pedanther

#14: A book with a higher average rating than the previous book

Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania by Erik Larson. A "narrative non-fiction" account of the final voyage of the trans-Atlantic passenger liner Lusitania, which was sunk by a German U-boat in 1915 with massive loss of life.

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#15: A book whose cover is the next colour in the rainbow (or a complementary colour if the previous book's cover isn't a rainbow colour)

Neuromancer by William Gibson. The iconic cyberpunk novel; a washed-up cyberspace cowboy is recruited to an eccentric group of criminals who have been gathered to perform a mysterious heist.

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#13: A book with a page count within 100 pages of the previous book

Second attempt: Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon. An account of the future history of mankind over the coming millennia, written in the 1930s and famous for its ambition and imaginative scope -- although not, of course, for the predictive accuracy of the opening chapters, which fail to foresee the Third Reich, the Chinese Communist Revolution, and the splitting of the atom, among other things.

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Third attempt: Wolf's Lair by James McGee. An ex-soldier turned smuggler is hired to join an expedition seeking the final resting place of a German U-boat that disappeared at the end of the War carrying a cargo of gold bullion and a dangerous macguffin.

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#14: A book with a higher average rating than the previous book

I didn't have anything particular in mind, so I decided to hit the local library and see what I came away with. What I came away with was Dead Wake, Erik Larson's account of the final voyage of the RMS Lusitania. I had only the vaguest memory of what the Lusitania died of; it turns out that this is, in part, another German U-boat story.

. I had the whole week off, and spent a lot of it either enjoying having nothing particular to do or feeling crumby due to the well-known phenomenon whereby as soon as I was on holiday and the show wrapped I came down with the mild lurgy I had been steadfastly refusing to entertain because I had things to do.

At a couple of points, I attempted to do some things I'd been putting off on the excuse that they involved getting things done during office hours, only to find (as I frequently have on previous occasions when I've counted on getting things done when I was on holiday) that the businesses I needed to interact with were also off for the holidays.


. On the weekend, we had a long gaming session where we played Mansions of Madness. The scenario we played was an interesting variation on the usual: ( Read more... )


. At the weekly game meet, we played Cockroach Soup, Flip 7 With a Vengeance, and Epic Spell Wars of the Battle Wizards: Duel at Mt. Skullzfyre. ( Read more... )


. Rehearsals for You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown have begun, and are going well.


. I watched the NASA live stream of the Artemis II launch, and have been following its progress.


. I went to Parkrun this week, despite a bit of rain being forecast; I already had a cold, and I didn't have anything I needed to do later in the day, so I figured it wouldn't hurt. In the event, there was only a brief light sprinkling of rain. I got a couple of nice comments from people who had been to see the play.


. My relationship with hot cross buns since I parted ways with the Holy Mother Church has been erratic. Some years, I make a point of eating one on the wrong day, to prove that the Church can no longer tell me what to do; other years, I make a point of only eating them on Good Friday, on the principle that if a thing's worth doing it's worth doing correctly (because I might be a lapsed Catholic but I'm still a practising pedant). This year, the entire question escaped my mind until it was already Good Friday and all the shops where I knew they were on sale were shut for the public holiday, so I bought some at a discount on Saturday morning and had them for morning tea.


. Until recently, I had managed to avoid getting any spam comments on my AO3 fics, but a couple of the fics I wrote for the most recent Three Sentence Ficathon have apparently stuck out enough to become targets for the kind of spam comment that pretends to be a real review before trying to get you to a secondary location. The one I received this week asserted that "i wasn’t expecting much at first but this actually turned out to be a pretty decent read", which is particularly transparent in the context of a fic that's only 37 words long.


. I was pleased to see the announcement that Farah Mendlesohn has been selected as the GUFF delegate to Swancon 50, then spent several minutes trying to remember where I actually know them from. I eventually managed to narrow it down from "overlapping online fannish space of some kind" to "mostly Diana Wynne Jones fandom, when I was still actively interacting with Diana Wynne Jones fandom". (Skimming the list of GUFF voters, I recognised a name from the old DWJ fan group, followed by another name whose owner was not yet born then, let alone old enough to vote; my, how the time etc.)

#9: A book with more pages than the previous book
February: Keyboard Keys

Watership Down by Richard Adams.

I enjoyed it. There are some very emotional parts. I have some quibbles about the way interspecies communication is depicted, but they're quibbles. The Tolkienesque asides about language and translation are fun. Actually, the whole vibe is kind of Tolkienesque, in that it's about a big adventure being had by small creatures who live in holes in the ground and are very English in their manners and speech despite having no concept of what an "England" is. I found myself occasionally wondering if the various strange rabbit communities our heroes encounter -- the decadent artist rabbits, the totalitarian dictatorship rabbits -- are meant to be read as commentary on human communities; the only one I'm confident about is the bit where one of the folk tales about the mythical rabbit hero El-ahrairah takes a moment to have El-ahrairah express his disdain for Kits These Days That Don't Respect Their Elders Who Fought For Their Freedom In The War.


