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Chit Chat and Reccomendation Post: March 2023 (Patreon)

Published:
2023-04-01 03:34:49
Imported:
2023-09

Content

Hello, hello, Patrons! Welcome to our monthly chit-chat and recommendation post, a cozy little space to update each other on what we've been doing lately and all the things we’ve enjoyed during the month!

March was a weird one for me behind the scenes! My day job picked up with a ton of extra hours all of a sudden, I had a bunch of appointments and other responsibilities fall in my lap, and some interesting (?) health stuff happened. I went for a check-up and my doctor was like, “Hey, good news! Your vitamin deficiency is fixed! Bad news, you’re anemic and *checks notes* diabetic.”

And I said, “That would certainly explain why I still feel like hot garbage all the time.”

And she said, “Wouldn’t it?”

So that’s fun! In some ways it’s not surprising. It's sort of the family curse; every woman in my family gets diabetes without fail, from my third cousin, a five foot nothing stickbug, to my great aunt, who’s about six feet tall, three hundred pounds, and possibly an actual Amazon. I thought I'd beaten the curse, cleverly outsmarting it with diet and exercise! But no, I have succumbed. Now I can't eat cookies anymore. Sad face.

The good news is it's in the early stages, so treatment is going to be a (relative) breeze. I may even go into remission with the right meds and diet. Fingers crossed!

So that's what's been going on with me. Now, for the fun stuff! A few things I enjoyed during March!

Articles: For once, articles took a backseat to books! I have just a couple offerings this month.

Fun Delivered: World's Foremost Experts on Whoopee Cushions and Silly Putty Tell All: A short retrospective on novelties! The kind you might send away for in the back of a comic book in 1956. You gotta know I love those! (In fact, I have a copy of Cheap Laffs: The Art of the Novelty Item sitting on my bookshelf as I type this, and am a longtime devotee of Archie McPhee.) 

I'm not saying I definitely own a comedy oversized shepherd's crook and am always ready for the return of vaudeville, I'm just saying it can't be ruled out.

The Communist Cookbook That Defined Prague’s Cuisine: A rather bleak (but fascinating!) look at cuisine behind the Iron Curtain, when deviation from a government approved cookbook was verboten. It's hard to fathom generations having access to fewer than a thousand recipes over the course of several decades, but it happened.

Books: With so little time to read the past few weeks, and slowly starving for mental stimulation, I finally broke down, turned on my geriatric Kindle's Text-to-Speech function, and let it read me to sleep all month long. It took an age to finish anything that way, since I fell asleep basically immediately like some kind of grandpa, but miraculously I did. Zounds!

I was in my sci-fi feels this month, so my selections reflect that.

Dragonflight : You might remember I started reading the first installment of the legendary Sci-Fantasy Dragonriders of Pern series months ago, but after a few false starts I finally managed to blaze through it in March. I LOVED IT. A downtrodden former noble turned scullery maid is selected to psychically bond with a newly hatched dragon queen, and finds herself thrust into a centuries long battle to protect her world.

To keep my review spoiler free and vague: this is the first time I've ever seen a Chekov's Deus Ex Machina work in fiction. There is nothing I can say about it that won't give away the plot, but I highly, highly recommend it. (One caveat: there is some era typical magical dubcon shenanigans, so beware if that sort of content bothers you. It's not graphic, but it is there.)

Lorelei of the Red Mist: This novella length Ray Bradbury/Leigh Brackett joint has a deliciously evil villainess, a conflicted sleazebag-turned-noble hero protagonist, a tough-as-nails love interest, and some really cool alien worldbuilding. Hugh Starke, a thief, dies on the lam and finds his consciousness plucked from his body and dropped into a new one by a powerful adversary. She intends to use him to commit genocide, but didn't count on his host body's lover turning Starke against her!

Black God's Kiss: Originally published in 1934, Black God's Kiss introduces Jirel of Joiry, the precursor to Red Sonja and other Sword-and-Sorcery characters of her ilk. I didn't actually get to finish this, but I'm gonna. I love a good bloodthirsty, vengeful barbarian character, and if she's a girl, all the better!

