Week in review: Week to 27 September
Sep. 28th, 2025 10:43 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pedanther. The local public library celebrated fifty years of operation this week, with a family fun day, giveaways of anniversary-branded book bags, fridge magnets, pens, bookmarks, cupcakes, etc., and a historical display describing the founding and history of the library with photographs and artifacts.
Among the artifacts was a collection of library membership cards showing how the design has changed over the years, stretching back to when the library computerised thirty years ago (before that, the system involved slips of unlaminated card that presumably haven't survived). I found the collection interesting from the opposite direction from that which it was presumably intended, as I've kept sufficiently good care of the membership card I was issued thirty years ago that I've never needed to replace it with a more recent model. (I've had a couple of encounters in the past year or so with younger librarians who had never seen one of this design in the wild before.)
. While I was at the library, I borrowed Death of a Foreign Gentleman by Steven Carroll. In post-war Cambridge, a controversial philosopher is killed in a hit-and-run. There's a detective on the case, but it's a novel built around a murder investigation rather than a mystery novel; by the time the case is cracked, by routine legwork rather than any burst of deductive genius, the audience has already been let in on the whole story in flashbacks. There's a lot of opportunities for characters to reflect on the meaning or meaninglessness of life, and the workings of destiny, and so on, to varying effect: I often enjoy it when fictional characters wonder about whether there's a greater force directing the course of events, but having characters standing around the poetically ironic denouement speculating about whether some unseen hand made it all come out so neatly runs the risk of coming off as authorial self-congratulation.
The novel wears its debt to Graham Greene on its sleeve, which might be the thing that finally gets me to actually read Greene. There are more respectable motivations to read a classic than a spiteful desire to confirm that it's better than its imitators, but hey, whatever works.
. This week, I also finished Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari, which I've been reading on and off for a while. The thesis is that if there's one thing that separates Homo sapiens from the other animals, and explains why we're the species that had such an outsized impact on the world, it's storytelling, and specifically the ability and inclination to tell stories that enable large-scale cohesion and co-operation between people who don't personally know each other. (Stories like "money" and "the legal system" and "New York" and "the scientific method".)
Some of the chapters that have stuck in my mind include the one about the development of agriculture (titled "History's Greatest Fraud"), the one about the development of religion from a way of interacting with the local environment to a way of trying to explain fundamental universal principles (which argues that godless modern society is functionally just as religious as it's always been, only the current fashion happens to be for ascribing moral precepts to abstract universal principles like "inherent human dignity" instead of personified universal principles like The Creator God), and a chapter near the end which asks the question "Has all of this made humans better off?" and then gives several different answers, pointing out that our understanding of what it means to be happy or well-off has changed over time just like our understanding of everything else.
. The Youth Theatre did their end-of-year show, which this year was a collection of short plays and skits on a common theme. It was a lot of fun. One of the highlights was a short play the senior class wrote themselves.
. At board game club this week, we played Night of the Ninja, Gravwell, and a couple of games out of The Lady and the Tiger.
Night of the Ninja is a hidden role game where everyone is a ninja trying to identify and eliminate members of an enemy clan. I did pretty well, but not well enough to win.
Gravwell is a racing game where you're trying to get a spaceship from one end of the board to the other, but the movement of your ship is dependent on where it is relative to the other ships, and if you fail to predict the movements of the other players you may end up going the opposite direction from where you planned. I got out in front at the start of the race, and then quickly discovered that it's difficult to keep moving forward without another ship in front of you; I was overtaken, never managed to recover, and while I wasn't in last place at the end of the race I was pretty far back.
The Lady and the Tiger is a box set containing a set of cards and tokens and a rulebook with several different games that can be played with the cards and tokens depending on how many players are available. After the game of Gravwell finished, another player and I were at a loose end while we waited to see what everyone else was doing, so I suggested a game of "Labyrinth", my favourite two-player game in the set. It was a close-run game, coming down to each of us having one token left to get into the end zone, but I managed to keep delaying my opponent's piece while I maneuvred my piece into a position where he couldn't stop me getting it home on my next move.
After that, he decided to head off and I decided to wait and see how the game being played on the other table turned out. While I was waiting I played "Hoard", the one-player game from the set, which involves setting out the coloured tokens at random and then having a limited number of turns in which to remove them according to an arcane set of rules. I nearly managed it, with a single token left at the end of the game.
. A while ago, I noticed that the storage space on my current phone is large enough that I could put my entire CD collection on there without making much difference, and have it available on a convenient device that talks to all my speakers and headphones. I got around to loading it up this week, and have been hitting shuffle and renewing my acquaintance with many songs I haven't listened to in ages. (And, from time to time, being reminded that there are some CDs in my collection that I never did like all that much.)
. At Parkrun, the weather was warm enough that the flies were out and about and kept coming to say hello. I made a mental note to remember the fly veil next week.
. On Saturday afternoon, I was between books and not in a mood to start anything long or heavy, but I had a reading streak that was one day away from a significant milestone, so I read a picture book from the library called The Grizzled Grist Does Not Exist!. It was fun, and it was nice to see the heroic role going to the quiet, observant child who nobody pays much attention to.
