Tag: nanowrimo2021

The Reckoners by Brandon Sanderson

Yesterday’s randomly chosen book was Firefight, the second book in Brandon Sanderson’s Reckoners trilogy. I have read the books, but it was a few years ago and didn’t make it into my “read” list and so I do kind of need to refresh my memory.

But first, I’ll write about my downloaded spreadsheet. As this shows, the books from my “to read” list are in that spreadsheet. Perhaps that was a mistake. If those numbers come up for a book that I really haven’t read yet, what am I going to do? Write 200 words on what I think the book might be like?

The Reckoners takes place in a world with superheroes. Well, when I say “superheroes,” the ones of this world aren’t so heroic. They are, in fact, supervillains. The name they carry in this world is “Epic.”

Our protagonist is David Charleston, who is present when the Epic Steelheart (think an evil Superman) makes his move to take over Chicago. In addition to invulnerability and being able to fly and Steelheart has the ability to turn things to steel. He turns every building in Chicago to steel and gets another Epic to block out the sun, turning the city into eternal night. He then dubs the city Newcago. Considering the resistance to the renaming of Marshall Field’s department store, Comiskey Park (home of the White Sox), and the Sears Tower, I suspect that the locals may call it Newcago out of fear of being turned into steel, but they privately still call it Chicago.

Anyway, most of the cities in the world are now dominated by Epics and David has made it his life’s work to find all of the information on backgrounds and weaknesses of the Epics as he can. His dream is to work with a group of rebels called the Reckoners, who intend to bring down the reign of Epics.

Apparently Sanderson has written a fourth book, Lux. It is currently only available as an audiobook, but there are supposedly plans to publish it as an ebook and in hard copy. It is about the Texas Reckoners and I know literally nothing about it other than that. I guess it’ll probably take place concurrent with the original trilogy, maybe?

Today’s Germane Amazon Link is for Steelheart, the first Reckoners novel. We’ll probably see it again as a Gratuitous Amazon Link once I’ve finished my reread.

I Bought Makeup Today

We have an expensive house repair currently and I will be needing more income than I currently have. I love blogging and don’t intend to stop. I may move to posting every other day so that my daily blog post will buy me more than one day, but as a profit center, so far blogging is a total bust.

So I’m planning to hang up my metaphorical shingle as a freelance proofreader. I’ve done quite a bit of proofreading in the past, both for-pay and for fun, and I still have an advanced sense of “you know this is wrong, don’t you?” which gets a pretty good workout at Walmart, I’ll tell you.

I know that my own posts have oodles of typos and things, but that’s the point of having a proofreader. Writers see what they think the put on the page. Proofreaders actually see what’s there.

So I’m re-signing up for a freelance website I worked with over 10 years ago and may be going to put my ear to the ground for other jobs, as well.

However, in order to do this, I will need a head shot. My last head shot was taken by Alex when he was, oh, nine or so? So I think I need something more up-to-date.

To that end, I went out and refreshed my haircut so that it’s perky and makes me look more alert (and also a bit more youthful!) and bought some actual makeup. I got some eyeliner and eye shadow and blush. I tried pulling out some of my extra eyebrow hairs in my mirror tonight but I think I’ll probably just apply some foundation under my eye shadow before I put the eye shadow on so that my eyebrow hairs are minimized.

I’ve been planning to go to a real eyebrow waxing place and also get my eyebrows tinted. My eyebrows are starting to turn gray and so all you can see are the ones closest to my nose. However, I don’t have time to do that before I need that head shot.

The one thing I didn’t need is lipstick. A couple of months ago, I took a picture of Safiya Nygaard’s Franken Lipstick to my HEB and got the lady working the makeup department to find me a color close to that. The one I got, (L’Oreal’s Berry Parisienne) is really close. And looks great on me. Evelyn, who is my makeup guru, agrees with me.

It’s 11:00 now and I need to go get some sleep. I know that I’m going to be doing a bunch of reading before bed, so I’d better head that way now so I look good-ish in the morning when Alex comes to photograph me.

