pedanther

. At board game club, I arrived late enough that all the spots had already been taken for the evening's big game, so I spent the evening at the casual table, where we played Love Letter, Flip 7, and Saboteur. ( Read more... )


. We also had a weekend gaming session where we played Onitama and Who Goes There?.( Read more... )


. On Wednesday, the power was out for most of the morning and afternoon -- a scheduled outage, as the power poles along the street were being refurbished. ( Read more... )


. Someone over on Tumblr has organised a group watch-along of Doctor Who's 12-episode epic "The Daleks' Master Plan", watching each episode on or about the 60th anniversary of its first airing. ( Read more... )


. My current playthrough of XCOM 2 is going well: ( Read more... )


. The current jigsaw puzzle is a bit stuck. ( Read more... )

. It was a committee meeting week again. This month, for a change, we had the meeting on a Sunday morning. ( Read more... )


. Sunday was also the annual Spring Festival, where community groups and small businesses set up stalls in the park. ( Read more... )


. At board game club, I got to play a couple of two-player games, ( Read more... )

After that, we joined the main group, who had been playing Bang!, and we played Saboteur and then Night of the Ninja. (All hidden role/social deduction games; I don't know if that was deliberate or just how it turned out when they were picking games that could accommodate the number of players.) ( Read more... )


. The Hidden Almanac seems to have made a permanent transition to having ongoing storylines; ( Read more... )


. I've begun another jigsaw puzzle. ( Read more... )


. I've started playing Invisible Inc. again. ( Read more... )


. I got an email out of the blue from Bookbub, a service I signed up to some time back that purports to email you alerts when your favourite authors release new books. ( Read more... )


. I went for a morning walk, and at one point I encountered a woman walking a large shaggy white dog. When I first saw them, they were passing behind a knee-high obstruction, so it was only after they cleared that that I discovered that they were accompanied by a second dog, a tiny pug.


. I've been watching The Celebrity Traitors, and enjoying it. It's the first time I've been following a season of The Traitors as it happens, instead of coming along later and gulping down the entire season in a few days.


. Yesterday was polling day for the local government elections. ( Read more... )

. Another milestone: I've now done one of these posts every week for an entire year.

. At board game club this week we played Deception: Murder in Hong Kong and Bang!. On the weekend, we also played Spicy, Psycho Killer, Let's Call the Exorcist, and Herd Mentality.

. I bought new walking shoes this week, which are much more comfortable than the old pair were after the soles started wearing out. ( Read more... )

. A while ago, I started reading Hesperides, a collection by the 17th-century poet Robert Herrick, partly because I'd read some interesting things about him as a person and partly because I was looking for a 17th-century book for a reading challenge. ( Read more... )

. Among the podcasts I listen to, I'm working through the back catalogues of You're Dead to Me! and Natalie Haynes Stands Up for the Classics, both of which offer humorous accounts of the lives of historical figures. ( Read more... )

. Polimines has definitely reached a stage where it's completely useless to play as a casual time-filler, or indeed in any circumstance except when I want to quickly become frustrated and angry. So I've started another jigsaw puzzle.

. I didn't even try to write any detailed journal entries this week, just made notes about things to mention in the blog post. ( Read more... )

. I didn't write a full journal entry all week. Fortunately, my habit of making brief notes about my day is solidly ingrained, so I still had something to work from for this blog post. ( Read more... )


. At the board game club, we played Bomb Busters again. We got through three missions, completing two successfully on the first attempt and requiring a second attempt for one after I lost track of one of the conditions and blew everyone up by cutting a wire that I was incorrectly certain was safe.


. This week, I read a couple of the short children's books that have been lurking unread on my shelves for longer than I can remember (though probably not since I was a child myself; I'm pretty sure both are books I picked up from secondhand book sales). ( Read more... ) The Island on Bird Street was my September pick for the Randomize Your TBR reading challenge; Jacob Two-Two didn't fit any of the pending challenges, I just saw it on the shelf and decided it would make a nice break from the kind of thing I'd been reading lately.


. During the time that my immediate precursors were occupying this house, the bathroom was remodelled and new fittings installed. ( Read more... ) There's something about that which feels emblematic of the modern world we live in.


. I nearly managed to finish my latest jigsaw puzzle in under a week - I've been catching up on a lot of podcasts lately - but last night I found myself with three spaces left in the puzzle and three leftover pieces which each seemed to be the right shape and colour for a space but didn't... quite... fit. ( Read more... )


. On Tumblr, there was a poll asking "What is the longest book series you've read?" My first thought was the Liaden series, currently at 27 novels with at least one more on the way. Then I remembered that I've read the entire Discworld series from beginning to end, and that's 40+ novels depending on how you count them. And then I recalled that I've done the same with the Doctor Who New Adventures, which is just over 60 novels. So far I haven't thought of anything else longer than that.


. From the CinemaStix youtube channel, a two-part video essay on the making of the movie Gladiator, with a focus on how much the key through-lines of the story were constructed in production and post-production: part 1 is about the script and part 2 is about the editing. One of the things covered in part 2 is how they rearranged the final act of the movie to cover for the untimely death of one of the actors, something that was achieved so successfully that, although I knew it had happened, it had never occurred to me until I watched this to wonder what his character would have done differently if the actor had survived.

