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So, yeah, no. I won’t be signing up with Steam so I can purchase and download Civ V when it comes out.

Why?

Because I just spent 5 real minutes, not 5 exaggerated for effect minutes, but 5 real actual minutes, grappling with their damn captcha. Here’s a hint: when your captcha seems to be composed primarily of graphite smears that make your 3s, 8s, Bs, and &s indistinguishable from each other? It’s neither useful nor usable. I couldn’t tell Ks from Ys. There were random smudges, squiggles, and just… visual junk… completely obscuring what I was supposed to be typing. There was no audio option, no “contact a person for help” option, no “instead, just answer a question” answer. Only failed captcha after failed captcha.

Totally awesome, and completely professional!

I don’t really identify as visually impaired because although I use what one might call an assistive device (glasses) that’s pretty expensive ($300 a pop, and my eyes degrade so quickly I really need new glasses every 9 months or so, although I can’t afford that), I’m far from legally blind. I slap my glasses on and go about my day and don’t really worry about my eyesight unless I need new glasses, I can’t find my glasses, or… I’m dealing with captchas.

It’s the rare captcha that doesn’t give me trouble. Even if there isn’t detritus littering the visual field, I’m still dyslexic enough that it’s hard to type random letters in the same order I see them, and it’s hard to tell upper and lower case letters apart in some fonts.

Steam doesn’t seem remotely interested in working with customers unable to use standard captcha devices– which is a HUGE fucking group of people. Which is sad. But, you know. I can obtain my games from other, less convenient sources.

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I’ve been playing Civ for… gosh… a decade now? I love the games so much. I’ve been goofing around with Civ IV quite a bit lately (although I didn’t care for Civ IV: Colonization very much; just not my kind of game) and enjoying the heck out of it.

Then I saw that Sid Meier’s Civilization V is coming out September 22!

I have about four million other places I need to put my money, but dang if I don’t want this game. Maybe I’ll ask for it for Christmas.

Anyone out there interested in playing multiplayer? I dislike playing the computer because it cheats. :O Actually, my preferred game is a culture race.

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It’s after midnight. Why am I up? Why, because I have searing god damn pain in my right ear that was making me whimper every time I moved my head. Since lying down also makes me cough, I just said fuck it. I’m up. I’m up for the night. It’s hot as hell, it’s sticky humid, it’s miserable. This is so not appropriate sick weather. I should be bundled up in a quilt drinking something hot, not sticking to everything I touch and oozing sweat.

I’m hitting one of those Take-Care clinic things tomorrow in the morning, and we’ll see if there’s anything they can do. I’m really afraid they’ll say something like “yup! It’s a virus! Drink plenty of fluids and pay this bill.” or else prescribe me some fucking homeopathy bullshit like the last time I went to a Take-Care clinic.

My right ear is my good ear. I’m really unused to not being able to hear out of it. It’s throwing me all off.

Bummer, dude.

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Just got a shipment from Amazon:

In The Forest Of Forgetting, by Theodora Goss; Fledgling by Octavia Butler; and Mockingjay (The Final Book of The Hunger Games) by Suzanne Collins.

I wasn’t expecting these for a few more days. Pretty much guarandamnteed to make me feel better. :D

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My current bathroom reading is Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen and I just finished the part where Marianne catches “a suppurating cold” and everyone freaks out and is convinced she’s going to die.

For the past few days I’ve been walking around very displeased because I kept smelling damp cigarette butts and stale, bitter coffee grounds. I figured out, after awhile, that the smell was coming from inside my nose (OH GOD THE CALL IS COMING FROM INSIDE THE HOUSE) and I sighed dramatically and hoped that a raging infection would pass me by. Then yesterday, feeling restless, I wiped down all the molding and windowsills in the house and swept the floors. When my throat started aching, I hoped it was just from my dust allergy and not a cold.

No, it’s a cold. And oh, how I identify with Marianne. I am suppurating, y’all. My throat is killing me, my head is killing me, and I’m freezing. And this after I took medication. I have asthma and my lungs are tight and I can’t quite grab a full lung of air, but I have a cough, so I have this tiny pathetic fake-sounding cough (people have accused me of faking this cough for sympathy. AS IF.) which, granted, I prefer to the muscle-pulling puke-making cough from hell I sometimes get, but man I hate nonproductive coughs.

