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. I've finished the Star Wars jigsaw puzzle, with the last several days spent filling in the black and speckled-black spaces in the image by trying pieces one at a time until I found the one that fit. I've enjoyed having a jigsaw puzzle on the go and filling bits in at odd moments, but now I've done all the puzzles I own. I'm thinking about going back to the oldest one and doing it again, since buying a new thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle every fortnight seems like a bad habit to get into when I'm trying to keep expenditure down.


. At board game club, we played Mysterium. I got both the suspect and the location first try, and then spent most of the rest of the game completely failing to interpret the clues I was given about the murder weapon: by the time I got it, there were only two potential weapons left to guess, and I still would have gone for the wrong one if the other investigators hadn't talked me out of it. All of the investigators made it to the finish line in time, some by the skin of their teeth, but when it came to the final deduction there was near-complete disagreement about the solution; only two investigators agreed on a solution, and unfortunately it turned out not to be the correct one.

Over the weekend, we also had one of our occasional sessions where a few of us get together outside the usual weekly meeting. Usually it's to play a big game that there isn't time for at the weekly meeting, but not enough people could make it on this occasion, so we just played a string of smaller games instead: Ticket to Ride: London, Sequoia, Shake that City, Star Fluxx, and Hero Realms.


. At one point this week, I found myself somewhat overwhelmed on the new media front: within a couple of days, a new season of a TV show started, two podcasts that have been quiet for a while released several hours of new content, and the new Rivers of London novel came out, in addition to my usual podcasts, the regular episodes of Jet Lag and Taskmaster and the backlog of Natural Six that I'm still trying to work through. In one area, at least, it came out to a net decrease in the number of things I was actively trying to keep up with, since the new Rivers of London novel immediately muscled aside the other two novels I'd been making some attempt to read; apart from that, though, I found myself with a lot of things to watch or listen to and not so many hours in the day in which to do it.
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. This week marked the tenth anniversary of my first entry on 750 Words. That sounds more impressive if you don't know how many long gaps there have been along the way: my current streak, which has lasted most of the past year, is the longest time I've stuck at it before giving up for a few years, and in that time I've written more entries than in the other nine years put together.


. At board game club this week, the main game was Russian Railroads, a worker-placement game themed around building railways, with several different tracks, each of which offers different kinds of rewards for building on it. Read more... )


. I finished A Choice of Catastrophes, a non-fiction book by Isaac Asimov that I've been reading here and there since April. The hook is describing the ways that the world, or at least humanity, might come to an end, but along the way there are lessons in a wide variety of other scientific and historical subjects: to understand how the world might stop working, one first needs to understand how it works.
It's good, but shows its age )


. I've had mixed experiences with the works of Tanith Lee: I loved her first novel, thought a couple of others were okay, and bounced off everything else of hers that I tried. And I've spent the last 25 years actively not reading The Silver Metal Lover ) I've made a good start, but I don't know how long it's going to take to finish, because I have a limited amount of cope for emotionally stressful fiction and when it comes down to it I'd rather be using it on catching up on the shows I've got behind on than dealing with a hapless teenage protagonist who, if I'm being honest, reminds me a bit too much of my own younger self.


. I happened upon an online listing recently for Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward: 2000-1887 that had a blurb describing it as a "dystopian classic", which would be a surprise to Bellamy. I don't know if the blurb writer was expressing an opinion about Bellamy's vision of utopia, or if it's just that "dystopian" has become such a marketable label lately that the online booksellers are slapping it on anything even remotely related.
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#19: Read a book where the title is a different color than the previous book's.

First attempt: Takeoff Too!, a collection of works by Randall Garrett. I was introduced to Garrett through his Lord Darcy stories, which I really enjoyed (the elevator pitch is "Sherlock Holmes in a world of magic, with the occasional delightfully awful pun"), and then pretty much everything else of his that I've read has left me cold. The contents of Takeoff Too! proved no exception )

Second attempt: How to Draw Stupid, and other essentials of cartooning by Kyle Baker, which also counts for the May prompt in the Buzzword challenge (title contains "to" or "too"). Since I was reading out of idle curiosity I don't have a strong opinion about whether it would actually be useful to someone seeking to become a cartoonist, but I was entertained.


#20: Read a book whose cover clashes with the cover of the previous book.

First attempt: K-PAX by Gene Brewer; the edition I had on hand has a vibrant purple cover that clashes with just about everything. My quickest DNF of the year to date: I lasted 20 pages. It was shaping up as one of those books where two sock-puppets talk at each other in a way that's supposed to end up imparting important life lessons; neither of the two participants in the dialogue felt like real people, and to the extent that they approached real personhood neither of them was a person I liked or wanted to spend more time with or expected to have any insights into life that were worth sticking around for.

(And then I took the rest of the week off fiction reading and binge-watched Natural Six instead.)
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The First Circle by Alexander Solzhenitsyn is an account of a few days in the lives of prisoners in Stalinist Russia, in a "special prison" that houses scientists and engineers who have been set to work on technical projects for the government. (The title is a reference to Dante's Inferno, which divides Hell into circles of increasing severity; the special prisoners, who get better treatment than in the regular prisons and the labour camps, are in the most comfortable outermost circle, but they're still in Hell.)

