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Current Mood: sore
Current Music: I've had Green Day's "Basket Case" stuck in my head all day

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reading list

September Reading Goals

This feels like a good month to finish things I've been working on or that I've abandoned.

I'm going to be reading The Burgermeister's Daughter by Steven E. Osment for the #nfBookClub on Mastodon. I think. I haven't actually started it, but it is only the 3rd. I can do this.

The #sffBookClub is apparently reading Wildings by Nilanjana Roy, which sounds fascinating but I think I'm gonna have to put it on the back burner and finish some of the others I've left off and have like 1-2 more chapters to go. There's like 3 of those and I want to get them done before I add another read-along thing I feel pressure to read on a schedule.

I am going to add Feeding Your Demons by Tsultrim Allione, but not push myself to finish it this month. It's been on my list for awhile and I've been working with some of the ideas and practices it describes, so I think it'll be helpful.

I also have a bunch of zines to read. There was a zine fest in my city last week and I went a little overboard in a great way.

But my biggest reading goal for the month is not to stress about it and just enjoy reading. The upside of getting involved with book clubs is obviously that you find new things to read and people to talk to about them. The downside (for me) can be that there's pressure to read on a schedule, to prioritize the book club selection over things you'd rather be reading, etc. Gonna try not to let that be a thing. No guilt, just optional and fun social reading.

Current Mood: silly
Current Music: FOB - Super Fade

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Second Life pics

Some people on Mastodon were talking about my favorite dress-up game. XD

I don't do a whole lot on SL. Sometimes I go to church services or other small group events. Every once in awhile I'll go check out one of the bigger things like live shows or festivals, but mostly it's just playing around with cute avatar styles to match different parts of my personality.

Anyway here's some pics of those.

SQUIRRELS.

I have 3 squirrel variants. Tiny agender squirrel, bigger femme-y but still enby squirrel, and biggest masc-y enby squirrel. The two bigger ones are my most frequently-used avatars of the whole bunch. I mostly alternate between them based on how masc I'm feeling and how much I think it would bother me to be read as a girl.

DRAGONS.

Baby dragon and bigger dragon. Baby dragon almost never gets used because if I'm gonna be that tiny I'm usually gonna go with the squirrel form, but it's cute and sometimes fitting.

Fun facts: Bigger dragon is probably the only avatar I have that definitely reads as exclusively feminine to me, not really sure why.

DEMONS.

In both masc and i-don't-understand-your-human-concept-of-gender versions. I rarely used these before I discovered animation overrides. I just have a pretty cheap basic masculine AO with like 2 poses, but it completely changed how I feel about these avatars and made them much more "right."

DOLLS/TOYS.
Clockpunk wind-up doll boy I made after reading "Carnival Nine" with the #StoryClub on Mastodon because I was just fascinated with the idea of living wind-up toys and wanted to be one. My favorite thing about him is that the wind-up key can actually run out of turns and he'll just *stop* and can't move until I (or someone else) winds him up again. Just like the story! Kind of. Not really. Close enough.

Space-teddy-bear-thing? Star-cat? I dunno but it's cute.

Current Mood: determined

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Millenials are (Hopefully) Killing Megacorporations...Very, Very Slowly

The Amazon strike got me looking at Kindle alternatives and thinking about better shopping practices in general. I wouldn't say I'm *boycotting* now, but I'm re-thinking my Amazon dependence and trying to favor better options...which so far has made the site unnecessary for me. I've been able to find everything I would have previously rushed to find at my one stop shopping site at more specialized, local or smaller businesses.

I stopped using the Kindle app (though I'm sure I will eventually go back and read the books I had already purchased for it) and started using the Kobo one instead. Bonus, the Kobo site had sooooo many fun-looking free books so now I have quite a bit of ebook reading to do without having to go back to Kindle *or* spend any more money right now.

They even have their own audiobook program.

So that's going really well. When I want to read a book now, instead of just checking the price on Amazon like I would have before, I have a system. Search the library catalog first, then Kobo, then Nook. And then local bookstores, which I realize should probably go before the e-books, but I don't have easy transportation and also the e-books tend to run cheaper.

Oh, but helpful note there - I found Kobo *through* one of my local stores, so it seems like they're affiliated somehow and if I can figure that out maybe I can buy my e-books from my local store? That's a neat idea.

Next up is looking for a different browser. I suspect loosening Google's grip on my life will be a lot harder than it was with Amazon, but taking baby steps.

Current Mood: happy

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WicDiv Silliness

While discussing The Wicked and the Divine #8, the current issue for #WicDivClub over on Mastodon, I decided to choose emojis to represent all the major characters. Because it's an easy way to cite them for quotes, takes less room in the post, and is just fun.

Post in thread: here.

Current Mood: excited

Current Reading List

Practical Magic by Alice Hoffman
I'm almost finished with it. The first 80% of it or so went so fast, I thought I had somehow finally cracked whatever shell was keeping me from being able to read like I used to before grad school. Then work got busy and exhausting and I haven't read a single page in a week or two. So sad. Hoping I can finish it this week.

Biketopia and Bikes in Space, both edited by Elly Blue
Great short story collections. Bikes! Feminism! Fiction! They're fun, and really good for when I have just short little bits of reading time.

River of Teeth by Sarah Gailey
I don't actually have this yet, but I will be reading it for the SFF book club on Mastodon. I thought my library had the ebook, but apparently it was actually the audiobook. I have so much trouble making time to listen to those. It takes a lot for me to focus on auditory input, reading is much easier. So I'll get the physical copy from the library instead on my next day off. Woo.

Dragonsdawn by Anne McCaffrey
Again over on Mastodon, I started a hashtag for people to share their book recommendations for a Summer Reading List. And so added a few things I hope to read soon. This is the first.

Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion by Alain de Botton
I actually have other not-quite-finished non-fiction books I started reading months ago that I probably should finish before diving into another one, but I already downloaded this one from my library so I'm reading it. OH WELL. I'll get back to the others later.

It's possible I read too many things at one time and need to learn to focus. Well, baby steps. This is actually only about half of the things I have in my "currently reading" queue. They're the ones I think I'm likely to actually finish this month. The rest might be there awhile.