got_quiet

I've been ill these last couple of weeks in that sort of way where I'm miserable and can't get anything done but sure all hell am not going to bother going to the doctor. There was never any follow up with that online checkup by the way. I was waiting for someone to call so I could get my flu shots, since that was part of the survey, and nope. So I gave up on them and got a vaccination elsewhere today.

A consequence of my feeling terrible was my brain short circuited and things got so silly that I ended up having to go back into the grocery store three times in a row because I couldn't remember this or that thing, including groceries that I had left at the cashier's. And then I forgot to put the lunch meat away when I got home and it didn't occur to me until the next day that this had happened, and sure enough it was sitting in a bag that morning, so I had to go buy new lunch meat because I was already feeling like crap and didn't want to risk further deterioration of my gut health. I've been feeling better now but the last few weeks have been a bit of a wild ride.

Also sort of kinda started playing this idle game on youtube of all places. Most of the playables suck, but there's this little game that's sort of similar to Neko Atsume. You can be a crazy cat dad with a husband and just fill your house with cats and do some bad interior decoration, and since you get your currency by just checking in once in a while I log in once at night, clip my cats nails, make my husband some lunch and that's it. It's called adorable home.


 

Just saw Burnt and WHAT THE FUCK WHY DID I NOT KNOW THIS MOVIE EXISTED?! (answer: because I pay 0 attention to film) I literally found out about it today via some random youtube short with a scene that didn't even exist in the final version, and decided to watch purely because I'm weak to Daniel Bruhl in a suit. I went in blind and had no idea what I was in for but what I was in for turned out to be one-sided gay pining and loyalty kink that was 100% textual. There was 0 squinting required.

But then the crowning achievement of this movie is that, after that crisis we get the feel good ending third where Adam learns to stop being a jerk, and starts accepting help. After finding out that he wasn't actually completely fucked over in his quest for three Michelin stars he decides to celebrate by kissing the shit out of Tony, who understandably loses his cognitive function. I also had my hands up in the air, like what the hell, why does this movie keep giving?

This clip misses the half minute of brain stuttering that Tony goes through after the kiss but still, it gets the gist.

So while yes, this movie is a very paint by numbers Asshole Prodigy fare, and kind of middling as a story, IDGAF. I am happy for Tony and I want him to be happy and if this special little asshole makes him happy then so be it.

The next two months are peak work related stress time so that's fun. I still spend some time doing frivolous things because one of the ways I express stress is avoidance, horray! I just feel physically ill while doing it.

Anyhoo!

I watched episode one of Chainsaw Man and looked like an interesting enough setup. I'm watching without subs, so I'm missing chunks of context, but immersion is both good practice and a good way to trick myself into practice. I'm way behind in Demon Slayers though because I picked up a whole chunk of Chainsaw man a while back and haven't had the time to hunt down to Demon Slayers episodes more recently. I'll get to it eventually.

Finally finished a round of Against the Storm on Viceroy difficulty. It was only my third try but I've been very lazy about ramping up the difficulty because Veteran is an easy and chill time and I've never lost, but Viceroy you suddenly have pay a little attention to your resources and can't just build every building willy nilly. The game gets significant balance and gameplay updates on the regular, and generally it feels like it's going in the right direction. I've been thinking there's some space to write some fic even though it's very much not a narrative canon, because the worldbuilding is interesting, and all the houses start with three people in them so instant threesome opportunity.

After playing through a bunch of Hyperlight Drifter I looked up whether or not it had more than one ending and was disappointed to learn that it didn't. I did enjoy the ending that we got. It's the mix of positive and sad that seemed to saturate the whole game from the beginning, but my desire to improve my completion rate was driven by the possibility that there was more narratively, and since it sounds like there isn't I don't know if I want to spend more time trying to complete more of it. Overall it was a great game though. Very cool art and music and a tight and challenging combat system.

The books finally coming out of hold on Libby I'm failing to read before they go back into the pool nowadays, but I did finish up one more book before the crunch choked out my reading habits.

A Marvelous Light is another M/M romance. It's set in late 19th century England and the worldbuilding is the familiar trope of everything being as usual except magicians live among us doing magician things but generally staying out of the limelight. Some spoilers below:

( spoilery reactions )

I don't know how I feel about these settings where magicians are chilling out in England and everything else is the same. I do like what I assume is late 19th century settings and I used to like magic is among us type of settings, but in terms of their worldbuilding it can be frustrating when nothing new is going on with the trope. It's very hard to match Clarke, who seemed to effortlessly fold magic into the world without having to rely on excuses of secrecy to avoid thinking about what magic in the world really could mean. But I do wish more people would try.

