Tag: Ramblings

February ’23 Roundup & Ramblings

~ Bookstooge ~ 30 Comments

Raw Data:

Novels 14 ↑

Short Stories 2 ↑

Manga/Graphic Novels 2 ⭤

Comics 5 ↑

Average Rating 3.30 ↑

Pages 4084 ↑

Words 1309K ↑

The Bad:

Titus Andronicus – 1.5stars that Shakespeare should have been ashamed to write

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #14 – 1.5stars of utter lack of story telling skills

The Good:

Anubis Gates – 5stars of re-read magical goodness

Fullmetal Alchemist #2 – 4stars of manga doing what manga does best

Miscellaneous Posts:

Personal:

Unfortunately, February was not much of an improvement over January. No ER visits and Mrs B is feeling ok, at the moment, but that could change at a moment’s notice and so we’re pretty much living on tenterhooks and taking life one day at a time.

Weatherwise, February was fantastic. Made work a real treat but the end of the month showed that March is probably going to be a brutal winter lion month instead of a gentle lamb spring month. Ahh well. Winter is here 😦

Plans for Next Month:

I’m going to start watching the Shrek franchise for my movies so I’ll be doing one a month for a bit.

There will be double posts every Monday and Thursday’s. Just wanted to give you the heads up. I know I’ve been posting a lot and it looks to be continuing for March. Wednesdays will be all manga, as I’m ready to start reading more each month of both One Piece and Fullmetal Alchemist.

Hoping to do several posts about journaling too. I’ve got 5 posts in mind about journaling, so as long as I can get my butt in gear and get them written, that will take up Saturdays and be some of the double posting I am planning on do on the weekdays.

And start the buddy read with Dave for the comic “Web of Spiderman“.

Goodness, it sounds like a lot when I type it all out like that. But really, if I wasn’t planning those things, I’d be planning something else. I’m just an inveterate planner, for good or bad, so I just roll with it until I burn out and then I plan my convalescence 😀

January ’23 Roundup & Ramblings

~ Bookstooge ~ 45 Comments

Raw Data:

Novels 13 ⭤

Short Stories 0 ⭤

Manga/Graphic Novels 2 ⭤

Comics 3 ⭤

Average Rating 3.19 ⭤

Pages 3238 ⭤

Words 1002K ⭤

The Bad:

Cat Magic – 2stars of cult programming masquerading

Bone #16 – 2stars of complete and utter filler

The Good:

Santiago – 5stars of re-read goodness

James and the Giant Peach – 5stars of just the right book hitting at the exact perfect moment.

Miscellaneous Posts:

Personal:

January has been one of the worst we’ve had in about a decade. Even worse than last year’s January when we both got covid and had to go to the hospital via ambulance.

I got a light case of food poisoning between Christmas and New Years. On New Years, Mrs B had the start of a crohn’s flair up that turned into the worst one she’s had in 10 years. Then she got vasculitus and we’re still dealing with that. Urgent Care visits, ER visits, dr visits, specialists being as unhelpful as possible, it all came together to make life as close to a living hell as we could imagine. While Mrs B is doing better now and her primary care doctor has started her down the right path of specialists to see and taken care of getting her out of work, Mrs B still has a good way to go before she’s healthy again. This has obviously been preying on my mind the entire month.

Also, Mrs B takes a monthly injection and her specialist has completely dropped the ball on getting the authorizations for that. Thankfully, since I am me, and expect the worst of everyone and every situation, I had prepared for just such an eventuality. But it means the safety cushion is now gone so I have to start building it back up again.

Outside of work, I pretty much retreated into our condo and outside of church, had zero social time in real life. I’m still pretty raw emotionally right now and it doesn’t take much to hurt me, hence the limited real life social thing. There’s no need to take it out on other people who are just asking an innocent question.

What this whole time has also shown me is that when I am in the middle of a situation, I have ultra-mega-tunnel vision. I can’t trust myself to look at the big picture or to think properly. Not being able to trust myself is very unpleasant and for an introvert like myself, extremely unsettling.

