Week in review: Week to 27 September
Sep. 29th, 2024 11:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pedanther. I went to the cinema for the first time in months, to see a new Australian film called Kid Snow, which was filmed on location in Western Australia and has a few people I know in the crowd scenes. (I also know some of the locations, and I'm pretty sure I spotted a sequence where the characters leave a small country town, drive all day, and arrive in a new small country town, in which both small country towns are played by the same somewhat larger country town, a few blocks apart.) The plot is the kind of thing that sounds very familiar if you try to explain it in a single sentence, and some of the dialogue is a bit on the nose, but the main performances are strong (including the tagalong kid character, who is genuinely charming and not irritating except when the story means him to be). Some of the supporting performances, too; at least two of the supporting characters are played by actors who have separately starred in other Australian productions that I've been meaning to get around to (one of which, Mystery Road: Origins, was filmed on location in the same part of Western Australia and has more familiar faces in it).
. Last weekend was a long weekend in WA, which as far as the local boardgaming club was concerned meant an opportunity to break out some of the longer board games that we don't get to play in our weekly evening sessions. Over the weekend, we played several rounds of Pandemic Legacy (which started well and then got out of hand repeatedly as additional constraints began appearing), Fury of Dracula (with unintentionally appropriate timing; in the chronology of Dracula this week in September is when the heroes stop playing catch-up and start actively hunting vampires), and a six-player game of Agricola, among other shorter games.
. I was right, I did end up picking Cobra for the September random book challenge. This involved shamelessly bending the instructions for selecting the book, but I've done that a few times already with this challenge. I feel like it's the kind of challenge where the aim is ultimately to break decision paralysis and read a book, and as long as that goal is achieved it doesn't really matter if you follow the instructions to the letter. I wouldn't be so cavalier with a reading challenge where the book selection mattered in itself, like the challenge I've seen going around where the aim is to read one book originating from each nation.
. Apart from the two monthly reading challenges I'm doing, I'm also doing another less structured one that's just a long list of varied prompts like "a book with a hotel on the cover" or "a book with a title that sounds like exercise". I haven't been mentioning it because the range of prompts is so broad that I can usually find something to check off for every book I read, so I've been tending to treat it as an afterthought and not an aid to book selection. However, since I was caught up on both the monthly challenges with some time left in September, I decided to look at the list of unfinished prompts and see if it would suggest something to read next. My eye was caught by "a book with the word 'secret' in the title", since that seemed like an easy one to match against my to-read list on StoryGraph -- and it was even easier than anticipated, because when I went to the to-read page the very first book listed, in the section at the top of the page for high-priority books, was The Mountains Have a Secret, the next novel in the Bony series. So I borrowed that from the library and read it. Then I immediately went on to read the following book, The Widows of Broome, because the ebook edition has a really ugly cover that I hate looking at and didn't want lurking at the top of my to-read page for however long it would otherwise have taken me to get around to it.
. Somebody in a book-related online group posted a picture of their recent book acquisitions, which included Prez: Setting a Dangerous President. This briefly gave me hope that Prez had somehow been revived without me hearing about it, but when I looked it up it turned out it was just a new edition of the first six issues with a different subtitle and a new bonus story.
The modern incarnation of Prez, written by Mark Russell with art by Ben Caldwell, ran for 6 issues around nine years ago, and then was cancelled just as it was really getting going. I wasn't a huge fan, but it had its moments, and Russell was clearly going somewhere with it and I would have liked to have seen where that was. Of the various questions left unanswered when the series was cancelled, the one that increasingly haunts me as time goes on is the place in the story of comic relief and occasional deus ex machina Fred Wayne, a quirky reclusive multi-billionaire who drops into the story from time to time to give events a nudge, and somehow avoids being one of the series' villains despite being a multi-billionaire with enough money and influence to bend democracy to his whim, whose reputation canonically rests on taking credit for the unrecognised work of more creatively gifted employees. (The bit about him making his first fortune from generative AI that's started crowding human writers out of the market hasn't aged well, either.) It might not bother me so much if there weren't occasional moments that might have been hints that Russell knew what he was doing and that what he was doing was setting Fred up to be an antagonist later on -- I even have a left-field theory, based partly on things that happened in the original 1970s incarnation of Prez that aren't in evidence in the six published issue of the reboot, that he might have been intended as the ultimate villain of the series. Or I could be reading too much into it, and Russell just wanted a convenient deus ex machina and didn't think too hard about the implications. We don't know, and what bothers me is that there is, now, no way we can ever know for certain.
