The Vixen War Bride

When you say screw it and decide to buy the remaining books in a series as you near the end of middle novel, I think this could be defined as a successful novel on the author’s part, or at least evidence of being well entertained by it.

A while back, one of my Kindle’s suggestions for what to read next was book one of The Vixen War Bride by Thomas Doscher. Having a bit of rewards piled up and it sounding like it could be worth a read, I decided to check it out. There went a night’s sleep, lol. The Vixen War Bride is full of amusing cross cultural misunderstandings and people who are trying to do the right thing even if it’s hard to communicate that to the other.

Ben’s forces come from a period where armed security drones making like flying monkeys and optics that can turn night into day, are simply old hat and have been for centuries. Then they get shipped off to an occupied alien planet where the background level of electromagnetic interference is so strong that they may as well be dressed in uniforms from 1942 😅. Life is surely sad when someone has to switch from computer all the things to a Mark I Pencil, but that pales in comparison to the problem of understanding the locals and vice versa. The exchange of weapons of mass destruction between the aliens destroying the American’s colony with an asteroid and several nuclear strikes on the alien home world, surely did not endear either side to the other before the war’s end. Ben and most of his troops come from our destroyed colony, and given the enemies skill for slitting throats in the night and the Va’Shen’s horrific sci-fi weapons, it’s little surprise that most sectors have at best an uneasy relationship with the local population.

Alacea’s village is deserted and the chieftain is giving the Ben’s folk the run around. Fearing that the vicious, cruel, baby eating monsters from outer space will destroy the village in punishment for the war, the community has fled into the hills leaving only a few behind that are too old to make the long journey to shelter. When the Alacea barrels into town to face the dark ones according to their custom, she literally sets off a storm. In their culture, the head priestess is responsible to the community and arguing their position before their gods. If your Na’Sha guides her community and argues well when entering the afterlife, she may make it to the glade and her people be blessed with good fortune, or if her community is not righteous, sacrifice themself to an eternity in the frosts beyond and pray the gods be merciful in the hardships set upon their community to set them back on the right path. It’s into such a culture that paths cross.

It doesn’t take very long before cross cultural communication to rear its head and begin the snowball effect. Alacea’s confession to war crimes against humanity is quickly understood to be full of shit, but she’s the only one who will both talk to the Dark Ones and knows where the villagers are hiding. Deciding maybe-pissed-off villagers down the road are better than angry ambushes out of know where, Ben wants them to come home and live normally. Sadly, the Va’Shen language is virtually unknown and they are just lucky to have an interpreter along that can “Kind of” speak the language. Convincing Alacea that Ben’s people won’t destroy the village or kill them all in a rage is virtually impossible, and convincing her to help them is hard to do when your terp can barely speak the same language herself.

Thanks to a mix up in translation and very different social histories this results in Ben and Alacea’s sudden marriage! Not quite the help the terp was trying to ask for, lol.

For one whose culture sees marriage and divorce as but a post card in the mailbox, and one whose culture sees marriage integral to every part of their society, it’s quite the mix up. But it’s one full of story potential.

For Alacea, it’s a chance to secure her community’s safety from the dark ones and direct the dark one’s anger away from her people. For Ben, it’s a chance to avoid hundreds of angry villagers wiping his company off the map before the army knows they’ve even been hit. Somewhere in the middle, the truth is it’s a great opportunity for peace and understanding, if they don’t kill each other first.

By the Va’Shen customs, marriage is forever and taking the head priestess as a bride is an old way for a conquering overlord to dominate a village, but by extension her community becomes his and due some measure of protection. But how can some alien from Earth know their ways? Everyone in Pelle expects such cruelty and horror from the humans that few Va’Shen believe their Na’Sha’s sacrifice will protect them. By human customs a few hundred years into the future, divorce rates are over 80% and far less eternal than anything known on the alien world. A world so foreign yet familiar, that flashlights are a water jar full of rocks that grow when wet and sound-reactive crops can rot if you fly loud helicopters overhead.

