. At board game club, we played our second game of Risk: Legacy. I lost by, in retrospect, not taking enough risks. A more aggressive strategy might not have paid off, but you miss 100% of the shots you don't take.


. I've resumed reading The Last English King, and it's holding my interest enough that I haven't given up on it yet.


. I feel like I've spent quite a lot of this past week watching reaction videos as distraction from other things. In particular, there's a Youtube channel called Sesskasays who's been watching through and reacting to twentieth-century Doctor Who from the beginning, and I've been watching a lot of those videos lately. She's just started reacting to the seventh Doctor stories, and I'm just caught up to the start of the sixth Doctor, so if I continue at this rate I may even catch up to her before she finishes.

. I've finished the Star Wars jigsaw puzzle, with the last several days spent filling in the black and speckled-black spaces in the image by trying pieces one at a time until I found the one that fit. I've enjoyed having a jigsaw puzzle on the go and filling bits in at odd moments, but now I've done all the puzzles I own. I'm thinking about going back to the oldest one and doing it again, since buying a new thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle every fortnight seems like a bad habit to get into when I'm trying to keep expenditure down.


. At board game club, we played Mysterium. I got both the suspect and the location first try, and then spent most of the rest of the game completely failing to interpret the clues I was given about the murder weapon: by the time I got it, there were only two potential weapons left to guess, and I still would have gone for the wrong one if the other investigators hadn't talked me out of it. All of the investigators made it to the finish line in time, some by the skin of their teeth, but when it came to the final deduction there was near-complete disagreement about the solution; only two investigators agreed on a solution, and unfortunately it turned out not to be the correct one.

Over the weekend, we also had one of our occasional sessions where a few of us get together outside the usual weekly meeting. Usually it's to play a big game that there isn't time for at the weekly meeting, but not enough people could make it on this occasion, so we just played a string of smaller games instead: Ticket to Ride: London, Sequoia, Shake that City, Star Fluxx, and Hero Realms.


. At one point this week, I found myself somewhat overwhelmed on the new media front: within a couple of days, a new season of a TV show started, two podcasts that have been quiet for a while released several hours of new content, and the new Rivers of London novel came out, in addition to my usual podcasts, the regular episodes of Jet Lag and Taskmaster and the backlog of Natural Six that I'm still trying to work through. In one area, at least, it came out to a net decrease in the number of things I was actively trying to keep up with, since the new Rivers of London novel immediately muscled aside the other two novels I'd been making some attempt to read; apart from that, though, I found myself with a lot of things to watch or listen to and not so many hours in the day in which to do it.

. I think I've found a good balance with the journalling, where I'm keeping a useful amount of notes about things I want to talk about and not spending an off-putting amount of time on it.


. At board game club, we played Power Hungry Pets and Space Base.( Read more... )


. ( Planning for the new financial year )


. I'm continuing to listen to The Hidden Almanac on the anniversaries of each episode's original release date. This week marked a milestone: ( Read more... )


. I had a productive week at work, and learned some new things.


. I went to see the Rep Club's latest production, The Great Emu War. ( Read more... )


. I finished the jigsaw puzzle I was working on in around ten days, and left it sitting around to look at for a few more days before taking it apart and getting started on the other jigsaw puzzle I got for Christmas. This one is based on a Star Wars movie poster, and is proving challenging: ( Read more... )


. At Parkrun, ( Read more... )

I've been experimenting with my journal entries in the last week or two, ( Read more... )

We had a family get-together for the public holiday, ( Read more... )

The board game club had another of their long public holiday sessions ( Read more... )

I had a doctor's appointment this week: a routine thing, not because anything was wrong with me. ( The next bit involves injections )

I don't think I've mentioned in one of these posts that I've started reading Solzhenitsyn: ( Read more... )

( Movies current - Ocean - and upcoming - including ) Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein. The latter had the tagline "Only monsters play god", which is staking out a position in the "'Frankenstein' is not the name of the monster" discourse that I respect.


I finished playing through The Beekeeper's Picnic. ( Read more... )

I got to Parkrun only slightly late this week: ( Read more... )

I've had several experiences this week where I was reading someone's description of their experiences with ADHD and thinking that it sounded worryingly familiar. ( Read more... )

I was yesterday years old when I learned that "Womble" is an actual real surname that actual people really have. (Apparently, it's derived from the Yorkshire town of Wombwell.) The context was somebody mentioning a law firm called Womble Bond Dickinson; the relevant founding partner was apparently called B. S. Womble, which is one of the most made-up-sounding real names I've encountered in recent memory. (His full name was "Bunyan Snipes Womble", which sounds like a law firm all by itself.)

