pedanther

. On my second week of leave, I did more weeding, focussing on the plants growing up along the front of the house (and making it possible to walk from the front door to the car without having to dodge or step over any tall weeds). I also fixed a pantry door that had come off one of its hinges, and found a remedy for the sagging seat of the sofa.

. Some while back, I signed up to a literary serial Substack called Wildfell Weekly, which presented Anne Brontë's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. (It wasn't a fully chronological presentation like Dracula Daily; the first few posts were co-ordinated with the dates in the narrative, but then the narrative starts skipping weeks and months at a time - the full story takes place over the course of about a decade - so after that the posts settled down to one a week.) I kept up with it pretty well at first, but I got stuck around halfway through, when the Tenant's backstory starts being revealed (having gone in with just enough knowledge of the premise to dread where the story would go from there), and remained stuck while the serial continued on all the way to the end. Faced with the need to keep up my reading streak without resorting to actually starting The Female Man, I began reading individual chapters, and gradually built up steam and got all the way to the end. I'm glad I've read it now - it's secured Anne the position of my favourite Brontë - but I think perhaps the weekly serial wasn't the best way for me to have read it. (On the other hand, perhaps it was, seeing as the only other option appears to have been me never getting around to reading it at all.)

. During August, I got into a situation on Duolingo where I needed to complete all the daily challenges every day for the rest of the month in order to keep my streak of monthly medals. I've been gradually going off Duolingo anyway (which is partly how the situation arose), with a rising feeling that I'm not getting enough out of it to be worth all the ways it annoys me, so I decided that if I failed to get the August medal I would take it as a sign to walk away. At the end of the month, I irretrievably lost one of the daily challenges that I could easily have won, due to Duolingo not being clear about the requirements for completing the challenge; I decided that was definitely enough for me, and uninstalled the app forthwith. And I have not missed it one bit.

. Saw some people online talking about a new game called Tactical Breach Wizards, and thought it sounded interesting enough to try downloading the demo. It's a turn-based tactical combat thing, and one of the wrinkles is that one of the main characters can see a minute or so into the future, which mechanically translates to you being able to preview the effects of your turn before committing to it, and you're encouraged to try out elaborate or showy moves to see if they'll work. Each of the player-controlled characters is a different kind of wizard, with different abilities and weaknesses; one of the starting characters, for instance, is a weather witch, who begins the game with several kinds of wind spell but nothing that does direct damage, so she has to knock opponents out by slamming them against walls or else remove them from the field of battle by pitching them out of windows. (I haven't played any of the developer's earlier games, but I'm given to understand that defenestration is something of a trademark.) By the time I hit the end of the demo I was sufficiently immersed to forget it was just the demo and be surprised to hit the end, and wanted to know what happened next, so I bought the full game. I've been playing it on and off since; if I'm honest, the gameplay isn't quite my jam, but I'm really enjoying the characters and the dialogue is great.

. There is a tournament currently being held on Tumblr where people were invited to submit their favourite character that they didn't think anybody else had heard of, and the characters face off in one-on-one contests where the winner is the one that more of the audience really hasn't heard of. (It's intended as an antidote to all the other character tournaments on Tumblr where the winner is usually the character most people have heard of, regardless of what the nominal criterion of the tournament was.) One of the competitors is a character from the Liaden Universe, and obscure even for that series: it's Jen Sin yos'Phelium, the keeper of Tinsori Light, who until quite recently had only appeared in one short story and none of the novels. He won his first match-up (against a sapient eyeball from a Youtube video I've never heard of) by a comfortable margin, and is through to the second round.

. I was cleaning out unused apps on my phone, came across Duolingo which I hadn't opened in months, and decided on a whim to have another crack at brushing up my German. The lessons I've been revising this week have included Food, Animals, and Plurals, so I've been learning quite about the dietary habits of bears. I have learned that the bear drinks the beer (das Bär trinkt das Bier) and that the bears eat the strawberries (die Bären fressen die Erdbeeren). It's not an all-alliteration diet, though; the bears also eat the fish (die Bären fressen die Fische -- on second thought, maybe that's just a different kind of alliteration). Or perhaps it's just these particular bears, who I was informed in the most recent lesson are called Hans and Karl (die Bären heißen Hans und Karl).


