pedanther

. I have long been a fan of Bride of the Rat God, Barbara Hambly's historical fantasy novel set in 1920s Hollywood, so I was intrigued to discover that she's recently started putting out a series of historical murder mysteries set in 1920s Hollywood in which the main characters described by the blurb are unmistakeably the protagonists of Rat God with slightly different names. Scandal in Babylon, the first book of the series, does an interesting balancing act where its characters don't appear to have actually experienced the events of Rat God (they're all acting as if this is the first time they've been caught up in a murder, and there's no mention of any supernatural elements), but they're picking up from where the characters of Rat God left off – the film star's sister-in-law already has the job and the boyfriend she acquired over the course of that novel, for instance – so that if you want to read it as a sequel you just have to squint a bit. The story itself leans a bit much toward the cosy mystery vein for my taste, so I'm not sure if I'm going to continue on with the series, though I am curious about where it might go now that it's got past having to set everything up again for the benefit of new readers.


. For the April theme challenge ("a book about rain, weather, spring, or some kind of new blossoming"), I chose an anthology called Mists and Magic, edited by Dorothy Edwards. Being an anthology, it's arguable whether the book as a whole is about the required subjects, but enough of the individual stories fit the criteria that I feel good about it as a pick. I haven't finished it yet, so I haven't looked at the May theme challenge yet.


. I got new spectacles in April, and for some time afterward kept stopping to stare around and marvel at how crisp the world is when my prescription is up to date and my lenses aren't all scratched up. I think part of why I was so surprised is that my brain had tricked itself into thinking that the way I see the world when I'm wearing my contact lenses was the best it ever got. To some extent that's reasonable, because the contact lenses get replaced more often so they have the most recent prescription and aren't at all scratched up; however, my eyeballs have at least two separate things wrong with them, and the contact lenses only correct for the more common and less complicated problem, so with the contact lenses in the world is always a bit blurry.


. I've finished playing SteamWorld Dig 2, and moved on to SteamWorld Heist, set in the same milieu a few centuries later. The art style and so on are very similar, but the gameplay mechanics are different, and so far I don't think I'm enjoying it as much. There might be something about the story, too: Dig 2 featured a single protagonist with a clearly defined ultimate goal, which helped hold what plot it had together even when it was effectively a case of solving whatever the immediate problem happened to be and then whatever new problem that caused, but Heist is about a group of characters, who are not very deeply characterised and don't appear so far to have a goal beyond the immediate problem.


. The rehearsals for the musical are coming along. There was a nice moment at a rehearsal recently. We were working on the choreography for a song which has an instrumental break in the middle, during which some of the characters do a bit of dumbshow which is briefly described in the script but the score (at least the vocal score, which is all we had to work with) doesn't give any details about how long each part of it was supposed to last. As an additional complication, there's also a scene change in the course of the song, and the score doesn't indicate exactly where that happens either (I have a suspicion that in the original staging there was a revolve or some other bit of machinery that rendered it trivial) but we'd figured out that it should probably happen during the instrumental break as well, to avoid undermining the singers. So we spent some time working out who needed to be doing what, and when, and walked it through a few times without music. And then we tried it with the music to see where the timing needed to be adjusted - and it fit into the instrumental break perfectly, first try.

1. I'm doing the monthly theme reading challenge again this year, and to shake things up I'm also doing another reading challenge for people who have all their unread books catalogued on something like StoryGraph or Goodreads, where each month there's a different method to randomly select one book from the list. I took one look at my randomly selected book for January and said, "Actually, I don't want to read that", so I decided it would still be in the spirit of the challenge to read the book next to it instead, which I've had on my shelf for years and keep forgetting about when I'm trying to decide what to read next. So now I've finally read Patricia A. McKillip's The Riddle-Master of Hed, which as a bonus I could also use for the monthly theme challenge, as January's theme was "begin a new series and/or a new author".

The Riddle-Master of Hed is very much a First Third of a Trilogy book, ending on a dramatic revelation without anything really being resolved. The second book is much the same, and it's only in book three that things finally come together. I'm not sure how I feel about the trilogy as a whole, now that I'm done with it; there's a part of me that wanted to immediately start reading it over from the beginning, so I could see all the foreshadowing now I know where the story goes, and there's another part of me that suspects I'm never going to read it again, because bits of it are quite unpleasant and there are so many other books I could be enjoying reading instead.