Because I’ve been so unsettled, my writing has gone up about 10,000%. I figured I was going to have many days in January where I had no posts and was kind of looking forward to doing nothing. But when I stress, I write. So I wrote every day here on the blog and actually already have half of February taken care of too. My personal journal writing became a daily thing instead of a weekly thing. The Cervantes Journal I showcased in November? I’m already 2/3rds of the way through it. It used to take me a year to go through one of those. I’ve also been reading my journal from my junior year in Bibleschool and I hope to be talking about that sometime in March. It’s slow going because as emotional as I am now, I was a daily rollercoaster of ups and downs in my 20’s. It’s making my Freshman Journal look pretty even-keeled!

Multiple rain and snow storms have also meant work has been unsettled and so it feels like every aspect of our lives is in turmoil right now. All small stuff, you know, but like I said, tunnel vision makes it hard to get perspective. Even with church I am dealing with some interpersonal stuff, which while not bad, is just one more thing that makes me go “Oh come on, I do not need to deal with this right now”.

I am tired and am not sure when I’ll get to stop being tired. And so as you can see, the words just spew out like a raging torrent.

Plans for Next Month:

Pretty much exactly like this month. No movie, can’t handle it at the moment (not that I’m not watching stuff. I’m actually watching quite a bit more to try to turn my brain off). So Magic Mondays, books, manga’s and comics, some more of the PCP (Project Christmas Present) and if I get really words’y, probably some silly double posting just to vent and get it all out.

Bookstooge Reviews 2022

~ Bookstooge ~ 49 Comments

THE STATS:

Annual Blog Stats

Posts – 380 (↑61)

Words written – 185.5K (↓10.1K)

Views – 28.3K (↑1.1K)

Visitors – 7.5K (↓2K)

Followers – 400 (↓19)

Comments – 9.3K(↓1.5K)

Book Stats

Books read – 247 (↑ 54)

Pages read – 52769 (↑3.3K)

words read – 16487K (↑ 1.1K)

average rating – 3.23 (↓0.15)

GENERAL THOUGHTS:

General Life Thoughts:

The year in general sailed along for both Mrs B and me. We both ended up working more than usual (I think our average weekly was 42 or 43 hrs). Those extra hours made a big difference. Student loans are finished! So now we’re using that money to pay down extra on our mortgage. I’m hoping we can shave off 5-6 years off the loan life. That’s my next big life goal, to get that mortgage out of the way.

We helped out each month with super church (sunday school) and live streaming (so 2 sunday’s a month) and I’m finding my tolerance for the kids is waning. There is one parent who pretty much brings her kids to be babysat and they’re not disciplined at home so they’re not model kids. Thankfully, after having used the “nuclear option” once, (take them out of class and march them up the middle of the aisle and drop them back off to their mom in the middle of the sermon) they’re learning I mean business. They’re not bad kids, just unruly and undisciplined. But it’s exhausting and those Sunday’s I come home and flop on the couch. Streaming is easier but mainly because I refuse to treat it like a show. I use 4 camera angles and that’s it. I don’t zoom around, I don’t focus on people playing special music, etc, etc.

This year was just a blur. Not that good things didn’t happen, or bad things, but overall it went so fast that it was over before I realized what was going on. Which is fine when you’re concerned about who is elected to political offices, but not so fine when it comes to paying bills. Actually had one bill go to a bill collector because I completely forgot to pay it. Sigh, life moving faster isn’t necessarily a good thing.

One of the kids at church expressed interest in Magic earlier this year so I’ve been getting together with his Dad and him once or twice a month and turning him into a life long addict. Someone’s gotta do it, so it might as well be me 😀 Speaking of Magic, I began collecting the Mirage set from 1996. Along with 4th Edition, those cards are some of the iconic visual memories of my late teen years. Plus, collecting cards doesn’t take up nearly as much space as collecting books does, hahahahaa!

General Bookish Thoughts:

Looking at those numbers, man, did my book numbers go up! Part of that is because I was reading individual issues of comics all year (whereas I had only started doing that in July of 2021), but even that only accounts for about an extra 25, so I simply read MORE this year. The Pages and Words metric fully back that up. It didn’t “feel” like I had read more, but with not picking up any other new hobby, Reading picked up the slack.

