pedanther

. 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.

1. How is it only today that I learn that Groot, the large tree-like alien in the new Marvel movie, Guardians of the Galaxy, is played, or at least voiced, by the same actor who voiced the title character in The Iron Giant? This is important information!


2. I've finished playing through the storyline in Lego Marvel Super Heroes, which leaves the part of the game that involves wandering around Manhattan finding all the side quests: foiling bank robberies, helping citizens in distress, and so on. The "helping citizens in distress" bits range from appropriately superheroic to things like finding lost pets and helping little old ladies cross the road. (Also, for some reason, at least two people having trouble getting a taxi to stop for them, the correct solution to which is apparently to steal a taxi and drive them to their destination oneself. Super heroic.)

[edit: I belatedly realise that you're probably supposed to use one of the passenger vehicles you get as a reward for other side quests. But finding the nearest taxi and stealing it is usually easier than remembering where your own vehicles are parked, anyway.]

One amusing aspect is that, because the sidequests don't take into account which character one happens to be playing at the moment -- the free play portion of the game lets you switch at will between any of the available characters, including villains, and to an extent encourages spending a little time as each of them to learn their capabilities -- the juxtapositions can sometimes be rather incongruous. My two favourite examples from my own playing are the time a little old lady calmly requested assistance from Spider-Man's nightmarish evil counterpart Venom, and the time the X-Men casually asked Magneto to help them repel an attack by his own League of Evil Mutants.


3. It took me a while to get around to seeing the second How to Train Your Dragon movie; maybe I should have left it a bit longer, because a few days after I saw it I found myself rewatching the first movie on TV. Oh well. I don't think anything was badly harmed by doing it that way around.


4. Since I mentioned that I have been unable to attend Toastmasters recently due to having something else on the same day, I have been to two Toastmasters meetings, though neither on my home club's usual day. One was at the new Gourmet club, which meets monthly over dinner; I enjoyed that, and intend to go again next month. The second was this weekend; there were a couple of higher-level officials in town to do club officer training for the three local clubs, so we had a combined meeting and potluck dinner with people attending from all three clubs. I ran Table Topics for the meeting, or as I announced it, Iron Chef Table Topics, in which each speaker is given a mystery ingredient and immediately has to spend two minutes talking about what meal they're going to prepare with that ingredient.


5. I've mentioned before that I enjoy cryptic crossword puzzles because a good cryptic clue can be satisfying in the same way as a really bad pun, and that sometimes I'll be stuck on a clue for a long time and then one day pick it up again and immediately see the answer. This one is a case in point:

Resort city is half a mile, pal, from Paris (5)

My favourite clue from the cryptic crossword I finished yesterday:
Lanes for rolling dish in navy kitchens (7,6)

Off to Perth for Swancon tomorrow. No internet access while I'm there, so I'll be even quieter than usual (and fall even further behind on reading my friendslist).

I've decided to enter the Art Show this year, with a picture derived from the series of bizarre Things I sketched for DrawMo last year, with titles like "The next big Thing", "A Thing of the past", and "The simple Things in life are often the best". I couldn't settle on which one I liked most, so I compiled five of them together and called it "A few of my favourite Things". Now I'm alternating between paranoia that it'll get destroyed on the trip and paranoia that it'll survive and everybody will hate it, but on the whole I'm feeling cautiously optimistic and glad I'm trying something new.


In other news, my favourite clue from a cryptic crossword I did yesterday:
Worries owls when they try to fix problems (15)