For tonight’s Gratuitous Amazon Link we have the fifth and final book in Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Last Olympian. I really enjoyed this book. After the final Harry Potter book came out, I was dubious (too many of my friends excused the weaknesses of the last books in the Harry Potter series as necessary “because of the formula” and I was concerned that Percy Jackson and the Olympians would go a similar way. Fortunately, it didn’t.)

FoxTrot, by Bill Amend

My first random-number-generated choice was Welcome to Jasorassic Park, by Bill Amend. This is a compilation of FoxTrot comic strips, so I deleted all of the FoxTrot books I could find in the spreadsheet and decided to do one post on the comic strip as a whole.

FoxTrot is the story of the stressors and confict and, yes, occasionally love and affection within the Fox family: Roger, the father, Andy, the mother, and their three children, 16-year-old Peter, 14-year-old Paige, and 10-year-old Jason.

Jason is pretty much the standout character because so many of the strips focus on his math/science/science fiction geekiness. Amend has a degree in physics, so I wonder how much of Jason is a self-insert. Jason loves school because it’s easy for him. He is shown working ahead in his textbooks just for fun.

Paige is a pretty stereotypical 14-year-old girl, interested in fashion, shopping, boys, and so forth. She has almost completely failed in her pursuit of boys, only ever attracting geeky Morton Goldthwait. She has no head for math or science and Jason will give her incorrect answers unless she pays for the correct ones.

Peter is interested in stereotypical boy things like rock music, cars, and sports. He is on the baseball team, but the running gag is that he is a benchwarmer — he barely gets to actually play, if ever. He is also a perennial procrastinator, waiting until the last minute to finish anything.

Dad Roger is also into stereotypical “dad” things like golf and barbecuing. He also fancies himself to be a good chess player, but both Jason and Andy can defeat him easily. Roger clearly loves his wife and children.

Andy is a good mom who loves her husband and children. She may be a bit too concerned about their welfare, because she is constantly trying to get her family to eat “healthy” food that also happens to be completely disgusting. She also harasses them to stop what she thinks are unhealthy habits like procrastinating or watching trashy television. Back in the day, I had a LiveJournal icon of Andy with her head down on the table in front of her in frustration, because, well, when I was frustrated, I felt just like that.

Jason has an ongoing rivalry with Paige. Some of the things Jason does would be beyond the pale for real life, but as it’s a comic strip, the readers give him a pass. It is revealed that Paige would intentionally scare Jason when he was a baby, and that the rivalry stems from those events.

I mostly came to FoxTrot as a young married woman. The strip started in 1988 when I was already in my early 20s and ran in the Chicago Tribune. My family were Sun-Times readers, so for the first couple of years I only got to read it when we were on vacation and the local paper had the strip or when I caught the comics at my in-laws’ (they read the Tribune).

When I got married, Thomas wanted to read the Tribune, and I loved that largely because of FoxTrot. Then I remembered that there should be actual books of FoxTrot strip compilations and I didn’t need the paper anymore. So, for today’s Germane Amazon Link, I bring you the earliest of the larger compilation books that I can find on Amazon: FoxTrot, the Works, by Bill Amend.

The Wheel of Time, Episode 1: Leavetaking

This will contain spoilers. So many spoilers. It’s downright spoiled. If you haven’t watched the first episode of the Wheel of Time and read all of the books, beware!

I’m also assuming that you know basic terminology like Aes Sedai, Ajahs, etc.

I need images to build up a bit more spoiler space, so I’m going back through my old photos in chronological order for now. I may take some new pictures over the next weekend. This is Vesuvius from 2014.

First off, I wasn’t expecting to spend so much time with the kids from the Two Rivers. Things people said about the focus of the first episode being on Moiraine and being about the rebirth of the Dragon Reborn, I was expecting more New Spring and less Eye of the World in the first episode. And, instead, the New Spring-y stuff is limited to the first few minutes. Then we get Moiraine and Lan watching a bunch of sisters of the Red Ajah catching a man who can channel (was that Logain?) and when it turns out that he isn’t the Dragon Reborn, Moiraine leaves for the Two Rivers.

