![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
I went to my first party in two years last weekend. It was my friend's 40th (he's actually 42, but this is the first chance we've had to actually have the party) and I have felt like pants ever since. The covid test came back negative and from this I have taken two lessons
-other viruses are available
-parties are bad and I should not go to them
Books
Cage of Souls by Adrian Tchaikovsky - starts off as a prison memoir set in a fantasy world, turns out to be far future Earth, and includes a plot irrelevant cul de sac about a time travelling soviet cosmonaut. I am awe of Tchaikovsky's imagination. Every book of his I have ever read has been filled to the brim with throwaway lines that could have been whole other books. It is very much a 'boy' book, in that there are hardly any female characters (like, two?) and they are very heavily filtered through the male pov character. It is very much a mark of how much I love Tchaikovsky's writing that this was not a dealbreaker the way it would be with someone whose brain I liked less.
Leave the World Behind by Rumaan Alam - I downloaded this to my kindle some time in the last couple of years and I couldn't remember what it was about. I started reading it and was like...a literary fiction book about upper middle class white people having a terrible vacation is an odd thing for me to have picked up, and then the world ended.
It's about the aforementioned insufferably middle class family on holiday in the sticks when the internet and TV inexplicably go out, and then the older black couple who actually own their holiday house turn up saying something has happened in NYC. It's paranoid and claustrophobic, and maybe nothing's actually happened, and maybe there's a good explanation for the sonic booms that can be heard over land, and maybe the mystery illness that looks a lot like radiation poisoning is psychosomatic...
The writing is...like, the pov changes are endless and fuzzy, the tenses are irksome in that way you sometimes get with litfic where it's like 'fuck's sake, you have an MFA, I know you know how tenses work,' but I ended up really liking it. On another day I could have picked it up and hated it, so.
TV
Star Trek: Discovery S4 - This is a show that I have been pirating out of sheer spite. All the previous seasons had been on Netflix, and season four had been meant to drop in two days when it was pulled to go on Paramount+, which isn't even available in the UK. Fuck you, paramount. And when it is eventually available it looks like it's not going to be a stand alone thing but an add on to a cable package I don't have. Double fuck you, paramount.
I read a thing about piracy, which said that it's not just price that drives piracy, its friction. If it's easier to steal something than buy it, then people will pirate it, and, like, yes obviously.
The net result was that I ended up religiously watching this season that I might not have bothered with if they hadn't pissed me off my yoinking it from Netflix. Disco didn't start all that strong, and though it's been following the Star Trek quality arc of every season being better than the one that came before, I've never quite managed to shake my initial season one impression that I didn't like it nearly as much as I wanted to.
But season four is the best by a big ol' margin. They've really settled into the far future setting (the pre-Kirk time period must have sounded like a good idea on paper but in practice it just ended up being a drag on the show's potential, same for Enterprise, and yet, and yet, I plan on watching the shit out of Strange New Worlds.) Book is a much better love interest for Michael than Ash, and Michael is such a natural captain that it seems borderline absurd that it took us four seasons to get here.
I actually didn't recognise Stacey Abrams as the President of Earth - what can I say, I only have so much RAM in my head, and I had to stop paying attention to US politics when UK politics went absolutely bug-fuck crazy - and it probably lost some of its initial impact when you have to google why some of the worst people on the internet are impotently raging, but A+ stunt casting, show!
Video Games
Horizon: Forbidden West - Having finished the main story I am tootling around in the open world playing Monster Hunter: Dinobots (I hope they add a New Game+ option at some point so I can get some use out of these upgrades I'm grinding for) and toying with writing some Aloy femslash (badass lady archers are my jam.)
-other viruses are available
-parties are bad and I should not go to them
Books
Cage of Souls by Adrian Tchaikovsky - starts off as a prison memoir set in a fantasy world, turns out to be far future Earth, and includes a plot irrelevant cul de sac about a time travelling soviet cosmonaut. I am awe of Tchaikovsky's imagination. Every book of his I have ever read has been filled to the brim with throwaway lines that could have been whole other books. It is very much a 'boy' book, in that there are hardly any female characters (like, two?) and they are very heavily filtered through the male pov character. It is very much a mark of how much I love Tchaikovsky's writing that this was not a dealbreaker the way it would be with someone whose brain I liked less.
Leave the World Behind by Rumaan Alam - I downloaded this to my kindle some time in the last couple of years and I couldn't remember what it was about. I started reading it and was like...a literary fiction book about upper middle class white people having a terrible vacation is an odd thing for me to have picked up, and then the world ended.
It's about the aforementioned insufferably middle class family on holiday in the sticks when the internet and TV inexplicably go out, and then the older black couple who actually own their holiday house turn up saying something has happened in NYC. It's paranoid and claustrophobic, and maybe nothing's actually happened, and maybe there's a good explanation for the sonic booms that can be heard over land, and maybe the mystery illness that looks a lot like radiation poisoning is psychosomatic...
The writing is...like, the pov changes are endless and fuzzy, the tenses are irksome in that way you sometimes get with litfic where it's like 'fuck's sake, you have an MFA, I know you know how tenses work,' but I ended up really liking it. On another day I could have picked it up and hated it, so.
TV
Star Trek: Discovery S4 - This is a show that I have been pirating out of sheer spite. All the previous seasons had been on Netflix, and season four had been meant to drop in two days when it was pulled to go on Paramount+, which isn't even available in the UK. Fuck you, paramount. And when it is eventually available it looks like it's not going to be a stand alone thing but an add on to a cable package I don't have. Double fuck you, paramount.
I read a thing about piracy, which said that it's not just price that drives piracy, its friction. If it's easier to steal something than buy it, then people will pirate it, and, like, yes obviously.
The net result was that I ended up religiously watching this season that I might not have bothered with if they hadn't pissed me off my yoinking it from Netflix. Disco didn't start all that strong, and though it's been following the Star Trek quality arc of every season being better than the one that came before, I've never quite managed to shake my initial season one impression that I didn't like it nearly as much as I wanted to.
But season four is the best by a big ol' margin. They've really settled into the far future setting (the pre-Kirk time period must have sounded like a good idea on paper but in practice it just ended up being a drag on the show's potential, same for Enterprise, and yet, and yet, I plan on watching the shit out of Strange New Worlds.) Book is a much better love interest for Michael than Ash, and Michael is such a natural captain that it seems borderline absurd that it took us four seasons to get here.
I actually didn't recognise Stacey Abrams as the President of Earth - what can I say, I only have so much RAM in my head, and I had to stop paying attention to US politics when UK politics went absolutely bug-fuck crazy - and it probably lost some of its initial impact when you have to google why some of the worst people on the internet are impotently raging, but A+ stunt casting, show!
Video Games
Horizon: Forbidden West - Having finished the main story I am tootling around in the open world playing Monster Hunter: Dinobots (I hope they add a New Game+ option at some point so I can get some use out of these upgrades I'm grinding for) and toying with writing some Aloy femslash (badass lady archers are my jam.)