2. For February, the theme prompt was "A book by an author you love or a genre you love. Bonus if it is shorter for the shortest month of the year." I read A Fall of Stardust, a small collection of short pieces by Neil Gaiman that was published for charity. I'd read some of them before, but not the main piece, which was a prologue to a sequel to Stardust that Gaiman never got around to writing the rest of. It was interesting, but also very definitely a prologue and not a self-sufficient story.

My randomly-selected book for February was Soulless by Gail Carriger. I was intrigued by the premise, but I wasn't that keen on the execution, although I don't know if I'd have liked it more if I were more familiar with the genre conventions it's playing with. (On the gripping hand, I do at least know enough about Regency Romance to know there are reasons beyond the obvious why it's not usually set during the reign of Queen Victoria.) Also there was a plot device that the author had clearly appropriated from Jewish mythology and then reskinned to remove all its explicitly Jewish elements, which I wasn't happy about.


3. For March, I was able to repeat January's trick of getting a book out of the random selection that also fit the monthly theme. (Entirely above-board, this time, as the random selection method for March produced a shortlist of ten books and left the final selection to the reader.) The theme for March is "A historical or epic book, bonus if it is related to ancient Rome", and I am reading Macaulay's Lays of Ancient Rome. I didn't know much about it before I started except for the much-quoted "brave Horatius" quatrain, and so far I suspect that not much of it is going to stick with me except for that.


4. I said when Kidnapped Weekly started that I thought I'd read Kidnapped before, because I remembered the initial set-up and had a clear memory of one particular scene. Now that we're done, I can confidently say that I haven't read the whole book before, because I didn't recognise anything except the initial set-up and that one scene, and even that one scene was unfamiliar in a way that suggests to me that I read a description of it rather than the scene itself. I enjoyed the novel, but I'm not sure whether reading it at one chapter a week did it any favours. (I'm going off the whole literary substack idea generally, I think; I've done so many in the last couple of years, and most of them unsurprisingly didn't work as well as Dracula Daily, so I'm finishing out the ones I've already started but I'm trying to avoid starting any new ones.)


5. I mentioned the last time I did one of these that I'd started playing XCOM: Enemy Unknown and that it had rapidly climbed into my top 10 most played games by hours played. I've since moved on to the sequel, XCOM 2, which is already up into the top 5.

. I'm still persisting with Re: Dracula. I have some quibbles about some of the adaptation choices, but when it works it really, really works. There was also a rough patch for a couple of weeks where every episode had one or more ads for their other podcasts; even on the longer episodes, it often meant the ad at the end jarred me out of the mood the episode had gone to some trouble to create, and it got quite intrusive on the days when there was only a short chapter -- the pinnacle being a two-and-a-half minute episode which contained one-and-a-half minutes of advertising. Fortunately for my willingness to continue engaging, the next episode had no ads at all and there's only been the occasional ad since.


. One of the other classic literature read-alongs I'm doing is for Robert Louis Stevenson's Kidnapped. I'm enjoying it so far. I thought I'd read it before, because I knew the initial set-up and the two main characters and remembered at least one scene quite clearly, but so far all the details have been making me go "I definitely haven't read this before", so I think it's just that I've read the one chapter that I remember. It was a class exercise in school, I think; I remember being in a classroom and doing an illustration of a scene from the story. One detail that made it stick in my memory was that there was a character in a kilt, and I drew the kilt as basically a stiff triangle (or do I mean a trapezium?) that didn't drape in anything like a properly cloth-like way.


. Another of the classic literature read-alongs I'm doing is for the Sherlock Holmes stories, and speaking of things I thought I'd read, we're up to The Return of Sherlock Holmes now and it turns out that I've never actually read it all the way through. I've read several of the stories in the collection individually (including, naturally, the initial one which contains the actual Return), and I've picked up the general idea of most of the others by osmosis, and somewhere along the line that apparently turned into me assuming that I'd already read the whole thing. As a result, I'm getting to enjoy a fair few stories for the first time.


. The reading challenge for July was "a book you got via your local indie bookseller, bought used, or borrowed from the library"; I read Wizard of the Crow by Ngugi wa Thiong'o, which I picked up from a second-hand book stall once because it looked interesting. It was. The two books it reminded me of are The Master and Margarita (satire of life under the regime with supernatural shenanigans) and Les Misérables (written in exile, an interconnected web of characters struggling to make a good life, and also there's like 50 pages of scene-setting anecdotes before the main character shows up -- although, to be fair, unlike in Les Mis most of the characters we're introduced to in the first 50 pages do continue to play a role in the rest of the story).


