I very nearly ended today’s earlier post with a suggestion that I might take a couple of days off. I deleted it on account of no I fucking won’t, so of course here I am a few hours later with a second post for the day.
We are doing a vegetarian week this week. This is not as big of a deal as it might sound; while I am very much a fan of meat and remaining a vegetarian for my entire life is not really something I’m interested in doing, I’ve been eating veggie burgers for lunch for like two weeks and I enjoy eating damn near everything vegetarians eat. So a week of being a vegetarian is really not a terribly difficult thing to do.
At least, when I’m paying attention.
The boy wanted McDonald’s for lunch today, and I couldn’t think of a good reason to tell him no, so we went. I toned down what I usually get on account of I’m trying to pay more attention to eating better in general (yes, I know McDonald’s is not progress in the “eat better” department, but at least I had less of it) and I swear to you that it took until well after I was finished with my lunch to realize that a McDonald’s Daily Double is made of meat.
Which, you need to understand here, this is a category error on my part, and not me just forgetting that I was a vegetarian this week. There’s been at least one vegetarian week where there was pizza at work and I absent-mindedly had a slice of pepperoni without thinking about it. This isn’t that. This is a McDonald’s Daily Double does not process in my brain as a cheeseburger, and it did not even occur to me to think that those two delicious, peppery patties were meat. What the fuck are they? They’re Daily Double patties, apparently. Made of what? Love and cholesterol. Sure as hell not meat.
I’m a lot of things, but “bright” ain’t one of them.
7:45 PM, Tuesday June 16th: 2,134,973 confirmed cases and 116,854 Americans dead.
Mizu, frequently referred to here as the Great Old One, decided last week that eating wasn’t something she was especially interested in any longer, and I bowed to necessity and had to have her put to sleep yesterday afternoon. I got her right after starting graduate school in 1998; she was a kitten, having been born (in Japan, believe it or not) in March; I probably got her in September or October. She was 22 years old, was the first pet who was really mine, and has been with me for my entire adult life.
Despite how I usually react to these things, I’m finding that I don’t really want to talk about this one. I’m having a very hard time with this. I hope everyone understands.
I can’t handle the world right now, so watch my favorite YouTuber react to the news that Demon’s Souls is getting a remake for the PS5, and understand that not only did this immediately sell me a PS5 but that my reaction wasn’t much different.
My wife and I decided we were in the mood for a movie last night after we put the boy to bed. It’s entirely possible that you don’t even know Bloodshot exists in the first place; it’s based on a comic book character, but from the Valiant universe, and if you’re not already a comic book person you do not know the Valiant universe exists. I am a comic book person and literally the only things I knew about Bloodshot going into the movie was that he was created during the 90s, which is the era when “Bloodshot” was something you decided to name your characters (I’m pretty sure the word is never once uttered in the film) and that he used guns and could regenerate. That was it.
The movie also had the deep misfortune to come out on March 13, which was the exact weekend that all hell broke loose and everything started getting cancelled. My last day at work was March 16, the following Monday. I don’t think they were really expecting gangbusters numbers out of this or it wouldn’t have released in March in the first place, but it flopped, and flopped hard. And it was sitting on a rather pathetic 33% rating on the TomatoMeter. We were both in the mood for a dumb action movie, though, and I am a huge Vin Diesel fan regardless of what he’s in, so what the hell, I’ll burn $5.99 to rent this on a Saturday night. It doesn’t need to be art, it needs to entertain me for two hours.
Y’all.
Not only is Bloodshot at least a solid movie, it’s an interesting one on a lot of different levels. The direction, in particular, makes the film worth watching all by itself– this is not a thing that I often say about movies, but the color palette the movie uses is a fascinating choice for an action movie, and there is a fight at the end that takes place in an elevator shaft on the outside of a skyscraper that was just outstanding. The rest of it is shot more like a drama than an action movie, which sounds like a criticism but isn’t. Bloodshot himself tends to be a little lumbery and Frankenstein-ish; like, dude, I know you’ll regenerate and gunshots aren’t likely to kill you, but maybe don’t just walk straight toward the guys that are shooting at you? Like, save the regeneration for when you need it.
