thistlechaser (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
thistlechaser) wrote2016-05-10 08:12 am
thistlechaser) wrote2016-05-10 08:12 am
2016 book: Tiger Born | TV: Fear the Walking Dead, GoT | Game: Stardew Valley
Tiger Born (Demon Age Book 1) by M. A. Nilles and Melanie Nilles
Rating: Okay (Hated-Disliked-Okay-Liked-Loved)
As I've mentioned before, I have really, really bad luck with self-published books. Outside of comments I left in others' LJs, I haven't written about Smashwords before though. Where 98% of self-published books are bad, 100% of Smashwords ones are just awful. That makes sense, as Smashwords was offering self-publishing before it became a big thing. (Also, interestingly, apparently the Smashwords company is located just a few miles from me...)
So, that this book was both self-published and a Smashwords book means I almost deleted it before starting it. That would have been sad, as it turns out this book was actually sort of readable. Not good, barely okay, but not god awful as I had expected it to be. However, that being said, a book being "readable" isn't enough to keep me going, and I gave up on it at the 28% mark.
This book was billed as a story set in the Demon Age series, so I had written off the lack of background and worldbuilding info as my fault, since I hadn't started at the beginning of the series. Yet when I checked Amazon for the full title, I see it's listed as Book 1. Also, there were a number of writing/grammar/editing issues, including basic ones like your/you're, but I've seen worse.
The story was about a "halfblood" -- the world was full of demonlords and humans, and apparently the two could interbreed, though it was something both groups frowned on. The main character halfblood was a super human, thanks to his half-demon blood. The character, though unreasonably overpowered, was interesting enough to keep me going for a while, until the plot just seemed to lose track of itself. (The halfblood was captured by humans, and a demonlord showed up to free him on the condition that he'd hunt for some magical item. He got free of the humans*, and suddenly the story was talking about how he had been looking for that magical item for his whole life...)
* The escape was perhaps the biggest cop-out I ever saw in a book. He was captured, no way to escape... then he was just escaped. He had gone into a "blood rage" and couldn't remember anything during it, so the writer got out of having to explain how he escaped from the impossible situation!
While checking Amazon for the official title, author's name, etc (the cover is too small on my Kindle to see those things easily), the authors' names caught my eye. M. A. Nilles and Melanie Nilles. Why M. A.? I wondered if they were maybe a same-sex couple and wanted to hide it for readers of who weren't as accepting of such things. Nope. They're the same person. Melanie Nilles wrote that M. A. Nilles is her "dark side". She gave her "dark side" credit for writing the book...
---
Game of Thrones: Spoiler for last week's ep (not this week's).It all makes sense now. I bet the show runners wanted to somehow free Jon to go elsewhere and be a bigger part of the plot. How to do that, when he's stuck at Castle Black, wouldn't break his "until death" vow? Kill him! Thus his vow no longer applies and he can go south once he's alive again.
Fear the Walking Dead: I finally gave up on The Walking Dead. I was in the middle of the last episode and realized that I didn't have one tiny bit of caring left about what happened to the characters, so I turned it off and never went back to it. Yet somehow I was still looking forward to Fear the Walking Dead. (Stupid me.) It's by the same people, of course the same issues are going to come up in it.
Apparently my patience for Fear the Walking Dead was seriously shortened by The Walking Dead. Last week's "characters acting like idiots just for Drama" was enough to kill my enjoyment of it. I got halfway through this week's episode and realized I no longer cared, so I stopped watching and I seriously doubt I'll be returning to it.
---
Stardew Valley: Now that I'm no longer worried my save file is corrupted, I'm really enjoying the bug that hit my game. I was in the dungeon, grinding slimes for the "kill # slimes" achievement and special ring. I warped back home to my farm and had to laugh -- I had been killing slimes for so long, I was hearing the "slime attacking you" noise on my farm! Then I noticed it...
A slime had somehow followed me out of the dungeon... You can't see it in this shot, but it nonstop tries to attack me. I hit it with my axe by mistake, and that damaged it, and as I have no idea if it regenerates health at any point, I had to be sure not to kill it. I ended up building a pen for it. Right here, next to my greenhouse, so I could see it every day (screenshot taken pre-building pen). I have no love of farm animals, but an escaped monster that wants to kill me? COOL! *pets it endlessly*
I'm headed into Winter #3 now, which makes me sad. Winter is such a boring, blah season in game. I keep thinking about starting a new farm, it'd be fun to play from scratch again, but I don't need to be more focused on this game and spend even more time on it. :P So I'm resisting making a new one for now, trying to finish the game on this one (all hearts for neighbors, finishing the museum). I'm up to almost four million gold, so it's kind of silly to make more, but I do it anyway. (Once you have your greenhouse full of ancient plants and make wine out of it, you make about 300K every six days, so your money goes up fast -- that's not even counting all your other crops and such.)
