Month: November 2021

Sebastián Yatra, Enrique Iglesias, and Ricky Martin, November 6, 2021

The concert last night was, as expected, awesome. My two biggest regrets were (a) Enrique Iglesias’s outfit was the same color as the stage and so, since I was sitting in the balcony, I kept losing him, and (b) there was no Sebastián Yatra merch.

Yatra, as the opener, went first and he was amazing. I sang, and danced, and looked forward to the days when he will be the headliner. He did “Robarte un Beso,” which is one of my favorite songs of any Latino music. Mwah. While they changed sets, I went walking around the building. I had surgery on my tailbone when I was in high school and now I cannot sit in the same place for too long without it hurting. So I went out to rest my tailbone and asked about the Yatra merch. Bummer.

Sebastián Yatra on the big screen to the side of the stage. This is probably the best photo I took that night.

I returned to my seat just after the lights went down for Enrique Iglesias. Even though he and Ricky Martin are listed as co-headliners, I think that Iglesias might be considered to be headlinier. There was way more merch for him and if I recall correctly, he was on for about half an hour longer. I enjoyed his set, but it was a little English-language heavier than I was expecting in an audience that was primarly Latino. I’m not sure if he was expecting a “whiter” audience than he got, or if he usually does a primarily English-language set, but I don’t actually know that many of his English-language songs.

Then, after another coccyx break, Ricky Martin came on. He performed for an hour and it was awesome. I knew most of the songs and was dancing along and singing along and, well, Yay!

Interestingly, I could have had half of a row to myself. The two ladies who were assigned the seats next to mine were only, apparently, interested in Enrique Iglesias. They didn’t show up until before his set and left right after. I stayed in my seat, though, because I didn’t know for sure that they were gone. I mean, the lines for the ladies’ room was really long. By the time I realized that they were gone, the concert was nearly over.

I didn’t write this until nighttime on November 7, partly because of time change. It’s 6:12 but feels a lot later now. And also because I’ve finally started reading The Last Graduate and I’ve had trouble putting it down.

I’m Nervous About the Upcoming Wheel of Time Series

What follows are some mild spoilers (should be mild spoilers) for the early books of the Wheel of Time series. I’m avoiding one major one that I’ll be going into in more depth later, because dammit.

Specifically this article, which says that the series won’t introduce characters and then have them disappear to bring them back later. Our initial group is Rand, Mat, Perrin, Egwene, Moiraine, Lan, and Thom.

Rand, Mat, Perrin, and Egwene grew up together in the town of Emond’s Field. Rand, Mat, and Perrin are almost exactly all the same age and Egwene is two years younger, but everyone in town expects her to marry Rand.

At some point, Thom disappears and then returns later. They’re going to circumvent this by having Thom not show up at all until “later.” Does this mean that the plot point where Thom disappears won’t happen at all?

Will Rand just . . . have a flute? Thom’s flute shows up a lot. Mat and Rand get free room and board at a number of inns thanks to Thom’s flute.

Alanna (rant deleted) is supposed to be a major player from early in the series even though she doesn’t (spoiler deleted) until the sixth book in the series.

Welp. There’s nothing I can do is watch the show and see how they work it all. out.

Reading Creep

Book creep?

It seems like there should be a term for how you can accumulate books in progress. I started out with a reasonable number of books — a hard copy book, an ebook, and an audiobook.

Now, suddenly, I have, like seven books in progress — three ebooks, three hard copy books, and an audiobook.

I’m going to have to scale back a bit.

The audiobook is the second Wheel of Time book, so that one is staying.

My three ebooks are Run, the third book in the Fearless series; The Deceivers, the second book in the Greystone Secrets series; and The Winterbourne Home for Mayhem and Mystery, the second book in the Winterbourne Home for Valor and Vengeance series.

I think I’m going to knuckle down and finish Run, then I don’t know. I actually have the Greystone Secrets one on my old phone and the Winterbourne Home one on my new phone, and I’m kind of tempted to leave it that way. That’ll leave me with two ebooks.

My four hard copy books are Motherhood: The Second Oldest Profession, by Erma Bombeck; Cash in a Flash, by Mark Victor Hansen and Robert G. Allen; and Eyewitness to History, by John Carey. I also have been working my way through the Young Wizards series and I’m kind of eager to get to my reread of Wizards at War and I have a copy of The Last Graduate, by Naomi Novik that I’ve been holding off on because I’m really worried that it won’t be as good as I hope it is.