The rating is down only a little bit from last year, but 2021’s rating was down from 2020’s, so I’m on a downward slide, albeit a very slight one. I think that is because I’m reading more. There are more crap books than fantastic books out there, so the more I read, the greater my chance of a getting a crap book. All it takes is ONE one star book in a month to drag the whole year down. And since I am so picky about handing out 5stars, well, it doesn’t surprise me. But as long as I stay above a 3star average, that means I’m enjoying the majority of what I read. I’ll try to be content with that.

With all of that being said, I only had FOUR 5star reads this year and all of them were re-reads. I had NINE 4.5star reads as well. On the other side, I only had TWO half star reads and NINE 1star reads. So I feel that I balanced everything out in the end.

With around 57 of the reads being re-reads (including ALL of the Bone comics), I’m still sticking around the 25% mark. I have a feeling that number is going to drop in ’23 as I am becoming more leery of re-reading my “old favorites” as I move into the phase of life (fully middle aged now) and all of my manga will be new to me as well. I am ok with this change.

Well, despite my issues with WP.com in 2021, I still came crawling back for more in 2022. To the point where I have a paid plan and Dotblog Site, sigh. Thankfully, I haven’t experienced some of the problems that I did last year, but I never count WP.com out of the problem fight. If they can’t make one problem get you, they’ll invent a whole new one, the wretches.

I have also realized that despite all of my complaining and grumbling, that I have nailed myself to WP.com. The finishing up of construction on The Hotel Bookstooge pretty much saw to that and the continued work on the Author Index is like putting up shutters on the windows. You only do that if you think you’re going to stay in the place for a while.

Between the paid plan’s upgrade to my storage, Dropbox and Caesium, space is not an issue for me.

The Churn continues apace with other bloggers slowing down, stopping or just moving on to other hobbies. I have also done my own share of unfollowing this year and finding new bloggers to follow. If I could have one blogging wish for 2023, I wish that things would stay stable in that regards. That’s a vain wish though, knowing how unstable the world in general is right now.

So the long and short? I’m here, I’m standing tall (well, kind of) and I’m not planning on leaving. But I’ll still be complaining.

Blogspot continues to be my review backup. Not in any meaningful way, as I didn’t do any work on the old reviews, so it’s as big a mess as my WordPress used to be. But it’s there for me when WP.com does something truly stupendously stupid (like they seem to do 3-4 times a year) and is a good safety valve so I don’t feel that WP.com is my only option.

Partway through the year (July to be particular) I stopped crossposting my reviews to Librarything. I had given up on the platform as a social site in 2021 and thus it was pretty inevitable that I stopped using them all together. Guess I’m more surprised it took me as long as it did than anything.

Calibre continues to putter along offline just fine. It is what I now use to check up on anything in particular. Now that it has full database searching abilities, I can look for almost anything and with enough patience, find it. I am currently using version 6.9 and will be updating as the creator puts up new updates.

THE BOOKS:

Best Book of the Year:

Without a question, A Christmas Carol read by Patrick Stewart. This is now my favorite version of this story and I suspect it will be an annual tradition.

Worst Book of the Year:

Definitely Flashman. He lies, murders and rapes his way through the book and we’re supposed to find it amusing. I definitely did not.

PLANS FOR 2023:

Personal:

The Self-Study for my Level3 Certification didn’t work out at all in ’22. I think that really needs to be a top priority for this year. I’m just afraid that I’ll slack off again though and “do it next month” all year long.

The potential move to Georgia is now indefinitely put off. It’s going to take an emergency to get us down there and even then we’d have to think about it. It is going into a closet shelf in the very back of my mind for now.

Trying not to make many, if any, plans. Because situations are easier to handle when you don’t have expectations about them.

Drink a lot of Rockstar energy drinks. Because I can.

Blog:

Continue working on my author index. Continue my Magic cards each Monday. So it’s going to be business as usual. I haven’t had a creative idea for some time about a long running series of blog posts, so I might end up not trying to do any. Which is too bad because long running series of posts is always easier to write and schedule than anything else.

I am going to try to do some more “arty” stuff but we’ll see how that pans out. I would like it to work but the logistics might be greater than anticipated.

Movies are still completely up in the air. There are so many movie reviewers out there. Besides, I don’t watch new stuff and even when I do watch stuff, I don’t really watch it that well. More like “listening to it” with glances up at the tv when there’s no dialogue to tell me what’s going on.

