Ok, that’s a lie. A lot of things about “BookTube” drive me a bit mad. Most of it, really. There is good stuff, real good stuff, but I rarely care to watch enough to find the good stuff.
I’ll be in a mood to discuss more later, maybe, but here’s something from dozens of thumbnails that is now irritating me enough I’m going to start telling Youtube to not recommend me channels which use it:
Books {held | stacked | pointed to} spine back while a thoughtful face is front and center and there’s a title like…
Five Books I Will Never Read Again Because They Are TOO Good
or
Three Books You Have Never Read but Should Get Right Now
or
These Books Absolutely Wrecked My Summer
The last one probably with fake tears added to the thumbnail, or some such.
And it is so annoying to be so constantly baited into every video where even if you know the BookTuber or subscribe or whatever you still have to essentially pretend to be tricked into watching it.
The new The Algorithm demands sacrifice. Tricks for Clicks! If you know what are you getting into, you might not waste so much time forming addiction to screens, amirite?! It’s that or absolutely low-tier enragement farming.
Look, we’re adults, here. Just show the books. Let me know.
If I have not read the books, then good! New stuff!
If I have read the books and hate them, then good, I can avoid it (or join in to see a difference in opinion).
If I have read the books and love them, then I can either avoid or watch to have my sense of utter-correctness validated. Win win!
Mostly, I suspect, the middle-of-the-road absolutely un-timeless, un-classics which proliferate across BookTube’s for-all-tastes vibe will bear little interest for me and that’s ok. I’m not here to yuck your yum, not really. I love that you love to read.
Let me choose to click or not.
Otherwise, I’m no longer clicking a goddamned thing. Well, except the hide channel and such.
I’m sorry the soul-sucking, orphan-crushing machine to which your livelihood is attached requires you to screech like performing monkeys and trick your audience to make it happy.
OH, here are the books, by the way. Lest hypocritical be I:
There’s no real reason for those three. They were just near my desk and I didn’t feel like spending longer taking the photo than typing the rant.
All three: recommended, if you are into that sort of thing.
Standard Ebooks is a volunteer-driven effort to produce a collection of high quality, carefully formatted, accessible, open source, and free public domain ebooks that meet or exceed the quality of commercially produced ebooks. The text and cover art in our ebooks are already believed to be in the U.S. public domain, and Standard Ebooks dedicates its own work to the public domain, thus releasing the entirety of each ebook file into the public domain. All the ebooks we produce are distributed free of cost and free of U.S. copyright restrictions.
There are other sources of pub-domain materials but Standard tries to standardize [hence, you know, the name] and modernize the layout. Having used just a small handful of their ebook versions, the difference is pretty noticeable. Some images and such put back properly. Text-corrections.
Sure, I could somewhat replicate using Calibre and tweaking a few settings to fix up some bits, but still: it’s nice to just be able to read a book without having to pre-edit it, first.
With the realization — from experience of formatting large amounts of text | information over my years as a web & marketing librarian — that such undertakings are hugely time intensive and involve a lot of people using a lot of scripts to download entire catalogs putting strain on a server: I went ahead and signed up for the Patrons Circle, today.
$15 a month and you get a few things like a better feed and a better access to collections. Can also suggest books. I won’t really use any of that.
This is just my general thanks.
The public domain — and stuff like CC-0 — are vital and important. They also require people like the folks at Standard Ebooks to actually provide the media to others. What’s more, I like the way that Standard Ebooks does it.
Recommended. The using of them, not necessarily the donation. Unless you end up really liking them, too.
EDIT: Forgot to add when I first clicked post, bonus points for not requiring me to go through something like Patreon to do this. They do use a third-party system to collection donations but the benefits themselves are currently directly from the site. I appreciate that. We need to de-Third-Party our internet, Space Pilgrims.
A fairly long habit of the older version of Dickens of a Blog was to have a reading tally where I personally tracked the books I read.
