I just sat here for ten minutes, staring at the screen, trying to come up with something that wasn’t either depressing or the same shit I’ve been posting for the last four days, and I’m gonna go play Dragon Age: Veilguard instead, because I’ve got nothing tonight. Everything is terrible all the time forever. That’s what I’ve got.
Month: November 2024
Third verse, same as the first
I woke up this morning fully intending to go to work and was immediately hit with a wave of nausea so potent that I had to lie back down again before I fell down. If anything, I’ve felt sicker today than I did yesterday, and everyone in the house stayed home from work/school today. My wife suspects food poisoning as all four of us had Burger King on Sunday night; I’m a little skeptical as we didn’t all eat the same thing, but whatever it is, I’m fucking tired of it, and while I’ll still maintain that the symptoms (and the timing) are overlapping pretty damn well with panic attacks, those aren’t contagious.
I am going to work tomorrow if I’m not in the hospital. If I have to throw up out the window of the car on the way there, so fucking be it. I’ve already missed five days out of the last two weeks and I refuse to miss any more between now and Christmas, damn it.
Ugggggghhhhhh, redux
I don’t think I’m recovered from the election yet, and I think yesterday’s illness may have been more along the lines of a panic attack than an actual illness. I have been edgy and stressed the fuck out all day long, to the point where I haven’t been able to read because I can’t focus on anything enough to do it.
I genuinely don’t know how I’m going to make it through another four years of this. I really don’t.
(Hits “publish,” opens BlueSky, discovers Trump has apparently named a Fox News host as Secretary of Defense.)
Uggghhhhhhh
Got to work this morning feeling fine, and half an hour later walked out of the building because I’d thrown up in the staff bathroom. Got home somehow without making a mess of the rental car, got sick again, and I’ve more or less been asleep since then. I had four pieces of toast and a little bit of turkey twenty minutes ago so we’ll see if I die. I’ve already called off for tomorrow.
Hoping your day was better than mine.
In which order is restored
Big Bastard 2: The Rebastarding appears to be working just fine, thanks; I have come up with one thing that might possibly have affected the previous console’s ability to work beyond “this shit is broken,” but to hell with it, FedEx has it already. I need to move it to where it’s actually going to live, but the original PS5 is still there since I wasn’t about to start really rearranging things until I was certain this one worked.
Meanwhile, it’s 6:30 and pitch fucking black outside, and mentally I’m like WAIT NO HOW THE HELL IS IT BEDTIME THERE’S MORE WEEKEND LEFT, and god, do I hate Daylight Savings Time. Saving Time. Whatever the fuck it’s called. I hate it being fucking dark at 6:30 in the evening during the winter and I hate it being light at 10:30 during the summer and time is bullshit.
#REVIEW: Somewhere Beyond the Sea, by TJ Klune
I have to say that I kind of needed this book. I absolutely adored The House in the Cerulean Sea, TJ Klune’s first book in what we’re apparently calling the Cerulean Chronicles, and I’m really hoping that the fact that the series has a title now means we’re going to see more of it. My review of that first book has become one of my most inexplicably popular posts– my seventh most popular post in the history of the blog, in fact– and traffic for it tends to come in waves. It’ll have 40 hits over the course of a day and then trail off, and then a couple of weeks later it’ll have a hundred, and then it happens again. I don’t know why! I don’t get enough information about referrers from WordPress and if there’s something else I can use to look up where views are coming from, I don’t know how to use it. Feel free to enlighten me in comments, if you have a suggestion.
Anyway, Somewhere Beyond the Sea returns to the orphanage on Marsyas Island, and the magical children and their two caretakers, who continue to have one of the most adorable relationships in all of literature. This book lives in Arthur Parnassus’ head, though, instead of Linus Baker, the main character and POV of the first book. While the switch makes perfect sense in the context of the series, Arthur is a darker, angrier character than Linus, and some of the gentleness and charm of the first book is lost in the switch. This book also introduces a couple of actual villains, as DICOMY, the Department In Charge of Magical Youth, Linus’ employer from the first book, turns on the orphanage and in particular on one of the children who live there. There is another DICOMY inspector, this one very much cut from the “I pretend to be here to help the children and am absolutely not here to help the children” cloth that I was so pleased to see Linus was not in the first book.
The first book was about a family forming. This one is about threats to tear that family apart, although the addition of a new child to the orphanage adds another new perspective that isn’t as negative as the two representatives of DICOMY.
Ironically, while the book isn’t quite the cozy “big gay blanket” of the first book, I found that I related to Arthur more than I ever did to Linus, which wasn’t something I was expecting on the way in. Arthur has a traumatic past– that’s not the bit I relate to, mind you, as I can’t really make that claim– but he spends much of the book struggling with his temper, as he has the ability to simply make the threats to his family go away in the most violent and retributive manner possible and repeatedly chooses not to, as that’s not the person he wishes to be.
Let me just say that it is not difficult for me to relate to a character who is a father and an educator who occasionally struggles with preventing his rage at the injustice and unfairness of the world from affecting the way he lives in it. Not difficult at all. I lack the ability to set things on fire with my mind, however, so his struggle has a touch more immediate salience than mine might.
Most interestingly, I think with Arthur and particularly Arthur’s past, and the fact that this book does dwell on trauma in a way that Cerulean Sea did not, Klune is in some ways addressing the criticisms of his first book, which I won’t go into here, but you’re welcome to click on that link up there. It turns out that Arthur Parnassus ending up the Master at Marsyas Island was not an accident. I’ll leave it at that.
I can’t issue quite as strong a recommendation for this book as I did Cerulean Sea, but that was one of my favorite books of the year it came out and remains my favorite of Klune’s books, so that’s not saying a lot. This is still a comfortable #2 in his body of work, and you should give it a read.
LOL, I guess not
The cherry on top of the shitshow that was this week is that my new, ridiculously overpriced PS5 Pro that I wasn’t even completely sure I wanted came out of its box tonight, and … it’s bricked. Three different known-good HDMI cables and two known-good power cords later plus the two out of the box, it’ll turn on but absolutely will not output a signal. So I’m returning it, and I’m not particularly interested in an exchange. I’m just getting my money back.
I find myself weirdly relieved.
Still not here
The big bastard is still not out of his box, and … I dunno, maybe tomorrow? My kids did really well on their test today; that’s good, I suppose. Everything else going on in my head involves thinking about how society would be way way better if literally like three people either died or were divested of all of their worldly possessions or both, and I don’t really want to put that on the internet right now, so maybe it’s best if I just go play a video game on the big bastard’s older, smaller brother and continue to minimize my Internet time.
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