There is also a Big Twist, but the Big Twist happens at about the 1/3 mark of the film, which … is not how that usually works? And I’m going to suggest that you withhold judgment until you get to that Big Twist, because it’s going to recast everything you just saw and some things that maybe didn’t make a ton of sense at first are going to click. And pay attention before then, because you get some interesting hints at what’s going on scattered here and there.
Vin Diesel is Vin Diesel; you kind of know what to expect there, and Guy Pearce continues to be a chameleon. There are a couple of weak spots in the cast; the bad guy’s muscle is underwritten, including one guy who is angry all the time for no clear reason, and I don’t know who decided that the guy who played Winston on New Girl should do his entire character with what I think was supposed to be a Cockney accent, but Jesus, his accent is so terrible that after a while I decided that the character was from Chicago and the whole thing was an elaborate prank.
… which, if you’d ever watched New Girl, you know that would have been just about the best movie moment of all time. Prank Sinatra, baby!
So: Bloodshot is not going to change your life or anything like that, but it’s a solid B as a film, which I was not expecting from something at 33% on the critical reviews. It’s a great Saturday night rental if you’re in the mood for an action movie. Check it out.
11:01 AM, Sunday June 14: 2,075,840 confirmed cases and 115,458 Americans dead.
I did not ride the bike today. I got back on yesterday, going a different direction that (I hoped) would not force me into a heart attack, only to be stopped dead by a truck doing a 180 degree, three-point turn in the middle of the damn road on the one part of the trek that was mildly uphill. Getting the bike moving again from a complete stop while going uphill was probably responsible for 80% of my pulse spike for the trip, but at least I didn’t fall or have to walk the damn thing this time. I’ll take it.
Today, I mowed the back yard, cut down what I think was a sapling but could have been some species of aggressive bush, and removed the ancient, rotting free-standing basketball hoop that our neighbors donated to us several years ago. It was old when they gave it to us and since then one of the support rods has completely rusted through, so it’s moved from “infrequently used eyesore” to “infrequently used, moderately dangerous eyesore” and it was time for it to go. I have moved it to the center of the cul-de-sac, which is where my entire neighborhood puts things that they want to go away. And it will! It is ridiculously heavy and large, but someone will take it away before the garbage truck needs to be called. It’s virtually guaranteed.
In addition to occasionally trying to get exercise on purpose I have also sort of started Weight Watchers this week. I am, so far, at least partially convinced that Weight Watchers is expensive voodoo; my wife and I have discovered that certain foods vary in points when she eats them versus when I do, and I discovered to my chagrin today that a single fucking can of Pepsi was ten goddamned points. A bottle of Gatorade is nine, and thank God I already like unsweetened tea because I’m sure sweet tea is a mess too. I get 60 points for a day and I am given to believe that that is a pretty high number. I am sure there is some sort of at least attempt at science behind it, and sooner or later I’ll do some reading and figure out what that is, but right now? There’s seven more cans of Pepsi in my beverage fridge and I’m drinking each and every one of them before switching over to Coke Zero or whateverthefuck. I’m happy to cut out/down sugar but you gotta let me burn through my stores first.
(Sidenote: this has been true for basically my entire life, but I’ve never really thought about it in these terms until recently: I drink all of my sugar. I almost never eat sweet snacks. I’ll get a craving for ice cream maybe once every couple of months, but a pint of ice cream can last me a week.)
Unrelated, but: I really need to cultivate at least a group of people on Twitter or something who are into video games, because I need to talk to someone about The Last of Us 2. Right now I feel like I don’t want to play it, which is a damn shame considering how amazing I thought the original was, but a couple of the reviews I’ve seen feel like they’ve got how I’ll react dialed in pretty well. Unfortunately, a bunch of other reviews are calling this the best game of this entire console generation. Now, I’m over 200 hours into Nioh 2, so I may have some things to say about that idea, but that’s still pretty fucking high praise. I just don’t need game stress right now on top of everything else, y’know?
