Dickens of a Blog – The third iteration of Doug Bolden's various thoughts and musings.

KoRo brand “Soy Chunks”

On 2026-03-10

Back in the States I consumed a lot of TVP from Betta Foods, Inc. I miss Betta Foods. Chances are, I could do something to ship over here but I also need to find some local replacements for multiple reasons.

While I am at it: goodbye, Butler Foods Soy Curls, you are the real king bar none.

Doing some shop arounds, one of the first local-to-EU brands of “soy chunks” to come to my attention was KoRo’s Bio grove sojastukjes, grof [aka, soy chunks, the biggish ones].

At €13.95/kg, the price was reasonable¹, but it was hard to tell how big it was at a glance online. You want chunks to be chunky, no? I decided to just order and put them through various tests and recipes.

First, the size test [versus a €.20 coin (I looked but didn’t have a Euro on hand and was already committed to the bit)]:

I did crank up the contrast and played with the brightness a little to try and make the texture pop out. Makes a couple look like they are floating in space [and thanks, phone, for focusing much harder on the coin than the product I’m showing and which is closer to you]. As you can see, average size is fair. Not as chunky as TRS Soya Chunks, which you can find in some local-to-Brussels Asian markets. A bit smaller than I like, but not terribly so.

The specks you see are from the “dust” in the bag. I’ve never minded a few random flakes of extra soya protein, but if you figure you might for whatever reason, just maybe toss them gently in a sieve or some such.

In order to give them a fair test across a few different cooking techniques. Each started with the basic prep: soaking them in water for 30 minutes prior to draining and squeezing out a bit but not too aggressively, then letting sit for a few minutes to reform and settle. I used some MSG, mushroom powder, and other seasonings but mix-and-matched that. And no, none of these have photos because you see how crappy I am taking food photos, above, at least with my cantankerous phone camera.

The four variations were:

A…um, what’s wet-stir-fry called? Like a stir fry but with sauce? That. With some rice vermicelli, veggies, and brussels sprouts in a mushroom sauce.
Deep fry after tossing them in a “Nashville Hot” blend of spices and a small amount of flour/starch on the outside.
A “cream of mushroom” soup with some flat wheat noodles and maybe a too heavy helping of the chunks. The next day the noodles and chunks had absorbed enough of the left over liquid that it was effectively “TVP and Dumplings.”
A soft- and hard-bake version (200C for 35 minutes and 50 minutes).

In all cases, the Taste was Very Fine. If you eat a lot of TVP [textured vegetable protein] and related protein products, you get a bit used to that shelf-stable soya flavor. Some brands embrace it. Some try to cover it up. With KoRo chunks, it is there but softer. These are very receptive to the flavors you add.

I would go so far as to say that if you are sensitive to that dried soya product flavor, these are the ones I’d put in your hands.

In the first three cases, the Texture was Lacking (a bit). This is not to say they had a bad texture, there just wasn’t much there. More akin to a thick noodle or tight dumpling than some of the other soy chunks. The bite was soft and missing that sense of internal fiber that I like by a hair. Compared to Plant Basics Soy Chunks, they have pretty much spot-on identical protein but PB’s has a tad more fiber. I think it might just be the processing.

With the fourth style, baking it it out, the soft-bake had a similar texture to the wet-prep and fried versions. The hard bake, getting them almost corn-nut-like in texture, is where I finally got the feel of the internal workings of the product.

As for Ease of Prep, I’d say they are Just Fine. No more or less harder than other similar sized soy/soya TVP. Well, maybe a little easier. A few, like the TRS mentioned above, are a lot stronger in flavor so you might need to soak those a bit longer than these from KoRo depending on the recipe. Since the KoRo ones respond more to added flavor, you don’t have to over-season to get the full effect.

To conclude, while I would like a slightly bigger “chunk” and a chunkier mouth-feel, these are Quite Good and might hit the spot for folks who have been a little reluctant to try such soy food options because of the flavor or preparation.

