Author Archives: Sam

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I just bought a book.

I haven’t done that in a while because I’m not the most diligent of readers (I want to read, I just don’t remember to make time for it). Also I’ve got a lot of freebie downloads from BookBub offers, plus access to some ebooks via the library. However, there was a particular book I wanted to read so I’m on the kindle page and I’m hesitating. I balked at paying full price for this book.

Not going to lie I then froze in realisation – I’m part of the problem. My dream is to one day indie publish. If nobody buys my books because they just want them for free/through the library, then I’m not going to get very far. I know why authors give away the first book in the series free – it’s to entice readers, you like the first one, you hopefully get hooked and buy the rest. However, I’ve fallen into the trap of just reading all the free books, and actually so has my mum, and I’m sure a lot of other people as well. Books have value and that value is being lost which is very sad.

So yeah something to think about.

WriYe 2021: Year in Review

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Another year has come and gone again
Look around and think where have you been
Can’t believe it’s that time of year again
Can you believe the life you led?
Did you achieve the goals you set?
Did you lose your mind?
Another year has come and gone again
Look around and wonder what happened

Sick Puppies – That time of year

This year I called my WriYe progress thread ‘Try Everything’ as to be honest I was that desperate to make some progress, that’s what I was willing to do. When I made my yearly goals I tried to be realistic, and I put as a subheading ‘starting small and dreaming higher’ because that was my intent. I had to balance what I wanted in my heart, with what was possibly practical (and I have never been good at judging that).

I set my initial WriYe target as 75k because that was the bare minimum. I knew I was going to be writing fanfic but I wanted 75k (aka a full length draft of an original novel). I also wanted to make progress with my art and – yet again – I set the goal of doing a drawing a month. If I look back at the goal post I made and quote myself, I said “What I want the most from 2021 is to make progress, to move forward, to finally get somewhere. There is nothing I want more than to get to the end of December in 2021 and type up a yearly review, and to list all the things I accomplished. I want that glow of satisfaction, of being able to feel like yes I did something good. I don’t want to get through another year and feel like I wasted the time again. Like I said I really want to feel like I made progress.”

So did I meet those goals?

Yes and no is the simple answer.

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“We all had dreams once, Liam.”

That line is just stuck in my head. I find myself repeating it to myself multiple times a day because I have dreams, or had them, and I hate this time of year at the best of times because it makes me feel very retrospective. Yet again I haven’t made progress towards my dreams. Renewal dates loom. Do I continue to dream or call it hopeless?

All this moving house uncertainty is just making it worse. If it happens then it’ll work out better in the end but right now there’s zero happening. We’ll try relaunching the house with a new estate agent in January and hopefully we’ll be able to find something suitable (as everything we have liked so far will have been sold by then). But I have done no writing since October 7th, no art, no Lego, no nothing.

“We all had dreams once.”

🙁

#I am sad today#ignore me

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I know I’ve been quiet on and off for a long time but I just noticed it had been 10 days since my last post (aside from that one weird post the person who hacked my account made last night. how does that happen and why? I mean what did it get them? so weird!).

Anyway, I’m moving house which is what has been consuming my life. It’s been building for quite a while but the decision to actually do it was a very snap one. It hadn’t been talked about and then it was suggested on the Tuesday, we had estate agents round to value on the Saturday, and put the house on the market about 10 days later. We are officially on RightMove and have 2 viewings tomorrow afternoon.

We don’t know where we’ve moving to (well general area of about three counties I think) and we’re vacillating between searching for a big house that can be essentially split into two separate ‘apartments’ or finding two houses that are next to each other. We’re leaning towards the latter which means we are looking at buying new build which is decidedly scary. We have found some options and will probably try and view showhomes and tour the developments/surrounding areas in the next couple of weeks.

I’m mentally exhausted and covered in bruises (I really bashed my left leg in particular, it is so tender it burns when anything touches it). We did a complete reshuffle upstairs to present the house better for market. So I had to move rooms and half my stuff is in storage which I’m sad about (and it’s also bloody expensive! yikes, that’s a good racket that business).

Crazy, crazy time and guess what – it’s NaNo on Monday! /facepalm. I have done almost zero writing this month (and last month actually) so nothing writing-wise is going at all according to plan. I will be very sad if I lose NaNo again after winning last year and breaking my lose streak. However, at the moment it admittedly feels slightly inevitable.

Everything is likely to get worse before it gets better. We might have to go into rented for a short time which will majorly suck. However, I’m trying to focus on the end result – my own space. That’s the goal. If I get my own house out of this then it’ll all be worth it.

Assassin’s Creed: An Overview

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There are 12 Assassin Creed games and I own 11 of them (+ Liberation as it was bundled with III). I don’t own Unity because I read so many comments about it being ‘buggy’ that it put me off. I didn’t feel any particular draw to the location either. If it had been super cheap like the earlier games I might have decided to try it, but even with the Steam sale it wasn’t quite cheap enough so I decided to skip it.

Anyway, I’ve talked a couple of times about reducing my backlog of games so this weekend I booted the games that I’d not even touched. I’ve now at least loaded all of the Assassin’s Creed games. Breaking it down game by game, this is what I thought:

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thisgirlshouldbeworking:

Marvel really had Captain Carter say “I want to go back to the time Steve is in” and then after the Watcher told her no she looked at Natasha, smiled and came back to her own time. Nat and Peggy is one hell of a crackship, but I am here for it. 

