pedanther

Miscellaneous

Han Solo's Revenge by Brian Daley.

I wasn't feeling in the mood for any of the books I had lined up for reading challenge prompts, so I decided to have another crack at the Han Solo omnibus. Possibly I wasn't really in the mood for this, either; in any case, I didn't enjoy it much more than the first one of the series. There are the same problems with it being a prequel constraned as to character development and populated with people we know aren't going to stick around, and although many of the individual scenes were fun, the plot that held them together is a bit of a mess with an unsatisfactory conclusion and no good villains. Likely it didn't help that I was never sold on the titular revenge motive, which depends on Han's insistence that he's owed a payout he was promised for doing a job that even the most sympathetic person in the galaxy would be obliged to admit that he didn't actually do. I did enjoy the parts where Chewie was the viewpoint character, at least.


Richard III by William Shakespeare.

Speaking of omnibuses I'm partway through: at least with this one I could be confident of a good villain. Recognisably of a piece with Henry VI; I kind of regret leaving such a long gap between them that I had trouble remembering who had done what in the earlier plays. This was the first time I've read the play all the way through, although I've seen it performed a couple of times; I'd forgotten most of it (and I suspect there were bits I'd never actually seen before, because I know one of the versions I saw was abridged and I suspect the other was also).

. Opening weekend went very well. The show started feeling much more cohesive once all the set painting and sound cues and things were finished. Audience feedback has been entirely positive, and a reassuring reminder that the audience, unlike me, isn't viewing the show through a haze of all the things we didn't manage to do.


. I didn't get to play any board games because I had dress rehearsals at the usual times.


. The first meeting of the new committee went well. Everybody seems to get along, which was not always the case with the immediately previous incarnation of the committee. Whether that translates into working well together to get things done remains to be seen.


. I had an appointment to have my leg examined, with the result that one of my veins has been officially declared incompetent -- not an adjective I'd expected to find applied to a non-sapient component, but I haven't thought of another that would be more suitable. (The job at which the vein is not competent is draining fluid from my leg and preventing it from puffing up.)


. If I had a nickel for every time I've found myself reporting to a librarian that I found a book with a sex scene in it shelved in the children's section, I'd have two nickels, and I don't really know whether twice in thirty-plus years is an unusually high rate for that sort of thing. ( Read more... )


. The recommendations from BookSorted have been getting more diverse, and the most recent ones have been for books and authors I hadn't already heard of. There was also an intermediate period where the recommendations were all things I was recommended by Hypatia back in the day and then never got around to trying, which might be a good sign because I remember Hypatia's recommendations as being solidly reliable when I did get around to trying them.

. At the weekly boardgame meet, I arrived earlier than usual and joined the group of people who usually arrive early and play Thirty-One until more people have arrived. When more people had arrived, we played Lovecraft Letter.

Our game went on for a while, because different people kept winning; by the end of it, every player had won at least one round, and several players were at the point where if they won the next round they'd win the game. In the course of the game we encountered some interesting situations. One of the things about Lovecraft Letter is that is has two versions of every card, including the one that wins the round if you still have it in your hand at the end of the round but causes you to lose if you have to discard it for any reason; one player had the misfortune of ending up with both versions of the card in his hand, leaving him with no choice but to discard one of them. In another round, I ended the round with the lowest-value card in the game (and this is one of the Love Letter variants where one of the cards has a face value of 0) but still won the round because the players with higher cards all got eliminated by the tie-breaker mechanic.


. One week left to opening, and as is traditional, things are in a state of chaos that will hopefully crystallise during the dress rehearsals into a show everyone can be proud of. I'm cautiously optimistic.


. I've been trying out BookSorted.app, a website where you import a list of books you've read (it has options for importing from Goodreads and StoryGraph) and it helps you rank them by showing you two at a time and asking which you preferred. I've been finding that choosing between two books I loved has been relatively easy; it's choosing between two books that were deeply mediocre (or completely unmemorable) that has been causing me trouble.

When you've ranked enough books for reliable extrapolation, it offers suggestions for what else to read. So far the suggestions I've been getting have been fairly obvious things like "You like Ursula K. Le Guin, here's another book by Ursula K. Le Guin" and "You've read a lot of Christie and Sayers, isn't it about time you got started on Allingham".

