Week in review: Week to 4 October
Oct. 5th, 2025 08:53 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pedanther. I have a book in mind for the next link of the Book Chain challenge, but I'm waiting for it to come in at the library, so instead I've been tackling the backlog of the monthly Random Book challenge.
For September, I read A Tremble in the Air by James D. Macdonald. It's a mystery novella, in which a psychic investigator is called in to investigate a ghostly apparition, and uncovers a murder. All the ghostly phenomena turn out to have rational explanations that don't require positing the existence and intervention of an unquiet spirit, with, as per genre tradition, one solitary exception that gets pointed out at the end. I appreciated the concept of the story, but something about the execution didn't quite click, which is something I've tended to find with Macdonald's short stories (I've had better luck with his novels).
For August, I read A Moment of Silence by Anna Dean. This is also a murder mystery; this time the gimmick is that it's set in Regency times - the Kirkus review features the phrase "if Jane Austen had written Miss Marple", which gives a fair idea of what it's aiming for. A young man of means receives a mysterious message at the ball celebrating his engagement, has a private conversation with his father, and quits the house forthwith, leaving his fiancée with a warning that she ought to break off the engagement for her own good but no explanation. The young lady summons her favourite spinster aunt, Miss Dido Kent, for moral support and with the hope that Miss Kent's inquisitive mind will ferret out the truth about her intended's strange behaviour. Miss Kent has barely begun when the stakes are raised by the discovery of a murdered stranger in the shrubbery, which might or might not have anything to do with the original mystery (of course it does).
I enjoyed it well enough, though again it didn't quite click. There were times when the whole thing felt rather artificial, though partly that's because I wasn't sure at first what narrative register to expect: there are elements in the story that you wouldn't find in, say, Jane Austen, and I wasn't sure how far that was going to be pushed. (For instance, one of the characters is clearly hinted to be homosexual, in ways that the audience can see but Miss Kent lacks the worldliness to make anything of, and it took me a while to be sure whether that was going to be made explicit or turn out to be relevant to the mystery.) Knowing that this is the first of a series of Miss Dido Kent Mysteries took all the suspense out of where one of the subplots would end up, although I will say that, when it came to the point, there was ample suspense in how and why it would end up there. I don't think I'll continue with the series; this works perfectly fine as a standalone novel, and I wasn't inspired to want more.
For July, I'm reading Charles Dickens' Little Dorrit, which is an interesting experience because every other time I've read a Dickens novel I've gone in basically knowing the story already, but this time I had no idea what to expect. (I definitely wasn't expecting the opening chapter to remind me so much of The Count of Monte Cristo.) I've even been surprised by the central character's name; I'd kind of assumed that "Dorrit" was a diminutive of her real given name, but it turns out it's her actual surname: her name is Amy Dorrit.
Little Dorrit would also work as the next link in the Book Chain, but I have a feeling I'm going to be a while getting through it, so I'm keeping it in mind as a fallback but if something quicker comes along I'll use that instead.
. Unrelated to any of the book challenges I'm doing, I'm also participating in Around the World in Eighty Emails, an online book club that's doing Jules Verne's Around the World in Eighty Days in sections attached to the dates on which the novel's events take place, starting on 2 October and finishing eighty days later in mid-December. I wasn't sure before I started if I'd ever read an unabridged version of the novel before, but I'm thinking I hadn't; the general outline of events is familiar, but a lot of the details are new to me.
. I finished the jigsaw puzzle early in the week, and what with one thing and another I haven't got around to packing it away and starting a new one yet.
. At Monday Knights, we had a long weekend session that started in the early afternoon. We began with The Mind as a warm-up, spent several hours playing Arkham Horror, and finished up with a few rounds of Concept.
Arkham Horror is part of a family of Lovecraft-inspired games that share a visual identity and setting and even, in some cases, player characters. Mansions of Madness, which I've played a couple of times recently, is another member of the family, as is Elder Sign, which I've played a lot in the app version and once or twice at an actual table. I played Arkham Horror: The Card Game a few years ago, and enjoyed it, but this was my first time playing the original board game.
It's a collaborative game, where each of the players controls a character moving around a board representing a map of the city of Arkham, gathering clues and tools and trying to defeat a cult before they summon one of the Ancient Ones to destroy the world. (I gather that it is still theoretically possible to win the game after the Ancient One has been summoned, at least with the Ancient One we were dealing with, but it's generally advised not to let the game get to that point.) It was touch and go for a while, but in the end we managed to prevent the summoning and save the world. (For now.)
