development corrupts

I take back what I’d said about the romance in the Vanyel books being somewhat frustratingly limited as a product of their time

( what is the statute of limitation on spoilers )

Inhaled the Oath* books. Then inevitably picked up the Arrows* books.

And then and then. I looked up the valdemar series, I thought I'd read all / most of them, but it turns out so many have been published in the meantime, that there are more books I haven't read than books I have. Hmmmmm.

• I think I'm definitely meh over lifebond stuff
• but I do like competence
• and I do gravitate towards protagonists who overthink (I got it from somewhere okay?)

Now the question I have: do I keep reading? Do I keep reading in publication order? (I semi-sort of have done that so far). Or do I skip the books I've already read and try to just go read books that are new to me? (I've read the Mage* and the Storm* and the first one of the Owl* series, but I never got my hands on the rest of the Owl* series. That was starting to get a bit angsty for me -- I wonder, if I just read the founding of valdemar, the herald backstory ones, and the ones with new-to-me-character Mags, if those would hit the notes I'm looking for)

I picked up By the Sword (Kerowyn's Tale) at the library because 4yo saw it on the free shelf and decided she really really wanted to get it, without any prompting from me. It was the exact same cover of the one that I used to own as a kid.

Set in the same world as the Valdemar series, it's one of the few that I think has really held up for me over time. I've read / reread this one over a dozen times. I know this story, can feel the story beats echo in my head half a page before they actually happen.

I don't know if I'd wholeheartedly recommend all Mercedes Lackey books still (lots of the tragic gay love story stuff feels a bit... limitations of the 90s (but you can take stefan and vanyel out of my cold dead hands thank you so very much)) (and there's a lot of sexual violence which in hindsight maybe I shouldn't have been reading at 10yo). But Kerowyn holds a special place in my heart both as an unsure teen and as a much more sure and competent adult.

ALSO, I had forgotten just how much Lackey goes for the internal monologue!

I've been playing a lot of Spirit Island (board game) recently. Sometimes with zorkian, sometimes solo. It's a fascinating game: co-op (1-4 players). You are spirits on an island that is being colonized by invaders. They're not really trying to do anything bad, but as they build up their towns and cities, they blight the land.

As a spirit, you can't really let them hurt you / your people, eh? So you fight back.

Love the theme. Love the flexibility. Love the thinkiness. Love that it's co-op.

I'm slowly getting better at it. Slowly, ever so slowly. I'm trying to get people around me to play it more, but so far no luck. It's so good though!

I'm reading Babel, by RF Kuang (same author as The Poppy Wars) and it is fierce.

It also tackles some parts of Chinese/British history (iykyk) that I rarely see other folks treat with sympathy.

( spoilers )

It's about the time of the Industrial Revolution, except this revolution is powered by the space in between words in translations. Centered around Oxford.

I think one of the things I really hate about stories set in this time-era is that it's usually accepted that white folks in this era are biased. And so if there are any BIPOCs, and everyone else is biased it feels frustrating like I want to stamp my feet and yell and if everyone else is not biased it feels a little fake (though sometimes preferable to the former). And this book manages to avoid both traps by including bias but then centering the BIPOC experience, in a way that I didn't realize I needed until now.

I'm a little nervous about the ending, it could still fall apart, but about three quarters of the way in and it makes me so happy.

I've decided to start learning guitar, just for kicks.

What really triggered it is that I've always been slightly curious and sort of wanting to pick up the guitar maybe, but never really enough to actually get one of my own. Buuuuuut for Christmas, zorkian got the kiddo a kid-sized guitar. And then a week ago, I decided to pick it up and try it out.

I'm trying to take it slowly, so I don't do the thing where I'm intensely interested in something for two weeks and do that and only that, and then never touch it again. But so far I think that I'm managing to pace myself. I am, however, now considering getting an adult-sized guitar of reasonable quality.

As with anything, being a beginner is scary and confusing and there are so many conflicting pieces of advice.

(It is not as intense as, say, the debate over circs vs dpn, but there seems to be an ongoing debate as to whether a laminate guitar is ever worth the money, or whether one should just jump straight to a solid-top one.)

I've decided for sure that I'm getting an acoustic guitar with steel strings (so not electric, and not classical with all nylon strings).

The remaining things I'm trying to decide are:

• whether I want to try a 3/4th sized guitar or a full-sized one.

  I have short and stubby fingers. The only gloves I've found that will fit me are kid-sized. So, while all beginners say that they can't do the chords properly, and while most experts say that this problem will go away once you've practiced enough that you have some finger strength, it may in my case be worth cheating a little bit and getting something explicitly for smaller hands.

  OTOH some kids are able to play full-sized guitar just fine so...

• whether to get a solid-top one or a laminate

  I'm definitely not getting the cheapest guitar out there, on the principle that as a beginner I don't want to spend all my time just fighting my tools. But given that I'm only a week into this interest, and this is mere casual interest and not "I want to perform someday", I want something that reflects that.

  What I figure from all I've seen is that by virtue of material, most solid-top guitars are likely to have a minimum bar of quality. You can find good laminate ones, for like $100 cheaper but it'll be a bit hit-or-miss -- if you know what to look for in the guitar / reviews then you might be able to find a good guitar for the price. If you don't then you'll want to upgrade soon enough that you'll end up spending more than if you'd just bought the higher-quality guitar in the first place.

My plan right now is to learn a couple of chords, and then go into a music store and try out a couple guitars that have good online reviews, and then pick one.

I don't know if this is reasonable or not! Wish me luck :)

(In the meantime, I can uh. Play "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star", and the "So Do La Fa" song from Sound of Music. Very very laboriously and slowly. I cannot play "Do Re Mi" though, because I don't actually remember what the notes for that are

Oh and I can semi-sort-of with much careful positioning do C, D, G, and Em chords.)

I've been thinking a lot about how I've drifted away from being defined by what I do.

As a teenager, I was heavily into anime fandom. I'd stay up until ~3am on dial-up to socialize with fellow fans on message boards and IRC. Eventually learned Japanese so I could understand, etc. Now, well it's been years since I even saw any anime, and I don't have any anime fandom friends anymore. (I have friends are still in anime fandom, but I don't talk anime/anime fandom with them).

I still play games, but I never identified as a gamer (not back when I was playing MMOs 8 hours+ a day, and certainly not now).

I enjoy programming, but I don't think of myself as a hacker (I enjoy building stuff, I enjoy the puzzle-solving aspect, I don't default to doing it in my spare time. And while I used to volunteer on other projects, these days I do my work, read tech-related articles, and call it a day).

I love books, but that's a pretty generic thing -- I don't love a particular series of books (and never have).

I enjoy knitting, but I haven't done it in a while, and it's not like I make new patterns.

I am geeky in general, but I don't think of myself as a geek anymore. A lot of things that give my little geeky heart a thrill have gone mainstream which is fantastic and amazing, but it seems ridiculous to go "oh I'm a geek" when there is nothing different in my level of affection or devotion from that of any person who considers themselves a non-geek. It's all normal now (I would have killed to make this happen as a kid; I luxuriate in this now).

But I feel like... like I've lost something somewhere. The ability to geek out and obsess over specific things? The desire to take something I enjoy and make it a part of my identity? I enjoy things still, I just don't have the intensity I used to have. And I don't know if this is because I don't make the time to foster my interests, or if it's because my outlook on life has just changed.

I'm happy though. I'm just no longer intense. I can't decide what that means.