If you don’t know the rough size of 1kg of TVP, it’s a pretty big amount. You can make a fairly chunky soup with just 100g of the stuff. Even with dishes completely centered on just soy chunks, you are looking at around 30-50 servings per bag. ↩︎

“Deleting” OneDrive…

By Doug Bolden

On 2026-03-09

In Technology

One of my promises to myself for 2026 — which admittedly feels a bit “puny” with everything going on — was to redraw from most cloud-based storage. Part of the broad “clean up!” phase of my mid-life crisis…

Leave social media
Leave [most] third party cloud-based storage [Google Drive is something of an exception, for now, and I have other specialty storage to handle certain accounts and servers]
Reduce streaming subscriptions to a minimum
Generally stop paying for services I can do myself with some sweat/tears

…which, when written like that, does sound a bit like I’m turning into a paranoid old codger. I am, that. But also, it gives me a challenge. Something to chew upon.

Today was OneDrive. I had some variation of the Office 365 subscription— which is now something like Office 365 Copilot — where I had apps, storage space, improvements to email, and upgrades to “freemium” MS stuff like Copilot++ Extreme Teams Plus™ or whatever branding makes the shareholders happy. I don’t know. The fact that I never knew what kind of value I could possible be getting from most of it is part of my problem.

Which is part of your problem, MS people.

Any Microsoft folks seeing this, that’s my feedback. Help me to feel like I am getting much more than $100 out of such a thing if you want me to keep it. Make it feel like you are giving me the sweetest deal ever. You ain’t a charity. You ain’t a college student just working your way up through the world. Impress me.

I got said annual subscription a few years back when I got this computer and continued, like a good little puppet, to pay the $100ish annual fee for all these many months. As we were prepping a move to the EU, I cut out most of my annual/recurring payments to stuff that wasn’t absolutely necessary, keeping only a few with some of those few on the eventual chopping block. This included my Office 365 [insert other branding terms, here] subscription though I figured I’d keep it if I wanted it after all.

If and only if I felt I was getting my value.

In the interim time, I set up more of my own storage, switched most/all documents to LibreOffice [etc], and started handling my email largely “in house.” In short, I absolutely did not need to pay a trillion dollar company $100 to do those things for me. Which left a problem.

There were roughly 500gig of files on my computer tied to OneDrive. Not paying meant my OneDrive was stuffed full to the brim — 9000% over the limit, the warnings said — and stuff was throwing errors. I logged in and started to delete out my files from the online side and then went…

…because while I doubted it, there was a non-zero chance that I was about to trigger Microsoft deleting half a terabytes of files off my PC. Good files. Stuff like my pdf copies of Outgunned and my Two Steps from Hell music. That would have made me sad having to redownload all that.

I stopped, looked into it, and figured out that I had to go through OneDrive’s settings and then stop syncing each of the major folders. One at a time. Which takes…time. It moves the folders around and changes the links and stuff. A few folders with only a gig or two worth of files might be quick but my main Documents folder which had 300gig alone took the better part of an hour. Then sit there in fear that it was simply going to delete those files outright [Ron Howard voice: it did not].

That’s before I had to go through and update some bookmarks, rebuild a music library in Foobar2000, and related things. Piece by piece.

Doug’s Note: There are walkthroughs already written for this process. I should have taken screenshots on the way down but didn’t think about it until later.

After I did all that, and dealt with all the errors, I then “resynced” and that deleted the files off my online account. I then deleted out a few more bits and then unlinked my account from OneDrive and then exited OneDrive.

Which has twice tried re-opening and which prompted Windows Defender to lecture me about the importance of having online backup, etc.

My primary annoyance since then is that the Default Library Folders — Documents, Pictures, Downloads, Videos, Desktop — are now put into kind of janky library containers in the “Libraries” tree at the bottom of the left-hand panel and there doesn’t seem to be a way to build a more functional version of that towards the top to match the older style.

In other words, paying for OneDrive put all those files into a convenient place in the panel which doesn’t seem possible, without possibly editing the registry, to replicate. That’s…madness, right? That’s purposely nerfing their own operating system to sell a side product.

Hey, looking for a book to read? Let me just suggest something. Probably totally unrelated to this whole experience:

I ended up just making “Quick Access” links to those folders, a few others, though it seems like Windows 11 keeps wanting to trim those out.

All this has made me really miss Linux all the more.

Waking Up to the STINK

By Doug Bolden

On 2026-03-07

In Daily Life, Grimbergen

Foggy mornings are not rare in Grimbergen.

BUT, sometimes those foggy mornings have a way of trapping the smells and scents of absolutely everything at around head height. The fumes from the airplanes, the smell of pollen, the decay of grass.

