P. Kirby > Recent Status Updates

Meh.

Well, that mission was a clusterfuck. And now there's a growing rift between Darrow and Sevro. The bromance is over? In other news, Ragnar is still awesome.

...my mother clenched her slender, manicured hand into a claw adn took a swipe at my face. I caught her delicate wrist in midair. She had swung at me so hard that my hand, stopping hers, left a bruise on her skin. My father made me apologize to her.

Wow! What a fucked up family. No wonder she prefers animals to people.

Now, thanks to Clarabelle [the tarantula], even the most ordinary corner of our home were freshly enchanted. The world, I realized, brimmed even fuller with life than I had suspected, rich with the souls of tiny creatures who may love their lives as much as we love ours.

I still love to look at the hands of those kids: brown hands, pink hand, gently cupped to welcome the footfall of a creature [a spider] that some of them had only moments earlier viscerally feared. [...] That day, I hear a little girl in neat pigtails murmur, almost under her breath, "Elle est belle, le monstre." She is beautiful, the monster.

Despite spiders' reputations as dirty, nasty "bugs," tarantulas are as immaculate as cats, carefully cleaning any dirt that falls on their bodies by meticulously drawing the hairs on their legs through the mouth, using their fangs like the teeth of a comb.

And then something magical happened. Holding her in my hand, I could literally feel a connection with this creature. No longer did I see her as a really big spider; now I saw her as a small animal.

People aren't born with a fear of spiders--all sorts of psychological tests have proven that--but arachnophobia is an exceptionally easy fear to invoke.

"What can never die?" Sevro growls in his best Obsidian accent.

"The fungus under Ares's sack."

Ugh. Sevro, I'm starting to believe that you really do have crotch rot, given the times you mention it.

I referred to the three as "he" for no anatomical reason. There is no way humans can sex live emus until someone lays an egg. But I couldn't think of these marvelous individual as its.

...my mother gave me a baby doll, but I ignored it. When my father returned from a trip to South America a d brought me back a stuffed baby caiman, a type of crocodile, I dressed it in the baby doll's clothing and pushed it around in the doll's pram.

LOL. This woman is like totally my soul sister. I hated human dolls, but dressed up all my toy critters.

This looks so cute!

Tapping out on this one. (DNF)

"You've always been bored by history. It's your greatest weakness."
Or my superpower. ZZZZZZZzzzz. Boring book is boring.

So glad Ragnar is still around.

I have only the sketchiest idea what's going on, but...big thumbs up for the gory (squishy, squishy guts) battle scenes.

Prose is drier than the Sahara and loaded with exposition dumps. ZZZZZzzzzzzzz.

It's okay, but seems to be heavy on politics. Probably not a good companion read to Morning Star. If it doesn't pick up my interest soon, I'm putting it aside for later.

Then farewell hope, and with hope farewell fear. Farewell remorse: all good to me is lost." He whispers to some distant, fading part of himself as he lazily lifts the scorcher to his father's forehead. "Evil, be thou my good."

Breaks my heart every time I read it.

"I do not truly fight because I want to be king or Emperor or whatever word you slap above my name in the history texts. The universe does not notice us, Darrow. There is no supreme being waiting to end existence when the last man breathes his final breath. Man will end. That is the fact accepted, but never discussed. And the universe will continue without care."

"Men." She rubs her right temple. "Your father was one to jump without looking." Her expression tells me what she thinks of that. "Helldivers all think they provide for the clans. No. The women do." She gestures around. "Everything you see, made by a woman."

He's loitering around Pliny's eyeball some twenty meters back. We turn to look at him and he shuffles his feet awkwardly.
"Can I..." He gestures to it.
[...]
He scoops up the eyeball and jams it into his pocket, grinning merrily. He runs to catch up. "Collecting the set, hopefully."

Sevro is so lovable.

"And I'm not sorry I left and missed conversations such as this. For you goodmen seem good only at one thing, and that is bickering Yet you quickly come to agreement upon me as an item of ridicule. Curious. Is it because you see me as a threat to your power? Or is it simply because I'm a woman?"

"I am not some frill-wearing tramp. I am a genius. I say this because it is a fact. I am smarter than any person you've ever met, except perhaps my twin. Me heart does not make my brain a fool."

Mustang rocks.

"No one know of these people," she says. "No one but a handful of Golds with access. The human spirit tries to break free, again and again, not in hate like the Dark Revolt. But for love. They don't mimic each other. They aren't inspired by others who come before them. Each is willing to take the leap, thinking they are the first. That's bravery. And that means it's a part of who we are as people."

"Now!" Fitchner smiles. "Who can I reason with?"

"Me." The Jackal takes a step forward. "I am heir to this house."

"Hmmm...pass! You're creepy."

He shoots Jackal in the chest with a stunFist.

LOL. And...very prescient.

"Well, I want you to imagine media as a pipeline to a city in the desert" [...] "Our metaphorical desert. I can provide only thirty percent of the content of what comes through that pipeline, but I can affect one hundred percent of it. My water contaminates the rest. That is the nature of media."

True.

The protagonist is sixteen-going-on-six and whinier than army of hungry puppies.

I'm not a fan of organized religion, so fanatics as antagonists are my crack, but...the writing is sort of overwrought and hand-wringy. And the characters lack internal consistency. And an ounce of good sense.