The player character I chose was Kate Winthrop, The Scientist, whose name has always intrigued me for reasons that probably make sense only to myself. Her special character ability is that she can prevent dimensional gateways and monsters appearing in her immediate vicinity. (I first encountered her as a character in the app version of Elder Sign, which doesn't include the flavour text that explains characters' backstories, so my initial theory was that it might be some version of that thing where magic stops working around someone who disbelieves in it hard enough; the official explanation turns out to be that she's studied the physics of dimensional rifts and has invented a device that stabilises the fabric of reality.) The catch with this ability is that you need to be where the gateways and/or monsters are about to appear, and in Arkham Horror they appear at random, so you can't plan ahead. So my character ability didn't see any use for most of the game, but then near the end there was a very satisfying moment where I happened by chance to be in exactly the right place at the right time to stop a gateway opening and derailing our victory.
. I was listening to music on my earbuds while I did something in the yard, and I wanted to skip to the next music track but I'd left my phone (which was acting as the music player) inside. I had a vague memory that the earbuds had a way of signalling the phone to skip to the next track by pressing one of the volume buttons the right way, so I started randomly pressing buttons to see if I could find it. I didn't find the way of signalling the phone to skip to the next track, but I did find how to signal the phone to redial the last person I called, resulting in me racing inside to try and remember where I'd left my phone so I could apologise for calling accidentally. (Fortunately it was somebody I knew well enough to have that conversation with fairly gracefully.)
The bonus twist at the end of the story is that I remembered afterward that I hadn't needed to mess with the earbud controls in the first place, because the new wristwatch/fitness tracker I got this year has a built-in remote control for the phone's audio player, complete with clearly marked 'skip track' buttons...
. I've added a new category to my monthly fiction log. Back during the lockdown, I got into watching reaction videos, where people film themselves watching a movie or TV show for the first time. They're usually just edited highlights, so I haven't been including them on the fiction log as a complete rewatch of the relevant movie or episode, but the thought has been growing on me that they do represent a significant influence on my fiction consumption: it's been years since I've rewatched the Star Wars trilogy, for instance, but in that time I've watched a bunch of people watching the Star Wars trilogy, and would I perhaps have watched the actual movies more often if I didn't have a way of watching them in concentrated form with bonus ersatz socialisation?
So, this month I decided to keep track of what reaction videos I watched, and... it's a lot. Like, the list is about half as long as the rest of the fiction log put together. This month may have been particularly heavy - I've been under some stress, so I've been watching a lot of cheerful videos to take my mind off things - but I don't know if it's as atypical as I'd like to think.
. Another thing I've been doing to take my mind off things is playing a computer game called Squeakross, in which you solve picross puzzles in order to earn clothing and furniture items to decorate a cartoon mouse and its habitat. More precisely, I've been playing the free demo version, which includes the first 60 puzzles, and having worked through all 60 I don't intend to buy the full game. I enjoyed doing the puzzles (and I really appreciated that the error noise is a lot less aggressive than the error noise in Polimines), but I've never been into the avatar-customisation/habitat-decoration kind of things, so apart from thinking that Marv the Mouse looks quite dashing in a tartan scarf most of that side of it landed somewhere between "irrelevant" and "aggressively cute", and I'd prefer a game that let me do picross puzzles without all the add-ons.
. Some years ago, I agreed to store some stuff for someone I knew, on the understanding that they'd come and pick it up next time they were in town. What with one thing and another (including, to be fair, several actual family crises), it never seemed to be the right time for them to come, so the stuff's been sitting in my storage unit for years, but this week finally they arranged for somebody to come and get it. I'm hoping to ride the momentum and take the opportunity to reassess my own stuff that's been sitting in the storage unit, and see what can be disposed of or shifted to somewhere less expensive.
. Yesterday I went to the pool and swam laps for the first time in quite a while. I enjoyed it, though unsurprisingly I don't have the stamina I used to have when I was doing it more regularly. Afterward, I got an interesting foot cramp that may or may not have been related.
. Another for the Words I'd Only Ever Seen Written Down and Thought I Knew How to Pronounce file: prions, the biochemical whatsits responsible for Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease and mad cow disease, are correctly pronounced pree-on. The way I've been pronouncing it for the last thirty-odd years, with the same first syllable as "pry bar", is apparently common enough that I may well have heard it pronounced that way in the wild, but is not the original pronunciation and is not officially considered correct.
For September, I read A Tremble in the Air by James D. Macdonald. It's a mystery novella, in which a psychic investigator is called in to investigate a ghostly apparition, and uncovers a murder. All the ghostly phenomena turn out to have rational explanations that don't require positing the existence and intervention of an unquiet spirit, with, as per genre tradition, one solitary exception that gets pointed out at the end. I appreciated the concept of the story, but something about the execution didn't quite click, which is something I've tended to find with Macdonald's short stories (I've had better luck with his novels).