Today I spent most of my evening cleaning up 10+ year old fic that I wrote for the Inception kink meme to get it onto Ao3. I've been lazy about archiving the stuff I wrote before Ao3 and wrote almost nothing after it became the de facto method of posting, so my account is barren, and after I lost my hard drive a number of years back it looks like I also lost all of the WiPs that I had been working on previously, with the exception of a couple of things I thought were good enough to go through more effort to preserve. I'm kind of down about a couple of them. One that I can't find (A fic about Arthur being cursed with cumsprites)  I liked a lot but I don't think there is any recovering it unless it turns up on a CD miraculously. The little bit I did post on the kink meme is there, but I had twice as much written. Eurgh.

There's another fic in particular where, if I had finished it, I feel is one of the few really good things I've ever written. But I started it during a unique time in my life when I had literally nothing else to do but think about writing (I was trapped on a mountain, basically) and while that time was one of the most creatively fruitful of my life, it ended before I finished the fic, and once I got back to the distractions of school and the internet, I just couldn't keep going. Every year or so I hit this melancholic moment where I think to myself, I need to finish this thing, and go back and read it, and don't add a single word to it. I kind of want to put it on the Ao3 even though it is barely half done, but also don't want to do that because it feels like admitting defeat.

I'm not sure why I'm thinking about fic so much lately. I haven't written anything in so long. I can't really get a sentence out anymore. Nothing has really changed on that front recently but I'm frustrated about it now for some reason.

A more open ended fest, dick_or_treat, is starting next month, so maybe I will try to commit to posting at least something for it. IDK how to get my focus back though!

My reading has slowed down a bit. I hit a book I didn't like so much, The Marrow Thieves.

I ended up not getting very far with this book in the 20 days that I had to read it. I have my limits with YA, and reliving the misery of Hatchet appears to be well beyond them. I'm not sure if the story changes any, but 27% in and it was all very basic survivalist stuff. The characters feel extremely thin. I'd read maybe a chapter, nothing would have happened, and I'd put it down. The worldbuilding is semi interesting as a post-apocalypse setting told from the Native American perspective, but all of that is so distant from what is actually happening in the story, which is hunting, walking through the woods, setting up camp, etc. I might keep picking at it up until we talk about it at the book club but I'm not going to be enthusiastic about it. I've also yet to see what makes this qualify as queer content. The protagonist appears to be a guy who immediately gets a crush on the first interesting girl that shows up. Maybe something comes out later in the book about that.

I was supposed to have finished Genesis of Misery today for club but never started it. I was too busy re-reading The Collared Knight, which started out as a meme fic and then became a self-pub. It's interesting to me how one's perspective of fiction can change when you read it all in one sitting instead of in spread out, short installments. As meme fic it was great. As a published work it has its rough spots, but I still liked it. It's an M/M/M spoils of war slave fic, and one of the characters, Ralston, is my type. He's got a bit of an ugly face, and a prickly demeanor, and a violent past, but also is a good person with a soft and considerate nature. There's a bunch of D/s stuff in there too, which I liked for the most part. The jump between Farnesse wanting to strangle Ralston to death and enthusiastically consenting to sub is rather sudden, but hey, it suits the porn logic driving most of the character development. It's been a long time since I read this and I'm not done yet, but iirc pretty much the entire second half is just sex. There is a little political maneuvering too though.

And then book two of the Whyborne and Griffon books came off hold so I'm just going to read that one now. I enjoy the two leads a lot, I like the author's style, and mysteries are low key my favorite genre.

Played some Trine for the first time cause my friend (actually she's my sister in law as of this weekend!!!) was hankering for some co-op. I never knew how puzzle focused it was. It took a while to figure out the mechanics, and then the camera didn't really know what to do with three players going different ways so things were a little janky, but actually even despite some of the issues it was fun and a different sort of game than I usually play.

In your own space, do the Fandom Wrap Challenge.

This is actually tough because I'm about as far from Fandom as I've ever been.
 

