe not gracefully. Maybe not without sacrifice, but we can do it.
[this is where i am right now]
And each day, maybe each hour, after that is a step back up the hill. Learning to walk on our own again. Learning to breathe without having to press our hands into our back. Reading. Watching TV. Doing these things on our own, again.
Moving on to the final shade of pain, the ugliest shade of all, the one we don’t like to talk about with anyone but ourselves and often not even then
: the shade where we remember what it felt like and know it will one day return. Maybe worse. Maybe not.
and we laugh and laugh and laugh and laugh and laugh
In the sheer inanity of modern existence, where every day is a slam between the mental load of simply considering an international conspiracy of terrible people on one side and the wryly chuckling at “boop-gate” on the other…
It is sometimes nice to see the same fights show up about fansubs as always.
Ah, that takes me back. Logging into IRC channels and getting reamed because you make a joke or ask about the process. I one time asked about the process of fansubbing a series that was on a kind of on semi-pause1 and the ensuing argument out of nowhere ended up with an announcement that “despite rumors, we have not dropped this series.” No shit. I was just curious.
Ah, 2003-2004 era TV-Nihon, I kind of miss that level of jack-assed-ness. Seriously TVN folks, thank you for the memories.
超 100% means “super” in this context, as backed up by all of the hype [heh, pun], press, and most likely some official release somewhere down the road that I’m ready and willing to slap down pre-order button upon when I get the chance. As in a reference to the Super Sentai series that Gavan is “replacing.” As in the kanji used in numerous Super Sentai productions which calls-back to that meta-series name. It’s an homage. I thought it was a nice touch.
A loving handshake to a venerable series that has lasted for multiple generations of childhoods.
Still, fansubbers and fansub-fans arguing about such things is like… it’s the universe healing, you know? Something lost from my youth and taken up by a whole new generation.
Look, it’s pretty impressive – at least, I’m impressed – that very intelligent people have mapped out the structure of Uranus’s upper atmosphere. I adore finding out more about our local system.
BUT…
Several pop-sci and pop-gen news services have gone for a slightly more tongue-in-cheek article title:
…and I also adore that.
Especially when the graphic just oh so slightly does not help.
BONUS STATUS REPORT: My stomach is currently considering the implications of the vegan corn dog I ate for lunch. We got it from Delhaize. Package says it is “Korean-style” but I have no idea what such words might mean in such a context. It was good but the Best By Date for Doug to eat anything like microwaveable food was something 2015. We’ll see.
I appreciate that I tend to get long-winded in every. single. post. And that this has a chilling effect. I put off writing things because I know I am going to write for days to say just a few basic things. Can I change this about myself to get back into more casual shit-posting? I don’t know.
Both of these unrelated things are just building up to having two limitations – my stomach is on stage 2 of contemplation, stage 3 is of an unknown character – as I type up a super quick (*wink*) response to the fact that I signed up for Matt Dinniman’s Patreon page so I could keep up with the Dungeon Crawler Carl books as they trickled out as well as the increasing sea of ephemera. Book 8, A Parade of Horribles, has just now – in the past day or so – wrapped up and there’s an unknown gap before “Book 9” [which is sort of like Books 9 and 10, according to the author, though how that really plays out I do not know].
CAVEAT 1: the version of the book published to the Patreon is something like a polished rough draft, with scenes and elements cut and altered before the finished book. Things get added to make later scenes make more sense. Things get cut for time. A later update will say something like, “Oh, I added a few paragraphs about this…,” and then have those paragraphs out of context. That is to say you gain something for reading them this way but you also kind of lose the final edit and polish.
CAVEAT 2: I am going to spoil nothing in plain-text, but will obfuscate a few words and sentences if I feel they might spoil things. Only click them if you don’t care about DCC, don’t care much about spoilers, or are prone to forgetting. Oh, I guess if you have already read the thing, that too. Though some elements of speculation included might irritate you if you hate that sort of thing.
Goddamnit, Matt.
The last few chapters had so many things hitting at such a huge scale that I had to physically get up and walk around a couple of times. It was punching. Super good. Even the “stupidity” of the last big plot shift before the epilogues. The lore dump is huge and I would say that I had already guessed around 90% of it as explained. It’s kind of just there in the text already, with some between-the-lines reading.
One element – SZwS SZr zbHSZroweG pw1 1H3r 1HeS Hi wDSA-I4FHyA1S SZwS erber1rDS1 FAir 14ePAPADy AD A3breiroSAHD – was kind of a new one to me.
