Happy spooky season all!
I talked about my then-upcoming endometriosis treatment surgery in my last post. It’s done now and it went fine! They managed to save my fallopian tubes, too. It was a minor surgery with no arduous recovery period, but I still had to spend two nights at the hospital. I’m not gonna recap the entire thing here, and it has been recapped to friends and family repeatedly in great detail anyway, but I’ll share some of the Experiences that left the most impression on me (as someone fortunate enough to never have had many surgeries and hospital stays in her life).
Did you guys know there’s a high chance you’ll experience shoulder and rib pain after any abdominal surgery, but especially after gynecological laparoscopy? I didn’t! Which is why I assumed it was my fault for sleeping in a weird position and raising my hospital bed too high, lol. But no, it’s actually apparently has something to do with the residual gas that’s left in your body after surgery. They pump your stomach full of gas to be able to see clearly during the operation, and what remains of that gas after they “release” it may affect the nerve that connects your neck to your diaphragm, if I understand that correctly. As a result, you’re in varying degrees of pain for several days after your surgery, and it travels through your upper body – that’s my experience, at least. At some point I almost fainted because at that particular time it literally hurt to breathe and I couldn’t inhale properly. Thankfully, for me the pain was mostly present only when I was vertical. Whenever I was able to lay down on my side, the pain almost completely disappeared.
That was actually the only pain I experienced. I expected my actual insides to hurt at least a bit post-op, but nope, nothing. Is it normal? Is it the result of paracetamol drips they gave me twice a day while I was at the hospital? Who knows. Either way, #blessed.
My post-op treatment includes inducing actual menopause for three months, though, so that’s uhhhh not fun. The menopause itself will take a bit to really stick, but I’ve already started experiencing other side effects from my meds – nothing too painful so far, thankfully. Anyway, not much left to do except tough it out.
Terrorposting
A big thing I did was finally read The Terror by Dan Simmons and watch the AMC adaptation. I’d been curious about both for some time, but only recently was I gripped by a Sudden Urge to actually do something about it. I enjoyed both, even though neither sparkled a hyperfixation like I secretly hoped they would (rumor has it she was still so traumatized by The Wheel of Time cancellation she tried switching to content about white men…). I do, however, have Thoughts.
First of all, while I did enjoy both the book and the show, I shouldn’t have watched one so soon after reading the other. That’s usually my number one rule, and I broke it. I wonder what I’d think about the show if I waited a little… because, while the show does keep the spirit of the book, there are some key changes that left me disappointed because that’s just not what I wanted or expected to see (but there are also plenty of changes for the better, especially when it comes to the Issues the book had).
The rest of my thoughts will be spoiler-heavy, so I’m hiding it under the details tag just in case.
What really disappointed me is that the show went for a completely different overall vibe than the novel. The supernatural horror – my favorite part of the book – was very considerably toned down :( The supernatural stuff in the book has much more of a cosmic vibe (sidenote: speaking of cosmic, the book is dedicated to the people who worked on The Thing from Another World (the 50s movie famously remade in the 80s by John Carpenter), which I found really cool! I like that movie). The show, however, is focused on the comprehensible horrors like lead poisoning, cannibalism and starvation, and even the supernatural stuff is more or less down-to-earth. I wish they went harder on the supernatural part! I think it could've been a nice backdrop for the man-made horrors.
Show!Tuunbaq is very much an animal – a supernatural one that eats souls as well as flesh, yes, but an animal nonetheless. He can be injured and killed, even if it takes a while. Book!Tuunbaq is very different from that. He’s a metaphysical presence as well as a physical one. There are many moments in the book where he appears out of nowhere, as if he’s part of the land (or ice) itself. He can’t be killed or injured. His physical description has very little in common with the Tuunbaq of the show (he was supposed to be a giant polar-bear-like bipedal creature with pitch-black eyes! Look how they massacred my boy!). What I liked on the show and what felt in keeping with the book was the way they didn’t really show Tuunbaq in the first few episodes. He was a shadow in the distance, a brief sighting, the sound of breathing and footsteps – and all that for such an underwhelming reveal. So much suspense only for Tuunbaq to look Like That :’’’’) This is especially painful when you know what he was actually supposed to look like.
Because of this approach many a scene I loved in the book was lost or altered, like the carnival scene. I wish we got it the way it was in the book, with Tuunbaq massacring everyone instead of Dr. Stanley going mad and burning everything down (I had to google why he did that btw). The heavy-handed reference to Poe’s Masque of the Red Death was also very dear to my heart and I’m sad it didn’t make it into the adaptation.
And, of course, the main horror that is absent from the show is that in the book nobody knows what the fuck is happening. They don’t know what Tuunbaq is or what he wants and they aren’t entirely sure Silna isn’t controlling him. There's just no creep factor in the show, sadly. At least it seemed so to me.
(I do have to admit that Tuunbaq being killed and Silna being forced to live separately from her people as a result is a pretty sick metaphor for colonization.)
The biggest positive change about the show vs the book was DEFINITELY the treatment of the few female characters we get to meet. The book was VERY evidently written by a white man in the mid-2000s, and while I know this flavor of white male writer and accept (and expect) that their books often are simultaneously the best and worst thing you’ve ever read, it still gave me a bit of an ick. Of course I didn’t really expect a novel about 19th century British sailors to have many women in it or for anyone in that book to be Woke™, but I at least expect the author to treat the female characters, I don’t know, neutrally? Instead, Sarah Cracroft is only there to be a sexual object (in what I think may have been a genuine but very poor attempt at subversion) and to give Crozier a sad backstory, and Silna is also objectified, mostly by the characters but by the author too (did she really have to be topless whenever she was on the ship, Dan Simmons? And did you really have to write the ending the way you did?). I’m glad they both had more agency in the show, especially Silna. I’m slightly miffed she could talk and actually communicate with the sailors for most of the show, but only because it removed the horror of nobody knowing what’s going on. It’s a reasonable choice for the TV medium and it feels like the show was much more respectful to Silna as a character. I also prefer the show’s ending for that reason, even though it’s terribly sad for her.