. I reached a milestone in 750 Words: one year since I resumed keeping a journal and began what has become by far my longest streak. Though the streak count (which goes by days when I actually wrote an entry) only just reached 300 days, which gives you some idea of how shamelessly I've been exploiting the generous allocation of vacation days on the occasions when I haven't found time or haven't felt up to stringing words together.( Read more... )


. Sunday was the first meeting of the new committee since they were elected in the AGM. ( Read more... )


. On Monday, I woke up while it was still dark. As I lay in bed, I found myself singing a riff on "Morning Has Broken" that started by observing that morning had not yet broken and ended with the conclusion that this might be a good opportunity to do some productive work done before the day started and distractions arrived. I did not in fact get any productive work done, because when I got up I went on the internet to look up a rhyming dictionary and try to improve one of the rhymes in the song, and from there I was perfectly capable of distracting myself.


. This week at the board game club I wound up on the casual card games table and played Monty Python Fluxx, UNO Show 'Em No Mercy, and Flip 7. ( Read more... )


. I've been listening to a fair bit of classical music this week. It started when I watched a video about The Shawshank Redemption and then decided to listen to the full version of the Mozart aria that's featured in one scene, which led to Youtube suggesting other bits of Mozart to listen to. I also, unrelatedly to that, saw a post with a linked video about a violin piece by Bach which is designed so that it can be played both forward and backward and that if it's played forward and backward at the same time it forms a pleasing duet.


. The week at work has been interesting, with several challenging projects that were stressful to be faced with but satisfying to have completed successfully.


. Parkrun went well. ( Read more... )


. I've started another jigsaw puzzle.

. I reached the ending of Monument Valley III, and my primary reaction was "Wait, was that the ending?". The narrative elements never did come together to form a satisfying story; where previous games have had minimalist but satisfying stories, this one just felt incomplete. The puzzles included some interesting new mechanisms, but did less with them than I feel earlier games in the series would have.


. At board game club, we played Great Western Trail: New Zealand, a game in the "moving little cubes around on a player mat" genre, which I've had mixed experiences with. ( Read more... )


. The Serpent's Egg is an early work by Caroline Stevermer, whose later and more polished fantasy novels include A College of Magics and half of Sorcery and Cecelia, both of which I've previously read and admired (and, I suppose it would be wise to remember, also The Glass Magician, which I bounced right off).( Read more... )

On the whole, it's colourful and messy and I don't think all the pieces really fit together - but I enjoyed it throughout, and after some of the reading experiences I've had lately, that's something to be grateful for.


. I was introduced during the week to a Youtube channel called ITV Retro, an apparently official collection of old ITV shows. The available selection apparently varies by region; from here, I can see episodes of Sapphire and Steel, Press Gang, The Prisoner, The Persuaders, several marionation shows including Thunderbirds, and something called Rising Damp.


. Among the reaction videos I watched this week was one for 1985's Ladyhawke, which stars Rutger Hauer and Michelle Pfeiffer as star-crossed lovers and Matthew Broderick as the plucky wisecracking sidekick. (It's a bit of departure from Rutger Hauer's usual kind of role; I've read somewhere that he was originally cast as one of the villains, and then given a shot at the lead when the original lead actor pulled out.) I loved Ladyhawke when I was a kid, and it's still entertaining, though I always forget when I haven't seen it for a while just how aggressively 1980s the incidental music is.


. I mentioned a while ago that I was having trouble getting started on the latest jigsaw puzzle, and seem to have neglected to mention that I did get into it after a while. I finished it this week, and left it on display for a few days before packing it away yesterday. While I was disassembling it, there was a moment when I thought I'd dropped a puzzle piece off the edge of the table, and when I looked down there was a puzzle piece peeking out from under the sofa - but when I picked it up, it was a piece from the previous puzzle, that I finished a month ago.


. Recently, between the weather and some foot trouble, I haven't been getting out for a walk as often as I'd like, to the point that if I hadn't made a deliberate effort to avoid it last week would have been the first week since January that I only went for a walk once. This week has been much better, and I'm back up to my high-water mark of going for a walk five days out of seven. (I thought for a bit that I'd managed six days out of seven, for the first time since I started keeping the current records, but then I realised I'd miscounted the days.)

. 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.

. My experiment in journalling this week was to take it offline and write my journal in a plain text file instead of on the 750 Words website. The theory was that, without having to worry about 750 Words policing breaks and interruptions, I would be more inclined to start journal entries even if I wasn't sure I'd have time to write the whole entry in a single sitting.( Read more... )


. At board game club, we played Dark Tomb, described as a dungeon-crawl-in-a-box. The box is small enough to fit in a pocket, and includes map tiles, premade characters, monster stats, etc. for an adventure in four increasingly-challenging locations. ( Read more... )


. I finally got around to setting up the work table again and starting one of the jigsaw puzzles I was given for Christmas. ( I'd forgotten how nice it is to have a puzzle on the go )


. I haven't started any new computer games, as such; this week, I've been trying out demos of a few new and upcoming games. These included ( Word Play, Star Birds, Deck of Haunts )


. I refuelled the car and took the opportunity to clean the front and rear windscreens, both of which needed it. I had a slightly weird feeling as I was driving away, because I'm used to there being enough grime around the edges of the windscreen to visually confirm its existence, and now I couldn't see anything between me and the outside world.