It's a story about arbitrary cruelty and deprivation, but it's also a story about human connection and friendship and unexpected kindnesses. There are obstacles and also reasons to carry on despite the obstacles.
Read more... )
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I've been experimenting with my journal entries in the last week or two, Read more... )

We had a family get-together for the public holiday, Read more... )

The board game club had another of their long public holiday sessions Read more... )

I had a doctor's appointment this week: a routine thing, not because anything was wrong with me. The next bit involves injections )

I don't think I've mentioned in one of these posts that I've started reading Solzhenitsyn: Read more... )

Movies current - Ocean - and upcoming - including ) Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein. The latter had the tagline "Only monsters play god", which is staking out a position in the "'Frankenstein' is not the name of the monster" discourse that I respect.


I finished playing through The Beekeeper's Picnic. Read more... )

I got to Parkrun only slightly late this week: Read more... )

I've had several experiences this week where I was reading someone's description of their experiences with ADHD and thinking that it sounded worryingly familiar. Read more... )

I was yesterday years old when I learned that "Womble" is an actual real surname that actual people really have. (Apparently, it's derived from the Yorkshire town of Wombwell.) The context was somebody mentioning a law firm called Womble Bond Dickinson; the relevant founding partner was apparently called B. S. Womble, which is one of the most made-up-sounding real names I've encountered in recent memory. (His full name was "Bunyan Snipes Womble", which sounds like a law firm all by itself.)
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#17: Read a book with a title that starts with the same letter as the last name of the previous book's author.

First attempt: Jirel of Joiry by C.L. Moore, a collection of sword & sorcery stories that were first published in Weird Tales in the 1930s alongside the likes of Conan the Barbarian, but have the historical distinction of being written by a woman and having a female protagonist. (The first story has one of those openings where it spends a couple of pages describing a heroic armoured figure before the helmet comes off and everyone, presumably including the original readers, is surprised she's a woman.)Read more... )

Second attempt: John Brown: Queen Victoria's Highland Servant by Raymond Lamont-Brown. Read more... )

Third attempt, for the sake of moving things along, was Chris Van Allsburg's Jumanji, which is a lot shorter and less complicated than the movie it inspired, but still fun. I appreciated the turn it took at the end.

#18: Read a book in the same genre as the previous book.

Taking the genre as "short, plentifully illustrated children's book featuring animals", I opted for The Animals Noah Forgot by the Australian poet Banjo Paterson, which also counts for the June prompt in the Buzzword challenge (a word in the title related to remembering or forgetting). Read more... )
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I haven't been watching the just-finished season of Doctor Who, and I was rather put out this morning to be told, by someone who assumed I'd already seen it, how the season finale ends )

In more cheerful TV news, the current season of Taskmaster is very, very good.


At board game club, we played Risk Legacy and Century: Golem Edition )

Computer games: Battletech, The Beekeeper's Picnic, Mark of the Ninja )

Reading challenges )

Podcast: The Hidden Almanac )

I overslept and missed Parkrun )

I've discovered a new word for the list of Words I'd Only Ever Seen Written Down And Was Pronouncing Wrong All This Time. This one is a character name: Methos, a recurring character from the 1990s TV series Highlander. I've been reading about him sporadically for decades, but I've never actually seen an episode with him in, and when I went looking for Youtube clips of Peter Wingfield performances a few days ago I discovered that I've been mentally pronouncing the E wrong: I always figured the first syllable of his name rhymed with "death", but it turns out it rhymes with "teeth".
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#14: Read a book with something on the cover that was also on the previous book’s cover.

Noose: True Stories of Australians Who Have Died at the Gallows by Xavier Duff. The subtitle is kind of inaccurate: many of the chapters are stories of crimes that led to someone dying at the gallows, but while the crimes can be recounted in detail, for most of them the historical record lacks the details that would allow the story of the person to be told. I didn't enjoy it, and I didn't feel like I was learning much that was new. (At least in the sense that everything it talked about was something I was aware of in general terms as a kind of thing that happened, though I admit that many of the details were new.) (And unpleasant.) I don't know if it's really the book's fault; it may largely be just that true crime isn't really my idea of fun reading.

#15: Read a book that has a spine that's a different colour from the previous book.

Howl's Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones. It was long overdue for a re-read, and I got a nudge from somebody I know organising a buddy read on StoryGraph. It's just as good as I remember, and a nice relief from all the darker books that I've been reading lately.

#16: Read a book that was published in a different decade than the previous book.

I decided to keep the Diana Wynne Jones train rolling and read House of Many Ways, a sequel to Howl's Moving Castle that was published a couple of decades later, and which I'd only read once, back when it first came out. (There's another sequel in between, but I have re-read that one before, and there were bits of it that I wasn't in the mood to revisit.) I don't love House of Many Ways as much as Howl's Moving Castle - it's less... I think maybe "ambitious" is the word I'm after? - but it's a fun read.
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#13: Read a book set in a different country or world than the previous book.

I had a couple of false starts, including The Third Policeman, a work of dark absurdist comedy that I found too dark and not detectably comedic, and lost patience with before it even got to the first policeman. (Afterward, I was moved to re-read An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest to confirm that my sense of humour wasn't broken.)