ROoSO oM 3OdW r6MMoT1f 3odv 36 3Od “356 Oj1FdM TdS69oWb 6Wd, jbjoW” MUTr163 3Oj3 63Odm5oMd Kdd1M Fdmf dn3mjWd6UM vdMro3d TdoWb o9r6m3jW3 36 j3 1djM3 6Wd SOjmjS3dm jWv sjm1’M 6Fdmj11 bm653O 36 3Odmd TdoWb 96md 3OjW 6Wd vdKoWo3o6W 6K MUmFoFj1.
I think it has been somewhat there, that fact, but also never quite laid like that, especially in that it sets up, for instance, 8 mAfZSfZQ O7tZ77Q 48P6 8QS tA7 cK [tA7 fOILfsm fQ7], 8 mAfZSfZQ O7tZ77Q 48P6 8QS NfQst [tA7 P7866e S8lQ7S tP8DL0 fQ7, Ost K’l Qft msP7 LR K Zfs6S Ose Lt sQ67mm Lt Z8m *P7866e* RfP07S], fP 9fmmLO6e 8 mAfZSfZQ O7tZ77Q ofPS708L [tA7 9ftLfQm l8mt7P] 8QS qS7tt7 [tA7 lfmt 6Ly76e tf ZLQ ufSAffS], ZAL0A Lm 9ft7QtL866e tA7 iJuz 98e fst tA8t DLI7m 48P6 tA7 fQ6e fst A7 08Q D7t.
Trying to be really unspoilery, but there is a tonal shift between the first 90% or of the book and the last 10%. My math might be off, especially if the full-release of the book trims some chapters. There is a moment where the general scope changes. It all makes sense in the context of the dungeon, and is telegraphed. ANYHOW…
I suspect that for a some people the vibe difference between Book 7 and Book 8 will be jarring, in that the parts that made Book 7 rough to take are still there but the parts that made Books 1-6 beloved are kind of not.
In a lot of ways, Book 7 is the kind of book that tends to end most series. A big build up with a huge number of threads and a lot of stakes and deaths and shifts.
Book 8, until that final “10%” is much more like the earlier books with Carl and Co having to bounce off a never ending series of rules and rails and changes. Only without the more “innocent” joy that was often in those books where every impossible problem was solved with stupid (or sometimes stupidly smart) solutions. That still happens, but it feels a lot less like a person just a little too dumb to understand game design tripping over exploits and more like a person being given a bunch of extra saving throws because they are dating the DM.
It also commits the usual sin of such fiction – one shared by a lot of the type – that the series starts out as effectively a story about people working together and then they find more friends and allies and it all about a group of beautiful people weathering horrible things then it gets to BIG BOY LORE GOD mode and those friendships start taking back seat to mechanics.
Dinniman course corrects around the half-way point, and does a good job of it, but by then you have several of the “lessons” learned from previous books just gone and some extra characters just deeply underutilized. Book 7 set up a lot of interesting things for Books 8+ but character growth comes really close to stuttering until its hard forced to take a step back from the edge.
Dungeon Crawler Carl is the kind of series that turns baby (goblin) killing atrocities into a kind of wry joke that you laugh out but kind of hate laughing at. The 7th book had to set some of that aside, and make you actually really hate baby (goblin) killing, but the 8th book makes a misstep in leaving it set aside too long, I think. It needed to step forward or step back and it just of stepped in place for a good bit of it.
Very few non-Carl – maybe not even Donut – characters really get a chance to act to their fullest. There are exceptions, for sure, and some absolutely lovely moments but its the rails of the earlier books hitting the seriousness of the 7th.
I still really, really enjoyed it, but I missed the sense of a group of friends sitting around a table playing a roleplaying together that other books had managed to hit. Despite the atrocities they were living through or maybe because of them. This is largely just friends having to suffer.
aK7 C XLLmDSqXQD RnbD nF QdD QnKX9 RdqFQ qR QdD RQq9QD7 9n2D RQnmh VDQODDK gXm9 XK7 vXQqX XK7 dnO dD dXR 9nRQ nKD nF dqR qbLnmQXKQ SDKQDmR Qn dqR SdXnR.
Not much to say here, but have been – much more slowly – going back through the audiobooks and just enjoying them in bursts of half-an-hour-to-an-hour a day. I’ll either have to increase the time or speed up the read-speed when I get to the later, chonkier books. The idea is just to continue to enjoy them but also listen out for a bunch of details that got buried under the weight of so many damned characters and threads.