. The reading challenge for August was "a fiction or non-fiction book about a career you dreamed of as a child"; I read Libriomancer by Jim C. Hines, which is about a wizard who is also a librarian or vice versa. (The career I dreamed of as a child is "wizard"; people were always telling me "you should be a librarian because you read a lot of books" but I never believed them.) I didn't like it as much as I'd hoped; the concept of a wizard who can pull any object out of a book as long as it fits through the page sounds cool, but I felt the execution was unimaginative, and the protagonist is the same nerdy regular joe character who always seems to be the protagonist of this kind of story. And not one of the more likeable examples of the type, either; being a relatable regular joe can only carry you so far when you're doing things like coercing people by threatening to blow their heads up.


. The 1964 BBC TV adaptation of The Count of Monte Cristo is good value for playing Spot the Actor Who Was Also in Doctor Who. As an adaptation, it's very faithful, for a certain kind of faithfulness. The things that happen in the series are, on the whole, things that happen in the book, and at 12 half-hours there's room for more of them than in a movie or a musical, but there's still quite a bit left out, and (whether by accident or design) what's left out includes most of Monte Cristo's stumbles and moments of self-reflection -- the things that, to me, make the heart of the story. (Among other things, it leaves out the entire subplot involving Villefort's second wife and son, and if you've read the novel you know what that means.) The climax of the series features many of the same events as the climax of the novel, but unsupported by much of what made the climax of the novel suitably climactic; people still go mad or have changes of heart because that's what the book says happens, but it's no longer quite clear why. I'm reminded of Terry Pratchett's remark that a good adaptation requires an understanding of what the story is about that goes beyond merely knowing what happens in it.


. I don't remember how Richard Powers' The Overstory got on my to-read list, as it's not the kind of thing I usually decide to read; I have a suspicion that I was under the impression that it was a non-fiction book about trees. It is in fact a novel (it was awarded the Pulitzer, but for fiction), about humanity's relationship with trees, and with each other, and about the extremes people will go to and the things they'll go to extremes for. Somebody I know, when I mentioned I was reading it, described it as poetic and sad and fierce, which is probably as good a summation as anything I could come up with.

Spy x Family is a comedy manga by Tatsuya Endo, which I've been hearing about for a while and decided to try out when I noticed the local library has the first few volumes.

The premise: Loid and Yor are a newlywed couple with a six-year-old daughter, Anya, from Loid's first marriage. Loid is a clinical psychologist, Yor does clerical work in a government office, and most of this description is lies. Loid is actually a foreign spy on a deep cover mission, and Anya is an orphan he adopted as part of his cover. (Yor doesn't know this.) Yor is actually an elite assassin. (Loid doesn't know this.) Anya is the product of a black-ops genetic engineering program, and can read people's minds. (Neither Loid nor Yor knows this.) Loid and Yor are each convinced that sooner or later it's going to become necessary to end the charade and ditch the other two, and as always happens in these cases, both are developing increasingly conflicted feelings about that. (Anya is not conflicted; she thinks both her new parents are awesome, and hopes they stay together forever.)

Spy x Family does that thing Buffy used to do of taking everyday events that feel world-shakingly important and giving them external stakes to match. In Buffy, it was things like "the school bully is literally a monster" and "you broke up with your boyfriend, and now the world is literally ending"; in Spy x Family, it's things like "winning over your new brother-in-law is a matter of life and death" and "world peace depends on your daughter getting good grades and making friends at her new school", plus the overarching metaphor about being afraid of what the people closest to you would think if they knew about the secret parts of yourself that you've never revealed to anyone.

And, having now read two and a half volumes... I have mixed feelings about it. The parts that I found funny are very funny - I don't remember the last book that made me laugh as hard or as often - but there are also bits that are clearly supposed to be funny that don't work for me at all. The bits where the characters have real emotions and real emotional connections are great, but are undermined by happening in a sitcom world where wacky shenanigans are always on hand to undo anything that might change the status quo, and so all the things the characters are having emotions about don't translate into the story having actual stakes; nobody's ever going to figure out that Loid is a spy or that Yor is an assassin no matter how many times they let their masks slip, and the big mission Loid's so invested in is always going to have just enough successes and just enough setbacks to keep the series spinning on.