This morning, I woke up, was getting out of bed, started to smell something…awful. For a few seconds, I got really angry at the cats for whatever the hell they had just did…and then decided to investigate.

Opened the front door and that’s what I realized just how well insulated our house is in general. It was worse outside. And there was that sound. Not unlike the scene in Dumb & Dumber where Jeff Daniels’ character tries to take a not quite stealth poo. If you don’t know the scene, just look at this GIF and imagine the sound:

Like a hundred tubes of cottage cheese being forcibly evacuated. Just a long phhlllbbttlllttt sound that would definitely be followed by a green fog in a 90s cartoon. It was rank.

There was a tractor in the field around 30m from our front door spraying a very organic fertilizer on the field.

The end result was a smell not unlike a port-a-potty left in the summer sun near the kind of race track where they serve egregious amounts of cheese and red meat.

I absolutely adore farmers and have no real issue with the process, but the mix of that being sprayed on a day when all smells are locked as tight as a 16-year-old girl’s diary…

It was a rough couple of hours until it dissipated.

Congrats to Connections for Reaching 1000 Puzzles

By Doug Bolden

On 2026-03-07

In Games

While I play around on several games on NYTimes, the game that I most enjoy remains Connections. And today, Connections hit the milestone of 1000 Puzzles [of which I seem to have played 587].

I was curious how they were going to celebrate, and we got a cute little message and a unique object:

Didn’t have too much trouble beating and getting the Reverse Rainbow [Purple, Blue, Green, Yellow in that order]: solving from hardest to easy category. To be honest, though, I just went for a category with the cute little Connections icon. It just happened to be, well, I guess already spoiled it: Purple.

All in all, the growing bloat and badges and all that are starting to detract from me enjoying even the regular rotation of NYT Games, but’s been fun playing this for the past year or two.

Even if I don’t make it to 2000 [or 1300, at this rate], just wanted to swing by and say “congrats” to the team behind it.

It’s been one of the better ones.

You Had Me at Henshin GIF

By Doug Bolden

On 2026-03-05

In Creativity, Tokusatsu

A friend on a certain Discord server shared with me a mod that puts Kamen Rider into Skyrim, and so I realized if I wanted to have a “You Had Me At HENSHIN!” gif I was going to have to make it myself, so I did:

Now I’m sharing it for everyone in the world to use, meaning me.

“What’s the mod?,” you might be rightly asking. I have no idea. I don’t play Skyrim…but I do adore some Kamen Rider.

I have suffered through a Reimagined achievement, finally

By Doug Bolden

On 2026-03-04

In Rants, Videogames

Look, I am generally a fan of the recent Dragon Quest VII: Reimagined even with the cutting of content and sometimes oversimplifying a few things. I like the improvement of character stories. I like the voice acting. I like the art. I like most of the pacing.

BUT, this took a stupidly long time to do…

To put this in perspective, I beat the game somewhere around the 60-70 hour mark. The rest has been grinding up stats and unlocking achievements. There is something like 10-11 hours of just playing for the achievement I’m about to rant about in this post.

Most of the achievements are precisely the sort of things you like to see for videogame achievements. Fight a certain number of fights. Get a certain amount of gold. Reach a few storyline checkpoints. Even some trickier stuff, like having to compete against some fairly difficult bosses. At least of a “standard hard difficulty” in the aspect of needing to grind quite a bit and trying out new strategies to be strong enough to do it without really good RNG.

Only the true boss of the entire damned game is not that, it’s a stupid match game called Lucky Panel where you flip over tiles and match items and some items have some chance of ranking up and if you get lucky you might rank something up to max before the final round and get a chest and then get a shot at a few really rare items.

And the sadistic game designers made it so that there are several items that are not only locked to the panel with no other way to get them but locked to the most RNG of RNG luck. Chests are already slightly rare due to the “early max rank” condition in a game where you have to also use some luck | strategy | skill just to keep playing – or, in various ways, cheat – AND then some of those items [such as the liquid metal gear] is very rare even by chest standards.

What this means is that folks are reporting 10-15+ hours of post-game content dedicated entirely to getting those rare-rare items from panels. And some are actively encouraging stuff like screen captures if not outright cheat-ware to help.

Sure, we only need to do play Lucky Panel if we want to get all the achievements, but I detest content like this where you have to play against highly complex dice rolls. Where people who luck might get those items in a dozen plays while folks like me have to play the match game…wait, let me see.