It started with “The Winter of Reading Lots” which was actually from September through December. The challenge, then, was to read 20 books and I seem to have hit it. To keep it “fair,” I introduced a weight, initially, so that different books had different points based on length and format. The data of the original weight is somewhat lost since I did not keep a changelog once I completed the challenge and just kept it as a rough tally.
Then, in 2007 I started the true precursor to the weighted reading tally. I will warn you, this is back when I read in the range of 70-120 books per year. 2007 was the first year where I actually started to properly try and break it down to get a better sense of what fit where in the reading spectrum based on my own vibes about the reading material.
In 2008 I started to develop the formulae to weight it towards a normalized book. Books were 1-2 books per book. That’s all you need to know to get where the madness might lead. The end result was 117 books.
By 2015, the last year it was kept as such, the formulae had developed to have a few different content types/lengths and had developed into what I felt was a pretty accurate reflection of my reading speeds and such. However, my reading habits were plummeting and I was only updating the notes semi-frequently so no doubt numerous things were getting lost.
Note that 2013 was incomplete and 2014 is effectively non-extant (presumably lost to some website update/glitch).
After almost a decade of rough years, really good years that involved a new kid, COVID, a life-changing accident, and all sorts of things I am finally wanting to try and get back into the “Reading as sport as well as pleasure” mindset and so today I spent a couple of hours building a brand-spanking new weighted reading tally and then converting my Have-Read List 2026 into that format. This now includes slightly different math on Short Stories and Graphic Novels and introduces Light Novels.
The new math/weights helps different divisions to add up more consistently (the old math meant it would count as reading “more” to list each comic/story in a graphic novel collection separately, for instance, now it is closer to a 1:1 for most).
But, Why?
There are a few reasons why I like doing this:
This is the kind thing that librarians who work with metadata and build web-pages consider fun, frankly.
Bragging.
I like having the data for myself because sometimes I forget exactly which volumes I read, and when, and having at least a basic finding tool helps me remember “Oh, I was on volume 7!”
A lot of systems that track reading lists tend to weight everything as 1 so you end up with a manga volume counting the same as War and Peace and that does not feel right.
It’s frankly a bit of a tragedy that readers who track this sort of thing are some of the most susceptible — besides people tracking their fitness/diet — to requiring third part data scrapers to enumerate their good habits.
Several of the more prominent ones are either baked into an eco-system — such as Amazon/Goodreads — or require at least as much time to add it to an external system and it would take and this way I can control the data.
The big reasons are mostly that I like external memory devices and it’s fun to brag, but I want to brag with a veneer of math.
Tuesday night, I was watching through one of my absolutely all time favorite comfort watches: “Sweet Danger,” a double episode of BBC’s Campion.
Amanda Fitton and Albert Campion’s flirting remains dear to my heart years after first watching. Dawwww.1 Series needs a dang Blu-Ray.
As I do, I got curious about seeing which of the Campion ebooks I have managed to accumulate — I have a complete run of the print books back when Felony & Mayhem had the license to print the print books — but…you know.
The First Oddity
What I found confused me, because while I wasn’t expecting to see the classic (to me) F&M covers, I was expecting to see the relatively profession covers of Open Road Media’s versions which have a certain panache. Instead, what I found was several variations of AI-generated content:
NOTE: This particular version doesn’t claim a publisher, as far as I can tell.
At least a solid handful of the books would still have the Open Road Media edition but would also have one of these newer versions priced lower so the “Albert Campion Series Page” is largely full of them. The general quality between the two covers is immediately obvious:
Open Road MediaAsimis
Now, AI book covers is not necessarily a truly-bad sign even if it is not necessarily ideal for hopes-getting-up, but I was also pretty confused (especially when care is not taken to capitalize “Albert” in the cover).
The Second Oddity
Allingham’s works are not, largely, in the public domain. Black Dudley2 is, and Mystery Mile. At least in the US (which Amazon dot com should be following).
