pedanther

alias_sqbr has posted some links to Info about parties in the upcoming Australian Federal Election, including several I'd been meaning to include in this post if I'd gotten around to it sooner.

Cluey Voter, Donkey Votie, and Build a Ballot all offer tools for rearranging a list of senate candidates to produce a personalised how-to-vote card to help you get the right numbers in the right boxes. Cluey Voter is the only one of the three that offers the full below-the-line service; the other two only cover the above-the-line list for each ballot. Build a Ballot offers a service where you can fill out a questionnaire about your opinions on key issues, and it will attempt to sort the candidates for you into what it thinks might be your preferred order, before presenting the list to you for tweaking. (I found that it predicted me pretty well on the lower house ballot, but my upper house ballot required more tweaking because that involved a bunch of minor parties and independents that it lacked relevant information on.)

Vote Compass has a chart illustrating the political positions of the main parties, on a scatter plot with axes for left-right and progressive-conservative, so you can see which ones are similar to each other, and if you fill in a questionnaire on your opinions about the main issues of the day it will add a dot for you and offer a selection of additional charts showing which parties have expressed opinions most similar to yours. (I always find that my results are about what I expected, but I don't mind having external validation that I've got a good grasp of the situation.)

This page on how to effectively vote for the Senate, including both the basics of how to make a valid vote and the more philosophical areas of which half of the ballot to opt for, seems useful but I admit I've only skimmed it so far.

#11: Read a book where the author’s name is not the same color on the cover as the previous book’s author’s name.

A Choice of Catastrophes did turn out to be the kind of book that one picks up only occasionally and reads only a bit of, so in the interests of keeping the momentum going, I revisited the bookshelf and came away with The Canterville Ghost, which fit the prompt, was short enough to make up for lost time, and fit in with some of the non-chain-related reading I've been doing lately.

I liked it okay. It suffered a bit from that thing you get sometimes when you spend decades getting around to a classic, where I'd read extracts from it and had heard of most of the good bits already, so it didn't have the same effect as if I'd been coming to it completely fresh. The edition I read has some nice illustrations by Inga Moore.


#12: Read a book with a title that starts with the next letter in the alphabet from the previous book.

Coincidentally, the first book I finished after receiving this prompt was Down and Out in Purgatory: The Collected Stories of Tim Powers, but that didn't qualify as the Next Book because I started reading it back before I signed up for the Book Chain. I've been working through the collection on and off for the past few months, and mostly enjoying it; a few of the shorter stories felt underbaked, but most of them had something of interest, even the ones I'd read before. One discovery for me was the novella "A Time to Cast Away Stones", which was written and is set between two of Powers' novels and makes clear several things about the second novel that had puzzled me when I read it. (And I note that if I'd read this collection promptly in 2018 when I bought it, I'd have read the novella before the novel - assuming I hadn't also read the novel promptly when I bought it in 2016.)

After making a list of books in the TBR that began with a D, I opted for the shortest one: A Deer in the Family by John Hartmann, translated from the Danish by Edith M. Nielsen. This is a non-fiction account for children about a Danish family that adopted and raised a baby deer, first published in the 1950s; a series of inscriptions on the flyleaf of my copy records that it was originally given to one of my mother's older relatives, then passed down to my mother, who gave it to me when I was seven, whereupon I didn't read it because it was old and the photos were in black and white. The story is quite charming, although the narration (at least in translation) occasionally verges on twee and I wasn't entirely satisfied by the book's answer to the question of whether the baby deer was actually in need of adoption in the first place.


#13: Read a book set in a different country or world than the previous book.

I hadn't looked ahead when I picked A Deer in the Family, but "read a book that isn't set in Denmark" basically gives me free rein to read any book from my TBR that I want to... which is not entirely helpful, since the point of doing these reading challenges is to narrow the options down to something manageable.

