Week in review: Week to 6 September
Sep. 7th, 2025 07:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pedanther. I didn't write a full journal entry all week. Fortunately, my habit of making brief notes about my day is solidly ingrained, so I still had something to work from for this blog post. I'm not sure what's causing the declining motivation to write full journal entries, but I suspect a couple of things that can't both be satisfied: on the one hand, writing full entries can provide an opportunity to think through things that happened and assess questions like "why did I do that/not do that/do that then and not some other time", but writing full entries takes time and effort and a lot of days lately nothing of particular significance has happened so the entries would have been mostly recitals of "read another chapter of X, listened to another episode of Y, bought Z for dinner on the way home despite suspecting it wouldn't be very good and I was right".
. At the board game club, we played Bomb Busters again. We got through three missions, completing two successfully on the first attempt and requiring a second attempt for one after I lost track of one of the conditions and blew everyone up by cutting a wire that I was incorrectly certain was safe.
. This week, I read a couple of the short children's books that have been lurking unread on my shelves for longer than I can remember (though probably not since I was a child myself; I'm pretty sure both are books I picked up from secondhand book sales). One was Jacob Two-Two Meets the Hooded Fang by Mordecai Richler, a wacky comedy about a boy who is thrown into a high-security prison for children who fail to show adequate respect to their elders; it was fun, and I laughed out loud several times, but I probably would have enjoyed it more if I'd read it at the target age. The other was The Island on Bird Street by Uri Orlev, an adventure story about a boy fending for himself in Nazi-occupied Poland, which is apparently inspired by parts of the author's own childhood (though with a tidier and happier ending than the real childhood had); I didn't laugh as much, but I found it more satisfying. The Island on Bird Street was my September pick for the Randomize Your TBR reading challenge; Jacob Two-Two didn't fit any of the pending challenges, I just saw it on the shelf and decided it would make a nice break from the kind of thing I'd been reading lately.
. During the time that my immediate precursors were occupying this house, the bathroom was remodelled and new fittings installed. One in particular is designed to give the impression of elegant seamless ceramic, but if you figure out how to get the lid off and examine the workings more closely it turns out that the smooth operation of the assemblage ultimately depends on the integrity of a small cheap-looking plastic widget that will almost certainly wear out before the metal and ceramic parts do. And if it does, as I was informed after I managed to extract the worn-out widget and carry it off to the local plumbing supplies store in search of a replacement, the manufacturer does not sell replacement widgets on their own, only as part of a whole new fitting. There's something about that which feels emblematic of the modern world we live in.
. I nearly managed to finish my latest jigsaw puzzle in under a week - I've been catching up on a lot of podcasts lately - but last night I found myself with three spaces left in the puzzle and three leftover pieces which each seemed to be the right shape and colour for a space but didn't... quite... fit. One of them also didn't quite visually match the pieces surrounding its space, which initially made it seem more mysterious but ended up being the key to an explanation, when I realised that it really belonged several inches away, where its proper space was being occupied by a piece that was almost the same shape and very slightly smaller. That left two pieces, both of which belonged somewhere in a sizeable region of cloudy blue. I didn't think I could find their proper places visually, so I pulled out all the pieces in that area with the intention of reassembling it, more carefully, in the morning.
. On Tumblr, there was a poll asking "What is the longest book series you've read?" My first thought was the Liaden series, currently at 27 novels with at least one more on the way. Then I remembered that I've read the entire Discworld series from beginning to end, and that's 40+ novels depending on how you count them. And then I recalled that I've done the same with the Doctor Who New Adventures, which is just over 60 novels. So far I haven't thought of anything else longer than that.
. From the CinemaStix youtube channel, a two-part video essay on the making of the movie Gladiator, with a focus on how much the key through-lines of the story were constructed in production and post-production: part 1 is about the script and part 2 is about the editing. One of the things covered in part 2 is how they rearranged the final act of the movie to cover for the untimely death of one of the actors, something that was achieved so successfully that, although I knew it had happened, it had never occurred to me until I watched this to wonder what his character would have done differently if the actor had survived.
