#chain of iron review

[just-a-girl-who-likes-sharks]

September 2024 books 🤎

The Shadowhunters adventure has almost come to an end. This month was the first time since July that I didn’t reread anything, as I have read all the previous Shadowhunter books at least once before.

Malec will forever have my heart, but I’ll admit The Eldest Curses left me wanting… more. They just weren’t very strong novels. Ghosts of the Shadow Market, on the other hand, might be the very best Shadowhunter book in the whole franchise. Jem Carstairs, you have my whole heart, now and forever.

I started reading The Last Hours, knowing I would fall in love with these characters, but damn, I didn’t know how much I actually would love them. How are they all so amazing?! I cannot even pick a favourite (other than you, Anna Lightwood, the woman you are) (and you, Matthew Fairchild, bisexual king with a tortured heart).

I tried very hard to finish Chain Of Thorns before the month was up and was even willing to cheat a little bit and give myself an extra day, but I just couldn’t. So… Chain of Thorns will be included in October’s wrap up. And that’ll be the end of the Shadowhunter chronicles.

[fimproda]

For those of you miserable that didn’t like Chot? Too bad you all shouldn’t have invested so much into headcanons and secondary characters 😂

And here we go.

I'm so, so bummed out that I didn't finish writing my review of that clusterfuck of a book, as that would've been a comprehensive comment listing all the reasons why ChoT sucked — as in, it was objectively a bad book and I didn't hate it just because, as you put it, I "invested so much into headcanons and secondary characters".

I did write part of that review, though; you can find it scrolling down on my profile, I added it to a reblog. So I'm not going to repeat here what I wrote there.

But I'll say this: do not make the same mistake as Clare and insult my intelligence as a reader.

I don't just read books as a form of escapism: I also read them critically, especially because I like to think of myself as a writer and would love to write outside of Wattpad and AO3 one day. When it comes to books, for me, there's a subjective aspect and an objective one. I don't expect any headcanons of mine to filter out of the subjective and into the objective, much less become reality. God forbid my own interpretation of the plot and characters does the same. So, no, I didn't "invest so much into headcanons and secondary characters", and if I did, it was confined to my mind and/or my conversations with @zoyalannister and our fanfictions. None of that, none, has ever bled out onto the pages of ChoT as I was reading it.

I was as close to a blank slate as I could get when I started reading ChoT. And yes, while I did get angry at Christopher's death, it's been almost a year since then and my anger has tapered out. You know what didn't taper out, though? My annoyance at the terrible plot development and character arcs. My bewilderment at the fact that so many Chekhov guns did not fire.

I'm human: I'm subjected to emotion as much as you are, as we all are. But I fancy myself as a pretty level-headed person, all things considered. I know how to de-escalate myself. I know how to wind down, take a deep breath, and analyze the situation under a critical lens. A year later, ChoT still doesn't measure up. Still doesn't work. Still sucks, on both a subjective and an objective level.

As a counterpoint, I've recently finished reading House of Flame and Shadow by Sarah J. Maas. I loved it. 10/10. Two days later, I'm starting to see some flaws. I have no doubt that I'm going to find even more as time goes on and my initial excitement dies down.

And I did have a load of theories and headcanons for HoFaS — as did most of the fandom, to be honest. Yes, some fans are angry because their theories have not been confirmed, but this is because they had been expecting ACoTaR 6, not Crescent City 3. There's a difference between an expectation born from logic and one born from air.

See? It works the other way around, as well.

So, I hope you'll see this as a teachable moment. You are clearly looking for someone who takes their time to explain to you what was wrong with ChoT, since you wrote an ask to @theultrawave on this same topic, too — or, well, someone anonymous did, so I can't be sure. I'm afraid I can't tell you more than this; if you want to read more reasons, take a look at that half-review I mentioned earlier.

And don't let the time you spent writing your asks and reading our replies go to waste.

[musicmags]

[kelfurgalicious]

top reads of 2022 and 2023

Of course I meant to publish my 2022 reads before nearing 2024, but here we are. 2022 brought many challenging times, with the passing of my beloved grandmother, and the chosen challenge of starting at a new company after 14 years at my previous one. To work through my anxieties, rereading became a crutch and a sense of comfort for me. That being said, of course I still dove into new reads in…

[terrible-romance-reviews]

who cares what i was reading im gonna return to my roots and become a die hard cassandra clare fan, i just checked out the ebook of chain of iron from the library (i own a physical copy and i was definitely halfway through it at one point, i remember absolutely nothing at this current moment though) and i am going to read it with such speed, just you guys wait

[reviewsbywolfie]

This one kinda left me on a confused tone. Can’t explain that without revealing too much. So Imma talk about how cool it was.

Chain of Iron is the 2nd installment of Chain of Gold. Like I said before, this is a trilogy so it leaves us where we left off last time.

We get the usual. Starting point, conflict, twists and turns, and then the cliffhanger. I swear every time I’m near a cliffhanger it’s like I’m over here dying of shock while the authors are laughing their asses off at my face.

But cliffhangers are important. Why? Cause how else are we gonna get you to read our books? You wanna read more? Awesome. Now all we have to do is convince you to do it. Which is why cliffhangers are super cool (and also annoying at the same time).

The last book of the trilogy is Chain of Thorns. I currently don’t have the book because I want it in paperback. Which won’t come until next year. The reason for that is because in the paperback version, if you look at the band of the book, you'll see a tiny illustration of one of the characters. And if you have all the books together, it creates one amazing picture of the story itself. So 10/10 for style Cassandra.

Anyway once I get it in paperback I’m gonna share my thoughts about that one. Hopefully we’ll get the ending we’re looking for.

