• 5 Posts
  • 70 Comments
Joined 11 months ago
cake
Cake day: August 1st, 2023

help-circle
  • “Latest hack you figured out”

    As a new parent, there have been countless little hacks shared with me that really helped my life. The first one: “sometimes babies just need to cry it out” (within reason). Helped me drop the parent guilt of hearing your baby cry and not being able to fix it right away.

    Latest one: if you are excited, they will likely be as well. (Experiences of potty training)










  • My little piece of advice: you don’t have to think about the future, tomorrow, next week, they are all far off. Think about now, this hour, the next 5 minutes, or whatever stretch of time seems manageable. What do you do now? Cook dinner? Watch a show? Cry in the shower? The future might be scary and too much to manage now. You’ll handle it when you get to it. Now, you only have to think about right now.

    Verbena tea is calming and soothing. Lavender is relaxing. Green tea for me is a calming ritual.

    You got this. Maybe it doesn’t feel like it, but you only need to do one step, and you got that one step.







  • As far as “best” go, I’m non plussed. Some of these I really liked, some… not so much.

    Personal positive votes:

    Perdido Street Station - absolutely loved it, great social commentary undertones while the story goes its own way in an incredibly vivid world

    Fifth Season - great first book of a good series, good writing and good tension points

    Saga - great art to match a great retelling of Romeo and Juliet in space, where all tropes are out the window

    Personal “good but not great”: All Systems Red - fun light read, nothing more

    Personal negative votes:

    The Name of the Wind - it’s the archetypal fantasy story, with a lot of world building and little else, a Marie Sue as a main character and a love story with many many problems. I guess it’s there because it’s famous thus essential?

    The Three Boby Problem - the writing is dry, the math is wrong, I can’t stand this book

    American Goods - talking about dry writing style. And keeping the reader in the dark about completely arbitrary world rules. I did not enjoy it, often it feels Neil Gaiman writes to show you how much smarter he is than you. I will admit that Gaiman has been extremely influential, so I support it being on the list

    Mistborn - page turner with little else to its name. The characters drop their life long ideals so easily to facilitate the plot, they are hardly believable

    The other books in the list I haven’t read nor were on my reading list, most I hadn’t heard about before.