Have you ever been hiking and come across a really cool animal track? Maybe you don’t know what animal made it, or maybe you do know, but the track is just so perfect that you wish you could bundle it up and take it home to admire? Maybe you’ve got a kid who loves animals and nature, who could use a little hands-on science enrichment?
You need to know how to field cast.
Field casting is easy, requiring just plaster of Paris, used cardboard food packaging, masking tape, and water. It won’t take a ton of time away from your hike, and it’ll leave you with a great memory and a useful piece of scientific evidence for studying the real animals who’ve walked your path.
Here’s how:
1. Find an animal track. We’ve chosen to hike in the woods behind our house the day after a big rainfall, and my ten-year-old finds just what we’d expect to find: deer tracks!
2. Make a cardboard collar around the track. Cut strips of the cardboard food packaging about 1″ wide and long enough to completely encircle the track; tape pieces together with masking tape to lengthen them if necessary.
Tape the two ends together into a collar that will circle the track.
3. Mix the plaster of Paris. Although there are specific ratios of plaster to water that will guarantee a standard result (and I used to do all our field casting that way), I went on a dino dig earlier this summer and learned there how to simply eyeball my plaster mixture. In a throwaway plastic cup that’s at the end of its life, dump some dry plaster, then add some water and stir with a stick. You’re looking for a pudding consistency, better thin than thick, so continue to gradually add plaster or water to reach this approximate consistency.
4. Pour into the animal track. We always need two people for this, one person to steady the collar and one person to actually pour.
The thinner the consistency of the plaster of Paris is, the better it will fill the animal track without bubbles, but the longer it will take to cure–use your own judgment about how much free time you have to kill making field casts on your hike.
5. Remove the cast. When the plaster is firm to the touch, you can remove the cast and clean up your work.
The field cast will be dirty, but you can rinse it, and then label or paint it.
If you’d like to hang the field cast on your wall later (we do this sometimes), unbend a paperclip into a hook, then embed it in the plaster after you’ve poured it.
If you’ve got an extra-savvy kid who needs a science fair project, have them see what information they can learn about an animal based solely on its track. Height? Weight? Age?
This is also a great technique to employ if you happen to come across an animal track that you can’t identify. You might come up with the first conclusive evidence of the elusive Sasquatch, or the wily chupacabra!
Actually… I have a story about the chupacabra. Buy me a margarita sometime, and I’ll tell you all about it.
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To be fair, 1) my own children egged me on in my impulse to keep the most adorable pair of American Girl doll pajamas that I sewed ostensibly for part of my niece's birthday present, and 2) I did sew my niece another pair of American Girl doll pajamas to make up for it.
Can you look at that above photo and guess which pair of pajamas I ended up keeping for our own American Girl doll collection?
This one!!!!!
Once upon a time, the big kid had the CUTEST pair of jammy pants that I made from this flannel dino fabric, and I also made endless other kid things from it, from crayon rolls Christmas stockings. When the big kid got more into horses than dinosaurs for a while, the little kid took up the mantle of lover of dinosaurs, and then you know a homeschooling mom can't let any kid interest alone so I got involved, too, and the culmination of all of this seems to mostly have been that when I showed around this brand-new pair of flannel dino pajamas that I'd just sewn for my niece's birthday box to each kid in turn, each kid in turn's eyes got very big and they each said, "AWWWWWWW!"
And then they both started saying stuff like, "Our cousin [Name Redacted] doesn't even like dinosaurs! She likes rainbow unicorns! We should probably keep the dinosaur pajamas so she doesn't have to look at them. Ooh, can you make a little robe to go with it?!? Can you make a little dino stuffie for her to snuggle?" And so on and so on.
Not that my arm had to be pulled very much, though--I think these particular pajamas are adorable and immediately coveted them, too!
What I'm actually going to do is dig through my fabric stash to see if I can muster up just enough of this dino flannel to make one more pair of American Girl doll pajamas, because I think I've found the only thing in our entire home that my kids would even possibly fight over after my death.
ANYWAY!
These adorable pajamas are the Monkey Pajamas pattern from All Dolled Up, by Joan Hinds. This book has so many classic patterns that I think are super versatile, including this one. You do need to figure out and add your own finishing bits, though, especially if you don't use a serger. I've got a lot of her patterns pretty well down pat by now, though, so I automatically top-stitch the seams, and figure out for myself what kind of fastening I want:
Tidily top-stitched shoulder seam!
