Week in review: Week to 26 July
Jul. 27th, 2025 08:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pedanther. At board game club this week, the main game we played was Night of the Ninja, a hidden-roles/social-deduction game where each player is a member of a ninja clan trying to take out the leaders of the opposing clan while protecting the leaders of their own clan - with the added wrinkle that because ninjas are so sneaky, nobody knows at the start who else is in the same clan or who the leaders are. Each player has a limited hand of action cards and a limited number of actions and has to figure out the best way to apply them so that they can learn the allegiances of other players and then take decisive action; if you don't spend enough time gathering information, you might end up making a serious mistake (like the ninja in one of our rounds who took out his own clan's leader), but if you spend too much time gathering information, you won't be able to act on it before the end of the round (or somebody else will get you first). At the end of each round, victory points are awarded to every player in the clan that came out on top (even if that player's ninja didn't survive; taking one for the good of the team is an important strategic option). It's been a few years since I last played, but I did better at it than I remembered doing before, and wound up with the most victory points at the end of the game.
. Monument Valley III had its Steam release in the past week, and I've enjoyed the first two games enough to buy it straight away, instead of waiting for a sale to roll around. I didn't have to pay quite full price for it, because there was an opening-week discount, and then there was also a package deal to get all three games at a reduced price, which, since Steam package deals take account of if you already own part of the package and I already had the first two games, amounted to an additional discount on the one I didn't have. I'm a few chapters into the game now; there are some interesting new types of puzzles, but I'm not sure the narrative elements are working for me as well as the first two did.
. Another reaction channel I've been watching lately is Marie-Clare's World, which I started following when she was working her way through Doctor Who. Now she's watching Babylon 5, and has just reached the end of the first season. She's had some interesting takes on part of it, particularly her reaction to Ambassador Delenn, who she's been much slower than I was, back the day, to accept as somebody the narrative intends us to recognise as basically trustworthy; that's made the last few episode reactions interesting and is one of the reasons I'm looking forward to seeing what she makes of the next few episodes. (Another reason is that one of the few characters she has accepted as basically trustworthy, and doesn't want to see anything bad happen to, is just about to be written out...)
. I've been having trouble with my printer for months - something was up with the release mechanism for the black ink, so that if I printed a document in black-and-white it came out illegibly faint, but anything with colours still came out at full strength. (One of the workarounds I've been relying on is tinting documents navy blue, which comes out looking black or at least more like black than the black does.) Part of the reason it took me so long is that I mostly use the printer only for committee documents roughly once a month, and the rest of the time it's been easy enough to kick the can down the road. The committee time of month being upon me again, and a lot of documents to be printed, I decided to do a web search to see if there were any maintenance things I might attempt, and found a short Youtube tutorial about detaching and cleaning the print head, which turned out to be much simpler than I'd expected. I gave it a shot, and it seems to have helped.
. I've been trying out a new tea blend this week, having picked up a packet on a whim while I was grocery shopping. It's labelled as "orange and cinnamon", with the small print mentioning that the base component is rooibos (as opposed to it being an entirely non-tea herbal blend like the peppermint or the lemon-and-ginger). It's quite nice, and a warm and comforting thing that suits the cold and uncomfortable weather we've been having lately.
. There was rain for a lot of the week, which led to me not getting as much outdoor exercise as I'd have preferred and also to ongoing trouble finding a good day to do the laundry. When I got up on Saturday morning, the forecast said there would be no rain so I made a plan to load the washing machine and then set it running on a delay so that it would finish about the time I got back from Parkrun. I was betrayed by muscle memory and set the washing machine running immediately I'd finished loading it, which meant that the cycle would finish in the middle of Parkrun and the washing would be sitting wet in the machine until I got back. I decided to give Parkrun a miss so I could hang the washing as soon as it was ready; the weather also played a part in the decision, as it wasn't raining but was cold and foggy. I did go for a long walk later in the day, after the fog had lifted and the sun had come out. During the afternoon I also finished the laundry, did the washing up, and dealt with some paperwork that had been hanging over me all week (and printed it out successfully). After all that, for one reason or another, I felt much brighter and more optimistic than I had for days.
. Monument Valley III had its Steam release in the past week, and I've enjoyed the first two games enough to buy it straight away, instead of waiting for a sale to roll around. I didn't have to pay quite full price for it, because there was an opening-week discount, and then there was also a package deal to get all three games at a reduced price, which, since Steam package deals take account of if you already own part of the package and I already had the first two games, amounted to an additional discount on the one I didn't have. I'm a few chapters into the game now; there are some interesting new types of puzzles, but I'm not sure the narrative elements are working for me as well as the first two did.
. Another reaction channel I've been watching lately is Marie-Clare's World, which I started following when she was working her way through Doctor Who. Now she's watching Babylon 5, and has just reached the end of the first season. She's had some interesting takes on part of it, particularly her reaction to Ambassador Delenn, who she's been much slower than I was, back the day, to accept as somebody the narrative intends us to recognise as basically trustworthy; that's made the last few episode reactions interesting and is one of the reasons I'm looking forward to seeing what she makes of the next few episodes. (Another reason is that one of the few characters she has accepted as basically trustworthy, and doesn't want to see anything bad happen to, is just about to be written out...)
. I've been having trouble with my printer for months - something was up with the release mechanism for the black ink, so that if I printed a document in black-and-white it came out illegibly faint, but anything with colours still came out at full strength. (One of the workarounds I've been relying on is tinting documents navy blue, which comes out looking black or at least more like black than the black does.) Part of the reason it took me so long is that I mostly use the printer only for committee documents roughly once a month, and the rest of the time it's been easy enough to kick the can down the road. The committee time of month being upon me again, and a lot of documents to be printed, I decided to do a web search to see if there were any maintenance things I might attempt, and found a short Youtube tutorial about detaching and cleaning the print head, which turned out to be much simpler than I'd expected. I gave it a shot, and it seems to have helped.
. I've been trying out a new tea blend this week, having picked up a packet on a whim while I was grocery shopping. It's labelled as "orange and cinnamon", with the small print mentioning that the base component is rooibos (as opposed to it being an entirely non-tea herbal blend like the peppermint or the lemon-and-ginger). It's quite nice, and a warm and comforting thing that suits the cold and uncomfortable weather we've been having lately.
. There was rain for a lot of the week, which led to me not getting as much outdoor exercise as I'd have preferred and also to ongoing trouble finding a good day to do the laundry. When I got up on Saturday morning, the forecast said there would be no rain so I made a plan to load the washing machine and then set it running on a delay so that it would finish about the time I got back from Parkrun. I was betrayed by muscle memory and set the washing machine running immediately I'd finished loading it, which meant that the cycle would finish in the middle of Parkrun and the washing would be sitting wet in the machine until I got back. I decided to give Parkrun a miss so I could hang the washing as soon as it was ready; the weather also played a part in the decision, as it wasn't raining but was cold and foggy. I did go for a long walk later in the day, after the fog had lifted and the sun had come out. During the afternoon I also finished the laundry, did the washing up, and dealt with some paperwork that had been hanging over me all week (and printed it out successfully). After all that, for one reason or another, I felt much brighter and more optimistic than I had for days.
no subject
Date: 2025-07-28 07:23 pm (UTC)Yes, I think she's taken the "nobody is as they seem part" very literally, in almost a kind of 'whodunnit' sort of way. It will be interesting to see what she thinks once everybody's arcs start going places across this season.