The book I ended up finishing was also my book for May in the Random Book Challenge; the instruction was to sort my TBR by 'Earliest Added' and pick one of the first five books listed. In my case, that didn't actually mean the books that have been waiting longest for me to read them, because when I started keeping a TBR on StoryGraph I first added the books that were on my ebook reader at the time before I went to the physical bookshelves.

Anyhow, the book I selected was A Hangman for Ghosts by Andrei Baltakmens, a murder mystery set in Australia during the convict period. It's an interesting one; the detective character is a convict with a hidden past, so the story's unfolding the mystery of him alongside the mystery of the murder, which he investigates for a variety of reasons - none of which are precisely to see law and order preserved, so neither he nor the audience is sure what he'll do when he does track the murderer down.


#14: Read a book with something on the cover that was also on the previous book’s cover.

The flip side of the "didn't look at the next prompt" coin: the cover of A Hangman for Ghosts featured a noose and not really anything else. I don't think I have anything else in the TBR with a noose on the cover.

I went to the local library to see what they had, and after confirming that their copy of Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None isn't one of the editions with a noose on it, and failing to locate their copy of Meg Caddy's Slipping the Noose (it turns out the library has shelved it in the Junior Fiction section, despite the subject matter and the publisher putting it solidly in Young Adult), I borrowed a non-fiction book of True Stories of Australians Who Have Died at the Gallows.
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#11: Read a book where the author’s name is not the same color on the cover as the previous book’s author’s name.

A Choice of Catastrophes did turn out to be the kind of book that one picks up only occasionally and reads only a bit of, so in the interests of keeping the momentum going, I revisited the bookshelf and came away with The Canterville Ghost, which fit the prompt, was short enough to make up for lost time, and fit in with some of the non-chain-related reading I've been doing lately.

I liked it okay. It suffered a bit from that thing you get sometimes when you spend decades getting around to a classic, where I'd read extracts from it and had heard of most of the good bits already, so it didn't have the same effect as if I'd been coming to it completely fresh. The edition I read has some nice illustrations by Inga Moore.


#12: Read a book with a title that starts with the next letter in the alphabet from the previous book.

Coincidentally, the first book I finished after receiving this prompt was Down and Out in Purgatory: The Collected Stories of Tim Powers, but that didn't qualify as the Next Book because I started reading it back before I signed up for the Book Chain. I've been working through the collection on and off for the past few months, and mostly enjoying it; a few of the shorter stories felt underbaked, but most of them had something of interest, even the ones I'd read before. One discovery for me was the novella "A Time to Cast Away Stones", which was written and is set between two of Powers' novels and makes clear several things about the second novel that had puzzled me when I read it. (And I note that if I'd read this collection promptly in 2018 when I bought it, I'd have read the novella before the novel - assuming I hadn't also read the novel promptly when I bought it in 2016.)

After making a list of books in the TBR that began with a D, I opted for the shortest one: A Deer in the Family by John Hartmann, translated from the Danish by Edith M. Nielsen. This is a non-fiction account for children about a Danish family that adopted and raised a baby deer, first published in the 1950s; a series of inscriptions on the flyleaf of my copy records that it was originally given to one of my mother's older relatives, then passed down to my mother, who gave it to me when I was seven, whereupon I didn't read it because it was old and the photos were in black and white. The story is quite charming, although the narration (at least in translation) occasionally verges on twee and I wasn't entirely satisfied by the book's answer to the question of whether the baby deer was actually in need of adoption in the first place.


#13: Read a book set in a different country or world than the previous book.

I hadn't looked ahead when I picked A Deer in the Family, but "read a book that isn't set in Denmark" basically gives me free rein to read any book from my TBR that I want to... which is not entirely helpful, since the point of doing these reading challenges is to narrow the options down to something manageable.
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#8: If the previous book had a person on the cover, read a book without a person on the cover.

The Mysterious Affair at Styles is the first Poirot novel, but I haven’t been reading them in any kind of systematic order, so I’ve read around half a dozen of the later novels already. It’s the second I’ve read that’s narrated by Arthur Hastings, and once again I found him an impediment to my enjoyment. People always unjustly think of Holmes and Watson as the prime example of the great detective and his slightly dim sidekick, but really it’s Poirot and Hastings; Hastings can be relied on to go after every red herring and bark up every wrong tree and ignore every hint from Poirot that he might be on the wrong track. Poirot keeps making little jokes about how slow on the uptake Hastings is, which Hastings is too slow on the uptake to notice. I get the feeling it’s supposed to be funny, but I don’t find it so, and anyway that just makes me annoyed at the author for setting him up to be laughed at. It’s certainly not the case that we’re being invited to laugh with him, because that would require that he be in on the joke.

Also, somebody gets murdered, I guess? The mystery is actually quite clever, I think; I’d almost be tempted to read it again to see how all the pieces fit together, except that would mean spending more time with Hastings.


#9: If the previous book’s title started with a consonant, read a book whose title starts with a vowel.

