pedanther

. At the weekend boardgame session two of us played Raptor while we waited for everyone to arrive, and then we all played the final game of Ticket to Ride Legacy. ( Read more... )


. At the regular weekly boardgame meet, we played Unfair. It was my second time playing, and I did better than the first time but still not great, but I enjoyed it and would like to keep playing until I get the hang of it properly.


. I wore my black corduroy jacket to the boardgame meet, with a lapel pin stuck in the breast pocket at the place where the buttonhole isn't. That's an option I might experiment further with. (Nobody commented on the lapel pin; very likely nobody noticed it, since I picked one that was mostly black specifically to avoid notice, because I didn't want to deal with too many new things at once.)

Later in the week, I broke my streak of only remembering about the menswear shop in town on days when it was closed, and went in to see if they had any suitable jackets. I found a denim jacket I actually didn't mind (as well as one that I immediately decided was Not Me), but decided that "I actually don't mind it" wasn't enough to make it worth the price tag.


. The current run in XCOM 2 has now definitely reached the point where everything is fully upgraded and I know I can handle anything the game can throw at me so it's just a case of putting in the time to reach the end. Which means I've largely put it aside to chase newer challenges.


. I've been trying out the demo of a computer game called Fogpiercer, which somebody I know was playing and it looked like fun. It's a turn-based game in which you control a train travelling through bandit-infested territory, carrying cargo and fighting off bandit attacks and earning resources to upgrade your train with better equipment and weapons to fight of more powerful bandits. I'm enjoying it okay, but I'm not sure if I'm getting enough out of it to want the full game.

. At the weekend gaming session, we played the penultimate game of Ticket to Ride: Legacy. ( Read more... )


. Over the course of the week, we had three sessions playing various party games from the Jackbox Party Pack series ( Read more... )


. At the regular weekly gaming meet, we played Love Letter, 7 Wonders, and Night of the Ninja. ( Read more... )


. My run in XCOM 2 came to a strange end, or rather declined strangely to come to an end: ( Read more... )

( So I started a fresh run, which is going well )


. I forgot to mention last week that my listen-through of The Hidden Almanac has reached another milestone in its development of ongoing storylines: ( Read more... )


. I've been thinking again about the fact that I have an enormous collection of fannish pins that I never wear because I don't have anything in the intersection of "I like wearing this" and "I'm happy sticking pin holes in this". ( Read more... )


. I've been playing a new daily puzzle game called Smush, which is a variation on the kind of puzzle where you have a grid of letters that you have to make words from, and there's a big bonus if you find the large word that uses all the letters at least once. ( Read more... )

I did finish Moreta: Dragonlady of Pern, but I had to discount it from the book chain, because when I checked what the following prompt would be, it was "A book with a word in the title that was also in the title of the previous book": I'm confident there are no other books with "Moreta" in the title, I haven't been able to find any with "Dragonlady", "of" would be cheating, and there are none with "Pern" that I am willing to read.

Moreta did manage to hold my interest once the plot got going, but it remains a book that I am pleased to have read because now I have read it, rather than a book I was pleased to read. ( Read more... )


Somewhere around a third of the way through, when I still wasn't sure I wasn't going to give up on it, I took a few days out and started reading the handbooks for Stealing Stories for the Devil, from the recent RPG Humble Bundle. I've read all of the player handbook and about half of the GM handbook, stopping at the point where it starts laying out the secret parts of the campaign setting that players aren't supposed to know until they discover them during the campaign. I probably will have to be the GM if I want to have any chance of playing the game, but you never know. (What I'm thinking, actually, is that the way to go might be to try and interest a few people in playing a one-shot and then see how they feel about playing a full campaign and how I feel about running one. The game is episodic by design, so it wouldn't be very difficult to come up with a single-session scenario that doesn't require getting into the full complexities of the campaign setting and backstory.)

. You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown had a successful opening weekend.


