pedanther

. The family Christmas gathering was held a few days after Christmas this year, because that was when everybody could manage to be in the same place for the same few hours. (Including the out-of-town contingent, who I hadn't realised were also going to be there until I got a text message with a photo of something interesting they'd seen on the road here.) It was very nice to spend some time with everybody. My haul this year included several jigsaw puzzles, my siblings having taken note of how much I enjoyed working through my set of Magic Puzzles earlier this year (and possibly also of the fact that it's much easier to be sure that I don't already have a particular puzzle than that I don't already have a particular book).


. As the weather has been getting hotter, there's been an increasing issue at Parkrun with flies taking friendly interest in one's face, and the attendant risk of accidentally inhaling one. (Or nearly inhaling one, which is almost as bad.) After Parkrun last Saturday, I decided I'd had enough and afterward went straight to the shops to buy a protective net thing to wear over my head and keep them off. Step two is remembering to take it with me to Parkrun.


. My reading this week included Always Was, Always Will Be, written by Thomas Mayo, one of the campaigners for the Voice to Parliament, after the referendum went the way it did, which I saw in the new books display at the library and felt I should read; and, for a change of pace, E. Nesbit's The Railway Children, which I've been meaning to read for years and am very glad I finally did. (And not just because now I'll be less likely to keep getting it mixed up with The Boxcar Children and The Story of the Treasure Seekers.)


. I've started playing through XCOM: Enemy Unknown again. I set out with noble intentions that this would be the time I got through an entire playthrough without reverting to the last save point when things started going pear-shaped, and of course that didn't last but it did last longer than I might have predicted. As I've been getting back into the swing of it I've been pushing out the limit on what counts as going sufficiently wrong, and getting back near the mark of keeping going as long as a mission wasn't a complete failure, and re-learning that it is possible and even fun to recover from setbacks like having most of your most experienced squad wiped out in one go.


. Game Show 1939! is a fun podcast where contestants are faced with trivia questions sourced from quiz books published in the 1930s. "Some of the answers in the books have changed since then, and some of the answers were never right to begin with, but for the purposes of today's quiz the official correct answer is whatever was written in the book." Part of the format involves contestants being given a preview of the categories and trying to predict which ones they'll find easier to answer and which ones to force their opponent to answer. Most of the questions are followed by the host explaining who or what the question was about.

Went to town, for the first time since before Covid. Caught up with my favourite aunt, my favourite niblings (and their parents), and a few friends from the old days. Got dragged along (not unwillingly) to a community orchestra rehearsal, where I played a trombone for the first time in years and was reassured by how much I still remembered. Got my dress shoes repaired. Visited the beach and looked at creatures in tide pools. Went clothing shopping, with questionable success. Successfully avoided coming home with more books than I arrived with. As usual, was too busy doing things to write anything down in detail.

One unanticipated benefit of being away from home with no reliable access to news media or social media was that certain major world events were just a faint noise in the distance instead of something I was living through as they happened. Actually, having most of a week away from social media probably did me a lot of good in general.

My hold on Remarkably Bright Creatures came up shortly before the trip, and I borrowed it with the intention of reading it on the train, but when I got my ebook reader out it turned out it had somehow not downloaded, so I had to leave it until I got back. Instead I read the new Rivers of London novella, and finished off Try Whistling This. I also tried reading my November book for the random book challenge, but I gave up on it after a couple of chapters. It had originally been published as a serial with a rotating set of authors taking turns writing chapters, and I found the effect off-putting; instead of setting up a definite story, it felt like the opening was throwing balls up in the air for other authors to catch, without any real idea of where they would land or any reassurance that they wouldn't be fumbled and dropped. While I was in town, my main book for reading on buses and trains was my other library book, Say Nothing, a fascinating non-fiction book about events in Belfast during the Troubles, which I managed to finish before I left, partly because it's so compelling but also partly because I spent so much time on buses and trains (everything is so far apart in the city).

I played the Dungeons and Dragons: Adventure Begins board game with the niblings. They enjoyed it, especially the bits where players are encouraged to tell a story about what happens when you roll the dice, and were curious about the differences between the board game and regular D&D.

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Before the trip away, we had another session of Pandemic: Legacy, and are now three-quarters of the way through Season One. I'm still enjoying the gameplay, but finding the unfolding season plot predictable and uninteresting.

At the regular weekly evening boardgaming session, we played Nemesis: Lockdown. We had very fortunate starting conditions, with no aliens showing up for several rounds, and most of the players having co-operative objectives that meant we could share information honestly and didn't take long to establish what we needed to do to survive the endgame. The downside of everyone being so well equipped for survival was that the game went on for hours - we only narrowly managed to get finished and packed up before the venue closed. Every game of Nemesis: Lockdown I've played has run long, and I think from now on it's going on my list of games not to start playing in the evening. (It may also end up on my list of games not to play at all, because the other thing that's happened every time I've played is that I've been killed by aliens over an hour before the game ended and been stuck with nothing to do waiting to see how it all turns out.)