. At the board game club, we played Bomb Busters again. We got through three missions, completing two successfully on the first attempt and requiring a second attempt for one after I lost track of one of the conditions and blew everyone up by cutting a wire that I was incorrectly certain was safe.
. This week, I read a couple of the short children's books that have been lurking unread on my shelves for longer than I can remember (though probably not since I was a child myself; I'm pretty sure both are books I picked up from secondhand book sales). One was Jacob Two-Two Meets the Hooded Fang by Mordecai Richler, a wacky comedy about a boy who is thrown into a high-security prison for children who fail to show adequate respect to their elders; it was fun, and I laughed out loud several times, but I probably would have enjoyed it more if I'd read it at the target age. The other was The Island on Bird Street by Uri Orlev, an adventure story about a boy fending for himself in Nazi-occupied Poland, which is apparently inspired by parts of the author's own childhood (though with a tidier and happier ending than the real childhood had); I didn't laugh as much, but I found it more satisfying. The Island on Bird Street was my September pick for the Randomize Your TBR reading challenge; Jacob Two-Two didn't fit any of the pending challenges, I just saw it on the shelf and decided it would make a nice break from the kind of thing I'd been reading lately.
. During the time that my immediate precursors were occupying this house, the bathroom was remodelled and new fittings installed. One in particular is designed to give the impression of elegant seamless ceramic, but if you figure out how to get the lid off and examine the workings more closely it turns out that the smooth operation of the assemblage ultimately depends on the integrity of a small cheap-looking plastic widget that will almost certainly wear out before the metal and ceramic parts do. And if it does, as I was informed after I managed to extract the worn-out widget and carry it off to the local plumbing supplies store in search of a replacement, the manufacturer does not sell replacement widgets on their own, only as part of a whole new fitting. There's something about that which feels emblematic of the modern world we live in.
. I nearly managed to finish my latest jigsaw puzzle in under a week - I've been catching up on a lot of podcasts lately - but last night I found myself with three spaces left in the puzzle and three leftover pieces which each seemed to be the right shape and colour for a space but didn't... quite... fit. One of them also didn't quite visually match the pieces surrounding its space, which initially made it seem more mysterious but ended up being the key to an explanation, when I realised that it really belonged several inches away, where its proper space was being occupied by a piece that was almost the same shape and very slightly smaller. That left two pieces, both of which belonged somewhere in a sizeable region of cloudy blue. I didn't think I could find their proper places visually, so I pulled out all the pieces in that area with the intention of reassembling it, more carefully, in the morning.
. On Tumblr, there was a poll asking "What is the longest book series you've read?" My first thought was the Liaden series, currently at 27 novels with at least one more on the way. Then I remembered that I've read the entire Discworld series from beginning to end, and that's 40+ novels depending on how you count them. And then I recalled that I've done the same with the Doctor Who New Adventures, which is just over 60 novels. So far I haven't thought of anything else longer than that.
. From the CinemaStix youtube channel, a two-part video essay on the making of the movie Gladiator, with a focus on how much the key through-lines of the story were constructed in production and post-production: part 1 is about the script and part 2 is about the editing. One of the things covered in part 2 is how they rearranged the final act of the movie to cover for the untimely death of one of the actors, something that was achieved so successfully that, although I knew it had happened, it had never occurred to me until I watched this to wonder what his character would have done differently if the actor had survived.
no subject
Date: 2025-09-08 02:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-09-08 11:55 pm (UTC)The New Adventures are a continuous sequence following the same central group of characters, though, which is why I specified them rather than Doctor Who spin-off novels in general.
(Well, and the fact that my interaction with most of the other Doctor Who spin-off ranges are considerably more spotty; the New Adventures happened to overlap with both my peak of interest in the spin-offs and the period at university where I knew someone who owned nearly the entire set and was willing to let me borrow the ones I didn't own myself.)
no subject
Date: 2025-09-11 07:49 am (UTC)My chief memory of the New Adventures is being very surprised when one of the apparently major characters was killed off in one of the first novels I read, and stayed permanently dead, which for obvious reasons was something that couldn't happen with the regular cast in a 'normal' tie-in novel -- at this juncture I have no idea who that could have been, however, since I didn't actually know at the time who was a 'regular' and who wasn't!