. Had a bit of a stressful week due to events ocurring with a committee I'm on. Did some things, didn't do some other things, spent a bunch of time worrying about whether I was doing enough or should be pushing myself to do more.


. One thing that helped counteract the stress was that this was also the week of the Howl's Moving Castle buddy read on StoryGraph, which lasted most of the week and offered something fun to keep my mind off things. At one point during the week, I found myself pondering a hypothetical cast for a TV adaptation, supposing there'd been one a few years after the book was published. The difficulty of such a hypothetical, of course, is that it wouldn't have had the budget for anyone really famous (the TV version of Archer's Goon didn't have anybody more famous than "played a villain in a middling Doctor Who story", though it had at least three of those). Or, at least, not anybody really famous now: if you timed it just right, you might be able to snag Catherine Zeta-Jones to play Miss Angorian before she got too famous and lit out for Hollywood. I didn't come to any conclusions about who might be good casting for Howell, largely because most of the Welsh actors I could think of would have been either too old or too young - I did notice that Peter Wingfield was in the right place at about the right age, and he's got a good face for it, but I still haven't actually got around to watching him in anything yet so I don't have an opinion on how well he'd do.


. At board game club, we played Epic Spell Wars of the Battle Wizards: Duel at Mt. Skullzfyre. My opinion remains what it was last time I played it, which is that I find the game mechanically interesting, but I dislike the artwork and the attempts at humour. We also played Flip 7, an abstract push-your-luck game; I did pretty well, but there were too many rounds where I pushed my luck one step too far and lost everything. I'd play it again.


. A few weeks ago, I was in the audience for the recording of an episode of a podcast game show called Inestimable, in which contestants are forced to guess at the answers to questions like "How many basketballs fit in an Olympic swimming pool" and "How many people were stabbed in the entire run of Columbo", and the audience members also put in guesses which are averaged or aggregated to get a collective guess which is put up against the contestants'. That episode has now been released.

. I cleaned the bathroom, an event that doesn't occur as often as I might like. Part of it is that cleaning the basin-countertop means finding somewhere to temporarily put all the stuff that usually sits on there, a problem for which I've yet to find a convenient solution. I also have a suspicion that my brain deliberately delays until there's enough dust and whatever that cleaning it off will produce a satisfyingly dramatic visual change; wiping a slightly dusty surface to achieve a slightly less dusty surface just isn't the same.


. At board game club, we played Betrayal at House on the Hill, using my copy of the game; I specifically suggested it because I wanted to test something out. ( Read more... )


. At work, it's been another week dominated by One of Those Clients. I got to vent about it at the end of the week to my siblings, which helped.


. Separately from the book chain, this week I also read Things Unborn by Eugene Byrne. I got it on special years ago, having read and enjoyed some of his short stories, and then proceeded to not read it on account of the front cover suggesting a book I wasn't in the mood for. ( It turns out that the cover is a complete tonal mismatch for the actual contents of the book )


. I'm also still working through A Choice of Catastrophes. As the focus narrows from the end of the universe down to merely the end of life on Earth, I'm increasingly recognising signs of the book's age; it's slightly older than me, and there's been a lot of scientific discovery in my lifetime. One of the chapters I read this week was about the risk of a large asteroid impact, and there's not a word about the dinosaur-killer asteroid, which was only just starting to be floated as a hypothesis when the book was published and didn't become widely accepted until years after.

Had a picnic on Easter Sunday with all the family members who were currently in town, which was nice.

My haul from the weekend included ( Read more... )

At board game club, we had an all-afternoon session because of the public holiday, so we played two games that would normally be too long to play in an evening: Fury of Dracula and Mansions of Madness.
( Read more... )

Speaking of computer games (that are adaptations of tabletop games), this week I tried out a new computer game (a phrase which here means that it came out a few years back and I got it on special a couple of months ago): a strategy game called BattleTech, derived from the tabletop game of the same name, which revolves around designing giant nuclear-powered robots and then getting into fights with other people's giant nuclear-power robots.
( Read more... )

Went to one of the Anzac Day morning services. ( Read more... )

There was a post going around on Tumblr inviting people to draw a horse without looking at any picture references, so I gave it a shot:
( Read more... )

. I've been making a few changes to my daily routine, having identified a couple of factors that were messing with my ability to go to bed at a sensible hour. It's been working pretty well so far; I've been in bed within half an hour of my target time most days this week. There were even a strange couple of days where I was all ready to go to bed at least an hour earlier than the time I've been aiming at – only to find my brain insisting that it wasn't time for bed yet and finding things to do until I reached the target time.