I picked up The African Queen in a library-discard sale years ago, with a vague idea about seeing how different it was from the movie. It’s broadly similar, though the movie has a significantly different ending (and doesn’t let the characters do any more than exchange suggestive banter and occasionally kiss, while the novel is less restrained). I didn’t quite warm to the main characters, partly because I got the impression that the author didn’t entirely like them; some of his explanations for their behaviour had a feeling of coming from a superior and somewhat cynical remove.

Interesting experience, probably won’t read it again.


#10: Read a book in a different format from the previous book.

I wasn’t entirely sure whether my copy of The African Queen was a native hardback or one of those cases where the library added a protective shell to a paperback, so I figured to be on the safe side I should go with an ebook - which provided a convenient opening to read Diviner’s Bow, the new Liaden Universe novel that came out this month.

I devoured Diviner’s Bow in a single day; after spending the past few months chipping away at the depths of my to-read pile, it was nice to have a reminder of what it can be like to read a book I really enjoy populated with characters I like spending time with.


#11: Read a book where the author’s name is not the same color on the cover as the previous book’s author’s name.

I’ve started reading A Choice of Catastrophes by Isaac Asimov, but I’m not sure yet if I’m going to make it my official pick for the prompt; it’s shaping up to be a read-a-chapter-every-now-and-again sort of book, and I might swap in something that will be done quicker.
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It took me all of week 3 to finish The Friendship Factor.


#7: Read a book with more pages than the previous book.

There were plenty of options here, as The Friendship Factor is a pretty slim volume, but I opted to count The Martian, which I was re-reading for a book club. This is the third time I've read it (not to mention having seen the movie version), and it's not quite as compelling when I know all the plot twists already, but it was still a fun time.


#8: If the previous book had a person on the cover, read a book without a person on the cover.

This is proving to be something of a problem, as all the books I had lined up to read for other reading challenges have people on the cover, and so do a significant proportion of the books on my TBR in general.

Attempt #1 was Gorky Park by Martin Cruz Smith. The opening chapters introduce a large cast of quirky characters who I didn't care a jot about, and a gruesome murder which I also didn't care about, partly because none of the characters seemed to care about it either: even the detective protagonist was just going through the motions while he looked for an excuse to shove the case off on somebody else, while also having a boring marriage crisis that I suspect was going to lead to him having a fling with a material witness or something. I gave it fifty pages to hook me and then abandoned it without regret. On the bright side, I got two books off the TBR for the price of one, since I got rid of the sequel as well.

While I was taking the sequel off the bookshelf, my eye was caught by the neighbouring book, The Tin Dog by Alexander McCall Smith, which I decided to read as a palate cleanser. It was okay, but I'm well out of the target age range and I kept wanting to ask spoilsport logistical questions like "How sentient is this robot dog supposed to be, actually?" and "Can you really enter a dog in a greyhound race on the morning of the race?" (not to mention "Isn't entering your robot dog in a race with ordinary dogs, you know, cheating?"). I went back and forth on whether to count it as an official attempt for the Book Chain - the cover image doesn't feature a person, but there are people present in the background - and decided against as much as anything else because of how slight it is.

Around the same time, I finished reading The Tolkien and Middle-Earth Handbook, which has a landscape on the cover with no people that I could see, but is disqualified because I've been reading it on and off since before I started the chain.

Official attempt #2 was Major Pettigrew's Last Stand by Helen Simonson, which I read fifty pages of and then... not abandoned, exactly, I have a feeling I might get back to it at some point when I'm in the right mood, but I'm certainly not in the right mood for it now. I remember saying when I read Remarkably Bright Creatures that if it weren't for the octopus it would be a kind of book I don't usually read; Major Pettigrew's Last Stand is that kind of book with no octopi in sight, nor the kind of spark that made me continue to be interested in the human characters of Remarkably Bright Creatures even when the octopus wasn't around. The main characters seem like sensible people, and I don't appear to be in any suspense about whether they're going to sort their problems out in the end, and in the mean time I'm not really in the frame of mind to enjoy watching people being smothered by social convention and being forced to confront their mortality.

After going through my TBR shelves and not finding anything that called out to me (at least, not that didn't have a person on the cover), I resorted to going to the local public library and wandering the stacks until I settled on Agatha Christie's The Mysterious Affair at Styles, in an edition which has the eponymous manor house on the cover with no people. From past experience with Christie, I'm reasonably confident I'll find it at least readable enough to get through it without giving up and that even if there's a few deaths there will be a minimum of people confronting their own mortality.
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Our production of Guys and Dolls opened this week, and has been playing to good-sized and appreciative audiences. My American accent, which had been commuting between New York, Chicago, and some other place that might have been New Jersey, finally settled into place in time for the final dress rehearsal.


This week I retired the Fitbit. The display screen has been on the way out for some time; at first, it was illegible in sunlight, which was annoying from the viewpoint of wanting to know my progress while I was out and exercising but otherwise supportable, but by the end it had got to the point that I had to shut myself in a room with the blinds drawn and the light off to be able to read it at all.

