starlings overhead

Did I forget to do a mid-April post here? Yes.

This was the month for new releases, and also the month of Carmilla, apparently.

( Read Books )

★ My week off last week was very nice and very needed, but I started feeling sick around Sunday and ended up with a cold. Luckily, it seems to have been a brief one; I've been off work since Wednesday and I'm feeling mostly better now. I'd really like to stop getting colds!

★ While sick, I've been rereading, then reading fresh, some of the Wicked Lovely series by Melissa Marr, because mildly trashy YA faery romance seemed about my brain speed. It's a lot darker than I remember, and slightly more textually queer given they came out from 2007-11. I'd read the first three years ago but never got around to the last two, so even though I'm not really in the mood anymore, I'm determined to read the fifth and finish the series - if I don't now, I probably never will!

★ Games-wise, I've picked up Sky: Children of the Light again (MMO by the people who made Journey), and I'm enjoying it a lot! I dropped it last year because it's repetitively grind-y and very FOMO-y with its cosmetics, but for the moment I'm finding it very chill. Also, I look adorable:

Hell Followed With Us is a YA post-apocalypse horror novel about a trans guy infected with a body horror bioweapon, who escapes from the fundamentalist cult that raised him. I love that it exists, I was excited to read it, and... it's fine?

Sometimes I can't tell whether I dislike books because of flaws in the book, or because I'm not the right person to read it. All of the elements were right for me, but I think I would want to read them in a different novel. I think I've aged out of YA fiction, or else I've grown away from some constraints of the genre.

It's also a glaring example of how the "for fans of [X thing] and [Y thing]" style of marketing is misleading. It was marketed as similar to Gideon the Ninth and Annihilation, and while I can see why for both... it's just not the same.

Finished it on a train to London, which is sometimes the only way I finish books that I've stalled on. I'm not sure what I'm going to read next; I should have put an extra book in my bag so I'd have another option.

I took the day off work today to go and watch the sun rise over the sea. I'm not especially spiritual by nature, but I attach some significance to the Solstice, both symbolically and as a part of nature worth appreciating, so I try to watch the sunrise each year. If the sea were easier to get to, I'd watch the sun rise at the Summer Solstice as well.


Close to the actual sunrise, I ended up accidentally sat next to a group of pagan/new age women also there for the Solstice. They were very nice, and correctly surmised that a guy in rainbow trousers probably wouldn't be scared off by them. So I sat by them while they did their stuff (they had these cool glass resonant things) until my feet felt like ice blocks and I had to go somewhere warm. Like I said, I'm not very spiritual, but it was nice to be invited to ambiently participate in their spiritual practice.

Then, since I had the day off, I went into town and got breakfast, returned a jumper that needed returning, and wandered around some charity shops. I ended up buying one of the Culture novels, and also a copy of Dune which someone has written in (!). I love books that people have written in, and I've never read Dune, so I'm going to enjoy reading it with someone's little annotations, I think.

♥ Because of the weather, my manager asked if I wanted to work from home over the next few days. The weather isn't that bad near me, but I'm tempted to just to avoid the cold of the commute and the skating rink of our driveway. The only trouble is, I forgot to bring the charging cable for my laptop home, so I'd have to take it in shifts with the person I live with. I don't need to work from home, so it's just the question of which faff I want to live with.

♥ I've played a few demos on Steam that I've enjoyed recently: Loddlenaut, Valley Peaks, and Wildfrost. Loddlenaut, I've had my eye on for a while, but the other two were new to me. I liked Valley Peaks (and its accessibility features) but I think it'd be easier with an actual mouse, not a trackpad. Wildfrost was fun, and reminded me of Slay the Spire, but I'm having trouble gauging if it's difficult because I'm bad at it, or because they've made it really difficult.

I've ended up just picking up Slay the Spire again, and I'm really enjoying it! Now that's a game where I know my failures are my own mistake (or, rarely, bad luck). I've played 14 hours of it and I haven't beaten it yet, but I'll keep throwing myself at it!

♥ I've started getting into icon-making! Because I needed another creative hobby. 😅 I'm still trying to decide if I want to shell out money for more icon slots, when I don't know if I'll use many icons, but... the thought is tempting. At least I can make myself the Guild Wars 2 icons I was really lusting after (as well as filling my own icontalking wishlist request for some icons of Wang Lingjiao, which I've been working on).

    ♥  After abandoning it for a month accidentally, I finally picked up Revenant Gun by Yoon Ha Lee again. I'd somehow forgotten how gripping and tense his writing style was; I was invested as soon as I opened the book again, and I'm fascinated by what might happen next. I'm hoping to finish the Machineries of Empire series by the end of the year, including the book of short stories. I need to stop waiting for the "optimal" time to read, because that just means I never end up reading at all. (Although I do have several train journeys next week that might be "optimal".

I'm also reading Peter Pan during my morning commute, on the Serial app that was recommended in the last post of Dracula Daily, and I'm having a lot of fun with that as well. The prose is so delightful (although I wish this version didn't have annotations explaining to me what words mean, because it always breaks me out of the mood). I'd never actually read it before, despite having a deep love for multiple adaptations/derivative works.

    ♥  Dimension 20's Neverafter releases tonight, so I'll probably watch it tomorrow evening. I'm glad that they clarified on Twitter that it would still mostly be comedy-centred, even with the added horror; it let me set my expectations of the tone correctly, so I don't go in hoping for Exandria Unlimited: Calamity levels of darkness. (On the topic of Dropout, they were my third artist on Spotify Wrapped. What that says about me, I don't know.)

    ♥  Speaking of Spotify Wrapped, I think my results would have been slightly different if the cut-off wasn't like... early November. Because I've had Dove Cameron's Boyfriend on a lot while thinking about an OC in the past week or so, and that didn't make it in at all. But overall, it was another year of feeling slightly too Seen by having my accumulated eclectic music taste laid out all at once.

    ♥  Two days into a virtual conference at work, and transgender rights / transgender inclusion have been mentioned in a good way multiple times, and I had a nice exchange with a co-worker in the chat who had they/them pronouns. 🏳️‍⚧️ I'm always glad to be reminded that I picked a decent place to work, as this country goes.