I may have the Bombeck one done tonight or tomorrow. I’m rereading Cash in a Flash because it’s the book that got me book blogging in the first place, and I’m hoping to find a way to monetize this blog besides just the Germane/Gratuitous Amazon Link thing. So I guess I’m jettisoning Eyewitness to History for the time being.

Well, five books isn’t three books, but it’s not seven books, either.

Book Casting

I don’t know why this is, but my brain casts characters in books without my actual input. Subconsciously, as it were.

Since we’re just a 17 days from seeing the characters of the Wheel of Time as actors, I thought I’d talk some about the actors that my brain has put in the roles.

Not unfitting, given my early young adult fixation on Classic Doctor Who, a lot of the characters turn up as actors who were in Classic Doctor Who episodes.

Hey! I just figured out that there’s a way to stick a table in a WordPress blog. W00t!

Unfortunately I cannot find any good pictures of the actors in question that gives photographer credits so we’re just going to name names and y’all can look up the actors if you don’t know who I’m talking about.

Starting from the beginning of the series, the actor that my brain first latched onto and said, “this one” was Mummy-era Brendan Fraser for Perrin (which means that, yes, Perrin’s eventual wife is Rachel Weisz, and no, I didn’t have to force my brain to that decision — my brain went “These two are going to end up together. Have some Rachel Weisz and I was, like, “Don’t mind if I do.”

Moiraine is Mira Furlan, who played De’Lenn on Babylon 5.

Min is Carole Ann Ford, who played Susan, the Doctor’s granddaughter, in the first season of Doctor Who, as she appeared when she was on Doctor Who. Another Doctor Who actor, this one was only in one episode, but explain that to my subconscious, Hilary Ryan, who played Rodan in the Tom Baker episode The Invasion of Time, is Nynaeve. I don’t know. I just work here.

And it goes on like this for some time. Elayne, Galad, Morgase, . . . . A lot of characters are as yet uncast in my brain. Strangely, that includes Rand and Mat. I’m one of those who sees the events of the book in my head, but my brain kind of puts an NPC with the physical description of those characters in their place.

After playing around with Doctor Who episodes on Amazon, my Germane Amazon Link ended up being The Mummy. Why do they not have the season boxed sets for DVD that they have for Blu-Ray?

Young Wizards Characters: Harry Callahan

When I (a) ran out of travel money and (b) was unable to travel due to COVID and decided to retreat into book blogging, one of the things I thought I’d do was write a bit about the characters of the books that I’ve read. I figured I’d do deep dives into protagonists and antagonists and things. I never imagined that my first character post would be about Nita and Dairine’s dad, of all things.

Additionally, I’m writing this at 2 am because my stomach hurts and I’m having trouble sleeping.

What follows will have spoilers for any/all of the Young Wizards books up to and including Games Wizards Play, but not for any of the short stories, novelettes, etc., or the New Millennium Editions. Turn back here, all who haven’t read all of the books in question and don’t want to be spoiled.

I’m currently rereading Wizards Holiday, which is one of my favorite books in the Young Wizards series. And one thought led to another, and here I am.

In one of the future books, I think it might be Wizards at War, but I might be misremembering, Roshaun says something to Dairine about how she . . . acts like a Wellakhite or something and that maybe she was born on the wrong planet.

I think that Roshaun is mistaken. I think that her father, Harry, was born on the wrong planet. It’s pretty clear by now that Harry was supposed to be, like, Nelaid (Roshaun’s father)’s brother or nephew or cousin or something, but the fact that the Wellakhite people assassinate member of their royal family led to the line he was supposed to have been born into ending before he could be born.

Would that have made Dairine a distant enough relative to make her a prospective queen of Wellakh? Or close enough that she and Roshaun would’ve been BFFs or what? I don’t know.

I originally thought that maybe Harry was a wizard. I mean, he could see the characters of the Speech, which non-wizards aren’t supposed to be able to do and Nita and Dairine’s visit to Ireland just in time to save them from the Lone Power was arranged by “North American regional,” whomever that is.

But why would he have acted so skeptical when Kit and Nita came out to him and Betty in Deep Wizardry in that case?

I guess that Harry and Betty’s conversation about sending Nita to Ireland being somehow “North American regional” will either stay a plot hole, or maybe something is explained in one of the stories I haven’t read? Or maybe Duane patched that up in the New Millennium Editions, which I haven’t read yet, either?

Another thing about Harry that hits me pretty hard is that he wasn’t offered the Oath. Once he discovers that Wizardry is a thing, he wishes that he’d been able to be a wizard and Nita thinks that if he’d really wanted to be a wizard he’d be one because there aren’t enough wizards to go around.

