pedanther

. I've been making a few changes to my daily routine, having identified a couple of factors that were messing with my ability to go to bed at a sensible hour. It's been working pretty well so far; I've been in bed within half an hour of my target time most days this week. There were even a strange couple of days where I was all ready to go to bed at least an hour earlier than the time I've been aiming at – only to find my brain insisting that it wasn't time for bed yet and finding things to do until I reached the target time.


. After we finished up our production of Guys and Dolls, I decided to read some of the Damon Runyon short stories that inspired it, to see how much had been changed in the process. "The Idyll of Miss Sarah Brown", which was the basis of the main plot thread, is recognisably the same story, albeit with a twist that the musical chose not to use (and without a whole bunch of complications the musical added to stretch it out to two acts). After that, things get more distant; "Pick the Winner" has a familiar set-up but a very different ending, while "Blood Pressure" has a familiar scene or two set in a completely unrelated plot, and by the time I got down to "The Hottest Guy in the World" and "The Snatching of Bookie Bob", the only things they really had in common with the musical were some of the character names. (And there are some things in the stories that I'm glad the musical doesn't have in common; it's been a long while since I read a story with as much casual antisemitism and misogyny as "Blood Pressure", and I hope it's a long while before I read another.)


. In other reading, I decided I should make some progress on some of the other reading challenges I've been neglecting since I started doing the book chain, so I read The Purloined Poodle by Kevin Hearne, which was a March pick for the Random challenge and also let me check off the April prompt ("animals") in the themed challenge. I got The Purloined Poodle as part of an ebook bundle that included something else I wanted; it's apparently a spin-off from an urban fantasy series I haven't read. (And, based on this sample, probably won't read; the main characters were fairly entertaining in a small dose but I think I've had enough of them now.) The spin-off sees two of the characters deciding to take it upon themselves to solve a mystery – which got us off to a bad start, because when it comes to stories about complete amateurs playing detective, I prefer the ones where the character has to turn detective because they have a personal stake in the solution of the mystery over the ones where the character is just being a busybody, and this falls too much toward the busybody end of the scale for my liking. I enjoyed it more once they'd located the culprit and the story shifted from amateur mystery-solving to a more straightforward sort of adventure story as they resolve the situation (which I suppose might be a sign that I'd like the main series more than the spin-off, but I'm still not interested enough in the characters to really want to find out). I did laugh out loud at least once, at the bit where Oberon the talking dog reviews The Great Gatsby on the criteria of things interesting to dogs.


. At board game club this week, we played Winter Rabbit again, having determined that we may have misunderstood how an important mechanic of the game worked when we played it the first time. I'm not sure we've got it right yet; on our second game, we won the scenario in half the time the game allowed for the attempt, which seems unlikely to be the intended experience.


. Went to the cinema again this week, to see an observational documentary, The Cats of Gokogu Shrine.


. Every now and again, there's an announcement of a big Ingress meet-up somewhere in the world, and I stopped bothering to read the announcements ages ago because it was annoying reading about the fun people were going to have somewhere that's nowhere near me. ...which is how I came to miss the announcement, a few months ago, that the next meetup is going to be in Perth. I only found out this week when another player in my faction messaged me to ask if I was planning to go. I haven't definitely ruled it out, but I'm feeling reluctant; it would mean making travel plans, and getting time off work, and all that sort of thing, in order to go and be sociable with a crowd of people I don't know and might completely fail to get on with. (The prospect of collecting another month-long respiratory infection is also weighing in the scales somewhat.) I thought I might be able to encourage myself by finding something else I wanted to do in Perth around the same time, so I could be guaranteed to get something out of the trip, but everything else I might be tempted to go to Perth for that month is either two weeks earlier or two weeks later.

Our production of Guys and Dolls opened this week, and has been playing to good-sized and appreciative audiences. My American accent, which had been commuting between New York, Chicago, and some other place that might have been New Jersey, finally settled into place in time for the final dress rehearsal.


This week I retired the Fitbit. The display screen has been on the way out for some time; at first, it was illegible in sunlight, which was annoying from the viewpoint of wanting to know my progress while I was out and exercising but otherwise supportable, but by the end it had got to the point that I had to shut myself in a room with the blinds drawn and the light off to be able to read it at all.

During the time I've been using the Fitbit, Fitbit-the-company was bought out by Google and I have some concerns about how things have been developing since, so I decided to look elsewhere for a new fitness tracker. In the end, for a variety of reasons of which some are more sensible than others, I opted for the Samsung Galaxy Fit3, which I'm liking well so far. (One thing I particularly liked about it was that I could use a stockpile of reward points that was otherwise just going to expire to get it for only $30.) It's actually a slightly better fit for my wrist than the Fitbit was, and the screen is nicely legible in all kinds of light levels. I like the Fit3's version of "maybe it's time to get up and stretch" reminders better, too.


I follow several Youtube channels whose thing is gameplay videos of computer games designed to be played by multiple players (either competitively or co-operatively). Usually there's a variety of games represented, with some channels focussing on new releases and others being more into old favourites, but it happened twice this week that a recently released or recently updated game showed up on two of the channels at the same time.

One was Make Way!, a racing game where the players build the race track as they go along, which looked like it would be fun to play with the right group of people but could be a bit difficult to follow as a spectator.