I feel absolutely awful, but not bronchitis levels of awful. Got anything to cheer me up?

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If you are a fan of V. C. Andrews you should go away right now and not read this post, because you will just get angry and curse at me and pray for someone to push me down the stairs, which is what happens to mother figures and, as I have a child, I am a mother figure.

I finished reading My Sweet Audrina and it is basically the worst book I have ever finished reading. Reading it was like gaping open-mawed at an accident site. How bad could this be?, I’d ask myself. Surely she won’t… oh. Oh, she did. Oh, I… I see. Well then.

This is a very trope-y book, jammed full of a lot of V. C. Andrews’ themes like:

Utterly terrible, selfish abusive INSANE (and I mean that clinically, not just as a disparaging word) parents!
Who do everything they can to prevent the main character(s) from growing up!
Selfish, lazy, spoiled mothers!
Evil, greedy, bordering-on-sexually-exploiting-their-daughters but isn’t it cuuuuuuute fathers!
Death by childbirth!
Messy clotty complete miscarriages that take place in only a minute or two!
Women are dirty whores! DIRTY WHORES I SAY!
Men are pigs though. PIGS I SAY!
Rape is hot. So totally hot. When a woman says no, she means “throw me down and rape me hard.” Possibly because she’s secretly a whore. WHORE!
Everyone is breathtakingly beautiful. EVERYONE.
Blond hair is totally fetishized, and people with dark hair are EVIL.
What the fuck is going on here what is this I mean really.

My Sweet Audrina doesn’t seem to have any overt incest in it, although the father is REALLY REALLY REALLY concerned about his daughters’ sex lives and wants the aforementioned Audrina to LOVE ONLY HIM. ONLY HIM. EVER. SHE MUST LOVE HIM UNCONDITIONALLY, ALWAYS. That is healthy and normal, right? Also, it’s healthy and normal to dress a 9 year old girl in white silk underpants, right? For her birthday? TOTALLY, MAN. And her love interest as she gets older is worried that she’ll see him as a brother and not a lover. Oh, and her half-sister/cousin masturbates in front of her. Other than that: no incest.

Basically, when Audrina was 9 years old, she took a shortcut through the woods on her way home to her birthday party. Her half-sister/cousin Vera recruited a group of boys about her own age to gang rape her. Because, you know, this is a very common thing that happens to affluent White 9 year old girls, right? Her mom freaks out, scrubs her in the bath tub so hard her skin starts peeling off, and then her dad comes home and she runs up into the tallest room (well, cupola) in the house to throw herself out a window. 9 year old girls! They are just so overly dramatic and prone to suicide! They take Audrina in for ECT and then decide to take matters into their own hands. What do they do, one might ask!

Why, hypnotize her until she thinks she’s 7, tell her that she had an older sister also named Audrina who died mysteriously in the woods (and so she must never, ever go there), fuck with her time sense, have her age 2 years in the course of a few weeks so she thinks she’s 9 again, and change the subject any time she wonders why she can’t remember anything.

THAT IS TOTALLY RATIONAL, YES.

She ends up being BFFs with Arden, who totally was there when she was set upon and raped, and who ran off. Of COURSE he, being 11, has the hots for her, a 9 year old who was raped and then mentally fucked with (one might even say mentally raped!) by her parents/family. Again, TOTALLY RATIONAL. Also his mom has no legs.

Audrina’s dad beats her mom, beats her aunt, and beats her half-sister/cousin (she’s presented as a cousin, they pretend she’s Audrina’s sister to prevent tongues-a-waggin’ about her whorish mom who had her out of wedlock, but in a completely unsurprising twist it’s revealed that OMG she’s Audrina’s half sister DUN DUN DUN). Vera, the half-sister/cousin has brittle bones for some reason, and breaks them CONSTANTLY, usually while in another room near her dad. Nobody questions the constantly broken bones. Granted, the book is set in ~~THE PASTS~~ but seriously. Come on. Anyway, one of her legs is shorter than the other as a result of this, and she has a limp. This brings the Characters With Physical Deformities (But Who Are Still Incredibly Good Looking) to 2.

