I'm a bird person now

Welcome to another episode of Puzzle Pals! Or...something else. I haven't really come up with a name for it. Anyway, this month's puzzle was State Birds of America, created by Cobble Hill Puzzle Company.

The thing about puzzles is sometimes the effort is frontloaded and sometimes it's backloaded. This is definitely a frontloaded puzzle. For starters, this was possibly the first time I've done a puzzle and thought it might have been easier starting with the center instead of the border. Except for the bottom, it was all just green, and we still had a couple of edge pieces we weren't sure what to do with when we finally thought we had it all together. I ended up just working on it and eventually figuring out where the border was wrong and fixing it WAY into the process. 

After some initial legwork, though, I thought it was a delightful puzzle. Very unique piece shape, things fit together well, and it was fun seeing all the different birds. It would have been a solid 5/5 puzzle, were it not for one heartbreaking thing, spotted on the box after we finished it. "This image was produced with the assistance of AI." That's a hard no thanks from me, so I guess I'll have to pay closer attention to where I source my puzzles going forward. Le sigh. Jazz hands for cool state birds (and a new haircut). Not so jazzy hands for using AI to create art instead of actual artists.

August Mystery Book

July's mystery book turned out to be excellent (and a dang series, of course, so I had to request the next book from the library), so I've been looking forward to the next one and hoping it's just as good, so I could start a streak. After starting the book, I'm not sure it's going to happen. But I'm getting ahead of myself!

August's mystery read is Murder of Crows by K. Ancrum. Cool, I like K. Ancrum. Seems intriguing.

But then I started reading it, and it's immediately apparent that this is a sequel of some sort. Even though it's listed as "Lethal Lit #1" on the Storygraph. Soooooo what is it a sequel to? 

A PODCAST. 

Yeah, apparently the events in this book take place between the first and second seasons of a scripted podcast called Lethal Lit. And I just...do we think this is a good idea, pals? I guess technically so far (four chapters in) it doesn't seem like it's a requirement to have the context from season one to understand the plot of the book, but events from the podcast are HEAVILY referenced, so it's such a weird vibe NOT having that context. Plus numbering a book as the first in a series when there is already existing story, just not in book form, rubs me the wrong way. I don't know the correct way to denote that this is set in an existing podcast universe, but like...it just all leaves me feeling a little offput. 

I looked it up, and the first episode of the podcast is six episodes, pretty short, so listening to it and then reading the book would be an option. But if I'm being honest, pushing readers to the podcast is part of what I don't like about this whole concept. Listening to the podcast feels like rewarding bad behavior, and if you know me you know one of the things I love to say is "I don't reward bad behavior." So no, I shan't be listening to season one of the podcast. I SHALL give the book a few more chapters and see how I feel about it. And then we can go from there.