. I was poking around in my old Tumblr posts, and found a limerick I wrote years ago. I've been trying to decide if I should put it on AO3 with the Coleridge limericks; maybe I should try my hand at a couple more first? (Hmm. Looking back at the tag, there's also the Shelley limerick...)

My gal's eyes are not like the sun.
In fact, if you take time to run
Her past ev'ry cliché
That romantic folk say,
You will find that she fits not a one.

(But I love her anyhow.)

. A good number of years ago, I backed the original set of Magic Puzzles 1000-piece jigsaw puzzles on Kickstarter, and then they sat around unopened because I never got around to setting up a space where I could work on them. A week ago, I finally hauled one out to have something to do with my hands while watching a Youtube stream (which was celebrating the third anniversary of its Youtube channel, and therefore nearly the third anniversary of the first time I said to myself, "You know, I could probably do one of those Magic Puzzles to have something to do with my hands while watching these"), and I've been working on it in spare moments. I finished it this morning, and am now trying to decide how long to leave it out and admire the artwork before I clear it away so I can get started on the next one. (I was a bit worried that the puzzle's gimmick, advertised as a "mind blowing magical ending", would end up being a fizzle; in the event, I think that description is overselling it a bit, but it is pretty neat.)


. The thing about the XCOM games is that, while I enjoy them, I'm not terribly good at them, or at least I wasn't at first, and I've never got all the way through one without saving before every mission and shamelessly reloading if everything goes pear-shaped. When I first started, this was necessary to avoid complete mission failure and my entire team getting wiped out on the regular, but as I've improved I've also been increasingly tempted to stretch the definition of mission failure, a tendency that was shown up when I found myself taking a mulligan on a mission which had gone entirely according to plan right up until the last-moment death of a single soldier who just happened to be one of the ones I was sentimentally attached to. After that, I promised myself that on my latest runthrough I would only replay missions that were complete disasters and specifically would keep the result of any mission where the objectives were successfully achieved no matter how many soldiers got killed doing it. I have kept to that resolve, even for the mission that ended with only two soldiers still standing; it's been challenging, and included long stretches where I was struggling to field a team for missions (and at least two points where I had to automatically fail missions because I literally didn't have enough active soldiers to do them), but it was very satisfying when I overcame that and started building up the team again. There's some kind of life lesson in that, probably. The funny thing is that, although there were those stretches where it felt like we were limping along, in the end the campaign has taken about the same amount of time as all my earlier ones; I reached the end game in roughly the same number of missions and within a month, in-game time, of my previous longest campaign. Presumably that had something to with the fact that I still took do-overs on the missions that I completely failed; doing a run where I kept the result of every single mission, no matter how disastrous, would be an even more interesting challenge, but one that I don't think I'm a good enough player yet to survive.


. After I completed the latest runthrough of XCOM 2, I decided it was time for a change of pace, so I've been playing a platformer called SteamWorld Dig 2, which I assume I got in a bundle at some point because I don't remember ever specifically deciding to buy it. I've been playing it often enough to start seeing it behind my eyelids, and enjoying it a lot, and it's reminding me how much I also enjoyed playing the last platformer of this kind that I played (the excellent Yoku's Island Express), so I'm thinking maybe I should play this genre more often.


. Another thing I've been really enjoying lately is a new D&D Actual Play series called Natural Six, which put out some preview/prequel episodes a while back and released its official Episode 1 last week. The players are all charming and invested in their characters, and they and the DM all bounce off each other really well. New episodes are being released fortnightly, on Youtube or as a podcast, alternating with episodes of an after-action series where the players talk about the previous week's session.


. The random book selection for April was based around picking one of the oldest books on the to-be-read list – which in my case didn't actually result in one of the books that's been waiting to be read the longest, because I already had a large stack of unread books when I joined StoryGraph and I didn't make any effort to list them chronologically. Actually, it looks like I started by adding the unread books on my ereader, which necessarily are all more recent than when I got the ereader about a decade ago. I definitely have paper books that have been waiting longer than that.

The book that was randomly selected for me was The Girl with the Red Balloon by Katherine Locke, a young adult time travel story that I think I picked up as part of a special offer and had no idea what it was about until I started reading. There were some parts that I felt lacked the subtlety that I would have expected if it were a book for not-young adults, but on the whole I enjoyed it well enough and found it satisfying in the end. (Speaking of the end, it makes some interesting choices about which questions it leaves unanswered – although I've noticed that, because of the time travel, at least one of those questions is actually answered in the first chapter before the reader knows what the question is yet...)

The theme challenge for April is "a book about rain, weather, spring, or some kind of new blossoming", and I haven't picked a book for it yet.