Five Things Make a Post
Jun. 15th, 2019 11:27 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pedanther1. My Fair Lady opened last night. The show came together pretty well during dress rehearsals, and although we had a few opening-night excitements, the audience seemed pleased. (At one point, I was halfway through a costume change when I realised that I still had another scene to do in the old costume before I changed into the new one. Fortunately I had time to change back.) We also got a good review in the paper, both in the sense that it said nice things about the production and in the sense that it had actual things to say about the production beyond "it is on" and "here's who is in it", which isn't a given with the local paper.
2. Over at Mark Watches, Mark has finished watching Babylon 5 and Crusade. I really enjoyed revisiting Babylon 5; I probably could have done without rewatching Crusade, except that now I've done it I never have to do it again. Now Mark is catching up on the last few years of Doctor Who, which is something I'd like to be following along with but what with it being crunch time on My Fair Lady I haven't had time to keep up.
3. The new collection of Liaden Universe short stories came out recently, with a bunch of stories I'd already read in their original venues and two that were new to me. One I found a bit disappointing; the other was much more interesting, and speaks to the time and place in which it was written in that way science fiction often does when it's telling a story about some other time and place entirely.
4. Back in February, I remarked that I have a significant backlog of board gaming I haven't blogged about. It's only gotten bigger since then.
5. I'm intrigued enough by what I've seen of Observation, a new science fiction thriller game, that I bought it in a recent sale. Unfortunately, it then turned out that it will only run on my computer with the graphics settings dialled right down, which has happened often enough lately with interesting new games that I'm beginning to think it might be worth actually getting my computer's graphical capabilities upgraded. But while I dither over that, I'm not getting any Observation played either.
Observation is set, at least in the early bits I've seen, on a near-Earth orbital space station where something goes wrong, leaving one of the crew isolated and trying to figure out what's happened with the sometimes-unreliable assistance of the station's damaged AI. It's very atmospheric -- I gather it has several key people, including the set designer, in common with the well-regarded Alien: Isolation game. Also the lead cast: the scientist and the AI are voiced by the actors who were Ripley and Samuels in Alien: Isolation.
One of the intriguing things about the game is that it's the disembodied AI, not the human scientist, who is the player character.
2. Over at Mark Watches, Mark has finished watching Babylon 5 and Crusade. I really enjoyed revisiting Babylon 5; I probably could have done without rewatching Crusade, except that now I've done it I never have to do it again. Now Mark is catching up on the last few years of Doctor Who, which is something I'd like to be following along with but what with it being crunch time on My Fair Lady I haven't had time to keep up.
3. The new collection of Liaden Universe short stories came out recently, with a bunch of stories I'd already read in their original venues and two that were new to me. One I found a bit disappointing; the other was much more interesting, and speaks to the time and place in which it was written in that way science fiction often does when it's telling a story about some other time and place entirely.
4. Back in February, I remarked that I have a significant backlog of board gaming I haven't blogged about. It's only gotten bigger since then.
5. I'm intrigued enough by what I've seen of Observation, a new science fiction thriller game, that I bought it in a recent sale. Unfortunately, it then turned out that it will only run on my computer with the graphics settings dialled right down, which has happened often enough lately with interesting new games that I'm beginning to think it might be worth actually getting my computer's graphical capabilities upgraded. But while I dither over that, I'm not getting any Observation played either.
Observation is set, at least in the early bits I've seen, on a near-Earth orbital space station where something goes wrong, leaving one of the crew isolated and trying to figure out what's happened with the sometimes-unreliable assistance of the station's damaged AI. It's very atmospheric -- I gather it has several key people, including the set designer, in common with the well-regarded Alien: Isolation game. Also the lead cast: the scientist and the AI are voiced by the actors who were Ripley and Samuels in Alien: Isolation.
One of the intriguing things about the game is that it's the disembodied AI, not the human scientist, who is the player character.
