January 30: Weird Batteries, Fiction Tropes, Painting, and Procrastination

About a year and a half ago, I started cooking meals for Lut, in an effort to reduce the salt in his diet (premade foods have lots of salt), because he has water-retention issues and is also allergic to most pills designed to treat that. As part of this effort, I bought a new meat thermometer: the instant-read sort that you stick into the meat after cooking to see if it's done.

After a few months of use, the battery died. It used disc-shaped batteries about the size of a nickel. I checked the exact kind  and ordered new ones. The new ones arrived and didn't fit. "Ah," I thought. "I ordered the wrong size. I will order the right ones later."

A year later, I was cooking turkey for Thanksgiving and Lut wanted to know why I didn't have a thermometer. I explained, and then sat down to order new batteries. I could no longer find the original battery that came with it, so I checked the listing for the original product. "CR-2032, 3 volt", it said. I ordered a package.

The batteries arrived. 

They did not fit.

I threw away the thermometer and ordered a new thermometer that used an AAA battery. PROBLEM SOLVED.

Today, as I went to weigh the ice cream for my Coke float, my kitchen scale showed "Lo" when I tried to turn it on. I flipped it over and opened the battery compartment.

It held two disc batteries about the size of a nickel.

"OH NO," I lamented to Lut. "Now I'll have to throw out the kitchen scale and replace it with one that uses AAA batteries."

But before I did that, I checked the battery drawer to see if I'd kept any of the disc batteries from the failure with the thermometer. I had! I checked the scale. "CR-2032 3 Volt", it said. I wrestled two batteries free of the consumer-proof packaging and put them in the scale. They fit! The scale worked again!

\o/

I honestly had half-expected to have thrown out the unused batteries, on the assumption that even if I bought or owned another device that took disc batteries, it would not take *these exact* disc batteries. So that was a pleasant shock.

~

Saw two people on Fedi commenting on the topic of 'genres not for you'. With me, that's most genres -- I don't read much as it is, and what I do read is in a narrow range compared to the vast breadth of available genres and subgenres. But they brought up some specific subgenres that I have strong opinions about (as opposed to most subgenres, where I'm more like 'whatever I don't read this.')

Quasi-European-Medieval Fantasy: I have read and enjoyed many, many books in this vein. So many that I am no longer interested in it. By "quasi-European-medieval" I mean a specific cluster of tropes:

* basically all characters are white

* agricultural-centered society 

* everything is made by hand; no mass-production, no factories, no automation

* feudal government

* magic and any benefits magic might have are not available to the vast majority of people, except loosely in the sense of things like "a small coalition of wizards protects the world from evil" -- nothing like "magic offers benefits in the everyday life of most people."

* not an analogue to a specific real-world time/place 

If the setting strays from some of these tropes, even if it still has others, I'm more likely to take an interest. Like a deeply-researched fantasy set in 11th-century France is way more interesting than "Middle Earth but with half-demons."

It's not that I dislike Middle Earth. I love Middle Earth! I loved the first several dozen (if not several hundred) Middle Earth clones I read!  But I have read enough books about this style of setting and would like some variety now k thx. When I'm world-building, I try to make sure that my fantasies are none of the first five. (I do some research for my books, but I do not enjoy it nearly enough to write a historical or historical fantasy novel.) Some of my settings have aspects or vestiges of feudal government, but even then I'll throw in some differences from the standard expectations. 

Action/Adventure plot: I've read and watched so many of these. The vast majority of sff uses an action/adventure plot where the protagonists are faced with violence and use force to win against evil. Despite being kind of bored with this style of plot as well, I keep using it. Out of my eighteen books, twelve center violent confrontations between protagonists and antagonists. I can see it changing in my recent work. The last three drafts I've finished -- Alien Peacelords, A Dragonling's Family, and The Jewel-Strewn Night -- plus the outline I'm working on now all have non-violent plots (the first three are romance/drama and the current one is a romantic comedy). But I doubt I'll ever get away from action/adventure plots entirely. A Game to You is an action/adventure fantasy, for example. 

Love triangles/jealousy/monogamy-focused romance tropes: This kind of things has largely never worked for me. There are some instances where love triangles didn't bother me. Most of these fall into the category of "protagonist has two options, one of whom the protagonist loves and the other the protagonist doesn't and who also is clearly unsuitable". For instance, in Pride and Prejudice, there are points where outside observers in the story think that Elizabeth and Wickham might be enamored with each other. But there's no point where either the reader or Elizabeth seriously considers Wickham as a love interest. This has never hampered my enjoyment of the story.

I've read one other exception, but it's only come up once in any book I've ever read. Once, in the eighties, I read a post-apocalyptic novel where men outnumbered women, and accordingly it wasn't uncommon for a woman to marry two men. The two male main characters were both in love with the same female main character. At one point, the two men had a conversation that went something like:

Man A: 'we could both marry her? But I don't think that would work for us specifically.'

Man B: 'yeah, I'm afraid you're right.'

And teenage me went "AT LEAST YOU CONSIDERED IT I'M SO PROUD."

(It is honestly wild how many sff novels in the 80s were queer-positive and/or polyam-positive, at a time when no people I knew talked much about either one. But then again, FurryMUCK was always queer- and polyam-positive and it started in the late 80s.) 

And honestly, that's still the thing that annoys me most with the love triangle and related trope: that polyamory isn't considered. Polyamory is not right for everyone! I am fine with people thinking about it, or trying it, and going 'nope, this doesn't work for me.' But it's always annoyed me when monoamory is presented as an inevitability. Even when I was a kid in the 80s and sure I'd never find anyone else who agreed with me, I thought there ought to be other options. Or when jealousy and possessiveness is presented as proof of love, a sign of a strong relationship.

Anyway, I'm always gonna enjoy queer polyam romances more but I'm fine with unqueer monoamorous ones. I just want them to acknowledge they're not the only possible kind of romance.

~

As an update: I did a bunch more painting yesterday, and glued together some of the terrain that I've painted. Lut's attempt to assemble the Death Reaper did not go well. It's not clear if it would've been possible to assemble it if the pieces were perfectly aligned and Lut just got them slightly misaligned, or if the pieces are misprinted and it can't be assembled. The last piece can't be glued on in its present state, ertainly. I'm gonna take it to the store and see if the manager can salvage it. (The manager and sole employee is a giant wargaming nerd and may be able to figure out what to do better than we can.) I don't think I'll do any more painting of unassembled miniatures, regardless of how this one turns out, though. Yes, it's nice to be able to paint the pieces before the assembly makes various places hard to get reach. But spending several hours painting the unassembled pieces only to discover they can't be assembled is horrible. I'm glad this happened with the Death Reaper and not the Shadow Seer (which took even longer) but it's still killing my interest in painting the rest of the team. It's the first time Lut's had this problem, too, and he's assembled dozens of miniatures in the last year. Just bad luck that it happened with the second unassembled mini I've painted.

I did some more work on the outline for Be That Way yesterday and Sunday evening. But I've been procrastinating on doing anything else with it all day. It's almost late enough for me to give up and do nothing with the day! Yay?