For the last few days, I pushed myself hard in completing Robert Jordan’s The Eye of the World. I had started it maybe over a year ago but never had the focus to really get traction with the novel. Honestly, I found it quite boring.
The book is quite dense with a good deal of world building, heavy descriptions, lore and distractions. But I found the bulk of the book to be boring because of these elements while the story meandered and frankly little action taking place. A bit too dialog heavy at times, the writing feels as though it’s trying to be very academic at times with how it attempts to throw examples our lists out for adding meat to an otherwise trite situation.
What I started to realize, especially towards the end, was how the book almost rehashes Lord of the Rings. I read some reviews and it sounds as though the structure is intentional except for where Robert Jordan wants to go with the notion of power. But the characters almost parallel Lord of the Rings like the kids being the equivalent of the four hobbits, Lan being Aragorn, the Dark One being Sauron, etc. There’s even a Gollum-like character.
While it’s tempting to pre-judge Jordan’s literary accomplishments with just a single book, I have to say that I wasn’t inspired to continue. I noticed that this is the first of thirteen books and I have no idea if they all share this vast amount of bloat. One person mentioned that it isn’t until the 4th book where the series hits its stride.
The last few pages of the book is the prologue for the 2nd book. I did not feel tempted to pursue more because this first book was pretty dry. I honestly hated most of the characters and felt there was no threat to anyone. At the end, I was confused where I thought one of the main characters had bit it but she turned out okay.
That simply confounded my frustration for the writing because it wasn’t clear. Similarly, the character Rand’s handling of the Dark One was too surreal and lost me. It felt too much like Deux Ex Machina and worse yet no real challenge as a boss fight. There’s a lot of spectacle that occurs around but the character merely summons some power up and denies the Dark One into oblivion. The end.
So yeah the ending was horribly anti-climatic for me and even somewhat expected given that these characters seemed indestructible by the worst set of plot armor I’ve ever seen. But I suppose this was Jordan’s first/earlier works where he was getting warmed up so I might have to give him a by.
Beyond that, I’ve been struck by an awful headache for the past few days. Finally, this morning it rained and my headache is starting to recede, which makes me believe it’s all pressure. Looking at the forecast, I saw that the up coming week will have several showers so I’m not looking forward to that if it implies more of this headache nonsense.
Not much gaming lately. I had to quit Game of War just because I could see where it was going. Pretty much unless you’re super rich and have too much time on your hands, that game is just a major waste of time and the company will probably rot in hell for having such a ridiculously high cost for players.
Boom Beach has been good. Main account just finished up a Boom Cannon lvl 16. If I can get lucky with some dives and the Trader’s chest this weekend, I might be able to push out a level 25 Mortar before the end of the weekend. But I’m not counting on it. Since this weekend wasn’t the Mega Crab, I expect one for next week, which means I’ll be waiting to finish up the Boom Cannon on this account.
My secondary account just started up a Sniper Tower lvl 24. If I can get enough resources, I hope to start leveling up a Mortar lvl 23. Then with the coming week’s Mega Crab, I can fully level it up. Also, I am in the process of finishing up my Warriors, making this account complete when it comes to the Armory. The positive factor from this is no longer needing gold for the time being for anything beyond more crystal.
With January coming to an end, I’m wondering what February will entail for Boom Beach. Since HQ 24 came out around August, I believe, another major HQ update might be in the works. It would be almost 6 months between updates, which does not sound unreasonable as I expect roughly 6-9 month updates at this stage.
I did see that HQ25 had a possible leak with an updated look. No idea what the actual update would be. I thought about it a bit and felt that it might be time for another landing craft. The beach has just enough space for another two landing craft so I would love to see this as opposed to more landing craft levels.
Although I anticipate tons of people complaining about power creep with such an addition, I still would love to see it happen. Maybe the compensation is another Rocket Launcher and Machine gun as more defenses. Another idea is to expand the Boom Beach map since there are still darkened regions. Maybe that could lead to higher level bases or another event and perhaps higher level events for the existing ones.
Just the idea of having at least a single additional landing craft gives me ideas like adding just one grenadier group to my existing load out. That would certainly help with clearing out the pesky mines that I now must spend heavy amounts of GBE with critters.
I’ve been eyeing Path of Exile here and there. The new expansion aspect just looks painful with the multi-boss feature. I seriously can’t understand how something that shitty was allowed. Not sure if I want to play at all at this point in time with the way that game is made. It’s a shame because I would have liked to have tried the redone Harvest mechanic.
Really have been wanting to try a new game. The sad thing is that there’s not a lot that catch my eye these days. I end up just going back to the classics.