Rating: Okay (Hated-Disliked-Okay-Liked-Loved)
As I've mentioned before, I have really, really bad luck with self-published books. Outside of comments I left in others' LJs, I haven't written about Smashwords before though. Where 98% of self-published books are bad, 100% of Smashwords ones are just awful. That makes sense, as Smashwords was offering self-publishing before it became a big thing. (Also, interestingly, apparently the Smashwords company is located just a few miles from me...)
So, that this book was both self-published and a Smashwords book means I almost deleted it before starting it. That would have been sad, as it turns out this book was actually sort of readable. Not good, barely okay, but not god awful as I had expected it to be. However, that being said, a book being "readable" isn't enough to keep me going, and I gave up on it at the 28% mark.
This book was billed as a story set in the Demon Age series, so I had written off the lack of background and worldbuilding info as my fault, since I hadn't started at the beginning of the series. Yet when I checked Amazon for the full title, I see it's listed as Book 1. Also, there were a number of writing/grammar/editing issues, including basic ones like your/you're, but I've seen worse.
The story was about a "halfblood" -- the world was full of demonlords and humans, and apparently the two could interbreed, though it was something both groups frowned on. The main character halfblood was a super human, thanks to his half-demon blood. The character, though unreasonably overpowered, was interesting enough to keep me going for a while, until the plot just seemed to lose track of itself. (The halfblood was captured by humans, and a demonlord showed up to free him on the condition that he'd hunt for some magical item. He got free of the humans*, and suddenly the story was talking about how he had been looking for that magical item for his whole life...)
* The escape was perhaps the biggest cop-out I ever saw in a book. He was captured, no way to escape... then he was just escaped. He had gone into a "blood rage" and couldn't remember anything during it, so the writer got out of having to explain how he escaped from the impossible situation!
While checking Amazon for the official title, author's name, etc (the cover is too small on my Kindle to see those things easily), the authors' names caught my eye. M. A. Nilles and Melanie Nilles. Why M. A.? I wondered if they were maybe a same-sex couple and wanted to hide it for readers of who weren't as accepting of such things. Nope. They're the same person. Melanie Nilles wrote that M. A. Nilles is her "dark side". She gave her "dark side" credit for writing the book...
---
Game of Thrones: Spoiler for last week's ep (not this week's).
Fear the Walking Dead: I finally gave up on The Walking Dead. I was in the middle of the last episode and realized that I didn't have one tiny bit of caring left about what happened to the characters, so I turned it off and never went back to it. Yet somehow I was still looking forward to Fear the Walking Dead. (Stupid me.) It's by the same people, of course the same issues are going to come up in it.
Apparently my patience for Fear the Walking Dead was seriously shortened by The Walking Dead. Last week's "characters acting like idiots just for Drama" was enough to kill my enjoyment of it. I got halfway through this week's episode and realized I no longer cared, so I stopped watching and I seriously doubt I'll be returning to it.
---
Stardew Valley: Now that I'm no longer worried my save file is corrupted, I'm really enjoying the bug that hit my game. I was in the dungeon, grinding slimes for the "kill # slimes" achievement and special ring. I warped back home to my farm and had to laugh -- I had been killing slimes for so long, I was hearing the "slime attacking you" noise on my farm! Then I noticed it...
A slime had somehow followed me out of the dungeon... You can't see it in this shot, but it nonstop tries to attack me. I hit it with my axe by mistake, and that damaged it, and as I have no idea if it regenerates health at any point, I had to be sure not to kill it. I ended up building a pen for it. Right here, next to my greenhouse, so I could see it every day (screenshot taken pre-building pen). I have no love of farm animals, but an escaped monster that wants to kill me? COOL! *pets it endlessly*
I'm headed into Winter #3 now, which makes me sad. Winter is such a boring, blah season in game. I keep thinking about starting a new farm, it'd be fun to play from scratch again, but I don't need to be more focused on this game and spend even more time on it. :P So I'm resisting making a new one for now, trying to finish the game on this one (all hearts for neighbors, finishing the museum). I'm up to almost four million gold, so it's kind of silly to make more, but I do it anyway. (Once you have your greenhouse full of ancient plants and make wine out of it, you make about 300K every six days, so your money goes up fast -- that's not even counting all your other crops and such.)
