Week in review: Week to 5 September
Sep. 6th, 2026 08:35 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pedanther. At the weekly boardgame meet, I arrived earlier than usual and joined the group of people who usually arrive early and play Thirty-One until more people have arrived. When more people had arrived, we played Lovecraft Letter.
Our game went on for a while, because different people kept winning; by the end of it, every player had won at least one round, and several players were at the point where if they won the next round they'd win the game. In the course of the game we encountered some interesting situations. One of the things about Lovecraft Letter is that is has two versions of every card, including the one that wins the round if you still have it in your hand at the end of the round but causes you to lose if you have to discard it for any reason; one player had the misfortune of ending up with both versions of the card in his hand, leaving him with no choice but to discard one of them. In another round, I ended the round with the lowest-value card in the game (and this is one of the Love Letter variants where one of the cards has a face value of 0) but still won the round because the players with higher cards all got eliminated by the tie-breaker mechanic.
. One week left to opening, and as is traditional, things are in a state of chaos that will hopefully crystallise during the dress rehearsals into a show everyone can be proud of. I'm cautiously optimistic.
. I've been trying out BookSorted.app, a website where you import a list of books you've read (it has options for importing from Goodreads and StoryGraph) and it helps you rank them by showing you two at a time and asking which you preferred. I've been finding that choosing between two books I loved has been relatively easy; it's choosing between two books that were deeply mediocre (or completely unmemorable) that has been causing me trouble.
When you've ranked enough books for reliable extrapolation, it offers suggestions for what else to read. So far the suggestions I've been getting have been fairly obvious things like "You like Ursula K. Le Guin, here's another book by Ursula K. Le Guin" and "You've read a lot of Christie and Sayers, isn't it about time you got started on Allingham".
Our game went on for a while, because different people kept winning; by the end of it, every player had won at least one round, and several players were at the point where if they won the next round they'd win the game. In the course of the game we encountered some interesting situations. One of the things about Lovecraft Letter is that is has two versions of every card, including the one that wins the round if you still have it in your hand at the end of the round but causes you to lose if you have to discard it for any reason; one player had the misfortune of ending up with both versions of the card in his hand, leaving him with no choice but to discard one of them. In another round, I ended the round with the lowest-value card in the game (and this is one of the Love Letter variants where one of the cards has a face value of 0) but still won the round because the players with higher cards all got eliminated by the tie-breaker mechanic.
. One week left to opening, and as is traditional, things are in a state of chaos that will hopefully crystallise during the dress rehearsals into a show everyone can be proud of. I'm cautiously optimistic.
. I've been trying out BookSorted.app, a website where you import a list of books you've read (it has options for importing from Goodreads and StoryGraph) and it helps you rank them by showing you two at a time and asking which you preferred. I've been finding that choosing between two books I loved has been relatively easy; it's choosing between two books that were deeply mediocre (or completely unmemorable) that has been causing me trouble.
When you've ranked enough books for reliable extrapolation, it offers suggestions for what else to read. So far the suggestions I've been getting have been fairly obvious things like "You like Ursula K. Le Guin, here's another book by Ursula K. Le Guin" and "You've read a lot of Christie and Sayers, isn't it about time you got started on Allingham".
