You’ve got me, you bastards. I’m in. The last of your fucking movies I saw in a theater was I don’t even remember but it might have been Endgame, weeks after it came out. I also don’t remember which of your movies was the last I saw at all. Maybe Black Widow.
I am going to see Fantastic Four: First Steps in a theater. I am not back and I have no plans to see any other forthcoming Marvel movies. I’m gonna see Superman, but that’s not you. That’s two superhero movies in a month which will be more than I’ve seen in the last several years.
Please don’t fuck this up.
Anybody know anything about flies? We have a mystery infestation in about a room and a half in the house. Our dining room has a big glass sliding door leading to a screened-in back porch. I have killed, and I swear I’m not shitting you, well over a hundred house flies crawling around on that screen door in the last two days. Well over a hundred of them. I have absolutely no idea where they’re coming from. There is no obvious source of flies in my dining room. There is a vent right in front of the sliding door; I have pulled the grille out of it and vacuumed inside it extensively, and it’s not big enough to be hiding a dead animal or something, plus if there was something in there we’d be able to smell it. Plus, if they were coming from the vents, they’d be in every room in the house, not concentrated by the back porch.
They are not on the outside of the sliding doors. Plus, again, there’s no source of flies out there and it’s screened in. They have to be coming from inside the house and they also have to be coming from somewhere very close to that sliding door, and there just isn’t anything. Flies don’t just spontaneously generate! That would mean that there’s something in my dining room that is rotting and was covered in maggots and zero of the four humans and three cats in the house noticed it?
I’ve sat and watched and waited to see if I could spot them crawling from somewhere, and of course, because they’re flies and flies have turning invisible as a class ability, I’ve had no luck on that. If I leave the room for half an hour there will be between five and seventeen (the current record) on the sliding door when I come back. I’ve been using the vacuum cleaner to kill them because it’s faster and more effective than a Goddamn flyswatter.
Somebody help me out, this is gross and I’m tired of it.
(Oh, and I made a flytrap with a Sprite bottle, some apple cider vinegar and a few drops of dish soap because the Internet told me it was an effective cheap flytrap. Pff. It has not caught a single fucking fly. There’s an indoor zapper coming Friday.)
I am tempted, in writing about Adrian Tchaikovsky’s ten-book, 6000+ page, nearly two million word series Shadows of the Apt, to be terse: read it.
But, like, that’s kind of a big ask, y’know? The series is 1.924 million words long. As a comparison, the Wheel of Time series is 4.36 million words. A Song of Ice and Fire is currently at 1.749 million, with two imaginary books left to go. James S.A. Corey’s Expanse series is 1.493 million words. The entire length of this blog: 1.563 million words. The King James Bible is around 785,000, depending on how you count and who you ask.
Oh, and there are apparently four volumes of short stories outside the main story? I just found out they existed, finding out they existed made me want to die, and I don’t know how much they add.
It’s a lot. And what fascinates me is that Shadows of the Apt has got to be the least well-known of all the big fantasy megaseries. Tchaikovsky writes seventeen books a year (he has, no joke, released five new books since I’ve been reading this series. I mean it. I’m not kidding.) and I don’t feel like the guy gets nearly enough credit for being as amazing as he is. Shadows was written between —
— you may want to sit down, as this is ridiculous —
— 2008 and 2014. All of those books came out in six years, and I’d bet money that he released books unrelated to SotA during that time, plus, remember, those four extra books.
I do not know a single other person who has read this series, and I never see anyone talking about it. I can’t explain this.
I picked up Empire in Black and Gold in October, and I finished Seal of the Worm earlier this week, obviously with a lot of detours. The series breaks down rather nicely into a four-book series, Empire through Salute the Dark, and I took a decent-size break in between that and picking up The Scarab Path. Path and Sea Watch feel pretty stand-alone, as they do a Two Towers sort of thing and don’t share a lot of characters, and then the last four books go in a big gulp, but they follow pretty closely on the events of Path and Sea Watch.
I haven’t said a single word about the actual fuckin’ story yet.
Adrian Tchaikovsky likes bugs. Outside of John Irving he may be the most “Oh, there it is” author I’ve ever read. Every John Irving book is going to include weird sex, an amputation, a bear, a hotel, and wrestling. Adrian Tchaikovsky books without bugs are rare. And in Shadows of the Apt, every character is a bug. Every single one.
Well. Sorta. The human race is divided into something called kinden, and each kinden has the characteristics of a type of bug, which somehow sounds weirder than it is. They’re all still human, mind you, and kinden can interbreed, but there are Beetle-kinden and Wasp-kinden and Mantis-kinden and … let’s see, spiders, flies, bees, ants, moths, mosquitoes, scorpions (there’s a reason I said “bug” and not “insect”), dragonflies, woodlice, and, uh, Mole Crickets.
I admit it, I burst out laughing the first time a Mole Cricket-kinden showed up in the book. That’s not an exhaustive list by any means, especially since a handful of the kinden are spoilers, and I never got the feeling that Tchaikovsky had sat down and written out an exhaustive list that he was never going to break away from. I’m pretty sure there’s a stick bug kinden in there somewhere that only gets mentioned a handful of times, and there’s exactly one butterfly-kinden in the entire series. I think if he got an idea for a character with a new kinden, he just put them in and rolled with it.
oh my god I just googled mole cricket for the first time oh my god OH MY GODWHAT the FUCK
Anyway, most of the main characters are Beetles and Wasps, with a few significant Mantises and Spiders, but by the end of the series the list of characters is like eight pages long. Some kinden have, effectively, powers– Wasps have a sting that is basically a force blast they can shoot from their hands, several kinden can fly, and Ants are effectively a hive mind, and not all of them are completely human-shaped– Mole Crickets (brrrr) are ten feet tall, for example, and Mantis-kinden have some spiky bits that the rest don’t have. Some can see in the dark. Some can dig basically as fast as they can walk. You get the idea. There are cultural differences as well, although the series does take some pains to not be completely “orcs are like this, and elves are like that,” if you know what I mean. Spiders are gonna be Like That, but then he’ll throw a Spider at you that isn’t Like That, just to make sure you realize there’s diversity in the kinden.