That’s all for now. Until next time, stay on track and stay in the pack 🐺

[mad-rdr]

Chain of Iron (The Last Hours) - Cassandra Clare

★ ★ ★ ★ ★/5

The set up for this sequel is pretty high stakes. Cordelia is engaged to James after compromising her honor to protect him from the Clave (ughh old English social norms sound like hell). Their wedding scene was actually really cute, and I felt so bad for Cordelia because she truly does love James, and she doesn’t know that he harbors feelings for her. We find out in this book that the bracelet Grace gave to James is enchanted made to bend him to her will under the guise of love. Grace has literally been manipulating James since he was 14 and if that’s not devastating idk what is. You can tell he also truly does care for, dare I say love, Cordelia and the scenes where it’s just the two of them in their new house (playing games and … other things) are my favorite in the entire book. I hope they get their shit together because at the end of the book, when James calls out Grace for her manipulations, Cordelia heard only the first part and assumed James was done with her. She runs to Mathew, who confesses his feelings for her, and they run off to Paris together (I feel the need for escapism but PLEASE talk to James that boy is going through it). James tried to run after Cordelia to explain everything but is stopped by Will because Lucie is missing. Why is Lucie missing you might ask? Because she’s fallen in love with Jesse Blackthorn (who is dead but a ghost) and has risen him from the dead. It turns out James being able to travel to demon realms isn’t the only Herondale family trick. In addition to those messes of miscommunication- we have Thomas and Alastair and Anna and Ariadne. Oh the romantic tensions are high my friends. CC is famous for her endings and this one was no different. Once again, the set up for the final book is leaving me wondering how she will manage to tie up all these loose ends while desperately hoping everyone gets a happy ending, but knowing Cassie, I’ll need more than just hope���

[brummiereader]

Uptown Girl

(Masterlist)

Summary: A woman from high society, never needing or wanting for anything. Your world of jewels and silk gowns comes crashing down around you when your father's mounting gambling debts catch up with him, and he is forced to relinquish your home Arrow House before his untimely death to his biggest creditor, Tommy Shelby. But with your name on the deeds, and the land of your childhood home your only bargaining source of income to escape the union arranged since your birth to a monster of a man from your own class. You make your intentions of staying put stubbornly known to the Birmingham gang leader, as you clutch to your only remaining hope of freedom from the inevitable chains of a violent marriage. With neither one of you willing to budge on the matter until the iron clad documents of Arrow House are reviewed, you are both begrudgingly left without any other choice but to live together. What will become of your unusual living situation with the notorious gangster, and the arranged marriage you want to be free from? A way out, friendship, lust...love? One thing is certain. Tommy Shelby's abrupt appearance into your life will open your curious eyes to a whole other world that had been shielded from you since the day of your noble birth.

Warnings: Language, angst, fluff, mutual pining, smut, domestic violence, mentions of suicide, violence

Authors Note: I basically took Alfie's passing statement of how Tommy acquired Arrow House and the trope "One bed, two people" and turned it into "One house, two strangers" and ran with it! The idea for this series and it's storyline, is loosely based off the lyrics to the well known song "Uptown Girl" by Billy Joel.

Teaser Trailer

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

Part Four

Part Five

Part Six

Part Seven

Part Eight

Part Nine (completed series)

Gif credit: @mushroomseb. Go check out their wonderful works of art!

[shousetsubangbang]

Shousetsu Bang*Bang Issue 112: Theme Free

cover by Swedishjazz

~*~

Shades of Purple, by Togi Kayako (土宜草子)

Nothing They Can Do About It, by Kit Miller

Of Figures and Fingering Things Out, by Greta Jia-Kang Cabrel

Chain Reactions, by juou no zan (女王のザン)

in a hallway, somewhere, by sen no akumu (先の悪夢)

Your Head, Your Neck, My Hands, by Sylla C.

Altare Sacrificiorum Columbarum, by Iron Eater*

*illustrated

–

Rosebuds, by lonelytuatara

Nice n’ Naughty, by yabamena

~*~

It’s been one of those years … pass the SSBB!

Welcome to our sixth and final issue of 2024, our theme-free big bang! All wrapped up and tied in a (metaphorical) bow, we’ve got a batch of stories and art guaranteed to heat up your nights no matter what the temperature outside may be. All queer, all smutty, and all absolutely free!

We here at SSBB are eternally grateful that in the age of commercial flashiness and computer-generated garbage, you’ve chosen to spend your holiday season with our long-running indie webzine. Everything in our pages is created by people who love what we’re doing so much, we just have to share! Please enjoy all our small-batch artisanal dick-touching (to say nothing of other body parts!), handcrafted with love especially for you.

Please help us keep SSBB going by spreading the word on social media (particularly Bluesky, Mastodon, and Tumblr), writing comments of encouragement for the creators, leaving reviews on our ebooks (at Smashwords and itch.io), and becoming one of our authors and/or artists! We’d love to welcome you — or welcome you back — to the project.

2025 will be our 20th year in print (can you believe it?), so check out what’s coming, add the dates and reminders to your Google calendar, and join the community on Discord to keep abreast of all fun happenings.

Thank you all again for helping make this project a reality. Best wishes for the end of the year, and we’ll see you in 2025!

[pierrotdoesnteat]

NUTRITION JOURNALS: VITAMINS (PT 1/2)

HOW MANY VITAMINS ARE THERE?

- there are thirteen (13) essential vitamins; vitamin A, vitamin B6, vitamin B12, vitamin C, vitamin D, vitamin E, vitamin K, thiamine (B1), riboflavin (B2), niacin (B3), pathogenic acid (B5), biotin (B7), and folate (B9). these are the ones i'll focus on in this past, and it will be a longer post.

WHAT IS VITAMIN A?

- vitamin A is a fat-soluble vitamin that supports your immune system, vision, reproductive health, and fetal growth. there are two forms of vitamin A; preformed vitamin A which are found in things like dairy, liver, and fish, and provitamin A carotenoids which can be found in fruits, vegetables, and oils. - The recommended daily amount of vitamin A is 900 micrograms (mcg) for adult men and 700 mcg for adult women.

WHAT IS VITAMIN B6?

- vitamin B6 (pyridoxine) is important for normal brain development and for keeping the nervous system and immune system healthy. Food sources of vitamin B6 include poultry, fish, potatoes, chickpeas, bananas and fortified cereals. - vitamin B6 has been shown to have antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties, and helps your body to make DNA, hemoglobin, and neurotransmitters. - in addition to low iron, low vitamin B6 has been linked to anemia, which i dont imagine i need to tell yall is incredibly common in disordered people. - because B6 is connected to neurotransmitters, it can help regulate mood and even aid sleep. One study showed that higher vitamin B6 intake is associated with lower depression and anxiety risk in females, but not males. - vitamin B6 also helps your body maintain normal levels of homocysteine, an amino acid that helps to build proteins. - vitamin B6 supplementation specifically has been shown to improve body composition – your ratio of lean muscle to fat. it has also been linked with higher muscle mass and lower body fat levels. in particular, vitamin B6 supplementation has been linked to lower-body weight loss, with a reduced amount of fat across the hips and waist.

