Tag: dragons

Dragonflight

Posted on by Traumadoll

The ninth World of Warcraft expansion, Dragonflight, launched yesterday. This expansion brings a playable dragon race called the Dracthyr who can only be a class called Evoker. The Dracthyr are available to both factions, so expect to see them everywhere like we saw Pandaren everywhere the first month or so of Mists of Pandaria. The Dracthyr became available for play during the pre-patch event. Of course I made one, leveled it, and promptly took some dragon person riding a dragon screenshots. Normally I take a while coming up with a punny name based on class abilities, but I went the uwu route with this one and named her Dwagyn. A throwaway name for a throwaway toon.

I logged on a couple hours into launch last night. While I am aware that some folks on full realms had to wait in a login queue, that was not the case on the medium pop realm Hyjal US. I didn’t experience any of the queues and server crashes that my guildmates who were able to log on right at launch time did. I used to be right there with them, laughing and cursing the launch delays. I guess I’m getting old (despite being on the younger end of the group). I no longer try so hard to keep up with the time zone differences. Some nights by the time my friends are ready to do something, it’s way too late for me to be getting started. If it’s midnight, I’m getting ready to wind down…we all know I’ll be reading for another hour or three, but that’s part of my process. If I’m up gaming until 2am, I’m tired the next day. If I’m reading, I’m more rested. The timezone differences used to stress me out, but I’ve learned to just operate on my time and enjoy the time I get to play with my friends.

Look at me going off on a tangent again. It’s a good thing I don’t try to write novels. The reviews would all be about how I meander all over the place before getting to the point.

Dragonflight launched yesterday and I’m not playing the dragon toon. As usual, I plan to main disc priest. Discipline has gone through several changes since I started playing 7 expansions and a million years ago. Some of the early changes were great and I felt like a god wielding the power of life and death. I was an unkillable beacon of light in PvP (unranked, because in reality I’ve never been that good). I had open invitations to heal for friends’ guilds’ raids, because I was a legit good PvE healer. Other changes completely revamped the way the spec works and it took me a while to learn. There was a time when I was embarrassed to do raids because I was no longer topping the heal charts. My performance wasn’t terrible, but when you’re not running your own raid team and you play with randos who don’t care about reading those charts with proper context and would rather just call you a baddie, it is properly discouraging. This last expansion, I was finally finding my groove doing 5 man content and then we all sort of fell off the game, most of us having found the expansion lackluster. So now we’re helping the dragonflights of Azeroth defend their ancestral home. I got to level 62 yesterday and I’m enjoying it so far. There have been some neat quality of life changes to the UI that I’m finding very convenient. But this is not a review, so I won’t get into all that just yet. Maybe I’ll write a review once I’ve seen more of the Dragon Isles. In the meantime, enjoy my rambling brain dump. There will probably be a few more as I continue leveling.

If you got through this, thanks. I appreciate you. Sometimes blogging feels like shouting into the void.

Monthly roundup – May 2022

Posted on by Traumadoll

No real stinkers this month. Once again I didn’t get through the third Wheel of Time book, but I made a decent dent in it. The big standout this month was The Keeper of Happy Endings, which surprised me because historical fiction isn’t my genre of choice. It was really good. I don’t know, maybe I’m getting a little sappy in my old age. Probably the same reason I liked The Space Between Us so much.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️:
The Space Between Us: Poetry and Prose, by Courtney Peppernell and Zack Grey
Of Mice and Men, by John Steinbeck
The Keeper of Happy Endings, by Barbara Davis
Choice, by Jodi Picoult
Fire in Her Dreams, by Ruby Dixon

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️:
Stolen Tongues, by Felix Blackwell
Someone Who Will Love You in All Your Damaged Glory, by Raphael Bob-Waksberg
Fire in His Chaos, by Ruby Dixon
Fire in Her Eyes, by Ruby Dixon
The Slob, by Aron Beauregard
Goldenrod: Poems, by Maggie Smith
I Live You, Call Me Back: Poems, by Sabrina Benaim
Fire in His Veins, by Ruby Dixon
Yard Work, by David Koepp

