Book dump
Mostly book I read ages ago but always forgot to write up because I didn't have terribly much to say about them. Like more posh murder:
John Rowland - Calamity in Kent
Tbh I couldn't say anything that's better than this Goodreads review:
I have a seriously hard time suspending disbelief for a mystery novel whose plot boils down to "Scotland Yard Inspector decides his tabloid journalist friend, Jimmy, is the best choice to investigate a locked-room murder, and tells Jimmy to go for it."
Also Jimmy is a jerk.
Gil North - The Methods of Seargent Cluff
A book about a policeman who just knows. There is an actual line where his boss asks him "Do you have proof for that?" and Cluff replies "It's true all the same."...only at the end it turns out that he was wrong and the guy he was convinced he was the killer didn't do it [Spoiler (click to open)]
it was the guy's wife. And because Cluff was too busy hunting down and annoying the guy, he has no proof against the wife. Thankfully he's a solution for that: he makes sure that guy finds out that his wife commited the murder and tried to frame him for it and then waits in the next room. Guy gets so angry he murders his wife, Cluff can finally arrest him and doesn't have to worry about the lack of proof against the wife!
Everyone's happy!
Except for me who wasted precious hours of my life with this
Then I read more books about lesbians and depressingly, was disappointed again
Jenny Frame - The Royal Court
The blurb made it sound as if this was some (historic) fantasy-land in which everyone is fine with homosexuality and the Queen is a lesbian (though the book wasn't about the queen but the captain of her guard) but it is actually set in some contemporary AU where the Queen of England is a young lesbian. Well why not?
I made it through a third of the book and by then I had read an extremely dull sex scene between the Queen and her wife (btw they also have a child that is biologically theirs but nobody is trans...), zero interaction between the actual designated couple but Queen, wife and assorted others decided to plot to force one half of the designated couple out of the closet because that is all part of a healthy friendship.
:D :D :D :D
Kellie Doherty - Sunnkissed Feathers and Severed Skies
This time an actual fantasy book. In a different world. Completely different. There's four different fantasy-races in this world (none of which are off-brand elves, or dwarves or anything but all new), some of which have further sub-categories and there's also a gazillion fantasy-animals and everything has an all-new fantasy name so I spend about a third of the book trying to remember what letter-jumble is a character name, what's a race and what's an animal.
Oh and life in this fantasy world happens at night. During the day evil sun-creatures and sun-worshippers are out to hunt honest citizens which is why elite forces - like our main character and her love interest - have to go out and kill the sun worshippers.
One of my questionable life choices is watching BuzzFeed Worth It on Youtube. Each episode the hosts try a certain food at a cheap place, a normal-priced place and a expensive place. And sometimes the expensive one actually is something that was something really labour intensive and deserves the price tag but other times it's "I put truffles, caviar and edible gold on this pizza and now it's $1000." And except for the edible gold there's nothing wrong with any of those things but pizza really doesn't need caviar.
The plot is the pizza and the worldbuilding is the caviar. I said it's weird comparison time.
Because the worldbuilding is cool and fancy and while I wish the author hadn't thrown quite so much all-new stuff in at once, it was intriguing and I kept reading because I expected something fancy, delicious and unusual. But all I got was pizza and I wondered why they didn't just put some mushrooms and ham on it because that would have been fine.
The plot was the plainest of plain 'Go from A to B' plots. MC1 (Misti) fights evil sun worshippers, one of them throws a mysterious pendant at her that she can't remove and that sucks the energy from the people around her. She's told she should try town X to ask there if the people can remove the pendant. She and love interest go there, fight sun worshippers on the way, get told that they can't remove it and try town Y. She and love interest go there, fight sun worshippers on the way, get told that they can't remove it and try town Z. They go there. Your pendant expert is in another castle.
All of this would just as easily have worked in ye olde 80s DnD inspired fantasy world where the elves live in the east and the evil kingdom is in the south.
During all the fight with the sun-worshippers there was some "But some of these are so young...is killing really the solution?" discussion and for a while I expected that to go all Carol Berg and be "Well, it turns out all the beliefs you and your people held for ages are wrong and you now have to cope with the emotional fallout from that and btw the world is in danger and you have to save it HAVE FUN!" but the big twist was...that the sun worshippers are slightly better organized than they expected? And honestly for a plot that makes the one from the first Nighrunner book look really sophisticated, I don't want a world that requires charts and an encyclopedia to keep track of.