For August, I read A Moment of Silence by Anna Dean. This is also a murder mystery; this time the gimmick is that it's set in Regency times - the Kirkus review features the phrase "if Jane Austen had written Miss Marple", which gives a fair idea of what it's aiming for. A young man of means receives a mysterious message at the ball celebrating his engagement, has a private conversation with his father, and quits the house forthwith, leaving his fiancée with a warning that she ought to break off the engagement for her own good but no explanation. The young lady summons her favourite spinster aunt, Miss Dido Kent, for moral support and with the hope that Miss Kent's inquisitive mind will ferret out the truth about her intended's strange behaviour. Miss Kent has barely begun when the stakes are raised by the discovery of a murdered stranger in the shrubbery, which might or might not have anything to do with the original mystery (of course it does).
I enjoyed it well enough, though again it didn't quite click. There were times when the whole thing felt rather artificial, though partly that's because I wasn't sure at first what narrative register to expect: there are elements in the story that you wouldn't find in, say, Jane Austen, and I wasn't sure how far that was going to be pushed. (For instance, one of the characters is clearly hinted to be homosexual, in ways that the audience can see but Miss Kent lacks the worldliness to make anything of, and it took me a while to be sure whether that was going to be made explicit or turn out to be relevant to the mystery.) Knowing that this is the first of a series of Miss Dido Kent Mysteries took all the suspense out of where one of the subplots would end up, although I will say that, when it came to the point, there was ample suspense in how and why it would end up there. I don't think I'll continue with the series; this works perfectly fine as a standalone novel, and I wasn't inspired to want more.
For July, I'm reading Charles Dickens' Little Dorrit, which is an interesting experience because every other time I've read a Dickens novel I've gone in basically knowing the story already, but this time I had no idea what to expect. (I definitely wasn't expecting the opening chapter to remind me so much of The Count of Monte Cristo.) I've even been surprised by the central character's name; I'd kind of assumed that "Dorrit" was a diminutive of her real given name, but it turns out it's her actual surname: her name is Amy Dorrit.
Little Dorrit would also work as the next link in the Book Chain, but I have a feeling I'm going to be a while getting through it, so I'm keeping it in mind as a fallback but if something quicker comes along I'll use that instead.
. Unrelated to any of the book challenges I'm doing, I'm also participating in Around the World in Eighty Emails, an online book club that's doing Jules Verne's Around the World in Eighty Days in sections attached to the dates on which the novel's events take place, starting on 2 October and finishing eighty days later in mid-December. I wasn't sure before I started if I'd ever read an unabridged version of the novel before, but I'm thinking I hadn't; the general outline of events is familiar, but a lot of the details are new to me.
. I finished the jigsaw puzzle early in the week, and what with one thing and another I haven't got around to packing it away and starting a new one yet.
. At Monday Knights, we had a long weekend session that started in the early afternoon. We began with The Mind as a warm-up, spent several hours playing Arkham Horror, and finished up with a few rounds of Concept.
Arkham Horror is part of a family of Lovecraft-inspired games that share a visual identity and setting and even, in some cases, player characters. Mansions of Madness, which I've played a couple of times recently, is another member of the family, as is Elder Sign, which I've played a lot in the app version and once or twice at an actual table. I played Arkham Horror: The Card Game a few years ago, and enjoyed it, but this was my first time playing the original board game.
It's a collaborative game, where each of the players controls a character moving around a board representing a map of the city of Arkham, gathering clues and tools and trying to defeat a cult before they summon one of the Ancient Ones to destroy the world. (I gather that it is still theoretically possible to win the game after the Ancient One has been summoned, at least with the Ancient One we were dealing with, but it's generally advised not to let the game get to that point.) It was touch and go for a while, but in the end we managed to prevent the summoning and save the world. (For now.)
The player character I chose was Kate Winthrop, The Scientist, whose name has always intrigued me for reasons that probably make sense only to myself. Her special character ability is that she can prevent dimensional gateways and monsters appearing in her immediate vicinity. (I first encountered her as a character in the app version of Elder Sign, which doesn't include the flavour text that explains characters' backstories, so my initial theory was that it might be some version of that thing where magic stops working around someone who disbelieves in it hard enough; the official explanation turns out to be that she's studied the physics of dimensional rifts and has invented a device that stabilises the fabric of reality.) The catch with this ability is that you need to be where the gateways and/or monsters are about to appear, and in Arkham Horror they appear at random, so you can't plan ahead. So my character ability didn't see any use for most of the game, but then near the end there was a very satisfying moment where I happened by chance to be in exactly the right place at the right time to stop a gateway opening and derailing our victory.