Reading
Other than The Terror, I’ve read one (1) book and that is The Turn of the Key by Ruth Ware. I read it at the hospital while I was recovering. Can’t say I particularly liked it, but it kept me company and was a fast, easy read. However, certain themes and twists felt shockingly similar to The Death of Mrs Westaway, the only other Ruth Ware book I’ve read, plus there was also a certain thing that happened at the very end that made suspension of disbelief hard for me :’) And it wasn’t even really a ghost story despite being marketed as such and the title being a clear reference to The Turn of the Screw.
There's one other book by Ruth Ware I'm still sort of interested in and may read someday (The Lying Game), but overall I've decided her books aren't really for me. Which is a shame because we have similar taste in books and there are influences and references to them in her own writing I could've enjoyed if the plots had more substance. I'm sorry, Ruth Ware! I really wanted to like your books!
Currently, I’m reading and very much enjoying The Night of the Hunter by Davis Grubb, the novel my favorite movie is based on. I'm delighted to report the book is really good! A bit of a forgotten classic, if you ask me. I’ve been thinking of creating a shrine for the movie specifically (one of my Many Site Ideas), but now it definitely needs to have a section for the book as well.
Watching
I seem to be back to watching TV again thanks in no small part to new seasons of shows I love. All Creatures Great and Small is finally back and it’s SUCH a treat! Such a shame we only get 6 episodes per series plus Christmas special... Whenever I start a show because I saw gifs of two middle-aged people looking longingly at each other, I genuinely think I won’t get too invested in them and I’m wrong every. Single. Time. This time is no different, of course. I’ve become way too invested in Audrey and Siegfried! The new series seems to be laying the groundwork for the possible future romantic turn of things between them; I’m keeping my fingers crossed the writers will actually go there! It seems inevitable on all accounts, but I remain cautious because I’ve been burned before :’’’) Honestly, as long as there’s *some* payoff with these two, I’ll be okay even if they put it off until the very last episode of the show.
We’re also already halfway through the new series of Taskmaster. The new lineup had big shoes to fill after series 19 and I was a bit scared I won’t be into it for that reason alone, but I was so wrong! S20 has been great and I’m loving it ♥ This show is great for discovering new-to-me British talent and this time I find myself absolutely captivated by Reece Shearsmith. The man makes haunted dollhouses! He commissioned a replica of the coat from Withnail & I as his Taskmaster outfit! He has a Halloween countdown on his Instagram, for God’s sake! I’m not made of stone!
(I desperately need a woman to win this series, though, so I'm rooting for my second favorite Ania Magliano.)
Speaking of discovering new-to-me people and things through Taskmaster, I’ve also finally caught up on Alma’s Not Normal, Sophie Willan’s (Taskmaster s17) show that she wrote and starred in! It’s a comedy based on Willan’s own experiences with foster care, her drug addict mother and working as an escort to support herself. This show is super funny and at times gut-wrenchingly sad.
Other notable shows I’ve been watching are Celebrity Traitors (UK) – iconic, marvelous, showstopping, etc – and, rather unexpectedly, Doc, a Fox medical drama about a doctor who lost 7 years’ worth of memories after a brain injury. This show is far from perfect and I’m not super invested in it or anything, but still, it has pleasantly surprised me! The relationships are pretty interesting, especially the dynamic between the main character and her ex-husband.
I’ve also been rewatching Scooby-Doo, Where Are You, plus I finally watched Scoobynatural, the famous 2015 Supernatural/Scooby-Doo crossover episode. I’d avoided it for years because I just don’t care for Supernatural, but I had to watch it after finding out it’s an homage to arguably the best OG Scooby episode A Night of Fright is No Delight. Turns out Scoobynatural is pretty iconic! I really enjoyed it, except for the part where Dean kept hitting on Daphne. I get that she was probably his first ever crush, but now he’s essentially a grown-ass man lusting after a teenage girl, and that ain’t it, chief.
Playing
I used to play The Sims 2 all the time when I was a teen, but I had to stop after my PC broke and was replaced by a laptop that couldn’t run TS2 properly. I just never got back to it, or any other The Sims installments, until fairly recently. I’ve been watching a lot of TS2 content which inspired me to start again, mod my game and download default replacements and some CC. I’m playing quite differently now to how I used to play – I preferred making my own Sims when I was younger, for example, rather than playing the premades, but now I plan on mostly playing the premades and utilizing rotational gameplay. Maybe I’ll even make a separate TS2 page on my site!
For now, here’s a cemetery I build for Strangetown (and placed it near Olive Specter’s house, of course). I downloaded lots of CC crosses and gravestones, but I intend to replace most of them with actual gravestones and urns when my Sims start to die.
(I know there’s a mod that gets rid of the red pause frame but the frame doesn’t really bother me)
There's a chapel and a columbarium and I guess an undertaker's hut.
The chapel is based partly on some pictures I saw on Pinterest and partly on Vibes (I know basically nothing about denominations of Christianity and their decorating styles).