The other was Split Fiction, a two-player co-operative game, and I don't have any opinion of the gameplay because the video I watched included the opening cinematic that sets up the premise, which was so stupid that I got bored and quit the video just as it was getting to the playable part. (The stupidity was a mixture of clichéd characters and situations - it's the kind of story that features a sinister machine called The Machine, with audible capital letters - and a few bits of blatant plot convenience. The one that really sticks in my head is that one of the protagonists is presented as being suspicious of the situation she's entering, but doesn't get around to demanding answers about what's going on until after she's compliantly gone through the induction process and it's basically too late to avoid getting forced to take part; it's particularly jarring because the induction includes changing out of her own clothes into a jumpsuit with all kinds of mysterious electronic attachments, which if I was her would have been the point where I refused to go any further without an explanation.)


I didn't go to Parkrun on Saturday, or board game club on Monday, because my sleep patterns had been thrown off and I wasn't feeling well. I did get a good amount of other exercise in the course of the week, with several long walks and bike rides.


I finished reading The Friendship Factor; I don't have anything I want to say about it that I didn't already say last week.

I've already posted about the run-up to the election, and about the books I read this week.


The Randomize Your TBR book challenge has continued to assist me in reducing my to-read collection by methods other than reading. When I went to pick the random book for March, the first random selection was a book that I realised I was no longer interested in reading, so I moved it straight to the box of books that I'm going to dispose of one of these days, and tried again until I got a book I was interested in reading. On a separate occasion, I had a go at one of the bonus prompts, which says to select a random book only after spending half an hour going through the to-read and pulling out books that have been there for a while and you're not interested in anymore. I spent the length of a podcast on it and moved another dozen books to the disposal box.


We had another public holiday on Monday. In the morning, I did some yard work that involved being up on a ladder, which wasn't as terrifying as I expected. (I'm usually very bad at being up on ladders, because my sense of balance gets wonky. One of the things that seemed to help on this occasion was that I was wearing good shoes that gave me a firm grip on the ladder.)

In the afternoon, there was another long afternoon session of the board game club. We played Eclipse again, and then a game of Dominion.


At the Rep Club, we did the first full run-throughs of both acts of Guys and Dolls this week. There were definitely places that needed improvement, but on the whole they went more smoothly than I'd expected. (I nevertheless sang the traditional Three Weeks Song at a moment when it seemed apposite.)

It's getting close to the dress rehearsal stage, so I went and got a hair cut and have shaved my beard off. This got a variety of reactions when I showed up for the next rehearsal, running the full spectrum from no reaction at all to "who is this stranger?". One of the other cast members remarked that she thought this was the first time she'd ever seen me clean-shaven, which I don't think is quite true, because we were both in another show a couple of years ago where I'm sure I remember that I was clean-shaven, but I think it is true that there hasn't been another time in the intervening years where I haven't had facial hair of one variety or another. I wasn't sure I recognised the person in the mirror myself at first, though later in the day I caught sight of myself in the mirror and instinctively smiled like someone meeting an old friend whose face one hasn't seen in a while.


I'm keeping up with my exercise, and have been on several long and interesting bike rides.

Inside Job, my random book for January, is one of an ebook bundle of Subterranean Press chapbooks I got a while back. It has a striking and atmospheric cover that completely fails to convey the tone of the contents; if I'd known it was a comedy, I might have skipped it, because historically I have not got on with Connie Willis's comedies. I didn't get on with this one, either; there's potential in the premise of a professional skeptic and debunker being forced to come to terms with two apparent impossibilities, but Willis's approach didn't work for me.

I also read a Bony novel, The Bachelors of Broken Hill, which I have mixed feelings about, and have started reading Down and Out in Purgatory: The Collected Stories of Tim Powers.


The annual Three Sentence Ficathon is on at threesentenceficathon. I have consequently written six sentences of fic already this year, which is more than I wrote in all of 2024. (It might actually be seven sentences: I had to jam two sentences together to fit one of my responses into three sentences, and the result just doesn't flow right and bothers me every time I look at it. I'm thinking of changing it back to four sentences when I put it on AO3, if I get around to doing that.)


Board game club has started up again for the year. This week I played Deception: Murder in Hong Kong (I was the murderer twice, and got caught very quickly the first time but managed to eliminate the inconvenient witness and win the round the second time) and Mayan Curse (which I enjoyed and would like to play again, though I'm iffy about the way it uses some old-fashioned tropes).


I've signed up for a free trial subscription to AVCX, an online crossword thing that publishes a few new crosswords each week. I heard about it independently in two different places recently (one of the compilers was a guest on the Lateral podcast, and it also got plugged on a puzzle-related Youtube channel I follow), so I decided to take that as a sign to check it out. I'm enjoying the puzzles so far, and have been finding them to be at a satisfactory level of difficulty. (Not counting this week's cryptic crossword, which I've only got about three answers on so far because I've forgotten most of what I used to know about how cryptic clues work and haven't got around to brushing up yet. And I seem to recall I did better at cryptics when they were on paper and I could doodle possible solutions in the margins.)


Dance rehearsals have started for Guys and Dolls. I've had an easy time of it so far; my character moves around in time to the music, but doesn't do anything that rises to the level of Dancing.


I spent the entire week continuing to not play XCOM 2. I did occasionally find myself thinking that my mental state had improved and maybe I could have another go at it, but usually there was something I wanted to get out of the way first, or it was late enough in the evening to be too late to be starting a new campaign.

. 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.