1. There's a "post the opening sentences of your recent fics" meme going around that nearly every fic-writing person on my friendslist has done. I keep looking at it and then remembering that I haven't finished any new fic since the last time I did a meme that involved posting the opening sentences of my recent fic.
2. Another thing I keep looking at and then deciding not to do is
Remix Revival. I do just scrape into eligibility for it this year; the trouble is the bit where you also have to say what fandoms you're willing to write for. I never know what to put when it's left completely open. (That's one of the reasons I like exchanges like Yuletide where there's an eligibility requirement, because they generate a list of eligible fandoms and I can go through crossing off the ones I don't know or don't like or don't feel up to, and then choose from what's left. If I'm left to choose from all fandoms that exist everywhere, with no idea of what people are likely to ask for, I don't know where to start.) (Well, Doctor Who, obviously. But then what?)
3. At gaming group this week, I played
Potion Explosion and
Dice Forge.
In Potion Explosion, players have to assemble magic potions out of randomly-dispensed ingredients (represented by coloured marbles); completing potions earns points, and then completed potions can also be used to gain advantages (some potions let you collect more ingredients in a turn, others let you substitute ingredients, and so on). I'm pretty sure I came last, but I'd be willing to try it again.
Dice Forge is a variant on the deck-building game, where you start with a deck of weak cards and over the course of the game acquire more powerful cards, but instead of a deck of cards each player has a pair of
dice with removable faces that can be upgraded over the course of the game. There's also a map of locations with mythologically-themed challenges; completing a challenge gives some benefit in resources to use on other challenges, unique special die faces, or just massive amounts of victory points.
4. I don't think I've mentioned yet that I signed up a while back for
LearnedLeague, an online trivia competition. I've now competed in two seasons, one as a rookie that ended with me being placed in the C grade (the second-best possible result of a rookie season, as you can't go straight to A), and one in C grade where I performed solidly but not well enough to be promoted. In each round, players get matched in head-to-head contests where points are scored not just for getting the correct answers but for predicting which answers their opponents will get right (to be precise, a player's prediction will affect their opponent's score, and vice versa; it's balanced so that a player who gets every question right that round will get full points regardless and conversely a player who gets every question wrong will get no points). To aid players in their predictions, there are detailed statistics kept, including breakdowns of each player's performance by question subject: apparently my best subjects are Science, Language, Mathematics, Film, and Classical Music, while my worst subjects are Business/Economics, Pop Music, Art, and Current Events.
5. After my run of John Buchan's thriller novels last month, I saw
Witch Wood mentioned somewhere as the most highly regarded of his other novels, so I decided to give it a go. The first few chapters have been an interesting experience, because I didn't know anything about it going in except the title and the author, so on top of the usual figuring out of plot and characters I needed to figure out what genre it is. It's set in the 17th century, in a village on the outskirts of forest with a dark and mysterious reputation, and revolves around a young priest who - we're informed in a present-day prologue - is remembered in local legend as having been carried away by either the Devil or the Fair Folk, depending on who you ask. There's several ways a premise like that could go, depending on whether the author is writing fantasy or horror or an adventure story where everything turns out to have a material explanation, and at first I wasn't sure which this was, which added an extra level of ambiguity to scenes like the one where the protagonist is travelling home one night and meets three men who he senses are not quite what they seem to be.
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