This might end up being a very sloggy blog year :-/

TOP 5:

Book Review Posts:

Non-Review Posts:

Commentors + Runner Up:

Movies:

Hall of Shame (5 least viewed posts)

December ’22 Roundup & Rambling

~ Bookstooge ~ 36 Comments

Raw Data:

Novels – 12 ⭤

Graphic Novels – 4 ⭤

Average Rating – 3.27 ↑

Pages – 3723 ↑

Words – 1259.5K ↑

The Bad:

Unsouled – 1.5stars of disgusting web novel disguised as a real book

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #12 – 1.5stars of utter ignorance on the subjects being written about

The Good:

A Christmas Carol read by Patrick Stewart – 5 stars of pure audio goodness!

In the Best Families – 4.5stars of Nero Wolfe NOT being Nero Wolfe

Movie:

Event Horizon was a great horror space movie that could have been better.

Miscellaneous Posts:

Personal:

Mrs B and I got sick near the beginning of the month but it wasn’t covid and it wasn’t serious. A couple of days out of work and we were good to go again.

Life was just busy from Thanksgiving til now. I think that contributed towards the sickness actually. One Saturday I slept for almost 12hrs.

I spent a lot of the month getting Mrs B’s Christmas present ready. It was a collaboration so I had to coordinate with some other people and one of them I had to collaborate through a 3rd party, so it was a lot of work to get things done that would have taken half the time and effort if I could have had direct contact. Oh well. It’s done now and turned out very well.

Plans for Next Month:

Well, just like always, I STILL have to deal with my upcoming Year in Review Post. I always leave it til last minute, always bemoan the fact in this final Roundup post and never actually do anything to change that. If I wasn’t so awesome, I’d be disgusted with myself 😉

I do plan on adding Manga back into my reading mix so that “open day” disappears. Might end up leaving Saturdays open for last minute silliness, we’ll see. I had talked about something, with somebody, sometime, for my next movie idea but I didn’t write it down and so have completely forgotten all the details. If that was you, would you mind saying what it was in the comments? Thanks. Otherwise, I might just let movies slide for a couple of months while I flail around looking for something suitable. Magic on Mondays will go on as usual.

Work continues apace on the Author Index and I’m in the P’s now. If I can keep up this momentum, I should be able to wrap this project up in 2023. Or I might stall out. It’s a tossup at this point.

See you tomorrow as I blab about the whole of ’22 then.

November ’22 Roundup & Ramblings

~ Bookstooge ~ 33 Comments

Raw Data:

Novels – 12 ↓

Graphic Novels – 4 ↓

Average Rating – 3.09 ↑

Pages – 3141 ↓

Words – 1088K ↓

The Bad:

Predator: Eyes of the Demon – 1.5stars of woke stories about pregnant predators and such.

Jackal of the Mind – 1star DNF for the usual reasons in fiction nowadays.

The Good:

Galactic Odyssey – 5stars of perennial favoriteness that I think I’m done with now.

Hidden Voices – 4stars as the newest entry in the Arcane Casebook series.

Movie:

Didn’t review any movies this month. I am sure you all were as devastated as I was about that 😉

Miscellaneous Posts:

Personal:

The last week of October and the first 2 weeks of November were sunny, warm and work was great. Weeks like these are why I put up with the winters of New England. I was soaking in the sunshine and humming to myself and life was good. Of course, by the end of the month I was wearing my thermal underwear and mountaineering socks, so winter came in fast.

The Author Index is going along quite swimmingly. I’m working my way backwards from Z to A and I’m working on the S’s already. It is already paying dividends as I found another book I hadn’t reviewed on the blog and so added it. I did have to change how the page behaved, as I realized I had over 900 authors and one single page with 900 links was going to be so unwieldy as to be useless. So each letter now opens up to its own page and associated authors. Not what I wanted but I suspect long term it will work out better.

I wrote what felt like was a lot of non-review posts and I HAD SO MUCH FUN AGAIN. Not posting on Tuesdays did mean I had to double up posts on other random days, but it worked for me. I do have to ask, how do you all feel about? Do you care if a blogger has multiple posts in a day or would you rather they were spread out completely? If you have never thought about this subject, I think you should. Being a wiser, discerning blog reader is important and besides, I want to raise the tone here on my blog. So raise that left pinky when leaving a comment please.