At the same time, the post credit scene heavily implies that Steve, aka Peggy’s canon love interest, is somehow back in her time. Now, in the main timeline, who is the person from Steve’s past that gets brought back? Bucky. Interesting… 

Honestly Marvel’s What If? take on Captain Carter is healing so many wounds. I did not like what happened in Endgame with Steve going back in time. That was wrong. He left Bucky, he left Sam, he left all the Avengers and the life he’d made over what a decade? To go and mess up the life that Peggy had made for herself and (presumably) branching a new timeline because I refuse to believe that he could just sit and watch history play out. Just do nothing as Hydra infiltrated Shield and Bucky was tortured. I hate it. It erases a decade of character growth and what about Bucky?!? What had they got to the end of the line? No, just no.

Anyway, in What If? the dynamic between Peggy and Steve is just what it should be, and I don’t mind that Peggy expressed a wish to go back to her time – because this was pre-Winter Soldier events! She was yanked out of the timeline by the watcher when she was on the boat (which happened at the start of that movie) so she’s still very much in the adjustment period. Even then though it was a fleeting pang and she went back willingly – like you said she thought of her friend/possibly something more with Natasha.

I’m very much there for Peggy and Natasha too. Can I offer OTP: sword and shield, or CaptainAgent as suggestions? I don’t know what other people are using. Perhaps Peggy in her world needs to get her Natasha a red shield, as she saw how effective it was with last-survivor!Natasha. Then they could just be SHIELD haha.

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I’m kinda bummed we didn’t get a Red Shield carrying Lego Marvel Black Widow minifig now in the collection of 12.

Personally I’d have replaced the gross zombie!Cap with her *shudder* but then I am very anti-zombies because I’m the worlds biggest wimp. Anyway considering the gold Gamora was only in the last episode, and didn’t say much, I do feel that badass last-woman standing shield-carrying Natasha Romanov would have been a better choice.

Natasha is one of my favourite characters though so I am probably pre-disposed to think that. Don’t get me wrong I do like Gamora it’s just I have feelings about last-survivor Natasha.

I should see if there is fanfic to read…

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This morning I was obsessed by the idea that Pete’s ex-wife was called “Amanda Martin” and Rebecca and Jack’s boss was called “Charlie Martin” and I was imagining that she was his daughter. Then I realised that I’d misread the wiki and Martin was her new married name and so that idea went in the bin.

Now I can’t stop thinking about “what if Valda and Sterling are actually the same person?” The Regents are all regular people, with regular jobs and so why couldn’t Valda be an insurance investigator, turned Interpol agent? It would explain how he had agent-like skills.

Of course that would cross Leverage into Warehouse 13. The most notable casting clash is of course Artie who was Dubinech in Leverage (a bad guy). There are probably others. Still that can be ignored, in a planet of billions some people are going to look a bit alike. What can’t be so easy ignored is Parker in a world of artifacts… I’m scared. Plus can you imagine Hardison? Word of God said that Eliot was part of the Stargate program, so he’s used to secret conspiracies. The other two *shudder*

Anyway, I’m not feeling an itch to do anything about it. Just my brain throwing things at me rather than working on my fic /sigh

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galactic-pirates:

My Warehouse 13 gifset isn’t appearing in the tags???

It’s not been flagged. I know other people can see it because 1 person has liked it (thank you friend), so I don’t get it.

Tumblr why are you so weird?

Ok I take it back

WHAT THE FUCK IS RECENT AND TOP FILTERING?!?!?!?

Excuse me but that is some high level bullshit right there. I didn’t even notice until just now. Seriously????

Gah!

So it’s in the tags just not obviously because of this shit. Why would tumblr even do that? Oh I know why. But ugh!

Sorry for the swearing but this is just pissing me off a lot right now.

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It’s been nearly a month since my PS5 got here and I resolved to complete games before I buy anymore. How has that gone?

Not bad actually. I have bought 1 game (Fitness Boxing 2) for the Switch, and as that’s an ‘exercise’ game, it doesn’t count. So I have kept my resolve and not bought any new games. I was helped in this endeavour by sending mum my christmas list early. I put them on the list so I can’t get them for myself.

How has completing the games gone? Mixed is the answer.

I completed the free Astro’s Playroom game that came with the PS5. It’s not 100% because I haven’t beaten the time trials. I’m not good with timers so I’m giving myself a pass on that. Otherwise it’s completed, I think it’s showing 92% or something which is close enough.

The next game on the list was Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3 on the Switch. That confuses me a bit. There’s some equippable crystals, what’s good? I don’t know. There’s some other advancement trees and I’m not sure what I’m supposed to put the currency into first. Why do they have to make it so complicated? I haven’t quite got to the end of the story, and then I think the idea is you start over at the beginning on a harder difficulty. I’ll go back to it eventually but it does feel like one of those ‘never ending’ things rather than something I can actually complete.

Which brings me to Assassin’s Creed: Origins. I’ve become fairly obsessed with it again over the past week, ever since I discovered I could link my PS5 controllers to my PC and use those instead. All my camera problems, my complete inability to aim a bow and arrow? Gone. Turns out the right controller solves all of that. Today I finished the main campaign but I still have a ton of sidequests, all the DLC and most of the achievements to tackle.

I’ve played Ratchet and Clank a couple of times on the PS5 but I’m not very far into it yet. Now I’ve got to a natural pause point with AC: Origins I should perhaps go back to it. On the other hand I do have about another 9 AC games still to go.

AC: Origins is such a beautiful game though. Visually it is stunning. It’s also easy to understand what I need to do for gear, ability points, quests etc. I’ve had little trials of some of the other AC games and I know I found parts of them confusing. I’m probably easily confused. I read yesterday that they are thinking 2024 before another AC game comes out. Given how much I have to complete I’m relieved. Maybe I’ll be up to date by then.