Snips and Snails and Puppy Dog Tales

Last season (last mid-season? Couple months back) I gave up on The Walking Dead. The characters were just being too stupid, nothing that happened was reasonable, and I just hated the whole thing. A friend convinced me to give this season (mid-season?) a chance, so I watched the ep last week.

While I had some of my usual issues with it (I don't like how bloody/gory/violent it is), the storyline itself? Loved it. So I gave this week's ep a chance, and liked it even more.

( Spoilers for last week and this week's ep )

So if, like me, you gave up on TWD, you might give these new eps a chance.

Game of Thrones: I was thinking this morning. The show is so popular, I'm surprised they're ending it in two seasons. I know the book's plot will be over then, but the show is its own thing now. They could easily keep the world going. New sets of characters to follow, new stories in the same world... Seems highly doable.

I suppose they want to end it on a high note though. Sadly.

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...

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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.

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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.)

Child of Grass (Book 2 of the Sea of Grass Trilogy) by David Gerrold
Rating: Disliked (Hated-Disliked-Okay-Liked-Loved)

In book one of this trilogy (which I loved so much), Kaer and her family were getting ready for life on "another planet" (an alternate Earth), a very low tech world with a young culture. It was a slow story full of wonderful worldbuilding and very little plot. What plot there was I disliked, but there was so little of it, I enjoyed the book overall. Unfortunately book 2 was just the opposite: Nothing but that plot I disliked.

While I'm no fan of organized religion, I really, really hate the "all organized religion is evil and everything bad in the world is caused by it, and every single religious person is bad/evil/stupid/cruel" plot device. It smacks of lazy writing. That was the whole plot of this book.

In the first book, we learned that one of the families that went to the new planet had lied through all their training: They, like other religious families in the training program, never intended to give up their current religion (basically Christianity -- it had a different name, but the main figures in it were named Jesus/Mary/Joseph/etc) and adopt or pretend to adopt the local religion. People from Earth had to believe or pretend to believe the new world's religion, since no one was supposed to find out they were from a different planet.

I lost interest before I got 10% into the book, but forced myself to keep going because I had liked the first one so much. By 20% I found myself skimming more than anything and forced myself to slow down and read... at which point I encountered many pages of two characters talking about what 'empowerment' meant -- just two characters, father and daughter, doing nothing about talking about what that term meant. (Which fed back into the 'all religion is bad' theme, since religion disempowers people.) I gave up on the book at that point.

I loved the first book of this trilogy so much, but I couldn't even come close to finishing the second one. But what really pisses me off is that Child of Grass made me want to defend religion! Arg!

You know, it's almost odd to run into an accurate Amazon review anymore. I checked them after writing this post. One reviewer wrote:

Kaer proves herself to be one of the more deep-thinking and resourceful 12-year-olds you're ever likely to encounter.

Unlike last book, I didn't for a moment believe Kaer was 12. I constantly found myself thinking she was an adult. She was smarter and "deeper-thinking" than any adult I know. Moral issues, planning/tactical issues, everything.

"Child of Earth" ends rather abruptly and continues seamlessly in "Child of Grass."

That amused me. My one complaint about the first book was that the author seemed to have the whole story ("trilogy") finished and just cut it into three chunks to publish -- there was zero attempt to make book one into a complete story at all, it cut off mid-scene to be continued into book two. "Ends rather abruptly" indeed.


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Game of Thrones: Season 5. No spoilers outside of the cut.

Oh man, this season. What a miserable mess. I heard nothing but bad from everyone about it, so my expectations were low, but the season was even worse.

There were a few enjoyable moments in the season (and I literally mean "moments" -- a good episode meant there was an enjoyable scene somewhere in the hour). But there was so so so much bad. Really bad. Unwatchable bad.

( Spoilers/details back here. )

I think by this point in the story I had lost interest in the books as well. I'm not intending to get the next book when it comes out, and it's highly questionable if I'll bother watching season six.