Asimis is out of the Ukraine.3 They mostly cover the first four books so it is possible there is a different pub-dom situation there, or even a different licensing. Again, not sure how that impacts the American version of Amazon.com, but there you go.
There are two other publishers, though: “Unabridged Books” and “Adhyaya Books House LLP.” The latter is from India. Absolutely no clue about the first since it is effectively an impossible term to search with definite confidence. They bounce around in later volumes, here or there. Sometimes leading to copies with the completely wrong cover:
How does the “official” copy of a 200pp book get up to 5.2MB?
I have no idea the licensing, and so will assume this is all above board, but it does show how “manipulation” of prices can break Amazon’s Kindle listings when multiple versions of an ebook are available. Which can have some surprises for the end-user. Especially in the light of Amazon’s somewhat infamous 1984 incident back in 2009. [To this day, an incident taken majorly out of context by people who use to try and prove that Amazon is deleting books on the reg.]
NOTE: The Asimis books seem to be sub-licensed through De Marque who have a philosophy of accessible ebooks. Let me tell you how I know.
The Third Oddity (a two-fer)
In what is a perfectly Doug whoopsie, I accidentally fat fingered the “Buy Now with 1-Click” button while trying to simply scroll over to find out more about why there were multiple editions. That’s how I ended up with a copy of this book:
Goodbye $0.99, it’s like I barely knew you.
Right after mis-clicking, I let out a long sigh and then decided to look deeper to figure out more about what was happening. Here are some things I learned.
The Asimis illustrations seem to be taken from disparate sources. I do not mean to say that they are taken from various editions of Campion stories, they just seem to be either old images from other books or AI-generated images in an older, Victorian style. They “fit” the general shape of the passages to which they are attached, but also lead to a strange cognitive dissonance.
The Asimis text is different (with some typos/glitches but better reflow). I first noticed the missing quotes in the text at the start. To do some comparisons, I got my copy of the Felony & Mayhem paperback and went to the same chapter and had a little bonus surprise. The text was very slightly different. “Although you’re a foreigner, Squoire…” had no “Squoire” in the paperback. To check, I got the Open Road Media version of the ebook and checked it (yes, Space Pilgrims, thanks my misclick I now have multiple versions of the ebook on my Kindle…for accidental science!).
Not only does the Asimis have slightly different text with some additional words, in 70% of the cases it has better reflow with clearer paragraphs. Though, there are places where it breaks in other ways.
AsimisOpen Road Media
For those curious, in the print version it looks more like this in the Felony & Mayhem print book:
Open Road Media wins that fight, even if it’s paragraph spacing outside of it is lacking.
Here’s another change in text, though, where I like Asimis’s version:
AsimisOpen Road Media
I just like the “The name was a local one, derived” more than “The name was derived.” The former doesn’t really add anything but rhythm, and rhythm is important.
My guess is there is some difference between the American vs British text or some such, and that is causing it (Asimis using double-quotes in the American English standard).
The Fourth Oddities
Wrapping up, because this was more to document the strangeness rather than say anything particular [besides maybe Amazon should let you filter publishers more easily/readily and needs to control its dang Authority files…FRBR FRBR FRBR, amirite, ‘brarians?]
Here are two things I cannot confirm because I am not going to accidentally buy more copies of these books [please, fat fingers, please], but I saw two complaints while checking reviews that might be of importance:
(1) One reviewer of Mystery Mile said they were frustrated that it was simply a repackaged Black Dudley. The narratives of both are fairly different so my guess is that there is at least one version that gave one of the books the wrong title. I glanced through all the previews I could, but did not see it, but it could have been a paperback version. Or the reviewer might have been talking about broader themes.
(2) A reviewer of another “illustrated edition” said the the images were risqué. I have no idea their tolerance and have learned from experience that it could be anywhere from “lingerie” to full nudity.