Rafe Judkins, creator of the television series, is attempting to obfuscate who the Dragon Reborn will turn out to be in part by saying that the Dragon Reborn can also be female and making Egwene or Nynaeve (or both?) ta’veren as well as the three boys, to which I say, “about damn time.”

There’s a lot I liked about Jordan’s attempts at egalitarianism. I liked the fact that so many of the countries of Randland have female rulers, for example. But as with everyone, Jordan had some blind spots. Channeling is stereotypical and, kind of kinky. Men are more powerful and they take an active role in channeling. Women are weaker and channel by surrendering to the Power. The balance for men being stronger is that women can join their abilities together, while for men, they can only join together if there’s a woman in their circle. See? Kinky.

In one big departure from the books, it seems clear to me that Nynaeve knows that “listening to the wind” is channeling. She doesn’t know who her parents are (which is odd. Where is that going?) and she was raised by the former Wisdom of Emond’s Field (a name that I don’t think I’ve heard in the series yet, so far they’ve just called it The Two Rivers), who could “listen to the wind” and went to Tar Valon to train to be an Aes Sedai and was refused because of her ragged clothes and her “peasant accent.”

As part of the attempt to make it uncertain who will be the Dragon Reborn, we also see way more than we do in the books. We see the ceremony where the Women’s Circle braid’s Egwene’s hair and we see the events of Winternight, rather than just seeing the destruction afterwards, which was nice. Well, watching the people of Emond’s Field be slaughtered by Trollocs wasn’t nice. But having those blank filled in was nice. Oh, you know what I mean. I think.

Now for the biggest, most spoilery, question, was Laila fridged? For those who have never heard the term “fridge” used that way, it’s based in a Green Lantern comic book featuring the stupidest Green Lantern of them all, Kyle Rayner. The villain Major Force kills Kyle’s girlfriend, Alexandra, and sticks her in the refrigerator. This leads Kyle to develop as a character. It has come to mean any time a female character is sacrificed (to death, or to incapacitation or whatever) to advance a man’s storyline.

Now, at first glance, Laila’s accidental death at Perrin’s hands (or axe, I guess) does look like fridging. Perrin will change and grow or otherwise develop (maybe in a maladjusted way) to this trauma. I hope that they find a way to subvert this trope in further episodes, but if that’s the only major problem I have with the show, then we’re doing pretty well.

Mega Spoiler for a book that won’t be adapted until season 3, I think, follows:

And what will happen when Perrin returns home with Faile after leaving town before Laila’s funeral? I suspect we may not have the happy Emond’s Field wedding of the book series.

I Need to Get Back to Knitting

Or crocheting or embroidery or something. The Wheel of Time series is starting in less than a week and I always used to knit or crochet in front of the television.

I have a bunch of projects that I’ve started and that I haven’t touched in ages. I started a sweater for Mila from Seamless Knits for Posh Pups that I need to get back to, particularly since it’s starting to get nippy and I want to take her out walking in the autumn weather.

I’ve bought some glass beads towards making a weighted blanket, but the yarn I wanted to thread it onto (the yarn from the blanket that I’m unraveling) is just a little too thick. I was going to make that blanket a gigantic mitered square, but I now have another blanket that’s falling apart, so I think I’ll use a slightly smaller needle and make a big square from the center out. Unraveling those blankets will take quite a while and I want to wait until it’s colder to go back to that project.

I was thinking about making a sort of string bag out of black crocheting cotton and fishing line. I haven’t decided whether I’m going to knit or crochet it, though.

I’ve been trying to get to the dog sweater pattern book that I have on Amazon, but my typing fingers have been a pain today. You’ll know by the time you get down here if I’ve been able to get to it, since it’ll be today’s Germane Amazon Link, but I figured I’d point out how frustrating it has been.