. I've been making a few changes to my daily routine, having identified a couple of factors that were messing with my ability to go to bed at a sensible hour. It's been working pretty well so far; I've been in bed within half an hour of my target time most days this week. There were even a strange couple of days where I was all ready to go to bed at least an hour earlier than the time I've been aiming at – only to find my brain insisting that it wasn't time for bed yet and finding things to do until I reached the target time.


. After we finished up our production of Guys and Dolls, I decided to read some of the Damon Runyon short stories that inspired it, to see how much had been changed in the process. "The Idyll of Miss Sarah Brown", which was the basis of the main plot thread, is recognisably the same story, albeit with a twist that the musical chose not to use (and without a whole bunch of complications the musical added to stretch it out to two acts). After that, things get more distant; "Pick the Winner" has a familiar set-up but a very different ending, while "Blood Pressure" has a familiar scene or two set in a completely unrelated plot, and by the time I got down to "The Hottest Guy in the World" and "The Snatching of Bookie Bob", the only things they really had in common with the musical were some of the character names. (And there are some things in the stories that I'm glad the musical doesn't have in common; it's been a long while since I read a story with as much casual antisemitism and misogyny as "Blood Pressure", and I hope it's a long while before I read another.)


. In other reading, I decided I should make some progress on some of the other reading challenges I've been neglecting since I started doing the book chain, so I read The Purloined Poodle by Kevin Hearne, which was a March pick for the Random challenge and also let me check off the April prompt ("animals") in the themed challenge. I got The Purloined Poodle as part of an ebook bundle that included something else I wanted; it's apparently a spin-off from an urban fantasy series I haven't read. (And, based on this sample, probably won't read; the main characters were fairly entertaining in a small dose but I think I've had enough of them now.) The spin-off sees two of the characters deciding to take it upon themselves to solve a mystery – which got us off to a bad start, because when it comes to stories about complete amateurs playing detective, I prefer the ones where the character has to turn detective because they have a personal stake in the solution of the mystery over the ones where the character is just being a busybody, and this falls too much toward the busybody end of the scale for my liking. I enjoyed it more once they'd located the culprit and the story shifted from amateur mystery-solving to a more straightforward sort of adventure story as they resolve the situation (which I suppose might be a sign that I'd like the main series more than the spin-off, but I'm still not interested enough in the characters to really want to find out). I did laugh out loud at least once, at the bit where Oberon the talking dog reviews The Great Gatsby on the criteria of things interesting to dogs.


. At board game club this week, we played Winter Rabbit again, having determined that we may have misunderstood how an important mechanic of the game worked when we played it the first time. I'm not sure we've got it right yet; on our second game, we won the scenario in half the time the game allowed for the attempt, which seems unlikely to be the intended experience.


. Went to the cinema again this week, to see an observational documentary, The Cats of Gokogu Shrine.


. Every now and again, there's an announcement of a big Ingress meet-up somewhere in the world, and I stopped bothering to read the announcements ages ago because it was annoying reading about the fun people were going to have somewhere that's nowhere near me. ...which is how I came to miss the announcement, a few months ago, that the next meetup is going to be in Perth. I only found out this week when another player in my faction messaged me to ask if I was planning to go. I haven't definitely ruled it out, but I'm feeling reluctant; it would mean making travel plans, and getting time off work, and all that sort of thing, in order to go and be sociable with a crowd of people I don't know and might completely fail to get on with. (The prospect of collecting another month-long respiratory infection is also weighing in the scales somewhat.) I thought I might be able to encourage myself by finding something else I wanted to do in Perth around the same time, so I could be guaranteed to get something out of the trip, but everything else I might be tempted to go to Perth for that month is either two weeks earlier or two weeks later.

Strictly speaking, this is an octave in review, covering the period from Saturday, 29 March, to Saturday, 5 April. I seem to have settled fairly solidly on doing the weekly blog post on Sunday, and it was getting annoying having to keep reminding myself "no, that happened yesterday, it goes in next week's blog post", so I'm shifting the window.


