Do you still think that way about me now?

rhondacrockett @ 2018-01-06T14:17:00

2018-01-06T14:22:20Z

Can anyone give me some advice on an alternative image hosting site to Photobucket? I don't upload or use images a lot but I was just in my Photobucket a few minutes ago and unholy HELL, the adverts are BEYOND obnoxious!!! I'm usually very good at ignoring adverts - in fact, I never notice them - but THIS, oh, THIS. It was impossible!!! GRAHHH!!!

This was the first article I found through Google: https://www.lifewire.com/free-image-hosting-sites-3486329 If anyone can advise me about what these sites are like to use, I'd be grateful. I'm kinda thinking of going with Google Photos because I already have that app on my phone.

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rhondacrockett @ 2018-01-05T17:52:00

2018-01-05T18:24:34Z

So. Trying to be more sociable and (re)connect with folk, be more proactive about my life...

I’m terrified.

I am not the most socially savvy of people. I am the one who will sit silently in between two different conversations and be part of neither. I compartmentalise my life e.g. the people from work don’t appear in my life outside of work and if I do meet them outside of work, I find it awkward and embarrassing and I can’t get away fast enough, particularly if they meet me alongside people I know from a different compartment of my life. I don’t know what I’m doing.

The above has been inspired by my discovery of “the island game” in a book. I don’t know if anyone has ever heard about this before or played it; it sounds like the kind of thing people would do at sleepovers. Anyway, not gonna describe the game itself here but let’s just say my answers were depressingly on-the-nose... And it just got me thinking

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rhondacrockett @ 2018-01-03T19:49:00

2018-01-03T19:56:27Z

Ill! So ill! We’ve had the flu in our house all of Christmas. My sister Sharon took it on 23 December, I took it on Christmas Eve, Mum got it on Boxing Day and my brother Philip fell ill on 28th? 29th? About then, anyway. We’ve been in voluntary quarantine for over a week, ugh.

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rhondacrockett @ 2017-12-25T16:00:00

2017-12-25T16:05:02Z

Season's greetings to you all! Hope you have a peaceful Christmas and a happy New Year :D

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rhondacrockett @ 2017-11-25T18:05:00

2017-11-25T18:07:49Z

I have just spent my day reading BoredPanda.com and Ryan Reynolds’s Twitter account #productive

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rhondacrockett @ 2017-11-01T20:24:00

2017-11-01T21:29:05Z

So, my opinion of My Little Pony The Movie? It's... alright. The plot is on the picaresque side and feels rushed. Elements like the city where everything is for sale, the airship pirates, the sea ponies, are skimmed through rather than solidly established. Similarly, the chief villain is a non-entity; he gets talked about a lot but doesn't actually do anything until the final act. Yes, I know the real focus is on Tempest, the redeemable second-string villain, but in order for that redemption to have impact, you need a sense of how powerful the evil entangling them is.

( Cut for spoiler )

So it's a bit rambling, shallow and scattershot. But then, I'm looking at it with an adult's eye; ankle biters may be more forgiving.

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rhondacrockett @ 2017-10-27T16:07:00

2017-10-27T15:12:18Z

Ooohh, what to say, what to say?

Job has changed - sort of - person I'm gofering for is different and I am NOT HAPPY. Stress - threats of quitting - ugh.

...

The only other major point in my life is the number of e-books I get through on my mobile phone these days. None of them are high literature by any stretch of the imagination. If books were food, these would be the equivalent of candyfloss or Haribo Starmix. My inner editor keeps wanting to rewrite them into something so much better...

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Gainful employment

2017-07-19T14:13:41Z

Shhhhh! Don't tell anyone that I'm sneaking on-line to avoid office work. My new role has none of the regular office work I had to deal with previously and now that I'm out of it, I am reeeeally reluctant to go back. Unfortunately, with the summer holidays, I can't avoid it entirely.

I should explain what my job actually is, but I'm cagey about putting those details on-line. And I can't explain my reasons why without possibly giving the game away to the wrong person. I don't have the greatest social media presence in the world but still. I know I'm not internet-savvy enough to avoid anyone who is looking for certain specifics.

Thinking about it, my caution may be a complete waste of time, of course. I'm using my actual name here, after all, and it's unusual enough that it wouldn't be hard to narrow down where I work, if someone wanted to.

*sigh* Why don't we just say, I'm in one of those jobs where it's best not to talk about what you do outside of your workplace? The best way I can think of to describe my current role is as a gofer, liaising between a particular person and everyone else s/he needs to work with, fetching paperwork, coffee, that kind of shizzle. My usual person is off on holiday, though, so I'm bouncing around between a few other people as and when needed, and if not needed, then I'm supposed to go down to the office and help them out with their filing etc. It's what I used to do all the time in my old workplace, after all. Except as aforementioned, now that I'm no longer doing it on a regular basis, I don't want to go back! Bad Rhonda! Lazy!

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The following icon is ironic

2017-07-03T15:18:36Z

Life has fallen into a routine. I am pretty happily settled in my new job and loving the lack of stress that comes from not working in the office. I'm not sure I could go back to a 'proper' desk job now. This morning was a string of disasters (forgot to set the alarm, spilled tea over my hand, boss started unexpectedly early and I lost a ream of stuff I had been writing) but the afternoon has been fine.