Pikmin Bloom

I’ve been playing Pikmin Bloom for . . . a week now? And it’s something to do, but I’m afraid I don’t get it.

It took me pretty much a week to figure out Pokemon Go and way less time to figure out Wizards Unite, since the activities in Wizards Unite pretty much map 1-to-1 to Pokemon Go. You walk, you catch Pokemon/return Foundables. You can use berries and make better throws to make it easier to catch Pokemon. You can use potions and make better traces to make it easier to return Foundables. You can get balls and other supplies from Pokestops. You can get spell energy from inns and potion ingredients from greenhouses. And so on and so on.

In Pikmin Bloom, it seems that you walk with a troop of Pikmin (plant-like critters), but you don’t pick up the supplies and Pikmin sprouts that are on the map yourself, you have to have your Pikmin do it for you?

I accidentally got a postcard and I sent it to one of my two Pikmin Bloom friends. The one that’s not Evelyn. I figured that I’d figure it out and send a card to Evelyn pretty soon. It’s been days and I haven’t been able to figure it out, so Evelyn is still going postcardless.

I’ve kind of read at some articles on the game, but it’s just not gelling.

So I am supposed to meet Evelyn tomorrow evening (November 13). I’ll try to get out earlier than that and go downtown and noodle around with this game and figure out if there’s a way to reliably get postcards, whether I can actually pick up fruit myself, and what I’m supposed to do with those giant flowers in the game.

Update: I still don’t have any postcards to send after playing off and on (mostly on) for five hours. I did find a lot of open flowers, though. Today was the first Pikmin Bloom Community Day, and the only goal was to walk 10,000 steps. The notification on my phone said until 8:00. Okay, it actually said “hasta . . . 20:00, hora local,” and no matter how I add it up, that’s 8:00 pm. Everything else I can find says that it ended at 6:00. I did make my 10,000 steps by 8:00, though, so let’s see if I get my badge or not.

ETA (11/17/21):

  1. I haven’t seen the badge for Community Day yet. I suspect I can just give up on that. I guess the event did end at 6:00.
  2. I’ve figured out a way to pretty predictably get postcards. Defeat a mushroom.
  3. I can hear you now, “A mushroom?” And, yes, a mushroom. Mushrooms are to Pikmin Bloom what gym battles are to Pokemon Go. They appear at certain times at Pokestop and gym locations and you can send X number of your Pikmin to tear down the mushroom. So far, every time my Pikmin have defeated a mushroom, they’ve gotten two pieces of fruit and a postcard.

My Favorite Wheel of Time Character The Wheel of Time, a Primer, Part 1

I was going to write about my favorite character, but I kept going back to the beginning and explaining the terms I was using in that post. So I guess I have to start with the most basic of basics. The Aes Sedai (the official organization for female channelers in the Wheel of Time books) —

Okay. More basic than that. The Wheel in the Wheel of Time is driven by a power known as the One Power*. Some people have the ability to use the One Power, an activity known as “channeling.” Ones who channel are “channelers.”

As the book opens, the only channelers who are allowed to channel —

Crap. This is turning into a different post than the one I intended to write. So let’s retitle this “The Wheel of Time, a Primer, Part 1” and start from there.

3,000 years before the Wheel of Time starts, the Aes Sedai were a coeducational group with both male and female channelers. Their symbol was the Taiji (known commonly as the “yin yang” symbol). The white half was for the female channelers and the black half for the male.

This is because the One Power doesn’t come from the same place for male and female channelers. In one of the things that irks me the most about this series, it’s a stereotype of male/female sexual relations. The male half is active and the female half is passive. Now, I’m Ace, but I’ve read enough to know that sex is, in fact, more complicated than that.

Then the male channelers, led by Lews Therin Telamon (a/k/a “The Dragon”) did . . .something in an attempt to destroy the Dark One and the Dark One struck back and tainted the male half of the Source, causing the male channelers to “go mad” (sic) and break the world.

