kaytaylorrea | Reading

I AM SCREAMING

SEVEN SEAS STARTED RELEASING A NEW TRANSLATION OF PET SHOP OF HORRORS IN FEBRUARY

AND THERE'S TWO NEW SPIN-OFFS

AND I LITERALLY ONLY JUST LEARNED ABOUT IT TODAY OH MY FUCKING GOD I AM FIRING MYSELF AS A FAN HOW DID I NOT KNOW ABOUT THIS

umadoshi

Reading: Still working my way through The Spear Cuts Through Water--somewhere past the halfway point now.

Watching: I finished my Guardian rewatch!

scruloose and I finished season 1 of Kingdom and did indeed opt to hold off on season 2 until after we finish season 2 of The Last of Us. (Is Kingdom complete at two seasons? Anyone know offhand? Fear of spoilers makes me not want to search up the info.) We also saw the season premiere of TLoU and the first episode of The Pitt.

Playing: Because the evil 368chickens game keeps track and springs the number on you when you beat it, I know that when I finally rescued 368 chickens a few days ago it was after 454 tries. And for reasons that are not clear to me, the victory screen (at least in the browser version) also informs you that you can't play anymore and is all that shows if you reload. (There are ways around it, of course--incognito tabs, simply using a different browser, whatever--but it just seems weird to me. I have thus far avoided going back to it, but that just means returning to my default couple of games that I play endlessly when my brain is completely incapable of focus but needs to be doing something. >.<)

Adulting: Mid-week,

scruloose and I took the day off for my birthday and both dropped off our tax documents with our tax guy (bless our tax guy) and voted in the federal election at the Elections Canada office. I'm glad we got the voting taken care of so early--sounds like lineups for advance polls have been unusually lengthy this weekend (and here's hoping that's a good sign for the outcome!).

( under the cut: fruit and meat consumption (separately) )

Current Mood: okay

umadoshi

Cooking/Baking: Biweekly banana bread-making yesterday, with a few dollops of applesauce to make up for being a banana short of the eight we usually use. I've also been experimenting with a bit of xanthan gum, which Kas and Ginny suggested a little while back when we mentioned how low the loaves are. The height is, to be fair, largely due to how little flour there actually is--about three and a half cups of oat flour for four loaves--but I think the xanthan gum is helping them rise a bit more.

And today there's a batch of black beans (starting from a pound or so of dried, soaked overnight) on the stove, following the ingredient suggestions

genarti posted for me on Mastodon a while back.

When placing a grocery order yesterday, we took a stab at meal planning for the week for the first time in...um...a while. Beans and rice tonight (and then beans in lunches, probably), and hopefully Chinese BBQ in a couple of days (which is dinner for two nights), and I think we settled on doing a pork shoulder at some point. Maybe we'll manage to dig through the freezer usefully and cook some things from it over the upcoming four-day weekend.

Meat-puppetry (and Cat Herding): I opted to sign up for the provincial health portal to access my records, and my recent A1C result is 5.9--the absolute highest it can be without crossing into (according to Canada) the ~prediabetic~ range, and up from the 5.8 I had in December. I was afraid it would be higher, so this is still a relief, but I need to renew my efforts at increasing how much moving around I do. Hopefully the end of winter will help a bit.

Yesterday the blues were scrapping and came tearing around the corner and under my feet as I was mid-step, and suddenly I was on the extremely hard kitchen floor (and scared that I'd actually stepped on Yona, but it seems like I didn't; both blues seem entirely unhurt). I'm mostly unscathed, thankfully--I took most of the brunt on my shin, not a knee, and didn't bash my head on the edge of the counter, so I'm counting myself very lucky. It's just a bit sore today.

The blues were both understandably spooked--poor Sinha's tail went all bottle-brush for a bit!--but Jinksy immediately hopped out of the box he'd been in and ran over to inspect me and make sure I was okay. There were many headbumps and much sniffing and some little licks. He's such a ridiculously good cat. (He doesn't really like being around Sinha--understandably, given what a terror baby!Sinha was to him and how much Sinha pesters him to this day--but if our high-strung little dragon is freaked out or distressed, most times Jinksy will still run over and check him out and be comforting.)