Ocean's Echo

I just finished reading Ocean's Echo a couple of days ago. It's an m/m space opera with mind powers and political conspiracy.  I enjoyed it a lot for about 3/4ths of the book and then the ending got messy and the momentum and conclusions felt like it just sort of fizzled away. I'm still a big fan of the author's first story, and I say story because it was modified heavily from its first draft, which I read in serial form a long time ago now, and once it was published as Winter's Orbit there had been added a lot of political maneuvering, worldbuilding exposition, and a new layer of galactic bureaucracy (fuck this word btw fucking French) that I felt didn't add anything to the core of the story and the removal of important scenes that made the character arcs not make as much sense.

Ocean's Echo does basically the same sort of story. They are very similar books and the author clearly has a narrative type, with a flippant guy with serious self-esteem issues and talent he doesn't acknowledge + an stoic and hyper competent other guy, forced connections, (Marriage for Winter's Orbit and a Mind Meld for Ocean's Echo) extremely scary and powerful elder women, and shitty militaries that commit war crimes. She's also clearly a big fan of assassination attempts. The second Tennal got called off a shuttle I was like oooh I've seen this before.

The books still read differently despite the similarities, and some of the traits and circumstances of the main characters get scrambled up. In Ocean's Echo Tennal, who is roughly the Kiem of this book, is the guy put in the shit position, and Surit is, at least for the first half of the book, the one who's in something resembling control.

I liked this pairing, both the characters individually and their relationship, a lot. I definitely hit that point somewhere in the middle of the book where I was stupid smiling over them becoming more and more fond of each other and starting to experience character growth. The tail end was weak mostly because I feel like the climax was primed only 2 thirds in and after that passed the back part started hitting repetitious scenes where characters were doing the same shit over and over again. Especially when a major point of the book is that a sync cannot be broken without it being fatal, to have it break twice and not even in a way that to me indicated any extreme circumstances and without major consequences strained my credulousness.

I still think it was a good book and a worthwhile read. My frustration stems mainly from the fact that I thought the new worldbuilding that entered Winter's Orbit was to that story's detriment, and it was continued on in Ocean's Echo, making me wonder if there was a stronger, tighter manuscript out there somewhere similar to what "Arranged marriage space royalty origfic" had at first been. I say this rarely, but perhaps the book could have done without an editor.

Last week I decided it was time to readjust my sleep habits a little bit. Typically I feel sleepy around 8 or 9, don't go to bed, get a second wind around 10, and then I'm wide awake through midnight, often past 1 and into 2AM. Then the next morning getting up sucks ass and I have to skip breakfast and the first few hours at work are very low productivity. So I decided I would just go straight to bed on the first round of getting sleepy and see where that led me. It sort of worked. I did go straight to sleep around 8pm, but woke up at 9 completely refreshed and then was wide awake in bed for three straight hours, but the next day was a little smoother.

In the before times I used to belong to a book club that would meet once a month. We read exclusively LGBT+ speculative work. It was a fun group and we read a lot of interesting stuff, both good and bad. When COVID came the meetings were moved to zoom, and since I hate zoom I stopped participating. I just never can remember it's time to stop doing whatever I'm doing and sit looking at a video of people looking at their screens. So I haven't read any of the books they have in the past few years, with a couple of exceptions. I still get their emails though and last month's book, The Last Sun,  looked interesting enough that I decided to see if it was in the library, which led me to getting set up in the library's ebooks borrowing system for the first time. I generally don't read ebooks, but not out of any conviction, just because I never bothered to set up a good way to do it, but figured I'd give it a shot and put this book on hold. That was a couple of weeks ago, and Friday night it became available.

So, I'm starting to feel tired around 9, decide I should just go straight to bed instead of working on stuff into the night, lie down... and since I'm a fucking moron I take my phone and start reading The Last Sun.

Now, while I don't usually read ebooks, I don't -never- read ebooks, and the ebooks I've read before have been meh indy things that I could put down without any trouble.

But unfortunately The Last Sun was very good and next thing I know it's 5:30 am and I'm finishing it up. I was actually hoping my improved habits would let me wake up at 4AM Saturday morning to watch some Korean Overwatch event but that event started while I was still awake, I considered a moment, and realized my brain was locked on and I couldn't actually stop reading, so I ended up missing it anyway...

And of course after that I fell asleep and woke up at 2PM so so much for improving my habits. My entire weekend was kind of lost to the sleep shift so now I'm back to square one.

I might write a little about The Last Sun in the future but I'm currently chomping at the bit for the second book, which is again on hold. Let's hope I start reading this one on the weekend instead of at 9PM at night.