To be fair, a lot of the bits I don't like are bits where I can see how they fit into the metaphorical thing I mentioned earlier. All the times when Loid or Yor or Anya inadvertently does something extremely suspicious, then immediately disarms suspicion with a hasty excuse, recall the moments we've all had where you inadvertently say something inappropriate to the situation that makes everybody stare at you until you mumble a hasty excuse or apology and life goes on. The time Loid summons every secret agent in the country for an urgent mission that turns out to be helping entertain his six-year-old presumably resonates with any parent who's pulled out all the stops to keep their child happy. The sequence where Loid's work intrudes on his first date with Yor is recognisably an exaggerated version of something that many people have experienced and many more have feared is going to befall them. On a metaphorical level, they're fine, I guess. But on the level where this is ostensibly a story about a secret agent working in hostile territory where any slip could have lethal consequences, the fact that all these moments have no consequences whatever takes me out of the story every time. Showing up to your first date with blood on your face could happen to anyone, but blowing up a vanload of gun-wielding thugs on your first date feels like it should get a bit more of a reaction.

(Incidentally, I notice I'm talking about Loid a lot. So far, his mission has been driving the plot, so he's been getting a lot of the focus. Anya is also the protagonist of some chapters once we get to the parts of the mission that required Loid to acquire a six-year-old. As the family member who doesn't have any part in the mission except protective camouflage, Yor's role has, so far, been smaller and more reactive. I don't know if that changes later.)

Part of me wonders if the real problem is just that I want this to be a drama with comedic elements (like, say, Buffy) rather than an outright comedy. I presumably wouldn't be making these complaints about Get Smart. But Get Smart never tries to persuade you that you should be seriously worried about Max getting killed by enemy agents, or interest you in how Agent 99 feels about how her spy work is affecting her relationship with her brother. And it's not just about dramatic weight: Loid's position as a spy in enemy territory, with limited resources and backup, isn't only dramatic, it's also the source of some of the funniest moments. The author is perfectly capable of crafting funny moments that lean into or arise from the story's constraints, so it bothers me every time a gag cuts the story adrift from those constraints instead.

So, to sum up, I have enjoyed a lot of what I've read so far, but there are also things that really bug me and make me reluctant to sign up for the long haul. I've just reached what feels like the end of the initial story arc: The family's been accepted by the various people who need to believe they're a real family, Anya's beginning to settle into her new school, Loid and Yor have just had a sweet little heart-to-heart about the challenges of living up to the role society places you in (in which neither was really talking about the thing they both pretended they were talking about), and the family is celebrating with cake. That seems like a good place to leave it and move on. If the series ever ends, and I hear that the end is worth the journey to get there, I might come back and try it again.

All that said, I'm seriously considering checking out the anime adaptation. There were enough moments reading the manga where I found myself thinking "I'm definitely not buying this, but I might feel different if was being acted persuasively" that it seems worth the test. And some things I've heard about what the anime did to flesh out the story and make it work in a continuous medium seem like they might have addressed some of the things that kept throwing me out of the story.

What else?

* The Rep Club's Christmas show will be Nuncrackers, the Christmas-themed edition of the Nunsense series. The club did a production of the original Nunsense a few years ago, and most of the cast will be reprising their roles. In the circumstances, there were only a couple of male actors needed, which made it easy for me to decide that after being in everything else this year it was time to take a break and sit this one out.

* I'm back on track with the monthly reading challenge, having backfilled the months I missed; for June (a book with "All" in the title), I read That's All Folks!, a history of Warner Bros. Animation, and for July (a book with a book-related word in the title), I read Batman/Superman: The Archive of Worlds by Gene Luen Yang. I always find Gene Luen Yang's work rewards the time taken to read it, but I was also reminded of some of the reasons why superhero comics aren't my thing any more. For September (a word associated with light or darkness), I read the novel that Ladies in Black was adapted from, which was a good time in itself and also an interesting study in an episodic narrative being adapted into a more traditional theatrical plot arc. The prompt for October is "an animal or creature in the title", and I am reading Avram Davidson's The Phoenix and the Mirror.

