pedanther

. 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.

#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.)

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... )

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.)

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".

Last night I dreamed that I came here to update my blog, only to find that the site had been shut down without notice and all Dreamwidth addresses now redirected to an ecommerce site flogging garden supplies.

At the bottom of the site, in tiny print, was a link to an announcement unapologetically stating that the shareholders had deemed Dreamwidth uneconomical and talking around the fact that - as my dream-self recalled - there'd been another statement back when Dreamwidth was bought out where they promised that it would stay the same old Dreamwidth and there would be no big changes without community consultation.

(At least I can be confident that, in the waking world, the actual owners of Dreamwidth wouldn't pull anything like that on us.)

(Now, Tumblr, on the other hand...)

#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.

. I had a much more productive and satisfying week at work.


. I'm having more trouble finding time to go for a walk or bike ride on weekdays now that it's getting dark so soon after the end of office hours, but I'm still managing to maintain a minimum of three per week.


. At board game club, we played Feed the Kraken, a social deduction game set on board a ship where some of the sailors have secret agendas. I'm iffy about social deduction games; I don't enjoy the ones that are all about being able to read opponents' body language to figure out if they're being dishonest, but I don't mind some of the ones that have some kind of mechanic that provides objective (though ambiguous) evidence of another kind. In the case of Feed the Kraken, that's plotting the ship's course: each of the factions on the ship wants to steer the ship toward a specific destination, so any change in the heading suggests something about the loyalties of the players who were contributing to navigation that round, but each decision involves three players drawing and discarding cards in such a way that it's never clear precisely who's responsible for the outcome. I enjoyed the game a lot, even before I ended up playing a key role in getting victory for my faction.


. I stopped using Duolingo a while back and uninstalled the app, but hadn't actually got around to closing my account, on the off chance that I might want to pick it up again at some point. Given the recent nonsense, I decided this week that that was never going to happen, and deleted my account.


. I have a rented storage unit which I had not had access to for months: the self-storage facility installed a new automatic front gate, and although I got the email notifying me of the upcoming change I never received the promised follow-up email containing instructions on how to open the new gate. And, being me, by the time I'd realised the follow-up email wasn't coming, enough time had passed that I felt awkward about contacting the site manager to raise the subject, a situation which obviously got no better the longer I put it off. I was reminded about this again this week, and decided enough was enough, and now the situation is resolved: I did an end-run around the contact awkwardness problem by driving to the self-storage facility, finding the manufacturer's logo on the housing of the gate mechanism, and googling for instructions. Fortunately for the success of this endeavour, it turns out that all the manufacturer's smart gates respond to a standard app that can be downloaded for free, and when I entered my contact information after installing the app it automatically matched me to the self-storage place's list of users and offered me a button to open the gate. Everything in the storage unit appears to be fine, if a bit more dusty and cobwebby than when I saw it last. (And I really should get around to talking to someone about the pile of stuff I agreed to temporarily store for a colleague until the covid lockdown ended...)


. Picked up Battletech again for the first time in a couple of weeks, and ended up playing it for a few hours. (Part of that was a big boss mission that took about an hour all on its own.) I'm still not sure exactly how much I'm really enjoying it, but there are enough little things that once I start playing I keep going "I'll just finish off this thing" or "I'll just tweak that thing". It's getting to the point I predicted earlier where the difficulty has ramped up enough that if I keep just coasting along with a vague idea of how the systems work I'm going to be in real trouble sooner or later; on the other hand, that leads to memorable events like a mission where I snatched victory from the jaws of defeat at the last moment. (That mission was followed by a cutscene where one of my colleagues remarked that she wondered if the conflict we'd been taking part in was really worth it, and the team's executive officer gestured at our pay packet and said, "It's worth it to us." And then we needed to spend nearly the entire pay packet on repairs for the mechs that had been shredded in the mission. That's life in the armoured mercenary business, I guess.)

#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.

Fiction books
Agatha Christie. The Mysterious Affair at Styles
CS Forester. The African Queen
Kevin Hearne. The Purloined Poodle (e)
Tove Jansson, tr. Elizabeth Portch. Comet in Moominland
Sharon Lee, Steve Miller. Diviner's Bow (e)
Tim Powers. Down and Out in Purgatory: The Collected Stories of Tim Powers (e)
Oscar Wilde. The Canterville Ghost
Oscar Wilde. An Ideal Husband (re-read)
Oscar Wilde. The Importance of Being Earnest (re-read)
Oscar Wilde. Salomé (re-read)
Oscar Wilde. A Woman of No Importance

In progress
Helen Simonson. Major Pettigrew's Last Stand (e)

Abandoned
Flann O'Brien. The Third Policeman

Picture books
Adam Goodes, Ellie Laing, David Hardy. Ceremony
John Hartmann, tr. Edith M Nielsen. A Deer in the Family

Non-fiction books in progress
Isaac Asimov. A Choice of Catastrophes

( short, screen, and stage )
( books bought and borrowed )

Top of the to-read pile
Andrei Baltakmens. A Hangman for Ghosts (e)