Besides...I'm not saying that if the author has a Tumblr she reblogged one of those "straight men are so weak, I, a lesbian, have been in changing rooms with other women and never had creepy inapropriate thoughts and that means all women are like that and women can't be evil or bad" posts but...
You see that evil artifact of dark magic Misti is stuck with? The narration tells us that it affects her mood and that she gets bad-tempered and annoyed by harmless things her traveling companions do and then...she takes a deep breath, ignores it and nothing happens. Absolutely nothing. She's fine. She can fight the darkness.
Sorry Frodo, Boromir and Ron. You were just not strong enough
I also spent a lot of time on trains in the past weeks and for that I dug out some Jess Faraday books (novellas) I bought on sale a while ago because I was promised gay and lesbian mystery with some fantasy and...well. I did read all three I had and they do make some nice train reading. They are vaguely entertaining, pass the time but not so engrossing that I was ever in danger of missing my stop but I'm not going to buy any more by the author.
The Affair of the Porcelain Dog
In Victorian London Ira Adler (yes) is the trophy boyfriend of off-brand Moriarty and is asked by him to retrive a porcelain dog that contains pictures that could be used to blackmail off-brand Moriarty - they show him with off-brand Sherlock Holmes and they're not busy arguing finer points of the law on them. Or anything similar. During the retrival Ira runs in his ex - off-brand Watson - things go terribly wrong, suddenly the whole world is against Ira, he gets beaten up, arrested, doesn't sleep for ages but still manages to solve pretty much everything on his own.
Inbetween there's signs of something better: We learn about Ira's backstory and that he ended up on the street after his mother died as a result of her opium addiction and he's been dirt poor until Moriarty picked him up and showered him in everything he wanted. But while he enjoys all that luxury he never had and is afraid of ending up on the street again, he's also slowly realising/admitting to himself that some of the money Moriarty makes comes from opium trade and that people like him are the reason he landed on the street in the first place and that leads to some soul-searching and in the end he even separates from him. That really could have been a good and moving story but the whole book is about 150 pages and most of it is 'Lone wolf Ira against the rest of the world' and his emotional turmoil is 'well and this also happened btw' and...I guess if you like gays and lone wolf stories you can now be happy that not every one of them is a straight guy but...I like stories about people doing stuff together.
The Left Hand of Justice
In Steampunk Paris Inspector Corbeau is incredibly unpopular with her boss because of complicated politics reasons but then her boss's boss - Javert (yes) - goes behind his back and tells Corbeau to find a missing cult leader. He even suggest that missing cult leader's girlfriend Maria is probably guilty. Maria is hot and very suspicious and gets abducted shortly after Corbeau talks to her the first time. She then discovers it's all a big conspiracy, now she's alone against the whole world, Javert has ulteriour motives, she also gets kidnapped and beaten up but in the end saves Damsel in Distress Maria, solves everything and they live happily ever after.
Now please imagine I just wrote again 'I guess if you like gays/lesbians etc.'
The Strange Case of the Big Sur Benefactor
Now this was depressing.
Because it wasn't more of the same. In Steampunk USA our translator heroine Rosetta Stein (yes), her brother Franklin (Frank for short so he's Frank Stein), her classmate Vincet and a charming lady marshall all work together to solve a case and they get some help from the Stein's faithful-as-a-hound butler Baskerville (yes...and yes faithful as a hound appeared in the text) and a certain Dr Hyde (yes) who's first grumpy that Vincent doesn't return his avances but then takes a honourable step back when he sees how well Vincent and Frank get along. Meanwhile charming lady marshall charms Rosetta.
Sadly, the whole story had 90 pages and once all characters and their relationships were introduced there wasn't much space left for the actual case. So much like Ira's emotional turmoil it was a case of 'well and this also happened' and I am simply not content with charming characters alone. I do want a plot. And I was kind of sad that I did because I wanted to love this and all the groan-worthy witty names but...I couldn't.
And finally a book that does not involve gays or murder but my other favourite thing: dead royals
Alexandra Walsh - The Catherine Howard Conspiracy
Full disclosure: I started this book somewhen on a Sunday morning and then finished it somewhen past midnight so I can't really call it complete trash.
