Come An’ Get It: The Story of the Old Cowboy Cook by Ramon F. Adams 
Three cowboy hats
I read this as a writing reference and it was fine for that! I got it from the library to take some notes from for worldbuilding and probably wouldn't recommend it unless you too had highly specific knowledge-absorbing needs.
#books2023
Weekend!
Today I have:
walked Baby Dog
done a load of laundry (still need to put it away though)
did some general chores/tidying
took down recycling
walked to the Asian grocer to restock on some stuff and buy an Enormous Cabbage that I'll cook with tomorrow
swung by Aldi for milk and bread
annnnnnd that's mostly it, I took a nap on the couch bcuz I crashed after doing all that and now I'm gonna play a little bit of bungame. I played some No Man's Sky this morning and may go back to that this evening, or I may try to crack back into Valheim and see if I can conquer the swamp biome. I dunno! It'll probably depend on what my friends are up to. For now, though, gonna do my dailies in Final Fantasy 14!
For a brief period of time my social circles on the internet intersected with people who were absolute snotty buttholes about D&D and I'm glad I yeeted that from my presence because I love playing D&D and I am frankly too busy to act like I'm above that
erikavonkaiser wrote: ↑Sun Aug 06, 2023 2:43 pmTrying some new routine stuff I'll talk about more later maybe
Routine stuff!
The main changes are with fitness and writing; I've essentially swapped their "time slots" because I was having trouble making efficient use of my writing time. The routine itself was working, but I wasn't getting much done because I frankly wasn't awake enough for creative brain to do anything but sputter a little bit. So I made some adjustments and now my morning routine on a work day is a little bit like:
0600-0615ish: wake up, morning ablutions
0630ish: morning walkies w/ Baby Dog, feed Baby Dog afterward
0700ish: tea kettle on, get stuff ready for my workout
0700-0830ish: drink tea while doing whatever my strength training is for the day, go on a run
After that I get cleaned up from my run, make a food, eat said food while watching a YouTube or scrolling feeds, then I sit down and do my thirty minutes of writing. After that I can either keep writing if I'm on a roll or go flop with some video games for a bit. It's working out a lot better for me to frontload my early morning and just autopilot exercise! That way, by the time I sit down I've had time to wake up, move my body, ponder, have food in my stomach, etc. On whatever my weekend is I eschew routines and just schedule out my day as suits me, because I've learned that while I am a fiend for structure, I also need opportunities to have a breather from structure or my body will decide for me when that happens.
Anyways, that's the big change and it's going well so far. I've also made some adjustments to my food/nutrition stuff, spurred somewhat by me adjusting my fitness goals but also by groceries being so frickin' frackin' expensive. I'm having to plan and meal prep a little bit more judiciously to make sure I'm being efficient and I haaaaaate it, but at least I don't have to fully meal prep like I used to. (My prior job was standard office hours, which obviously had its perks, but also meant if I didn't have my lunches fully packed and ready to go the evening before then I just was not bringing lunch that day.)
I think that's it for now. It's my Monday equivalent and I've already done my routine stuff so I'm gonna log in to Final Fantasy 14 to do some quick dailies maybe byeeeeeeeeeeeee
Mags and Leon energy
The Bear and the Nightingale by Katherine Arden 
Two stars, didn't finish
So this is a good time to mention I have two different variants of "did not finish" -- the first is what I reserve one star ratings for, which is a book that made me angry or that I find objectively bad either in terms of how it's written or the tropes it's using. The other variant is what this falls under, which is a book that didn't frustrate me so much as I bounced off it enough that I'll file it as "not for me, but might be someone else's jam." As a testament to this, this book is highly rated on Goodreads (4.10 average with almost 200k ratings!), but I found it pretty dull. The prose itself was lovely, and I was invested for maybe the first third, but I would say my main issues are:
1) there are nine thousand characters I struggled to keep straight; some of this is cultural because these are all enormous Russian families and Russian diminutives/nicknames are a whole thing, so one character can be called by three or four completely different names depending on who is speaking to them
2) it definitely just becomes what was, to me, an overly simplistic unhinged Christians vs. the kindly pagans plot, which isn't a bad thing, but a YA version of it is just not up my alley
3) I think I went into this wanting more fairy tale stuff and less medieval "I don't want to go to the convent~~~" interpersonal drama and I would say it's about 30% of the former and 70% of the latter
As an aside I did look up the author and she's a white lady from Texas who has an educational background in Russian; I'm mentioning this because I did see a few lowly-rated reviews from actual eastern Europeans and Russians specifically who felt the book was, to them, painfully inauthentic, so, something to consider. I can't say either way -- I did pick this up specifically because I enjoy Slavic fairy tales, but I don't know a lot about them. She has a lot of reviews, though, and you definitely can't please everyone, so who knows!
#books2023
Also I sometimes wish book blurbs would more clearly state the age of the protagonists; I was browsing the "similar books" section to the above and there's a few that sound interesting but I can't tell from the genre tags and blurb if I would be reading about grown-up people or, like, fifteen-year-olds and sorry but YA is just very not my thing
I just wanna read about grown-ups going on all these cool adventures the frickin' frackin' teenagers get to go on
I finished Dredge this morning!
I had gotten distracted from it around the 90% mark, more or less, and I've decided I want to be better about finishing games that it's reasonable to finish (so basically everything except survival games, which I love but those I just play to play, not to mainline until completion). I continue to recommend Dredge for anyone who is interested in Lovecraftian horror vibes; if you're not into the finishing minigames the settings do adjust to make them easier or also to offer a narrative/peaceful mode where you can just explore and do the plot stuff. I didn't catch all the fish because that felt a bit too fussy and didn't have a tangible reward, but I did max out research/upgrades/pursuits, so I'm considering that close enough to 100%'d until the DLC comes out whenever it comes out.
Next I'm going to restart Subnautica and play it more efficiently, I think. I also got that game to about the 90% mark but bounced off because I was in a weird situation where I'd missed out on some schematics I needed and would have to backtrack in order to get and ehhhhhhh, so I may just make a new game and do a Once More, With Feeling run-through to completion.
Otherwise my video games rotation right now is chipping away at Elden Ring bit-by-bit, playing Final Fantasy 14 semi-regularly, and then Valheim and No Man's Sky as I feel like progressing in them. No Man's Sky is probably most on the backburner, but I did play for a bit recently to get my inventory fixed after some recent patches that changed how your inventory and technology slots work. I might play some more Elden Ring this weekend, because I would like to be able to beat the game and set it aside for a bit before the DLC comes out (again, whenever it comes out). Oh, and I'm still going through Digimon Cyber Sleuth and Ni No Kuni on my Switch.
I am spoiled for video game choice! First world problems, for sure, but it's my main hobby and something I've enjoyed since childhood so I'm trying to give myself more time to actually finish games and get through my substantial backlog.