188 games. Siggghhhhhhhh. It’s the return of gacha trauma.

Anyhow, after said 188 games, I finally got this…

Which unlocked the Heroic Hoarder achievement and that unlocked the final “get all the other achievements” achievement. My word. I have no idea, going by the top screenshot, about that poor 0.3% who managed to get through the stupid Panel grind without getting everything else which generally pales in comparison.

While there are a handful of text/translation errors and other things I would prioritize fixing, at this point one of my big wish list items for this game if they could go back and tweak it would be to allow some items like rare monster hearts that increased the number of misses or improved the luck on the panels or something like that.

OR, make it so that every item can be gotten, somehow, outside of it and leave the Lucky Panel as less a requirement and more a fun way to just score a few duplicates of rare items if people are so inclined.

On the Shades of Pain

By Doug Bolden

On 2026-03-04

In Daily Life, Health, Rants, Words

I have a half-dozen links/notes saved for blog posts from this past week. Which is likely a sign that those half-dozen things will not be posted. Because that is the way of blogs like these: you either strike when the rod is too hot for common sense to stop you or you do not strike at all

And because I have spent the last week in a lot of pain.

Pain comes in shades.

I post this with the caveat that I am not trying to one-up or out-suffer anyone. Trust me, as much as you can trust me, that I appreciate that pain is personal in the way that tastes in food or enjoyment of art is personal. There are recipes. There are genres. But right there, where the spark exists between the “I” which is you and me and each of us individually and the It, the object or concept in question, there is that personal relationship between your I and its It.

When you hurt long enough, people are apt to give you advice which is to say people are apt to tell you about their pain. Their suffering. Their shades. Their tastes. We are lonely. It is in our nature to talk. Bless us, one and all.

Sometimes, maybe most times, we mean well, but we are idiots. Because all we do is shout the name of our own personal pain over and over and over again. Into the void. Into the sky. Into the gray.

I am sorry that you hurt, Space Pilgrims, I truly am.

But this is my blog, so it is my time to shout. I am not speaking for you. I am not even speaking for myself, because the me in this much pain is probably not really me. Whether a half-truth or a desperate plea, I hold to that. I will continue to hold to that.

In 2022, when I fell while hiking and tore the ligaments | muscles | nerves in my leg so badly that I still do not walk like a real boy these four years later: that should have been the worst pain I ever experienced. It maybe was. I do not know. I told the people at the scene that it was a 6 or 7 on the out-of-10 scale, maybe an 8. A doctor later told me that it was a 10. Thing is, I do not recall that pain. I recall the fear. I recall the months of healing. I recall the falling down. I recall the long void that followed.

The pain I better remember is the pain much like the pain I have right now: the revolt of my body against itself as the genetic lottery awards me an autoimmune disfunction which fills my vessels and my veins and throat and my joints and my bones with inflammation.

The shades of this particular flavor of pains goes like this:

First, there is the idea of pain. A twinge. A whisper. A voice hiding behind a corner which is down the hall.

Then, there is the greeting. The laughter. The introduction. Hello, my name is…

Then, there is the romance. The dance. The twirling with pain down the path under the trees and up the hill. Waking up and having your pain there in the bed beside you. The pain strips naked and crawls into the shower with you. It shares meals with you. It stands with you and walks with you and it listens to you tell stories about itself.

Then, there comes the shade I fear the most. There comes the moment on the edge of a pit where you wonder for a second if you and the pain are just different names for the same thing.

This is the moment of exhaustion.

The reason the pain no longer crawls into the shower with you is because you no longer feel able to take a shower. You do not wake up beside pain because your dreams were pain. So much so for a moment upon waking you think you might be better, only to realize you are worse.

Where you press your hand against your back because making it hurt there means it hurts less elsewhere and you can breathe for a moment without wondering why you can you feel each and every breath. Where you watch TV or read books and every word and every scene is being told to you by the pain and it speaks with broken spiral teeth and a throat of bark and and bone and feathers.

Then, comes the shade I do not fear so much, though it is possibly worse. That point past the exhaustion. There are no words or quaint ideas about that point. Deconstruction. The silence that was never silent in the moment but is after because part of us is lost there on that shore. We forget the sound of the waves and later wonder from where did the salt and grit come. Memory lapses and a sense of loss.