Planning: We both booked my birthday off, more just to not have to work on it than to do anything terribly exciting. But we reserved a car so we can do some erranding ranging from (hopefully) advance voting and dropping off our taxes info to picking up the aforementioned Chinese BBQ and cake. (Theoretically, a couple slices of different flavors. We'll see what the bakery I have in mind has on offer.)

Current Mood: hungry

umadoshi

Fangirling: Last week was Feed's fifteenth anniversary (!), which reminded me that I keep vaguely meaning to post what there is of my unfinished post-Feed(-but-spoilery-for-Deadline) AU.

Reading: Let's see! I finished Ann Aguirre's Strange Love and enjoyed it, although I don't feel a burning need to seek out the book(s) that follow it. I followed that with KJ Charles' Spectred Isle, and I'll probably keep an eye out for its sequel; Charles' books are always a good time.

Now I'm (I think) maybe a sixth of the way into The Spear Cuts Through Water (Simon Jimenez), and I think I'm basically following what's going on. (?) It's beautifully written and layered in ways that I'm not finding the easiest to follow so far.

Watching: Only four episodes left of my Guardian rewatch! So close to finished!

scruloose and I are three or four episodes into Kingdom now; I'm not sure if we're going to keep going once we finish season 1 and watch it concurrently with The Last of Us or put it on hold and come back for season 2 after season 2 of TLoU. So many zombies.

(Between The Last of Us and all the talk I've been seeing about The Pitt, I might opt to reactivate our Crave membership for a month or two. [If "reactivate" is the right word when it's "we got a six-month trial for it at some point, so we have an account already, but I'm not sure we ever actually watched anything on it." I sifted through their catalogue a few days ago, and there are quite a few things that are on my to-watch list, but the overall size of the collection seems way smaller than Netflix Canada's, which is unfortunate.)

And in the name of trying something lighter with shorter episodes, we also watched ep. 1 of Superstore, which completely failed to grab me. But it's the pilot episode of a sitcom, and I haven't actually heard much about the show, so I have no idea how representative it is. (Sometimes I think about season 1 of Parks and Recreation and how there would have been no chance in hell that I'd keep watching after even its first episode if I hadn't heard repeatedly that it wasn't representative. And even then, the only reason I didn't skip ahead to season 2--and I am not exactly prone to skipping things--was that season 1 was so mercifully shot.)

Playing: I saw 368 Chickens mentioned repeatedly on Bluesky the other day, so I tried it, and have since lost...I don't know how much time to it, because calculating the amount of time I lose to idle games when my brain needs to be doing something but isn't actually up to anything is a horrifying prospect. But it's a change of pace from my usual online Boggle game or the Tents and Trees (or is it the other way around?) app, even if I'm not very good at it. I think my best so far is only just below 200.

Current Mood: busy

owlmoose

We finished it yesterday. I am relatively satisfied overall -- some things I enjoyed, some complaints for sure. From what little I've seen of a consensus (since we played so slowly I haven't been following along with commentary at all), I agree that the story and characters had a lot of potential but were underwritten. Given where the story starts, I feel like we missed almost an entire game of backstory (the story DA: Dread Wolf was going to be?). I understand why, from a practical position, this game stands so separate from all the others -- there are so many potential world states by now that managing all the different versions would be a Herculean task (I suppose that's what fic is for) -- but divorcing the action and characters almost completely from what happened in southern Thedas over the past ten years made it harder for me to connect to the larger world. Also T got pretty bored with the sidequests about halfway through -- he felt like they weren't interesting enough on their own to justify spending the time. So we focused on main story and character quests, and toward the end on getting every faction up to a rank of at least two stars.

To the surprise of no one who knows me, we played a Grey Warden dwarf and romanced Harding (although we flirted with everybody until we were forced to make a choice, and it was hard to resist Neve (T's favorite companion by far) and Davrin (thereby breaking my streak of romancing the Grey Warden companion the first time through every game; I justified it because we were the Grey Warden this time)). Everything else is spoilers, so I'll put it behind a cut).

Here be spoilers, you are officially warned.

( Spoilers for all of DA:V )

For a game in a series that's been so important to my fannish life, I feel like I ought to have more to say, but maybe its inevitable, given that I've been disconnected from the fandom for so long. Maybe it's time to fix that.

Who else has played? What do you think? Feel free to leave spoilers in the comments (but mark them as such in case there are others here who don't want them).

Current Mood: accomplished
Current Music: Aerith's Theme - FFVII Piano Collections version