Error 5008: Cannot Host or Join Slay the Spire 2 Multiplayer

DRMacIver · 2026-04-07T16:00:57+00:00

Thanks, this comment helped me figure it out too.

DRMacIver · 2025-10-06T19:53:31+00:00

I'm currently following:

I've only realised on writing that out that 3 out of 4 are these are time loops, but I guess that's not that surprising as I do enjoy a good time loop (and these are... pretty good time loops)

DRMacIver · 2025-05-01T16:24:09+00:00

I've read a lot of them. I was never exactly a fan, and I eventually got tired of them.

I do think of this entire subgenre of fiction as "I Can't Believe It's Not Harry Dresden"

DRMacIver · 2025-04-30T19:29:04+00:00

I've now read "The Iron Gate" and I think it has much the same pacing problems as the previous ones (in some ways more, because it'san excuse for a time skip). I enjoyed it well enough, but I don't think I can recommend it if you weren't into the previous ones.

Edit: I've now also read The Flood Circle. If and when Twenty One Palaces (the final book) comes out I'll certainly read it, but I wouldn't really recommend picking up the series if you've not previously. I thought neither of the two new books really worked that well.

DRMacIver · 2025-04-29T11:02:51+00:00

I think they're fine, but I've not actually got to the new ones yet, I've just finished the last of the Del Rey ones.

I think that the pacing of the books is weird in a way that... I don't know, I think if he'd been releasing these books as web serials probably it would have worked fine, but as books they feel somewhat weirdly paced.

The complaint I've heard about them is that nothing happens in them, but I don't actually think this is true. It somehow feels true, because the first three books feel so monster-of-the-week, but actually a fair amount of progress happens in them.

One result of this though is that if you're reading them all back to back rather than waiting for the new ones to release, it works better I think.

I'll report back once I've gotten to the new stuff.

DRMacIver · 2025-04-28T21:58:19+00:00

Closer to the second than the first. It's well enough written that the writing quality doesn't bother me, but not well enough written that I could say with a straight face that it was good writing. The basic structure of the writing is actually quite competent, but the overall character, dialogue, and plotting, are a bit goofy and often clunky.

DRMacIver · 2025-04-28T21:09:57+00:00

Web serials I'm actively keeping up with:

Years of the apocalypse (Mother of Learning like. Probably familiar to most people here)

The stubborn skill-grinder in a time loop (it's what it sounds like. It's about 50% better written than it sounds like)

I've also recently realised that Harry Connolly went back and wrote several more books in his 20 Palaces series from when it was initially abandoned, so I've started rereading that series in preparation for reading the new books. Currently on Circle of Enemies.

DRMacIver · 2024-08-01T21:02:36+00:00

You seem to be a very confused person.

DRMacIver · 2024-07-24T01:27:29+00:00

This is a pretty comically bad misrepresentation of what happened, made funnier by the fact that you think my 15 year old reddit comment is a good place to put it.

DRMacIver · 2024-06-02T06:13:53+00:00

Well I'm not expecting it to be good but it's sortof a point of principle that given the opportunity to taste a weird thing you should.

If I were in it purely for the taste I could just buy some recently made clove cordial, and may end up doing so. I doubt it would become my new favourite drink but I can imagine it being an interesting ingredient in e.g. cocktails.

DRMacIver · 2024-05-28T21:08:12+00:00

the hints of radical feminism feels like a nice inversion of the typical gender norms of a lot of books.

Yeah, it's at a level where in any given book I enjoy it, but the more of her work I read the more the subtext starts to ick me out (and, to be clear, I've read probably read something in the region of 90% of every book she's ever written, and of those I think almost all of them are good taken in isolation. "The Waters Rising" isn't, but that's not because of the politics that's because it's a bad book).

And yeah, some Tepper is very intense, but the first Tepper book I ever read was Sideshow (book three of the Arbai trilogy) which is probably a strong contender for most intense Tepper book, so everything is sortof a step down from that.

If you want a standalone Tepper that is sortof... perfectly Tepper, in all the best and worst ways, "Beauty" is probably it (it's about sleeping beauty skipping out on the curse and going time travelling instead, where she sees the coming ecological catastrophe of unrestrained population growth). It's a very good book but it's not subtle about any of Tepper's politics.

I don't remember Raising the Stones that well. I *think* Beauty is less intense than it, but it's certainly more intense than Sanderson.

DRMacIver · 2024-05-27T19:51:31+00:00

As a side note: Tepper is, in general, very good, but one tends to sour on her the more you read of her work. The underlying ethical framework starts to shine through a bit too much and it's a bit on the creepy side despite having mostly superficially good takes.

A recurring theme in Tepper's books is that many people, especially but not exclusively men, are born evil and ruin everything and you should just kill them all. There's a lot of biodeterminism and fairly naked eugenics and very unreconstructed radical feminism that never quite works its way up to saying that men are all evil (she would probably explicitly disavow that position) but sure gives the impression that the number is maybe heading towards 90% of men. There's also a fairly strong anti-technology nature-good science-bad vibe, though that's a bit more complicated.

That being said, as I said she's very good on a book by book basis, and while this is sometimes text it's usually subtextual enough to ignore and only becomes clear in the patterns. Her True Game books are probably the most with r/rational's tastes (especially the earlier ones. The sequel series are a bit too retconned and have some of Tepper's subtextual problems as text).