And I know that I never would’ve been offered the Oath. My mom had cancer when I was eight and then hid it from me for a couple of years after the danger was all over. This led to several years (including the one when I’d most likely have been offered the Oath) of being terrified of getting cancer. I remember asking my mom for a comprehensive list of all of the parts that can get cancerous so I knew which parts I didn’t have to worry about if they changed. I even panicked when I noticed the join between the two pieces of lower lateral cartilage in my nose.

I can’t help but wonder if something like that happened to Harry.

I Went Downtown Tonight (November 1, 2021)

I sat around all day, working on my reading and writing blog posts (this is my fourth post for today, and will go live on November 5), but not getting any exercise, or any reading on The Eye of the World.

I was so close to having The Eye of the World finished and I figured that a trip from my house to the Pearl and then walking downtown from the Pearl and then reversing the trip should be enough time to finish The Eye of the World and, just maybe, get started on The Great Hunt. And it was, too. Yay!

I was a little nervous a couple of times during my walk, but I mostly enjoyed the walk. I saw a couple of Christmas trees while I was out and about, but mostly it felt like a nice, autumnal evening.

I enjoy taking night photographs in the city because the play of light and shadow is so interesting. During the daytime around here, everything’s so bright. We get an occasional darkly overcast day, which makes photography interesting, but mostly it’s just . . . sunny.

Tonight’s picture of the Alamo. There were people standing in front taking family photos, so I decided to get an angled shot for this one.

Unfortunately, even after all of that walking, I’m still 2,000 steps short and it’s 10:45 at night. Let’s see if I can knock some of that out before bedtime (which is about an hour away).

Reading Speed

I’m in an interesting place right now with regard to my reading speed. I’m sort of trapped in between two memes:

And

Today I’m leaning towards the first rather than the second. I realized today that I’ve read over 100 books since the beginning of NaNoWriMo last year and that’s by my calculation about 20% of the total hard copy books I own. I’ve got probably another hundred or so ebooks* and a few audiobooks that I haven’t listened to.

I may someday have to stop listing “tsundoku” as one of my hobbies.

Of course, probably 90 of those hard copy books are history books that I bought specifically to slow down my reading speed because back in the Before Times (there seems to be a dividing line right down my cancer treatment in 2001/2002 where my reading speed and cognition are concerned) I was going through books *so* fast that it was starting to get expensive.

So it may take another year or so to go through those 90 books. Unless my reading speed is picking back up to the point where it was in the Before Times. That would be interesting.

Not that I’m significantly impaired or anything. I’ve done a bunch of online testing and test pretty highly for my age group. But in my mid-30s, my mind definitely went from a laser to, like, a maglite or something.

I just stopped and took a cognitive function test and I’m “at or above average” for my age group. So there’s that.

For our Gratuitous Amazon Link, we have Heist Society, the first book in the Heist Society trilogy by Ally Carter. Heist Society is a series on the adventures of a “crew” of teen art thieves who get together to steal items that were originally stolen from their rightful owners. The Heist Society books are not a series with an overarching story, like Carter’s Gallagher Girls series, so it may stay at three books, but there may be further books down the line. I hope there are further books down the line.

* I just checked. I have 154 books on my Kindle.

Wizards Unite Is Ending, Part II

I realized that I feel about the departure of Wizards Unite like I did when a dear friend’s girlfriend broke up with him. He was devastated and, while I empathized with his devastation, I was kind of expecting their relationship not to work out.

One of the reasons that I saw the end of Wizards Unite coming is that they clearly weren’t making a lot of money from players — the daily goal list had an optional “get a reward for watching a commercial.” And that, by itself, wasn’t what made me think that Wizards Unite wasn’t long for the world. It was the fact that the button didn’t work.

I mean, it would work eventually. Occasionally. I’d click on it and nothing would happen. I’d click again. Still nothing. I’d tap it repeatedly. Nothing. Sometimes closing the game and opening it again would work, but even that was no guarantee. I mean, I’m trying to get your sponsor to pay you and I can’t? Why?

There have been a lot of things that WB Games dropped the ball on. Wizards Unite has an event that rotates through where the player is interacting with things from the Fantastic Beasts movies and it requires the player to open portkeys by walking. Only one cannot open portkeys without the game open. Notice that in other games that use the same engine as Pokemon Go the game counts steps even with the game closed. Wizards Unite, not so much.