Foreigner: Another that I didn't actually finish (yet!) Humans on their way to found a new colony find their ship in an uncharted region of space. Decades pass as they build and survive on a space station and eventually they have no choice but to make planetfall--and first contact with the dominant species. Political machinations abound!

Movies: I really love Cult Cinema Classics on youtube; they post lots of oddities that are right up my alley. This month, I caught the charmingly cheesy first installment of some classic Flash Gordon serials and a film called Night Tide, which I can only describe as "Surreal Mermaid Noir."

They also just posted My Man Godfrey! Which technically I saw a couple of years ago rather than this month, but still recommend. It's a fantastic farce that still holds up.

And that's it for me this month! What have you all been up to? Consume any good movies/books/games?  

Comments

Anonymous

Just re-read Plain Bad Heroines, every time I do I notice something new! Multi-layer mystery with an angle on movie stars, tragic grade school loves, ghosts, and curses. As far as movies, Rhymes for Young Ghouls!! Amazing movie that follows a young woman on her reservation in Canada, and her story dealing with the RCMP, the horrors of the residential school system, and her coming into her own despite generations of family trauma. Having lived on my tribe’s reservation as a child it hits home hard, literally. As a warning there are some very intense graphic scenes, but if you can stomach that then there’s a lot to be understood from the film on what life is like for those coming from a similar story.

