another round of general updates
Aug. 30th, 2023 05:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kindkit1) Health
Betterish. I started back to work this past Saturday, though I haven't yet been able to work a full shift. In an ideal world I'd still be off, but I've already burned through most of my PTO and our horrible HR person was badgering me to apply for FMLA (while not actually sending me the paperwork). So pretty much as soon as I felt well enough to do dishes AND take a shower on the same day, I started back.
I'm trying to keep in mind that it's good for sciatica to move around. But that doesn't make it less painful or exhausting. So far my pattern has been "work 4 - 5.5 hours, go home and collapse in a heap, take 3 hour nap."
I thought my physical therapy started early next month, but I checked again and my first session isn't until September 19. But at this rate I don't expect to be fully recovered by then, so it'll probably do me some good anyway.
2) Our Flag Means Death
The S2 trailer has dropped. I haven't watched it. I'm hoping to avoid watching it, because so many trailers spoil important plot developments and/or the best jokes, and I'd like to go into S2 as blithely ignorant as I was for S1.
However people are already posting details about it on Twitter, the land of no cut tags. I have #OFMDS2Spoilers blocked, but of course nobody's tagging a trailer that way. The obvious solution is to stay off Twitter, but I haven't been very successful in previous attempts. (I deeply appreciate that people over here are keeping everything behind a cut.)
S2, or at least the first few episodes, will apparently release on October 5. I'm excited and nervous, because S1 was far better than I expected and it'll hurt all the more if S2 goes horribly wrong.
3) Other viewing
I've watched a few more episodes of Taskmaster, not having the brainpower for much else. I'm on S4 now, which I'm liking better than the last season.
4) Reading
Charles Stross, Escape from Yokai Land. This is an interstitial novelette in Stross's Laundry Files series. It's good grim fun, more in keeping with the tone of the early books than the much bleaker later ones. But the book centers around a lot of Japanese pop culture stuff I'm not really into, so I had a sense throughout of really not being the intended reader.
Jonathan Strahan (ed.), The Book of Witches. An anthology of short stories about witches. It's solid, with only a few choices that left me shaking my head. But there wasn't much I really loved, either. Most of the stories seemed to be riffing off traditional ideas of witchcraft rather than trying to do anything really new.
Ellen Datlow (ed.), Supernatural Noir. This is a reissue from some years back, not a new anthology. I'm only a few stories in, and so far I'm a bit disappointed. Which is more my fault than the fault of the stories--I was wanting detective stories with a supernatural element, but the anthology is delivering horror stories with a little noir atmosphere.
Terry Pratchett, A Hat Full of Sky and Wintersmith. I was feeling quite sulky, wanting to read but not in the mood for the available options, and realized finally that what I was in the mood for was Pratchett. The only adult Discworld novels I haven't yet read are a few of the silly-seeming ones (e.g. The Lost Continent) and the ones post-Unseen Academicals that I have no intention of ever reading. So I got these, having read the first Tiffany Aching book, The Wee Free Men, some time back and liked it well enough. Which is what I'll say for the next two--I like them well enough. They're recognizably Pratchett, recognizably Discworld, but very much YA Pratchett. It all feels a bit diluted, like how Italians supposedly give kids a spoonful of espresso in a cup of hot milk at breakfast. As the kids get older, the proportions change. But I'm used to the fully-caffeinated version, and while I don't mind the milky one, it's not my favorite thing.
Hmmmph, now I'm feeling sulky that as the years go by, my list of Sadly Lamented Dead Authors, Like Whom Nobody Writes Anymore, keeps growing.
Betterish. I started back to work this past Saturday, though I haven't yet been able to work a full shift. In an ideal world I'd still be off, but I've already burned through most of my PTO and our horrible HR person was badgering me to apply for FMLA (while not actually sending me the paperwork). So pretty much as soon as I felt well enough to do dishes AND take a shower on the same day, I started back.
I'm trying to keep in mind that it's good for sciatica to move around. But that doesn't make it less painful or exhausting. So far my pattern has been "work 4 - 5.5 hours, go home and collapse in a heap, take 3 hour nap."
I thought my physical therapy started early next month, but I checked again and my first session isn't until September 19. But at this rate I don't expect to be fully recovered by then, so it'll probably do me some good anyway.
2) Our Flag Means Death
The S2 trailer has dropped. I haven't watched it. I'm hoping to avoid watching it, because so many trailers spoil important plot developments and/or the best jokes, and I'd like to go into S2 as blithely ignorant as I was for S1.
However people are already posting details about it on Twitter, the land of no cut tags. I have #OFMDS2Spoilers blocked, but of course nobody's tagging a trailer that way. The obvious solution is to stay off Twitter, but I haven't been very successful in previous attempts. (I deeply appreciate that people over here are keeping everything behind a cut.)
S2, or at least the first few episodes, will apparently release on October 5. I'm excited and nervous, because S1 was far better than I expected and it'll hurt all the more if S2 goes horribly wrong.
3) Other viewing
I've watched a few more episodes of Taskmaster, not having the brainpower for much else. I'm on S4 now, which I'm liking better than the last season.
4) Reading
Charles Stross, Escape from Yokai Land. This is an interstitial novelette in Stross's Laundry Files series. It's good grim fun, more in keeping with the tone of the early books than the much bleaker later ones. But the book centers around a lot of Japanese pop culture stuff I'm not really into, so I had a sense throughout of really not being the intended reader.
Jonathan Strahan (ed.), The Book of Witches. An anthology of short stories about witches. It's solid, with only a few choices that left me shaking my head. But there wasn't much I really loved, either. Most of the stories seemed to be riffing off traditional ideas of witchcraft rather than trying to do anything really new.
Ellen Datlow (ed.), Supernatural Noir. This is a reissue from some years back, not a new anthology. I'm only a few stories in, and so far I'm a bit disappointed. Which is more my fault than the fault of the stories--I was wanting detective stories with a supernatural element, but the anthology is delivering horror stories with a little noir atmosphere.
Terry Pratchett, A Hat Full of Sky and Wintersmith. I was feeling quite sulky, wanting to read but not in the mood for the available options, and realized finally that what I was in the mood for was Pratchett. The only adult Discworld novels I haven't yet read are a few of the silly-seeming ones (e.g. The Lost Continent) and the ones post-Unseen Academicals that I have no intention of ever reading. So I got these, having read the first Tiffany Aching book, The Wee Free Men, some time back and liked it well enough. Which is what I'll say for the next two--I like them well enough. They're recognizably Pratchett, recognizably Discworld, but very much YA Pratchett. It all feels a bit diluted, like how Italians supposedly give kids a spoonful of espresso in a cup of hot milk at breakfast. As the kids get older, the proportions change. But I'm used to the fully-caffeinated version, and while I don't mind the milky one, it's not my favorite thing.
Hmmmph, now I'm feeling sulky that as the years go by, my list of Sadly Lamented Dead Authors, Like Whom Nobody Writes Anymore, keeps growing.
