pedanther

Fiction books
Arthur Upfield. The Barrakee Mystery (e)

In hiatus
Charles Dickens. Our Mutual Friend (e)

Non-fiction books in progress
Adrian Goldsworthy. Philip and Alexander (e)

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

Top of the to-read pile
Jason Aaron, Esad Ribic. Thor, God of Thunder: The God Butcher

(via thisbluespirit)

Stats

List of Completed Fic
The Phantom Dennis of the Opera (Angel: The Series x The Phantom of the Opera fusion, G, 80 words) for thenewbuzzwuzz in Three Sentence Ficathon

The Continuation of Diplomacy by Other Means (Marvel Cinematic Universe, G, 182 words) for sideways in Three Sentence Ficathon

Three Sentences About Susan (Doctor Who and/or Narnia, G, 101 words) for thetransintransgenic in Three Sentence Ficathon

Don't Let the Pigeon Write a Commentfic! (Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus!, G, 19 words) for anonymous on Three Sentence Ficathon

Assemble (Marvel Cinematic Universe, G, 147 words) for fleetsparrow in Three Sentence Ficathon

A Couple of Letters Can Make a Lot of Difference (Narnia x undisclosed crossover, G, 103 words) for anonymous in Three Sentence Ficathon

Mightier Than the Bird (Discworld x Untitled Goose Game crossover, G, 64 words) for siver in Three Sentence Ficathon

Today is the feast day of St. Peter of Thorkelston (The Hidden Almanac x The Monkees crossover, G, 165 words) for violsva in Three Sentence Ficathon

Professional Standards (Batman, G, 100 words) for conuly in Three Sentence Ficathon

Total number: 9

Total word count: 1,064

( Read more... )

Fiction books
Aaron Allston. Iron Fist (e)
Aaron Allston. Solo Command (e)
Aaron Allston. Starfighters of Adumar (e)
Aaron Allston. Wraith Squadron (e)
Lois McMaster Bujold. Captain Vorpatril's Alliance (e) (re-read)
Lois McMaster Bujold. Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen (e) (re-read)
Lois McMaster Bujold. Komarr (e) (re-read)
Michael Stewart, Jerry Herman. Hello, Dolly!
Thornton Wilder. The Matchmaker
Timothy Zahn. Dark Force Rising (e) (re-read)
Timothy Zahn. Heir to the Empire (e) (re-read)
Timothy Zahn. The Last Command (e) (re-read)

In progress
(anthology). Batman Black and White, volume 2 (re-read)
Terry Pratchett. Raising Steam (e) (re-read)

Picture books
Diane Redfield Massie. The Baby Beebee Bird

Non-fiction books in progress
Christopher Lascelles. Pontifex Maximus (e)

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

Top of the to-read pile
Ben Aaronovitch. False Value

Fiction books
David McGillivray, Walter Zerlin Jr. The Farndale Avenue Housing Estate Townswomen's Guild Dramatic Society Murder Mystery
David McGillivray, Walter Zerlin Jr. The Haunted Through Lounge and Recessed Dining Nook at Farndale Castle
Terry Pratchett. Going Postal (e) (re-read)

In progress
Terry Pratchett. Thud (e) (re-read)

Non-fiction books in progress
Stephen Curtis. Staging Ideas

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

Top of the to-read pile
Ben Aaronovitch. Lies Sleeping

1. The fanfic I recommended last week has a sequel now: Christmas in Kansas, the story of the first time Clark Kent brought his colleagues Bruce and Diana home for the Christmas holidays. There's inevitably quite a bit of focus on Bruce, due to the inherent incongruity of Bruce Wayne + relaxed family holiday, but Diana gets some really nice moments, too.


2. Since I'm already recommending out-of-season Christmas fanfic, I don't think I've recced back in anno domini here; it's a crossover in which Susan Pevensie goes to stay with a friend in Tatchester and ends up befriending Kay Harker. It's really beautiful, but it hasn't got a lot of attention possibly because there aren't a lot of people on AO3 who know who Kay Harker is. (I mean, I suspect it would still be a beautiful story even if you have no idea, but I can see why people might be cautious.) (And of course I could be wrong, since I've known Kay nearly as long as I've known Susan.)


3. Rehearsals for Oliver! continue. I'm beginning to really get a feel for Fagin's physicality: how he holds his shoulders, how he moves his hands, how he walks. Not so much, alas! for how he speaks - I'm shifting unreliably between several different accents, and it seems like the more I attention I pay to how I'm speaking the less likely I am to get the result I'm after.

The children of the cast seem to have largely accepted me, in (will-I or nill-I) the role of the fun adult who'll often play along with a joke but needn't be paid any attention to if he tries to get one to settle down. Fortunately, there are other adults in the cast who can achieve more success if settling down is what's needed, including our Nancy, who's a teacher in real life.


4. I've been to see Captain America: Civil War. I have previously had occasion to comment that the MCU doesn't have a track record of sticking the distance with moral dilemmas or good-vs-good conflicts; the side that the heroes aren't on tends to see the light, or do something that allows their viewpoint to be swept under the carpet, like die or turn evil (or turn evil and then die). I didn't expect this movie to be any different, and it wasn't. Doubtless there will be bloggers who will examine the details in more depth, but that's not really my thing.

