May '23 Roundup & Ramblings

Raw Data:

Novels – 16 ↑

Short Stories – 1 ↑

Manga/Graphic Novels – 4 ⭤

Comics – 4 ↓

Average Rating – 3.44 ↑

Pages – 4781 ↑

Words – 1369K ↑

The Bad:

Lapvona – 1/2star of vileness

Speaker for the Dead – 2.5stars of cerebral navel gazing

Web of Spiderman Annual #1 – 2.5stars of 13 year old boy wish fulfillment

The Good:

The Black Cauldron – 5stars of middle grade goodness

The Queen of Swords – 5stars of old school fantasy kicking butt and taking names.

The Yellow Sign – 4.5stars of Fantastic Madness realized

Movie:

Shrek the Third was a silly continuation of the franchise, but one I still enjoyed quite a bit despite it admittedly going into stupid territory instead of clever territory.

Miscellaneous Posts:

• Cave People – MTG 4E
• Blogshido: The Way of the Blogger
• Celestial Prism – MTG 4E
• Seasons of the Tree of Day and Night
• WordPress Reader Issue
• Channel – MTG 4E
• Chaos Lace – MTG 4E
• Literature Meme
• Circle of Protection: Artifacts – MTG 4E

Personal:

Well, this was a tough month for me. I had an eye bleed (my second in 2 years) and had to get another shot in my left eye to deal with it. If that doesn’t clear it up, I could very well be looking at eye surgery. 3 decades of being a type one diabetic (insulin dependent) are starting to hit me. I honestly expected a heart attack before this. I’ve been mentally prepared since about 16 for the heart attack, so this eye thing has kind of blind sided me (ba dum tish!). In all seriousness though, it is a serious issue and one I’ll be having to deal with from now on. While not as scary as Mrs B being sick at the beginning of the year, this is scary enough and has left me very unsettled. It also pretty much overshadowed everything else for me.

On the fun side of things, Dawie and I were able to play some Warhammer 40K Magic the Gathering. Using whatsapp we took turns and had a couple of rousing games. The final one came down one life point separating the winner from the loser. That’s the kind of Commander game I like. I played the Necron deck while Dawie played Tyranids. Here’s a pix of the commander of the necrons:

Plans for Next Month:

I’ve got the final Shrek movie to watch and review. Then comes the very hard (for me) chore of figuring out what I’m going to watch and review next. For whatever reason, movies and tv shows are just wicked hard to review. Watching them seems like work sometimes and then adding talking about them? But I’ll soldier on. I’ve talked with people at various times about potential projects, but I never end up writing them down and so I forget.

So it will be review, review, review. I’ve got a few ideas for non-review posts but they’ll probably be spur of the moment silliness. My days of addressing current social issues with deep and thoughtful posts are done. Senator Bookstooge, that hoary headed font of wisdom, has retired from the political arena. I’ll leave it to the young bucks.

I’ve also been thinking how crowded my posting schedule has become. It is becoming more of hindrance than anything. To me and to the readers. I’ve come across blogs where so much posting goes on that it is hard to keep up. I don’t want to become that and I’m already well down that path. So something has to change in that regards. I’ve got a couple of ideas.

One is to simply cut down the number of book reviews I do. The problem is that I’ve tried that and while I always have the best of intentions, well, it never seems to work out the way I want. I just keep reading those books! Of the making of books there is no end and of the reading and reviewing of books there is no end either. Sigh.

The second option is to start another blog and post certain categories there and not here. Off the top of my head I’d probably put the magic cards, manga and comics over there. That would immediately free up 3 days a week here. So I might actually have some empty days, which would be nice. The main problem is that while the actual work load wouldn’t increase, the act of figuring out what goes where and dealing with all the setup of a new blog, could be daunting. Plus, since I’m such a stickler, I’d be figuring out all the silly stuff like tags and links. What about my Author Index? Suddenly I’d be having to link to two blogs to deal with that. I can just foresee there being problems, which is why I’ve always kept everything at one blog every time I did a blog.

If there is a third option, or if any of you have some ideas, I’m all ears. Input would be appreciated. This is something I’ll be giving some serious thought to over the coming month and will try to arrive at a decision for July.