The Games Gods Play by Abigail Owen (2024) – BR00299 (R2026) – 🐸🐸🐸🐸⚪
Plot or Premise
The Olympic gods still rule Earth, and once every hundred years, they choose champions to compete in the Crucible to see whose patron will lead the Gods for the next 100 years.
What I Liked
The trial of the Crucible is covered by this first book in the series instead of being spread out across multiple novels. In addition, the love interests ensure that nobody mistakes this for Percy Jackson stories aimed at a younger audience. Hades is awesome, while most of the rest of the Gods are caricatures. The trials are generally good throughout, with relatively realistic challenges and solutions.
What I Didn’t Like
When we first meet Lyra, I thought she was in her teens. Everything about her screams mid- to late- teens. A few chapters in, it reveals she’s 23. Wait, what? She is nowhere near streetsmart enough for 23, particularly with the life she’s been living and work she has been doing. Way too naïve. Equally, Lyra’s supposed curse is never fully explained, including how her existing friends “show up” for her during the Crucible but had never done so before, and she makes a couple of new friends relatively easily, but had never been able to before either?
The Bottom Line
Gods, have you met death yet?
QotD: Killing stories (PWQ00067)
GIMP lesson 003 – Launching GIMP
Since I started this “learning exercise” for GIMP almost 2.5 years ago, and the training was already a year or two old at that point, my lessons are a bit jumbled up. Not only that, it was designed for v2.6 of GIMP, and the current version is 3.0.8. A few versions later, to say the least. As such, I’m going to have to do a bit of searching from time to time to convert certain steps over into “new GIMP”.
When I started, I looked at how to save images and optimize certain file types for size. Now, I’m stepping back for a moment to see the “start-up” options to see if there is anything I should tweak or customize.
One of the first tweaks is to personalize my workspace palettes. It’s a decently long list of options of things to add to the default desktop:
- Tool options *
- Device status *
- Layers ***
- Channels ***
- Paths ***
- Colormap
- Histogram
- Selection editor **
- Navigation
- Undo history *
- Pointed
- Sample points
- Symmetry painting
- Colors
- Brushes **
- Paint dynamics
- MyPaint brushes
- Patterns **
- Gradients
- Palettes **
- Fonts **
- Tool presets
- Buffers
- Images *
- Document history **
- Templates
- Error Console
- Dashboard
The ones with asterisks are part of my default choices; a bunch of the others will come in handy when I eventually get to the stage of doing astro processing. The ones with one * are on the left sidebar; the ones with ** are on the top right; and the ones with *** are on the bottom right.
After that, you either open an existing file (FILE / OPEN) or create a new one (blank or from an existing template as FILE / NEW).
What I learned today
I learned how to set up my desktop for access to my most common “palettes” (submenus and tools) and how to create a new file.
The Compound by Aisling Rawle (2025) – BR00298 (R2026) – 🐸🐸🐸🐸⚪
Plot or Premise
In a semi-dystopian future where the world is at war, a TV show called The Compound puts 20 young men and women through a series of Survivor-like tasks, with Big Brother dynamics.
What I Liked
I gave this book to my brother-in-law for a new Christmas Eve tradition. I thought he would enjoy the cross-over stuff from the two shows. The mechanics of the game seem great, as each member tries to figure out how they want to play. Eventually, the dynamics stop being simply “fun” and the real emotions show through. And at least a couple of the roommates are a wee bit psycho.
What I Didn’t Like
I was hoping for more info about the outside world, what they were all “running” from, their backgrounds, and their motivations to join the show. And when it all comes to a head at the end, it seems weird that the show just keeps going.
The Bottom Line
Come for the show, stay for the spectacle