ELSEWHERE

I did in fact feel better after getting some more sleep, though not 100%. Woke up, ate some breakfast, internetted for a little, and then Erika, Dave, and I spent three hours working on a spaghetti restaurant in PlateUp! I am waiting, Erika is bussing, and Dave is cooking. It was very fun and we'll definitely do it again sometime.

Alas by the time we were done, ash was going to bed, so no Resident Evil tonight. Instead I'll dick around in Breath of the Wild some more, probably. Luckily it has in fact cooled off tonight and I will probably be able to go to sleep at a more decent hour, and I am definitely tired enough to do that

Dave we need soooooooooooup

Dave!!!! We need soooouuuuuuuup!!!!!

Listened to podcast episode where they talked about the book and I did not expect them to largely agree with my vibes, but they did (though one of them still enjoyed it, and the other did not specifically talk about whether or not he enjoyed it). They are both more into historical fiction than I am so they also had some extra critiques on that front, pointing out how anachronistic some of it was. There was also some interesting commentary that I, as a white American, did not feel super comfortable talking about, and which they, as white Europeans, are also not necessarily equipped to be making -- but the book is very, very heavily middle-eastern in content and the author is a black American who spent a chunk of his childhood in the Caribbean and who has higher education credentials in history. And as a white person who is not an expert in any field let alone history or middle-eastern cultures, I do not have any grounding to look at the contents of the book and be able to tell if this is being done respectfully or in any sort of gross way -- I do benefit-of-the-doubt assume it's all fine, especially as I did not get far enough into the book to be able to judge and I didn't see any other reviews commenting on it (for example, from a person from the culture being written about). However the writing just, the author does the thing of inserting words from other languages into the dialogue as like, a character's catchphrase almost, and it just came across as exotifying to me -- but again I don't want to talk out of turn and it was just a thing that on top of the author's other weaknesses just kind of felt off to me.

The podcast hosts also made an interesting point about how every alternate history that gives power to a darker-skinned nation, in this case turning Cairo into a global superpower, always seems to do it via magic and it comes across as authors thinking it impossible for said nations to be powerful outside of a complete fantasy, supernatural scenario. Like they can't gain power by their own means and need to be given it. Again I don't go here, so I don't know how true that is, but it's an interesting observation if it is

The next book they're doing is Children of Time, so I've added that to my library hold list. My hold for Ghost Hunter's Adventure Club and the Express Train to Nowhere came in so I started reading that -- I added it months ago because Game Grumps put up an ad for it that pointed out it is Extremely meta and I'm very curious. I think I'll be able to rip through it in a few days, which is good because my hold for Annihilation also just came in while I was writing this post, and I don't want to put it back on hold because the wait on it is very, very long, but I also don't like to have two books checked out at once

Today got hot again but only up to 105, so could definitely have been worse. Hopefully it cools off again tonight, it was so nice to be able to get a cold breeze into my room. I did go to bed at about 2, but didn't get to sleep for a couple hours later than that. Still it was nice to just lay in a dark room with my eyes closed

Woke up at 9, which you'll note is not enough sleep, to neighbourhood yard work. I stayed up to enjoy the cooler weather until it started heating up at about 11, then continued being up until 2 at which point I went back to sleep for three hours, when I woke up again because it was 85 in my room. AC got turned on when ash got home so it's cooler now, and I can stop hanging out in the dark with all my electronics turned off to avoid making it even hotter, so in a minute here I'm gonna fire up some video games and hang out with the cats

"Hey mek why did Game Grumps put up an ad for a book"

Because they're selling it, of course

"...Why are the Game Grumps selling a book?"

Well, they're the rightsholders for it, I believe. They're not the publishing house, of course, but you could say they're the developer of the series, in video game terms

"mek"

I mean, we don't know. The "lore" is that the books are written by Arin's uncle, Dr. Cecil H. H. Mills, but Dr. Cecil H. H. Mills is really obviously just Arin in a wig and doing a voice. The books are probably not written by Arin, it's very, very likely they're ghostwritten by someone Arin is supporting both monetarily and through publicity, or that they hired a ghostwriter (or ghostwriters) to make a thing that someone Arin is supporting wanted made. Current theory is that the Game Grumps' producer is behind it because there's evidence of "The Ghost Hunters Adventure Club" as a concept originating with an idea said producer had in high school, or something, but we as fans just aren't privy to any of the behind-the-scenes info on this. All we get is "They're written by Dr. Cecil H. H. Mills ;)"

