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…
Reading Induced Insomnia, Rank: 7 Days
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?
Dungeon Crawl Carl Series, Rank: 4 Books and Counting
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.
Becoming Mostly Ok with Audiobooks, Rank: 1(ish)
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.
