pedanther

* I've signed up for the Buzzword Reading Challenge, where each month there's a theme and a list of words and you read at least one book with one of those words in the title, because I thought it might give me an impetus to stretch myself a bit, or at least to get a few books out of the ever-growing to-read pile. The word list for January was "Who, What, When, Where, Why, or How", and the book I picked out of the to-read pile (which would also have done for February, March, August, or November) was The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making by Catherynne M Valente. The word list for February is "He, His, She, Hers, Me, Mine, You, Yours, We, Ours, etc.", and I'm having a second crack at Our Mutual Friend; so far it's going much better than the first attempt, which ran out of steam a few chapters in. (I saw bits of the TV version that featured Paul McGann and Keeley Hawes, just enough to have an inkling of the troubles that await the protagonists but not enough to know whether any of them get happy endings. Or, in the case of some of them, to have a clear idea whether I should want them to have happy endings.)


* Our production of All Together Now! went really well. After that I took a break and didn't do anything for the Christmas Show except come and watch one performance. We're currently in rehearsals for the first show of the new year, which is called Female Transport and is a drama set on a convict ship bound for Australia. I'm playing the ship's captain (which, come to think of it, is also what I did last time we had a play set on a convict ship bound for Australia).


* My walking routine has fallen in a bit of a hole since I was boasting about how well it was doing. Weirdly, it feels like the onset of summer did it more damage than winter did. You'd think longer days and less chance of rain would make it easier to go for a walk, but my work hours shifted in a way that made it harder to find time in the mornings, and by the time it cooled down in the evenings I often couldn't summon the energy. One thing that has recently given my exercise routine a lift is that I finally got around to digging the bicycle out of storage and getting it serviced, and now I'm riding it pretty regularly. (And yes, that's how the walking routine started too, but the bicycle lets me do more exercise in less time so I'm hoping it'll persist.)


* I signed up for Disney+ a few months ago so I could watch Loki while my friends were still talking about it, and then I watched What If...?, and re-watched Ant-Man (I had remembered it was a fun movie, but not just how much fun it was)... and now I've fallen into the same trap I always seem to fall into with streaming services, where the monthly fees rack up while I don't watch anything because I can't make up my mind what to watch next. I do want to watch Ant-Man and the Wasp, and I'm at least a bit interested in at least some parts of WandaVision and Hawkeye, and I intend to watch The Mandalorian at some point, and that's barely scratching the surface of what's available. But somehow it always seems like something for another day.


* Instead, I've been watching a bunch of stuff on Youtube. One thing I have been watching a lot of recently is the British game show Taskmaster, in which the competitors are given eccentric challenges ranging from the seemingly simple ("Eat this egg. Fastest wins.") to the more elaborate ("Create the most thrilling soap opera cliffhanger. You have one hour."). A lot of the entertainment comes from comparing the different approaches taken by the different competitors (you might not think there could be four wildly distinct ways to "Eat this egg", but there were). Another thing I've been enjoying is a series of reaction videos on medusacascade's channel, where she's watching Babylon 5 for the first time. It's great getting to watch somebody new discover the show, and while it's not quite the same thing as watching the series again myself, it's enough like it that I suspect it's taking up a "this is the show I'm currently watching" slot in my brain and might be part of why I'm not currently getting around to watching any new scripted drama series.

Here are the answers to the lyrics meme from last month, a bit later than I originally intended to post them:

( Read more... )

This is a fairly representative sample of my music collection, although once again the Charlie Daniels entry is a song I don't like from the album I bought solely for "The Devil Went Down to Georgia".

I'm amused to note that this time round the list includes both the Tom Lehrer patter song "The Elements" and one of its inspirations, the Danny Kaye patter song "Tchaikovsky (and other Russians)" -- although the latter was harder to spot, because the recording I have includes the two-and-half-minute recitative lead-in from the stage show, and I gave the opening lines of the recitative instead of the opening lines of the patter song ("There's Maliszewski, Rubinstein, Arensky, and Tchaikovsky..."). Though I don't know if anybody now would have recognised it even if I had started there.

Fiction books
Frances Hodgson Burnett. The Secret Garden (e) (re-read)
Kenneth Grahame, GMW Wemyss, Markham Shaw Pyle. The Annotated Wind in the Willows, for adults and sensible children (or, possibly, children and sensible adults) (e)
Josephine Tey. A Shilling for Candles

In progress
Terry Pratchett. The Fifth Elephant (e) (re-read)

Non-fiction books
Pauline Scudamore. Spike

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

Top of the to-read pile
Michael Troughton. Patrick Troughton

1. The opening night of Oliver! went well, though not without a few hiccups.

We got the feature photo on the front page of the Saturday paper, and more photos inside accompanied by a basic write-up. No review; the chap who's been covering the theatre beat for the local paper has moved on (which is a pity, because he wrote proper reviews and I was looking forward to seeing what he made of it), so the paper only sent a photographer to the dress-and-press and then had someone back at the office write the accompaniment for the photos. Which may explain how they managed to relocate the show to a different theatre a fair way across town from the one it's actually in...


2. I recently rewatched "Curious Jarod", which has always been one of my favourite episodes of The Pretender. It still is, but this time around it struck me that it was an example of one of the patterns that the Bechdel Test exists to encourage awareness of. It has an unusually large number of female characters for an episode of The Pretender, in a range of ages, ethnicities, and social positions -- and not once do we see any of them interact with each other, even the ones who are said to be co-workers or otherwise have interacted off-screen. They're all on separate spokes off the hub of the male lead character. By contrast, most of the male characters in the episode have at least one conversation with at least one other male character who isn't the lead.