WHAT IS VITAMIN B12?

- vitamin B-12 (cobalamin) plays an essential role in red blood cell formation, cell metabolism, nerve function and the production of DNA, the molecules inside cells that carry genetic information. - sources of vitamin B-12 include poultry, meat, fish and dairy products. Vitamin B-12 is also added to some foods, such as fortified breakfast cereals, and is available as an oral supplement. - some studies suggest that vitamin B12 could affect body fat and metabolism. one review concluded that vitamin B12 plays a key role in fat metabolism, noting that a deficiency could be linked to increased fat accumulation and obesity. take this with a grain of salt, though, because there is limited research on the topic. - vitamin B12 plays a role in serotonin production, so a deficiency may be connected with clinical depression. this may feel irrelevant, but your physical and mental health are really complexly connected. taking care of one can help improve the other.

WHAT IS VITAMIN C?

- vitamin C (ascorbic acid) is a nutrient your body needs to form blood vessels, cartilage, muscle and collagen in bones. vitamin C is also vital to your body's healing process. additionally, it is an antioxidant that helps protect your cells against the effects of free radicals- molecules produced when your body breaks down food or is exposed to tobacco smoke and radiation from the sun, x-rays or other sources. - vitamin C is found in citrus fruits, berries, potatoes, tomatoes, peppers, cabbage, brussel sprouts, broccoli and spinach. - vitamin C helps your body to absorb iron in foods like beans and spinach, who's bio-availability is lower. - although vitamin C doesn't necessarily cause weight loss, it seems to be related to body weight. getting sufficient amounts of vitamin C increases body fat oxidation during moderate-intensity exercise. - another critical function of vitamin C is synthesizing carnitine, which transports long-chain fatty acids into the mitochondria that produce energy.

WHAT IS VITAMIN D?

- there are different forms of vitamin D, including ergocalciferol (vitamin D2) and cholecalciferol (vitamin D3). vitamin D is found in fish, eggs, and fortified milk. It's also made in the skin when exposed to sunlight. during periods of sunlight, vitamin D is stored in fat and then released when sunlight is not available. - your body can only absorb calcium, the primary component of bone, when vitamin D is present. Vitamin D also regulates many other cellular functions in your body. Its anti-inflammatory, antioxidant and neuro-protective properties support immune health, muscle function and brain cell activity. - vitamin D might play an important role in regulating mood and decreasing the risk of depression, and some studies suggest there may be a link between vitamin D and obesity, though more research is needed to verify this.

WHAT IS VITAMIN E?

- vitamin E is a nutrient that's important to vision, reproduction, and the health of your blood, brain and skin. vitamin E deficiency can cause nerve pain (neuropathy). - foods rich in vitamin E include canola oil, olive oil, margarine, almonds and peanuts. You can also get vitamin E from meats, dairy, leafy greens and fortified cereals. - getting enough vitamin E may help prevent oxidative stress and cellular damage. oxidative stress occurs when there’s an imbalance between your body’s antioxidant defenses and the production and accumulation of compounds called reactive oxygen species (ROS). this can lead to cellular damage and increased disease risk.

WHAT IS VITAMIN K?

- vitamin K is actually a group of compounds, with the most important ones being vitamin K1 and vitamin K2. vitamin K1 is obtained from leafy greens and some other vegetables. vitamin K2 is a group of compounds largely obtained from meats, cheeses, and eggs and synthesized by bacteria. - vitamin K's key role is to help heal injuries through blood clotting and strengthen bones by making four proteins among the 13 that are needed for blood clotting (coagulation) and osteocalcin.

[streettealee]

100% agree with this. I’m convinced Clare messed up her writing schedule or something or didn’t have a full outline for certain things and wound up losing track of everything that made up Chain of Gold and Chain of Iron, so that Chain of Thorns felt almost like a fanfic of her own canon fiction where a lot of people were OOC at least half the time. There were a lot of other ways Chain of Thorns could have gone and ways the atmosphere could have much more closely resembled the two previous stunning books, and I still haven’t recovered from the disappointment. 

Is it just me or does Chain of Thorns really feel like a book from a different series than the same ones Chain of Gold and Chain of Iron are a part of? Something happened and *crack* yeah, something happened.

[dayhair]

dr rants!

the squirrelly, inane edition that leaves you wondering why your eyes loom over certain semicolons and en-dashes [ how self-deprecating, i know 🎀 ]

also .. my first post, a liberating departure from the chains of shifttok

marauders; tell me why sirius black, heir apparent to the noble house of inbreeding, behaves like a broken analog clock — drinking at the sixth hour, and a mental breakdown with the occasional tactless jab when his little hand strikes nine ( i'll admit the metaphor is bizarre because i can't even tell the hour hand from the minute, anywho .. )

sirius black? oh, he invented sarcasm. and ebony locks of hair, chainsmoking ( whilst listening to lana del rey, crying in the shower ), sporadicity & a taste for gryffindor's finest, a bowie-loving werewolf

with him, it's always, "lonnie, i swear to god if you don't leave regulus alone," or, "let's deflower a firewhiskey after divination," no in-between

the insipid crash-outs & tantrums of an old-money dauphin must sound riveting, but a half-blood beauxbatons transfer can only behave so .. cordially; after all, my family's motto does translate to something like, "strike the iron while it's hot," and i'm not sure pulling sirius black's hair back as he [ i don't want to gross you out ] is what my ancestors had in mind whilst stitching gilded threads on our coat-of-arms

so .. do i ghost the anti-hero? i'm sure we'd have way more fun anyway if he was sorted into slytherin, or if i wasn't in his brother's year

gossip girl; serena van der woodsen, silver spring of her family, once said to me, "it's not my world, i just live in it." i'm pretty sure she was drunk, because she's no sylvia plath, no matter how hard she pretends. naïve me, in the dregs of upper east side bacchanals, more or less, teenage debauchery, and affairs on both sides of the tennis court — i'd no idea the roman holidays she was referring to, for death had always taken vacation on mine

picture this: a soirée, a suicide, a suit of cards ( hearts for the ones broken, clubs for the ultraviolence, diamonds for the [ well, we're bourgeoisie, there isn't much else to say ], and spades for my blackened luck )

i won't name-drop, but this ballot triggers easily to the unyielding imagination. let's just say an un-judging breakfast club was left fractured, and now i know to mark my julian calendar for the next time death and his blooded scythe strike

