PNW Affliction I: Recycled

 

This is probably the first time I've read something in this format. The story picks up quickly, and I appreciate the author's backstories and explanations; they help when you read this book as a standalone.

We follow the main character, who sometimes talks to readers throughout the night. He is caught in an unfortunate situation and has to spend the night outside his home, trying to survive, which is the book's whole premise.

I wish to know the character and the plot better. I know bits and pieces of what the MC is like from how he looks at things, which is interesting, but I don't know the motivation and his actual purpose yet. I would love to better understand why someone like him, who is resourceful, fearless, and seems very logical, feels the need to spend the night out there, risking frostbite, instead of going home, somewhere nearby. I believe there will be more justifications to help me understand his choice in the subsequent books. It would be nice to have a clearer indication if the group he meets at the end is the perpetrator of the first incident or, at least, if it's related. It seems like he has another suspicion for another group of people.

Multiple scenes make me hopeful about the possibility of this turning into something epic (like the card), and everything is done for a reason. The ending opens the potential for more stories and answers to all questions. This book One feels a bit incomplete, but it starts well and captivates me to the end. It is easy to read, I like the writing style, the character is thought-provoking with many indications about the intriguing past that shaped him into what he is now. I like every detail, and this deserves a more complete assessment, so I'll read the follow-up book and return to this review.

You Are Not Alone

 

June is Male Mental Health Awareness Month, and Father’s Day also falls in June in many parts of the world.

Around 2002, I worked as a junior staff member in this big company, with multiple departments on multiple floors. My department (around a dozen people) was located next to another (around four-five dozen). The workflow sequence was from ours to theirs. I don’t need to liaise with them in Department 2 since I only did technical presentation work exclusive to Department 1. Still, I know their faces and sometimes their names because we shared communal facilities, and there were some team-building activities now and then.

I had a small lunch group of around five people or less. Sometimes, one or two people from Department 2 would join us, but it was rare. I didn’t really enjoy lunch for personal reasons (story for another day) and because working-hour lunch was hellish. Everywhere was jampacked, it was always rushed, it was harder to secure a table for a group, and before you finished half of your food, other patrons would stand behind you to wait for your seats. I don’t exaggerate this; it’s still happening now. So, the food court was a nightmare, but that was what most of us could afford.

One day, this middle-aged guy from 2 invited us for lunch in a more private restaurant. He had ‘booked’ us the day before. I knew him only from passing interactions as a nice, hardworking, quiet, respected, and polite guy. Sometimes, we exchanged small talk in the pantry, but I never had lunch with him. I wasn’t sure; it was only my first year, and most likely, one or two guys in my group had. Anyway, it was nice to have a peaceful meal once in a while, sitting in a comfortable restaurant without needing to rush. I didn’t know he could be very social and chatty; he was friendly and seemed happy to know us better.

The day after, he jumped to his death from his high-rise apartment.

He was a father of two, and no one, not even people who were so-called close to him, expected that. Twenty-two years now, it still makes me sad to think about how nobody knew what he was going through. I still don’t know why, and out of respect, I didn’t go around and ask. Most people just speculated, and it became a blurred line between reality and assumption.

I don’t need anyone to scream at me about depression doesn’t recognize gender etc. While it’s true, it’s also true that many men decide to face it themselves because they feel they can’t talk about it without prejudice. Sometimes, it’s a stigma, sometimes, they don’t think they have good support around them, and sometimes, they actually don’t have anyone to help them. Although the roles have shifted, most responsible men hold big burdens on their shoulders about what they should be in the family and society and work hard to be the pillar for everyone. It’s very tough, and I really respect them for that. I could only wish that everyone else could also be the pillar for them when they need it.

I want to share this video; it always gets me every time I watch it.

Many Happy Returns

 

We have just celebrated my dog’s 9th birthday two weeks ago. 

I have always loved dogs and almost went through the adoption process with a rescue shelter, but unfortunately, it wasn’t meant to be (some scheduling and other issues). After that, I decided not to get a dog at all since I was traveling quite often, I didn't want to leave my dog in boarding houses often.

My colleague learned about it in a passing conversation, and a few weeks after that, she offered me a puppy for adoption. It was a coincidence there were three new puppies in her home (on top of the existing four dogs), and they couldn’t take care of all of them. Since she knew my difficulty, it came with a perk: I can put him with them whenever I travel.