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chichiri posted a link to some beautiful, interesting music, perhaps from a video game:

TV: Old and New, or TV: Good and Bad. Take your pick!

The old/good: I'm rewatching Stargate: Atlantis and it's even better than I remembered. I'm in the middle of the second season, and I'm really quite impressed with the storylines thus far, and wow do I love the characters! I can see how easily I fell into the fandom at the time, and boy what was my then OTP sure has chemistry! (Shepherd/McKay) I could easily read it either way though, it would totally work as "just" friendship as well. But I sure wouldn't need much convincing of more!

The new/bad: Game of Thrones. "Oh ho ho," you say, "What's this? The most popular show on current TV? Bad?" This week's episode was, yep.



Know what? Rape for the sake of the thrill annoys me.
Rape called consensual sex by one of the directors of the episode annoys me a hell of a lot more.

I'm no SJW, please don't mistake me for one of those, but know what? If a woman says no, it means no. No ifs, ands, buts, or "she eventually got into it!"s about it.

Know what also annoys me? This ruins Jamie's character. What about all the building up they did last season? His protecting Brienne from being raped only to turn around and rape his own sister?

Something should be done about that director.



I'm almost done with the current book I'm reading. I don't think my reading pace could get any slower. I've been at 75% done for four days now and 80% done for two -- and it's not even a long book! I wish I knew where my drive to read went.

First off, this is the best thing ever. Charles Dance (Tywin Lannister) reads Fifty Shades of Grey:



I would happily listen to him read the whole book.

Second thing: I just got an email from hbo.com. "Cheers To Tyrion & Sansa With 20% Off Game of Thrones™ Glassware!" Ummmmm. She's a 14 year old girl, marrying against her will, and he's ordered to get her pregnant (which would also be against her will). Did you really think this through, HBO?

The Last Free Cat by Jon Blake.

While this book had an interesting idea, it was perhaps the most unbelievable book I've ever read.

Set in the near future, the cat flu forced people to kill all wild/feral cats and everyone who owned one had to turn them in to be put down as well. The flu was too dangerous and spread too easily for people to have cats anymore. (Or was it.)

A giant company took over the "business" of cats -- they did all the breeding, neutered every cat they sold, controlled the whole market. Cats sold for 40 million euros or some crazy figure like that. Only the richest people in the world could own a cat.

Then a girl finds one in her garden. There are no free/wild cats left in the world, but one goes strolling into her garden. Though the punishment for having an unregistered cat is death, the mother lets her keep it.

Then the girl tells a kid at school about the cat. A kid she doesn't even like.

The cops find out she has the cat, and that's where the book really goes downhill. She and the boy she told lead a chase that would make the worst movie or TV show look like a masterpiece. These two kids outsmart every adult they meet. In a physical fight, they beat multiple cops. The two kids hitch a ride with a trucker. The boy watches the trucker drive. Five minutes into the trip the trucker stops the truck. The boy physically beats the trucker in a fight and then the two kids drive away in the tractor trailer, able to drive perfectly after watching for five minutes.

And then things get even worse. There's this whole subplot about the Free Cat Movement and it comes out that maybe everyone lied and there was no cat flu to begin with! That somehow the company tricked the entire world into destroying their cats so they could corner the market.

Every single adult was just so stupid in this book. The girl was caught at the end, but someone made a distraction, and all the cops watching her went to check it out, allowing her to just walk away.

I read a lot of young adult books. So many of them are well-written and just as enjoyable for an adult as for younger people. This was not one of those books.

(Side note: I did wonder at how many YA books I read, then I read an interview with an author. Many new and established writers are now writing YA instead of adult books because it permits them to write shorter books -- they don't have to pad 100 extra pages into their books. YA books can have just as mature, dark plots as adult books.)

( My Amazon review for the book. )

Book #16 will be Old Man's War by John Scalzi. I've only read a few pages of it so far, but I'm loving it.

And on to TV...

