TV: Part Two

While I haven't posted about it here, my money situation is getting tighter and tighter. I live in one of the most expensive places in the country (more so than even places like New York City). My rent is significantly over 50% of my pay... and my rent keeps going up while my salary does not. Add on the endless medical crap that I seem to always be going through, and I'm losing $300-$1,000 in savings per month, every month. That's a serious problem.

Fun fact: My sister's rent for a four bedroom home is less than a quarter of my rent for a one bedroom apartment.

I had posted about turning off my TV service a couple months ago, but then I chickened out. Part of it was that I had months of Tivo service left, but most of it was that I just didn't want to let it go. However, Tivo is up for renewal mid-November, so this seems the time to do it. I discontinued that this morning.

My mother is coming for a visit. And while I love her, this is going to be a hard visit. She does not understand/believe that I'm having trouble with money. She thinks I "deserve" to live well and buy what I want -- I understand why she says it, but that logic drives me crazy. How much money you have, your spending ability, is not based on what you "deserve". She loves shopping (I hate it) -- for her it's just a fun activity to do. She has a very very rich long-term boyfriend who gives her money for whatever she wants, so I think that skews her view of things. Once she leaves, I'll be turning my TV service off. (Edit: Not to hide that I'm doing it, I already told her I am, but she likes watching TV so I want to have it while she's here.)

This shouldn't be a hard thing to adjust to (I hope). The rare times I turn my TV on, it's to watch something I Tivo'ed -- so I could just as easily download it or watch it online.

I just need to make a list of shows I want to catch (which will be surprisingly short, I think it's about three shows right now -- Great British Baking Challenge, Face Off, Ink Masters (four I guess, and whatever that post-Ink Masters show is called). Most of the rest of what I watch is on Netflix or downloaded.

Eventually, hopefully this December, I might get a promotion/raise at work (PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE). If it's not this December, it will be next December, and I don't know if I can hold out that long. I mean technically I can, but it will be rough, and the idea of living paycheck to paycheck would keep me up at night.

Book #30 and #31 of 2015: Nowhere Land & Mutation (Remnants #4 & 5)

Nowhere Land by K. A. Applegate
Rating: Liked (Hated-Disliked-Okay-Liked-Loved)

Mutation by K. A. Applegate
Rating: Okay (Hated-Disliked-Okay-Liked-Loved)

This is not an image of either of the book's covers, however both of them are seriously boring (just substandard art of a person standing), and this is by the same author and came up in the first row of results in my google image search. I would totally read this book!


( Spoilers for the series thus far, including books 4 and 5. )

While the plot is great, the number of non-story issues are growing. As I said in my last reviews of the books in this series, these books are darned short. They very very much feel like chapters, not whole books. Related to that: It's getting annoying how much recapping the author has to do, when it feels like we just read about it in the last chapter.

Unfortunately there's an even bigger issue: I'm afraid poor Mrs. Applegate's editor might have died. The first book was near-perfect in editing, then in the second and third books more and more errors were slipping in. Book four crossed the line into an unacceptable amount of errors, and book five was so bad I nearly stopped reading it. Each page had a number of errors -- it wasn't uncommon for 2-3 periods to be missing per page. Major spacing issues. Typos. Misspellings. It read like a draft instead of a published book. The current book I'm reading, #6, is quite a bit better, so maybe the publisher brought in a new editor. (Book 6 is far from perfect though. This amusing thing appeared in a sentence. "slight[l]y" -- someone's mark to fix the spelling, I guess?)

I've always thought that the Holodeck (of Star Trek) would make a great setting for a book or TV series, since your group of characters could go anywhere, anytime, meet any people. That's essentially what this book has featured, at least thus far. Book 6 is going more into the ship's AI and the aliens though, which I'm enjoying.

Other than the shortness of the books and the editing issues, I'm really enjoying this series a lot. It's so creative, and it avoids all the things I usually hate about YA books (the kids being perfect at everything/adults being useless or just plain evil, stupid romance/love triangles, etc).