pedanther

. I recently got an achievement in Duolingo for having been doing the lessons continually for an entire year. At this point, I'm not sure I'll ever have a practical use for having German as a second language, but it gives my brain exercise and I learn fun things from time to time like the existence of a German expression that translates as something like "He's missing a few cups from the cupboard".


. The production of Hello Dolly has concluded successfully; up next is a season of short plays. The one I'm in is an absurdist comedy about a married couple having a very trying day: he's been fired, and she's murdered somebody but can't remember who it was.


. My morning walking routine has become somewhat less regular since winter brought in the cold dark rainy mornings, but it still happens often enough to have a claim to existence. My most common route these days is a lap around the outside of the racecourse, part of it on a nice wooded walking trail dotted with war memorials that I keep telling myself one day I'll actually stop to look at. If I'm feeling ambitious I'll widen the loop a bit and continue on to the north end of the walking trail, at the park with the sound shell where they do concerts in the summer. Most days it's pretty deserted at that time of the morning, but one time there was a car boot sale on, and one morning this week they were setting up for what looked like an inter-school sports day.


. Something else that's been getting less regular and less frequent lately is our roleplaying sessions, due to difficulty getting everyone's schedules lined up. At our most recent session, one of the other players turned out at the last minute to be unable to join in, so we couldn't continue the campaign, but everybody who did turn up had been looking forward to getting some roleplaying in, so I volunteered to run a one-shot session of Lasers and Feelings, a mini RPG whose design features include being able to be run with no preparation whatever. There were some rough patches, but everybody had fun.


. I caved and got Disney+ about halfway through the run of Loki so that I could keep up with what friends were talking about on Tumblr without worrying about spoilers, and I don't regret it. Now that I have it, I'll probably circle back and watch WandaVision at some point; I still don't much care about the MCU versions of Wanda or Vision or especially about the MCU version of their relationship, but apparently it's also got Darcy Lewis and Monica Rambeau in it and I want to find out what they're doing these days. Black Widow I went to see in the cinema, since I'm fortunate enough to have that as an option and even here where cinema tickets aren't cheap it cost literally half as much to see it on the big screen with other people than it would have to watch it on a little screen by myself at home.

. With the WA elections coming up, the ABC has published a summary of the 19 parties running and their major policies. May be useful for telling apart the minor parties who didn't just name themselves after their main policy.


. The brass band has started up again for 2021. We're in a position where we have some rebuilding to do before we're at the level we were around this time last year, not just because of the long pandemic hiatus but also because the new year is the time when people go away to university or leave town for new jobs elsewhere, and this year we've lost our conductor, a couple of key players, and two of the mainstays of the band committee. We have a new conductor and new committee members, but there's going to be a while before we have an idea of the effect on the band's collective personality and goals.


. The Rep Club has also started up again for the year. We have a season of one-act plays going up next month, and then will be the big push toward this year's musical. We're having another run at Hello Dolly!, which we were going to do last year before the pandemic hit. Some of the people who were cast last year have left town or had to withdraw for other reasons, but fortunately most of the losses were down in the supporting cast where the gaps are easier to fill in.


. The roleplaying campaign is progressing. We're beginning to accumulate some of those "your players did what?" anecdotes that every good campaign produces. Our adventuring party has done enough adventuring to pass probation and get officially accredited, which raises the question: What are we going to call ourselves? I've been leaning toward something about dire wolves, on the "if I had a nickel for every time we've been attacked by dire wolves" principle, but only if we can make it clear that "dire" isn't a judgement on our adventuring abilities. When I mentioned this to the rest of the group, somebody suggested that we could call ourselves The DW, and claim it stood for whatever seemed most appropriate depending on who was asking. "When you're in trouble, you call DW," said two players in unison.


. I recently had a go at reading The Barrakee Mystery, an Australian murder mystery novel from 1929 that turned into the first of a series running to 29 novels over three and a half decades. The protagonist of the series, though he's more of a supporting character in the first novel, is Detective Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte, known as "Bony", a detective with mixed ancestry from an Aboriginal mother and an unknown European father. As such, it's worth noting that the series spans several eventful decades in the history of race relations in Australia. I'd read some of the novels from near the end of the series before, but the beginning is a very different experience. It hadn't occurred to me to wonder why a white author in the 1920s would put a half-Aboriginal detective in his novel, but of course race relations play a big role in the plot and Bony isn't the only half-Aboriginal character in the novel. It's an uncomfortable read at times: Bony and the narrator both have pointed things to say about white Australia's treatment of Aboriginal people, but the novel also seems to take it as given that someone with mixed white and Aboriginal heritage will be dragged down by their inferior blood. (It's the Aboriginal blood that's being posited as inferior, to be clear.) It certainly takes it as given that most of the white characters will be prejudiced against Aboriginal people to a greater or lesser extent, and that this isn't expected to affect how likeable the audience finds them.

I sometimes think about what a modern TV adaptation of the Bony novels might be like. It would probably have to be pretty thoroughly reimagined; even the most recent of the novels is over fifty years old, and The Barrakee Mystery is coming up on its centenary, and the national conversation on race has changed a lot in that time. But sometimes I feel like we kind of owe it to Bony, for the fact that there have already been two TV series inspired by the novels and both of them starred white men. (The 1970s series made at least a token effort to audition Aboriginal actors before casting a white man and investing heavily in brown makeup; the 1990s series just straight-up made the protagonist a handsome white twentysomething, played by one of the several bankable handsome white twentysomethings that were on TV all the time in those days. And those days were the days when Ernie Dingo was also a bankable twentysomething, so it's not like they didn't have options.)

Fiction books
Aaron Allston. Iron Fist (e)
Aaron Allston. Solo Command (e)
Aaron Allston. Starfighters of Adumar (e)
Aaron Allston. Wraith Squadron (e)
Lois McMaster Bujold. Captain Vorpatril's Alliance (e) (re-read)
Lois McMaster Bujold. Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen (e) (re-read)
Lois McMaster Bujold. Komarr (e) (re-read)
Michael Stewart, Jerry Herman. Hello, Dolly!
Thornton Wilder. The Matchmaker
Timothy Zahn. Dark Force Rising (e) (re-read)
Timothy Zahn. Heir to the Empire (e) (re-read)
Timothy Zahn. The Last Command (e) (re-read)

In progress
(anthology). Batman Black and White, volume 2 (re-read)
Terry Pratchett. Raising Steam (e) (re-read)

Picture books
Diane Redfield Massie. The Baby Beebee Bird

Non-fiction books in progress
Christopher Lascelles. Pontifex Maximus (e)

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

Top of the to-read pile
Ben Aaronovitch. False Value