The original pattern calls for the pajama top front/back to also be sewn from the secondary fabric, but I wasn't feeling it, at least for these pajamas. I think they look cute enough with a contrasting fabric just at the wrists and ankles:
Kids who want everything around them to look like it was dunked in magical rainbow unicorn vomit do sometimes get beyond that (case in point: my own kid!), so I didn't do every single piece of doll clothing for my niece in pinks and purples and sparkles. Sometimes you just want to throw on your comfiest pair of brown flannel pjs and kick back with a book in front of the fire!
Although these specific garments look VERY pajama-y, I think that both parts of the Monkey Pajamas pattern are actually quite versatile, especially as a basic top and bottom made from woven, not knit, fabrics. I need to dig through my stash to find some thin denim, which I think would be perfect to make doll jeans using this pattern, cuff and all. I'd probably omit the cuff on the top, though, if I was making anything other than a pajama top. I think it would work very well with novelty quilting cotton, though, particularly a small print that would look proportionate to the doll. Very Hawaiian shirt-esque!
Here's everything that I've sewn for my niece's American Girl doll so far:
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.....or it does something bad to your A1C. My doctor definitely mentioned one of those!
Whatever. The point is, you know we love ourselves a trail! My favorite trails so far have been the Garfield Trail, where the kids earned fun patches for their Girl Scout vests, the Southern Indiana Ice Cream Trail, where we were promised T-shirts but they ran out so instead they gave us hats and Mr. Craft Knife was so distraught about this downgrade that the little kid designed us all our very own We Licked the Southern Indiana Ice Cream Trail T-shirts (Lactose Lovers Unite!), and the Dayton Aviation Heritage Trail, where we earned my very beloved Wilbear Wright who comes with me on all my travels now because his namesake used to love going new places (such as the sky!).
Oh, there was also the full year that I dragged everyone around on an Indiana Culinary Trail because I wanted a set of wine tumblers!
I'm telling you my greatest lesson so far: if you don't follow life's off-beat trails, you'll never discover life's experimental aircraft that are allowed to fly at life's unmonitored airfields.
Also, it was the big kid's birthday, we were all in the precious same place at the precious same time, and we all had the whole day free. That in itself is a sign that it was meant to be!
Fun fact: we'd originally planned to do this whole Butler County Donut Trail not on the big kid's birthday but on July 5th, which we also all had free. But then when I went through all the donut shop websites to get their opening hours, I discovered... well... DID YOU KNOW THAT EVERY DONUT SHOP IN BUTLER COUNTY IS CLOSED ON JULY 5?
Genuinely, what is that about?
So anyway, a couple of weeks later, on a day that is safely not the day after a federal holiday, off we went upon a strictly ordered trail that maximized the somewhat limited opening hours of the busy independent donut shops of southwest Ohio:
It's funny, because this place had what would turn out to be my absolute favorite donut of the day. Actually, I think this thing is my absolute favorite donut of all time! I'm thinking about it right now and wishing I had it in front of me.
Here it is, in the photo below. Any guesses?
Nope, not the plain glazed that the big kid always likes. Not the fried cinnamon roll that the little kid tried. It's this glorious beast:
It is a giant croissant, flattened somehow and covered with chocolate ganache and chocolate chips. It was INSANE.
And it turns out that there were two Ross Bakery locations on our donut trail map, so I got two of them!
Organizational note: you can freeze donuts. We all basically ordered whatever we wanted at every stop, did not even attempt to eat it beyond the first couple of stops, and put everything into individual plastic baggies inside a bigger freezer baggie when we got home. To warm donuts up you can microwave them for a few seconds until they taste like they're hot from the fryer, or you can do what I do and put the plastic baggie with your morning donut in it out onto the kitchen table the night before to defrost.
If only I could remember what my doctor was saying about my A1C...
Oh, well. Maybe it will come to me after I eat 11 more donuts!
You know you've been on the road too long/eaten waaaaay too much sugar when you, as a family, cannot stop laughing about what is objectively a perfectly normal sign that you don't even have a decent photo of because the person who was supposed to be taking the picture did not understand the assignment. Regardless, there was a storefront for a pizza restaurant. With a bar. That proclaims that it is OPEN TILL LATE NIGHT. For the rest of the entire day, we were all, "Omg, it is 11 pm and I would like an alcohol. I wish there was a BAR that was OPEN TILL LATE NIGHT!"
"Well, *I* wish there was a BAR OPEN TILL LATE NIGHT that also had pizza!"
"But only TRUE SLICES of pizza! Not slices of falsehood!"