Doug’s Final Thoughts
The primary final thoughts I have are, in order of importance to myself:
You should read more Campion. Yes, you. Allingham was delightful.
Campion needs a dang Blu-Ray+ edition.
I would 100% adore a Sweet Danger movie as long as they accepted the weird mish-mash of gangsters, evil businessmen, satanism, English folklore, “Local shops for local people,” and twee flirtations.
Amazon needs to figure out a way to keep this in control before it gets even worse when a billion versions of book can be insta-plagiarized by AI.
While not a long list at the best of times, the only on-screen flirtation that makes me giggle more is from The Mummy and that one is practically cheating because damn, son. ↩︎
Another publisher is listed as Andrii Ponomarenko, also from the Ukraine and also from Kyiv, with very similar covers across the books and very similar by-lines, so I assume this is the same person/entity. ↩︎
On the left is my Kindle Colorsoft. On the right is my Kindle Voyage. I thought about cleaning them up for the shot but I think it drives home just how often the two devices are used.
A Brief History of My Kindle Usage
My first Kindle (Gen 2) was purchased in 2009. One of the older, “clunkier” models with the big side buttons and the built in keyboard. I used it a good bit. Kept it largely on airplane mode and “side-loaded” it from downloaded content.
When the storms hit Huntsville back in April 2011, that Kindle was used to keep track with the outside world and I used a mixture of it and a old flip phone to order equipment we needed to survive.
For five or so years, the Paperwhite was my primary reading device though I honestly do not recall how often I read from it. Often, I would say. Around here, somewhere, I probably started to read Kindle books as often on app and website.
Voyage and Colorsoft
I got a Kindle Voyage in 2017. Oddly enough, it was the Oasis that caused this. I was interested in a new Kindle and Oasis was getting a lot of hype but for whatever reason, the Oasis simply did not gel with me and I ended up with the Voyage as “a replacement.”
For the next eight years, it was the center of my reading life. Now, this was also the time after Barbara’s birth and then COVID and then the accident so it was kind of a weird time for me to read. I read pretty frequently, but we’re talking about maybe thirty books per year compared to three times that a few years prior.
I really liked it. It was often in my bookbag to pull out when I wanted to read for a bit. It also has a bit of personal history for me:
Got to love the cat hairs just baked right on in, eh?
That sticker, I think, came from one of the last outings before the accident made it hard for me to go to such things [and roughly impossible to carry Barbara around on my shoulders]. We were going to see some test launch in May 2022 and I don’t recall what it is because of reasons [a couple of months before and after the accident are only skeletal in my thoughts, the trauma kind of melted most things away] but I snagged a sticker promoting the then upcoming Artemis mission.
I might be conflating two different events, but that’s ok.
Here’s one of my favorite pictures and B and me…
I was absolutely enjoying the heck out of the Voyage with possibly two complaints:
It had 3GB which seems like a lot of space for an e-reader but my ebook library [not including all the comics and definitely not including all the RPGs] is around 6-7 +gig. Tossing in comics and RPGs and it’s 60+ gigabytes [maybe 100+ gig]. I was already having to decide which books to keep and which ones to delete.
It was a bit sluggish, really. It was clearly meant to handle smaller amounts of books without a lot of on-screen manipulation.
Still, the inertia of having to reload 1000s of ebooks kept me uninterested for years, until finally Christmas 2024: Kaz bought me a Kindle Colorsoft as a gift.
Around here, we were already planning to move to Belgium so I held on to it. After the move, once I confirmed it would work and I would not just be bricking a device, I started using it. I cannot buy a new Kindle [if I wanted to, which I don’t] and have it shipped due to geography-lock but it seems like setting up one already bought with an already established account works ok. For now, at least.
For the past year, it has been an astounding e-reader. It works more or less like I expect an e-reader to act. Nearly every complaint I have about it is based on Amazon’s own stupid restrictions to handling non-Kindle content. The enforced ecosystem stuff is dumb.
