Non-Spoiler Review of Invasive by Chuck Wendig

Just finished reading Invasive by Chuck Wendig. It's a very fast-paced sci-fi thriller about killer ants. I read the entire thing in two days after having it catch my eye in the library. It's nice to binge read something again. It was only after I finished reading it that I discovered it was a sequel to a story called Zeroes, which explains a couple of the things that kind of come out of nowhere and seemed like they were references from an unrelated story. But you don't need to understand any of that to understand this story.

I have very...complicated feelings regarding the main character, Hannah Stander. Not really sure how to articulate them, and some of it is personal. Complicated means positive and negative feelings and I'm not sure how to piece them all together. Maybe I'll talk about it some more later if I can figure out what I want to say. Her background works well for the story, though.

Wendig's writing style is very distinctive. I hardly ever notice tense when I'm reading though and had to flip back to verify that this book is in present tense, but it is. I think that works well for a thriller. Even if I didn't consciously notice it, it probably helps lend an air of immediacy to the whole thing. There's also a lot of very exuberant metaphor and simile. There are interludes, though these are much more closely tied into the main storyline than the ones in Aftermath. Kind of increases my feeling that Wendig probably had deadline issues with Aftermath, but I digress. The main point here is that while the subject matter differs, this book and Aftermath are very stylistically similar even if they're otherwise very different.

I really enjoyed the more sciency parts of this story--this is much more hard sci-fi than Star Wars, and Wendig did a good job with the arthropod research. There are also other incidental details that slip past that lend an air of credibility to the story as well.

I'm glad I don't have an ant phobia. This book might be unreadable for the ant-phobic. At the same time, I've always believed that knowledge of a thing can help reduce fear of it. I suffered from severe arachnophobia as a child and I know learning more about spiders--how to identify them, which ones are dangerous, which are not, helped me greatly reduce that fear. And this book will give you lots of real facts about ants!

2018 Taxes

Been looking at 2018 tax forms. Just a heads up for anyone in the US who may not have noticed this or perhaps forgot about it, but this year's tax forms are considerably different from last years. There are no more 1040A or 1040 EZ. The 1040 is the form everyone uses now, and it's been broken up into a bunch of different schedules. Those schedules are also still in draft form, though I think the best strategy is to fill them out as they are now (if applicable) and wait to see what happens with those. If you would have been able to fill out the 1040EZ or 1040A you may not need any of the schedules, and the 1040 appears to be in final form.

The new 1040 has a bizarre half-page design for both it's pages, and the signature has inexplicably been moved to page 1. Of the more notable structural changes, there are no personal or dependent exemptions anymore, but the standard deductions are higher. Otherwise most of the actual calculations for most people are probably very similar to last year. I mean, unless you're a business person with a "qualified business". Then you get a 20% tax cut. I guess that's one of the rich people tax cuts, lol.

I've gotten an early start on this year's taxes because I wanted to give myself time to process the new changes. Definitely think it's better to get started sooner than later.

Communities

I think I really like the idea of forming a community, but I don't want to manage it as a mod. I tend to be cautious about taking on responsibility because I know it's very hard for me to get out of situations where I overcommit. I joke that it's because I'm lazy, and I am, but it's also because I stress a lot about anything I see as a time commitment. That's why I don't do more exchange stories either, despite really enjoying fanfic exchanges.