While doing it, I started sorting through my wild speculation mental folder, and I have come up with a few ideas [though one I already wrote above, I will put it down here]:
In the context of that last one, bfT3 OfdSY bfTF5 fk3 k o6Ybbe 3Y6TY3 ZfōFYF HkF5k sT1Y kFl Pk6S’3 k3gYF3TdF 3YYH3 kSHd3b 58k6kFbYYl….18b OY’SS 3YY..
Anyhow, enough of all that. I’m off to play some Dragon Quest VII and grind job tiers.
Also, Stage 3 has been fine. Stage 4, we’ll see, but I think the hot dog passes the “won’t make Doug want to die” test.
I had another bout of reading-induced insomnia last night and so when my alarm went off at 06:00, I slapped the snooze button with a mix of despair and elation. The former for the fact today is going to be a snoozy mess and the latter because that was 06:15 Doug’s problem.
Then Kaz, in bed, asked me to get up so I could help them take care of a spider.
“It’s big,” they said.
To put this in perspective, this is a rough depiction of what happened next…
For a less silly depiction, keep these measurements in mind. There is a carafe that we use to bring water up to refill a cat fountain. I have not measured it but I would assume the top to be around 8cm wide. The spider, aka Shelob the Ancient Terror, was big enough that she maybe had 0,5cm clearance on either side when I aimed the carafe to capture her.
After summoning enough energy to actually capture and not outright kill the foul hell beast, I finally – with only one instance of the spider trying to bolt – got it in the carafe and then the spider actively leapt to the back of the carafe like she was trying to eat my hand. Sure, sure, I appreciate she was probably just going for something she could hide in, but it made me think really hard about this scene:
I grabbed an index card to act as a temporary lid and then had to semi-gently hold it down to trap the demon, who preceded to charge the lid as the obvious weakpoint in her containment.
Kaz, who has pretty notable arachnophobia, had to take point at this, um…point…because my legs are not stable enough to go down stairs while holding a paper lid to a glass carafe with the fifth horsewoman trapped inside.
Kaz got it downstairs and then set it outside by the hedges and fled the area to a minimum safe distance.
While it is not freezing here in Grimbergen, it is cold, and I realized that if the spider was unable to get out of the glass carafe then it could be in a bit of trouble and I felt bad for it. I got on enough clothes to go outside and see if I needed to tip the carafe over and it was like a scene from a horror movie where the clearly dead monster is now gone.
There was the glass carafe, empty, and the paper lid on top had been knocked over and was a few cm over right at the edge of the hedges, like it had been dragged with force, with no spider in sight. You could practically hear the John Carpenter soundtrack playing. The spider you don’t see, and all that…
I picked up the carafe, and brought it inside, a single strand of thick web on the lip of it the only sign it had been used for that purpose.
It was only around fifteen minutes later that I realized what the index card had on it and that I was going to have to go back outside and reach into the edges of a hedge bush that statistically now had more giant spiders than it had before, and had to get it.
Why?
Because this was what was on the index card…
![can you figr out who this is from? I love you Kaz and Douge. you two are the best parints in the world. [then there is a heart with K+D = B and an explanation of K = Kaz, D = Douge, and B = Barbara...which maybe negates the secret love letter angle a *tad*]](https://dickens.wyrmis.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/SpiderQueen-1024x576.jpg)
…and I wasn’t going to allow her to keep it.
Anyhow, I’ll accept my Dad of the Year Award, now.
BONUS HORROR MOVIE VIBE: Right as I was finishing this post I reached up to brush at the side of my face where I could feel something, and there was a long, thick strand of spiderweb in my hair, because I guess I had brushed my head against the hedges.
Once again, cue John Carpenter music.
Today, I hit this count…
All five of those read books, and the book I am currently reading, are Dungeon Crawler Carl. The first couple of books started out as roughly reasonable in their page count and the later ones have grown to books of a certain size. The sixth one, the one I am currently reading, is close to eight-hundred-pages long. I think the seventh one is similar.
At any rate, I have no good “number of pages read” metric to say off the top of my head and won’t get up to do the math but I’d wager that “more than three” will suffice as a page count total.
One of the earliest posts on this rebuilt blog was about hitting the five-hundred-days-of-reading mark. I included some caveats, there, that are still roughly applicable. The past century of days has tended to be more legit reading, hitting somewhere between fifty- and two-hundred-pages per day on average, but many of the points are otherwise valid.
I’m still refusing to make any specific goals, but I do appreciate the irony that letting go of caring about shiny made-up medals is helping to actually do more of the hobbies I like.
