Snips and Snails and Puppy Dog Tales

Paging teaandfailure and orangerful: tersa is just starting to play Stardew Valley, and it's really fun to see posts from a new player!

I loaded up the game to get a screenshot, and I found I kind of missed it. Yay maybe my burnout is over? Maybe I'll give it another go. :D

I haven't played since the big patch, so there should be lots of new stuff to check out. Maybe I will this weekend.

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.)

For some reason, I like to keep my book review posts on their own, so there will be another post sometime later today with a couple of reviews.

First off, exciting times! While this DOES NOT COUNT, as tomorrow is my official weighing day, I couldn't help but take a picture anyway. The first time I've been under 200 since I went away to college (multiple decades ago).



Now I just have to eat really, really good today so it doesn't go up for my official weighing tomorrow. :D (And yes, I'm bad, I can't help but weigh myself every single day. Yes, it makes me crazy. But I also think it makes me more accountable for my day-to-day eating.)

For a couple reasons, I think I'm going to move to Kaiser insurance when we're able to switch. Money is part of it (they're the cheapest plan by far), but also gonzostar posted some information on coverage of skin removal, and it seems like it will be a much easier process there. I'm not 100% sure I want to have it done (surgery, eek!), but my surgeon said I have about 15 pounds of stomach skin (can you imagine?), and getting my breasts done would be another big chunk, so I almost want to have it done for "easy" loss off ~25 pounds.

---

Stardew Valley people: I found an easy way to get a screenshot of your whole farm. Go to http://upload.farm, upload your save file (open Windows Explorer, enter %appdata%, and you can find it from there), and you get a page like mine, scroll down to the bottom for the map. You can see my farm and all my game stats there.

orangerful had said I had a had a good farm, which started my quest to make that screenshot. As you can see, my farm SUCKS. I hadn't even realized how bad it was until I saw that overhead shot. So much wasted space! I think I'm going to scrap the whole thing and start over.


---

I'm spinning my wheels right now on so much stuff. My vacation is coming up in less than a month, and there's so much I have to do/plan, I'm so nervous about so much. (I really hate my brain sometimes.) Even though I'm planning on leaving my apartment four hours before my flight (leaving two hours for what should be just over a 30 minute drive, but it'll be rush hour, and two hours for security and such), I'm so worried something will happen and I'll miss it.

Also, I had thought I wouldn't have to check my bag, but it's a couple inches too big, so I guess I'll have to. That's not such a big deal on the outgoing leg, but onto the returning home leg, I have a 45 minute layover (shorter than I'd like), so I have no idea if I or my bag will make it... Plus there's always the worry that someone might steal your bag during luggage claim.

---

Though it's still early, I'm plotting and planning things for my move. I'd like to be rid of my sofa, but I had no idea how hard of a task that is. If I have someone come in to haul it away, it will be a minimum of $150! It's way too big for me to get out of my apartment myself, otherwise I could sneak it into the apartment complex trash (not supposed to dump furniture there, but people do).

I'm semi-considering buying a saw and, assuming it's made of wood inside, breaking it down into smaller pieces that I can take out during the night myself (putting a sheet down to contain any mess). However, I have no idea of a number of things: How expensive a saw is. What I would do with the saw after. If it's made of wood inside or if there are metal bars. How big of a job it would be to saw a sofa into pieces myself.

I will NOT be buying a new sofa to replace it. :P

I had an amusing moment yesterday. I read ahead and found out what happens in spring of your third year, and so wanted to get ready for that. I was trying to max out my last two skills (mining and adventuring were both at 9, everything else 10), which meant lots of trips into the dungeon.

When I had animals, I made lots of omelets, and had kept them on hand to use as food for adventuring.

Eventually I had spent so much time in the mines and dungeon, that I ran out of food. I had never cooked anything else, and saved no produce for cooking, which meant... no food for adventuring. Which meant no adventuring.

I discovered that I could turn my maple syrup into maple bars (mmm) and so when I had a handful of those, I went into the dungeon.

In addition to wanting to max out my skills, I still did not have a prism shard. That was really bugging me.