. I wrote something! In fact I have now written several things, all thanks to the 3 Sentence Ficathon. They might be hard to find amongst all the action on the ficathon itself, so I've started copying them over to my AO3 archive.


. Auditions have happened for this year's musical, which is to be Hello Dolly!. Now we're waiting to find out what the results are. In the past few years, I've usually had a solid idea which role I'm going to get in the musical, because the club's pool of male talent for musicals is not large and most of the people in it have particular character types that they gravitate toward. In the case of Hello Dolly!, I don't know the show well enough to have a firm opinion, and the director said at the audition that she has me in mind for a couple of roles and was keeping her options open until she saw who else was available.


. I went to see Jojo Rabbit, Taika Waititi's new movie, and I'm glad I did; it's an experience I would not want to have missed.

(One of the reasons I considered not going is that I'm susceptible to getting ferocious second-hand embarrassment on behalf of fictional characters, so I'm always very cautious about comedies with the premise "protagonist talks to someone nobody else can see or hear"; I'm pleased to be able to report that Jojo Rabbit doesn't go in that direction and nothing in it set me off.)


. In the foreword to her most recent book, Lois McMaster Bujold talks a bit about her writing process. One thing she says that struck me, and gives me hope for my own writing, is that she starts by accumulating ideas and for a novel can have as many as fifty pages of notes before she knows enough about the story to begin writing the actual words.


. One of my relatives has acquired a new kitten named Ivy, who is adorable and very friendly. I forget whether she was always named after the comic book character Poison Ivy, or if that was something my relative decided retroactively upon acquisition, but in any case I find it an appropriate name because if I let her come and nuzzle me I itch for the rest of the day. Totally worth it.

At gaming group recently I have played Gorechosen, Dixit, Skull; Dice Throne, Skull, Star Fluxx, Ingenious.

Gorechosen simulates a gladiatorial combat with figurines on a board marked out in hexes. Each figurine represents a distinct character with their own attack pattern and basic actions, and the players draw cards to gain special actions (moving further in a single turn, attacking more strongly or more cunningly, etc.). Goes with Epic Spell Wars under the heading of "I appreciate the mechanics, but the theme is very much not for me".

Dice Throne simulates a combat with dice and cards (and more cartoony art and less gore than Gorechosen). Each player chooses a character with their own unique set of abilities and their own unique set of dice to activate them. An interesting mechanic is that if there are more than two players in the game, the attacking player has to roll a die to determine who they're attacking instead of making a deliberate choice (although there are cards that will let them influence the die roll). I was first out, but I enjoyed it enough that I'd be willing to try again sometime.

I have actually started winning points in Skull, though I don't think I've won a full game yet. I'm not sure if this is a good development or not; I was enjoying being no good at it.

My sister has come along to several sessions of gaming group in recent months, but we haven't managed a game together. She arrives separately, when I'm already in a game, and after that for the rest of the session when one of us finishes a game the other is already in the middle of another one.

* * *

There was a day when all of my siblings happened to be in town at once, and one of my brothers had a new board game he wanted to try out, so we got together for an afternoon and played Azul, Animal Upon Animal, and Once Upon a Time.

Azul is a new game, this year's Spiel des Jahres winner. Players try to acquire tiles in the colours they need to fill in a mosaic. You can only add one colour of tile to a row at a time, and only if you have all the tiles of that colour you need for that row; if you don't have enough, you can't add anything to that row that turn, and if you have too many, you lose points for each leftover tile. The acquisition phase is partly about getting the colours you need for each row and partly about cornering opponents into having to take too few or too many of the colours they're after. You score points each time you successfully add to the mosaic, and at the end of the game there are bonuses for each complete row, each complete column, and for each colour that you've added all the tiles of that colour in the mosaic. I enjoyed it, and would play again.

Animal Upon Animal is a stacking game with small wooden animals, which we played with our young nieces.

Once Upon a Time, the fairy tale telling game, was my suggestion; I've played it before and always enjoy it. We played two games. The first ended up as a fairly straightforward story about a prince who was cursed and broke the curse by rescuing and marrying a princess.

