pedanther

. We weren't sure for a while if we were going to be able to have the usual family Christmas gathering, due to a health scare and some travel scheduling issues, but everyone made it in the end, and as far as I could tell everyone had a good time. It was indoors this year, to be out of the weather, and while we were waiting for everyone to arrive we decided to watch a movie to pass the time; after the disc for Disney's The Sword in the Stone (arguably at least Christmas-adjacent in a couple of places) turned out to be missing, we settled on Disney's Robin Hood (not really Christmassy, but you could probably do something with the theme of peace to men of good will and loving thy neighbour). One of the last arrivals seemed oddly intrigued by the choice of movie; when we got to the present-opening part of the proceedings it was revealed that he'd coincidentally chosen a Disney's-Robin-Hood themed present for another family member.


. I'm still only a few episodes into Bille August's TV adaptation of The Count of Monte Cristo, and struggling to muster enthusiasm to continue. My feeling is that it's trying too hard to be a Serious Literary Adaptation, and that none of the many credited writers have a knack for adventure and intrigue -- nor, unfortunately, for character motivation. The results are frequently implausible and, frankly, rather tedious. It's making me feel more kindly toward the old 1960s TV adaptation I watched a while ago, which was not without faults but many of them could be blamed on lack of budget and production time, which is not an excuse this version has. It's even making me feel more kindly toward the most recent film version; I often disagreed with the choices it was making, but at least it wasn't dull.


. My enthusiasm for playing Spirited Thief has waned. I'm still not finding the plot and dialogue engaging, and as I progress through it keeps adding new mechanisms in a way that I'm finding makes it more cluttered rather than more interestingly challenging. I've been having rather an off week all round, though, so I'll probably give it another go at some point when I'm feeling more generous.


. I was thinking about my mental state and time management, and it occurred to me that I hadn't touched the current jigsaw puzzle in nearly a month. So I went over to look at it, and was immediately reminded of all the reasons I'd been having an actively unpleasant time working on it. So now I've packed it away, and made a start on a puzzle I was given for my birthday.

* I've signed up for the Buzzword Reading Challenge, where each month there's a theme and a list of words and you read at least one book with one of those words in the title, because I thought it might give me an impetus to stretch myself a bit, or at least to get a few books out of the ever-growing to-read pile. The word list for January was "Who, What, When, Where, Why, or How", and the book I picked out of the to-read pile (which would also have done for February, March, August, or November) was The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making by Catherynne M Valente. The word list for February is "He, His, She, Hers, Me, Mine, You, Yours, We, Ours, etc.", and I'm having a second crack at Our Mutual Friend; so far it's going much better than the first attempt, which ran out of steam a few chapters in. (I saw bits of the TV version that featured Paul McGann and Keeley Hawes, just enough to have an inkling of the troubles that await the protagonists but not enough to know whether any of them get happy endings. Or, in the case of some of them, to have a clear idea whether I should want them to have happy endings.)


* Our production of All Together Now! went really well. After that I took a break and didn't do anything for the Christmas Show except come and watch one performance. We're currently in rehearsals for the first show of the new year, which is called Female Transport and is a drama set on a convict ship bound for Australia. I'm playing the ship's captain (which, come to think of it, is also what I did last time we had a play set on a convict ship bound for Australia).


* My walking routine has fallen in a bit of a hole since I was boasting about how well it was doing. Weirdly, it feels like the onset of summer did it more damage than winter did. You'd think longer days and less chance of rain would make it easier to go for a walk, but my work hours shifted in a way that made it harder to find time in the mornings, and by the time it cooled down in the evenings I often couldn't summon the energy. One thing that has recently given my exercise routine a lift is that I finally got around to digging the bicycle out of storage and getting it serviced, and now I'm riding it pretty regularly. (And yes, that's how the walking routine started too, but the bicycle lets me do more exercise in less time so I'm hoping it'll persist.)