My dream dog back then was a big dog, a mongrel, like the ones my family had. Mongrels dominate rescue shelters, as people here prefer pricey, purebred, ‘cute’ dogs. So, I was looking at this puppy picture and thought, oh dear, this looked like those fancy celebrity dogs. I hesitated, but how could I resist helping give this puppy a home with a perk that solved my problems?

When I brought him home, he was scrawny and smelly. He loved eating rocks and was scared of other puppies, waves, water, and the sea. He pooped on his bowl and tipped over everything. But he is the most intelligent dog, and with some training and patience, he becomes the most confident dog who surfs and is fearless. He is a well-behaved dog, never destroys anything, and has many toys because everything is as good as new, and he loves to play. No bias!

Here he is on his 9th birthday. He is my best friend, my companion, my therapy dog. He is not a lap dog; he would push me off with his paws for unsolicited cuddling (unless it’s pretty cold!), but whenever I am sad or angry, he would sit on my lap and nudge or lick away my sorrow until he is convinced that I am no longer sad or angry. One of the reasons I quit my job was because I wanted to spend more time with him. I arrange my life around him, and there is nothing I wouldn’t do to make sure he is happy. We have an unbreakable bond, and everyone says he takes after me. He doesn’t like people, screaming children, or high-pitched and repetitive sounds. We howl together every time an ambulance passes us in traffic and bark at the neighbor’s chickens when they get too rowdy.

These were the pictures sent to me before adoption. He was around two months old.

His first day with me at home, he was three and a half months old. The killer eyebrows! I know!

Now. Today. A wise and grumpy nine-year-old. Wishing for many more years together

Links to free short stories from authors with subscription. Maybe you will find some stories you like.

SF/F GIVEAWAY

 

Dial-up Internet

 

Whenever I meet with my friends (I only have a few, and it is dwindling), we always reminisce about good old times, well, of course, on top of health talk and how annoying it is to grow older. Another topic is about technology and the internet as we put on our best grumpy behaviors while squinting on the phone and cursing that everything needs to be an app nowadays. 

I am a younger Gen-X (Gen-Xer?). I was a bit late, but the first time I accessed internet was in the year 2000 when I just graduated from University and was looking for work. It's hard for users nowadays to pick email addresses they like without numbers and weird combinations of unusual words, but back then, we could! My email was exactly what I wanted, and my password was a six-letter word, no uppercase, no punctuations, no numbers, and it didn't look like a cursed word. 

I had to take at least a thirty-minute public transport ride to access a facility called Internet café. It had a bunch of PCs with fat screens, and I paid hourly to access the internet. With internet, I meant email, because that was the only thing I knew, and it took me almost a full hour to check and reply. How many inboxes did I have? One! Yeah, it was the combination of a slow connection, my navigation skills, and drafting an email in English, a language I barely knew or used back then. It was also my very first inbox and reply (of course, on top of the usual automated welcome from the provider), and I created the email for this purpose not too long ago before my interview.

Thankfully, it was good news. I got my first job, and it was my top choice. I would be back in a few days, wandering around the neighborhood, catching public transport, clearing the café's administration, waiting for the green field and blue sky background to appear, waiting for the connection with the soundtrack of EEEEE OOOO EEEEE OOOO TEEEEEEEEEEEE, logging into my email with my very easy to remember password, and check whether they replied me. Woohoo! Easy peasy. Hopefully, they would have replied to me by then because it cost me a lot to get there. Otherwise, I'd be back in a few more days. I might have to break my piggy bank, but woohoooo!

So, that was my first experience with internet. I still remember the layout of the café and the relief I had. I was considered lucky because we didn't have Google Maps back then. I had no idea where I could find one but to explore around. The content of the internet back then? It was pretty much the same as what we have now regarding the concept. There were creeps in ICQ (a chat room), kind Nigerian princes (so many of them) who tried to give me money, hoaxes, advertisements about enlarging stuff, and unsolicited access to uncensored beheading videos.

How was your first internet experience? Was it fun, traumatizing, or something you fondly remember like mine? Nowadays, on top of all the negativities and stupidities I always have a hard time processing, I am still grateful because I get opportunities like this to connect with all of you without having to meet in person. I am an uber introvert, but I love exchanging minds and learning about worlds outside my own. 