Life has been changing, in small ways but more than I was expecting. Upgrading my avatar, buying a new computer, going Dot Blog, the disastrous new theme that didn’t work out, Mrs B becoming a contributor to the blog, all little things in and of themselves, but for someone like me, that’s a veritable avalanche of changes. Last month I joked about reading my old journals being my midlife crisis, but in all seriousness, this much changing in such a short time is not like me at all. But I am enjoying it instead of worrying about it, hahahhaaa. In the words of the Immortal Bill & Ted, Party on Dudes!

Cover Love:

Hidden Voices, book 9 in the series, does not fail to once again deliver a stunning cover. I LOVE these!

Plans for Next Month:

Well, pretty much the same as this month I think. 12 books a month seems to work out well for me in terms of reviewing without burning out and adding 4 comics on top of that was not too much. I’m still not going to be reading any manga though. That’s going to have to wait until January.

I am going to be watching and reviewing Event Horizon for my movie. Starting next year I’m going to have to figure out something as watching and reviewing random movies really doesn’t work for me. The Muppet journey was perfect and if I could find something akin to that, it would be great. I doubt I’ll be able to though. I might even give the whole one movie a month thing the toss.

Got a bunch of non-review nonsense posts queued up. Just need to actually write them. That’s the biggest problem with blogging I have found. I have some great ideas but then I actually have to work and write it out. Totally bogus.

Survive the holidays. Thanksgiving wasn’t nearly as bad as I was afraid it might be, but we’ll see what happens with Christmas and New Years. Speaking of Christmas, tomorrow I’ll be reviewing A Christmas Carol as read by Patrick Stewart. Please look forward to it!

October ’22 Roundup & Rambling

~ Bookstooge ~ 43 Comments

Raw Data:

Novels – 23 ↑

Graphic Novels – 6 ⭤

Average Rating – 3.02 ↓

Pages – 6498 ↑

Words – 2175K ↑

The Bad:

Forgotten Ruin – 2.5stars of Rangers rangering this book right into the ground.

The Good:

Kill Shot – 4.5stars of Mitch Rapp at his best.

Movie:

The Muppets Haunted Mansion was the final muppet movie in my journey. I’d say it was for either kids who know nothing about the Muppets or for fans like myself who need to watch everything Muppet. Everyone else, probably not really worth your time.

Miscellaneous Posts:

Personal:

What a month. I was sick near the beginning that threw me out of work for a week and then took another 2 weeks to fully recover. Bronchitis is awful! 😦 But it is one reason I read so much. Of course, feeling so bad I rated things a bit harder and so my average rating was down.

Not writing reviews was just what I needed. It gave me a chance to realize that a book review site is a second job while blogging is a hobby. Over the last year I have turned into a book reviewing site and I want to be a blogger again. I want to write for fun, not because I feel like I have to. With my personality, that is going to be a hard line to balance, as I just want to go all-out in whatever I am doing. But I can’t. I would also like to thank all of you for your patience as I posted essentially book ratings. Several of you commented mightily and made it a fun time in spite of nothing going on. Aonghus, I was proud of you for jumping in too. Even if you aren’t a regular 🙂

Reading my old journals made me realize how I’ve changed and stayed the same and blogging is integral to that part of me that is fun and spontaneous (it’s about the only spontaneous part of my life). I am not a spontaneous person and so I have to take it when I can. I’ll never call out of work sick and just go to the beach (especially not in November in New England, brrrrrrrr!) but maybe I can blow off a book review and write about how laundry has changed my life 😉

Cover Love:

You better watch out
You better not cry
Better not pout
I’m telling you why
Shadow Claus is coming to town
He’s making a list
And checking it twice;
Gonna find out Who’s naughty and nice
Shadow Claus is coming to town”
He sees you when you’re sleeping
He knows when you’re awake
He knows if you’ve been bad or good
So be good for goodness sake!
O! You better watch out!
You better not cry
Better not pout
I’m telling you why
Shadow Claus is coming to town
Shadow Claus is coming to town

Plans for Next Month:

November is going to be a return to having some words and pictures to go along with the ratings. I am also going to be cutting WAY down on the number of books read (I am NOT going to have 29 entries for books, that is for sure!) and I’m going to be leaving Tuesdays open. Not as a space to post something last minute but just have a day to not worry about the blog and to concentrate on those I am following.

