Tag: vikings

Two reviewlets

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, Reviews, video gamesLeave a comment

I have two things I want to review, but I don’t have the patience to do a full-length review of either of them, so you should fully expect that the actual writing in this post will take up less space than the pictures. Short version: buy both of these things!

The Fury of the Gods, by John Gwynne, is the third and concluding volume of his Bloodsworn trilogy, and as luck would have it I finished the book I was reading the day it showed up so I was able to dive right into it. I have ten of Gwynne’s books, all read over the last couple of years, and Bloodsworn is definitely his best series, but I’d need to reread the whole trilogy to tell you for sure if Fury of the Gods is my favorite of his books or not. One way or another, this showcases everything Gwynne is best at: a deeply Norse-inflected world, with very cool magic and absolutely brutal action, that starts off with all of the gods dead and gone and ends with them very much neither of those two things. The last hundred and fifty pages of Fury is one long battle scene. It’s amazing. His character work remains exceptional and the way this series swaps POVs between both sides of the major conflict in the book is great; I think it’s fair to say that there’s a bad-guy side but everyone’s reasons for fighting the way they do make sense and damn near everyone was interesting.

Also, my God, the covers for these books are remarkable.

He’s also doing this thing in this series where men and women exist in a society of complete equality and yet he never bothers to draw attention to it. There’s a lot of stuff in The Bloodsworn that is drawn from Norse/Viking culture, including the alphabet, but he sets aside historical accuracy whenever he feels like it, and gender differences are one of those places. If you’re looking for woman warrior characters (and everyone in these books is a warrior), you need look no further.

I finished Black Myth Wukong yesterday, finally, and I’m playing at least partially through it again because this is one of those games where I feel like I need the Platinum trophy and there’s no way to do that in one play through. This game is Chinese the same way that The Bloodsworn is Norse; it’s more inspired by myth and legend than historical reality, and frankly if you’re not already a student of Chinese culture (and I’m very much not) there’s a lot in this story that’s going to leave you behind. It’s apparently a video game version of Journey to the West, one of the five Classical Chinese novels, and … uh, that’s all I know about the five Classical Chinese novels? All I know is the story in lots of places makes no sense at all to my American ass but that doesn’t matter even a tiny bit because monkey man hit monster with stick.

Seriously, outside of the Nioh series this may be my favorite non-Fromsoft Soulslike (and anyone who claims it’s not a Soulslike but an “action RPG” should be shunned; this is absolutely a Soulslike) and I think I might like it more than I liked Nioh 1 anyway. There are some technical issues; I’m still hoping for an optimization patch, and there’s a stuttering issue that gets worse the longer you go without either restarting your PS5 or actually closing the game out and reopening it, but beyond that? No gripes. You’d think that build variation would be a problem given that you’re limited to the staff as your weapon, but 1) it doesn’t matter because the staff is hugely fun and 2) there are enough different stances and other ways to set up your build that there are going to be a million ways to approach any situation anyway. I talked about the difficulty yesterday; I’d say this hits the sweet spot of being difficult but fair pretty precisely, but people who haven’t been mainlining Souls games for years like I have may want to gird their loins. I hear there’s a big DLC coming eventually and I’m going to buy it the second I hear about it.

#REVIEW: Black Shield Maiden, by Willow Smith & Jess Hendel

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, ReviewsLeave a comment

I waited too long to write this– life, getting sick, and various other dramas intervened– so I admit my ardor has cooled a bit, but my admiration for Willow Smith continues to grow with every project she releases. It’s impossible to really know how much of Black Shield Maiden is her work and how much is Jess Hendel’s, of course, although I do find it interesting that Hendel is more or less given co-author credit here. Her name’s smaller than Smith’s, as one might expect, but not that much smaller, and I can easily imagine a world where this is simply ghostwritten and only Smith’s name appears on the cover.

Also, I found it at Target, of all places, which is not somewhere I’m accustomed to discovering books. I didn’t actually buy it there, but that was where I noticed it for the first time. The cover’s striking as hell, and it took me a second to actually realize who the author was.

