Omega

It's hard to tell if Omega is better than Chindi. They're nearly equal, though Omega edges ahead a tiny little bit. They both are very strong in term of stories and characters. The only thing that might make Omega rank over Chindi, perhaps, is that we're visiting truly new narrative spaces, here. 

We're outside of the crazy-last-second-rescue-of-a-main-character template McDevitt followed for the previous 3 books. It feels good and fresh. Sure, there is rescuing taking place, but it's in various forms and ways that are different than the previous books. 

Retiring from Bloodstrike

Here we are. I'm done. 300 hours in, on both PC and mobile. I reached Legendary rank several times. My account is level 50. All my guns are level 70+. Then I've hit the wall.

The core gunplay is outstanding. Responsive and satisfying. It's the best. But sadly, when you play for long enough, everything else is a dumpster fire.

The matchmaking is awful. You get matched against 12-year-olds with 2,000 hours who play like it's their job. Or you're stomping absolute beginners. The BR ladder means nothing because skill distribution is nonexistent. It's mostly a indicator of how sweaty you are. And things get really fucking sweaty, really fast.

Cheaters. There are tons of them. If you follow the devs on social media, you'll notice they usually announce how many accounts they're banning every month. It's in the tens of thousands. Let that sink in. Tens of thousands of hackers you're forced to play against.

Small map pool. 3 BR maps, 1 being rather small, the others rather empty. 6 pretty average Hot Zone maps. You rotate through these same maps very fast.

An exhausting loop. Get wrecked by sweats, respawn, get wrecked again… Watch killcams of people who clearly have no life, rinse and repeat. There's no learning curve. Just sweats.

I get why people grind it though. The gunplay is great, the guns are cool and the game feels rather good at first. But it's not enough when every match is against people who treat ranked like a second job.

Life's too short for this frustration loop. The fun just isn't there anymore. Moving on.

Writing about Writing Part 4

Oh, no… here we are again! This can't be real!

The last time I went on a rant about this, I settled on Obsidian as my ultimate note-taking and writing application. It sounded pretty final… I mean, the last chapter detailing why was called Endgame. Can't be more final than that—unless you work at Marvel!

So, yeah. Here I am again, ready to switch to yet another note-taking and/or writing application.

Welcome back!

This time, we are starting from Obsidian.

Chindi

Chindi is the strongest installment of the Academy series to date. McDevitt continues to build an incredible hard SF world full of mystery. Things unfold with with so many questions atop questions… You can't stop turning pages. While the previous one, Deepsix, had a much smaller scope, this one goes huge. A very well-crafted story.

The mystery of the Chindi itself — the artifact our heroes are concerned with, its origins, its nature — is at the heart of the story. McDevitt handles it so well. Rather than dumping exposition, he lets our heroes circle around it, finding new angles, new contradictions. Each discovery feels earned. The mythology he constructs around this thing is unsettling, and the implications only go deeper as we progress. It's the kind of SF mystery that makes you want to immediately reread it to catch what you missed.

My one tiny gripe is that we have yet another last-second rescue under catastrophic circumstances. Our heroes pull off the impossible for the 3rd time in a row. It's a minor flaw in an otherwise excellent series, but the pattern is there. Is it a big deal? No. Is the book any less good because of it? No.

Great read!

 

Brave New World

 

The conditioning angle of Brave New World is genuinely unsettling, and cranking the Ford mythology into a full-blown religion is a bold move that pays off. Great dystopian setup. Strong foundation.

I read the abridged version in high school, so my memory of the book was pretty vague. Still, having loved it, I came in with high expectations.

Turns out memory and reality don't always match.

First surprise: they get to the Savage Reserve fast. In my head, that was a second-half reveal. Nope. It threw me off the pacing early on, and I spent a good chunk of the book waiting for a gear shift that never quite came. 

I also remembered Lenina as almost a co-lead, her story arc feeling as central as Bernard Marx's. Reading it now, that's not really the case. Maybe the abridged version gave her more space. Maybe I just projected. Either way, it felt odd.

And the world itself, man, I wanted more of it. Compared to 1984, which practically drowns you in its nightmare, Huxley's society feels a little underexposed. You get the ideas, but not always the weight of them.

Here's the thing though: Brave New World is an excellent book. I'm just pretty sure I read it at the wrong time… right after finishing 1984. That's not a fair fight for anyone…

Does the sequencing of what you read affect how you land on a book? Curious if anyone else has read these two back to back.