Then, the lucky of us…we wake up one morning and we’re still exhausted but we can walk again. We can shower again. We can drop something on the floor and pick it back up again. Maybe not gracefully. Maybe not without sacrifice, but we can do it.

[this is where i am right now]

And each day, maybe each hour, after that is a step back up the hill. Learning to walk on our own again. Learning to breathe without having to press our hands into our back. Reading. Watching TV. Doing these things on our own, again.

Moving on to the final shade of pain, the ugliest shade of all, the one we don’t like to talk about with anyone but ourselves and often not even then

: the shade where we remember what it felt like and know it will one day return. Maybe worse. Maybe not.

and we laugh and laugh and laugh and laugh and laugh

The [Super] Universe is Healing…

By Doug Bolden

On 2026-02-24

In Internet, Movies & TV, Tokusatsu

In the sheer inanity of modern existence, where every day is a slam between the mental load of simply considering an international conspiracy of terrible people on one side and the wryly chuckling at “boop-gate” on the other…

It is sometimes nice to see the same fights show up about fansubs as always.

Ah, that takes me back. Logging into IRC channels and getting reamed because you make a joke or ask about the process. I one time asked about the process of fansubbing a series that was on a kind of on semi-pause¹ and the ensuing argument out of nowhere ended up with an announcement that “despite rumors, we have not dropped this series.” No shit. I was just curious.

Ah, 2003-2004 era TV-Nihon, I kind of miss that level of jack-assed-ness. Seriously TVN folks, thank you for the memories.

超 100% means “super” in this context, as backed up by all of the hype [heh, pun], press, and most likely some official release somewhere down the road that I’m ready and willing to slap down pre-order button upon when I get the chance. As in a reference to the Super Sentai series that Gavan is “replacing.” As in the kanji used in numerous Super Sentai productions which calls-back to that meta-series name. It’s an homage. I thought it was a nice touch.

A loving handshake to a venerable series that has lasted for multiple generations of childhoods.

Still, fansubbers and fansub-fans arguing about such things is like… it’s the universe healing, you know? Something lost from my youth and taken up by a whole new generation.

Actually, I think it was more like the series was still be subbed, but they were sharing the files via a different method? I don’t know, that was 20 damned years ago. Specifics escape me. ↩︎

Giggle

By Doug Bolden

On 2026-02-24

In Discoveries, Humor, Science

Look, it’s pretty impressive – at least, I’m impressed – that very intelligent people have mapped out the structure of Uranus’s upper atmosphere. I adore finding out more about our local system.

BUT…

Several pop-sci and pop-gen news services have gone for a slightly more tongue-in-cheek article title:

…and I also adore that.

Especially when the graphic just oh so slightly does not help.

Finished up Pass #1 of A Parade of Horribles, Overall Dungeon Crawler Crawl Thoughts, the Re-Listen

By Doug Bolden

On 2026-02-09

In Reading

BONUS STATUS REPORT: My stomach is currently considering the implications of the vegan corn dog I ate for lunch. We got it from Delhaize. Package says it is “Korean-style” but I have no idea what such words might mean in such a context. It was good but the Best By Date for Doug to eat anything like microwaveable food was something 2015. We’ll see.

I appreciate that I tend to get long-winded in every. single. post. And that this has a chilling effect. I put off writing things because I know I am going to write for days to say just a few basic things. Can I change this about myself to get back into more casual shit-posting? I don’t know.

Both of these unrelated things are just building up to having two limitations – my stomach is on stage 2 of contemplation, stage 3 is of an unknown character – as I type up a super quick (*wink*) response to the fact that I signed up for Matt Dinniman’s Patreon page so I could keep up with the Dungeon Crawler Carl books as they trickled out as well as the increasing sea of ephemera. Book 8, A Parade of Horribles, has just now – in the past day or so – wrapped up and there’s an unknown gap before “Book 9” [which is sort of like Books 9 and 10, according to the author, though how that really plays out I do not know].

CAVEAT 1: the version of the book published to the Patreon is something like a polished rough draft, with scenes and elements cut and altered before the finished book. Things get added to make later scenes make more sense. Things get cut for time. A later update will say something like, “Oh, I added a few paragraphs about this…,” and then have those paragraphs out of context. That is to say you gain something for reading them this way but you also kind of lose the final edit and polish.

