The Dragon Rider Smut Book Club Is Now In Session. This Month's Topic: Onyx Storm

I do NOT want to talk about that hockey score pop-up in the frame. I am so disappointed in the playoff results so far! Nevermind that my most beloved Stars lost to the Oilers, because the Oilers are fine and I'd be satisfied to have them win the Cup, but the Panthers are also in the final?!? The Panthers represent the absolute worst of the NHL, everything that I find most toxic about men's professional hockey. Not the players, because they mostly can't help where they play, but the awful management. Okay, I guess I *did* want to talk about that hockey pop-up, but now my mouth is closed about hockey until October!

I have begun annoying/entertaining my family by inserting Fourth Wing taglines into every scenario.

Case in point before Family Movie Night the other night:

A fighter plane without its pilot is a tragedy.

A fighter pilot without their plane is dead.

Welcome to Top Gun.

Catchy, right? And it works in a surprising number of scenarios!

Anyway, for my crimes I spent much of my free time over the Spring semester listening to Onyx Storm while walking my 10,000 steps a day, cleaning house (how are two empty nesters still making this much mess?!?), and sewing, the latter of which led to an interesting moment in which I'd forgotten that my partner was working from home and I was absolutely BLASTING my audiobook, the better to hear it over the noise of my sewing machine. He walked through the room on his way to make himself a sandwich, and was all, "Um, are you listening to porn?"

And then had to repeat himself three times because not only was I indeed listening to porn, but I was listening to it LOUDLY.

I told you after I read the last book that Xaden was going to eventually figure out some more uses for his shadow manifesting signet!

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I'm pretty sure it was Chapter 49...

Fair Warning: the following meeting of the Dragon Rider Smut Book Club is members-only, because there will be all the spoilers for all the books!

Here's my review of Fourth Wing.

Here's my review of Iron Flame.

And here's my review of Onyx Storm!

SPOILERSPOILERSPOILERSPOILERSPOILERSPOILERSPOILIERSPOILERSPOILERSPOILERSPOILERSPOILER

Onyx Storm by Rebecca Yarros
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I’m pretty sure that Tiktok has damaged my ability to process information, because I genuinely really liked this book?

I mean, quite a lot of it was stupid, and there are too many characters and I refuse to be expected to have memorized the name of everyone’s dragon, and I am SO bored with Violet as the #bestest #specialest #mostdragonriderwhoeverdragonridedest, but I dunno. I drank the Kool-aid. I bonded with my captors. I collaborated with the fascist regime, and I enjoyed my time in Basgiath.

I was still annoyed on every page, though!

The most annoying thing about Violet, even more than her absolute bestestness/most specialness, is how she seems to just really feel all her feelings in her body. Every time Violet hears bad news or thinks a scary thought, we have to hear how her body responds. Are venin on the prowl? Well, then Violet’s throat is going to tighten in response. Does she have to keep yet another boring secret from Rhiannon? That’s sure going to put a pit in her stomach! Poor girl really needs several rounds of EMDR and a consultation with a gastroenterologist.

The thing that I really like about Violet, however, is her moral greyness. She’s actually not that great of a person, and I’m so into it! That BRILLIANT shit she pulls at Faris’ court is legitimately my favorite scene in this entire series, and I'm not sure why every problem is not being solved by permitting Violet to serial killer her way to success. 

The other best scene in the book is when the gang is on the luck island and fortune determines that Trager is shot right in front of their faces, and they just have to stand there and be all, "Ah, fortune... Cool, cool." These scenes have in common the idea that morality is inherently objectively grey in this world, variable according to who wields it, and if Yarros would just lean into that as her overarching premise instead of just a cool bit that she uses every now and then, the series as a whole would be so much stronger, more interesting, and more meaningful. Don't you feel like society as a whole, right at this moment, really needs to sit down and have a discussion about who determines what's right and what's wrong and where that puts those who don't agree with that determination?

Other than the fact that dragons are great and we should all ride them, I have to confess that I’m not actually sure why channeling from the ground is so bad? Yes, venin are assholes, but that seems to be about the venin, not the channeling, because Xaden channels and all it did was make him a sad, wet dishcloth of a man, not an asshole. And yes, depriving the ground and the people on it of their life force to the extent that they die is VERY bad, but Xaden can also channel from Violet’s conduit, we learn, so why can’t they all do that instead?

What I would prefer, and what would make me genuinely interested in Violet/Xaden, would be if channeling from the ground did make you absolutely 100% genuinely EVIL. Like, you can choose from Lawful Evil or Chaotic Evil or Neutral Evil, I don’t care, as long as that second part is EVIL. And Xaden can still be obsessed with Violet, even, after he’s evil--actually, I’d prefer it if he was, because that would be interesting! Just imagine him bopping along with the Scooby Gang, helping solve all their mysteries, trying to hide the whole time that he’s evil. It would be so good!