PsionicsKnight

Hi everyone, hope March has been good for you. Thanks for the recommendations here, Velvet! They do sound interesting and I will try to check them out later. I am sorry to hear about your diabetic issue, but perhaps with your dieting and exercise it’ll go into remission. And considering the health breakthroughs we’ve had in the last few decades or so, I wouldn’t be surprised if we find a way to “cure” diabetes and other conditions like it in our lifetime. In the meantime, I’ll be hoping and praying for you! For me, March has been a mixed bag. It started off relatively good, as I got to see my grandpa for his 96th birthday—he and my grandmother are doing incredibly well for their ages (early-to-mid 90s) to the point where I think they could at least make it past age 100 for at least a few years—so that was really nice for the most part! I will admit that it was a little sad since I got fearful about losing them, but I think that’s more because I have a tendency to assume the worst possible scenario will happen (I.e. they’ll die before I have a chance to publish anything they could read) and the fact that my mom and stepdad have a sort of… morbid obsession with their mortality. Not in a, “Why can’t they just die so we get the inheritance?” obsession, but more of just holding onto this idea that the two of them could die at any moment from old age, and seemingly more because they just “feel” it could happen at any moment as opposed to speaking with their doctors about their condition. Besides… I gotta be honest—if they’re that worried, and they have the chance to go on regular cruises (including ones that can last between two-to-four weeks) and, as flight attendants, have both good flight benefits and flexible hours… I can’t help but wonder, “Why aren’t *you two* choosing to spend more time with them if you think they’re going to die soon?” Regardless, I talked about my concerns with my therapist and, while she gave fairly standard advice, I still appreciate what she said and feel that talking about it helped my fears. In other news, work has been… difficult. Long story short: Amazon hasn’t been doing well recently, so they’ve been laying people off. And since I had my four-and-a-half year anniversary on the 19th of this month, I feel like I might have more of a risk of getting laid off. Especially since I got a fifth write-up in a year this month, due to “low productivity” (despite me working on a slow day) which means that if I get one more write-up before May 2, it’ll be a job termination. So, this might make the laid-off situation worse, or it could just be a ploy to get me out without having to do a lot of red tape. Regardless, I am considering leaving the job soon to focus on other career paths. Currently, I’m thinking of going into Technical Writing—it would fit my college degree—with tutoring being a back-up if that doesn’t work, but I’m not sure if I should try to leave ASAP or stay at Amazon for as long as possible. I have talked with a friend and my therapist about this, though I want to discuss this with some family members as well to see what they say. In better news: in light of the situation at Amazon, and the fact that we got a lot of voluntary time off opportunities, I was able to complete a good portion of a Webflow Web Design course on a skill building website called Udemy! I’m about 85% of the way done, and while I still think I need some more practice, I also think I’m doing pretty well. So, Velvet, if you or anyone else ever wants or needs a personal website, well… you know where to find me. 😉 I also was able to get some more writing done, including a script I hope to donate to Velvet (and maybe make public, if she’s cool with that). I might also use some more free time to get some other scripts for Dangerous ASMR, or just scripts in general, done too, but I don’t want to overexert myself. I also got the next box for the Year of Sanderson! If I didn’t mention it before: I supported Brandon Sanderson’s Four Secret Projects Kickstarter—basically, a Kickstarter to help fund publishing four novels he wrote during the Quarantine—and if the goal was met, he’d do a “Year of Sanderson” event in which every month backers (at least of a certain tier) would get a box every month with Sanderson-themed goodies. Four of which would feature the books he wrote! While there has been trouble with the first box getting constantly delayed, since so many people supported the Kickstarter, I did get the second and third boxes: which were themed around Hoid (a recurring character in the Cosmere universe) and the Cytoverse, which is the setting for Sanderson’s YA Sci-Fi series Skyward. I haven’t read any of Skyward yet, but I do appreciate getting the box for it—especially since I got a model for a space ship and a silicon mold for Cytoverse character “Doomslug the Destroyer.” I also might be getting the first box—the first project Tress of the Emerald Sea—tomorrow due to a message I found on Backerkit, but I’m not sure just yet. Other than that, I didn’t have a lot of time to read or watch things. However, I do have two recommendations. The first is a book called “Children of Time” by Adrian Tchaikovsky. It’s a sci-fi book that has it’s plot started when a mad scientist tries to use a genetically engineered virus to speed up the evolutionary process of a group of monkeys, in the hopes of giving them sapience so she can become (essentially) their god. However, an accident occurs and the virus instead infects a number of creatures, the most significant being… spiders! In doing so, we see two sides of the story: a human-focused one about humanity fleeing a dying Earth and trying to find a new home, and the story of how the spiders evolve to gain sapience, and then later form a civilization. With problems truly arising after the two species meet up together. I haven’t officially read it, but I did hear about it from YouTubers Quinn’s Ideas and Hello Future Me, and I have to say that the idea of it is absolutely fascinating! I also read Jeremy Bates Dancing Plague novel, which I found started off really strong… and then had a weaker end. But, to explain, the story is based on the real-life Dancing Plague of 1518, in which a young woman in what is now France went into the streets of her village and started dancing. While people were entertained at first, things got creepy when after a few days she wouldn’t stop dancing, and others began to join her. This went on for a month until, finally, everyone just stopped and went about their lives—though I heard some sources claim that people did indeed die during this time. Bates’s book is about a similar event happening in the 1980s in a quiet Maine town where a group of kids discover that certain residents start dancing obsessively, and try to get to the bottom of it. Definitely a good slow burn, and it has a sequel, but the twist at the end was… disappointing, to say the least. The other book recommendation is Giorgio de Maria’s The Twenty Days of Turin. The story is that in Turin, Italy, there was an epidemic of insomnia that eventually went into violence, and our unnamed protagonist tries to learn more about it. However, as he delves into the story more, he discovers that the actual cause of the Twenty Nights is something more inhuman and dangerous than he thought. It’s an interesting cosmic horror story that, from what I read, is meant to be an allegory for the Years of Lead, a period of great political and social unrest that happened in Italy between the 1960s and 1980s. Some have also called it a prophetic novel on social media and the Internet, as one of the key elements in the book’s fictional version of Turin is “the Library” which was meant to be a place for people to donate diaries and allow for lonely people to read those donations to connect with one another. However, what started as a way to bring people together ended up revealing macabre secrets of the populace, and it seems that the Library might have even influenced the dark force that holds Turin in its grip. So, sorry again for the novel, but a lot of stuff has happened, as I said. And hopefully, April will be a bit more laid-back.

