Week in review: Week to 1 November

[pedanther]

What with one thing and another, I didn't get around to writing the weekly blog post yesterday, and I don't have time to write it now, but I have a feeling that if I let it slide any further it won't happen at all - so you're getting a list of what I was planning to write about, and if you point out anything you'd like me to expand on, I'll try to get back to it in more detail:

. Games: Race for the Galaxy, Root, Bomb Busters; Mysterium, Dixit, Waking Shards; Unlock

. Events on the internet at times suited for people on the other side of the world

. Celebrity Traitors, Jet Lag

. Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens: I enjoyed reading it, but the ending didn't quite land for me. I didn't like some of the characters nearly as much as the narrative seemed to expect me to.

. Sharpe's Sword by Bernard Cornwell: A quarter of the way in, I realised that I could now confidently predict all the key events of the rest of the story, and that I had no interest in reading on to experience the details. I think I've read enough of these now to say that they're not for me.

. Invisible Inc.

. Halloween

. The new video from Overly Sarcastic Productions about The Count of Monte Cristo is a lot of fun and captures a lot of what I like so much about the novel.


I do have one thing that you get in full because I wrote it out in advance:

. Having played a few different nonogram/picross games now, I find I have opinions about how they give feedback.

In the one I played most recently, if you mark a square incorrectly, it plays a noise and changes it to the correct marking (with a flag to show that you got that square wrong). I don't like this. For one thing, having it keep a record of how many errors I made (which it does even in "Relaxed" mode) means that when I'm in the wrong frame of mind I can get into a spiral of obsession with finishing a puzzle with no errors. Beyond that, this behaviour means that it gives you information that you didn't already have, which feels a bit like cheating -- and can lead to behaviour that feels even more like cheating, such as making an error, deciding to restart the puzzle, and then deciding that, since one is going to restart anyway, there's nothing to be lost by clicking on a few more squares and finding out what they are...

My favourite feedback method, in a picross game that I otherwise didn't like much, never gave you free information: it would alert you if you put down a mark that contradicted the information you already had (for instance, if you filled in a row in a way that would make one of the columns impossible to finish), but it would never tell you directly whether any given mark was correct.

Comments

[leecetheartist]

How did your Mysterium go?

[pedanther]

Could've gone better! I was the ghost for the first time in a while, and I'd forgotten how difficult it could be. Two of the investigators didn't make it across the finish line; one of them was so thrown off track by the first vision I gave him (I had really bad cards for it) that he didn't correctly guess his suspect until it was literally the only one left unguessed. I also had a fun time trying to indicate the swimming pool as a murder location when all the cards that suggested water also had sailing ships, and one of the red herring locations was the room with the model sailing ship in it...

[leecetheartist]

Ah, winyarn. We have had some success with the deployment of the cards upside down and sideways to indicate opposite and lateral meanings.

[igenlode]

I suspect one of the characters you didn't like as much as the author wanted was Amy Dorrit?

It hadn't occurred to me that "The Count of Monte Cristo" is deliberately set up so that we are never privy to Dantes' own thoughts once he takes on the persona of the Count -- in fact, as she says, the character almost disappears from large chunks of the story, arranging his machinations and then himself remaining entirely in the background while they play out -- but of course if we saw things from his point of view that would rather give the game away. Less of a problem from a visual adaptation angle, I suppose, since the screen doesn't tell you what the protagonist is thinking...

(I am almost tempted to go back and watch "The Prisoner of the Chateau d'If" again now that I have discovered auto-subtitling -- but only almost!)

[pedanther]

Actually, I was mostly thinking of Meagles: Miss Wade is clearly set up as someone who takes the dimmest possible view of everything, but I don't think her assessment of Harriet's situation is entirely without foundation, and it's not to Meagles' credit that he dismisses it immediately without taking any time for reflection.

Also, I spent the section involving the courtship of Minnie Meagles utterly bemused about what Gowan and Clennam saw in her, but that can't be described as disliking the character because the problem was that Dickens didn't bother to give her any character. I'm not sure she even had any dialogue before the scene where she announced her engagement. (I was strongly reminded of the internet meme about romance stories where the female love interest could be replaced by a decorative lamp without affecting the plot.)

I didn't mind Amy Dorrit; I didn't agree with all her choices, but I could see where she was coming from.

[igenlode]

Yes, the whole Tattycoram thing leaves a nasty taste in the mouth, because she clearly *is* being treated very badly by the Meagles family (and in putting those sentiments into Miss Wade's mouth, Dickens shows that he was evidently not oblivious to that interpretation), and yet the message of the book seems to be that she ought to put up with it and be grateful, because her rebellion is depicted as self-evidently wrongheaded :(