There's actually a lot of drama surrounding this whole thing, because fans are gonna do that and honestly the ruse was not handled super well from the outset, but at this point everyone knows it's a goof and that the Game Grumps as a business entity just, are selling a book series, and merch for that book series. There's also ARG elements

I had zero interest in any of this nonsense until they hired Super Eyepatch Wolf to do a video about how meta the second book is, which caught my attention -- meta in a "characters discover they're in a book" sort of sense, not a "exaggerated winking at the camera" sort of sense. So yeah, so far it's alright, there's definitely stuff I'm picking up on because I'm primed to pick up on it. We'll see how it goes

"Excuse me," Inspector Horvath went on. "Why did we stop so abruptly?"
The engineer threw her hands up. "Beats me! The emergency break system engaged and there doesn't seem to be any way to get it disengaged."
"But you're the engineer," said the inspector. "Isn't there anything you can do?"
"I have a name, you know," she responded. Then, remembering, she looked down at the embroidery on her uniform to reconfirm that her name was, in fact, "Engineer." She sighed.
"Look, sir," she began. "I'm very brand-new to all of this. Not the train running stuff. From as far as I can surmise I have a pretty rock-solid knowledge of the thing. It's this universe that I'm still trying to figure out. It's sort of like a cross between genre fiction and plot-motivated absurdism. The fact of the matter is that the train is broken and I can't get it fixed because my toolkit is missing."

The Engineer is a little broken because she didn't exist when the book started and had to be hastily created in situ when a character insisted on visiting a location (the train's engine) that the author hadn't planned on having to write

Just had a couple of raw smores which means I'm thinking about the smores they made on Great British Bake Off

If I were trapped in the resident evil house I would simply not release the ultimate evil. Rip to Chris Redfield but I'm different

The plan is to completely invert my sleeping pattern until the heat stops -- in bed at about seven AM, awake at about 3 PM. This is not the ideal, because the ideal would mean missing out on social with ash since he's at home during the hottest part of the day, but it does give me a chance to get some stuff done when it's cool in the morning, and sleep through some of the too-hot-to-think. So, this morning I watered my plants, finally, and took a walk around the pool. Tonight I need to do some laundry, including the putting away of clean laundry that I've just been ignoring for a few weeks, oops. There's also some arcadia that turned into independent recordings because my co-actor couldn't make the scheduled one today and we don't have space in the schedule to reschedule things. I've also got some other independents, including one that's on the same timeline as the aforementioned (it's part of the same episode), and some intros/outros to knock out. I'll get that done either tonight or tomorrow -- probably tomorrow because I'm tired tonight, and laundry.

A famous conlanger has been doing a prompt-a-day challenge this year, that I just found out about last night, and I figured I'd give a shot at it, but I just got through the introductory prompts ('think about the environment the speakers of your conlang would live in! think about what they look like!' etc) -- or, through some of the introductory prompts, but I just got to one that makes it clear the next chunk is going to be proto-lang focused and listen -- if you enjoy making proto-langs then fuckin' go for it, I fully support you in your art and process. But god I'm tired of them being pushed as necessary to everyone's process.

A proto-lang is an ancestor for your conlang, so like, if your conlang is french then you make latin first and then evolve latin into french to get your conlang. It is a lot of work for what I consider to be very little benefit, and there's a school of conlangers that insist that making a whole other language first is the only way to get a believable, naturalistic conlang. And, to be petty about it, the people I see making that claim? Their conlangs are not actually all that great, and I'm pretty sure part of that is because they use the proto-lang process as a crutch.

Anyway, this famous conlanger is in a relationship with another famous conlanger who is imo responsible for the ubiquity of the proto-lang pushers, so I should have expected this. I might continue trying out the prompts, I might not, I might just skip a bunch of them, we'll see.

Tuesday night Dave and I did more stardew, which was fun, we upgraded the barn and got a couple pigs and we got to do the desert carnival event, and then Dave wanted to call it early so he could go lay down because it was very hot up there that night. ash and I continue to play Resident Evil, we've just got to the residence tonight and we're a little stuck on what to do next but I'm sure we'll figure it out. I'm continuing to play Breath of the Wild, I've beat three of the four divine beasts and am trying to work my way through all the side quests that I can.

Bank continues to recover from the ransomware incident, I still don't have access to my balance but things I'm trying to pay for are going through, so. We're fast approaching the point where I'm going to have to try to pay off my major bills without being able to see how much money I have in my account, which is sure a thing! I'll just have to try to math it and hope I don't fuck it up

Oh firefox is about to update and might make me restart it, let me post this real quick so I don't lose it