* Back at the beginning of the year, before I got sidetracked into deciding to re/read all of the Philip Marlowe novels, I'd been meaning to try out a different detective novel: A Few Right-Thinking Men, the first of a series by Sulari Gentill. Having disposed of Marlowe, I finally got around to reading it, and unfortunately didn't find it worth the wait. (One of the problems was that it had a significant dose of first-book-itis, so I read the second book as well, and found it significantly better written but still not what I'd been hoping for.) The description of the series that caught my attention is that it's an interbellum setting with a younger-son-of-the-upper-class amateur detective and his eccentric friends, but written by an Australian author and set in Australia, and tied in to the actual historical events of the 1930s. It was nice having a series like this set in my own country for a change (memo to self: really should try out Kerry Greenwood one of these days), but the historical aspect wasn't what I'd hoped: it's mainly used as a backdrop and a source of colourful supporting characters. The way it uses real people as supporting acts rubbed me the wrong way, and so did the way it threw in bits of history without, it seemed to me, ever really engaging with them. Cozy mysteries have their place, to be sure, but to my mind that place is not "in front of a backdrop depicting the rise of fascism".

* Mumblety years ago, I acquired all of the TV series The Pretender on DVD and set out to watch the whole thing from beginning to end, having originally seen parts of it out of order and missed some key episodes including the series finale. I got through the first two seasons at a good rate, started flagging during the third season, and eventually reached a point where I knew two of my least favourite episodes were coming up, and decided to put it aside for a while. I was inspired to give it another crack this week, and as a reward for pushing through those two episodes I got to go on and watch "PTB", which I missed when it aired and turns out to be a pretty good episode, with a not-yet-famous Bryan Cranston in the main guest role and some important arc stuff including an answer to something I'd been wondering about for years. But now, recalling that the quality of the show continues to trend downward, I need to decide whether I actually want to watch the rest of the series, or if I would be better off setting an October point and moving on to something else.

* Dracula Daily is drawing towards its close. I've learned a lot of interesting things doing it, but keeping up with the conversation has been quite demanding of time and attention at times, and although I don't think I regret it, I also don't think I want to do anything quite like it again in a hurry. Soon I will have a decision to make: when I decided to do Dracula Daily, it was partly with the intention of slingshotting off it to read through Kim Newman's Anno Dracula series (another series I originally experienced somewhat out of order and with bits missing). Now I'm not sure if that's still a good idea; having spent so much time with people analysing the characters in Dracula and discussing issues like the representations of race and mental illness, I think it's likely I'll be sensitive to the places where, if memory serves, Kim Newman doesn't give them as much careful attention.

. Everything Everywhere All at Once is the best thing I've seen in a cinema in a very long time. It's a showcase of the dramatic and creative possibilities of the medium, but more importantly it's all in service of an emotionally resonant and satisfying story. The cast are all great, too. I would happily have added it to the very short list of films I've gone to see in the cinema more than once, but the local cinema only did a single screening. Actually, to be fair, they've recently announced a second single screening, but unfortunately it's on a night when I have rehearsals.


. Rehearsals are continuing for Rock of Ages. I've also been roped into a part for another production, partly on condition that it's a small role and I don't have to attend every rehearsal but it still means that there aren't a lot of nights left that I don't have rehearsals.


. In the annals of small personal victories, I hired a lawnmower for an hour and tamed the overgrown grass in my back yard. I've known where the hire place is for months, but I kept putting it off on the excuse that they didn't stock small lawnmowers and I didn't know if the ones they had would fit in the back of my car. Turns out it was fine once we folded up the handle. The staff were very helpful, and in all it was definitely a better experience than any of the other ways I've dealt with the overgrown yard in the past. (Most often by hiring an entire person to come and do it, which is stressful and rather more expensive and it keeps happening that when I like the work a person has done, they've gone out of business by the time I want them to come and do it again.)

As a fun side note, I noticed when I was done that my Fitbit was registering an elevated heart rate (probably mostly from hoicking the mower in and out of the car, rather than the bit where I pushed it around), and wondered if the automatic exercise logger would make something of it. It did: it marked it down as a period of bicycle riding, presumably on the basis that the arm with the Fitbit on had spent most of the period in question in a handlebar-holding position.


. For this month's reading challenge (book with a direction in the title), I'm reading James A. Michener's Tales of the South Pacific. It's a collection of stories set in the Pacific theatre of World War 2; a couple of them, combined, were the inspiration for the musical South Pacific. I haven't got up to either of those stories yet; the ones I have read so far have been less cheery than I remember the musical being. One of the ones I have read is set on Norfolk Island, which was interesting; I don't often see American writers writing about Australian history.


