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Hockey season. I do watch actual hockey as one of the only sports I don't find unforgivably boring but this month has also been hockey media.

Half my tumblr dashboard became obsessed with the new gay hockey show Heated Rivalry so I was like 'okay, I will try it' and yeah, it gave me feelings. I am, however, like the 1% of fandom that cares way more about Scott and Kip than Shane and Ilya. I've watched episodes 3 and 5 multiple times. After episode 3 I also decided I was going to read the Scott/Kip book so:

Game Changers by Rachel Reid. This reads like what I imagine hockey RPF fic to be like. Book Kip is annoying to me but I love show Kip. Overall I think the show hugely elevated the source material.

I will now begin my annual Christmas to New Year's vegetating phase :)

Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson. Adventures in the Scottish Highlands.

Queen Demon by Martha Wells. Always love Martha Wells' emotionally repressed protagonist voice. Is it wrong that my favorite part of this was the feral, claw-hooved omnivorous Arike horses? <3

In TV, I re-watched Arrow (season 1) and yes it is a silly show but I do really enjoy season 1 where Oliver is just going around shooting people with arrows and we get the Slade and Oliver relationship before everything goes fully insane. I watched the show for them and then season 2 betrayed me so bad! Literally considering a sequel to my now 8-year-old season 1 AU fic where everyone lives and stays friends. Also, shout out to Chris GM51 who collected the flashback scenes into a YouTube playlist so I can just watch the backstory.

Cannery Row by John Steinbeck. The library didn't have East of Eden available so I grabbed this Steinbeck instead and it was good. Kind of a collection of slice of life stories set in the same neighborhood. The characters are funny and odd and overall just feel real in a way that's hard to describe.

This Inevitable Ruin by Matt Dinniman. Latest Dungeon Crawler Carl book! Continues to be fun and insane. Apparently we are getting book 8 release next year and there is a TV series in the works but now I must wait.

Amongst Our Weapons by Ben Aaronovitch
Stone and Sky by Ben Aaronovitch

I know I just said I was taking a break from book reading but I already had these from the library and after the length of the Dungeon Crawler Carl books they just seemed really doable. Also I did manage to get some of my life things I've been procrastinating on done so yay.

Creatively I feel like I've been procrastinating on any and all of my projects for months so I am attempting the communal_creators challenge through October 15th. I want to write! I want to vid! I want to bookbind! Please muse come back to me.

A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M Miller Jr. Humanity virtually annihilates itself via nuclear weapons and then goes through thousands of rebuilding years. This sounds really dark, and it is really dark, but also the abbots of the Order of Saint Leibowitz are very funny. I see why a lot of people have profound feeling about this novel.

Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman. I saw a couple of recommendations for this series on tumblr and it is indeed extremely fun! Aliens mine the Earth and send millions of people--including Carl and his cat Princess Donut--into what is essentially a Twitch live-streamed video game where they have to survive to escape. I'm not much of a video game person but it's still an accessible read.

Carl's Doomsday Scenario by Matt Dinniman. Continued adventures of Carl and Princess Donut! These books are 400 to 900 page bricks yet I am burning through them. Next!

World War Z by Max Brooks. How the world reacts to the zombie apocalypse. This was very compelling and I liked the structure as various interviews. Not a huge fan of the writing. It's intended to be transcripts from a bunch of different people but the POVs didn't feel very distinct to me and a there were passages where it just felt like descriptive writing, which would be fine except it was supposed to be dialogue, and in my head I was like 'who talks like this'? Although dialogue is not my strong point so maybe that's just me. I watched the Brad Pitt movie after and it was fine but bears almost no resemblance to the the book at all lol.

False Value by Ben Aaronovitch. Magical police of London. I've fallen behind on reading this series but I still enjoy it. For some reason this particular book was incredibly hard to find in print. I remember having it on my Kindle at least twice and forgetting about it as I do with all ebooks.

In TV, I watched Department Q. Fine detective show though I didn't feel a strong spark for it. I appreciated that it's Scottish and that they gave us an interesting and borderline unlikeable female character to go along with the interesting and borderline unlikeable male lead.

Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler. Gripping, terrifyingly plausible post-apocalyptic America where climate change has made L.A. unlivable and the protagonist sets out to make a better life. Read this through in two days and have the sequel on hold.

In TV, I finished Spaced (seasons 1 & 2). Funny British show where the two main characters Tim and Daisy pretend to be a couple so they can rent a flat that will only rent to a professional couple and the friend group has a lot of hijinks. Perfect time capsule of 90s/Y2K. I'd never heard of this show but I'm in a Simon Pegg phase from my Mission Impossible hyperfixation. I also watched Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, and The World's End for the first time. The movies I knew about through general pop culture osmosis but I didn't really think I'd like them because they're kind of silly comedy and I don't tend to watch a lot of comedy but I enjoyed them a lot!

As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner. Even more impenetrable stream of consciousness style than Mrs. Dalloway but eventually I started to grasp what was going on and all the narrators and their unreliability. Like, Cora, your impressions are laughably off base. Darl, you committed arson and your POV chapter doesn't even indicate it except mildly in retrospect. Addie, your only POV chapter is literally after you are dead. Put this book on the Weird But Interesting shelf.

In RL, I continue my organization spree. I can see my craft space again so maybe I will re-start one of the projects I've been stalling on.

Lord of the Flies by William Golding. Intense depiction of the failures of a group project (survival on deserted island). Shocked to discover this does not actually have cannibalism, although there is the strong implication that there would have been cannibalism if the events of the last chapter went differently.

White Nights by Fyodor Dostoevsky. A Russian man meets a woman waiting for her fiance to return after a year. I wanted to like this more but I just found it so rambling and repetitive.

Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein. A man raised on Mars returns to Earth and tries to understand it. I found the disconnects between Mike and humanity compelling and this did have some things to say about religion and society but it is really obviously written by a dude in the 60s and it's very sexist and explicitly homophobic.

I need to go read some more books written by women now.

The Drowned World by J. G. Ballard. Solar flares cause the ice caps to melt and the world is flooded and reverts to Triassic-era climate and reptile supremacy. People go out to study and salvage what's left of the previous cities. This book has so many good building blocks and yet unfortunately I found it quite boring. I would almost never say this about a book but I think I'd have liked it better as a movie. There's a lot of psychological aspects happening which is cool, but could benefit from the visuals and soundtrack a movie provides. (Just looked up on Google and apparently WB was was working on a adaptation in 2013 but then radio silence so guess it never got made.)

The Lost World by Arthur Conan Doyle. Re-read this because The Drowned World made me crave the action-adventure of it. One of my favorite books but there is a lot of 'oof, product of its time' bits.

In TV, I finished:

Wheel of Time (season 3): This was a great season. The Rhuidean episode was extremely cool and all the Aes Sedai politics and upheaval was intense.

Slow Horses (seasons 1 - 4): NEW SPY SHOW! I mean, it has been on since 2022 but new to me. I love spy media and typically the appeal for me is extreme competence but these are like the reject fuck-up spies and I find them so endearing oh my God. I might just rewatch this series again while I wait for season 5 in September. Anyone getting Apple TV short term for Murderbot reasons, I recommend watching this show too!

And I did just go see The Accountant 2 and it had a lot of extremely funny sibling behavior between Chris and Braxton which is exactly what I wanted. Obsessed with Jon Bernthal in this. I'll probably go see it again.