pedanther

I've finally worked through all of the collection of respiratory ailments. One of the last symptoms to persist was a lethargy that I hadn't really noticed until it wasn't there and I was suddenly interested again in doing things that I'd been putting off all month. If I don't do them now, it'll just be the usual procrastination.

One of the things I'm suddenly interested in again is exercise: I'm already right back on track with the walking and bike riding I'd been doing before.

Mildly annoyed that my regular check-up at the doctor fell due now, at the end of a month of inactivity and leaning on comfort food, instead of a month ago, when I was exercising regularly and eating fairly well. The results weren't too bad, considering, but I'd have liked to have known how much better I was doing. Oh well, there's always next time.

I finished reading several things this week. First there was the Classic Tales of SF collection I've been working through since July; the last two tales after Herland were both novellas, so I finished them both in one day. Then Letters From Watson reached the end of The Valley of Fear, which means it has now gone through the complete Sherlock Holmes canon and is going into hiatus until the organiser feels up to doing the whole thing over again. Then I also finished Bone -- I had a strong suspicion I would finish it quickly despite the page count, which is why I picked it -- which means I have also finished the Randomize Your TBR challenge for 2024. I've already signed up for the 2025 Randomize Your TBR challenge, but I'm still considering whether to do the monthly theme challenge again; I like it, but it's the same themes every year, so I might do a different monthly theme challenge instead.

Auditions for the club's next production were held this week. There was an option to audition remotely by sending a video for people who couldn't make it to the audition session, and I decided I'd better take that option rather than trail my remaining respiratory symptoms through a room full of people -- which meant that I needed to teach myself how to make and send a video on my phone. It came out pretty well, I thought. Not having been to the audition session, I have no specific information about who else auditioned, so I can have some fun speculating about who might have been cast in the other roles.

The Obscure Favourite Characters blog on Tumblr is doing a seasonal mini-tournament for Santa Clauses and Father Christmases. I nominated Raymond Briggs's Father Christmas, who seems to be doing well in his first contest.

Long service leave is over, and I'm back at work. The first few days were busy as I caught up with what had been done in my absence, but then things settled back into the old rhythm. I briefly considered blagging some extra time off on account of respiratory interestingness, and would have if I still shared a working space with other people, but since I work from home there's not a risk of sharing infection, and I was awake and alert enough to do the work, so I decided that it would be better to be back on duty when people were expecting me to be back.

The lingering cough has continued to linger, but is mostly gone now.

I've caught up with the random monthly reading challenge, finishing off my October book (This Is Improbable) and November book (The Sword of Islam). The challenge for December is to read one of the five longest (by page count) books on the to-read list, which seems just a bit rude for the challenge that starts only one month before the final deadline. (To be fair, the rules of the challenge actually allow doing the prompts in any order, so there's nothing stopping someone choosing a book for this prompt in January and spending the entire year on it. Still.) The five books on my to-read shelf with the largest page counts are mostly omnibus editions - a complete works of Shakespeare, a complete novels of Austen, and Bone: The Complete Cartoon Epic in One Volume - plus one novel, The Reality Dysfunction by Peter F. Hamilton, and a 1981 edition of Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable.

I've also started catching up with Natural Six, which I'd been keeping up with easily during long service leave but then fell a couple of episodes behind when I had the lurgy and lacked the concentration to watch three-hour-long episodes. I expect to be caught up before the next episode comes out, but then I'll be dealing with the issue of being back at work and having significantly fewer three-hour blocks of free time in a week, so I might fall behind again.

I haven't resumed doing 750 Words yet; my current plan is to write off November and start again fresh on the first day of December.

Saturday was my last full day in town. I went to Parkrun in the morning, taking the opportunity to visit a course I haven't done before; I picked one near the seashore since I hadn't been properly near the sea yet during my visit, though as it turned out the track was on the landward side of a string of high dunes so I didn't actually see the sea except in glimpses. Later in the day I went to WABA and to Astrofest, and caught up with people I knew.

On Sunday morning, I went to the beach with relatives, and we looked in tide pools and found interesting shells and generally had a nice time. In the afternoon, it was time for the train home. On the train, I read The Witch Who Came in From the Cold, one of a bundle of ebooks I got a while back which had originally been published in a serial format with different authors writing each chapter. I got on better with it than the last one I tried, in that I didn't give up before I reached the end, but I found it disappointing; the plotting was uneven, with elements being introduced without proper set-up or dropped without proper pay-off, and the characters were all Types without enough personal history or individuality for me to really care about what happened to them.