. I was listening to music on my earbuds while I did something in the yard, and I wanted to skip to the next music track but I'd left my phone (which was acting as the music player) inside. I had a vague memory that the earbuds had a way of signalling the phone to skip to the next track by pressing one of the volume buttons the right way, so I started randomly pressing buttons to see if I could find it. I didn't find the way of signalling the phone to skip to the next track, but I did find how to signal the phone to redial the last person I called, resulting in me racing inside to try and remember where I'd left my phone so I could apologise for calling accidentally. (Fortunately it was somebody I knew well enough to have that conversation with fairly gracefully.)
The bonus twist at the end of the story is that I remembered afterward that I hadn't needed to mess with the earbud controls in the first place, because the new wristwatch/fitness tracker I got this year has a built-in remote control for the phone's audio player, complete with clearly marked 'skip track' buttons...
. I've added a new category to my monthly fiction log. Back during the lockdown, I got into watching reaction videos, where people film themselves watching a movie or TV show for the first time. They're usually just edited highlights, so I haven't been including them on the fiction log as a complete rewatch of the relevant movie or episode, but the thought has been growing on me that they do represent a significant influence on my fiction consumption: it's been years since I've rewatched the Star Wars trilogy, for instance, but in that time I've watched a bunch of people watching the Star Wars trilogy, and would I perhaps have watched the actual movies more often if I didn't have a way of watching them in concentrated form with bonus ersatz socialisation?
So, this month I decided to keep track of what reaction videos I watched, and... it's a lot. Like, the list is about half as long as the rest of the fiction log put together. This month may have been particularly heavy - I've been under some stress, so I've been watching a lot of cheerful videos to take my mind off things - but I don't know if it's as atypical as I'd like to think.
. Another thing I've been doing to take my mind off things is playing a computer game called Squeakross, in which you solve picross puzzles in order to earn clothing and furniture items to decorate a cartoon mouse and its habitat. More precisely, I've been playing the free demo version, which includes the first 60 puzzles, and having worked through all 60 I don't intend to buy the full game. I enjoyed doing the puzzles (and I really appreciated that the error noise is a lot less aggressive than the error noise in Polimines), but I've never been into the avatar-customisation/habitat-decoration kind of things, so apart from thinking that Marv the Mouse looks quite dashing in a tartan scarf most of that side of it landed somewhere between "irrelevant" and "aggressively cute", and I'd prefer a game that let me do picross puzzles without all the add-ons.
. Some years ago, I agreed to store some stuff for someone I knew, on the understanding that they'd come and pick it up next time they were in town. What with one thing and another (including, to be fair, several actual family crises), it never seemed to be the right time for them to come, so the stuff's been sitting in my storage unit for years, but this week finally they arranged for somebody to come and get it. I'm hoping to ride the momentum and take the opportunity to reassess my own stuff that's been sitting in the storage unit, and see what can be disposed of or shifted to somewhere less expensive.
. Yesterday I went to the pool and swam laps for the first time in quite a while. I enjoyed it, though unsurprisingly I don't have the stamina I used to have when I was doing it more regularly. Afterward, I got an interesting foot cramp that may or may not have been related.
. Another for the Words I'd Only Ever Seen Written Down and Thought I Knew How to Pronounce file: prions, the biochemical whatsits responsible for Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease and mad cow disease, are correctly pronounced pree-on. The way I've been pronouncing it for the last thirty-odd years, with the same first syllable as "pry bar", is apparently common enough that I may well have heard it pronounced that way in the wild, but is not the original pronunciation and is not officially considered correct.
no subject
Date: 2025-10-05 02:04 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-10-05 11:35 am (UTC)This took me aback, but... yes, Marseilles! (And a villainous type...)
My first acquaintance with "Little Dorrit" was a very enjoyable BBC version on television, which coincidentally has been in the news recently https://www.express.co.uk/showbiz/tv-radio/2112587/masterpiece-bbc-period-drama-based -- and because I didn't know the plot, it was genuinely nail-biting, especially in the European sequences where 'the obvious' has already happened and we have absolutely no idea how things are going to pan out. More recently I heard a BBC radio adaptation, which also worked very well: https://www.bbc.com/mediacentre/proginfo/2024/42/dickensian-little-dorrit
Dickens tends to shine as a source for adaptation rather than in the original, I find.