Tag: Roundup

February ’21 Roundup & Ramblings

~ Bookstooge ~ 33 Comments

Raw Data:

Books – 12

Pages – 3691

Words – 1219k

Average Rating – 3.54

The Bad:

Children of Ruin – 1.5stars of utter disappointment
Auxiliary: London 2039 – 2stars of despair and robot blowjobs

The Good:

Retribution – 4.5stars for the Star Wars that should have been
Magician’s Ward – 4.5stars of fluffy regency fantasy

Movie:

The Great Muppet Caper was a good continuation of the Muppet Movie Franchise. Definitely worth the watch and worth owning.

Miscellaneous Posts:

Personal:

Is the month really over? Don’t toy with me, tomorrow IS March, right? February’s have always been bad for me and this one felt particularly brutal. Weather was horrible with snow, cold, rain, no sun, then some more snow. Work sucked with too much to do, not enough help, office manager being a real jerk. Blogging sucked because I’d come home exhausted and not have the energy to deal with anything online.

By the end of the month I was running on caffeine and that affected me emotionally and that made EVERYTHING seem about 10x bigger than it actually was. Pay a bill? Oh my goodness, talk about the end of the world. 3 loads of laundry when I was expecting 2? Laundrypocalypse and I’ll just go kill myself, thank you very much. Run out of soda? Job obviously didn’t know the meaning of REAL suffering.

Thankfully, by the halfway mark I realized what was going on with me and started to take steps to give me a buffer. I think I started too late though so I was in survival mode longer than I wanted to be. Still am in fact.

Cover Love:

This is not the cover I used for my review of the Path of Daggers, but of the 4 covers I’ve seen, I liked this the best. Gateways, Birgette, the Seanchan, this has it all.

Plans for Next Month:

Reviews. And then some more reviews. And just to break things up, another couple of reviews! Having the Gulag off my back has made me feel like a speed reader and I’m taking full advantage of that for as long as it lasts. 📚📕📖📗📘📙

Since I don’t want to overwhelm you all with my overly long and indepth book analyses, I’ll be sure to add a puff piece here and there. Don’t let it be said that The Bookstooge never pandered to the hoi poloi!

In regards to the aforementioned “suckiness”, if things do continue that way I’ll be pulling back from being online as much. Might not be commenting as much in general and might have to save the replies to comments on here to the weekends. Blogging in February felt like a battle and I don’t want that to continue. Blogging is supposed to be fun and I’m evaluating what all contributed to it not being fun this past month.

January ’21 Roundup & Ramblings

~ Bookstooge ~ 61 Comments

Raw Data:

Books – 10
Pages – 2594
Words – 741K
Average Rating – 3.75

The Bad:

Wicked Bronze Ambition – 2stars that whimpered all the way to the end. Pathetic really.

The Good:

Transfer of Power – 4stars of studly responsible machoman’ness

Movie:

The Muppet Movie was laughing, grinning, dancing, singing fun! I have a feeling this Year of the Muppets is going to be good for me.

Miscellaneous Posts:

So this month I turned into one of those book reviewers that I’ve come to not particularly care for over the years. The ones that have more non-reviews than reviews on their blog and as you scroll by vapid posts of nothing, desperately looking for a review, your hope dwindles. My minimum preference has always been 50/50. That simply didn’t happen with my read of Gulag II going on. I feel shame. My family feels shame. My cow feels shame!

Ok, with that out of the way, here’s the list, sigh.

Personal:

What a month this turned out to be. From a national & political level to a personal level, I was glad to see the backside of January. Being bombarded by pure propaganda by the news outlets didn’t help, especially as I was seeing direct parallels to what I was reading in Gulag Vol II. After the second day I just turned the radio off to keep my sanity.

My laptop also just up and died part way through the month. While a smaller thing, it definitely added to the stress of “everything”. Throw in that we found out our car is going to need about $1K of work to pass inspection in a couple of months and well, it all kept adding up. It still amazes me how unsmooth life is. You’d think I’d be used to the bumpy (at best) ride by now. Speaking of rides, better start saving ’cause gas is going up to $5 a gallon way too soon.

And then of course, right at the very end of the month I went dotcom. Definitely a spur of the moment thing but I had been thinking about it for some time. The damnable NSP’s were the last straw.

Cover Love:

Ahhh, one final McKillip cover. While it’s not a Kinuko Craft cover, it definitely is aiming for that same touch. Love it!

