Five Things Make a Post
Dec. 26th, 2023 09:21 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pedanther. I didn't agree with everything in the three Doctor Who 60th Anniversary Specials, but I enjoyed all three, and I'm excited to see what comes next in a way I haven't been for years, so as far as I'm concerned they're a success.
. We did not, in the end, achieve the feat of doing a full run-through more than a week before the show opened, but the show was a success anyway. We even got a reasonable write-up in the local paper, complete with front page photo. Next year, the big focus is going to be on doing a musical, which will be Mamma Mia.
. The reading challenge for December was "a book about somebody who is gifted"; I started reading The Calculating Stars by Mary Robinette Kowal, got bogged down, read the much shorter Rhianna and the Wild Magic by Dave Luckett instead, and then, having removed the pressure to finish, was able to also finish reading The Calculating Stars.
. I first read Bridge of Birds, Barry Hughart's novel about the adventures of Number Ten Ox and his friend Li Kao, the scholar with a slight flaw in his character, when I was in university. I re-read it recently, and then finally got around to reading the two sequels, The Story of the Stone and Eight Skilled Gentlemen - and I'm not sure whether I wish I hadn't. It's one of those situations where turning a one-off story into a series involves tweaking the premise to open it out, and in this case I felt like some of the things I'd loved about the original were lost in the process. One of the changes is that there's a subtle but significant shift in genre: Bridge of Birds is a series of whimsical adventures in which Master Li and Ox solve a number of apparently unrelated puzzles and problems which turn out in the end to be interconnected; the sequels are detective stories, in which Master Li is presented at the start with a mystery that takes the whole book to solve. There are still whimsical incidents along the way, but they don't land the same because one feels obliged to interrogate them about how they fit into the main plot instead of just enjoying them and letting it be a bonus if they fit into the plot at all. There's also a change in Ox's personality: in the first book, he's a naive young man going on the adventure of a lifetime to save people he cares deeply about; in the sequel, he's become a seasoned adventurer, a development which happened entirely off the page between books and left me feeling for a while like I wasn't sure I recognised him (and for even longer like, if he doesn't care so much about how the adventure turns out, why should I?).
. I decided about a month ago that it was about time I tried a long-form computer game again, and picked XCOM: Enemy Unknown out of my large pile of unplayed games on Steam. It's already cracked my top 10 most hours played. (Which is, I have to admit, partly due to there having been some stressful days in the past month where it was helpful to be able to submerge myself for a few hours in solving problems with no real-world consequences, but that's not the whole reason.)
. We did not, in the end, achieve the feat of doing a full run-through more than a week before the show opened, but the show was a success anyway. We even got a reasonable write-up in the local paper, complete with front page photo. Next year, the big focus is going to be on doing a musical, which will be Mamma Mia.
. The reading challenge for December was "a book about somebody who is gifted"; I started reading The Calculating Stars by Mary Robinette Kowal, got bogged down, read the much shorter Rhianna and the Wild Magic by Dave Luckett instead, and then, having removed the pressure to finish, was able to also finish reading The Calculating Stars.
. I first read Bridge of Birds, Barry Hughart's novel about the adventures of Number Ten Ox and his friend Li Kao, the scholar with a slight flaw in his character, when I was in university. I re-read it recently, and then finally got around to reading the two sequels, The Story of the Stone and Eight Skilled Gentlemen - and I'm not sure whether I wish I hadn't. It's one of those situations where turning a one-off story into a series involves tweaking the premise to open it out, and in this case I felt like some of the things I'd loved about the original were lost in the process. One of the changes is that there's a subtle but significant shift in genre: Bridge of Birds is a series of whimsical adventures in which Master Li and Ox solve a number of apparently unrelated puzzles and problems which turn out in the end to be interconnected; the sequels are detective stories, in which Master Li is presented at the start with a mystery that takes the whole book to solve. There are still whimsical incidents along the way, but they don't land the same because one feels obliged to interrogate them about how they fit into the main plot instead of just enjoying them and letting it be a bonus if they fit into the plot at all. There's also a change in Ox's personality: in the first book, he's a naive young man going on the adventure of a lifetime to save people he cares deeply about; in the sequel, he's become a seasoned adventurer, a development which happened entirely off the page between books and left me feeling for a while like I wasn't sure I recognised him (and for even longer like, if he doesn't care so much about how the adventure turns out, why should I?).
. I decided about a month ago that it was about time I tried a long-form computer game again, and picked XCOM: Enemy Unknown out of my large pile of unplayed games on Steam. It's already cracked my top 10 most hours played. (Which is, I have to admit, partly due to there having been some stressful days in the past month where it was helpful to be able to submerge myself for a few hours in solving problems with no real-world consequences, but that's not the whole reason.)
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Date: 2024-01-08 10:34 pm (UTC)