Among the artifacts was a collection of library membership cards showing how the design has changed over the years, stretching back to when the library computerised thirty years ago (before that, the system involved slips of unlaminated card that presumably haven't survived). I found the collection interesting from the opposite direction from that which it was presumably intended, as I've kept sufficiently good care of the membership card I was issued thirty years ago that I've never needed to replace it with a more recent model. (I've had a couple of encounters in the past year or so with younger librarians who had never seen one of this design in the wild before.)
. While I was at the library, I borrowed Death of a Foreign Gentleman by Steven Carroll. In post-war Cambridge, a controversial philosopher is killed in a hit-and-run. There's a detective on the case, but it's a novel built around a murder investigation rather than a mystery novel; by the time the case is cracked, by routine legwork rather than any burst of deductive genius, the audience has already been let in on the whole story in flashbacks. There's a lot of opportunities for characters to reflect on the meaning or meaninglessness of life, and the workings of destiny, and so on, to varying effect: I often enjoy it when fictional characters wonder about whether there's a greater force directing the course of events, but having characters standing around the poetically ironic denouement speculating about whether some unseen hand made it all come out so neatly runs the risk of coming off as authorial self-congratulation.
The novel wears its debt to Graham Greene on its sleeve, which might be the thing that finally gets me to actually read Greene. There are more respectable motivations to read a classic than a spiteful desire to confirm that it's better than its imitators, but hey, whatever works.
. This week, I also finished Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari, which I've been reading on and off for a while. The thesis is that if there's one thing that separates Homo sapiens from the other animals, and explains why we're the species that had such an outsized impact on the world, it's storytelling, and specifically the ability and inclination to tell stories that enable large-scale cohesion and co-operation between people who don't personally know each other. (Stories like "money" and "the legal system" and "New York" and "the scientific method".)
Some of the chapters that have stuck in my mind include the one about the development of agriculture (titled "History's Greatest Fraud"), the one about the development of religion from a way of interacting with the local environment to a way of trying to explain fundamental universal principles (which argues that godless modern society is functionally just as religious as it's always been, only the current fashion happens to be for ascribing moral precepts to abstract universal principles like "inherent human dignity" instead of personified universal principles like The Creator God), and a chapter near the end which asks the question "Has all of this made humans better off?" and then gives several different answers, pointing out that our understanding of what it means to be happy or well-off has changed over time just like our understanding of everything else.
. The Youth Theatre did their end-of-year show, which this year was a collection of short plays and skits on a common theme. It was a lot of fun. One of the highlights was a short play the senior class wrote themselves.
. At board game club this week, we played Night of the Ninja, Gravwell, and a couple of games out of The Lady and the Tiger.
Night of the Ninja is a hidden role game where everyone is a ninja trying to identify and eliminate members of an enemy clan. I did pretty well, but not well enough to win.
Gravwell is a racing game where you're trying to get a spaceship from one end of the board to the other, but the movement of your ship is dependent on where it is relative to the other ships, and if you fail to predict the movements of the other players you may end up going the opposite direction from where you planned. I got out in front at the start of the race, and then quickly discovered that it's difficult to keep moving forward without another ship in front of you; I was overtaken, never managed to recover, and while I wasn't in last place at the end of the race I was pretty far back.
The Lady and the Tiger is a box set containing a set of cards and tokens and a rulebook with several different games that can be played with the cards and tokens depending on how many players are available. After the game of Gravwell finished, another player and I were at a loose end while we waited to see what everyone else was doing, so I suggested a game of "Labyrinth", my favourite two-player game in the set. It was a close-run game, coming down to each of us having one token left to get into the end zone, but I managed to keep delaying my opponent's piece while I maneuvred my piece into a position where he couldn't stop me getting it home on my next move.
After that, he decided to head off and I decided to wait and see how the game being played on the other table turned out. While I was waiting I played "Hoard", the one-player game from the set, which involves setting out the coloured tokens at random and then having a limited number of turns in which to remove them according to an arcane set of rules. I nearly managed it, with a single token left at the end of the game.
. A while ago, I noticed that the storage space on my current phone is large enough that I could put my entire CD collection on there without making much difference, and have it available on a convenient device that talks to all my speakers and headphones. I got around to loading it up this week, and have been hitting shuffle and renewing my acquaintance with many songs I haven't listened to in ages. (And, from time to time, being reminded that there are some CDs in my collection that I never did like all that much.)
. At Parkrun, the weather was warm enough that the flies were out and about and kept coming to say hello. I made a mental note to remember the fly veil next week.
. On Saturday afternoon, I was between books and not in a mood to start anything long or heavy, but I had a reading streak that was one day away from a significant milestone, so I read a picture book from the library called The Grizzled Grist Does Not Exist!. It was fun, and it was nice to see the heroic role going to the quiet, observant child who nobody pays much attention to.
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Date: 2025-09-28 03:33 am (UTC)