Ironik

You can farm a character to 50 in 3 hours? And play them "normally" to 50 in 30?

I'd like to try that just once. Someone point me to these farms. And someone tell me how to get ANY character to 50 in less than a week of playing.

It's the journey, not the destination. Although the way I play and the insane prices for everything Incarnate, the destination is still the journey for me. Heh.

Ouch. My wealthiest character just tipped over 150 mil Sunday. I looked at purple IOs and despaired yet again when I saw the prices at 275-500 million per.

We have to earn hundreds of doodads to make things, tens of thousands of something-or-others to unlock slots and hundreds of millions of Inf in order to craft whatchamacallits and you're surprised people are maximizing their grind? Weird.

Running around the Chalet last night:





When's the last time you saw someone use the word "chartreuse" in the game? Never, that's the last time.



Bwa-hahaha!

Clive Plus Five?

Fortunately, after putting down Invasion and reading Robopocalypse (don't bother, it's a bad WWZ with robots), I moved on to The Falling Machine (The Society of Steam, Book One) by Andrew Mayer.

As you can see by the cover, this is a superhero steampunk book. Given the recent booster pack in CoH, the timing is fortuitous. Given also the last few books I read, the fact that this one is actually quite good was enormously refreshing.

This is a sort of "1880s Justice League/Avengers" with a number of characters who fill familiar tropes: you've got your Batman analogue, your Captain America type, the Vision/Red Tornado... you get the idea. But then Mayer does what good writers do: they give you the familiar and then they give it a quarter twist until you are no longer on familiar ground. Some characters are not who they seem to be, most have more depth than you first suspect and all have impulses, intentions and interests which diverge and conflict, just like real people.

It's a debut novel and it's not perfect. My reaction to it may be rosier because the dross that had gone before it in my reading pile, but I'm not blind to its imperfections. For one thing, it's book one of an intended series, so there's a lot of set-up and it doesn't have a wham-bam conclusion. There are also parts where it drags somewhat and it does fall into the trap of many steampunk stories where it gets fussy about the tech. All in all, though, those are minor quibbles in an otherwise entertaining story.

One thing I do really like about this book is that it's steampunk science fiction rather than steampunk fantasy. It's science fiction in the same way Flash Gordon and The Rocketeer are: light on the science, heavy on the fiction with a double helping of adventure. It's a lot of fun and a nice twist on the steampunk genre.

The next installment comes out Nov. 22. Sign me up!

I'm partway through Invasion: Book One of the Secret World Chronicle by Mercedes Lackey, Steve Libbey, Dennis Lee and Cody Martin. I'm pretty sure I'm not going to finish it.

I'm sorry if this upsets some of our fellow players (such as the ones who wrote this book) but, to be honest, a lot of this reads like second-rate CoH fan fiction. It's very disjointed, with sketchily-drawn characters and lapses into passive voice too often. In fact, it starts in that mode. For a book about an invasion of giant Nazi mechs, that's an odd choice. Some of the characters come across just like typical Mary Sues, such as the heroine who lives with her psychic cat. It's so cliche that I actually groaned aloud when I got to that section. The problem is things like that aren't inverted or played with in any way: they're just straight up look-at-me-I-wrote-a-story-about-my-cat. This goes the same for the weapon fetish dude and one other character that I have already forgotten.

Some things are just amateurish, such as when a squad of Nazi mechs beat down Kid Zero. Of all the characters introduced, Kid Zero was the only one with A) an interesting name and B) cool powers. Kid Zero can divide into two people: Kid Plus and Kid Minus. As soon as he was introduced I thought, "Finally! Someone whose name doesn't sound like a second choice in the costume creator!" (Mercurye, Belladonna Blue, Victoria Victrix, Gyrefalcon.) Cool name, interesting concept, killed two paragraphs after his introduction. Talk about a waste.

Kid Zero even has an interesting but silly death, because when they beat up one of his forms the other explodes like a miniature nuclear bomb. Now, I'm not sure why beating up Kid Minus caused Kid Plus to explode like a bomb -- seems dumb to split into two and both be twice as vulnerable. A power such as that sounds like it would've proven fatal long ago: catch one, kill both. When Mercurye... I'm sorry, that name still looks like a typo. When Mercurye flies over the crater, he calls the kid's death "an unintentional suicide bombing."

I read lines like that and I say to myself, "Did no one edit this? Did no one proofread it?" What the hell is an unintentional suicide? "Suicide" has the intent built into the word. One might say, "It looked like the aftereffects of suicide bombers but on a larger scale," but it sure wasn't an "unintentional suicide."

A few pages after that the 100-foot stone-form mutant named Mountain steps on a German Shepherd for -- apparently -- comic effect. Ha ha **** you.

There's a really good story here fighting to get out. Unfortunately, none of these writers have the superpower to allow it to escape.

With nothing to really give it scale, it looks to be either a fox or coyote with mange. The cage looked medium-sized, so I'd go with coyote. Poor little thing.

Permission to enter the bridge... of love.

I would start here:

Eight Immortals (which sounds very much where you're headed)

and

Shaolin Kung Fu

Here you go, spoilers-lovers.

Proving yet again that "rich" is not synonymous with "smart."

When they get wiped out from a tsunami/rogue wave/hurricane/pirate invasion, we get to point and laugh.