. I have finished the extended story mode of Invisible, Inc in Expert Plus difficulty, and consequently I've now garnered every in-game achievement except the gimmick achievement that it's literally impossible to attain while actually playing the game. I'm glad I took the time to work on Expert Plus difficulty; I don't want to sound like one of those "You haven't really played until you've beaten the game on the highest difficulty" gamers (particularly since the game itself describes Expert Plus difficulty as 'a bit ridiculous') but my experience was that once I started getting the hang of it the extra level of challenge made it more immersive, and finishing the story mode came with a real sense of accomplishment.

. Rock of Ages is only a few years old, but it's a musical in the classical style -- which is to say that the plot is formulaic and the characters thin, but none of that matters while the songs are happening. After the first read-through of the script, I had a pretty low opinion of it, but after the first vocal rehearsal I was much more kindly disposed.


. I didn't end up reading The High Window in March, deciding instead to focus on finishing off Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow and a couple of other books that have been lying about half-read for a while. Now that the decks are cleared, I appear to have started reading The Woman in White instead. I didn't have this much trouble starting The Big Sleep or Farewell, My Lovely, but then I've read those before and I knew what to expect from them; I haven't read The High Window before and it appears to be getting stuck in the general reluctance to Start New Things.


. It took me a few months to get through Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow, but not because I didn't enjoy it; it's a dense read, not to be gulped down too quickly or when the mind is already full of other things. This is a book about the present being built on the bones of the past. The plot has Smilla uncovering a sequence of events stretching back to the second world war, and ultimately caused by something that happened much longer ago. At the same time, the novelist is uncovering, a bit at a time, the events that made Smilla into the person she is. For each of the people she meets along the way, we're given a glimpse of what made them the people they've become. It reminds me of John le Carré's thrillers, which are similarly portraits of people under pressure. (And, like a lot of le Carré's novels, it doesn't tidy everything away neatly and happily at the end. I found that it gave good enough answers to the most important questions, and that I could live with the uncertainties that remained, but this isn't a universal experience.)


. Over the past while, I've been importing my reading log into StoryGraph. Since the first decade of my reading log exists only on paper, this has involved a fair amount of typing, some opportunities to bathe in nostalgia, and occasionally squinting at an entry and muttering, "That's weird, I don't remember that book at all." I've also learned a thing or two about International Standard Book Numbers, including how the typo protection works and how to translate the old 10-digit ISBN into a modern 13-digit ISBN (not to mention an exciting side-trip involving my copy of Tarzan of the Apes, which is so old it only has a 9-digit SBN).


. After a long hiatus occasioned by various life events and scheduling conflicts, our roleplaying group has resumed meeting more-or-less regularly and has got back into the investigation we were in the middle of before things ground to a halt. In our most recent playing session, we started investigating a lighthouse that had been left abandoned(?) after the occupants were attacked in the middle of renovating it. I figured out a way of climbing up the outside of the lighthouse and getting in at the top, a strategy that had served us well for getting past the guards last time we needed to investigate a tower; unfortunately on this occasion it turned out the scenario had been designed to provide an increasing challenge level as the players worked their way up, so going in from the top meant running straight into the most difficult set of opponents in the lighthouse. I was obliged to retreat back down the side of the lighthouse and rejoin the rest of the party, and we used the front door instead.

. With the WA elections coming up, the ABC has published a summary of the 19 parties running and their major policies. May be useful for telling apart the minor parties who didn't just name themselves after their main policy.


. The brass band has started up again for 2021. We're in a position where we have some rebuilding to do before we're at the level we were around this time last year, not just because of the long pandemic hiatus but also because the new year is the time when people go away to university or leave town for new jobs elsewhere, and this year we've lost our conductor, a couple of key players, and two of the mainstays of the band committee. We have a new conductor and new committee members, but there's going to be a while before we have an idea of the effect on the band's collective personality and goals.


. The Rep Club has also started up again for the year. We have a season of one-act plays going up next month, and then will be the big push toward this year's musical. We're having another run at Hello Dolly!, which we were going to do last year before the pandemic hit. Some of the people who were cast last year have left town or had to withdraw for other reasons, but fortunately most of the losses were down in the supporting cast where the gaps are easier to fill in.