Only very entertaining trash.
I guess the 'Conspiracy' in the title should have warned me but the blurb just made it sound like 'Historian inherits house, discovers clues that suggest that Catherine Howard wasn't actually executed by Henry VIII and then digs deeper to find out more' and the whole thing is like one of those mysteries where the sleuth tries to solve a 100+ year old crime.
This book is essentially The Tudor Code. It's about an awesome historian who discovers that the story we've been told about a historical figure is wrong. And then she is hunted by MI5/6/007 or whatever because the public can never know that truth.
Now let's take a step back and look at The Da Vinci Code:
The story of an awesome historian who discovers that Jesus was actually married and had children. If this came out it would make a lot of people upset because Jesus is kind of a big deal for a lot of people and so is the fact that he is exactly what we've always been taught: unmarried and untouched by any desires of the flesh. Now I hate to use the phrase it makes sense when talking about a Dan Brown book but internal logic wise...it makes sense that the Vatican sends out assassins to keep that knowledge a secret.And really I should get of my high horse because I did read The Da Vinci Code and then even paid money to see it in the cinema.
Meanwhiel Catherine Howard...was a teenager who married a king but never wielded any political influence, was executed after a year and afterwards also did not wield any political influence due to being dead. But then it turns out that she didn't actually die but went into hiding where she also wielded no political influence. But nobody is allowed to know about that because...people would riot on the street?
I mean I guess a considerable percentage of the population won't be able to name all of Henry's wives and if you gave them a list most would be able to tell you that Anne Boleyn got executed and possibly that Jane Seymour died but would have a hard time matching the rest to divorced-beheaded etc.
Why would these people care?
But not in this book. Early on, before MI007 turns up the MC tells her designated love interest that she found some documents that suggest Catherine wasn't executed he freaks out and yells at her how she could ever say such a thing. And he explains his outburst with 'But if that is true the Divorced Beheaded Died, Divorced Beheaded Survived rhyme won't work anymore' and apparently that rhyme working is an important part of his sense of identity?
BUT THAT'S NOT ALL!
Because he then starts going on about Richard III and how everybody believed Shakespeare who said he was an evil hunchback and then they found his bones that showed he wasn't a hunchback and suddenly nobody believed he was evil, either.
Dude
DUDE
Long before they dug up those bones, historians have argued that perhaps the guy who wrote a play set on the Bohemian coast wasn't too big on historical or any other accuracy and that probably wasn't helped by the fact that the Tudors paid him to write about the guy they dethroned.
Real Richard III being different from Shakespeare's Richard III is not news. I was aware of this and my interest in English monarchs (apart from Steven and Matilda) is nowhere near as deep as my interest in certain Austrian and Bavarian monarchs.
And he doesn't really explain why it's bad(?) that now people no longer believe that Richard III was a bad guy. There's just some vague 'history has changed' but he doesn't go any deeper. Only...in reality it wasn't that big a deal for people that weren't historians that specialised on the Plantagenets. So unless the book tells me that it's set in an alternate reality in which there was an uproar after the bones were discovered and the Brexit vote could be directly connected to people discovering that ALL THEIR HISTORY IS WRONG!!11!! I am going to say "Your flimsy reasoning is flimsy and you should feel bad and you still haven't explained properly why the secret service is suddenly after her (and...why they didn't kill the scientists who dug up Richard...is Catherine more important than him?)"
But I did read it in a day. And I can't even deny that I have toyed with getting the second part once it's released. Just for the lulz and because I want to know if awesome historian will turn out to be a descendant of Catherine Howard. And honestly I would semi-seriously consider it, if it really was just 'Awesome historian hunted by MI007' but only half the book was about her. The other half tells Catherine Howard's story directly and I could have forgiven that it turns her into a genius angels who did no wrong ever, decided, the moment she learned that Henry wanted to marry her, that from now on she wouldn't be alone with a man, even if he's a relative, and got on well with her predeccessor as well as Mary and Elisabeth (who also taught her French and Latin). Because god forbid we tell a story about a not particularily clever promiscuous teenager. Those can die. You have to work to deserve your life.
But then the chapters about Catherine also included some quite graphic scenes in which Henry rapes her and I really could have done without that. Because you can aknowledge that some women in political marriages didn't have much chance to say no (or that Henry VIII was...well not a hero of feminism) without making me read in great detail about a ~16-year-old being raped. Really.