When I got home, I did read Remarkably Bright Creatures. If it weren't for the octopus, it would be a kind of book I don't usually read, but on the whole I enjoyed it, though one of the subplots set off one of my narrative allergies so badly that I started skimming chapters whenever it cropped up. It might have been a good thing that I didn't have it with me on the train; I think I might have been less happy with it if I hadn't been able to put it down and walk away for a bit when it was getting too much.

After the better part of two years, I've finally finished listening to all of Re: Dracula, the audio drama podcast adaptation of Dracula Daily. I started listening last year on its original release, but stopped partway through, then restarted at the same point when it came around again this year. To be fair to the podcast, a major reason I struggled with it was external; last year was the year I started logging daily reading progress and not just when I completed a book, and I made the possibly unwise decision to log Re: Dracula as an audio book and keep track of the cumulative run time. That would always have been a challenge and a distraction from simply listening and enjoying, though now I'm done being fair I want to also note that having to calculate and subtract the run time of all the ad breaks certainly didn't help.

With that out of the way, Letters From Watson is now the only serialised fiction thing I'm still participating in, and when that finishes next month I think I'm going to want a significant break before I let myself consider getting caught up in any more.

I put my 750 Words account into scheduled vacation mode before my trip, since I wouldn't have access to an internet with a keyboard and I don't write anything of significant length on my phone, and I didn't reactivate it immediately after I got home. Partly that was because I'd found that it was actually quite nice to be able to go "I'm tired, I'm going to bed" and not "I'm tired, but I have to write 750 words before I can think about going to bed", and partly it was because I couldn't decide what to do about the days I'd skipped: try to summarise them, or just write them off and resume journalling from where I was. Anyway, I didn't do any journal entries all week, and one of the consequences was that I didn't have a handy supply of pre-digested things to say. That's one of the reasons this is a week late, though perhaps not the main one – but that is a topic for next time.

. As I mentioned some time back, I had formed a vague intention to travel to the city and catch up with family there, but I had run aground on my problems with self-motivated scheduling. A week ago, I finally managed to nail down a specific event I could build the rest of my travel plans around, and then things proceeded with rapidity (perhaps aided by the fact that I'm running out of leave), so I'll be heading down later this week. Those of you who are in the city already, any suggestions about fun things to do or places to visit while I'm in town? I've already taken note that it's a WABA weekend, so if any of you are going I might see you there.


. I've been playing Ingress more than usual, partly inspired by the recent event and partly by noticing that I'm getting close to unlocking Access Level 12, which I've been picking my way toward for quite a while. (Although I looked it up just now, and apparently the feature that used to be only available to Level 12 and up was recalibrated months ago and is now available from Level 10 up, which shows you how much attention I've been paying. I'd have found out if I'd tried to use it in the past few months, but of course I never did because I thought I knew it wouldn't be available.) I'm running out of things to do locally because everything within easy bike distance is already incorporated into a field, which is partly a result of my activity and partly due to the fact that my main opponent, who can usually be relied on to tear down anything I build in short order, hasn't been active recently (based on past experience, he's probably out of town for a while). I'm using it as an impetus to expand my definition of "easy bike distance".


. Speaking of which, I've been riding my bike a lot recently. I'm trying to build up a habit of going for a bike ride in the morning before the day heats up (though even then, I haven't gone out recently without being glad my bike has a water bottle holder). I'm hoping that if I get the habit going now, it will stick when my leave is over and turn into me going for a bike ride before work.


. I've been reading a four-volume retelling of stories from the Mabinogion by Evangeline Walton, which if memory serves I picked up secondhand at a Swancon. It's a mixed bag; she tries to give comprehensible human motivations to the characters, which works better for some stories than others. Sometimes if you try to add human depth to a wonder tale about a cunning trickster, you run the risk of your audience coming to the conclusion that the trickster is an entitled jackass. And sometimes I don't know what Walton was doing; her characterisation of the female characters in Prince of Annwn, which I read first, is deeply weird and would probably have resulted in me giving up on the series entirely if I didn't already have all four volumes at hand. The Children of Llyr, which I read next, is much more successful (though the subject matter is grimmer, and it trails off a bit after it gets to the climactic tragedy), and The Song of Rhiannon and The Island of the Mighty fall somewhere in between. Looking back on it, I think the characters Walton created from whole cloth to patch gaps in the narrative feel more alive than the ones she took from the Mabinogion and tried to add flesh to, which is probably significant of something about the pitfalls of a project like this. In the end The Island of the Mighty did stick the landing, but my main emotion at finishing is to be glad I've got these checked off and can get on with reading something else that hopefully I'll enjoy more.