. Our roleplaying campaign continues. I'm playing the fighter class character of the group, and my ancestry/class backstory meant I started out with heavy armour, so my role in the group has come to include going out ahead in any fight and making a nuisance of myself so that our opponents will waste time trying to land a hit on me while the rest of the team picks them off from a safe distance. (Not that I am not also doing my bit to pick them off, especially since I learned the feat called Riposte, which gives me a reaction attack against an attacker who fails to penetrate my armour.) In the various times we've used this strategy, I have had occasion to be thankful that my character's ancestry also bequeathed resistance against poison and immunity to suffocation. It's almost a running joke at this point that every time the team has encountered a monster with a suffocating attack or a cloud of choking dust or a creature surrounded wherever it goes by a noxious vapour, the person who's taken the brunt of it has been the guy who doesn't breathe.


. In this part of the world, the coronavirus situation has receded to the point that things involving groups of people are happening again. The brass band has resumed rehearsals, although a bit aimlessly because until the last week or so all the places the band usually plays were still closed. The Rep Club is having a variety performance this weekend to mark being able to have live shows with audiences again (although the remaining social distancing restrictions do mean that the theatre will be at half capacity). The gaming group has also started meeting again this month, although there were a lot fewer people there than usual while I was there. I played Half Truth with a group of people; both the players and the group of kibitzers we accumulated agreed that it was a good and fun game, but I don't think I'll get anyone to play against me again in a hurry.


. I don't seem to have reacquired the interest in watching theatrical streams after all. I think part of it is that watching a theatre performance this way lacks the shared social aspect; there's nobody else with me while I'm watching, and nobody I know who I can discuss the performance with afterward.


. I've now been working from home for several months. I'm still dressing in work clothes on work days, but not always before I actually start work: somewhere along the line I decided it was okay, if I was still in my pyjamas at work o'clock, to check my email and deal with anything urgent before I went and got dressed, and that's extended to the point that sometimes I'm still not dressed at lunchtime. So far I'm holding the line at being dressed for lunch, although once or twice lunch has happened quite late as a consequence.

1. In July of 2013, I set out to re-read all the novels and short stories by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller set in the Liaden universe (sixteen novels, and considerably more short stories), one chapter at a time in chronological order, blogging my progress as a way to keep myself on track. I have now achieved that goal, but the blog will be continuing for a bit longer while I read the new novel that came out while I was re-reading the old ones. (That also buys me some time to finish up the concluding post on Lessons From This Project, or What You Can Learn From My Mistakes.)


2. For reasons that I may get around to talking about later, I have started studying German through Duolingo. (I did German for three years in high school, but most of it has leaked away since; what I usually say is that I can reliably manage "Hello", "Goodbye", and "I'll have a slice of the black forest cake, please".)

I was amused when one of the example sentences in the first lesson on nominative pronouns was "Ist das deine Kuh?" ("Das ist nicht meine Kuh. Es spreche Neigh. Das ist ein Pferd.")


3. The annual local performing arts festival is over for another year. Once again, I emceed all of it except for the session where I was playing with the brass band. I was pretty wrung out by Sunday evening. (The music section of the festival runs for three whole days, from Friday through Sunday. The drama section fluctuates a lot, depending on how many of the schools have active drama programs and choose to enter that year, but this year we had enough for a drama evening on the Monday, with some pretty impressive work entered. It strikes me that there is perhaps more outreach needed when the city has two theatre groups and neither ever produces any entries.)


4. I completed NaArMaMo this year, and found it very friendly and encouraging. I have posted my daily artworks on my Tumblr. (See if you can spot which one I did on Sunday night after the performing arts festival.)


5. Signal boosting: Humble Bundle offers bundles of games, ebooks, and other electronic products for special prices with proceeds going to charity. They're currently, but not for much longer, offering a bundle of Star Wars audio books which includes, if you pay at least $15, all three parts of the Star Wars radio series.