John Rowland - Calamity in Kent
Tbh I couldn't say anything that's better than this Goodreads review:
I have a seriously hard time suspending disbelief for a mystery novel whose plot boils down to "Scotland Yard Inspector decides his tabloid journalist friend, Jimmy, is the best choice to investigate a locked-room murder, and tells Jimmy to go for it."
Also Jimmy is a jerk.
Gil North - The Methods of Seargent Cluff
A book about a policeman who just knows. There is an actual line where his boss asks him "Do you have proof for that?" and Cluff replies "It's true all the same."...only at the end it turns out that he was wrong and the guy he was convinced he was the killer didn't do it [Spoiler (click to open)]
it was the guy's wife. And because Cluff was too busy hunting down and annoying the guy, he has no proof against the wife. Thankfully he's a solution for that: he makes sure that guy finds out that his wife commited the murder and tried to frame him for it and then waits in the next room. Guy gets so angry he murders his wife, Cluff can finally arrest him and doesn't have to worry about the lack of proof against the wife!
Everyone's happy!
Except for me who wasted precious hours of my life with this
Then I read more books about lesbians and depressingly, was disappointed again
Jenny Frame - The Royal Court
The blurb made it sound as if this was some (historic) fantasy-land in which everyone is fine with homosexuality and the Queen is a lesbian (though the book wasn't about the queen but the captain of her guard) but it is actually set in some contemporary AU where the Queen of England is a young lesbian. Well why not?
I made it through a third of the book and by then I had read an extremely dull sex scene between the Queen and her wife (btw they also have a child that is biologically theirs but nobody is trans...), zero interaction between the actual designated couple but Queen, wife and assorted others decided to plot to force one half of the designated couple out of the closet because that is all part of a healthy friendship.
:D :D :D :D
Kellie Doherty - Sunnkissed Feathers and Severed Skies
This time an actual fantasy book. In a different world. Completely different. There's four different fantasy-races in this world (none of which are off-brand elves, or dwarves or anything but all new), some of which have further sub-categories and there's also a gazillion fantasy-animals and everything has an all-new fantasy name so I spend about a third of the book trying to remember what letter-jumble is a character name, what's a race and what's an animal.
Oh and life in this fantasy world happens at night. During the day evil sun-creatures and sun-worshippers are out to hunt honest citizens which is why elite forces - like our main character and her love interest - have to go out and kill the sun worshippers.
One of my questionable life choices is watching BuzzFeed Worth It on Youtube. Each episode the hosts try a certain food at a cheap place, a normal-priced place and a expensive place. And sometimes the expensive one actually is something that was something really labour intensive and deserves the price tag but other times it's "I put truffles, caviar and edible gold on this pizza and now it's $1000." And except for the edible gold there's nothing wrong with any of those things but pizza really doesn't need caviar.
The plot is the pizza and the worldbuilding is the caviar. I said it's weird comparison time.
Because the worldbuilding is cool and fancy and while I wish the author hadn't thrown quite so much all-new stuff in at once, it was intriguing and I kept reading because I expected something fancy, delicious and unusual. But all I got was pizza and I wondered why they didn't just put some mushrooms and ham on it because that would have been fine.
The plot was the plainest of plain 'Go from A to B' plots. MC1 (Misti) fights evil sun worshippers, one of them throws a mysterious pendant at her that she can't remove and that sucks the energy from the people around her. She's told she should try town X to ask there if the people can remove the pendant. She and love interest go there, fight sun worshippers on the way, get told that they can't remove it and try town Y. She and love interest go there, fight sun worshippers on the way, get told that they can't remove it and try town Z. They go there. Your pendant expert is in another castle.
All of this would just as easily have worked in ye olde 80s DnD inspired fantasy world where the elves live in the east and the evil kingdom is in the south.
During all the fight with the sun-worshippers there was some "But some of these are so young...is killing really the solution?" discussion and for a while I expected that to go all Carol Berg and be "Well, it turns out all the beliefs you and your people held for ages are wrong and you now have to cope with the emotional fallout from that and btw the world is in danger and you have to save it HAVE FUN!" but the big twist was...that the sun worshippers are slightly better organized than they expected? And honestly for a plot that makes the one from the first Nighrunner book look really sophisticated, I don't want a world that requires charts and an encyclopedia to keep track of.
