pedanther

. I recently got an achievement in Duolingo for having been doing the lessons continually for an entire year. At this point, I'm not sure I'll ever have a practical use for having German as a second language, but it gives my brain exercise and I learn fun things from time to time like the existence of a German expression that translates as something like "He's missing a few cups from the cupboard".


. The production of Hello Dolly has concluded successfully; up next is a season of short plays. The one I'm in is an absurdist comedy about a married couple having a very trying day: he's been fired, and she's murdered somebody but can't remember who it was.


. My morning walking routine has become somewhat less regular since winter brought in the cold dark rainy mornings, but it still happens often enough to have a claim to existence. My most common route these days is a lap around the outside of the racecourse, part of it on a nice wooded walking trail dotted with war memorials that I keep telling myself one day I'll actually stop to look at. If I'm feeling ambitious I'll widen the loop a bit and continue on to the north end of the walking trail, at the park with the sound shell where they do concerts in the summer. Most days it's pretty deserted at that time of the morning, but one time there was a car boot sale on, and one morning this week they were setting up for what looked like an inter-school sports day.


. Something else that's been getting less regular and less frequent lately is our roleplaying sessions, due to difficulty getting everyone's schedules lined up. At our most recent session, one of the other players turned out at the last minute to be unable to join in, so we couldn't continue the campaign, but everybody who did turn up had been looking forward to getting some roleplaying in, so I volunteered to run a one-shot session of Lasers and Feelings, a mini RPG whose design features include being able to be run with no preparation whatever. There were some rough patches, but everybody had fun.


. I caved and got Disney+ about halfway through the run of Loki so that I could keep up with what friends were talking about on Tumblr without worrying about spoilers, and I don't regret it. Now that I have it, I'll probably circle back and watch WandaVision at some point; I still don't much care about the MCU versions of Wanda or Vision or especially about the MCU version of their relationship, but apparently it's also got Darcy Lewis and Monica Rambeau in it and I want to find out what they're doing these days. Black Widow I went to see in the cinema, since I'm fortunate enough to have that as an option and even here where cinema tickets aren't cheap it cost literally half as much to see it on the big screen with other people than it would have to watch it on a little screen by myself at home.

Fiction books
Sharon Lee, Steve Miller. Accepting the Lance (e)
Sharon Lee, Steve Miller. Agent of Change (e) (re-read)
Sharon Lee, Steve Miller. Carpe Diem (e) (re-read)
Sharon Lee, Steve Miller. Dragon Ship (e) (re-read)
Sharon Lee, Steve Miller. Fledgling (e) (re-read)
Sharon Lee, Steve Miller. Ghost Ship (e) (re-read)
Sharon Lee, Steve Miller. I Dare (e) (re-read)
Sharon Lee, Steve Miller. Plan B (e) (re-read)
Terry Pratchett. Snuff (e) (re-read)

In hiatus
Grant Allen. An African Millionaire: Episodes in the Life of the Illustrious Colonel Clay (e)

Non-fiction books in progress
Christopher Lascelles. Pontifex Maximus (e)

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

Top of the to-read pile
Tim Powers. Medusa's Web

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
Debra Doyle, James D Macdonald. The Price of the Stars (e)
Elliot S Maggin. Last Son of Krypton
Elliot S Maggin. Miracle Monday
Edith Pargeter. Afterglow and Nightfall
Edith Pargeter. The Dragon at Noonday
Edith Pargeter. The Hounds of Sunset
Annelie Wendeberg. The Devil's Grin (e)
Annelie Wendeberg. The Fall (e)
Annelie Wendeberg. The Journey (e)

In progress
Terry Pratchett. Wintersmith (e) (re-read)

Non-fiction books in progress
Stephen Curtis. Staging Ideas
Steve Lindstrom. CSS Refactoring (e)

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

Top of the to-read pile
Terry Pratchett. Making Money

Fiction books
(none completed)

In progress
James Goss. Now We Are Six Hundred
Sharon Lee, Steve Miller. Neogenesis (e)
Terry Pratchett. The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents (e) (re-read)

Non-fiction books
Randall Munroe. What If?

