I've been playing Carcassonne online a lot lately.

(Because I've been bored.)

The bots are incredibly stupid. They never steal. They never, of course, prepare for the possibility of having their field or road or city stolen. They deliberately build cities and roads to get immediate points NOW... even if what they're doing means they can't close that city or road (or even keep building on it, particularly if there's a builder). They never close a city just to get the tokens or to force somebody to have to re-place their builder.

But, you know, they're bots. They don't think.

As I play, I'm starting to wonder something. A few somethings, actually.

1. Using the tiles from the standard Carcassonne, could you connect all the road pieces to each other? Or all the city pieces to each other?

2. Could you do this in such a way that you have no open ends left?

3. If so, could you repeat the feat with various of the expansions?

Obviously that would never happen in a real game, but could you do it for fun?

When I saw Avatar, there was an ad for the new Percy Jackson movie.

(I am so there. That series is surprisingly not-terrible.)

The guy I was with scoffed at "you were underwater for 7 minutes!!" with "That's not possible", but clearly he doesn't understand the secret filmmaking that indicates "this isn't actually possible, but suspend your disbelief a little". (One wonders how he reacted when he saw trailers for the first ever HP movie, years ago. Broomsticks? Flying? That's not possible!)

As it happens, Greek/Roman mythology is a bigger topic in kidlit than you'd imagine. Aside from the aforementioned Percy Jackson series there's one about Pandora and various deadly sins (or something...), and now there's... this series. It's on Goodreads as a giveaway.

Authors Joan Holub and Suzanne Williams put a modern spin on classic myths with the Goddess Girls series. Follow the ins and outs of divine social life at Mount Olympus Academy, where the most privileged godboys and goddessgirls in the Greek pantheon hone their mythical skills.

Yes, it appears to be a High School AU for Mount Olympus.

...

This is either going to be super sucky or it's going to be SO AWESOME. All it needs is for the "students" to sparkle, right?

There's another one as well. They're both in the First Reads program so I entered.

Persephone often "goes along to get along" instead of doing what she really wants. But when she meets Mount Olympus Academy bad-boy Hades, she finally feels she has found someone with whom she can be herself. He's the first person who actually listens to her, and she finds herself liking him, despite the fact that the other goddessgirls think he's bad news. But if he makes her feel so special -- and so comfortable -- can he really be all that bad?

My goodness. I've never felt so much LOL-ing anticipation towards a book before in my life. If you can snag me a copy when I don't win, I'd very much appreciate it. (I think this is even better than cannibalistic time-traveling mermaids!)

Edit: It turns out - thank you, rho! - that it is definitely possible to hold your breath underwater for well more than seven minutes. I had no idea!