Since I don’t actually care about Violet/Xaden, I also don’t really care about the cliffhanger ending. But I DO hope Violet poisons someone about it, because that would be hilarious.

Also? The Irids are right.

Also also? Now there is a cat, and that is my favorite part.

Very last also: The Basgiath cadets are thirstier for patches than Girl Scouts, lol. I hope they DO pause their war long enough to commission themselves a Quest Squad patch!

Predictions for the next book:

• Violet is also somehow genetically venin and that’s why her parents offered her up to that death cult or whatever when she was a baby--it was to mask that part of her. But somehow she’ll figure out how to reveal it and then integrate it or whatever, and then she can teach Xaden.
• The venin aren’t actually bad. Maybe they’re just enslaved or something to a couple of bad leaders, so Violet and the gang will solve that problem and then everyone, everywhere, will be able to channel allllll the magic.
• I know this contradicts what I just said in the previous point, but my other idea is that Violet will somehow turn out to be inherently Good--I mean, isn't that what the best of the bestiness is all leading to?--and her union with Xaden, now objectively Bad because he's a venin, will work to unite the two sides of The Force to bring harmony to their world. And maybe then even all dragon riders will bond two dragons, a regular war dragon like always and a peaceful Irid that's always going to be talking hippie peace and love into their other ear.

Feel free to use my ideas, Yarros! In payment, just have Violet poison someone!

P.S. View all my reviews.

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!

I Read Death in Grand Canyon, Because I Needed To Be Told Not To Pick Up a Rattlesnake With My Bare Hands

Photos courtesy of a 2010 trip I took with the kids to the Grand Canyon. There's more than enough to see even when you're standing behind the guardrails and staying on the path!

Over the Edge: Death in Grand Canyon by Michael P. Ghiglieri
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Y’all know how obsessed I am with my Special Interest of Human Mishaps in National Parks. I like to tackle it through various lenses--missing people, or search and rescue, or the occasional paranormal theorist--but my favorite is this type of book that simply chronicles every single death, of every circumstance, in one specific national park.

While Death in Grand Canyon isn’t nearly as gruesome as Death in Yellowstone (sooooo many people have been boiled down to their bones in Yellowstone! So many people have been devoured by bears!), it’s still pretty gruesome. I now know so much about how to die of dehydration, and ALSO how to die of hyperhydration. Eat salty snacks while you chug your water, Friends!

As I gleefully announced every time my husband walked by while I was reading this book, the main risk factor for dying in Grand Canyon appears to be being male. Men are the ones pranking their poor daughters by pretending to fall off the rim and then slipping and actually doing so (Greg Austin Gingrich). Men are the ones trying to pick up rattlesnakes with their bare hands. Men are the ones ducking under guardrails to go stand on the rim, and when their young sons warn them that they’re not supposed to go past the rail, they respond, “You gotta take some chances in life,” then immediately step onto an unsupported snowbank and fall 350 feet (Richard Pena). And most of all, apparently, men are the ones insisting on peeing over the edge of the canyon, then getting dizzy and falling to their deaths with their dicks out.

And when men aren’t actively getting killed on their own behalf, they’re actively dragging their women into death instead. I am still absolutely fuming about the talented young athlete Margaret Bradley, whose amazing performance at the Boston Marathon and in her collegiate competitions had her planning for the Olympic Trials… after she visited her buddy Ryan in Flagstaff, of course. He was a runner, too, and had planned a fun fifteen-mile training run for them down and back at the Grand Canyon.

It wasn’t even so much that Ryan’s proposed trail was WAY longer than fifteen miles. Or even that they didn’t carry nearly enough water. Or even that when they got tired and dehydrated and Ryan couldn’t continue, they agreed that Bradley would pound on to their destination and send help. That’s all stupid, but every one of those mistakes could have been recovered from. The mistake that couldn’t be recovered from is when Ryan, who’d sheltered in place overnight, was rescued the next morning by a USGS employee who happened by, HE DID NOT TELL HER THAT HE HAD A COMPANION WHO WAS MISSING. Instead, he was like, “Yeah, I’ve got a buddy down at Phantom Ranch. Can you have someone tell her I’m moving the car?” Like, Dude literally just assumed that Margaret, suffering from dehydration and heatstroke, had blithely run all the way to Phantom Ranch and then just… what? Hung out there without breathing a word to anyone about HIM?!?

You guys. This dude hitched a ride with that USGS employee back to Flagstaff, still without breathing a word about his missing companion, and went to bed. Meanwhile, Margaret’s parents are freaking out that she hasn’t checked in with them, they’re calling everyone, they finally get the police to get ahold of Ryan early the next morning, and he finally tells the authorities the actual story so they can get a helicopter out to look for Margaret.

