pedanther

Briefly noted:

The Star Wars Rolling Remix 2017 collection has opened. The works will remain anonymous for about a week, for the benefit of those who like to amuse themselves by guessing who wrote what and in what order.

From the existence of this post, you may safely conclude that one the works in the collection is by me.

For the explanation of what is a rolling remix and the details of how this one was organised, I refer you to starwarsrollingremix.

1. At the gaming group, last time I went, we played 7 Wonders: Duel. There were about half a dozen people interested in learning about it, so we ended up playing in rotation, where everyone got two games against different opponents and most people (including me) won the first and then lost the second.


2. I participated in the Multifandom Drabble Exchange on Imzy, because it seemed like a good excuse to check out Imzy and a good excuse to write some drabbles. I wrote one drabble, and attempted a second based on one of my recipient's other prompts but it refused to be squished down to 100 words.

* New Flowers Bloom expands a bit on some of the events that are summarized so briefly in the happily-ever-after paragraph of the fairy tale "Snow-white and Rose-red".

* A week next Saturday at the Stork Club is a shameless fix-fic for the end of Captain America: The First Avenger.

I received two drabbles, both for the TV series Ultraviolet (yay!). Neither of them seems to have been posted anywhere outside of Imzy (which is currently still only readable to the beta testers).


3. I have not signed up for Yuletide this year, though I may end up doing a pinch hit or a treat or something. This is my usual level of engagement with Yuletide, because I find that the most daunting part of Yuletide is thinking of things to ask for.


4. Kim Newman's new novel Angels of Music (a take on the Charlie's Angels premise populated with characters from 19th century genre fiction, including the Paris Opera Ghost as the mysterious faceless leader) is now available in a variety of formats. It's also been announced that his next book will be a short story collection with a theme of monsters, featuring a brand new Anno Dracula story titled "Yokai Town".


5. Ursula Vernon's new novel Summer in Orcus is being published online as a serial, with new chapters dropping twice a week. It's her version of the old "child dragged into another world for an adventure" genre.

(via alias_sqbr)

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1. The fanfic I recommended last week has a sequel now: Christmas in Kansas, the story of the first time Clark Kent brought his colleagues Bruce and Diana home for the Christmas holidays. There's inevitably quite a bit of focus on Bruce, due to the inherent incongruity of Bruce Wayne + relaxed family holiday, but Diana gets some really nice moments, too.


2. Since I'm already recommending out-of-season Christmas fanfic, I don't think I've recced back in anno domini here; it's a crossover in which Susan Pevensie goes to stay with a friend in Tatchester and ends up befriending Kay Harker. It's really beautiful, but it hasn't got a lot of attention possibly because there aren't a lot of people on AO3 who know who Kay Harker is. (I mean, I suspect it would still be a beautiful story even if you have no idea, but I can see why people might be cautious.) (And of course I could be wrong, since I've known Kay nearly as long as I've known Susan.)


3. Rehearsals for Oliver! continue. I'm beginning to really get a feel for Fagin's physicality: how he holds his shoulders, how he moves his hands, how he walks. Not so much, alas! for how he speaks - I'm shifting unreliably between several different accents, and it seems like the more I attention I pay to how I'm speaking the less likely I am to get the result I'm after.

The children of the cast seem to have largely accepted me, in (will-I or nill-I) the role of the fun adult who'll often play along with a joke but needn't be paid any attention to if he tries to get one to settle down. Fortunately, there are other adults in the cast who can achieve more success if settling down is what's needed, including our Nancy, who's a teacher in real life.


4. I've been to see Captain America: Civil War. I have previously had occasion to comment that the MCU doesn't have a track record of sticking the distance with moral dilemmas or good-vs-good conflicts; the side that the heroes aren't on tends to see the light, or do something that allows their viewpoint to be swept under the carpet, like die or turn evil (or turn evil and then die). I didn't expect this movie to be any different, and it wasn't. Doubtless there will be bloggers who will examine the details in more depth, but that's not really my thing.

I like the new version of Spider-Man.