Anyway, Black Shield Maiden is the story of Yafeu, a Ghanaian warrior who is kidnapped and sold into slavery, then rescued during a Viking raid on the camp where she’s being held. She’s more or less still a slave in the frozen north, but the Viking concept of slavery was quite different from American chattel slavery, and she serves as a handmaiden to the princess Freydis and ultimately becomes a mentor of sorts to the girl as well. I won’t spoil the story, but I can safely tell you that she ends the story in a very different place than she starts it, both literally and figuratively, and the book doesn’t quite end on a cliffhanger but the last fifty pages or so make me really interested to see what’s coming next. This is book one of what I think is a trilogy; the final page promises a forthcoming book two but doesn’t give a name or a date yet.

I don’t have a ton of criticisms of this; it’s a really solid book the whole way through, and not only am I onboard for more collaboration between these two women but I’m probably going to look into Jess Hendel’s work as a solo author– this book was my first exposure to either of them. The way Yafeu is integrated into Viking society doesn’t quite go the way you think it’s going to; she learns the language perhaps a bit quicker than she ought but I’ll forgive it because her being unable to understand anyone would have gotten annoying quickly, and it really seems like most of the people around her just literally decide she’s a dark elf and roll with it. The cultural differences and her outsider’s view on Viking society is neat to read about, too, and Yafeu and Freydis and a handful of others are compelling characters with interesting arcs over the course of the story. I don’t know that I liked it enough that it’s going to end up on my end-of-year list or anything, but it’s a well-written, action-packed, enjoyable read with lots of interesting female characters and if the plot tickles your fancy I’d recommend picking it up.

In which Willow continues to impress

On By Luther M. SilerIn ReadingLeave a comment

This is emphatically not a review, mostly because 1) I’m still about 130 pages from the end, and 2) I’m still dog-sick and have already taken tomorrow off, but I’ve spent most of my waking hours today with Willow Smith & Jess Hendel’s Black Shield Maiden in my hands, and thus far I’ve quite enjoyed it. And the cover is pretty as hell, so feel free to stare at it for a while while I go finish the book so that I can review it tomorrow.

In which I love you, really, I swear

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching1 Comment

20130816-163401.jpgEffective immediately, there is going to be a large and angry Viking armed with several sharp and spiky implements of bodily destruction guarding the door to my classroom. If you happen to need or want anything from me, that’s fine; you just have to get by Sven. His name will be Sven; I just decided that. I may feed him some LSD from time to time, too; don’t worry about that. Norsemen don’t get addicted to things.

This is honest truth: I don’t mind helping people in my building with things. It’s part of my damn job. But holy shit. I got nothing at all done yesterday, and with two work days left until the school year starts (after which point, as every teacher knows, nothing organizational will get done until December) I am seriously running up against the limits of how much any sensible human being can get done in the time I have left, and I have much much more to do this year than I ordinarily would at the beginning of the school year. I’ve said it before, many times: the week before school starts is my busiest week of the year, and this week has been substantially worse than usual in terms of how much I’ve had to do and how few hours I’ve had to do it in. The crowning moment of yesterday’s ridiculousness came when my former assistant principal called me from his new job to ask me something about a spreadsheet I’d created for him to keep track of disciplinary issues. While I was answering his questions for him (which quickly devolved into me saying “email it to me; I’ll fix it and send it back, because that will be quicker”) my current assistant principal came into my room… to ask me about the exact same spreadsheet.

And, again, because 1) it’s true and 2) I know my co-workers read this: I don’t mind. I really truly honestly and totally am happy to help people when they need help from me. But I also don’t want my kids skinning me and dancing on my corpse next week because I didn’t manage to get ready for the new school year properly, and I’m down to two days to get about four days of work done. Thus: my new friend Sven.

He’ll be answering the phone and handling my email, too, by the way.

(For real, though: I was in my classroom for about 2 1/2 hours today, because I was on Daddy Duty this morning and couldn’t get in before early afternoon, and then had to cut out before I wanted to because it’s Friday and the building was closing a bit earlier than usual. In that two and a half hours I got about six hours of work done, and still looked around before I left my room and could only see shit that I still had left to do. And, unfortunately, money that I had to spend, too. Christ, the last few weeks have been expensive.)

UPDATE: About fifteen minutes ago I took advantage of it being slow time at OtherJob, opened up Wunderlist on the iPad, and started putting together a to-do list for Monday and Tuesday. It is currently at 38 items, and that is not because I went crazy breaking things up into subtasks. Fifteen. Minutes. Ago. I’m sure it will increase in size by at least 50% by the end of the night.

SECOND UPDATE: Item #39? “Write lesson plans.” Oh, right, I have to do that too.