Snips and Snails and Puppy Dog Tales

What a depressing end to a TV show. Spoilers for the end of this season's Homeland.

Man am I depressed. My favorite character was killed off. It's not really surprising, but it's still depressing as hell. He was the whole reason I watched the show.

I don't even feel like writing much about it. I'm just depressed. On one hand, it feels silly to be depressed about the death of a fictional character, but I supposed that's evidence that the show was good.

Time permitting, tomorrow I'm going to post a book review. Also, I'm hoping to get a copy of The Hunger Gays (not a typo) to review next.

Wow, it's been almost a week since my last post. To be fair, I did write one a couple days ago, but made it private an hour or so after posting (it was a whine whine whine one).

Book #18 was The Warrior's Apprentice by Lois McMaster Bujold.

(Note: I often use Amazon links for the books I read. I don't have one of those deals where if you click through my link I make a couple cents, it's just that often that's the best source of an official review as well as reviews by readers.)

I couldn't believe she wrote Warrior's Apprentice. After reading the Sharing Knife series and the Curse of Chalion books, I was so in love with her work. Then I remembered something. She said she only writes a book every other year, and there had been more than a dozen books in the series. Googling, I confirmed that this was in fact one of the first books she ever wrote.

I'm afraid I didn't enjoy it hardly at all. There was a moment in the middle of the book I liked (couple pages long) and I liked the end more than the rest of the book together. But the characters (which currently are her strong point in writing) were so boring that even at the end of the book I couldn't remember who they were. More than that, I didn't care.

The whole book was way, way, way too light and fluffy for me. The one moment I liked was a sole dark moment (when his bodyguard/armsman was discovered to have been a torturer and raped women and was raising one of their babies as his own daughter). I don't need a book to be totally dark for me to enjoy it, but chances are I won't enjoy one that is 100% (well, 99.9999%) fluff.

I'm not giving up on the series, but I think when I return to it, I'll read one of the later books. I hate to read a series out of order, but I'm done with finishing books I'm not enjoying. My reading time is too limited to waste it on things I'm not enjoying.

And speaking of not enjoying... The sorry excuse for a MoP "opening event" (not an opening event) was released on WoW. ( Cut for spoilers, just in case. )

I just... I'm so burnt out on WoW. I wanted MoP to be fun. I do want to like it. But... Why couldn't there have been some fun world event? Something EVERYONE could take part in (not just 85s with the gear to do heroics or whatever). Even the sucky Cata one where we had to run around the world doing something with portals was better than this one.

I'm so tired of being disappointed by Blizz. Unless 1) Blizz gets control of this dupping situation, and 2) MoP is fun for me, it's going to be time for me to move on from WoW. Well, I should add on 3: Unless I get back to RPing and have fun with that.

Blah, see, this is another all depressing post. I hate writing those. To end on an up note: The high point of my day is when I rewatch an episode of Homeland. I'm so glad I bought the DVDs and am rewatching it. There are only 12 eps, I'm trying to restrict myself to one ep per day, but sometimes I fail.

This interview with a Megadeth band member turned Christian is just the most mind boggling thing to read.

"They're taking God out of the schools to dumb us down."

... Okay then. Credit to the interviewer for staying as professional as he did.

( Homeland spoilers back here. )

Crowfeathers is my WoW character who has had the most RL money spent on him, more than all my other alts put together. He started on one server (Feathermoon), he moved to a PvE one to play with friends (Durotar), then he moved to WRA. Then he moved to Alliance on WRA, and tonight he moved back to Horde. So that's, what, $120 of RL money on him alone. D: It kills me to think about that.

But! He's back home on Horde now. He started out as a tauren, went to worgen, and I was kind of thinking of making him a tauren again (maybe female, because they look better than males), but I couldn't do it. Blood elf or ugly cow thing? Easy choice. So now I have belf hunter #3 on Horde WRA. c.c At least hunter #4 is a worgen?

The excuse I used to move him was that I was short on Christmas gifts (not enough finished products I wanted on Horde AH or mats to make them), but that was really just an excuse. I had 330K gold on Alliance that I was itching to move to Horde. As usual, I filled his bank and bags with Alliance-only vendor stuff, so I'll be selling that for ages. (My guild bank is such a mess! Arg!)

I got a little RP tonight, which was great. I hadn't for the last couple nights, and it shocked me that I couldn't find Thistle's voice at first. Eek! Character voices don't usually vanish that fast! But luckily it came back.