Our production of Guys and Dolls finished yesterday. It was successful both in the sense that the audiences had a good time and in the sense that the cast and crew got on with each other and also had a good time. The wrap party after the final performance featured karaoke, which, since it was the cast of a musical doing it, was a lot less painful than some karaoke sessions I can remember. I didn't step up to the microphone - I wouldn't have minded, I just couldn't make up my mind to a song - but I enjoyed singing along to the chorus parts and a few songs that the whole room did en masse.


After having never, to my knowledge, ever heard "Pink Pony Club" by Chappell Roan before, this week I've heard three different versions: the original, Rick Astley's cover, and a karaoke rendition done at the wrap party.


The light bulb in the spare room died during the week, which wouldn't be particularly noteworthy except for an incidental consequence. To get a ladder under the light fitting to swap the bulb, I needed to move the boxes that were piled there, and in the process I regained an accurate sense of just how many boxes I have full of books that I'd shoved in a box with the intention of carting them to a second-hand book shop at some point. I now have all those boxes piled in their own space where I can continue to see how many of them there are, and have added another reminder to my phone; whether that results in any of the boxes actually being disposed of any time soon remains to be seen.


At board game club, we played MLEM Space Agency as the main game, and then several different variants of Uno to round out the evening.


I finished reading Comet in Moominland. I didn't vibe with it. I realised afterward that I'd been in a bad mood on the day I read the last third, due to lack of sleep and some life things that I'd been not thinking about, but I don't think it'd have clicked in any case. I liked the first chapter or so, and then the comet shows up and it turns into a string of arbitrary whimsical events - and, mind you, I like a story that's a string of arbitrary whimsical events when it works, but this didn't work for me.


I did Parkrun both Saturdays of the octave, but if I encountered any charismatic fauna, I didn't make a note of it.


The colour-coded exercise tracker I set up in January seems to have hooked into my brain in a useful way, and my consistency of exercise is gradually increasing. In January, I never went an entire week without exercising at least once; in February, at least twice; and in March, I exercised at least three times in every seven-day period, which was the minimum goal I was working toward. So far this month, if it's not too soon to be saying so, I'm on track to never fall below four exercises in a week.

The new fitness tracker is going well. The "time to get up and stretch" notifications are better targeted at my use case than the Fitbit's method was, and are still working effectively.

It took several attempts to get the new fitness tracker to track my bicycle rides. On the first attempt, it didn't track anything; apparently there was some permission or other that hadn't been set correctly. On the second attempt (after I'd confirmed that all the permissions were now set properly), I decided not to hit the "starting cycling" button and see if the automatic exercise detection figured out what I was doing; not only did it not detect that I was cycling, at the end of the hour-long ride I got a notification that I'd been sitting in one place for an hour and should get up and do some exercise...

Since then, I've been hitting the "starting cycling" button every time, to be on the safe side.

It's been a bit tricky lately finding places to ride the bike that are off the road: we have a fairly good network of bike trails around the town, but in January a lot of the trails in my vicinity were torn up as the first stage of laying down fresh tarmac, and it was only recently that the actual laying down began. Looking forward to having that finished; the new tracks, in the areas they've been completed, are smooth and very nice to ride on.


At Parkrun this week (where the fitness tracker had no trouble automatically detecting that I was doing walking exercise), I saw a small brown lizard sunning itself by the side of the track.


It's been a rough week at work, featuring one of Those Clients.


At board game club, we played Last Light, a game involving exploring the galaxy and gathering resources. In general outline, it's somewhat similar to Eclipse, which we played a while back, but with some significant differences in gameplay (including a less complicated scoring system) that result in it being less of a marathon. One of the interesting gameplay differences that's not directly related to the playing time is that the board representing the galaxy rotates at intervals, with different parts of it rotating at different speeds, altering the strategic situation each time it happens.