3. In other old TV news, I've finished watching my way through the World War II-set drama series Enemy at the Door, which I got on DVD after lost_spook posted about it. I enjoyed it a lot, if "enjoyed" is the right word for a series which is all about moral dilemmas and compromises and features a large number of unhappy endings.

Since I raised the subject already, I can't remember whether it passed the Bechdel Test; there are a fair number of female characters, and they often have conversations with each other, but the ones that come to mind are about husbands or sons or boyfriends. But it does pass capriuni's disability representation test: one of the recurring characters, Helen Porteous, is in a wheelchair, and although the initial impetus for introducing her is clearly to give her son someone to worry about, she's depicted as a character in her own right, with her own wants and needs that never include the stock disabled character motivations of Death, Revenge, or Cure.


4. For anyone who might be interested, Kim Newman's next book has been announced as Angels of Music, a 19th-century take-off of Charlie's Angels with the Paris Opera Ghost as Charlie, the daroga as Bosley, and a line-up of Angels that includes Christine Daaé, Trilby O'Ferrall, and Irene Adler. It will presumably incorporate in some fashion the short story with that premise Newman wrote a while back, in which the Angels of Music were pitted against the Countess Cagliostro and an army of Dr Coppélius's mechanical dolls.


5. And in what seems to be becoming a tradition, another recommendation for Batman fic from the usual source: Reviving a Tomb, in which Selina Kyle meets Bruce Wayne and Batman meets Catwoman.

1. Last night (Friday) we had a showcase night at the Rep Club, with members performing songs from various musicals -- ending, of course, with a couple from the upcoming production of Oliver!. I got called on to perform "Reviewing the Situation", which was a bit nerve-wracking, particularly since at the point where it was added to the program we hadn't actually got up to it in rehearsals. I'd been practicing it at home, but never with someone else accompanying, and it's the kind of song where that can make a difference. I did manage to get in some practice with the showcase night's accompanist, and in the event it went off well. The other performances were also good, and all in all it was a fun night.


2. Three weeks until Oliver! opens, which puts us into the traditional period for worrying about whether the whole thing will come together in time. We still haven't had any rehearsals with the pit orchestra yet, for one thing. I suspect the big test might be in about a week, when we start doing the head-to-tail run-throughs, and we find out how much the children still remember of Act One.


3. My current favorite author of DC superhero fanfic strikes again. The title of this one is Arm Candy, and the summary is: Where Bruce Wayne goes, models follow. It's almost a joke, the way he wears them like watches, girls too young for him hanging off his arms. It's a wonder he can even tell them apart. Both are ironic.


4. I did a piece of adulting recently that I was quite proud of. The venetian blinds on one of my windows weren't staying up, and I figured out that some of the brackets that held them in place had been twisted out of shape. I found a shop that sold replacement brackets, installed them, and re-hung the blinds all by myself. I even dealt calmly and collectedly with the part where I learned why the original installer had drilled two holes for one of the brackets, which I did by inadvertantly screwing the bracket into the wrong hole first and discovering, as the original installer presumably had, that when it was placed there it got in the way of the mechanism for raising and lowering the blinds.


5. The local high school's big production of the year was the musical Hairspray. I went along, and it was one of the most entertaining nights out I've had in a while.

(One thing I was a bit worried about going in was how they were going to handle the fact that a significant subset of the characters are African-American, a group that isn't represented in large numbers in these parts. Apparently, this is not an uncommon problem; there was actually a message in the show programme from the authors of the show saying that they encouraged high school productions to find creative solutions to it -- ie., absolutely not blackface -- and asked the audience to get into the spirit of the thing. In the event, what this production did was have all the white characters played by white actors and all characters who are people of colour played by actors who are people of colour, if not necessarily the colour originally intended. That seemed like a reasonable compromise.)

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.
 

Fiction books
Lionel Bart. Oliver!
Lois McMaster Bujold. Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen (e)
Brian Clevinger, Scott Wegener. Atomic Robo and the Ring of Fire (e)
T Kingfisher. The Raven and the Reindeer (e)
Tim Powers. On Stranger Tides (e) (re-read)
Manly Wade Wellman. The Beyonders (e)

In progress
Terry Pratchett. Soul Music (e) (re-read)

Non-fiction books in progress
Harley Granville-Barker. Prefaces to Shakespeare: Hamlet

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

Top of the to-read pile
William Shakespeare. Hamlet

Fiction books
Neil Gaiman, Yoshitako Amano. Sandman: The Dream Hunters
Kim Newman. The Hound of the D'Urbervilles
Kim Newman. Jago

Non-fiction books
(collection). Chicks Dig Time Lords: A Celebration of Doctor Who by the Women Who Love It

In progress
Barbara Sher, Barbara Smith. I Could Do Anything If I Only Knew What It Was

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

Top of the to-read pile
Marianne de Pierres. Nylon Angel

Fiction books
Stephen Dedman. The Art of Arrow Cutting (re-read)
Stephen Dedman. Shadows Bite
Dale Estey. A Lost Tale
Geary Gravel. Batman: Mask of the Phantasm - The Animated Movie
Sharon Lee, Steve Miller. Fledgling
Shirley Rosseau Murphy. The Catswold Portal

In progress
Leo Tolstoy. War and Peace

Non-fiction books
(none)

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

Top of the to-read pile
Terry Pratchett. Nation