During the time I've been using the Fitbit, Fitbit-the-company was bought out by Google and I have some concerns about how things have been developing since, so I decided to look elsewhere for a new fitness tracker. In the end, for a variety of reasons of which some are more sensible than others, I opted for the Samsung Galaxy Fit3, which I'm liking well so far. (One thing I particularly liked about it was that I could use a stockpile of reward points that was otherwise just going to expire to get it for only $30.) It's actually a slightly better fit for my wrist than the Fitbit was, and the screen is nicely legible in all kinds of light levels. I like the Fit3's version of "maybe it's time to get up and stretch" reminders better, too.


I follow several Youtube channels whose thing is gameplay videos of computer games designed to be played by multiple players (either competitively or co-operatively). Usually there's a variety of games represented, with some channels focussing on new releases and others being more into old favourites, but it happened twice this week that a recently released or recently updated game showed up on two of the channels at the same time.

One was Make Way!, a racing game where the players build the race track as they go along, which looked like it would be fun to play with the right group of people but could be a bit difficult to follow as a spectator.

The other was Split Fiction, a two-player co-operative game, and I don't have any opinion of the gameplay because the video I watched included the opening cinematic that sets up the premise, which was so stupid that I got bored and quit the video just as it was getting to the playable part. (The stupidity was a mixture of clichéd characters and situations - it's the kind of story that features a sinister machine called The Machine, with audible capital letters - and a few bits of blatant plot convenience. The one that really sticks in my head is that one of the protagonists is presented as being suspicious of the situation she's entering, but doesn't get around to demanding answers about what's going on until after she's compliantly gone through the induction process and it's basically too late to avoid getting forced to take part; it's particularly jarring because the induction includes changing out of her own clothes into a jumpsuit with all kinds of mysterious electronic attachments, which if I was her would have been the point where I refused to go any further without an explanation.)


I didn't go to Parkrun on Saturday, or board game club on Monday, because my sleep patterns had been thrown off and I wasn't feeling well. I did get a good amount of other exercise in the course of the week, with several long walks and bike rides.


I finished reading The Friendship Factor; I don't have anything I want to say about it that I didn't already say last week.
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#5: Read a book where the author’s name is the same color on the cover as the previous book’s author’s name.

The Rout of the Ollafubs is a collection of linked short stories, with a shared setting and a cast of recurring characters, but focussing on a different character for each story (apart from the first and last, which bring all the characters together). I read it once when I was much younger, and some of the ideas and moments have stuck with me, along with a recollection that there were other parts I found dull and skipped over. Re-reading it as an adult, there are some imaginative ideas and fun characters, but the stories are rambling and lack clear stakes and in the end I feel that the whole is somewhat less than the sum of the parts. Some of the humour hasn't aged well, either, with parts of it depending on derogatory stereotypes of foreigners and the lower classes.

One of the things that made my experience of reading it now different from reading it back then is that now I'm able to recognise the influence of some of the other authors that preceded it; in particular, there were several points that reminded me strongly of George MacDonald's work in the genre, a comparison that tended to come out to Rout's detriment. With MacDonald, you can always tell that there's some underlying pattern or purpose even when the story's apparently being arbitrary; with this book, there were occasional moments where I got the sense that the author might have some idea of what the stories were driving at, but that idea never communicated itself to me (and the book ends with an explicit refusal to offer any explanations).

Of the individual stories, my favourites were the ones featuring the family of talking bears. There's something about making a bear cub with a Cornish accent the hero of a fantasy story that ensures it won't be as straightforward as a story revolving around a generic human protagonist, and these stories include most of the bits that had remained with me from my first read.


#6: Read a book that has the same colour spine as the previous book.

I'm currently working my way through The Friendship Factor by Alan Loy McGinnis, which is full of sensible advice about how to build better relationships with people that I'm probably never going to follow.
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I've already posted about the run-up to the election, and about the books I read this week.


The Randomize Your TBR book challenge has continued to assist me in reducing my to-read collection by methods other than reading. When I went to pick the random book for March, the first random selection was a book that I realised I was no longer interested in reading, so I moved it straight to the box of books that I'm going to dispose of one of these days, and tried again until I got a book I was interested in reading. On a separate occasion, I had a go at one of the bonus prompts, which says to select a random book only after spending half an hour going through the to-read and pulling out books that have been there for a while and you're not interested in anymore. I spent the length of a podcast on it and moved another dozen books to the disposal box.


We had another public holiday on Monday. In the morning, I did some yard work that involved being up on a ladder, which wasn't as terrifying as I expected. (I'm usually very bad at being up on ladders, because my sense of balance gets wonky. One of the things that seemed to help on this occasion was that I was wearing good shoes that gave me a firm grip on the ladder.)

In the afternoon, there was another long afternoon session of the board game club. We played Eclipse again, and then a game of Dominion.


At the Rep Club, we did the first full run-throughs of both acts of Guys and Dolls this week. There were definitely places that needed improvement, but on the whole they went more smoothly than I'd expected. (I nevertheless sang the traditional Three Weeks Song at a moment when it seemed apposite.)

It's getting close to the dress rehearsal stage, so I went and got a hair cut and have shaved my beard off. This got a variety of reactions when I showed up for the next rehearsal, running the full spectrum from no reaction at all to "who is this stranger?". One of the other cast members remarked that she thought this was the first time she'd ever seen me clean-shaven, which I don't think is quite true, because we were both in another show a couple of years ago where I'm sure I remember that I was clean-shaven, but I think it is true that there hasn't been another time in the intervening years where I haven't had facial hair of one variety or another. I wasn't sure I recognised the person in the mirror myself at first, though later in the day I caught sight of myself in the mirror and instinctively smiled like someone meeting an old friend whose face one hasn't seen in a while.


