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Week in review: Week to 31 May
I haven't been watching the just-finished season of Doctor Who, because the end of the previous season didn't leave me with much enthusiasm about the direction the show seemed to be going, but I've been curating my Tumblr feed and taking other such precautions just in case I do decide to watch it at some point, and I was rather put out this morning to be told, by someone who assumed I'd already seen it, how the season finale ends. To be fair, I suppose I was going to have to find out at some point, but it would have been nice to see it for the first time in context. And then again, it's looking less likely that I would have watched it anyway, since pretty much everything that's leaked through my spoiler precautions about this season has been about the show pandering to old fans (which, speaking as an old fan, I'm pretty tired of these days). Though I suppose that might say more about the kind of thing that makes enough noise to leak through the spoiler barrier than it does about the nature of the season as a whole.
In more cheerful TV news, the current season of Taskmaster is very, very good.
At board game club, a group of us started playing Risk Legacy. I'm enjoying it okay, particularly since one of the differences from the standard game is that the victory conditions for each game are (so far) less arduous than "eliminate every other player" and allow for the game to be over in a reasonable amount of time.
We also played Century: Golem Edition, which involves collecting and trading gem stones until you have the right set of colours to claim a golem card worth victory points. It took me a while to get the hang of how it worked, but I ended up coming second after snagging a valuable golem in the very last move of the game.
I've given up on playing Battletech: I reached the part of the game where you can't just wing it without having a grasp of the fiddly little numbers, and I still wasn't interested in the numbers in themselves and hadn't found any motivation to put in the effort despite that. (The plot and characters, for instance, continued to be serviceable but not particularly gripping; I figure it'll all work out for them somehow, and possibly better without me getting in the way.)
I got back into playing The Beekeeper's Picnic, the point-and-click adventure game featuring retired Sherlock Holmes, and I think I've almost finished the main storyline.
I also finally got around to trying Mark of the Ninja (by the creators of one my favourite computer games, Invisible, Inc.). I don't think I'm going to continue with it; the stealth mechanics are interesting and I didn't mind some of the sneaking around, but I didn't really enjoy the parts where I had to stab people and blood went everywhere, or the part where the player character has no personality outside of being a mysterious member of a mysterious tribe of mysterious ninjas who mysteriously don't sound like any of them are voiced by Japanese actors.
It's been a week for not finishing things: I started and abandoned two separate attempts at the current link in the Book Chain reading challenge (more on those in a separate post later). I also failed to make substantial progress on either of the monthly reading challenges: I haven't even picked a book for the May Buzzword challenge (book with "to" or "too" in the title), and although I did finish my Random Book for May a while back, I haven't started the books for either March or April yet.
I decided to re-do the random selection for March, on the basis that if it's been sitting unread for months on end I probably don't actually want to read it. I had to re-do it a couple of times, because I kept looking at the selection and deciding I wasn't enthusiastic about it. (This is particularly important, because the March prompt is to randomly select a book over 500 pages, and a book over 500 pages needs some enthusiasm to get through.) I've currently settled on Ursula K. Le Guin's Always Coming Home, which I know that I want to read - or, at least, that I want to have read, which is not quite the same thing.
I'm still working through The Hidden Almanac, Ursula Vernon's podcast of weird historical events from the world several of her fantasy novels are set in. One of the segments this week was about a computer-animated children's TV show that traumatised a generation, which caught me by surprise: even though the podcast is explicitly looking backward from the 21st century, I somehow never considered that it might be a 21st century with computers in it. (The existence of podcasts ought perhaps to have been a clue, but I don't think the presenter ever explicitly says it's a podcast in-universe, and I always picture him speaking over the radio, probably via one of those old-timey circular microphones.)
I stayed up late on Friday night for an online event in another time zone, and on Saturday morning I woke up almost exactly an hour later than usual. This threw off my sense of time, and I went about my morning thinking I had plenty of time before Parkrun, until I looked at the clock to confirm that I still had another half hour and realised that actually I'd already missed the start time. I went to the park anyway, later in the morning, and walked the course by myself, and heard more birdsong than I probably would have if I'd been there with the crowd.