Game of Thrones is working for me less and less this season. I can't imagine how I'd follow the show if I hadn't read the books. I should have posted about it earlier in the week, I can't even remember all the things that annoy me now. :P There's just one...

( Spoiler for the 4/14 ep )

I'm running out of time, so I'll have to end this with just a short recommendation: I watched the first ep of Naked Castaway for the novelty of seeing a naked guy walking around on a beach trying to survive alone, but it turns out to be really interesting (in addition to how odd it is seeing a naked manbutt on TV).

How fitting is that sign for my LJ? :P

TV: Confession time! I wasn't in love with the first season of Game of Thrones. Sure I watched it, I even sometimes looked forward to it, but at least once per ep I got bored in the middle of things. I have no idea why, I loved the books, but the show didn't hook me.

I'm happy to say, this season is different. I've been looking forward to the new eps ("Hey, tomorrow is Sunday, yay!"), and they seem to be over in the blink of an eye. Was I expecting less of the show this season, since I didn't really love it last season? Or is it actually better now? I'm not sure.

However, it's not my favorite show currently on TV. That honor goes to Korra. Seems like my entire friends list wrote about it this weekend, so I'll keep this brief: The show is perfect in every way. It's a children's cartoon, yet it treats the audience like an adult. Even just a few eps into the series, and it's endlessly cool and has had honestly creepy moments. So nicely mature.

WoW: I love you, Darkmoon Faire. I bought yet another Crimson Deathcharger yesterday (gotta catch 'em all?), so my money fell below a million again, which made me flail. Stupid, stupid brain, that's no reason to panic. The horses are an investment at this point. With account-bound mounts coming for sure in MoP, I expect the price of mounts to go through the roof (you're basically getting up to 10 of them for the price of one! Or is it across servers, too? Even more, if so!). I'm hoping to sell each of them for at least 500K, when MoP drops.

So anyway. DMF. I had about 300 quest items saved up. I was certain I would never move them all, I stopped buying about two weeks before the faire, but amazingly they're almost all gone now, on the first day. I have no idea how much money I made, but I bought them all for 20 gold or less (with a few exceptions, some of the rarest ones I bought for up to 50), I've sold them all for 50-200 (with the rare ones for 200-300). It boggles me, flat out boggles me, how many people do not buy these items ahead of time. But hey, I'm willing to take advantage of their lack of planning.

I think I need to start adding 'liquid' to my amounts, when I speak of my money: Liquid gold and goods. I easily have a million in mounts, pets, Lich King drops, mats, and other assorted things waiting to sell. (Or in the LK items, just holding onto.)

Plants: Alas, my basil went the way of tersa's. I brought it home, planted it, and right away the adult plants started to die. I saw younger ones were just growing leaves, so I thought maybe the young ones would replace the older ones, but as soon as the young ones got to adult size, they all fell over dead too. No idea why. I guess it just doesn't like growing in this area.

Everything else is growing well, though the poor sunflowers are running flat along the ground. They're still so small and thin, it's really hard to stake them up.

Ellie New Cat: I got her a new carrying case (case #4... sigh). But I finally got one she's not afraid of! As in she's willing to be in the same room with it without fleeing. So I've been working with her, putting her in it (without closing it), then giving her all the pats. It's backfiring though, I'm going too fast, now she's back to being afraid of being picked up by me. :/ Sigh. Poor kitty.

It's got to be hard for her. She wants to be brushed, she seems to very much like it, but she's afraid of both the brush and being in a position where I could easily keep hold of her. She's so clearly torn between wanting to be brushed and afraid.

I feel guilty, but even now, more than a year later, I think about how things would have been if I had gotten a different cat. I'm glad to have given Ellie a home, her foster mother said she wasn't happy living with so many other cats, but a loving, not scared cat would be so nice. I know she's made lightyears of progress, and she'll still keep improving, but... :/

Most amazing trailer ever? I think so!



Three months to go. :D