Like, physically break the world. People had to leave their homes because some places that had been dry land became the ocean, or vice versa. Mountains cropped up where none had been before and mountains that had been there disappeared without a trace.

To give you a frame of reference, Jordan said that his hometown of Charleston, South Carolina would eventually be the area whence our protagonists hale — the Two Rivers. The Two Rivers is on the western half of the continent in the Wheel of Time. Kind of like where, I don’t know, Nevada? Utah? Colorado? is in the United States in our world. So most of what is now the United States is under the Aryth Ocean.

Once the land stopped heaving and oceans stopped flowing around and things, they discovered that this taint was still there, and every man who learned how to channel eventually succumbed to mental illness. So, the female Aes Sedai set out to find all of the men who can channel and cut them off from that ability before they can succumb.

This is where the Ajahs come in. 3,000 years ago, ajahs were temporary alliances to achieve a goal. Jordan doesn’t really go into what that entailed, that I can find, but I’m imagining an ajah forming to maybe rescue victims of a genocide scheme, or construct a large structure or whatever.

The biggest and best of these projects were created by men and women working together. Which is, of course, no longer an option.

At some point in the intervening 3,000 years, the female Aes Sedai separated into permanent groups based on their interests and skills. They also used the name “Ajah” to refer to these groups. The largest group of them dedicated themselves to finding and “gentling” men who can channel. This is the Red Ajah.

The other Ajahs are:

Yellow, who have talent and interest in healing and medicine;

Green, who train and wait and hold themselves ready for The Dragon to return and fight the Last Battle against the Dark One;

Blue, who dedicate themselves to “causes of honor and justice”;

White, who value logic above all else;

Gray, who value diplomacy and politics; and, last but never least,

Brown, who are dedicated to study and research.

And I’m, like, a whole Ajah of bookworms? Sign me right the heck up for that!

I mean, as a paralegal, I did kind of toy with the Gray for a while, but really there was no actual contest.

Oh, and there are rumors of a Black Ajah dedicated to serving the Dark One, but that could never happen, right?

*Things that happen later in the series have me believing that the One Power is electricity.

Back to Cleaning?

I’ve been having a heck of a time with writer’s block lately. This is hilarious because the whole point of NaNoWriMo is to teach yourself to just write. Well, I’m 11 days in and that’s not happening.


So I’m considering procrastinating a bit on writing and maybe doing some thinking about writing while I do it by working on decluttering my closet, cleaning the floors, bleaching my shower, etc.

So. I just hauled my current bag of old clothes out to my car, found most of the pants that I’m planning to cut into strips and macrame into a bag or something.

My weight is doing weird things right now. I’m exercising and watching what I eat and so forth, but I seem to be actually putting on weight? One of the dresses that I am jettisoning was too loose on me once upon a time and now it’s too tight. I don’t even know.

I cleaned out my car a bit and then did a little cleaning in the kitchen. Meanwhile, I’ve decided to write a very, very spoilery Wheel of Time post about my favorite character, who has just made her first appearance in my current reread.

I’ll need a good photo to use as spoiler space, though.

Maybe I’ll even put a cut on this post so that someone just glancing down my home page won’t get spoiled. Because, argh! It’s just. So good.

Gratuitous Amazon Link time. Today we have the second in the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series by Rick Riordan, The Sea of Monsters. This may well be my favorite book in the series. I mean, Percy, Annabeth, Tyson, Grover. What’s not to love?

Now if only I could find my copy of The Lightning Thief. Grrr.

Content Creators: Yes Theory

Wow. I’m trying to remember in what order I discovered the various YouTube channels that I visit. I’m pretty sure that Yes Theory came behind Try Guys.

The origins of Yes Theory are both long and short. The Reader’s Digest Condensed version is that Thomas Brag and Matt Dajer attended McGill University in Montreal at the same time. They attended a party where they met the only person to ever be given permission to climb the Great Pyramid of Giza, Ammar Kandil. The three hit it off immediately and, with a friend acting as cameraman, they decided to try one new thing every day for thirty days. They called this “Project Thirty.”