I am going to follow Matt’s path and make my reviews very simple affairs, like they used to be. Trying to become a blogger again and not exclusively a book reviewer. I LIKE connecting with people on their blogs and if all they did was reviews with no personality, it wouldn’t be much fun. So I’m going to add personality here, or at least try.

I am also going to be stopping my manga reading until January. Once the new year rolls around I’m going to start up One Piece again as well as Full Metal Alchemist. But I just need a break so this is one place I can easily make that happen. Sorry, Misaki, you’ll have to continue being patient with me.

September ’22 Roundup & Rambling

~ Bookstooge ~ 34 Comments

Raw Data:

Novels – 21 ↑

Graphic Novels – 6 ⭤

Average Rating – 3.07 ↓

Pages – 6116 ↑

Words – 1919K ↑

The Bad:

Dead Silence – 1star of totally awesome space horror RUINED by scyenze and romance

Hunting Zero – 1star read that killed this already dead series for me.

The Good:

American Assassin – The ONLY 4star read I had this month. sigh….

Movie:

Muppets Now, while quite enjoyable, had some serious flaws as an episodic show, in my opinion. There hasn’t been a season 2 yet and I doubt there ever will be.

Miscellaneous Posts:

Personal:

What a busy, busy month. The only way I got through all the blogging was knowing that October was going to be totally different (more on that in the next section). After August’s R&R and realizing I was on the edge of burnout, I spent this month strategizing. It helped me mentally and emotionally (you try being an introspective introvert who hates people yet still wants to be liked).

Work still continues to be the dominant part of both my and Mrs B’s life. We are both working overtime every week and the holiday season is approaching (Mrs B has already seen Christmas stuff getting readied to be out on the sales floor, boooo!). So Mrs B is only going to get busier and my own work shows ZERO slow down. We’re still running about 2 months behind (so if you call and hire us, we won’t be able to get there for 7-8 weeks) so this winter is probably going to be as busy as ever. I’m tired just thinking about it.

The weather started to change, which was much appreciated. Some mornings it was chilly enough so you could see your breath but the afternoons were still warm enough that t-shirts and shorts were more than enough. With the drought we’re having I don’t know what is going to happen for the foliage. Glad I’m not a leaf peeper.

Utilities are skyrocketing in price. The electrical company instituted a price hike that comes out to about a 50% across the board hike. It’s all in the “service” part of the bill so you can’t even offset it by trying to use less electricity. Once the cold weather hits and we have to turn on the furnace, and the natural gas bills start coming in, well, it’s going to be an expensive winter. Thank goodness I have 3 can of campbell’s chunky soup in reserve!

On the good side of things, Mrs B and I celebrated our 14th wedding anniversary. God has truly blessed us together and we are so thankful He led us to the other. We don’t take it lightly. The stability we provide for each other is priceless.

I’ve also been playing the board game Doom with my brother every 3-6 weeks and that has been a blast. I keep taking pictures of the board and mini’s when we’re playing but my goodness, it is HARD to get even decent pix out of it, much less good ones. I’m going to keep trying though and maybe in the next month or two I’ll have a mini’s update about it.

The Hotel Bookstooge opened up fully for business. That project was probably the biggest one I’ve undertaken in regards to blogging in my whole experience so far. I’m very glad it’s finished and now all I have to do is decide what’s next!

Ended the month being sick with the flu and bronchitis. I was out of work all of last week and this week, while I went back, I was moving like a dead man. I can’t wait until I’m all better.

Plans for Next Month:

I’m still reading up a storm but for October, while I’ll be posting reviews, said reviews will only contain all the data I put in the very beginning. Pretty much going back to my roots of 2000-2001 and how I reviewed books then. That cuts about 90% of the writing so that pressure just isn’t on me. That will have the twofold effect of relieving the pressure and also letting my word well recharge. I won’t even be adding covers. We’re talking straight up text posts. LITTLE text posts too.

