I would genuinely love to know what the longest active streak is (I’m sure it puts this to shame) and where I am in terms of, like, percentiles.
I swear I had something for this
I had a plan for tonight’s post, but after a conversation with my son I’ve decided to refine it further and write it another day. Unfortunately, that leaves me with not a lot other than bitching about how insanely fucking hot it is outside and various other forms of electronic begging for death.
Anyway, now that I’ve failed at that, time to go finish the last Robert Jordan book I ever have to read.
Monthly Reads: August 2026
I actually only had one five-star read in August, which was Tana French’s The Keeper, Book of the Month by default, although Daggermouth has grown in my estimation since I read it.
I’m fighting somebody
These four Tana French books are a completed trilogy and a standalone novel, and you will never guess which one is the standalone novel, and I want to have a quick sit-down with whatever filthy jackanapes were involved in making cover decisions over at Viking.
Unread Shelf: August 31, 2026
About the same as last month, and I’m going to take a serious beating in September, because there are a ton of new releases this month that are already pre-ordered. I need an extra three or four hours a day if I want to keep up.
#REVIEW: Rise of the Ronin (PS5, 2024)
Freakin’ finally.
Allow me to tell you a story about the game Rise of the Ronin. It came out in March of 2024, and was by the same people who make the Nioh games, easily my favorite game franchise of all time that doesn’t have the word Souls in the name. Maybe even then. I was excited about it. I bought it. I didn’t get to it immediately, because I was playing something else. But then I played it a little bit. Maybe the first ten percent or so.
And then Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree came out on June 21, and I was done with Rise of the Ronin. And it sat on my PS5 for literally two years, being ignored and making me feel guilty. I even deleted it and reinstalled it a couple of times, intending to get to it and never actually doing it. And finally, this summer, I had the combination of a wild hair up my ass and nothing new coming out and I finally deleted my old save file and started afresh.
70 hours later, I Platinumed the Goddamned thing, and then I deleted it from my PS5, never to be reinstalled again.
I’m very tempted to say “the end.”
This is an open-world samurai game, clearly a test run for Nioh 3 and honestly not terribly far removed from Elden Ring or any of the other Soulslikes that are more or less all I play nowadays, so you’d think it would be right up my alley. And in a lot of ways, it was! Lots of different weapons, multiple stances for every weapon, customizable special moves, all the stuff I like.
Two fatal flaws: 1) it was way too easy, and 2) every single mission and I mean every single mission boiled down to “go here, and kill all the humans.” Human enemies came in two flavors: Little Guys and Big Guys. There were also dogs and pigs occasionally– and, bizarrely, sometimes you’d get sent to take out a local outlaw and the outlaw would be a pig with a name. One of the big side missions was pacifying unruly parts of the countryside, by– you guessed it– going there and killing everyone. Sometimes everyone there would be a dog or a pig. I have no explanation. It didn’t happen often, but I’m not making this up. Enemy variety was practically negligible, and even bosses were all more or less the same fight– sometimes literally so, because for some reason Team Ninja really resists actually killing people in boss fights, so they were forever escaping and threatening you with more of the same later.
Dude, we have fought five times and I have whipped your ass all five times. Next time run the fuck away.
I have a serious weakness for games with big overworld maps with lots of icons on them, I admit it. But there needs to be some fucking variety in what you’re doing, and everything in this game got to feeling very, very samey after a while, and “samey” combined with “easy” isn’t a great mix. I think the toughest boss in the game took me two tries? Maybe three. I almost never died, and when I did it was because I stopped paying attention and got sloppy. The customizable martial arts moves? I never used them, and even the stance-switching, which was supposed to have a sort of paper-rock-scissors thing going on with the stances your enemies used (helpfully indicated by an icon showing whether your stance was the effective one or not) was something I didn’t really bother learning until very, very late in the game. Button mashing would get you through 90% of the game so long as you paid a little bit of attention to your stamina.
So, yeah: sadly, the major achievement of having beaten Rise of the Ronin is that I don’t have to think about Rise of the Ronin anymore, and I suppose I should be grateful that Team Ninja learned some lessons from this game and applied them to Nioh 3, which was a vastly superior game.
And speaking of Nioh 3 and DLC, guess what dropped in the last couple of weeks? So I’m going to go do that for a while now.
In which none of that worked out
Ugh.
I wanted a whole bunch of things to happen today, starting with being able to sleep past 5:45 in the fucking morning, and really nothing that I wanted to happen today went the way I wanted it to. Mind you, nothing terrible happened, although I did initially write “bad” and then edited it, but today was supposed to be a good day on several different levels and it just … wasn’t.
Tonight I’m going to start reading the last book Robert Jordan ever wrote, which may very well also be the last Robert Jordan book I ever read, assuming I don’t go back to his Conan books at some point in the future. I may just blast through the Brandon Sanderson books in September just to be done with The Wheel of Time. I’ve been sticking to one a month, which would have me finish up in November. Then again, there are two million new releases coming out in September, so spending three thousand pages on books that technically aren’t sitting on my TBR might not be the greatest decision I ever made.
First world problems, I know.
Another first
After twenty-plus years of teaching, I don’t encounter a ton of circumstances any longer that I’ve never run into before. I had two in two days, though– first, despite being home sick yesterday, it was the first day that I’ve ever received an email from a school nurse with the phrase “cannabinoid hyperemesis” in it. Which, if you’re wondering if I immediately sent thirty text messages demanding that someone tell me what I’d missed … yeah, I sure as hell did. Apparently four of our eighth grade girls– two of them mine, judging from the suspensions today– decided to hit a THC vape on the way to school, because there’s nothing like being high in middle school at 8:15 in the Goddamned morning, and, well, apparently one of them didn’t react very well to it. Chunks were blown.
I don’t know if the hypervomiter was mine or not.
Today I got a series of emails from one of last year’s kids, now a high school freshman, asking for help with her math assignment. This, in and of itself, is not remotely new– my record for helping former students is a college sophomore, a former denizen of a 7th grade homeroom of mine, who reached out to me completely out of the blue in hope that I could help her with her statistics homework. I could, as it turns out.
No, what was new was that she was doing this while she was sitting in math class. Her current math class, in high school, with her high school Algebra 1 teacher. And, to add to the hilarity, I know her math teacher, and I don’t like her very much. I have received emails from way more of last year’s eighth graders than I usually do this early in the year, and several of them have been begging me either to move up to the high school (nope) or take them back (also nope), and every single one who I’ve asked has turned out to have this particular teacher. I don’t know if y’all remember the saga in my previous district of the teacher whose “medical leave” led to me getting stuffed into her classroom and constantly yanked around when she told people she’d be back on a certain date and then didn’t come back, but yeah, she’s back, and she works at the high school now. She still sucks, too.
Anyway, I got her through her assignment, while teaching my own students. Because that’s just how much of a badass I am, that I can teach two different classes in two different buildings at the same time.
Who wants to touch me?