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[AnotherFairportfan]

I completely forgot about those!

Also, I got the newest David Weber book yesterday. At least, I assume it's the newest. Now, if I can just quit playing around and finish the book that came before it...

Safehold or Honorverse?

The newest Honorverse (of which i cannot recall the title) is getting flack from a number of reviewers.

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Ah. Shadow of Victory

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(It doesn't deserve it, in my opinion - solid three stars, minimum.)

[Alkarii]

Safehold. I don't think I've seen anything new in the Honorverse, as far as the central series goes.

EDIT: Yeah, I have yet to see that one on the shelves at the bookstore.

[AnotherFairportfan]

I think i must be a Very Bad Man

I couldn't help myself. As soon as i saw this:
 

i was doing an online search for JUST the right photo:
 

[Catawampus]

That one's stirring up a lot of unhappiness among the fans.

Fans are generally good at stirring.

[Alkarii]

Sounds to me like someone who is a fan favorite dies, or the situation just gets more jacked up.

Something to think about: Without that drama, would people still be interested?

[AnotherFairportfan]

Sounds to me like someone who is a fan favorite dies, or the situation just gets more jacked up.

Something to think about: Without that drama, would people still be interested?

Actually, what's upsetting them is that it is (admittedly) to a great extent a recap of the previous three "Shadow" books - but it's a recap told from different angles and points of view, it includes at least one thread i'm pretty sure is original and quite interesting ... and it advances the storyline of one important (albeit minor) character, which i've been hoping for all along.

[Alkarii]

Ah, okay. So nothing to really dread.

[TazManiac]

Yep, you are indeed a Bad Man. But I laughed anyway. Around here there are lots of noisy Crows/Ravens and Chattering Squirrels to contend with but I reserve those traps for the Bandersnatch Wood Rats; they who enjoy actually chewing holes in stuff like wall joists, just because...

(I'm sorry I disposed of the most recent one caught without taking a picture- they get a good size...)

[AnotherFairportfan]

Most expensive house in the US ($250 million)

Promo video
 
Why would anyone get excited - it's just a knockoff of the Tracy place, and it only comes with cars and helicopters...? Chee.

[Alkarii]

I managed to get moved from the closing shift at work to the opening shift. This means that I won't be stuck with two people who are always disappearing for smoking weed while on the clock, and staying gone for a half hour or more.

It also means that I now have evenings available during the week, and I'm not completely sure why I'm even considering his, but once I get a new car, I'm thinking about actually trying one of those dating sites.

At the very least, it might be a source of amusingly awkward anecdotes.

[Alkarii]

Crap... Because I was just a few days late on two payments more than a year ago, it may not be possible to get the loan I need for a car today. This is in spite of the fact that my credit is MUCH higher, although last time my dad was the cosigner, and he isn't now.

[TazManiac]

Two things;

- Wood Rats chewed my trackball's usb cord without my knowing. Good thing I had picked up two more traps today. (Hunting is fun...)

- Consider buying a cheaper car. The only time I've bothered with a ca loan was when the baby was born and the wife needed 'reliable' transportation. You pick a decent vehicle and you can keep it running, even with a few repairs, for much less tan monthly car payments. In fact I'm bringing it up to encourage you to develop wrenching skills and not fall back on the 'disposable car' syndrome...

[GlytchMeister]

Two things;

- Wood Rats chewed my trackball's usb cord without my knowing. Good thing I had picked up two more traps today. (Hunting is fun...)

- Consider buying a cheaper car. The only time I've bothered with a ca loan was when the baby was born and the wife needed 'reliable' transportation. You pick a decent vehicle and you can keep it running, even with a few repairs, for much less tan monthly car payments. In fact I'm bringing it up to encourage you to develop wrenching skills and not fall back on the 'disposable car' syndrome...

I can attest to the value of wrenching skills: I resurrected my car... Repeatedly... You don't even need a very decent car. Just a halfway decent one, and ask people here or look up solutions on YouTube or car-brand-specific forums. If you have access to a socket wrench set, a good knife, some pliers, and some screwdrivers, you should have enough to go to a junkyard and get new-ish parts to fix your ride.
Auto Zone, O'Reilly Auto Parts, and most mom-and-pop mechanic shops will read your codes for free (plug a doohickey into your car when a warning light is on to help figure out what's wrong) and the local mom-and-pop mechanics can frequently tell you what is wrong with your car for free, too. Sometimes just by listening.

The wood saw attachment on multitools is great for sawing through bumper plastic if you can't find an exact match for your car and need to cut holes for fog lights. Starter Fluid is a gift of chemistry, I shit you not. That stuff saved my sorry butt so many times trying to start with a misfiring cylinder, I keep a can in my car at all times now.

GORILLA TAPE. Duct tape is ok, but dude. Gorilla tape. You can patch holes in vacuum hoses, make semi-permanent repairs to rubber radiator tubes, especially if you have good industrial zip ties. Which, by the way, those black, thick industrial zip ties are also a wonderful thing to have sitting in your car.

JB Weld is your friend if you shatter the ECM casing. The JB Weld rubber cement stuff is great if your ECM circuit board is submerged in jelly. Use the rubber cement to seal the jelly back up, just fill the cracks all up with that stuff, don't worry about squeezing it back together. Then patch the metal outer casing with JB Weld epoxy. Also works great if you break a side mirror off. JB Weld quickset is best for that.

