ELSEWHERE

What I actually ended up doing was finishing up modding ESO, and the majority of that was fighting one mod in particular in trying to get it to work. But I succeeded!

By the time I was done with that, ash was home with dinner, so I shut everything down to go eat and watch TV, but now it's his bedtime so I'm going to actually play some video games. Going once again to try to get to bed a little early to maximise sleep time, though I'm very at the whims of Oz and her willingness to eat enough of her dinner before then so it won't get left out while I'm unconscious. I am very tired, though, so actually falling asleep shouldn't be a problem

(I'd be willing to give ESO a spin if you wanna play together sometime, I've never played and I think most complaints I've heard in the MMO community is that it's just a bit clunky and outdated compared to powerhouses like FF14 and WoW, which, like, duh)

I'd be very down if you can run it! And if you'd forgive me being exactly as lost as you about the multiplayer content because I haven't touched that side of it since Dave played it with me in 2014

Happy Thanksgiving!

Because ash has a four-day weekend we're able to push Cael's meds forward to a more reasonable wake-up time, of about 9, and then he's done with it on Tuesday morning so it'll only be another couple of days of waking up at 7. Of course today the cats decided I needed to wake up at 7 anyway.

Oz has been a bit stressed and I'm not sure what to do about it. Although I think additionally to that, that her claws have been long enough to cause her discomfort or outright pain, so I've started trimming them again and I think that's helping. But yeah, she has very little guaranteed alone-time right now and I should probably start putting Cael in the bathroom for a period, again? Or maybe some time with Cael out of my room and my door closed? Unsure, because even if I do that I can't really communicate to her that she's safe in a way she'll understand

Cael does okay at leaving her alone so long as he gets enough attention and playtime through the day, but even then he still bothers her. He has decided he doesn't like her, I think, and since she hisses at him all the time I can't exactly blame him. Also unsure if the Feliway is helping -- possibly they aren't getting enough exposure to it since they spend a fair amount of time out of my room, or my outside door is open. Possibly putting others through the house might help? It did seem to help for a little bit -- Oz seemed less generally nervous and Cael was less aggressive, but that could have been coincidence or confirmation bias.

Today I washed all my bedding and cleaned my humidifier, and also it was Thanksgiving! We had a good meal, even though it was just the three of us and we didn't super treat it like any sort of special event -- it would not be super duper out of character for ash to just want to make a roast turkey with stuffing and baked potatoes for no particular reason.

I do wish the pandemic would actually end.

Wished the immediate family a happy one and got replies back, so they're all still alive at least.

The mild sleep deprivation has been really affecting my cognitive functions and I'm very ready to start getting a full, uninterrupted night's sleep again, but let's be honest there's no guarantee of that even after I'm done waking up early to medicate a cat, because cats.

Yup! Got late, so gonna go eat some more, watch youtube, play ESO, you know the drill.

Well, the weekend is over and things can go a little bit more normal! Tuesday morning we will finally be done with Cael's medicine and then things can go fully normal, but unfortunately for the next two days I once again need to wake up at 7 AM (unless we run out of the medicine before then, which is possible, it really feels like they haven't given us enough)

Backup files recovery is going Extremely Poorly and tonight it has given up the ghost. Going to poke at it some more tomorrow to figure out what the fuck, but since Erik helped me pay for another year on that subscription, it's not actually urgent that I get it sorted. Not sure how I'll fix it, but I'll think about it, and in the meantime I can start getting computers upgraded so they're no longer running out-of-date OSes

Speaking of which, apparently at some point since I last had to use the laptop for a discord voice call, discord stopped accepting microphone access from any browser that will run on said laptop, so that was exciting to find out while we were in the process of trying to use it for a recording. With the desktop busy trying to download half a terabyte of data, I couldn't use that for recording, so we then had to figure out a different alternative. Unfortunately, when I tried using ash's laptop -- after having successfully set up everything on it the night before -- it refused to acknowledge my microphone and then refused to acknowledge both my microphone and my headphones at the same time. Erik has now donated his laptop to the cause, and I need to try to use it for a recording tonight, and we'll see what weird issues it runs in to (one hopes none, fingers crossed and touch wood)

Speaking of having to get up at 7, it's gotten late. I need to eat a little more and then get ready for bed. Two more days, and then I'll sleep forever, uninterrupted.

Alright, the plan is to get that computer ready for the OS upgrade, and then while it's wiped, get the backups downloaded onto it. Then move those to different storage, and get that computer set up for actual use.

