August '23 Roundup & Ramblings

Raw Data:

Novels – 20 ↑

Short Stories – 0 ⭤

Manga/Graphic Novels – 1 ↓

Comics – 2 ⭤

Average Rating – 3.15 ↓

Pages – 5416 ↑

Words – 1756K ↑

The Bad:

Children of the Mind – 1star of Card navel gazing even harder than ever

Silver Queendom – 1Star DNF for the usual reasons

The Good:

Taran Wanderer – 5Stars of growing up

Golden Spiders – 4Stars of Nero Wolfe

Movie:

X2: X-Men United was a fun romp but not quite as good as the original. I think almost all movies in a series follow that pattern though, so it didn’t come as a surprise.

Miscellaneous Posts:

• Cockatrice – MTG 4E
• Steampunk Elf
• Colossus of Sardia – MTG 4E
• Conservator – MTG 4E
• Blogshido: Likejitsu
• Control Magic – MTG 4E

Personal:

Meatbag Intern is GOOOOOONE. I am so sad. He was a good worker and intelligent. Great, now I’ll probably get saddled with somebody like myself 😉 (oh the horror!)

Our mattress finally arrived. We have slept so much better. Not exactly a miracle cure, but neither of us now wakes up feeling like we didn’t sleep. That is such a nice change.

My eye has stabilized. Not all better, but getting it stabilized is the first big step in getting it better. That news made me very happy.

With how many books, etc I read this month I have decided to start reading some web comics to help slow my pace. Since they are individual strips, I feel no need to blog about them at all, so that helps with both slowing my book reading down AND my blogging. Started reading Schlock Mercenary this past week and man, I had forgotten just how funny that comic is. Good stuff!

Part way through the month drove up to Maine with Mrs B, WC. Bombfunk and Mrs Bombfunk to visit the maternal pod. She was up visiting for her sister’s 80th birthday. It was a LOT of driving and made for an 11hr day. But it made mom happy, so it was worth it.

Cover Love:

Smoke by Ivan Turgenev. The cover just conveys the emotional turmoil that the story contains. All that red, it totally unsettles me. A good cover should never leave the reader unmoved, for good or for bad. It turns out this is actually a painting by some guy called Charles Hermans and is called “Circe the temptress”. It is extremely apt given the story.

Plans for Next Month:

Going to ease back into the manga game again. I feel like a 2 month break was enough. But I’m not doing a volume every week like I had been. That became too much. I’m thinking of reading one volume of One Piece and one volume of Fullmetal Alchemist each month. Not a lot, but enough.

9/11 is coming up. Again.

Our 15th Wedding Anniversary is this September, so we’re going to be celebrating that. Don’t know if I’ll be blogging about it, but chances are good. I am a blogaholic after all and I’m not too proud to admit it. But I don’t need help, not yet anyway.

The word “movie” is now no longer verboten in the comments. Either WordPress really cleaned up the spam or the filter worked. Either way, I’m not getting a bunch of spam comments linking to pron movies now. So write “movie” all you want to. Nobody will care, hahahaha.