Went to the cinema to see The Return, a demythified retelling of Odysseus' return to Ithaca after decades away, starring Ralph Fiennes as Odysseus and Juliette Binoche as Penelope. It's getting good notices for the central performances, which I agree are spectacular, but I think the story as a whole has some shortcomings and I'm not sure the ending would have worked if the performances weren't so good. (It probably doesn't help that it's not that long since I read The Last Song of Penelope, another demythified retelling of Odysseus' return which I found more effective.) I did enjoy some of the nods to other parts of the Odyssey that are woven into the story.


This week was the release of The Beekeeper's Picnic, a new point-and-click adventure game featuring an elderly beekeeper named Sherlock Holmes who used to be a famous detective but is now very definitely retired but keeps tripping over mysteries needing to be solved anyway. I'm enjoying it so far.


On the library trip where I picked up The Mysterious Affair at Styles, I also discovered that the library had a copy of Tove Jansson's first Moomin book, The Moomins and the Great Flood, so I've now read that and am partway through the sequel, Comet in Moominland. (Neither of them count for the book chain "no people" challenge because I take it as read that Moomins count as people.) I'm not disliking them, but I suspect I've left it too long to start the series and have missed the age where they would have clicked with me.


I need to have a proper think about how I'm using 750 Words as a journaling tool. The journaling itself feels helpful, and I want to continue doing it, but I'm not sure 750 Words is actually the right place for it; I'm not really using it the way it's supposed to be used. For one thing, you're supposed to pick a consistent time of day to do it, and to start and finish in a single sitting, but I've been all over the shop lately (the best time of day is clearly first thing in the morning, but that's also the best time of day for several other things so it often gets bumped) and have frequently written a journal entry in two or more sittings when I've been able to find the time. (None of those has resulted in me failing the challenge of writing 750 words without interruption, because each journal entry is easily over a thousand words - which in itself is another reason why this might not be the appropriate application.)

Our production of Guys and Dolls opened this week, and has been playing to good-sized and appreciative audiences. My American accent, which had been commuting between New York, Chicago, and some other place that might have been New Jersey, finally settled into place in time for the final dress rehearsal.


This week I retired the Fitbit. The display screen has been on the way out for some time; at first, it was illegible in sunlight, which was annoying from the viewpoint of wanting to know my progress while I was out and exercising but otherwise supportable, but by the end it had got to the point that I had to shut myself in a room with the blinds drawn and the light off to be able to read it at all.

During the time I've been using the Fitbit, Fitbit-the-company was bought out by Google and I have some concerns about how things have been developing since, so I decided to look elsewhere for a new fitness tracker. In the end, for a variety of reasons of which some are more sensible than others, I opted for the Samsung Galaxy Fit3, which I'm liking well so far. (One thing I particularly liked about it was that I could use a stockpile of reward points that was otherwise just going to expire to get it for only $30.) It's actually a slightly better fit for my wrist than the Fitbit was, and the screen is nicely legible in all kinds of light levels. I like the Fit3's version of "maybe it's time to get up and stretch" reminders better, too.


I follow several Youtube channels whose thing is gameplay videos of computer games designed to be played by multiple players (either competitively or co-operatively). Usually there's a variety of games represented, with some channels focussing on new releases and others being more into old favourites, but it happened twice this week that a recently released or recently updated game showed up on two of the channels at the same time.

One was Make Way!, a racing game where the players build the race track as they go along, which looked like it would be fun to play with the right group of people but could be a bit difficult to follow as a spectator.

The other was Split Fiction, a two-player co-operative game, and I don't have any opinion of the gameplay because the video I watched included the opening cinematic that sets up the premise, which was so stupid that I got bored and quit the video just as it was getting to the playable part. (The stupidity was a mixture of clichéd characters and situations - it's the kind of story that features a sinister machine called The Machine, with audible capital letters - and a few bits of blatant plot convenience. The one that really sticks in my head is that one of the protagonists is presented as being suspicious of the situation she's entering, but doesn't get around to demanding answers about what's going on until after she's compliantly gone through the induction process and it's basically too late to avoid getting forced to take part; it's particularly jarring because the induction includes changing out of her own clothes into a jumpsuit with all kinds of mysterious electronic attachments, which if I was her would have been the point where I refused to go any further without an explanation.)