I've discovered a new word for the list of Words I'd Only Ever Seen Written Down And Was Pronouncing Wrong All This Time. This one is a character name: Methos, a recurring character from the 1990s TV series Highlander. I've been reading about him sporadically for decades, but I've never actually seen an episode with him in, and when I went looking for Youtube clips of Peter Wingfield performances a few days ago I discovered that I've been mentally pronouncing the E wrong: I always figured the first syllable of his name rhymed with "death", but it turns out it rhymes with "teeth".
In more cheerful TV news, the current season of Taskmaster is very, very good.
At board game club, a group of us started playing Risk Legacy. I'm enjoying it okay, particularly since one of the differences from the standard game is that the victory conditions for each game are (so far) less arduous than "eliminate every other player" and allow for the game to be over in a reasonable amount of time.
We also played Century: Golem Edition, which involves collecting and trading gem stones until you have the right set of colours to claim a golem card worth victory points. It took me a while to get the hang of how it worked, but I ended up coming second after snagging a valuable golem in the very last move of the game.
I've given up on playing Battletech: I reached the part of the game where you can't just wing it without having a grasp of the fiddly little numbers, and I still wasn't interested in the numbers in themselves and hadn't found any motivation to put in the effort despite that. (The plot and characters, for instance, continued to be serviceable but not particularly gripping; I figure it'll all work out for them somehow, and possibly better without me getting in the way.)
I got back into playing The Beekeeper's Picnic, the point-and-click adventure game featuring retired Sherlock Holmes, and I think I've almost finished the main storyline.
I also finally got around to trying Mark of the Ninja (by the creators of one my favourite computer games, Invisible, Inc.). I don't think I'm going to continue with it; the stealth mechanics are interesting and I didn't mind some of the sneaking around, but I didn't really enjoy the parts where I had to stab people and blood went everywhere, or the part where the player character has no personality outside of being a mysterious member of a mysterious tribe of mysterious ninjas who mysteriously don't sound like any of them are voiced by Japanese actors.
It's been a week for not finishing things: I started and abandoned two separate attempts at the current link in the Book Chain reading challenge (more on those in a separate post later). I also failed to make substantial progress on either of the monthly reading challenges: I haven't even picked a book for the May Buzzword challenge (book with "to" or "too" in the title), and although I did finish my Random Book for May a while back, I haven't started the books for either March or April yet.
I decided to re-do the random selection for March, on the basis that if it's been sitting unread for months on end I probably don't actually want to read it. I had to re-do it a couple of times, because I kept looking at the selection and deciding I wasn't enthusiastic about it. (This is particularly important, because the March prompt is to randomly select a book over 500 pages, and a book over 500 pages needs some enthusiasm to get through.) I've currently settled on Ursula K. Le Guin's Always Coming Home, which I know that I want to read - or, at least, that I want to have read, which is not quite the same thing.
I'm still working through The Hidden Almanac, Ursula Vernon's podcast of weird historical events from the world several of her fantasy novels are set in. One of the segments this week was about a computer-animated children's TV show that traumatised a generation, which caught me by surprise: even though the podcast is explicitly looking backward from the 21st century, I somehow never considered that it might be a 21st century with computers in it. (The existence of podcasts ought perhaps to have been a clue, but I don't think the presenter ever explicitly says it's a podcast in-universe, and I always picture him speaking over the radio, probably via one of those old-timey circular microphones.)
I stayed up late on Friday night for an online event in another time zone, and on Saturday morning I woke up almost exactly an hour later than usual. This threw off my sense of time, and I went about my morning thinking I had plenty of time before Parkrun, until I looked at the clock to confirm that I still had another half hour and realised that actually I'd already missed the start time. I went to the park anyway, later in the morning, and walked the course by myself, and heard more birdsong than I probably would have if I'd been there with the crowd.
I've discovered a new word for the list of Words I'd Only Ever Seen Written Down And Was Pronouncing Wrong All This Time. This one is a character name: Methos, a recurring character from the 1990s TV series Highlander. I've been reading about him sporadically for decades, but I've never actually seen an episode with him in, and when I went looking for Youtube clips of Peter Wingfield performances a few days ago I discovered that I've been mentally pronouncing the E wrong: I always figured the first syllable of his name rhymed with "death", but it turns out it rhymes with "teeth".