Besides...I'm not saying that if the author has a Tumblr she reblogged one of those "straight men are so weak, I, a lesbian, have been in changing rooms with other women and never had creepy inapropriate thoughts and that means all women are like that and women can't be evil or bad" posts but...
You see that evil artifact of dark magic Misti is stuck with? The narration tells us that it affects her mood and that she gets bad-tempered and annoyed by harmless things her traveling companions do and then...she takes a deep breath, ignores it and nothing happens. Absolutely nothing. She's fine. She can fight the darkness.
Sorry Frodo, Boromir and Ron. You were just not strong enough
I also spent a lot of time on trains in the past weeks and for that I dug out some Jess Faraday books (novellas) I bought on sale a while ago because I was promised gay and lesbian mystery with some fantasy and...well. I did read all three I had and they do make some nice train reading. They are vaguely entertaining, pass the time but not so engrossing that I was ever in danger of missing my stop but I'm not going to buy any more by the author.
The Affair of the Porcelain Dog
In Victorian London Ira Adler (yes) is the trophy boyfriend of off-brand Moriarty and is asked by him to retrive a porcelain dog that contains pictures that could be used to blackmail off-brand Moriarty - they show him with off-brand Sherlock Holmes and they're not busy arguing finer points of the law on them. Or anything similar. During the retrival Ira runs in his ex - off-brand Watson - things go terribly wrong, suddenly the whole world is against Ira, he gets beaten up, arrested, doesn't sleep for ages but still manages to solve pretty much everything on his own.
Inbetween there's signs of something better: We learn about Ira's backstory and that he ended up on the street after his mother died as a result of her opium addiction and he's been dirt poor until Moriarty picked him up and showered him in everything he wanted. But while he enjoys all that luxury he never had and is afraid of ending up on the street again, he's also slowly realising/admitting to himself that some of the money Moriarty makes comes from opium trade and that people like him are the reason he landed on the street in the first place and that leads to some soul-searching and in the end he even separates from him. That really could have been a good and moving story but the whole book is about 150 pages and most of it is 'Lone wolf Ira against the rest of the world' and his emotional turmoil is 'well and this also happened btw' and...I guess if you like gays and lone wolf stories you can now be happy that not every one of them is a straight guy but...I like stories about people doing stuff together.
The Left Hand of Justice
In Steampunk Paris Inspector Corbeau is incredibly unpopular with her boss because of complicated politics reasons but then her boss's boss - Javert (yes) - goes behind his back and tells Corbeau to find a missing cult leader. He even suggest that missing cult leader's girlfriend Maria is probably guilty. Maria is hot and very suspicious and gets abducted shortly after Corbeau talks to her the first time. She then discovers it's all a big conspiracy, now she's alone against the whole world, Javert has ulteriour motives, she also gets kidnapped and beaten up but in the end saves Damsel in Distress Maria, solves everything and they live happily ever after.
Now please imagine I just wrote again 'I guess if you like gays/lesbians etc.'
The Strange Case of the Big Sur Benefactor
Now this was depressing.
Because it wasn't more of the same. In Steampunk USA our translator heroine Rosetta Stein (yes), her brother Franklin (Frank for short so he's Frank Stein), her classmate Vincet and a charming lady marshall all work together to solve a case and they get some help from the Stein's faithful-as-a-hound butler Baskerville (yes...and yes faithful as a hound appeared in the text) and a certain Dr Hyde (yes) who's first grumpy that Vincent doesn't return his avances but then takes a honourable step back when he sees how well Vincent and Frank get along. Meanwhile charming lady marshall charms Rosetta.
Sadly, the whole story had 90 pages and once all characters and their relationships were introduced there wasn't much space left for the actual case. So much like Ira's emotional turmoil it was a case of 'well and this also happened' and I am simply not content with charming characters alone. I do want a plot. And I was kind of sad that I did because I wanted to love this and all the groan-worthy witty names but...I couldn't.
And finally a book that does not involve gays or murder but my other favourite thing: dead royals
Alexandra Walsh - The Catherine Howard Conspiracy
Full disclosure: I started this book somewhen on a Sunday morning and then finished it somewhen past midnight so I can't really call it complete trash.
Only very entertaining trash.
