pedanther

. I cleaned the bathroom, an event that doesn't occur as often as I might like. Part of it is that cleaning the basin-countertop means finding somewhere to temporarily put all the stuff that usually sits on there, a problem for which I've yet to find a convenient solution. I also have a suspicion that my brain deliberately delays until there's enough dust and whatever that cleaning it off will produce a satisfyingly dramatic visual change; wiping a slightly dusty surface to achieve a slightly less dusty surface just isn't the same.

. At board game club, we played Betrayal at House on the Hill, using my copy of the game; I specifically suggested it because I wanted to test something out. ( Read more... )

. At work, it's been another week dominated by One of Those Clients. I got to vent about it at the end of the week to my siblings, which helped.

. Separately from the book chain, this week I also read Things Unborn by Eugene Byrne. I got it on special years ago, having read and enjoyed some of his short stories, and then proceeded to not read it on account of the front cover suggesting a book I wasn't in the mood for. ( It turns out that the cover is a complete tonal mismatch for the actual contents of the book )

. I'm also still working through A Choice of Catastrophes. As the focus narrows from the end of the universe down to merely the end of life on Earth, I'm increasingly recognising signs of the book's age; it's slightly older than me, and there's been a lot of scientific discovery in my lifetime. One of the chapters I read this week was about the risk of a large asteroid impact, and there's not a word about the dinosaur-killer asteroid, which was only just starting to be floated as a hypothesis when the book was published and didn't become widely accepted until years after.

1. To anyone I haven't already, Season's Greetings! (Or General Well-Wishings, if you're one of the people who don't find anything remarkable about this time of the year.) And a happy new b'ak'tun!

2. I got some nice presents for Christmas this year, but none of those really great surprises that was exactly what you would have wanted if you'd expected to get it. I did manage to hit the target a couple of times in my gifts to others, which was just as good. And it was really nice just to get to hang out with the family for a while. (At one point we were watching Fantasia, and the narrator asserted that the dinosaurs were mostly peaceful herbivores apart from a few gangsters and bullies like T. rex. A few minutes later,

poinketh remarked out of the blue that he could picture a T. rex rocking a fedora, but he was having trouble figuring out how it worked the Tommy gun.)

3. There has been some good stuff in the Yuletide fic exchange this year.

* I particularly liked If the Fates Allow, which is the one for anybody who's suspected that Captain America: The First Avenger (2011, dir. Joe Johnston) is set in the same twentieth century as The Rocketeer (1991, dir. Joe Johnston). Though not so much if your interest is in blazing action sequences; the focus here is on the quiet moments between the adventures (which, given that time takes its toll, are not all happy).

* The Butterfly Also Casts a Shadow is another good one for fans of underappreciated retro action movies of the 1990s, in this case the 1994 version of The Shadow.

* On a different note, What You Make of It is an epistolatory fic, consisting of emails sent between Terry Pratchett's Johnny Maxwell and his friend Yo-less during their gap year after high school. Johnny is working at a dusty old second-hand book shop that never sells anything, which since he's Johnny turns out less boring than it sounds, while Yo-less is volunteering on a marine biology expedition and making new discoveries in the area of human biology.

4. Have I mentioned we finished our run of Snow White's Pizza Palace? Well, that was a thing that happened. I enjoyed it, and I think I'll try doing more comedy next year. The first production in the new year will be a Season of Short Plays (we're officially not calling them "one-acts" any more, because informal market research has suggested that people think that means there's only one actor). I won't be involved with that, because it overlaps with preparations for the National Band Championships, which the band is going to take a shot at because they're on this side of the continent for a change.

5. Haven't seen The Hobbit Part One or Les Mis yet, because the people I was planning to see it with are out of town. (I suppose I could see Wreck-It Ralph by myself, since the person I was hoping to see it with was

poinketh, and I know he won't be back before it closes.) Have seen the Doctor Who Christmas special, and wasn't super-impressed; it was enjoyable enough and had some really good moments, but I'm not sure it all held together, and there are worrying signs that Steven Moffat still hasn't remembered that when people say the hero of the show is a clever, unpredictable trickster figure, they're not talking about him.

Earlier this month I read a novel by S. M. Stirling in which the heroes get around on dinosaur-back, controlling the dinosaurs by means of electrodes planted in their brains to make them happy when they go where the controller wants them to go and unhappy when they try to go somewhere the controller doesn't want them to go. I admit it's kind of a cool concept, but I felt a bit uncomfortable that none of the characters seemed at all worried about the ethical considerations.

Today, I read a novel by Roger Zelazny, twenty-some years older, in which there is incidentally a character who rides a dinosaur around in a similar fashion - and he gets called on it, by somebody who isn't impressed by the justifications he offers (which are much the same as those tendered in Stirling's novel).

It wasn't the only reason I enjoyed the Zelazny much more than the Stirling, but it was definitely appreciated.

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