. At the weekend gaming session, we finally had all the players again for Ticket to Ride: Legacy, but most of us had had busy days and didn't have the oomph for a long game, so instead we played Takenoko, Chomp, Sushi Go, and Fabled Fruit. ( Read more... )


. I didn't make it to the weekly game meet because I had to go to a dress rehearsal instead.


. While I was grocery shopping, I came across some blocks of chocolate that were on sale for 2 For $11. I didn't think I wanted two, so I looked at the small print that says how much it was to buy just one, and was surprised to find that it said $1. And when I got my one block of chocolate to the checkout, $1 was indeed the price that came up. When I went back a day or two later, there were only a couple of blocks of chocolate left and the price sign had been replaced with a new one that simply said they were $5.50 each.


. I've started playing a new casual game called Dogpile. It has a tall rectangular playing area like Tetris, but instead of blocks falling, it's dogs of various sizes and shapes; when two dogs of the same kind touch, they merge into a single larger (and more awkwardly shaped) dog. There are various mechanisms to affect which dogs appear and where they move, and the aim is to acquire the largest kind of dog before the playing area fills up.


. Hank Green has started a new podcast called Humans, in which he has long-form conversations with interesting human beings. The first episode features the best-selling novelist (and author of The Anthropocene Reviewed) John Green, and this week's episode features Wyna Liu, who creates puzzles for the New York Times.

. The weekend gaming session was short-handed again -- one day, Ticket to Ride: Legacy, one day! -- so we played Uno: Show 'Em No Mercy, No Thanks, and Chomp. ( Read more... )


. At the regular weekly gaming session, we played the racing game Formula D. ( Read more... )


. We've had our first scripts-down run-through of You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown. It went well, apart from the bits that didn't.


. I spent some time re-arranging one of my bookshelves, and just as I was finishing up I remembered why I'd had it the way it was before. I'll probably leave it as it is for a while, and maybe put it back the other way next time I feel like making myself feel better by re-arranging something.


. There is a new episode out of Inestimable, the podcast gameshow in which contestants are challenged to get the closest answer to questions like "How many Mona Lisas would it take to cover the exterior surface of the glass pyramid outside the Louvre?" and "What position did 'All Star' by Smashmouth appear in the end-of-year Billboard Top 100?". I was in the studio audience for this one as well, and let me tell you, if you think the finished episode is chaotic...

. When we did the family walk on Sunday morning, I suggested we walk in a direction where I'd seen a mass of bright orange flowers blooming when I drove past the previous afternoon, but when we got there the orange blooms were nowhere to be seen. One of my siblings identified the plants as something in the daisy family that closes up for the night and apparently hadn't opened up for the day yet. We saw some other nice flowers, though, and a few interesting birds.


. At the weekend gaming session, we were missing one of the players for Ticket to Ride: Legacy again (a different one from last time), so we played Sequoia and Dark Tomb. I remember thinking, the first time I played Dark Tomb, that playing it again would quickly start to feel repetitive, and this proved to be the case even though were were playing a different scenario from last time.


. At the weekly gaming meet, we played Finspan. It's only the second time I've played it, and I'm still not very good at it, though I did at least avoid coming last.


. I saw a thing online mentioning that if you buy an ebook for Kindle that has a notice saying something along the lines of "At the request of the publisher, this ebook is available DRM-free", there's a way to download a separate copy of the ebook, if you can find where that option has been hidden away, and it occurred to me that the same was probably true of the Kobo store. So now I've downloaded separate copies of all the ebooks I've bought through the Kobo store where that's an option; I don't really have any plans to read them not-on-my-Kobo, but it feels reassuring to know that they're there. I kind of wish I'd figured this out earlier, before Humble Bundle did a bundle last year that included all the Murderbot books, and I bought it at least partly in order to have copies of the Murderbot books that weren't tied to my Kobo; to be fair, though, there were enough other interesting books in the bundle that I'd probably have bought it anyway.