5. At the gaming group this week I played Hoax, Council of Verona, and Goblins, Inc..

Hoax is one of those bluffing games where you have to figure out what cards your opponents have while being free to lie as much as you like about your own. I've generally been pretty terrible at bluffing games because I have no poker face when I get a good card, but between Batman Love Letter last week and Hoax this week I've been working on a strategy where I attempt to mask my reaction to good news maintaining a cheerful demeanor all the time regardless. I was getting pretty good at it by the time we moved on to the next thing.

Council of Verona involves a meeting to settle the feud between the Montagues and Capulets, and cards representing various characters from Romeo and Juliet, each of which either has a goal for the outcome of the meeting or an action that will affect the outcome. (For example, Lord Montague's goal is to end the game with more Montagues at the meeting than Capulets, and there's a lesser Montague whose action can be used to have one of the Capulets kicked out of the meeting. Another character, I forget which, has the goal of ending the game with more people kicked out of the meeting than still in. Romeo, meanwhile, doesn't care what happens at the meeting, or whether he's in or out, only whether Juliet is there with him.) Where it gets complicated is that players score by betting on which characters will achieve their goals, and using the action characters to influence the outcome - and some of the characters' actions, instead of directly affecting other characters, can be used to mess with the other players' bets. I still don't think I've quite got my head around it.

Goblins, Inc. is about designing giant fighting machines and then playing them off against one another. It's an interesting mix of co-operation and competition. It's played with two teams of two, but halfway through the game the pairs are split and rearranged so that you end up allied with a former opponent. At various points in the game, each player is required to make important decisions without consulting their ally. Players are scored individually, and each player earns a different number of points from a victorious round depending on their secret agenda. (For instance, one player might earn points for each of their opponent's weapons that's destroyed, while another might earn points for each bit of armor; and similarly when it comes to the bits of their own machine remaining intact at the end of the fight.) In theory, the secret agenda might also influence a player to make a decision during the round that helps them but harms their ally. In practice, I found that I paid a lot of attention to my intactness agenda during the design phase (points for every intact weapon at the end of the fight? okay, we need to start with lots of weapons) but during the fight phase I would just forget about the destruction agenda and concentrate on the best outcome for the team. That seemed to work well for me, since I won the game.
 

1. Swancon soon! I haven't packed yet, because I usually do that after laundry day, so as to have the widest range of clothing options, and laundry day this week has been postponed because of rain. (Note to self: Go and bring the laundry in off the line once this is posted.)


2. The brass band is contesting at the Nationals again, but I'm not going with them; I've already missed one Swancon and most of another for the previous two occasions, and I feel that's quite enough. I went to all the rehearsals, though, because it's good practice and because the person who will be filling in for me won't be available until just before the contest, so until then it was useful to have someone filling in for them.


3. I've recently rewatched some episodes of Davies-era Doctor Who that I hadn't watched in years. (Part of the impetus was that the Verities are rewatching both first seasons of Doctor Who for their podcast this year.) The stories and performances hold up pretty well, and I don't think any of the special effects struck me as fake-looking that didn't already the first time, but the incidental music! I remember, back in the day, there were a lot of complaints about Murray Gold's music being obtrusive; it never seemed so to me then, but it does now.


4. Buffy the Vampire Slayer was on TV last week, the 1992 comedy film version, and I'd never watched it all the way through before, so I did, and now I kind of want to see the Yuletide Buffy fanfic we'd be getting if there'd never been the TV series afterward. There are all these hooks in the movie that everyone ignores now because the TV series went a different direction, like the idea that there's just one Watcher and one Slayer, endlessly reincarnated. Or even Buffy's ludicrously uninvolved parents - imagine what a fanfic exploration of that could be like... (I tried looking at AO3 to see if it had any movie Buffy fic, but all I found was a bit of Pike/Benny slash and a lot of TV Buffy fans who don't understand how fandom tags work.)


5. At Mark Reads, Mark has just finished reading all of Tamora Pierce's novels, and is just about to embark on Diane Duane's Young Wizards series. I was really keen on those when I was around the same age as the protagonists, but I've never re-read any of them, so that'll be interesting. (Actually, I've started re-reading the first one already, and it's holding up pretty well so far.)