. The roleplaying campaign is progressing. We're beginning to accumulate some of those "your players did what?" anecdotes that every good campaign produces. Our adventuring party has done enough adventuring to pass probation and get officially accredited, which raises the question: What are we going to call ourselves? I've been leaning toward something about dire wolves, on the "if I had a nickel for every time we've been attacked by dire wolves" principle, but only if we can make it clear that "dire" isn't a judgement on our adventuring abilities. When I mentioned this to the rest of the group, somebody suggested that we could call ourselves The DW, and claim it stood for whatever seemed most appropriate depending on who was asking. "When you're in trouble, you call DW," said two players in unison.


. I recently had a go at reading The Barrakee Mystery, an Australian murder mystery novel from 1929 that turned into the first of a series running to 29 novels over three and a half decades. The protagonist of the series, though he's more of a supporting character in the first novel, is Detective Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte, known as "Bony", a detective with mixed ancestry from an Aboriginal mother and an unknown European father. As such, it's worth noting that the series spans several eventful decades in the history of race relations in Australia. I'd read some of the novels from near the end of the series before, but the beginning is a very different experience. It hadn't occurred to me to wonder why a white author in the 1920s would put a half-Aboriginal detective in his novel, but of course race relations play a big role in the plot and Bony isn't the only half-Aboriginal character in the novel. It's an uncomfortable read at times: Bony and the narrator both have pointed things to say about white Australia's treatment of Aboriginal people, but the novel also seems to take it as given that someone with mixed white and Aboriginal heritage will be dragged down by their inferior blood. (It's the Aboriginal blood that's being posited as inferior, to be clear.) It certainly takes it as given that most of the white characters will be prejudiced against Aboriginal people to a greater or lesser extent, and that this isn't expected to affect how likeable the audience finds them.

I sometimes think about what a modern TV adaptation of the Bony novels might be like. It would probably have to be pretty thoroughly reimagined; even the most recent of the novels is over fifty years old, and The Barrakee Mystery is coming up on its centenary, and the national conversation on race has changed a lot in that time. But sometimes I feel like we kind of owe it to Bony, for the fact that there have already been two TV series inspired by the novels and both of them starred white men. (The 1970s series made at least a token effort to audition Aboriginal actors before casting a white man and investing heavily in brown makeup; the 1990s series just straight-up made the protagonist a handsome white twentysomething, played by one of the several bankable handsome white twentysomethings that were on TV all the time in those days. And those days were the days when Ernie Dingo was also a bankable twentysomething, so it's not like they didn't have options.)

. My reading lately has been tending toward the light and escapist, although even then there have been pitfalls, like the time I tried a swashbuckling Sabatini novel only to find the characters having the same kind of arguments about abuse of power and the appropriateness of violent protest that I’d been trying to distract myself from. (In retrospect, a novel set in the lead-up to the French Revolution was probably not my best choice.) I’ve been having good luck with novels that have amusing first-person narrators, like Daddy-Long-Legs and The Martian -- does anybody have any recommendations in that vein?


. I’ve only watched one more theatrical stream since last time I posted about it, which was the Shakespeare’s Globe production of The Winter’s Tale. After that I just kind of lost interest, I’m not sure why. Part of it, I think, is that once the novelty wore off the hit rate of the streams I’d watched wasn’t high enough to encourage me to persist. The Winter’s Tale was another disappointing one, solid on the comedic parts but struggling with the more dramatic parts. The rendition of King Leontes had the same problem as the Lear I posted about last time, giving a convincing account of his human frailties and no sense whatever of him as an authority figure accustomed to obedience. All the courtiers had to be weakened to avoid overpowering him (one was played by the same actor as the comic relief shepherd who shows up in the second half, with very little difference in the style of performance). And the actress in the role of Paulina played her like somebody who had been handed Hamlet’s warning against overacting and taken it for a to-do list. The actress playing Hermione was great, though, and gave much-needed emotional weight to every scene she was in.


. Or maybe it’s that any kind of theatrical production requires more emotional investment than I have spare at the moment. I haven’t watched any full-length movies lately, either. Instead I’ve fallen into a Youtube rabbit hole of people filming themselves watching famous movies for the first time and then posting highlight videos of their reactions to the big moments. In this way, I’ve had concentrated doses of The Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, Indiana Jones, and several other favourites. I was interested to discover that the climax of Wreck-It Ralph still makes me cry even without most of the lead-up.