The Magnificent Swimming Pool

 

I had a chance to visit a traditional Asian village last week and spent hours in a place that brought me to the past.

With chickens and ducks freely roaming around, one always side-eyed me with judgmental eyes (maybe he thought I was supposed to feed him). I had pleasant afternoons watching goat MBEEE on their way home. Kids were out playing bicycles and soccer and got muddy on one rainy afternoon with laughter as the soundtrack. 

Dirt, animals, soaking in the rain, and playing outside were the good times of my childhood. Nothing could kill us; tumbling from the tree, falling to the drain, running from a snake, and stepping on a colony of fire ants was just another Thursday. Even the ghost in our attic and the monstrous neighbor didn’t kill us. Well, I made one up, but the monstrous neighbor was real; she threatened to chop off my hand because I touched her flower, but that is the story for another day. It traumatized me for a while, and I have been planning on an elaborate revenge by making her a despicable character in my future book! Just wait, you mean neighbor!

My primary (elementary) school back then was considered the biggest in town. To me, it was huge, with giant outdoor courts and a gigantic park with trees that reached the sky with my favorite bench under one of the trees (when I had the chance to go back as an adult, it was a small school with two rundown courts and a small patch of green with a few medium-sized trees, but everything looked big and grand when I was a child). 

One day, I arrived at school, and the whole park and court were filled with water. They were situated lower than the main street outside, and after raining the entire night and, of course, a horrible drainage problem, the whole yard was flooded up to my knee. We could still access the classrooms through the corridors, but during the class, everyone was looking out of the window longingly at the most magnificent swimming pool. Most of us didn’t have many chances to swim in a proper swimming pool, so it was very tempting. Our class had a sports subject that day, and we begged our teacher to let us play in the water. They did!

We giggled, laughed, and splashed each other while wading through the knee-high brownish-clogged rainwater; we couldn’t even see our toes or identify what we were stepping on. Other classes that didn’t have sports subjects that day were allowed to play in the water during the break as long as they didn’t get their uniforms wet. You would see rows and rows of shoes on the corridor with children walking around holding hands in the ‘pool.’ We were the luckiest ones as we got to play longer and had change of clothes, so it was up to us whether we wanted to go all in, as in real swimming!

Germs? Pathogens? Possible dangerous animals? Possible skin problems? Oh yeah, the risk remained the same with our modern day, but the attitude was different. Maybe some studies say we have better immune systems; maybe some parents would categorize that as horror. I don’t know. I am not a parent, and I am not an expert. But I can tell you that it was one of the best days of my childhood, and it’s nice to recount the memory.

Locky seems to agree with the theory 'What doesn't kill you makes you stronger.' Below are his pictures lounging on the river discharge to the ocean. It looks clear, clean, and pretty, but trust me, it doesn't smell as lovely as it seems. 

A Tale of the Young Witch

 

A tale of a young witch is a very ambitious fantasy. However, I am not sure why it’s divided into three parts because all three happen continuously and in the same timeline, involving the same characters.

The book has a simple but interesting beginning. We follow the story of Amelia as some origin story because she is the titular character who starts as someone ordinary enough with ordinary life, but it doesn’t stay that way for long. From there, the journey goes to common fantasy routes with a twist ending. More on these later.

This goes throughout the book, but it’s more jarring in the beginning; it is the way the story is told as ‘Amelia this,’ ‘Amelia that’ even though the scenes only involve one character or the other character is a male. It becomes very distracting because of the number of times the name is thrown instead of using she or her. I believe it would average at least three times per page. I am also distracted by the description of Jack earlier as lanky and when he is mentioned later in the book as lean. It would be fine as the two definitions are close enough if it’s not mentioned too often. Other terms that bother me are between ‘puppet’ and ‘clone.’ I love Sci-Fi, and the way these terms are used as if they are the same confuses me. In the earlier scenes with Scarlet, I’m sorry, but I have to repeat the word ‘distracting’ to read things like ‘angelic’ voice and ‘gorgeous’ eyes while they are in dire situations and not some observations of someone about the character. But these are nitpicking, and they most likely don’t distract others as much.