"So you want, like, a combination TRUE SLICE PIZZA/BAR OPEN TILL LATE NIGHT?"
I dunno, y'all. We'd gotten up pretty early for this. We hadn't eaten any protein yet other than the bacon on Mr. Craft Knife's maple bacon pizza three donut shops ago. I think we were all a little loopy.
Actually, I just looked up that pizza place, and their tandoori chicken pizza sounds DELICIOUS.
Loopy as I was, I also lost my damn mind with glee when I discovered that Jupiter Coffee and Donuts was having a Summerween event that week!
I'm pretty sure I got one of every Summerween donut, though they're currently still in the freezer.
This was my second-favorite donut of the day. Something something sour cream something?
The beauty of us all being free this day to do the donut trail is that it was actually a weekday, so we could go straight to the Butler County tourism office with our completed passports to pick up our shirts.
On the way, we were all, "Omg, they're going to be so excited that somebody completed the trail! They're probably going to want to take photos of us for their social media--is everyone's hair nice? Ooh, what if we're interviewed? Should we have talking points?"
Lol. We had to STAND IN LINE to get our shirts, there were so many people there for the exact same reason. #notsoquirkyafterall
But our goal was indeed achieved!
The kids never did inherit the passion for free T-shirts that their father and I honed during college, when people would put tables outside the Student Center offering free T-shirts for signing up for a credit card--AND WE ALL DID IT! I blame their disdain on the fact that 1) I don't think colleges (or the finance industry?!?) allows that kind of shit anymore, and 2) neither of the kids' colleges charge to use the laundry machines, so they do not know the joy of being able to put laundry off for one more day cause you just scored a free T-shirt.
Regardless, Mr. Craft Knife and I still hate doing laundry, and I personally think that these T-shirts are legit. There's a smiling cup of coffee!!! And the donut is holding a little flaaaaaggggg!!!!!!!
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What is the material the item is made from? If it’s thrifted and/or doesn’t have a tag, you may not know for sure.
What kind of stains/dirt has the item been exposed to? Even with a very good pre-wash, an item might have a hidden stain or unknown type of dirt or adherent that won’t wash out and will react unpredictably with the dye.
What color is the item? The darker the overdyed color, the more accurate the result to the color you want, but if the original color of your item is anything other than white, that will affect your final result.
What graphics are already on the item? The materials and colors used for graphics take dye unpredictably.
That being said, if you like a little adventure in your refashioning journey, then overdyeing is a fun, eco-friendly, and often thrifty way to take something you don’t love and turn it into something you do.
To illustrate that, here’s how I overdyed some clothing items for my college-aged daughter using materials purchased entirely from the nearest big-box store. It’s a super accessible process, and the clothes turned out great!
Materials
My kid called my shirt arrangement "the Depop scrunch," lol. Apparently the kids all scrunch in the waists of their shirts when they do their flat lays.
To overdye your own clothing items, you will need:
clothing items. Ideally, your items will have the tags so you know their fabric makeup. If not, though, it’s okay–just know the results will be a little more unpredictable. For this project, the items are either definitely cotton or are likely cotton-adjacent.
dye. For this specific project, I am using 1 bottle of black Rit liquid all-purpose dye per pound of clothing. Note that this is double the amount of this specific dye that I’d need if I were dyeing it a lighter color. Black needs a lot of dye!
color fixative (optional). For this project, I am using 1/2 cup of Rit ColorStay Dye Fixative per pound of clothing for the non-denim items only. My daughter actually wants the denim to be able to fade a little in the wash over time, but if you want the color to stay super-saturated for denim, too, then this color fixative would also work well on it.
salt. You need approximately 1 cup of salt per dye pot. Iodized salt is fine.
dish soap. You need approximately 1 tsp of the dish soap you use for handwashing dishes per dye pot. This breaks the surface tension of the water and encourages even absorption of dye.
giant pot. Your dye pot should be able to fit 1 pound of clothing with enough room for the clothes to be able to agitate freely. If your pot holds less, you can divide the dye and clothes and do this project in batches.
Note that my specific project here is for cotton clothing. If you want to dye items with a polyester content, check out the manufacturer’s instructions here.
Step 1: Weigh, then wash your clothing items REALLY well.
Before you throw your items in the wash, weigh them on a postal scale. My specific project here is for 1 pound of clothing, because that’s what fits in my pot.
