Zeph: the Hungry 📚🐿️ @zephasaurus_hex@booktoot.club

The Craft gave me unrealistic expectations for so many things.

Home from work for a few days to recover from surgery on my wrist. I also can't play games and am just barely getting to a point where I feel comfy typing, so it's MOVIE DAYS! Yay!

Today is witch day. Already watched Practical Magic and Witches of Eastwick, currently on The Craft, The VVitch is up next. Maybe also Paranorman?

Any good recs for things I might find on streaming?

Oops bonus toot.

I forgot the brief maybe-intentional nod to The Yellow Wallpaper I really enjoyed.

The MC's mother-in-law has dementia and dies in the book but is the first to recognize the danger and comes back from beyond to warn her and help her kill the vampire. MC is in a kitchen with yellow walls and sees her hidden behind a door.

Small and maybe not even meant to be a reference at all but I liked it.

And then he has to go away and she escapes and that's the end of that. He's kind of useless as a vampire?

Basically all his creepy vibes come from things we already know as creepy from the real world. Invading space, pushing boundaries, old boys club-ing. The whole blood-drinking becomes kind of a welcome escape from the truly terrifying systemic oppression that's all over the pages.

4/4

Like, there's a scene where Patricia is hiding in the vampire's attic and he knows she's there and also it's been established he can't see well in the light so he should be *great* in the dark and then also vampires typically have enhanced senses so it seems of course there's no way to hide...

But no, she totally does. And he's just screaming ineffectually that he totally knows where she is so she might as well come out.

(3/?)

Buffy's a little (or a lot) more on the nose with it. Like sure high school is Hell but also the actual real scary part of Buffy is all the literal vampires and other monsters coming to kill you.

In this book the vampire is real but easily dispatched once faced, the real horror is the way he weaponizes patriarchy, white supremacy, and general self-interest and how it leaves the protagonist feeling so isolated and powerless.

2/?

Despite having read Hendrix before, I think from the title and description I was expecting much more of a...straight-forward vampire-slaying cozy mystery type book?

So then like 3/4 through the book I'm like "where's all the slaying?" because it's not...you know, Buffy but moms.

(Though that story would also be cool.)

But I do like the way both deal with the supernatural as a metaphor for the horror of real life.

1/?

I went with the vampire one for my Hendrix book this year and started it today. Pretty good so far!

I really like the way he builds up to the scary vibes by rooting it in very mundane real-world creepiness and then just really slowly turning up the supernatural a notch.

We got this eco-friendly printer when our last one broke but every time it either prints more than 2 pages or doesn't print anything for more than a few days it just completely fails and has to go through like a dozen cleaning/testing cycles and tbh I've probably wasted way more ink with this thing than I would have in a normal printer.

I seem to read one Grady Hendrix book a year, usually right around this time I think.

Do I want this year to be "The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires" or "We Sold Our Souls"?

🤔

I have no reason to dress up for Halloween. Which means, I will still definitely dress up for Halloween but pick a costume that doesn't require me to do much. And that it doesn't matter at all if no one will know who/what I'm supposed to be.

Finally, it is time for my Quentin Quire Halloween costume! Yay!

Gave my first ever shot to someone who wasn't me!

Just a saline one for a test/practice. I still need to meet some requirements to do it for realsies at my job.

But it was cool!

I don't know if this actually needs a cw and I feel weird when the cw is probably more graphic than the content in the post but idk how else to handle it so if I did a bad and someone has advice for future please let me know.

Oh. My. Glob.

I was never a wimp about pain, if I'm talking about it it means *I'm actually in too much pain to ignore* and people have just been ignoring me anyway my whole life because whenever I complained about being in pain I'd downplay it and be in tears over something I'd say wasn't "that bad."

Wow.

3/3

In fact, I'm frequently known for not taking my pain seriously and waiting to seek medical help until I just can't function anymore.

This is *so much* my thing that it was a big part of my autism diagnosis as a child - that if I was given a task (like running laps) I'd keep at it even if I was struggling to breathe and just ignore my body's feedback.

And *still* I kept being told I just whine about pain and use it as an excuse.

2/3 oops

In about a week I go for surgery to fix my messed up wrist. This is great, because it's been hurting for most of this year and I kept thinking it was nothing and I should just wait for it to heal.

Co-worker made a comment about how my approach to injury is wear a brace and go to work as normal.

And *that's* weird because my whole life my family told me I was a wimp with no pain tolerance.

And it just hit me *no one else* thinks that about me.

1/2

Been watching a lot of vtubers and now I really want to commission my own avatar so I can be a cute anime boy and play games or talk about tv shows or books or whatever.

This is probably a really bad impulse and I'm glad I can't afford it right now, but we'll see how I feel in a month.

Reading "The Handmaid's Tale" for the next book club meeting.

I've avoided it for a long time because I thought it would be too much, but I like it so far.

Serious and scary issues addressed, but with just a sprinkling of hope (which tbh is about all the hope I can make room for a lot of the time these days) and w/a focus mostly on the narrator as a person you almost start to meet as a friend. Softens the blow a bit and makes it easier to handle.

Felt spooky, might run around some dungeons later idk.

#ffxiv #gaming