Plans for Next Month:

My mind was all over the place this month so I kept making, and breaking, plans for February. I finally decided to stop trying to plan and just let stuff happen. So besides the usual suspects of Movie and Manga Monday, my only planned thing is a book giveaway and starting my Project X in earnest. I’ll make up the rest of February as it happens.

Gulag II slowed me down so much that if not only affected January but has pre-emptively affected February already. I’m usually about 3 weeks ahead in my reviews. Now? I’m a week and struggling. As such, prepare for another onslaught of non-review posts like in January. I’m already sharpening my sepuku knife and sword in preparation.

“You Call Yourself a Book Reviewer?!? Hellen Keller was more of a book reviewer than you!” quote attributed to Sergeant Bookstooge during Book War III.

ps,
is this format of Monthly Roundups getting stale for you? I realized I’ve been doing this since my Booklikes days, so we’re talking over 5 years now. Just wondering if I need to change things up any.

December ’20 Roundup & Ramblings

~ Bookstooge ~ 57 Comments

Raw Data:

Books – 15

Pages – 4380

Words – 1473.5K

Average Rating – 3.77

The Bad:

Light – 2.5 Stars

Darkwalker on Moonshae – 1star DNF

The Good:

A Tale of Two Cities – 5 stars for the penultimate book in my Dicken’s journey

Message for the Dead – 4.5 stars for the Star Wars that should have been

Movie:

The Muppets Christmas Carol was great! I am really glad I ended up buying it.

Miscellaneous Posts:

Personal:

Work for me and Mrs B went as well as could be expected. I’m really ready for her to stop working the night shift though. Thankfully, that’ll happen next week. I can handle one more week. My work show NO inclination to slow down even though we now have a foot of snow on the ground. It’s going to be a slog of a winter, sigh.

The words absolutely spewed out of my fingers this month as I had a post almost every day. I keep saying I don’t know how I’ll keep up that kind of output and then I keep on keeping up. It definitely helped my stats for the month! I plan on talking about the blog stats a bit more in my Year in Review post tomorrow, but this December is the Best Month I’ve ever had here at WordPress. I guess I have you all to thank for that 😉

Just want to put in a plug for AAA if you’re in the United States. Had to have the subaru towed once and then I locked my keys in it and they had to come unlock it. Between those 2 things, my annual membership was more than paid for. Totally worth it if you regularly buy used cars like we do.

Cover Love:

Blood Relation by Dan Willis. If my chin looked like that, I’d be breaking concrete blocks with it just because I could. I do see a lack of suspenders though. Vests might look good, but when they cover up your awesome suspenders, well, your priorities are obviously all wrong.

Plans for Next Month:

I think I need to get through the Year in Review before I even think of plans for January. ♪Tomorrow is ♪only a sleep away♪

November ’20 Roundup & Ramblings

~ Bookstooge ~ 30 Comments

Raw Data:

Books – 16

Pages – 5964

Words – 2117.5K (2.1million)

Average Rating – 3.37

The Bad:

Rosemary & Rue – 1Star

Blackwing – 1Star

The Good:

The Private Life of Elder Things – 4Stars

King John – 4Stars

Miscellaneous Posts:

Personal:

This month was all over the place. Blogwise, stats were fantastic. This was the best month I’ve ever had in terms of views, likes, comments, etc.

Of course, WordPress ruins it by forcing me to double dip in terms of liking people’s comments. Then today I just started having issues with controlling my spam comments. I had one phrase that would throw any comment straight into the trash. Well, WP deleted that and now whenever I try to add it back, my settings won’t save. I’ve cleared my cache and tried Chrome, Edge AND firefox. Since I’m still banned on the forums, I can’t ask for help. I swear, I’m this close to calling it quits, good numbers or not!

Then you had the real life side of things. From bad work weeks to all the political crap flooding everything to escalation of the covid scare, it felt like this month was all about “killing, stealing and destroying”. That was overwhelming.

Cover Love:

I have to admit, when I saw the cover for the Copper Assassin, I was sure that was going to be the Cover Love choice of the month. And I was NOT wrong! Yum, yum, yum!

Plans for Next Month:

Having skipped the movie review for this month, I want to make sure to get one in for December. I’m about 99% sure it will be The Muppets Christmas Carol. That seems about the level of “Movieocracy” that I can take right now.

Other than that, it should be business as usual. I suspect a lot of my time in December will be spent planning and writing up stuff for the Year in Review post and seeing what I want to do for 2021.