I guess the 'Conspiracy' in the title should have warned me but the blurb just made it sound like 'Historian inherits house, discovers clues that suggest that Catherine Howard wasn't actually executed by Henry VIII and then digs deeper to find out more' and the whole thing is like one of those mysteries where the sleuth tries to solve a 100+ year old crime.
This book is essentially The Tudor Code. It's about an awesome historian who discovers that the story we've been told about a historical figure is wrong. And then she is hunted by MI5/6/007 or whatever because the public can never know that truth.
Now let's take a step back and look at The Da Vinci Code:
The story of an awesome historian who discovers that Jesus was actually married and had children. If this came out it would make a lot of people upset because Jesus is kind of a big deal for a lot of people and so is the fact that he is exactly what we've always been taught: unmarried and untouched by any desires of the flesh. Now I hate to use the phrase it makes sense when talking about a Dan Brown book but internal logic wise...it makes sense that the Vatican sends out assassins to keep that knowledge a secret.And really I should get of my high horse because I did read The Da Vinci Code and then even paid money to see it in the cinema.
Meanwhiel Catherine Howard...was a teenager who married a king but never wielded any political influence, was executed after a year and afterwards also did not wield any political influence due to being dead. But then it turns out that she didn't actually die but went into hiding where she also wielded no political influence. But nobody is allowed to know about that because...people would riot on the street?
I mean I guess a considerable percentage of the population won't be able to name all of Henry's wives and if you gave them a list most would be able to tell you that Anne Boleyn got executed and possibly that Jane Seymour died but would have a hard time matching the rest to divorced-beheaded etc.
Why would these people care?
But not in this book. Early on, before MI007 turns up the MC tells her designated love interest that she found some documents that suggest Catherine wasn't executed he freaks out and yells at her how she could ever say such a thing. And he explains his outburst with 'But if that is true the Divorced Beheaded Died, Divorced Beheaded Survived rhyme won't work anymore' and apparently that rhyme working is an important part of his sense of identity?
BUT THAT'S NOT ALL!
Because he then starts going on about Richard III and how everybody believed Shakespeare who said he was an evil hunchback and then they found his bones that showed he wasn't a hunchback and suddenly nobody believed he was evil, either.
Dude
DUDE
Long before they dug up those bones, historians have argued that perhaps the guy who wrote a play set on the Bohemian coast wasn't too big on historical or any other accuracy and that probably wasn't helped by the fact that the Tudors paid him to write about the guy they dethroned.
Real Richard III being different from Shakespeare's Richard III is not news. I was aware of this and my interest in English monarchs (apart from Steven and Matilda) is nowhere near as deep as my interest in certain Austrian and Bavarian monarchs.
And he doesn't really explain why it's bad(?) that now people no longer believe that Richard III was a bad guy. There's just some vague 'history has changed' but he doesn't go any deeper. Only...in reality it wasn't that big a deal for people that weren't historians that specialised on the Plantagenets. So unless the book tells me that it's set in an alternate reality in which there was an uproar after the bones were discovered and the Brexit vote could be directly connected to people discovering that ALL THEIR HISTORY IS WRONG!!11!! I am going to say "Your flimsy reasoning is flimsy and you should feel bad and you still haven't explained properly why the secret service is suddenly after her (and...why they didn't kill the scientists who dug up Richard...is Catherine more important than him?)"
But I did read it in a day. And I can't even deny that I have toyed with getting the second part once it's released. Just for the lulz and because I want to know if awesome historian will turn out to be a descendant of Catherine Howard. And honestly I would semi-seriously consider it, if it really was just 'Awesome historian hunted by MI007' but only half the book was about her. The other half tells Catherine Howard's story directly and I could have forgiven that it turns her into a genius angels who did no wrong ever, decided, the moment she learned that Henry wanted to marry her, that from now on she wouldn't be alone with a man, even if he's a relative, and got on well with her predeccessor as well as Mary and Elisabeth (who also taught her French and Latin). Because god forbid we tell a story about a not particularily clever promiscuous teenager. Those can die. You have to work to deserve your life.
But then the chapters about Catherine also included some quite graphic scenes in which Henry rapes her and I really could have done without that. Because you can aknowledge that some women in political marriages didn't have much chance to say no (or that Henry VIII was...well not a hero of feminism) without making me read in great detail about a ~16-year-old being raped. Really.