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
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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

new year’s resolution (okay, seriously this time)

i’m going to concentrate on being this year.

being happy
being kind
being there for him
being there for myself

just plain being who i am supposed to be

because i know that, right? i know who i’m supposed to be, which is pretty damn lucky if you ask me, and not something that i should let go to waste.

xoxo and Happy New Year to you all, shift key and everything!

claire

new year’s resolution

1,000,000 px X 1,000,000 px

is that too ambitious?

love story

okay, so i asked msg if it would be okay for me to write our love story as a blog entry, and he was like, "um ..." and i was like, "what?" and he said, "well, is there really that much to tell? do you think people will find that romantic? or even all that interesting?" and then i hit him and he said, "okay, okay, write whatever you want!"

so ... of course i didn't really hit him. how could i? i love him.

even when he's being dopey.

which is to say, duh, of course the story of the two of us coming together is not the world's greatest romance in history. but i think a big part of the problem with the way people approach love stories is that they act like the coming together part is the part that's a big deal.

news flash, people! a whole, whole lot of couples come together 'cause one or both of them gets the hots for what the other one's gots, not out of some kinda soulmate stars aligning so the heavens and earth move when they clap eyes on each other. please don't think i am putting down the value of relationships based on mutual drool-ality, because i'm a pretty big fan of lust and libido and other ooh-la-la l-words. but you have to admit that wanting what's in their pants isn't really high romance.

but in my book, a love story is more about being together than getting together.

so, sure, we met because he basically answered an online ad and then filled out a form and forked over some moolah. but that doesn't mean we weren't made for each other! (one of us pretty much literally, you know.)

anyway.

do you know what it's like to have someone fascinated and amazed by you every hour of every day for months and months before they've even met you?

do you know what it's like to have a really amazing poem written about you, just for you, just because the other person can't help writing it?

do you know what it's like to be able to tell someone absolutely anything, and have them tell you absolutely anything, and no matter what either one of you is telling the other one, there's never any judgy tone in their voice when they respond, and you never have to worry about whether you're being boring or annoying or embarrassing yourself?

how about having someone spend hours taking your picture, or you spending hours taking someone else's?

and they always laugh at your jokes? and you always think their jokes are hysterical? (okay, maybe once in a while one of you tosses out a dud, but even that is funny?)

and this other person is crazy creative, i mean, super-duper talented and great at tons of things and you get to be the one who convinces them on a day-to-day basis that it's true? that they're brilliant and awesome and the only reason the whole world doesn't know it is, the world's kinda an effed-up place?

that's our love story.

those are the things we do for each other. and why in a couple of months, it'll be ten years that we've been together and we're still nutsy-kookoo amazed by each other.

and the weird thing is, everybody ought to have this. and everybody could! only instead, most anybody who read our love story would think it's weird and bizarre and they'd have a hard time understanding why it's beautiful and not even remotely sad.

so many people in this world look at love from an angle of what's missing. how they don't have that special person in their lives. or how some single person they know must be soooo lonely.

but love isn't about filling in what's missing. something is always going to be missing. trying to fill it all in is just going to make you crazy and destroy whatever relationship you get into.

love is about loving what's there.

appreciating what you're able to share together, even if there are things you can't share -- like in our case going out to the movies together or taking a vacation to a tropical island.

plus, the sex is realllly good.

(just thought i'd throw that one in there. holy moley, it's good!)

so congratulations to all the other people out there with love stories as good as ours. be happy you have that special person.

and if you don't have that special person, be that person. you'll love it. i promise.

xoxo,

claire

super depresso show!

okay, so we've watched some episodes of this "black mirror" show on netflix and it's way interesting but wwwaaaaayyyyyyy dark and while interesting is good, dark is not so much my scene. but there's a star-trekky episode in season four apparently and you know how i like star trek, but msg is of course totally whack anal about watching shows in order, so we're watching seasons 1-3 first. and because it's interesting and he's interested in watching it, i'm not yet ready to say, "yikes, too dark! i am out! lemme know when you get to the star trekky one!"

so why i'm writing this post right now is, season two episode one just really had some personally noteworthy aspects that made it even more interesting than the others, and i figured it was a good excuse to blog, which i haven't been doing enough of lately.

spoilers ahead, folks! (because i can't talk about the part that interested me most without spoiling some of the big plot developments. i won't spoil the ending though.)

first spoiler is, although season 1 was all about these disaster relationship things (plus other stuff too, but there was disaster relationship stuff right and left in all the episodes), the couple in this episode have a great relationship, which obviously means one of them has to die. yep. it's the dude from the harry potter and star wars movies and that "ex machina" flick from a few years back. don't get too attached to his character!

