Work has been wrecking me lately. I've started studying tea again but I barely have any time for classes. My goal is to get the damn fukusa folded correctly and consistently all the time and just to remember the order of operations for the ryakubon temae without my teacher needing to prompt me. Years ago I had this all fully memorized, but my memory is a sieve so now with the passage of time I need to basically start from 0. I haven't had much time or space to practice at home. It's one of those things where if feel like in order to do Z, I need to get Y done, but to do that I need to do X and then I get tired just thinking about it. But luckily a lot of my busy work obligations are now pretty much done for the year so I'm not putting in so much overtime and my evenings are more free.
Even though I've been kind of feeling pressed for time, I did check Libby a bit ago to see if any of the Whyborne and Griffin books had become newly available, and they had! So I abandoned all responsibilities and read Bloodlines, Hoarfrost, Maelstrom, Fallow and Drackenwood all in very quick succession, to the point where trying to remember what happened in which book is actually mildly difficult. My understanding is that there are two more main books that I haven't gotten to, and unfortunately Libby still doesn't have any of the shorts besides carousel so I'm missing those still.
I've basically disappeared because OWL is on again and I'm spending almost every spare second watching. and most of my posting about it happens on the subreddit so I usually don't have much to say here about it. Guangzhou is no longer tragically awful, which is great. Mixed rosters are still showing a ton of strength, also great. The overall exports environment continues to be trash and things get a little worse every day it seems which is not great. The meta this season has so far been relatively diverse but diversity of meta has never been a thing I care all that much about.
I've gotten a little bit of reading done before OWL interrupted everything. Finished the next Whyborne and Griffin book, Necropolis.
( Whyborne and Griffin stuff. )
Unfortunately that's where the availability of the books stops with Libby. I could buy the next few, and I may eventually just to support an author I'm very much enjoying, but just eyeballing things at the moment... I have like... over 10 feet of to-be-read books just in my field of vision, disregarding the bookshelves of TBR in the closet. So I'm trying to be good and not bring more books into the house even when I am currently working a job that is resulting in free books entering the house, so it's been a challenge lol. I actually am building up a couple of boxes to try to get rid of somehow, because it's starting to get out of hand.
That said if another Tarot Sequence book comes out I'm scooping it up immediately.
Otherwise, most of my time has been absorbed with OWL, so I haven't been reading or watching or playing that much at all otherwise. Thanks to some anonymous kindness I was gifted a copy of Hyper Light Drifter and I enjoyed that a lot. The first run through at least was very fun. It was a good mix of chill and challenging, but I'm pretty sure there is a better end out there for me to get if I more thoroughly complete the game, so in random moments of spare time I've been trying to. The problem is that discovering all the little secrets of the game is mostly a matter of being able to keep track of where you are on the map and what nooks you've managed to fully exploit, and I am terrible at getting turned around and going in circles and all that. But eventually I will probably at least get all the keys, the fragments, and maybe the weird tablet things, and then we'll see if that leads to a different sort of ending or not.
My brother and I have also finally gotten a good schedule going to play Divinity: Original Sin together. After trying to get a duo game going for what feels like over a year at this point we've finally fallen into a weekly appointment that we're both keeping. I'm having a lot of fun with it. We generally have the same approach to games, although I read the flavor text a little more than he does, so it works out that sometimes we will be in over our heads and willing to spend 3 hours trying to get through a single fight lol. I've been enjoying the writing in the game generally although things do get a little messy when someone else is running around talking to people and you're not there to pay attention, and all the side quests have been fun but feel very much like side quests. My necromancer Ifan is so Necromancery that he just whacks his way to full health. I want to use his blood ooze more because I think it's neat, but my bone spider queen is more well rounded and she's cuter.
At the moment we're cleaning up quests around town and then I guess will eventually be finding our way to Arx.
Read the second Whyborne and Griffin book and enjoyed it about as much as the first, which was a lot. The mystery was still fun, Elliot, the guy from Griffin's past, was fun to hate, Whyborne remains an adorable nerd and Griffin's insecurities are extremely attractive to me. When Elliot was like, "When I met Griffin he was in the process of getting spitroasted" in order to disrupt their relationship I was like, "Yes, talk about how much of a hussy Griffin was, more sordid past please." I want something to grab Griffin and make him suffer more, and would look up fic for it, but I've got like a dozen books to go and am waiting for the next one to come off hold, and maybe after I've gone through them all I'll take a look at what's on offer.
I'm also now a little sad that the covers are so photoshop. The two guys on the covers don't really reflect my internal visualization of them and again there's not much art out there, and what is there reasonably sticks to what's close to the covers. I was impressed when I hit the Carry On fan art cause there's actually a ton of it, but it doesn't appear to be typical of books. So I'm kind of on my own with visualizing them I guess.