I prefer realistic fantasy, if that’s a thing. I wish there were a genre for it. It’s like fantasy, but the plot, the problems that the characters face, and the characters themselves are very much in line with reality. I devour The Song of Ice and Fire with great interest and have no problem with big-sized books, but this book makes me recall my experience watching the first Transformer movie. I’d categorize it as pure fantasy, so maybe I am biased in my reading experience because, as mentioned, I prefer the other kind of fantasy, nevermind they both have a similar magical creature. It starts well, and everything is intriguing enough. Still, unfortunately, I can’t wait for it to end after the final fights that stretch over one hundred pages, more or less, with repetitive dialogues. The fights are great and well-written, but it takes one-fifth of the book, and I have to admit I don’t care anymore since the outcome is obvious to me anyway. And there is a plethora of action scenes before these final fights that already exhaust me.

Having said all that, pure fantasy readers might enjoy this book. The author put a lot of effort into this, and there are a lot of unique and great scenes for the theme that is probably quite saturated. The characters are done well; we are introduced to plenty of them, and although some have fewer scenes than they deserve, they are distinguishable enough. The fight scenes are creative and well-written, and although I am not really taken by the ending, it has the potential for more stories.

3.5 rounded up.

 

Fools' Day

 

Locky is not a fool and knows how to enjoy a beach day and make that bath worth it!

 

ONE: The hitmanS

 

You get what you pay for.

 

This was what a Chinese Developer thought when he hired a hitman to kill his competitor because he was sued over a project dispute. At the price of 2 million Yuan (around $282,800), that should be enough to get a good quality hitman, or so he thought, and got Hitman 1.

 

Hitman 1 happily took the job, and with his impeccable business instinct, he hired Hitman 2. Why should he do the job if he could hire others for half the price and get the work done without getting his hands dirty? He was a genius! However, the idea was not exclusive. Gone were the days when we saw the John-Wick-alike kind of hitman; they all turned into entrepreneurs! So, Hitman 2 hired Hitman 3 with even less price, Hitman 3 hired Hitman 4, and Hitman 4 hired Hitman 5. That was a synchronization of teamwork we had never seen before. However, once it got to Hitman 5, the amount of money was not lucrative anymore; it was also quite insufficient to hire another tier of hitman. With that in mind, Hitman 5 let the murder target know about the plan. They staged a murder, and all the hitman wannabes and the mastermind were caught.

 

 

TWO: The elusive escapee

 

Speaking about cool movie characters (Yes, I like John Wick. I believe anyone who loves dogs like John Wick), there was a time when police in the Irish Republic faced the challenge of a serial traffic offender. This guy was so skillful he evaded tons of traffic violations by giving the authorities a different address every time, continued to break the traffic law, and always escaped the consequences. We are talking about fifty of them. Fifty! And I can't even win one game of hide and seek with my dog.

 

The police scratched their heads and were convinced they were dealing with a mastermind, 'The Fine Evader,' 'The Road Flash,' and 'The Asphalt Avenger' were the allocated supervillain names—by me. So, who was this traffic offender that had reached the legendary and cult level among the Irish traffic police?

 

Spoiler alert: his name was Prawo Jazdy. And who is this Prawo Jazdy? Prawo Jadzy is actually not a person but a Polish term for a driving license. Polish people were, and I believe still are, one of Ireland's most significant immigrant populations. So, there were over fifty times when the police wrote down the first line they saw on these offenders' driving licenses instead of their actual names, which led to the hunt for this mythical escapee.

 

For those who like to watch and read weird random things on the internet, you might have heard those stories before. For those who haven't, both are legit, they really happened and are out there in the news. Both stories amused me and made me laugh out loud in the middle of the night.

 

Happy April Fools' Day.

 

I don't do pranks, and I am not a recipient of pranks from random acquaintances. I have that kind of face that my schoolmates and colleagues think twice before they pull one on me. I hope! There are times I make exceptions for people I am close with, but we don't do those annoying elaborate pranks, just harmless, endearing ones, and they are not confined to April Fools. One of the most memorable pranks I got was the incident I called 'ball-less mouse,' No, we didn't catch the mouse and castrate it. Gen X-ers would understand that computer mouse/mice (?) used to have balls. The balls were removable for cleaning because they could get sticky over time, but no ball or cursor! I realize it's impossible to talk about balls without them sounding like innuendos. One morning, I almost pulled my hair out because I couldn't find the cursor. I am not a patient person when things break. Growing frustrated, I moved the mouse frantically with a little bit of slamming, but it still didn't work. It went on repeatedly until I heard an eruption of laughter. Someone had stolen my mouse's ball.