I made a [hopefully slight] mistake, Space Pilgrims. In the sheer metric tonnage of things to do prior to moving, I forgot at least one important step.
There’s a company, a tax company, that Kaz and I have worked with for years. As our finances have gotten more complicated, they have they have been great to us. I don’t want to precisely name and shame them—*cough* *cough* Z&5 tycTM *cough* *cough*—but let’s just say that you could come up with an almost-a-pun if you said, with a bit of a swollen mouth, sketch and draw block.
Like a lot of accounts, our account with them is deeply associated with an email address. And in this case, the email was deeply associated with my old job. I had notes to myself, “Doug needs to change this specific email address for {x, y, z, etc},” and in a lot of cases I did.
I think I started to change it there, but when I try to log in to start the annual Joy in Taxes Ritual, it wants my old work email to let me sign in. Despite insisting, in the out of date online help pages, that there should be a button I could button to use another way to verify who I am, said button does not even have the dignity to face me as a man.
So I call.
Pick up a phone and call.
Like an old person.
Only, now there is an AI assistant to help with the phone. Ah, the dream. The future. The slow erosion of all middle-class jobs to make sure there is an even bigger divide between the rich and the riff-raff.
*sips tea* Yes, yes.
At any rate, I smile because why not be nice to the unthinking digital monstrosity feasting on our good will and hopes for a brighter tomorrow, and I respond to the “How can I help you [fleshy creature]?” prompt and I say, in as clear of a voice as I can muster:
“I need help updating my email address on your website.”
This was followed by clicking and clacking sounds. To make me feel like it was thinking and typing out an answer. It went on for a while, so I had some hope that it was digging up some module to actually assist with my problem or at least give me follow-up sub-prompts.
….
………
….
……
“To update your computer, you need to make sure you have the right software…[detailed instructions on finding software as a concept online]…and then make sure your firewall is not blocking the upgrade and install…[some more advice, including contacting the company’s help line for all my tech support needs].”
It “heard” the word “update” and then gave me a response about updating my computer before then appending the standard “there is help available” by giving me the information I had already used to end up in this conversation. It was both an endless loop and a sidequest.
Now, the company does have product-specific software. At least, I assume it does. Wait, let me check….
[pretend clicking and clacking noises]
…yes. It does. It seems like they have it updated through 2025 and I’m sure more AI bots are vibe coding the 2026 version right as we speak. Well, right as I type. I’m not saying this out loud or anything. That would be….crazy, right?
At any rate, while utterly unhelpful, it makes at least some vague sense if their average customer base is calling to ask for tech help and its having to start very basic on a whole.
Still.
The future is now.
After that, I simply said, “Agent, please,” and it made some more clicking clacking, told me human agents were only available from 7am to some other time CST, and then hung up on me.
Something of a sysadmin style notice, but if I clicked the right clicks then this will be the first post where comments are turned completely off by default. There will probably be “discussion” posts, not that anyone discusses things on my blog, but due to all the normal reasons that people hate leaving comments over – reasons #1 through #10 being annoying spam and reasons #11 through around #24 being variations of security issues – it will only be the odd post out that has comments. I’ll leave on pingbacks for the moment, partially because I use those to form a matrix of ideas but I am not precisely attached to having to have them.
Now, on with the show…
I have gone too bed too late for too many nights in a row. Due to reading. I know from experience that being in a relaxed state and reading an hour or two past my sleepy-bye time tends to leave me almost nearly as rested as sleep but this past week it has gone on a bit too much so I have to cut myself off for a few nights. Grammpy Doug needs his 22:00-22:30 bedtime or he gets the fuzzy brain, Space Pilgrims.
The reason for it?
The reason for this is exactly due to one thing, I’ve been reading through Matt Dinniman’s rather delightful Dungeon Crawler Carl series. I’m on Book Four – The Gate of the Feral Gods – and remain thoroughly invested.
It is a series that has been on my radar for a couple of years though I had misunderstood the basic setup this whole time and so a lot of references to it made no sense to me out of context.
I knew the general LitRPG concept, books where characters are player in a game and are aware of the concepts, which is funnily enough how a lot of people play their actual RPGs. “I cast magic missile using the mirror, which should give it +1 to hit!” The kind of thing that their characters wouldn’t really be able to suss out with precision, though it’s the kind of detail that would pretty unfun to try and always encapsulate in purely in-world terms. To each their own.
