Malazan
I'm finally going to do it. I'm going to start this damn series. "Gardens of the Moon" has been sitting on my shelf for nearly a year, collecting dust, mocking me. I grew up on epic fantasy, but I haven't started a series like this in decades. They require real commitment, significant mental bandwidth. Summer is a good time for it, I think.
And speaking of summer, it's kind of shit. Oppressive heat, torrential rains knocking out our third-world power grid, nowhere to go that isn't swarmed with people trying to escape heatstroke and boredom. And now, with the World Cup, it's even worse. Northern Europeans looking like freshly boiled lobsters as they discover the hard way that this city is neither walkable nor safe.
I thought about flying somewhere for a weekend getaway, but domestic travel is priced higher than international travel was in the UK. It makes me miss Edinburgh, when we could just pick a random city on the continent, hop on the tram to the airport, and be there in a few hours. £15/pp to Biarritz? Sure, why not? Bus to Bilbao for a walk around the Guggenheim? Might as well. Now it takes longer and costs 20x more just to get to another city in the same state.
So it goes. For now, I'll go let these frustrations out on the barbell. The boy has discovered Cyberpunk, so his day is spoken for, along with my gaming rig, it seems.