October ’20 Roundup & Ramblings

~ Bookstooge ~ 44 Comments

Raw Data:

Books – 12

Pages – 3662

Words – 1125K

Average Rating – 3.75

The Bad:

Cold Fire – 1 Star

The Master and Margarita – 1.5 stars

The Good:

Dombey and Son – 5 Stars

Yotsuba Vol’s 1 & 2 – 5 stars

Movie:

Howl’s Moving Castle was a good movie without any scariness to bother me. I don’t care if it’s Halloween this month, no scariness for me!

Miscellaneous Posts:

Personal:

This was a pretty good month overall. Reading wise, another out of the ballpark average! Unbelievable!!! Helps that Yotsuba is just about guaranteed to be 5 stars each read. Plus I had several other 5 star reads. The end of year has been pretty generous to me with all the 5stars I’ve been reading recently. Thankfully, the lower rated books have pretty much slid off my back like water and it’s not bothered me one bit. Used to be, a 1 star book would get me into the doldrums or downright depressed. With these, eh, whatever. I rather like that to be honest.

Of course, that week in the middle of the month with sickness, car problems and everything sucked the joy out of the month but both Mrs B and me are at the stage of life where we just put our heads down and keep on trucking, knowing things will get better. Or we’ll die, which is the best case scenario we could ask for!

The best performing post this month was the “When Do You Stop Following” post. That got a LOT of comments and warmed the cockles of my heart. The one I had the most fun writing was “Psychic Grandma & the T200”. I just let all the silly loose and it felt like the old days of blogging, back in my 20’s. You know, when I had a full head of hair, boundless energy and dreams of becoming the Emperor of Mars? Of course you don’t know that, none you read my blogs back then. And you can’t now either, because I’ve deleted them over the years, hahahahaa! I wouldn’t be the Mysterious Doctor Lord Bookstooge now would I?

Plans for Next Month:

Besides the usual #6degrees and movie, I’m hoping to do another crossover post with Masters of Ironing, to truly promote the art of Ironing. A true Master of Ironing doesn’t need an iron OR even know how to iron. Remember, There Is No Iron, Neo.

Also going to try to do some Currently Reading & Quote posts to talk about the books I’m reading in a non-review way. Sometimes it’s fun to just talk about a book WHILE you’re reading it.

Oh, I will probably start thinking about End of Year stuff. That stuff always takes me forever to get together and the sooner I start, the less I’ll have to deal with as New Years approaches.

Other than that, I’ll try to keep things unstructured so if I feel like writing something out of the blue, I can. Us creative types needs our space. So BACK OFF buster, and let me be creative! Or I’ll cry, I swear, I will. I’m warning you right now….

September ’20 Roundup & Ramblings

~ Bookstooge ~ 59 Comments

Raw Data:

Books – 17

Pages – 5087

Words – 1708K

Average Rating – 3.82!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The Bad:

Awakenings – 1 Star DNF

Breakout – 2.5 Stars of Utter Mediocrity

The Good:

Howl’s Moving Castle – 5 Stars of Awesomesauce

Little Dorrit – 5 Stars of Dickens’ Awesomesauce

Movie:

Voices of a Distant Star was a great anime, for a teenager and angsty 20something. Not for me anymore :-/

Miscellaneous Posts:

Personal:

Wow! What a great month of reading! I had FIVE 5star reads and FIVE 4star reads. I think this is my highest average monthly rating, ever? I would kill for more months of reading like this.

It was also a high point for all my blog stats. Best views ever since I started in ’13. I guess posting every day pays dividends.

Of course, the stress of using the new editor while blogger was also introducing a new editor got to me and just created some constant, low level stress for the whole month. Playing around with various photo storage/hosting options didn’t help either. I did decide to go back to using wordpress to host my pix until I get close to that 3bg limit. I have options with Dropbox, so I feel ok.

Also had stress due to seeing a couple of people leave either wordpress or blogger due to editor issues. Throw in some sleep and caffeine issues and spam comments and low level stress was the name of the game for the whole month. It really began to affect me mid-month and honestly, I’m not convinced I’m out of the bushes yet. And that infernal Akismet telling me my comments going into the spam folder is my fault, not theirs, didn’t help my blood pressure any either. Thankfully, it was resolved, but still, stress.

So, hobby stress. It’s a thing, as odd as it sounds. Other than that though, the month was good.

Plans for Next Month:

Manga Monday’s are coming back, so be warned. I’m also warning myself, as the numbers show.

