Reid Main

I was exposed to this earworm and now I pass it onto you.

Read The Strength of the Few

In April 2024 I wrote about The Will of the Many, the first book in the The Hierarchy series. I said I enjoyed the worldbuilding but found myself caring less about the characters as the story progressed. It also ended in what I would consider to be a horrible cliffhanger so I had high expectations that the second book would finally give some cathartic answers.

Unfortunately, The Strength of the Few is a complete failure in my opinion. I did not get any real answers to most of my questions. Dozens more were raised that had no conclusions. Character development and pacing continued to be all over the place. But worst of all this book also ends in another brutal cliffhanger. It is even more frustrating than the first because it explicitly undermines the emotional attachment you made with certain characters.

I compared the first book to Avengers: Infinity War and that comparison is still very apt. The Strength of the Few is effectively Avengers: Endgame if the film stopped just as the "time heist" commenced. It spends 700+ pages building towards these potentially cataclysmic showdowns when it just suddenly ends and we have to wait 2+ years for the conclusion. Except you're not actually going to get a conclusion because the author, James Islington, has revealed that The Hierarchy series is going to be at least four books. When I heard that I lost all interest in reading anything more from him. He burned up so much good will with The Strength of the Few that I have absolutely no confidence in him as a writer anymore.

Reading these books, and the first two of the Red Rising trilogy, leads me to believe that book trilogies with only a single point-of-view character are almost always destined to fail. By the second book the main protagonist's plot armour is so strong and the requirement that they be at the centre of every major event usually makes their actions completely unbelievable. The crazy shit that Vis does in the second book makes absolutely no sense based on the character progression he had in the first. Core parts of his personality have been thrown away or retconned for the sake of the plot. Also, barely any time has passed so we are still supposed to believe that this naive 18 year old learned everything he needed in a year of boarding school such that he can now rule over what is effectively Ancient Rome.

I was thinking about the Mistborn trilogy and how different it would be if we saw everything from Vin's perspective. Yes, she is the "chosen one" who is fighting the big bad thoroughout every book. But she comes off as much more human because we see her from so many other perspectives. While her actions are central to the plot, there are dozens of other characters who are nearly as important and their actions carry really weight and gravitas. In The Hierarchy series Vis is this godlike being that everything revolves around even though he is seemingly become more inept as the books progress.

Season two of The Pitt

Season two of The Pitt concluded this month and, unlike The Strength of the Few, they really did stick the landing. I'm of the opinion that cliffhangers are nearly always negative because they typically leave you wondering what happened in the next five seconds. The best cliffhangers are the ones that leave you asking what did this mean months from now. That is what both season 1 and 2 of The Pitt managed. I cannot wait to see what happens next to all of these doctors but I personally do not need a 16th episode to show how they handled the immediate aftermath of such a brutal shift. I want to jump ahead several months to see the ramifications and how it caused the characters to grow.

Which is to say that that I am still very psyched about a January 2027 release of a third season.

The Super Mario Galaxy Movie

Nintendo has continued to weaponize my nostalgia and got me out to the theatre for The Super Mario Galaxy Movie this month. Objectively it is a bad film as they just stapled a bunch of random Nintendo references together for 90 minutes but I'd be lying if I said I didn't eat them all up.

Stellar Blade

I don't want to spend a lot of time on this because Stellar Blade already wasted 30 hours of my life. If you are looking for a "I know it when I see it" pornographic video game where you can ogle an impossibly proportion Korean woman/cyborg in various stages of undress then by all means spend $90 CAD on Temu Bayonetta.

But I gotta give props where it's due. Shift Up saw the boobie physics that Team Ninja perfected in the early 2000s and decided to crank it to 11. I wouldn't be shocked to hear if this was some R&D project where they worked on the physics and costumes for multiple years before realizing they needed to ship a video game and just slapped something together in six months.

Every single aspect of this game, except for the pornography, has been done better elsewhere. Devil May Cry 5, Bayonetta, Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, and Sekiro are some of the most obvious examples. But if you still want to be titillated then play Nier: Automata which has superior combat, story, and open-world exploration.

But I guess the old adage that "sex sells" continues to hold true. So if you're looking for a game where a nearly nude female Android routinely fights other nearly nude female Androids you've hit the jackpot with Stellar Blade.

