Week in review: Week to 4 April
Apr. 5th, 2026 12:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pedanther. I had the whole week off, and spent a lot of it either enjoying having nothing particular to do or feeling crumby due to the well-known phenomenon whereby as soon as I was on holiday and the show wrapped I came down with the mild lurgy I had been steadfastly refusing to entertain because I had things to do.
At a couple of points, I attempted to do some things I'd been putting off on the excuse that they involved getting things done during office hours, only to find (as I frequently have on previous occasions when I've counted on getting things done when I was on holiday) that the businesses I needed to interact with were also off for the holidays.
. On the weekend, we had a long gaming session where we played Mansions of Madness. The scenario we played was an interesting variation on the usual: normally, the players form a team of investigators who are exploring a building and piecing together what the villains are up to before putting a stop to it, but this scenario begins with half the team falling through a time rift, so that the game proceeds with two teams exploring two different versions of the same house, with the house in the later time zone occasionally changing to reflect what the players in the earlier time zone do (or fail to do). Another fun aspect was that the time-travelling villain has brought a variety of artifacts back from the future, including a mysterious object featuring a rectangle of dark glass in which visions of the future appear (if you can successfully perform the activation ritual of Entering the Four-Digit Lock Code).
. At the weekly game meet, we played Cockroach Soup, Flip 7 With a Vengeance, and Epic Spell Wars of the Battle Wizards: Duel at Mt. Skullzfyre. I continue to be iffy about Epic Spell Wars: the actual game mechanics are interesting, but I dislike the art style and don't find most of the humorous spell names funny. The game involves constructing spells out of up to three cards (spells with more cards are more powerful, but take longer to cast and increase the risk of being interrupted by another spell before they go off). Some of the spell cards allow you to draw additional cards and add them to the spell, which doesn't always have a dramatic effect but during our game one player kept drawing cards that also had that effect, and ended up with a spell eleven cards long.
. Rehearsals for You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown have begun, and are going well.
. I watched the NASA live stream of the Artemis II launch, and have been following its progress.
. I went to Parkrun this week, despite a bit of rain being forecast; I already had a cold, and I didn't have anything I needed to do later in the day, so I figured it wouldn't hurt. In the event, there was only a brief light sprinkling of rain. I got a couple of nice comments from people who had been to see the play.
. My relationship with hot cross buns since I parted ways with the Holy Mother Church has been erratic. Some years, I make a point of eating one on the wrong day, to prove that the Church can no longer tell me what to do; other years, I make a point of only eating them on Good Friday, on the principle that if a thing's worth doing it's worth doing correctly (because I might be a lapsed Catholic but I'm still a practising pedant). This year, the entire question escaped my mind until it was already Good Friday and all the shops where I knew they were on sale were shut for the public holiday, so I bought some at a discount on Saturday morning and had them for morning tea.
. Until recently, I had managed to avoid getting any spam comments on my AO3 fics, but a couple of the fics I wrote for the most recent Three Sentence Ficathon have apparently stuck out enough to become targets for the kind of spam comment that pretends to be a real review before trying to get you to a secondary location. The one I received this week asserted that "i wasn’t expecting much at first but this actually turned out to be a pretty decent read", which is particularly transparent in the context of a fic that's only 37 words long.
. I was pleased to see the announcement that Farah Mendlesohn has been selected as the GUFF delegate to Swancon 50, then spent several minutes trying to remember where I actually know them from. I eventually managed to narrow it down from "overlapping online fannish space of some kind" to "mostly Diana Wynne Jones fandom, when I was still actively interacting with Diana Wynne Jones fandom". (Skimming the list of GUFF voters, I recognised a name from the old DWJ fan group, followed by another name whose owner was not yet born then, let alone old enough to vote; my, how the time etc.)
At a couple of points, I attempted to do some things I'd been putting off on the excuse that they involved getting things done during office hours, only to find (as I frequently have on previous occasions when I've counted on getting things done when I was on holiday) that the businesses I needed to interact with were also off for the holidays.
. On the weekend, we had a long gaming session where we played Mansions of Madness. The scenario we played was an interesting variation on the usual: normally, the players form a team of investigators who are exploring a building and piecing together what the villains are up to before putting a stop to it, but this scenario begins with half the team falling through a time rift, so that the game proceeds with two teams exploring two different versions of the same house, with the house in the later time zone occasionally changing to reflect what the players in the earlier time zone do (or fail to do). Another fun aspect was that the time-travelling villain has brought a variety of artifacts back from the future, including a mysterious object featuring a rectangle of dark glass in which visions of the future appear (if you can successfully perform the activation ritual of Entering the Four-Digit Lock Code).
. At the weekly game meet, we played Cockroach Soup, Flip 7 With a Vengeance, and Epic Spell Wars of the Battle Wizards: Duel at Mt. Skullzfyre. I continue to be iffy about Epic Spell Wars: the actual game mechanics are interesting, but I dislike the art style and don't find most of the humorous spell names funny. The game involves constructing spells out of up to three cards (spells with more cards are more powerful, but take longer to cast and increase the risk of being interrupted by another spell before they go off). Some of the spell cards allow you to draw additional cards and add them to the spell, which doesn't always have a dramatic effect but during our game one player kept drawing cards that also had that effect, and ended up with a spell eleven cards long.
. Rehearsals for You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown have begun, and are going well.
. I watched the NASA live stream of the Artemis II launch, and have been following its progress.
. I went to Parkrun this week, despite a bit of rain being forecast; I already had a cold, and I didn't have anything I needed to do later in the day, so I figured it wouldn't hurt. In the event, there was only a brief light sprinkling of rain. I got a couple of nice comments from people who had been to see the play.
. My relationship with hot cross buns since I parted ways with the Holy Mother Church has been erratic. Some years, I make a point of eating one on the wrong day, to prove that the Church can no longer tell me what to do; other years, I make a point of only eating them on Good Friday, on the principle that if a thing's worth doing it's worth doing correctly (because I might be a lapsed Catholic but I'm still a practising pedant). This year, the entire question escaped my mind until it was already Good Friday and all the shops where I knew they were on sale were shut for the public holiday, so I bought some at a discount on Saturday morning and had them for morning tea.
. Until recently, I had managed to avoid getting any spam comments on my AO3 fics, but a couple of the fics I wrote for the most recent Three Sentence Ficathon have apparently stuck out enough to become targets for the kind of spam comment that pretends to be a real review before trying to get you to a secondary location. The one I received this week asserted that "i wasn’t expecting much at first but this actually turned out to be a pretty decent read", which is particularly transparent in the context of a fic that's only 37 words long.
. I was pleased to see the announcement that Farah Mendlesohn has been selected as the GUFF delegate to Swancon 50, then spent several minutes trying to remember where I actually know them from. I eventually managed to narrow it down from "overlapping online fannish space of some kind" to "mostly Diana Wynne Jones fandom, when I was still actively interacting with Diana Wynne Jones fandom". (Skimming the list of GUFF voters, I recognised a name from the old DWJ fan group, followed by another name whose owner was not yet born then, let alone old enough to vote; my, how the time etc.)
no subject
Date: 2026-04-05 11:00 pm (UTC)The trouble with Easter-tide is that it tends to be a bit chilly for yeast cookery at room temperature...
no subject
Date: 2026-04-06 03:37 am (UTC)As a non-practicing pagan (and practicing pedant) I don't have strong feelings about hot cross buns other than the fact that I start buying them as soon as the gluten free ones turn up the shelves, because it is so nice to have a different GF snack option, and they fit the sweet (hah) spot of being a mostly savoury but sweetened option.