90s fame; how does one recover from the faux-pas, glossy tabloids of la la land? mixed reviews from critics and i questioned my steed in the oscar race, no golden globe nomination ( must they ignore me, so? and i know i could just script it in, but what's the fun in that?? ) and i'd already booked an month-off to st. tropez

a few things that i remember from this era

candid shots of me & heath ledger, drunk & the snl parody skit that followed

rumors of false behind-the-scenes drama, which then spurred into actuality 🤦‍♂️

appearing in britney spear's '.. baby one more time' mtv mv ( i was so nervous dbsndjwa )

i was on nirvana's 4th album cover ( scripted out kurt's death )

".. a pretentious performance that crashes into itself and shatters the film's narrative into something maladroit and unworthy of watching" ( some stupid critic about my acting; they don't know true talent or art. like at all. the movie's already a cult classic here so whatever ig )

oh, tinseltown. you pretend to be as glamorous as the age of beatniks & true cinema, but hollywood really is dead ..!

you've reached the post-script; i'd love to go on-&-on, but sleepiness strikes 💤

a reblog wouldn't hurt, eh? ( please )

ok. i'm done

ta-ta, happy shifting !!

[thewritetofreespeech]

May I request Gojo with an s/o who's the daughter of a lesser-known yet very humble clan who are blacksmiths? They do have a cursed technique though (the ability to both see all possible outcomes to any event and also control which ones will actually occur), they just prefer to create an use weaponry more.

“Senseeeii…where are we going?” Yuji bemoaned as he and Gojo walked up the miles worth of steep stairs towards a destination unknown.

“We have to get Slaughter Demon fixed.” He reminded him. “Now that the tournament is over, Mai-chan remembered you broke it and has been a complete pain ever since. Literally.” He rotated his shoulder to make a point.

“It was an accident!!” Yuji said. For the umpth time as no one seemed to be able to hear him when he said it any of the other times. “I didn’t know you could even break it. I thought they were like….magical items or something. Besides, weren’t you the one that stole it from Mai-san?”

“Eh, that part is less important.” Gojo replied. “In any case, like the proverbs say, if you want to solve a problem: you have to go to the top of the mountain.”

The two eventually made it to the top, where a big gate stood to let them in. “What is this place?” Yuji asked as he looked around the classic estate. Seeming frozen in time since the rise of the emperor.

“This is the place where all cursed tools come from. Or, at least, where any of the ones worth their salt come from.”

They continue walking through he seemingly abandoned estate until Yuji could here the sound of banging in the background. Soft, at first. Then louder as they came closer. The sharp sound of metal on metal in a rhythmic fashion having almost an ominous sound.

“Yoohoo~! [Y/N]-chan!!”

The banging stopped and Yuji’s blood ran cold as a face, covered in a welding mask, turned around to look at them. Back lit in an orange glow of a furnace. The smell of sulfur & iron in the air. Chains, blades, and containers of things he just classified as spooky all around. He thought ‘this is it. this is where I’m gonna die. my bones are going to be used to make a new blade for Mai-san.’

“Satoru?” His murder lifted their mask, and Yuji took a step back in preparation to flee, but stopped when he saw the face of a cute girl under the mask. “What are you doing here?”

“I thought I’d come to see you at work. You’re always so sexy in your little blacksmith outfit.” Yuji was very confused now. He’d gone from fearing for his life to wondering why his teacher was leering at the blacksmith. Who seemed both bashful and annoyed by his comment. “We also had a bit of an accident.”

“Is that Slaughter Demon?” [Y/N] asked as they got up and took the blade. Yuji realizing they weren’t as hulking as he originally thought, and much less intimidating. “What the hell happened to it? Who broke it?! I didn’t even know you could even break it.”

“Uh….it was me…” Yuji confessed with a shy raise of his hand. “It broke when I was fighting a Special Grade curse.”

“He died [Y/N]-chan.” Gojo added in.

“I mean that was later….”

[Y/N] seemed to listen and then eventually huffed and went over to their worktable.  “You know I made this for Mai, right? It won’t work correctly if anyone else uses it.”

“Cursed tools have specific users?”

“Not always.”

“[Y/N]-chan has a special ability.” Gojo said as they reviewed the tool to see what the actual damage was. “Aside from being a member of one of the great house that makes nearly all cursed tools, they have an inherit technique that lets them see all possibility.”

“Like Nanami’s technique?”

“It’s a little more advance than that. Nami-kun can only determine the probability of a fixed object for maximum damage. [Y/N] can assess all probability for a fixed portion of time. They can then employ that probability into their weapon construction and create nearly perfect cursed tools.”

“Wow. You know a lot about their technique Gojo-sensei. I didn’t know you even used cursed tools.”

Gojo smirked. “I’m not interested in the cursed tools.”

“Ok. I think I got it figured out. It’s a clean enough break at least, but it’ll take me a few days to reconstruct. Have Mai come by Saturday to pick it up.”

“Oooor, you could bring it by the campus yourself and we could go on a date.” Gojo countered with a grin.

“I have a lot of work to do Satoru.”

“Doing what? Making more artifacts for the Zenins to hang on their wall?” [Y/N]’s furtive look let him know it was true. “Come on. I haven’t seen you in ages.”

“…fine…” [Y/N] replied to get him to stop giving her the puppy dog eyes. “I’ll drop it off. It was nice to meet you Yuji.”

“Y-Yeah…nice to meet you too [Y/N]-san. Sorry for breaking your knife.” He gave a low bow and [Y/N] chuckled.

“It’s ok. It wasn’t meant for you. I’m sure someone forgot to tell you that when they gave it to you without permission.” Gojo gave her a little wink with his tongue out. Clearly thinking that if he just played dumb & cute, he’d get away with it. Like he always did. “I’m just sorry it didn’t hold up enough for you to not get hurt. At least the dying part didn’t stick.”

“Oh. It’s ok. I’m used to it now.” Yuji said with a laugh and rubbing the back of his head. Sort of a messed up thing to be ok with.

The men leave and let [Y/N] get back to work. “They seem nice.”

“They are.” Gojo confirmed as they headed down the stairs. “But don’t get any ideas, Yuji-kun. [Y/N]-chan is mine. And I won’t have you using your boyish good looks and charm to sway them away.”

