"You're shooting stars with the barrels in your eyes."

Hey to my tiny but powerful reader base. I'm back. I didn't forget you. How could I forget you? You're so quirky and have excellent posture.

So yeah, I took last week off from my rigorous schedule of blogging once a week for my birthday.

I also have been spending a lot of time engaging with humanity in the wild and at work, as well as at school. I started my new semester taking my Noir fiction class. Finished up discussions on The Maltese Falcon and am on to The Big Sleep. I realized I made a fatal error in not rereading The Big Sleep, since it's been almost exactly a year since I read it, and the details are hazier than I expected. Hopefully no one notices me mostly commenting about the movie.

Aside from school work, and work work, I've been playing Fallout 4 in the wake of the Far Harbor DLC being released. I've been farting around bringing all my settlements up to snuff and rearranging my house furniture with all the new things added for settlement building. I spent all last night doing this:

From Drab

To Fab

Thanks to a post on /r/fallout, and me not reading patch notes, I found out how to rotate items on multiple axis's, so once again I spent a full work day straightening up my personal settlement. Welcome Home.

I've of course been playing the DLC but I've been having issues with live broadcasting on twitch lately so I don't have anything to show for it. I've mostly been doing side quests and I haven't advanced the main plot for Far Harbor yet. I've been running around the island being chased by mutated angler fish. But I finally decked out my guns with top quality mods, and I'm getting into more of my Charisma perks, so needing guns will hopefully be a thing of the past. Pacifying a Deathclaw and sicking it on someone is fun.

I've also been on a huge Deftones listening kick. If you're a fan and haven't picked up their latest album, Gore, I would do so. I'd say quality-wise it falls in between Diamond Eyes and Koi No Yokan, and has just as many awesome old school metal sounding riffs (especially Doomed User) as shoegazing walls of sound (like Phantom Bride). I've been a fan of them since '98 after I stumbled upon Around the Fur, and they're a band that's grown in maturity alongside of me just growing. As much as I love the nostalgia drummed up by listening to Adrenaline-White Pony, I feel their last 3 albums since losing Chi have just gotten more focused and adventurous with their sound. Having been listening to their albums in chronological order, the teenage bombast of Adrenaline has its fingers all over the rest of their catalog, but the last 21 years have morphed their sound into something all together different. What started out on Fireal and Fist closing the album with powerful soaring guitars with weird sounds and effects has become their signature sound.

And in the last 2 weeks where you haven't heard from me, I also finished chapter 8 rewrites with chapter 9 almost complete (had I not been playing Fallout till 5 in the morning, I would have).  So I'm gonna close out on the requisite dog picture and chapter posting. See you next week, gang.

Someone get this freakin' thing off me!

EDIT: I also managed to finish chapter 9 today, so I added that below. It's two for you, because one won't do.