Category: Uncategorized

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).

And So It Begins . . .

With a nice case of writer’s block.

I remember being told in that past that when you have writer’s block, just throw a T-Rex into the situation to give your characters something to react to, but since I’m writing autobiographically, I think that’s probably a bad idea.

I had a streak of housecleaning today. Now that I’m going through my books and discarding the ones that I don’t think I’ll ever read again, I’m starting to have empty bookshelves. Okay Empty book shelf. Which is no longer empty because I have 10 years’ worth of old National Geographics on that shelf now. But that, also, leads to cleaner areas elsewhere. Eventually it might look like human beings live in this house. Or maybe not. It remains to be seen.

We had, by my calculations, 30 trick-or-treaters today. Not as good as last year when I had to retreat when I ran out of candy, but better than in past years.

I keep saying, “today” when it’s technically November 1 now. My days begin and end when I get out of bed in the morning. And I haven’t been to bed yet, so it’s still today for me.

I already had a post lined up for November 1, so I guess I’ll queue this up for November . . . 2? I’d like to keep up my one-post-a-day momentum until I build up an audience of some sort, but I don’t want to run out of books that I’ve read before the end of the month.

Well, I’ll schedule this for the 2nd and we’ll see if I can write another couple of posts today. Once I run out of books, then I’ll start spreading them out a bit so that I have time to do more reading for more Gratuitous Amazon Links.

I wonder if my next post, which I’ll write after I get some sleep, could be the first of a Wheel of Time Amazon Prime series countdown, like I did with my NaNoWriMo countdown. The problem with that is that, since I’ve posted November 1 (and 2) already, my countdown will be outdated before I can post it.

Oh, well, I’ll come up with something. Or not. We’ll see.

For today’s Gratuitous Amazon Link, we have Princess Academy, by Shannon Hale. I love this book. It’s the tale of Miri, who lives in a country in fantasy-equivalent Europe. The town she comes from, Mount Eskel, is a quarry town, where they quarry a white stone that is more or less fantasy-marble. The god of their world has told his priests that the next queen of their land will come from Mount Eskel, and so the government have to set up a school to teach a selection of girls from the town some of the things they’ll need to know when the prince chooses one of them to be his bride. It’s just . . . :chef’s kiss:.

The Werewolf of Whitechapel

So. I had my Moderna booster yesterday and I feel pretty lousy. I’d bought The Werewolf of Whitechapel, by Suzannah Rountree on . . . Wednesday, October 20, and I felt lousy last night, so I did a bunch of reading. I’m only 25% of the way into it, but I have thoughts.

As you may be able to guess from the reference to Whitechapel, this book is a Jack the Ripper story, only it’s one in which monsters are real, and are members of the royal family of every country except England (we’ll be coming back to this later).

So far, at the 25% mark, we’ve been told that the royal families of Denmark and Greece are Sirens, the royal families of Russia and Romania are Vampires and the royal families of Germany and I can’t remember where right now are Werewolves. Sweden?

Anyway, one of the major characters in the book is Mary of Teck, who was Queen of England for 26 years, during the reign of George V. Mary’s grandfather was a German duke and her grandmother was a commoner. Her father was also a German duke and her mother was English. Therefore she is not a werewolf and thus a safe wife for the future King of England.

And this is where my suspension of disbelief is getting harder to sustain. Because the royal family of England are German, not English. Queen Victoria’s mother was a German princess and her husband was a German prince. Victoria’s paternal grandmother was also a German princess, and it kind of keeps going that way for a while.

I have a copy of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Heming: An American Controversy, by Annette Gordon-Reed and in the book, she says that Jefferson believed that once seven of your great-grandfathers were white, you were white. And, well, something very like that is at work here.

I don’t know if Rowntree knows this, though.

=========

Update: What follows will be a massive spoiler so.

Spoiler.

Space.

It turns out that the entire royal family of England is werewolves, though it’s not specified that it was because they’re German. Also, this book changes history in a pretty significant way. Mary of Teck cannot cope with the fact that the English royal family is werewolves, and so she doesn’t marry George V after all. And this must change history because Mary of Teck was Queen Elizabeth II’s paternal grandmother.

With a different mother, would George V’s eldest son (a) marry an American divorcee or (b) become a Hitler fanboy (depending on which explanation for his abdication you prefer) and if he didn’t abdicate, then George V’s second son (in our timeline Queen Elizabeth II’s father) certainly wouldn’t have become king in his brother’s stead unless the eldest son died without any children.

Yeah, so basically that’s all screwed up and so, too, would the history of the British Raj, probably. Would George V been crowned Emperor of India without Mary of Teck? Possibly. Maybe even probably. But what about the end of the Raj? George VI was on the throne then, but we’ve all but done away with George VI. Would George V’s alternative elder son given India its freedom? Would Pakistan be Pakistan in that situation?

I mean, I know that the politics and economics of the situation are more than I can really cope with, neither being my strong suit, but I certainly think that something as huge as changing George V’s wife for someone else would have made a huge difference in everything else.

Assuming that George V ever married. If he didn’t, then the throne would have passed to the descendants of another of Queen Victoria’s children entirely.

Basically, I’m tempted to read the rest of the series just to find out if the succession ends up being the mess that I’m afraid it will be.

NaNoWriMo Starts in 1 Hour 45 Minutes

I don’t know.

Well, with the Wheel of Time TV series starting in November, I probably need a new knitting project. I’m turning two falling-apart blankets into a new blanket, and unraveling the old blankets is a pain in the ass. I’ll have to wait until the weather cools off more to get back to unraveling.

Oh! I’ve got a concert in less than a week (that’s a topic right there!) and I’ve always wanted a kind of string bag bag for concerts. Something transparent and within the size limits for the venue. Like that.

I have two rolls of fishing line. One is the plasticky kind and the other is more stringy. I was hoping to use the stringy fishing line to reinforce the bag, but right now all I can find is the plasticky roll. I’ll keep looking for the stringy one, but if I can’t find it by the time I go back to work on Tuesday (I’m off on November 1), I’ll get another roll.

Gratuitous Amazon Link time! Today we have Dark Souls, by Paula Morris. We’re starting the 2021 books now. I’d better get on the stick with regard to my reading, or I’m going to be out of books by the end of November. Dark Souls is a supernatural story of Miranda, who discovered that she can see ghosts. After a terrible automobile accident kills her best friend, Her parents take her and her brother to York, England, where she gets exposed to the fear and the fascination of some of England’s famous ghosts.

1 Day Until NaNoWriMo

I’m really enjoying this era of book blogging, but I do kind of miss the old travel blog days. I may go back to 1992 and do Thomas’s and my second honeymoon at some point during November.

I’ve started researching book blogging conventions and have found some that might be interesting, if I can recover financially from our upcoming house repair to attend.

I’ve always sucked at networking. I’m either too “I’m here to meet other professionals and make contacts” or I’m too, “I’m just here to check things out. I don’t need contacts.” And I guess that the only way to do this is to do it.

Maybe I should attend a virtual conference or two. They should be cheaper than traveling to the convention, after all.

Well, I’ll keep looking at them. I don’t have to make a decision right now. At least, I hope not.

For our Gratuitous Amazon Link today, we’re at the end of the books I read in 2020. My last book for the year was Ruined, by Paula Morris. Ruined is the story of Rebecca, who has to move in with a distant family friend in New Orleans while her father works abroad. Soon after moving to New Orleans, Rebecca meets Lisette, a the ghost of a slave who died in the Bowman home in 1853. And who would turn out to be Rebecca’s arch-nemesis in school? Helena Bowman, who lives in the very house where Lisette died.