Xenonauts 2

If you asked me to pick my favourite video game of all-time X-COM: UFO Defense would undoubtedly make the shortlist. I have more vivid memories playing X-COM on my cousin's PlayStation 1 than the original Super Mario Bros. on NES. I wrote X-COM fan fiction for my grade 5 English class, and am actually still in possession of it because the PowerBook 180 I wrote it on is sitting on the shelf behind me. I say all of this so you understand that the following opinion must be taken with a massive grain of salt.

Xenonauts 2 is a fantastic game and the most faithful X-COM: UFO Defense remake ever.

While I thoroughly enjoy Firaxis' XCOM games, playing through Xenonauts 2 made me realize how much I loved the original. Soldiers are so much more expendable but flexible. Air superiority is an integral part of pushing back the alien threat. And by god it felt great to have to manage "time units" again. I will be forever grateful to Firaxis' for modernizing the franchise and bringing it to a mainstream audience. But I am super happy that even in this day and age games like Xenonauts 2 can still be released.

Factorio

I finally managed to "beat" Factorio after 109 hours. Previously I had written about how I was already planning my second playthrough but by the time we reached the edge of the solar system my brain was absolutely fried. I still do want to go back and try to create some perfect mega factory but I gotta take a few months off first.

Looking back at my time with Factorio I can definitely say that I enjoyed the the pre-space travel part of the game more. There were a lot of fun aspects of the Space Age expansion, particularly the planet Vulcanus. But I really did not enjoy ferrying resources across the solar system. At the same time planets like Gleba were just straight up frustrating and really killed my motivation to continue. But I also think I share part of the blame because, just like Satisfactory, I was obsessed with "beating" the game. I didn't want to get bogged down building a perfect factory. I was pushing to unlock the next component so I could get myself closer to "winning". My hope with both Factorio and Satisfactory is that whenever I go back to either game I turn off all objectives and instead focus on what will bring me joy.

Dyson Sphere Program

Even thought I was done with Factorio my brain still craved factory automation so I purchased Dyson Sphere Program to try and keep the high going. Unfortunately it worked more like methadone and helped me kick the habit.

I do not think Dyson Sphere Program is a bad game. I can totally see why hundreds of thousands of people love it. But to me it is inferior to Satisfactory and Factorio in nearly every way. I tried to start the game three different times over the span of 20 hours and bounced off hard every time. I kept expecting all of the quality of life improvements that Satisfactory and Factorio had to be in Dyson Sphere Program, and every time I ran into a rough edge it killed any momentum I had. Some people are going to say I should give the developers a break because the game is in early access but it has been like that for five years now. It seems like the last major update was three years ago and the developers are effectively treating this game as finished.

So rather than continuing to bang my head against the wall I chose to be finished with it as well.

Smoked Chicken Thighs

Continuing the trend of writing about what I smoked this month we tried to some bone-in chicken thighs. We decided to skip brining this time so it was really straight forward and came out fantastic.

1. Preheat the smoker to 375 degrees. If your smoker gets to that temperature in less than 60 minutes consider doing this step once you've started spicing the meat.
2. Thoroughly salt the chicken thighs and put them in the fridge for 30 minutes to remove moisture from the skin.
3. Cover the chicken thighs in the desired space and put them back in the fridge for another 30 minutes.
4. Place the chicken thighs directly on the grill and cook for 60 minutes.
5. Check temperature of the chicken and ensure it is at least 175 degrees before taking it off the smoker.
6. Cover and let sit for 10-15 minutes before serving.

When I use this recipe again I'll make one change as the skin was more charred than I would have liked. I don't think it affected the taste that much but from an aesthetic perspective it definitely looked like we could have screwed up and overcooked it. So next time I'll only cook for 50 minutes before checking the temperature and char on the skin. I'm betting that I'll be able to take the chicken off at that time and after letting it stand for 10-15 minutes it will be cooked through perfectly.

Review April Goals

• 🙅🏻‍♂️ Run 50+ kilometres.
• ✅ Lift weights 12+ times.
• 🙅🏻‍♂️ Paint some miniatures.
• ✅ Play a new board game.
• ✅ Read a book.

May Goals

• Finish reading Shorefall.
• Play The Lord of the Rings: Fate of the Fellowship.