. Last weekend was a long weekend in WA, which as far as the local boardgaming club was concerned meant an opportunity to break out some of the longer board games that we don't get to play in our weekly evening sessions. Over the weekend, we played several rounds of Pandemic Legacy (which started well and then got out of hand repeatedly as additional constraints began appearing), Fury of Dracula (with unintentionally appropriate timing; in the chronology of Dracula this week in September is when the heroes stop playing catch-up and start actively hunting vampires), and a six-player game of Agricola, among other shorter games.
. I was right, I did end up picking Cobra for the September random book challenge. This involved shamelessly bending the instructions for selecting the book, but I've done that a few times already with this challenge. I feel like it's the kind of challenge where the aim is ultimately to break decision paralysis and read a book, and as long as that goal is achieved it doesn't really matter if you follow the instructions to the letter. I wouldn't be so cavalier with a reading challenge where the book selection mattered in itself, like the challenge I've seen going around where the aim is to read one book originating from each nation.
. Apart from the two monthly reading challenges I'm doing, I'm also doing another less structured one that's just a long list of varied prompts like "a book with a hotel on the cover" or "a book with a title that sounds like exercise". I haven't been mentioning it because the range of prompts is so broad that I can usually find something to check off for every book I read, so I've been tending to treat it as an afterthought and not an aid to book selection. However, since I was caught up on both the monthly challenges with some time left in September, I decided to look at the list of unfinished prompts and see if it would suggest something to read next. My eye was caught by "a book with the word 'secret' in the title", since that seemed like an easy one to match against my to-read list on StoryGraph -- and it was even easier than anticipated, because when I went to the to-read page the very first book listed, in the section at the top of the page for high-priority books, was The Mountains Have a Secret, the next novel in the Bony series. So I borrowed that from the library and read it. Then I immediately went on to read the following book, The Widows of Broome, because the ebook edition has a really ugly cover that I hate looking at and didn't want lurking at the top of my to-read page for however long it would otherwise have taken me to get around to it.
. Somebody in a book-related online group posted a picture of their recent book acquisitions, which included Prez: Setting a Dangerous President. This briefly gave me hope that Prez had somehow been revived without me hearing about it, but when I looked it up it turned out it was just a new edition of the first six issues with a different subtitle and a new bonus story.
The modern incarnation of Prez, written by Mark Russell with art by Ben Caldwell, ran for 6 issues around nine years ago, and then was cancelled just as it was really getting going. I wasn't a huge fan, but it had its moments, and Russell was clearly going somewhere with it and I would have liked to have seen where that was. Of the various questions left unanswered when the series was cancelled, the one that increasingly haunts me as time goes on is the place in the story of comic relief and occasional deus ex machina Fred Wayne, a quirky reclusive multi-billionaire who drops into the story from time to time to give events a nudge, and somehow avoids being one of the series' villains despite being a multi-billionaire with enough money and influence to bend democracy to his whim, whose reputation canonically rests on taking credit for the unrecognised work of more creatively gifted employees. (The bit about him making his first fortune from generative AI that's started crowding human writers out of the market hasn't aged well, either.) It might not bother me so much if there weren't occasional moments that might have been hints that Russell knew what he was doing and that what he was doing was setting Fred up to be an antagonist later on -- I even have a left-field theory, based partly on things that happened in the original 1970s incarnation of Prez that aren't in evidence in the six published issue of the reboot, that he might have been intended as the ultimate villain of the series. Or I could be reading too much into it, and Russell just wanted a convenient deus ex machina and didn't think too hard about the implications. We don't know, and what bothers me is that there is, now, no way we can ever know for certain.