CAVEAT 2: I am going to spoil nothing in plain-text, but will obfuscate a few words and sentences if I feel they might spoil things. Only click them if you don’t care about DCC, don’t care much about spoilers, or are prone to forgetting. Oh, I guess if you have already read the thing, that too. Though some elements of speculation included might irritate you if you hate that sort of thing.

THOUGHTS AT THE END OF BOOK 8 IN ITS CURRENT FORM

Goddamnit, Matt.

The last few chapters had so many things hitting at such a huge scale that I had to physically get up and walk around a couple of times. It was punching. Super good. Even the “stupidity” of the last big plot shift before the epilogues. The lore dump is huge and I would say that I had already guessed around 90% of it as explained. It’s kind of just there in the text already, with some between-the-lines reading.

One element – SZwS SZr zbHSZroweG pw1 1H3r 1HeS Hi wDSA-I4FHyA1S SZwS erber1rDS1 FAir 14ePAPADy AD A3breiroSAHD – was kind of a new one to me.

ROoSO oM 3OdW r6MMoT1f 3odv 36 3Od “356 Oj1FdM TdS69oWb 6Wd, jbjoW” MUTr163 3Oj3 63Odm5oMd Kdd1M Fdmf dn3mjWd6UM vdMro3d TdoWb o9r6m3jW3 36 j3 1djM3 6Wd SOjmjS3dm jWv sjm1’M 6Fdmj11 bm653O 36 3Odmd TdoWb 96md 3OjW 6Wd vdKoWo3o6W 6K MUmFoFj1.

I think it has been somewhat there, that fact, but also never quite laid like that, especially in that it sets up, for instance, 8 mAfZSfZQ O7tZ77Q 48P6 8QS tA7 cK [tA7 fOILfsm fQ7], 8 mAfZSfZQ O7tZ77Q 48P6 8QS NfQst [tA7 P7866e S8lQ7S tP8DL0 fQ7, Ost K’l Qft msP7 LR K Zfs6S Ose Lt sQ67mm Lt Z8m *P7866e* RfP07S], fP 9fmmLO6e 8 mAfZSfZQ O7tZ77Q ofPS708L [tA7 9ftLfQm l8mt7P] 8QS qS7tt7 [tA7 lfmt 6Ly76e tf ZLQ ufSAffS], ZAL0A Lm 9ft7QtL866e tA7 iJuz 98e fst tA8t DLI7m 48P6 tA7 fQ6e fst A7 08Q D7t.

THOUGHTS OF THE BOOK PRIOR TO THE LAST 10%

Trying to be really unspoilery, but there is a tonal shift between the first 90% or of the book and the last 10%. My math might be off, especially if the full-release of the book trims some chapters. There is a moment where the general scope changes. It all makes sense in the context of the dungeon, and is telegraphed. ANYHOW…

I suspect that for a some people the vibe difference between Book 7 and Book 8 will be jarring, in that the parts that made Book 7 rough to take are still there but the parts that made Books 1-6 beloved are kind of not.

In a lot of ways, Book 7 is the kind of book that tends to end most series. A big build up with a huge number of threads and a lot of stakes and deaths and shifts.

Book 8, until that final “10%” is much more like the earlier books with Carl and Co having to bounce off a never ending series of rules and rails and changes. Only without the more “innocent” joy that was often in those books where every impossible problem was solved with stupid (or sometimes stupidly smart) solutions. That still happens, but it feels a lot less like a person just a little too dumb to understand game design tripping over exploits and more like a person being given a bunch of extra saving throws because they are dating the DM.

It also commits the usual sin of such fiction – one shared by a lot of the type – that the series starts out as effectively a story about people working together and then they find more friends and allies and it all about a group of beautiful people weathering horrible things then it gets to BIG BOY LORE GOD mode and those friendships start taking back seat to mechanics.

Dinniman course corrects around the half-way point, and does a good job of it, but by then you have several of the “lessons” learned from previous books just gone and some extra characters just deeply underutilized. Book 7 set up a lot of interesting things for Books 8+ but character growth comes really close to stuttering until its hard forced to take a step back from the edge.

Dungeon Crawler Carl is the kind of series that turns baby (goblin) killing atrocities into a kind of wry joke that you laugh out but kind of hate laughing at. The 7th book had to set some of that aside, and make you actually really hate baby (goblin) killing, but the 8th book makes a misstep in leaving it set aside too long, I think. It needed to step forward or step back and it just of stepped in place for a good bit of it.

