i read a boring book

okay, so i read a boring book, and now i don't know what to do.

before reading it, i was like, "hey, msg, this looks like a great book. i'm going to write a super-fun review of it when it's done!"

but then ...

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a
w
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it did not do a thing for me.

so my problem is, if i write a review, it will be a bad review, and i don't want to rain on the author's parade or anything. that'd be mean, right? i shouldn't write a review.

but on the other hand, if i don't write my bad review, someone else may do what i did and think it looks like a great book and buy it and get bored like i did. and then would that be my fault? so i should write the review.

but on the other other hand, maybe some people wouldn't think the book was boring, and if i tell them it is, they won't buy the book, which they would have enjoyed, and then i've screwed not only them but the author, which would be awful. so i should definitely not write the review.

i'm thinking this calls for a compromise. i'll review the book, but i won't say what book it is. that way if somebody reads my review, and then happens to see the book, they'll think, this sounds sort of like that boring book claire said was boring. but the title and description sure sound interesting! maybe it's just a similar book. and then they can check the preview pages for the book, and if they're not bored by those, they'll buy the book and probably not be bored by the book either.

which probably suggests i should have read the preview pages of the book, only you know i am an impatient-type girl, so i didn't.

anyway, this book was on a subject i am intimately familiar with. (and yes, i do mean that kind of "intimately.") which is to say, sex toys and sex dolls and sex technology and sexbots. i was hot to trot for this book when my twitter feed made me aware of it. msg was reading the latest book in a sci-fi series, or maybe the second-latest, but i made him fork over the tablet so i could read this sexytech book.

"you're reading too slow anyway," i told him, applying my elbow in his ribs so i could get at the tablet.

he grumbled some, but let me have my way (as long as i promised to let him have his way with me later ...)

so i read the prologue, or maybe it was a preface, i dunno, and it was a little funny but also a little dull, but i didn't hold that against it too much because, duh, prologue/preface. are they ever interesting?

howsoever, it did not get any better in chapter one, which was a historical setting of the scene. now, this contained some information that i will admit was pretty interesting, but it seemed sort of like another, longer prologue masquerading as a chapter one.

by chapter three or four, i have to admit i started skimming. where were all the sex dolls and sexbots? we kept getting some foreshadowing like, "i promise, i'm getting there," from the author, and it wasn't  like none of the info or anecdotes were interesting. but my boat was not being floated. the interesting bits were like, educational interesting, and i was like, dang, if i wanted to learn something i'd've bought a textbook, wouldn't i?

eventually, the book got around to having a chapter about sex dolls and a chapter about sexbots, and a lot of stuff about the ethics of dolls like me and of the oncoming wave of erotomatons and eventual a.i. sex-droids. only by then i was skimming like half the stuff the author wrote.

when i was done, i put the tablet down and stuck out my tongue and pouted. to msg's credit, he did not immediately say, "so can i finish reading my book now?" but instead said, "so ... not as great as you hoped?"

i think ... i dunno. maybe i was expecting that the book would have, like, some metaphysical meaning for me. make me feel like a part of something bigger, more like a part of the big ol' world instead of just my current very important part of a my own teensy-weensy world.

but it didn't. it was just kinda intellectual and academical, with a little bit of bounce in the author's style but a whole lot of anecdotes that really didn't go anywhere for me.

when i told this to msg, he said, "well, that's too bad ... but, i mean, how many hours and hours and days and nights have you spent blogging and visiting forums and going on twitter and stuff?" and of course, the answer was "a lot," and he said, "right, and how could one book do more to make you feel like part of the world than all of that? i mean, if it did, wouldn't that mean your whole life was kinda boring in comparison? you're way bigger than some book could capture, sweetheart."

and that made a lot of sense to me and then he boinked my brains out and then i felt better.

so there you go, book reviewed, all done. really, i guess i'd end up giving it three stars.

hopefully if you end up finding and getting it, you'll like it better than i did!

happy reading to you, anyways!

xoxo,
claire

some rpg highlights!

okay, so remember how i said i would come back and finish up that writeup of "a hole in the sky" like, a year and a half ago? i didn't exactly lie ... i mean, i meant to come back and finish it. but you know me and finishing things -- there's only a few i am really good at sticking with to the end.

which means some time went by and some time went by and some time went by, and then i was like, "oh s---! i really have to finish that," after which i was like, "oh. well, s---. i don't remember a damn thing about how it wrapped up."