And the folks at WB Games kept dinking around with things. They had a nice set of tasks for their “brilliant events,” and they started messing with them. My personal favorite was when you had to interact with other players. Only, there are no other players, as far as I can tell. Okay, that’s a bit of hyperbole. I mean, there’s a fairly active community on Reddit, for example. However, both of the communities that I participated in before discovering the Reddit community have died. I finally had to strongarm Evelyn into starting to play so that I could get her to be my friend for those events.

I had a lot of fun playing Wizards Unite. It’s just that if I were to list the things I enjoyed about the game, a lot of it would sound like the same things I find fun about Pokemon Go, and whoever is running the servers for Pokemon Go (Niantic, I think) cares more about keeping stuff running and relevant than the people at WB Games did.

I’m giving Pikmin Bloom a shot. That’s the game that the people on the subReddit seem to be migrating to. So far I’m not sure I get it, but at least it counts your steps when you’re not playing the game.

Wizards Unite is Ending

I have to go get ready for work in seven minutes. Since this is sort of time-dependent, I’m going to post this whenever that time hits and if I’m not done with my thoughts by then I’ll make a Part II later.

Just before I went to sleep last night, I saw the announcement in Wizards Unite that the Wizards Unite servers would be shut down on January 31, 2022.

I really wish I could say that I’m blindsided and heartbroken, but while I’m kind of sad, I’m not really surprised.

First, Wizards Unite was repetitive. I mean, I understand the whole collect items until you have them and then prestige the page and start over mechanic, but . . . why? I mean, once you’ve “returned” the same “foundable,” like, 100 times or whatever. Why?

Second, why are so many we rescuing the most powerful wizards in history from things they handled in the books? The number of times we have to rescue Harry, Ron, Hermione, Neville, and Parvati from their boggarts? Really? Why?

The overarching storyline didn’t really matter. I run my phone in other languages, including Traditional Chinese characters, and I have real trouble reading Traditional Chinese characters. Did my inability to understand all of the developments of the storyline impede my gameplay? Not at all. Again, why?

Content Creators: The Try Guys

Last year, I started a tag called “Content Creators” in an effort to scare up something to write about.

Well, once again, I’m trying to scare up something to write about, so here we are again.

I could’ve sworn I’ve written about the Try Guys before, but maybe that was just about the concert that I went to with Ray a couple of years ago.

Try Guys Tryceratops at concert in 2019
Yes. I’ve clearly written about the Try Guys concert, since I had this in my already-posted photos.

First, a small content warning. I love The Try Guys, but a lot of their content is based on food. If videos about food are an issue for you (disordered eating, autism-spectrum sensory issues, etc.) be selective about their videos.

The group of men who call themselves The Try Guys started out as a . . . channel? troupe? theme? on Buzzfeed. They developed a following, so in 2018 they left Buzzfeed and formed their own company. Since then it’s been fun watching them grow.

The four “guys” of the Try Guys are (alphabetically by first name) Eugene Lee Yang, from Pflugerville, Texas; Keith Habersberger, from Carthage, Tennessee (though he went to Illinois State University and lived for a time in Chicago); Ned Fulmer, from Jacksonville, Florida (though he also lived in Chicago for a while); and (my personal favorite) Zach Kornfeld, from Scarsdale, New York.

Over the years since the Try Guys have left Buzzfeed, we’ve watched Ned become a father (twice!), Keith and Becky settle into married life, Zach and Maggie’s relationship, and have gotten to know Eugene’s partner of 9 years, Matt.

The Try Guys YouTube channel has a number of ongoing series, including 4 vs. 1, where the Try Guys collectively try to beat a champion in some area (chess, soccer, poker, etc.). They usually lose, but it’s always a fun time and also very educational.

There’s also Eat the Menu, where Keith, well, tries everything at a (usually chain) restaurant. This has given birth to another feature on the channel, the Food Babies. Two of their staffers (editor YB and associate producer Alex) originally were tasked with finishing up the things that Keith didn’t finish on Eat the Menu. Now the Food Babies have their own series and they also frequently appear in food-related Try Guys videos.

Mostly the Try Guys video is comedy, but they can be educational as well, as when the Try Guys went to Australia, and in the 4 vs. 1 videos, where we learn about the sports/competitions and how they work.

Today we have a not-so-Gratuitous Amazon Link. I think I’ve listed this before, but what the heck. The Hidden Power of F*cking Up, by the Try Guys is a great book in which the Try Guys confront their own weaknesses. For Keith, it’s his health; for Eugene, it’s family love; for Ned, it’s fashion; and for Zach, it’s romantic love (though Zach’s cooking with gas on that one now thanks to his relationship with his fiancee Maggie).