The journey to where the villagers of Pelle are hiding and their return home sets the tone well. I especially loved how the discussion of how Alacea can be sure Ben won’t harm her village and that she will kill him if he does betray her plays out. Seeing that she’s unlikely to succeed in it but will make it her dedicated mission in life if that comes to pass, Ben hands her his Ka-Bar and tells her if he breaks his promise not to harm her people, she can use that knife to kill him for it. Likewise, the brawl between Ramirez and an angry young farm hand that turns into a friendly exhibition while folks were discussing peaceful terms, that then snowballs into Alacea and Yasuno yelling at tod for his stupidity until the Ranger feels bad for the guy, was just freaking hilarious and well executed.

By the second book, Holdouts, the antics of SSgt Ramirez and huntress Alzoria seriously had me laughing my ass off and made it quite the binge read. Both Ben and Alacea’s own antics end up intersecting and making it quite a story. It was great, best book in the series so far. By the end of the third book, Uncivil Affairs, both main characters now know the embarrassing truth of how their marriage occurred and have stirred up a storm. I’ve been entertained well enough that towards the end, I had to exercise Amazon’s button for buying the remaining books in the series thus far.

I love stories that turn the expected on its head and that build upon the characters and situations. Good science fiction rarely has anything to do with science directly, so much as the technology is a backdrop that enables the story.

Reading nooks and kindles

Well, it looks like at 10% off on the most expensive of my short term projects, means I’ll be experimenting with a planned lifestyle shift: having a dedicated reading spot. That, or a chair that proves suitably uncomfortable enough to be repurposed elsewhere, lol.

I’ve done well with my goal to read a little bit every day. Typically, this works out as being before bed. Working off the same concept as why you shouldn’t use a laptop in bed because of its effects on your sleep, I’ve for a while now, thought about having a dedicated place to read. My vision for the next phase of bedroom development is a pair of bookshelves, a chair, and maybe a comfortable rug to help zone it off from the rest of the room. The dogs bequeathed me enough blankets not to have to worry about details, and a place to rest a book and a drink is easily solved.

My theory is that it would be better to sit and read, put up my kindle for the night, and then cross the room and crash into bed than it is to toss and turn alight with a kindle in hand. How well this works in practice, I think will depend on a suitably cozy place. It’s also a better incentive to read earlier and not stay up so late.

And of course there’s the issue of shelving. Most of my books are still in the garage, as I opted to convert my old shelves (about 15 and 25 years old, respectively, or older) into storage shelving in the garage, leaving me with know place to store them other than how I packed them. Bookshelves are cheap though, so that’s less a concern. The downside of sorts is that Really Cheap shelves are now better than my old shelves for weight capacity without falling apart, and are almost cheap enough to turn the spare room into a library by papering the walls with bookshelves. I must resist this temptation.

Odd reflection before bed

For the most part, the high point that Windows NT has achieved for me is “Not pissing me off by default” and becoming a fairly decent shell upon which to use the Linux things that I care about without needing a second machine or dual boot, thanks to WSL. The era of Windows 10 also brought iterative improvements to system components I care about like the command line environment. But versus native Linux, the main win for me is better access to DirectX games and Microsoft’s office apps.

But truth is, there are certain parts of Windows that are likely to always piss me off. Namely Bluetooth support, and to a somewhat lesser extent anything related to USB or networking will inevitably drive me nuts given enough time around NT.

Thinking about this as I finish up a few things before bed, I realize I typically like using MacOS. The aspects that piss me off tend to revolve around muscle memory, like how some common PC shortcuts are cmd+key and others are ctrl+key. Which are shell level uniquenesses not systemic design. On that note, I’ll add that I tend to find iOS/iPadOS rather more meh, or average than pleasant.

By contrast things that irk me so about using modern Linux as a desktop are the quality of mail clients, lol.