Christine continues to be attracted to danger like a high powered magnet and she makes a great best friend along for the ride.
Next up I'm back in to YA territory and already getting a little annoyed at it a few pages in. It's another book club book, The Sunbearer Trials, and so far it's just started off with a creation myth that is both overly long and entirely cliche. I put the book down after the exposition dump but I still plan on finishing it, I'm just not overly enthusiastic about it at the moment.
I finally finished Mass Effect 3, and it felt like a comedy of errors all the way through. I did finally get my big smooch with Kaiden, and honestly, him lying in the hospital bed did it for me more, but I can at least check the "smooched Kaiden" box off my to do gaming list. I also managed to -not- get Jacob and Samara killed, so that makes a grand total of two people that I did not completely fuck over on this run.
After cleaning up a couple of sidequests I figured it was time for the end game, and it was a complete cluster fuck. First thing that happens is Cortez dies. I looked it up and it says that if I don't spend enough time with him he just gets himself shot out of the air, but I stopped to check on that mother fucker constantly and he had nothing to say, so I don't see how I can be responsible for his poor flying. Like there were side quests for him and everything that just never triggered or pinged for me. I did spend the majority of the game thinking, "It's weird how there's like no loyalty quests or any real interaction with any of the squad this time." I was -looking- for it, so I don't know how I missed all of it.
And to top it all of at the final choice... I couldn't figure out which side was which option. Maybe the little kid's explanation was too long and I lost my concentration or something but it just gave me two different colored ramps and I was like, ok but... which is which?! So I started half way up the left ramp, thought, no, this one will probably destroy the reapers since it's on the left and destroying the reapers was the first choice offered, and since I sided with the Geth I'd feel bad just genociding them right after they came to help us out and also I like Edi so I will try the control thing. So I went right, then got locked into a prompt to shoot at the machine without ever interacting with anything (how is this the way to turn something on?) and couldn't walk away from it! So in the end I did the choice that I didn't want to pick and murdered Edi and the Geth. And of course the game doesn't let you save before big choices so I'd have to play a chunk again to see the other ending.
I just... wtf. I don't recall having all these sorts of problems when I played one or two but three felt like a small mess from start to finish. I suppose my canonical Shepard is a total fuckup who managed to somehow thread the needle to something barely adequate as an outcome. Poor Kaiden has terrible taste in men.
White Trash Warlock
( General impressions )
The very last major scene of the book was the final nail for me and exemplifies the problem so well I'm going to post spoilery details below.
( Spoilery stuff )
The other major issue I had was with the romance. It lacks chemistry for much of the same reason. Some very strange shit happens and a police officer is brought into Adam's world. The two of them can also suddenly hear each other's thoughts and the officer is like, that's cool. They both sort of fall in love but it's more like two people being like... hmm, I'm in love with you now. Adam's like, really? You like me? And the guy's like, "yup, guess so." Ok then. I was never entirely sold on why the cop was all that interested in Adam outside of getting magicked into it. Their relationship is never a driving element of the plot outside of Adam trying to protect his love interest like a sexy lamp and the love interest just going along with whatever happens without worry.
The brother's relationship to his wife was also weird. You never really meet the wife, but Bobby thinks of her a little like some sort of prize for making it to the middle class and his reaction to her peril feels more like he thinks he's obligated to care about it than actually feeling any sense of concern for her well being. Honestly Adam seems to care more about her given his decision to help.
It was just a weird book. I wanted to like it a lot more than I actually did, and I sort of couldn't keep fooling myself on that once the last few revelations came out and no one seemed to really care all that much.
So This is Ever After
( Read more... )
Widdershins
( A story about undead horrors and also a bunch of sex. )
Blood Orbit
( tl;dr it kind of sucked. )
The Handsome Prince
This was my second attempt at finding something gay on Libby and I kind of hit the bullseye this time. The Handsome Prince is basically a porn anthology centered around fantasy happy ever afters. But fantasy as in porn fantasy, not as in genre fantasy. Its short little chapters cut right to the chase, with guys grabbing dicks left and right. Some of the stories are sort of modern day, some are in a vague Europe-like area, one is Renaissance Italy, etc. There's no magic or anything, just the idea of nice scenarios where guys always get the man. The writing is exactly what I would expect from the premise. It's just good enough to be fun and hot, and is also more nifty than Ao3 in its sensibilities, which I actually enjoy at times. So yeah, if you want a bunch of in and out, no funny business, fuck, get feelings, hooray, this is that.
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timeasmymeasure
