Life's kicking my ass emotionally at the moment, and I don't know why. That is, I know a couple of minor reasons - but maybe those are enough to break my mood after all.

One's the stupid clinic. Another is not being able to compress certain bits of me with Lycra because I'm being careful not to aggravate my back. The third is mum periodically locking the computer room without warning after temper tantrums (in this last case, locking my iPod in there too, because I'd taken it in there to charge). It's more of her power games and posturing, which hurts, but ultimately she can do it if she wants to - I just want warning, so I don't arrange to talk to someone or rearrange movie plans to fix something broken on my website¹ or be kept waiting an hour to use the modem before finding she's swanned out somewhere and locked the door or whatever.

But then, she knows this perfectly well; the inconvenience is all part of the game. *rolls eyes*

I just need my own place. Now if only I wasn't terrified of literally everything that exists, maybe I could do more than passively recognise this fact.

Gridlinked, by Neal Asher, was good. I'm currently inhaling its sequel, Brass Man. That is, I think it's a direct sequel; there's no noticeable gap in the narrative, but there may have been books (about other parts of the same universe) in between². These are the two I own, though, so that's handy.

I could've taken or left Mr. Crane in Gridlinked³, but he's hooking me in this. To the point where I murmured "Good boy" aloud at a fitting moment. And I'm wondering how much of it Asher planned in the first book - not all of it, I'm guessing (resurrecting a character that was killed pretty definitively dead in the first, when I realised that was what was going to happen, made me immediately very cynical), but it does feel as though he's returning to themes he didn't get a chance to elaborate on. I like that.

So. Considering my main criticisms of books like Gridlinked are always "More AIs! More androids! More biotech!", in my mind Brass Man is getting kinda filed as the better second half of the former. We shall see. I'm rooting for Asher to fail to do the 'villain redeems desself then dies nobly' schtick.

¹ I don't literally do this. Fucking annoying if I've planned to get a newsletter written and sent out that evening, though.
² Before you ask, I deliberately don't look these things up online, because I honestly hate spoilers that damn much.
³ And to be fair, I can't be sure if that was more the lack of characterisation or my not reading it carefully, because I didn't understand the ending of G/L either. (Actually, I'd been sure throughout the closing chapters that [alienCharA] would turn out to be the offspring of [dissimilarAlienCharB] in an earlier stage of life. Still think that would've been cool.)