Annette Marie has a number of series set in her world of The Guild Codex. Urban fantasy where guilds of “mythics” (mages of various sorts) live hidden from the mundane world. The first series The Guild Codex: Spellbound is a good place to start, featuring a normal human woman stumbling into a bartending gig for such a guild. That 8 book series within the world is complete. Book one is “Three Mages and a Margarita.”

Super engaging, and has great audio narration if you’re into that as well.

Pretty close to the same at least. The main distinction would be that the Steam version still requires a copy of Steam to be running and logged in on the computer you copy it to, which at least means Steam has to have been online once ever to get the account logged in before using offline mode. GOG has offline installers that can be backed up and used without any client.

For the vast majority of use cases, it’s a pretty minor difference, but one way in which it might be significant is that the GOG installers will never stop working, but if one day years down the road Steam were to shut down, the Steam version could only run on computers that could be running offline-mode Steam. There’d probably be ways to break that simple bit of DRM, but a legal offline installer is a very nice bonus for things like archival sites or research applications.

It’s the kind of thing that even if you’re not choosing to use it, it’s nice that it exists, and hopefully it can continue to.

I took that zip file and imported it at Storygraph. That site isn’t perfect either but at least it’s building up instead of falling down, and seems to have heart. Also its recommendations, while hit and miss, are a lot better than what Goodreads has offered in the last couple years.

The two things I occasionally go back to Goodreads for at this point are the list of releases by authors I’m following, as you mention, and an FSF book club I’m in over there. That said I haven’t bothered tracking my books on GR for a while now. I really can’t see it turning around any time soon, especially now it’s Amazon owned, and Storygraph deals with that aspect of things very well.

I’ve also seen Bookwyrm mentioned around here lately as a Fediverse alternative. I’m not familiar with it or its features, but it’d bear looking at for comparison.

I largely limit myself to ebooks or audiobooks now, which generally means I’ve no need to purchase a book before the very second I intend to read it, unless I expect to be somewhere without internet for a while and need to predownload stuff.

If there’s a book in interested in but won’t be reading right away, then I put it on a TBR list. Previously on Goodreads, ATM I’m using Storygraph. Then when I’m looking to read something new I skim through the TBR list and pick something off of it to borrow or buy. In that sense it’s less a backlog and more a menu lol.

Spiritfarer is an absolutely wonderful experience that is somehow both a casual open world chill game and a game that delves deep into the topic of death, being prepared for it, and leaving people behind. Really special game.

Another Kobo user, I have the Clara HD. I like having an eInk device for ease on the eyes, it has a good backlight with a natural light setting for warmer usage at night which is nice.

I suspect most basic ebook readers would be similar. I just wanted something feature-light that was purely for reading.

I did specifically want to avoid Amazon. Basically every other retailer uses the same ebook format: Epub, either DRM free or with Adobe Digital Editions DRM. This means most ereaders can use books from most retailers. The exception is Amazon - they use their own proprietary format with its own DRM to lock you into the Kindle ecosystem. Kindles can now read non-Amazon ebooks but non-Kindles can’t read Amazon ones due to this. I find that particularly scummy and want nothing to do with supporting it, especially when most books I buy through Kobo or other sites are completely DRM free by comparison.

(There are ways to get Amazon books you own onto other devices in a pinch if you do some searching. Questionable legality, even if you own the book, which is crazy to me, but it’s not impossible. Amazon has been updating their DRM against it, but it’s still doable.)

I honestly had no idea that a 1.0 was even in the works. I thought this was one of those roguelikes where they’d just keep adding new ideas to it over time on and on, like Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup does for example.

I personally can’t. I find it too distracting, even lyricless stuff. Oddly the opposite is often okay… I can listen to an audiobook while doing something else mindless and not miss out on details. But a physical or ebook generally takes my full attention.