pedanther

. I spent most of the week getting through Herland, a feminist utopian novel by Charlotte Perkins Gilman of Yellow Wall-Paper fame. Unlike the last utopian novel I read, the reason I found it slow going wasn't that I found it flat and didactic but because the characters had enough personality that I was genuinely dreading the prospect of one of the visitors to the utopia transgressing a local norm and actual drama ensuing.


. I've also started reading Bone: The Complete Cartoon Epic for the 'longest book on the TBR' challenge. It's a lot of pages, but I'm getting through them quickly, so I'm confident of getting it done by the end of the month.


. The club's production of Seussical is finishing this weekend. I went to see a performance a few weeks into the run, and was impressed. The first production of the new year is to be Guys and Dolls, which has been discussed as a prospect on and off for the last few years; this time it's definitely happening, they've secured the rights and everything, though I'm still not entirely sure they're going to be able to round up enough male cast members.


. I started playing a new casual mobile game to fill in spare moments of the day like waiting for a reply to an email, and I enjoyed it at first, but it became increasingly wearing just how many different gimmicks it had to try and encourage the player to keep playing and spend money and so on. I was already on the fence when, a few days after I started with it, it decided I was invested enough that it was time to unleash a whole new wave of ways to try and get me to spend money. At that point, I decided I'd had enough and uninstalled it.

I went back to playing Alto's Adventure instead, and then decided that it might be time to try out the sequel, Alto's Odyssey, which has been sitting on my tablet since it came out but I never got into because I was still happy playing the original. Odyssey has some fun variations on the format, which go some way toward making up for the dearth of llamas, but there are two things about it that bug me. One is that the balance of the game has been tilted slightly more toward including the kind of player manipulation tricks that the casual game I mentioned earlier was rife with. A particular annoyance is that, where Adventure would always give you a free chance to continue your run the first time you messed up, Odyssey instead has a "free" chance to continue that you have to watch advertising to claim; since I don't want to watch advertising, this effectively means that the run is over the first time I make a mistake, which makes every run more stressful and is especially frustrating when I'm trying to master a new technique or when the run ended due to the procedural level generation throwing an impossible obstacle in my path. The second thing that bugs me is that the game regularly crashes, usually at the end of the run, and often when I've just reached a progress milestone that I then have to redo (sometimes more than once) because the crash meant it wasn't recorded.


. There's a new round starting of the Obscure Favourite Characters Tournament on Tumblr. I've recognised a few of the characters who have come up so far (including some who I really don't think count as obscure), but the one that really struck me was Alice, from BBV's Audio Adventures in Time and Space. Part of why, I think, is that I'm not in the habit of thinking of her as a distinct character: this was the series that cast Sylvester McCoy and Sophie Aldred in the leads and hewed so close to the Doctor Who formula that it was the subject of legal action from the BBC, and you can see their point because I do usually think of McCoy's and Aldred's characters as the Doctor and Ace when I think about them at all. It doesn't look as if Alice is going to make it into the next round of the tournament, anyway; she's up against someone even more obscure.

. I have now been working from home for a bit over three weeks. So far, I have stuck to dressing in work clothes on work days, although I haven't been bothering with unnecessary fripperies like shoes. I haven't been having much trouble keeping track of what day it is; keeping a daily diary probably helps there. One thing I have noticed being affected is laundry; in olden times, there would be only a few days a week that I had time to do a full load of laundry, which concentrated my attention and made it easier to decide it was time to do it, but now that I can do laundry any day there's less impetus to go "today's the day", and I've repeatedly left it later and later until I had to do it because I was one day away from running out of something.


. As predicted, working at home and having all my evening social groups in suspension hasn't made an enormous difference to how much more I get done around the house nor to how quickly my to-read and to-watch lists have been depleted. I've been thinking about why this is, particularly during moments when I've been lying on the couch moaning "there's nothing to do" and meaning "there's a bunch of things to do, but I don't feel like doing any of them, even the fun ones", and I think part of it is related to how I'm bad at making irrevocable decisions. Choosing to spend a couple of hours watching a particular movie or reading a particular book means choosing not to do any of the other things I might be doing instead, and what if it's a poor choice and I could be spending my time better, and so on and so on. Of course, the same could be said about lying on the couch moaning, or spending four hours on the internet doing nothing in particular, and somehow my brain doesn't have any problem with those. Brains are weird.


. I've been keeping an eye on some of the various theatrical groups that are making portions of their back catalogues available online, but so far have only got around to watching two: the Jesus Christ Superstar with Tim Minchin as Judas, and the National Theatre's Treasure Island with Arthur Darvill as Long John Silver. I thought about watching the National Theatre's One Man, Two Guvnors, which I remember hearing got good notices at the time, but I kept putting it off until it was too late, possibly because it doesn't star any actors I like. Probably the same thing is going to happen with The Phantom of the Opera, which isn't available much longer.


. Our roleplaying campaign has successfully transitioned to meeting online through Roll20. We've had two online sessions so far, completed our first adventure, and picked up a new party member, because it occurred to my sister that the advantage of being stuck playing online instead of face-to-face is that we're not limited to players we know locally, so she's invited a friend who lives miles away to join us.


. Still playing Alto's Adventure. Still charmed by the snow-scooting llamas.