A crowbar, sledgehammer, and blowtorch are handy-dandy when bending small bits of metal back into place. Brackets and stuff like that.

It's actually not that much work, you learn valuable skills, and it's really fun to tear cars apart in a junk yard. And you get to have a $2000 car for several years.

[Alkarii]

I was able to get a car after all. Totally forgot to mention that... Oh well. The new car is white, and has a reverse camera, I don't back into anything.

[AnotherFairportfan]

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[Catawampus]

Kin of Devyn's? Many of those Olympians did seem to have a tendency to try and get it on with anything that they could catch, after all.

[GlytchMeister]

OMG the Olympic village... there was an article about that on Cracked I think...

[lake_wrangler]

Boy, what a day this was!

They had called for snow starting last night, and reaching 4 to 6 inches. I had gotten up  ½ hour earlier, to have extra time to ride my bicycle to work (it's only 5 km - 3 mi.) When I woke up, nothing of the sort. So I go back to bed for another half hour. Got up, ate, rode my bike to work on dry pavement.

By the time I was pulling out my bus from the garage, it was raining, and the roads were covered with ice. Even just driving slowly, not touching the breaks, the back of the bus would sometimes swing to the right, because of the inclination of the road! I had to constantly put in in neutral to brake.

There was an accident on one road, where I was headed. The connecting street which normally takes me 5 or 6 minutes to cover from one end to the other took me one hour and 45 minutes. People kept coming into the bus to get out of the rain, only to get out again to start walking (as best as they could, on the ice), because we were barely moving. At one point, I had to straddle lanes, to make sure to have enough room, because the rear end kept moving right if I wasn't careful. By straddling, I had more room, and prevented anyone passing me on either side, so as to avoid any dangerous situation afterwards. I ended up clocking 2 hours and ten minutes of overtime, because of the delays.

I then went to take a nap. By then, it was more of a drizzle and frozen rain. When I got up an hour and 15 min. later, it was snowing heavily, with already a few inches of accumulation on the ground. My afternoon shift went well, with nary any delays.

I rode my bike home in a hurry, to catch the post office before it closed, as there were supposed to be two packages waiting for me there. One anti-snoring device, and one monitor for my computer. I made it just mere minutes before they closed. But neither package was there, because no mail moved today due to the storm... I have to wait until tomorrow evening...

Got home, fixed my shovel (it was cracked, and I repaired it with plumber's foil and some rivets... it worked) and shovelled my entrance. I also spent 30 to 40 minutes scraping the ice off my truck's windows. It might have taken me a little less time, had I realized sooner that one of my scrapers has better teeth than the other...

Coming in, I checked for tomorrow's comic, which was posted. Yay! First post on the new thread!

And now, it's already time for bed...

[TazManiac]

LW, I sympathize; Saturday's trek into town to visit the broadband that is Library called upon a dry snowflake event at the north end of the country lane and devolved to wet slush falling from the skys by trip's end; all of a medium speed bike ride of twenty mins... <-- again, this is based in California, a place (other than the thinly populated Sierra mountains), that has very little Institutional Snow Knowledge in the populace... Most of the Cold Weather Stuff for sale is garish Ski-wear/Hunting gear or thinnish rain-wear...

I am the King of Layered Clothing, bow all who cast your eyes upon my visage!

(edit- currently 9:30PM, 30F outside & falling, ground/fields are wet and saturated from a very rainy Jan/Xmas season, and looking to freeze overnight the next week- despite the Sun coming back out for a few days, so they say...)

[ShneekeyTheLost]

The newest Honorverse (of which i cannot recall the title) is getting flack from a number of reviewers.

==============

Ah. Shadow of Victory

reviews.jpg

(It doesn't deserve it, in my opinion - solid three stars, minimum.)

Having been an avid reader of the Honorverse, I can understand why.

In effect, Shadow of Victory is, largely, 'the deleted scenes' which had no relevance on the larger plot as a whole. They still carry no significant relevance as you follow a throwaway character doing something we already knew at least two or three books ago was going on. Then the reader was rewarded for trudging through these deleted scenes with a 'fresh' scene at the very end.

This book is entirely skippable. It's even worse than previous Shadow Of books at copypasting whole swathes into it, with the caveat that they were scenes originally deleted due to relevance and space.

It's not a badly written book, the characters are no less engaging than any other he has developed, and had it not been an Honorverse book, it would've been a pretty good read. But it just has absolutely no relevance other than to tease readers with a book titled 'Shadow of VICTORY', to make them assume that a resolution is brought to the main plot, only to be disappointed by still more backfill. If it were a youtube video, it would be a clickbait title, and it certainly feels like a blatant 'edition churn' and cash grab.

This at the same time when he did bring the Safehold story to a meaningful and pleasant conclusion. I got them both in the mail on the same day, in fact, having pre-ordered them both. Personally feel that I should've waited on Shadow of Victory until it came out in paperback to save me the money.

I give Shadow of Victory 2.5 stars out of 5. It's an interesting book, with interesting characters, that do absolutely nothing to further the plot that has already been stalled for several books now. Wheel of Time's plot moved faster than this series at this point.