I like the new version of Spider-Man.


5. At the gaming group this week I played Hoax, Council of Verona, and Goblins, Inc..

Hoax is one of those bluffing games where you have to figure out what cards your opponents have while being free to lie as much as you like about your own. I've generally been pretty terrible at bluffing games because I have no poker face when I get a good card, but between Batman Love Letter last week and Hoax this week I've been working on a strategy where I attempt to mask my reaction to good news maintaining a cheerful demeanor all the time regardless. I was getting pretty good at it by the time we moved on to the next thing.

Council of Verona involves a meeting to settle the feud between the Montagues and Capulets, and cards representing various characters from Romeo and Juliet, each of which either has a goal for the outcome of the meeting or an action that will affect the outcome. (For example, Lord Montague's goal is to end the game with more Montagues at the meeting than Capulets, and there's a lesser Montague whose action can be used to have one of the Capulets kicked out of the meeting. Another character, I forget which, has the goal of ending the game with more people kicked out of the meeting than still in. Romeo, meanwhile, doesn't care what happens at the meeting, or whether he's in or out, only whether Juliet is there with him.) Where it gets complicated is that players score by betting on which characters will achieve their goals, and using the action characters to influence the outcome - and some of the characters' actions, instead of directly affecting other characters, can be used to mess with the other players' bets. I still don't think I've quite got my head around it.

Goblins, Inc. is about designing giant fighting machines and then playing them off against one another. It's an interesting mix of co-operation and competition. It's played with two teams of two, but halfway through the game the pairs are split and rearranged so that you end up allied with a former opponent. At various points in the game, each player is required to make important decisions without consulting their ally. Players are scored individually, and each player earns a different number of points from a victorious round depending on their secret agenda. (For instance, one player might earn points for each of their opponent's weapons that's destroyed, while another might earn points for each bit of armor; and similarly when it comes to the bits of their own machine remaining intact at the end of the fight.) In theory, the secret agenda might also influence a player to make a decision during the round that helps them but harms their ally. In practice, I found that I paid a lot of attention to my intactness agenda during the design phase (points for every intact weapon at the end of the fight? okay, we need to start with lots of weapons) but during the fight phase I would just forget about the destruction agenda and concentrate on the best outcome for the team. That seemed to work well for me, since I won the game.
 

1. So, a new year.

My new year's resolution last year was to make some progress on figuring out what I want to do with my life, prompted by the realisation that I was about to qualify for long service leave in the job I took temporarily after university until I decided out what I really wanted to do.

I've achieved it, kind of. I still don't really know what I want to do with my life, but I do know where I want to be in two years from now, which is more than I've managed before. Conveniently, it's geographically the same place I am now, but at least I have a positive reason for wanting to be here instead of just drifting along in the direction I was already going. And the nature of the reason is suggestive of what I might want from life, so there's room for further development there.

I don't have a formal resolution this year, just an intention to keep on with last year's, with a side order of getting back on the wagons I've fallen off with respect to morning-ness and exercise and suchlike.


2. Boy, it's hot. I've been spending large portions of the day inside, with the blinds drawn against the nuclear-powered fury of the sun, reading Yuletide fics and playing online games.


3. Speaking of Yuletide, author's names have now been revealed, resulting in the discovery that two of the fics that particularly impressed me this year were both written by the same author, RecessiveJean, who furthermore has written two more fics as well, for a total of four excellent fics, in six fandoms. (Captain America, The Enchanted Forest Chronicles, Jurassic Park, Narnia, The Rocketeer, The Scarlet Pimpernel. So yes, that means at least one superficially-unworkable crossover.)

T-Rex was in Kentucky, although he didn’t know it. He hadn’t brought a map, and if he had, he probably would have tried to eat it by now, anyway.


4. Speaking of online games, I've reached the final story arc in Doctor Who: Worlds in Time. The Doctor has traced the source of the time disturbances back to the planet Skaro - which, as he points out, is a disturbance in itself, since Skaro is supposed to be utterly destroyed.

The new iDaleks look even less threatening as two-dimensional cartoons than they did in "Victory of the Daleks", incidentally.


5. Lady Spy, Gentleman Explorer: the life of Herbert Dyce Murphy sounded promising, but I had to give up on it before the end of the fourth chapter.

The first strike against the book is that it's a work of non-fiction written as if it were a novel, studded with details the author couldn't possibly have known about what the people involved did and thought on such-and-such an occasion. To be fair, some of these are marked as supposition, but that just draws attention to the places where the author did the same thing without marking it. And it prompts one to consider whether the supposition adds anything to the account, to which my answer was generally negative.

The third strike is that on top of being written like a novel, it's such a twee novel. It's all very comfortable and superficial; despite supposedly being real people, they've got (or at least are granted by the author) less depth and complication than many fictional characters I've known. The point where I gave up was when I realised that the author had somehow managed to make the story of a man who lived as a woman in Victorian England dull.

So much for the style. Are the underlying facts any good? Well...

The second strike was awarded to a ten-word parenthesis that single-handedly destroyed my faith in the author's fact-checking. The author reports that when Murphy was living in Oxford and preparing to enter the University, he was tutored by a man named Montgomery Bell, "said to be the original of Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes".