It’s Labor Day, so I should be helping build guillotines for Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, or something, but instead I’m being a useless lump. I managed to do a grocery shop, but that’s about it.

Read: The Ruin of Angels (Max Gladstone): Sixth novel in the Craft Sequence, about colonialism and hubristic tech startups and surveillance and brain squids and criminal gods and broken reality. Gladstone apparently understands that there’s just no point to male characters.

Watched: Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone: Not very good as a movie, but I was just watching it for inspiration for Zoomwarts. The movie had a lot more random magical nonsense (like the flying keys and chessboard), more monsters (troll in the castle!), magic without specific incantations or even wand use, and a distressing lack of suits of armor to hide behind. It didn’t even have much in the way of secret passages, just the one area the Golden Trio found “accidentally”. Also a distinct lack of romantic drama, of course, but not all 11-year-olds can be as boy-crazy as Bella.

Words: Check.