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.

Fiction books
(anthology). The Witch Who Came in From the Cold: Season One (e)
Ben Aaronovitch. The Masquerades of Spring (e)
Pamela Freeman. Victor's Quest
Tamora Pierce. Cold Fire (e) (re-read)
Tamora Pierce. The Fire in the Forging (e) (re-read)
Tamora Pierce. The Healing in the Vine (e) (re-read)
Tamora Pierce. The Magic in the Weaving (e) (re-read)
Tamora Pierce. Magic Steps (e) (re-read)
Tamora Pierce. The Power in the Storm (e) (re-read)
Tamora Pierce. Shatterglass (e)
Tamora Pierce. Street Magic (e) (re-read)
Rafael Sabatini. The Sword of Islam
Shelby Van Pelt. Remarkably Bright Creatures (e)
Evangeline Walton. The Island of the Mighty

In progress
Hanan al-Shayk. Women of Sand and Myrrh
Arthur Conan Doyle. The Valley of Fear (e) (re-read)

Abandoned
(anthology). Tremontaine: Season One (e)

Picture books
Lee Fox, Mitch Vane. Jasper McFlea Will Not Eat His Tea
Julia Patton. The Very Very Very Long Dog
Eve Titus, Paul Galdone. Anatole

Non-fiction books
Marc Abrahams. This Is Improbable
Andrew Ford. Try Whistling This: Writings on Music (e)
Patrick Radden Keefe. Say Nothing (e)

Non-fiction books in progress
Rosaleen Love. Reefscape

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

Top of the to-read pile
Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Herland