Week in review: Week to 20 December
Dec. 21st, 2025 04:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pedanther. At the last board game meetup of the year, I played Uno: Show 'Em No Mercy, Guillotine, and Cockroach Salad. I don't remember if I'd played Guillotine before; it's a card game where you're trying to collect French aristocrats, and play cards to manipulate the pool so that you can gather the ones that are worth high points and avoid the ones with penalties.
. It's getting to the time of year where I'm feeling the pinch of having signed up for too many year-long reading challenges, with half a dozen challenge prompts (including the final link of the Book Chain) still to tick off in the next ten days. I'm fully capable of reading six books in ten days, especially since I'm now on holiday, but some of the prompts call for specific books that I'm not currently in the mood to read. One book I've at least started is Lies My Teacher Told Me by James W. Leowen, which is about the gulf between how history is taught in schools and the messy complexity of history itself.
. I haven't helped matters by also signing up for a book club that's reading Susan Cooper's classic wintery novel The Dark Is Rising on a Dracula-Daily-type schedule over the next few weeks, kicking off just as Around the World in Eighty Emails finishes. I'm not sure how well the wintery mood is going to come across in my case; it's summer here, and in the past week the very coldest it got was 14 degrees above freezing. The precursor novel, Over Sea, Under Stone – which I finished re-reading this morning – is much better suited to an Australian Christmas, being set during a summer holiday at the seaside.
. I went to see Wicked: For Good. I didn't like it quite as much as Wicked: Part I, but then it's been quite a while since I saw a movie I liked as much as I liked Wicked: Part I. I was interested to notice that one of the changes made for the movie, to fix an issue with one of the character arcs, also goes a fair way toward fixing something else that had bugged me about the plot of the stage version; I'm not sure if the writers had also had that in mind, or if it's just a happy coincidence. A few days later, after my thoughts on it had been simmering for a while, I found myself committing fanfic. I still have to figure out where the fic is going to end up, and I'm not going to make any definite decisions until the movie hits home video and I can rewatch a few scenes, but I'm feeling good about it.
. I have been playing Spirited Thief, which was massively discounted in the Steam Summer Sale right after somebody commended to me as a game similar to Invisible, Inc.. The player controls a group of thieves doing a heist, one of whom is a disembodied spirit; each mission has two phases, with the spirit going in to case the joint and locate valuables, map guard patrols, and disable alarm systems, before the actual heist is carried out by the members of the team capable of lifting solid objects. I'm enjoying the gameplay so far, although I'm not entirely clicking with the writing of the story that ties the various missions together.
. It's getting to the time of year where I'm feeling the pinch of having signed up for too many year-long reading challenges, with half a dozen challenge prompts (including the final link of the Book Chain) still to tick off in the next ten days. I'm fully capable of reading six books in ten days, especially since I'm now on holiday, but some of the prompts call for specific books that I'm not currently in the mood to read. One book I've at least started is Lies My Teacher Told Me by James W. Leowen, which is about the gulf between how history is taught in schools and the messy complexity of history itself.
. I haven't helped matters by also signing up for a book club that's reading Susan Cooper's classic wintery novel The Dark Is Rising on a Dracula-Daily-type schedule over the next few weeks, kicking off just as Around the World in Eighty Emails finishes. I'm not sure how well the wintery mood is going to come across in my case; it's summer here, and in the past week the very coldest it got was 14 degrees above freezing. The precursor novel, Over Sea, Under Stone – which I finished re-reading this morning – is much better suited to an Australian Christmas, being set during a summer holiday at the seaside.
. I went to see Wicked: For Good. I didn't like it quite as much as Wicked: Part I, but then it's been quite a while since I saw a movie I liked as much as I liked Wicked: Part I. I was interested to notice that one of the changes made for the movie, to fix an issue with one of the character arcs, also goes a fair way toward fixing something else that had bugged me about the plot of the stage version; I'm not sure if the writers had also had that in mind, or if it's just a happy coincidence. A few days later, after my thoughts on it had been simmering for a while, I found myself committing fanfic. I still have to figure out where the fic is going to end up, and I'm not going to make any definite decisions until the movie hits home video and I can rewatch a few scenes, but I'm feeling good about it.
. I have been playing Spirited Thief, which was massively discounted in the Steam Summer Sale right after somebody commended to me as a game similar to Invisible, Inc.. The player controls a group of thieves doing a heist, one of whom is a disembodied spirit; each mission has two phases, with the spirit going in to case the joint and locate valuables, map guard patrols, and disable alarm systems, before the actual heist is carried out by the members of the team capable of lifting solid objects. I'm enjoying the gameplay so far, although I'm not entirely clicking with the writing of the story that ties the various missions together.
