if i fail, let me be wormfood.

hand still hurts! probably surgery in my future, alas. i hope i can get it done quickly; i'd like to be recovered by the end of the year. this has really thrown my last quarter in disarray...

in other news i've still been spending time in the diadem, because i like pain i guess. i only have... 88,000 more grade 3 materials to gather before i can work on the actual main achievement. give me strength. the only other ffxiv news is that i'm making good progress on my cosmic points; i'm nearly at 500k in the three gatherers thanks to red alerts. i've really been trying to finish the gatherer point grind as quickly as i can because i know it'll be way more tedious once people stop pinging red alerts...

in reading news, i read Valerie Valdes's Where Peace is Lost the other night and really enjoyed it! nothing groundbreaking in terms of plot, but i thought the worldbuilding was really neat and the characters were delightful. i've lined up a bunch of sci fi books to read next; currently reading Megan E. O'Keefe's The Two Lies of Faven Sythe which has likewise had fascinating worldbuilding. hoping to find more contemporary sci fi i love; i'm very open to recommendations.

nothing much else this week, tbh. the hand thing scuttled a lot of my plans. i need to get working on my ardbert site, though, so hopefully i can focus on that this week.

late post again because... idk, i spent six hours in the diadem in final fantasy xiv in the past two days, my brain is mush.

anyway, no real updates here. hand still hurts, treatment hasn't worked, continuing to worry that i have surgery in my imminent future. at least presumably then i'd get full use of my hand back, but still, :(. not much i can do about it at this point though.

i really want to play video games, but my hands are only partially cooperating with me. as a result i've been doing really simple tasks in ff14 that don't tax my hands too much, and avoiding any high level combat content. of course all i actually want to do is the latter — i've barely touched the new deep dungeon despite how much i want to play through it, alas. anyway, this is why i've been in the diadem... i might as well do something towards a long-term goal, right...

still reading a lot. this week i've been reading the burning kingdoms trilogy by tasha suri, which is an indian-inspired sapphic fantasy. i'm about 80% through the last book, which i've been struggling with somewhat as the main draw of the series is the dynamic between the two female leads, and they spent a good portion of this book apart. any time they're in the same room the story is much more alive (the sapphic yearning is off the charts) but as a result i've been finding the other parts of the story less interesting. although anything to do with prince rao is generally excellent.

once i finish that i'm hoping to dive back into sci fi, though; i have an original sci fi story concept i'm noodling on and i need some inspiration from contemporary books in the genre, so it's time to read. will probably pull together a reading list tomorrow, since my TBR is mostly fantasy-adjacent right now.