Plan of the day prepared for the week

After quite a bit of Battletech 2018 and a break in the middle to sweep and mop all the floors, I set to work on the next phase of things. Kind of funny, in that kitchen time is in my head, a break from sitting at my desk, but hey, BT has been consuming a lot of my gaming cycles this month, lol.

I had an idea last night about making a low carb tuna salad. It’s inspired by a cucumber and watermelon summer salad I encountered in an YouTube video. That is to say instead of macaroni style full of carbs or pickle style full of salt, it’s built around veggies. Details in footnote.

While blanching some carrots for the tuna salad, I broke down some broccoli and sliced additional carrots for later roasting for dinner and during the week. Aptly, by the time this was done it’s close enough to when I’d have to cook, I decided to stay downstairs and break out Shion to work on this journal entry.

Footnote: my tuna salad experiment

  1. Diced cucumber.
  2. Diced, blanched carrots (between 1:0.75 and 1:1 ratio /w cucu’)
    • Effectively, I quartered the cucumber and carrots and then cut them thin so the pieces are similar in size: slightly less area than a fingernail.
    • Raw carrots are hard as fuck, thus they need blanching or steaming. 4 minutes in a boiling water and then into a bath of ice water to chill.
  3. Sweet peppers, shredded
    • Already cleaned the cutting board when I did this and these are the seedless kind. So I simply snipped the ends, quarter, and then snipped my way lengthwise with a good kitchen scissors.
  4. Spring onions, chopped.
  5. Packet of tuna, 74g
    • 74g is about half a can.
    • Lower sodium light tuna, because I’m trying to cut down on salt for ye old blood pressure.
  6. Black pepper to taste
    • And sadly, I don’t have any garlic powder handy.
  7. Ranch dressing
    • I debated using oil/vinegar and opted to go with ranch.
    • I almost never have mayo, so most things people use mayo for I use ranch 😛

Coffee and groceries

Simple plan of the day, well executed thus far. Got up early instead of sleeping in, despite the urge to read all of last night. Skipped the usual breakfast/coffee routine and hit the road for Sprouts Farmer’s market. Managed to take care of most of my shopping list, given it’s mostly the veggies needing resupply. Then hit Publix on the way back for odds and ends better acquired there.

Came home and then opted to make breakfast. Picked the most ready to nosh avocado from the sprouts trip and cut off a chunk of fresh baked bread from the Publix bakery. Made coffee. I kind of blame my ancestors for the urge to pour some coffee on the plate and dunk the bread, and still ended up dunking some in the cup just the same, lol. I was a little tempted to add a Roma from the previous batch of tomatoes as well.

Ahh, I forgot how much I enjoy making fresh coffee. Thanks to all that’s been going on, I’ve mostly used pre-ground coffee in recent months. I find that is best for convenance when you need to get rolling on the POTD but want caffeinated goodness in a cup. But grinding and brewing coffee is kind of therapeutic in its own way as far as morning rituals go.

Perhaps contrary to that joy, I finally decided to try an experiment that I’ve been meaning to. Normally, I only grind up enough coffee for one brewing. For me, that’s about 2 – 2 1/2 cups of Joe. This time, I ground a full load: there is probably enough for tomorrow and next Saturday, maybe next Sunday as well. Stored it in a air bag and then in one of my mother’s air tight jars that usually adorn my counter, one of which is labelled coffee and usually empty unlike the flour, sugar, and tea ones next to it. So, we’ll see how well it keeps. In any case, I went a wee bit overboard and stocked up on coffee beans enough not to have to worry for quite a while, lol.

Captain’s personal log, star date 2023.267

This morning’s plan seems to have jellied. Get up, grab a quick breakfast, go for a 2 kilometer walk, make coffee, and then sit on my ass. Seeing it about 14~15 Celsius outside made me rethink the not sleeping in part of executing this plan, but worked pretty swell none the less.

