Halfway Through Dark Age... Should I Keep Reading?
Welcome to another reading vlog! Er, blog; the vlog is the video version, which you can find below. I think I’m going to plan to do these when I have bulkier books to read because it gives me more time to enjoy the books rather than feeling rushed to get them completed within a week. This is a pretty good idea since I’ve got some hefty stories coming up after I’m done with Dark Age!
In this post, I’ll talk about a bit of what I’ve been up to in the past couple of weeks, as well as some casual thoughts on Dark Age, which I’m halfway through!
Spending Whirlwind
Christmas is skyrocketing toward us, bringing the end of 2021 with it (so suddenly). This means the holidays have rolled around, and with them comes the delight of purchasing and giving gifts to loved ones! I have bought several presents for members of my D&D campaign, as well as gifts for my family members. I’m excited to get those out! We’re doing our D&D Christmas this Saturday, so I won’t have footage of that for the video coming up, but I’m so excited about it! I’m pretty proud of the presents I got for everyone. You can even see some of those gifts behind me in several of my recent videos (including the video for this post). All of the D20 stockings are filled with presents for my lovely players.
In addition to buying gifts for others, I bought a couple of things for myself. There are two things in particular that I am extra excited about. One of them was especially pricey but is something that I have needed for several years. I’ll get to that in just a second because the other thing I got me (which was also expensive, but not too terrible) is a Playstation 5! I finally got my hands on one through Walmart’s Black Friday sale. I had to stay awake several hours past my bedtime to get in the (thankfully digital) line to order this. A few weeks later, it arrived in perfect condition and I’ve already picked up some games for it that I’m excited to play, specifically the director’s cut of my favorite game ever: Ghost of Tsushima.
The Other Thing
So the other thing that I bought was… a laptop. Back in 2016, I bought my first real laptop. I purchased it because I worked overnights at a data center and wanted a device I could use to work on some educational things, specifically learning game development and art. Obvious the work PC wasn’t going to be great for that and I always had several hours to kill each night because… well, it was overnights. Once changes were done, I was typically left with five or six hours of just sitting there waiting for things to catch on fire, so I wanted to get a laptop to fill in that time frame.
The laptop I purchased served its purpose well and has been faithful to me for many years! It still works fairly well, too, though is beginning to show signs of age (and has been for about a year, now). It also just isn’t great for editing videos, which I’m doing a lot of, now. With that in mind, I knew I needed to shell out a nice chunk of cash to build a laptop that suits my needs… so that’s what I did.
I went with Origin PC. Their customer support was incredibly friendly and so helpful. They worked with me to make sure I was getting exactly the laptop I wanted, right down to the laser engraving of my logo on the back! It’s much lighter than my old laptop, has a better display, and works like a dream. I’m definitely going to be using this for editing on the go in the future, as well as gaming and other things! I’m so excited to finally have this.
Oh, Yeah… And…
I bought another thing. It didn’t go as well as the other two. If you somehow don’t know, I run a D&D Campaign. I even have a series that’s designed to help other game masters run their own homebrew tabletop worlds! As part of the campaign, I have a 3D printer that I use to print miniatures for my games. It worked like a charm for several years but recently started failing consistently. I know how to fix it, but the process and all that are just so frustrating to me. I’m not the kind of person who can bear to spend several days on a project like that, so instead, I went and bought an upgraded model that will require less fiddling than my older model.
I was so excited to sit down, put it together, and start printing something again… but then…
Then I found that they hadn’t sent me everything.
Yeah.
The box was missing several key components.
So I contacted support and they’ve been giving me the run-around for several days, asking for all sorts of random photographs and pieces of “clarifying information” before finally telling me that they were going to contact the warehouse. It’s been days since they told me that they’d be contacting the warehouse and, as of the time of this recording, they still haven’t gotten back to me or sent the missing parts! It’s seriously ridiculous and so frustrating; I really wanted to print some minis for this Saturday’s session, and now I won’t be able to. Nice.
Dark Age
Throughout all of this, I have of course been reading Dark Age by Pierce Brown! This is the second book of the sequel trilogy, a follow-up to Iron Gold. I enjoyed Iron Gold considerably and had heard that Dark Age is even better, so I came in with high expectations… and Dark Age…
has seriously exceeded those expectations, so far. However high those expectations were going in, they have been blown out of the water by this follow-up to Iron Gold.
I’m about halfway through and this is already my favorite book by Pierce Brown. It is epic. We open with some incredibly intense action that permeates the book throughout. It is a relentless, brutal, and emotional rollercoaster. If you’ve read the books, then you should understand what I mean when I say that at the time of this writing, I’ve just finished… that chapter from Mustang’s perspective. And that was… wow.
That was a lot. I was shocked.
I cannot wait to get back to reading it. So far, I am feeling like Dark Age is pushing toward the five-star mark. Unless it tanks the ending (which I can’t see happening), then I have a feeling that this is going to be the first five-star Pierce Brown book that I review. It is excellent. Absolutely fantastic. So far, it’s probably one of the best books I have read so far, this year.
My more thorough review of Dark Age will be released next Wednesday! I’ll be a bit more specific and critical in that review, so stay tuned for that.
Redoing My Bookshelf Lights!
Oh, and one more thing that I did these past couple of weeks is redoing my bookshelves! You may have noticed a gradual change in the appearance of my bookshelves throughout recent videos. First, I moved some shelves around so that I could get a third, larger shelf in place behind me instead of the small white one that used to be there. Then, I spent hours adding some Philips Hue light strips to the interior of the shelves so that I can get some nicer, more precise control over the lighting. This makes it great for filming with some holiday-esque lighting behind me!
The process was long and challenging, but… I’m pretty happy with the results.
Sony A7III Woes
If you watched my video version of this post, you may have noticed I shot it from my webcam... yeah, that's right. My Sony A7III has given up on me. Yesterday, I did a huge filming spree, filming five videos... all of which turned out to be worthless, due to a lack of audio. See, the Sony A7III is notorious for having a bad mic input that can just give up on you at any time. When I bought the camera, videography was the furthest thing from my mind; I just wanted nice photos! So I didn't care about microphone problems. Now, though, this is a showstopper. I'm working with Sony support to hopefully get this fixed, but even after it's fixed, there's no telling when the problem will recur.
I still have some videos that I've filmed that will work--specifically the two remaining "cringemas" videos I've been doing, which are out this Friday and the following Friday. I'll need to figure something out for the rest of them, though. All in all, this has been an incredibly frustrating couple of weeks, so I'm considering this a very frustrated reading blog... or vlog.
Conclusion
Well, this has been a brief blog post about what I've been up to since I started reading Dark Age. It’s both a lot and not much at all, wrapped into one. I’ve been insanely busy throughout all of this, too. Blog writing, video filming, video editing, running a D&D campaign, writing my books, and my full-time job are all eating up so much time. I’m starting to wonder why I bought a PS5 since it’s unlikely I’ll get to spend much time playing it, but… at least I’ve got it for when some time frees up!
Thanks so much for taking the time to check out this post, I really appreciate it! My full, critical review of Dark Age by Pierce Brown will be out in one week, so make sure you subscribe to my YouTube channel, that way you get to see the video as soon as it’s out. You can also follow me on social media! I’m @TLBainter on most social media platforms and will have links to all of my social media accounts down below.
Thanks again for taking the time to check out this reading blog. Until next time, bye!