7:58 PM, Saturday June 13: 2,071,782 confirmed cases and 115,347 Americans dead. Meanwhile, the WaPo has the number of reported cases today as the highest single-day total since May 14, and passing that date and becoming the highest single-day reported cases since May 8 is not impossible. This is getting worse again, folks.
Mei-Mei asked in comments to the last post what I do with all of my books after I’m done reading, and it occurs to me that I don’t actually think I’ve done this post yet, somehow. Let’s take a tour of my house! Without cleaning it first, because … I really should have straightened the place up first. Oh well.
Also, yes, we only have one child.
We begin in “the back” of the house, the room that we have never really settled on a name for. This is technically a CD/DVD rack, and these are all paperbacks, and it needs dusting quite badly.
Same room, on the other side of the sliding glass door to the back porch.
Opposite wall, with Star Wars hardcovers, general fiction, comic books, Stephen King, and Brandon Sanderson, and also featuring my telescope and the boy’s home-made robot costume.
On to the living room!
Getting a good angle on this bookshelf is kind of tricky because of where it’s located. That top shelf will never contain books as it’s where I throw my wallet and my keys and various and sundry things I need to keep track of. The rest of it is basically all black history.
To the right behind the lamp is not a smaller bookshelf; that’s actually a piano.
These four bookshelves are on the wall behind the one you just saw, and are part of the reason it’s kind of tricky to get a good shot of that bookshelf. Subjects include religion, presidential history (the third shelf, left to right, the one with Thor and Hawkeye on top, has at least one book by or about every legitimately elected President of the United States, plus my Lincoln shelf,) education, and history and philosophy of science.
The next few pictures are all on the same wall, opposite this one:
Mostly fiction, with some history scattered here and there, especially on that very top part, along with comic books and role-playing games.
My leatherbounds and two shelves of mostly nonfiction, although the books that are stacked in front and not properly on the shelves are more likely to be fiction than not.
To the right of the TV, entirely fiction, plus the top shelf of Books By Me And People I Know. Also some overflow from the black history shelf.
On to the bedroom!
Fiction, a couple of shelves of my wife’s books, and yearbooks and photo albums. Top left is the (empty!!!!) unread shelf; note that the four books on the unread shelf are not part of the unread shelf. Two are ARCs that are due for a review in July sometime and so don’t count yet and two are eventually going to be moved to the People I Know/Indie Authors shelf and I just haven’t gotten around to it for some reason. Also, a litterbox.
In the office are several boxes full of my own books for whenever I’m able to go to a con again and exactly two shelves, one of hardback Star Wars books and one of generic fiction hardcovers that I didn’t have a better place to put. The shelf itself is in a corner and buried behind a bunch of stuff so I didn’t bother getting a picture of it.
Also, back in January I took, I think, six banker’s boxes of books into the basement, with the understanding that if by January of 2021 I hadn’t found a reason to go looking through them, I was going to donate them to someone. So this would have had probably another 100-120 books scattered throughout if I hadn’t done that.
I think I’ll spend my whole weekend cleaning now.
6:06 PM, Friday, June 12: 2,039,468 confirmed cases and 114,446 Americans dead. I keep almost doing a much more comprehensive “this is not going away” type of post with these numbers; perhaps I’ll do that this weekend, in between dusting every surface in the house.
My neighborhood– please don’t use this information to stalk me– is full of cul-de-sacs. I live on one of them, not pictured in the above photo. Over the last several days since acquiring the bike I have managed to either learn or relearn riding a bike to the point where I could go down my driveway, circle my cul-de-sac a couple of times, and then return to my driveway without incident. We’re talking literal one-minute bike rides. But I could do it!
I take my improvements where I can get them.
Tonight, I resolved that I was going to Take a Bike Ride. I was going to put my helmet on my giant head and ride far enough away from my house that I couldn’t see it any longer.
It did not go well.
Now, it didn’t go as comically poorly as the diagram above seems to indicate– at no point was I off the road, and I certainly did not drive my Goddamned bike right through anyone’s houses, as the orange line seems to imply. There was no corner-cutting through lawns or anything like that. I don’t know why the line isn’t smoother, but it does more or less represent the route.