* I signed up for Disney+ a few months ago so I could watch Loki while my friends were still talking about it, and then I watched What If...?, and re-watched Ant-Man (I had remembered it was a fun movie, but not just how much fun it was)... and now I've fallen into the same trap I always seem to fall into with streaming services, where the monthly fees rack up while I don't watch anything because I can't make up my mind what to watch next. I do want to watch Ant-Man and the Wasp, and I'm at least a bit interested in at least some parts of WandaVision and Hawkeye, and I intend to watch The Mandalorian at some point, and that's barely scratching the surface of what's available. But somehow it always seems like something for another day.


* Instead, I've been watching a bunch of stuff on Youtube. One thing I have been watching a lot of recently is the British game show Taskmaster, in which the competitors are given eccentric challenges ranging from the seemingly simple ("Eat this egg. Fastest wins.") to the more elaborate ("Create the most thrilling soap opera cliffhanger. You have one hour."). A lot of the entertainment comes from comparing the different approaches taken by the different competitors (you might not think there could be four wildly distinct ways to "Eat this egg", but there were). Another thing I've been enjoying is a series of reaction videos on medusacascade's channel, where she's watching Babylon 5 for the first time. It's great getting to watch somebody new discover the show, and while it's not quite the same thing as watching the series again myself, it's enough like it that I suspect it's taking up a "this is the show I'm currently watching" slot in my brain and might be part of why I'm not currently getting around to watching any new scripted drama series.

Fiction books
Lois McMaster Bujold. Penric's Travels (e)
Terry Pratchett. The Shepherd's Crown
Rafael Sabatini. Scaramouche (e)
Jean Webster. Daddy-Long-Legs (e)
Andy Weir. The Martian (e) (re-read)

In progress
(anthology). Batman Black and White, volume 2 (re-read)

In hiatus
Caroline Stevermer. The Glass Magician (e)

Non-fiction books
(none)

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

Top of the to-read pile
Rex Stout. Fer-de-Lance

I don't usually make any significant inroads into the Yuletide collection before reveals, but this year I was in need of distraction.

( Part one: The Big Episodic Crossovers: 2 works, 19 fandoms )

( Part two: Everything Else: 14 works, 11 fandoms )

. After about two years of playing Crypt of the NecroDancer on and off, I've finally beaten the fire-and-ice zone and unlocked the fourth and final zone of the game. At this rate, I may even get to the bit with the actual NecroDancer in before the end of the decade.


. The annual performing arts festival is on again. Last year, the vocal weekend was a bit sparse and the instrumental weekend was packed, so this year we've got the same adjudicator for both weekends so the entries can be spread out more evenly. Which was probably a good thing, because we've had so many entries this year that even spread out evenly there's no space for any workshops; I can't imagine how we'd have managed if we'd tried to fit all the instrumental entries on one weekend. Unfortunately, this hasn't extended to the drama section, which has been cancelled due to lack of entries for another year running.

One of the highlights of the mostly vocal weekend was the junior character vocal section, where two of the entries were songs from a revue I hadn't previously heard of called How to Eat Like a Child. The songs themselves were hilarious, and they got really good performances, with a level of acting we don't often get in the junior character vocal section, which sometimes seems like it's just a parade of small children whose attempt at characterisation stops at being dressed like a Disney princess. (This year, apart from the How to kids, we had two Pocahontases and a Cinderella, but to be fair they did a bit of acting too.)


. The Rep Club's production of Away opens two weekends from now, which means we're currently in the "couldn't be worse / will it ever be right" phase of the process where everybody's worrying about whether their lines will stick in their memory, especially the guy who just got cast last week after another actor pulled out, and there are still parts of the set being built and we've only really rehearsed the final scene once. But I'm confident it's going to pull together at the eleventh hour, the way these things usually do.


. The other local amateur theatre group that isn't the Rep Club is putting on Little Shop of Horrors. Between the performing arts festival and Away there's exactly one performance I can make it to, and for a while it was looking like I might not be able to make it to that one either. I'm looking forward to it; Little Shop of Horrors is usually a good time, and this production has been getting good word of mouth.