ETA: 5a. Mark is, of course, also still reading through the Discworld series. He's just started on Interesting Times; it makes an... intriguing accompaniment to Lian Hearn's Tales of the Otori, which I'm reading as homework for Swancon.
 

(via lost_spook)

Give me a character/pairing and I will write snippets of ten different alternate universes for it. One line, ten lines, a ficlet if you're lucky.

1. Wild West
2. Coffee Shop
3. Shapeshifters
4. Pirates
5. ...In SPACE!!
6. Born Another Gender
7. Schoolfic
8. Police/Firefighters
9. Urban Fantasy
10. Regency

(via john_amend_all, out of several available options, because he linked to a handy template)
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1. Our season of short plays has opened and closed, with positive responses from the people who came to see it. We got a good write-up in the local paper, both in the sense that the reviewer liked it and in the sense that everyone's names were spelled right and it didn't give away too many of the good surprises. (If I'd been directing one of the other plays, I'd have been annoyed about some of the moments chosen for the accompanying photo spread, but fortunately my own play was immune to being spoiled in that manner.) The reviewer said that of the three plays the one I directed was his favourite, which I'm inclined to attribute to the quality of the script, and showed the best acting, which I'm prepared to take some credit for.

After it was over, I spent about a week not stirring from home except to go to work and band practice, and I'm not letting myself get roped into any more theatrical productions until June.


2. We've had the second round of the Toastmasters speech evaluation contest, with winners from three club contests competing against each other. This year, for the first time, I was competing as a winner of a club contest. I didn't win the area contest, but I'm not too bothered; just getting there was an achievement, and anyway I wouldn't have been able to make it to the third round, the division contest, this weekend, so I wouldn't have advanced any further regardless. The winner of the division contest will go on to compete in the final round at the District Convention in early June. (Which I'm on the organising committee for, and that's another reason I'm not committing to any more theatre before then.)


3. The final season of Foyle's War aired here recently - at least, they say it's the final season, but they've said that before. More than once. The war that the title theoretically refers to ended two final seasons ago, not that I'm complaining. (At least it hasn't become one of those wartime series where the war drags on longer than it did in reality so they can fit more seasons in; that trick only works if the series is set vaguely "during the war", and Foyle's War has always been tied to specific historical events, which is one of the things I like about it.) I'm actually really glad we got this final season, because it leaves us in a much better place than the last final season did; not entirely happy, but considerably more hopeful.


4. One of the things I like about reading fanfic is that it can offer new ways of looking at things that one might not have thought of before.

For instance, I recently read a Doctor Who fic that starts with a fresh look at "The End of Time", Ten's regeneration reluctance, and the extended companion farewell tour, through the lens of "The Time of the Doctor":

He doesn't want to go.

Coward, the Master called him, and maybe it's true, because he's terrified. Imagine him, of all people, frightened of change. But it's different this time. Twelve regenerations to a Time Lord, and the last one may have been non-standard, but it counts, and so does the one he tries to tell himself wasn't really him. He can feel the evidence inside him, irrefutable: some vital part of him busy using itself up.

Twelve regenerations, and he's just shoved the only people capable of giving him more back into their time lock. So this is the last time he'll ever experience this, and he's not going to go gentle. No, this last time, Death is going to have a fight on its hands.

He knows what he wants to do with the time he has left, and he has to do it now, because there's no telling how much time he'll have left, after. And no telling what kind of man he'll become.

So he visits them, one by one: the people he's loved, the people he's failed to do right by.

The fic is And at the End, a Garden by AstroGirl, and the rest of it is good too.


5. Video link of the month: John Oliver presents: Infrastructure: The Movie

"You cannot tell me that you are not interested in this, because every summer people flock to see our infrastructure threatened by terrorists or aliens, but we should care just as much when it's under threat from the inevitable passage of time. The problem is, no one has made a blockbuster movie about the importance of routine maintenance and repair. Or they hadn't - until now..."

(If you want to skip straight to the hypothetical action movie, that begins at 17:10. The preamble is worth sitting through if you have the time, though.)

1. One thing that struck me, looking back over my fiction logs for 2014, was that if you don't count fanfic (of which more in a moment), I read only two new novels in 2014 that weren't chosen for me by a book club or similar endeavour. I read both of them in April, when I had a holiday with a lot of travel time to fill and only limited contact with the book-clubs-and-similar.