Going to do my usual Movie and a #6degree post, which leaves me with 2 Sundays open. At the moment, I have no idea what I’ll fill them with.

I won’t be reading as much so I don’t think I’ll be posting as much. This month was just chockful and I can’t keep that kind of posting pace up. Of course, I’ve said that in years/months past and then wrote so much that I was appalled at myself. So while plans are nice, they’re more like “guidelines” 😉

Going to do my best to kick the stress to the curb though and not let it affect me in October. New month, new Bookstooge, new Ideas and whole new levels of silliness. I’ve already had 2 ideas while typing this post up. That’s usually a bad sign 😀

August ’20 Roundup & Ramblings

~ Bookstooge ~ 49 Comments

Raw Data:

Books – 16

Pages – 3968

Words – 895.5K

Average Rating – 3.0 Stars

The Bad:

The Big O Manga: The Whole Series

The Good:

The Fires of Heaven – 5 Stars

The Screwtape Letters – 4.5 stars

Movie:

Spriggan was a more successful foray into my anime collection. Next month will either be Place Promised in Our Early Days or Voices of a Distant Star. More anime, but of such a different tone from Spriggan that you might as well call John Wick the same as Casablanca because they’re both “movies”.

Miscellaneous Posts:

Didn’t write nearly as much as I thought I would.

Personal:

While the title of my Vacation post might have led some to believe that there would be other King & Queen posts to follow, I was just too lazy. The vacation went as perfectly as I could have asked for. I didn’t blog or work on my blog or do anything, as much as I thought I would. I spent a lot of time simply sitting and doing nothing, barely thinking. I didn’t even realize I needed that until I found myself at my sister’s pool one day looking at the sky for about an hour without having thought a thing. Of course, I had to get back to reality once we got home, but that is the darkside of Vacations that we all know about but don’t discuss. Both of us survived the weather just fine, so a possible move in the future isn’t out of the question any more. Pretty much spent the rest of the month wishing we were back on vacation. Sad but true.

Took a short break from interacting online near the end of the month. Sensory overload was just too much. Thankfully, pizza and books helped me cope and Mrs B and I had some more good “connection” times. During that week I did a lot of work on the blog and got a lot of old reviews posted.

Plans for Next Month:

Tomorrow I plan to blog about how this month of using the block editor went. #Blockeditorsucks ! (hint, it isn’t good)

Read BETTER books! I can’t believe my average for this month was a paltry 3 stars. The blame is squarely all on Big O but that DNF for The Well at World’s End didn’t help either, sigh.

I feel kind of overdosed on manga, as Big O was just such a disappointment. As such, I’m going to start the Yotsuba&! series. I’m going to take a break from manga in September though and start it back up in October.

I’m going to try to bulk up my numbers in terms of books read, so be prepared for a few extra book reviews and a few less non-review posts. End of the year is fast approaching.

See you tomorrow.

July ’20 Roundup & Ramblings

~ Bookstooge ~ 20 Comments

Raw Data:

Books – 12

Pages – 4658

Words – 1673K

Average Rating – 3.13 Stars

The Bad:

Kingdom Come – 1 Star Graphic Novel

The Kingdom – 1 Star Graphic Novel

The Good:

The Jupiter War – 5 Stars of Ultra- (Space) -Violence, In Space!

David Copperfield – 5 Stars of Dickens.

Movie:

Instead of watching one movie, I decided to watch four anime series. I won’t be doing that again. With each series being 5-6hrs long, it simply required too much of my time. Don’t get me wrong, for the most part I enjoyed myself, but that was seriously dedicated time that I’d rather be able to spend on other things, even if it’s nothing but goofing off.

This month I watched:
1) Big O, Season 1
2) Tenchi Muyo, OVA
3) Big O, Season 2
4) Record of Lodoss War OVA

Miscellaneous Posts:

With all of my anime posts, I didn’t write nearly so many non-review posts this month. Here’s the short list:

Personal:

While my average rating was way down and I had three sub-2 star reads, I actually felt like I enjoyed my reading just as much as the previous month. No idea why, but I’m thankful for that because sometimes 1stars can just suck the very life out of one’s bookish existence.

Most of the month I was focused on getting ready for our vacation. It is amazing what you can plan even with lots of things being restricted. Throw in the fact that I haven’t gone on a week long vacation in I don’t know how many years and there is a lot of shopping that needed to be done.

