alexseanchai | (no subject)

Thing that is profoundly irritating: attempting to Internet via laptop on main floor of house while all the other people are on main floor of house with TV and dishwasher and whatnot making noise.

Thing that I do not know if I can do: Internet via desktop while the massive antivirus scan is running.

(Thing that was profoundly frustrating earlier today: getting desktop and laptop to behave and update their antivirus. Gee, Norton/Symantec and Comcast, thanks so much for the heads-up that our free-because-Comcast-subscribers Norton was about to expire.)

(There wasn't a heads-up. Dad understandably wouldn't share the password for updating it by any means other than face-to-face; between his work schedule, mine, and parents attending a family friend's relation's funeral yesterday some hours' drive away followed immediately by parents attending the high school production of Hello Dolly, I haven't seen him since last Sunday. So my computers have been functionally antivirus-free for three days. You see why I am concerned. The laptop came up squeaky clean, but there's a whole lot less crap to scan on the laptop. Though it did take a solid two hours for Norton to get started once it got installed; I have a suspicion that it got stuck somewhere, because when I ~~gave up telling the laptop every ten minutes to postpone restarting like it wanted to do for Windows updates~~ told the laptop to restart, it told me to cancel restarting for fear of losing much Norton data, and I canceled restarting, and within sixty seconds Norton had finished starting.)

Thing that I seem profoundly unwilling to do: anything that isn't Internetting. I have Pratchett's Equal Rites out from the library and I was gonna read it today, but I got as far as the dedication, rolled my eyes, and gave up. (For the record, I loved Hogfather and have no reason to believe I will dislike Equal Rites.) I thought about crocheting but it seemed like too much effort to go fetch any of the in-progresses. (Not too much effort to go fetch my tablet to Internet on that, though!)

Thing that I need to do in order to be a good [insert aspiration here]: actually there's several, but surprisingly enough, most of them are not Internetting.

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Equal Rites is one of the very early Discworld novels, and isn't as good as later stuff. There's a shift in... I don't know, tone, how seriously he took his characters, something. They become a lot more relatable and fleshed out, and he gives himself more room to work. Equal Rites is better than the previous two books (both Rincewind novels, which frankly are just generally not all that good), and is sort of the beginning of that shift, to my mind, and then over the next few novels it improves substantially. Not even all that many novels. Mort was the next one published, in the same year even, and it's different. Not as much different as Hogfather, which was published another nine years down the road, but distinctly. And Mort isn't as different as Wyrd Sisters, and so on. The first two books, he was just sort of throwing stuff in, having fun, goofing around. He's not entirely thinking about the implications of what he's doing with the world. He starts to do that with Equal Rites, and then is actually starting to systemize things over the next few books, and it really improves things.

If you want to read the Witches (and I recommend them a lot), but Equal Rites isn't working for you, I suggest starting with Wyrd Sisters instead. Equal Rites doesn't have a lot of bearing on the rest of the Witches books.

That turned into a whole thing, and it really wasn't meant to be. Point being, don't expect too much out of Equal Rites, it isn't Hogfather, and if it isn't to your taste, try Wyrd Sisters before giving up.

Nod, thanks. Though I seriously haven't started the book and thus cannot express any opinion on any of its contents. It's just, depression, why must you.

I know that one all too well.