. I've started another run on XCOM 2. I've had one disastrous mission, where I got complacent and wound up bringing the combined might of every enemy unit in the area down on my head at once, but apart from that it's been going well.


. Saturday gave us the first foggy morning of the autumn, at least as far as I've noticed; I haven't been consistently sticking my head out of doors early on these cold mornings, and only did so on Saturday because I had to go to Parkrun. If I hadn't had to get to Parkrun, I'd have been tempted to stop and take a photo of the fog lurking atmospherically over the cemetery. (Except that, see above, I wouldn't have been outside to notice the fog over the cemetery in the first place.)

. No board games this week: the regular meeting was cancelled because the venue had been hired out for a special event, and the person who usually hosts the weekend sessions had gone away for the long weekend. One of the people from the board game club did host a barbecue, which I went to and had a good time.


. We had another good rehearsal where we got the harmonies to sound like they're supposed to.


. I came across a demo for a new computer game called Vampire Crawlers, which several people I know have said good things about. That's "crawl" as in "dungeon crawl"; you go into a spooky location and fight vampires and zombies and assorted other monsters (all of whom, so far, have moved in an upright posture). I'm not sure what I think of it yet, but I'm at least interested enough to keep playing a bit longer.


. Sequel to last week's link, where someone watched the music video of "The Wombling Song" with zero context: she was curious enough that she's now started reacting to the Wombles TV show.

. One of the great things about AO3's subscription feature is that you can be promptly notified when an author adds a new chapter to a fic you really liked that last got a new chapter nearly twelve years ago. ( Read more... )


. Quite some time ago, I took my car in for a check-up and was notified, among other things, that at least one of the tyres needed to be replaced. I said I would get right on that, and then proceeded not to, because I'd never dealt with a tyre shop before and I'm very bad at inserting myself into unfamiliar situations even when the situation should just involve saying "Hello, I would like to pay you to do the thing that you advertise that you do." ( You can probably guess where this is going... )


. We had a weekend gaming session in which we played a couple of games of Raptor and then a couple of games of Ticket to Ride: Legacy. We've unlocked the entire map now, and should be finished with the whole campaign in one more session.


. At the usual weekly gaming session, we played Feed the Kraken. ( Read more... )


. I went to the doctor for a check-up, ( Read more... )


. Another set of out-of-town relatives visited, which was nice.


. It occurs to me, as I adjust the height of the monitor, that I don't think I got around to mentioning it when I bought one of those spring-loaded monitor arms that allow you to move the screen to any height and angle and it will stay there. I originally decided to get it to simplify repositioning the monitor when I had friends over and we wanted to watch a show from the sofa (I don't have a TV, and watch all my shows via DVD or online streaming), but it's also so good for the basic task of setting the screen to a comfortable height that it's become one of those bits of technology that, now I have it, I wonder how I ever managed without.

. I had the whole week off, and spent a lot of it either enjoying having nothing particular to do or feeling crumby due to the well-known phenomenon whereby as soon as I was on holiday and the show wrapped I came down with the mild lurgy I had been steadfastly refusing to entertain because I had things to do.

At a couple of points, I attempted to do some things I'd been putting off on the excuse that they involved getting things done during office hours, only to find (as I frequently have on previous occasions when I've counted on getting things done when I was on holiday) that the businesses I needed to interact with were also off for the holidays.


. On the weekend, we had a long gaming session where we played Mansions of Madness. The scenario we played was an interesting variation on the usual: ( Read more... )


. At the weekly game meet, we played Cockroach Soup, Flip 7 With a Vengeance, and Epic Spell Wars of the Battle Wizards: Duel at Mt. Skullzfyre. ( Read more... )


. Rehearsals for You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown have begun, and are going well.


. I watched the NASA live stream of the Artemis II launch, and have been following its progress.


. I went to Parkrun this week, despite a bit of rain being forecast; I already had a cold, and I didn't have anything I needed to do later in the day, so I figured it wouldn't hurt. In the event, there was only a brief light sprinkling of rain. I got a couple of nice comments from people who had been to see the play.