The second story was about a pair of tiny children (it was later established that they were tiny giant children, and therefore about normal human size) who were kidnapped by a witch. The sister was rescued by their father, while the brother went on an adventure and rescued and married a princess... at which point we discovered that none of us had a suitable ending card to stop the story there, so we had to keep spinning it out with further adventures as the brother was blinded in a fire, kidnapped again by the witch and turned into a tree, rescued by his father and the princess, restored to human form (incidentally curing his blindness), caught in a storm, lost his memory, had his memory restored with the help of a passing cook and a dragon who was actually an enchantress (or vice versa), until I was eventually able to shoehorn in my ending and everybody lived happily ever after (except the witch, who got pushed down a well). So, a pretty authentically plotted fairy tale, in other words.

* * *

I have been trying out the electronic version of Mysterium that I got in the Digital Tabletop Humble Bundle. It's not a bad implementation, but whether it's any fun depends heavily on finding a good group of people to play with, which is difficult with time zones. (Playing a game like Mysterium with the AI characters is just weird. One is never sure just how much they understand of what is going on.) I was about to give up on it entirely when I happened to be on at the same time as a really fun group of players and had a few good games. But I've never managed to get my time lined up with theirs again, and in the interim I've had some disappointing games with less fun players, and I think I might be about to give up on it after all.

1. All the immediate family were in town for Christmas, which was nice. We made an unhurried afternoon of it, and all enjoyed ourselves. I gave some good presents, judging by their recipients' reactions, and I received some really nice presents, too.


2. My sister brought along a Doctor Who special edition Monopoly set which someone had given her and she hadn't had a chance to play with anyone. It wasn't really a success, because once the novelty of the theme wore off it was basically still the same old grindingly slow game Monopoly has always been, and somewhere around the point where all the chance cards had been played at least once, and all the properties had been bought without anybody getting a complete set of anything, we just gave up. The most fun we had in the whole game was when my sister and I found ourselves getting into a bitter rivalry over possession of one particular $50 note, which kept going back and forward between us as rent money, accompanied by increasingly theatrical cries of "You see! It always finds its way home!"


3. Also, while my brother was in town, the two of us played a few more levels of Lego Star Wars, which seems to have become our traditional "We don't often see each other, and when we do, we don't know what to do next" activity. We're up to Return of the Jedi now, and still occasionally accidentally shoot each other or drag each other off ledges. (All part of the fun.)


4. Another thing we all did together as a family was go to the cinema and see The Desolation of Smaug, my opinion of which in one respect may be judged by the fact that I've taken to referring to it as just "The Desolation of Smaug" without according it the surtitle. I did like the way they made an effort to ground and round out the character of Bard the bowman, but most of the other additions struck me as unnecessary and poorly-suited to the material they were allegedly adapting. I think it says something about their priorities that the film begins with a completely invented scene designed to recap the premise of the plot, and then leaves out the plot recap scene that actually occurs near that point in the novel.


5. My new year's resolution for this year is, in contrast to the usual, to get off the diet. I'll still be watching what I eat, but in a more general and flexible sort of way instead of trying to tie myself down to specific numbers (which I was never all that good at, anyway).

1. Another February, another Toastmasters speech evaluation contest, another creditable but not dazzling performance from me that didn't result in a place on the podium. (Which is probably just as well this year, as I think the next round of the contest is likely to clash with other stuff I have on.) Also probably just as well is that the evaluation rules explicitly forbid commenting on whether you agree with what the speaker says (the point being to improve the speaker's skills in how it is said), because this year I seriously disagreed with the conclusion of the speech we were set to evaluate. I have a speaking slot coming up next meeting; I'm seriously considering revisting the topic.


2. The first episode of Elementary aired here recently. It seems like a fairly entertaining example of the American quirky-detective show, and it's nice to see a female character get a major role in one of these things. The bee-keeping scene was a nice shout-out to the grand-daddy of the genre, I thought.


3. Mr Darwin's Incredible Shrinking World is turning out to be a good book for killing time in waiting rooms and so on, but not the kind of book that's an entertaining read in itself. It's a survey of the technological and cultural changes that began or entered new phases in 1859, the year Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species; the coverage is (perhaps necessarily) broad, but not very deep.


4. Continuing through this Murray Leinster omnibus. Continuing to find Leinster's delusion that "because she was a woman" is a necessary or useful explanation annoyingly infecting stories that might otherwise have been pretty good. The latest victim is "Anthropological Note", in which a female anthopologist studies a matriarchal alien tribe -- a subject which, as the man who once wrote in all apparent seriousness that "there is no profession in which a really competent man tries to understand women", he might have thought better of attempting. Once again, though, it's the narrator more than the actual story that's the problem: I have a feeling that if someone had red-pencilled all the places where an explanation is given a prefix like "Being a woman" or a suffix like "in a typically female way", the substance of the story would not have been materially altered. ...Well, you'd still have some of the unpleasant features of the matriarchy, but at least you wouldn't have to put up with any of them being explicitly described as "definitely female".

