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First, happy birthday to my man. I wish I could spoil him as much as he deserves.

Second, I don't think I've actually talked about the current D&D game much, if at all. It's fun. I'm not DMing, I'm playing. exarian's husband is running it. He had this game going for a few months, and at some point with hanging out with them Paul and I mentioned that we'd be game to play. His group had shrunk a bit with one guy, Ben, off to do military training for a while, so we joined a month ago or so. It's nice to play at a table again and not be running it. It's fun to play with with Dana and Shawn again. It's been a blast playing with Tony for the first time. And I love seeing Paul get into the group with smack talk and joking.

I re-speced a character that I had been playing online before this game. It's a Swarm Druid, and he's pretty fun to play. It dose take some finesse with his abilities to control the enemies and not damage party members. But it just takes some planning, which is a nice change for D&D.

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I finished "Morning Star (Ethos)" by Desiree Finkbeiner recently. I think it was linked to by graeae. (I get more free books from her twitter feed...)

The story was pretty good. A lot of cool concepts. I did see a lot of similarities to the movie Avatar, but they were tweaked enough that they can be considered influences, not plagiarism at all. Fun world. Good characters. Nice plot. I did like all of the classes of people/beings and how that was handled. Strong world building there. Lots of YA fantasy tropes, but they were handled well. I rarely rolled my eyes. I did think the romance aspect was a bit too much, but I've come to understand that my interest/level of acceptance of sappy romance is a lot lower than the standard YA story has. So it's more of a personal preference thing.

rating: B-

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I forget which book blog I was following that covered the works of Andre Norton, maybe Tor.com? But the over view interested me, and since a lot of her works are public domain now, I grabbed a bunch. I have finished All Cats are Gray now and I liked it. It's a pretty short story, but well written. It wasn't deep or heavy, just a good sci-fi story. I'm looking forward to more of her stuff. I think they will be good filler stories between novels.

rating: A