We did in fact run out of Cael's meds -- there wasn't even enough in the bottle to do a dose this morning, turns out. Annoying, and his poops are still unhealthy looking, so I'm going to keep an eye on that for a bit and then if nothing changes see about talking to the vet about it again. He's been getting a lot of treats lately to try to reinforce good behaviours, and they might be messing with his poops, so I'm going to hold off on giving him any today and see what happens. Luckily (not really) he has decided to be a complete butt today, so there hasn't been any good behaviour to reinforce.

Taking today down, mostly. Been reading in bed all afternoon -- I tried to sleep in, but see above about the cat being a small asshole. I've gotten 300 more pages into Carry On, and I'm honestly mostly continuing it because I find the ways in which it's not good kind of fascinating. The library is going to remove it from my phone at 11 tonight, so I kind of have a goal to finish it before then. The stats on it say I can finish it with four hours of reading, so it's technically possible, but we'll see if I have the stamina to read for another four hours today.

But I'm also going to do some more ESO -- I've been wandering around Tamriel, knocking quests out and looking for skyshards, and when I get tired of that I'll do some thieving. When I have money again I need to either re-subscribe or buy the DLCs so I can more properly have access to the thieves' guild stuff. I hate what they've done with the paid content -- the crafting bag access in particular is pretty egregious, functionally giving you infinite inventory space if you subscribe -- but that's not going to stop me from doing it. I'll just complain about it the whole time. That said, all my money is spoken for for at least the next month and probably more, so it'll be a tick.

Going free-to-play is the devil talking, it's been vaguely downhill since then. But the actual game content is fun, despite. And obviously I've been enjoying it even without access to the paid stuff

So Carry On is written with British POV characters and a lot of British slang that sounds tinny to my ear, so I looked up the author and
A. Sure enough she's from and lives in Nebraska
B. "Rainbow Rowell controversy" is in suggested searches for her name

Turns out one of her books gets criticised for racism via fetishising the Korean lead -- a lot of defences (from readers) of 'everything's racist and problematic nowadays' and a lot of POC talking about being personally hurt by the writing. So, uh, that's a thing!

So Rainbow Rowell wrote Fangirl, a book in which the main characters are fans of the Simon Snow book series -- she then went on to write the book the characters in her book are fangirls of, and that's what Carry On is.

It reads extremely in the voice of fanfic, and the author is not good enough at distinguishing character voices to pull off the 'a different character is the POV for each chapter' thing. It's also mostly Harry Potter with the serial filed off -- more specifically, it's the fandom version of Harry Potter from the early 2000s, and more specifically than that it's a Draco/Harry fic from that period. It does really pick up about halfway through, and I ended up enjoying the plot, though it's pretty predictable. The first half is very 'teen emotions', and people who are into that might like it more than I did.

It does something very interesting, which is that this is treated like the last in a septilogy, where the first six books don't exist. The first half, along with all the 'I am a teenager/young adult and have Feelings about Things' also has a lot of, setting by way of explaining previous adventures the characters had, to the extent that it feels like the book, up to the plot kicking off, is nothing but recap. That's part of why it has such a strong fanfic feel to it, I think, it's very much the characters all talking about (or, thinking about) all the stuff that's happened to them in the actual canon.

Our main protagonist is The Chosen One, brought to a magical school for witches and wizards, where he has a nerdy and activist-minded best friend, a girlfriend who isn't really into all this adventuring stuff and whom he has been dating purely out of a feeling that that's what he's supposed to do (their relationship starts the book on the rocks, as aftermath from an event in the nonexistent previous book), and a roommate who comes from a long line of wealthy and pure-blooded wizards and also hates his guts (except he's actually in love with him). Our Chosen One is destined to fight The Insidious Humdrum, a threat to all of magic-kind by way of just kind of, sucking all magic out of the world, but also they have to solve a murder or two.

Given the nature of the author's writing, I 110% believe she'd just unthinkingly put racial stereotypes into her writing without thinking about it -- the rest of her writing is pretty trope-ic and superficial as well. But it's obviously a fast read, and the chunk between 50% and about 85% is fun.

I have this very strong feeling that I have heard Rainbow Rowell's name (jesus even that's a touch close to JKR, isn't it) brought up in some fandom drama somewhere at some point, but all I can find on the internet is the racism stuff, and the worst I saw from her on that was a lack of response, and a kind of shitty defence of one part of it.

There is never any reason why a VR game has to be exclusive to VR, every one of them would work perfectly well on a screen instead, and it's really annoying when they make them exclusive to VR anyway

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