I'm keeping up with my exercise, and have been on several long and interesting bike rides.

Book Chain

Mar. 9th, 2025 06:54 pm
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The Book Chain reading challenge is turning out to be quite motivating; I've already read two more books in the chain and started a third. I suppose it's because the set-up requires to one to start thinking about the next book one is going to read as soon as one has finished the previous book.


The third prompt in the challenge is to read a book where the title contains a noun or adjective that appears on page 50 of the previous book. The first adjective I found on that page was "light", so I read Sister Light, Sister Dark by Jane Yolen.

Sister Light, Sister Dark is the first half of a duology about a young woman with a long-prophesied world-shaking Destiny, although at the beginning of the book it's unclear what that destiny actually entails, because the ancient prophecy follows the traditional strategy of being impossible to understand until it's too late to dodge. At the end of the book, it's still pretty unclear, partly because things are only just beginning to really kick off but also partly because, in my view, the book does a less-than-stellar job of explaining what's going on in the world that might be shaken by a world-shaking Destiny. We get a very clear portrait of the isolated community the protagonist grows up in, and a few slightly-less-isolated neighbouring communities she visits over the course of the story, but the wider world remains foggy: somewhere away in the distance there's a king, and some guy trying to usurp the throne, but it's never really explained what the political situation is or what difference it makes to most of the people the story is actually about.

There's some interesting worldbuilding, including the titular light and dark sisters, who give an effectively otherworldly tone to the parts of the story where they feature. I was disappointed, though, by how much they felt like set dressing and didn't affect the (fundamentally rather familiar-feeling) plot. My reservations are probably addressed in the second half of the duology, but I find that I'm not in any hurry to find out.

One of the features of the book is that it's interspersed with legends and scholarly articles from later centuries, showing how the key events of the protagonist's life left their mark on posterity. The first few piqued my interest, but in the aggregate I felt that they rather weighed the story down, and although I got some wry humour from the scholars' biased misrepresentations of the past (including the repeated insistence on interpreting what the reader knows to be genuine supernatural events as metaphors or later inventions), I found that the accumulation of them had the effect of making me less invested in how things turn out: how important can the details of the protagonist's life really be, when posterity will forget most of it, misunderstand the rest, and believe none of it?


The fourth prompt is to read a book at least five years older than the third book. I read a Biggles novel I happened to have lying around, Biggles Forms a Syndicate. It's pretty slight, even compared to other Biggles books I've read; in particular, the nominal villain barely achieves anything in a plot where the environmental hazards are the real driver of the drama. But it passed a couple of hours and was an effective palate cleanser.


The fifth prompt is to read a book where the author's name on the cover is the same colour as on the fourth book. I've made a start on The Rout of the Ollafubs by K.G. Lethbridge, a collection of interlinked fantasy stories which share a setting and a recurring cast but each story has a different central character and a different style. I know I read through it once when I was much younger, but I seem to recall that I skimmed over the bits I was bored or confused by, and I'm interested to see how different it hits me at my current age.
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This week I earned a level-up in Ingress, and am now at Level 12. I've actually had sufficient XP to meet the requirement for Level 12 for a while - and indeed, at the moment of my promotion to Level 12, already had enough XP to meet the requirement for Level 13 - but, while XP is sufficient for the lower levels, the higher levels also require a minimum number of achievements in game activities like capturing portals and creating fields, which I've been slower to attain. I had been looking forward to Level 12 because that used to be the level at which the full range of higher-level abilities was unlocked, but it took me so long to get from Level 11 to Level 12 that in the mean time they changed the promotion ladder so that the full range is now available to everyone above Level 10, so getting to Level 12 has been a bit of an anti-climax. I suppose I'll push on and try to reach Level 13 anyway, since I've almost got enough achievements for it already.

On Sunday, I had several hours free and the weather was nice, so I decided to go for a walk around the golf course. The local golf course has a track that runs all the way around the outside of the perimeter fence, and people often use it for dog-walking and similar activities; the course is on the edge of town and surrounded on several sides by undeveloped bushland, so there's a nice view and occasional wildlife. I've been all the way around once before, accompanying friends who were walking their dogs, but this was my first time on my own. I had a good time, and was glad I'd thought to bring a water bottle, and probably should have thought of sunscreen as well.

The February prompt in the monthly themed reading challenge is a book with a word in the title related to a body of water. I read Sea Wrack and Changewind, a collection of short stories by Sharon Lee that came out last year. The stories all share a setting, and often characters, with the novels of her Carousel trilogy, and I probably wouldn't recommend the collection to anyone who hadn't already read the novels; I hadn't realised how long it's been since I read them myself, and I kept running up against moments where a story took as read some detail that I couldn't recall.