Depending on how that goes I might carry that format on for the rest of the year. Once my words get recharged and I keep on doing the minimum for reviews that will allow me to start writing some non-review posts again. It’s been months since I’ve written something based on an idea that popped into my head at 2pm or some such thing. I need the spontaneity back and I can’t do that if all my words go to just reviews. I’m a blogger, not just a book reviewer and it is time to take that aspect back.

I suspect October will be a recovery time for me and not a “hey, look at me blogging about Whatever” kind of month. Lots of tiny review posts. I’m hoping it will also help me to clear my head about blogging in general and using wordpress in particular. I’ll still be commenting away and if you have any questions on any of the reviews, I’ll be glad to answer, in the comments..

August ’22 Roundup & Rambling

~ Bookstooge ~ 30 Comments

Raw Data:

Novels – 15 ↑

Graphic Novels – 6 ⭤

Average Rating – 3.33 ↑

Pages – 4125 ↓

Words – 1162K ↓

The Bad:

One Piece #28 – The only under 3star rating this whole month!

The Good:

A Season in Carcosa – 4.5stars of Almost Perfect cosmic horror

Movie:

The 2015 tv revival of The Muppets made them rude and crude instead of laughable and lovable.

Miscellaneous Posts:

Personal:

Batched the first week of the month as Mrs B was still out in California visiting family. Got sick in the middle of the month for a couple of days and then worked and read, worked and read. I just felt super busy the whole month even when things were going fine.

Had a baptism at church, which was really nice, went to a company lunch one friday (which was great because we still got paid but didn’t have to work those 3hrs), visited the SDA church one Saturday and tried to get a game of boardgame Doom going with my brother.

WordPress “updated” in the background at some point this month and they broke the ability to copy/paste multiple items into the Title bar of a post. Since I c/p the title, series and rating, I had to figure out an alternate way. I emailed WP and they confirmed it was the update doing the breaking and they also confirmed it wouldn’t be fixed at least until the next update. So I had to start using blogger as my primary blog and then WP as the backup. Blogging is just becoming a hassle and WordPress seems fixed on their course of driving away the casual blogger. I am really stressed about it. It is cumulative stress too, so it doesn’t go away. The block editor, which I am used to, still makes me angry to use, WP’s various shenanigans with their plans and addons and crap and now something “basic” isn’t working. It feels like I am dragging a ball and chain behind me every time I go to blog and I am starting to really, really, really hate it.

My Librarything usage has also been dropping and since the few people I interacted with on a social level had dwindled as well, I began cutting back at LT soon after the month began. Starting this week I’ve cut the cord completely. One less place I have to copy/paste and keep track of information. I feel like I’m re-trenching on multiple fronts. That’s not good, because you only retrench when you’re in a war, and usually only when you are losing that war. Reviewing has become a war that I’m losing. While I know my moods affect how I feel about blogging, the fact that I am feeling this way at all about it is a big fat warning sign to me. I’ll be giving it all some serious consideration over the coming months.

Plans for Next Month:

September is going to be a very full blogging month. So much so that I’ll be double posting on Mondays. One will be the typical Magic the Gathering post and the next one will be a book review, hopefully at noon. Might be some timing issues due to WP being idiotic but it will at least go up on my site at noon.

I’ve got to write about September 11 and do the next Muppets thing and everything else will be book reviews, book reviews, book reviews. I have GOT to get caught up, so September gets to be the month I pack them all in. I know book review posts aren’t as fun to read, but my backlog has almost doubled between the reading time I had while in California and the sick time I had this month. So prepare yourselves to be socked between the eyes. If I feel the need to write some other non-book review stuff, well, then that’ll be another double posting day as well.

July ’22 Roundup & Ramblings

~ Bookstooge ~ 27 Comments

Raw Data:

Novels – 12 ↓

Graphic Novels – 6 ⭤

Average Rating – 3.17 ↓

Pages – 4271 ↑

Words – 1303.5K ↑

The Bad:

The Best of Lester Del Rey – 1/2star of the Worst!

