I was just thinking how many of the TV shows I've been loving recently have a really cool premise about the world (or, at least, the characters world).

From - People that enter this town are unable to leave (all roads lead back to town), get hunted by monster-people at night

Silo - 10,000 people live in a silo. Their history has been erased, they know nothing of the outside world.

Severance - People can disconnect their 'work-self' from their 'non-work' self via a mysterious company.

The Leftovers - Two percent of the worlds population vanish instantly.

The Devils Hour - It's hard to not give anything away in this one but the premise at the very start is a woman wakes up at 3:33AM every single day. Has a timelooping premise later on

What are some of your favorite shows in the same vein (interesting premise)?

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We stayed in Albuquerque and Taos.

I was surprised and pleased to learn that petroglyphs national monument has free admission. The Pueblo cultural center in Albuquerque is a great resource. If you plan to visit, definitely check their website to see what is scheduled.

We visited and toured Taos Pueblo. Each Pueblo has different craft and art traditional styles. The museums and art galleries in Taos were cool.

New Mexico is beautiful and has a unique cultural identity within the US. It's a poor state but with a high percentage of scientists, artists, old Spanish American families and native Americans.

I liked it well enough to plan for a return trip.

I'm a pretty introspective person. I grew up with an emotionally abusive parent, struggled with my mental health from teenagerhood, and been to more therapy than I can remember since the time of my parents' divorce when I was eight. My siblings and I have done a lot of deconstructing over the years to figure out what the heck happened to us (the abuse was pretty insidious and, of course, we normalized it) and how it affected us internally. I'm also most likely autistic and have always struggled to socialize correctly, which led to a LOT of observation and imitation that was both conscious and unconscious.

Despite all this practice at introspection though, in the past few years, I've come to realize I am wildly out of touch with my own emotions. I am tempted to blame much of this on the fact that I was always collecting social "scripts" to follow, so that I could react appropriately to jokes, or good/bad news, or whatever. If you're acting, you don't actually need to know how you feel. And if you feel something different from standard, it's irrelevant because it's "wrong" to feel that way, so you ignore it. So it took me a long time to realize that my display for other people was actually pretty disconnected from whether I was actually feeling anything. I don't feel it was dishonest, though, because I still would have wanted to show sympathy, excitement, etc. for the people I care about. It just takes me so long to process things that I wouldn't have been able to do it within the same conversation if I didn't have a ready script.

I know that some autistic people experience alexithymia/emotional blindness, but it doesn't look terribly well understood. I know I should probably get back on the therapy horse, for a number of reasons including this one, but I'm pretty leery. I never felt like it helped me much. (Although most of it, at the time, was to help me with "depression". Which I certainly had, but there was no understanding from either my end or theirs that the cause was likely rooted in ADHD/autism.) And I did try to start up again last year; I found a psychologist who specialized in ADHD and autism, and although she seemed understanding at first, I felt like I couldn't establish any clear communication and we just kept talking past each other. At this time, I super don't have the energy to keep trying new therapists, and waste weeks or months on each one before I figure out we won't click.

So I ask: have any of you folks ever dealt with emotional blindness? If so, how have you learned to identify your emotions? Do you keep a feelings journal, and how do you even know what to put in at first? Any advice is welcome!

Next week we will be discussing the City We Became. Our next book discussion after that will be at the end of January.

I've organized this schedule so that longer books are followed by shorter ones. I look forward to reading with you.

Last week in January : Kim Stanley Robinson Ministry for the Future,

Last week in February: Trevor Noah Born a Crime,

Last week in March: Dan Simmons Hyperion,

Last week in April: Adrian Tchaikovsky Elder Race,

Last week in May: Victor LaValle a People's Future of the United States,

Last week in June: T Kingfisher A House with Good Bones,

Last week in July: James McBride the Heaven and Earth grocery Store,

Last week in August: Cats Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut

Last week in September: Ted Chiang Stories of Your Life and Others

The other day I had to get new glasses, and I braced myself for my lenses to be incredibly thick and expensive to boot again - but then I had them made, they look normal, and they barely cost me a Benjamin. Clearly, the optometrist crowd has made some major developments in the past decade or so, which leads me to ask - if you're working in an industry most people don't really think about, what's happened in your space in the past ten years?

Week 4 has begun!

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Quick links:

• Backlog Bingo Site
• Week 1 Discussion and Event Guidelines
• Week 2 Discussion
• Week 3 Discussion

Week 3 Recap

12 participants played 12 bingo cards and moved 34 games out of their backlogs!
There were 0 bingo wins.

• 4 people played Flow bingo cards
• 8 people played Flux bingo cards

Thus far, a total of 87 games have been played for the November 2024 Backlog Burner.

Week 3 Game List:

• Ariel_Knight’s Never Yield
• BioShock 2 Remastered
• Call of the Sea
• Cave Story+
• Cavity Busters
• Celeste
• Cloud Gardens
• Convoy
• Eigengrau
• FPS Chess
• Garden Life: A Cozy Simulator
• Golf Club Nostalgia
• Hades
• Half-Life 2: VR Mod
• Lost in Blue
• Mining Mechs
• No Man’s Sky
• Paradise Killer
• Party Hard
• PictoQuest
• Portal 2
• Portal with RTX
• Praey for the Gods
• Prey
• Project Borealis: Prologue
• Project Warlock II
• Pumpkin Jack
• Slant
• Subnautica
• The Falconeer
• The Gardens Between
• Victoria 3
• Warhammer 40,000: Darktide
• Warpips