Derik Badman's Journal

February arrives with a snowstorm. Started yesterday around noon and the snow and rain have been off and on ever since. As I sit here in my office I can hear what I must assume is freezing rain tapping against the roof or windows. Days like this I wish our house had better insulation and that the windows in my office weren't the least weather efficient ones possible (two of them I have literally tried to caulk shut to help with the drafts). I'll be out shovelling soon, as the snow is supposed to continue into tomorrow and I learned last time not to let it pile up too much.

A lot of false starts with books and movies in the past week. I gave up on That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana and Japanese Poetic Diaries. The former was just too... uneventful and rambling for me, and something of its... Italian-ness did not appeal. The latter was not very interesting and, I think, the editor/translator was less poet and more academic, which meant the haiku/poetry in it was not well translated. A previous reader to me (used book) had actually pencilled in edits to a bunch of the early poems (they too seemed to not have finished the book), and frequently added "awk" in the margins. I cede to their judgement.

So last night I ended up starting in on a reread of Gaddis' JR instead. It's easy to see how it would almost immediately turn off almost all readers. The first scene, in almost all unattributed dialogue (as is the whole book), is a meeting between a lawyer trying to deal with the two old sisters of a deceased businessman. They talk at cross-purposes, he just trying to ascertain some basic facts while they misunderstand all his legal jargon and keep going off on tangents. It's all very Gaddis (jargon, misunderstanding, cross-purposes).

Also gave up on Rohmer's The Tree, the Mayor and the Mediatheque which found him taking up a story of politics with a lot of people debating very French specific politics in very broad terms. I just could not bear it. Maybe that's why this one seemingly didn't get a release in the US (or at least disappeared very fast).

Got pretty annoyed with Divinity: Original Sin 2 yesterday. As I get towards what I assume is the ending, even playing on the easiest difficulty level, the game seems to be requiring a greater skill with the innumerable combat skills than I really have or want. It's very much about knowing the right combinations of this and that to more efficiently defeat the enemies and that's not something I had to pay much attention to up until this last section when suddenly it seems like the difficulty level jumped substantially.