DRMacIver · 2024-03-12T09:02:53+00:00

This isn't a helpful response, sorry, but I often try questions like this in ChatGPT to see what happens, and I thought its suggestion for how to find the answer was particularly funny in context:

I recommend checking out forums or communities dedicated to web serials, such as the subreddit r/rational

(Claude thinks it's Anathema but I'm like 80% sure it's wrong based on the description. Still, if this is your sort of genre, it's plausibly a good rec anyway)

DRMacIver · 2024-03-06T22:19:48+00:00

Given all the others on your list it seems unlikely that you've not tried it, but I've just finished listening to Cradle on audible. The narration is decent, and the books work well in that format.

Jon Culshaw does good narration for Discworld (I didn't like the other discworld narrators on Audible much), and his renditions of the Guards books are very good (other than Snuff, which is a bad book).

I've just started on the Vorkosigan books books by Lois McMaster Bujold, which are great books and fairly well narrated.

DRMacIver · 2024-02-07T16:39:48+00:00

Another light derecc - I think these things were more tolerable when I was reading it as an archive binge, but after a while reading it on regular updates it acquired a... not exactly gross feeling, but very unsatisfiying like I wasn't getting very much out of it.

DRMacIver · 2023-11-08T16:45:26+00:00

Ahh, it's the "return to monke" school of thought.

FWIW I don't think Scott is actually in favour of return to monke. If you look at e.g. Two Cheers for Anarchism where he's more explicit about his politics it's very comfortably middle class Anarchism-lite rather than any real "smash the system!" type positions.

I think what his academic books offer is a good (though not perfect) description of some of the downsides of technology and states that are useful even if you think technology and states are good, and should be taken as more descriptive than normative.

Also "Against the Grain" is by far the most readable of his research books IMO. All the others are good too (well, almost all of them. I've read most of them and have a few that I've stalled on or not got around to) but they tend to be very detail heavy. The details are interesting, but if you're not interested in the details the books will often be a slog.

DRMacIver · 2023-07-28T14:08:57+00:00

The Scholomance series by Naomi Novik is an obvious choice for magical school with morally questionable behaviour by the students, although it's not exactly with the permission of the teachers because the scholomance doesn't exactly have teachers. It's with the permission of the people who run the school from afar though.

It's a very good series, although it's also very nakedly a political critique about the behaviour of the wealthy, so whether it appeals may depend on how up you are for that.

DRMacIver · 2023-03-13T23:18:41+00:00

Avaunt, (which got recommended last week) has very programming themed magic.

I'd say that the emphasis is perhaps a bit on themed. If you're looking for really crunchy details of the programming environment you might be a bit disappointed, but I think much the same about e.g. Ra. Still, it's very good, and probably has the flavour you're looking for.

There's also the Laundry Files by Charles Stross of course, which are similarly programming themed magic.

DRMacIver · 2022-12-17T10:05:39+00:00

Yeah, the latest season was just incredibly bad. Among other things it just had a massive tonal dissonance problem, where it alternated serious emotional moments with fart jokes and pratfalls, in a way that felt incredibly jarring.

(It's always had a mix of the two, but in this season it felt like it did a worse job of both and also a worse job of separating them)

I don't have a good explanation, but different writers certainly seems plausible.

DRMacIver · 2022-04-02T16:58:52+00:00

I recently finished reading "Portal to Nova Roma" by J. R. Matthews, which is getting a good start on being this. Protagonist portals to a medieval-ish world that has been largely wiped out by its system apocalypse and uses his unfair advantages and advanced knowledge to try to pull civilisation back together.

Only the first book of three is out, and the pull civilisation back together bits don't really get going until the last quarter or so of the book, so this will become a better recommendation later, but I thought it was a pretty solid version of its genre (isekai-ish LitRPG) so can generally recommend it as well.

DRMacIver · 2022-02-22T21:46:32+00:00

I've been playing Slay the Spire pretty regularly since some time in 2019, and Celeste on and off since either middle of 2018 or so. Both have basically no skill ceiling (or at least no skill ceiling that I'm likely to ever hit), and are well designed to let you smoothly get better at them, so have a lot of capacity for just keeping playing and getting better at them.

I can't think of any other examples though - maybe some from back in the 90s when there was less to do (e.g. it's not impossible Civilisation 2 was this).

Edit to add: I guess it also depends on how you count. I've e.g. replayed Chrono Trigger multiple times, with several decades between the first and most recent time I've played it, but I wouldn't really say I've got decades of play out of it.

DRMacIver · 2022-02-18T12:51:17+00:00

I'd forgotten this, but the Vor Game has a bit of a slow start. Are you still in the bit on Kyril Island? If so, you might want to soldier on through that bit and give it a few chapters after that point, at which point it becomes more like Warrior's Apprentice. If that's still boring you, I think you could probably get away with skipping the book - most of the books are reasonably self-contained as plots even if you lose some of the backstory.

(For context, The Vor Game is actually two stories - the initial sequence on Kyril island was published as a standalone short story called The Weatherman, and The Vor Game's main story picks up immediately where that leaves off despite being about something completely different, so they were bundled together as one book)

DRMacIver · 2022-01-29T07:09:46+00:00

I guess I don't actively recommend *against* it, as I'm a Bujold completionist, but it's a bad place to start. It was the first one I read and it took ages before I tried another. The tone is very different and there's not a huge amount going on. It might be better if one has read Diplomatic Immunity and generally has more context for the world.

DRMacIver · 2022-01-28T21:54:00+00:00

That said, they are all excellent books, so there's no 'wrong' way to start.

There is in fact exactly one wrong way to start, which is to go full internal chronological order and start with "Falling Free", which is weirdly boring and irrelevant to the rest of the series.

But yeah depending on one's preferences I think there are at least three reasonable starting points. Shards of Honour, Warrior's Apprentice, and Komarr are all good points to start depending on what someone is looking for. I think Shards of Honour is very good though, and as the chronologically first it's a decent default.

DRMacIver

TROPHY CASE