. Letters from Watson is onto the last Sherlock Holmes novel, The Valley of Fear. We're about halfway through, which since it shares the traditional Sherlock Holmes Novel Structure means that Holmes has just solved the murder and most of the remaining page count is going to be Arthur Conan Doyle, Frustrated Historical Novelist, giving us a detailed account of the killer and victim's backstory. I'm looking forward to it; from memory, this is the one in which the structure is most successful and the backstory most interesting. (I'm also looking forward to the reactions of the people who haven't read it before.)

. At the beginning of last year, I read Harley Quinn: Reckoning, the first in a trilogy of YA novels retelling the origin story of the Batman supporting character (and increasingly a headline character in her own right) Harley Quinn. It was very good, although I found it stressful, and had to read it in short bursts with long breaks between, because of it being a prequel and having certain events from Harley's canonical backstory hanging over it. After I finished it I immediately put a hold request on the sequel at the library - and then spent the next year and a half putting it off, and flipping the hold every time the book became available, because it was apparent from the blurb that this was going to be the volume in which those canonical events started happening, and I was dreading seeing how they played out. This week I finally bit the bullet and started reading Harley Quinn: Ravenous; the first few chapters were heavy going, but once it reached a certain point and it became apparent how the author was going to handle Harley's story a lot of the dread evaporated and after that I got through it much quicker. (It does an interesting thing where it treats Harley's usual origin story as just the rumour that got around later; by the end of Ravenous, you can see how people started telling that story, but some of it is exaggeration or misrepresentation and some of it is quite plainly the result of people who weren't there adding assumptions to incomplete information and jumping to entirely incorrect conclusions.) I'm still going to need a breather before I tackle the final book of the trilogy, but I'm not dreading it in the same way.


. This week was an anniversary of the the first local Parkrun event, which reminds me that I haven't kept up on reporting my progress there. I'm still doing Parkrun regularly, and have passed a few more official milestones: I've now participated in over 250 individual Parkrun events, and am working my way toward 500. My record as an event volunteer is much more spotty, because when I can make it to an event I usually prefer to be out on the course getting my exercise and not standing around by the finish line, but for the anniversary event I volunteered to scan membership barcodes. I remarked to the event organiser that this is one thing that has changed over the years: when I first joined, the barcode scanners were rudimentary and nobody was allowed to participate without showing an official member barcode card printed in the regulation size and format, but now the scanning is done with a smartphone app that can recognise a wide variety of sizes and formats, including official Parkrun wristbands and keyring fobs, not to mention the people who just have a copy of the barcode on their own smartphone. (Or smartwatch. At the event, there were several people who presented their barcode on a smartwatch; some of the watches displayed it very small to fit it on the face of the watch, and some displayed it as a square QR code instead. I was relieved when the app was unfazed by either challenge.)


. I went for a long bike ride this week, most of it through the park where Parkrun is held but exploring some of the many trails that aren't part of the Parkrun course. It was quite a warm day, and I had reason to be glad I'd remembered (for, as far as I can remember, the first time ever) to pack a water bottle in the bike's water bottle holder. It was nice to be out amid the nature for a bit.


. I've been doing very well lately at getting the washing up done regularly. Perhaps by way of compensation, I seem to be getting worse at putting the clean laundry away in a timely manner. (The sticking point appears to be the t-shirts. I thought I'd found a solution, but now that's not doing it either.)


. The café near my house does bubble teas in a wide variety of colours and flavours, but due to the discouragement of single-use plastics they're always served in an opaque cardboard vessel with a sealed lid. I understand the practicalities, but it does rather suck a lot of the fun out of having a brightly-coloured bubble tea when you can't see it.