. After we finished up our production of Guys and Dolls, I decided to read some of the Damon Runyon short stories that inspired it, to see how much had been changed in the process. "The Idyll of Miss Sarah Brown", which was the basis of the main plot thread, is recognisably the same story, albeit with a twist that the musical chose not to use (and without a whole bunch of complications the musical added to stretch it out to two acts). After that, things get more distant; "Pick the Winner" has a familiar set-up but a very different ending, while "Blood Pressure" has a familiar scene or two set in a completely unrelated plot, and by the time I got down to "The Hottest Guy in the World" and "The Snatching of Bookie Bob", the only things they really had in common with the musical were some of the character names. (And there are some things in the stories that I'm glad the musical doesn't have in common; it's been a long while since I read a story with as much casual antisemitism and misogyny as "Blood Pressure", and I hope it's a long while before I read another.)


. In other reading, I decided I should make some progress on some of the other reading challenges I've been neglecting since I started doing the book chain, so I read The Purloined Poodle by Kevin Hearne, which was a March pick for the Random challenge and also let me check off the April prompt ("animals") in the themed challenge. I got The Purloined Poodle as part of an ebook bundle that included something else I wanted; it's apparently a spin-off from an urban fantasy series I haven't read. (And, based on this sample, probably won't read; the main characters were fairly entertaining in a small dose but I think I've had enough of them now.) The spin-off sees two of the characters deciding to take it upon themselves to solve a mystery – which got us off to a bad start, because when it comes to stories about complete amateurs playing detective, I prefer the ones where the character has to turn detective because they have a personal stake in the solution of the mystery over the ones where the character is just being a busybody, and this falls too much toward the busybody end of the scale for my liking. I enjoyed it more once they'd located the culprit and the story shifted from amateur mystery-solving to a more straightforward sort of adventure story as they resolve the situation (which I suppose might be a sign that I'd like the main series more than the spin-off, but I'm still not interested enough in the characters to really want to find out). I did laugh out loud at least once, at the bit where Oberon the talking dog reviews The Great Gatsby on the criteria of things interesting to dogs.


. At board game club this week, we played Winter Rabbit again, having determined that we may have misunderstood how an important mechanic of the game worked when we played it the first time. I'm not sure we've got it right yet; on our second game, we won the scenario in half the time the game allowed for the attempt, which seems unlikely to be the intended experience.


. Went to the cinema again this week, to see an observational documentary, The Cats of Gokogu Shrine.


. Every now and again, there's an announcement of a big Ingress meet-up somewhere in the world, and I stopped bothering to read the announcements ages ago because it was annoying reading about the fun people were going to have somewhere that's nowhere near me. ...which is how I came to miss the announcement, a few months ago, that the next meetup is going to be in Perth. I only found out this week when another player in my faction messaged me to ask if I was planning to go. I haven't definitely ruled it out, but I'm feeling reluctant; it would mean making travel plans, and getting time off work, and all that sort of thing, in order to go and be sociable with a crowd of people I don't know and might completely fail to get on with. (The prospect of collecting another month-long respiratory infection is also weighing in the scales somewhat.) I thought I might be able to encourage myself by finding something else I wanted to do in Perth around the same time, so I could be guaranteed to get something out of the trip, but everything else I might be tempted to go to Perth for that month is either two weeks earlier or two weeks later.

The new fitness tracker is going well. The "time to get up and stretch" notifications are better targeted at my use case than the Fitbit's method was, and are still working effectively.

It took several attempts to get the new fitness tracker to track my bicycle rides. On the first attempt, it didn't track anything; apparently there was some permission or other that hadn't been set correctly. On the second attempt (after I'd confirmed that all the permissions were now set properly), I decided not to hit the "starting cycling" button and see if the automatic exercise detection figured out what I was doing; not only did it not detect that I was cycling, at the end of the hour-long ride I got a notification that I'd been sitting in one place for an hour and should get up and do some exercise...

Since then, I've been hitting the "starting cycling" button every time, to be on the safe side.

It's been a bit tricky lately finding places to ride the bike that are off the road: we have a fairly good network of bike trails around the town, but in January a lot of the trails in my vicinity were torn up as the first stage of laying down fresh tarmac, and it was only recently that the actual laying down began. Looking forward to having that finished; the new tracks, in the areas they've been completed, are smooth and very nice to ride on.


At Parkrun this week (where the fitness tracker had no trouble automatically detecting that I was doing walking exercise), I saw a small brown lizard sunning itself by the side of the track.


It's been a rough week at work, featuring one of Those Clients.


At board game club, we played Last Light, a game involving exploring the galaxy and gathering resources. In general outline, it's somewhat similar to Eclipse, which we played a while back, but with some significant differences in gameplay (including a less complicated scoring system) that result in it being less of a marathon. One of the interesting gameplay differences that's not directly related to the playing time is that the board representing the galaxy rotates at intervals, with different parts of it rotating at different speeds, altering the strategic situation each time it happens.