⭐️⭐️⭐️:
Winterset Hollow, by Jonathan Edward Durham
When She’s Lonely, by Ruby Dixon
The Fifth Survivor: Bacon Nightmares, by Angel Ramon
Anonymous, by Uzodinma Iweala
Ungirls, by Lauren Beukes
The Night Shift, by Alex Finlay

Winterset Hollow is pretty popular in the horror group on Facebook, so popular that there have been several posts by people with fresh tattoos if the rabbit on the cover. I wanted to love it. I usually love the books that are popular there. This one didn’t quite hit the spot for me. I know they can’t all be great, but I guess I had higher expectations for a tattoo worthy book. That said, I did like it.

On the agenda for June is that same Wheel of Time book, the last of Ruby Dixon’s dragon books, and a couple of book club selections. I may even catch up on my ARCs and finish up some drafts.

I read a book: Fire in His Blood, by Ruby Dixon

Posted on by Traumadoll

Sometime last summer I saw Ice Planet Barbarians on my Goodreads feed. I had dabbled in the romance/erotica/smutty genre many years ago but the few books I read didn’t really do anything for me so I just thought I wasn’t into it and moved on. Then I saw IPB on an old high school acquaintance’s Goodreads and I decided to give it another shot. I tore through IPB, the spin-off Ice Home, Corsairs, Corsair Brothers, and Risdaverse. That’s a lot of books featuring abducted human woman and sexy blue aliens and I loved them all. When I got through them all, I tried another monster romance by another author but didn’t love it and went back to Ruby Dixon‘s catalog. There is a drakoni in the Ice Home series, so I was familiar with them before I started the Fireblood Dragon series. The drakoni are less appealing to me than the Messakah.

Fire in His Blood describes a post apocalyptic Earth, one where a rift was opened and dragons came through, went mad, and destroyed the world as we know it. As in all post apocalyptic stories, there are human survivors spread across the world in camps that are controlled by whatever militias pop up. In most zombie apocalypse stories, those militias are usually the type who are semi-secretly preparing for the government to declare martial law in the real world. You know the type. This one didn’t specify where the militia came from, or if it did, I missed it. Anyway, this is the story of Claudia, a woman who scavenges to earn enough to keep herself, her sister, and her friend fed and sheltered. There are only two real options for women in this world, scavenging (which is against the law) and whoring. Claudia opts to lead a life of crime, which leads to her capture and incarceration by the militia. And eventual nonconsensual participation in an experiment involving women and dragons.

I’ve read some reviews and noted that many of the complaints are about Claudia and repetition, and those are valid complaints. There is a lot of repetition. And it’s all coming from Claudia and her one track mind. Her entire existence since the dragons set the world on fire has been survival and protecting her sister. So when she’s incarcerated and then forced into this experiment, the one thing she keeps thinking about is how her sister will survive without her. Most of the book is told from Claudia’s perspective and a lot of it is her thinking about how she can get back to her sister and deal with her dragon at the same time. She could have gotten swept up in the romance and left her life behind, but stayed true to herself and figured out a way to come through for her sister, with the help of her dragon of course.

While I still find the drakoni less appealing than my beloved Messakah, I did enjoy this book and will be reading the rest of the series. There isn’t a whole lot of spice, and the spice that is there is timid compared to IPB, but that’s okay. That’s one of the things I like about Dixon’s books. There’s spice, but the story is always good enough that I don’t even mind if the spice level is low. I’m looking forward to more world building, meeting more drakoni, and possibly addressing the problem of the female dragons. All of Ruby Dixon’s books that I’ve read so far feature human women and alien men, so I’m not sure if she will tackle the female dragons, but a girl can dream.