As if I didn't have enough reading challenges already, I came across a Book Chain reading challenge and decided to give it a go. The idea is that, after the first prompt (which is "a book with 'a' or 'the' in the title"), each prompt is defined in some way by the previous book, whether broadly (the second prompt is "a book that's in a different genre from the first book") or narrowly (the third prompt is "a book that has a noun or adjective in its title that also appears on page 50 of the second book"). I'm counting The Visitors and Sea Wrack and Changewind as book one and book two, and we'll see how it goes from there.

At the board game group this week, we played Paladins of the West Kingdom, which took all evening. It's the complicated kind of game that I usually don't enjoy, and I'm not sure whether I did enjoy it.

Had a productive week at work.
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My second attempt at a random book for February, Perfume by Patrick Süskind, came to the same end as the first: fifty pages in I didn't care about any of the characters (apart from maybe a couple who had appeared in one scene each and I was confident would not be appearing again) and I had no curiosity about where the plot, such as it was, was going, so I abandoned the book and moved on. Perfume struck me as a book that might appeal to the kind of reader who enjoys bathing in written language: parts of it are beautifully crafted, and there was some interest in the way the narrative was centred on the sense of smell instead of something more usual like sight or sound, but I'm not that kind of reader and I didn't feel like I was getting anything out of it that rewarded the time I was spending on it.

My third attempt, The Visitors by Clifford D. Simak, was more successful, in that I read nearly fifty pages in just the first sitting and went on to read the whole thing before consigning it to the box of books I intend to get rid of. It's a story about the arrival on Earth of a group of very alien aliens, and how the people of the United States (where the first one happens to land) react to the situation. In the first part of the story, when everyone's just trying to figure out what the first arrival is, I found myself less interested in the aliens than in the detailed account of a group of reporters and photographers covering the landing (I wasn't surprised when the opening sentence of the author's bio at the back of the book turned out to be "Clifford D. Simak is a newspaperman"). Later, we get more detail about the aliens, but I felt a lack of drama, partly because the presentation is very dry (lots of scenes of people in conference rooms telling each other things the author wants the reader to know) and partly because both the aliens and the key humans are so darn reasonable about the whole business. In the last third of the novel, the author starts developing the idea that the aliens might cause a lot of trouble with the best of intentions, just by not understanding the economic and political consequences of their attempts to be helpful, but the novel ends without the author committing to the idea, and trails off into more scenes of people in conference rooms talking about what might happen next. Even the obligatory last-second sting in the tail happens thirty pages before the end and gets talked to death before the novel's finally over. There's a kind of half-baked attempt to compare the aliens to the European colonialists in the New World, both early on when people are afraid the Visitors plan to move in and take over Earth without regard for its existing population and again later when they start handing out advanced technology, but it doesn't go anywhere deep or insightful and in the meantime it means we get stuck with a bunch of scenes of white people talking about Native Americans with varying degrees of knowledge and sympathy, including a character going on a four-page rant about, among other related topics, how the Europeans were doing the Native Americans (he doesn't say "Native Americans") a favour by stealing their land off them. (That guy isn't meant to be sympathetic, and he's only in that one chapter, but it left a bad taste).


At the board game group this week, I played Chomp (arrange tiles with dinosaurs and landscape on them so that the dinosaurs that will score you points don't get eaten, starve, or fall into tar pits), Ticket to Ride: Europe (lay out the best train routes on a map of Europe), and Santorini (build towers and be the first to have a worker at the top of a tower while preventing your opponents from completing their own towers or stealing yours).


During the periods when I've been using 750 Words regularly, I've mostly been using it as a place to keep a journal, but one day this week I used it for the original intended purpose of furthering creative writing. I'd been reminiscing about a story idea I had years ago, as a spin-off from another story I also never completed, and decided to dig out my old story notes and see if I could add to them. I looked in the folder on my computer and found the story notes for the original story idea, but there weren't any notes about the sequel story. So I decided that my 750 Words session for the day would be a brain dump of everything I could remember about the story idea, including the bits and pieces I could remember having made up for WIP memes and things over the years. When I was done, I tried a word search on my computer to try and find a scene fragment I knew I'd written out at some point; I didn't find that, but I did find that I had, after all, written an extensive set of notes on the story idea - I'd stashed them in a separate folder, because I was trying to make it work as a standalone story instead of a sequel, under a code name that I'd subsequently forgotten referred to that story. I don't think the brain dump was a wasted exercise, though, because it's useful to have a record of which parts of the idea have stuck with me over the fifteen years since I wrote the original story notes; in the unlikely event that I do ever write the story, that'll give me an indication of which parts of the story are the ones that really resonate with me.

I'm still mostly doing my 750 Words sessions in the mornings. I'm not happy about how it cuts into the time I could be using for morning exercise or other useful things, but one day this week I did the session at night because I hadn't found time earlier in the day, and was reminded how much of a struggle it was to do when I was tired.
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My random book for February was Devil May Care, a James Bond novel by Sebastian Faulks - or, as the cover had it, "Sebastian Faulks writing as Ian Fleming". That would usually mean that the book was originally published under Fleming's name before Faulks's authorship was acknowledged, but I gather that in this case the author credit has been in exactly those words right from the first edition, and indicates that Faulks made a conscious effort to mimic Fleming's manner of writing instead of employing his own. I found the result felt slightly exaggerated, not to the level of parody or caricature but enough to be a bit offputting, especially since it highlighted some of the aspects of Fleming's novels that I never much liked in the first place. It also had a few new faults of its own, including that thing you often get when a setting is pastiched by a writer decades later who can't resist throwing in a bunch of references to historical events and people that the original author wouldn't have considered relevant or appropriate to include. All of which I could probably have forgiven if it had succeeded in endearing me to the characters or engaging my interest in the plot; as it was, I hit page 50 and still didn't give a fig for the fate of the world or any of the characters, so I ditched it and went to read something more fun.