I didn't go to Parkrun on Saturday, or board game club on Monday, because my sleep patterns had been thrown off and I wasn't feeling well. I did get a good amount of other exercise in the course of the week, with several long walks and bike rides.


I finished reading The Friendship Factor; I don't have anything I want to say about it that I didn't already say last week.

#5: Read a book where the author’s name is the same color on the cover as the previous book’s author’s name.

The Rout of the Ollafubs is a collection of linked short stories, with a shared setting and a cast of recurring characters, but focussing on a different character for each story (apart from the first and last, which bring all the characters together). I read it once when I was much younger, and some of the ideas and moments have stuck with me, along with a recollection that there were other parts I found dull and skipped over. Re-reading it as an adult, there are some imaginative ideas and fun characters, but the stories are rambling and lack clear stakes and in the end I feel that the whole is somewhat less than the sum of the parts. Some of the humour hasn't aged well, either, with parts of it depending on derogatory stereotypes of foreigners and the lower classes.

One of the things that made my experience of reading it now different from reading it back then is that now I'm able to recognise the influence of some of the other authors that preceded it; in particular, there were several points that reminded me strongly of George MacDonald's work in the genre, a comparison that tended to come out to Rout's detriment. With MacDonald, you can always tell that there's some underlying pattern or purpose even when the story's apparently being arbitrary; with this book, there were occasional moments where I got the sense that the author might have some idea of what the stories were driving at, but that idea never communicated itself to me (and the book ends with an explicit refusal to offer any explanations).

Of the individual stories, my favourites were the ones featuring the family of talking bears. There's something about making a bear cub with a Cornish accent the hero of a fantasy story that ensures it won't be as straightforward as a story revolving around a generic human protagonist, and these stories include most of the bits that had remained with me from my first read.


#6: Read a book that has the same colour spine as the previous book.

I'm currently working my way through The Friendship Factor by Alan Loy McGinnis, which is full of sensible advice about how to build better relationships with people that I'm probably never going to follow.

The Book Chain reading challenge is turning out to be quite motivating; I've already read two more books in the chain and started a third. I suppose it's because the set-up requires to one to start thinking about the next book one is going to read as soon as one has finished the previous book.


The third prompt in the challenge is to read a book where the title contains a noun or adjective that appears on page 50 of the previous book. The first adjective I found on that page was "light", so I read Sister Light, Sister Dark by Jane Yolen.

Sister Light, Sister Dark is the first half of a duology about a young woman with a long-prophesied world-shaking Destiny, although at the beginning of the book it's unclear what that destiny actually entails, because the ancient prophecy follows the traditional strategy of being impossible to understand until it's too late to dodge. At the end of the book, it's still pretty unclear, partly because things are only just beginning to really kick off but also partly because, in my view, the book does a less-than-stellar job of explaining what's going on in the world that might be shaken by a world-shaking Destiny. We get a very clear portrait of the isolated community the protagonist grows up in, and a few slightly-less-isolated neighbouring communities she visits over the course of the story, but the wider world remains foggy: somewhere away in the distance there's a king, and some guy trying to usurp the throne, but it's never really explained what the political situation is or what difference it makes to most of the people the story is actually about.

There's some interesting worldbuilding, including the titular light and dark sisters, who give an effectively otherworldly tone to the parts of the story where they feature. I was disappointed, though, by how much they felt like set dressing and didn't affect the (fundamentally rather familiar-feeling) plot. My reservations are probably addressed in the second half of the duology, but I find that I'm not in any hurry to find out.

One of the features of the book is that it's interspersed with legends and scholarly articles from later centuries, showing how the key events of the protagonist's life left their mark on posterity. The first few piqued my interest, but in the aggregate I felt that they rather weighed the story down, and although I got some wry humour from the scholars' biased misrepresentations of the past (including the repeated insistence on interpreting what the reader knows to be genuine supernatural events as metaphors or later inventions), I found that the accumulation of them had the effect of making me less invested in how things turn out: how important can the details of the protagonist's life really be, when posterity will forget most of it, misunderstand the rest, and believe none of it?