. Went for a bike ride for the first time in a couple of months. My bike is in pretty good condition, although I think the seat needs adjusting to be a bit more comfortable. With the weather warming, I'll need to try to remember to take a water bottle with me if I go on a long ride (my bike came fitted with a carrying bracket for a water bottle, but I've never actually used it).

. The week to 4 October is a big week in the chronology of Dracula, being the week where Dracula's victims start actively fighting back and things begin happening in earnest. In terms of Re: Dracula, there were three days with hour-long episodes and one, the most action-packed day in the entire story, with an episode lasting two hours. I'm generally enjoying Re: Dracula, though continuing to be annoyed by the ads that get stuck on the beginning or end of most episodes (and, in one instance this week, in the middle) and reliably break the mood that the episode is trying to create. I'm also continuing to find sometimes that if I consumed some other dense piece of media already in the day, I'm not ready to listen to the scheduled episode of Re: Dracula as well; the two-hour episode, in fact, I put off until the following morning for that reason.

. The dense piece of media I had been reading on that occasion was "And What Happened After", a long Lord of the Rings fanfic about what became of the hobbits who sailed off to the utmost West with Gandalf and the elves. I was re-reading it so I could write a rec post for fancake, which you can read here if you want to know more.

. The random book challenge for October is "sort your to-read list alphabetically by author and read a book by the first author you haven't read before". The book thus indicated was the first part of a series that I have no access to the later parts of, so I skipped it and went with This Is Improbable, by Marc Abrahams, the founder of the Annals of Improbable Research and the Ig Nobel Prize.

. I've reached the end of the story mode in Tactical Breach Wizards. At the end of the final battle, the player is given a choice to make - a variation on the standard "bring the villain in alive to face justice" vs "the world would be better off with the villain dead" dilemma that's usual for this kind of story - and the game, I gather, gives different versions of the 'where are they now' epilogue depending on which choice the player makes. Something that struck me is that, due to the circumstances in which the villain is defeated, there are actually three options presented, one in which the villain winds up dead and two in which the villain ends up alive. I don't know if the two 'alive' options are functionally identical, or if they lead to different epilogues; replaying missions skips the story bits, so the only way to get to the final choice and explore a different option is to play the entire game again, and I'm not sure I'm quite that curious.

. The season recently closed for the club's latest production, The Regina Monologues, a set of six interconnected stories inspired by the six wives of Henry VIII but set in the present day. I wasn't involved (it's an all-female cast, with only the six women appearing on stage), but I went to see a performance and was very impressed. It's the most challenging (for both the cast and the audience) bit of drama the club has done in the last few years.

The club's next production is Seussical, the musical inspired by the works of Dr Seuss, which I'm also not in; I decided not to audition for several reasons, including still being a bit musicalled out after Mamma Mia. My sister was disappointed when I told her; she says I have the right kind of face to be a Dr Seuss character.


. Am still listening to Re: Dracula. One problem I've been occasionally having is that because it's intended to be listened to on a specific schedule, I sometimes find that the schedule expects me to listen to an episode when I'm still busy digesting something else. That was an issue the day I read the last of the Penelope trilogy, and I couldn't easily put the episode off because there was another one due the next day; it cropped up again the night I went to see The Regina Monologues, but on that occasion there was a break of several days before the next episode, so that time I postponed the episode until I felt ready for it.


. A while ago, I started using the Calibre ebook management software to organise my ebooks. Part of the motivation is that I've replaced my physical ebook reader a couple of times now, and each time I did, the books that I bought through the official store had their read status and tags automatically re-applied from the cloud, but not the several hundred books I'd obtained by other means. The second time I was faced with the prospect of going through all those books, individually re-marking the ones I'd already read (if I could remember) and re-adding all the tags (if I could remember, with part of the problem being that the tags largely existed to remind me of things), I added Calibre to the mix, in the hope that once this round of re-marking and re-tagging was complete Calibre would remember the details for me and handle the whole task should it ever again be required.

I've achieved a full success with the tags; if I add a tag to a book on the reader, it automatically gets copied to Calibre's records next time they share information, and if I add a tag to a book in Calibre, it's automatically copied to the reader. The read status has proven to be trickier. With the help of a plugin, I've got it set up so that the ebook reader tells Calibre whenever I change the status of a book on the reader (how far I'm up to, or if I've marked it as finished); what I haven't been able to find is a way to arbitrarily mark a book as finished in Calibre and have that recognised by the ebook reader. I suppose if all else fails I can go through everything on the ebook reader and mark the ones I've read there, and that information will be transferred to Calibre, and then hopefully since it's information provided by the ebook reader it will, when the time comes, be transferred back.