The coroner’s report stated that Margaret had died about 12-24 hours before the helicopter spotted her. If Ryan had told anyone that his running buddy had kept going and he didn’t know where she was, she wouldn’t have died lost and alone from heat stroke.

I swear, y’all, if you’re a man and you want to go to the Grand Canyon, you need to first make sure it’s your turn with the single brain cell that you all share.

Fortunately, or the book might be too depressing even for me, we also learn about plenty of heroes whose quick thinking and compassion save lives. In 2001, when a couple with four children went hiking down the canyon, they didn’t keep track of their kids and the three older kids ranged far ahead of the parents and toddler. The three older kids happened upon a Boy Scout troop whose leader, Jim Furgo, had just made the decision that the troop was going to forgo their fun overnight at the bottom of Hualapai Canyon because of the weather forecast, and when that Boy Scout leader saw three unaccompanied children hiking towards an area he considered unsafe, he roped them in with his troop, and they all hiked a mile to a much wider area. And so when the flash flood came through the canyon with its 20-foot-high wall of water, the parents and toddler died, but Jim Furgo had saved the lives of every child with him.

I framed it for the vista, so you can't tell that they're not sitting anywhere NEAR the edge. Don't sit on the edge of the Grand Canyon! Your brain can't make sense of the perspective and will make you lose your balance or feel faint as you're getting up.

Although the authors can be a bit glib at times, I appreciated their emphasis on what one can learn from these accounts. Listen to the park rangers and heed all warning signs. Bring more than enough water, and enough salty snacks to accompany them. Don’t hike alone, if possible. Ensure that someone outside your party knows where you will be and when you plan to return. Be mindful of local weather. Don’t sit on the edge of the Grand Canyon, because you’ll stumble or get vertigo when you get up and fall. Don’t use the Grand Canyon as your suicide plan, because it’s traumatic for the people who have to pick your meaty bits out of the dirt.

And don’t try to pick up a rattlesnake with your bare hands. Why are people even doing that in the first place?

P.S. View all my reviews.

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One More Site To Go Until I Earn Wilbear Wright

Local, independent museums are always so delightfully surprising and strange.

As in, I never would have told you that when I planned to hit up Butler County Warbirds, part of the Dayton Aviation Trail, early on a Saturday morning, I would also be visiting one of the best, most interesting, and absolutely most surprising private collections of World War II memorabilia.

But there we have it!

The primary goal of Butler County Warbirds is to preserve, protect, and restore its collection of antique planes and equipment, but the founder also made a small museum out of his own personal collection of military memorabilia, padded out with donations and loans from other collectors. The display is my favorite kind of intense--as in, there's a LOT of stuff, and a lot of it is the kind of everyday item or ephemera that it's more unusual to have had preserved for our present-day benefit. 

World War I gas mask

I remember this one from when the kids and I studied World War I. We engaged in trench warfare and listened to rousing tunes on Spotify!

A newspaper is usually a great example of ephemera you wouldn't normally see preserved, but people actually often saved entire newspapers when there was a big headline. It doesn't make it any less interesting to see, though!

The displays are well-organized chronologically and by theme, but one place where there's room for a research-minded volunteer to contribute is in explanation of provenance, meaning, and context. The volunteer docents had excellent general knowledge but weren't able to speak about specific pieces, so I had to martial my patience and bide my time until I could look everything up at home, ahem.

For instance, check out this INSANE KNIFE!!!

Have you ever seen anything more baller outside of a movie? It's apparently a Skull and Cobra Fighting Knife, and in my enthusiasm I just happened to take a photo that shows that it's also the even rarer "pig nose" variant, so probably made for a Marine with a blade repurposed from another knife. It's interesting that soldiers wanted fighting knives enough to make them for each other when they weren't being issued, but now I'm curious to know if soldiers were really out there knife fighting each other during World War II or what?

I thought it was cool to see a real syringe, but I wish I knew whose Purple Heart that was...

My partner and I had just seen some other examples of painted flying jackets when we were at the National Museum of the Air Force, but I love that this display has several of the pilot's things together:

This display was also pretty wild. The caption for this armband reads "JEWISH ARMBAND VILIJAMPOLE GHETTO":

That location is particularly notable because there was a well-documented underground resistance movement there, but over a year before the end of the war that ghetto was emptied and everyone who lived there was sent to be murdered in concentration camps. 

This page from the Zekelman Holocaust Center has examples of the typical badges that Jews were required to wear in different regions. The one in the photo matches the first example. I'm curious about the stamps on the badge in the photo, though. I've seen stamps on other badges, but I've never learned who did them or why.

