Sunbird

Finally ordered a copy of Derek Landy's Demon Road, and tomorrow I will get my hands on The Hammer of Thor from Rick Riordan's series Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard. =D

Oh man. Today's Darths & Droids is an absolute gem.

Finished the last book in Jennifer Armentrout's Dark Elements trilogy and oh. THE FEELS. Another one for the short list of books that made me cry. Starting Nightshades by Melissa F Olson soon.

I've had deep-fried Oreos a few times. They're surprisingly tasty.

Powerful itches that appear seemingly out of nowhere.

@Mestiv About abortion, those laws sound reasonable, more reasonable than the laws about it in the States. I hate the thought of abortion because it's an innocent baby's life being snuffed out, so I could never condone it for reasons of inconvenience or financial stability. But to save the mother's life, or if the baby would certainly die after birth... I can't condemn abortion for those reasons. As for rape, I find that a little more difficult to choose a stance on. I mean, no, the mother can't be blamed that she's pregnant, but it makes me sad that a baby could miss out on life as a result of the father's crimes.

I've seen you mostly in the Riddles thread and Without Looking It Up. You come up with some serious head-scratchers!

D= I realize that this post is from 2 hours ago, but please tell me you're okay now! Diabetes runs in my family, so I'm well aware of how scary volatile blood sugar can be.

Re: sandwiches, my default thought when someone just says "sandwich" is the double-bread version because I've lived in the US all my life and that's what is accepted as a sandwich here. But I also accept the existence of the single-bread version; it's just not likely that I'll think of that unless you specify "open-faced."

Grasshoppers spit as a defense mechanism. When I would grab their hind legs (the powerful ones for jumping), they'd get upset and start basically drooling in the hopes that the predator (me) would get grossed out and decide not to eat them. (I'm guessing the spit tastes nasty, but I thankfully have no personal experience with that.) The stuff is dark brown and has a similar consistency to plain old water, which is why I compared it to soy sauce. As you can imagine, I didn't like getting it on my fingers, so I'd usually try to grasp the grasshopper's legs behind its back so that it couldn't bend over and drool on me. (Plus, some of the larger grasshoppers have really powerful legs that can give you a painful kick if you don't restrain them.) My butterfly net has little brown stains all over it from distressed grasshoppers. Oh, here's a pretty good photo (spoilered for size and to spare anyone with a phobia of bugs):

@Delightful I was waiting for that kind of reaction. XD When I was younger (like 10 or 12 years old), my family had a lake practically in our backyard, edged with tall weeds, and a nice thick stand of trees nearby. We found all sorts of cool wildlife in our yard and neighborhood: frogs, toads, lizards, grasshoppers, praying mantises, turtles, herons, hawks, all kinds of songbirds, and the occasional snake. Lots of times I would take the praying mantises inside and keep them in terrariums as pets, and catch grasshoppers outside to feed to them. So yeah, I got spit on by grasshoppers pretty frequently.

@Delightful The other thing I've read and enjoyed by her is the Night Walkers trilogy. The first book is called Insomnia, and it's about this teen guy who spends the night in the dreams of the last person he makes eye contact with before bed. It is the opposite of restful, so he's literally dying of sleep deprivation until he accidentally enters the dreams of a girl whose sleeping mind is unusually peaceful, enough so that he can get some rest. Then he gets kind of obsessed with her, his lifeline, which of course leads to all sorts of problems. She's written some other things too, but I haven't read them yet.

Another week has come and gone. Accordingly, may I present The Row by J.R. Johansson? Its official US release date is October 11; my review is of the ARC I received at Salt Lake Comic Con back in March.

When you see one of your friends on GoodReads post this quote and you think, "Huh. That doesn't sound like something Kazan Smedry would say..." because your mind jumped to Alcatraz the minute you saw the name Kaz.

This kind of overreaction. I'm the goldenrod poster, and I don't think I said anything remotely inflammatory to deserve the blue poster's response.

No, but somewhat related: I'd never heard of Lin-Manuel Miranda until Hamilton took over the Internet, but now every time I see his name, this is my face: =D

Just wanted to put in my endorsement for The Aeronaut's Windlass; it's my personal favorite of Jim Butcher's work.

Finished V for Vendetta. It was... kinda meh, honestly. Rereading the new illustrated edition of Alcatraz #3 now as a refresher before I get to The Dark Talent.

@Orlion Determined Nah, I'm pretty sure it's because I've had personal experience with grasshoppers spitting on me.

Today on Weird Crem From my Brain: Eating Japanese food for dinner and all of a sudden I realize that soy sauce looks an awful lot like grasshopper spit. Why, Brain?!

All-you-can-eat buffets in a nutshell:

I thought you were misunderstanding him intentionally for the lolz. XD

I get annoyed when people mix up "illusive" and "elusive." An elusive animal is eluding you, whether you're trying to look at it, photograph it, or capture it, or whatever. An illusive animal is an illusion, meaning it isn't actually there, regardless of what you think you're seeing.

@Slowswift @Magestar I want to say that the other galaxy shape is "irregular" or something like that. Y'know, the ones that are neither spiral nor ellipse shapes but just kinda amorphous blobs.

I can pose a question, if y'all don't mind that I haven't answered one recently. WLIU name 3 types of electromagnetic radiation that are not visible to human eyes.