Week in review: Week to 9 August
Aug. 10th, 2025 01:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pedanther. At board game club, we played Cosmic Encounter, which would have gone quite differently if anybody had read the rule book first; most of us were relying on the player who'd proposed the game to remind us how it went, and it turned out his memory of the rules wasn't quite as solid as he'd thought.
. I fell behind on Natural Six back in November, when my long service leave ended and my week was suddenly much less well supplied with opportunities to watch three-hour-long episodes, and what with one thing and another the backlog got significantly larger before I started actively trying to catch up, so I've been trailing behind ever since. I've been making significant progress lately - partly thanks to the series starting a particularly compelling story arc with high stakes and dramatic cliffhangers - and this week I got through four episodes (including the arc finale, which weighed in at nearly five hours), and am finally all caught up. In a way, I'm actually glad I caught up now and not, say, a couple of months ago, so I could get through the whole of that arc pretty quickly and wasn't left waiting two weeks to find out how one of those dramatic cliffhangers turned out.
. Another thing I'm all caught up with is Sesska's Doctor Who reactions - just in time for her to go on a break and not be posting any more for a while.
. I read A Room with a View by E.M. Forster for the Buzzword reading challenge (this month's prompt was "with"). It took me a while to get into it, but by the halfway mark I really wanted to see how things turned out. (I've repeated often enough the saying that no novel can survive the words "I don't care what happens to these people"; the thing that kept me going through this novel is that, once I got to know her, I did care what happened to Lucy.) I enjoyed the flashes of sly humour that I noticed, and suspect that there were more that I missed. I was reading an annotated edition, which had lots of annotations about the things the characters looked at in Italy but were less helpful on the more important matter of the things the characters took for granted at home. (I suspected trouble early on when there was no annotation for an allusion to "Mrs. Grundy"; I know who she is, but I bet there are a fair number of people these days who wouldn't, and would be confused by what seems to be a new character being mentioned out of nowhere and then never being mentioned again.)
. I had brunch in a cafe on Saturday morning, and was hit by not one but two surcharges. One was the usual surcharge when a business chooses to pass on the fee for paying electronically, but the other - which is new since last time I ate at that cafe - was a surcharge for It's Saturday. Okay, it was a Weekends and Public Holidays surcharge, but although I've seen Sunday-and-Public-Holiday surcharges before, this is the first time I've been surcharged for buying something on a Saturday, and it struck me as particularly odd because this cafe has always been open on Saturdays so it's not like having to serve customers on Saturdays is a new or unexpected development. There's a spiteful part of me that keeps suggesting that if it's such a bother to have people accept their offer to be served during the opening hours they chose, perhaps it would be polite of me not to burden them with my custom any further.
. One of the saints' days mentioned in The Hidden Almanac this week was the feast of Saint Caliper, the patron of those who travel the dreadful roads between ebook formats.
. Several times in the past few weeks, when I've popped into the local shop to get bread or whatever, my eye has been caught by a display of large varicolored marshmallows, imported from the US. This week I succumbed to temptation and bought a bag. They tasted terrible.
. I fell behind on Natural Six back in November, when my long service leave ended and my week was suddenly much less well supplied with opportunities to watch three-hour-long episodes, and what with one thing and another the backlog got significantly larger before I started actively trying to catch up, so I've been trailing behind ever since. I've been making significant progress lately - partly thanks to the series starting a particularly compelling story arc with high stakes and dramatic cliffhangers - and this week I got through four episodes (including the arc finale, which weighed in at nearly five hours), and am finally all caught up. In a way, I'm actually glad I caught up now and not, say, a couple of months ago, so I could get through the whole of that arc pretty quickly and wasn't left waiting two weeks to find out how one of those dramatic cliffhangers turned out.
. Another thing I'm all caught up with is Sesska's Doctor Who reactions - just in time for her to go on a break and not be posting any more for a while.
. I read A Room with a View by E.M. Forster for the Buzzword reading challenge (this month's prompt was "with"). It took me a while to get into it, but by the halfway mark I really wanted to see how things turned out. (I've repeated often enough the saying that no novel can survive the words "I don't care what happens to these people"; the thing that kept me going through this novel is that, once I got to know her, I did care what happened to Lucy.) I enjoyed the flashes of sly humour that I noticed, and suspect that there were more that I missed. I was reading an annotated edition, which had lots of annotations about the things the characters looked at in Italy but were less helpful on the more important matter of the things the characters took for granted at home. (I suspected trouble early on when there was no annotation for an allusion to "Mrs. Grundy"; I know who she is, but I bet there are a fair number of people these days who wouldn't, and would be confused by what seems to be a new character being mentioned out of nowhere and then never being mentioned again.)
. I had brunch in a cafe on Saturday morning, and was hit by not one but two surcharges. One was the usual surcharge when a business chooses to pass on the fee for paying electronically, but the other - which is new since last time I ate at that cafe - was a surcharge for It's Saturday. Okay, it was a Weekends and Public Holidays surcharge, but although I've seen Sunday-and-Public-Holiday surcharges before, this is the first time I've been surcharged for buying something on a Saturday, and it struck me as particularly odd because this cafe has always been open on Saturdays so it's not like having to serve customers on Saturdays is a new or unexpected development. There's a spiteful part of me that keeps suggesting that if it's such a bother to have people accept their offer to be served during the opening hours they chose, perhaps it would be polite of me not to burden them with my custom any further.
. One of the saints' days mentioned in The Hidden Almanac this week was the feast of Saint Caliper, the patron of those who travel the dreadful roads between ebook formats.
. Several times in the past few weeks, when I've popped into the local shop to get bread or whatever, my eye has been caught by a display of large varicolored marshmallows, imported from the US. This week I succumbed to temptation and bought a bag. They tasted terrible.
no subject
Date: 2025-08-10 11:38 am (UTC)I tried hard to keep up for a long time, because he *was* very interesting to listen to -- clearly a 'natural' reviewer/reactor who was able to translate his thoughts and responses to the game into a real-time narrative, plus being someone who was old enough and grew up in the right area to have real-life experience of many of the aspects of the game, and with enough life-experience to relate to the characters in a different way to your average twenty-something gamer -- but it just wasn't possible to watch the material as fast as he was putting it out. I still theoretically want to catch up at least with the end of the RDR2 series (he went on to play all sorts of other games after his channel blew up; I assume he is getting a decent financial return out of it at this point, and certainly deserves to, but he started off doing it for the sheer fun of the exercise) but at the moment the Soviet Musketeers-related material has taken over pretty much all my 'YouTube time'.
But if those episodes had been edited down to, say, an hour each -- which would in itself have taken a lot more time at the *recording* end than just putting out the raw footage -- I would have been able to keep up with them for much longer. Yes, half the charm was all the open-world rambling around and associated anecdotes, but the time commitment demanded of the viewers was just too great. Although judging by the comments other people seemed to be able to keep up and even to complain if he missed a single day, so perhaps it was just me...
no subject
Date: 2025-08-11 01:46 pm (UTC)(Though they do release at least an hour of bonus content in the alternate weeks, and I was trying to catch up on all of that as well...)
no subject
Date: 2025-08-11 05:46 am (UTC)As far as I can tell the penalty rates for workers at the weekend do include extra for Saturday, though possibly more on Sunday and even more on public holidays. It appears to have been updated recently so perhaps that is the cause of your increase.