“You think I’m good looking Gojo-sensei??”

[whilereadingandwalking]

As always, my favorites of the year list was beset by last minute changes, doubts, and decisions, especially because this year I forced myself into a top 10!

Second photo is my honorable mentions...I literally already have regrets! Ask me anything about these top choices—I'm happy to share my reviews, thoughts, and more!

My Top Ten of 2023:

Tale of Genji by Lady Murasaki Shikibu tr. Seidensticker

Nettle & Bone by T. Kingfisher

Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield

We Deserve Monuments by Jas Hammonds

The Vaster Wilds by Lauren Groff

What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat by Aubrey Gordon

Ace by Angela Chen

Babel by R.F. Kuang

Chain-Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

Our Share of Night by Mariana Enríquez tr. McDowell

Honorable mentions:

Now Go: On Grief and Studio Ghibli by Karl Thomas Smith

What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami tr. Gabriel

The Water Outlaws by S.L. Huang

White Cat, Black Dog: Stories by Kelly Link

The Word for World is Forest by Ursula K. Le Guin

When the Hibiscus Falls by M. Evelina Galang

Let Us Descend by Jesmyn Ward

The Spare Man by Mary Robinette Kowal

Bleed: Destroying Myths and Misogyny in Endometriosis Care by Tracey Lindeman

Never a City So Real by Alex Kotlowitz

The Crown Ain't Worth Much by Hanif Abdurraqib

Sons of Darkness (Jan ’24) by Gourav Mohanty

The End of August by Yū Miri tr. Giles

(Unpictured): Iron Widow by Xiran Jay Zhao

(Unpictured): The Thick and the Lean by Chana Porter

[alexanderwales]

Game Review: Factorio: Space Age (pt 2)

This is the second part of my review of Factorio: Space Age, covering the planets. This will have more spoilers than the previous section, but also include more cohesive thoughts on the expansion as a whole.

Vulcanus

Once you've built a spaceship, you have a choice of three planets to go to, and you can do them in any order you'd like. Each planet comes with its own researchable rewards, which require you to build up a base on the planet capable of making a science pack and shipping it into space (or alternately, to remake all sciences on the planet, but this is stupid and pointless given what lies further down the tech tree).

I chose Vulcanus first. There are five resources here, three of which can't be found anywhere else: coal, sulfuric acid, calcite, tungsten ore, and lava. Lava gets used to make anything having to do with copper and iron using the foundry, which is most of the things in Factorio. Sulfuric acid gets used with calcite to make water, which is one of the notable things missing from Vulcanus, along with oil. Plastic requires a long chain to make: coal liquefaction into heavy oil into light oil into petroleum into plastic. Because rockets require plastic twice (LDS and blue chips), you eventually need to set up a fairly sizeable build for this.

I didn't find any of this to be too interesting. Infinite resources are at least different, but there was nothing that fundamentally changed how I view the game, and I ended up setting up a bus with more fluids than usual, mostly making on-site plates, pipes, steel, etc. The art for it is cool, and impassable lava is at least a little constraining, but I didn't feel like it was all that great.

Tungsten ore is the main material from Vulcanus, and it's defended by the other major thing that makes the place unique, the worms. Each worm has a territory, and until you've killed your first worm, you don't have access to a tungsten ore patch, only loose scraps that have been laying around.

The worms are long and segmented, very distinct from the biters. They disable electronics with their attacks, making fountains of lava beneath you, and overall I think they're cool ... except that they're a little too easy to defeat. I set up a grid of 50 turrets with armor-piercing ammo, and that proved sufficient.

This is a boring solution. I wish it didn't work. It was the first thing I tried, and afterward I thought ... well, what was the point of that? I don't have a good solution to what you'd want to do to stop this from working, but I do think this is sort of bad design, since it's a "more dakka" solution. I've also seen that you can build a tank and take one out with a single uranium shell, which is even worse design. What I wanted was a fight were I needed to use poison capsules, land mines, strategically placed turrets, etc., some kind of mixed-asset offensive package, and what I got was fifty turrets in a stupid grid. I really do try to not be one of those players that optimizes myself out of having fun, but it's hard to motivate myself to do something the pointlessly hard way when there's something simple, easy, and foolproof.

The other thing about demolishers is that they have their own territory, and that territory never changes. This means that if you want to expand beyond a relatively modest starting patch, you need to kill them ... but unless you're going for a megabase, you don't need to kill more than three or four of them across the entire time playing the game, and since they only attack if you build in their territory, those worm encounters become like 1% of the Vulcanus experience.

I would have liked if the worm territories changed. I think it would have been cool if they fought each other for dominance over an area in a way you could capitalize on, or if they would expand into places that no one had claimed, or places a dead rival had left behind. It would have been cool to require the player to build up some do-nothing machines or other infrastructure to keep the worms back, like a sort of "build this at the edge of your territory to be in constant motion to convince the worms that it's occupied" type of thing. But instead, you just kill the worms and that's that, you never see them again unless you go hunting them. According to my end-of-game statistics, I killed 8 small demolishers and 2 medium demolishers, which was probably 5 more worms than I needed to kill, since I ended up with a lot of empty space I didn't do anything with.

So overall, Vulcanus is the weakest of the planets for me, and I think that's at least partly down to the under-use of the worms and the simplicity of the "new" mechanics.

Fulgora

Fulgora contains the ruins of a vast civilization, and there are no resources except the heavy oil between islands and the scrap that's left behind. Solar is terrible on Fulgora, but there are lightning storms at night, and lightning towers can collect it into accumulators to power your base.

Scrap gets "recycled" into a bunch of different things, and so it quickly because a nightmare of sorting things out, dealing with excess products, and turning complex materials into simple ones. There are no iron plates, those need to be recycled from iron gears. There are no copper platers, those need to be recycled from copper wire. Blue chips, which in any other circumstance need to be jealously guarded, are found in abundance.

I found this to be great fun. The challenge is certainly unique, turning the production chain on its head, but it has a nice "ramp" to it, as first you get a pile of crap, then you turn it into things, then you uncover excesses that are gumming it up, and the problems keep coming, but they usually come after you've solved some other problem.

When I started, I did a sushi belt (ed. - a sushi belt is a belt that contains multiple unsorted good, controlled by circuit conditions which allow certain limits of each item to go by, named after conveyor belt sushi restuarants), which was good enough for the short term and got me all the basic technologies, but ran into all the problems that come with a sushi belt, and switched over to a belt-based sorting system of splitters that could handle two full green belts of scrap input.