Audrina’s mom gets pregnant and dies in childbirth, and the resulting child is (of course!) incredibly gorgeous and is also “retarded” but apparently she’s faking just how delayed she is. Despite being told that she will never learn to feed herself, be potty trained, talk, etc. Audrina manages to teach her all these things to a degree because she is FULL OF LOVE.

YOU GUYS.

SHE IS SO FULL OF LOVE.

THAT IS THE REASON HER DAD FUCKED WITH HER HEAD AND LIED TO HER: SO SHE WOULD ALWAYS LOVE HIM.

Audrina and Arden date very chastely and get married when he graduates college and she braces herself and forces herself to let him fuck her and he has NO IDEA why someone who was raped (when she was 9) (who doesn’t realize she was raped, but internalized a lot of bad feelings about physical contact) would not want to have sex but SHE OWES HIM SEX and if she doesn’t sex him HE WILL LEAVE HER FOR VERA, who he totes doesn’t love but man, she sexes him up, and it’s not a PURE LOVE like he and Audrina have but SEX MAN HE NEEDS IT.

At one point she falls into a coma.

Every single mother figure she has dies/is killed (two of them by falling/being pushed down stairs).

She has some kind of psychic bond with her mentally and physically delayed sister.

Arden rapes has exciting sexy sex with her in the pouring rain in a muddy graveyard and that’s just so sexy, y’all! hooray! No means yes! When a woman’s sobbing and crying and beating at your chest and trying to claw your eyes out, that means MORE!

This book is just a train wreck.

It’s clunkily written and I swear, V. C. Andrews never actually had a conversation with anyone nor overheard people talking. There’s not so much dialogue as there is chunks of exposition shoved into peoples’ mouths. Characters, except for Billie (who drops her “g”s and gives down home folksy speeches about crap), have absolutely no voice. Not only are they interchangeable with each other, they sound exactly the same as other characters from other books.

The book SOUNDS promising, you know? There’s this girl! She had an older sister who died mysteriously! Her dad seems to want to remake her into the older sister, who he loved best of all! There is a big family mystery that nobody talks about! There are gaping holes in her memory! What is going on? But the mystery is hilariously awful, as are most big plot elements (Vera sneaks around pushing people down stairs like it’s going out of style, mainly) and the writing is just nowhere near good enough to save it.

I really wish this had been made into a movie.

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Day 20 – Favorite kiss

Wow, do I totally not have one. I am, in general, uninterested in romantic elements in fiction.

Any great kissing scenes that will change my mind, that you can recommend?

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Day 19 – Favorite book cover (bonus points for posting an image!)

The original cover toThe Changeover , by Margaret Mahy, is one that’s always grabbed me. Laura is not a conventionally attractive girl, nor is she entirely White. I mean, she’s not HIDEOUS, but it was clear in the text that she didn’t really fit in for a number of reasons. And here’s the book cover featuring her¹², and she looks as described, and she’s got olive skin and dark curly hair and looks kind of tired and what’s with that coin? That looks interesting. Hm, let me just pick this book up and huh! wow! Witches? Really?

Margaret Mahy… gosh. I read so much of her stuff when I was younger. She’s an excellent writer.

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Day 18 – Favorite beginning scene in a book

Cricket magazine used to have a feature ¹ where people submitted the first sentence of favorite books. Just the first sentence. It was so… intriguing! Tantalizing! I’d sit there and dream up really awesome first sentences, hooks that would lure people in.

I can’t really remember any specific favorite beginning scenes– or first lines– now, though. Sorry.

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Day 17 – Favorite story or collection of stories (short stories, novellas, novelettes, etc.)

I really, really enjoyed Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, and once we’re settled where we’re going to live permanently¹, and I have a bit of extra money, I’m going to start collecting all the volumes. They will require their own bookshelf. When I was younger, one of my goals was to get something published, and then have it reprinted in Year’s Best. I still haven’t been published, and Year’s Best is no longer active, sadly. I discovered a lot of new-to-me authors in the pages of those anthologies, both printed in the actual volumes and in the honorable mentions.

Datlow and Windling also edited several books of retold fairy tales: Snow White, Blood Red, Black Thorn, White Rose, Ruby Slippers, Golden Tears, Black Swan, White Raven, Silver Birch, Blood Moon, Black Heart, Ivory Bones. I’m pretty sure I’ve read all of them, and own most of them. I dip into them time and again.

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