The misunderstanding is that I was under the impression that the Earth had been turned into the Dungeon World by using existing structures. I was expecting something kind of like a violent take on The Mall World concept. Fitting into a particular flavor of 1970s-1990s dystopian film and novel where death games were played out in bits of the real world.
Dungeon Crawler Carl is a lot weirder than that but I’ll leave it to the reader to find out how. It’s probably more spoiled everywhere now, as the series is picking up more and more steam.
At any rate, I enjoy very nearly everything about the books. Carl and his caring but righteous indignation. The sassy chaos of Princess Donut. Most of the NPCs and other PCs. The skill systems and nearly ineffable game rules. The violence and extreme solutions. The cosmic horror tinged with corporate horror as people competing in death games far over their heads deal with horrors that are kind of a parody of the earth but also glimpses into a universe that very nearly makes no sense to humanity.
Carl would likely have resonated even harder with a younger Doug back when I was a bit more self-righteously angry about things, but as a slightly mollified older man with a child and having to navigate – *gestures at everything happening in 2026* – I can still enjoy a person that fits like a broken cog in a machine and getting away with it.
If you like stuff like fantasy-tech ARPGs with complex skill trees, dramatically soul crushing developments, a bunch of soon-to-be-dated references that are pretty timely at the moment, huge explosions, and sarcastic humor while people are covered in gore and being lectured by an increasingly unhinged AI “gamemaster,” give it a shot.
There are a lot of reviews out there. This is not really a review. Just an acknowledgement that in a little over a week phrases like, “Goddamnit, Donut,” and, “NEW ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED!,” have entered a kind of general vernacular in Huis van Bolden.
Some of the foot-fetish humor, and especially the degree that the character’s distaste in being forced to engage in it while friends and companions more or less laugh at him for feeling sexually harassed is an odd glitch note in the text. I mean, sure, he’s also being forced to bash in the heads of people. It just hits funky.
At least around 30% of my “reading” the series has been via the Audible exclusive (?) audiobooks narrated by the absolutely phenomenal Jeff Hays. To put how good his narration is, if DCC had been a flop for me I would probably have just tried to find more books narrated by that man. He is great.
Audiobooks and I have tended to never quite get along. The reasons are many. My reading speed tends to be a bit faster than reasonable narration. I like to glance back and forth a good bit to check charts, footnotes, or whatever. Just to sometimes compare scenes and get a feeling of the writer behind the words.
While I tend to read fairly fast, I do sometimes like to slow down and think more about the situation, enter into a kind of liminal reading space. Audiobooks have ways to mitigate this, especially in conjunction with ebooks that track the progress between the two, but I can’t imagine audiobooks ever really replacing that mental space in my brain. Especially those with mediocre or particularly slow readers, which ends up just draining me and making me kind of hate the book in question.
Another reason is a bit more petty and barely holds up to scrutiny over time. Back, around 20-years-ago, when I was in library school there was the rise of three “variations” of literature among the librarians: young adult fiction, audiobooks, and ebooks. None of which were new but all of which were being simultaneously pushed as a forefront for helping to inspire reluctant readers.
For the lattermost two, there was this tribal desire to try and claim only one format as being “authentic books.” I heard multiple library students say they hated ebooks because they preferred the { smell | feel | texture | taste | whatever } of “real books” but then they would talk about how 90% of their reading was listening. “Amazon actually owns all your Kindle books,” they would taunt as they downloaded another low fidelity book via Audible [which was bought out by Amazon around this time].
These arguments are partially why I tend to refer to physical books as “Dead Tree Fetishism” (where the act of owning a bit of dead tree is more important than enjoying the text via that medium) though I obviously adore physical books.
My irritation at this, despite accepting one aspect of their argument – that good audiobooks are akin to a transformative work that approaches the material in a different way – made me cranky at the wider audiobook world.
A more reasonable final reason is that my brain is slightly incompatible with audiobooks. I tend to dance around the threads in my brain and audiobooks always had the effect of only occupying perhaps one of them at most, and sometimes the other threads would just be a bit too loud to focus. With some mental practice, I have been able to more overcome this.
I have no specific numbers, and refuse to make a specific goal, but in general I think I will try to get my “Tolerates Audiobooks” to at least a Rank 2 or 3 skill before the 2026th floor collapses and we are thrown into whatever chaos exists on Floor 2027.
Just picture, Space Pilgrims, next year’s Doug: *gestures at all that stuff going down in 2027*.
At any rate, I’m so sleepy I just dropped my keyboard while typing in some act of physics rebellion I do not understand, so I’ll wrap this up, here.
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