The thing about dyeing fabric is that anything on the fabric–dirt, sure, but also body oils, deodorant, soap residue, minerals from hard water, even oils from your fingertips–can affect how the dye adheres. This is exacerbated when you’re overdyeing, as I’m assuming that you’re overdyeing something that you’ve already been washing and wearing, perhaps something that you’ve thrifted. That’s a lot of history that you don’t know about!
So this is not the time for a quick wash. This is the time for a hot water wash with an excellent detergent that contains lipase but not optical brighteners (thank you, r/laundry!), and multiple rinses with a rinse aid like citric acid that will knock off soap residue and hard water minerals.
If you’re overdyeing immediately afterwards, skip the dryer because your clothing items will need to start off wet anyway.
Step 2: Prep the dye bath.
Into a metal pot, add 1 cup salt and 1 tsp dish soap, then fill the pot with water, leaving enough room for your clothing items.
If your clothing items aren’t already wet, soak them in water and ring them out. Don’t put them in the pot yet, though!
First, put the pot on the stove and heat the water until it’s just about to boil–you should see steam, and maybe just a little movement in the water, but it shouldn’t be boiling.
Shake the whole bottle of Rit dye well, then add to the water. I like to refill the bottle with tap water, shake it up again, and also pour that into the pot just to make sure that I’m getting every speck of dye.
Step 3: Add the clothes to the dye pot and stir.
This is where your real time commitment starts.
The Rit dye instructions recommend a dye bath time of 20 minutes to 1 hour, and since I’m dyeing clothes black, I’m using the longest dye time. Combined with stirring every couple of minutes, it’s a chore!
Especially if you’re going for the full hour, you’ll need to readjust the heat down a few times to keep the temperature just below boiling.
Step 4: Rinse, then color fix.
When the dye time is up, pour out the dye water and rinse the clothing items until the water runs clear.
While you’re doing that, refill the pot with water and heat it on the stove until it’s once again just below boiling.
Add 1/2 cup of Rit Dye ColorStay Dye Fixative to the pot, and stir well.
Wring out the rinsed clothing items, then add them to the pot. This time you only have to keep them in the bath for 20 minutes, but you do have to keep stirring every couple of minutes. It’s still a chore!
Step 5: Rinse again, then wash well.
Pour out the water again, and rinse the clothing items again until the water runs clear.
Wash the clothing items again exactly as you did in Step 1. Optionally, add color catcher sheets to the wash load to absorb excess dye, but the thorough wash should be sufficient.
Dry clothes as normal.
Afterwards, the fun part is seeing how your experiment turned out!
The denim shorts turned out super black and super even. They’re honestly a little darker than my daughter would prefer, since she likes a more faded look, but I skipped the color fixative on these and denim is notorious for fading, so I think it’ll look closer to what she wants after a few washes and wears. I’d already warned her that the thread on these garments likely wouldn’t dye, so that wasn’t an issue.
The long-sleeved shirt was more of a gamble, since I could tell by the feel that it’s not 100% cotton. It actually took the dye great, though… except for a couple of uneven spots, grr. The shirt was originally dark enough grey that the spots could represent stains that weren’t previously visible. Crowding items in the dye pot or insufficient agitation can also cause uneven dyeing, but I don’t think that’s the case here. If the color was very important I’d dye it again, but my daughter says she’ll wear it as-is, so I guess we’ll wait and see if that’s true!
Here is the real winner of my dye pot gamble!
My daughter LOVES how her Bowie T-shirt turned out, and I agree! The lightning bolt is present but more subdued, and the Bowie graphic now looks like a spooky negative. The dye is completely even and a lovely black, and the shirt has been promoted from a pajama top that she wears only around the dorm to one of her favorite everyday T-shirts.
Which is good, because I’m pretty sure that unevenly-dyed long-sleeved T-shirt will end up being demoted to pajama top…
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LITERALLY WHY AM I CRYING?!? This series is about a dude who runs around in boxers and a leather jacket and his ex-girlfriend’s cat on his shoulder! WHY DOES IT HAVE SO MANY FEELINGS?!?
I think I could have held the line against Feelings if I’d stopped at Book 1. Dungeon Crawler Carl was mostly simply fun--in a really fucked up way, I mean. Y’all, that Hoarder Neighborhood Boss thought she’d died and gone to hell because she was a bad person! I was, as they say, appalled.
Interestingly, that scene is set up to reward the reader who isn’t simply rushing through the text to get to the next explosion… as long as they’re not already literate in Spanish, I guess. I can read Spanish if it’s easy, but my older kid can’t, and when we were talking about the book she hadn’t thought that scene was especially affecting, but THEN she admitted that she hadn’t bothered to translate the Spanish, either. When I told her what the Hoarder had been saying, she was all, “Yeah, omg that’s fucked up.”