Fiction books
Monte Cook. Stealing Stories for the Devil (e)
Arthur Upfield. Venom House (e)

In progress
Martha Wells. Witch King (e)

Abandoned
(anthology). The Onion's Finest News Reporting
Kathryn Stockett. The Calamity Club

Non-fiction books
Matt Kracht. OMFG, Bees! (e)
Kwok Man-ho. The Chinese Horoscopes Library: Monkey
Frank Nischk. Of Cockroaches and Crickets (e)
Solomon Northup. Twelve Years a Slave (e)

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

Top of the to-read pile
Sangu Mandanna. The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches

August: Groups and Clubs

I didn't have anything suitable in my to-read pile, so I went to the library, and there were two candidates right there in the New Arrivals display. (This isn't as unlikely as it might seem, because the thing about the Buzzwords challenge is that the prompts are based on current publishing trends.) They were The Calamity Club by Kathryn Stockett and The Society of Literary Marauders by Sasha Wasley. I opted for The Calamity Club as the one that sounded less like it was going to annoy me.

It's the kind of book that starts with a scene from near the end before jumping back to the start of the story, so that the reader has something intriguing to look forward to. At this point, I'm not sure I'm going to make it back to the intriguing scene, which is not intriguing enough on its own to keep me reading if the rest of the book hasn't won me over soon. I'm trying to be fair to the book, because I think part of the reason I'm not buying into the story is that part of it's rubbing up against my social anxieties, and maybe if the other shoe drops I'll either be more comfortable with it or have a definite reason to stop, but if the shoe doesn't drop soon I'm going to give up on it regardless and look for something I'll enjoy more.


Miscellaneous

While I was hunting for a book to fit the month's Buzzword prompt and the next Book Chain prompt, I revived my occasional project of working my way through Arthur Upfield's Bony series, and read Venom House. The premise is interesting: Upfield has had a shot at constructing an Australian version of a Gothic melodrama revolving around a big old house where everyone in the family has something wrong with them, there's a mentally-ill relative locked in an upstairs room, and there may or may not be an ancestral curse. Unfortunately, I think it falls down on the execution; the plot comes to a rather abrupt and unsatisfying conclusion, and while the series by this point is doing relatively well at not being shockingly racist, it shows its age in other ways. The treatment of mental illness is iffy, and the gender policing is worse; the designated something-wrong-with-her of one of the characters is that she doesn't fit within conventional gender roles, and while she does end up being considered a more sympathetic character than her conventionally feminine sister, that only comes after some really nasty things are said about her from all sides including the narrator and the protagonist. Part of the backstory is that the ancestor who claimed the land and built the house wiped out the local Aboriginal people in the process; this is the first of the Bony books that I can remember acknowledging that aspect of Australian history, and I appreciate it, even if it might be only because an ancestral curse requires somebody to do the cursing.

. One advantage of spending the week reading an unengaging non-fiction book was that I had the mental space to watch a TV show. ( I've been catching up on Andor )


. At the weekly boardgame meet, I played Seven Wonders Architects and Love Letter.


. Dogpile is a fairly casual game in principle, with each game lasting a few minutes and nothing carrying over from game to game, but there are a bunch of unlockable challenges with different starting conditions and difficulty levels, and the completionist part of my brain felt like I had to unlock and then beat all of them. I have now done that, so I can relax and enjoy the occasional casual game, and maybe I'll try starting something new. (Although not until I've got Andor out of the way, because I suspect being heavily involved in a computer game is another thing that takes up TV-watching mental space.)


. It occurred to me again that I still have an audio book of Charmed Life that I've never actually listened to more than a few minutes of. ( Read more... )


. I did a repair project on a couple of pairs of drawstring trousers I'd stopped wearing because the drawstrings had broken, although they were otherwise in good condition. It presented soome interesting challenges and gave me something to do with my hands while listening to a long podcast.


. There is currently a bracket tournament running on Tumblr where people vote for the Best Fictional Lizard. I nominated three lizards: Reynold from Daniel M. Pinkwater's Lizard Music, The Winslow from Buck Godot: Zap Gun for Hire, and Chameleon from Chameleon Was a Spy by Diane Redfield Massey. ( Read more... )

. My little cheap portable speaker seems to have packed it in finally -- it's insisting that the battery is out of charge regardless of how long I charge it -- which gave me the excuse I wanted to do what I've been thinking about for a while and get a somewhat less cheap portable speaker with better sound quality and the ability to talk to more than one of my devices. The new speaker is somewhat larger, about on the upper edge of what's comfortable to casually carry about the house one-handed (in fact it comes with a detachable shoulder strap, which says something about how portable the designers considered it), but the improvement in sound quality was immediately apparent.


. No weekend gaming for me this week, as I was at an AGM where I once again failed to dodge a committee nomination.


. At the weekly board game meet, we played Space Base (which I now understand well enough to enjoy, but not enough to score big) and Splendor (where I thought I was doing well until suddenly I wasn't), and then I joined the other table where they were playing Bomb Busters.


. I'm starting to warm to Proverbs, but I have a feeling that by the time I've finished the free preview section I'll have had enough and won't care to pay to unlock the full puzzle. I am not starting to warm to Into the Breach; I've tried to give it a fair shot, and I think it's probably a good game for people who enjoy it, but I'm not enjoying it. I haven't tried any new computer games this week, and have instead spent a lot of time playing Dogpile.


