Week in review: Week to 2 August
Aug. 3rd, 2025 02:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pedanther. I reached the ending of Monument Valley III, and my primary reaction was "Wait, was that the ending?". The narrative elements never did come together to form a satisfying story; where previous games have had minimalist but satisfying stories, this one just felt incomplete. The puzzles included some interesting new mechanisms, but did less with them than I feel earlier games in the series would have.
. At board game club, we played Great Western Trail: New Zealand, a game in the "moving little cubes around on a player mat" genre, which I've had mixed experiences with. It turned into a long game - the second time I can remember where we ended up finishing just in time to hurriedly pack up the game and get out the door before the venue manager locked up for the night - and there were some fairly lengthy stretches of it where I would have been quite happy to call it a night and go home (although to be fair to the game, I was quite tired and it was an unusually cold night). I realised near the end of the game that I'd misunderstood an important rule about what triggered bonus actions, and had been taking quite a few actions that strictly speaking I wasn't entitled to, but I refuse to feel guilty about it, given that (a) the rules were quite complicated and (b) I nevertheless finished last by a considerable margin.
. The Serpent's Egg is an early work by Caroline Stevermer, whose later and more polished fantasy novels include A College of Magics and half of Sorcery and Cecelia, both of which I've previously read and admired (and, I suppose it would be wise to remember, also The Glass Magician, which I bounced right off).
It's an odd one, and perhaps the oddest thing is that the one unambiguously magical element - the artifact called the Serpent's Egg - spends the entire novel off in its own subplot, only occasionally brushing up against the rest of the story and playing no role whatever in the climax. (It gets its own little denouement after, which solves a problem that is mentioned for the first time in the scene where it's solved and never affects anybody except the three people in the subplot, and fails to answer any of the real questions the reader has about the artifact and its history.) I wound up with the feeling that the Serpent's Egg could have been left out of The Serpent's Egg entirely without materially affecting the rest of the story, leaving behind a non-magical tale of chivalry and courtly intrigue with incidents that occasionally reminded me of things like the D'Artagnan Romances.
On the whole, it's colourful and messy and I don't think all the pieces really fit together - but I enjoyed it throughout, and after some of the reading experiences I've had lately, that's something to be grateful for.
. I was introduced during the week to a Youtube channel called ITV Retro, an apparently official collection of old ITV shows. The available selection apparently varies by region; from here, I can see episodes of Sapphire and Steel, Press Gang, The Prisoner, The Persuaders, several marionation shows including Thunderbirds, and something called Rising Damp.
. Among the reaction videos I watched this week was one for 1985's Ladyhawke, which stars Rutger Hauer and Michelle Pfeiffer as star-crossed lovers and Matthew Broderick as the plucky wisecracking sidekick. (It's a bit of departure from Rutger Hauer's usual kind of role; I've read somewhere that he was originally cast as one of the villains, and then given a shot at the lead when the original lead actor pulled out.) I loved Ladyhawke when I was a kid, and it's still entertaining, though I always forget when I haven't seen it for a while just how aggressively 1980s the incidental music is.
. I mentioned a while ago that I was having trouble getting started on the latest jigsaw puzzle, and seem to have neglected to mention that I did get into it after a while. I finished it this week, and left it on display for a few days before packing it away yesterday. While I was disassembling it, there was a moment when I thought I'd dropped a puzzle piece off the edge of the table, and when I looked down there was a puzzle piece peeking out from under the sofa - but when I picked it up, it was a piece from the previous puzzle, that I finished a month ago.
. Recently, between the weather and some foot trouble, I haven't been getting out for a walk as often as I'd like, to the point that if I hadn't made a deliberate effort to avoid it last week would have been the first week since January that I only went for a walk once. This week has been much better, and I'm back up to my high-water mark of going for a walk five days out of seven. (I thought for a bit that I'd managed six days out of seven, for the first time since I started keeping the current records, but then I realised I'd miscounted the days.)
. At board game club, we played Great Western Trail: New Zealand, a game in the "moving little cubes around on a player mat" genre, which I've had mixed experiences with. It turned into a long game - the second time I can remember where we ended up finishing just in time to hurriedly pack up the game and get out the door before the venue manager locked up for the night - and there were some fairly lengthy stretches of it where I would have been quite happy to call it a night and go home (although to be fair to the game, I was quite tired and it was an unusually cold night). I realised near the end of the game that I'd misunderstood an important rule about what triggered bonus actions, and had been taking quite a few actions that strictly speaking I wasn't entitled to, but I refuse to feel guilty about it, given that (a) the rules were quite complicated and (b) I nevertheless finished last by a considerable margin.
. The Serpent's Egg is an early work by Caroline Stevermer, whose later and more polished fantasy novels include A College of Magics and half of Sorcery and Cecelia, both of which I've previously read and admired (and, I suppose it would be wise to remember, also The Glass Magician, which I bounced right off).
It's an odd one, and perhaps the oddest thing is that the one unambiguously magical element - the artifact called the Serpent's Egg - spends the entire novel off in its own subplot, only occasionally brushing up against the rest of the story and playing no role whatever in the climax. (It gets its own little denouement after, which solves a problem that is mentioned for the first time in the scene where it's solved and never affects anybody except the three people in the subplot, and fails to answer any of the real questions the reader has about the artifact and its history.) I wound up with the feeling that the Serpent's Egg could have been left out of The Serpent's Egg entirely without materially affecting the rest of the story, leaving behind a non-magical tale of chivalry and courtly intrigue with incidents that occasionally reminded me of things like the D'Artagnan Romances.
On the whole, it's colourful and messy and I don't think all the pieces really fit together - but I enjoyed it throughout, and after some of the reading experiences I've had lately, that's something to be grateful for.
. I was introduced during the week to a Youtube channel called ITV Retro, an apparently official collection of old ITV shows. The available selection apparently varies by region; from here, I can see episodes of Sapphire and Steel, Press Gang, The Prisoner, The Persuaders, several marionation shows including Thunderbirds, and something called Rising Damp.
. Among the reaction videos I watched this week was one for 1985's Ladyhawke, which stars Rutger Hauer and Michelle Pfeiffer as star-crossed lovers and Matthew Broderick as the plucky wisecracking sidekick. (It's a bit of departure from Rutger Hauer's usual kind of role; I've read somewhere that he was originally cast as one of the villains, and then given a shot at the lead when the original lead actor pulled out.) I loved Ladyhawke when I was a kid, and it's still entertaining, though I always forget when I haven't seen it for a while just how aggressively 1980s the incidental music is.
. I mentioned a while ago that I was having trouble getting started on the latest jigsaw puzzle, and seem to have neglected to mention that I did get into it after a while. I finished it this week, and left it on display for a few days before packing it away yesterday. While I was disassembling it, there was a moment when I thought I'd dropped a puzzle piece off the edge of the table, and when I looked down there was a puzzle piece peeking out from under the sofa - but when I picked it up, it was a piece from the previous puzzle, that I finished a month ago.
. Recently, between the weather and some foot trouble, I haven't been getting out for a walk as often as I'd like, to the point that if I hadn't made a deliberate effort to avoid it last week would have been the first week since January that I only went for a walk once. This week has been much better, and I'm back up to my high-water mark of going for a walk five days out of seven. (I thought for a bit that I'd managed six days out of seven, for the first time since I started keeping the current records, but then I realised I'd miscounted the days.)
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Date: 2025-08-05 03:01 pm (UTC)There's a Monument Valley III? .... gets distracted, goes off to look...
no subject
Date: 2025-08-06 12:29 am (UTC)