So yeah, the first four books are the Wasps basically trying to take over the world. That war ends in book four. In the back six they basically consolidate what they lost in the first war and then try again, and the entire tenth book is a spoiler. The big problem with maxiseries like this is that there can be a lot of filler– I will never get tired of pointing out that the entire second book of The Wheel of Time could be a ten-page prologue to book three without losing anything– and it’s amazing how well this series keeps the plot moving. If anything, I felt like Book Ten could be broken into two books with another 300 pages and I’d have been fine with it, as some of the developments in that book feel like they come kind of out of left field. The flabbiest part of the series is The Sea Watch, which is the only book that’s remotely skippable, and even that one is stuffed full of tons of crazy cool ideas. It’s just that they don’t pay off sufficiently in subsequent books, which is part of why I feel like Seal of the Worm could be two books.
The different kinden are broken into two categories, the Apt and the Inapt. Apt kinden can use technology, and the work various groups of Apt artificers do over the course of the series to forge new ways to kill each other is genuinely impressive. Inapt kinden simply cannot use technology, and I’ll admit that figuring out what this exactly meant was one of my few complaints about the series. What is meant by that is that you can literally hand a crossbow, powered by a trigger, to an Inapt Mantis-kinden and they will be unable to figure out that pulling the trigger will shoot the thing. Most of the races that have major characters are Apt, and you don’t really get into the head of an Inapt character until really late, so it takes a while for it to sink in that Tchaikovsky really means it when he says at one point that if a door is opened by a button, an Inapt character will not be able to figure out how to open that door or understand how it works even if someone else shows them. Ultimately, this is a fantasy series, with swords and armor and such, but the artificers and the Apt kinden give a nice soupçon of science fiction to go with it.
(Yes, I wrote that sentence just so I could say soupçon.)
There is also magic, but … Christ, that’s a whole thing, and it’s practically a spoiler just to say that, but let’s say that the back part of the series is more about magic and the Apt vs the Inapt than the first part is, where that distinction is really in the background.
So much for being terse.
Please read this series. Come back in two years and let me know when you’re done. I need someone to talk to about it.
None of these are really worth posts on their own– well, one, maybe– but I wanna record them, so here you go.
Driving home from dropping the boy off at school one day last week, a bird happens to catch my eye at a traffic light. It’s probably a blackbird, but it’s a bit too far away for me to be sure– crow-shaped, and black, but too small to be a crow unless it’s a juvenile. So, sure. Blackbird. As I’m watching it, it abruptly does a tight 270° turn and heads straight down to the ground, wings out. I think at first that either the bird has been shot and what looked like a turn was actually a tumble or I’ve literally just seen this bird die in midair— which has to happen to birds sometime, right? Surely once in a while a bird just has a stroke or a heart attack or something?
At any rate, it pulls up right before it hits the ground and lands and then I lose track of it. If it had dove down at an angle, I’d not have said anything about it and just assumed it was going after a mouse or something, but 1) it looked way too small to be a bird of prey and 2) I have never seen a bird fly straight down before. It was weird as hell.
I’m at work, and I notice a spider perhaps two feet above my eye level and maybe three feet off to my right. The building I work in has very high ceilings, and my first thought is where the hell is his web attached, because if he’s coming down a string of silk it’s gotta be thirty or forty feet long by now. Then I notice that he’s coming straight toward me, which is not something I’d expect a spider coming down a strand of silk to do. He’s a tiny spider, and I’m not frightened of them, so this provokes fascination rather than oh god kill it fear. As he gets closer, I realize that he’s not attached to anything and he’s not acting like he’s climbing a web– he’s got his legs curled up underneath him, in fact. The damn thing is floating. I even wave my hand above him to check, and the breeze from my hand stirs him a bit but I clearly don’t break any strands of web. I try to film him but he’s too small for the resolution on my phone to handle. I watch him drift onto a sofa and crawl away.
Yesterday, first customer of the day. He waves me off at first, saying he’s only looking, which is just fine. I tell him everything in the store is on sale (which is true, and is useful information, I figure) and that the way our current deal works is “spend more, save more.”
He looks dead at me and says “You mean Jew more, save more?”
It takes me a second to process yeah that’s what the fuck he said.
“No,” I reply, shifting into my Teacher Voice. “I said spend more, save more.” And then I walk away and let my manager know that this fucker will be receiving no help from me whatsoever while he’s in the store and that if he speaks to me again we’re all lucky if the only thing I do is refer him to another salesperson.
The man and his wife circle the sales floor and leave without speaking to or being spoken to by anyone else. I spend the rest of my day with half of my brain proud of me for not losing my job by lighting this fucker up and the other half of my brain ashamed of me for not lighting the fucker up anyway.
I am, much later, trending toward the second option, for the record. How the fuck are you so fucking comfortable with being a bigot that you’ll just say shit like that to random fucking strangers in public? I shoulda thrown his ass out.
Last night I got up at 3 o’clock in the morning to stand in my front yard and watch the Perseids. I saw about six meteors in 20 minutes. This is way more interesting. This guy is now completely out of his exoskeleton.
None of these are really worth posts on their own– well, one, maybe– but I wanna record them, so here you go.
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