Here's another amazing, and also baffling, artifact:

Its caption reads just "CONCENTRATION CAMP ARM BAND JEWISH HOMOSEXUAL," and I have so many questions! Obviously, I want to know where it came from, who wore it, what concentration camp they were confined in, and what happened to them. I'm also curious about how atypical the badge is:

People normally had to make their badges themselves, or obtain them from someone else who had handmade them, and this one is beautifully done. But it doesn't seem to be how they were technically meant to look, and I can't find another one like it. The closest comparison is here, interestingly also part of a private collection.

It's almost physically painful to look at it and not know who had to wear it and what happened to them, much less what happened afterwards that led it to a display case in a tiny museum in Ohio. 

After the Butler County Warbirds--and its Dayton Aviation Trail stamp!--we went to Wright "B" Flyer, Inc., another small non-profit that makes and flies recreations of the Wright airplanes. 

We got to actually climb up and sit inside a working recreation of the Wright B Flyer--

--and an actual Model T, including honking the ooga horn--

--and check out another modernized version of the Wright B Flyer that's still in progress. At this point, I think we've encountered 50 Wright Flyer images, models, and recreations!

Here's a good video that shows what the organization does. Pay a lot of attention to that good footage of wing warping--that's the Wright brothers' biggest innovation!

At some point while touring the Butler County Warbirds planes with two docents, I asked about how people were able to fly these DIY and kit-built literal airplanes. Was the FAA not... concerned? That's when I learned that there is literally such a designation as "experimental airplane," and yes, you CAN get the FAA to come to your backyard shed and certify your experimental airplane so you can tool it around unmonitored airfields!

Y'all. I think I found my mid-life crisis.

My other mid-life crisis plan is to buy land that has genuine prehistoric Native mounds on it and then, just, I don't know... roll around on all my mounds, I guess. While preserving and protecting them, of course.

So obviously, after all this airplane content, we had to 1) pick up Raising Cane's chicken (my favorite fast food place because the menu is so manageable, so PLEASE do not tell me who the company's owners donate money to or what other atrocities they've committed because I promise you I am boycotting enough businesses at it is) and 2) take it to the nearby Miamisburg Mound to eat it:

I did not realize it until we got there, but you can also CLIMB the mound!

So we did!

I find it frustrating when a mound like this doesn't seem to have been professionally studied in contemporary times (this excavation in the 1800s doesn't count, because they're also talking about how the mound definitely contained Nephilim skeletons, sigh), but I'm also horrified whenever I learn that a mound has been taken apart and then put back together just so people can see what's inside, so I guess there's no pleasing me.

When I buy my property with mounds on it, you're not even going to so much as look at them while you've got a garden shovel in your hand or I swear to God I'll bite you.

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Three More Sites To Go Until I Earn Wilbear Wright

 I will never get over how weird it is to say that the National Museum of the United States Air Force is the most underrated museum I've ever visited.

I've been there twice now, and I still haven't seen half the museum.

I was told before I visited the first time that it's better than the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, and it IS.

I guess if you're the US Air Force, you've had a good, long while to collect some cool stuff!

What's even better is that the museum actually hosts TWO Dayton Aviation Trail stamps, as they treat the Aviation Hall of Fame inside the museum as a separate site. So my partner and I dutifully saw more early flight exhibitions and Wright flyer reproductions (I think we're up to about 20 at this point, and we'll have hit at least 40 before we're through)--

--and then before you know it, the Wright brothers have their plane business up and running and it's time for World War 1!

Check out Snoopy's plane:

I really like how colorful planes got to be before they were standardized:

I had to text my kids when I came across this poem on display:

I knew I'd required one kid to memorize that poem while the other kid had to memorize Dulce et Decorum Est, but which was which?

It was this one, and she still remembers it!

Fun fact: the big kid had actually had a choice between memorizing "Dulce et Decorum Est" and "Boots," but she thought "Boots" was too scary and she liked shouting "GAS! GAS!" in "Dulce et Decorum Est." 

The museum moves chronologically into World War 2--

logbook from the only American pilot killed in action during the Battle of Britain

--and then the Cold War:

the Mark 6 was the first mass-produced nuclear weapon

I'm so interested in all the Cold War spy stuff, all the normal bits and bobs of luggage with their secret compartments full of mysteries.

Yet another nuclear bomb, because I guess why not keep upgrading them until you're quite sure you can blow the entire planet to smithereens?

Mark 7 nuclear bomb, first produced in 1952

The last years of the Cold War are when my partner and I were impressionable kids, and so, of course, we both have our favorite planes from that time. Mine is the SR-71 Blackbird:

--but because he's a bad boy, I guess, his is the MiG:

But we both have the same favorite Desert Storm plane, the F-117 Nighthawk!

We only had time for a couple of exhibit galleries before we really needed to get back on the road (college move-out appointments do not wait for parents who are distracted by sightseeing!), but on the way out I did spy this cool exhibit of women's flight suits. Yay for strong female role models!

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!