I have discovered the guilty pleasures of crappy e-books on my phone. Perhaps the biggest advantage of my current role is that I spend a lot of time waiting in corridors so I need to entertain myself. I'm currently addicted to Eve Langlais's paranormal romances. Oh dear. I think a big part of the fun is planning in my head how I would rewrite them to make the narrative soooo much better *inner editor wields her pen*

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Rhonda's very brief thoughts today

2017-06-10T16:17:34Z

Yay for hayfever! And yay for what-the-hell-I-can't-even elections! Seriously, wake me up when the world starts making sense again because Western European civilisation currently appears to be having a meltdown. Ugh, Arlene Foster was smug enough before this happened; now she thinks she's the key to the stability of the whole UK. You couldn't whistle her a better tune - pity about the rest of us. If it wasn't actually happening, I'd think it was some crazy dystopian satire. Jake O'Kane and Colin Murphy on The Blame Game will be loving it, though, glorious comedy material.

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Hmmm

2017-05-19T14:20:02Z

Not much going on... Work's fine. Weather's lovely (when it's not raining). I'm just up to the usual: reading, watching TV, making dinner, housework. Nothing to report in my life *shrugs*

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Rhonda Reads... The Baroque Cycle

2017-04-29T21:48:33Z

Welcome to the 17th and 18th centuries: science has exploded with geniuses and modern banking is being born, while Europe's monarchies tumble through a series of interconnected wars and revolutions. Daniel Waterhouse is Isaac Newton's oldest friend but is collaborating with his great rival, Gottfried Leibniz, in a project to create a Logic Mill. Jack Shaftoe is King of the Vagabonds, a reputation he has garnered more by accident than design, and only has half a penis (don't ask). His brother Bob, meanwhile, is pursuing a more respectable career in the army, being kept very busy in said European wars. And Eliza has a head for high finance, an encyclopaedic knowledge of sexual techniques, and a fanatical hatred of slavery. So far, so multi-plotted historical narrative. Then the gold appears...

These are dense books. Stephenson has done his homework and it shows. Perhaps a little too well. I was often left feeling like I had walked in at the end of an in-joke, particularly in the first volume, Quicksilver. It doesn't help that this first book is split between three different narratives and two verb tenses: Daniel in the present tense (sailing from a newly-independent USA to Britain), Daniel in the past tense (flashbacks to his friendships with Newton and Leibniz, and the volatile politics of Britain from the Restoration on), and Jack and Eliza in the past tense (their adventures running in parallel to Daniel-in-the-past). I'm usually good at juggling multiple storylines and protagonists but this one led to headaches. Remembering who's who, how they know each other, which narrative they belong to... ugh. The dramatis personae list at the back helped a bit - but not much.

I couldn't get into Quicksilver; I had to keep breaking off to read something else and give my brain a rest from trying to make sense of all the historical allusions. Daniel is the nominal lead in two of our three narratives but doesn't do much except run into famous figures from history: Newton, Leibniz, King Charles II, the Duke of Marlborough, Blackbeard. And aside from the Logic Mill project and Eliza's coming from a non-existent country with an unpronounceable name (this latter bugged me throughout the series; why make up countries?), I didn't understand why this was filed in the sci-fi and fantasy section.

The Confusion is a more straightforward adventure story, with Jack and Eliza taking the lead roles. They are much more dynamic protagonists than Daniel; Eliza even manages to make explaining the stock exchange entertaining. There are no flashbacks, as the narratives occur contemporaneously with each other, and either there aren't so many of those historical in-jokes, or the ones which are there I understood more readily (there are long sequences set during the Irish wars of a certain King Billy, for example). It's in this book that the McGuffin of the gold comes into play (I don't want to say more than that for fear of spoilers), and with that, the plots start to cohere and the characters cross each other's orbits in a less random manner - another reason why I found this an easier book to enjoy than Quicksilver. Plus: globe-trotting multinational pirates!

But I still didn't understand why this was in SFF and not General Historical Fiction. Sure, the gold is alleged to be [REDACTED] but this was an age of quacks and fakes, as well as genius. The narrative doesn't confirm that the gold really is what some characters believe it to be...

...Until (maybe) you come to the end of The System of the World. Now initially I had the same problem here as with Quicksilver: I couldn't get into the story and had to keep stopping-and-starting in order to maintain my interest, particularly during the Tower of London sequences. But now the gold becomes the key force in everyone's plot line, and as the Hanoverian succession comes closer, the political landscape became much more recognisable to me. Daniel, who in the first two books was a mostly passive character - someone who has stuff done to him rather than doing stuff - comes into his own at last, taking the lead in a tale of political conspiracy, economic sabotage and that finally-maybe justification for the SFF label.

Except... when you've read thousands of pages of more-or-less regular-flavour historical fiction, does a few hundred pages at the end really change the genre of the whole? Do I even want it to? I had been waiting for so long for the sci-fi/fantasy element to become a clear factor - and when it did, I preferred not believing in the gold.

So in the end, I don't know what to make of The Baroque Cycle. Headache-inducingly-widescreen historical adventure with the vaguest tint of steampunk and some alternative geography? Hmmm.

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