. Since the social distancing restrictions have been relaxed in this part of the world, I’ve had a chance to gather some friends and try out Half Truth, the game I backed on Kickstarter that got delivered when the restrictions were at their height. It’s a quiz game along broadly the same lines as Trivial Pursuit, but designed to try and avoid some of the common problems with that type of game, such as the issue of “Everyone else keeps getting asked the questions I know the answers to”. We all had a good time, and I look forward to playing it again some time.


. The Alto’s Adventure llama situation has had an important development, which I’ve mentioned on Tumblr already but not here yet -- one of the llamas has learned to snowboard:

. Poking some more at the thing I wrote last time:

On reflection, I don't think it's about "using time well" for the brain weasels; I think that's too big and complicated a concept for them. They care about doing particular tasks well -- or, more precisely, worry about doing them badly. Contemplating a purposeful and productive task creates anxiety about whether I'll successfully achieve the purpose, which makes it hard to get started. Aimless activities like meandering around on the internet or flumping on the couch might not be a good use of time, but they don't generate the same level of anxiety because where there's no aim there's nothing to feed anxiety about failing to achieve the aim.

Interestingly, my brain weasels apparently don't consider watching TV or a movie to be sufficiently aimless: I know people who, if they want to kill time, can just pick something out and sit down and watch it, but I don't have the trick of it. Apparently there's a wrong way to watch a TV show? Or maybe the barrier to entry is the task of choosing which show to watch.


. Relatedly, I saw a post on Tumblr recently that resonated with me, where someone said that when they found themselves surrounded by new things to read or watch and couldn't summon up the motivation to read or watch any of them, it was because starting a new novel or series or whatever required a minimum amount of spare emotional investment and all their emotional investment was currently occupied, either with things they were already reading or watching or with things going on in real life.

At the moment, I seem to have about enough spare emotional investment for one thing at a time; in the last few weeks, I've watched a couple of theatrical streams and a few movies and re-read an old Modesty Blaise novel, one at a time, and in all that time I didn't pick up The Master and Margarita because it was only by leaving it on the back-burner that I had room for anything else. This suggests that if I want to take advantage of all these theatrical streams with their time-limited offers, I'm going to have to be careful with my time management and not start any new long novels or series (or narrative-heavy video games).


. The movies I watched were the three James Bond movies from back when I was the age to start being interested in James Bond movies -- Timothy Dalton's The Living Daylights and Licence to Kill, and Pierce Brosnan's GoldenEye. Of the three, on this rewatch, I liked The Living Daylights the most; GoldenEye was a lot of fun but felt somehow more hollow than I remembered, and Licence to Kill has good bits but also the problem of being the one where Bond goes on a personal vendetta and gets a bunch of people killed and the movie never quite settles the question of whether everyone would have been better off if he'd just stayed home. (There's a hint that undercover narcotics agent whose operation Bond inadvertantly tramples over might have been about to mess things up for himself anyway, but the movie never follows that idea up because it's got explosions to do.) The Living Daylights, apart from a few moments I found jarring, is charming and has a bunch of actors I like in it, and of the three is the one that to me felt most like Bond and his young lady actually cared about each other and weren't just ticking off boxes on the "young lady in a Bond movie" checklist.


. I picked up The Master and Margarita again this weekend -- it turned out I'd stopped just as the title characters were about to be introduced -- and have now finished it. I said before that it reminded me of The Man Who Was Thursday; with the whole thing under my belt, it also reminds me of Carnivalé, partly because of the moments of people having everyday reality yanked out from under them and partly because it has a similar structure where the first half throws a lot of concepts at the audience and raises a lot of questions and then the second half settles down to start properly explaining how it all fits together. (Which, as the example of Carnivalé taught us, is a perfectly fine way to run a story but it may be a good idea to make sure the audience knows that's what's happening if you don't want them giving up before the explanations arrive.) There was also an interesting shift of mood in the second half where it stopped being nightmarish and became, in places, laugh-out-loud funny; the same kinds of things are happening as in the first half, but now the audience is in on the joke. Despite a somewhat confusing beginning, I found the novel pretty satisfying in the end.


. I got stuck on a crossword for several days because I couldn't figure out what the compiler was after with "Queen of whodunits (6)". "Agatha" had the requisite number of letters, but I couldn't get any of the words that crossed it to work. Ditto "Sayers". After that, I was inclined to think that whatever the compiler was thinking was obviously wrong, but when I did get enough of the cross-words to figure it out -- which was at "_ _ L _ _ Y" -- I had to admit he had a point.