After about a kilometer I’ve warmed up and my coat functions as insurance, so the temperature was a non-issue with continuous activity. Actually, I think if I finally broke down and bought new boots that aren’t so worn out, in this weather I could have managed another lap since I brought my water bottle along. While I’ve never cared much for dedicated exercises like press ups and crunches, walks let me get out and enjoy the scenery a bit. Although, I’m definitely too round around the middle for my teenaged metric of “Be sure to take a sit by 3 hours march”, but that’s what I get for flying a desk and being a lazy git😅.

Now if I just get the rest of the weekend chores done as effectively, lol.

Eggs and power tools

Breakfast

While the handiwork of just about any Japanese housewife would put mine to shame, I do think that this morning’s experiment at tamogoyaki is the best success yet.

The key I’m finding is to be sure to add thin enough layer of the egg mixture that it cooks fairly evenly and quickly, so that it’s easily rolled before the pan facing side gets too brown. Adding a small amount of egg is a lot easier when you don’t almost cook your thumb off the heat radiating from the pan 😅. On the flip side the square shape of a tamogoyaki pan and a spatula near the same size, does make it pretty darn easy to roll the omelette over. That’s pretty much the difference between a tamogoyaki pan and a small skillet: it’s square instead of round.

Power tools

My follow up project for the day was to investigate the wiring on the light switches by my garage. There’s two switches there, one that controls the hallway lighting and one that controls the main lighting in the garage itself. In general, I’m tempted to replace the classic flick switches in my home with slider switches like my apartment had, or simple rocker switches because I kind of like the newer types. A few with Alexa control would be nice but aren’t a big deal thanks to electrical code mandated multiway switches. But for the hallway there where it is the only switch, I’m interested in putting a motion sensor in place so that it’s easy to have that lighting ‘on’ when useful and not constantly forget to turn it on in the first place, or off.

Popping the breaker and getting my tester out because I’m more cautious with mains electricity, it looks like both these switches are the classic two wires and a ground. So that will probably curtail that idea more than finding a suitable two gang plate would. Occupancy sensor type stuff I’ve seen tends to require a neutral third wire. I’m really not surprised though, this house is relatively young but it’s not that young a building.

In retrospect, I should have unscrewed the left switch instead of the right, in order to get a better look at the wiring coming into the box, but for now I have enough information to satisfy my research. Finding it rather a pain in my ass to unscrew the switch itself and that one screw refused to drive far enough to get the front plate to rest flat, I finally caved into that reoccurring thought that groans, “Damn it, I should just buy a drill”, in the back of my head whenever I do things like this. A short ride to the Home Depot later, I now have a cordless drill and impact driver as well as the switch’s plate properly in place. That should take care of my thermostat plans and help with tasks involving light switches and furniture assembly!

I find it kind of curious that I’m accustomed to dealing with low voltage electronics but I find myself far more paranoid when it involves household mains electricity. But not as curious as the fact that power tools make me far more self conscious than handling firearms would. Firearms tend to put holes through things and civilian weapons are limited to the semi automatic variety. Power tools also tend to put holes through things, but have the potential to keep going and typically have less safe guards built in than a pistol or carbine does. Making them far more dangerous to handle IMHO. I was kind of amused at the instructions warning against hitting the trigger when picking up or slinging the drill with the battery still in place.

On the positive side, I suppose the safety concepts are similar enough. It’s just while a dumb ass with a firearm may neglectfully reach out and perforate someone or something at a distance, a dumbass with a power tool is more likely to make like the chainsaw scene from Dawn of the Dead’s finale. I like to think that I may be ignorant or foolish at times, but I try to be a responsible schmuck rather than a true dumbass.

Somehow the joys that are using Cream’s internet connection sharing to power Rimuru’s networking requirements, is reminding me that converting to a mesh network is one of the cheaper ideas on my long term planning board.

Dang gum computers (>.<)

This made my day

A friend shared this earlier and I rather busted out laughing with a face like my dad’s shit eating grin when I read it. Yes, this does describe me 😀