a murder of angels

Two wildly different media signal boosts:

--The Murderbot & More Humble Bundle is available for almost two more weeks! (I already have all but one ebook in there, so I'm not pouncing personally, but it's a great collection!)

--Via a couple of people, Javier Grillo-Marxuach recently shared on Bluesky that The Middleman is now streaming on Archive.org. (This is probably my definitive answer to the classic "what canceled show would you revive if you could?" question, although at this point it's not really "revive" so much as "magically keep from being canceled in the first place so it could've just carried on". This show deserved so much more--or at the bare minimum, to have had its season 1 finale actually filmed, while in this timeline 12/13 episodes were filmed. Like. Come ON, studios.)

Reading: scruloose and I finished listening to Rogue Protocol! Here's hoping future installments listened to via Hoopla don't have the weird audio glitches that this one did. I think we're probably going to go with chronological order rather than publication order, and if so, I think that gives us two more novellas before the novel. I suspect I'll lean toward not having an audiobook on the go during the fall crunch at Dayjob, but hopefully we can get at least one novella in before that starts up.

I finished These Burning Stars (Bethany Jacobs) and found it more engrossing than I'd expected at first, but I don't feel a need to rush out and read the second book. (Given how this book was constructed, my guess is that the second will be a fairly different experience? But I don't actually know that.) I also read Stephen Graham Jones' Mongrels, which I liked; there are some things I'm still a bit fuzzy on in terms of the backstory/worldbuilding, but it feels likely that that was a deliberate choice.

Current fiction: The Future of Another Timeline, which I think is my first Annalee Newitz book.

Non-fiction: I've been doing some more cookbook reading, and I'm still reading Warmth: Coming of Age at the End of Our World, and I've now also got Goblin Mode: How to Get Cozy, Embrace Imperfection, and Thrive in the Muck (McKayla Coyle) on the go. Given that my non-fiction intake is generally quite low, this is...well, a whole lot. I'm not getting the feeling that I'll actually take much away from Goblin Mode, but it's kinda fun, so I'm pressing on with it.

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Meat-puppetry: I got my first A1C test since April, and got a 5.8 result. (After a 5.9 in April and a 5.8 in December.)

I don't know what was different about how the test was administered (it was even the same person who did my last one, I'm 99% sure), but that was a couple of days ago and my fingertip still hurts a bit (it's improving steadily, so I don't think anything is wrong-wrong) and was very faintly bruised. O_o Dunno what's up with that, but hopefully it increases the odds that next time I'll remember to ask them to use the side of a finger, not the pad. I need that!

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Weathering: The province overall is still too dry. Our region got a very respectable rainfall early last week (? It's a bit of a blur), but the area with a major wildfire got almost nothing from that weather system. What we got was nowhere near enough to properly refill the water reservoirs, and Halifax Water reports that they've noticed very little change in water consumption since they started asked residents to voluntarily conserve water (I've seen multiple people mention seeing their neighbors out watering their fucking lawns), so it's possible mandatory restrictions will be rolled out. (Unless something's changed drastically overnight; I haven't checked Bluesky yet today, which is where I get nearly all of my local info.) People are allowed in the woods again in this area, though.

>.< Naturally, it appears that golf courses are officially exempt from the "STOP WATERING YOUR GRASS" requests.

Today marks twelve years since Jinksy and Claudia came to live with us. Twelve! (I mean, this should be easier to believe, it having been Jinksy's twelfth birthday three months ago.) *selects icon* Look how little they once were!

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We've decided to give ourselves a four-and-a-half-day weekend (I'm going to work only a half day tomorrow to match scruloose's schedule), and a good chunk of that has to be focused on freelance work--the volume of Pet Shop of Horrors I'm working on is due in just over two weeks, and they're hefty books. (IIRC this edition is seven omnibus volumes and the series originally came out as ten standard volumes.)

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There, we'll call that an update.