Bethink Yourself – 1star DNF of war is bad, blah, blah, blah

The Good:

Pyrate Cthulhu Vol 1 – 4.5stars of awesome cosmic horror

Battlefield Earth – 5stars of nostalgia that has run its course

Movie:

Muppets Most Wanted was a fantastic movie and I loved it! Enough that I’ll be buying it on bluray.

Miscellaneous Posts:

Personal:

Got sick at the beginning of the month and missed the July 4th extended weekend. That was a real bummer. Going to California for a couple of days was a nice relaxer time though. Other than that, work, work, work. With the housing market still being wicked hot (despite the best efforts of certain people), my work is NOT slowing down like I thought it might. Maybe later this year in winter I’ll get a break? I can hope.

On the book side of things, my numbers were looking pretty good. My average rating went down but with the various stinkers I had I was expecting that. So all the other numbers going up was great. I like my numbers going up.

On the blog side, the numbers are all over the place and still make no sense to me. Of course, it feels like people are either taking breaks or flaming out. In all honesty, it just takes one person leaving blogging to make me feel that way, so it’s not hard to get to that place, sigh. It is not hard to mess with my head 😉

One of the big lotteries here in the US, Mega Millions, got up to over 1 Billion dollars. Talk about a boatload of cash! I obviously didn’t win. But even if I had, I certainly wouldn’t be telling all of you and shouting it out on my blog, now would I? I might be one of the world’s biggest egotists, but I’m not that stupid 😀 But it was really fun to think what it would be like to win that.

Plans for Next Month:

I got nothing. Just trying to pump those reviews out and not fall too far behind. I’ve still got like 8 reviews to write just to get caught up and every day that passes brings yet another to write. Oh, I might try for a Binstagramm post. I hear it’s the next big thing online. One post and I’ll become an Internet Celebrity. But don’t worry, I won’t forget all you little people.

June ’22 Roundup & Ramblings

~ Bookstooge ~ 51 Comments

Raw Data:

Novels – 13 ↑

Graphic Novels – 6 ⭤

Average Rating – 3.34 ↑

Pages – 3667 ↑

Words – 995.5K ↑

The Bad:

Dead Souls – 2stars of incomplete and rambling ridiculousness

Morningside Fall – Unrated DNF’s always make me sad 😦

The Good:

Hostile Takeover – 4stars for the latest Arcane Casebook entry

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #6 – 4stars of Turtles fighting Space Triceratops!

Movie:

The Muppets, a 2011 reboot, was decent. Not really exciting, but not bad at all.

Miscellaneous Posts:

Personal:

Ohhh, this was a wicked busy month. It felt like we were doing something every single day, even though we weren’t.

We also had cell phone issues. We were using a budget carrier but they were bought out by Dish Network. And to keep the current rate we would have had to sign up with Dish, which since we live in a condo is impossible. And if we didn’t sign up, our plan would triple in price. So I spent a good while trying to figure out a budget alternative. Most cheap plans by the bigger carriers were at least double what we had been paying plus having to buy new phones on top of that. We’ve ended up going with Google Fi and got everything moved over this past week. Now it’s just using it and seeing where the kinks are hiding out so we can straighten them out.

Work was low key for the first half of the month. I was holding steady at 40hrs a week and that extra hour of leisure time was fantastic. Then things went back to normal and once I’d come home and cleaned up and checked my comments on WP, I’d look at the clock and it would be 7pm already. Aye yi yi. When’s that recession going to hit so I can take some time off!?

Plans for Next Month:

I was doing some searching on my site and realized that the search wasn’t doing what I wanted, so I’m going to be adding the series info back into the post titles, so the titles will be getting busy again. Also, my reviews shouldn’t be just one liners. I gotta admit though, it sure was nice! But I felt your pain at trying to comment on such succinct posts, so back to the bloated flabby fleshpots of Egypt we go.

Also going to be doing a little bit of traveling near the end of the month. So I’ll be out of commission for a couple of days; probably do me some good to take a break 🙂 Posts will be going up but they’ll be scheduled and I won’t be around to comment.

Recently had a doctors visit where I was told I was overweight (I am) and that I needed to start getting exercise outside of work. So I am hoping to start walking 2 miles 4-5times a week in the evenings. I suspect that will cut into my blogging time as well. So between work and exercise, we’ll have to see how things go.