Non-fiction books in progress
Grant Morrison. Supergods

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

Top of the to-read pile
Terry Pratchett. Night Watch

1. The Multifandom Drabble Exchange is running again this year. Admin posts are on Dreamwidth at multifandomdrabble. The nomination period for fandoms has just started. I did it last year and enjoyed it; it's a nice low-pressure fic exchange where all you have to write is 100 words. Simple, right? (This is of course a trick question: it's often very difficult to fit everything you want to say into 100 words. But I did enjoy it.)


2. Our production of The Farndale Avenue Housing Estate Townswomen's Guild Operatic Society production of The Mikado opens this week. I was worried about it for a while (Four weeks, you rehearse and rehearse / Three weeks, and it couldn't be worse), but it's been really coming together over the last few rehearsals, so I think we'll survive.


3. I didn't mention that while our production was in rehearsals, the club also put on its annual season of one-act plays. There were two this year, titled "Harry's Bounty" and "Kayak", which were both excellent. (Though I did think that "Harry's Bounty" was one scene too long; the final scene doesn't say anything new, just repeat explicitly things that had been strongly implied already, and loses the strong ending the play would have had if it had finished on what is currently the second-last scene.) Both plays were built around relationships of parents and children, and the director of "Harry's Bounty" is the mother of the director of "Kayak"; they were planning at one point to advertise the season under the title "Mother and Son", but they got a lot of feedback that people were getting confused and thinking that meant there would be a stage version of the popular sitcom.


4. This year's big production by the local high school that does a big annual production was Disney's Beauty and the Beast. The actor playing Belle was also the lead in last year's Hairspray; she and the actor playing the Beast were also the duo who took top honours at the drama eisteddfod last year. They both did very well in the roles, although I felt that the actor playing the Beast did better at bringing out the Beast's hidden humanity than at portraying his surface beastliness. In this he was not being given much assistance by his costume, which tended toward the minimal for logistical reasons. The actors playing Gaston and Lefou were also very good. Seeing how the stage version was adapted from the animated film was interesting; I liked how the animated furniture was handled. The songs added for the stage version are a mixed bunch; "Home" is excellent, others are good, and I cordially detest "A Change in Me": it has a nice enough tune but rubbish lyrics that lean too heavily on vague generalities and when it does get specific they're the wrong specifics. (Wikipedia informs me that it was added to the show late and in a hurry, which perhaps explains it.)


5. I'm finally filling a gap in my fannish experience and reading The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes, the final collection of Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories. It's not as easy to come by as the earlier books, because it's still covered by copyright so there isn't the same plenitude of cheap editions, and its reputation suggested that it wasn't particularly worth much effort in seeking out, so up until recently I'd only read a few of the stories that were reprinted in anthologies. (In fact I think "The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire", which was in a horror-themed anthology I read as a child, may have been the first actual Holmes story I ever read.) The stories aren't ACD's best work, and some of them give a distinct air of having been dashed off without much effort, but there are some good moments in there. (And some terrible ones: "The Adventure of the Creeping Man", which has a solution based on what I presume was cutting-edge scientific theory at the time, really hasn't aged well.) Of the ones I've got through so far, I think my favourite is "The Problem of Thor Bridge", which has some proper detectoring, some nice character work (including a character who is of a familiar type but turns out to be more complicated than he might have been in an earlier ACD story), and a solution I didn't already know and didn't find too easy to guess.

1. Our production of The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee opened this week. Everyone seems to be enjoying it so far. (Including us; not that we weren't enjoying it anyway, but it helps to be reminded how funny some of the bits are that had faded through over-familiarity.)


2. This weekend was the area final of the Toastmasters International Speech Contest and Evaluation Contest. I represented my club in the Evaluation Contest, and came second -- which came as a nice surprise, because I was pretty sure there were at least two other competitors who'd done better than me. My friend who represented the club in the International Speech Contest, with a speech about dealing with negative self-talk, was even more surprised to come first (but I wasn't, because it was clearly the best speech in the contest -- though I may be biased).