It's always amusing when IC things turn up in RL. I had to (had to! had to! had to!) get my Christmas cards out tonight (tomorrow is the last day to mail them and have them arrive on time). One of the cards had glitter on it, so now it's all over my desk. I can't stop snickering. (Glitterbombs have been featured in our RP lately. :D )

( Homeland: HA! (spoilers!) )

Arg, no Walking Dead for me! My copy is just audio, no video. D:

WoW yesterday was a quiet day. Reed and Clove both got to 26 (5 levels for Reed, 1 for Clove, both done with one instance). It's strange leveling two alts at once, generally I focus on only one until they're done, then move on to the next.

I'm liking playing a paladin more and more. When I'm bad and play Let's Turn The Mob From The Tank*, there's no penalty -- I don't have to wait and hope the healer notices me, I can heal myself just fine. Tank drops from the group? I can take over. (Tanking is scary, frantic fun!) Heals out of mana? Well hello there, would you like me to help out?

(* I'm not serious, that's not a game I play. I know it's best to let tanks tank, the needs of the group always come before the amusement of any one person. But sometimes as I'm going through my rotation a mob will turn towards me, and it makes me smile.)

Other than that, had some RP and did a crapton of busywork. My AH work expands to fill what free time I have. There's always something to make, always more things to sell than I have time to deal with. I still dabble in flipping, but I continue to not like it that much. I bought some level 60 Darkmoon card for 20 gold (1% of usual cost, my addon told me), but it took forever to sell. Eventually it moved for 160, which was good even with the 3 gold/24 hour listing fee. Problem is, the addon is easily fooled as to what the value of an item really is.

I still kick myself for passing up on the 2 42K crimson deathchargers. I still kick myself for buying the magic rooster to flip. When it comes to judging myself, clearly I can't win! :P (I really should have bought the horses though...)

Cut for spoilers.

( Crazy lady is crazy, film at 11. )

I am so very in love with Homeland, for so many reasons. I'm loving the story, loving getting it bit by small bit. But the best thing is also the most scariest: It shows how different groups can see the same situation as meaning opposite things. The CIA/anti-terrorists folks expect to see certain things, which very much colors how they interpret a situation. It's so satisfying not to even know what the reality of the situation is -- are the CIA folks right? Or are they seeing terrorists under the bed?

The show also does a handy trick of giving the viewers just a little more information than the CIA people have, which allows you to make more guesses (more accurate guesses?) than them.

I said this of last week's ep, but it holds even more true now: I love how little we know. I love how much the viewer keeps having to guess. You get a little (or not so little) clue and you have to put all the pieces together again. Sometimes one little clue changes everything. I have no idea at all if the rescued marine was really turned or not, and I love not knowing.

---

Elizabeth Moon is my new most favorite author. Remnant Population was the first book of hers that I read. The protagonist is a 70 year old woman, and while this is a scifi book, she's really 70, not "people live to 300 now so 70 is like 20". She's old, has liver spots and wrinkles, her joints hurt, all that. 40 years ago, she was one of many colonists sent to a new world. Her colony failed, and so the company who sent them there came to pull them all out. She didn't want to go. The story is about how she lives on the planet alone (and then not so alone). It's such a unique POV! Imagine a 70 year old woman alone on a planet, growing her own food, having to do all the care of buildings and the few animals on her own, and how she deals with things when she's no longer alone and untrained her is handling first-contact with an alien species.

As soon as I finished that book, I bought more of Moon's work. (Thank you, Kindle, for being able to read a new book literally seconds after buying it.) The protagonist in The Speed of Dark is actually even more interesting and less likely of a first-person main character than in Remnant Population (he is autistic). The author did a ton of research before writing the book, and it shows. To be inside the head of an autistic person is so different and really interesting. I just started Speed of Dark last night, so I'm not sure what the plot is like, but I suspect I'm going to love it even more than Remnant Population. (Amazon reviews compare it to Flowers for Algernon, which I'd second.)

Initially my review of her books was going to be totally different. The first line of Remnant Population made me frown muchly.

"Between her toes the damp earth felt cool, but already sweat crept between the roots of her hair."

Clunky, 'between' was used twice in the same short sentence. I'd rewrite the second half as "but already sweat ran through her hair", something like that. I've always been told (and agreed) that the first sentence in a story is one of the most important ones (the other being the last). I really dislike that sentence, enough that I stopped reading and frowned at it. But happily then I continued on, and I had zero further issues with the writing. (In fact, I did a rare thing: I almost never use Kindle's highlighting feature, but in Remnant I marked a few sentences that were so well written that I wanted to be able to find them again.)

So anyway, I highly recommend her books! She also has a LJ, e_moon60.