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I just... the fact that this is a thing that exists fills me with equal parts delight and despair. What a world we live in, when you can co-write a book with your "dark side" and have it published in some fashion that allows people to read it. XD
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Though, more seriously, I agree with you. That is kind of cool... but also scary!
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Hope you enjoy GoT once you're able to see it!
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And GoT? Love it! SO glad John Snow is back.
Walking Dead: still watching but starting to not like it as much.
Fear the Walking Dead: HATE it. SO very boring. I can't watch it any more.
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Last season I liked Fear better than the original Walking Dead, I think because it was new and so it had potential. I liked the idea of the boat too, but I really, really do not like this season's plotline. Oh well! More time to watch other things!
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I can't stand reading books with a bunch of errors in them. Even in a self-published book, mistakes like your/you're are unacceptable in my mind. That mistake is ALWAYS unacceptable. I cringe when I see noticeable errors in published books. I remember noticing multiple errors in some of my textbooks and thinking, "There are people whose only job was to ensure that errors like this did not get published. Why am I not getting paid to do their job?!" Seriously. I think it's especially unacceptable for textbooks.
My friends and family tease me about being a spelling and grammar Nazi. Haha. I remember one time my friend texted me to tell me that after I'd corrected his previous text, and my response was just to correct his grammar again. It went something like this:
Him: You are such a spelling and grammar nazi.
Me: Nazi*
Me: It's a proper noun, so it needs to be capitalized.
Him: Point proven.
Haha. My LJ entries aren't always perfectly grammatically correct, but that's because it's casual writing. I also tend to leave a few unnoticed (at first) typos because I post from my phone a lot, hence the annoying extra spaces between paragraphs we talked about, haha. My LJ may not always be perfect, but anything I wrote for school and anything I write for work is perfect, or damn near close.
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While I try not to twitch over it, I know I make errors in my own posts, too. But like you said, it's more casual -- no one is paying me for this, no one is buying my posts. I do my best, but I'm human, and sometimes I don't proofread as closely as I should.
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I wholeheartedly agree. There's no excuse for it when people are paid to proofread and edit books to make sure they're error-free before publication.
I'm better about proofreading when I'm on my computer. I need to stop using my phone so much. It means more typos, and those godawful extra spaces between paragraphs. I also mentioned to you how it drives me crazy that the app causes two words to run together if I italicize a word, so I have to put an extra space after an italicized word. It's annoying. But yeah, my entries here aren't perfect. I constantly misuse ellipses, but who doesn't do that when casually writing and posting things on the internet, really? I don't worry about things like that, or using fragmented sentences, or any of the things that are commonplace in casual writing online. Typos from my phone are the most annoying thing, next to the giant spaces in between paragraphs. I'm just addicted to using my phone for everything, unfortunately.
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Makes sense to use your phone a lot if you're not at the computer all the time. If I'm awake, I'm pretty much at or near a computer, so it's easier for me to do it there.
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Yeah, exactly. I put ellipses wherever I'd pause like that as well.
I actually am on the computer a lot during the day for work, but not so much at home (not counting while I'm working from home, because then I'm on the computer). I would never use my computer at work for LJ, because they could screen it if they wanted to, and I write a lot of personal stuff here. At work, we're not supposed to use our computers for personal stuff anyway. I'm in management so I can get away with more, but still...I don't want to risk it being screened. There's that ellipses, by the way haha. I used to be on my laptop a lot at home...all the time, actually. But then I just got so used to using my phone that I stopped using my laptop very often. And now that I have a young baby on my arm a lot of the time (like right this moment, though he's about to be put down...and that also makes for more typos), my phone comes in handy even more. Also, I tend to write most of my entries and do most of my catching up at night when I'm relaxing, or on breaks at work, so my phone makes sense for that. It's mostly just that I've gotten too used to using my phone though. I never put it down, which is a bad habit.
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LOL random slime, wtf! I'm nearing the end of my second spring. I keep meaning to make a post about it LOL. SOON! BUT DAMN I NEED THAT GREENHOUSE! I spent ALL my money on the new backback the other day so I'm saving up now for the new fishing rod.
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While the greenhouse is great, the backpack upgrades are way more important. I CANNOT BELIEVE HOW SMALL THE STARTING HOUSE IS, ARG! *ahem* While I want to upgrade my house, that's low on the list of things I need to do.
Looking forward to your post. :D
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Nooooooooooope. Bring me the nopetopus!
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