Actually, the story does have another annoying flaw, again in the narration. The denouement depends on a rather neat coincidence, which Leinster apparently didn't trust his readers to buy unaided; his solution is to add a rather heavy-handed lampshade-hanging in the form of regularly reminding the reader that the denouement is going to depend on a remarkable coincidence, which might be regarded as a sign of the tribe's deity taking a hand in matters, if you believe in such things as tribal deities, ho ho ho. I reckon I can see a better way of handling it, but it does require modern subtle-incluing technology, which Leinster may not have had in his tool kit, and also that the author regard our lady anthropologist as an actual human being, which also appears to be a tool Leinster was lacking.


5. On a more cheerful note, I really liked Croc and Bird, a charming little picture book that begins with two eggs hatching together on a river bank, and the hatchlings deciding, in the absence of any grown-ups around to tell them otherwise, that they're brothers. And then it's about how they grow up together, and teach each other the things each knows instinctively (Bird teaches Croc to sing; Croc teaches Bird to hunt water buffalo), and about what happens when they meet other crocodiles and other birds and discover that their understanding of the world is not the commonly accepted one.

(I was hanging out in the junior corner of the library with my niece when I discovered it, but I shamelessly admit I read it for myself. My niece is still at the age where the coloured blocks are more interesting than the books.)

1. If I had known how much Jago (which was marketed as a standalone horror novel) tied in to Kim Newman's other works, I'd have read it years ago.

2. Apparently, this is now a Thing: Wholock, in which people edit together screencaps (or, if they're feeling ambitious, video clips) to create Doctor Who-Sherlock crossover stories. For technical proficiency, my favourite is still the first one I ever saw, A Study in Time, but for story-being-told, my favourite is Why me?.

3. This weekend, I competed in the area final of the Toastmasters evaluation contest. (As noted in a previous post, I didn't win in the previous round, but the person who did bowed out due to unavailability.) I didn't win in this round either, but I enjoyed attending the contest. There were some very good speeches.

4. Also, I caught up with my brother and sister, who I don't get to see often enough. That was nice.

5. I have written fic for the prompts I got in the iPod Shuffle meme. I'll do a proper post for that later, when I've got time to do a proper post.

I went to see Toy Story 3 today, with the family. In 3D, because that happened to be the showing that we could all make it to. (Mostly I didn't even consciously notice it was in 3D, which I suspect on some level means they did it right.)

I can't think of anything to say about the film that hasn't probably already been said, better, by somebody else, so instead two things that I'm pretty sure nobody but me will say:

1. This seems to be my weekend for familiar things unexpectedly transformed by Spanish music; yesterday I watched an episode of The Muppet Show in which Animal played uncharacteristically restrained drums in a mariachi band (he even wore the ruffled shirt).

2. Toy Story 3 made me nostalgic (not in a bad way) for a novel I read many years ago called When the Dolls Woke. I wound up mail-ordering it on the internet when I got home, along with the prequel I hadn't known it had.

Two different members of my family independently received copies of Bill Bailey's Remarkable Guide to the Orchestra for Christmas, from people who hadn't watched it yet but figured it would be X's kind of thing because X liked Bill Bailey and/or like orchestras. We subsequently managed to arrange a gathering in which the people who had received it, the people who had given it, and one or two interested others sat down to watch it together.

I think the title's a bit of a cheat: A more accurate, though less punchy, title would be "See What Bill Bailey Can Do With An Entire Orchestra To Play With". The whole "guide to the orchestra" aspect is a bit under-represented, and a lot of the jokes are funnier if you know something about music already.

Threaded through the show's new material, there are a number of expanded multi-instrumental versions of classic Bill Bailey musical bits (some of which, if memory serves, have never been officially available on video in their original one-man versions). There is, for instance, a new version of the famous Doctor-Who-as-sixties-jazz routine, which adds string bass and other jazz-combo instruments to the original's tinkly piano; and the finale of the Guide to the Orchestra part of the show, which brings together all the stuff that's been said about the individual instruments, is an impressive extended version of the skit about Seventies Cop Show Soundtracks. The show ends with an entertainingly bombastic full orchestral version of Bailey's prog-rock homage "The Leg of Time".

I can't say from my own knowledge, but I suspect it would also be fun for people who don't know much about music but are Bill Bailey fans (if such a thing is possible). On the other hand, the X who was given a copy because she likes orchestras (but is indifferent to Bill Bailey) seemed underwhelmed.

On Saturday night, some friends gathered a group together to play boardgames, prompted by the decision that it had been too long since they'd last had a chance to play their copy of 221B Baker Street.

( 221B Baker Street was a new one on me, and I like it -- and not just because I won... )

After that, we played a round of Pictionary, then just hung out chatting until it felt like time to head home.