#10: A book published in a different decade than the previous book
March: "This" and "That"

1066 and All That: A Memorable History of England by W.C. Sellar and R.J. Yeatman.

A re-read, because I was feeling like something light and none of the other options I was seeing for the March prompt were appealing to me.

. Our season of short plays opened this week, to successful audiences. There was apparently a positive write-up in the local paper, but I didn't hear about it until it was too late to get hold of a copy. The play I'm in is a collection of skits on Shakespearean topics, with premises such as "What if Julius Caesar had asked the soothsayer for clarification?" and "What if Lady Macbeth had had a really good lawyer?" and "What if Richard III had been taken at his word on the 'my kingdom for a horse' thing?"


. I didn't make it to any board game meets this week because they all clashed with dress rehearsals.


. Further experimentation with the cat-head ice trays has established that using orange juice instead of water makes the ice irregular enough that it doesn't cling to the mould. It also established that I don't really have a regular use for blocks of frozen orange juice shaped like cat heads, so I'm probably just going to stop using the ice tray.


. I didn't get around to watching the National Theatre Importance of Being Earnest during the week it was available free to watch on Youtube. This was partly because I was busy, and partly because, despite the stacked cast, I've never been particularly enthusiastic about this production. My least favourite kind of production of a classic comedy is the kind that seems to think that it won't be funny without a whole bunch of new gags slathered over it, and if this production isn't one of those then the trailers I've seen are doing a bad job of representing it.

. At the weekly boardgame meet, we played Cockroach Soup (which is like Cockroach Salad but with more slurping, although one player refused to slurp and just said "slurp" instead), Flip 7 With A Vengeance (which is like Flip 7 only more so), Lovecraft Letter (which is like Love Letter with the option to unlock forbidden techniques that are more powerful but increase the chance that you'll go mad and get disqualified), The Mind, and Cheating Moth.


. Further experimentation with the cat-head ice cube tray has established that if I leave it out of the freezer for about fifteen minutes, the ice blocks will melt enough to relent their grip while otherwise retaining their shape. I will probably continue to use the dog tray more often, as I'm not the kind of person to know fifteen minutes in advance that I'll be wanting a cold drink. I have made a mental note to try with fruit juice and see if that affects the grippiness.


. I've played through all the prequel missions in the XCOM 2 "Tactical Legacy" DLC. There's a state I get into sometimes when I'm reading a book that I'm not really enjoying, where I'm still interested in seeing what happens next but what I'm really looking forward to is getting to the point where I've seen what happens next and can move on to something else; that's how I felt when I was doing the last few missions. One thing I can say for them is that they've given me a new appreciation of how the main game works as an ongoing story with a cast of familiar characters who grow and develop over time, with the player getting involved in guiding their development, and isn't just a bunch of arbitrary missions featuring an arbitrary bunch of people with random skill sets.


. Auditions have begun for our next production, which will be the Peanuts-inspired musical You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown. I remember auditioning for something years ago (it seems likely it was Putnam County, though it might not have been) with Charlie Brown's kite song from this musical, but I haven't been able to find where I stored the music for it. (I was undecided about whether I would actually audition with it this time, since usually I make a point of not auditioning with a piece from the musical I'm auditioning for, but it would have been nice to find it again regardless.)


. The BBC has announced the recovery of two more missing episodes from early Doctor Who, both from near the beginning of "The Daleks' Master Plan". This means we now have substantially more than we previously had of Adrienne Hill's run as a Doctor Who companion, and of Nicholas Courtney's first appearance on the series.

Coincidentally, the day after the announcement, I was poking around in my digital archive looking for the kite song, when I found a mysterious folder containing a single file with the informative name of "scan0003.jpg", which turned out to be a newspaper clipping from the last time an episode of "The Daleks' Master Plan" was recovered.


. The family walk continues.

. We had a long board game meet on the public holiday, where we played Unfathomable, in which the crew and passengers of a ship under attack from Lovecraftian sea monsters is trying to get safely back to port, unaware that some of the people on board are secretly working with the monsters.( Read more... )

After Unfathomable, we played a game of Citadels.


. On the weekend, we played a couple more games of Ticket to Ride Legacy. ( Read more... )


. I've started a new jigsaw puzzle, and completed most of the edges. I like the artwork on this one better than the previous one, and the introductory booklet doesn't set my teeth on edge the same way. ( Read more... )


. I've completed the story campaign in XCOM 2: War of the Chosen. The final boss fight went pretty smoothly. ( Read more... )

One of the other DLC includes a set of bonus missions that are supposedly set in the years between XCOM: Enemy Unknown and XCOM 2, with a framing device where one of the characters from XCOM 2 is telling stories about past experiences. I've been trying those next, ( Read more... )