. At the boardgame club this week, I had a chance to get a couple of games on the table that I haven't had out for a while. I got Jabberwocky and The Lady and the Tiger in a Kickstarter; neither is a single game, but instead each has a set of components (cards and coloured tokens) and a rulebook containing rules for several different games that can be played with the components, depending on how many players you have. They seemed like a useful and flexible thing to be able to take along to a boardgame gathering, but in practice I've only ever played a couple of games out of each and still don't really know most of the games well enough to be confident suggesting them.

My favourite game from either set is "Labyrinth", a two-player game in The Lady and the Tiger where the cards are laid out to create a playing board that changes configuration each turn and the players race to get all their pieces from one corner of the board to the other across the shifting terrain; I got to play a game of it this week while we were waiting for more people to show up so we could start a larger game.

When one other person showed up, we also played a three-player game from Jabberwocky; in "Gyre", which I don't think I've played before, the cards are laid out to create a playing board which the players move around the edge of while performing actions to gain control of specific areas on the board. It took us a round or two to come to grips with how the game worked, but it ended up being a very close match and we all enjoyed it.

(I promise the games don't all start with the cards being laid out to create a playing board; last time I had Jabberwocky on the table, for instance, we played "Slithy", which involves using the tokens to bid for points based on the predicted value of another player's hand of cards.)


. One of my so-far-unrealised plans for long service leave was to take up knitting or crocheting or something of the sort, partly for the potential practical value and partly to have something to do with my hands while I'm watching TV or listening to a podcast. Since I have so far consistently forgotten to go and obtain the necessary equipment and materials, I decided this week to shift my sights to something a bit less ambitious, and for which I already have the necessary equipment to hand: namely, learning to shuffle a deck of cards properly. My current shuffling technique is not the worst I've observed among the people I've played with, but it's awkward and clumsy enough that I'd like to improve it, and I've always been impressed by anyone who could do a clean riffle shuffle. I haven't made much progress on that specific goal so far, as none of the "How to do a riffle shuffle" tutorials I've looked at bother to explain how the actual riffling part works, having apparently been written by people who have been handling cards long enough to have forgotten which of the things that are now second nature to them might be opaque to a beginner. So for now I'm sticking with a tutorial that covers the very basics of card handling, like what a "dealer's grip" is (another thing that came up in a shuffling tutorial without further elaboration), and hoping to work my way up. I can do a pretty consistent one-handed swing cut now, at least, so that's something.

. My login to borrow ebooks from the library had stopped working for no apparent reason, which happens several times a year and almost always just means that it's been a while since I borrowed a book in person and the library computer wants me to go in and confirm that I'm still a local resident and active library user. (I had to figure that out from first principles the first time it happened; I don't know why they can't display a message explaining what's going on. Well, probably because the ebook library is a third-party system and it would be some flavour of Too Hard.) Accordingly, I went in to the library to see if anything caught my eye that I could borrow and prove my continued existence. One of the first things that caught my eye, on the display of New and Popular Books near the front desk, was the third volume of Claire North's recent trilogy about what Odysseus' wife Penelope had to deal with while he was off having the Odyssey, which I'd heard about somewhere a while ago and thought might be interesting. While I was browsing through the shelves I found that the library had the first two volumes as well, so I decided to borrow the first one, Ithaca, and see how it went.

. Last year, I started listening to Re: Dracula, the audio drama version of Dracula Daily, but gave up on it a little way into September for a number of reasons, including general Having Too Much to Keep Up With and a more specific Fed Up With All the Ads. I decided that this year, having a bit more mental and emotional bandwidth to spare, I'd pick up where I left off (or actually, a few episodes before, to start at a suitable inflection point in the narrative), and so far it's going pretty well. There are still All the Ads, but I'm coping with them better (and being more ruthless about just skipping through them, since at this point even if there was an ad for something I was actually interested in I would probably avoid it out of spite).