Now, to be fair, I read quite a few new novels for the book-clubs-and-similar, but there was a certain lack of variety. So for 2015, I've made myself a rule that I'm going to read at least one chapter each month of something I've picked for myself.


2. The thing is, I did actually read several more novel-length works of fiction in 2014, but they didn't get into the fiction log because they were fanfic. (I read an enormous quantity of fanfic in 2014, I suspect at least partly as a way of getting some variety from all the book-clubs-and-similar, and although I was reluctant to have too many novels on the go at once, fanfic didn't trigger the reluctance even if it was long enough to otherwise count as a novel.)

Most of the novel-length fics were from the Undone Universe and Motion Practice series. They're both based on the Marvel Avengers movies, and mix novel-length works with shorter fillers and side-stories. Undone Universe mixes the Marvel multiverse, mythology, and a threat to the totality of existence; it's interesting and complicated but really, really grim. Motion Practice is an AU in which Nick Fury is a District Attorney, the Avengers are his team, and Loki is that one defense attorney whose reputation is based on being able to get anybody off if they have the money; it's a lot of fun, but also has its serious side - one of the things I like about it is the way the drama arises naturally out of the solid character work. (The character- and world-building has enough solidity that a lot of the stories in the setting arise from those rather than just being echoes of things that have happened to the non-AU Avengers.)

It seemed weird in retrospect to not be logging fiction that I'd spent so much time reading. So this year, I'm logging any fanfic I read that's at least 7500 words long (which I picked arbitrarily because it's the cut-off for novella length in the Hugo Awards).


3. I have, of course, been to see the third of Jackson's Hobbit movies by now, and I'm not at all surprised that the internet already contains at least one fan-edit that attempts to squeeze the trilogy into a single film with most of Jackson's inventions removed. There were parts of the third movie where I was mentally marking it up for edits while I was watching it in the cinema, which I think marks a failure of engagement on the film's part.

The thing that bothers me about The Battle of the Five Armies is not so much how much time Jackson devotes to depicting the eponymous battle (which Tolkien, in a sign of how important he considered it to the story, pretty much skipped entirely), but the way he chooses to depict it. All the named characters who die during the battle do so in meaningful one-on-one confrontations with named characters from the other side, some of whom have been invented for the purpose, often physically separate from the main mass where the nameless extras are hacking away at each other. I don't think I like that, and not just because it's a big departure from the book (where Thorin and Kili and Fili are in the thick of the fighting the whole time, and Thorin is killed not by a single blow from a Dramatic Archenemy but from the accumulated injuries from all the people he's fought). It's also generally a misleading thing to be suggesting about the way battles work.


4. I finally got around to watching the first episode of Leverage yesterday. It was fun, but I don't know if I'll be watching any more, because a feature that I suspect is going to be integral to the format going forward turns out to hammer one of my narrative turn-off buttons. I've been known to say that as a kid I spent more time watching I Love Lucy from behind the sofa than I did Doctor Who, because alien monsters don't inspire dread in me but what does is the prospect of someone being publicly humiliated because they thought they knew what was going on but they were wrong. And it turns out, apparently, that this happens even if the someone in question is the villain of the episode.


5. I've mentioned before that when the Modesty Blaise comic strip ended in 2001, our newspaper started running the strip from the beginning, and then in 2012 it started from the beginning again even though it had only got a third of the way through.

I recently realised something else: This time around it's printing the strip off a different set of masters. (The way you can tell is that the strip was first printed with a title block in the top left corner of the first panel, which was removed in reprints and the artwork extrapolated to fill the space left behind. Comparing the strips we're getting now to the ones we got in the 2001 re-run, many of them have differently extrapolated details.)

I have a theory that this means that there are two versions of the strip being made available to newspapers, and the reason our newspaper restarted was that they discovered they were signed up for, according to some definition, the wrong one. (Speaking historically, in the original run the distributors started offering two different versions of the strip to newspapers starting with the story "Cry Wolf" - which, as I noted at the time, is precisely the point at which our newspaper re-started in 2012.)