In Project Thirty, they did things like give flowers to strangers, try to get strangers to dance with them in public, and so on. The videos are a lot of fun.

Then, in 2016, they got an offer to move to Venice, California and film videos there for a company called Vertical. During the early days of their time in California they all lived together in one house and also let friends live in that house with them.

I didn’t discover Yes Theory until the last year or so, so I went back through the posts and got caught up-to-date. I really enjoyed this era of videos, even though a number of their videos during this era are, erm, I’m not sure how to describe them. Their videos are very pro-social, about cooperating and making friends, and learning, and travel.

In the middle stretch of their channel, they made a number of videos seeing what they could get away with — trying to convince people in Beverly Hills to let them swim in their pools, sneaking into movie premieres, etc. They also had a series whenever they traveled of one of the guys having to find strangers who would feed and house them in a strange city.

This group of three guys who met at a party are now hoping to to lead a sort of revolution encouraging people to “Seek Discomfort.” As they put it, “We believe life’s greatest moments and deepest connections exist outside of your comfort zone.”

Matt is no longer making videos and Ammar only shows up occasionally, so they’ve added Matt’s younger brother, also named Thomas (he goes by Tommy in the videos) and a friend named Eric Tabach.

Today’s Gratuitous Amazon Link for today is Princess Academy: Palace of Stone by Shannon Hale. In this sequel to Princess Academy, Miri and the other girls from the academy come to the capital of Danland, Asland, to help Britta prepare for her wedding. Miri also gets a chance to attend the institution of higher learning for Danland — the Queen’s Castle.

Foreshadowing and Prophecies

This contains spoilers for The Wheel of Time and The Scholomance (or at least the first two Scholomance books, since the third hasn’t come out yet). I think the spoilers are fairly mild, but still, if you’re like me and want to go into things unspoiled, you might want to read something else for now.

In books, television shows, etc., there’s almost always some form of foreshadowing and, in the kind of books, television shows, etc, that I like, there’s a good chance that there’ll be at least one prophecy.

Like, one of my favorite television shows in recent years was Gravity Falls (OMG. So good!). In Gravity Falls, twins Dipper and Mabel Pines are sent to stay with their Grunkle Stan for the summer. Dipper finds a book with a handprint and the number 3 on the cover. Soon, Dipper is noticing all sorts of weird things about Gravity Falls and he wants to get to the bottom of it. Meanwhile, Mabel is willing to help Dipper, but mostly she just wants to have fun. Alex Hirsch, the creator, foreshadowed things and dropped clues, and so on. When a group of the fans started poring through the series, Hirsch is quoted as saying that he created an army of Dippers.

I’m a Mabel. I’m along for the ride, just having fun. Sometimes I’ll catch a line that sticks out to me, but like as not, I won’t actually say, “Wow. This will be important later.”

This is not to say that I don’t have fun on rereads finding the foreshadowing. But for my first reading/watching, I like finding out things as the author intends to reveal them.

Strangely, though, I tend to worry at prophecies like a terrier with a rat.

In the Wheel of Time series, it is predicted that Rand will “break the world again,” and everyone’s terrified of what he will do, etc., but after people have been fleeing their homelands and settling elsewhere, someone is all, “Rand will break the world,” and I’m, “dude, he already is breaking the world.”

The exact words of the prophecy are “and he shall break the world again by his coming, tearing apart all ties that bind.” I mean, people leaving their homes and moving to new places and putting down roots there? The characters are clearly expecting a physical breaking, but the breaking that Rand brings is more of an interpersonal breaking.

This is brought on by my recent read of The Last Graduate, by Naomi Novik. In the Scholomance series, we find that our protagonist, El, is the subject of a prophecy in which El is supposed to “destroy” the enclaves of the wizards. I think I know how she’s going to do it, and I can’t wait to find out if I’m right.