3. Now that rehearsals for Spelling Bee are over, I'll be able to start going to gaming group meetings again; I'm looking forward to it. Usually I just show up and see who's got a game that needs players, but this time I'm planning to suggest a few games of my own: Forbidden Island, which my brother gave me for Christmas, and Ingenious, which I gave myself for Christmas after getting hooked on the app version.


4. I've played a bit more Mass Effect since I last posted, and now know Garrus, Wrex, and Tali as more than just faces on Tumblr posts. I also, being me, managed to put my foot in my mouth with all three of them during their respective tell-me-about-your-backstory conversations. (No, that's not quite true; I did fumble things with Wrex and Garrus, but when I hacked off Tali I knew exactly what I was doing. Attempts to justify genocide make me prickly; who'd've guessed?)


5. Movie-wise, I have been to see Rogue One (I teared up at the end, in the good-heartwarming way not the bad-distressing way) and Moana (lots of fun).

Fiction books
Lois McMaster Bujold. The Curse of Chalion (re-read)
Lee Falk, Ray Moore. The Phantom: The Complete Newspaper Dailies volume 1
Gail Carson Levine. Fairest
Anne McCaffrey. The Ship Who Sang (e) (re-read)
Anthony Price. A New Kind of War (e)
John Scalzi. The End of All Things
John Scalzi. The Human Division
Ursula Vernon. Summer in Orcus (e)

In progress
Katherine Addison. The Goblin Emperor (e)
Terry Pratchett. The Last Continent (e) (re-read)

Non-fiction books In progress
Pauline Scudamore. Spike

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

Top of the to-read pile
Anthony Price. A Prospect of Vengeance

1. Oliver! opens on Friday. I've been singing the bridge section from "Another Op'nin', Another Show" a lot. One week - will it ever be right? Actually, we're doing pretty well, apart from a couple of scenes and a couple of crowd songs where the choreography could stand to be tightened a bit.

The junior contingent of the cast is doing pretty well on the stage, but is getting on a lot of nerves backstage. The last time we did Oliver!, about fifteen years ago, it was in a big modern theatre with a soundproofed backstage area and a separate room for the kids and their minders. For this production, we're back in our home theatre, which is older, smaller, and more rickety, so we're all sharing one green room and spending a lot of time trying out new variations on "Hey, pipe down, the audience will be able to hear you" in the hope that one of them will stick.

In the interests of full disclosure, I should mention that there was one scene that kept going wrong because somebody was getting their lines out in the wrong places, and when we dug the script out to check it turned out to be me. Whoops. Still, I'm pretty confident we've got that straightened out now.


2. At the gaming group this week, we played Talisman, subtitled "The Magical Quest Game". Well, we started playing; the designers took the "epic quest" brief very seriously, so it's not a quick play. Three and half hours later it was nearly time to pack up and nobody was close to winning, so when the first player died we decided that would have to do as an outcome and ended it there.

Each player picks a character out of a deck of about a dozen, each of which has varying strengths and weaknesses. (I was playing the Minstrel, who has high intelligence/magical ability, low physical strength, and a special ability that means that if he is attacked by a wild animal, instead of having to fight it he can try to charm it with his music, and if he succeeds it will follow him around and help him fight things he can't charm.) If you're not playing with a time limit, the rule is apparently that when your character is killed you get to pick another one and start again from the beginning (otherwise you'd be sitting around for ages waiting for someone else to win, which would be no fun).

The board is laid out in three concentric rectangles. The outermost area is the settled world, with towns and fields and forests, and the best places to stock up on weapons and armour and other equipment before setting out on the quest properly. Across a river is the middle area, which has more adventurous climates, like deserts and mountains, as well as the royal palace and the high temple, and a big sinister portal that leads into the mountain fastness that is the object of the quest. The innermost area has encounters with vampires, werewolves, Death itself, and another door that can only be opened with the eponymous talisman, and leads to the treasure everyone seeks.