Which has started to be a problem because there are some books here or there from other sources I’ve been trying to read and I end up having to use various work-arounds to avoid using the Send to Kindle feature which works ok but is awful in the metadata (and oopsie-boopsies the covers because, I assume, of entirely petty reasons and nothing else).
Then…something occurred to me.
The Return Voyage
You know things are bad when Youtube starts recommending videos about jailbreaking Kindles to you. Like, out of the blue. I didn’t go “how jailbreak kindle pls?!” or anything.
Seeing how much they are pushing AI to be pre-loaded on the newer Kindles, maybe soon. Not yet, though.
It did get me thinking. I like the e-ink display. I considering Amazon’s Ember to be my favorite e-reading font [fun fact, I just realized while writing this post that I could download Amazon’s Kindle fonts]. I have been using ReadEra for my phone but something about the interface was missing a little bit. I like it a lot but I missed the vibe of an e-ink book.
Sure, there are Kobo e-readers. Those are a pretty big deal here. Just…you know, more gristle for the pig-farm. Also, via BOL.com I have picked up a few Kobo ebooks and having them locked by third party DRM is not in any real way an improvement. At this point you can’t even say something like “But they are more customer supportive!” because no company likes customers anymore. They only time they pretend to like customers is when there is a bigger fish is in the pond and the pretense of customer service is baked into a business model. Everyone is just waiting to sell out to said bigger fish so the cycle can continue.
What I want is an e-ink reader that jumps straight to KOReader and 100%, absolutely, is not primarily a storefront masquerading as a device. Not necessarily a e-ink display tablet that can also do my taxes. Just like…locked the hell down to launching KOReader. That sort of thing. Let me pay €200 and get 64GB + e-ink + an app that can read pretty much all the “open” ebook formats.
Yesterday, I finally realized that thanks to Calibre, it is relatively trivial to convert any of my ebooks to a format that a 2017-era Kindle can read and a 2017-era Kindle is from the time when Amazon was still considering side-loading to be a primary access point. They may have started discouraging it by that point, but they were mostly fine with it. Books were stored on the device with names like
The Shadow King of Lancelot Book 17 (Light Novel The Shadow King of Lancelot Series)
As opposed to things like
BR1922298Q1521_azw
I got my Voyage out, got out an old charger, and then spent a fair amount of time recharging it. Let it get through all the stuff it needed to get through to wake back up after a year of not being used. Relatively updated. Relatively synched. All that.
Then I told to say goodbye to mama.
Turned on Airplane mode, hooked it up to computer, and viola. Spent last night reading the back half of a Reggie Oliver Book. Today will be finishing up The Seven Dials Mystery by Agatha Christie (may I recommend StandardEbooks version if you would like a free copy?).
It made me very wistful for a time when companies like Valancourt and Tartarus Press would just sell you ebooks directly instead of having to go through Amazon. I assume a variety of reasons drove such a thing.
It is madness how much ebooks have been tainted in such a short period of time.
Over time, I’ll probably remove most of the Kindle books off of the Voyage and just it exclusively for other ebooks without going through send-to-Kindle [not least because I just assume Amazon is gobbling those up to support its AI].
It’s a terrible boorish workaround but it is nice to bring back my Voyage without it simply being “yet another Kindle” in my collection.
Once support officially ends for the pre-2013 Kindles, might be time to start properly hacking my old Paperwhite. Just to see.
At this time, not really planning on getting another Kindle unless something big changes in their ecosystem. Let’s see how long these two last.
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.
THOUGHTS AT THE END OF BOOK 8 IN ITS CURRENT FORM
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.
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.
THOUGHTS OF THE BOOK PRIOR TO THE LAST 10%
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.