The fourth prompt is to read a book at least five years older than the third book. I read a Biggles novel I happened to have lying around, Biggles Forms a Syndicate. It's pretty slight, even compared to other Biggles books I've read; in particular, the nominal villain barely achieves anything in a plot where the environmental hazards are the real driver of the drama. But it passed a couple of hours and was an effective palate cleanser.


The fifth prompt is to read a book where the author's name on the cover is the same colour as on the fourth book. I've made a start on The Rout of the Ollafubs by K.G. Lethbridge, a collection of interlinked fantasy stories which share a setting and a recurring cast but each story has a different central character and a different style. I know I read through it once when I was much younger, but I seem to recall that I skimmed over the bits I was bored or confused by, and I'm interested to see how different it hits me at my current age.

This week I earned a level-up in Ingress, and am now at Level 12. I've actually had sufficient XP to meet the requirement for Level 12 for a while - and indeed, at the moment of my promotion to Level 12, already had enough XP to meet the requirement for Level 13 - but, while XP is sufficient for the lower levels, the higher levels also require a minimum number of achievements in game activities like capturing portals and creating fields, which I've been slower to attain. I had been looking forward to Level 12 because that used to be the level at which the full range of higher-level abilities was unlocked, but it took me so long to get from Level 11 to Level 12 that in the mean time they changed the promotion ladder so that the full range is now available to everyone above Level 10, so getting to Level 12 has been a bit of an anti-climax. I suppose I'll push on and try to reach Level 13 anyway, since I've almost got enough achievements for it already.

On Sunday, I had several hours free and the weather was nice, so I decided to go for a walk around the golf course. The local golf course has a track that runs all the way around the outside of the perimeter fence, and people often use it for dog-walking and similar activities; the course is on the edge of town and surrounded on several sides by undeveloped bushland, so there's a nice view and occasional wildlife. I've been all the way around once before, accompanying friends who were walking their dogs, but this was my first time on my own. I had a good time, and was glad I'd thought to bring a water bottle, and probably should have thought of sunscreen as well.

The February prompt in the monthly themed reading challenge is a book with a word in the title related to a body of water. I read Sea Wrack and Changewind, a collection of short stories by Sharon Lee that came out last year. The stories all share a setting, and often characters, with the novels of her Carousel trilogy, and I probably wouldn't recommend the collection to anyone who hadn't already read the novels; I hadn't realised how long it's been since I read them myself, and I kept running up against moments where a story took as read some detail that I couldn't recall.

As if I didn't have enough reading challenges already, I came across a Book Chain reading challenge and decided to give it a go. The idea is that, after the first prompt (which is "a book with 'a' or 'the' in the title"), each prompt is defined in some way by the previous book, whether broadly (the second prompt is "a book that's in a different genre from the first book") or narrowly (the third prompt is "a book that has a noun or adjective in its title that also appears on page 50 of the second book"). I'm counting The Visitors and Sea Wrack and Changewind as book one and book two, and we'll see how it goes from there.

At the board game group this week, we played Paladins of the West Kingdom, which took all evening. It's the complicated kind of game that I usually don't enjoy, and I'm not sure whether I did enjoy it.

Had a productive week at work.

Fiction books
Clifford D Simak. The Visitors

In progress
Sharon Lee. Sea Wrack and Changewind (e)
Tim Powers. Down and Out in Purgatory: The Collected Stories of Tim Powers (e)

Abandoned
Sebastian Faulks. Devil May Care
Patrick Süskind. Perfume

Non-fiction books in progress
Colin Duriez. The Tolkien and Middle-Earth Handbook

( short, screen, and stage )
( books bought and borrowed )

Top of the to-read pile
Jane Yolen. Sister Light, Sister Dark (e)