Cover Love:

Come on, we all knew this was coming. Even with a McKillip/Craft in the running, Lime Light, another Arcane Casebook entry, takes this hands down. Whatever money Dan Willis spent to hire Mihaela Voicu has been totally worth it in my opinion!

Plans for August: (LOTS)

I am hoping to read the Big O manga. Fill up those Manga Monday slots and possibly some extra as there are 6 volumes.

Watch ONE anime movie. Movie, not a series. I need a break from that much screen time.

Do two #6Degree posts. The one I missed in July and then the one for August.

Some Vacation Pictures and probably a Vacation Post or two.

Master the Insidious Block Editor and write every post for the month using it. And blog about it. What’s the point if I can’t complain like a baby?

Work on the blog. So if you get posts emailed to you, expect a potential flood of incoming old reviews. You have been warned.

June ’20 Roundup & Ramblings

~ Bookstooge ~ 47 Comments

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Raw Data:

Books – 11

Pages – 4912

Words – 1337.5K

Average Rating – 3.64

 

The Less Good:

In all honesty, I can’t even call these mediocre, because they weren’t. They just weren’t as good as the rest of the books I read this month.  Which is a fantastic problem to have!

Harrigan – 3 Stars

Sabbat Martyr – 3 Stars

 

The Good:

Princeps’ Fury – 5 Stars

Gulag Archipelago – 4 Stars

 

Movie:

Karas left me reeling like an amnesiac drunk in a hurricane. I simply had no clue what was going on in that anime and had to wonder why I ever picked it up back in the day.  Not a good experience.

 

Miscellaneous Posts:

Once again, I’ll just bullet point these if you happened to miss any during the month.

 

Personal:

Summer is here.  Which means it has been getting into the 90’s. All I can say is thank goodness for central air and air conditioning!

Church is back open but I’d estimate about half the people aren’t comfortable coming back yet and so have still been watching on facebook livestream.

Our bluray player got stuck in an on/off cycle that put the kibosh on using it. Thankfully, it was cheap enough to pick up another one at Target, so my anime watching plans didn’t go off the rails.

WordPress has pulled back from forcing everyone to switch to the new block editor until at least 2021.  I remain pessimistic though 😦

 

Plans for Next Month:

Hoping to take a vacation at the end of July, beginning of August,  so not exactly sure how that will impact the blog.  Probably hardly at all for July. I suspect August will be where things might get off the rails. Or I end up doing such an excellent job of scheduling things that nobody ever notices. But who believes in best case scenarios?

I am planning on making Sundays all about anime that I really hope turn out better than Karas. If it works out well for me, I might try to do more in future months. Problem is, anime series are just that, series. Consisting of 6-26 episodes, they are much more of a time commitment than a single movie. So I guess July will be another experiment on my part. If it ends up impinging on my reading time, then forget about it. But if I can fit it in where I would normally watch amazon prime or something, then sure.

See you all tomorrow!

 

bookstooge (Custom)

May ’20 Roundup & Ramblings

~ Bookstooge ~ 40 Comments

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Raw Data:

Books — 11

Pages — 4505

Words — 1215K

Average Rating — 3.55 Stars

The Mediocre:

Pericles, Prince of Tyre — 3 Stars

The Sword-Edged Blonde — 3 Stars

 

The Good:

Captain’s Fury — 5 Stars

Kingfisher — 4 1/2 stars

 

Movie:

The 10th Kingdom ended on a rather meh note and I know I won’t be watching it again any time soon. June’s options are either Karas or The Returner. So far, Karas has all the votes.

 

Miscellaneous Posts:

This was a very wordy month and while I didn’t write a post every day,  my total (including this one) was 26. With 11 reviews, that means I pushed out 15 non-review posts.  Never felt burnt out even while some of the posts bordered on the simply ridiculous.

So without further ado, here’s the bullet list:

 

Personal:

Work has gone back to a regular 5 days now, so I was a bit too busy to let small things get any notice.  Work is fine, cars are fine, condo is fine, so it’s all fine.  Not going to complain about that!

 

Plans for Next Month:

With work going back to a normal schedule, I suspect my reading numbers will drop back into the single digits and that my output of non-review posts be less numerous as well. I am planning to read & review some manga and to have some more Gulag quotes, as well as the old standbyes of movie &  #6degree. Trying to scrounge up some tag post material as well. Might be another rant post about the calendar/scheduling if that continues to annoy me.

 

bookstooge (Custom)