. Rehearsals continue. Costumes are starting to come together. Back at the beginning of production, there was talk about the Talking Beasts having animal faces painted on, but now it looks like we're going for half-masks instead, at least for the supporting roles. That strikes me as more practical; I can think of several people who are playing an animal character and then coming back on as a human character, which is going to be easier if they don't have to clean face paint off in a hurry -- especially as there's at least one person who's switching from an animal character to a human character and then back to the animal and then back to the human.

. The clear-out of the garage continued, and resulted in the unearthing, amidst a large quantity of Stuff That Might Be Useful One Day, of several items that made us go "Oh, I remember that!". One such was a Secret Valley Holiday Camp t-shirt, once much-loved, but now alas reduced to a condition where dust-rags would turn up their noses at it.


. At the weekend gaming session, we played Forgotten Waters, a game in which the players are a crew of pirates sailing around the ocean having whimsical adventures while trying to achieve a collective goal and each an individual goal. ( Read more... )


. At the regular weekly board game meet, we played Dead by Daylight: The Board Game, in which one of the players is a serial killer hunting the other players around the board while they attempt to find the macguffins to open an escape route. ( Read more... )


. I've been making a deliberate effort to try new games out of my pile of unplayed games instead of just starting XCOM 2 again, and this has resulted in me trying three new games:

- ( Guacamelee )

- ( Proverbs )

- ( Into the Breach )


. I had vaguely hoped that I would be able to roll my streak of Prisoner of Zenda watching into watching some other of the TV shows I've been meaning to watch, but it didn't happen. I wonder if it makes a difference that episodes of The Prisoner of Zenda were only half an hour long, while the more recent things I want to watch are around an hour.


. There was a big storm, which in my neighbourhood at least included a protracted period of hailstones, which were very loud and made me glad I had somewhere safe and dry to be. My house wasn't damaged, beyond some chipped paint; other buildings around town weren't so lucky. After the storm, there were drifts of hailstones all around the yard, and one of the downpipes from the rain gutters had a cone of hailstones around its base several inches high, which still hasn't entirely melted away several days later. I was looking out my window on the day after the storm and saw one of the neighbour cats investigating the pile with a puzzled air.


. I went to a going-away party for a friend who's moving up north to take up a challenging new job opportunity. I didn't know most of the other people there, who were from other parts of my friend's life than the one in which we intersected, but I had a good time and am glad I went.


. I learned a new word just now: "roborant", meaning "having a strengthening or restorative effect". Pronounced with the stress on the first syllable. I was looking in the thesaurus while writing the previous paragraph, trying to find a word that captured what I meant better than "challenging" (still not quite right, but I didn't find one I liked better). I have a pretty good vocabulary, so checking a thesaurus is usually a case of running my eye over a list of words I already know and weighing up their shades of meaning; I was astonished to be confronted with a synonym that, as far as I can recall, I've never encountered before.

. Circumstances have prompted Dad to clear out some of the furniture, boxes of old documents, etc, that have been cluttering up the garage for I-don't-remember-how-long. ( Read more... )


. Somebody I know mentioned that they were watching the 1984 TV adaptation of The Prisoner of Zenda, which reminded me that I'd been meaning to check it out, so I've been watching one episode a day. ( Read more... )


. I spent an evening finishing off my run in XCOM 2. It's one of the best runs I've done, and the first time I've completed a run at the regular difficulty level without any do-overs. "I think I'm ready to give it a rest for a while and try something else," I said, and then by the next morning I was thinking about starting another run. So far, I haven't started another run, but I haven't settled on anything new to start either.


. Over on Bluesky, author & illustrator Trung Le Nguyen recently finished a liveblog of his first time reading Pride and Prejudice, which I really enjoyed: it's funny, and insightful, and breathes new life into parts of the novel that I'd started taking for granted. Here's a link to the liveblog thread; it's so long that when I tried to read it it broke halfway through, so I was grateful when someone posted a Google doc compilation.

Fiction books
Douglas Adams. Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (re-read)
Anne McCaffrey. Moreta: Dragonlady of Pern
Catherine Louisa Pirkis. The Experiences of Loveday Brooke, Lady Detective (e)
Jeff Smith. Tuki: Fight for Family
Jeff Smith. Tuki: Fight for Fire

In progress
Monte Cook. Stealing Stories for the Devil (e)

Abandoned
Dan Jones. Essex Dogs

Picture books
Adam Goodes, Ellie Laing, David Hardy. Dreaming

Non-fiction books
Lindsay C Gibson. Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents (e)
John Green. Everything Is Tuberculosis (e)

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

Top of the to-read pile
Solomon Northrup. Twelve Years a Slave (e)