Blog Post #8 Buzzer Beater

Nicholas Abbott
3 min readJul 1, 2021

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I have successfully completed the first month of keeping my commitment of one blog post per month. Plenty of time to spare as well which is great.

In all seriousness I was planning on doing this a few days ago but it slipped my mind but I happened to have time to do it today so here I am!

Let’s talk about dreaming, I dream every few days and I’m getting more and more convinced that I should start writing down everything that is happening in them because it seems that they are becoming more and more fully fledged stories every time. Naturally you never remember your dreams but the last few dreams I’ve been having have been so layered and I’m not sure if that is genuine or because I can’t tell that it makes no sense but it honestly feels like my brain is creating TV for me. What is really crazy to me as well is that there are jokes that I would swear I have never heard which means my subconscious put two and two together itself but it really is bizarre to me afterwards. I might record them but not during the split at least, I’ll shelve that for now.

As far as new interesting ideas go… nothing has really grabbed me recently. I have watched Wandavision, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, and the first four episodes of Loki, read some random manga but nothing has really piqued my interest enough to recall it. Although now that I think about it, I was planning on writing a book review on a real book I had read a few weeks ago but scrapped it because I didn’t know how to articulate why I didn’t like it well enough, and only recently came across something that would help explain that but now it’s been a while since I read it so it isn’t fresh in my memory.

That won’t stop me from talking about it though because I do want to explain why I don’t like this book with this new information. The book is called “The Devil and the Dark Water” by Stuart Turton and it is a mystery book and since this isn’t going to be a full review I won’t overexplain it but there is something called the 10 Commandments of detective fiction and it was an agreed upon standard that many mystery authors agreed to follow to make it fair to readers trying to solve the mystery that it will be fair and just. Now some of those rules are very outdated, but some are in my opinion still good to be kept in place. This story in my opinion breaks one of the rules which may not seem like much but combined with my general problem with the solution lead me to not enjoying the solution. The rule it broke is where you shouldn’t have more than one secret room/trap door which is pretty self explanatory on how he broke it, but why is it so bad?

Well the problem is the “villain” is virtually omnipotent. It didn’t seem like there was any point where the villain was confined in ANY sort of way which leads to the solution being incredibly overcomplicated and involving too many of the people in the actual story. How are you supposed to guess that so many people are involved in the plot as well as from the villains point of view, know that the people that know your secret won’t say anything about it. Also also when you say this guy did this because they are close friends, and say it like 3 times and never have a dialogue between the two to make you even consider that that may not be the case how are you supposed to override that with other evidence? I had a lot of problems with this book and maybe it’s too hard to explain without going into details but I just didn’t like the ending and there are a bunch of reasons. Not even going to go into the part where the villain pretends it isn’t his fault because the person he bribed revolted and resulted in many people dying and then the main character being ok with that even though it goes against his character.

Regardless it was dumb, but I don’t have much time before I actually am late so I think I’m gonna call it here despite this one being a bit short. I promise the next one will be longer, but I might not have anything interesting to write about but I’ll figure it out for sure. Thanks for reading, JUNE COMPLETE

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