3. I finally got around to seeing the caper film Now You See Me, which was very entertaining but I suspect is going to make less sense the more I think about it. (It's certainly a lot better constructed than The Illusionist, the last trick-ending movie featuring stage magicians I saw, but that's really not a high bar to clear.) I wish I'd gotten around to it before someone told me which character was the Fifth Horseman, because that's the kind of thing I enjoy trying to figure out for myself. I think I might have managed it; I'm pretty sure that even without knowing the answer in advance I would have ruled out three of the suspects by the time the endgame started, which would have narrowed the field considerably. (One of them gets ruled out for you at the end of the second act, another I think would have pinged my red herring detector from being pushed a bit too hard as Suspicious, and a third either can't be or must be the Fifth Horseman, depending on how much I-know-you-know one applies to the hints about the Fifth Horseman's motives, and I think I would have come down on the correct side.) But it would have been nice to find out.


4. It's not been a good month for my childhood, with the deaths of author Nicholas Fisk (Grinny, Monster Maker, et al.) and actor Alan Young (the definitive Scrooge McDuck, among many notable roles in a varied career).


5. This week's Batman fanfic rec: Unpaid Internship, in which there's less than an hour until a quarter of the earth's population meets explosive doom and Batman is carrying something that he's adamant isn't a baby.

1. Baen Books has recently released ebooks of Janet Kagan's novels Hellspark and Mirabile, and a collection of her short stories (including the Hugo-winner, "The Nutcracker Coup"). Hellspark is a mainstay of my collection of comfort reads, and I'm very much looking forward to making the acquaintance of Mirabile. The short stories, too; I've only read one up to now - "Standing in the Spirit", a heartwarming Christmas tale that wears its debt to Dickens on its sleeve without going down the well-worn "visited by three spirits" path.


2. Speaking of Dickens: Still rehearsing Oliver!. I think I'm managing to get the hang of Fagin's accent now. It seems to be largely a question of holding my tongue right. (Making a face like I smell something bad also seems to help.)


3. At the gaming group this week, the main thing I did was watch a group of people play X-Wing Miniatures. There were four people who wanted to play, so they set up a big square playing area, with each player starting on one side, and drew lots to see who would attack who. The result of the draw produced two battles going on separately in opposite corners of the playing area, and then the survivors of each battle took each other on. It started out with a wide variety of different ship types (including what I was told was the main ship from Rebels, which I still haven't seen), but in the end it came down to a couple of X-Wings vs a couple of TIE fighters.

After that we played a few rounds of Hobbit Love Letter (which is like Batman Love Letter apart from the obvious, and also with an extra card, The One Ring, which is worth 0 points except in one specific situation where it's the second most powerful card in the game) and then it was time to go home.


4. It tends to be the case with movies that either I'll see them in the first week they're in the cinema or the last, because it I don't have a great and specific desire to see a movie, I'll do my usual put-it-off-until-a-deadline-looms thing. (And then sometimes it happens that when the deadline's close enough to see there aren't any screenings left I can actually get to, and then I don't see the movie at all.) I'd been putting off going to see Zootopia until today's 1pm screening was absolutely my last chance, and likewise the new Jungle Book movie - also at 1pm. Faced with that decision, I realised that I didn't particularly want to see a new version of a movie that hadn't been that much like The Jungle Book in the first place, so I'm rereading the book instead and I went to see Zootopia.


5. The Australian election campaign's started, which means it's time to start hoarding and swapping links for informed voting. (If anyone spots a good run-down of this year's minor Senate parties, let me know, please?)

Vote Compass is available again for this election. If you don't know about it, it's a nifty application where you fill out a questionnaire about where you stand on the current hot public policy issues, and then it shows you where you are compared to the announced policies of the major parties. (I always turn out to be standing pretty much where I expected to be, but it's nice to know.)