Week in review: Week to 8 November
Nov. 14th, 2024 11:45 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pedantherWent to town, for the first time since before Covid. Caught up with my favourite aunt, my favourite niblings (and their parents), and a few friends from the old days. Got dragged along (not unwillingly) to a community orchestra rehearsal, where I played a trombone for the first time in years and was reassured by how much I still remembered. Got my dress shoes repaired. Visited the beach and looked at creatures in tide pools. Went clothing shopping, with questionable success. Successfully avoided coming home with more books than I arrived with. As usual, was too busy doing things to write anything down in detail.
One unanticipated benefit of being away from home with no reliable access to news media or social media was that certain major world events were just a faint noise in the distance instead of something I was living through as they happened. Actually, having most of a week away from social media probably did me a lot of good in general.
My hold on Remarkably Bright Creatures came up shortly before the trip, and I borrowed it with the intention of reading it on the train, but when I got my ebook reader out it turned out it had somehow not downloaded, so I had to leave it until I got back. Instead I read the new Rivers of London novella, and finished off Try Whistling This. I also tried reading my November book for the random book challenge, but I gave up on it after a couple of chapters. It had originally been published as a serial with a rotating set of authors taking turns writing chapters, and I found the effect off-putting; instead of setting up a definite story, it felt like the opening was throwing balls up in the air for other authors to catch, without any real idea of where they would land or any reassurance that they wouldn't be fumbled and dropped. While I was in town, my main book for reading on buses and trains was my other library book, Say Nothing, a fascinating non-fiction book about events in Belfast during the Troubles, which I managed to finish before I left, partly because it's so compelling but also partly because I spent so much time on buses and trains (everything is so far apart in the city).
I played the Dungeons and Dragons: Adventure Begins board game with the niblings. They enjoyed it, especially the bits where players are encouraged to tell a story about what happens when you roll the dice, and were curious about the differences between the board game and regular D&D.
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Before the trip away, we had another session of Pandemic: Legacy, and are now three-quarters of the way through Season One. I'm still enjoying the gameplay, but finding the unfolding season plot predictable and uninteresting.
At the regular weekly evening boardgaming session, we played Nemesis: Lockdown. We had very fortunate starting conditions, with no aliens showing up for several rounds, and most of the players having co-operative objectives that meant we could share information honestly and didn't take long to establish what we needed to do to survive the endgame. The downside of everyone being so well equipped for survival was that the game went on for hours - we only narrowly managed to get finished and packed up before the venue closed. Every game of Nemesis: Lockdown I've played has run long, and I think from now on it's going on my list of games not to start playing in the evening. (It may also end up on my list of games not to play at all, because the other thing that's happened every time I've played is that I've been killed by aliens over an hour before the game ended and been stuck with nothing to do waiting to see how it all turns out.)
One unanticipated benefit of being away from home with no reliable access to news media or social media was that certain major world events were just a faint noise in the distance instead of something I was living through as they happened. Actually, having most of a week away from social media probably did me a lot of good in general.
My hold on Remarkably Bright Creatures came up shortly before the trip, and I borrowed it with the intention of reading it on the train, but when I got my ebook reader out it turned out it had somehow not downloaded, so I had to leave it until I got back. Instead I read the new Rivers of London novella, and finished off Try Whistling This. I also tried reading my November book for the random book challenge, but I gave up on it after a couple of chapters. It had originally been published as a serial with a rotating set of authors taking turns writing chapters, and I found the effect off-putting; instead of setting up a definite story, it felt like the opening was throwing balls up in the air for other authors to catch, without any real idea of where they would land or any reassurance that they wouldn't be fumbled and dropped. While I was in town, my main book for reading on buses and trains was my other library book, Say Nothing, a fascinating non-fiction book about events in Belfast during the Troubles, which I managed to finish before I left, partly because it's so compelling but also partly because I spent so much time on buses and trains (everything is so far apart in the city).
I played the Dungeons and Dragons: Adventure Begins board game with the niblings. They enjoyed it, especially the bits where players are encouraged to tell a story about what happens when you roll the dice, and were curious about the differences between the board game and regular D&D.
----
Before the trip away, we had another session of Pandemic: Legacy, and are now three-quarters of the way through Season One. I'm still enjoying the gameplay, but finding the unfolding season plot predictable and uninteresting.
At the regular weekly evening boardgaming session, we played Nemesis: Lockdown. We had very fortunate starting conditions, with no aliens showing up for several rounds, and most of the players having co-operative objectives that meant we could share information honestly and didn't take long to establish what we needed to do to survive the endgame. The downside of everyone being so well equipped for survival was that the game went on for hours - we only narrowly managed to get finished and packed up before the venue closed. Every game of Nemesis: Lockdown I've played has run long, and I think from now on it's going on my list of games not to start playing in the evening. (It may also end up on my list of games not to play at all, because the other thing that's happened every time I've played is that I've been killed by aliens over an hour before the game ended and been stuck with nothing to do waiting to see how it all turns out.)