I only had a couple bars, but nothing else to do that day, so I went into the dungeon just to see how far I could get. First level, I killed one of those bat things, it dropped a shard (!!!). There's like a .01% chance of that!

I left the dungeon immediately and went home to sleep so my game would save. And overnight I hit max rank on mining and adventuring.

Ha.

So suddenly, with one bat killed, I had accomplished all my goals. Except I didn't. When I read the shard's flavor text, I saw that I need a second one for the museum. *sob*

Back to the dungeon with me.

It's been three days since my last post about Stardew Valley! So this is so totally not a daily post~

( Game stuff back here: Spring has sprung! )

Three failed books in a row. Blah! I didn't reach the 50% point on any of them, so none of them count towards my total for the year.

Thimble Summer by Elizabeth Enright
Rating: Disliked (Hated-Disliked-Okay-Liked-Loved)



I was excited when I spotted this ebook. I remember reading Thimble Summer as a child, and it was the first audio book I ever listened to. I still clearly remember the woman's voice crying out "Thimble summer! Thimble summer!" at the end of it.

But memory is a strange thing sometimes, and somehow my brain got the plot of this book (this childrens book) mixed up with the first online "adult" story I ever read. Not the sex part of the story, but somehow everything else that happened in the adult story I thought took place in this book. That made for quite a bit of confusion and then amusement once I realized my mistake.

Thimble Summer was set in the Depression era of early America, and told the story of a nine year old girl. First published in 1938, it's no wonder the text felt so dated and the story boring. Somehow my brain bringing in the plot elements of that adult story improved my memory of Thimble Summer -- the real version of the story was boring enough to not hold my attention at all, and I gave up on it at the 25% point.

Cat Running by Zilpha Keatley Snyder
Rating: Disliked (Hated-Disliked-Okay-Liked-Loved)



After Thimble Summer, I picked a different book at random to try. What are the chances that I would pick another one set in the Depression era? Especially when this sort of thing is very much not to my reading tastes and I would have thought I didn't own a single book about that time, let alone two.

Though a modern book (published in the 90s), this book felt much the same as Thimble Summer. A young girl in the hot summer. She was a runner, but her father wouldn't let her wear "slacks" so she had to run in skirts. I read up to the 20% point, and though this was written by a "three-time Newbery Honor-winning author," the plot never seemed to get more complex than that.


Simon Thorn And The Wolf's Den by Aimée Carter
Rating: Disliked (Hated-Disliked-Okay-Liked-Loved)



This book was SUCH a disappointment. I was saving it for when I'd need a good book to read. It was exactly to my tastes, I thought it would work for me...

In it a boy was able to talk to animals, and eventually learned he has the power to transform into them. Blah blah big plot, he has to save the world. The plot wasn't what mattered so much to me, but talking to animals? Sign me up!

Unfortunately this was an example of a really bad YA book -- the writing was so immature, the writer had no trust in her readers, the adults were generally bad/untrusting just because they were adults in a YA story, etc.

Currently reading: A Fisherman of the Inland Sea (short stories) by Ursula K. Le Guin.

Stardew Valley: I think I've finally played enough that I don't feel the need to play it every free moment. I'm up to early winter now. I reached the bottom level of the mines and opened Skull Dungeon. Unlocked the desert. Completed most of the bundles (except the greenhouse one *sob*). I guess I'm going to do the last upgrade on my house next and then get the horse.

This screenshot amused me. I fish a lot. NPC was standing there, staring at me, making notes. He claimed he was taking scientific readings on the river, but I think he was more interested in a death knight fishing.



It's strange, but when you're playing, you don't really notice how bad the graphics are. But in a screenshot? I boggle that I (who value graphics so much) play it.

Once more behind the cut. Short and sweet. A sad lack of screenshots.

( How many days have I been lost in this valley? )

This icon is actually a WoW one. I had two different 'farmer' kind of characters, this was for the other one. (Supposedly that silhouette is a blood elf, ha. Looks more like a demon of some kind.)

Anyway! I'm not going to make these Stardew Valley posts on a nightly basis, but I started the game over, so that's worth mentioning.

( Game details and a couple small images back here. )