THE RE-LISTEN AND THREE PIECES OF ABSOLUTELY BASELESS SPECULATION
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]:
[Not really spoiling any book, but I’ll still obfuscate it, but about something that happens early on, very early on] K3 bOU3 kW8dQ O8G tOvz qyNvWwOwzR OcOu3. kW8dQ zOQ3v fORf fb3 QbWdCbQ fb3 b3OvG m3vGq8O8G gOzzq8C b3v. tOvz cOf cOuq8C dN 4vWy O 8qCbQyOv3. ib3f3 QcW Qbq8Cf z3OG QW Qb3y w3q8C Owz3 QW 38Q3v Qb3 Gd8C3W8. 1’U3 cW8G3v3G 4Wv O yq8dQ3 q4 Qbqf cOf z3OGq8C dN QW fWy3 uq8G W4 NzWQ NWq8Q, 3fN3gqOzzR fq8g3 zOQ3v C3Q 8WQ3f OwWdQ fWy3Qbq8C 4dguR w3q8C dN cqQb m3vGq8O8G O8G Qb3 4WWG fQd44, 3Qg.
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.
Snagged from mattdinnamin.com. Used without permission but you should click that link and find out more. Trust 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…
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.
Last night I hit a 500-day reading streak on my Kindle.
Which is to say on my Kindle App because I don’t think my Kindle, not even my newer Colorsoft one, has any sort of streak/days-of-reading/Kindle Challenge type screen. Maybe it does. I’m not going to look for it.
That’s neat though, hitting that. Only you can likely tell from the fact that the number of books I read on Kindle are only 31 this year [roughly 3 a month] so it doesn’t quite line up. With the move and all, it’s been a rough year for reading a lot.
I have maintained the act of looking at pages on a screen in a prescribed manner. I am the best.
Four quick thoughts and then to my morning workout with me! Why this streak is a lie…
The Streak Is a Lie Because: it’s actually longer…
The real total is something like 800 days. Twice over the past 2-3 years, the system has essentially not counted days when I have 100% read something. The last hiccup, apparently 500 days ago, was after I had spent a couple of hours finishing the back half of some book.
I remember being irate at the time because not only had I read for some time, but because I had the book in my library clearly marked as finished and had submitted a rating through the app. The “Finished Date” and presumably the “Rating Date” would have been for the day that the same app was claiming I had skipped reading.
Part of the reason I got to 500-days this time is because I was initially fussy about that and then it just became a habit.
I don’t recall the time before but I remember irate at that time, too.
The Streak Is a Lie Because: it only tracks the bare minimum…
I don’t know what all it actually tracks, not really. Is just opening the app enough? Just opening a book? The truth is that at 100-days of those 500-days were me opening the app or my Kindle (etc) and just reading for maybe 3- to 5-minutes. I would guess my average duration per day would not be all that high.
It is nice to have a gentle prod to keep up some reading because reading is a habit you have to nurture. It just might be better if I could set a minimal threshold [e.g., 10 pages, 20 minutes] to actually count.
The Streak Is a Lie Because: it only counts books-on-Kindle…
Probably half my reading, or more, in that whole time period was via physical books. Which means I either have to do the bare minimum opening of the app to satisfy above or I have to get a book on Kindle and on paper and then move the Kindle version forward.
I have done a bit both. Where both feel silly.
The Streak Is a Lie Because: the constant gamification of everyday pleasures is a poison…
In this case, the streak is not so much a lie as a constant external stressor to stay addicted to an app for reasons only tangentially related to the purpose of the app. Reading some is not hard for many of us but reading regularly is hard. Much like diet apps and exercise apps and productivity apps and language apps and many others: having this gamification added to them can help you to hit goals. That is true.
However, the fact that so many apps have such streaks and such baked in is mentally draining. We can no longer just play our games. Now, we have to play our games daily for shiny lights and particle effects to keep blessing us. Skip a day and you might just receive a meaningless warning. Our gentle hobbies to survive the soul-crushing march of modern life have been turned into just another stress for us to endure.
The whole time our personal data and habits are being scraped and digested by The Algorithm. Using the app is giving them permissions to dig deeper into our lives.
