Week in review: Week to 11 October
Oct. 13th, 2024 09:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pedanther. We had another session of playing Pandemic Legacy, and are now about halfway through "Season One". I had a suspicion about how the designers of the game were going to turn a game about containing and curing diseases into an experience with an ongoing storyline, and I'm a bit disappointed that I turned out to be bang on the money, partly because one doesn't like a story to be too predictable but largely because it's a plot I feel I've seen done, in both interactive and non-interactive media, quite enough already.
. The themed book challenge for October is "a book about people wearing masks, hiding, or masquerading as something they are not". I read The Leader and the Damned, a spy thriller by Colin Forbes set in World War II, involving someone impersonating a major head of state and several trusted officials who are revealed to be double agents working for a foreign power. (One of the latter is named Tim Whelby, presumably because the real Kim Philby was still alive when the book was published, unlike the various safely-dead politicians and generals who appear under their own names.) I found the novel disappointing; in retrospect, the trouble with a historical thriller about a secret with the potential to Change the Course of the War is that unless you're Quentin Tarantino you're stuck with the inevitability that the Course of the War must remain unchanged at the end, so you need to persuade the reader that the journey is worthwhile regardless of the destination, or give the protagonist a satisfying end to their character arc, or something, and the novel doesn't manage any of those.
. A while back, the dietician suggested that one way for me to eat healthy more reliably would be to sign up to one of the services that home-delivers pre-prepared meals, and this week I finally got around to giving one a try. The service I picked delivers the meals frozen and microwave-ready, which is very convenient and probably the best way to make sure I actually eat them, but does mean that I have moments when I look at them and wonder why I'm going to the extra trouble and expense when there are frozen microwave-ready meals to be had any time I go to the supermarket. Part of the answer, of course, is that the meals at the supermarket are mostly not very healthy and not as well prepared, and the intersection of healthy meals and meals I like is small enough that after sticking to it for a while I get bored and go and eat something unhealthy just for variety. That last problem is not going to be an issue with the meal service, at least; there are enough different meals on offer that it would take me a fair while to try them all and there's a good chance that when I had there would be a fair number left that I liked enough to eat again.
. Hurrah for responsive landlords! The air conditioner in the living room was getting old and had developed enough issues that I just wasn't using it most of the time, but it's now been replaced with a brand new unit, just in time for the weather heating up into summer. It's already made enough of a difference that I shudder to think what summer would have been like without it.
. I saw a post on Tumblr asking people to say what song first came to mind when they read the description "that song that goes na na na na na na na na na na na na na na", and immediately heard the memory of a voice singing "na na-na-na-na na-na-na-na na-na-na na-na-na na-na-na-na", but couldn't remember the title of the song or any of the other words. I eventually figured out an effective way to search for songs with those lyrics, and several pages deep in the search results, I found the song I'd been remembering, which turns out to be called "Here Comes the Hotstepper" by Ini Kamoze. (The na-na-na-na chorus, I learned, was copied from an older song called "Land of 1000 Dances", but I listened to both on Youtube and "Here Comes the Hotstepper" was definitely the version I was remembering.)
. The themed book challenge for October is "a book about people wearing masks, hiding, or masquerading as something they are not". I read The Leader and the Damned, a spy thriller by Colin Forbes set in World War II, involving someone impersonating a major head of state and several trusted officials who are revealed to be double agents working for a foreign power. (One of the latter is named Tim Whelby, presumably because the real Kim Philby was still alive when the book was published, unlike the various safely-dead politicians and generals who appear under their own names.) I found the novel disappointing; in retrospect, the trouble with a historical thriller about a secret with the potential to Change the Course of the War is that unless you're Quentin Tarantino you're stuck with the inevitability that the Course of the War must remain unchanged at the end, so you need to persuade the reader that the journey is worthwhile regardless of the destination, or give the protagonist a satisfying end to their character arc, or something, and the novel doesn't manage any of those.
. A while back, the dietician suggested that one way for me to eat healthy more reliably would be to sign up to one of the services that home-delivers pre-prepared meals, and this week I finally got around to giving one a try. The service I picked delivers the meals frozen and microwave-ready, which is very convenient and probably the best way to make sure I actually eat them, but does mean that I have moments when I look at them and wonder why I'm going to the extra trouble and expense when there are frozen microwave-ready meals to be had any time I go to the supermarket. Part of the answer, of course, is that the meals at the supermarket are mostly not very healthy and not as well prepared, and the intersection of healthy meals and meals I like is small enough that after sticking to it for a while I get bored and go and eat something unhealthy just for variety. That last problem is not going to be an issue with the meal service, at least; there are enough different meals on offer that it would take me a fair while to try them all and there's a good chance that when I had there would be a fair number left that I liked enough to eat again.
. Hurrah for responsive landlords! The air conditioner in the living room was getting old and had developed enough issues that I just wasn't using it most of the time, but it's now been replaced with a brand new unit, just in time for the weather heating up into summer. It's already made enough of a difference that I shudder to think what summer would have been like without it.
. I saw a post on Tumblr asking people to say what song first came to mind when they read the description "that song that goes na na na na na na na na na na na na na na", and immediately heard the memory of a voice singing "na na-na-na-na na-na-na-na na-na-na na-na-na na-na-na-na", but couldn't remember the title of the song or any of the other words. I eventually figured out an effective way to search for songs with those lyrics, and several pages deep in the search results, I found the song I'd been remembering, which turns out to be called "Here Comes the Hotstepper" by Ini Kamoze. (The na-na-na-na chorus, I learned, was copied from an older song called "Land of 1000 Dances", but I listened to both on Youtube and "Here Comes the Hotstepper" was definitely the version I was remembering.)
no subject
Date: 2024-10-14 01:49 am (UTC)Reading the 'na-na-na-na..." I read it as the relevant section of ACDC's Thunderstruck, even though in the song it is shorter than what you've written. I'm familiar enough with the one that you mention that i can bring up the 'Here comes the Hotstepper' bit of tune, but not familiar enough to be able to get the 'na na..' bit.
no subject
Date: 2024-10-14 02:33 am (UTC)I mainly 'eat healthily' by cooking my own meals, which means you get to see what actually goes into them and tend to balk at wasting half your butter on a single cake, or making anything that involves a vast amount of food processing.
One of the more memorable dietary suggestions I saw was the one that said it was fine to eat junk food so long as you had made it yourself; the amount of labour involved in cutting and frying your own chips from the raw-potato stage, for instance, is sufficient to make them into a rare and valued treat rather than a daily staple.