There is, for me, one big miss on Fulgora, which is that the lightning storms are basically not a challenge at all. You set up a grid of substations, each with a lightning rod, and that protects your base. You set up accumulator fields on one tip of the island, and this is a pretty boring solution. If you went to Gleba first, you can instead set up heating towers that burn the fuel you get from scrap, but this doesn't seem like it saves terribly much more space, and either way you need the lightning towers, so I'm not sure it's worth anything, and I never implemented that plan.

One of the other big challenges of Fulgora is that it's a set of islands, and there's no way to place anything on the oil sands. Additionally, there are two types of islands, one with a fair amount of space and minimal scrap, the other with tons of scrap and almost no room. In theory, this encourages a rail world, but in practice, the first island I plopped down on was the one I stayed on the entire time, and my rail network, such as it was, extended to only two of the smaller islands to guarantee all the scrap I would ever need. I think I rolled high on one of those islands: 63M scrap is a ton, but that's what I ended up with on default settings. With the drills from Vulcanus, expected output is double that, and with the legendary drills I can now produce, it would be 787M. There's simply not a need to place rails elsewhere.

I do feel that Fulgora would have benefitted from some enemies of some kind, either those that lived on the oil fields, so you'd have to build defenses on the edges of the islands, or some kind of robot enemy that you needed to kill to take islands from. Given the setup of an abandoned high-tech planet, and the electrical weapons you unlock there, it would have been nice to have some reason or chance to use them. I've definitely played Factorio scenarios with bot opponents and buildings that can be captured after the AI's defenses have been breached.

Still, the scrap sorting puzzle was a good one, with many solutions, and Fulgora was a ton of fun.

Gleba

Gleba is a swampy fungi planet. There are no conventional resources except for stone, and pretty much everything else is derived from two plants, jellynut and yamako, that get broken down.

The main mechanic of the planet is spoilage, where materials break down over time. Jellynut and yamako last for about an hour, the products you get from them are much less, a material made from both of them, bioflux, lasts a lot longer, and nutrients, which are fed to the new building, the biochamber, last hardly any time at all.

Spoilage is cool because it requires a very different mindset. Normally in Factorio, you're building up big buffers to minimize downtime. On Gleba, you want as little buffer as possible, just constant rivers of materials flowing by to be as fresh as possible, because if anything stays still for too long, there's a chance it'll spoil, which will stop the machine trying to take the ingredient, which can create a spoilage cascade.

My initial plan was to have some kind of circuit-based just-in-time system, where every machine would be monitored in order to see what ingredients it needed, and everything would be made fresh-to-order.

I ended up not doing this, mostly because demand stays relatively constant, and where it doesn't stay constant, you can just eat the spoilage costs. There's so much abundance that you really don't need to care about half your crops going to waste.

The other reason I didn't end up going with this is because unfortunately, the "river of goods" solution has essentially no complications to it, and you can simply dump everything into a recycler/incinerator at the end. In some of the Factorio overhaul mods, this concept is called "voiding", a way of dealing with byproducts, and if you make voiding easy, you essentially remove a logistical challenge, which means less gameplay. I kind of get why they made this easy, but ... I don't know. I did kind of want something that would require a big, complicated solution, a factory that dances on the edge of clogging itself up.

I ended up with a completely belt-based system, with a belt of jelly and mash, then a belt of bioflux, all nutrients made on demand, and production lines in defined blocks. The final build does 520 science/minute, which becomes 2Ks/m with full-prod biolabs, most of which goes into the trash, since it's not actually consumed all the time.

One of my favorite little puzzles of Gleba was the metals, which are produced with bacteria that spoil in a minute, becoming ore. There's a process, with bioflux, of having bacteria make more bacteria, but if the bacteria ever stop flowing (if, for example, you have enough ore), then they spoil and die, and the whole production line stops. So you need to build in a little kickstart system that will inject new bacteria if it's needed, and I found that to be delightful to work on.

The other major thing on Gleba are the enemies, which are pentapods. Pentapod eggs are necessary to make biochambers and science, but after you have one, you can set up breeding, which is dangerous given they can make more of themselves, but definitely the way to go. There are three forms of pentapod, all with their own weaknesses, and ...

Look, I went to Gleba last, but I put up a defensive wall fairly early on using only materials that I had gotten from Gleba, and then basically never had any cause to think about the pentapods again. Because I slapped this down with blueprints, it took all of ten minutes, most of which was spent fixing the kind of scuffed corners (skill issue). So I would say the amount that I actually got to experience the pentapods was pretty minimal. I also shipped in four artillery turrets that are crowded around a box of ammo, supplied by site-made shells using imported tungsten, and the circle almost entirely contains my pollution cloud, so in theory it's just an easily solved problem.

It might have been different if I had gone to Gleba first, I don't know and can't say without actually doing that, but I would have liked a little more of a challenge, and this might be where being a veteran hinders me.

Overall, I really enjoyed Gleba, the mechanics were new and unique, the little puzzles inherent in design were interesting, and I thought that overall it had the best art direction of the four planets, which is saying something, because I think they're all great on the front.

Aquilo

On every other planet, a "cold start" is possible, building up from just what you find laying around. Aquilo is different: it's a planet with ammonia oceans and some scattered liquid vents, and part of the point of it is that you need materials from outside, including anything made from iron, copper, or stone. You can't softlock on other planets, but you can softlock on Aquilo.

Aside from requiring pretty solid planetary logistics, Aquilo's main mechanic is heat. It's cold enough there that bots don't work very well, and everything has to have a heat pipe near it for it to function, including pipes and belts. To heat up a heat pipe takes either nuclear, fusion, or the heat towers that burn up fuel, and if the heat ever stops flowing, everything will seize up, requiring heroic efforts to get running again.

There's not all that much to Aquilo. You pull up slurry from the ocean, split it into ammonia and ice, use them together to make ice platforms, import concrete, and then combine oil and ammonia to make rocket fuel, which is used to both launch rockets and to toss into heating towers for power and heat to keep everything running.

The science pack is easy, though it require imported holmium plate, and my entire 200 science per minute production line was run off a tiny cluster of buildings that would have been pretty trivial to expand.