Luke Childers

Hello everyone! This will be my first time joining in for the chit chat posts and I'm sorry to say it will be a little bit of a rollercoaster. I'd like to start by saying, during these past few months since I've joined the patreon, reading these posts and replies have been a surprisingly effective source of inspiration, and a sense or normalcy in their positivity and interestingness, and I'd like to thank you all for that. The most simple part this month's events for me, I've gotten back into re-reading one of my favorite novels, Worm (and its sequel, Ward), by the author Wildbow. It's a wonderful, complex, dark, and sometimes gory, web-serial that follows the story of a version of earth where people began manifesting powers after experiencing unique and heavy points of trauma in life, with the plot following the perspective of the main character, Taylor Hebert, a teenage girl with the power to control bugs who finds herself quickly falling in with one of her city's most interesting, and dangerous, group of villains. Frankly, my description could never do it justice without spoiling its complexity so I'd definitely recommend researching it a bit more if anyone is intrigued by my word-soup style explanation. Over the course of March I've also gotten into many new games but alas for this first time posting I'll forgo talking about them for the sake of my current mental energy. For the more personal side of things the past month has been very eventful and I apologize for the ensuing ramble. For starters, I've made great leaps of progress in working on my mental health thanks to my friends and family, and in kind I have managed to become a stronger supporter and advocate for many of them in their own journeys. On the other side of things I've grown further apart from, and maybe even lost, one of my closest and longest lasting friends due to growing interpersonal conflict between us. Back on the positive end I started off this month deep in the bowels of a multi-month long cancer scare as my doctors started investigating the cause of an abnormally high white blood cell count that I've had for the past three years, but as of yesterday my doctors have determined (pending further testing) that instead of leukemia I instead likely have a perpetually hyper active immune system, which for now I choose to believe is a great boon until my next round of appointments. And finally back on the negative end, tonight, just an hour before this post was made, I experienced another loss of a different kind as I had to let my wonderful dog, Patches, go after fourteen years of life. He had withdrawn into a terrible bout of lethargy for the past couple of days and after taking him to the vet tonight we learned that he had been suffering from both a severe case of diabetes, as well as three painful, and inoperable, masses within his chest, which sadly didn't come as too much shock as he was already a cancer survivor. All in all, despite the loses,  I'm doing well, and I hope that you all are too, let's all have a great April! (And I promise to bring less sad things and more cool recommendations next time!)

snes200

Hello, this is my first time saying something on one of these, first off, hi everyone, my name is Jason, you can call me snes. I'm somewhat of a pixel artist, average media enjoyer(I really dig some good sci-fi, fantasy, drama, and some good comedy), and I've recently been all over the place, so I seeked therapy and hopefully this will help me. On the upside of things, I've been making some fanart of many things, recently it's been of a game titled Pizza Tower, after playing it I really enjoyed it a lot, and...the Madam, the Myth, the Legend, Vanilla Velvet, though Idk how to actually send it, but it's fine, I like how it turned out. As well as doing pixel art, I've been reading some comics, specifically one titled The Last Fall, it's a pretty good one, I recommend it.

TheYounglingSlayer

Hello folks and happy April! March was kinda awesome for me and I hope y'all had a great month as well. So much yet so little happened for me in March, which doesn't really make any sense, but whatever. Let's get into it! Work's been good. I have had some opportunities to get out onto the range as an RO and even some chances to get experience instructing. I'm hoping to do my instructor qualification class at the end of May, so I need to keep practicing, not only as a shooter, but an instructor. I refuse to accept anything short of my best! I finished The Last of Us and I'm thrilled to say they didn't fumble at the 10 yard line, so good job! A couple of my friends and I picked up BO3 on steam while it was on sale and have been playing zombies. I personally prefer the simplicity of classic zombies, but it's still been a blast. The most significant thing to happen to me this month was my new girlyfriend! I mentioned her last month; she's my best friend's sister and we have totally hit it off! They live in a different state, so for the time being, it's a long distance relationship. I was able to get some time off in the future so I can go and visit her as well as my friends for a week and frankly, time just can't go fast enough. Last thing is Dad Advice. You may not be able to choose who's in your biological family, but you can choose who you consider your family. Find your people and take care of one another. That's all! Have a great April and I hope to hear from y'all in May! Edit: I completely forgot, I finished and submitted my Western script! It's far from perfect, but I think it came out decent, all things considered.