I also think it’s interesting that the two most messed up scenes in the entire series, that Hoarder one and the goblin baby one, are both in Book 1. At the end of Book 1, and then much more heavy-handedly throughout the rest of the series, we start getting kicked in the teeth by the concept that the NPCs are beings, too, with their own thoughts and feelings and interior worlds, etc., so the idea of horrific violence against them no longer works to elicit even horrified laughter.
I think it takes about that same amount of time for us to realize that Carl isn’t just an action-adventure meathead, and that even though Donut still has her psychotic cat-like tendencies, she’s going to grow emotionally.
Although--several characters throughout the book call her a child, or child-like, but I don’t feel like that’s an accurate description for how she is, or especially for the relationship between her and Carl. She’s very much exactly as a cat would be if they were suddenly actually a person in a fur suit, and I think that is a major part of why I love this book so much. At its core, Dungeon Crawler Carl is genuinely just a book about a guy who really, really, really loves his cat. And if you, too, have powerfully, aggressively, wholeheartedly loved an animal companion, I feel like you’re going to recognize that and you’re going to get why that’s important. Like, my cat, Spots, is not my baby. She gets on my nerves. She’s spoiled and completely unreasonable. I would also murder an actual human in cold blood to protect her and I doubt I’d even feel bad about it afterwards.
This isn’t my first series in the LitRPG genre, although it’s close--I’ve read the Ready, Player One series, but that’s about it--and I’m definitely not as into the passages about stats and loot boxes and character classes as I could be, although I’ve played my share of DnD so I understand it. And the books where the premise switched to Pokemon or Mario Kart were not as fun as the dungeon fantasy ones. Is the trains premise meant to mimic an RPG genre? Surely not Ticket to Ride, right? Although now that we’re talking about it, a Settlers of Catan book would be SICK!
Carl’s Doomsday Scenario is where the stakes got a lot less like simple fucked-up fun and more like we are torturing these people in such a heartbreaking manner, because it turns out that my meathead Coastie is actually a really good guy who’s had his goodness taken advantage of for too long, and the stuck-up cat brat is actually the pet mom that she herself should have had, and she knows it. Like, genuinely how does the exact same book have me exclaiming both “HEY! IT’S UNETHICAL TO GENOCIDE AN ENTIRE PLANET!” and “HEY! IT’S UNETHICAL TO GIVE AWAY YOUR PET!” I mean, both of those sentiments are obvious, it’s just funny that they’re both themes in the same book.
And the sentiment of beating your head against the wall of whatever unfair limit is and always will inevitably be thwarting you, with no hope that it will get better, but still you beat your head against that wall and proclaim that the wall will not break you, you will break that wall--that’s always the human condition, I guess, but it feels especially like the human condition these days.
Walking the tightrope of portraying that the AI/Dungeon has taken the most stereotypical (and therefore demeaning/dehumanizing) elements of human pop culture for the dungeon while also portraying that the creatures embodying these stereotypes are actually whole beings worthy of compassion (and not, you know, of having all their babies bombed to death) got a little wobbly here--I just don’t know if there was a way of depicting the murders of goblin sex workers that would have successfully walked that tightrope--but I think I got what Dinniman was going for. None of the portrayals were as abject as Book 1’s Hoarder Boss or those goblin babies, but I’m still pouring one out for good old GumGum tonight.
The Dungeon Anarchist’s Cookbook is the book where it’s probably the easiest to get lost, because not only is there a complicated train system that Dinniman explicitly says you’re not supposed to try to figure out but it’s definitely super weird that you can’t figure it out, but also I’m personally less interested in crafting tables, chats, gems, and just all magical items in general. I did surprisingly enjoy some of the train mob battles, though--very Train to Busan-ish! I got VERY invested in the Katia/Hekla storyline, though--Iceland is so messy!
Also, how many other crawlers do we feel like have been invited to become part of a secret society and just can’t tell anyone?
The Gate of the Feral Gods makes the switch from Monster of the Week to Big Bad format, which is a little bit of a bummer for me, because if given the choice I will ALWAYS vote for Monster of the Week, and yet my series are ALWAYS trying to Big Bad me! Sam and Dean, I really did want you to just keep fighting wendigos and vampires and ghosts for 16 seasons!