It seems to me that Aquilo is at least partly inspired by Seablock, an infamous mod where you start with almost nothing on a tiny island that you have to expand with the mineral sludge you dredge up with an offshore pump. But Seablock is a very long mod, one that typically takes hundreds of hours, and here ... well, there are a handful of challenges, and they're not all that challenging. I think I could probably list them out now.

Making ammonia also makes ice. You can void excess ice through repeated recycling, but ammonia can't be voided except by combining it with crude oil to make solid fuel, which can then be put in an incinerator. I solved this problem with a simple circuit condition.

Science and some crafting uses coolant, which must be cooled back down after use. If you just keep making coolant, eventually the system will seize up, since you won't be able to put more hot coolant into the system. But because this is a lossy cycle (you lose half the coolant) you can just hook a pump up to a tank and only inject more hot coolant into the system when below a threshold.

Outposts need their own heating for the pumps to work, and those outposts are, on default settings, quite far away. This requires setting up a self-sufficient little heating module that's either serviced by train or which runs entirely with materials found at the outpost. I ended up doing two different modules, one for oil outposts and the other for everywhere else ... but I never actually had to use them, because there were sufficient resources for tens of thousands of resources right next to the starting area.

As the "final boss", I am underwhelmed, and even as one of four planets I find myself a little underwhelmed. I don't know how much postgame stuff I'm going to do, but I can't see that there's going to be much challenge in going large on Aquilo, except that I might have to build another ship for moving in materials (as currently I have a single ship that makes a circuit of the solar system for materials and also handles shipments of science).

There is also, again, a lack of enemy. Once the rocket fuel setup was done, I had a single scare when ammonia backed up and stopped ice production, which shut down the water chem plant, which killed the turbines and stopped power to the entire base. But that didn't even freeze anything out, and it was fixed pretty easily from a restart module I'd built earlier, and after that, the ammonia issue was fixed to never have that problem again. If the cold is the enemy, it's not enough of one for my tastes.

Integration

With each planet you conquer, you get a new science pack, which opens up new technologies, and in theory you, can use them on other planets. These buildings are very powerful, and so there's some incentive to return to old factories, rip up old designs, and install new ones using the better buildings.

I did eventually do this, but I'm not sure how much I actually needed to. My furnace stacks were replaced by the foundries from Vulcanus, supplies by a hauler ship exclusively for calcite, though I did make an abortive attempt to just harvest calcite from space using a stationary space platform.

(I made four of them before giving up on the project, and found out only later that asteroid spawn rates depend on how many chunks large the ship is, so the ideal build has asteroid collectors on very long arms, and there's nothing in the game that tells you about the asteroid spawning thing, so ... whatever, it's opaque and very gamey hidden stuff, of the kind that I hate.)

I replaced my circuit production areas with the EMP, which saved vast quantities of resources and also made more circuits at a much faster rate within the same blueprint. I upgraded most belts to green.

I didn't end up using the biochambers much, in part because they need nutrients to run, and 50% prod with more module slots is great, but not so great that I wanted to set up a biter egg farm that could potentially blow up in my face.

Cryochambers just came too late for me to implement them anywhere, though I probably would if I kept playing to the megabase stage, or if I'm gunning for an achievement that requires updating Nauvis.

So I think, strangely, when considering how the planets impact each other, they ... kind of don't all that much? Yes, having foundries on Gleba means that you can make all your belts and things at a fraction of the cost, but how much doesn't that really impact anything? It meant that my ore production areas could be smaller, I guess. Is that worth anything? I kind of don't think so, if I'm considering the main gameplay to be in terms of design and decisions. Foundries saved me from having to lay down a furnace stack. EMPs saved me from having to have expansive red circuit lines to get the blue chips necessary for rocket launches.

Ideally, I would have liked one or two killer techs that mostly work through combining each planet's "thing". Like imagine that there was a combination recycler and foundry that melted down whatever was put into it, giving you molten copper and iron in exchange, creating a whole new kind of problem in exchange for ... I don't know, much much faster recycling, or less loss from recycling, or maybe a recipe that allowed true voiding. Or if you went to Gleba and then Vulcanus, and were able to bring biochambers that would allow the cultivation of some new specimen specific to that environment, maybe something that would allow better plastic production, or could pull water out of the air, both of which are kind of a pain in the ass on Vulcanus. Couldn't there be some kind of new bacteria swimming in the oil sands of Fulgora? Not something that would trivialize any challenge, something that would be a reward for having two flavors of research from two different planets. Ideally, there'd be six of these in total, allowing for each pair to benefit each other pair, but at that point I start to feel like I'm just asking for new content.

I cracked my game back open to check the tech tree, and all the Aquilo techs require all three planets. The are two techs that require mixed packs: Rail Support Foundations, which simplify rails for Fulgora, and Railgun Damage, which increases the power of the railgun. That's it. This screams missed opportunity to me.

So in terms of how the planets and their mechanics interact with each other ... I would say that they mostly don't, which is a bit of a shame. The biochamber in particular requires nutrients, which makes it effectively unusable on Vulcanus and Fulgora ... unless you're shipping in heroic quantities of bioflux, I guess, though I don't think that I could ever see myself doing that. I guess maybe on Vulcanus, which has the aforementioned plastics problem? But it feels like the kind of thing that would mostly be done for a stunt rather than because it was actually the right thing to do. And potentially on Nauvis, but it does seem like a megabase thing to do, rather than normal play. I will have to do the math, this too might be a skill issue.

(Real quick: 1 Bioflux makes 8 nutrients in a standard biochamber, which is 12 with prod, which is 24 MJ. A biochamber consumes 500kW, so with no spoilage nutrients allow 2 crafts of the 2 second oil cracking recipes, which means that every Bioflux can, at most, turn 960 heavy oil into 1080 light oil rather than the 720 light oil it would normally crack into. But obviously since the Bioflux has to be shipped in, it ends up being less than that. This is obviously more effective than shipping over oil itself, but ... man, I don't know, this seems very weak, even with adding in productivity to other steps. I guess the use case in Nauvis, where you're in theory shipping Bioflux anyway in order to feed captive biters, but that's still premised on an oil shortage that I never actually experienced.)

I do also want to say that quality had very little impact on my play. I tended to carry around some high quality quality modules and use them when crafting infrastructure, but in most cases it just wasn't much to write home about. It's most important for the ships, and for personal stuff, but it never felt that important.

