S1E3 Geek Exercise, Ex Novo, DragonQuest, Ocarina of Time, and Oh So Many Books!

Welcome to the Untitled Podcast. You know what the name is, we don’t … but we’re getting closer. Maybe. On this exercise, we hit the gym (or at least, the sidewalk) with our respective exercise routines, finish up our Tales from the Loop game, talk physical therapy for dogs, get lost in a few endless video games, and start grabbing books off the shelf for our respective reading lists.

• David’s Exercise Update
  • David talks about his exercise routine
• Delays in editing the Untitled Podcast and Cowboy Dracula
  • But you’re in the future, so the shows are already done!
• Physical therapy is going to the dogs
  • Dog Zeke needs to continue his physical therapy for his muscle atrophy
• David’s Reading List
  • David started a reading list. Since he can’t go to a bookstore and just browse shelves, he needs to be much more mindful of what he wants to read next
  • The Books:
    • Color of Magic by Terry Pratchett (First book in the Discworld series)
      • Learn more at Tor’s Terry Pratchett Book Club.
    • Calculating Stars by Mary Robinette Kowal
      • Check out Kowal’s website
    • Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir
      • Tor Publishing’s website for the book
• Exiting Tales from the Loop
  • Finished our last session of Tales from the Loop and looking forward to another arc or a new game
  • The official website for Tales from the Loop
• Settlement creation with Ex Novo
  • David played a little game called Ex Novo to create the settlement in his Gamma World game
  • Started out with a river, plain and pretty boring
  • Soon after had a cave system with metal tunnels with robots, a mountain that had been split in half, and the primary food source was the Hoppers, grasshoppers the size of your hand
  • A faction grew up to brew beers and spirits from the hoppers, another wanted to engineer the site to help with the yearly flooding and to increase the hopper population
  • The brewers collapsed as a faction as a fire in that district killed one of the elders of the village as they fought the fire and after that spirits were no longer allowed to be brewed
  • It went on from there with new factions forming, old factions gaining or losing influence
  • It makes for a great role-playing tool, since now the players have a direct interest in the settlement that we all built, and can reference the history

• Run, Geek Run
  • Ken’s 10K Training Routine continues with Week 4.
  • Also strength training routine (lots of planks, lunges, stretching, rollie, squats, etc.)
• Getting Lost in Video Games
  • Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time
    • Ken made it to the final temple. It only took 22 years…
    • Nintendo’s Ocarina of Time website
  • DRAGON QUEST® XI S: Echoes of an Elusive Age – Definitive Edition
    • Massive JRPG for the Switch
    • Includes “flashback” segments with old school 16-bit graphics Took me years to finish DragonQuest IX on the DS/3DS
    • Nintendo’s Dragon Quest XI website
• Ken’s Summer Reading List
  • It’s summer somewhen, right?
  • The Unicorn Project: A Novel about Developers, Digital Disruption, and Thriving in the Age of Data by Gene Kim
    • The follow-up to The Phoenix Project takes place alongside the earlier book. It’s like the Ender’s Shadow of the IT workflow/productivity fiction genre (which is so niche it might only contain these two books)
    • Official website for the boo . 
  • Fall; or, Dodge in Hell by Neal Stephenson
    • An indirect follow up to Cryptonomicon
    • A sequel of sorts to Reamde
    • About getting scanned and uploaded into a virtual universe.
    • Stephenson’s website for the book
  • Bone Silence by Alistair Reynolds
    • Set in a far-future version of our solar system
    • Major planets have been dismantled and replaced by thousands of orbital habitats. Civilization has risen and fallen multiple times, leaving behind valuable detritus to those willing to risk dangers terrible and strange
    • The publisher’s website
  • And the rest…
    • Excession (A Culture Novel Book, Book 5) by Iain M Banks (GoodReads)
    • The Bohr Maker (The Nanotech Succession Book 1) by Linda Nagata (GoodReads)
    • The Dreaming Stars (Axiom, Book 2) by Tim Pratt (GoodReads)
    • The Last Emperox (The Interdependency, Book 3) by John Scalzi (GoodReads)
    • The Wise Man’s Fear (Kingkiller Chronicle, Book 2) by Patrick Rothfuss (GoodReads)
    • 10 books in total, plus a bunch of 1950s Hellboy as well as Abe Sapien standalone graphic novels. Check outthe full list over at Nuketown
    • We talked about Atomic Robo too!
  • Comments?
    • Email us at podcast@lairofsecrets.com or leave a comment below
  • Featured Image Meta
    • Cover art for the 3DS version of Ocarina of Time. Credit: Nintendo