Very few non-Carl – maybe not even Donut – characters really get a chance to act to their fullest. There are exceptions, for sure, and some absolutely lovely moments but its the rails of the earlier books hitting the seriousness of the 7th.

I still really, really enjoyed it, but I missed the sense of a group of friends sitting around a table playing a roleplaying together that other books had managed to hit. Despite the atrocities they were living through or maybe because of them. This is largely just friends having to suffer.

aK7 C XLLmDSqXQD RnbD nF QdD QnKX9 RdqFQ qR QdD RQq9QD7 9n2D RQnmh VDQODDK gXm9 XK7 vXQqX XK7 dnO dD dXR 9nRQ nKD nF dqR qbLnmQXKQ SDKQDmR Qn dqR SdXnR.

THE RE-LISTEN AND THREE PIECES OF ABSOLUTELY BASELESS SPECULATION

Not much to say here, but have been – much more slowly – going back through the audiobooks and just enjoying them in bursts of half-an-hour-to-an-hour a day. I’ll either have to increase the time or speed up the read-speed when I get to the later, chonkier books. The idea is just to continue to enjoy them but also listen out for a bunch of details that got buried under the weight of so many damned characters and threads.

While doing it, I started sorting through my wild speculation mental folder, and I have come up with a few ideas [though one I already wrote above, I will put it down here]:

[Not really spoiling any book, but I’ll still obfuscate it, but about something that happens early on, very early on] K3 bOU3 kW8dQ O8G tOvz qyNvWwOwzR OcOu3. kW8dQ zOQ3v fORf fb3 QbWdCbQ fb3 b3OvG m3vGq8O8G gOzzq8C b3v. tOvz cOf cOuq8C dN 4vWy O 8qCbQyOv3. ib3f3 QcW Qbq8Cf z3OG QW Qb3y w3q8C Owz3 QW 38Q3v Qb3 Gd8C3W8. 1’U3 cW8G3v3G 4Wv O yq8dQ3 q4 Qbqf cOf z3OGq8C dN QW fWy3 uq8G W4 NzWQ NWq8Q, 3fN3gqOzzR fq8g3 zOQ3v C3Q 8WQ3f OwWdQ fWy3Qbq8C 4dguR w3q8C dN cqQb m3vGq8O8G O8G Qb3 4WWG fQd44, 3Qg.
[Book 7] vs3KIQC lZL LhQ s0 zss6 j, ybw4L zsY CKgC CZL QsLCh’l 0LLF KhglZwhO 3ZLh CZL lsb4ZLC AKIF QLCPwlL 8LwhO K8FL ls ILKQ Cs5LshL 8g lsb4Z. c KF5sCl lK6L lZwC KC K 6whQ s0 “c 0LLF rslZwhO” 3Zw4Z ZKC FsIL wh lZL OK5L/hsNLFC. vZKl lZLIL wCh’l l3s PFKgLIC – lZL abFsOwCl NC 7PslZL4KIg – 8bl K4lbKFFg lZILL KhQ AKIF ILPILCLhlC lZKl bCL s0 vZL rslZwhO wh OK5L KC K 5LlKPZsI hsl LNLh lZL 7c bhQLIClKhQC gLl.
[Book 8] I1b wSpb q 91sEl uCSP9 s9, 91b wSpb q’w 5pb99y WPpb 91u9 9HS CbsEVW CbsEV 8SwCsEbJ 9SVb91bp sW VSsEV 9S Cb 91b esEuz uEWHbp. q HuW 91sElsEV 91b Xq uEJ…dupz? dupz uEJ 2SEP9? FSPsW uEJ QuwuE91u? q JSE’9 lESH. dupz + 91b Xq uEJ 91bE 1b 9ps5W 91b 2SSwWJuy? 3SW9 Se wy uEWHbpW ebbz rbpy 8zs81b.

In the context of that last one, bfT3 OfdSY bfTF5 fk3 k o6Ybbe 3Y6TY3 ZfōFYF HkF5k sT1Y kFl Pk6S’3 k3gYF3TdF 3YYH3 kSHd3b 58k6kFbYYl….18b OY’SS 3YY..

Anyhow, enough of all that. I’m off to play some Dragon Quest VII and grind job tiers.

Also, Stage 3 has been fine. Stage 4, we’ll see, but I think the hot dog passes the “won’t make Doug want to die” test.