I learned something about my neighborhood tonight that, after nine years of living in this house, I was not aware of: I live at the top of a fucking hill. I swear to you, I didn’t know this. So I turned out of my cul-de-sac heading roughly eastward expecting more or less a level, pleasant ride, and a few moments later I was hurtling toward death at, the app tells me, a max speed of fifteen miles an hour.
I am not sure what counts as fast to someone who is used to riding a bike. I can tell you that when you have not been on one in thirty years, fifteen miles an hour is motherfucking terrifying. I was going fast enough that I didn’t need to pedal, and at one point on the way down the thought I’m going to die and I’m not even getting any exercise out of it floated through my head. I still don’t quite get how the gearing system works, so chances are I could have adjusted the gears and done … something, but hell if I knew what.
That said, I did not die, and I managed to slow myself down without flipping over the front of the bike and decided to turn off and turn around, figuring I’d been far enough that it counted as progress. And I did! I also learned that I don’t really know how to turn around and look behind me, so right now left turns are out of the question until I get a mirror or something like that. Luckily the one turn I had to make coming out of the turnaround was nice and clear in both directions so I didn’t have to negotiate slowing down too much or stopping before turning back toward home.
Which was uphill.
I realized very quickly that I was in trouble.
See that spot in the upper left of the image where it looks like a toddler scribbled on the screen for a moment? That’s where I had to stop and rest. That’s how far I made it, pedaling uphill on what was a mild enough grade that in nine years I had never noticed it before. I stopped the bike for a second, intending to catch my breath and then continue. Turns out the house on that corner has three kids! None over ten! They’re cute. One of them told me she liked my bike. I thanked her. Then I tried to get the bike moving again.
And failed.
And I tried again.
And failed.
And then I decided that, pride be damned, I was going to have to push the motherfucker up the damn hill, because unless I wanted to turn around and go back downhill again to build up some speed I wasn’t going to get my 45-pound bike and my 318-pound ass (yep) moving up that damn hill.
And as soon as I tried to get off the bike, my legs went to jelly and I fell. I’ve never experienced that before; my legs basically just decided to stop being legs. Lucky for me, I was getting off lawn-side (no sidewalks in my neighborhood) so I fell onto grass and wasn’t hurt, but it didn’t go well. And, of course, the kids were still there. They asked if I was ok. I said I was.
And then I tried to stand up, and my legs weren’t having that either, so I got to sit there for a minute or two until actually standing the fuck up was possible, and then I had to push the bike the rest of the way home. I managed to make it without further embarrassment (other than the other guy on a bike who rode past me and gave me a hell of a confused look) and staggered into my house and collapsed into a chair, so out of breath I couldn’t talk.
(Entertaining sidenote: the app I’m using asks you to rate how difficult you think any given ride was, and one of the guidelines it gives you for a “max effort” ride is that you can no longer remember your name. That’s not a joke. I can’t find it right now, but I will screenshot it next time. I wasn’t quite that bad, but I filed it as max effort anyway.)
It took about fifteen minutes for my heart rate to subside from what my watch tells me was a peak of 149 BPM to something approaching normal, and for at least part of that I was actually trying to move my legs and wasn’t able to. I’m damned glad I made it back; my wife still has a broken foot, remember, so if it had been much worse than it was I’m not sure what the merry fuck I would have been able to do about it.
And once I was recovered enough to describe to my wife what had happened, she says to me, I swear to God, “Oh, I’d have told you about the hill if you’d asked.”
Anybody want a bike?
This is the data I was given about the ride that almost killed me. I swear to you that despite how ridiculously nothing this looks, nothing in this post is hyperbole. This doesn’t include the walk back pushing that heavy-ass thing, though, because I ended the “recording” session once I decided I wasn’t getting back on the bike.
Y’all are lucky I have no shame at all or this place would be a lot less entertaining.
8:11 PM, Thursday June 11: 2,021,900 confirmed infections and 113,774 Americans dead.
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