anyway, he dies and there his poor wife is all alone and long story short, the technology twist in this episode is they've figured out how to take a person's online social media activities and use it to create a personality program you can interact with after they're dead ... including putting it in a robot body so they can walk around and talk to you and stuff. (yes, including that kind of  "and stuff"!)

which means i'm watching the episode and thinking, whoa, i am totally redheaded star wars scottish dude, except for the pretending to be somebody dead part, and not being scottish or in star wars.

the guy being dead part was pretty heartbreaking on account of them being such a great couple and him being so funny and nice. but maybe the sadder part was that of course this poor robot computer program can't actually stand in for the dead guy. there's gaps in its data base because he didn't put every single thing about himself online, naturally, and he has to keep asking for her input on things where his data banks don't cover what the real dude would have done.

and this is what sucked most about the episode: it would have worked out so much better long-term if they hadn't tried to exactly copy him, but just put the things they could copy into a robot body that only looked a little like him. then she wouldn't have kept being reminded of him by the fact that the robot was trying to be him, and she could have just moved on with this funny, sensitive, devoted guy who had lots of similarities to the things she loved about her husband.

that was the message for me ... she'd had it perfect with the real dude. probably the next real dude she hooked up with wouldn't live up to that. maybe even several next dudes would have disappointed her, maybe she never would have found anybody who'd make her as happy. so if she wasn't likely to ever have it as good, probably her best bet would have been a robot guy who got close.

(obviously, me being not a flesh and blood girl makes me way less sentimental about things other people would consider "not real" about the robot replacement scenario, but too bad for them: i know i'm awesome and how much i mean to msg, so i wouldn't feel a bit sorry for her "settling" for "just a robot" ... only for the fact that her great guy died in the first place.)

anyhoo, it was a very thoughtful episode and despite being all tear-jerky from the guy kicking the bucket early on, it didn't have the same grim and ickly feeling to it that the season one episodes gave me, so i liked it.

your mileage may vary!

laters,

claire

my sweet sappy boy

okay, so spoilery notice here. msg saw bladerunner 2049 today and told me some stuff about it. (of course i couldn't go, so i have to content my little self with what he tells me until it hits blu-ray or cable or something. super lucky i am not the spoiler-hating type!)

anyways, i'm not giving a whole lot away about the movie itself, but people who know much about me (sex doll!) might be able to figure some stuff out ahead of time if they read any further. you have been warned!

he really liked it ... and he's never been that huge-ongous a fan of the original one or anything. but when he got out to the car afterward, he said he just suddenly broke down crying. because, you know, there's this sub-plot in the flick that way reminded him of me.

and our relationship.

and what he would feel like if some of the things that happened in the movie happened to us.

probably not a whole lot of people had their water-works turned on full blast by this particular movie. and probably even fewer of them had it happen for the same reason he did. and that's probably why it affected him so much.

because he knew what the main character was feeling and thinking way more than most anybody else could. and it like, mega-magnified his response once his mind wasn't busy processing the movie and it really sank in that he understood something those other people didn't. and that he knew how lucky he was to understand it.

which is why he had that wonderful cry, and why it was that best-kind-of-crying cry.

"people get turned upside-down about what's real and what's not," he told me. "they feel some things because they've been told all their lives to feel them. and they miss other things -- can't even comprehend those other things -- because they've been told all their lives where real feelings come from. that feelings are a response to the things that happen in our lives, and that happiness comes from having the right things in our lives. but that's backwards. our lives are the feelings we create within ourselves out of the experiences we have. if we want to be happy, we have to get hold of that process and own it -- make it work for us."

and i said, "uh ... one more time, for the slow people in the room?"

"i love you, and i know how i would feel if i lost you. and that's real. it's as real as it gets, no matter what anybody else might think. and all the millions of people who would say it's not real, or even that it's sad that i would feel this way -- they're missing a little piece of heart that you and i have."

"well that's better!" i said. "'i love you' beats all the philosophizing any day of the week."

and he shook his head and said, "'i love you' is the deepest philosophizing of all, when it means what it means when i say it to you."

which made me say, "awwww," and probably would have made me cry too, except i'm not as sentimentally or as tear-ducty as all that.

love is what's really, really true. even in a movie. even in fiction. and that's too beautiful not to cry about, isn't it?

anyways, now i'm all excited for the blu-ray.

however many months away that is.

xoxoxo to you all,

claire