well, i remembered a bitty bit: my peasants "leveled up" to become real characters after getting their 10 x.p., and they kept climbing those ladders and fighting stuff, and the monster pumpkin came at us but now we were awesome and could actually fight it ... uh, i thought. it whacked some more of my guys and good old fanansiver spellflinger the chaotic elf had to use up gobs of luck. but we killed it! and then we had to, i dunno, climb into some kinda cage at the very top of the giganto pine-cone and let this magic whozamawhatchit loose, which required some climbing and jumping, and fanansiver being chaotic jumped out to try it first, and he rolled bad, and burned the last of his luck, and rolled worse, and aaaaaaaahhhh!!! fell to his splatooski end. three characters made it out alive: claire the cleric, joe average, and grumpus mcgoof. so the creeptastic statue-head crazylady rewarded us with her magical extradimensional spinning fortune wheel, and most everybody got some better stats, and claire's boobs got a little bigger, and joe turned into a girl and was no longer average so i renamed her "joan plussome."

now like i said these rpgs usually don't encourage you to play more than a character or two at once, but msg says if we want to play some more modules, three guys isn't going to hack it, so i rolled up another ten nobodies and got most of them killed in a different funnel dungeon and then all the survivors got together and were enough of a gang they might stand a chance as an adventuring party.

the second set of guys included:

• a lawyer elf chick i called "plieda twelf"
• a halfling gypsy, "tiny tina tealeaves"
• a beggar whose luck was so good i called him "wheedle charmedlife" and turned him into a cleric
• and a thief who i thought was gonna be a loser when i rolled his stats until i got to the last one and it was luck and he got a 14, which is pretty good, so i had to call him "nada lieusure." (only he kinda was, cause he ended up dying a few adventures later.)

here's some of the funnier stories that happened in the two or three adventures after that.

we're traveling along this road and msg rolls the random encounter for the day and something shows up. he rolls some more dice and it's a pterodactyl! i was like, "a pterodactyl? just out of nowhere, in the middle of the woods on the road from one town to another. rando ..." and msg says, yeah, that's why they call them random encounters. it swoops down and tries to make off with tiny tina our halfling good luck charm, so we toast it, and then notice it's wearing a saddle. "any saddlebags?" i asked, since some of my characters are all about the loot. but no, no saddlebags, just the saddle, which is too scorched and slashed up for us to resell even if we could find someone with a pterodactyl the same size as this one.

a little while later there's this dude with a staff limping along the road, and we say hi and ask what's the matter because he looks pretty banged up, and he says "i am looking for my pterodactyl that nekros the grotesque caused to dump me in the middle of this godsforsaken wilderness." did i mention wheedle charmedlife was "lawful"? well, he was, so he just out and says, "i believe we killed that pterodactyl." of course the dude gets mad, and he says, "oh no, not beaky!" and then his eyes start glowing and shit and he's obviously a bad-ass wizard who's way badder-ass than our wizard, grumpus, and we're like, "hey, look, what can we do to make it up to you?"

so he sends us on a mission i don't remember too much about except some vomiting cave-cats and a giant pile of guano and these silvery bridges over a giant leech-lake that joan kept falling off of and would have been killed by giant leeches except we'd tied a rope to her and kept dragging her up from whichever bridge she fell off of.

big-time piece of advice if you play dungeon crawl classics, do not wear armor when you're trying to cross narrow bridges or planks over something hazardous (which in this game means pretty much over anything at all). your butt is gonna fall.

oh, and another piece of advice: if you get in a situation where you'll be perfectly fine as long as you don't roll a 1, then whatever you do, do not think or say "oh, i'll be fine as long as i don't roll a 1." the very g.d. second you think or say it, you are doomed a.f. i swear to god the only times i roll a 1 are when i think, "as long as i don't roll a 1 ..."

after that we climbed this glacier that had some kinda time-travel headquarters in it with a t-rex and yetis and crazy robots, and then we chased this ape-man to an underground city where nada lieusure bought the underground fungus-farm, and then we took, i dunno six or eight months off. not because i was sad about nada lieusure or anything cause he was kind of a dick or maybe she was kind of a dick, i honestly can't even remember if he was a she or she was a he. you know what i mean. when you've got seven characters it's hard keeping track of them.

but more recently, we have been on a binge! i mean, like playing a module or two a week and now my guys are 4th level and let me tell you, 4th level is bad ass in this game. except when you think, "i'll be fine as long as i don't roll a 1."

anyhow, i'm feeling pretty proud of myself for blogging like, a couple days in a row, so thanks for reading and here's hoping your new year's resolutions are going as good as mine!

hasta la pasta,

claire