And finally, I do want to give a shoutout to how easy and effective remote viewing was. One of the things I'm going to eventually do, after a Factorio break, is the 40 hour achievement run, and I have to imagine that a lot of that is just landing on a planet, doing the unlocks, building a rocket to get back, then having starter bots do all the actual base building for me, which is pretty cool.

Conclusion

Space Age took me about 140 hours, and I would say that about 10 of that was idle time while I was waiting for legendary ship parts or for a buildup of materials. The Jacknape-class ships have an issue with ammo production where they can more or less keep up with rockets, but the belt buffer goes from the front of the ship to the back, meaning that it empties from where it's needed most, rather than emptying where it's needed least, and yeah, having a fully stacked buffer takes a hot minute of waiting. Similarly, the quality module I made works over sufficient time scales, but especially while waiting on quality quality modules, there's a real temptation to just leave it running rather than actively playing.

130 hours for a veteran player is a long time for an expansion, much longer than I would have expected, even knowing what I knew about the expansion going in. Some of that time I don't count as expansion time, like all the parts where I was just doing normal Factorio stuff, and I did end up building adapted malls on each of the planets, which added on more time that could have been cut out by making an effective blueprint the first go-around, and which I don't really count as expansion time, because there's not much that's unique about making the new malls. But even if I'm arbitrarily cutting things out, that's still a ton of time.

Overall, I'm extremely happy with it, and I think I'll be more happy with it once there's another round of iteration, QoL, changes based on feedback, and modding. The modding scene for Factorio is really really good, and I have to imagine that the expansion is only going to make it better, particularly some of the changes that were made to implementation.

But I do think that it could have been more, and maybe this is just coming from a guy with more than a thousand hours in this game and multiple overhaul mods under his belt. It's very possible I would have had a better time with it if I'd chosen a higher difficulty, though of course that's very hard to know ahead of time. Certainly there were some design misses for me, and at least some of that is because I have enough experience that I can fix things with circuitry, plan a base that doesn't immediately become spaghetti, and see the deadlocks coming. I'm not saying that it wasn't hard, because parts of it certainly were, and I'm not saying that I made a bunch of perfect bases with no major flaws, because there were designs that needed to be ripped out and belts that needed to squeak through. But I think I would have preferred more complexity, more problems, more more more, and I'll have to hope that mods can give it to me.

All that said, this is the best expansion I've ever played, they put a ton of work into making sure that every planet was truly different from the others artistically and mechanically, and it's a 10/10 from me.

(I do plan on getting all achievements ... eventually. The "win in 40 hour" achievement seems very doable, and that's the hardest of the lot, though the others might take some significant time. It took me multiple years to finally getting around to doing the last green chip achievement, so I'm in no rush.)

[eggshellsareeat]

Alright, here's my review of Parkour Civilization as a (retired) actual Minecraft parkour player on how well it represents high-level Minecraft parkour. Spoilers and infodumping below!

Minecraft Version

Most parkour players play 1.8 or 1.12. Modern Minecraft has a couple fundamental movement changes, namely making walls harder to jump around.

Accuracy: Low

Walk-Only Parkour

Walk-Only parkour kinda sucks because fundamentally, it's significantly faster to walk diagonally (e.x hold w and d) than to walk straight (this is not true of sprinting: it is faster to sprint straight than diagonally).

Evbo_ also misnames some jumps, but that's a running theme and I'm not going to knock it too much. For what it's worth, a "one block vertical jump" is more correctly called a "one block + one", or "1+1" for short.

Accuracy: Low

Backwards Jumps and 360s

Backwards jumps don't really exist, but 360s are genuinely used for flair in the parkour scene. It's seen as very gutsy and impressive to 360 particularly risky jumps.

Could they bribe someone? Maybe.

Accuracy: Sort of

Multiple Jumps "In a row"

This exists in two forms: "chaining" and "onlysprint".

A chain jump is a jump which doesn't have enough starting space to get the speed to do the jump. Therefore, you need to do the previous jump and the chain jump in a row, "chaining" the two together to complete the course. Check out 10 Jumps to 10 Jumps to see this taken to its logical extreme.

It's not to be confused with "chain jumps", which are jumps on chain blocks.

Onlysprint is a harsher ruleset, which will auto-fail the player if they stop sprinting for any reason--this includes hitting walls. Courses are incredibly difficult, check out Iris for a great example.

Ultimately, it's a thing, and it's impressive.

Accuracy: Close-ish

Parkour Battles

Accuracy: What did you expect

Parkour Practice

At the pro civilization, there's an arena where players can practice jumps for risky courses. This is shockingly accurate.

"Rankup Parkour" is a format where courses are very long and have no checkpoints. Think of them like Foddian games, except parkour rankups predate Getting Over It by a good couple years.

So how do you do jumps at the very end of a map? Simple: leave, build them in a creative world, and practice them there. This is an incredibly common practice, and single sections of parkour can take multiple hours as a result. It's good fun.

Accuracy: Spot-on

That hidden barrier path at the one part of the pro course

This is a very common thing on older maps, which tended to have significant amounts of bullshit. Particular shout-out to the ceiling doors on JC IX, a set of 20 teleportation doors where 19 take you to random past points in the map and the 20th takes you to the end. No, you don't know which is which, they all look identical.

Accuracy: Accurate

Water bucket jumps

Water jumps are a thing, but water bucket clutches would qualify as "obstacle" and not pure parkour. I don't play obstacle, so I can't comment further

Accuracy: Low

Brewing stand jumps

They don't give effects, but I want to give them a mention for being the most annoying hitbox in the game. Evbo_ gets that one right.

Accuracy: Medium

The parkour champion

There's a lot of different types of parkour, so whoever's the best is pretty up for debate. They definitely don't rule over the parkour lands with an iron fist, though.

Accuracy: Low

The parkour god

Is kyroh still a meme?

Accuracy: Medium

The triple neo

Finally, we get to the end of the video. Evbo_ does a triple neo, and all is good with the world (presumably, haven't watched the sequel yet). Not much to nitpick here. Triples are hard, especially for new players. I personally see them as certifying a true parkour-er. When a Minecrafter does a triple neo, they get their wings. It's a real hallmark of a jump, and a great place to end the movie.

Although it's common enough to have a standard momentum which the parkour champion does NOT build, opting for 4bmm instead like a psychopath.

Accuracy: Medium