My new random book for February is Perfume: The Story of a Murderer by Patrick Süskind, which I haven't started reading yet.


The group of people I've been playing through Pandemic: Legacy with managed to get together on the weekend and play a few more rounds for the first time in a few months. I'm still finding the unfolding legacy plot familiar and predictable, though I appreciated that a document that was revealed this session provided context for an earlier plot development I'd been unhappy about and established it as something that we're intended to not be happy about. I was also amused when the same cache of documents contained an in-story explanation for a game mechanic that's necessary for game balance but hadn't, until now, made a great deal of sense within the fiction of the game.

At the same session, we also played Western Legends, Raptor, and Schotten Totten. In Western Legends, the board is a map of a territory in the Wild West and each player takes on the role of an outlaw or lawman (or stays neutral, but you earn victory points for being a notorious outlaw or a successful lawman and there's no reward for doing neither) and moves around completing activities like prospecting for gold, fighting bandits, robbing banks, or driving cattle, according to personal preference and the character's secret goal cards. Raptor is an asymmetrical game where one player controls a family of dinosaurs and the other controls a group of hunters trying to capture them. In Schotten Totten, two families are fighting over a property line and players win skirmishes by putting together the best three-card combinations.

At the usual Monday evening session, we played Deception: Murder in Hong Kong and Forgotten Waters. In Deception: Murder in Hong Kong, I was the clue-giver once, and succeeded in leading the investigators to the murderer; and the witness once, and succeeded in getting the murderer caught without being identified and nobbled; and a regular investigator once, and achieved nothing of distinction. Forgotten Waters is a pirate game with narrative elements that's intended to be played over several sessions; we started a game about a year ago which fell apart quickly for a number of reasons, so this time we were starting again from scratch with a partly different group of players. That meant that a lot of the story bits we got to were familiar, but the game went well and we remembered to record the game state at the end of the evening so we could pick it up again another time.


Rehearsals have fully started for Guys and Dolls. I'm enjoying the singing, and mostly managing to remember the dance steps.


Still bike riding regularly. Somewhat complicated by the fact that there's an ongoing project to resurface the city's bike trails, and on a couple of my regular routes this has got as far as digging up the old cracked tarmac but not yet progressed to laying down the new smooth tarmac. A couple of days ago, when I was out riding in the morning, I saw a kangaroo, which stood a few metres from the bike trail and watched me go past.
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. The family Christmas gathering was held a few days after Christmas this year, because that was when everybody could manage to be in the same place for the same few hours. (Including the out-of-town contingent, who I hadn't realised were also going to be there until I got a text message with a photo of something interesting they'd seen on the road here.) It was very nice to spend some time with everybody. My haul this year included several jigsaw puzzles, my siblings having taken note of how much I enjoyed working through my set of Magic Puzzles earlier this year (and possibly also of the fact that it's much easier to be sure that I don't already have a particular puzzle than that I don't already have a particular book).


. As the weather has been getting hotter, there's been an increasing issue at Parkrun with flies taking friendly interest in one's face, and the attendant risk of accidentally inhaling one. (Or nearly inhaling one, which is almost as bad.) After Parkrun last Saturday, I decided I'd had enough and afterward went straight to the shops to buy a protective net thing to wear over my head and keep them off. Step two is remembering to take it with me to Parkrun.


. My reading this week included Always Was, Always Will Be, written by Thomas Mayo, one of the campaigners for the Voice to Parliament, after the referendum went the way it did, which I saw in the new books display at the library and felt I should read; and, for a change of pace, E. Nesbit's The Railway Children, which I've been meaning to read for years and am very glad I finally did. (And not just because now I'll be less likely to keep getting it mixed up with The Boxcar Children and The Story of the Treasure Seekers.)


. I've started playing through XCOM: Enemy Unknown again. I set out with noble intentions that this would be the time I got through an entire playthrough without reverting to the last save point when things started going pear-shaped, and of course that didn't last but it did last longer than I might have predicted. As I've been getting back into the swing of it I've been pushing out the limit on what counts as going sufficiently wrong, and getting back near the mark of keeping going as long as a mission wasn't a complete failure, and re-learning that it is possible and even fun to recover from setbacks like having most of your most experienced squad wiped out in one go.


. Game Show 1939! is a fun podcast where contestants are faced with trivia questions sourced from quiz books published in the 1930s. "Some of the answers in the books have changed since then, and some of the answers were never right to begin with, but for the purposes of today's quiz the official correct answer is whatever was written in the book." Part of the format involves contestants being given a preview of the categories and trying to predict which ones they'll find easier to answer and which ones to force their opponent to answer. Most of the questions are followed by the host explaining who or what the question was about.

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