Also, I know I excused the prostitution storyline from Book 2, because I get that the AI/Dungeon Planners are taking the worst/most stereotypical versions of human pop culture as their premise, but Dinniman. Must we have ANOTHER sex worker storyline?!? Two sex worker storylines is too many sex worker storylines. Make Juicebox a regular waitress and stop being weird.
Oh, wait. If you count Samantha that’s three sex worker storylines. Dinniman, you’re starting to reveal too much about your psyche. Like, this is becoming My Dad Wrote a Porno levels of unconscious revelation.
I do appreciate, though, that at least we’re not getting any sex/romance storylines with Carl, thank goodness. Let me enjoy his competence and developing character arc in peace, please! Plus the emotional growth of his platonic life partner, Donut. I’m worried that at some point they ARE going to break him, but until then my favorite thing is watching him craft a complicated plan to save everyone, and then throw bombs at it until it works.
I also remain very worried about Donut’s Constitution.
The Butcher’s Masquerade leans very hard into the discomfort of existing in a universe that is built upon the oppressed as status quo, with bullying evident all the way from top to bottom. This universe is built upon the goal of no matter how low you go, you should always have a dog to kick. And we’re starting to see how some of those dogs are and have been fighting back, and how it’s starting to maybe pay off.
Also, even a Dungeon Crawler universe has lawyers!
I know for sure that I'm a basic bitch, because Prepotente shrieking out of nowhere will never not be absolutely hilarious to me.
I never played Magic the Gathering or Pokemon, so the premise of this book is a little bit lost on me. But I still haven't figured out what the train game from Book 3 was supposed to be, either--Ticket to Ride? Chutes and Ladders?--so it's fine. My mind definitely skimmed over all the card game rules talk, though, so I'm glad that Donut was paying attention!
It feels really unfair that not only are the aliens trying to kill Carl, but they're also trying to existentially torture him, as well. But at least they've got the excuse of being villains--what on EARTH was up with Bea?!? WHY IS SHE SO CARTOONISHLY EVIL?!? Genuine question: is she a sociopath? She has to be a sociopath. Seriously. Who DOES this?!?
It's interesting, though, that everything revealed about Bea paints Carl as a guy with a good heart who was just floating through life. If he'd ever paid attention to or emotionally invested himself in Bea, there's no way that he wouldn't have noticed all that she was up to. And not to victim blame, but I can't help but feel a little sorry for Bea. Her machinations were absurdly easy to suss out by someone who paid the least bit of attention to her--I mean, the CAT sussed them out!--so how little attention could Carl have been tossing in the direction of his very own live-in girlfriend to not have clocked a single bit of it.
How she didn't try babytrapping him is beyond me!
But anyway, in Book 1, Carl was a video game character. The writing was fine, but he, as a person, didn't have a ton of depth. It's wild that even though this scenario is terrible, this is the most alive he's been since he was a little dude holding his mom's hand and looking out at the Grand Canyon. This is the most love he's given and received. The most family he's had. He's got a devoted platonic life partner who shares his goals and is a true peer and companion. He's got a purpose now. He's passionate. What he's doing is important.
Deep down inside, do we think Carl might be kinda happy here in the dungeon?
Our anti-capitalist anti-heroes really come into their own on this level. I kind of wish that the Carl of Level 9 could go back in time so I could see how he'd handle Level 1's Hoarder, or Level 2's GumGum, with his newfound understanding of how this universe works. And I think it would be even sadder, because I don't think he *could* have handled them differently!
Is there meaning in suffering, even when the suffering itself is pointless? It's certainly helped Carl gain a lot of leadership skills, I guess! Seriously, though, I feel like this book does have a lot to say about what it means to suffer, to be a victim. Whether you're a goblin baby or a dungeon crawler or are caught up in Donut's Giant Ball spell or are one of 120,000 children trapped inside Lucia's mind or your cartoon villain girlfriend is monstrously manipulating you and you don't even know it, your experience has meaning, and the meaning of that suffering travels beyond just you.
I also love the through-line of those who strive to help the vulnerable. And not just the already desperate, like those on the surface repeatedly attacking the kinder center, but also Katia, who just wants to comfort a terminally ill baby for the time she has left, and Mordecai, who's one of the few game guides genuinely doing his best. Same for Carl's lawyer. It keeps the vast number of those who are thrilled to victimize the vulnerable from feeling too oppressive.
All that being said, though, I genuinely had no idea what was going on in most of the book. And it was fine. I should have just tossed a bunch of bombs at the plot and I could have been like Carl!
P.P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!
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