. I've been doing a project for a while now, posting on Tumblr, where I go through The Count of Monte Cristo chapter by chapter and note everything the text says about when the events take place. The hope was at the end of it I would have a set of information I could assemble into a proper timeline that would be useful for future reference, but I am confounded at every turn. And, mark you, it's not that Dumas doesn't give dates, it's that he seems incapable of giving a date without contradicting himself: the most important event in the novel is given no fewer than three different dates in different chapters (and, on one occasion, two different dates within the same scene); the only character who has a birth date explicitly stated has two different explictly-stated birth dates; the date that a week-long event begins is two days after the date that it ends. I still want to present my findings in some kind of useful reference document, but at this point I don't have any idea what form such a thing would take.

. My current standby book, for when I need a couple of pages to keep my reading streak going but don't feel up to anything too involving, is Try Whistling This, a collection of essays about music by the composer and music critic (and host of Radio National's The Music Show) Andrew Ford. One of the essays I've read so far was about the role of nostalgia in popular music, and how musicians who were considered rebellious and dangerous in their heyday, like Elvis and Beethoven, wind up being sold as nice and comforting. (Which reminded me of the time I heard a choir sing "Imagine" at a memorial service, in between a hymn and the Lord's Prayer, and found myself reflecting that it's become so familiar that it's now possible for the words to pass through people without slowing down.)

. Too tired to elaborate, but Natural Six is really very good.

Off the back of my previous post, it's occurred to me that reviewing a week's worth of journal entries at a time is reasonably doable, and maybe once I'm caught up I could make a weekly habit of it. So here are five things from my first week of journalling:

. One thing I have achieved in the past month, though not to as full an extent as I would have liked, is that I've done some yard work and weeded out the plants that have grown up around the sides of the house over winter, which I never quite found the time and energy to deal with when I was working full-time. In the first week, I concentrated on the side of the house where the clothes line is, because some of the plants had grown tall enough to brush against the clothes when they were hung there to dry.

. I've already mentioned that I didn't achieve any progress on reading The Female Man; I loaded it onto my ebook reader at the beginning of the week and then spent the entire week never quite getting around to starting it. Every evening I'd remember that I needed to read something to keep my streak going, then decide that I was too tired to start what would probably be a book requiring concentrated attention, and read the latest Letter from Watson or Wildfell Weekly or a story from He Do the Time Police in Different Voices instead. On the Friday, there was a power outage lasting much of the day, which presented a prime opportunity to get a concentrated bout of reading in - and that's when I decided it was about time I got around to reading the latest Liaden novel.

. I am still really enjoying the D&D actual play series Natural Six. Each new episode premieres with a half-hour live pre-show on Twitch, with many of the more dedicated fans watching it and chatting together as soon as it premieres; due to time zones, that happens in the wee small hours of the morning here, so I'd always missed it. On my first week of leave, I decided to try getting up early and watching, since missing a few hours of sleep wouldn't be a problem when I didn't have to work later in the day. I made it through the pre-show before deciding that I was way too tired to sit up for another three hours watching the actual episode, or to get any enjoyment out of interacting with the other watchers, and went back to bed. I watched the episode on VOD later in the day, and it was a lot of fun and ended in a really dramatic place.

. During the week, I received a phone call which, after a confusing beginning, turned out to be from someone who was calling because they still had me down as the contact person for the brass band. That reminds me that it's been several years since I last talked about the band here, back when it was starting to rebuild after the pandemic hiatus and the loss of several key members, so I should probably at least mention that I haven't been playing with the band for a few years now; I wasn't comfortable with the direction the band was moving, and, to be fair, would have been uncomfortable in any case since the pandemic had left me with a lingering discomfort with the basic idea of getting together in a group to operate devices that spray bodily fluids into the air. I told myself when I stopped that I'd go back if I found that I missed it, but that hasn't happened yet; I miss in a general way being able to regularly make music with other people, but not the brass band in particular. (And partly that's because one of the reasons I stopped going to the brass band is that not very much time was being spent at the rehearsals actually making music.)

. On the Wednesday, I decided to go and have lunch at the café that recently opened a few blocks up from where I live. It's at least the third café that's tried to make a go of that location since I've been paying attention, and we'll see if it lasts any longer than the previous two. There was a good range of food, but the menus showed signs of being hastily assembled and could have done with at least one more round of proof-reading; I particularly remember that the burger I ate purportedly contained "friend onion".