. I've been vaguely aware for years of Goodbye, Mr Chips, James Hilton's novel about a retired schoolteacher looking back on his life, but only recently got around to reading it. It's a charming book, and I can see why it was popular. One thing I wasn't expecting is that, because Chips's career spans the decades up to and including the 1910s, quite a few of his anecdotes about schoolboys he's known end with him remembering that the boy in question died in the First World War. Quite a lot of people die in the course of the book, actually, though I suppose that's a risk you take in a story that spans eighty years, and somehow it never quite disturbs the mood.

Fiction books
Ben Aaronovitch. Lies Sleeping (e)
John Masefield. The Box of Delights (re-read)
John Masefield. The Midnight Folk (re-read)
Edith Pargeter. Sunrise in the West
Terry Pratchett. Thud (e) (re-read)

Picture books
Richard Byrne. Millicent and Meer

Non-fiction books in progress
Stephen Curtis. Staging Ideas

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

Top of the to-read pile
Terry Pratchett. Wintersmith

1. The travelling exhibition Let Me Be Myself - The Life Story of Anne Frank is in town for a month. Having been to see it, I'm a bit bemused that it's come to rest in the town's art gallery when we also have a museum that hosts travelling exhibitions, and I would have classed this as a historical presentation rather than an artistic one. It could be just that it was the gallery who had the exhibition space free at the relevant time, but I could be missing something. Apart from the historical material about Anne Frank and the world she lived and died in, there's a section devoted to reminding visitors that prejudice and discrimination continue to be live issues, with members of today's youth talking about their experiences of being discriminated against on the basis of race, religion, disability, or gender non-conformity.


2. The announcement of the new Doctor weirded me out a bit when I realised that the new actor is younger than me. (Matt Smith is too, but that didn't bother me because he seems young. But I still reflexively assume that anybody who seems like a responsible adult is older than me until proven otherwise.)

Apart from that, my reaction to the announcement is pretty much what it usually is at this stage, which is that I've never seen anything this person has been in and won't have a solid opinion on whether it's good casting until I've actually seen the new Doctor in action.


3. Since I mentioned last entry that I had hopes for the Doctor Who season finale, I should probably report on how that turned out, which is that I was disappointed. To be honest, I was pretty much expecting to be disappointed, because I know Steven Moffat's thing with two-parters is always to send the second part shooting off in a completely different direction, I just didn't say so because I was hoping it wouldn't happen if I didn't say it. But it did go shooting off in a different direction, and sidelined most of what I'd found interesting about part one. There was also the problem that it sidelined what I'd found most interesting about the season as a whole -- after a season where the interesting thing was Bill and the Doctor interacting, and the business with Missy felt like a pasted-on afterthought in most episodes, the finale is built around the Doctor and Missy and it's Bill who's left feeling like an afterthought. Looking back, I reckon that's been a recurring thing with Moffat's version of Who; he's brought us some amazing individual stories, but he's never been terribly good at making the season-long arc work.


4. The improv group has not collapsed yet.


5. I am looking forward to the DuckTales reboot.

Fiction books
Terry Pratchett. The Fifth Elephant (e) (re-read)

In progress
Arthur Conan Doyle. The Case Book of Sherlock Holmes (e)
Sharon Lee, Steve Miller. The Gathering Edge (e)
Terry Pratchett. The Truth (e) (re-read)

Non-fiction books in progress
Michael Troughton. Patrick Troughton

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

Top of the to-read pile
Kai Ashante Wilson. A Taste of Honey

Fiction books
Katherine Addison. The Goblin Emperor (e)
Agatha Christie. The Murder at the Vicarage
J Sheridan Le Fanu. Wylder's Hand (e)
Ellis Peters. City of Gold and Shadows (e)
Ellis Peters. Rainbow's End (e)
Terry Pratchett. The Last Continent (e) (re-read)
Anthony Price. The Memory Trap (e)
Anthony Price. A Prospect of Vengeance (e)

In progress
Terry Pratchett. Carpe Jugulum (e) (re-read)

Non-fiction books in progress
Pauline Scudamore. Spike

Abandoned
Gregory Mone. The Truth About Santa Claus

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

Top of the to-read pile
T L Garrison. The Twisted Blackmailer