. My relationship with hot cross buns since I parted ways with the Holy Mother Church has been erratic. Some years, I make a point of eating one on the wrong day, to prove that the Church can no longer tell me what to do; other years, I make a point of only eating them on Good Friday, on the principle that if a thing's worth doing it's worth doing correctly (because I might be a lapsed Catholic but I'm still a practising pedant). This year, the entire question escaped my mind until it was already Good Friday and all the shops where I knew they were on sale were shut for the public holiday, so I bought some at a discount on Saturday morning and had them for morning tea.


. Until recently, I had managed to avoid getting any spam comments on my AO3 fics, but a couple of the fics I wrote for the most recent Three Sentence Ficathon have apparently stuck out enough to become targets for the kind of spam comment that pretends to be a real review before trying to get you to a secondary location. The one I received this week asserted that "i wasn’t expecting much at first but this actually turned out to be a pretty decent read", which is particularly transparent in the context of a fic that's only 37 words long.


. I was pleased to see the announcement that Farah Mendlesohn has been selected as the GUFF delegate to Swancon 50, then spent several minutes trying to remember where I actually know them from. I eventually managed to narrow it down from "overlapping online fannish space of some kind" to "mostly Diana Wynne Jones fandom, when I was still actively interacting with Diana Wynne Jones fandom". (Skimming the list of GUFF voters, I recognised a name from the old DWJ fan group, followed by another name whose owner was not yet born then, let alone old enough to vote; my, how the time etc.)

. At the weekly boardgame meet, we played Cockroach Soup (which is like Cockroach Salad but with more slurping, although one player refused to slurp and just said "slurp" instead), Flip 7 With A Vengeance (which is like Flip 7 only more so), Lovecraft Letter (which is like Love Letter with the option to unlock forbidden techniques that are more powerful but increase the chance that you'll go mad and get disqualified), The Mind, and Cheating Moth.


. Further experimentation with the cat-head ice cube tray has established that if I leave it out of the freezer for about fifteen minutes, the ice blocks will melt enough to relent their grip while otherwise retaining their shape. I will probably continue to use the dog tray more often, as I'm not the kind of person to know fifteen minutes in advance that I'll be wanting a cold drink. I have made a mental note to try with fruit juice and see if that affects the grippiness.


. I've played through all the prequel missions in the XCOM 2 "Tactical Legacy" DLC. There's a state I get into sometimes when I'm reading a book that I'm not really enjoying, where I'm still interested in seeing what happens next but what I'm really looking forward to is getting to the point where I've seen what happens next and can move on to something else; that's how I felt when I was doing the last few missions. One thing I can say for them is that they've given me a new appreciation of how the main game works as an ongoing story with a cast of familiar characters who grow and develop over time, with the player getting involved in guiding their development, and isn't just a bunch of arbitrary missions featuring an arbitrary bunch of people with random skill sets.


. Auditions have begun for our next production, which will be the Peanuts-inspired musical You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown. I remember auditioning for something years ago (it seems likely it was Putnam County, though it might not have been) with Charlie Brown's kite song from this musical, but I haven't been able to find where I stored the music for it. (I was undecided about whether I would actually audition with it this time, since usually I make a point of not auditioning with a piece from the musical I'm auditioning for, but it would have been nice to find it again regardless.)


. The BBC has announced the recovery of two more missing episodes from early Doctor Who, both from near the beginning of "The Daleks' Master Plan". This means we now have substantially more than we previously had of Adrienne Hill's run as a Doctor Who companion, and of Nicholas Courtney's first appearance on the series.

Coincidentally, the day after the announcement, I was poking around in my digital archive looking for the kite song, when I found a mysterious folder containing a single file with the informative name of "scan0003.jpg", which turned out to be a newspaper clipping from the last time an episode of "The Daleks' Master Plan" was recovered.


. The family walk continues.