Went to the cinema to see The Return, a demythified retelling of Odysseus' return to Ithaca after decades away, starring Ralph Fiennes as Odysseus and Juliette Binoche as Penelope. It's getting good notices for the central performances, which I agree are spectacular, but I think the story as a whole has some shortcomings and I'm not sure the ending would have worked if the performances weren't so good. (It probably doesn't help that it's not that long since I read The Last Song of Penelope, another demythified retelling of Odysseus' return which I found more effective.) I did enjoy some of the nods to other parts of the Odyssey that are woven into the story.


This week was the release of The Beekeeper's Picnic, a new point-and-click adventure game featuring an elderly beekeeper named Sherlock Holmes who used to be a famous detective but is now very definitely retired but keeps tripping over mysteries needing to be solved anyway. I'm enjoying it so far.


On the library trip where I picked up The Mysterious Affair at Styles, I also discovered that the library had a copy of Tove Jansson's first Moomin book, The Moomins and the Great Flood, so I've now read that and am partway through the sequel, Comet in Moominland. (Neither of them count for the book chain "no people" challenge because I take it as read that Moomins count as people.) I'm not disliking them, but I suspect I've left it too long to start the series and have missed the age where they would have clicked with me.


I need to have a proper think about how I'm using 750 Words as a journaling tool. The journaling itself feels helpful, and I want to continue doing it, but I'm not sure 750 Words is actually the right place for it; I'm not really using it the way it's supposed to be used. For one thing, you're supposed to pick a consistent time of day to do it, and to start and finish in a single sitting, but I've been all over the shop lately (the best time of day is clearly first thing in the morning, but that's also the best time of day for several other things so it often gets bumped) and have frequently written a journal entry in two or more sittings when I've been able to find the time. (None of those has resulted in me failing the challenge of writing 750 words without interruption, because each journal entry is easily over a thousand words - which in itself is another reason why this might not be the appropriate application.)

There was a state election. The overall result wasn't a surprise. The outcome in the electorate I live in is still in doubt, but it's looking like the candidate I was hoping for is going to win. (I should draw a distinction between the Labor candidate who I was hoping would win, and supported in the two-party-preferred contest, and the Greens candidate who I gave first preference to despite knowing he had no chance of winning in this electorate. He clearly knew it, too, because he didn't waste any resources on campaigning; during the entire election period I saw a single generic "Vote Greens" ad and nothing specific to this electorate or the candidate. I wouldn't even know his name if it hadn't been on the ballot form.)


When I first started playing Ingress, I got messaged out of the blue by a player on the opposing team to thank me for starting, because he'd been the only active player in the area for a while and it had been dull having no competition. Now he's left town, and I'm getting a taste of what that's like. On Sunday morning, there was a sudden burst of activity and I was briefly hopeful that there was a new player in town, until I checked the times and locations and realised it was somebody passing through on the transcontinental train and hitting up the tourist spots during the layover.


At the board game club, we played a new board game called Winter Rabbit. It's a collaborative game inspired by Cherokee mythology and culture, themed around building up a village so it has all the resources it needs to last through winter. We didn't quite make it, but we got a lot closer than we thought we were going to when we were halfway through.


Someone on Tumblr was asking people to nominate the five most important video games of their youth. I cheated a bit, since my five picks were two individual games, two series, and a genre - respectively: Nyet, a Tetris clone that was one of the first games my family had on our first home computer; Scorched Earth, a tank game we played incessantly on the rec room computer when I was at boarding school; the Commander Keen series of platformers; the series that was then called Star Control but is now, due to trademark shenanigans, called Free Stars; and the Concept of Interactive Fiction Games (I never quite had the patience to play any one interactive fiction game through to the end, but I was fascinated by their existence and the process of creating them).


One of my favourite youtubers, Tom Scott (who did Amazing Places and Things You Might Not Know, among others) is guest competitor on the current season of Jet Lag: The Game. The format of Jet Lag changes each season, but always revolves around the idea of using geographical areas as a huge game board; this season, the game board is the Schengen Area, the free-transit region that covers most of Europe, and the aim is to be the team that claims the most "spaces" on the "board" by travelling to the corresponding country. Being the first to set foot in a country is sufficient to claim it temporarily (for a metaphorical value of "set foot" that includes passing through on a train to somewhere else, a fact that has already resulted in some interesting tactical moves), but gaining permanent control of a country requires completing that country's themed challenge.


Dress rehearsals are going well.


I didn't get as much bike riding done this week as I would have liked, because of the weather, but on one of the bike rides I did do I saw kangaroos again.