What I Did in May

This month was entirely uni holidays for me, which led to sleepy mornings and little productivity. This happens between every term, and usually can make me quite sad, but I've very happily managed to dodge the brunt of it this month by doing a lot of reading on my new old Kindle!

Bookshelf

One problem with the Kindle though, as relayed to me by a friend, is that there's no physical souvenir of what you've read - it's just files, right. I've attempted to curb this by putting together a little bookshelf page where I can track what I've read - go check it out!

I'm a big fan, I like the way that each book's apparent volume relates to its word count, it's simple and skeuomorphic and nice. The books are offset randomly with a golden-ratio method inspired by my friend Temmie's media page.

To test this bookshelf generator out, I also threw together a page that shows how the works of prolific web-serialist Wildbow might look in physical edition. Pale is huge!!

What I Read this Month!

Since I didn't do any projects this month, I thought I'd share some quick thoughts on the books I read. Maybe I'll keep this going each month, who knows!

I'll also try out spoiler text, which looks like this: Boo! (You can hover or highlight to read it.)

This Used to be About Dungeons: Vol 1

A cute, comfy web serial that I was reading years ago but never finished - figured I'd start off my dive back into, uh, books with something easy and familiar. Looove the way it takes advantage of the long format to go crazy with worldbuilding: arcane civic infrastructure and dozens of magic systems and items abound, but I think I am mostly here for the (mostly) charming characters. Like I loooove Alfric and Mizuki and Isra, and I loooove reading about the convoluted logistics of selling off dungeon loot!

There's a section in here where the characters are figuring out how to cleverly combine magical effects in order to get around the weight limitations on teleportation, and when a similar situation came up in D&D I was so prepared. Polymorph that Paladin into a sparrow and put him in the bag of holding so the party of three can Dimension Door, baby!

The Disaster Artist

(Memoir of Greg Sestero, who plays Mark in Tommy Wiseau's The Room.) I picked this up on a whim - I've never actually seen The Room, though an indie cinema near me plays it every month.

Incredible fan of how this book uses the exact same non-linear storytelling structure as Project Hail Mary: chapters alternate between a horrible disaster nightmare situation (the set of The Room), and snippets/vignettes of the events that led to it (Greg and Tommy's relationship).

The book makes a lot of reference to the film The Talented Mr. Ripley, and I had been watching the recent TV adaptation Ripley with my mum immediately prior, so that was a bit of a jumpscare!

Fun read, blitzed it in a couple days and then terrorised friends with a frankly horrid Wiseau impression for about a week.

Arc of a Scythe #1: Scythe

The cover of this book has been catching my eye every time I entered a bookstore for YEARS, and I mean dude it's YA with a fun premise, it slaps! At each twist I was like "ooooh", y'know. Would have absolutely loved this as a teenager and it remains enjoyable to me now.

Really interesting to see what worldbuilding is like outside of million-word web serials - they really gotta play all their cards in like 100k words, huh. Also weird to see the strange prescience of the superintelligent AI Thunderhead stuff, given the book came out 2016. Like, idk it didn't predict LLMs crazy style but there are ideas in here that are interesting to think about when framed against a modern context. I think I feel a bit more distaste about the Thunderhead than I might've if I'd read the book before the advent of LLMs.

Twig Arc 14: Thicker than Water

The thing with Wildbow books is like,, how can you even begin to explain them, like I'm in so deep here lol. I was reading this book last year (it was actually one of my bingo goals!), but bounced off about midway through Arc 14, on account of the section where Evette was taking charge of Sy's mind - they took out all of the lovely characters I loved in the book I was reading for the lovely characters!

After building up some momentum from the previous 3 books, I was determined to give Twig another crack, so I used the (frankly distressingly minimal) pypub3 library to scrape it to epub, broken up by arc (so that the progress bar at the bottom of my Kindle's screen doesn't get clogged by, like, 300 chapter marker.)

And it was good! I broke my curse, I got through the arc! The one thing I was spoiled for in Twig was that there's a trans character, and I did pick up that it was Jamie right away, so it's cool to see that seed fruit, a million words in.

I am once again as locked in as I was last year, and excited to read more! (Will be alternating between an arc of Twig and, like, a regular book, so as to balance out the two writing styles' speeds.)

Arc of a Scythe #2: Thunderhead

Something that's really struck me as a distinguishing point between this and the prior book is like,, it feels as though the original book was written as something of a standalone, and in response to its success, two more books were planned. Like, this book feels like such a part one to a grand finale, y'know?

Lots of things remain unresolved, with the knowledge that there will be a chance to resolve them, like, for example, the payoff to the Land of Nod subplot isn't, going there, or finding out what's on it, it's just seeing it on a map!

Not a bad thing, just an interesting point of difference. I did think the ending of this book tied together the clues in a nice way. This book's a bit like Glass Onion, hey, in that it's fun and it's linking together setups and payoffs so I'm happy. :p Looking forward to the trilogy's grand finale!

And That's It!

Uni term is resuming, my last one (assuming I've done everything right). I'd love to lock in and end it on a high note with good marks in my last course, so we'll see if that keeps me away from projects, or if I end up obsessing over things I shouldn't once my assignments come due.

Chat to you at the end of June!